working

It’s pouring outside. Oswald and I are hunkered down in my studio and I’m drawing away. And my studio is a huge mess, just the way I like it.

Ack… as my work has gotten bigger (and it is, slowly but surely, getting bigger) it has also gotten a lot less bloggerific, meaning that it’s not as easy to simply slap a new drawing on the scanner, and then toss it up on this site. This piece, which is made up of two tall, vertical panels, looks in the scan like there are actually four panels since I had to scan it in in two chunks (and it wouldn’t fit on the scanbed length-wise). After some fumbling with Photoshop, I decided just to go ahead and put it up… but bear in mind that the horizontal line coming across the middle isn’t in the actual piece.

Confusing, I know… gotta get it professionally photographed…

About two weeks ago, I was killing time and avoiding doing real work by checking out the site Etsy.com. On Etsy, people sell their wares (t-shirts, tote bags, etc) and what I saw over and over was some really nice screenprinting on different homemade items. Where were all these craftspeople getting access to a press? Home screenprinting is a huge pain - it’s messy and you need a lot of space and exacting conditions, for starters. I’ve never been able to get it to work.

So there I was, jealously looking at all these listings until I found one that the young woman who was selling some shirts wrote, “These images are gocco’ed onto the fabric…” and I realized there was a word there I had never heard. I googled “gocco” and wound up here… I read some more and googled some more and before I knew it, I was on a grand quest to buy myself a Print Gocco.

They’re hard to find in NY, but after a little legwork I wound up at NY Central Art Supply where they had two left in the case (I bought one and one of my students bought the other. I assume they have more on the way?). I finally tried it out today. And oh my god…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. So, what is a Print Gocco? This is the box:

They’re made in Japan. And in the box is a little kit that you use to make prints. Everything takes place inside this little self-contained plastic box - there is no separate darkroom, no chemicals that you have to mess with. The “darkroom” and everything is somehow ingeniously contained in this box. The whole thing is made for people who live in apartments to make their own prints - whereas you really need to live in a house (with a big tub and plenty of spare room) to make standard silkscreen prints, to make Goccos all you need is a kitchen table. (I PROMISE you this is true. There is zero mess. There is zero smell. I was up and running in ten minutes with my first prints done, and I’m someone who finds it hard to follow directions the first time through.)

You wind up with a print that looks an awful lot like a traditional screenprint:

(The roughness of the texture of the bark on the tree comes from the way in which I drew it, not from the process itself.)

This might be the single most clever art supply I have ever encountered. You can print on just about anything, and I keep thinking it will lend itself well to making cards, stickers, t-shirts, and - what I bought it for - artist’s books. Again, I can’t overstress how easy it was and how I had my first prints done so quickly and easily.

Ok, possible drawbacks:
Purchasing the thing was difficult, first because it was hard to find and secondly because it was $200. (You can get them on ebay for around $130, but then you have to pay for shipping from Japan which drives the price up to at least that.) However, absolutely everything you need to make two screens and a ton of prints are in the kit, and I think that if you bought the equivilant in silkscreening materials, you’d be out as much if not more.

The replacement parts - new screens, lightbulbs, ink, etc - are all made by the company that makes the kit… which has me scared to find out how much they will cost me. I haven’t crossed this bridge yet, and I still think - given the no mess, the ease of printing, etc. - that purchasing this thing was a great investment.

Ok, I am very excited now! I have a new toy and a ton of ideas to put it to good use.

Yay, the semester is done! All that’s left is a stack of grading, but I can deal with that. It was an absolutely terrific semester — I think this was the best yet. I miss my classes already.

For whatever reason, the end of the year has me thinking a lot about my own education and its relationship to my work. I have a feeling that this will take shape a little more as I start doing the research for my classes for next year, but a few random thoughts:

I went to school (speaking of college and grad school, so 1991-1997) and wound up, just because of where I was and the time it was, studying primarily with Conceptual, Minimal, and post-Minimal artists. I don’t think I was even aware of it at the time, since I - like a lot of students - just basically took the classes available to me without really asking (if the teacher teaching the class was “famous” then all the better - but I never really questioned the ideology that they embraced).

I look back on all this and think about what a strange fit it was. I was attracted to art because it gave me a forum and a place to express something that I couldn’t express anywhere else - and that something, while I still struggle to explain what it is, is related to my personal experience in the world. As I sit here, staring at the screen, all I can think to say to explain it is “the awkwardness of being alive,” but that’s not quite right. Maybe the best I can think of at this moment is “the awkwardness of me being alive right now.” Regardless of my fumbling with the best way to say it, the point is that I was always very interested in trying to capture bits of myself as an individual - my thoughts, feelings, my inhabited self (if that’s not too artsy). And in turn, I’ve always been interested in work that speaks to the same thing for other people.

All of this, of course, was the antithesis of what my instructors were interested in. They wanted to talk about theory and philosophy and to move art away from “therapy” and personal experience. i should point out that I respect the work from this period and that many of my teachers were absolutely wonderful to me, and that I am grateful for their guidance. Lord knows what would have happened had I not been forceably exposed to this other way of thinking and of making art - somehow, for me (given my personality, etc), having this to work against was a strong motivator to stick to my own path.

But the kind of work that was really encouraged when I was a student (this may be true to this day, I’m not totally sure) was work that left me numb. It seemed that the more devoid of emotion and personal experience a work would be (and the slicker it was made), the higher grade it would get and the more praise would be heaped on it. I fell under the spell of this ideology for a long time and completely embraced it (my work was never slick, but it was thickly coated in irony and, as such, ok by these standards) and breaking free from it has been a long and difficult process.

All this results in me thinking about how teaching is one of the primary joys of my life, mostly because I get to be around students who are asking many of the same questions that I did, and still do. I’m so fortunate it worked out this way - hey, it could have easily have been that I would inherit class after class of students making Donald Judd-inspired work, but it just hasn’t shaken out that way. As it winds up, my students care deeply about making their work themselves (rather than using fabricators or buying pre-made elements), about having an emotional experience with their work and telling stories about their lives; they reject irony and consumerism and the flashiness of the art world.

I recognize this as a fleeting thing. Ten years from now, it’s entirely possible that I may have class after class of students who think that personal narrative is stupid. It will be their right to decide that and my job to figure out the best way to guide them. But for right now? I’m so lucky to have this perfect match.
**

(sort of a postscript)
I gave this post a title that’s a line from a Sleater-Kinney song called What’s Mine is Yours. For me, it captures all the anxiety and frustrations of being young and trapped in a place (a small town, in school) you’re perpetually trying to get out of.
Did you ever get the feeling that you don’t belong?
Said the teacher in the classroom, I think there’s something wrong.
But your desks are too heavy
And your walls are too white
And your rules are all wrong
And it’s either run or fight.
Well, I’m still running…

It gets me everytime I hear it. This is why I really consider teaching to be part of my artistic practice - because I’m still running and I don’t think I’ll ever stop.

Semester’s almost over. Yippee! Just a few more days…

Ahhh, it’s a gloomy day out there and I am probably the only person in the tri-state area who is glad because of it. The weather has been so perfectly, wonderfully spring-y the last couple of days that it’s made me feel like a creep to be holed up and inside working (well, not that I haven’t been without the occasional breaks to the park or to work on the garden). But today? It’s perfectly acceptable to be a creep. It’s chilly which makes our apartment seem cozy and my studio seem like the absolutely best place on earth to be.

And in that vein, a new drawing - sort of a biggie for me, since it’s on two pages and almost 18″ across…

This weekend has about a gazillion events related to Art Chicago and Artropolis, all of which sound really fun and I had been hoping to jump on a plane last minute and go out there and be a part of it. Alas, I think the end of the semester craziness has gotten to me; Jeff has the flu and I don’t have the energy to really go anywhere this weekend, let alone to a whole new city. But if you’re going…

My work (in this case, my new-ish print) is in Diane Villani’s booth at the main fair at the Merchandise Mart.
Also…
My work (including a few new books and drawings) is at the Next Art Fair in the Bravin Lee Programs booth, also conveniently located at the Merchandise Mart. (Unlike, say, the satellite fairs for the Armory Show, it seems like all the other fairs around Art Chicago seem to be in the same building… very civilized, I think!). Plus someone told me there would be hotdogs and popcorn served…??? An unsubstantiated rumor right now, but sounds good to me.

Let me know if you go!

The semester is almost done, just a week and a half left. I wrote my last lecture today and put together my final stuff for my drawing classes. I am gnawing at the bit for this thing to be over, only because I have so much of my own work to do and I want to dive right in. My classes this year are probably the best I’ve ever had, so I know I’m going to miss everyone when it’s done… but for right now, all I can do is look in my studio at the huge pile of half-finished drawings and think…. soon, soon…

I’ve been sick the last couple of days too, which doesn’t help.

There is a sheet of notepaper next to my computer onto which I have written all my notes for the last couple of weeks - ideas for work, for classes, stuff I want to write, etc.,- and the list is totally intertwined with a low-grade fever and too much sleep. It reads, in part:

content (same)
other comments
FACULTY SIGNATURES
gocco!!!
underwear!!!
iron-on transfers
liberace
analog to the real world
candyass
garbage pail kids
NEED MORE SCHLOCK
write about it and don’t forget Michael Fried

… yeah, that’s about it in a nutshell. I eliminated the obnoxious underlining, which is something I do when I’m especially earnest about a thought that’s popped into my head. It doesn’t really work because in the end, everything winds up underlined.

Week and a half. Almost there.

For some strange reason, my parents were especially into the soundtracks of 1970s broadway musicals - or, at least, when I was growing up, this is what was in their record collection. As a result, I grew up listening to the soundtracks of some of the most ridiculous, over-the-top music ever recorded (Andrew Lloyd Weber will one day rot in hell), but if I’m being totally honest… I loved it. Maybe it was just perfect for a kid; I don’t know. But to this day, I’d bet I still know nearly every word to such classics as Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar.

But one of the musicals that I have the fondest memories of is A Chorus Line. I can’t help but think that by listening to that score over and over growing up, I instilled in myself many of the obsessions I carry with me today - making art, performing, art school (or acting/dance class, as in the musical), the critique, American Idol, all that stuff. There’s a particular track that I only remember in the haziest of ways that deals with this student taking a class with a teacher that is especially beloved and adored by all the other students. She takes the class assuming that she will have the same mind-blowing experience as everyone else reports having, and instead finds herself studying with a guy who is totally gross, unsupportive, abusive, and all around a shitty teacher. As all her classmates exclaim their love and affection for the guy, she comes back over and over to the refrain, “I felt nothing.” She goes through this whole What the hell is wrong with me thing throughout the song. I think in the end the teacher dies and all the other students are beside themselves with grief, and she returns to the phrase “I felt nothing.”*

I thought of this as I wandered around the touring Frida Kahlo exhibit, which is currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I want, so much, to be blown away by Kahlo’s work - to have this divine, mystical experience with it; to be moved deeply and profoundly. And somehow, I’m just not. I would accept the alterntive as well - if her work really pissed me off and seemed fradulent, I could deal with that too. But like the girl in A Chorus Line, I kept finding myself feeling nothing.

I would go for a moment or two just being frustrated with Kahlo being a constant victim (Oh Frida: just dump that bum Diego and get a better medical doctor, one that can actually treat your ailments successfully and maybe prevent you from having nonstop miscarriages). And then I’d find myself being impressed with her incredibly fine abilities with paint and the really weird metaphors and visual language she was using. And then, I would quickly shift into not caring and being really annoyed with her. I wanted to see her as this great hero, but I couldn’t force myself to do it. The show made me place her firmly in the camp of surrealism and outside of the realm of feminism which, for me, isn’t such a great place to be. I love that she revealed all this painful, violent, angry, ugly stuff about herself, that she never shied away from incorporating blood or gross imagery in her work. I love that she stuck to a pretty singular theme - the self-portrait - that she worked and reworked her whole life. So why don’t I like her work at all?

And then, as the clincher to the whole show, the only path out of the gallery is through the gift shop (which is something museums are doing more and more). But I have never seen marketing of an exhibition that is quite as out-of-control as this one is. I know that museums have to make money and I accept your standard museum-shop cliche of splashing a famous painting on a mug, t-shirt, or postcard. But do we really need to have an image of a topless, sick Kahlo cropped just so and placed on a men’s tie? (Ok,on a tie?? Jesus.) Reproducing an image on a postcard is ok for me, but reworking it so that it can be a lenticular, 3-d image is kind of going too far. Aren’t Frida Kahlo dolls a little… stupid? Aren’t we basically (re)victimizing her to reduce her work to such kitsch?

Ughhh. I didn’t like the show but the gift shop kind of made me root for her just a little bit more.

Kind of interesting that the museum’s online shop doesn’t have any pictures of the especially offensive merchandise. Two pictures I was able to quickly take:

Update:
A friend and colleague of mine** who came with us on the trip sent me a note saying, among other things:
[I] thought some of the contextual material, especially the ex-votos, helped to place her imagery in a broader context and encouraged me to reconsider her work in the context of Mexican art rather than Surrealism.
Ok, this is a really great point and one that I really meant to draw some sort of attention to in the original post. They had a wall of ex-voto paintings that were pretty amazing and that I was really happy to see. I don’t think that seeing them necessarily changed my opinion about putting Kahlo in with the Surrealists, but they were still very interesting to check out - probably my favorite part of the exhibit.

[...] the audio guide addressed the issue of reception and pointed out that unlike Feminist artists and critics, Chicanos and Chicano artists regard her not as a victim but as a woman of great strength who managed to overcome physical and mental torment.

I’ve heard this before and, while I don’t doubt that it’s true, it still remains difficult for me to stomach. That’s partially my POV as a person who has lived in the US all her life (and has been deeply indoctrinated/influenced by US-based feminism), but also reinforced by the wall text that I’ve seen accompany every single Kahlo painting ever, which really stresses more of the pain that she withstood rather than her triumph over it. This is really a shame, as the pain in her paintings is so self-evident that having a text next to it reinforce it is obvious at best, whereas some sort of text about how she overcame it might actually add more information that would be helpful as a viewer.

(Oh, I don’t know. I still really want to like her work and I still really don’t.)

(Footnotes, sort of)
*Bear in mind I’m remembering this from having listened to A Chorus Line when I was maybe 6-9 years old and then not again for many years. If I’m screwing up the story behind the song, that has an awful lot to do with it.
**I don’t like to drop people’s names into posts unless they’re public figures or if I have their permission, and in this case the name doesn’t qualify on either accounts. But if she grants me her permssion, I’d be happy to add it! I just didn’t want to assume that it was ok.