Podcasts for tender, artsy souls

I'm going up to NY again today to look around Chelsea and the Met and possibly the Whitney- the only thing that's positively on the agenda is that we need to see Hatshepshut at the Met. Thom (the beloved) has a way of knowing about things like Hatshepshut that never fails to amaze me. While there's a good chance that I might know that there's an Egyptian show at the Met with some pharaoh or other, Thom will have known it was coming months before it's on my radar and if it happens to come up in conversation he will be able to give me a rundown on the history of the specific pharaoh. And he's not even particularly interested in Egypt. I mean, he is- he's the force behind Hatshepshut being on the top of the art to do list today- but it's more about bikes, guitars, urban planning, cooking, gardening, the environment and everything else. It's like living with Wikipedia- the person.

Me, I need help to know about Hatshepshut, so I listened to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's podcast, which is narrated, weirdly enough, by Sam Watterson. He was in a Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, so I guess, um, it makes sense?



(Apparently she's sitting on the Ark of the Covenant.)

The met podcast was pretty fascinating, and since Wikipedia is still asleep and I'm loathe to get out of bed, I thought I'd copy the NY Times and make an entry about some fabulous podcasts I've found.

There's a New York Times article about museum podcasts today that lists a bunch of great podcasts I already know about. They talk about the great Metropolitan Museum of Art podcasts, but there also looks to be an interesting one at MOCA (conversations with Dave Hickey, Rauchenberg, Kentridge) and MOMA has one called "Think Modern" that records conversations with artists and critics as well. I'm stocking up for the drive to NY.

Hammer Conversations features artists, filmmakers and writers talking about their work. It's downloadable from the same site as KCET's Aloud at the Central Library program, which I've listened to a few times and like very much. You can download these from the websites I've linked to, but if you do have an ipod, it's easier to just search for them in itunes.

There's also the WGBH Forum Network, which has random talks on the kinds of geeky subjects I like to listen to during long hours of cutting out stencils. There's a really fabulous lecture called "Impassioned Experience: Art in a 4th Grade Classroom" that just kills me. It features a super-sincere British man analyzing photographs taken by fourth grades with the weight and gravity normally given to...Well, normally not given to pictures featuring Stephanie's fuzzy bunny. In Our Time is a consistently interesting show from the BBC that deals with art in a tangential way- they get panels of academics together with a cranky commentator to discuss Big Ideas in an accessible way- it's a good time.

I keep trying to like the Exit Art podcast, but the last one I listened to had verrry insider artsy pants tone that put me off. I can't handle Artdispatch for the same reason- it looks like it should be right up my alley, but the very tone of voice of the podcast narrator makes my hair stand on end. Which is pretty scary, because Artdispatch calls itself the voice of the art world. But I do love the portentious voice of John Ciardi, who NPR has republished from beyond the grave. His On Words with John Ciardi is my favorite podcast ever.

Thanks, nice airport people!

The Philadelphia Airport has a little blurb about my piece on their website- neat!

To Blog or not to Blog

I thought I would write about the art I've been seeing in NY, but seeing so much art has made me want to stop spending time writing and reading blogs. I went to the Pierpont Morgan museum and saw handwritten manuscripts by Dickens (meticulously planned) and the Brontes (very tiny tiny writing about the kingdom of Gondor).

And I was knocked over by an incredible line drawing by someone I'd never heard of that I wish I'd made. Writing about art is nice, but writing like I want to write- writing that just says "Oh, it was so cool!" is not. Translations of admiration for a certain piece of art can't be communicated by utilitarian language- the best form of communication for enthusiasm about art is another art form. Maybe if I was a really inspired essay writer I could do it, but I'm not, and so I'll make some art,and in the meantime a shout out should do it. The shout out seems like the appropriate form: it precedes the work of art, expresses gratitude, and is louder than a dedication. So. A shout out to the Brontes! A shout out to Hoefnagel!

A shout out to the Piepont Morgan Library, and a big fat shout out to the people at Pace Editions, who were so freaking nice!

That I can write about, because the love wasn't so visual, or planted so deep- it was tail-wagging brain love. Pace Editions is the print shop for the Pace Gallery, and we went to see it because the people at the Pace Gallery are so fabulously classy and kind that they invited my mom and Druck, who run a printmaking studio, to come see the way they print editions for people like Chuck Close. The Pace printers were great fun- they paused their work to answer technical questions and show us the fabulous art that was hung all over the room and they let us poke a plate by Tara Donovan, who printed a pile of rubber bands to great effect- her rubber band compositions look fantastic: they look like drawings by Martin Ramirez.



They told us about some subtle little Terry Winters- looking prints that looked full of little bubbles- they were very beautiful, and it turns out they were made by Tara Donovan mixing bubble stuff with acid and transferring them with a straw to the plate.


Printmakers, if you haven't met any, are fantastic people. They are the artists you want to meet- I've been seeing previews for Art School Confidential all over the place, and in the manner of the great art school stereotype narrator, when I was in art school the stereotypes ran like this: painters are self absorbed and mean, sculptors are dumb, performance artists are crazy, ceramicists are fun and stoned and printmakers are....awesome. They're funny, down to earth, smart, work well in groups. Their very art form means they have to play well with others. Mine means I gas up a room and listen to whatever is in my own head for more hours than is good for me. Thus the damned blog. But I'm done now.

I haven't posted lately because I'm in the middle of a whole bunch of experiments. I've done lots of new watercolors, some very elaborate drawings and I have started messing with some new ideas with the airbrush. The biggest experiment is this one: I'm trying to airbrush people. I almost always use animals AS people in my paintings, but I do draw people all the time, so I'm experimenting with doing it in paint. I'm liking the idea of developing a formal cast of characters that includes figures I use all the time: the badger, the Prevost's Squirrel, a pumpkin head...But adding a human in there causes problems. I stopped using human figures in the first place because they feel too specific, especially compared to an animal. A person in a painting doesn't look like a generalized actor in a play, they look like the artist, or that model the artist used, or that person. I used to make paintings of women. People always saw those characters as me, and weirdly enough they do NOT do that when I use a badger. It's not just that I want to avoid autobiography, it's more that I want to achieve a unversality- I want to verr towards the mythic rather than the specific. Using animals also allows me to make paintings that talk about gender without any sense of essentialism: a badger in a dress is always in drag, even if it's a girl badger.
Anyways, I'm trying to see if I can pull of a useable person character, and I'm working on a series of portrait studies. I'm hoping to come up with a set of faces that work as generalities somehow, but I'm running afoul of other stereotypes: I really want to use a skeleton figure, but I'm thinking I'll get accused of ripping off Day of the Dead characters. I also want to single-handedly dissociate the pumpkin head from Halloween. We'll see. I've started working on a drawing for a new large piece and I'm going to spend next week looking at art in NY with my mom and her partner Thom, who are really great artists if I do say so myself. Which I do.

Speaking of which, I went to see Shazia Sikander talk on Friday at the Fabric Workshop- she was amazing. Her work is great, she's a densely intelligent speaker, and she's unbelievably gorgeous. It's really insane.