A Visit To / A Visit From / The Island Galapagos #3

Back to the topic of images that resonate with you throughout your life. I saw a painting by Eric Fischl at theWhitney many years ago but it ahs stayed with me and also informed my world as a basic truth.  The Galapagos has had a very hard time during the pandemic. No tourists no income. The people I spoke with told me of the hard times they have had. Rice, beans, yucca, and fish. As I was hiking in a forest of Palo Santo trees and Chandelier cactus I came upon an open beach. This is what saw. Not much changes, huh?

Eric Fischl, A Visit To / A Visit From / The Island, 1983
Susan Shaw, To and From the Island, 2021

Thinking about Ansel Adams

There was lots of opportunity to photograph the landscape in the Galapagos. It's emptiness floating some 800 miles out in the open ocean propelled flashbacks of the early photographers exploring the American West. I was lucky enough to meet some of them as a young woman. I even worked in Ansel Adams' darkroom. I admit, it drove me sort of crazy because he had you rock the trays of developer and fixer in time to a metronome. But times have really changed. No darkroom for me. Instead of an giant, heavy 8x10 view camera, I used my new phone, a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, which has a 100x optical zoom. Other than photographer error, my pictures are incredibly sharp--no mushy pixelation of digital zoom for me, and I didn't have to spend hours in a smelly dark room. Ansel would have loved it. So much control with every aspect of the photograph from shooting raw, to Photoshop retouching to printing on a high end printer, One of mine, a Canon IPF 8100, uses 12 color inks and can print an image to 44 inches by 100 feet at the touch of a button. Admittedly, the largest I ever printed was 44 inches by 18 feet but there is that possibility... And I am privileged to see, not unlike those who experienced horse to jet like my Grandmother, the change from chemical to digital in my lifetime.

P.S. I even saw a traffic cone in the landscape, which turned out to be a 20+ foot structure sitting on an extinct volcano.

Galapagos...the Enchanted Islands #1

Sharks, Boobies and fratricide! 

 

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? 

 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

 Roughly translated, "What goes around comes around." Sifting through my archives in search of something else, I discovered these two photographs, one by Andy Warhol from 1958 and one by myself from 2014.

I know it's NPC these days, nonetheless I wish it were a case of great minds, but I think it is only a case of vague visual memory somewhere in the ether.

The Blog is Reinventing Itself, Refreshing itself, Regaining a Trajectory

 I'm very sad to say that Kurt Hoss passed away on April 27, 2018. He will be greatly missed, especially by me. I am retooling the site to reflect his loss so stay tuned. Below is one of his last cartoons.

Is it Tiffany or Robin's Egg blue?

When you say  Hermes orange, or Tiffany blue,  does Kapoor black come to mind? British artist Anish Kapoor has secured the exclusive right to use the high-tech color "Vantablack", a color developed for military purposes. The pigment is so dark that it absorbs 99.96 percent of light making anything coated with it nearly invisible. I heard that the former Soviet Union went to great lengths during the Cold War to discover the formula.


Kapoor is not the first artist to secure rights to a color.  Think Yves Klein. Did you know you are supposed to pay a licensing fee to the estate if you use that color (International Klein Blue)? And how would you ever know if you strayed into Yves Klein territory when for instance doing a painting of a swimming pool with a myriad of blues?

What do you think of an artist monopolizing a color? Should brand identity stand in the way of artistic expression? Will Kapoor aggressively pursue his rights and sue fellow artists?  Will you be arrested by painting with Kapoor Black?

And what if you are using it as a commentary on Kapoor, or a reference to the military, or the nature and presence of a painting with the absence of color? Shouldn't that all be covered under freedom of expression and merit legal protection?

Tom Sachs comes to mind with his use of safety orange. It informs our understanding of his work. I love that he's thought about orange.

I think we are at the beginning of a large conversation. What do you think pink?

COLOR. By Tom Sachs from Tom Sachs on Vimeo.

Pierrot Lunaire

I am finally gaining insight into my newest works in paper (The artist is always the last to know...).

As you know, they had the working title, Tropes but are clearly concurrent with Pierrot Lunaire by the Belgian writer, Albert Giraud.

Fables, tropes, and the absurd. Dreamlike, fractured, nocturnal. Stories that are told without telling coalesce into potent though uncertain relationships.

Within a theater of recurring figures and gestures, a disconcerted balance of undiscovered and ambiguous histories emerge as metatheatre — improvisation and invention, parody and burlesque a world of lunacy, deceit, disorder, and confusion.

In my Pierrot, man and animal trade body parts, morph into mists and smoke and touch each other in ambiguous spaces. With these tropes on the fabulous and fractured, all is possible.

Here's a preview:

Susan Shaw, A host of playful pranks

cotton, linen, trash pulp  2016

Susan Shaw, Linen spun of light

cotton, linen, trash pulp  2016

Susan Shaw, The fountain laughs in it's pool 

cotton, linen, wood, trash pulp  2016

New Tropes taking on a life of their own.

As you know I have been working on a series of Tropes at Dieu Donné Papermill...large works in handmade paper.  All painting done with pigmented pulp—cotton, linen and trash pulp.

Susan Shaw 2016  60" x 40" Trope 005 (green deer) cotton, linen and trash pulp







©susanshaw2016

Pulling Pulp

Catching up. I spent the month of September at the  Women's Studio Workshop. I had the paper studio residency all to myself and how great it was. WSW is an incredibly supportive place. Everyone is very encouraging no matter what you are trying to accomplish. Chris Petrone the studio manager and the interns were beyond great. Chris helped me wrestle with fibers I had never tried before. Tana the Artistic Director and co-founder got me using the vacuum press, a noisy novelty. The other artists in residence were also interesting. My apartment mate, artist Wei Jane Chir, was working on a book about organ harvesting. Interesting photos floating around when I got home at night... All of this helped me to create more than fifty works during my residency.  Add all that to the glorious fall weather and wow—you should try it yourself. Read more about it in this article.

Photos by Chelsea Campbell

Je Suis Charlie

The comic world is a small one and Kurt knew some of those killed. It is so very sad. As a tribute, I have made a poster in the style of those I saw during the 1968 student protests in Paris. With hope for a better world, la lutte continue!

Dieu Donné Benefit and Ann Hamilton too!

Dieu Donné is the world's leading cultural institution dedicated to serving established and emerging artists through the collaborative creation of cutting-edge contemporary art using the process of hand papermaking. As you know I work there frequently, and have met some of the wonderful artists who collaborate with them.Last night was their annual benefit. It was great, in addition to a silent auction, they honored Ann Hamilton and  performed her piece, Page Sounding. 

Below are some snapshots from the event,  a short clip of the performance and a video of the process at Dieu Donné  to make that paper.

 

W.A.G.E. Rage — an Update

I'm happy to write this follow up to a blog post I wrote in 2009, called W.A.G.E. Rage. It's been one of my most popular posts. I wrote about how W.A.G.E., Working Artists for a Greater Economy, is trying to create a model for artists to earn money from their work in a lot of different ways. Here's some good news I received in a recent email from W.A.G.E.:

"W.A.G.E. just launched W.A.G.E. Certification, a paradigm-shifting model for the remuneration of artistic labor.
Initiated and operated by W.A.G.E., Certification is a program that publicly recognizes non-profit arts organizations that demonstrate a history of, and commitment to, voluntarily paying artist fees—it is also the first of its kind in the U.S. that establishes a sector-wide minimum standard for compensation, as well as a clear set of guidelines and standards for the conditions under which artistic labor is contracted.

W.A.G.E. worked in dialog with artists, arts organizations, writers, sociologists, labor historians, and critical theorists over the past four years to produce a scalable model that can be applied across the non-profit arts economy in all its variation: from small artist-runspaces struggling to support a single employee to large institutions with hundreds of full-time workers and top salaries in the seven figures.

We are also proud to announce that, working with W.A.G.E. over the past year as part of a two-year Research Partnership, Artists Space has met the policy’s requirements and paid fees meeting a minimum standard specified by the program’s fee calculator—making it the first organization to be W.A.G.E. Certified.

If you know our work, then you know that these are major achievements in the history of W.A.G.E. What you may not know is that for the past six years we have operated on speaking, writing and workshop fees. It's a miracle we've lasted this long.

W.A.G.E. can only keep fighting for equitable compensation if we ourselves are compensated.

We are asking you, as our constituency and our community, to join W.A.G.E. by directly supporting us: help us raise $75,000 by making a tax-deductible donation to Wages 4 W.A.G.E. Funds will be applied directly to minimal overhead costs, which include paying our dedicated organizers a living wage. We cannot W.A.G.E. RAGE without you!

W.A.G.E. Certification's guidelines and fee calculator are at wageforwork.com.

To support Wages 4 W.A.G.E. please go to wages4wage.causevox.com."

I am excited to say, "For the times they are a changin'"

Selfie Ergo Sum

O.K. I'm still obsessed with selfies at the moment, even though the first usage is reported as early as 2002.  I looked up some definitions:

Merriam – Webster    self·ie   noun \ˈsel-fē\  An image of oneself taken by oneself using a digital camera especially for posting on social networks

Oxford English Dictionary   Syllabification: sel·fie   Pronunciation: /ˈselfē  (also selfy)   NOUN (plural selfies)   informal  A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media: occasional selfies are acceptable, but posting a new picture of yourself everyday isn’t necessary

Dictionary.com    selfie   [sel-fee] Spell Syllables   noun, Informal.  A photograph that one takes of oneself with a digital camera or a front-facing smartphone, tablet, or webcam, especially for posting on a social-networking or photo-sharing website.

There are lots floating around on the web, even lots of articles like: The 29 Greatest Selfies Of All Time from the Huffingto Post.

Hashtag fundraising is something which has become hugely prevalent in the last few months. This new popular method of fundraising seems to offer the holy trinity of selfiedom. exposure, cachet and self congratulation. In our increasingly media conscious lives, it is hard to feel meaningful. 

Probably the most famous was #icebucketchallenge. From home movies (home videos?) to Bill Gates well produced video,  according to the BBC over 2.4 million ice bucket-related videos were posted on Facebook. Did that really translate into money for the charity? Yes and No. The money did go up for many charitable organisations. Pre-ice bucket, the MND Association was receiving about £200,000 a week in donations while between 22-29 August, it received £2.7m. The danger is that people may feel "done" and if the charity doesn't come up with something else as "fun," it may lose supporters very quickly.

The success of the ice bucket challenge was entirely different to that of #nomakeupselfie. It's viral nature was a result of its nomination capacity. Those completing the challenge asked  friends to follow suit within 24 hours, and thus Facebook newsfeeds were taken over by the videos, with a better than average chance of nomination for everyone.

William MacAskill, founder of 80,000 Hours, publicly came out against the ice bucket challenge stating, "The challenge gives you a way to very publicly demonstrate your altruism via a painful task, despite actually accomplishing very little (on average, not including those who don't donate at all, a $40 gift, or 0.07% of the average American household's income): it's geared up to make you feel as good about your actions as possible, rather than to ensure that your actions do as much good as possible."

Ultimately only time will tell if #hashtagfundraising increases our propensity to give and to generate more selfies, or just allows us to feel better while doing less.

Getting to the art part of it...my friend during at the San Francisco Art Institute and a great phitographer, Adal Maldinado, has been doing elegant and interesting takes on the selfie. These next images are from his book of self-portraits, "I Was A Squizophrenic Mambo Dancer for the FBI" by Pull Press, NY, 1990-2006

You can see more at http://www.adalmindfictions.com/#!auto-portraits   But what I like the best are some of his very recent ones from work called "GO F_CK YOUR Selfie." It's on Facebook now along with fans who have submitted their own selfies in response.  

Hmmm, groups, responses, charity, art and more— doesn't sound so selfie to me.

Collectors, a Rare Breed

Rome made me think about collectors. People like the Popes, the Borghese, the Medicis or the Farnese, who transformed Florence and Rome. 

I also encountered other kinds of collectors, those who just buy and buy, often the same things over and over again like Evan Gorga. For instance in the current exhibit at Pallazzo Altemps, he owned multiple examples of mortars (for pestles) in the shape of fingers.

And the impulse is everywhere. Look at Graham Barker who collects his navel hair or Natasha Goldsworth who has an enormous Hello Kitty collection.

And of course, the famous/infamous Herb and Dorothy, with whom our interest shows no sign of abating.

Art News publishes the top 200 collectors every year or one might look at a more historical list of collectors. And so on and so on.

If 98% of Americans have a moving experience with art at some point in their lives, why do only 27% think artists should be paid reasonably for their labors?  ,,,Let us now thank collectors one and all.