Devils and Dust: Bruce Springsteen, Edward Hopper and American Light

by Gregg Chadwick


Bruce Springsteen's latest album will be released on April 26th, 2005. But the title track, "Devils and Dust" is already available. Like the compelling story in the newspaper that you find well after the hype of the front page, the characters in this new song are riveting yet invisible to the general public. The music is stripped down, at times hardscrabble and barren like the physical and emotional landscapes that these characters roam. As a painter, when I listen to Springsteen's hard fought melodies and stark vocals, I see images. And many times I see images painted by Edward Hopper.

Edward Hopper

Gas

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Hopper's figures share with Springsteen's characters a very American way of being. Not always pretty- but always present. Both Hopper's paintings and Springsteen's songs are lit by a sort of American light that exists not to create atmosphere, but to light objects. This same light is used in school portraits and family snapshots to fix smiles for posterity. But, as in the boxes of color photos found in attics and basements, the color in Hopper's paintings seems to turn amber as the works age. I was struck recently by the evident aging in Hopper’s "New York Movie" at the Museum of Modern Art. The paint was visibly pulling away from the edges of the painting. The clean, smooth look found in much contemporary painting and photography was not there. You could see the struggle in the painting's creation and feel its impending loss in the growing network of cracks and fissures. Springsteen's ballads on 1982's "Nebraska" foretold another process of decay even while new. The album was mastered from a damaged cassette tape of homemade demos that Bruce carried with him to band rehearsals. The crack and hiss in the album were there from the start and seemed to create the soundtrack for the eventual decay of Reagan's grand American Empire. Springsteen's next stripped down acoustic album, 1995's " The Ghost of Tom Joad", was steeped in Steinbeck’s novels "Grapes of Wrath" and "East of Eden". But Steinbeck's optimism had been left in Salinas. And Bruce left the romanticism out on New Jersey's Highway 9. The music in "The Ghost of Tom Joad" was as dry as Hopper's paint in his later works. And that was the point. These were American artworks based on tangible images and moments. And there was a sort of American heroism evident in getting these images and stories down.

USMC, Korean War

photo by Robert Chadwick

Springsteen wrote the haunting title track for "Devils and Dust" on the eve of the war in Iraq. There is no bombast in this piece. This is no call to arms. Instead, Bruce captures the inner conflict of all soldiers on all battlefields. When Bruce mumbles, "We're a long, long way from home, Bobbie", I think of the photos taken by my father, another Bob, as a young Marine in the Korean War. But even more I think of my mom, waiting for her man to come home. And I think of the young American moms and dads waiting for their loved ones to come home from Iraq, or Afghanistan, or the numerous and un-named lily pad bases scattered across the globe.

Springsteen and Bono, 1981

U2 tackled the mythos of the American West in 1987's "Joshua Tree". This music is now so emblematic of an American sense of place that I longed to hear those anthemic songs while recently driving through the National Park at Joshua Tree. But when I exited the park and watched the afternoon light slant across boarded up storefronts along the Highway and heard the scream of the Marine Corps jets above me, I realized that Springsteen had to leave his anthems behind when he tackled his vision of the American West in "Devil's and Dust". Springsteen doesn't just see the wide-open vistas at the scenic viewpoints. Springsteen turns around and sees the young Mexican girl selling trinkets along the road. Springsteen knows of the rat-filled tunnels she crawled through to get to America. Springsteen hears the diatribe coming from Washington and Sacramento. Springsteen's response is to strip his songs down just a little bit more, to edit deeply, and to keep looking at the American light.




Springsteen plays in Los Angeles on May 2 and May 3. My thoughts on the concert will follow:
See Devils and Dust Tour

*Update: Devils and Dust Tour

Whispers of Siam

by Gregg Chadwick

Gregg Chadwick

"Poem of the River"

36"x29" oil on linen 2005

Julie Weiss, who designed the costumes for the films Frida, American Beauty and Twelve Monkeys, recently stepped into my studio to view my new paintings. She was struck by the garments of remembrance that ran across the wall: saffron robed monks, a trio of women in kimonos, a boy in blue running across an open beach. Julie Weiss said, “ The paintings all together are like a ribbon across time and experience. We are following these monks on their journey. We see with their eyes as they pass by storefronts and streets. We are with them in fate, chance and accident.”

This ribbon began a few years ago in Thailand during a journey with my father. He was acting as a visiting lawyer involved in issues of justice and human rights. I would scurry out at dawn to wander the alleys of Chiang Mai and would catch the monks on their small morning pilgrimages. The morning of my last day was especially luminous. The light was almost incandescent and the blur of movement seemed to create paintings for me. I just needed to pay attention. To really see. I spent the time on the short flight to Bangkok watching a film in my mind of saffron robes glowing in the morning mist. As I waited for my connecting flight to San Francisco I caught a new clip on the television monitor. As the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center I longed for home and my son and knew that my artistic pilgrimage was just beginning. My new paintings are inspired by the whispers of Siam that I carry with me from that day. The saffron robed monks in my work are direct echoes of that experience. For me these monks are spiritual pilgrims that lead us away from the destruction and waste of violence, racism and hatred.

A selection of new paintings will be on exhibit from May 6 – June 9, 2005 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
Art Rental & Sales Gallery
5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Reception for the artist
Friday, May 6th, 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Leo S. Bing Center, Lower Level at LACMA

Gallery hours:
11am - 4 pm: Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday
Closed Sunday, Monday and Wednesday
323-857-6500

Miranda July: New Film & New Blog

Miranda July, recently involved with the Learning to Love You More project which made stops along the West Coast as part of the Baja to Vancouver exhibition and was in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, has a new film and a new blog .

Miranda July, The Swan Tool

"I loved Miranda July's piquantly original first feature film, "Me and You and Everyone We Know", about a fragile, quirky,and imperfect human connection. It was probably my favorite among the American Dramas I saw at Sundance, and I loved it like a poem or perhaps like a piece of performance art for which Miranda July is known; it is also poem-size, the kind of exotic delicacy likely to bloom only in festival soil."
- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Private Screening of "A Day Without A Mexican" for Arnold?

by Gregg Chadwick

California's actor governor knows all about film screenings. After his latest off the cuff and out of control quip:

"Close the borders. Close the borders in California, and all across Mexico and the United States. Because I think it is just unfair to have all of those people coming across, and to have the borders open the way it is. We in California have to still finish the border. That is the key thing -- to have borders and to keep the law, enforce the law.", Schwarzenegger told hundreds of newspaper publishers at the Newspaper Association of America convention at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

Arnold needs to arrange a private screening of Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi's film - "A Day Without A Mexican". In an interview with Bija Gutoff on the Apple Final Cut Pro site Sergio explains the genesis of the film:

“I was waiting for my car to be washed, and this guy handed me a tip,” says Sergio Arau. “In a restaurant someone heard me speaking Spanish and asked me to bring water. I’d say to myself, ‘Do I look like I work here?’”

Yareli Arizmendi and Sergio Arau

A well-known journalist, cartoonist, animator, musician and film and video director in Mexico City, Arau was used to being viewed as a serious professional. So it was a shock to discover how little his resume counted in the U.S.

“What happened?” asks Arau. “I had a long career before I came here, and because I didn’t speak English, for the first time in my life I was a minority. No one knew or cared about the work I had done. What’s worse, they didn’t even see me.”

As an immigrant, Arnold Schwarzenegger should realize the unwarranted and destructive nature of his comments. Close off immigration from Mexico, Central and South America and California will grind to a halt. Take a break Arnold. Grab a bowl of popcorn. Screen "A Day Without A Mexican". Get ready to laugh and learn a few things. Remember Arnold; it's that other newly elected German-speaking guy who thinks he is infallible.

Gregg Chadwick
Portrait of Yareli Arizmendi
40"x30" oil on linen 2012

"How do you make the invisible visible? You take it away," says Yareli Arizmendi, the film's lead actress, co-writer and co-producer, also known for her portrayal of Rosaura in Like Water for Chocolate.

Arizmendi's mantra comes from the old adage 'you don't know what you have until it's gone,’ and it is precisely this idea and sentiment that the filmmakers want us to walk away with-- knowing and feeling that immigrants, legal or illegal, are indispensable not only to our economy but to our very way of life.

"The most important thing is that we are human beings," says Sergio Arau, the film's director, co-writer and co-producer.

"I believe this film will make a better place for my kids," says Sergio Guerrero, the film's co-writer, second-unit director and one of the top directors of Spanish-language television commercials."

Note:
*Interview With Sergio and Yareli from the article "A Day Without Racism?" by Ricardo Acuña in Socal.com



Art

New Pope - New Culture War?

by Gregg Chadwick

Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany Is Elected
265th Pope, Taking Benedict XVI as Name

The newly elected pope is a divisive figure and an acknowledged opponent of a contemporary, pluralistic and modern culture.
In a world beset with war, over-population, environmental degradation, religious strife, AIDS, prejudice and racism, we need a religious leader who embraces humanity in all its colors, genders, orientations and talents. Instead we are presented with a man who is according to Rose Marie Berger of Sojourner's Magazine, "dogmatic, and rule-bound. Inclusive language makes him queasy. Liberation theology and women's ordination give him hives." The new pope sees pluralist modernity as heresy and homosexuality as a moral and psychological disorder. As Cardinal, Ratzinger predicted that Buddhism would replace Marxism as the Catholic Church’s main enemy this century.

"Art itself, which in impressionism and expressionism explored the extreme possibilities of the sense of sight, becomes literally object-less. Art turns into experimenting with self-created worlds, empty "creativity", which no longer perceives the Creator Spiritus, the Creator Spirit. It attempts to take his place, and yet, in so doing, it manages to produce only what is arbitrary and vacuous, bringing home to man the absurdity of his role as creator."
- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "Art, Image and Artists"

"There is simply no other figure more extreme than the new Pope on the issues that divide the Church. No one. He raised the stakes even further by his extraordinarily bold homily at the beginning of the conclave, where he all but declared a war on modernity, liberalism (meaning modern liberal democracy of all stripes) and freedom of thought and conscience. And the speed of the decision must be interpreted as an enthusiastic endorsement of his views. What this says to American Catholics is quite striking: it's not just a disagreement, it's a full-scale assault. This new Pope has no pastoral experience as such. He is a creature of theological discourse, a man of books and treatises and arguments. He proclaims his version of the truth as God-given and therefore unalterable and undebateable. His theology is indeed distinguished, if somewhat esoteric and at times a little odd. But his response to dialogue within the church is to silence those who disagree with him. He has no experience dealing with people en masse, no hands-on experience of the challenges of the church in the developing world, and complete contempt for dissent in the West. His views on the subordinate role of women in the Church and society, the marginalization of homosexuals (he once argued that violence against them was predictable if they kept pushing for rights), the impermissibility of any sexual act that does not involve the depositing of semen in a fertile uterus, and the inadmissibility of any open discourse with other faiths reveal him as even more hard-line than the previous pope. I expected continuity. I didn't expect intensification of the fundamentalism and insularity of the current hierarchy. I expect an imminent ban on all gay seminarians, celibate or otherwise. And I expect the Church's immersion in the culture wars in the West - on every imaginable issue. For American Catholics, I foresee an accelerating exodus. But that, remember, is the plan. The Ratzingerians want to empty the pews in America and start over. They will, in that sense, be successful."
-Andrew Sullivan

Also see: don't forgive them;they know what they are doing.

Marla Ruzicka Dies in Her Line of Duty

by Gregg Chadwick

"I was really changed by my experiences in Afghanistan. It is a luxury for people to say war is bad when they are in San Francisco. You need to make friends with people in the U.S. government in order to get a change in policy. You can't say something is bad unless you come in with ways to fix it."
-Marla Ruzicka

Marla Ruzicka and Matt Gonzalez at Laila Carlsen's show, San Francisco City Hall

photo by Gregg Chadwick

The war in Iraq is a senseless accumulation of deaths. Marla Ruzicka, the founder and tireless leader of CIVIC (The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict) and Faiz Ali Salim, (CIVIC's Iraq Country Director) were just two of the most recent casualties. But for the San Francisco art community these deaths struck home. Marla was good friends with Matt Gonzalez and frequented the art openings in Matt's office at City Hall when she was in town drumming up support for her campaign to account for the civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Marla died on Saturday at the age of 28 in a suicide bomb attack while on the way "to visit an Iraqi child injured by a bomb, part of her daily work of identifying and supporting innocent victims of this war," said CIVIC representative April Pedersen in a statement on the group's Web site.

April Pederson continues, "It is tragically ironic that two beautiful people who devoted their lives to helping innocent victims of war have now become them.There are precious few who have the courage to stand up and demand justice for all the victims of conflict wherever they may be. This troubled world cannot afford to lose people like them.

Marla overflowed with passion and had an incredible sense of obligation to help those less fortunate. She worked tirelessly to push the US military on its responsibility to keep a proper accounting of the consequences of military action on civilians in Iraq."

Marla's funeral will be held on Saturday at 11am in Lakeport's St. Mary's Church, and a memorial service will follow in Washington, D.C. Her father, Clifford Ruzicka, asks that donations in her memory be made to CIVIC at P. O. Box 1189, Lakeport, CA 95453.

Robert Worth in the New York Times reports."On the day she was killed, Ms. Ruzicka was visiting Iraqi families that had lost relatives to the violence here. She sent a text message to a friend saying the stories had been painful to hear.

An American Army officer who arrived on the scene shortly after the bomber struck said that Ms. Ruzicka's car was engulfed in flames, and that she was still alive and conscious.

A medic on the scene treated her, said the officer, Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, and heard her last words.

"I'm alive," she said."

Marla's spirit was captivating. Her vision was clear. And her bravery and willingness to get into the dirt of both war and politics should inspire all of us to continue with our efforts to create peace in our time. Marla's last words ring clear. Marla's spirit, Marla's vision, Marla's bravery and Marla's cause live on.

Marla's Work- The Christian Science Monitor
Marla's Work- The San Francisco Chronicle
Marla Dies in Her Line of Duty- New York Times
Marla : Time

Sculptor Robert Graham's Nude Gift to Venice

by Gregg Chadwick

The Los Angeles Times reports on the controversy over the gift of a sculpture by the figurative artist Robert Graham to the city of Venice, California. Diane Haithman in the LA Times reports,"The Los Angeles City Council approved the yet-to-be completed artwork, a gift to the city from the artist and Venice donor Roy Doumani, last June. But earlier this month a handful of Venice residents filed appeals with the city to block the sculpture's placement in Windward Circle, a traffic circle ringed with funky eateries, wacky gift shops and chic boutiques."

Robert Graham's work, like that of the Bay Area sculptor Stephen de Staebler and Rodin before him, plays on the history of classical sculpture and its fragmentation over time. The proposed sculpture for Venice is an elevated stainless steel female torso. The work would focus on the core of the body minus extremities. This emphasis helps to exclude a reading of the sculpture as a portrait of an individual or a type and broadens the scope of the work to include myth as well as art history. There is nobility and strength in a portrayal of the active human core that is exemplified in the classical Belvedere Torso now in the Vatican Collection.

Sculpture by Robert Graham, UCLA Sculpture Garden

photo by Gregg Chadwick

Peter Selz writes on the subject of fragmentation while considering the work of Stephen de Staebler:

"Ever since Auguste Rodin, evoking the damaged sculpture of antiquity, presented his partial, yet muscular and erotic figures, the fractured human form has been endemic to modern sculpture. The human torso was a dominant theme in the work of artists as diverse as Maillol and Brancusi, Henry Moore and Antoine Pevsner. Giacometti pared the standing woman and the striding man to the bare essentials of existence. But only in the “Abakans,” the poignant headless figures by Magdalena Abakanowicz, and in De Staebler’s sculpted images does the fragmented figure assume a symbolic function of human incompleteness and yearning for wholeness. De Staebler’s large-scale legs signify this predicament for an artist who faces the human condition—both its vulnerability and its tenacity. His work recalls the ancient effigies of the Sumerians and the Egyptians. At the same time, it is painfully contemporary. While there is a timeless quality in De Staebler’s work, these severed limbs remind us of our recently awakened sense of vulnerability."

Belvedere Torso,1st Century, Vatican Collection

"Despite delays and controversy, Doumani and Graham have no intention of withdrawing their donation. 'Venice is Venice. It's one of the most outspoken communities anywhere,' Doumani said wryly. 'I've never had so much trouble giving anything in my life."




Art

Artists Interview Artists

J.T. Kirkland on his site:thinking about art has a call out for artists to interview other artists. Formulate five interview questions that you would like another artist to answer. Send them on to J.T. He will then provide you with five questions from another artist that you will answer and return. JT will post the interviews periodically.

More on Peter Schjeldahl at SFMOMA

Peter Schjeldahl was also at SFMOMA last Thursday evening - Anna Conti who graciously provided a link to my entries on Neil Welliver and Peter Schjeldahl provides a detailed account of Thursday's lecture:

Peter Schjeldahl at SFMOMA

Neil Welliver- Down the Canvas to the Bottom and Out

by Gregg Chadwick

Neil Welliver, who died this week, painted the Maine landscape with rigorous vision and an all-over technique inspired by abstract expressionism that gave his work a Thoreau-like spirit of both the pragmatic and the numinous.
He settled on a daringly simple method of painting. Starting from the top of his large, usually square paintings, Welliver would finish a corner, then a horizontal strip and work his way down the surface of the work until he painted his way out in the last corner. There is a freshness of seeing and paint in these works that bring to life both the crisp light of Maine and the inner workings of Neil's richly intelligent and humorous mind.

Neil Welliver, Vickie 48"x48" oil on canvas 1970

"Courbet looked very hard and had a method. Bierstadt did not
look very hard and had a method, and de Kooning makes it up as he
goes along. I think I relate much more to de Kooning because I look
very hard and then I make it up as I go along.
The way I paint is totally focused and intense and complete -
every mark is a form that's not going to be covered up later. I don't
go over it. I go down the canvas to the bottom and out, and that's it."  
-Neil Welliver, from a conversation with Edwin Denby, 1981

"Years ago, Neil said to me that his goal as a painter was to make a natural painting as fluid as de Kooning. And he repeatedly acknowledges that the vitality of his own art comes from Abstract Expressionism, and that he has a natural affinity for pure abstraction. What is truly remarkable about his paintings is their success in, at once, organizing the picturesque elements of nature without loss of phenomenological integrity, and at the same time, achieving abstract structure without the feeling of the imposition of a natural order."  
-Frank Goodyear, 1993 

Also see:

modernkicks: neil welliver

terry teachout on welliver

ken johnson on welliver

alexandre gallery

Art

Peter Schjeldahl at SFMOMA

by Gregg Chadwick

Peter Schjeldahl at SFMOMA
photo by Gregg Chadwick

Peter Schjeldahl, currently the art critic for the New Yorker, held a roundtable discussion with Neal Benezra, director SFMOMA, and Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture SFMOMA, yesterday at the Wattis Theater in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His enthusiasm for art and artists was palpable. And his wit was in rare form. During the question and answer session following the discussion it was announced by an artist in the back rows of the Wattis Theater that painting was dead. Peter chuckled and then asked,” What kind of art do you do?" The artist responded that she was involved in art that utilized new technologies. Peter laughed again and blurted out, "Well, there you go, trying to kill off the competition." He neither dismissed the woman nor her art but instead pointed out the careerism hiding behind many art labels and preferences.

When I asked about the place of beauty in contemporary art, Peter leaned forward and spoke from the heart." This is an important, if not controversial, question that I write about often. In the 60s and 70s in academia it was the forbidden word. A group of art historians could look up at the blue sky and and declare it a beautiful day on their way to a conference on contemporary art. But once in the doors of the conference room, beauty ceased to exist." Peter concluded by stating, "Art does not have to address beauty- to reach for beauty. But it sure is great if it does."

SFMOMA · Public Programs Archive: Peter Schjeldahl: The Story of the Image (April 7, 2005)

Art

Murakami's Little Boy Exhibition Opens April 8th at New York's Japan Society

From:
Japan Society Gallery, Spring 2005
Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture

Curated by Takashi Murakami
April 8 - July 24, 2005

Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture explores the culture of postwar Japan through its arts and popular visual media, from the perspective of one of Japan's most celebrated artists. Focusing on the phenomenally influential subcultures of otaku (roughly translated as "pop cult fanaticism") and its relationships to Japan's artistic vanguard, Takashi Murakami explores the historical influences that shape Japanese contemporary art and its distinct graphic idioms. The exhibition's title, Little Boy, refers to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, clearly locating the birth of these new cultural forms in the trauma and generational aftershock. In Murakami's perspective, a resonant figure for Japan's contemporary condition is that of the "little boy"--both the nickname for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and an image of Japan's infantalized culture.

Little Boy concludes Murakami's "Superflat" trilogy, a project conceived in 2000 to introduce a new wave of Japanese artists and to place their work in the historical context of traditional Japanese styles and concepts. The exhibition will showcase the work of key otaku artists and designers, many of whom are cult celebrities in Japan, and introduces their film and video animations, video games and internet sites, music, toys, and fashion to American audiences.

Work by Anno Hideaki, Aoshima Chiho, Ban Chinatsu, Fujiko F. Fujio, Kawashima Hideaki, Kato Izumi, Komatsuzaki Shigeru, Mahomi Kunikata, Matsumoto Reiji, Miura Jun, "Mr.," Narita Toru, Okamoto Taro, Oshima Yuki, Otomo Katsuhiro, Otomo Shoji, Takano Aya, Tsubaki Noboru, Yanobe Kenji, Yoshitomo Nara, and Murakami will be exhibited. Public art works by Ban, Aoshima and Murakami will be installed at sites throughout New York City.

A fully illustrated, bilingual catalogue, co-published with Yale University Press, accompanies the exhibition, with essays by Murakami, Midori Matsui, Morikawa Kaichiro, Okada Toshio, Sawagari Noi, Katy Siegel and project directors Tom Eccles, Director of the Public Art Fund and Alexandra Munroe, Director of the Gallery and Vice President of Arts & Culture at Japan Society.
Gallery hours
Tuesday through Thursday, 11 am - 6 pm
Friday, 11 am - 9 pm
Saturday & Sunday, 11 am - 5 pm

Moby's Music for Our New Flat Earth

by Gregg Chadwick

Thomas L. Friedman's new book, "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century'', argues that the fall of the Berlin Wall was the first in a series of important events that have ushered in the 21st Century. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing dissolution of the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe allowed us to see the world, maybe for the first time, as one whole fabric.

Moby
April 1, 2005
photo by Gregg Chadwick

"It was a result of events and forces that all came together during the 1990's and converged right around the year 2000 ...The first event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a single space.’ The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,' the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the wall went down just as the windows went up -- the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a global computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell. 

The second key date was 8/9. Aug. 9, 1995, is the day Netscape went public, which did two important things. First, it brought the Internet alive by giving us the browser to display images and data stored on Web sites. Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. In sum, what the Netscape revolution did was bring people-to-people connectivity to a whole new level. Suddenly more people could connect with more other people from more different places in more different ways than ever before."
-Thomas L. Friedman, "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century''

It is the last sentence that I think will prove to be the most prescient for artists around the globe. More people are connecting with more people from more different places in more different artistic ways than ever before. In the past, new art was engendered as differing artistic cultures slid along each other like massive geological plates. In our age, music and art can be created in real time over a vast "flat" landscape. Global distinctions are breaking down. Artists are using the machines of business and industry to stay ahead of some sort of global homogenization. Instead artists like Moby are connecting and creating with a vast and potentially powerful community.

I thought of the collapse of the wall again when I read Kelefa Sanneh's failed attempt in the New York Times to use Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" as a bludgeon to beat Moby's new album "Hotel" into the ground.

Moby's music is built using techniques that are global. Musicians can gather in their respective studios and plug in across the globe to create one new piece of music. The opportunities are open and endless and just being touched on.

Kelefa bemoans this influx of technology into the art world :"Mr. Fukuyama, in his famous obituary, might have written (but didn't quite, of course) that "boredom at the end of music will serve to get music started once again." That's an appealing idea, but it's also appealing to know, listening to "Hotel," that it won't be necessary. The end of music seems to have ended itself."

Of course this is a willful misreading of both Fukuyama and Moby. "The End of History" is not an obituary but instead a birth announcement - a philosophical examination of political good news:

"Liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe. In addition, liberal principles in economics – the “free market” – have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity, both in industrially developed countries and in countries that had been, at the close of World War II, part of the impoverished Third World. A liberal revolution in economic thinking has sometimes preceded, sometimes followed, the move toward political freedom around the globe."
-Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History"

Moby in a recent interview with Jaan Uhelszki in SOMA magazine describes walking down a hotel corridor past rows of closed and forbidding doorways but with the understanding that behind these doors people "are doing the most intimate things...bathing, sleeping, crying, having sex, laughing, starting relationships and ending relationships."

Friedman in "The World is Flat" describes the fall of the Berlin Wall as opening the closed doors of Eastern Europe and goes on to show how the world's new digital railway has opened the doors of India and China. Moby's global concerns and global audience indicate that he is in the forefront of a new worldwide artistic community. The beauty that Moby strives for and finds in his music speaks to the denizens of our new flat earth.

Venetians Added Ground Glass to Renaissance Paints

In the current issue of "Science News", Barbara Berrie and Louisa Matthew, from the conservation department at the National Gallery of Art, report on new discoveries in the paint formulation of sixteenth century Venetian paintings. It seems that ground glass was added to the powdered pigments upon grinding in linseed oil to increase transparency and to speed the drying time of the paint. Microscopic traces of glass were found in samples of Lorenzo Lotto's pigments viewed by Berrie "using scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive spectrometry, among other sophisticated analytical techniques"

"Upon closer examination, Berrie found high-quality silica in a form routinely used by Venetian glassmakers. During the Renaissance, they obtained it from quartzite pebbles along the Ticino River in northern Italy. They would then grind the quartzite into a fine powder."

Lorenzo Lotto

detail: Allegory of Virtue and Vice, 1505, National Gallery of Art

"For the Venetians to be able to use this ultrapure source of silica was a real technological innovation. Traditionally, glass was made from sand, which is loaded with impurities such as iron. The iron gives glass a green tint. Using pure silica, helped Venetian glassmakers to create their colorless cristallo. Perhaps Lotto was trying to achieve the same clarity in his paintings. He was layering these paints so thinly, he must have been taking advantage of glass' optical properties, says Berrie."

sciencenews

And I highly recommend the color histories found on:

webexhibits

"De Kooning: An American Master" by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan Wins Pulitzer Prize

"De Kooning: An American Master" by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Biography today.

Portrait of De Kooning

photo by Harry Bowden

 Courtesy of the Charles Campbell Gallery, San Francisco

David Hockney - Hand, Eye, Heart, Space

David Hockney's current exhibition of landscape watercolors at the LA Louver Gallery in Venice, California brings him back to the fields of East Yorkshire where as a teen on summer breaks from school he worked the fields he now paints. There is a youthful expansiveness in these new watercolors. Hockney's deep study of Picasso and Braque's cubistic space allows him to blow open these paintings in a way seldom seen in watercolor. The type of bent and overlapping space found in Hockney's earlier photo collages such as "Pearblossom Highway"(up the road at the Getty) is very much in evidence here.

Moving from the foreground with its patterned arrangements of vegetation, to the lozenged fields in the middleground, to the horizon line in "East Yorkshire Spring" (above) which seems to bend with the curvature of the earth, leads us not to a single point, but to the vast interconnected nature of time and existence. We have seen these wide-open vistas so often in American films, especially Westerns, that it is easy to brand the vista as an exclusively American idea. In these works, Hockney seems to be discovering that these limitless horizons were already found in the landscape of his youth. And these limitless spaces are also found in the ideas of physicists such as Stephen Hawking. Hockney, throughout his career, has been as interested in how we see as in what we see. Light, color and questions on space and time have come to the forefront in both physics (light has become the cornerstone of reality and space and time have become observer-dependent) and the art of David Hockney.



Art

Robert Creeley Remembered 1926-2005

Donald Sultan
Spring 1999
"Robert Creeley is an artist’s poet....I think of him as one of the most
 thoughtful poets ever to explore this complex relationship between the eye and the object."
 - Donald Sultan, 1999

"(Battery) There"
Wherever it was, I took this place
To be in mind as well as there
Where persons walked with muffled forms,
Marked by the high sky's yellow glare.

The measured look placed all in squares,
Boxed by a distance fixed in space.
Lampposts blackened against the day.
The shuffled passage of persons faded.

The building, it seemed, they would never
          get to.
Its vertical strips of window reflected
Light from a world they might have heard of,
But, try as they would, they would
          never reach.

- Robert Creeley

From the New York Public Library:
"Over his lifetime Robert Creeley explored the profound connections between visual art and creative writing in collaborations with artists such as Georg Baselitz, Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz, R. B. Kitaj, Susan Rothenberg, Marisol, and Donald Sultan. Since his early years as one of the originators of the Black Mountain school of poetry in the 1950s, Creeley worked with artists from a variety of disciplines. He employed an ever evolving "process" of collaboration through his relationships with artists resulting in a body of work that includes books and portfolios of poetry, art, prose, and criticism in a variety of media."

The poem and image here were originally published in
"Visual Poetics: The Arts of Donald Sultan"
with text by Michael McKenzie

Marcos Fine Arts Contemporary Atelier
201 Nevada Street
El Segundo, CA 90245

Images © Donald Sultan
Poems © Robert Creeley

More on Robert Creeley, his life and work:

creeley remembered

Events this Weekend at the San Francisco Art Institute

Gregg Chadwick
Speed of Life Study
33"x20" monotype 2005
From the San Francisco Art Institute Art Auction

The annual San Francisco Art Institute Art Auction will be held Saturday, April 2, at SomArts, 934 Brannan St., in San Francisco.

Works donated by such artists as Marcel Dzama, Jay DeFeo, Lynda Benglis,Gregg Chadwick, Imogen Cunningham, David Ireland, Annie Leibovitz, Larry Thomas, and Charles Hobson will be offered to the highest bidder. The range in value is expected to be $150 to $15,000 for the works. In addition to paintings, works on paper, photographs, and sculpture, other items to be auctioned include art-related travel tours, restaurant gift certificates, and fine wines.

The reception and silent auction begin at 5:00 P.M., and the live auction commences at 7:00 P.M. The auctioneer is Malcolm Barber, from Bonhams & Butterfields. SKYY Vodka will sponsor the open bar. Co-chairs of the event are Nicole Fife and Will Wick (Art Auction Committee) and Carol Baker and Linda Fairchild (Art Advisory Committee). The Art Auction benefits the Scholarship Fund at the Art Institute. Tickets are $85 in advance and $100 at the door. For more information and to reserve tickets, contact SFAI Events at 415-749-4569

The following galleries have contributed artwork to the auction to date:

Aurobora Press, Andrea Schwartz Gallery, Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, Braunstein/Quay Gallery, Catharine Clark Gallery, Charles Campbell Gallery, Crown Point Press, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, Gallery Paule Anglim, Hackett Freedman Gallery, Haines Gallery, John Berggruen Gallery, K Kimpton Contemporary Art, Marcel Sitcoske Gallery, Linda Fairchild Contemporary Art, Paulson Press, Richard Levy Gallery, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, Toomey Tourell Gallery, Traywick Contemporary, Trillium Press

And at the Institute this Friday:



Grand Opening of The Offices of the Anti-Advertising Agency
Friday (this Friday) April 1, 2005 5:30-7:30
McBean Project Space at the San Francisco Art Institute
800 Chestnut St. San Francisco, Ca

Mission Statement from the Anti-Advertising Website:

Outdoor advertising has become unavoidable. Traditional billboards and transit shelters have cleared the way for more pervasive methods such as wrapped vehicles, sides of buildings, electronic signs, kiosks, taxis, posters, sides of buses, and more. In urban areas commercial content is placed in our sight and into our consciousness every moment we are in public space. Over time, this domination of the surroundings has become the "natural" state. Through long-term commercial saturation, it has become implicitly understood by the public that advertising has the right to own, occupy and control every inch of available space. The steady normalization of invasive advertising dulls the public's perception of their surroundings, re-enforcing a general attitude of powerlessness toward creativity and change, thus a cycle develops enabling advertisers to slowly and consistently increase the saturation of advertising with little or no public outcry.


The Anti-Advertising Agency co-opts the tools and structures used by the advertising and public relations industries. Our work calls into question the purpose and affects of advertising in public space. Through constructive parody and gentle humor our Agency's campaigns will ask passers by to critically consider the role and strategies of today's marketing media as well as alternatives for the public arena. Our work will de-normalize "out-of-home" advertising and increase awareness of the public's power to contribute to a more democratically-based outdoor environment.


Our work may result in traditional advertising formats - signs, posters, postcards, and stickers - or more conventional artistic formats - performance, installation, artists books - or some combination of the two.

Arts Writing and Elitism

A wonderful discussion is continuing on the place of arts writing and elitism in contemporary art. From Mark Vallen's

art for a change

"A poet living in Southern California made a few points I’ve been wanting to touch upon. Although the poet practices a discipline apart from that of the visual artist, the two are linked in many ways. When artists malign the public for having ‘bad taste’, or when critics say that ‘art is not for everyone’, they fail to see how this is a problem of acculturation. For instance, in much of Latin America crowds fill stadiums during poetry festivals, while such an event is impossible to envision for the US: “I wish I had been present at the forum because the same thing is happening in the world of poetry. Some academics say that poetry is not for everyone. But how come that is not so in many other countries? I grew up in Persia and poetry was in our blood. In the smallest villages, even the illiterate could recite poetry by heart. In Afghanistan they have resorted to sending a poet to get rivaling clans to talk to one another. This is how much they respect poets and poetry. Yet, in this country sports and television rule. Why? You were right on the dot ... money and attention. Same thing is happening to other forms of art and people like you and me can either shake their heads and say: how sad... Or we can do something about it. Even the smallest contribution is community service and can have a tremendous and lasting effect on the fabric of this country's life and culture."

The image of a stadium filled for a poetry festival in Latin America is, on one hand a damning indictment of current US culture , and on the other hand a source of immense hope for change. The arts are incredibly powerful and important.

Gerard Bourgeois at the Sarah Bain Gallery

Gerard Bourgeois
Après le Bain
41" x 54" oil on canvas 2005

Currently on view at the Sarah Bain Gallery in Brea, California is a new collection of paintings by Gerard Bourgeois. These seemingly Degas inspired images of a woman at the bath are rich in painterly nuance accomplished by a rigorous process of painting, readjusting, overpainting, sanding, scraping down and finishing. Like a frescoed wall eroded over time, the images in Gerard's paintings emerge from the accumulation of paint. The history of the painting, with its ghosts and pentimenti, is the painting.

Gerard's work is extremely sophisticated, notice the nuances of hip and shoulder, yet these paintings ring true emotionally. Based on intimate moments with his wife, the paintings in this exhibition are not mere exercises involving painter and model, but instead portray an intimacy normally found in the cinema.

Gerard was raised in the South Pacific on the island of Vanuatu. Like a reverse Gauguin, Gerard left the color and light of the islands for the tans and grays of modern urbanity - first, to Australia and eventually to California. In this new body of work, Gerard seems to have found his voice, distilling the experiences of his background and travels into paintings that move beyond initial impulses into something deeper, more profound and mysterious.

gerard bourgeois

sarah bain gallery

Upcoming Lecture - Julie Weiss: “The Bias of Costume Design”

“The Bias of Costume Design”
a lecture by
Oscar & Tony Nominated, Emmy Award Winning Costume Designer
JULIE WEISS
Sunday, April 3rd, 2005
6:30 PM
On The Re-Defining of Beauty Through Costume



films include:
Frida
American Beauty
12 Monkeys
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas
and many others


•The costume as part of the character…or
•The character as part of the costume
•Can the costume dress the spirit
•How does the costume help the written word?
•The loss of individuality through dress
•The definition of the veil as privacy or ownership
•Is a trend without a story nothing more than a blink?

$5 donation
RSVP 310/ 397-7449
Lecture held in ARENA 1 GALLERY
3026 Airport Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90405

hangarstudios@verizon.net
310 397 7449 phone
310 397 7459 fax

The School of L.A.

Update: RB Kitaj Exits



R.B. Kitaj
Los Angeles no. 20 1990-2003
Collection of the National Gallery of Australia

"Don't listen to the fools who say either that pictures of people can be of no consequence or that painting is finished. There is much to be done. It matters what men of good will want to do with their lives."
-RB Kitaj

We are fortunate to have Kitaj back in Los Angeles. Much like Alex and Jane Eliot, Kitaj should be declared a living national treasure. Almost thirty years ago Kitaj curated an exhibition, for the Arts Council of Great Britain, entitled The Human Clay.
Let me be the first to propose a new exhibition incorporating Kitaj's School of London with our new - School of L.A.

The School of London - School of L. A. connection is a natural one with Kitaj and Hockney working here and inspiring a whole new generation of artists. In the catalog essay for the original Human Clay exhibition, Kitaj wrote, "If some of the strange and fascinating personalities you may encounter here were given a fraction of the internationalist attention and encouragement reserved in this barren time for provincial and orthodox vanguardism, a School of London might become even more real than the one I have construed in my head. " Substitute Los Angeles for London, and the above sentence supports the brave efforts of many, including Caryn Coleman's
and Mark Vallen's
mission to encourage the development of a vital art press in Los Angeles.

As artists, gallerists, curators, writers and collectors, we need to come together and refuse to accept the status quo.
I hope that this School of L.A. which I have construed in my head, will become real. RB Kitaj - we need you.

The Looting of Cambodia

photo courtesy Heritage Watch

"There is not a single site that is not affected," said Helen Jessup, the founder of Friends of Khmer Culture, describing the looting of Cambodia's artistic treasures. "The Western collectors continue to be as guilty as those who do this."
-Jane Perlez in the New York Times


Jane Perlez' New York Times article, on the looting of Angkor Wat, shed light on a growing problem in Cambodia and Thailand - the defacement and looting of national treasures for collector's cash. Hidden in the article, a single photo credit, is the identity of an organization that refuses to accept these events as inevitable. Headed by Dr. Dougald O'Reilly, Heritage Watch is actively promoting a series of measures to combat looting and the international trade in stolen art:

"The initial phase of HeritageWatch’s projects will focus on education. By targeting a broad spectrum of Cambodian society and visitors to Cambodia we hope to slow the destruction of important archaeological sites. It is hoped that HeritageWatch’s  projects will raise awareness regarding the importance of cultural heritage in all sectors of Cambodian society. This will be followed with training in Cultural Heritage for those in the Culture sector and law enforcement, the creation of a national archaeological register, an evaluation of Cambodia’s heritage laws, and feasibility studies to select suitable sites for museums that would encourage sustainable development through heritage activities. The destruction of cultural heritage is, of course, not restricted to Cambodia and HeritageWatch seeks to broaden its efforts to other countries in the Association of Southeast Asian States where the problem of illicit trade in antiquities is also a problem."

Contact Information:
Dr Dougald O’Reilly, Director, HeritageWatch, GPO Box 1395, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Ph. 012 832 160, e-mail: director@heritagewatch.org

Diebenkorn & Kitaj Off Ocean Park

Richard Diebenkorn
"Ocean Park No. 54"
100" x 81" oil on canvas 1972
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

"There is a kind of light on Diebenkorn's stretch of coastline - mild, high and ineffably clear, descending like a benediction on the ticky-tack slopes just before the fleeting sunset drops over Malibu - that is all but unique in North America, and Diebenkorn's paintings always appear to be done in terms of it. It is part of their signature."
-Robert Hughes on Diebenkorn, from "Nothing if Not Critical"

I think of Diebenkorn almost every evening when I step out of my studio for some air and catch the late afternoon light glowing on the horizon. The WWII era hangar at the Santa Monica Airport that houses my studio brings to mind a sense of the American space found in Edward Hopper, who was a major early influence on Diebenkorn. But the sea-light tempers the tight ruled architectural structure with Bonnard-like fluctuations of light and color. Lately, puddles from the incessant rains, mirror and distort the light and color of these moments. The tarmac surface seems to hold past and future paintings for those who have eyes to see. I have been re-reading Robert Hughes essays in "Nothing if Not Critical". And next to my brushes, the book is left open to a page on R.B.Kitaj:

"Because the museum does nothing if it does not strive toward some ideal of visual literacy. Its mission begins from the belief that learning to see is as important as learning to read, and that seeing is not the property of one class. This literacy - a sense of the thickness of art's layer over an insufficiently named world, a knowledge of what alternative images it contains- is part of Kitaj's essential subject matter."
- Robert Hughes on Kitaj, "Nothing if Not Critical"


Gregg Chadwick
Buddha Off Ocean Park
72"x36" oil on linen 2005

There is as much Kitaj as Diebenkorn in the atmospheres in my recent work. While studying briefly at the Royal College of Art in London I painted in the small studio space that Kitaj used while he was painting there as a student. Often I can sense a bit of Kitaj's combination of American upbringing and open armed embrace of European art and culture in my own work.

From the catalog of a recent National Gallery, London exhibition:
"For nearly forty years the American-born painter RB Kitaj played a central role in British art. At the beginning of his career he became associated with artists like David Hockney, Peter Blake and others of the so-called Pop generation, but he also formed lasting friendships with fellow artists such as Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud.

Kitaj's Jewish identity in a post-Holocaust world is of central importance to his life and is a theme he has often explored in his work. In 1997 however, three years after the tragic and unexpected death of his wife Sandra Fisher at the age of 47, Kitaj returned to live in the United States and London lost one of its most colourful and influential personalities."


R B Kitaj
"If Not, Not"
60" x 60" oil on canvas 1975-76
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

The Power of Suggestion

Leonardo da Vinci
Woman's Head Almost in Profile 

"Since the time of Pliny the Elder unfinished works were cherished because they seemed to reveal the thoughts of the artist. In the Renaissance, Leonardo honored the sketch as capturing the very instant of inspiration....Inspiration thus was valued as something even more urgent and vital than the conceptual planning of a work of art."
From Peter Sutton's catalog essay accompanying the exhibition, "Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens":

In the past few years, two exhibitions have captured my attention because of the light they shed on the process of creation. "Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman" was on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during the frigid winter of 2003. The current exhibition, "Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens", at the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California continues this theme. Both da Vinci's drawings and Ruben's painted studies are exploratory, yet supremely confident. These sketches allow the viewer to enter into the work and imagine what the fully fleshed out scene would be like.  


Peter Paul Rubens
Head of a Man

"C'est parce que, dans ce travail si spontané, nous saisissons sur le vif l'acte de création. Parce que, en tout contemplant, nous semblons prendre part à cet acte, que l'étude de ce esquisses nous intéresse tant."
"Thanks to the spontaneity of this work, we grasp the living act of creation. The sketches interest us so because in their contemplation we take part in this act."
—Leo van Puyvelde
Les Esquisses de Rubens (Basel, 1940)

The informality of these studies allowed da Vinci and Rubens to depict real people with vigor and appreciation unencumbered by the masks of madonna or moor. In these works we are privileged to step back into time and glimpse the genesis of art as well as encounter faces from the past. I can't help but wonder about these encounters between artist and model. Was there a flesh and blood woman who posed for Leonardo? Or did his immense artistic vision, honed by years of drawing, conjure her out of thin air? And who was the handsome black man who posed for Rubens? The open quality of these studies encourages this mode of questioning.


Gregg Chadwick
what the world whispers
38"x38" oil on linen 2005

In my own work I am drawn to this world of nuance and suggestion. We are left with questions, mere hints about our time on earth and the thread of history and influence that links us to the past.

Goya, Napoleon and Bush

"Contemptuous of the Insults"
Goya 1816-1820
From: "A Revolutionary Age: Drawing in Europe, 1770–1820" organized by the Getty as a companion exhibition to the traveling exhibition
" Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile"

"Sometimes the most determined of invaders, equipped with strong armies and copious intelligence about its enemy can make myopic blunders that later seem close to madness"
Robert Hughes, from "Goya"- on Napoleon's invasion of Spain

Two years into our debacle in Iraq it is helpful to turn to art and history for some perspective. Napoleon invaded and occupied Spain from 1808 to 1813 prompting Goya's series of etchings, "The Disasters of War", and a related group of drawings . Currently on view in the Getty is a small, ink wash drawing from this period depicting a modish, probably anti-monarchist Spaniard (note the outfit- no pretensions to court style). He mockingly doffs his hat to two miniaturized French soldiers while expressing disdain with his right hand in response to the soldier's insults. The Getty's notes to the exhibition point out Goya's anti-Napoleonic stance as evidenced in this drawing which illumines Spanish contempt for the Napoleonic forces laying waste to their country. The Spanish people resisted the French occupation with guerilla warfare (Robert Hughes points out in his study of Goya that this is the first use of the now familiar term to describe battle by irregular forces) and eventually defeated and expelled the French forces with the help of the English army.

One of the important points to bear in mind is the initial hope found by the Spanish middle class in the French Revolution and the possibilities inherent in a democratic society based on the Enlightenment with a separation between church and state. But Napoleon destroyed this goodwill through his own egoism and brutality. Invading someone else's home rarely endears one to the local population.

While viewing this drawing I thought of our little-Napoleon and his misguided efforts to export democracy by force. His words from two years ago still ring hollow:
"Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.
We will meet that threat now with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities."
-George Bush March 19, 2003. From an address to the American people on the start of the war in Iraq. (Note the emphasis on weapons of mass murder and the not so subtle attempt to link Iraq with the September 11, 2001 attacks.)

Napoleon was kicked out but in many ways Spain was still defeated. The Spanish people continued to suffer under both a puffed up, penniless monarchy, to be followed by the brutality of Franco in the 20th Century, and a fear- driven, reactionary and provincial Spanish church. It was illegal in Spain until the 1970's to declare oneself anything but Christian. This sad coda to an earlier, misguided occupation does not bode well for the people of Iraq.


Art

Keeping Artists, Writers and Intellectuals Out

"The list of foreign writers, artists and intellectuals who, at one time or another, have been denied entry to the United States on ideological grounds is a long one. It includes English novelist Graham Greene, Italian playwright Dario Fo, and French actor Yves Montand, as well as Nobel-prize-winning authors."
-Joanne Mariner

Find Law columnist and human rights attorney Joanne Mariner analyzes the case of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan historian and former Sandinista official who was recently denied a U.S. visa. Tellez was barred from entering the U.S. for her purported involvement in terrorist acts, but Mariner argues that the decision to bar Tellez had little to do with national security and everything to do with politics:

Playing Politics with Visas

Superior Court Judge Rules Against California Ban on Gay Marriage

Bouquet
photo by Gregg Chadwick

From Judge Richard Kramer's decision:
"The state's protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional. In 1948 California's statutory ban on interracial marriages was challenged as violating the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution. Advocates of the racial ban asserted that because historically and culturally, blacks had not been permitted to marry whites, the statute was justified. This argument was rejected by the court."


Judge Kramer continues,"Simply put, same-sex marriage cannot be prohibited solely because California has always done so before."

Art Speaks

photo by Gregg Chadwick

"In ads, displays, altars, graphic design, fashion, magazines, signage, architecture, television, movies, web sites, on and on we’re being addressed and coddled and seduced and terrorized and we can't talk about it because we don’t have words for it. Visual "language" is a one way communication."
-David Byrne, entry from

david byrne's tour journal

I was at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles yesterday and was struck by the tortured language used in the wall labels. As soon as the text moved from historical information - artist, date, place, and provenance- the thoughts grew murky. Some of it is art historical posturing. But part of the difficulty is the lack of a contemporary vocabulary that engages visual communication as well as verbal communication. Yes, we are bombarded with visual stimulii. But the typical response from art critics such as Kenneth Baker, who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, is to declare that this visual white noise makes certain types of communication impossible for visual artists. That what we are left with is a palimpsest of earlier images. And all we can do is pick through the tattered and effaced clues to search for meaning.

Contemporary artists can and do use visual language to communicate. We have not given all of this power away to advertising agencies. At times we too, "coddle,terrorize, or seduce." But we also can create a visual field that communicates an idea such as peace or contemplation without verbal clues. This visual communication is powerful,almost shamanistic, and quite wondrous to watch.

David Byrne is correct in stating that we don't have words for visual language. But, just as importantly, we do not use our sophisticated visual sensors to receive this communication. As an audience, many of us have not developed the slow and careful process of looking deeply at art. In museums and galleries we race by, gobbling up wall label after wall label, without taking the time to stop and let the artwork speak to us.

One painting spoke more forcefully than any other, yesterday, at the Getty. A Jackson Pollock work from the late '40's, on loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A. hung in a room dedicated to the Impressionists. Pollock's enamel and aluminum paint glittered next to a Monet. I sat and watched as the work stopped people in their tracks. A young girl grabbed her father's arm as he took her close to the painting's surface, almost into it. They spoke quietly and looked. And after a while, the girl stepped back and gently swung her arm in ovals miming the drip of wet paint onto a canvas on a floor.


Art

Temple of the Mind- Upcoming Exhibition

gregg chadwick
temple of the mind
(for montien boonma)
60"x28" oil on linen 2005

Ordinary men hate solitude.
But the master makes use of it,
embracing his aloneness,realizing
he is one with the whole universe.
Lao-Tzu, Tao-te-Ching

I am currently gathering a group of paintings together for my next exhibition which opens on May 6th, 2005 at the
Art Rental & Sales Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036.
The opening reception will run from 6:30-8:30 and will be held in the Leo S. Bing Center, Lower Level at LACMA.

These new paintings are appreciations of the deep mystery of life and acknowledge the connection that exists between all existence.

The exhibition will run from May 6th through June 9th.
The gallery is open 11am - 4 pm
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday

Closed Sunday, Monday and Wednesday.
Phone: 323-857-6500



Art

Stolen Thai Crown?

An international art incident seems to be brewing this week complete with gold, royalty, theft, smuggling and muck-raking journalism. A gold crown on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of

"The Kingdom of Siam" exhibition, currently at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, appears to have been looted from a crypt in the historical city of Ayutthaya in 1957. It entered the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection in 1982. After Jom Patch, from the Thai network ITV, reported last week that the crown might have been looted in the '50's from a sacred chamber at the Buddhist temple of Wat Ratchaburana at Ayutthaya, a furor erupted in Thailand.

From Jesse Hamlin at the San Francisco Chronicle-
"I am kind of brokenhearted,'' says Forrest McGill, the museum's chief curator, a Thai art scholar who wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan on the kingdom of Ayutthaya. "A group of American and Thai scholars has been working together on this for years, produced a major scholarly catalog and an exhibition of material that has hardly ever been seen before. And we can't get the focus on that because, for now at least, the focus seems to be on this one object.''

Not to worry Forrest- the exhibition continues and the news stories on the crown will focus more attention on the exhibition than it would have received otherwise. The important thing is to use your knowledge of the Ayutthaya artifacts and the initial looting of the site to help trace the path of this one object from Thailand, to a mysterious art dealer named Klejman who acquired the piece in 1965, to Sotheby's from which the Philadelphia Museum acquired the work in 1982.

Pattaratorn Chirapravati, a California professor and co-curator of the exhibition told ITV that the crown " was probably taken out of Thailand when Wat Ratchaburana was broken into." An interesting note: Pattaratorn is related to the Thai royal family - the great-great-granddaughter of King Chulalongkorn of Thailand.

There is a precedent for the return of historical artifacts to Thailand- In 1988, the Art Institute of Chicago repatriated a 1,000-year-old stone carving of a Hindu god, which had vanished from northeastern Thailand in the 1960s and later was displayed at the museum. This theft triggered a surge of nationalist sentiment, including lyrics in a hit song by a Thai pop singer decrying the loss and the reluctance of the Art Institute to return the sculpture.

I was encouraged that in a written statement provided to the press, Philadelphia Museum of Art director Anne d'Harnoncourt took responsibility, "We take the issue of provenance very seriously and would of course be ready to explore any questions about the history of the object with the appropriate Thai officials.''

Monterey Art Museum Benefit - March 5th

Gregg Chadwick

Of Sleep and Skies

33"x20" monotype 1999

To be auctioned on Saturday, March 5th at the Monterey Museum of Art Benefit

Courtesy the Lisa Coscino Gallery & the Artist

MARCH 5

Art Lovers' Benefit. 6-10 p.m. Saturday, March 5 at the Highlands Inn, Carmel. Food, entertainment and music. A live art auction will benefit the Monterey Museum of Art's educational programs. Tickets are $125 per person. Auction artwork may be previewed and absentee bids can be placed until Feb. 28. The art is in the Buck Gallery at the Monterey Museum of Art, 559 Pacific St., Monterey. Information: 372-5477, ext. 66.

Collapse by Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond's new book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" will prove to be as influential for this generation as Rachel Carson's, "Silent Spring" was to the embryonic environmental movement of the early 1960's. In "Collapse", Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" examines the downfall of some of history's greatest civilizations This is an important book and President Bush better be reading it right now. Unlike most books of the moment, Diamond's "Collapse" is brilliantly written and persuasively argued. Diamond takes an unstinting look at the failures of past societies - from the deforestation and eventually depopulation of Easter Island to the vanishing civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and the doomed Viking colony on Greenland. Jared argues that,"environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways." In one of the book's most chilling sections, Diamond lists the countries around the globe with the most environmental degradation -coupled with unbearable population density- and then ticks off the same as contemporary global trouble spots. Rwanda, Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan all make the list. Jared argues that change is needed to prevent the future demise of our 21st Century civilizations and that hard, political and cultural choices lay ahead. Jared teaches at UCLA and, lately, whenever I am in the student store on campus, I stop to look at the area devoted to his work and I think of this book's major question,” how can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?"

Coming Soon: Opens- May 1, 2005
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County presents "Collapse?"
this exhibition will draw on ideas from Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed".

"Collapse?" at The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

To Never Forget: Faces of the Fallen Now at Syracuse University

The exhibition "To Never Forget: Faces of the Fallen" organized by Chester Arnold at the College of Marin has now traveled to Syracuse University.


Photo by Ashley McDowell

More than 1,400 paintings of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq since March 2003 line the first floor wall of Syracuse University's Shaffer Art Building.

The initial “Faces of the Fallen” originated when Chester Arnold at the College of Marin was moved by a story in The New York Times on U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. Faculty and students at the college painted, drew and produced more than 1, 100 portraits of soldiers killed since the war began.

Stephen Zaima, professor of painting in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, arranged to bring the exhibit to Syracuse University. Students, faculty, staff and Syracuse community members will paint an additional 350 portraits of soldiers who have died since the exhibit began at the College of Marin in November 2004.

All of the portraits in the exhibition will eventually be given to the families of the soldiers depicted.

Hours for the exhibit are Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-9 p.m.; and weekends 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Paid parking is available in Comstock Avenue lots. For more information, contact the Studio Arts department at (315) 443-4613 or jlwinne@syr.edu

The exhibition which runs March 3-April 1 is free and open to the public.

For me, the blank grey panels placed to mark individuals whose images were unavailable remind me of Gerhard Richter's work and give the entire collection an even more poignant presence.

The Kingdom of Siam

Currently at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco is the exhibition- THE KINGDOM OF SIAM: THE ART OF CENTRAL THAILAND, 1350-1800



The exhibition is the first to focus on art from Thailand’s lost kingdom of Ayutthaya, and the first exhibition of classical art from Thailand shown in the United States in more than thirty years. This exhibition is rich in spiritual and artistic inspiration.
The works are exhibited in chronological order, and according to the curators (classical Thai art authority Dr. Forrest McGill, the Asian Art Museum’s Chief Curator and Wattis Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art and M. L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati, Assistant Professor of Asian Art, California State University, Sacramento): three major themes are explored: the development of a distinct national culture; cosmopolitanism and the importance of trade; and art as an instrument of royal power.

On the day I visited, the galleries housing the traveling exhibition were crowded, yet hushed. Two Thai monks gazed reverently at the objects on display. The saffron color of their robes added a taste of Siam to the grey San Francisco afternoon.



More than neighboring kingdoms, including perpetual rival Burma, Ayutthaya was cosmopolitan and outward–looking. The 1600s and early 1700s were a period of great prosperity and cultural accomplishment, but in 1767 Burmese armies destroyed the capital. These conflicts were dramatized in the recent Thai blockbuster- "Suriyothai", which can be described as a sort of Thai "Gone With the Wind". The human suffering was great, and the loss of artworks and records incalculable. As one peers into the open cavity in the huge Buddha head in the lobby, its original sculpted flame crown torn off by time or battle, the costs of this warfare become clear. In our present era, with forces battling over territory and ideology in Iraq, the calm, internal gaze of the one who became awake provides hope for an alternate path.