Sylvia Sleigh
1916- 2010

I wanted to give my perspective; portraying both sexes with dignity and humanism.
I don’t mind the ‘desire’ part, it’s the ‘object’ that’s not very nice.”

- Sylvia Sleigh
(repost from here.)

"Sylvia Sleigh, a British-born artist who put a feminist spin on the portrait genre by painting male nudes in poses that recalled the female subjects of Ingres, Velázquez and Titian,
died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94. "

via here, and here...

"Sylvia Sleigh, 89, is best known for her valiant effort in the 1970's to institute a new genre of feminist painting by changing the gender of the traditional odalisque. Whether because of her limitations as a painter or some deeper sociocultural resistance, the idea never took hold.

Today her flatfootedly realist pictures of young, beautiful, extravagantly long-haired nude men in states of voluptuous relaxation remain fascinating artifacts of their time. Like other things about the 70's, they are embarrassing, unintentionally comical and oddly creepy, yet they remain somehow touching in their quixotic ambition to establish a new humanely erotic tradition for the heterosexual female gaze."









taken from NYT here..



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Something about always moving forward.
Something about giving.

(for victoria)
in lieu of words.











1. Two works by Jason Rhoades: 1. Light 1997 2. Inner Light, 1998 via here..


Jason Rhoades:

"July 9, 1965 in Newcastle, California – August 1, 2006 in Los Angeles was an installation artist who enjoyed critical acclaim, if not widespread public recognition, at the time of his death, and who was eulogized by some critics as one of the most significant artists of his generation."

















Something about always moving forward.
Something about giving.


2. Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (March 5th), Executed in 1991 40-watt light bulbs, porcelain light sockets, extension cords in two parts.


Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996)

In 1993, in lieu of a standard biography/bibliography, Felix chose to write a portrait of himself:

"This is the Biography that we have chosen to print, which is in the true spirit of this gifted artist. 1957 born in Guaimaro, Cuba, the third of what would eventually be four children 1964 Dad bought me a set of watercolors and gave me my first cat 1971 sent to Spain with my sister Gloria, then went to Puerto Rico to live with my uncle 1979 returned to Cuba to see my parents after an eight-year separation 1981 parents escaped Cuba during Mariel boat lift, my brother Mario and sister Mayda escaped with them 1978 met Jeff in Puerto Rico 1976 Gloria and I moved to our own apartment-small, but full of sunlight 1977 Rosa 1976 met my friend Mario 1979 moved to New York City 1980 met Luis at the beach 1983 received BFA from Pratt Institute 1981 and 1983 attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program 1987 received MFA from the International Center of Photography and New York University 1983 Ross at the Boybar 1985 Jeff gave me Pebbles and Biko, two Lilac Point Siamese cats-hardly able to support myself, and now with two cats to feed, only Jeff 1985 first trip to Europe, first summer with Ross 1986 summer in Venice, studied Venetian painting and architecture 1986 blue kitchen, blue flowers in Toronto - a real home for the first time in so long, so long, Ross is here 1987 Wawanaisa Lake: beavers, wild brown bears, Harry retrieved every buoy he sees, New York Times every morning, duck cabin 1986 Mother died of leukemia 1990 Myriam died 1991 Ross died of AIDS, Dad died three weeks later, a hundred small yellow envelopes of my lover's ashes-his last will 1991 Jorge stopped talking to me, I'm lost - Claudio and Miami Beach saved me 1992 Jeff died of AIDS 1990 silver ocean in San Francisco 1992 President Clinton - hope, twelve years of trickle-down economics came to an end 1990 moved to L.A. with Ross (already very sick), Harry the Dog, Biko, and Pebbles, the Ravenswood, Rossmore, golden hour, Ann and Chris by the pool, magic hour, rented a red car, money for the first time, no more waiting on tables, 'Golden Girls', great students at CalArts, Millie and Catherine, went back to Madrid after almost twenty years-sweet revenge 1989 the fall of the Berlin Wall 1991 Bruno and Mary, two black cats Ross found in Toronto, came to live with me 1991 the world I knew is gone, moved the four cats, books, and a few things to a new apartment 1991 went back to L.A., hospitalized for 10 days 1990 first show with Andrea Rosen 1993 moved to 24th Street 1987 joined Group Material 1991 Julie moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan 1992 the forces of hate and ignorance are alive and well in Oregon and Colorado, among other places 1993 Sam Nunn is such a sissy, peace might be possible in the Middle East 1992 started to collect George Nelson clocks and furniture 1993 three years since Ross died, painted kitchen floor bright orange, this book

1997.







Something about always moving forward. (light)
Something about giving. (inner light)

(for victoria)
in lieu of words. (untitled)

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Nicolas Carone,
1917-2010

"One of the last surviving Abstract Expressionist painters,
died on July 15 at his home in Hudson, N.Y."
















"Mr. Carone was present at the beginning of the New York School and friends with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Lee Krasner. But his best work may have come long after the style faded, in the large paintings in shades of black, white and gray that he made during the last two or three decades of his life. The shifting lines and layered brushwork of these works most completely integrated the classical figurative tradition he absorbed during his earliest art studies and the instinctive painting processes of Abstract Expressionism.



Mr. Carone was born in June 4, 1917, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the eldest of seven children of Italian immigrants. He grew up in Hoboken, N.J., where his father was a bartender, and began drawing at age 4. When he was around 11, his mother sent him to the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on East 10th Street in Manhattan, which offered instruction for a small tuition. "




read Roberta Smith's NYT article here..







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Sigmar Polke
1941-2010

Sigmar Polke,
via NYTIMES



Sigmar Polke, an artist of infinite, often ravishing pictorial jest, whose sarcastic and vibrant layering of found images and maverick, chaos-provoking painting processes left an indelible mark on the last four decades of contemporary painting, died yesterday in Cologne, Germany. He was 69; the cause was complications of cancer, according to Gordon Veneklasen, a partner at the Michael Werner Gallery New York, the artist’s chief American representative.

"Sigmar Polke is an artist whose work defies easy definitions. He is one of the most significant painters of the post-war generation, yet his career has by no means been confined to painting. Since the early 1960s Polke has experimented with a wide range of styles and subject matter, bringing together imagery from contradictory or unexpected sources, both historical and contemporary, and using a variety of different materials and techniques. In fact Polke’s artistic diversity, and his resistance to any form of categorisation, has been seen as the only consistent theme in his work."

via the tate
modern....






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J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010

-


"Don't ever tell anybody anything.
If you do, you start missing everybody."
the catcher in the rye, last lines.

“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

J.D. Salinger, 1974

"In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish, N.H. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.”

"A series of fourteen letters written by J.D. Salinger

the reclusive author of "Catcher in the Rye," to the 18-year-old Joyce Maynard

were sold at Sotheby's New York Fine Books

nd Manuscripts auction in New York in 1999. Salinger died Thursday at the age of 91."

"Mr. Salinger’s privacy was further punctured in 1998 and again in 2000 with the publication of memoirs by, first, Joyce Maynard — with whom he had a 10-month affair in 1973, when Ms. Maynard was a college freshman — and then his daughter, Margaret. Some critics complained that both women were trying to exploit and profit from their history with Mr. Salinger, and Mr. Salinger’s son, Matthew, wrote in a letter to The New York Observer that his sister had “a troubled mind” and that he didn’t recognize the man portrayed in her account. But both books nevertheless added a creepy, Howard Hughesish element to the Salinger legend.

Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other exotic enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box."

all text taken from NY Times article, here, by Charles McGrath

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Jeanne-Claude, 74, American artist and resident of New York City, died suddenly November 18, 2009 as a result of of complications due to a ruptured brain aneurysm.

Christo is deeply saddened by the passing of his wife, partner and collaborator and is committed to honor the promise they made to each other many years ago: The art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude will continue.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude met in Paris, France in November, 1958, sharing the same date of birth and have worked together for 51 years creating temporary works of art.

go here for more info...

their first outdoor environmental work, 1961...

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE DOCKSIDE PACKAGES, COLOGNE HARBOR, 1961 At the same time as Christo‚s first personal exhibition, at the Haro Lauhus Gallery, in Cologne in 1961, Christo and Jeanne-Claude created their first temporary outdoor environmental work of art. The gallery was near the waterfront of the Rhine River. For the Dockside Packages the artists used several stacks of oil barrels and large rolls of industrial paper covering them with tarpaulins which they secured with ropes. With the permission from the Port Authority all the materials were borrowed from the dockworkers. Dockside Packages was composed of separate parts of various sizes, each approximately 5 x 2 x 10 meters (16.4 x 6.5 x 32.8 feet). The temporary work of art remained for two weeks.



see the work here.

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“I try not to think.
I try to just let it happen.”

Ruth Duckworth



























Ruth Duckworth (1919–2009)
10.22.09


"Modernist sculptor Ruth Duckworth has passed away, according to the Chicago Tribune. A Chicagoan since 1964 via Germany and England, Duckworth created work that resides in the collections of major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago. Many of her large-scale murals and sculptures grace lobbies, airport terminals, and other public spaces. Shortly after coming to the US to teach at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, she created a four-hundred-square-foot stoneware mural that forms the entryway of the school’s geophysical sciences building. In the 1970s, she received a commission for Clouds over Lake Michigan, which was first in a bank and later in the lobby of the Chicago Board of Trade Building, a sweeping piece of relief that incorporates meteorologic and geologic themes. Amid a 2005 career retrospective of her work that had showings in New York and at the Chicago Cultural Center, Duckworth told the Tribune that when she made something, “I try not to think. I try to just let it happen.”

c/o Artforum here

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"It seems to me that the more you find out, the more questions there are;
the more you know, the more unknown things become..."

-Gregor Schneider

Gregor Schneider

"Schneider dislikes explaining his work. He very seldom gives interviews. Long silences fall: his mouth hanging open and empty as he hunts for the right words. You can well imagine the interview that got him out of National Service in the Army - they asked him how he had been spending his time and he tried to tell them about his interest in walls. Even his smile looks upside down.

In his work - in Dead House Ur, for instance, or in his still-to-be-fulfilled “room in which to die” - he is interested, he says, “in the unknown: in the hidden places which I can no longer feel or hear or smell”.

“I wanted to find the point when my art was surrounding me completely but, at the same time, I could no longer recognise it... I wanted to look at the moment that a dying person ceases perceiving. I wanted to think about that transition point. It seems to me that the more you find out, the more questions there are; the more you know, the more unknown things become. And what is more unknown than death?"

taken from article here..

""Making is a higher form of thinking," claims Gregor Schneider, who began to "make" art as an adolescent. So urgent was his desire to be an artist that, in order to pay for the materials he needed to make his sculptures, he even worked as a gravedigger. Introverted, self-effacing, and a close observer of human behavior--with a particular passion for the lowliest of social categories--Schneider has developed an all-absorbing identification with his work, living together with it night and day in an apartment he soundproofed from the rest of the world. Schneider has tried his hand at film, painting, and sculpture, but most remarkable is the installation he created between 1985 and 1994, in his home. There he built rooms within rooms, walls in front of walls, doors that led nowhere and windows that opened onto dead spaces. When questioned about his motivations, he would defiantly proclaim, "I can't do anything else."

from amazon here..



(listen to burger and voigt here...) via motel de moka..

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some
kind
of
wonderful....

(nan goldin)

"What have I done today
Just sat and watched the jets fly over
A car goes by
And the sun goes down
We talk about the town

This city's mad in the head
And sick in the soul
All the stars flew away a long time ago
Isn't that nice"

-Flesh for Lulu, "I Go Crazy"
listen here...

(robert adams)

John Hughes, dead at 59.... here

His films and music choices inspired me. A light at at the end of the tunnel. Some Kind of Wonderful, a personal favorite. Living life on the wrong side of the tracks.

""I just used what I was listening to at the time, bands I liked," Hughes said in a rare 1999 interview. "It was my own personal taste."

Watch clips and songs here...

Thank you John....

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dash show
2006, mixed media

Dash Snow, dies at 27

Dash Snow, a promising young New York artist, died Monday night at Lafayette House, a hotel in Lower Manhattan. He was 27 and lived in Manhattan. His death was confirmed by his grandmother, the art collector and philanthropist Christophede Menil, who said that Mr. Snow had died of a drug overdose.

Roberta Smith, here..


























all images by dash snow, via peres projects..

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"then i could see... then i could hear...." felix gonazael torres

mayumi terada

anders krisar

(Felix Gonzalez-Torres)



"The Sun kept setting -- setting -- still
No Hue of Afternoon --
Upon the Village I perceived
From House to House 'twas Noon --"

The Dusk kept dropping -- dropping -- still
No Dew upon the Grass --
But only on my Forehead stopped --
And wandered in my Face --

-

klaus berges

How well I knew the Light before --
I could see it now --
'Tis Dying -- I am doing -- but
I'm not afraid to know --

mayumi terada

ander krisar

{Poem by Emily Dickinson, "the sun kept setting still...."

(all text below taken from a conversation between felix gonzalez torres and ross bleckner, bomb magazine...read more here..)

Felix: No, the year before he got the diagnosis of AIDS he had his appendix removed and they tested the blood and it was HIV positive. But he was a fucking horse. He was 195 pounds, he could build you a house if you asked him to. It’s amazing, I know you’ve seen it the same way I’ve seen it, this beautiful, incredible body, this entity of perfection just physically, thoroughly disappear right in front of your eyes.

Ross: Do you mean disappear or dissipate?

Felix: Just disappear like a dried flower. The wonderful thing about life and love, is that sometimes the way things turn out is so unexpected. I would say that when he was becoming less of a person I was loving him more. Every lesion he got I loved him more. Until the last second. I told him, “I want to be there until your last breath,” and I was there to his last breath. One time he asked me for the pills to commit suicide. I couldn’t give him the pills. I just said, “Honey, you have fought hard enough, you can go now. You can leave. Die.” We were at home. We had a house in Toronto that we called Pee-Wee Herman’s Playhouse Part 2 because it was so full with eclectic, campy, kitsch taste. His idols were not only George Nelson and Joseph D’Urso, but also Liberace.

Ross: That’s a very nice combination.

Felix: Love gives you the space and the place to do other work. Once that space is filled, once that space was covered by Ross, that feeling of home, then I could see, then I could hear. One of the beauties of theory is when you can actually make it into a practice.

more images here..

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