B-Muse-Meant
2009/2017
24×28
Oil on linen
Painting notes:
B-MUSE-MEANT? aka
Annus Mirabilis [P. Larkin]
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
1/ Robert Gober, Bag of Donuts
Literally remaking the readymade, Robert Gober’s objects are made to look like manufactured, quotidian forms; however, their crafted character and the artist’s actual labor exposes these objects as authentic creations. Gober’s objects become anti-readymades and exist as simultaneously artificial and real: an intrinsic paradox.
The naturalism of the bag of donuts-its visual connection to the “real”-makes categorization difficult. Using real ingredients from the supermarket and a deep-frying donut recipe, the artist cooked the donuts. The same authenticity that makes homemade cookies taste better than store bought versions problematizes Gober’s sculptures. Even Gober acknowledges that his sculptures’ connection to the real confuses his viewers. Placed on a pedestal, a place of honor, the donuts experience a very Duchampian-moment, which ultimately compromises their identity. Is it a sculpture? Or a free tasting sample? To further compromise the objects identity, the artist went to great conversational lengths to prevent its deterioration. By physically eliminating all of the natural ingredients, that the artist initially bought, measured and used to make the donuts, the donuts literally become inedible. The donuts will last forever as objects that are neither real nor artificial-and the phrase “nothing lasts forever” suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.
2/ Picasso, Musketeer with a Pipe [14.6 mil at auction]
3/ Malvin Singer in Ace G-Man Stories, May/June 1937
4/ Enoch Bolles in Film Fun, December 1937
5/ Unknown artist in Cupid’s Capers, October 1933
6/ Chris Ofili, No Woman, No Cry, 1998
The next generation will be unable to comprehend that Chris Ofili’s work was once regarded as blasphemous, just as it’s impossible now to believe that the paintings of Gustav Klimt once had to be shown behind screens to stop them corrupting the young. No Woman No Cry is a tribute to the London teenager Stephen Lawrence. The Metropolitan police investigation into his racially motivated murder was mishandled, and a subsequent inquiry described the police force as institutionally racist. In each of the tears shed by the woman in the painting is a collaged image of Stephen Lawrence’s face, while the words ‘R.I.P. Stephen Lawrence’ are just discernible beneath the layers of paint. Despite these specific references, the artist also intended the painting to be read in more general terms, as a universal portrayal of melancholy and grief.
7/ Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit (for David) (detail), 1992-’97
a new installation of sewn fruit, the idea for which grew out of a meditation on the death of a friend. The installation features peels carefully sewn together after the fruit has been removed. The result evokes the human body as a fragile container and suggests both loss and repair.
8/ Herbert James Draper, The Lament for Icarus [detail]
9/ Rachel Harrison, Wardrobe Malfunction
10/ Georg Herold, Bluehendes Leben
11/ Meryl Streep, Julia Child
12/ Stanley Spencer, Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece, 1936 [detail]
In Self Portrait with Patricia Preece 1936 Spencer paints himself with a dull grey skin tone not unlike the colour of the sheets on the bed where Patricia lies looking glassily away from him. The couple do not meet in any way – the bodies just avoid touching, the eyes stare away from each other, and the skin tones are opposite; this concurs with a letter Spencer sent Hilda in later years telling her that he and Patricia were not having sex ’during all the years when I was doing those nudes of her and myself.’ Interestingly introduces the colour not in his body but in his cheeks – this flush is important as it may relate to his adolescence when he found himself embarrassed and distracted by the experience of sexual arousal – as if it were somehow incongruous with his higher purpose of painting. In the portrait with Patricia Spencer deliberately places his head so that it does not cover the lower half of Patricia’s body, and he looks away – not with embarrassment, but with something more like frustration and bewilderment. The composition lacks balance and it is interesting that he places himself so that he cannot see above or around her; she is the entirety of his sexual vision, while he is only on the periphery of hers.
13/ Kiki Smith, Untitled [Hanging Woman]
14/ P. P. Rubens, Susanna Fourment, [detail]
15/ Joan Leslie
16/ Venus Figurine, Hohle Fels Cave, Germany
17/ Rudolf Stingel, Installation
rudolf stingel makes installations out by covering the walls of a gallery with panels of celotex tuff-R, an insulated foil-covered foam that invited visitors to scratch, gouge, rip and insert objects like a giant graffiti wall. it’s a very moving experience because there is a chaotic overlay of multi-scaled art unique and predictable. these installations make the point that user-generated art can be gorgeous as long as the medium is suitable for a wide array of participants and maintains an consistent esthetic no matter what people do. it behaves very similarly to comments on a blog post, sometimes childish and obnoxious and sometimes sensitive and delicate but always revealing of the particular viewing public’s soul.
18/ Mary Nichols [ Jack the Ripper]
19/ Jason Rhoades, Installation
overloaded his sprawling, testosterone-driven sculptural environments with so much narrative that they were transformed into walk-in versions of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. They were orgies of narrative – Nevada’s celebrated Chicken Ranch brothel crossed with Wal-Mart and Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, the never-completed house filled with fantastical interiors. Rhoades embedded his three-dimensional blowouts with id, excess, obnoxiousness, rascally ambition and a rampaging life force
20/ Mary Kelly [ Jack the Ripper]
21/ Laura Owens, Untitled
“I am not interested in making people uncomfortable, but at the same time I don’t have an interest in paintings that are truly passive. The best paintings are ones that require an active, discerning viewer.”
22/ Woman run over by a train
23/ R. Crumb, Whip of Fire [detail]
24/ Eric Stanton, Priscilla Queen of Escapes [detail]
THE FETISHISTIC illustrations and strip cartoons drawn by the American artist Eric Stanton were so distinctive and powerful that they attracted a clientele of connoisseurs rumoured to have included over the years Howard Hughes, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, Elvis Presley and the Kinsey Foundation. The missing link between the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb and the cult film director Russ Meyer, Stanton never achieved respectability, but his striking work influenced the look and the record sleeve artwork of acts like the Cramps, Madonna and Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
25/ Cosmic ray vapor trails
26/ Plutonium
27/ Jeff Koons, Hanging Heart
NEW YORK, 15 NOVEMBER 2007—A new record for a living artist at auction was set when Jeff Koons’ stainless steel Hanging Heart brought $23.6 million yesterday at Sotheby’s evening sale of Contemporary Art in New York. Sold to Gagosian Gallery to applause, Hanging Heart, 1994-2006 is considered one of the most important works by Koons ever offered at auction. The sculpture was offered for sale by a private American collector and had a pre-sale estimate of $15 million to $20 million. Its sale price included an auction house commission. The bright magenta heart and gold undulating bow, which took ten years from conception to completion, is one of five uniquely colored versions of this work from Koons’ Celebrationseries. The perfect surface is coated in more than ten layers of paint. Executed in high chromium stainless steel, Hanging Heart weighs over 3,500 pounds (1,600 kg), is almost nine feet (2.7 meter) tall and took over 6,000 man hours to produce.
28/ Le Motif
29/ John Hodiak
30/ Bernie Madoff, [in the manner of C. Close]
31/ Cy Twombly
32/ Anonymous, Somewhat Nude
Explores contemporary obsessions with sex and desire; race and gender; and celebrity, media, commerce, and fame. “Art is really just communication of something and the more archetypal it is, the more communicative it is.”
33/ Bearded Lady
34/ Venus Figurine, Hohle Fels Cave, Germany
35/ Someone run over by a tank
36/ Francis Bacon, Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X
37/ Fulham, factory of John Dwight, Lydia Dwight
38/ Jeff Koons in front of Popeye
39/ Recollections of a Michael Heizer drawing
Mr. Heizer belongs to a generation that was determined to break with any notion of art as a containable experience. He was one of the pioneers of Earthworks, the movement involving largescale wilderness projects, although he has downplayed a sense of esprit de corps with erstwhile collaborators Walter de Maria and the late Robert Smithson, claiming they took credit for his ideas. His occasional returns to relatively small, saleable art objects or local commissions no doubt arises in part from personal needs.
40/ Watteau, Study for Le Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère
41/ Drawing in the manner of Michael Heizer
42/ R. R. Hoffmeister, The pink ones are the dates… [detail]
43/ Extra art materials for Chris Ofili, No Woman, No Cry