eruption of 1980

Looking for an old magazine, I came across a stash of old Willamette Weeks. I used to illustrate articles for the rag when Reed Darmon was the art director, especially music articles by Mark Sten. When I came across the above piece today, I had to wince – because today is the day the big one blew exactly 28 years ago. Barry Johnson is only anticipating it here because this was printed in April.

It’s particularly telling that Johnson refers to San Francisco and how it has an earthquake. But hey, they got nothing on us! Up until that time, some of us scare-d-cats were actually avoiding the inevitable move to the Bay Area because of the earthquake. Once the mountain blew, I just didn’t care anymore. Turns out Portland wasn’t so sleepy after all - and I liked making art around lava lake activity.

I remember hearing a big bomb. Just like that, it disturbed the peace in my house on NW Kearney. I walked outside and heard it before I saw it: the pitter pat of light grey ash hitting the lawn. Eventually it invaded the house, got into our sheets and lungs and eyes. I had to make a trip to SF soon after that and remarked in my diary how nice it would be just to get away from the ash.



The best part was the deserted streets. Only the buses went up and down Burnside and the streets belonged to the people, some of us wearing masks. I’ve posted this photograph by Rupert Jenkins before. It’s a group on Burnside waiting for the bus.

John Brodie at Milepost 5

John Brodie had a room filled large collages at Milepost 5, where we made this short video. I’ve always like his work – we showed some of his paintings at Lovelake in 2003. Even these collages, made with billboard bits, paint, Mylar and vinyl have a lot in common with the paintings back then. Of course collage takes time to arrange and rearrange, but they still seem spontaneous. Milepost 5 has invited about 30 artists and organizations to take over rooms and install all kinds of shows.

poor artists and rich husbands

In 1988 I was freelancing for Christian Dior as a makeup artist, often putting in a week at Macy’s. This was the biggest Dior counter in the 48 states and a crazy house of business, not that far removed from the frenzy below, the 33rd Street subway station.

I had a returning client, an artist who showed all over the world (she still does). She’s got the huge, tremendous loft in Soho, acquired sometime in the late 70s, the whole nine yards. She kept telling me I had to marry a rich man. This was the way to get that art career. - Or at least be able to paint for life, she said, because your feet are not going to hold out forever in this job, while painting at night too. (She was right about that actually – I had surgery on both of my feet in the 90s – a common NYC retail thing).

So she arranged a party to which not only was I invited but also her rich single neighbor. He also had the fabulous loft in Soho, just waiting, as it turned out, for the right woman to waltz in and decorate it. For at least the party I was game enough.

I remember the night very well – I went to a Christopher Makos exhibition at Ronald Feldman right before the party. The show was photographs of Andy Warhol in drag - every single photograph. The photos are pretty famous actually. There was a long line winding outside the door onto the street, just to get in. After I left the place, I found a playing card of the King of Diamonds outside her loft’s door. I took this as some kind sign.

.... I could barely get through the dinner as this Frenchman she had in mind was so dull. Then a stranger walked in and I thought to myself, well now here is something interesting. Like a brat I left the party with the new guy and we went dancing at a nightclub called MK.

We still tried it though, the Frenchman and I, with a couple of dates later. Nothing happened and it never did when someone championed the marry-a-rich-man idea.

Once I moved into the computer age, I ran across my artist friend and could trace her well deserved success. She was always a great painter. She seems happy in marriage too - although come to think of it, she never talked about it.

- When I shared this story with a businessman recently, he asked me: "Did she tell the rich guy that ‘what you need to do is to marry an artist?’” I laughed, realizing how much my perception of “living with an artist” in the intervening 20 years had changed.

At one time and for a long time, I thought this was some sort of a wonderful thing for the person who has no art in their life, but would like to. Some people see art from a distance, something they enjoy, but they know they’re missing out on vital information. The artist in their lives supposedly provides this - makes museum trips more fun, decorates your house, adds all kinds of sweet touches.

As an artist you buy into this idea too, you think you have something to offer. And if you are uncomplicated enough, it comes off just like that - a smooth exchange where each can offer things the other doesn't have.

But I now know that artists are very, very complicated creatures. Interviews with artists have really opened my eyes in ways I never expected. Everyone has a got a story that most people don't know about, especially if they are making very singular work. That work doesn't come out of nowhere and often the people who make it are no walk on the beach. They are not here to brighten the world, liven up a party, decorate life or any of that.

Well, maybe they can do it at a dinner party. I guess they better be charming at openings. But once they are home or in the studio, life takes over.

ways to be an artist

Years ago I wrote down a quote by Bill Ball of San Francisco's American Ballet Theater: Artists need to be working all of the time. That way the best work just gets tossed off.

In a perfect world, yes, we get to work all the time. Or rather, we produce work all the time. But I've come to realize that processes, over a lifetime, vary with the individual.

I wrote down that quote after going through a stretch of not making art, or least art that anyone would see. You can get panic attacks when the constant question is what are you doing now?

Tom Cramer once said to me: "You've got to know when to not make art." That makes so much sense to me. Some of us make art not by making it, but by thinking about it, or by just taking a long walk - maybe for months.

When you are young and don't paint for a month, you can feel all worried. And it's true that many artists do not survive after 35 or so - I mean their intensive art practice does not survive, or their aspirations. So I guess you better worry and always get back to work.

But I no longer feel that way. Just making objects for the gallery system doesn't cut it for me - though without them, many would grasp no real measurement of an artist. I think young artists also get confused because they want an interesting, courageous life and then find themselves stuck in a room, whether it’s making objects or teaching - and that often does not feel very courageous. Real life is much more interesting. I'm glad to have had both, but you can pay a price.

While putting together a punk art show in 1979, I received an immense amount of heat from my supposed peers. "Our art doesn’t belong in the gallery system, blah blah." I almost buckled and didn't go through with the proposal. It was Katherine Dunn who told me: “Don’t you see - you've got a responsibility as an artist. If you step down, you'll have done what so many women do in the face of men trying to tell them what they shouldn't do. You have to do this thing.”

I don’t think Katherine considers herself a big-time feminist, but it just so happened that it was a bunch of cool dudes telling me what I shouldn’t do. They were all my friends, so I couldn’t see a bigger picture. But the point is there are many ways to be an artist and it goes way beyond making work. She really clued me into that.

Fast forward to around 2001, when I was visiting NYC and ran into Leon Klayman. He told me about his book project called Who gave you permission? He asked various artists: did an individual provide some kind of lightbulb or turning point for you? And what was the story? Many of us have one, a crystallizing relationship or event. It might have been that moment for me.

Laurie Danial at Froelick

Laurie Danial has a show of new paintings at Froelick called Beautiful Losers. We talked about the work in this video, especially The General below.

rock stars and art stars

So many new artists “challenging” the boundaries of paint and sculpture. My friend doesn’t trust it one iota. The challenge seems academic to her, especially when the challengers are teachers yet the pose is rock star.

This made me think about the art system and the difference between a rock star and an art star. While rock and roll is in a twilight similar to where jazz was in the 1970s, it still has a chance to be made by just about anyone. Meaning rock stars do not generally posses MFAs or come to the game with heavy theory. In fact quite a few are still art school, college and even high school dropouts. Rejection of institutions is part of the process in claiming authenticity.

But art stars embrace all of that. They’re inside and outside at once, not only earning grades but dishing them out, often on the theory and supposed practice of subversion. A good friend of mine in this particular wave once cut me off by stating: “It’s great that one wants to keep going to school. It’s great to get as much education as you can.”

Well, I agree, I’ve had fun in school. It’s good for the student and it’s good for the teacher. I am not so convinced that it’s been good for art though. And as to the viewer, they can take the “challenges” for sure. But some are really hollow in their pitch and punch.

Walter Robinson

Young girls who like to draw may find themselves drawing couple after couple in a lip-lock. I know I did – my early diaries are full of them. Was I looking at Harlequin Romances? Or just too ready for my own adventures?

So I found the images of Walter Robinson’s show of 80s Paintings at Metro Pictures just wonderful: one panting and passionate embrace after another, all rendered like a book cover. The video James Kalm made of his gallery visit is worth checking out. I think he’s right when he says that not only is Robinson way ahead of current painters circling in their search for some sort of authentic intimacy, he feels so much more real, fiery and unstudied. While the work explores a marketed approach to romance, it is still very Romantic. Charlie Finch wrote a good piece about it too.

Jim Neidhardt and Kerry Davis

Jim Neidhardt and Kerry Davis installed their latest work, Supermodel, at Blackfish Gallery. They offer their version of an art world supermodel in this interview.

Romantics

Like many artists, I love Liz Taylor. I also like Eugene Delacroix and had a good time combining them. They are both Romantics.

indulgence

A few people have asked me how Isabella and Edward are doing. They got together this weekend, but he is still a little too enthusiastic to get close.

Mark R. Smith and Maria T.D. Inocencio at South Waterfront

The South Waterfront here has an artist in residency program. For a year, Linda K. Johnson is curating various artists to make work which engages the community in that area and points beyond. For the month of April, Mark R. Smith (above) and Maria T.D. Inocencio collaborated on a piece called Compass. The artists are interviewed here. The projects involved all kinds of cool maps and flags representing everyone who participated.

Naked Women

Sometimes art of the Olden Days looks like a Gentleman’s Sport. Lately I’ve been finding old issues of Art Digest, which had very archaic covers. Yet they are not ancient, giving me just another reason why women artists had a tough time making headway. As the Guerilla Girls liked to remind us, the best way to get into the museum was to get naked.

These rags are for cutting up, but instead I’ve limped through the passages and articles, mind blown at the images and what they say.

Sure, they do get to the modern masters, as they call them - Picasso and Matisse and so on - which then reminded me of the “great paintings” poll around the blogosphere via Newsweek awhile back. The question was: what are the greatest paintings of the 20th century? I smiled at one blog, which pitched White on White by Malevich.

Naked women by Picasso seemed the favorite. Tyler Green added a nude by Matisse into the mix. I fell asleep at these choices, regardless of history – which hey, can be rewritten. Mostly I am just bored, bored, bored of naked babes, especially as any kind of pitch for the best of the 20th century.

And especially in light of what we read of how women functioned in Picasso’s life – the ones he painted. A whole army was in place to keep his shit together. I also recently read a disgusting and fascinating account by Kennedy Frazier on the women of Matisse and how he fed off whores for a long time after he decided his wife (Woman in the Hat, etc) was too old to paint.

Ah, the way the critics argue that Picasso needed Matisse and Matisse needed Picasso and so on, as regards the making of a painting of a woman. No, what they really needed was a lot of naked women! And a system compliant in rounding them up.

I remember a certain art history Prof from the University of Oregon who wanted to take pictures of me. I thought gee whiz, Okay. Once there in his studio, he asked me to get naked. Yeah, my professor. I won’t tell you which area was his expertise. I was all confused and probably too stupid to not have seen this coming, but thank God not stupid enough to comply.

Art history is filled with back-stories which define why things are important. These paintings of naked women are no longer just, well, “great paintings” to me. The equipment pictured is actually very familiar – no surprises there – and the audience (and dialogue created from) is no longer just comprised by those who don’t have it but want to look.

Christoph Hueppi at Gallery Homeland

Yesterday I met Christoph Hueppi of Zurich, Switzerland who has had a residency at Gallery Homeland here. He produced a sizeable body of work called Swarm Intelligence, all inspired from ants he witnessed in india. Chris talks about the paintings in this video.

the Big 5-0

I sent this collage to my friend, who turns 50 today. Maybe someday I'll make a whole body of work using the Demuth 5. This particular 5 is cut from a previous montage, combining it with O'Keeffe - hence, the same tear.

Recently Ken Butler was in town and gave me a heavy duty stash of art books, as his childhood home is being sold. This stash has been in a basement and is so moldy, it can't be held with other books and wasn't fit for giving to the library. So I get to cut the babies up.

Jenene Nagy at the Marylhurst Art Gym

At the Marylhurst Art Gym there's also a show called Sitelines, works by Jenene Nagy and Stephanie Robison. In this video Nagy talks about her recent work and how she’s dealing with space and to some degree, with sculptural and painting boundaries. There’s an interest in color too: Nagy tells us that we don’t actually remember color, in that we cannot reproduce it later on. As to memory, I’m willing to believe that it always plays tricks and that perception is in no way universal or even consistent. But as to reproduction, I’m not so sure that experience (and color) cannot be made - some kick-ass painters still taking that on….

Jesse Hayward at the Marylhurst Art Gym

Jesse Hayward has a show up at the Marylhurst Art Gym called the Why and the Why Not. I first saw his work at the Haze Gallery and then, at Gallery 500, where he showed sculptures that practically peeled away my retinas, they were so intensely colored. I curated him later into Chambers. All of the work I’ve enjoyed. In this video, he talks about the show up now at Marylhurst.

the Matriarchist

I have a theory: artists go crazy when they have a show. Sure, some of them – many of us, how about that – are already crazy. But we can become not ourselves at all during this crucial time.

I'm not sure why it is. Is it because we spend all of that time in the studio and the social skills are rusty? Or is this a frantic do-or-die mentality which takes over? We want control and say things which can eventually hurt us the most.

One day I had a near-paralyzing experience with an artist. I liked and trusted him from the moment I saw him and his work. It was an immediate, almost instinctual response. The show I was to hang (and promote, let us not forget) was his first real gallery show - no small thing really, especially considering that I showed a lot of artists on the other side of 40 and he was not. But he seemed to have a lot of grace in his character as well as his style.

On the day he delivered the work, we installed some of it together – maybe a mistake on my part, looking back. For then he had some time to talk price and how he wanted to up it all. We got into a discussion about it, because while I believe his work is worth more than the proposed price tag (as is the case with virtually every PDX artist), it's a market and I could probably sell some work that my audience, such as they were, could afford.

He said he did not care about the past, about other artists, about my own trials as an undervalued artist, or those of my peers: he lived in the present. He did not go to art school, he did not care if he sold at all. He knew what he wanted for them and if they didn't sell at all, so what.

I began to ask myself if he would have talked to the owner the way he talked to me. The owner was a man, tall and older, generous and quite kind to foot the bill on that operation…. tell him you don't care if you sell!

When I told him (stupid on my part, this I know now): "Hey, I'm turning 50 this year and have some experience," he said contritely: "Congratulations."

Here was the wild card about the whole thing - he had, before this all came up, in a previous enraptured discussion, explained how his art was all about the matriarchy!

When I talked about my own journey to commercial galleries in this town, he said: "Don't bring the personal and your own baggage into this." Hmm… I thought it must have been obvious that my personal baggage is what got him that show to begin with. It is everything, for better or worse, and it is not up to him to delete.

What the hell became of the free thinker, the graciousness and the fucking matriarchy, by the way? Is this the new Feminist Man? Ouch. Call me mean and crazy, but this repartee took all spark out of this show for me. He knew best. Then he could fucking sell it.

Jason Langer at Charles A. Hartman

Charles A. Hartman Fine Art recently opened a show of photography by Jason Langer. Langer, who worked for Michael Kenna for years, has put together a pretty impressive book called Secret City, published by Nazraeli Press. In this interview, Langer discusses his imagery and the making of the book.

the Impossibilists at Rake

I was just casually walking around First Thursday and sauntered into Rake, completely unprepared to encounter works by an artist I knew years ago: Tom Cassidy. He was often known by another name: Musicmaster. This is what he called himself for a lot of his mail art activities and poster work in the 1970s.

It was in fact Musicmaster who gave me my first job when I arrived in Portland in 1978. This was no small thing – I was highly unemployable! Of course you can probably be the prom queen these days, looking like I did, but back them most people thought I was some kind of insane hooker. But people actually referred me to him, as a weird artist sympathetic to such and pretty soon I was behind the bar at the notorious Earth Tavern.


The exhibition at Rake has a table full of propaganda from those days, including punk posters made by all kinds of artists, myself included. But what I found most interesting were all the Impossibilist Manifestoes. I can only say that Impossiblism is like Dada – take it from there, think what you will. Tonight the Impossibilitists (including Mark Sargent, another crazy from back in the day) will perform at Rake.

beauty and anger

Naomi Campbell was arrested again, this time for a little run-in with the police. I‘ve been trying to use her lately and it hasn’t been a breeze. Perhaps it’s due to not particularly liking her – liking helps – and not so much for all her bad press. Campbell was quite unkind to my boss at Chanel in the early 90s, when she was still high in the Trinity, hurling a foul and obscene litany on the phone because my boss could not get an alteration done in the timely manner Ms. Campbell desired. My boss, having a really good (and French) sense of humor, blasted the entire rant on speaker phone in the employees lounge for all us worker-bees to enjoy.

- So why use her at all? Beauty and anger are not necessarily divorced from one another. One’s greatest power can at times feel like a dehumanizing curse. She once said in W that her anger stemmed from not knowing her father (something I can relate to), but I don’t think it explains all.

In the same interview, she expressed surprise/amusement when people were interested in what she wore to her community service gigs for her previous trespassing in anger at the little people. “I’ve never looked bad in my life,” she said (italics theirs).

Whoa, not in your life. The pressure, with so many hands and eyes all over you since you were 15. I’d be pissed too. You could say it's just a photograph but after awhile, one wonders. I’m no Naomi Campbell, but I do know what it’s like to shift the expectation for a nanosecond. Some who smirked or snarled the lipstick and nails were still oddly taken back on the day I showed up without it. “Are you sick?” they asked me.

Lucinda Parker at Laura Russo

Yesterday Lucinda Parker and I made a short video about her present show up at the Laura Russo Gallery, which opens tonight. For the past year she has been working on a public art project, a mural for the Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington (sponsored by the Washington State Arts Commission). Studies for the mural are at the show, which opens tonight, plus some new big paintings too.

memoirs, real and imagined

Truth can be stranger than fiction. The more I tried to write fiction, the more this became obvious. Depends, of course, on who is doing the living. So I’ve been reading memoirs and contrasting, especially as it is such a big market.

For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why so many fake ones were coming out. All the hype around this very real tragic story, reviews and profiles, sorrow and redemption – and then it’s all fake! It happened recently with this woman who claimed to grow up in a LA street gang, half Native American. She was profiled in the Times and I paid attention, as she was also now living in Eugene, Oregon of all places. It turned out to be all a scam.

The plight of JT Leroy was perhaps the most notorious. And now the writer, a middle aged woman who (I guess) could not sell her incredible story as a novel must now pay thousands because she tricked so many people into thinking it was all real.

Why is “reality” so much more interesting and marketable than fiction? Is it because the reader will eat more readily the sweat and sorrow you actually – supposedly! – sewed?

One memoir was recommended to me because it was based in wild and weird San Francisco and therefore, I might relate. Well, Everyone into the Pool begins with an account around the family dinner table, straight out of Ozzie and Harriet, where everybody’s happy nowadays – with the Mom wondering if it’s really true that so many people out there actually had, gosh, unhappy childhoods.

The author Beth Lisick indeed seems to have had a perfect one, cheerleader and prom queen to boot. But oh, she bravely tosses that mundane happiness all aside to pretend to be queer in SF, sow wild seeds and experiment, to eventually discover that she is indeed straight and lives to tell the tale.

- Actually, I am just projecting from a book jacket, because after reading two or three pages, I became kinda nauseous and could read no more. It’s not all that “brave” or even funny to me, her tripping down the Wild Side, as I knew so many who had no choice. The reviews refer to her living in "squalor" as if this is fodder for a sitcom.

Choice is an operative word here in several ways: it speaks of class, but also alludes to being compelled, as opposed to having another cheap holiday in other people’s misery.

The dinner table at Ozzie and Harriet’s is one I can only describe from the TV set. How about dope dealers moving in with a greatest generation republican mom much their elder (who never does, oddly enough, change her vote) - young enough, in fact, to be wanting to fuck you almost as much as her, loading you up with four finger lids to sell at your high school. It all only moves into a slow decline when the FBI finally show up at the house and mom is now having me bury sixteen pot plants. And in a hurry. Hopefully they won't find the LSD tabs in the freezer. Let’s just say that being prom queen never entered my mind.

confidence crushers

In a previous post we were discussing confidence crushers.

I once directed a gallery in a beautiful building. The super of this building seemed nice and accommodating at first. You need a mail slot? You got one. Yes, we will build a wall there, no problem.

Then one day as I was painting the walls, he made a comment on my “painting outfit.” I sluffed it off, just like I was trained to do. Then another day he came up and tried to touch whatever I was wearing and I flinched away. Sort of a natural reaction at this point.

The opening of the gallery had gone so well, a true success. Still, the next day, when I had to arrange a phone line, I had to ask this super when he might be there in the building, as Qwest had dealt with him many times before.

"Yes, you should be there at some point. Sitting in a certain position. I could put you in the right position -- maybe we can try a few out."

You can be the Director of an establishment and still be treated like a whore. It would get to the point that he rarely looked into my eyes, but elsewhere.

Mind, then there would be a time when he would briskly breeze into the gallery and talk only business, just the facts - and so the sexual remarks, coming at another time and sometimes out of nowhere, can take you unaware. Being nice didn't help. Or being just plain businesslike. Ignoring didn't help - red lights look oddly green to those who want to see it that way.

These kinds of things can take a big bite out of confidence, and a sense of real victory. It is very difficult to feel like you are truly moving forward, even when you know how good the game is going. I actually ended up crying one night about it .... someone reading this now may think that it’s no big deal... but it wasn’t the first time. It was too much like being a peon salesgirl in New York City, powerless save for the beauty people were happy to interpret as the best and speediest currency.

- But I was now nearly 50 and running the show. I didn’t really have the time to personally bring this man into the 20th century, but that is just what I had to do. The main reason I am thinking about this now is the current fallout with Elliot Spitzer and how the adage was quoted: “the most powerful people in the world are old white men and beautiful young women.” For me, it took time and distance. Not only am I no longer at that job, but neither is he.

new targets

The Targets traffic in more than one side of my own life. It’s not just a social statement or an aesthetic proposal. It leans upon my own personal baggage and presentation and I don’t mean that in a bad way.


Beauty, style and substance, what women want, what they’re told to want and what, in the end, we get. Again, this is not all a negative exposé. Liz with her gems has done all right, still alive and kicking. And as to Jane Fonda, she’s such an All American Girl. They are both remarkable human beings.



The piece below features a California artist I enjoy, Joe Goode, who made some great stairs. Some in the art world will of course recognize them, yet they still might not recognize a major megastar of the 20th century, Jean Harlow.

who can stop you?

I heard from someone who used to be in the same online journaling community as me, saying it was wrong of me to state that someone's art was "shitty" (this was a few years ago). She thought I was talking about her work, though I never mentioned any names.

What stayed with me the most was when she said that she stopped painting for a long time after the comment. It made me think, eventually, about just what can make us stop doing what we love doing.

The question I pose is - who can stop you? And why should you let them? It’s amazing, the power we hand over to others, while they may be completely oblivious to our acts anyway.

In the public pursuit of art making, it's not for the weak or timid. If you seek approval - to have everyone love you - you are going to have a rough ride! Because even if you become very "good" at what you do, not everyone will agree. Art is subjective. People have very strident opinions about it. (Perhaps I came through it trial by fire, because my first public foray into an art “career,” if that’s what you want to call it, were the punk collages, fanzines and posters. I had a fan base of about five back then.)

Many of us go into the creative act thinking well, we've made a poem and it's good. But sorry to say, this does not make us a poet. A really great poet applies their life to it. The great poems are no accident, or the thing they did last year when there was time or "inspiration." Writing a couple of good poems did not make me a poet. Even at 51, I am still finding out on a daily basis just how much art is asking of me.

The notion of quitting made me pause because I, too, from time to time, would or could not paint. Perhaps I told myself it was about economics but maybe that was not really true. Perhaps that stroke of the ego was not received at a critical time.

And there is that cyclical thing - everyone has them - you make work by not making it. Maybe you have to go out and make money (instead of art, damnit!) or you’re sick. Maybe you just need to think. But what someone does or does not say about your work should never stop you.

This also made me consider what I might to say to several fellows who told me what I couldn’t or shouldn’t do and why I listened to them. Because yes, I listened to them and while they have probably forgotten all about it, my own reaction hurt me. Of course this is really a subject for another post, but when someone says they love you and your work is cool but but but - well, it’s really damaging….

- But is it their fault I took the turns I did? Whoever made them right anyway?