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I love living in New York because so many gorgeous people are walking around, sometimes utterly unaware of their own beauty.

I got this shot on my way to poker last night, where my losses were not utterly shameful, but were still disheartening. I did manage to win what I think is the smallest pot we’ve ever had – something on the order of 80 cents, 60 of which was my own money.

We celebrate all of our achievements.

This morning while preparing for my 8am meeting, I was listening to the Bad At Sports Podcast featuring Ted Purves, which turned out to be a substantive exploration of some new ideas in thinking about art and training artists. It was really refreshing, and is leading me to try to organize some more of my own thinking on the topics. It’s also important in the thinking of what the Bay Area’s role is in American Art even though this wasn’t directly addressed in the discussion. There is a power in being perennially tangential.

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I’m an old, fat man who goes to events at galleries and can’t stand standing up through the whole presentation so he sits on the floor.

I’m told that honesty is best policy.

Sitting on the floor didn’t make the talk between curator Maura Reilly and artist Ghada Amer any less interesting. Quite the opposite. And was a nice and thoughtful crowd attending to them.

At the end of the whole thing I scrambled up, said my farewells, and schlumped on home.

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I spent much of yesterday at The Artist is Absent, an event organized by a group of young artists, that brought together a wide range of people around the work of Marina Abramović. People were performing a number of her pieces from the 70′s in an atmosphere that was strikingly different from the official MoMA show I saw on Friday.

I’ve agreed to do some writing about the expereince for a catalog they’re putting out, but I’ll just say here that I found yesterday’s event so much more compelling than the experience on Friday. much of that was due to the lack of distracting video in the Absent show. Without that, it was possible to sit with the various performers in a way that was both relaxed and intense.

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It’s been a big week for going out with friends, and reconnecting with the past. On Tuesday I saw Chris play, and while there ran into Sarah Schulman, Joe, who produced my project at BAM a dozen years ago, and CW, one of the members of my high school art nerd pack. Wednesday and Thursday I went to TES meetings (later I’ll post a picture of how good my boots look after Thursday’s class). Yesterday I went with Dominic to the Marina Abramović show at MoMA. I wasn’t as moved by it as I was by the Picasso print show that is also up there. But there, in the middle of the throng of oddly (or perhaps typically) behaving New Yorkers I saw Ben, one of my oldest friends, and one of the ringleaders of the aforementioned pack. As D remarked, he had a full shaman/priestly outfit thing going. Since it’s been a good 20 years since we last saw each other, I had to introduce myself. There was something fitting about hooking him up with Dom,given many of their overlapping interests.

After a bit more art viewing and a burger at the Parker Meridian, I scooted downtown for a quick interview with someone I’m going to be working with for a future class. And then I bought a new mop at the hardware store, so I could finish up the job I started on my kitchen floor. I should have checked the package to see if it said single use, because seconds after I got done with my first pass on the linoleum, the metal handle came apart in my hands. I’m strong, but not that strong. In fact, I’m not even strong. My privileged consumer heart is outraged by the shoddiness of the thing.

Today I’m off to see a group of young artists perform a kind of anti retrospective of Abramović works at 25CPW. I suppose I’ll be the one standing around with a broken mop in my hands.

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After all of the discussion around yesterday’s post, I realize that should come clean about some things. Those somethings are my personal aesthetic predilections, which I think often lead me to be impatient with some of the complaints that I see people lodge against cultural products. It may be better for everyone if I just state this stuff up front:

I don’t really care about continuity, internal consistency or resolution in works of art.

Some of my favorite books: Dhalgren by Samuel Delany, Great Expectations by Kathy Acker, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, The Castle by Kafka, The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carrol and Martin Gardener.

My favorite theater: Richard Foreman and The Wooster Group.

Some of my favorite films: Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith, Tsui Hark’s Kung Fu films, Nashville by Robert Altman, The Man who Fell To Earth.

Most of these are shaggy, baggy types of works, where attention wanders, things come in and out of focus and are not consistent. There are multiple voices, fragments, differing points of view.

This is the sort of art that makes me happy. It’s the kind of space I feel like I can wander around in and notice things, the sort of thing I can return to because there are so many ways to enter it.

Narrative drive and closer tend to bore me. I enjoy the sensation of not knowing what will happen next, or even what is happening right now. Ambiguity entices me more than definition does. I demand experiences, not answers.

I’m not immune to the charms of continuity, but when I love Love and Rockets, it’s for the rich, surprising way each story is told, not for the ability to place each element on a time line.

I don’t think that people who hold internal logic and explanations to be paramount to be wrong in applying that yardstick to their art and entertainment. But I do value different sorts of things in art. That’s probably why I find it hard to be roused to indignation by flaws in internal logic, which so often are the basis for people’s complaints about work.

Maybe laying that out will clarify in part why I got so cranky yesterday.

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We hemmed and hawed, but eventually Dominic and I got together for a little art viewing this afternoon. After lunch our first stop was the top of the Chelsea Hotel, where we met up with a some friends of his who were having a pop up sale of their work. One, Elisa, gave him a a lovely garment for his unbirthday, and just for being around I got a dashing cravat. She and I had a long chat, and it turns out that we’ve got a lot of points of overlap. I once met her father on a grant making panel.

The apartment was a fantasia of color and pattern and it made me very happy just to be around it. Afterwards we headed into the more traditional gallery environment, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun.

Second time I’ve worn a tie this week!

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My pal D-L is staying with me for a couple of days and yesterday we hied ourselves off to the Whitney Biennial. I’ve said here before that the show is a no-win endeavor, given that it can’t really encompass what is truly interesting. There were people and works that I’ve liked in other contexts, but as a whole the show didn’t do much to restore my faith in the contemporary art scene.
A big problem is the current conventions for showing video. I’m part of the generation that has a very hard time not looking at any glowing screen in the vicinity. Because of this I hate the proliferation of TVs in bars and cafes, and now museums seem to be following the trend of incorporating video in almost every exhibition.

The Whitney does most of this on the third floor, which seemed to me on Sunday to be like one big, very unsexy maze of peep booths. The attempt to include video installation meant that there was a series of cubicles each with some sort of video or film projection in each. In practice it means that people are wandering down hallways peeking into rooms and usually seeing works from some odd point in the middle and then if they are sufficiently intrigued, waiting around to see where the beginning of the thing is and then watching it again. This is channel surfing made physical. Meanwhile, pokey old painting and sculpture just can’t compete. One of my favorite rooms in the show is a painting installation by R M Quaytman that requires time and acute viewing to reveal itself. The rest of the exhibition argues against that type of encounter with art.

The worst moment comes on the second floor where a group of drawings and a series of intimate photographs have to duke it out with a video piece that literally harangues the viewer for ten minutes at a time. If those were drawings I’d be pissed, not because the video piece is so bad (yelling at art patrons is not automatically a bad thing) but because there’s no way that the works can be seen as being on equal footing in terms of experience.

In the Seventies, artists began to critique the “white cube”, a shorthand term for the sterile exhibition spaces that began to crop up as containers for contemporary art. The understanding of the white cube as alienated has become so commonplace that art students now refer to it reflexively. What I saw at the Whitney, and what I’ve been seeing at other places is the rise of the black cube, a new standardized methodology for making and consuming video that seems just as alienating to me.

One good thing about going to show like this is that they provide negative examples. I came out of the show with a few ideas for new work.

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I went from: a quick return to MoCCA, where I saw LJ’s VernNYC, to the East Village for the gallery talk of my friend Linda Matalon. I got to meet up with Dan And Julia, and then had dinner and extravagant frozen treats with Angel and Sebastien.

It was a busy weekend. Generally feeling good – but not so very reflective. What with all my new comics and the art I saw, I’ve got the inspiration for some new work.

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Made this year, available as part of The Sculpture Center’s Lucky Draw Benefit. Don’t miss your chance to own it!

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A day in Chelsea, making the rounds. Here’s my friend David Dietcher at Paula Cooper’s where Sam Durant offers the viewing public a drink of water, as long as they are willing to sign a release and ascend a scaffold in remembrance of executed anarchists.

David and I and Dominic saw many other things: R.Crumb’s original drawings for his recent Genesis book, a collection of vintage pictures of a run from the New York Centurions, a gay bike club from the Seventies, a group of cursory paintings of the West Bank, Lyle Ashton Harris’ color soaked meditation on Ghana, a subtle Joan Jonas installation, Ursula Von Ridingsvard’s tending of sculpture’s true flame, and Catherine Opie’s revisitation of the heady days of the early 90′s lesbian explosion.

Those were the stand-outs. There was much more that popped out of my brain shortly after I saw it. I was not in the mood to be moved, but I was very happy to be spending some prime outdoor time with two good pals. Dominic left on other errands, and David and I had a burger and a heart to heart and then hit Printed Matter to flirt and chat up the cashier. I walked David back to his bike and then made the decision to walk back downtown and across the Brooklyn Bridge, an idea that seemed less stellar when I saw how crammed the walkway was. I think I had the idea that I would shoot some pictures, but there were so many cameras being brandished by every soul on the bridge that I decided I didn’t need to contribute anything else.

Once I hit the Brooklyn side, I knew that even though the weather was delightful, I couldn’t walk back to my house, or even to Atlantic Avenue, so I hopped the subway and sped back to where Lehigh was waiting.

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