artists of a certain sort part I

Mel Chin

Mel Chin's work


Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

Website of Cardiff and Miller


Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton's Website


Christian Boltanski

MOMA link to Boltanski

Marian Goodman Gallery Link to Boltanski

Love and Luc Tuymans

I am in love with Luc Tuymans.

Here it is ... someone who is after my soul. Someone who can and does look deeply at a thing. Someone who gets it. This deep and thoughtful conversation on painting means so much to me.

Bombsite: Luc Tuymans and Kerry James Marshall

I really love art, truly, deeply. It is art that makes life more than mean and hard -- in whatever form you find it, wherever you find it -- brought into being by any impulse which drives the someone to make art. Such a futile endeavor. Such a folly. Yet what a desert life is without it.

I am really tired -- deeply fatigued with the war between the "makers and the thinkers." It is bullshit.

There's an illness in this need to exclude. It is an illness knitted from fear of differentness. It is a fear of being proved irrelevant. It is the fear of god in a way of thinking. The fear of being judged and being found lacking. So let us condemn before we ourselves are condemned -- a fear of oblivion and meaninglessness.

We go at it like fundamentalists. If you don't come at it like I do -- if you don't do what I do -- expect what I expect -- then you're an atheist and there's no place for you.

However you come to work. Whatever way you love. That's enough. It's a spectrum of thinking. Different ways of thinking deeply. Different ways of giving over. Give over. Make room for those who would give over.

favorite artists ... culled from Facebook ...

some folks to look at ...


Ad Reinhardt
Ellsworth Kelly
Alfred Jensen
Le Corbusier
Tom Nozkowski
Jackson Pollock
Mark Rothko
Gene Davis
PBS - Remembering Abstract Color field Painter Kenneth Noland
Sam Gilliam
Larry Poons
Pat Steir
Rudolf Stingel
Jack Whitten

Donald Judd
Richard Serra
Anish Kapoor
James Turrell

Giotto
Sassetta
Petrus Christus (portrait of a Carthusian monk)
Master of the Osservanza
Memling
Caravaggio
James Ensor
Philip Guston
Ed Ruscha
Frederick Church
Degas
Vincent Van Gogh
Charles Burchfield
Mauricio Lasansky (the Nazi Drawings)
Willem DeKooning
Robert Rauschenberg (especially erased DeKooning Drawing)
Larry Rivers
Anselm Kiefer
Arnulf Rainer
Basquiat
Kerry James Marshall

Marcel Duchamp
Gertrude Stein
Joseph Beuys
Laurie Anderson

Eva Hesse
Yayoi Kasama
Robert Smithson
Hannah Wilke
Ana Mendieta
Yoko Ono

Jeremy Blake
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Cai Guo-Qiang

Mel Chin

Lillian Beyond Reach

... engage

I am reengaging this blog ... and I hope others will too. I'm posting those things which privilege art and the thinking that goes on around art. So much distracts from this, it seems appropriate that there be spaces like this where this is the only focus. So links, resources, musings ... Saul Ostrow sent me a link to Tom Huhn's recommended reading list. It's a monthly list that you can subscribe to ... the readings are awesome. I wish I had more time to spend with them. Tom Huhn, Ph.D. Reading List

Exhortation to make remarkable – September 14, 2011

Our chief charge as artists is to bring ourselves to our work … to extend through this work to an audience that which elicits passions within us … This is to some degree the nature of ambition for artists. How do I “take to the next level” … elevate above the expected those things I wish to give to my audience?

Every opportunity to make work, every opportunity to engage an audience, is a challenge to our ambitions. How do we achieve these? How do we make remarkable that which we do?

It is to us to exceed our own expectations, to exceed that which is adequate … to make exceptional.

relevant quotes

"... I would like to ask a question about the exact involvement in a work of art. What kind of love or grief is there in it? I don't understand, in a painting, the love of anything except the love of painting itself. If there is agony, other than the agony of painting, I don't know exactly what kind of agony that would be. I am sure external agony does not enter very importantly into the agony of our painting." - Ad Reinhardt statement: Artist's Session at Studio 35 (1950) taken from p. 298,

_New York School Abstract Expressionit: Artists by Choice_ by Marika Herskovic

"[Pat] Steir exemplifies the old rule that the best painters are always engaged in a learning process, at which they almost always get better." - Stephen Mueller, "Pat Steir: Cheim & Read" (Review), _Art in America_, June/July 2011, p. 186

Cheim & Read - Pat Steir Artist's Page