mary

My mother is dying.

My son is flunking math.

I DO NOT WANT MORE THAN I HAVE NOW

I have youth and joy

I have have wisdom, even from tears.

I have young children and a loving husband. I have a dog.

I am proud of my people, I have belief in the future.

I do not have want of more than I have now.

THanks so very much to Cory Logan for helping me make a website & the video/posting.

http://fernandoconrad.com

come see:

Luggage Store this Friday the 14th.

I felt like a child on Christmas morning. Althea, Rush and I got soused the night before, and then we sang many songs while Rush played the ukelele, including “Sometimes it’s hard to be a Woman”. So, although my enthusiasm was unwavering, Tinyeyes and Fogbrain dogged my steps until lunch.

By 9:06 I was on the steps of the Met, waiting with 6 or so other diehards to see the Rembrandt show. I was literally the first person in the gallery. Guess what, I wasn’t into it. It felt like one of those, ‘now is time to put away childish things.’ No more dawdling in history’s holiday mansion. Off to do an honest day’s labour. So, I went to the Whitney. Mark Bradford was lovely, and the more I looked at it I enjoyed decoding how it was made.

Kara Walker far and above carried the day. Nothing gets my attention unless it’s visually worthwhile. It’s the price of entry. I don’t care how rigorous the thought is if it’s shoddy, ugly or just plain dull. In that context, rigorous thought is just tedious. I’m all about accessibility baby. Give me a way in. Kara came into my purview probably 5 years ago because the work is just visually interesting. Also, I have worked in paper cut-out because of my erstwhile Matisse binges and I work in collage because of my sensibility and I work in solid black shapes because of my high school obsession with Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Maxfield Parrish, and some guy Nielsson. All of them made exquisite watercolors for the tipped -in plates to children’s stories, and black and white silhouette drawings for end of chapter illustrations.

So, Kara Walker was literally mind-blowing: afterward, I had to stop and sit. She uses two devices with great effectiveness. One is the idea of fantasy. The fantastical, whimsical nature of her images gives you a way in. You think, oh, this will be amusing. I did have an Aubrey Beardsley moment in college, which doesn’t come into my work, but I think does come into hers. A way of tackling an intense subject by handling it lightly. But after immersion in the show, the fantastical world of curlicues, culottes, cutlasses, priapuses, petticoats and pedigrees gives way to the surreal horror of war. The other device is the notion of obscenity. Children defecating, people pumping in various doggie-style poses seems to prepare you to lower your sense of decorum and decency, but nothing can prepare you for the obscenity of systematic rape, brutal punishment and lynchings literally enclosing you.

What made the show work for me, what makes it incredibly powerful and important is it’s subject matter - the history of slavery in the United States, that is simply not recognized, taught in schools, or acknowledged on a fundamental, basic, necessary level. Particularly ignored is the treatment of the freed slaves after the war, and the myriad of ways from petty humiliation at a store to outright lynching that was the consistent manner in which a group of people were kept oppressed. I encourage everyone to read Cane River — not literature, but a very important book.

What makes the subject matter work is the fact that Kara Walker comes at it from a point of view that is purely personal. Because the work feels personal, and because it is so raw, Kara is allowed complete authority to discuss what is an astonishing subject of great power.

Well, then I went to Moma to see Martin Puryear. I rambled along since Kara had been so overwhelming. Martin is lovely. The work uses the language of wood farm tools, wainwrights and roof framers. It speaks of great patience and faith. It is masculine but gentle. One sees his humble struggle to build a poetic language with roots in practicality, serviceability, usefulness. Hence containers, vessels, wheelbarrows, baskets, ladders, haycarts, He has some attraction to an ovoid shape that he renders solid, transparent, hollow. He has many ideas involving solidity (volume) and poise (balance).

Next to it was a Seurat show that was wonderful also.

What an invigorating day. I spent the day in Chelsea looking at art. Some things I picked up to take back to my studio. Do Ho-Suh at Lehmann Maupin had a work made up of many concentric circles drawn with a compass. I want to re-establish drafting in my practice. I am thinking I need a 4×8 roll of borco, and a 48″paraline and then I will install the paraline running vertically and get a long t-square. Then I can draft on very large watercolor paper with greater ease of handling. Also, I anticipate horizontal format work.  An artist whose approach to materials is admirable. He molds things out of plastic, he drafts tiny circles, he airbrushes with enamel.  I definately got the sense that he is using his hands and not employing someone else’s.  Super solid good work.

The thing that knocked my socks off, the thing I had to see twice was the Cy Twombly at Gagosian. I might even need to go see it again on Tuesday before I leave. How can I describe it? What astonishes first is the color color color, and then the scale of the color. Then the powerful, precise emotion. What emotion. He provides a script in the form of words, haikus on the canvas. One line that comes up on the major wall of three pieces runs something like: “in the face of the peonies’ overwhelming beauty, the warrior — took of his armor.” Had I not deciphered the body of work as a whole with the words, I am not sure what interpretation I would have given it, but it would not have been the following interpretation (which doesn’t matter at all here -s0 great). The work is a tremendous elegy, a saying goodbye of Twombly himself who compares himself to a warrior going to his death after laboring in where he felt bound, but taking a moment prior to the end to meaningfully interact with living, natural pleasure.  After I saw that all I could think was, so what, a life in paint is a beautiful life.

I did like Black Pussy by Jason Rhoades. Formally, the work was fresh, inventive, original. I do not get the pussy bit, and I am not sure I want to know what he’s saying. (Don’t piss in my ear and tell me it’s raining.)

Tomorrow to the Met to see Vermeer and Rembrandt.

OE makes rather breathtaking mists and colored spaces and kaliedoscopes. The show contains a ghostly water pattern that is sublime. The lecture I went to today (M Grynsteyn) emphasizes his intentions around ’seeing yourself see’ and extends that self-awareness as a social value.

I find this aspect of his work tedious and trivial.

As opposed to James Turrell’s work around the physiology of visual response or even Duchamp’s zoetrope things, OE never completely answers the question as to why he belongs in an art museum as opposed to a science museum. There is a way in which it is simply entertainment, a visual trick or a scientific concept graphically demonstrated, like Charles and Ray Eames’ mathematical exhibition.

As a discussion on the character, the nature, the experience of existence, which is something I have always asked from elaborate human endeavors (art, science, even politics), it is surprisingly cold, cold, cold.

The Economist had a great essay question in 2003 - Do We Need Nature? The winning essay, which I liked a great deal, discussed the question from the point of view of another life form with another perception of reality: a fungus. Well, I sent an essay (which I attach). I think the hubris of the question is not simply that it assumes that nature requires human presence, but that nature requires life at all to continue to be nature in a all its extreme magnificence.

OE addresses the nature that happens most of the time: empty rock and air. I admire the absence of sentimentality, even regarding any possibly apocalyptic scenario and I admire the fact that he is OK about an infinity where life of any variety, even viral, is a statistical error, so extreme is its infrequence.

This is the cold cold experience of reality that I feel OE conceals behind the curtain of roadside spectacle. The absence of life, the cold fires of stars.