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Sometimes, one comes to know and appreciate something in a roundabout manner. No bolt from the blue, no epiphany that life and the world will never be seen in quite the same way again, but rather a slow realization over time that this could be important.

As a teen, I became a fan of “non-musician” Brian Eno, who was a member of Roxy Music and had worked with David Bowie. Like them, Eno made arty records and had a postmodern approach to rock and roll. His song “Kurt’s Rejoinder”1 features a recording, home-taped by Eno from a BBC Radio Three programme, of painter/collagist/sculptor/designer/writer Kurt Schwitters performing a sound poem. Eno didn’t use the recording as the vocal for the song, but more as a textural element; it sounds like some unknown, mysterious instrument in the distance. The liner notes credit Schwitters with “Voice (from the Ur Sonata).” Eno’s lyrics to the song gave me no clue as to Schwitters’ work – or to anything else about him, for that matter, including to what he was supposedly responding. I didn’t know much about Schwitters, although somehow, I was aware he was associated with Dada. Never mind I really didn’t know what Dada was.2

In 1986, by which time I had become familiar with Schwitters’ work, the Brian Eno/Russell Mills collaborative book More Dark than Shark3 was published. It contains the lyrics of all the songs from Eno’s initial four rock albums, and a corresponding piece of artwork by Mills. I purchased my copy very soon after it came out, for the work of both contributors. Mills’ interpretation of “Kurt’s Rejoinder” contains what he called “semi-Schwitters collages” – his imitations of Schwitters’ work – and his commentary on the piece includes a short summary of the sad trajectory of Schwitters’ career.

In the following years, I learned little details about Schwitters’ life – he was born in Germany in 1887 and studied art at the Dresden Academy. When the National Socialist cretins came to power he was branded a “degenerate artist” and his books were burned. In 1937 he fled to Norway and, when that country was overrun, to England. By 1948, in dire financial straits, he had been trying to sell his collages for £1 a piece. He died that year, one day after being granted British citizenship and less than two weeks before the opening of his first solo exhibition in the US. I’m not sure if his work was Dada, but his life certainly was.4

I’m most interested in Schwitters’ collages, the work for which he is now most celebrated. He collected rubbish from the street to make them, and they often don’t contain “imagery” but consist of texture, both actual and visual; shape; and color. Text is frequently employed, generally as a compositional device rather than for the actual meaning of the words. To create a more cohesive surface, he regularly utilized paint on the collages, and used a flour and water mixture not only as paste, but to mute any color that was too vivid. Although Schwitters sometimes incorporated faces and figures in the work, I prefer the pieces without such representational aspects. His employment of modern-world detritus such as bus tickets, newspaper clippings, shipping labels, and candy wrappers anticipated the work of Robert Rauschenberg, and as far as I’m concerned, was more revolutionary than Picasso’s use of collage, which was illustrative in nature.5

I have a preference for the pieces with a grid-like structure. I find these, especially, to be quite elegant, despite the lowly origins of the materials used. Schwitters’ subtle use of color, along with the relatively small scale of the work and his eye for harmonious composition, gives his oeuvre this intimate, poetic quality, while he called attention to the mass-produced, the everyday, the ignored.6

Several years ago, I purchased a used copy of the catalogue Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage.7 I’d had it a few days when I noticed on the copyright page the exhibition had come to the Berkeley Art Museum in 2011. I hadn’t been aware the show had been less than eighty miles away, and I missed the chance to see all the actual work that I had been poring over in reproduction. I was crushed, as I imagined it would be quite some time before I would again have the opportunity to see a large selection of Schwitters’ work. I’m still waiting.

Postscript: Although over forty-five years after its release, “Kurt’s Rejoinder” remains one of only two rock songs I’ve heard with a title that cites Schwitters,8 I do know of another reference to him in the genre – the sleeve for The Rolling Stones 1989 single “Rock and a Hard Place” is based on a Schwitters piece.

 

1 From Before and After Science (Island Records, 1977), the fourth of Eno’s solo rock albums; it was his last record to be comprised of songs until Wrong Way Up, which he made with John Cale in 1990.

2 Mainly I was familiar with the term because both Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were often referred to as “Neo-Dada.” In the wake of World War I, the Dadaists created absurd “anti-art” and rallied against the circumstances in which mankind had put itself, those which resulted in more than ten million casualties. Maybe if I’d known more about the movement, Eno’s lyrics would have made more “sense” to me.

3 Faber and Faber. I learned about this book via the liner notes of the companion compilation LP, More Blank than Frank (EG Records, 1986) – “Please send check for US $25.00 + $2.00 postage and handling to…,” which I did. The title of the album is derived from Eno’s song “Blank Frank,” which doesn’t appear on the record. The title of the book, according to its acknowledgements page, was “kindly and unwittingly supplied” by one Mike Clark.

4 As was his death – he was buried in an unmarked grave in England, but in 1970 his remains were disinterred and re-buried in Germany, where he had vowed, because of Nazi atrocities, never to return.

5 Bring on the arguments.

6 Several decades later, the Pop artists would employ this idea in an exeedingly different manner.

7 Yale University Press, 2010.

8 The other one being Jim Carroll’s “I am Not Kurt Schwitters,” from the album Pools of Mercury (Mercury Records, 1998).

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A few days ago, October 1, marked five years that I have been posting monthly installments to this blog.1 The idea of writing a blog was suggested by my friend Michael as a way to keep this website, which he designed, active. I really hadn’t done much writing since high school – that was a long time ago – so I had my doubts I was even capable of producing a newspaper column-type piece of writing2 every few weeks. Despite my ambivalence, both Michael and my better half were encouraging, so I figured I would give it a whirl.

In an attempt to prepare for this undertaking, I searched for and read blogs about art, but was unable to find any that I could use as a template of sorts for what would keep me engaged and might be of interest to those who hold my work in some regard. Despite this, I did figure out fairly quickly what I wanted the blog to be, although it took a few months before I was able to find my footing.

Initially, I wrote about things I had recently experienced – exhibitions I’d just seen or other art-related activities in which I’d taken part – but less than six months in, COVID-19 reared its ugly head. In order to continue, I started to write for the most part about large retrospective shows I’d seen in the past. I have fairly good recall about such things, and often have very specific recollections of these exhibitions, but it certainly helps if I’d purchased a catalogue which I could use to jog my memory. For a few of the posts, I asked those who were there what they remember of the time. Since my first post-vaccine trip to the San Francisco Bay Area in the spring of 2022, which spawned two posts – about Alice Neel’s People Come First retrospective at the de Young and Paul McCartney’s Got Back Tour at the Oakland Arena – the blog has dealt with a combination of recent events and those from the past.

The scope of the blog has expanded a little over time – in addition to painting, I’ve also written about music, books, and movies. This was largely a result of my fear, which I continue to harbor, of running out of topics to write about. I still often feel I’m ill-equipped for the whole endeavor, but it has turned into something of which I’m actually proud.

All of which brings us to the present. This will be my last monthly entry for a while. Over the last few years, life has become increasingly complicated – I currently have neither the time nor the energy to keep up that schedule and I don’t foresee this situation changing in the near future. However, I’m not finished here; there are artists, some of whom have been favorites of mine since I was a teen – those whose work is so ingrained in me I can’t imagine who I would be had I never discovered them – that I have yet to write about. There are also plenty of artists with whom I have become familiar in the intervening decades – those whose work I love and is important to me, but hasn’t been an integral part of my consciousness for the majority of my life. I will continue to post on an intermittent basis and do hope to re-establish a regular timetable before too long. I have very much appreciated the feedback and comments I’ve received about specific posts and the blog in general, and I hope everyone will check back occasionally and continue to read my ramblings. Thanks.

“My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare…” – David Bowie, “Five Years”

 

1 In that time I’ve only missed my schedule once.

2 I grew up reading newspaper columns, back when there were such things. Back when there were newspapers. Mike Royko was my favorite.

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When I was a young child occasionally someone I didn’t know – usually one of my mother’s co-workers – would give me an art book, generally of the Walter T. Foster “how to” variety. Walter T. Foster published those large thin paperbacks with titles such as How to Draw Horses and Of Course You Can Paint. I recall one particular occasion when my mother brought home a few of these books for me. One of them, Russell Iredell’s Drawing the Figure, had a nude on the cover, and my mother’s co-worker had warned, “You might not want to give this one to him until he’s older.” I don’t remember exactly what my mother said her response was, but it was obvious to me she thought that very idea was patently ridiculous.

While I did look at and appreciate these second-hand books, I don’t believe I ever did any of the exercises – I’ve never constructed form by first drawing a collection of cubes, cones, cylinders, and spheres; or started a figure drawing with a “line of action.”

The books I most treasured were those with lots of reproductions from art history. The anatomical distortion of Parmigiano’s The Madonna with the Long Neck, the vivid color in Degas’s Blue Dancers, the indescribable humanity of so many of Rembrandt’s figures – these were images that obsessed me as a child, images I knew from books. Even when I got a little older, however, I only had a handful of this type of volume. So what’s an idle young teen out to bend his mind a little to do? Go to the library, of course. As a kid I would from time to time make that trip, but I started frequenting my local branch of the Sacramento Public Library system specifically to look at art books during the summer after ninth grade, just prior to entering high school.

Sacramento Central Library; Downtown Sacramento, CA.
Sacramento Central Library; Downtown Sacramento, CA.

In the following few years, a whole world became available to me through those visits – the artists I learned about at the library during that time included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. Some of them I already knew a little about; others, as far as I can remember, I discovered there – they are all still among the artists most important to me. The fact that at the time five of these painters were still alive and producing made their work feel as immediate as a new album by a favorite rock and roll band.1 As with the musical artists, I wanted to know about these painters whose work seemed so romantic to me. Although I still gravitated toward books comprised mainly of reproductions, I read biographies, as well. The first time I read both Popism: The Warhol ’60s and Interviews with Francis Bacon,2 two books which had a major impact on me, they were library copies.

It’s amazing to me now how recent much of this work was at the time; Pop Art made its splash less than two decades before, and Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s first shows took place only a few years prior to that. It also surprises me that books featuring these artists were on the shelves of my humble suburban branch of the library. I’m sure in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the general public considered these artists to be no-talent charlatans,3 but there those books were, waiting for me to discover them.

After I got a job and was able to purchase books for myself, I did so with some abandon and my personal collection really started to grow. Nevertheless, I continued to go to the library and discover artists new to me. When I moved to Midtown Sacramento in the mid-1980s, I lived just a few blocks from the McKinley Library, which I’d visit, but the Central branch became my favorite, as it had a considerably larger art section than the others. My life has been enriched immeasurably by books and the public library system, and this was especially true during those pivotal years as an impressionable teen and young adult.

For the last several years, that very system has been under siege by little brownshirts who are attempting to erase from public discourse the personal stories of individuals and the histories of whole populations. According to a report by the American Library Association, the number of titles targeted for censorhip rose by 65% from 2022 to 2023. Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol all belong to one of the most heavily targeted groups, the LGBT+ community. Currently available through the Sacramento Public Library are books about or by all the above artists, plus others of whom the Thought Police would not approve, including Jenny Saville, Ross Bleckner, and Kara Walker. Let’s make sure those books and so many others stay on the shelves for us and for those kids seeking to expand and elevate their hearts, minds, and lives.

“Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” – Heinrich Heine, 1823

 

1 From The Beatles and The Stones, to Roxy Music and David Bowie, to Patti Smith and Television, rock and roll had a liberating power that held sway over me at the time. Sadly, although those old favorite bands still embody that spirit for me, rock and roll as a genre no longer does.

2 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980) and David Sylvester (Thames and Hudson, 1975), respectively.

3 Judging from many comments I’ve overheard even at recent museum shows, maybe they still are. For example, at From A to B and Back Again, the 2019 Andy Warhol retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I witnessed a man browbeating his female companion because she stopped to look at some examples of the “Death and Disaster” series. “Car crashes?! Car crashes?! That’s not art!”

 

Recommended Reading: Susan Orlean: The Library Book (Simon & Schuster, 2018). Ostensibly about a 1986 arson fire at the Los Angeles Central Library, this book is part memoir, part true crime, part historical account, part love letter – all engaging, all wonderful.

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In 2002 the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art presented Andy Warhol: Retrospective, which included 240 pieces from 1942 through 1986. That’s a large show. Since I spent the whole day at the museum, I did occasionally feel the need to sit down and take a rest. Fortunately, the museum has a small auditorium where a selection of Warhol’s Screen Tests was being shown continually throughout the day, so a few times during my visit, I took the opportunity to watch some of these short films.

Between 1964 and 1966 Warhol made nearly 500 of the silent, black & white Screen Tests with his Bolex camera. Completely unedited, they were shot on 100-foot 16mm rolls in the standard twenty-four frames per second. However, Warhol conceived the films to be projected at a slower sixteen frames per second, extending the running time from under three minutes to over four minutes long.

Some of the subjects self-consciously pose. Or smoke. Lou Reed drinks from a bottle of Coca-Cola®. Jane Holzer brushes her teeth. Warhol often instructed the sitters to look straight into the camera and to not move. Edie Sedgwick and Mary Woronov both did a Screen Test in this manner, but Ann Buchanan adheres to the instruction most strictly – she goes the entire length of the film without blinking. At about the two-minute mark, a tear comes down her left cheek; by the end, tears are streaming down her face, but she still does not blink.

At one point while I was watching the films, a couple and their young daughter entered and sat down. The girl was probably seven or eight years old. She watched for a little while, but soon it became too much for her, and, obviously agitated, she loudly exclaimed, “This isn’t good! This isn’t good at all!”1

Although over the past twenty-two years I’ve often wondered what it was about the Screen Tests that elicited such a strong visceral reaction, I do realize it was perfectly rational, albeit a little over the top. Her parents probably told her they were going to watch some movies, and she reasonably thought in a movie, people do things. This does not occur in the Screen Tests; the subjects just sit there. Her parents, however, jumped into action, and the family quickly exited the auditorium.

The little girl’s judgment notwithstanding, I find the Screen Tests to be enthralling works which are most effective when the subject followed Warhol’s dictum. The slow motion gives the films a druggy quality, although not the amphetamine rush one associates with the Factory scene; the Screen Tests are more like a suspended barbiturate haze. The films relate to Warhol’s paintings of the time, especially the Most Wanted Men series, which are largely made up of mugshots. The face-front, unflinchingly factual nature of the police photos is echoed in the composition and starkness of the best Screen Tests. In essence, Warhol invented his own genre – film which reveals its subject in a similar manner as does painted portraiture.

Epilogue: A few years ago at a Goodwill Store in Sacramento I found the 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests DVD2 and purchased it for three dollars. On it, one can view the films with or without soundtracks by Dean Wareham & Britta Phillips, both ex of the band Luna and who have a distinct Velvet Underground fixation. Although I am a casual fan and enjoy their music, the Screen Tests are most powerful when viewed in silence, as nature intended.

 

All Screen Test images © 2009 The Andy Warhol Museum. All rights reserved.

 

1 Her outburst would become a running gag between my better half, who was also there, and me.

2 Plexifilm/The Andy Warhol Museum (2009). This was the first-ever authorized DVD release of films by Andy Warhol, and is now out of print.

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Willem de Kooning: Seated Woman (c. 1940).When I was eighteen or nineteen years old and started studying the work of Willem de Kooning, I was mainly interested in the human form as subject matter. Upon acquiring a general, cursory knowledge of his career, including the aggressive Women from the 1950s and the watery figures from the ’60s, I gravitated toward his late ’30s/early ’40s figures. I don’t remember what my thinking or feeling was at the time, but I imagine because the earlier figures tend to be more rooted in actual anatomy, they were more accessible to me. Although I soon came to love the later work as well, Seated Woman, c. 1940, is still among my favorites in an oeuvre that is arguably the strongest of the twentieth century.

There were many reasons I was so attracted to this particular piece. I don’t believe I’d ever encountered a painting in which the distinction between the figure and the ground was blurred in such a subtle and engaging manner. The geometric ground suggests an interior with a window, a table, and the chair in which the figure is seated. Her right arm has morphed into a large teardrop shape which could also be an object, possibly a vase or a pitcher, on the green tabletop. The oval shape above that, next to her head, could have initially been her right hand. The method in which the legs are painted, as well as the outlining and visible pentimento, flattens the figure and merges it with the ground. Juxtaposed with the more modeled head, neck, and upper torso, this creates a push/pull dynamic that I found endlessly seductive.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: Portrait of Madam Louis-Nicholas-Marie Destouches (1816). Graphite on paper, 17” x 11 1/4”.

In several ways, Seated Woman is reminiscent of the work of Jean-Augusta-Dominique Ingres, for whom de Kooning never shied away from declaring his admiration. The figure’s elongated left arm resembles a mannequin’s, detached from her body. This fragmentation relates to the anatomical restructuring that Ingres often utilized, and the length of the arm, as well as the composition as a whole, recalls Ingres’s 1816 Portrait of Louis-Nicolas-Marie Destouches. In his drawings, Ingres often left portions of the figure in outline, with no modeling at all, as de Kooning did the legs, here.

De Kooning reportedly once said he’d like to paint like Ingres and Chaïm Soutine – simultaneously. Although in Seated Woman he did not attempt the Soutine side of that unlikely but strikingly enticing marriage – it’s less expressionist and more cubist-inspired – he did succeed in evoking Ingres and producing what was perhaps the first major work of his career. It was also the first painting of his that made me realize why he is considered a master, although when he made it, he was only known to a few painters in the New York City art scene – he wouldn’t even have his first solo show until 1948.

Over forty years after the paint was dry, Seated Woman was a revelation to me, opening my mind to seeing the figure in a whole new way.

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In late 1988, I was newly single and needed a roommate to share the Midtown Sacramento apartment from which my ex had moved. I proposed the situation to M, a young woman with whom I had become acquainted a few years before and who had recently done some modeling for me, and she accepted. She was a budding songwriter who also played bass,1 and had a small record collection – all vinyl; neither of us owned a CD player during the few years we were roommates.

In the Venn diagram of musical tastes, ours had some overlap which grew as she heard the records I played. She didn’t act as DJ much, but one LP I recall her owning is Japan’s live album Oil on Canvas, which is notable for the Frank Auerbach painting that graces the jacket. With its heavily impastoed surface and virtuosic brushwork, the portrait of Juliet Yardley Mills, who sat regularly for Auerbach for over forty years, is representative of his arresting technique and as far as I know is the only example of his work on a record cover.

I didn’t know a lot about either the band or the painter, but was vaguely familiar with both. I’d heard a couple of Japan’s albums and some of leader David Sylvian’s solo work, but didn’t know any of the records well. As for Auerbach, I was aware of paintings similar to the one on the album cover and that he ran in the same circles as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, two other renowned British figurative artists,2 but that was about the extent of my knowledge.

That situation didn’t change much for many years, but when my friend Laureen Landau passed away in 2009, she left much of her estate to a mutual friend of ours, the aforementioned ex, who, from Laureen’s possessions, gave me a black leather blazer of which I am very fond, and several art books, including a Frank Auerbach monograph.3 Of the work reproduced therein, the portrait heads interest me the most, and I have a preference for the charcoal drawings over the oils. Also appearing in the book is a compelling series of forty photographs documenting the progress of a single drawing, Portrait of Sandra. Auerbach would rub out the drawing prior to each session with the sitter and start over with the pentimento of what had been done before as a foundation. He worked and re-worked all his drawings until they were so abraded he often needed to patch them where the paper had been worn through. The resultant layers and textures from this working method give the images a captivating expressionist quality.4

Earlier this year, The Courtauld Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of Auerbach portraits from the mid-1950s to the mid-’60s. I didn’t make it to Merrie Olde for The Charcoal Heads, although I did stroll through the gallery and see the show in the online virtual world.5 In addition to the seventeen titular drawings in the show, there were six oil paintings from the same period, all depicting sitters who appear in the drawings. The work is simultaneously sensitive and brutal; it evokes an emotional desolation that could be viewed as reflective of not only the circumstances of Post-War Britain, but also Auerbach’s personal trauma – in 1939, at eight years old, he was sent to England from Germany via Kindertransport. He never saw his parents again; they were among the over one million people murdered at Auschwitz. Still in his early twenties when he made the earliest of the pieces in the show, he was astonishingly young to be producing work of such sophistication and depth.

Frank Auerbach is now ninety-three years old, and still works every day in his studio. In 2023 he had a show of new self-portraits, both drawings and paintings, most of which were done when his regular models couldn’t sit for him during the COVID lockdown. His process hasn’t changed – he still rubs out all his drawings and scrapes down all his paintings prior to starting again. Although he said the show included “what may be [his] last paintings,” I imagine he will continue that practice until he is unable to work at all.

It’s been well over thirty years since M’s and my living arrangement came to an end. Despite her moving to several different cities up and down the West Coast in subsequent years, she has modeled for me occasionally since then, and we’ve managed to stay in touch all this time. Maybe she’ll take a page from Auerbach’s models, and sit for me regularly for the next few decades.

 

1 Shortly after she moved in, I was listening to Keith Richards’ first solo album, Talk is Cheap, which had just been released and was in heavy rotation at the apartment. The first song on side one is called “Big Enough,” and while it was playing, she asked, “Who is that on bass?!” It’s Bootsy Collins.

2 Decades into their respective careers, all three painters were deemed part of the School of London, figurative artists based in and around England’s capital. Besides these three, the only other artist associated with the group with whom I was familiar at the time was David Hockney. 

3 Robert Hughes: Frank Auerbach (Thames & Hudson, 1992).

4 Like Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, Auerbach has denied any expressionist intent in his work.

5 In the actual real world, I purchased the catalogue. Barnaby Wright and Colm Tóibín: Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2024).

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Ross Bleckner: One Day Fever (1986). Oil and wax on linen, 48" x 40".For much of the 1990s, I had a magazine subscription to Art in America. Occasionally, my favorite part of an issue would be the monthly advertisement for recently-published art books that could be purchased at a slight discount through the magazine itself. If memory serves, there would be four different ads a year, one for each season. It was in one of these ads that I first saw the Ross Bleckner painting One Day Fever, which appears on the cover of the catalogue to his 1995 Guggenheim retrospective. Even in the tiny reproduction – the photo was not much larger than a couple of postage stamps – the painting was striking. It captured my attention and for weeks I kept flipping back to the ad. I was already somewhat familiar with Bleckner’s work, which, since the early ’80s,  I had occasionally read about and admired in Art in America and other magazines. On the strength of its cover image and my rudimentary knowledge of his work, I decided to take the plunge and ordered the catalogue through a local independent bookstore I frequented. Apparently one can judge a book….

Bleckner utilizes an ever-expanding set of motifs, but his dark interiors are still among my favorites of his oeuvre. The obscure environment in One Day Fever, as well as those in several other pieces in the catalogue, brought to mind the rooms in many of Francis Bacon’s dark paintings from the 1950s. However, whereas Bacon’s spaces feel airless and claustrophobic, Bleckner’s appear open and expansive – those in the Examined Life series, with chandeliers or other lamp-like objects, often resemble the dance floors of discotheques. The shaft of light coming down on the left side of One Day Fever also recalls Bacon’s ’50s work; it resembles the vertical brushstrokes he used to merge figure and ground and which he referred to as “shuttering.” Despite these similar aspects, Bleckner’s piece no more resembles a Bacon painting than it does El Greco’s Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, a detail from which Bleckner based his composition. Bleckner has obviously studied the vocabularies of a myriad of artists from the past, but the manner in which he employs them is his own.

Bleckner transformed the El Greco angel’s pale, fleshy legs into spectral limbs which float at the top of the scene and are a principle component of his composition. The roses, lilies, and urn, which fill the majority of the picture plane, create the funereal atmosphere which permeated Bleckner’s work of the time. The urn doesn’t even seem to have a physical presence – it appears to be composed completely of light reflected off an object which is no longer present. Although Bleckner’s approach to referencing HIV and AIDS was actually quite oblique, One Day Fever immediately and unmistakably evoked all the issues surrounding that crisis. As far as I know, Bleckner explicitly referred to AIDS in only one piece – 8,122 as of January 1986 – but in the 1980s and ’90s it was impossible to view his paintings of loss and mourning without thinking about the disease.

It’s been almost thirty years since Bleckner’s “mid-career” Guggenheim retrospective, almost thirty years since I became familiar with One Day Fever. I believe seeing the piece for the first time today, out of the context of the times, would be a very different experience, although it continues to embody the gravitas it held then. I admire Bleckner’s compulsion to make work based on his sociopolitical concerns, I admire his need to do so on his own terms, and I admire the paintings themselves, of which I’ve only seen a handful. One Day Fever has not been among them.

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Field of Fire, my first solo show in quite some time, is opening later this week. My previous exhibition was back in November 2020, and almost all the work for it was done during the COVID lockdown, which was a difficult time for me as a painter. I wasn’t making visual or conceptual connections; working on one piece did not lead to ideas for any further work – with each painting I started I felt as if I were back at square one. I believe this was because, in addition to the overwhelmingly oppressive and physically threatening political climate of the time,1 I was barely leaving the confines of my four walls. With next to none of the sensory input that came with what had been normal life, it became difficult for me to transform thought into expression. This was something I did not anticipate, something that I had never even considered I would have to manage, but something that became apparent early in the pandemic.

Several years ago, I began to utilize actual objects – rivets, a fork, a music box, a tooth in a vial – in some of my work, and when the 2020 show was scheduled, I planned on continuing that practice. Unfortunately, as it turned out, I had a hard enough time putting the show together even without adding other elements. The one piece that did have a sculptural aspect – it included rivets, twine and three Chinese coins – was finished in late 2019, prior to the first reported cases of the coronavirus in the US.

When the vaccine became available, I returned to the world outside, but even so, between that time and when I started working on the present show, I only finished a handful of pieces, none of which had an easy gestation. Last year I did produce a painting that incorporated a 7” vinyl record, although I considered it more of a design job than a piece of art.2

Feeling I had to regain my equilibrium as a painter, I decided not to concern myself with the “painting with objects” idea while producing the Field of Fire pieces – I simply wanted to create a body of work that belonged together, that felt like a show. Fortunately, the ability to tap into those artistic processes which had previously been so natural did start to come back to me while I was working on these current paintings.

Although I began these pieces up to ten months ago, they were all finished this year. Since I always had a few paintings on which I was actively working – something I’d never done before – all the work developed together. Additionally, a major occurrence in my life took place about a year and a half ago, and I found that most of the paintings, even those that don’t relate to that event, are seen through its lens, a perspective experienced by most people my age. I believe that these conditions contributed to the cohesiveness of the work as a whole.

Field of Fire will run from April 4-27, 2024 at Archival Gallery, 3223 Folsom Boulevard in Sacramento, CA.

 

1 Which, frankly, hasn’t abated much, and is currently ramping up again. Somebody shove a mute in that trumpet, please.

2 The work served as the announcement image for Archival Gallery’s Top 40 anniversary group exhibition.

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Starting in the mid-1990s and continuing for many years, I worked at a small used record shop in Sacramento.1 This was prior to the current resurgence in the popularity of vinyl and also to streaming being the primary manner in which most people listen to music. CDs were the dominant format of the time and also what we generally played in the store, although we did sell vinyl, cassettes, and the occasional 8-track.

One morning, while perusing the racks looking for something to play, I came across Kronos Quartet’s 1993 recording of composer Paul Ostertag’s All the Rage.2 I’d been a Kronos fan for many years, and had seen them perform a few times. Although this particular album was in my personal collection, I hadn’t listened to it in some time, so I decided on it as the first instore-play record of the day. No one else was in the shop as I pushed the play button.

The day’s first customer, a young woman, soon wandered in to browse, and shortly, Eric Gupton’s impassioned delivery of Sara Miles’ libretto came over the speakers:

... The first time someone really tries to kill me.
With a knife like they tried to kill Julio,
a baseball bat like they did Jo,
a bottle like Vickie,
a two by four like Matt,
a fist a fist a fist a foot and a fist...

The voice took her by surprise; she looked up and listened until the section ended. She then asked what I was playing, and I told her the name of the quartet, of the composer, and of the piece. She thanked me and continued her browsing, but I could tell she was paying close attention to the record.

Kronos Quartet: All the Rage CD. Elektra/Nonesuch Records (1993).

In 1991, California’s then-Governor Pete Wilson vetoed Assembly Bill 101, although he had made a campaign promise to sign it. AB101 would have prohibited employers from discriminating in hiring and promotion on the basis of a person’s sexual orientation. In response to the veto, there were demonstrations throughout the state, and the one in San Francisco turned violent. Years of pent-up frustration and anger about lack of AIDS funding and support, about gay-bashing, about police harassment exploded after thousands of demonstrators marched from the Castro District to a state building on Golden Gate Avenue where Wilson had an office. Over $250,000 in damage was done to the building. Bob Ostertag was there, and made a sound recording of the incident. Later, he isolated sections of the tape which suggested music, notated the sounds musically, and developed the piece from there. Much of what he wrote for the quartet to play came from the riot’s inherent rhythms which he refined through the editing process; the sounds of screaming, whistles, breaking glass, and chants of “We’re Not Going Back” and “Queers Fight Back” from his tape appear throughout the finished All the Rage recording.

After a few more minutes, the customer again approached the counter.

“I never knew something like this could even exist,” she said to me with a tone and expression that sounded and looked like awe, and asked if I could tell her anything about what she was hearing. I handed her the CD case and told her a little about Kronos – that they were from San Francisco and were commonly referred to as the Fab Four of the classical music world; that they completely changed how a string quartet could look and sound; that their recorded catalogue was varied and always, at the very least, intriguing; that their impact on new music3 really couldn’t be overestimated.

She didn’t talk about how the music affected her, although it was obvious it did so on some profound level. I took her comment about how the piece “could even exist” as meaning she’d never before heard music which so directly spoke to, or possibly even for, her. She read Ostertag’s liner notes, which tell of the riot and his process, and asked if she could purchase the album. I sold it to her and felt I had a role in creating the circumstances which could actually change someone’s life in a positive way.

I’m a straight cisgender male; this fight isn’t mine, except in that I believe in equality; I have close friends in the LGBT+ community; and, as a Japanese-American who has dealt with lifelong discrimination – including having “f*ggot” yelled at me more times than I can count – I feel I can understand that rage.

Art has power. Alliance has power. And rage has power.

 

The Kronos Quartet’s royalties from All the Rage were and continue to be donated to The American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR),4 because Kronos is a righteous organization.

 

1 I frequented Esoteric Records for years prior to being employed there, and with one particular employee had had conversations regarding David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, Brian Eno, and The Velvet Underground, among other favorites of mine. However, I believe I was offered the job because I knew Doug Sahm’s version of the Bob Dylan song “Wallflower.” I became close friends with my co-worker, Keith, and the owner, Denis, both of whom are no longer with us. I miss their friendship more than I can say, but at least the store lives on, at 1139 Fulton Avenue in Sacramento.

2 Elektra/Nonesuch Records.

3 “New music” is a term used to describe contemporary classically-based music, often avant-garde in nature.

4 The non-profit is now called simply The Foundation for AIDS Research.

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In the early-to-mid-1980s, in what now seems like another lifetime, I managed a Shakey’s Pizza Parlor & Ye Public House. Back in those days, something one found in most pizza parlors was a cigarette machine.1 These vending machines have been outlawed in establishments where those under eighteen are allowed, in Sacramento since 1991, in California since 1995, and in the US since 2010. The one I saw five days a week in the Shakey’s dining room is probably rotting away in a landfill somewhere. One might think that someone should do something constructive with these heavy, large, unwieldy metal boxes.

Well, someone has. Since 2007, I’ve been working on-and-off with the Art-o-Mat® project. These good folks refurbish old cigarette machines, making them bright and shiny, and artists contribute a wide variety of cigarette pack-size work to stock them. There are paintings, drawings, sculptures, pieces of jewelry, photographs, et al. which are sold for five dollars each2 at museums, galleries, and shops across the country. One puts a token in the machine, pulls the knob which corresponds to the desired “brand,” and fresh art drops like a stale pack of Marlboro Reds.

I just sent in my twenty-first edition of the painted blocks – over the years, more than 1250 of my small pieces have helped fill the machines. My ongoing series, Paintings of Safety & Danger, depicts objects – actual size3 safety pins, safety matches, safety razors, syringes, broken safety glass, pills, and condoms – which symbolize actions which can be seen as either safe or dangerous. I like that the objects are thematically linked in such a subjective manner, and that the title of the series reflects that. However, despite the obvious caveat in that title, some Art-o-Mat® hosts and collectors have objected to the condoms. Consequently, my work is no longer available at some locations where it could previously be purchased, and is now considered R-rated. It’s not exactly Robert Mapplethorpe, but I guess, compared to most of the Art-o-Mat® inventory, it is kind of racy. Still, it’s a sad comment that this far into the twenty-first century, a painting of a prophylactic could cause a fuss. Nevertheless, Art-o-Mat® founder and Main Man Clark Whittington has never asked me to change the series or desist from painting anything. I have appreciated his support in this matter, as the condoms are such an essential part of the series I wouldn’t want to continue it without them.

 

Art-o-Mat® is for everyone, although the machines do seem to be particularly appealing to children. An interest in art needs to be fostered in order to flourish, and Art-o-Mat® is a perfect way to do that – it’s approachable, inexpensive, and fun. There are plenty of options from which to choose, so give the kid a token and let him or her4 determine what is most appealing. As with the artwork in the museums where many of the machines reside, kids may have questions about some of the pieces one can buy. So, if he/she/they comes to you with a painting of a condom, take the opportunity to have a conversation. It may save you some trouble sometime down the road.

 

1 They were found in many ye public houses, as well. 

2 Lucrative? Uh… no.

3 For some reason, this is conceptually important to me. I’m actually not sure why.

4 Or them. I have no problem with “them.” Well, honestly, grammatically, I kind of do, but ideologically I have no problem with “them.”