Ravels in Review: It's Summer!

I'm thrilled to be writing this when it's actually hot and sunny outside. Summer had to come eventually, I suppose, and it's basically August. So let's see:

• The BBC updated Byron's image with a music video, to odd effect, but I appreciate the effort.

• Then I read the collected poems of E.E. Cummings in one sitting, but figured I'd spare you and hunt up the one I really liked.

• I saw In & Out of Amsterdam at MoMA. More intellectually apppealing than visually, and I might just be more visual.

• I found out a bit about rust used in art, specifically rust paints. (Thanks all!)

• For something absolutely delightful and cheering on your Friday, check out this artist dress code.

• Artists do not own Mickey Mouse, and more illegal art due to copyright.

Also, I'm trying out the twitter thing. If you're on there, come find me at linnea_west. Have a great weekend!

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Copyright: Who owns Mickey?

Call me a libertine, but I'm pretty open about the spread of images and their appropriation and reuse. So is this website Illegal Art, featuring projects like Ashley Holt's Notmickey above. The art projects featured there have run into trouble for infringing copyright, and usually it's with corporate entities who wish to protect and retain the only rights to Mickey Mouse, Viagra, or Starbucks. At some point, I would think cultural icons become public property rather than corporate property. I'm not sure where that point is.

The thing is, copyright protects individuals as well as corporations. The artists might feel differently were I to take their projects, like Notmickey, and claim them as my own and use them to create ads for Disney or sell t-shirts. (Or maybe they wouldn't.)


At any rate, the Illegal Art website has some really interesting projects to illuminate these theoretical issues. My favorite? Four years ago, University of Iowa professor Kembrew McLeod trademarked the phrase "Freedom of Expression"--then hired a lawyer to sue for infringement.

n+1's Artist Dress Code like Oscar Wilde on Steroids

How Artists Must Dress

Artists must first of all distinguish themselves from members of the adjacent professional classes typically present at art world events: dealers, critics, curators, and caterers. They must second of all take care not to look like artists. This double negation founds the generative logic of artists' fashion.

The relationship between an artist's work and attire should not take the form of a direct visual analogy. A stripe painter may not wear stripes. The relationship between an artist's work and attire should function in the manner of a dialectic, in which the discrepancy between the personal appearance of the artist and the appearance of her work is resolved into a higher conceptual unity. An artist's attire should open her work to a wider range of interpretive possibilities.

The artist's sartorial choices are subject to the same hermeneutic operations as are his work. When dressing, an artist should imagine a five-paragraph review of his clothes—the attitudes and intentions they reveal, their topicality, their relationship to history, the extent to which they challenge or endorse, subvert or affirm dominant forms of fashion—written by a critic he detests.

Communicating an attitude of complete indifference to one's personal appearance is only achievable through a process of self-reflexive critique bordering on the obsessive. Artists who are in reality oblivious to how they dress never achieve this effect.

Whereas a dealer must signal, in wardrobe, a sympathy to the tastes and tendencies of the collector class, an artist is under no obligation to endorse these. Rather, the task of the artist with regard to fashion is to interrogate the relationship between cost and value as it pertains to clothing, and, by analogy, to artworks.

An artist compensates for a limited wardrobe budget by making creative and entertaining clothing choices, much in the way that a dog compensates for a lack of speech through vigorous barking.

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n+1's full piece here.

Image, Gilbert and George at Jack Freak Pictures show at White Cube Gallery.

I have become a twit...

so now what do I do?

Rust on the Brain

A friend told me about photographer and painter Charlotta Janssen, image above left, and I was most intrigued by her working methods. She paints from old photographs in in a color palette limited to black, white, aqua and grey iron. Once the piece is finished, she rusts it and the colors change and bleed into each other. Her next show is August 8 at Boltox Gallery on Shelter Island, if you happen to be in those parts.




Then I came across close up shots (image detail top, above Janssen's Jones' Family Car) from Richard Serra's 2007 retrospective at MoMA that really captured the patina of the steel slabs he works with. To encourage oxidation, or rust, sprinklers are sometimes directed at the large slabs of steel he uses in his sculpture. Natural weathering of his outdoor installations creates the same effect, but it is one I've failed to notice when wandering amid his gigantic creations concerned with the space and form.

Rust is such an odd thing to work with, rather than protect works from, and it creates a really rich palette. I'm so intrigued by the idea of paint that rusts--anybody know anything about that? Or how else rust is used?

In & Out of Amsterdam at MoMA

Amsterdam in the 1970s functioned as a hub for Conceptual artists, MoMA's thorough, enlightening new exhibition documents. Old exhibition posters lead you down the hall into rooms of slide projectors and photographs. For me, it drew connections between various familiar and unfamiliar artists. For example, this wall:

is not Sol Le Witt, but by Lawrence Weiner, or at least according to his directions. So which came first, the Weiner or the Sol?

All the art felt dated, and the exhibition felt like a collection of excavated fossils brought out for study at the Natural History Museum. Partly the concepts have been absorbed into mainstream contemporary art, so that a video of a chorus singing doesn't have the same effect it once would have and Gilbert and George's living art is remembered with nostalgia.

Personally, I found it hard to pay so much attention to artifacts that lacked real intellectual or visual interest. For all that I found certain pieces cool or neat, I never really felt engaged. That doesn't diminish the scholarly and historical value of the exhibition, and it's quite possible I'm not familiar enough with the material to get it, but I found it a challenging exhibition to really enjoy. Maybe any thorough exhibition of conceptual art is bound to be, in my case at least, in one ear--

Photograph of exhibition wall [ears mine].

--and out the other.

Eyes big love crumbs

i like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more. i like your body. i like what it does, i like its hows. i like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which i will again and again and again kiss, i like kissing this and that of you, i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes over parting flesh ... And eyes big love-crumbs, and possibly i like the thrill of under me you so quite new ee cummings

Byron Updated

The BBC tries to make Lord Byron cool in this new video, as if he needed any help. The King Blues update 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know' Byron with a punk rock twist.

Change for the better? Eh...

Ravelled Reviews

Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Fruit Dish

In honor of Cubism, Gertrude Stein, and Cezanne, a fractured ravels in review that attempts to document the act of ravelling. (Unfragmented links included).

Yesterday, it was Cubism, Visual and Literal, without Gertrude Stein's mug in the end, before some explicit in odd ways not explicit enough notes on Butt in ASS , dear lord what a title for an exhibition, and horses, really big horses and what glitter at Jack the Pelican and why would they have named the gallery that, whose full name is Jack the Pelican Presents, and then in between is smushed a really great piece written by Richard Serra- Had I dressed it up better, images and all, maybe more people would have read it, my eyes are caked with sleep, before, before is so long ago, and my finger hurts from a paper cut given by a file folder, who knew such barbarities existed, so then here we are, we're reviewing ravels, but what the hell happened this week, do I drink too much that I have the memory of a goldfish, but wait--I'll check, oh dear, I really need a new website. And then i had written about loving my 'hood, which terrible choice of word now strikes me as particularly annoying, and yet we must march on, although to note the accordion shop is choice, and so then- then now my boyfriend came into my room and did a flying ninja pose and told a work story, Gertrude didn't have to deal with this, and so lastly I see I wrote about the High Line, which is nice, as I tell you, but maybe not so special it needs to be written about so much, but then I broke that cardinal.

Pablo Picasso, The Reservoir, Herta de Ebro

Images from the special exhibition on the fifth floor of MoMA, which leads you by the nose over to the room next door, for this savagery, savagery!:

Cubism, Visual and Literal

Georges Braque, Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, and Glass (1913)

A success, a success is alright when there are there rooms and no vacancies, a success is alright when there is a package, success is alright anyway and any curtain is wholesale. A curtain diminishes and an ample space shows varnish.

Louis Casimir Marcoussis, Still Life with Three Fish (1925)

One taste one tack, one taste one bottle, one taste one fish, one taste one barometer. This shows no distinguishing sign when there is a store.

Pablo Picasso, Table with Loaves and Bowl of Fruit (1909)

Any smile is stern and any coat is a sample. Is there any use in changing more doors than there are committees. This question is so often asked that squares show that they are blotters. It is so very agreeable to hear a voice and to see all the signs of that expression.

Georges Braque, Woman with Guitar (1914)

Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.

Text from "Rooms" section of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914), in which convetional meaning becomes fractured, split apart, and reorganized.

My, what a big horse you have

Gregory de la Haba's Equus Maximus

Sometimes you see something that is just wrong:

"New York multimedia artist Gregory de la Haba's not-to-be-missed masterpiece Equus Maximus is ambitious to say the least, involving life-size taxidermy show horses... The overall effect is at once baroque and erotic, emotionally charged, and animated by a certain primitive, tribal sorcery that lends a deep soulfulness to the tableau's splashy titillation." - Flavorpill

And you feel the need to correct it, even if you never were particularly motivated to talk about the art you first saw months ago. If you've been to Jack the Pelican in Williamsburg...you've surely noticed this in the back of their gallery:

It's striking, and makes me quite uneasy as it's crammed into a dimly-lit, small backroom and you really have to scoot behind the rearing horses with obscene huge sexual organs to see all of it. What I did not see was "a deep soulfulness" the Flavorpill writer mentions. Of course, I've also heard it described as awesomely amazing, which I don't buy into either. The gallery website puts it best by saying: "Over-the-top doesn't quite capture the incredible vulgarity of it all." Has anyone else seen it? I'm not sure if I'm turned off by the calculated attempt at shock value, or if the sexual horse thing is just too much for me. Either way, I'm pretty sure the emotional primal sorcery was lost on me.

Now I'm going to try to find something to write about that doesn't involve horse sex or butts.

From Richard Serra's Mouth: Dick Bellamy

One of the art dealers profiled in The Art Dealers is Richard Bellamy, and they refer to him as a dealer's dealer. Other dealer's profiles were sprinkled with references to him. But when I read his profile, I don't know that I quite got why or how he was so important. He talks like this:

"In the early years I hadn't formed any allegiances or opinions yet, so there was no static around the art that interfered with what I was seeing. Being unpracticed, I was registering things very clearly, with an innocent eye. I had an intensity of perception, where things just got interiorized immediately."

Interesting, but something was missing. Then I came across this essay by Richard Serra in The Brooklyn Rail. Here's an excerpt:

After I arrived in New York, Dick would phone me every morning. He would always ask the same question: “Richard, how is the weather downtown?” I would put the phone down, walk the length of the loft to the window, look out, go back and report: gray, sunny, fog, rain, snow, whatever. It took me a while to realize that the weather was the same uptown, and this was Dick’s way of keeping in touch. The fact that he phoned every day without fail gave me a sense of security that I needed. I knew that art was being made around the corner and I was nowhere, driving a truck for a living and trying to sort it all out.

The whole piece is great read; I recommend you check it out. The list of artist's who had initial shows through Green or Hansa or Goldowsky gallery--including Serra--is impressive. Now I think the book should refer to him as the artist's dealer.

Neighborhood ASS

In the spirit of neighborhood patriotism, I thought I should do a little gallery research beyond LaViolaBank, Heist, the intermittent Reena Spaulings, little Dispatch--all within a 2 block radius just in my little corner of the world.

Artlog has thorough neighborhood gallery maps which led me to the Asia Song Society, or ASS, as they like to call themselves. At times in Chinatown there are issues with odd translation, so I thought this might be one of those times.

Until I saw the poster for their most recent exhibition:


I recommend reading the fine print. I have no idea what's really going on here, but it made my day.

Why I Love My 'Hood

If there is a bumblefuck corner of Manhattan, it's my neighborhood. I never know if I should tell people I live in Chinatown or the lower Lower East Side. I don't really belong here, not being a Chinese immigrant or a Hasidic Jew or even Puerto Rican. (Quite a mix...) And then there's me.



And this is just on one block, not even getting into the offshoots of Chinatown or the galleries down here.

Allen Grubesic's Another Masterpiece at LaViolaBank Gallery

High Line Views

The newly opened High Line in New York is a really nicely-done park that hovers above the city on the sight of old train tracks, which are now interspersed among the wildflowers.


And some sights from it....





It looks like a typical old warehouse building. I never would have known the top of that roof was covered in flowers!

Ravels in Review Friday Plus Banana

It's been a while since I did this, so check out a bounty of ravels below. Happy Friday!

• Would you buy Virginia Woolfe's beach or, better yet, my wall?

• Another question: Which is Madame X?

• Stories of Andy Warhol, from the horses' mouths

• Advertising, not street art. Should have known it was too neat and prominent.

• Captions! for Hitchcock's silent Easy Virtue

• Bosch's Earthly Delights are Strange

• A mention of moi? Tres cool.

• Review of Waiting for Godot at the Roundabout

• **The Ensor show at MoMA inspired some visual comparisons**

• News Flash: Artists are poor

• King Lear outdoors courtesy of NY Classical Theater

*It gets stars because I like it best. (Don't tell the others.)

Would you buy Virginia Woolfe's beach?

A Cornish beach thought to have inspired Virginia Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse has been sold for £80,000, says the BBC. It is believed childhood recollections of trips to the seaside in Cornwall influenced her novel, set in the Hebrides.

It's not quite the oddity one might think, as the proceeds have gone to charity for a local theater. Personally, I find it a very exciting development. I have been staring at the same bit of wall this past year writing my novel, and I'm sure its been a very important influence. I would be willing to part with this portion of the wall for a fraction of the sum Woolfe's beach got. Similarly, there are these two orange pillows I've been resting my feet on. I feel the color orange now pervades my work. You could be the proud owner of Linnea West memorabilia before the rest of the world even knows that name. Think about it.

Which is the real Madame X?

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Which of these two images is the real Madame X painted by John Sargent?

As I learned yesterday at Lisa'a History Room, they both are. Sort of.

If you though the one on the left was the Sargent's Madame X, congratulations--you've been to the Met, where that version of the painting is hanging. The image on the right was made to represent Sargent's original Madame. Sargent first painted the infamous Madame X with one strap dangling off her shoulder. The outcry in France over the fallen strap was such that Madame X's mother demanded Sargent remove it from the salon. To appease the public, Sargent painted this second version with both straps firmly in place. The whole risque fiasco ended with Sergent moving to England because of the disapproval of Parisian society.

Who knew there was such a story in a little strap?

From the Horse's Mouth: Impressions of Warhol

Warhol's persona is almost as iconic as his images have become. Here are some New York art dealers fascinating stories and first impressions of Andy Warhol from The Art Dealers:

“The boy is a very important artist, Andy, because he helped America. He mixes very much with youth, and with all the chic people—you know, the bums. When you have such a stupid expression as Andy has—when he is being silent, before the smile starts—when you look like that, you can do anything you want in the world. As Christ said to all those priests, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” and Warhol is a horrible child.” -Alexander Iolas


“I saw the first Andy Warhol show, the Brillo boxes, at Stable Gallery. I went to the opening with James Harvey, a painter supporting himself as a freelance package designer. It was he who had designed the actual Brillo box, and strangely enough, he was a friend of Andy’s. Jim nearly collapsed when we went in and saw people actually buying Warhol’s identical versions. All Jim could do was write it off as part of the madness of life.” -Joan Washburn

“Warhol very badly wanted to join my gallery, to be with artists he admired, like Johns. I turned him down at first because I felt his work was too similar to Lichtenstein’s. Warhol told me I was very much mistaken. Was there another gallery interested? Yes, I was told. If I didn’t take him, Andy said, then he had no choice but to go to Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. And he did. His show there a year later was fantastic: the Brillo boxes, the Marylins, and the Elvis paintings. I realized I had made a big mistake.” -Leo Castelli


"A few weeks later a very strange man with a terrible complexion and mottled gray hair came in, looking for drawings by Jasper Johns. Although I told him they were very expensive, $400 or $500, he asked for the drawing of a light bulb. I showed him the Lichtenstein girl with the beach ball, and he said his own work was very similar. He then asked me to visit his studio. I was intrigued by him and went to his place on Eighty-Ninth Street, where I saw beautiful antique furnishings alongside twenty-five paintings of Campbell's soup cans and cartoon characters. He was playing rock-n-roll music so loudly we couldn't really have a conversation." -Ivan Karp

"Also at that time I had my first encounter with Andy Warhol. He was about halfway into his soup-can series when I visited his studio. I spent quite a bit of time chatting with him while looking hard at those paintings. I decided virtually on the spot to show them in California, and Andy was thrilled with the idea. He had no representation at the time; he sold one or two thins with Martha Jackson and Allan Stone, but he had no New York gallery. We struck a bargain then and there, and the paintings arrived in California in July 1962. I showed them by encircling the gallery with the thirty-two soup cans, all of them the same size, 20 inches high and 16 inches across." -Irving Blum

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Street View: L.E.S. and Williamsburg

Walking around the East Village yesterday this large mural caught my eye at 6th and A. I've never noticed it before. It reads "Restrticted Area: For Humans Only." It evens gives you a phone number to call to report non-humans, but I didn't try it.

I did a lot of walking yesterday--from the East Village, to the High Line festival on the West side (where there was an hour line to go up), to the East River Park in Williamsburg for a free concert, to dinner by McCarren Pool park. What a great New York summer Sunday!

"Bang," below, was in Williamsburg and turned out to be an advertisement for a drum school.

Easy Virtue's Silent Incarnation, Plus Captions!

"Here you are, a beautiful young woman immersed in scandal, about to be divorced. I could find you guilty, or you could come home with me."

Easy Virtue Stats:
Noel Coward writes play 1925
Alfred Hitchcock makes silent film in 1928
Idiots make bad film in 2008

The glib charm of Noel Coward's social comedy must come through better on stage, since the 2008 film blew it. The latest film version with Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, and Jessica Biel had a chance at capturing that charm, but something went wrong. Alfred Hitchcock 1928 film does them one better. Hitchcock's silent film obviously loses the clever dialogue and, instead of a comedy, the film becomes a sentimental melodrama, albeit with a rather emancipated heroine. Yet the framing of the story in a courthouse, the transitions, the theatrical acting and the mooody orchestra pieces all make for a fun watch.

The film might be hard to find, but amazingly there is a website that has 1,000 film stills telling the story scene by scene. I started to wonder halfway through if silent films weren't a perfect opportunity for audience creativity. Like Mystery Science Theater, you could create the words to the movie...


"No, really darling, I only take gin in my teacup."


"Golly--I'm smoking a cigarette. A flagrant sign you're stuffy mother will hate me!"


"Darling--why is your father still holding my hand---I've gotten into scandals over such things."


"How charming. But if you don't get me out of here, I insist on a second divorce."


"If only I could read."


"Wait a sec--she looks familiar!"


"There goes the family reputation. I should have listened to Mother."


"Migraine my ass! I'll dance in my slutty satin gown if I please."


"It's true I shouldn't dance with my husband's friend. But then, virtue is never easy."