Oohs, Wows, and Mmms

Journal entry for 06 Sep 2010 | Link

Greetings from Bedford-Stuyvesant, where generous friends are putting me up for the first weekend of the Governors Island Art Fair. This was a roundly successful event, with a wide variety of talent on hand, thousands of interested fairgoers, and perfect weather. My room was hardly empty for two days. I brought reading material for an article I’m working on, and I made it through all of two paragraphs because I was busy greeting people and answering questions. On Saturday a number of friends came through, including Pretty Lady, Chris Rywalt, Oriane Stender, and Piri Halasz. Not long after Piri’s arrival she pulled out her notebook and began taking copious, energetic notes, as befitting a former art critic for Time Magazine. At one point she answered the questions of a French-speaking visitor in her own polished French. The next day she issued a roundly positive review of the nine new landscapes I have up in the show. Eyes as sharp as can openers, as goes a line in an anthology of Yehuda Amichai that I picked up Saturday night from Mast Books in Alphabet City, and I’m glad to have pleased them.

It was quieter on Sunday but still quite busy. After seven or eight years of trading e-mails with Maud Newton, I finally met her and her husband, which was great fun. One visitor to the room was a young man in an educational program associated with a major auction house. He treated me to an unsolicited critique of Blue House, Blue Roof, Blue Sky, one of the 40-inch-square acrylic paintings. I wouldn’t call it uninformed, but I might say that his knowledge had more enthusiasm behind it than breadth.

“Why do you have these areas of thick paint on top of the impasto?”

What? The areas of thick paint are the impasto. “I apply some of the impasto in a directional way in order to introduce structure into the painting. In the foliage I can let it be more diffuse.”

“You have these little touches here and there, and the big areas seem much less important to me.”

“And yet here you are looking at them.”

Life isn't school, son. I’ve come to think that the main ailment of advanced art education is the assumption that art is explicable. Failing everything else, all we ask of our universities is to explain things to us. We put art into the universities and produce professional explainers and art amenable to explanation. I support intellectual work, but few truths match the profundity and usefulness of Alfred Korzybski’s observation that the map is not the territory. And fewer territories shift and roil like the country of art. If I ever produce a book, its preface will be another passage of Amichai:

From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

I often prefer the responses of children. I had forgotten since working in the public eye at Artcenter/South Florida how much kids like my work. The texture and the animation of the paint seem to draw them, but those are my explanations, and I may never know the real reasons. They often grasp the work in exactly the manner I intended it to be enjoyed, which is gratifying beyond measure. A girl of eight, looking at one of the bigger acrylics, noted to me, “This is interesting. Because it’s like an abstract painting, but there’s a picture in it.” I couldn’t sum up the impulses behind Bay Area Figuration more succinctly. Another girl, even younger, squinted across the room from the doorway and announced, “From far away they look real.” Satisfied, she turned around and marched to the next room, leaving me to compliment her eye to her mother, whom I made promise me that she would keep showing her art.

I treasure a fully-formed review, written well, but I thrill in people’s automatic responses, the oohs, wows, and mmms they utter in front of work they enjoy. Many came forth this weekend. I regard them as complete communications, just as fully-formed in their way. And I’ll admit to a particularly piquant delight when an attractive woman tells you that your work looks edible.

Circumstances lined up so that I could stay in New York through Wednesday, thus allowing me to view Yuan Revolution among other promising exhibitions. It will be a work week in New York, but a consummately pleasant one.