Book report -- 2020

The pandemic had its bright moments, and for me one of the highlights of the year was more reading time.  Thankfully our library, though all branches were shut for several months, kept its digital services going and seemed to be buying new e-books at a faster rate than it had Before.  As an avid reader of the New York Times Book Review, I would frequently read about a new book that looked interesting, pick up my phone and put in a request for the e-book.  Nowadays if a library hasn't purchased a book yet, it will still show you the blurb for the book and allow you to "recommend" it.  If it's purchased, you go to the head of the line to check it out.

I know exactly what books I read last year thanks to my new habit of writing an excerpt from each book as my daily calligraphy, on the day I finish it.  And I can go back and read those passages to revisit any book that I have forgotten the details of.

I read a lot of nonfiction last year, mostly about social justice, American history and politics.  I particularly recommend Evil Geniuses by Kurt Andersen, which outlines how our political system has become so polarized and hateful in the last decades.  (Hint: it wasn't accidental.)

After reading several books by black authors, I was at times outraged, at times frustrated, at times both over the state of race relations in the US.  I had always known about slavery, of course, but even as an American history major I had never heard about many of the darker aspects of our sorry past.  My eyes were opened, but the negative emotions were overwhelming.

Somehow I got the idea to read Barack Obama's first book, Dreams From My Father, written in 1995 when he hadn't achieved any public prominence.  Of all the authors who grappled with the dilemma of being black in America, Obama seemed to me the most thoughtful and nuanced.  If you can only read one book about race and social justice, read this one.

But my nonfiction reading wasn't all heavy and discouraging.  I loved The Wave, by Susan Casey, who finds existential meaning in rogue waves, tsunamis and giant wave surfing.  Unless you live in a low ranch house on a barrier island, this is wonderful escapism! 

I won't recommend fiction, because tastes are so varied that the book I love is very likely to be one that you wouldn't read if they paid you.  And vice versa.  But I confess that having to write down every book I read has been a subtle nudge in the direction of less trashy trash, which makes me proud.

Despite doing a lot of reading in 2020, I chalked up a lot fewer books than the year before -- 59 books, compared to 79 in 2019.  That's because in 2019 we spent six weeks on cruise ships, mostly crossing the ocean rather than doing port calls every day.  That means a lot of time to sit on the balcony and read.  By contrast, during pandemic I spent many hours in the studio and in the kitchen instead of with a book.  

I'll keep up the book diary this year, so if you every want to check up on what I've been reading and see if it's up to your standards, look on my daily art blog.  This link will show you just the weeks in which I had a book diary entry. 

Meanwhile, what have been your favorite books from the last year or so?

Art reader's digest

From How to Disappear, by Akiko Busch:

"Soetsu Yanagi was a Japanese potter who advocated for anonymity in folk art. In his 1972 book, The Unknown Craftsman, he includes the absence of the artist's signature in his list of what confers beauty on an object.  Along with use, the imprint of the human hand, simplicity, low cost, and regional tradition, the anonymity that comes in deflecting attention from maker to user is part of what infuses physical artifacts with value and meaning.  Certainly those criteria apply to all those handcrafted household artifacts made of wood, clay, textiles, metal; all those utilitarian plates and spoons; all those touchstones of domestic life, tables, chairs, knives, tools, hinges, and quilts, all shaped, carved, molded, and sewn at a time when such things are largely forgotten, but this archive of objects carries its own collective effervescence over the centuries.  In an odd way, it might even be the very absence of the signature that confirms the humanity of the work."

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Thought-provoking, but I'm not sure I agree.

Perhaps it's true that functional objects are more about the user than the maker, but over the centuries the master makers have always commanded more value than the anonymous journeyman.  Think silver made by Paul Revere, fabrics by Jack Lenor Larsen.

I am one of many quilt lovers who are sorry that so many of the old quilts lack a signature.  When the owners of these quilts bring them in for appraisal or display, the ones with ID seem to be more prized; how many family quilts are tagged with a precious slip of paper, perhaps safety-pinned to the binding, noting that great-grandma started this quilt in 1917 and Aunt Minnie finished it in 1940.  Many of my own family "heirlooms" were lovingly wrapped and labeled by my mother.

I'll happily use an anonymous doily in my fabric collage, but I'd never cut into one made by my grandmother.  At some point I'll have to add a second label to this roll, explaining that it was my mother who wrote "my mother."  And just to make things clear, I'll add her name -- Ida Wilhelmina Fahselt Burtzlaff.  Because I think it's good to know who made something special.

What do you think?

A surprise in a book

I've been reading a fascinating book called "The Newspaper in Art," which traces the long history of artists using it either as subject matter or as raw material.  Although artists were incorporating images of "news" publications as early as the 16th century, the Impressionists were the ones who really went to town, painting all kinds of people reading papers in their daily life.

Paul Cezanne, The Artist's Father, 1866 

Mary Cassatt, The Artist's Mother, 1878

The Cubists also loved newspapers, but they cut them up and pasted the pieces into their paintings as a clever way to achieve double meaning.  The paper could represent a shape, and at the same time the newspaper story could reference an idea or event.

Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Wine Glass, 1912

I had a great time reading the book, which consisted of three separate sections, each written by a different commentator.  One of the writers decided to wind up his section with a kind of miscellaneous discussion of how modern newspapers have been affected by art, which I thought was a kind of lame non sequitur that didn't really hold water, but I was getting to the end so I dutifully read it anyway....

... and was surprised to find the guy talking about my father!

I'm not sure that any other reader of this book found much of interest in this paragraph -- it doesn't really have much to do with fine art -- but I liked it.

Art reader's digest

From "Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures" by Michael Baxandall:

'Influence' is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who is the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relation which the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account.  If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X.  But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality.  ....

If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appripriate from, have recourse to, adapt, misunderstand, refer to, pick up, take on, engage with, react to, quote, differentiate oneself from, assimilate oneself to, align oneself with, copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody, extract from, distort, attend to, resist, simplify, reconstitute, elaborate on, develop, face up to, master, subvert, perpetuate, reduce, promote, respond to, transform, tackle... everyone will be able to think of others.  Most of these relations just cannot be stated the other way round -- in terns of X acting on Y rather than Y acting on X.  To think in terms of influence blunts thought by impoverishing the means of differentiation.

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Kathy talking now:  Artists often have mixed feelings when they admit to being influenced by some other artist.  On the one hand, if it's a famous, well-regarded artist, you're kind of proud to have studied with her or to recognize elements of her practice or attitude in your own work.  On the other hand, is there a more condescending, withering adjective that can be applied to artwork than "derivative"?

As a writer, I love the use of a grammatical argument to make what is actually a more profound point: that your relationship to other artists, both your contemporaries and those of the past, is controlled by YOU!  Yes, you can choose to make swoopy shapes like Matisse cutouts or to cut improvisational shapes like Nancy Crow, but it's still your decision and your hand that executes that decision.  And if Henri or Nancy lurks somewhere in the back of your consciousness as you work, it's YOU who shapes the thought process.

So if you have somebody in your consciousness, do yourself the honor of understanding that relationship.  Take the time to think about what you pick and choose from that person, and define it exactly.  If you know, for instance, that you love Nancy Crow's method of improvisation cutting, but you don't particularly like her way of composing the entire quilt on the design wall before you start to sew, then you have taken a big step toward understanding yourself.

influenced by Nancy Crow: of course!



















I believe it is always a good idea to articulate what's going on in your own head and your own life; if you can't say what it is, you can neither control your own behavior nor expect other people to appreciate your work.

I challenge you to think this week about the artists who lurk in your own consciousness, and define their place in your head and your work.  And then to contemplate what that greater understanding might mean to your art.

Good thoughts

Every now and then I take down at random one of the hundreds of art and quilting books on my shelves and reread it.  If nothing else, you can usually find some nice pictures to drool over, but often you find some words of wisdom that are worth thinking about.  In the latter category, some words from Ruth McDowell's book, "Fabric Journey."

I've always been a fan of Ruth McDowell, even though I would never in a million years try to work as she does, with intricate designs totally planned out in advance and executed with precise freezer-paper templates.  To me most of the fun of quiltmaking is improvisation, solving problems as you go rather than charting out your course before you even start to cut and sew.

But I'm still in awe of her ability to combine commercial prints into harmonious and evocative compositions that faithfully reproduce the character and feeling of nature, even if they are miles away from the actual appearance of that nature.  Only Ruth can make skies out of plaid, pumpkins out of polka dots, flamingoes out of floral prints.  And she does it all the old-fashioned way, with traditional piecing techniques.

Ruth McDowell, Fort Morrison Jerseys

I was impressed by her remarks about her use of purchased and found fabrics:

"My quilts are visual compositions in line, color, and pattern, as well as interpretations of the inspirational subject; they must work graphically from a distance as well as reward close study of the details.  The use of commercial fabrics contributed to this outcome, not only with their variety of colors and patterns, but also because of the historical and emotional connections these fabrics make.

"Fabrics have been part of the human experience, providing comfort and warmth for thousands of years.  Technically, it would often be much easier to dye or paint the fabrics I need, but the deliberate use of the same fabrics found in clothing and furnishing in my quilts links both the quiltmaker (me) and the viewer to other lives and times, whether or not we are intellectually aware of that connection."

I don't work much with found fabrics in my own quiltmaking, but I do love to work with other people's scraps or abandoned projects, and it's for exactly the reasons that Ruth points out -- the connection between me and some other woman who once sat down at a sewing machine or a cutting table to work on her own project and express her own joy and creativity in its making.  We all honor the same ideal: the power of the needle to stitch together our world and the loved ones who inhabit it.

Whatever happened to social realism?

My art book group was reading about Ben Shahn, the great Social Realism artist of the mid-20th Century, and the question came up, is there any Social Realism in today's art world?  That movement, you will recall, pictures ordinary people, especially the poor and downtrodden of the world, and implicitly criticizes the power structures that keep them down.  It includes a lot of great art.

George Luks, St. Botolph St., 1922

Ben Shahn, Demonstration, 1933

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942

One of the most enduring projects of Social Realism was the monumental effort by the U.S. Farm Security Administration to document poverty during the Depression.  Many unemployed artists, including Ben Shahn, worked for the FSA and produced photos that we all recognize.

Ben Shahn, Boone County, Arkansas, 1935 

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936

















The poor we still have with us, but at least within the realm of painting, there seems to be little interest in High Art lately in documenting their lives.

What happened to Social Realism after its heyday?  We thought of several factors.  First, photography seemed to be a much better way of depicting the details of real life, and proving that extreme conditions aren't just a figment of the artist's imagination.  The FSA photos themselves were Exhibit A for that argument.

Second, Abstract Expressionism made realistic painting seem so old-fashioned.  And subsequent trends in art -- Pop, Conceptual, Minimalist, whatever -- seemed equally bent on distancing themselves from anything from previous generations.  Painters who did stick with the old traditions, such as Andrew Wyeth, may have been popular with the public but were never fully accepted by High Art.

Third, irony came to rule American culture, making it terminally uncool to be earnest or sincere.

Enough for one day; I'll write more later about what Social Realism has become in the 21st Century, as far as I can figure out.

Art readers digest

From "The Shape of Content," by Ben Shahn, 1956

Such prevailing values exercise a powerful effect upon art, both in the making and in the judging.  Consider, for instance, our own highly cherished concept of freedom.  It is our proudest value, the one for which we are ready to sacrifice everything, so that we find ourselves inclined to sacrifice liberty of speech and even liberties of action -- lest we be even suspected of opposing freedom.  The concept of freedom in art takes interesting forms: freedom of execution, for instance, is a basis for evaluation.  How often do we read the critical comment that this or that work appears "labored."  And on the other hand, the calligraphic, the easily brushed style is highly admired; it has a free look about it.  Extreme care is "tight" and not good; extreme freedom is "loose" and considered desirable.  Art becomes increasingly free; it has freed itself of craft, freed itself from academic discipline, freed itself from meaning in many cases, and freed itself of responsibility.  In some of the recent phases almost the only ingredient left in art besides paint seems to be freedom.

Ben Shahn, Miner's Wives

Art reader's digest

From "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)", Andy Warhol, 1975

Business art is the step that comes after Art.  I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.  After I did the thing called "art" or whatever it's called, I went into business art... Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.  During the hippie era people put down the idea of business -- they'd say, "Money is bad," and "working is bad," but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

Clawing your way out -- or in

I've been reading a book by Glenn Adamson, "Thinking Through Craft," in which he grapples with the question of the difference, if any, between art and craft.  Unfortunately, there is a difference, at least in the minds of the High Art world.  Craft is somehow not only different from but inferior to art, in these minds, and those of us who work in the "craft" mediums such as ceramics, glass, wood and fiber have a hard time being regarded as "real artists" in the way that painters and sculptors are.

Adamson writes about the discipline of ceramics shortly after mid-century.  You might want to substitute "fiber" for "ceramics" and see if the discussion rings true.

But first he talks about Robert Morris, one of the so-called Process Artists who really didn't want to be like the Abstract Expressionists.  He quotes Morris as saying, "When I sliced unto the plywood with my Skilsaw, I could hear, beneath the ear-damaging whine, a stark and refreshing 'no' reverberate off the four walls: no to transcendence and spiritual values, heroic scale, anguished decisions, historicizing narrative, valuable artifact, intelligent structure, interesting visual experience."

Adamson continues:  "It was from this attitude that Process Art, the most craft-like of the twentieth-century avant gardes, was born.... If Morris was a sculptor who did not want to make a modern sculpture, then the story of ceramics is primarily that of potters who did not want to make pottery.  Of course, both of these efforts were doomed to failure.  Ceramics, defined as such, could only continue to be ceramics, and for the most part, those who work with clay have remained identified as craftspeople rather than contemporary artists.  Process Artists, meanwhile, despite their seeming attempts not to, made modern art objects that were revered as sculpture.

... The two groups were traveling in opposite directions and, in some sense, each was striving for the other's condition -- the one vainly trying to claw its way to the category of sculpture and the other trying to escape from it."

Interestingly, Morris tried to claw his way out not just with plywood but with fiber, making many works out of draped or piled felt that were regarded as sculpture, just as the first generation of "fiber artists" were trying to claw their own way in to being regarded as sculpture.

Robert Morris, Brown Felt, 1973

I find it both amusing and discouraging to think of two groups of people desperately headed in opposite directions.  The grass is always greener...

And yet the High Art world does this all the time, arbitrarily awarding designations that are difficult to escape.  Get your MFA from Yale as a painter, and you can subsequently have as many New York gallery shows as you want in whatever medium and technique you choose.  Make quilts, if that's what floats your boat, but make sure you aren't too meticulous about the craft techniques.  You might even want to have your mom do the actual sewing.

On the other hand, start out making quilts for your bed or your children, and become so accomplished that your work comes off the bed and onto the wall, and is aesthetically stunning, but you'll never get that New York gallery show, even if your quilts look just like the guy's in the previous paragraph.  Or far more likely, even if your quilts look a whole lot better than the guy's in the previous paragraph.

Go figure.


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I'm cross-posting this to Ragged Cloth Cafe, a blog about art of which I am one of seven regular contributors.  You might like to check it out.

Art reader's digest

glass vase by Carlo Scarpa, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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From the New York Times last week, a review by Roberta Smith of a show of Venetian glass:

Craft.  Decorative. Functional.  Well made.  Words like these are often used to keep objects in their place, carefully segregated from the realm of art.

These may spring to mind as you (see this exhibit) ... But they will most likely be shorn of their pejorative power or simultaneously elevated and transcended, and to a revelatory extent.  If you are open to it, this exhibition can radically reshape your ideas about form, beauty, originality and art for art's sake.  Nothing could be better for a time when such concepts are often viewed with suspicion. ...

With a painting, you can ignore how it was made and cling to subject matter for meaning; these glass works force you to think about how form and process achieve meaning on their own, without a clear-cut narrative, or a hushed relationship to, say, abstraction.

Ultimately, though, a substantial narrative does emerge.  It's about discipline, curiosity and risk, and a seductive, volatile, magical medium pushed to extremes.  These objects can't help being meaningful, out of sheer force of aesthetic personality.

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How nice to read such words about craft, from one of the premier art critics in the U.S.  It would be nice to read similar thoughts about fiber.  I'd be happy if somebody had those thoughts about my work.

Art reader's digest

From "Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color," by Philip Ball (which I wrote about last week):

But will anyone still be painting in ten or twenty years' time?  It is not a fashionable art.  Painters have become a relative novelty among the candidates for the much hyped Turner Prize, awarded annually in Britain for young artists.  The names of no new young painters are on everyone's lips (at least, not for longer than a few weeks).  We are still blessed with our Fran Auerbachs, our Howard Hodgkins, our Lucian Freuds, but do we have our Klees, our Goyas, our Raphaels?

...The truth is that we had more than enough greatness in twentieth-century painting, and what does it matter that the final years lost their sparkle?  Who now complains, for example, about the fallow time at the end of the seventeenth century when Vermeer, Velazquez, Rubens, and Rembrandt had passed on and no one had stepped up to take their place?

And so where will the next great colorists take us, and what will be on their palette?  Perhaps conventional pigmentation will indeed take second place as the metallic flakes and fluorescent splashes of Stella and the Pop Artists become supplemented with new possibilities: pearlescent colors... or pigments that change hue as we change our viewing angle.  Both are manufactured as automobile pigments.  Perhaps artists will use liquid crystals that change color with temperature or that offer an iridescent rainbow all at once.

Frank Stella, Kagu, mixed media on aluminum, 1979-80

Well, maybe.  Certainly, all these media will be used -- because that is the way of art, to find ways to take advantage of what technology offers.  That, I hope, is the one central message of this book: technology opens new doors for artists.  And of course technologists cannot then prescribe which portals the artists will go through or what they will do on the other side.  "The painter of the future," said van Gogh, "is a colorist such as has never been seen before."  I do hope so.  The delicious irony is that paint manufacturers, color theorists, and colormakers, practically inclined craftspeople, have traditionally been conventionally minded folk, offering up gleaming new tools into the hands of visionaries who go and do something crazy with them, break the mold, create a revolution.  Long may it last.

More good news on the textile front

I wrote last week about some U.S. textile factories that are thriving, as apparel manufacturers decide they can get better quality and faster turnaround from making the fabric here instead of importing it.
Yesterday the New York Times had another article on a similar theme: the apparel and furnishings manufacturers who want to sew their goods in the U.S.

Demand for American-made goods has been rising, and the same textile industry that has been slashing jobs right and left for the last two decades has suddenly realized that it needs people.  The Times article focuses on companies in Minneapolis that are trying desperately to train and hire enough people to produce goods they already have orders for.

New York Times photo

at a job training program in Minneapolis

Although the U.S. lost 77 percent of its textile workforce since 1990, there are still 142,000 people working as sewing machine operators.  But suddenly that's too few.  Wages for "cut-and-sew jobs" have risen 13.3 percent annually from 2007 to 2012, compared to 1.4 percent for all private sector jobs, as manufacturers try to find qualified workers.

If you're a glass-half-empty kind of person you might find fault with the American companies who were so quick to move their production overseas in the last 25 years, giving us ever-cheaper clothes (in many senses of the word) but losing the skills once abundant in the U.S.

The sewing workforce "withered away and nobody noticed," said a manufacturing executive in the Times article,  "Businesses stopped investing in training; they stopped investing in equipment."

Now the chickens are coming home to roost.  Overseas production is still cheaper, but the gap is closing fast; one manufacturer quoted in the article said that its Chinese labor costs have almost quadrupled since 2000.  Quality control is more difficult half a world away; shipping and import duties eat into the profit margin.  Concerns over worker safety in many countries have also made U.S. producers more wary.  But having stabbed the U.S. workforce in the heart and left it to die, now the industry wonders how to build it back up.

But if you're a glass-half-full kind of person you will find this story to be heartening.  How nice to learn that one can earn a modest income (starting wages for the Minneapolis trainees: $12-16 an hour plus benefits) in a relatively clean factory doing the kinds of things we know are skilled and productive.  How nice to hear a 22-year-old former college student say, "I like getting back to making things, to touching and manipulating materials rather than just pushing buttons or tweeting all day."

Amen to that.

Good news on the textile front

I don't often recommend you read articles in the newspaper, but yesterday's New York Times had a fascinating, detailed explanation of how some textile factories in the U.S. are actually getting business back from Asia because they can make better fabric and garments, despite our higher labor costs.

The article focuses on a new company making high-end sweatshirts. The company started out using a textile mill in India, but had problems with quality control, turnaround time and bureaucratic hassles. Recently it brought the manufacturing back home to a plant in South Carolina that can actually produce the fabric for less than the plant in India.  Also there are no customs duties and less than a third the shipping costs.

photo -- New York Times

In the Parkdale textile plant, Gaffney SC

Those of us who love textiles and use them in our work should be intrigued by this -- dare we call it a trend?  At one time or another we've all bemoaned the spotty quality in a bolt of fabric, wished we weren't losing jobs to other countries, or worried about the appalling working conditions of overseas textile and garment workers.  It would be nice if we could make more of our precious fabrics here at home.

The key to this resurgence of American textile manufacturing, as with other types of manufacturing, is automation.  The yarn mill in South Carolina featured in the article needs 140 workers to make a quantity of product that would have required more than 2,000 workers in 1980.

I commend this article to you -- if for no other reason than the mesmerizing videos of yarn being spun and fabric being woven.

Art reader's digest

Last spring when I was taking an art history class heavy on theory, I wondered in the blog whether theory actually had anything to do with people who make art, or if it was just for people who talk about art.  Here's one answer to that question.

From "Art and Fear," by David Bayles and Ted Orland, 1993:

"Today art issues have for the most part become solely the concern of artists, divorced from -- and ignored by -- the larger community.  Today artists often back away from engaging the times and places of their life, choosing instead the largely intellectual challenge of engaging the times and places of Art. But it's an artificial construct that begins and ends at the gallery door.  Apart from the readership of Artforum, remarkably few people lose sleep trying to incorporate gender-neutral biomorphic deconstructivism into their personal lives.  As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art."

"In such a setting artists strain to find material of any human consequence.  Under pressure of impending irrelevance, they may begin to fill their canvasses and monitors with charged particles 'appropriated' from other places and times.  It is as though art itself confers universality upon its subject, as though in art all objects automatically retain their power -- as though you could incorporate the power of the Plains Indian medicine bundle into your work.  Or convincingly complete the closing movements of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony.  Today, indeed, you can find urban white artists -- people who could not reliably tell a coyote from a German shepherd at a hundred feet -- casually incorporating the figure of Coyote the Trickster into their work.  A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time.  It cannot.  There's a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced.  As someone once said, no one should wear a Greek fisherman's hat except a Greek fisherman."

Art reader's digest

from "Transgressions: The Offences of Art," by Anthony Julius

Politically resistant artworks have divided audiences: those against whom they are directed, and those whose morale they are intended to lift.  The stance of the artist is thus both oppositional and representative.  His artworks are pitches against one audience, but made on behalf of another one. They are transgressive and affirmative -- in a sense, transgressive because affirmative. Politically resistant works are exceptional.  There is no place for them in two contrasting kinds of state.  There is the state whose citizens take for granted, correctly, that they order their own lives, and that institutions exist to serve them.  Politically resistant artworks are not needed in such a state.  And then there is the state where these assumptions are not made and in which politically resistant artworks are not possible.  Such works will be exceptional, then, either because of the acquiescence of accommodating states or the harshness of repressive states.  One kind of state is usually too hard to offend; the other kind of state is usually too quick to respond.

Compare the anti-Vietnam War art in the United States with the art briefly on display at the September 1974 Moscow 'Bulldozer' show.  While the former, with exceptions, was unable even to engage the state's attention, the latter could not survive its brisk dismissal.  In Moscow, artworks were thrown into skips and destroyed, and visitors chased away with waterhoses mounted on trucks.  On the one side, then, there tends to be a surplus of political works, existing, as artists experience it, in a vacuum of indifference, while on the other side there is a dearth of works, surviving against expectation.

Kathleen Loomis, War Rationale 2, 2004, (existing in a vacuum of indifference) 

Art reader's digest

From "Double Take," by Richard Whelan, 1981:

"The choice between black-and-white and color film is, then, not a matter of reactionism versus avant-gardism or of asceticism versus hedonism.  Color and black-and-white photographs are actually about different things.  Color photographs are disjunctive and sensual; black-and-whites are conjunctive and cerebral.  The photographer who uses black-and-white film starts out with an advantage: his medium evidently offers easier access to the subconscious, with its overtones of surrealism and repressed emotions, the expression of which is an essential function of art.  This access to the seething subconscious may help to explain why it is so difficult to imagine in anything but black and white the work of such photographers as Diane Arbus, in whose photographs there is an element of rapacious voyeurism, or Weegee, who was drawn to scenes of violence.  Their photographs simply wouldn't have been as powerful or as disturbing in color.  They would have been just gortesque or horrifying pictures rather than profoundly unsettling photographs.

Car accident, Weegee

"The photographer who uses color film must work extraordinarily hard to make an image that resonates with anything like the kind of ambiguity and dreamlike, subconscious-stimulating qualities that come naturally to black and white.  It may be precisely an intuition of the magnitude of this challenge that began to attract so many sophisticated and adventurous photographers to color during the 1970s."

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Kathy comments:  Would he say the same things today?  Have four decades of color photography achieved their challenge?  Check out what's happening today in black-and-white here.

Art reader's digest

From a review by Holland Cotter in the New York Times of a show by the great Italian painter Giorgio Morandi:

(Near the end of his life,)  "His hand had lost steadiness; his eyesight was, perhaps, failing,  But he didn't rest.  He kept painting.  Why?

Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morte (Still Life), 1954

"You might ask other artist-poets this question: Joseph Albers, say, or Paul Klee or Agnes Martin or a New York artist I know who sits down at his apartment desk for two hours every day -- only two, but always two -- to embroider small squares of raw canvas with abstract patterns in silk thread.  The work is close, slow and painstaking, done stitch by stitch, row by row -- letter by letter, line by line -- in calligraphic loops and tufts.  An inch of embroidery, approximately the size of a sonnet quatrain, takes months to complete.

"But the work goes on.  Because it is controllable reality.  It is a form of thinking that frees up thought.  It is time-consuming, but time-slowing, isolating but self-fulfilling.  It is a part of life, but also a metaphor for how life should be: with everything in place, every pattern clear, every rhyme exact, every goal near."

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Kathy comments:

The good news: a lyrical description of the making of art, perfectly capturing the transcendent allure of slow handwork.

The bad news: why couldn't Cotter have named his admirable artist-friend?

Art reader's digest

"The Painted Word", by Tom Wolfe, 1975, is a delightful short book that should be read by anybody who's studied or read about the theories of modern and contemporary art -- I guarantee, you'll understand more from reading this book than you did from your art history teacher or from reading (or reading about) Clement Greenberg.  Yes, the references are 35 years out of date, but it is still TRUE!!  And funny.

Here's an excerpt:

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in Modern Art, the notion that the public scorns, ignores, fails to comprehend, allows to wither, crushes the spirit of, or commits any other crime against Art or any individual artist is merely a romantic fiction, a bittersweet Trilby sentiment.  The game is completed and the trophies distributes long before the public knows what has happened.  The public that buys books in hardcover and paperback by the millions, the public that buys records by the billions and fills stadiums for concerts, the public that spends $100 million on a single movie -- this public affects taste, theory, and artistic outlook in literature, music, and drama, even though courtly elites hand on somewhat desperately in each field.  The same has never been true in art.  The public whose glorious numbers are recorded in the annual reports of the museums, all those students and bus tours and moms and dads and random intellectuals ... are merely tourists, autograph seekers, gawkers, parade watchers, so far as the game of Success in Art is concerned.  The public is presented with a fait accompli and the aforementioned printed announcement, usually in the form of a story or a spread of color pictures in the back pages of Time.  An announcement, as I say.  Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his worth and make it stick.  They can only bring you the news, tell you which artists the beau hamlet, Cultureburg, has discovered and certified.  They can only bring you the scores.

Art reader's digest

From "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)", Andy Warhol, 1975:

I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things.  Things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good, I always though had a great potential to be funny.  It was like recycling work.  I always thought there was a lot of humor in leftovers.  When I see an old Esther Williams movie and a hundred girls are jumping off their swings, I think of what the auditions must have been like and about all the takes where maybe one girl didn't have the nerve to jump when she was supposed to, and I think about her left over on the swing.  So that take of the scene was a leftover on the editing-room floor -- and out-take -- and the girl was probably a leftover at that point -- she was probably fired -- so the whole scene is much funnier than the real scene where everything went right, and the girl who didn't jump is the star of the out-take.

I'm not saying that popular taste is bad so that what's left over from the bad taste is good: I'm saying that what's left over is probably bad, but if you can take it and make it good or at least interesting, then you're not wasting as much as you would otherwise.  You're recycling work and you're recycling people, and you're running your business as a byproduct of other businesses....  So that's a very economical operating procedure.  It's also the funniest operating procedure because, as I said, leftovers are inherently funny.

My Valentine

from my recent show of art made from junk on the street -- I agree, leftovers are funny!

Art reader's digest

from an exhibit review in Embroidery magazine (published in the UK), September/October 2004, by Angela Hesketh:

"While some of the work in (the show) is irreverent, the search for 'content' often upstages the medium and some of the work could have been better executed.  When content is championed over the handling of the chosen medium, it raises a further debate -- that of the value and status of textiles as an art form."

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Do we agree?

Suppose the works had been paintings -- would the critic say that emphasis on content and possible poor execution call the value and status of painting as an art form into question?

Suppose the works had been paintings -- would a critic even bring up the issue of execution?

The whole thrust of contemporary art is to value content over technique -- does textile art deliberately want to distance itself from this historical development?