picking cichorium

i should begin in the beginning. at first there was fish.

then there was elmo, mom, sheep and what not. every time i waited for a seat at Mogador, i would check out the window of the De La Vega‘s shop. slowly checking out has become more systematic: i now take a stroll along St. Mark’s every Sat or Sun morning to see what’s new.

reading up on this young artist has revealed that his genius is not appreciated by the NYPD. i have nothing to say to this, but to remember my own encounter with NYPD, when i almost got arrested for sitting in a park late at night, talking about politics and economics with two friends. heh, NYPD and the law do not seem to have a sense of humor.

James De La Vega’s popularity is not only with the local police. if you walk thru east village or east harlem paying attention to what is around, you will be blown away how many businesses get this man to decorate their furniture, exteriors and what not.

I should have posted this entry while Filthy was still up

The original:

Pablo Picasso. Guernica.  1937. Oil on canvas. 349 × 776 cm. Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid

East Village remix:

Must look up the artist. Filthy,vile. 2008. Spraypaint on brick. Around  200 x 200 cm. Outside of Mars Bar.

I found out about Eliasson’s installation on the East River, The New York Waterfalls, from NYT. I surely deemed the project interesting, but did not read up on it due to the lack of time. Several days ago, I rode in a cab with a friend, saw The Waterfalls, and started babbling away about public art, telling the engineer type about the Running Fence of Christo and Jeanne Claude. “Nah, but how does it work and how much electricity are they wasting on it?” – he asked the questions that naturally popped up in his head. Well, the website dedicated to the project does tell us how the waterfalls were installed, how they work, but keeps quiet about the energy consumption. Apparently, the answer is “A LOT” since the project is reported to be the second most expensive in the city’s history. Whether a part of the money does come from the city’s budget, or all of it is from the Public Art Fund and other organizations, let us rejoice for the minor spending boost, since the economic stimulus package does not seem to be doing its job. According to The Economist, apparently the “consumers are planning to spend only somewhere between 20% and 40% of the rebate. The rest will go towards paying down debt or into savings accounts” (“Stimulus and Shopping,” The Economist, May 29th, 2008).

Jokes aside, I recommend to see the four beasts driving on the FDR or riding the Q train. I will spare you of the blackberry pictures of the project, since it is best seen live or on the pictures by the pros.

Cendrars captures him much better than any art historian. In short lines the poet jots down the magic, the rebellion against gravity, the macramé of goats, sardines, churches, Bella, etc. – the multi-faceted world of the real and its surreal extensions.

Portrait
Blaise Cendrars

Il dort
Il est éveillé
Tout à coup, il peint
Il prend une église et peint avec une église
Il prend une vache et peint avec une vache
Avec une sardine
Avec des têtes, des mains, des couteaux
Il peint avec un nerf de bœuf
Il peint avec toutes les sales passions d’une petite ville juive
Avec toute la sexualité exacerbée de la province russe
Pour la France
Sans sensualité
Il peint avec ses cuisses
Il a les yeux au cul
Et c’est tout à coup votre portrait
C’est toi lecteur
C’est moi
C’est lui
C’est sa fiancée
C’est l’épicier du coin
La vachère
La sage-femme
Il y a des baquets de sang
On y lave les nouveau-nés
Des ciels de folie
Bouches de modernité
La tour en tire-bouchon
Des mains
Le Christ
Le Christ c’est lui
Il a passé son enfance sur la Croix
Il se suicide tous les jours
Tout à coup il ne peint plus
Il était éveillé
Il dort maintenant
Il s’étrangle avec sa cravate
Chagall est étonné de vivre encore

A collector of feelings, when I look at the works of art, I mostly allow myself to separate them into “likes” and “dislikes” simply by the sentiment that they evoke the very second I see them for the first time. Not every work of Chagall produces a positive disturbance in my imagination; thus, I had to force myself to step over my hostility and into exploration regardless of this animosity without a clear reason. That was when I found the greatest painter of a magic moment in time together with its expansion into surreal.

I personally prefer the later works of Chagall, after he has already stepped away from the cubists’ technique of a linear separation of a canvas. I prefer fuzziness of the images, their airy softness of fusion to the harsh outlines and borders of the earlier works.

Not a grand connoisseur of art, I know very few works.

I have walked past her several times, I am sure. This time around she attracted me. I did not look for a while at the title of the sculpture, did not even try to figure out what was in front of me. Instead I savored the fact that somebody has cast in bronze a familiar feeling, even a phobia.

Alberto Giacometti. Woman with Her Throat Cut. 1932 (cast 1949). Bronze, 8 x 34 1/2 x 25″ (20.3 x 87.6 x 63.5 cm)

Once I got home, I read in whatever art his literature I own and online about Giacometti and the Woman. Different critics interpreted the work differently, calling it anything from “a bronze construction of a dismembered female corpse” to “powerful image of sexual pleasure and violence.” The most thorough and thoughtful interpretation of the work that I found is by Laurie Wilson. You can read a four-page excerpt (p. 120) about the Woman in Wilson’s Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic, and the Man available via google books.

Still, how did he know, I wondered? How did he know this feeling of being defenseless yet dangerous, destroyed, yet dangerous, ripped open in front of the viewer, exposed, disfigured, yet graceful and, again, dangerous? The question that I am mulling on is “What kind of man is able to grasp this feeling, and what was his path to understanding it?”