sounds/sights

What else am I thinking of? I am also of Jasper Johns’ Three Flags, up there on the fifth floor at the Whitney, in a room that glowed with the whiteness of day when I was there. When I saw it I realized that I had never seen any of his flag paintings before but it really took my breath away because each brush stroke was so beautiful in texture and shape, so many of them composing this one object, again and again. And then there were all the brush strokes within the stack of canvasses that you couldn’t see, every hidden stroke like a secret to be tucked away forever, because in the end the hidden brush strokes don’t matter in visibility but only for the fact that they are there, making up three flags stacked upon each other, the waving symbol of land of the free home of the brave flattened into craftsmanship, into an object to be looked at, into something earnest.

A flag is a flag is a flag, it is what it is. What is it anyway? It is a beautiful thing. It is a beautiful painting, in its earnestness, in its insistence. Jasper Johns saw himself painting the American flag in a dream and decided that it was a sign, and he did the original work upon layers of newspaper with a crude paint, upon layers of some history that we can barely make out. It is made to be seen, to be considered, a sign so carefully considered in its own replication. You make of it what you want.

83 years today!

From BOMB 57, Fall 1996 
Jasper Johns Interview with Marjorie Welish:

MW Okay. The painting Racing Thoughts (1983) is indeed one of those very difficult paintings, in part because the subject matter is apparently a miscellany, a kind of curio-cabinet of stuff which frustrates an easy coherence. So my question to you is how did you cope with the possibility of that painting being merely idiosyncratic, how did you protect yourself against that possibility?

JJ I’m not sure that it isn’t. What does that mean? What do you mean by idiosyncratic?

MW Personal or private language…

JJ I don’t know. In a sense, everybody has a private language. So on some level, even that idea is a shared thought, a shared experience.

MW I have told myself that one way you protected yourself against that possibility is by giving us access to the meaning of the painting through formal relations that are more evident: In one of the two versions, for instance, there are hatch-marks on the left and then color on the right, which allows the reader of the painting to know that relations from left to right will be profitable if pursued. Then thematically, there is a gamut of faces, faces in relation to different notions of embodiment. In other words, there are means compensating for the private language.

JJ You’re reading backwards, reading after the fact. The painting was triggered when I was looking at a television program—a soap opera or something. An abstract painting had been made to decorate the wall of the set by slightly blending three or four arbitrary areas of color and drawing a black scribble over that. I thought it was an incredible way to make a complicated picture with rather simple means. So I set out to try to do the same thing, but it became a little more complicated as I worked on it.

MW Your answers compensate for my over-reading and reading into…

JJ Well, things become “other” when you look at them backwards. Dissecting a painting is different from constructing a painting. When you look at a painting, you can’t easily go back to the point at which it was begun.

MW Does that speak for the artist too, in the process of revision?

JJ It speaks of that and it probably also speaks of the nature of time and space.

[source]

“But a life is more than the sum of its intentions and wants. The whole of our inner experience cannot be willed into existence or worked into a plan. The richness of one’s continuously evolving subjectivity depends not only on the mental stuff that furnishes conscious life. It also relies on what is unreasoned, undreamed, or unrealized – in other words, all the latent memories, experiences, neuroses, and desires that silently haunt the consciousness of an active mind. The specter of unthinking shadows every thought. It is the force that embeds every act of expression with the imprint of a singular presence. It is the siren’s song that draws us toward the empty center of our own unique and purposeless singularity. And it is this curious music, which one cannot help but play, that the community tries to silence, on behalf of our greater self, and in the guise of a common will.”

– Paul Chan, “The Unthinkable Community”

curate:

Louise Bourgeois, 2005   garconniere:f-whimsy

bombmagazine:

Louise Bourgeois, The Insomnia Drawings. Featured in Ivan Vartanian’s new book, Art Work: Seeing Inside the Creative Process.

My sentiments exactly.

Anachronism in the Hamptons: Augustus nobly caresses the leaves of an American oak tree in the 21st century. Rows of Roman emperors at the Parrish Museum, Southampton, NY. 

They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the mate:
  “This mad sea shows his teeth to-night.
He curls his lip, he lies in wait,
  With lifted teeth, as if to bite!
Brave Admiral, say but one good word:
  What shall we do when hope is gone?”
The words leapt like a leaping sword:
  “Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!”

- from Columbus, Joaquin Miller

__________________________

The photo is a detail from the Columbus Circle monument in Manhattan. The statue was created by Gaetano Russo in 1892, in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. I had never noticed the intricacy of the bronze reliefs on the statue’s base until I began taking my lunch hour near them this summer. One of the beautiful things about living in New York City is that you are especially capable of being surprised by the places that you frequent.

Rivane Neuenschwander, as featured in this wonderful-looking exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.