Pumpkinhead, oh pumpkinhead

Man I love Halloween. And I love Philadelphia. And I dare you not to love the kids that came to my door this year.






I couldn't really see what I was doing because I was busy giving out goodies and it was very dark but my pictures came out really well. Some of the kids got really excited about being photographed and struck poses. They held their tough stances long enough for my interminably slow camera to flash, then they broke out and turned completely sweet and shy when they asked to see the pictures. The little badasses kill me.







When I was little I thought Halloween was the one night a year when kids took over, when we could go from house to house threatening people into giving us candy. I thought we were ripping off the Man, man. But it's a fair exchange. It's worth way more than candy to see the costumes.

Being Declarative

I finished a new piece that I'm calling Declaration.



I'm very pleased with it. Here's a detail.



I've been doing text pieces for a while now, but something snapped into place in my head when I was working on this one. I'm going to keep doing these: they allow me to answer a lot of the questions I couldn't address in the large airbrushed pieces. I've always been interested in narrative structures: my big paintings use literary devices like plots and subplots, suspense, disguises and lies. (The lie strikes me as an essentially literary form- maybe the disguise is the pictorial representation of the lie. ) Anyways, my interest has always been quite squarely in the middle of the two- between the lie told and the face of the person telling it.

But people rarely get to that level with the big work. Part of the problem is of my own making. I'm so interested in using accessible, pleasurable visual forms that a certain kind of viewer assumes that what I'm saying must be as easily accessible as how I'm saying it. It's usually not. These text pieces don't let me hide what I'm thinking at all: I'm just saying it. And rather than writing it down, which has never worked for me, I can make the text include both pictorial and literary ideas. There's no point, for me, in having a rock hyrax say something if I can't draw a picture of a rock hyrax.

This piece is about the problem of being declarative. There are bigger images of it on my website here.

There's also an interesting, twisty snake of a little article that touches on the reasons I'm interested in using the kinds of visual pleasure that we associate with simple content here, but that's not why anyone should read it. It's a good article- enraging and redeeming in turns. It's about lip gloss, camp, and irony, and it makes a person glad to live in Philadelphia, where there's no question of "living" ones "life". Philadelphia is not a place that tolerates too many quotation marks. You can get beat up for looking too ironic.

Cleveland Coincidence

My virtual life is lagging about a week behind my real life. I've got things to say about yesterday and today, but I haven't finished writing about last weekend yet, much less last Wednesday. I'm not sure I'll ever catch up. I blame my processor.

I could just skip last weekend, but that would be depriving myself of the ability to relate one of the coolest coincidences ever to befall a woman with a blog.

Here's the story. I went to Cleveland to celebrate a friend's wedding. We had about three hours to kill before the party, so I decided we should visit the zoo. Visiting zoos in strange cities is one of my favorite things to do when I don't have time to see a museum. Two hours in a new museum would make me feel like I'd been ripped off- two hours in a new zoo is always a bonus.

So off we went, through the hinterlands of detour-ridden Cleveland to the zoo, which was so close to closing by the time we got there that the ticket takers ignored us. We raced in, wanting to see as much as we could in the 45 minutes before the place closed.

First thing we came upon?



Rock Hyraxes! My favorite animal.

Rock hyraxes, besides having the best faces ever, are related to elephants by way of the wooly mammoth.



They're fantastic.



If you don't believe me about their claims to mammoth relatives, you can read about that here.



Or you can just look at their badassed little tusks.

Gagosian

I went to see Gagosian talk to a bunch of Wharton School of Business students at Penn early this week. Or rather, I saw a big screen with a blurry image of Gagosian on it in a room with a bunch of Wharton business students. I was a little late so I was directed to the simulcast, which was a new and odd experience for me. A woman at the door gave me a little pink slip of paper and indicated in hushed tones that I was allowed to stand in the back, despite the fact that there were plenty of open seats. I stood for a few minutes, saw other people being granted the pink slips, and then took a chair on the other side of the room, crumpling my pink slip in my hand. I never did discover what those slips were supposed to be for, and I'm still not sure what the purpose of the simulcast is, except that like the pink slip, it incited a kind of rebellion.

Gagosian was being interviewed by a collector who had bought several pieces from him, and the two of them had a sort of bonhomie rapport that couldn't quite squeeze its way through the wires into the room with the simulcast. One or the other of them would make some dopey joke, and the whole audience in the room where the real talk was taking place would laugh, not because it was funny, but because they were right in front of them, so they laughed out of politeness, or in order to show sympathy with the powerful men in front of them or something. Not so in the simulcast room. Our laughs came later, when the collector guy's high pitched peals of monkeyfried laughter echoed weirdly through the microphone, or, occasionally, when Gagosian said something a little too disingenuous.

It was an interesting talk, but interesting in a way that made me want to watch the whole thing simulcast into my bedroom, which I would paint black for the occasion, wearing a pair of sweatpants I've worn for about a month, staring at the ceiling with Pink Floyd's The Wall playing on repeat. I had difficulty keeping my neck muscles stiff during the talk- my head kept drifting towards the desk. The highlight was when he said something along the lines of, "If a collector buys a piece of art because they love it and the value goes down they won't like looking at it as much."

Luckily, though, I was in the room with the simulcast. So when I flinched, so did other people in the room.

The talk struck me as the antidote to a poetry festival. Poetry festivals are full of people fighting for a lost cause. This should give them a lot in common with gallerists, who are engaged in the same battle. I think the difference might be that gallerists sometimes win, and winning big enough makes it possible to forget what the fight was for in the first place.

I'm not sure.

But I'd rather be here





This was the Dodge Poetry Festival.



And this was its snake.

___
I hope to be posting more soon: I have news about animal sightings, a new piece, stuff I want to say about upside-down world and lots of new pictures, but I'm a little behind. In the meantime, to cheer you up, here's the Ambien Cookbook.