Two Birds and a Baby Moose

Taken in 2014, here are a few of my personal favorite animal portraits. From Denali, Alaska to Grahamsville, New York--ain't life grand? 

 

Andy Again..Andy Warhol

The other day I was reminded of Andy's photograph, "Two Cakes and a Gun." I walked into my own kitchen and saw my cake and evidently my gun. The fact that mine is plastic makes it Andy Warhol redux.

Well, it's not cake but it's certainly eating.

A Belated Fourth of July

I had a wonderful Fourth of July. The police directed and redirected us so that a normal fifteen minute trip took an hour and a half. It was raining. We missed the parade and saw only the last three floats. Being the eternal optimist, I went out looking for photographic opportunity. Perhaps channeling Robert Frank's The Americans, a book indelibly burned into my brain, I took these photos.

Crowd Control and Observation..the High View

Tom and James do some hard work!

Tom Sachs new paintings and sculptures at Sperone Westwater remind us of the creativity of artists and the laborious work that goes into the creation of an art object. It also showcases the totally groovy way artists use materials and techniques like resin or  pyrography, where "paint strokes" are burned and etched into wood.

His cultural iconography from McDonalds to James Brown addresses the conception, production, consumption and circulation of modern-day stuff.

My  favorite seen here is "James Brown’s Hair Products" (2009) and relates to color studies by artists such as Albers and Richter.

There's also a nice interview in "Huffpo" with lots if pix. See Keeping Time With Tom Sachs: An Interview With the Artist .

Fit to be Cable Tied

Use 'em for bags, bundles, hand cuffs and art.

"Flaming Cactus” is an art project by ANIMUS Art which has been installed in Astor Place. It’s made by wrapping plastic neon-colored cable ties around light poles to transform them into hairy urban cacti!

Gotta love 'em!





For more views, not by me but lovely,,,

The Street Snap

... depends on the street. These are both "street" snaps I took this year. Location, location, location.

Brooklyn Bridge #2

Brooklyn Bridge #1

Unfinished Business

This video turned up as part of a course I am taking on Abstract Expressionism. It is provocatively symbolic. It announces the room where the Rothko's given to the Tate by Rothko will hang, without showing any of the works.

The backstory is this... Rothko repudiated his agreement to provide 600 square feet of paintings for the the new Four Seasons restaurant at the Seagram Building in New York. Rothko later gave nine of the paintings that he had intended for the Four Seasons to the Tate, insisting on an exclusive room for his paintings. On the morning he died, after slitting his arms, creating a a pool of blood roughly the same size as and as abstract as his own paintings, the works arrived at the Tate.

At the request of Rothko, The Tate, like the Phillips Collection, has created a special room to view the works. This video was created to announce the "Room."

We might all agree the color and luminosity of Rothko's works have a transformative power. As distillation of human experience, his works are not just abstract exercises. So...can this video be re-contexturalized as a post modern abstract exercise? An "abstracted" commentary, devoid of color, luminosity, and human experience, on the packaging of art?

Stripped of all content, yet referencing it, Rothko repackaged and absent — an unfinished installation and unfinished Beethoven too. How modern can you get?

Art Gals!

I belong to an artist's professional group that meets monthly, the New York Artist's Circle. We exchange tips, discuss business issues and more. These are two of the outstanding artists in the group, Barbara Ellmann and Gwyneth Leech. Gwyneth and Barbara are holding some of Gwyneth's "coffee cup" drawings. You can see others on her blog, Gwyneth's Full Brew.

Focus on Kurt #1

I tend to be more interested in the blog than my compatriot so I've decided to raid his files on a regular basis and show you the results. He loves NYC and the parks. Here are three from our parks.





Remember OPEN CALL for Videos on Broadway.

Happy Lunar New Year

Remember OPEN CALL for Videos on Broadway.

Modern Romantic American Landscape...Why does this sound weird?

I first saw Valerie Hegarty's work in a public project on the High Line in New York City. A painting being "reclaimed" by nature. Her work amusingly turns the conceits of landscape painting on it's head while also seriously investigating the meaning of landscape painting in the context of American history. A local artist, she also had/has a work on view in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum.

Joe Mangrum — Art that Blows Away

Or at least I heard he sweeps it up to use again. He was at Union Square last week. I passed seeing the sparkling sand twinkling in the gloaming. The artist is Joe Mangrum who has created prints and book documenting the mandalas. It was fascinating to watch, mesmerizing like a Zen garden. He's received a lot of attention including the prestigious Lorenzo de Medici award in "New Media", for his striking piece, "Fragile." Catch him if you can, before it's swept or blown away.

"Portraits" Artist Joe Mangrum - a film by Repertorium Films Leandro Sanchez Director from joe Mangrum on Vimeo.

The perverse New Yorker

Here I am out in the deep woods, banjo sounds floating thru the trees and this image of "Nature" floated into my New York brain with the impulse to share it with my 5000 closest friends.

Highline#1

So far I've been to the Highline twice, once on a rainy and once on a sunny. It's a park created out of an elevated abandoned freight line. In the olden days when I was a child, shipping used to be unloaded from giant ships on the Hudson, stored across the street in giant warehouses, then loaded onto giant freight trains going to final destinations in tiny towns. The trains rode right into the warehouses on tracks above the city streets.

The new park is spare and lovely. There are greeters to answer questions, benches with views and little food carts. It catches a nice breeze and sports some spectacular artistic features. My favorite is the amphitheater of traffic watching. In this context even the pigeons look beautiful.

Free Ride

Took the New York Free Water Taxi to IKEA last week. Splendid views, Swedish Meatballs and plebian photographs. I've amused myself, and hopefully you too, by fooling around with filters to see what I could salvage. Wasn't much there but these four caught my eye. I think they are too much sugar-substitute on the palate, but at least, the pixels were free.

A Cautionary Tale...

This imposing bronze statue of statesman William Seward (1801–1872) at 23rd and Broadway, was created by the artist Randolph Rogers (1825–1892). The sculpture was dedicated in 1876, and Seward is said to be the first New Yorker to be honored with a monument in the city. Seward earned it. He was secretary of state during the Civil War, a typical New Yorkers appetite for a stressful job. However, he is best remembered for his purchase of Alaska from the Russians ("Seward's Folly")

The story I heard was that his statue of Seward was nothing more than a new head added to a sculpture of Lincoln that Randolph Rogers had already made. The size of Seward’s body appears too large, and the proportion of the head to body seems at odds. Also, the original subscription effort to fund the memorial, which began in 1873, faltered, and to save money as the story goes, its organizers asked Rogers if he could cut some corners. Rogers supposedly offered to sculpt only a head of Seward, which would then be affixed to an existing body, laying around his studio, of Abraham Lincoln. Seward is depicted seated with pen and parchment at hand perhaps the Emancipation Proclamation.

In 1904, a writer to The Times referred to the “great saving of time and labor to decapitate the Lincoln model and place the head of Seward on it;” that writer added conspiratorily, “I know whereof I speak.” Each time a revelation like this surfaced, rebuttals would appear. One writer to The Times quoted Seward’s son, Frederick, who called the story “unfounded and absurd.” The letter writer went on to point out that the committee that raised the money for the statue published a detailed accounting of its financial records and activities in 1876, which apparently makes it plain that the statue’s $25,000 cost was paid in full by 250 donors, among them General Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) and Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt (1843–1899).

The only conspiracy at work here seems to be Rogers’s lack of imagination, and perhaps his poor eye for proportion. When I saw the orange caution tape drifting across the statue, I just couldn't resist. Just say no to bad sculpture!

Delicious

Sometimes sculpture is so delicious. The new Hellenistic, Etruscan, and Roman galleries—an entire wing housing over 5,300 objects in more than 30,000 square feet—is where the restaurant with the fountain used to be—how New York. Plus, offering a curatorial perspective on this, is Carlos Picón, Curator in Charge, Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.