exhibitions
Boston fire, 1872: The city in ruins, the men in coats and bowler hats become architecture among the rubble.Life is short; art is long. But life is getting longer and art shorter.
In a Roman amphitheater, tragedy performed daily, between ruins, their shadows, and a rising and falling sun.
Electricity crawling over stone.
Schiele's eyelashes, pubic hair.
Little girls with large hands with long fingers with knotty knuckles . . .
Malliol's buttocks.
Three favorites: Duchamp, Twombly, Schiele: Marcel, Cy, Egon.
Private Studies: George Grosz's series of sketches of mice snapped in mousetraps; Egon Schiele's series of self-portraits masturbating; Bruno Shultz's Book of Idolatry, its procession of man-beast hybrid hydrocephalic dwarves, obsequiously on hands and knees, kissing the feet of statuesque women.
Give me a gallery strewn with large black lemons, a mirror painted with vaseline . . .
Professional Conceptual Wrestling by Vincent McGroary: " . . . and in this corner, Ladies and Gentlemen, from parts unknown, weighing in at zero pounds, No-one!"
I love the idea of a global, an international organization with less than ten people as members.
All the artistic media available - graphic, music, performance, photographic, even earthwork, and all to potential for combining them - and still I limit myself to writing my one or two lines.
Those who equate artistic merit with the amount of labor involved in creation. I'm for art created "off the cuff" and effortlessly.
The Art Thief's Manifesto.
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Art thieved is art conceived.
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A work of art thieved by me leaves behind a work of art conceived by me.
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Cleaning out the entire gallery amounts to a one-man show.
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Art created. Art replaced. Art removed entirely.The art thief who steals contemporary vanitas art by living artists.
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The artist is the thief's canvas,
primed with the feeling of loss at the work's disappearance,
painted with the surge of pride at having the work so desired.
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Artistic vanity is the medium of the new vanitas artist, who thieves to create his art.Striking contrast of fragile, colorful stained glass set in massive, gray stone.
Young girl, yellow hair, blue eyes, blowing a growing, quivering, thinning pink bubble.
The Louvre asks you, if you are a man, if you are a Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo man; if you are a woman, if you are a Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo.
In the Louvre, the little cards on which the painter, title, and date of the paintings are written should be a hundred times larger than the paintings themselves, rather than the other way around.
Following two women in tight jeans through the Louvre.
Allegory of the death of love: procession of cupids in little black hoods.
Odalisque using a skull as an armrest.
Vanitas/ vanité: the skull on the table facing the mirror.
Vanitas Iconography:
Books
Bubbles
Candle, guttering
Cards
Clock, hourglass
Crystal glasses
Dice
Flowers, cut
Fruit crawling with insects
Fruit rind
Globe
Gold goblets
Jewels
Mirror
Musical instruments
Pipe
Pottery, broken
Scales
Skull
Smoke
Weapons, armorIn the Greek and Roman sculpture galleries in the Louvre, he dreamed of taking a wet-saw to it all and rearranging the pieces with glue.
Musée d'Orsay, upper floor, Impressionists and Post-, a man who marches softly the perimeter of each gallery, scanning in with his digital cam-corder each tableau in turn.
Pro wrestling: opera of the new millennium. He is simple-minded enough to shut out all ideas, art and writing that undermine his inflated opinion of himself. He feels threatened by Pollock and Twombly because their canvases lack primary focal points, and if a canvas can exist without a focal point, it may well be that he is not, as he sees himself, the focal point of the canvas of humanity. And so to those to whom he refers as mere "scribblers" he shutters the windows and locks the door of his delusion for the privacy necessary to write the "hard and important works" that, we are left to presume, will enlighten us, his billions of inferiors.
Generic dreams.
A finger-under-the-chin coochie-coochie-coo for the avant-garde enfant terrible.
Delusion is a hothouse flower.
IQ Tests: tomahawking the precise, steel ruler of psychometrics, the one with the out-of-this-word shine, into the maelstrom, the mud-tornado of ailments, emotions, and motivations.
He has taken every IQ test available, has gained entry into 15 high IQ societies. Unsatisfied, he plans crimes, "victimless" crimes, art theft, takes art as though taking tests. He has moved from taking tests to taking-tests. After several successes, he allows himself to be captured, so as to take the escaping-test. He succeeds, leaving scores of paintings and the question of his whereabouts.
Early 20th century interest in the fourth dimension. See also Socrates, Plato. If 3-D object projects 2-D shadow, does 4-D project 3-D, that is, us, etc? Was there ever any inquiry into the 2-D shadow projecting the 1-D? Is there any limit to Ds and, if so, why? If there are infinite Ds, is where infinity meets zero a closing of the circle, and, if so, being 3-D, are we considerably closer to this closing than other Ds? Or is this closing where infinity, positive, meets negative infinity, Ds extending beyond the other side of zero? And what would serve as the sun does for us between these other Ds? (And because words are more plentiful than toy blocks, I need not raze this construction with a swipe of my arm in order to continue playing.)
He is proud of himself for not living a paint-by-numbers life (job, marriage, house, kids), yet he faithfully acts out every stereotype of the tortured, individual, bohemian genius-a path well worn through the Twentieth century. He paints by the numbers; just a different picture.
Alone, in bed, in his cork-lined bedroom, the conceptual artist masturbates, ejaculates onto the pages of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, sticking them together, each in turn. This is his masterwork.
"You don't know what goes into making something until you know what's been thrown out in the process." Why he is equally interested in preliminary sketches, early drafts, and women's feces.
The sculptor, he works with clay, uses his bare hands. Dead and buried, he sinks his fingers into the earth to make a world.
A cluster of kinetic sculptures in the center of a circle of pavement within a square garden. An old man rollerblades the perimeter of the circle, and four others sleep in the square's corners.
An exhibition of fifty identical works of art, all with the same title, each attributed to a different artist.
Exhibition of local senior citizen art: child art without the imagination.
Art exhibit: In the center of the gallery, within a thick, transparent dome atop a pedestal, a wooden Pieta. A third of the way down the front of the pedestal, a button displaying the word "Push," which, when pushed, to the horror of the typical patron, ignited into inextinguishable flames the contents of the dome. We learn that the dome is easily cleaned and that it is large enough to fit a rat, cat, or perhaps even an infant. We exit knowing that such a dome may be made large enough to accommodate anything, even ourselves.
Definition of Art: that which continuously redefines itself.
A loon in the museum who asks for handouts while proclaiming she's Venus de Milo.
Atop the heroic civil servant statue a peg-legged pigeon.