Day Without Art

Coinciding with today's World AIDS Day was the 24^th Day Without Art to raise AIDS awareness. Robert Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 and died on March 9, 1989 at the age of 42. Less than a year before his death he took this simple but striking self-portrait that is considered one of his best and most influential works. During that last year of his life he also created the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation which has since raised millions of dollars for AIDS research.

"Robert Mapplethorpe shows himself in a 1988 self portrait withered and dying from AIDS. He grasps a cane topped with a small skull. It is one of the photographs in which every part is not fiercely defined by sharp focus. In stark, silvery black and white, the shiny detail of the skull is chillingly juxtaposed with Mapplethorpe’s haunted face – floating out of focus, receding into darkness." John Ingledew, 2005.

self-portrait, Robert Mapplethorpe, 1988
The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Observations from the Window 10.27

I received a rather weighty package from Amazon yesterday that may signal the beginning of a cold weather reading binge, something I think my brain needs. It also seems to be the time to put Patti Smith's Just Kids on the shelf for a long deserved break. I first read the book back in April and have been rereading parts of it ever since, partly because I live near where so many of the scenes took place. But one part I have stayed away from is the end because it always brings tears to my eyes.

In late February of 1989 Smith saw Robert Mapplethorpe for the last time. In the book she shows the following note which she wrote to Mapplethorpe, but doesn't say whether she actually sent it to him than or was writing it to him in the book. If I should ever meet her that's the first question I'm going to ask.

Dear Robert,
Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake. Are you in pain or feeling alone? You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together. 
Your work, coming from a fluid source can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke than of holding hands with god. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand, grip it hard, Robert, and don't let go.
The other afternoon, when you fell asleep on my shoulder, I drifted off too. But before I did, it occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all of your work, you are still your most beautiful.
The most beautiful work of all.
Patti

Mapplethorpe died a few days later on March 9, 1989.

Like I said, tears.

Patti Smith - Paths That Cross

Observations on Art, The Muse

The muses of the ancients were divinities. In Greek mythology Apollonis, Cephisso, and Borysthenis were known as the three muses, the goddesses who were said to inspire works of art and literature. The word museum finds its root in the Greek word mouseion which was a place where these daughters of Apollo were worshiped. The mythological muses met their end in Dante's Devine Comedy which was inspired by his very earthly muse Beatrice Portinari who he claimed to have met when they were both 9 years old. From than on the muse has come to be known as an artist's source of inspiration, whether real or imaginary, and generally refers to a person who inspires an artist.

During the Renaissance the model for two of Raphael's most famous Madonnas was a Sienese baker's daughter named Margharita di Luti, who was probably Raphael's lover. In one of my favorite stories the painter Fra Filippo Lippi went in for a riskier muse relationship when he seduced a young nun named Lucrezia Buti and went on to live with her, using her as the model for several portraits including one of the Holy Mother. Renaissance muses were subordinate to their artists, bound to their sexual needs while the artists were free to do as they pleased.

Modern muses seem to be powerful and creative women in their own right like Georgia O'Keeffe who didn't just inspire photographer Alfred Stieglitz, but influenced the direction of his art as well. I could write all day about Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, mutual muses and collaborators. They were in and out of each others lives and art for over two decades until Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS in 1989. People will debate till the end of time on whether Yoko Ono was good for John Lennon's music but nobody will ever debate the effect she had on him.

Than again artists and muses seem to traditionally take a toll on each other. Salvador Dalí's wife Gala shrewdly tortured her sex-averse and masochistic husband with her affairs and the dancer Suzanne Farrell, George Balanchine's astonishingly beautiful muse, married another dancer the day his divorce was finalized. Pablo Picasso met Marie-Thérèse Walter in Paris when she was 17 and immediately made her his mistress, sometimes having his chauffeur wait outside her school to pick her up and take her to the artist's studio where she modeled for countless paintings. Walter later bore him a daughter though he refused to marry her, and killed herself in 1977, four years after Picasso died.

So what do I think a muse is? Somewhere in the past or present is a person that comes back to you again and again in your thoughts and dreams. You may have barely known them or you may know them well but either way they left an indelible impression on you. I had a professor who used Carl Jung's animus when she described her muse and the idea works for me too. Jung described the animus as the unconscious male dominated part of the female psyche. In my professors description this core part of your being, part of your very soul, is projected to the other person and when you look at them you see its reflection. You want desperately to speak to it but find it impossible and so turn to the only language that works, your art.

In an LA Times article on the death of the muse UCLA sociology professor David Halle wrote, "The concept of the muse is part of the Romantic tradition and this is just not a romantic age.” I don't agree at all and I'll finish with the words that best sum it up for me.

Everything I did I did for you.

Observations on Art 9.1

A friend of mine posted something on Google+ in which she asked the question “do you think Black and White photography specifically has gained more than it has lost in the digital age and why?”

I had to think about the answer to that because it really is a hard question for me. The first affordable digital cameras emerged in the late '90s and the first Adobe program in 2003 so by the time I began to take photography seriously the world had already begun to change. I never had much formal training and only ever toyed in a darkroom but I did take a lot of analog photos with a pair of OM10s I own. It's something I would like to get back into someday but who knows if I'll ever have the time. I'm torn because my photos are almost exclusively monochrome but a large percentage are color shots I changed with software. The different methods of doing that is something I have in the back of my mind to write about and something that came up in the seminar I just took.

I first fell in love with
black & white when I discovered the portraits of Robert Mapplethorpe and the landscapes of Ansel Adams almost twenty years ago. To me color records the scene in front of you while black & white interprets that scene and there aren't any better at it than those two. Maybe this is a little arrogant of me to say but the way I feel is that a color photo is a photo but a black & white one is a work of art. I try to limit using software myself but to me software is just another tool to use in creating that work of art. I'm sure photography has lost something in the digital age but I also think it has gained just as much or more than it has lost. One thing I'm not quite sure of is if the ability to take hundreds of shots in search of that one great one is a good thing or if it takes away from the original composition of the photo. Than again I'm as guilty of that as anybody

Software isn't used in just digital photography today but all kinds and even without software a purely analog photographer has any number of ways to change a photo including film speed, exposure, and soaking time. So I guess my total cop out answer is you can't take the digital out of photography anymore than you can take the acrylic paints out of contemporary painting. One thing we both miss are the scents and smells of the old styles.

I don't know if I answered the question or asked more but thanks for making me think.

Observations on Art 4.24

Anybody that knows me also knows by now that I have a love affair with black & white photography. It's something that I have had for a long time, long before I even started thinking about taking photos myself. I can even tell the exact time it started, the summer of 1996.


My dad has always subscribed to Rolling Stone and it was one of the first magazines I read regularly. The July issue in 1996 was the yearly summer double issue and had Jenny McCarthy showing her boobs on the cover. That may have been the reason I picked it up but something I found inside in ways changed me forever. In an interview of Patti Smith I found this quote, "When I perform, I can't say I feel like a male or a female. What I feel is not in the human vocabulary." I was so fascinated by the interview and quote that I combed my dad's massive vinyl collection and found her debut album.

More important than the music I found on "Horses" was the cover. A stark black & white portrait I just found stunning. The cover notes said it was by Robert Mapplethorpe so i did some more digging and my love affair with b&w was born. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were many things too each other - collaborators, lovers, each others muse, and lifelong friends. Through it all their one goal was to create art and they did just that through poetry, drawing, music, and photography. Mapplethorpe's photos are breathtaking, beautiful, and at times brutally graphic yet they seem somehow emotional to me, at one instant tense and at the next simply beautiful.

I'm not sure why this has all come back to me now. I think a major part of it was the realization that I live within walking distance of his 23rd street loft where Mapplethorpe did much of his work and Smith lived but a block away from here during that time.  I recently picked up a copy of the book "Just Kids" by Patti Smith which is her story the years together with Mapplethorpe. The book ends with their last days and conversations, as Mapplethorpe died of AIDs in 1989. In the back of the book are the lyrics to her memorial song for Mapplethorpe ....

"Little emerald bird

Wants to fly away

If I cup my hand

Could I make him stay?

Little emerald soul

Little emerald eye

Little emerald soul

Must you say goodbye?

All the things that we pursue

All that we dream

Are composed as nature knew

In a feather green

Little emerald bird

As you light afar

It is true I heard

God is where you are

Little emerald soul

Little emerald eye

Little emerald bird

We must say goodbye"

footnote - In February the J. Paul Getty Trust and Los Angeles County Museum of Art jointly acquired the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. The 200 artworks, 2000 photographs, 3,500 Polaroids and 120,000 negatives are worth in the neighborhood of $30 million.

Patti Smith interviewed by Tom Snyder in 1978. This interview is just classic.

Observations from the Coffee Shop 3.8

I suppose it is finally time to wrap up my writing on Armory Week and get back to the real world. Maybe it would be better to say my world which doesn't seem all that real sometimes. It's a little sad because I enjoyed the week and enjoyed writing about it so don't be surprised if you see me doing a lot more art writing.

Here are some final thoughts ....

In a week filled with art a few things did leave a lasting impression. Among the best was a set of seven, out of 23 known, brightly colored plaster busts from the series "Heads" by the late David Wojnarowicz. A collector had spent years putting the seven together and the complete set sold for $300,000. For me another real treat to see was a Robert Mapplethorpe dye transfer print the name of which escapes me. Dye transfer itself is a dying photo printing technique due to the fact that Kodak no longer makes the chemicals needed to do it.

Something that made a very negative impression was Ivan Navarro's glowing neon-lit fence titled "The Armory Fence." So many people said so many good things about it but I just didn't like it at all. Maybe it would have worked for me at a Las Vegas Art Fair along with the velvet Elvis paintings but it just didn't work for me here. The fence totaled 82 feet around an open floor and was priced at $40,000 per seven foot section but I have no idea if any of them sold. You might look for it at a trailer park near you.

A question I heard often was whether New York, a city filled with galleries and museums, really needs a major art fair at all. The best answer I found to the question was this; "New York is a city without parallel in this world, and we want to support it, and keep in contact with curators here," said Tim Marlow, director of London gallery White Cube. I'm no expert on these things but I personally think New York without a major Art Fair would be like San Francisco without a major Gay Pride event. It just shouldn’t be allowed to happen if we expect the world to keep spinning in the proper direction.

In the end Armory Week may be the closest I'll ever come to a Penn State football weekend in New York City. Except it only happens once a year, it lasts a week, there probably isn't as much to eat or drink, and the attire of choice is a bit darker in New York.

Metric - Black Sheep