Good lord, Matthew Marks

Hmmm....I was very excited to be assigned the Matthew Marks Gallery because I know it's Terry Winters gallery.....but a lot of this work either had the effect of irritating the crap out of me or just didn't seem to relate to any one of us in particular. That said, I make these recommendations with some reservations....

For example, Robert Gober might connect to Jules in a really superficial kind of way. Maybe looking at it will clarify things you don't want to fall into....The Untitled Candle piece is the one that seems to hold up for me but it's still so showy. Let me know what you think about his work. It seems like the work comes out of a tension between an outside morality structure and the individual and in that way might be interesting but....I just can't shake the ease of that reading. Or...it's so showy. 

Andreas Gursky seems to exist in a world between Scott and Mandy. Probably closer to Scott than Mandy considering the distance from the subject. I don't get the sense that this artist is trying to spin anything.

Karen...have a look at Terry Winter's Meshworks pieces if you haven't already. You are talking about two very different things but it still might do something for you. Besides, you might be talking about sex and he might be talking about technology but as we know....those things aren't so separate anymore! Yikes..wow that could be really interesting work though....Terry Winters with a dirty streak. Sign me up!

Now I have to listen to Midnight Vultures.

I can't look at this gallery any more...

can anyone read spanish?

http://elperritovive.blogspot.com/

this is the website i found when i was trying to confirm a petition that a pretty reliable friend reposted on myspace. if it is true, it represents exactly why pluralism needs to end in every way.

the myspace petition was written by a british artist, to the central american biennial and any gallery that represents Guillermo Habacuc Vargas, the puerto rican representative to said biennial. supposedly, and so far i have no reason to believe anything otherwise, this "artist" (in the worst sense of the word) paid local children to catch a stray dog, a dog which the "artist" proceeded to tether in a gallery space, with words on the wall made out of dog food, and other tantalizing things just out of reach, all to make the dog's last days and hours even more miserable than the simple starvation would have caused. yes, the "artwork," which many gallery patrons observed and i'm sure remarked upon very deeply and ironically, was the act of letting the dog starve to death. Guillermo Habacuc Vargas has been invited to recreate the event at the central american biennial in honduras, and if any of you were wondering what intellectual art's extremes were, i think we may have found them.

let me know if this is in any way untrue, or, alternately, a reasonable piece of artwork.

Mark Bradford

This is a new artist I came across.

Pergola

Seeing the vines wrapping around the pergola in my backyard reminded me of the Helen O'Leary talk as she spoke about interpreting her use of the grid in her work.

Mayan Lego

Anyone else love legos?

Allison Miller

This website wouldn't let me nab one of they're pictures so you'll just have to hit this link: Allison Miller. 

While I'm there: Tomory Dodge.

Speaking of the art market...

Zhang Xiaogang's is considered one of the most important artists in China and is selling work in the millions...

check this out...it's good talk, with a leading thinker of our times

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGFRi_ueq-M

burrowing in: redon's consciousnest

Here's some paintings by Redon that I've been looking at,
'n been interested in...






The myth of "Psyche and Eros" is said to be a metaphor for the feminine journey toward consciousness... (psyche is Greek for both soul and butterfly.)






here's his Orpheus and one eyed monster, respectively:

an image from the gutai expo in 1957, and a painting by gutai artist nasaka yuko

cy twombly

i've been reading kirk varnedoe's "pictures of nothing." about this twombly he says: My wife, who is an artist, said of this picture that it's so large and complex that it has its own weather. We sense that it has a kind of energy to it, a pulse like that of a cosmic nebula. And we keep reaching for analogies--weather, night sky, impulsiveness--for a vocabulary that in the end describes nothing other than this picture. We grapple with the combination of things the picture presents: with minute, intimate, and grand scale; with flatness and depth; with huge energy and vast, dissolving serenity. And we continually wind around something that never becomes any particular thing but itself, that has all the complexity and energy that only it has, and that did not exist before.

karen, all this seemed to describe one way of finding that cloudlike space you were talking about; something we reach for and hold, only for it to disappear and reform somewhere else.