Anniversaries, Grilled Icebergs and Openings

The proof that this balmy spring weather is being coordinated by the anti-Christ

is shown on our thermometer on the first day of spring, 2012:

(Outside temp and inside temp, respectively.)

As Garrison Kiellor would say, it’s been a busy week in Lake Wobegon, only substitute New York.  He’s always been a favorite of mine, Garrison – when he had a morning talk show I'd listen in the barn while milking the cows, who loved it.  They are picky about what they listen to, cows.  Turn on some dis-harmonius jazz or psychedelic guitar riffs and watch their production plummet.  Or heavy metal.  (With the possible exception of certain Led Zeppelin songs, as in not "Dazed and Confused" but "Going to California").  

(Photo from deadline.com)

But Garrison had such a soothing voice and he’d play songs they enjoyed, like Anne Murray's "You Needed Me," which Garrison actually hated but his co-host Jim Ed Poole (Tom Keith) adored, the former saying Murray's music was like suffocating on maple syrup, or something to that effect.  Then Garrison got his "Prairie Home Companion" show going, we sold the cows (long story there), 

I divorced, went back to school, moved to Brooklyn, etc. 

Which brings us back to New York.

 Frank's and my anniversary is March 24th, and we celebrate this one - the 19th (!!!) - by going out to dinner at Flatbush Farms, 76 St. Marks Place in Brooklyn, where I order an appetiser of “Grilled Iceberg Lettuce.”  I’m not a big fan of the boldly non-nutritional staple, the greenest thing on many American tables, which my mother had permanently ensconced in its own special Tupperware container—but grilling seems so exotic.  Throwing caution to the wind, I'm rewarded by a subtle smoky flavor and Caesar dressing like a creamy hummus littered with crunchy crostini.  Not your mother’s iceberg lettuce!  I do all but lick my plate.  Well, maybe a bit of a lick...

Can "grilled iceberg" be a sly reference to global climate change

or am I reading too much into it?

Frank and I, lo those 19 years ago, got married by a JP 

at 1 Centre Street, the big downtown courthouse in Manhattan 

at 9AM on Wed., March 24th, 1993.  We wanted to do it on the Equinox 

to make it properly pagan, but the scheduling didn't work out.

 I was working at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in SoHo and took the day off, 

and Frank had every Wednesday off during his stint as the Chair of Fine Arts at Pratt.

Here's our wedding announcement and

 pics from our reception book, put together by Nina Leto-Mayleas, shown above with Frank.

We are on the left, looking like mere kids, and Frank's friend Pedro and his wife on the right.  

Sadly, Pedro died ten years ago of of a heart attack at the age of 56.

On our way to the Flatbush Farm restaurant from the studio, we pass a true monstrosity (an alien space ship?  some random space junk put here by the Chinese? these being guesses made on my Facebook post) looming at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, one of most highly trafficked corners in the universe, obviously the best place for a new basketball stadium currently owned by the Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov who wheeled and dealed with Bruce Ratner to buy this wonderful thing, the only thing left after the meltdown of the huge, ill-planned and ill-fated Atlantic Yards project, besides all the displaced people and destroyed neighborhoods, that is.

This side of the building has windows that reflect the 

fierce waning afternoon sun right into the eyes of drivers.

Prohorov is running for President against Vladimir Putin.  

Perhaps if he wins he'll move the Nets to Russia, lifting the entire stadium on a space-crane out of

Brooklyn and dropping it in the middle of Moscow.

Speaking of cranes, this one was spotted on Third Street, where I live, last week.

The truck it sprang from advertised "We get it up fast."

That morning a violin player was playing a beautiful classical piece in the 7th Avenue

B/Q station, and then "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

He was on the wrong side of the tracks, otherwise I would have dropped some big bucks, or at least one, into his violin case.

At Kingsborough where I teach painting and art history I ran across this edition of "Art News."

Can this cut-up cover be seen as an anti-feminist statement,  

or am I reading too much into it?

And last but not least, this week sees another anniversary, this one the big opening of 

Gallery 128's 25th Anniversary Exhibition

which features my video "Animated Abstraction 2"

that takes a small detail of one of my former abstract paintings and puts it through 

its After Effects paces, 

like the painting having a dream of itself.

Also an elegant work by Jack Sal is in the show:  ink, gesso and silk surgical tape,
 a piece that is subtle yet strong, serene yet emphatic.

I'm not taking very good pictures with my Iphone tonight, it appears.

I forget to take one of my own installation.

Don't show this to the Painted People - I don't know what their reaction will be.

Here's the scene outside the gallery, Kuzuko Miyamoto is on the far left, the director of the gallery

who has been with it from the inaugural exhibition, which also

included Sol Lewitt, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Milton Resnick.

Also in the show is one of Kuzuko's paintings from the 1960's that was recently found - 

it had been bought at auction by David Hammond.

Across the street is another opening next to Gary's Unisex Hair Salon, 

and a police car,

obviously there for crowd control!

Gallery Dealers: The Good, the Bad, the Insulting

Tuesday, an interesting day in the art world.  I start out getting picked up by a limo and escorted to New Jersey to visit (again!) Mana Contemporary to check out (again!) 

the work of Eugene Lemay, whose work I am going to write about for d'ART Magazine.

But before I say any more about Eugene Lemay and his visionary art and projects, 

I need to vent a bit.  Bear with me.

Anyone who has been in the NY art world for more than five minutes has had some kind of
excruciating experience at a gallery.

Artists especially bear the scars of feeling like some kind of craven beast crawling around
sniffing out that one special gallery that will take our work and show it.
Or at least be marginally polite with their cruel rejections so we can feel marginally human again.

But today I'm not going around as an artist, I'm "collecting" cool stuff for the blog, 

so in a way, I'm a collector, that most prized and catered to gallery visitor, the one who has doors
opened for them so they don't have to stand outside an impervious glass facade like a drooling fool,
trying to figure out where the door is and how to open it.

On with the tale.  After the NJ visit I stopped in at the 529 building on W. 20th Street with its
11 floors of art galleries.  When I reached the seventh, I visited the Howard Scott Gallery,
one of my favorite galleries, Howard being a true gentleman who cares about
and has faith in his artists (he'll be showing my friend Rick Klauber's work in the fall).
His current show is the work of Amsterdam-based Toon Kuijpers, quiet, painterly and exquisite still lives...

...that speak a bit about Morandi...

(Morandi photo from internet)

...and at times William Bailey
(whom I modeled for in the late 80's, BTW).


(William Bailey photo from the internet, "Mercatale Still Life" 1981.  Oil and wax on canvas,
Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund.  copyright 2012 William Bailey)


But back to my rant.
After I leave Howard Scott, I happen to notice the following artwork in a nearby gallery...

(Courtesy of Alejandro Diaz and Royale Projects)

...which I think will make a pithy addition to the blog, where I'll say something clever about happiness 

being not only expensive but also blah, blah (insert clever phrase here).

The gallery appears deserted, so I proceed to take a photo, not easy since the digital camera absorbs 

the light and makes it unreadable...

...so I finesse a bit to attempt to get a good shot. Meanwhile, the gallery dealer comes in and says,
by the way, 

do I know that I should never take a photo without asking first?  Never ever?

That I should always ask for permission? Always? That it's just freaking common courtesy to ask first?

I apologize, saying I saw no one to ask, a feeble excuse in his book, and I further dig myself into a hole by alluding to my blog where I often talk about art and artists, 

and perhaps I might speak of this piece?

Well! Mr. Gallery Dealer scoffs, I probably don't even know the artist's name, do I?

No, I say, that's why I'm walking over here to the desk, to look for information, a list, 

perhaps a press release.

Mr. GD follows me over to the desk, unconcerned that no press releases are in sight, 

wondering aloud if I know that it's only common courtesy to ask for 

permission to take photos in a gallery?

I take his obsessive questioning as a signal to leave,

whereupon I walk out of the gallery and take a photo of his sign - without permission! -

which I have rendered here virtually unreadable by the magic of photoshop, 

not wishing to be a name-dropper.

After I return home, I google "happiness is expensive" and find the artist's name, 

Alejandro Diaz, and his gallery in Indian Wells, California, Royale Projects, which 

happily and inexpensively gives me permission to use the image, along with proper credit, of course.

After the photo fandango, I find myself taking another picture without permission,
this one in the stairwell, which says,
"USA is not the boss"
while little silver letters document the opposing view:  "Yes it is."

On the sixth floor of 529 is another favorite gallery, Elizabeth Harris, now showing 

William Carroll's "City Silhouettes"...

...that also seem a bit Morandi-like in their elegant spareness, their purity of vision, 

giving us the essential Platonic "forms" of things that are 

(paradoxically) gleaned from everyday experience.

Also at E. Harris, Bill Weiss paints of "Doing and Non-Doing" and all the doing seems to 

spring from the left side of the canvas, 

an invasion of whimsical forms that reach and strive, 

leaving us both anxious for them to complete their missions while 

savoring the space they haven't yet touched.

 I also visit the Kim Foster Gallery where I am given enthusiastic permission to take pictures.

The above, a work on paper by Paul Glabicki from his "Order" series, springs from his internet search of the word "order."  The resulting imagery, depicting the many tangents it takes him on, is all hand drawn and arranged in wreath-like compositions that revolve around an empty center,
full of details that appear scientific, planetary, arbitrary, willful and intelligent beyond our means.
Rather like the internet.

Glabicki is using the computer for inspiration - grist for my own mill being that my own work is done staring into that little screen for hours on end while one thing or another 

flies past and morphs into another thing, and then another..

(Jeanne Wilkinson, "Feer Euphoria" 2012, digital collage, used with permission)

...which brings me full circle back to Mana Contemporary and the work of Eugene Lemay,
also done on the computer, very large prints that are affixed to the wall with wheat paste,

creating holes in our vision that we fall into, a soft and velvety darkness that seems 

not frightening and empty but luxurious and full.

His work reminds me of Margery Edwards, the Australian artist whose art estate

I handled for many years after she died in 1989 at the age of 57.  

During her last years she painted black paintings

that spoke of a kind of "unknowing" - 

not an emptiness but instead a kind of ethereal landscape to be explored.

I wish she could see Lemay's work - she would understand it implicitly.

(Margery Edwards in her studio, used with permission.)

Eugene Lemay's work is made of layers and layers of letters written in Hebrew and 

some with Arabian script, letters never sent

to the families of men from Lemay's time as a soldier in the Israeli army, families on both sides.

The letters are layered until they build up a dark scrim that resembles the landscape that he was sent out

to learn and explore as a soldier, at night, with no lights.

Mana Contemporary, under Lemay's leadership, is working on a program that will bring Israeli and Palestinian artists together to work on mutual projects.

Lemay is an artist and also a businessman. At the end of our interview, he points to the building (above) next to the one that now houses Mana Contemporary and explains that it will be a center for fashion, and then there will be a theater further on, and where the parking lot now lies 

there will be a sculpture garden.

Art, along with happiness, can be expensive, 

and there are means here to do amazing things.

Comments, Complaints, Cavils.

(Shen Wei's "Undivided Divided" dance performance)


How do you know, like with cigars, when a comment is just a comment?

 What if it's really a complaint, a critique, or even a cavil?

Is it all in the ear of the beholder?

When I asked my son Aaron (the comedian) if he'd seen my last blog-post

 he thought for a long moment while I could hear him fiddling with his computer,

and then he asked, 

"Was that the one that started with all the Andrew pictures and was really long?"

(Andrew is his younger brother.)

So does "really long" mean wonderfully long, brilliantly long, why not longer?

Or something else?

In any case, this post will be different.  

It will start with Aaron, for obvious reasons, and will be shorter.
Sort of.

Here is Aaron with his Hal Thompson birthday cake.

(I designed the Hal logo.)

Below is Hal himself, showing his ham.

Here is Aaron playing "Beer and Board Games" with Greg Benson of 

Mediocre Films.  The game is Dr. Ruth's "Game of Good Sex."  

Greg is playing the woman, Aaron the man.

Here is Aaron as Chad Vader, with Matt Sloan as Clint.

Okay, that's all the space there is for Aaron.

Now I'll show and tell a bit about my week, full of art and 

various annoying things for me to "comment" on.

Here's the sunrise at Kingsborough where I teach Art History at 8AM on Monday mornings.  

Due to the unnecessary and absurd onset of daylight savings time, I catch the morning sun rising over Sheepshead Bay.  It's another beautiful day in the making, way too warm for early March.

More Ted Bundy weather.  When the ice sheets dissolve, this scene will no longer exist!

During the weekend, my artwork is in the Fountain Art Fair at the Art For Progress booth.

Go, Art for Progress!  We love you.

The Painted People are there, as is famed art critic Jerry Saltz, who might have missed them, 

an oversight now corrected through the magic of Photoshop.

I share the space with (among others) Chris Twomey, a great artist and friend whose 

elegant and erotic prints-on-metal-foil are shown here:

Below is the work of Don Porcella (in the foreground and on the left) 

 in the Big Deal Arts space, curated by Ginger Shulick Porcella 

who is launching a new Manhattan gallery next fall called Durable Goods. 

Don's sculptures are woven of pipe cleaners, 

a task he sometimes does in the subway, like knitting.

They are whimsical, satirical and adorable, poking fun at Pop precepts

and the human condition, for what it's worth.

Kind of "commentaries" in a way, of the pipe cleaner variety.

In the Curcio Projects booth, Christopher Chambers new sculpture shines and undulates, 

charging the space with its muscular but delicate movements.

And below is the haunting imagery of Michael Zansky, whose paintings make you forget 

where you are as you're lured into a Grimm-style world that both charms and disturbs 

in a continual unbalancing flow.  

Speaking of art, I went back to Mana Contemporary for a 

weekend performance of the work of Shen Wei Dance Arts.

I am accompanied by my friend Jack Sal, 

who goes with me on the posh bus

through the glistening Holland Tunnel.

Emerging from the Holland Tunnel, we confront many more red lights.

We are in New Jersey now.  

At Mana Contemporary, Shen Wei photographs the dancers in his piece,

 "Undivided Divided".

The dancers and the paintings merge identities and movements.

The audience is allowed to walk amongst the pieces, 

which makes for a wonderful interaction, an immersion into art and dance,

and many photos are taken.

I note some changes in Joshua Hirsch's piece, "Sympathetic Resonance."

Before (above, from earlier in the week), 

and after (below).

Not only has he neatened the cord-tangle into separate spirals, but

also he's added a yellow cord amongst the red.  

The piece is making me think of

the Lakota tradition of the four sacred colors of red, yellow, black, white, 

which represent north, east, west, south, respectively.

Unless it's white/north, red/east, yellow/south, black/west.

Truth is not a static code in Lakota tradition, but a moving, undulating, ever-changing thing.

Like the music that emerges from Hirsch's artful machine.

After a weekend of art, Frank and I struggle to put up blinds

in my studio, both as a projection screen and to block light.

Let me say that it was a nightmare from start to finish.  

One of those projects that should be easy but isn't.

And annoying enough, there is a big seam halfway down the screen!

Too late to turn back now, however.  Must live with it.

Not that I'm complaining.  Or even caviling.

Frank, however, made a few pithy "comments" throughout the process, especially while on ladder duty.

But here he is after it's all done, peace in the studio finally regained.

And here are the Painted People, watching themselves star in their very own drive-in film, 

even though they did nothing but sit around and watch us labor away on their behalf!

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