Another Bouncing Ball

(Previous post on the modestly-sized here)

Diem Chau carves crayons.

But that’s not all.

Her blog here. Her Web site.

Saya Moriyasu brings Elie Nadelman-style high romance to pocket-sized figures.

Moriyasu’s gallery here.

Marita Dingus makes her small people from whatever is at hand.

Dingus’ gallery here. Her Web site here.

John Perreault tackles The Generational: Younger than Jesus on his blog, Artopia. He tackled it last week, but in the spirit of this post, the concept of “today” covers a lot of ground.

Perreault:

The NuMu “The Generational” has an attention-getting but foolish extended title: “Younger Than Jesus”, which seems to mean that all the 50 artists from 25 different countries are younger than The Christ when He was crucified. I find this truly offensive. And I am not even a Christian.

Will future titles be equally insulting? How about: More Boring Than the Buddha; Bossier Than Moses; Louder Than Luther; Madder Than Mohammad; More Baffling Than Madame Blavatsky?

…
Well, yes, art is indeed global. But so is late capitalism and so is tuberculosis. In spite of transnational trends like the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Enlightenment, and then Modernism, it was once thought nations were little, much cherished pockets of stylistic development, language tics, and even aesthetic surprise. Not so anymore.
…

The official Artopia doctrine is that art has been done in by a fatal disconnect from poetry and from the metaphysical. Whatever art was, it is being continued somewhere else.

In a similar vein, Edward Winkleman capers through aesthetic theory, here.

OK, so clearly I have no idea what I’m talking about (and yet, amazingly, that doesn’t slow me down one bit, does it?)

Not all artists are connected in webs of art-based relationships. When not in their studios, they work day jobs or dig in their garden, drop the kids at
school if they have kids and do yoga if they can bear to bend over.

There are artists, good artists, who have no idea what anyone in
Artforum thinks or what’s on view in any particular museum or gallery.
They are so outside the system of having a gallery or being included in
a museum that years go by without them giving it much thought, and yet,
day after day, they’re still working.

Because at its root art is so frequently about the interplay of ideas arising from a particular time and place, being cut off from other artists as well as curators, dealers and critics is not usually a good thing. For some people, however, it’s necessary. Talk can be depressing noise, and other people’s voices can drain the life from an inspiration that arises from materials at hand.

Nole Giulini is not naive by any stretch, nor is she uninformed or entirely unknown. Her banana peels sewn into a species of Persian slipper were included in an exhibit at the New Museum in 1996. Her dessicated Mickey Mouse is in the Surrealist Impulse at the Tacoma Art Museum, which is what made me think of her again.

It’s a stopper, that little mouse, made of dried fungal membranes joined by coarse thread.

Some of her sock puppets bring to mind Louise Bourgeois’ wool figures, heavy with absurdly sexual implications.

Her fungal puppets might have marched straight out of a William Kentridge video. Brought into their own universe and seen in their own company, however, both wool and fungal objects remind viewers of no other.

Giulini needs what she doesn’t have – a solo show in a respected and well-attended space. Instead, every couple of years, a single piece pops up. Take Unititled (wedding dress) from 1994 constructed entirely of used underwear, which I saw half a dozen years ago in Seattle.

A girdle stretches across the shoulders with old
lace at the waist. The skirt features a massive Jockey train, each garment
signaling a long lifeline. Get married in this dress, and you’re up front about your back story, which trails behind you, sporting intractable stains.

Out, out, damn spot! This dress says don’t bother.

This dress says, virginal white is either a fantasy or the person
wearing it is too young to make the commitment. Getting married means
dressing up, but being married means picking up somebody else’s
underwear.

Be mine.

The box with clear glass sides contains rabbit droppings, each wrapped in 22 K gold, Untitled from 1991.

A curator or the right kind of dealer could put it together. Do artists have to make the scene to make anything happen for them, even in a regional context? When does the work speak for itself?

Not necessarily on purpose.

Robert Longo:

Xu Zhen:

Image from flickr. Hirons is a finalist for this year’s Turner Prize.

As an addition to this post (Body farming: the latest in pushing up daises), artist/curator Sharon Arnold suggested the image below by Jennifer Zwick:

Very nice indeed. It reminds me of Crazy Jane’s final, trump-card words to the bishop:

A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.

And as an addition to this post (Art at the end of the road: your life span – time’s up), David Maisel suggested this image from his series, Library of Dust:

An interest in wallpaper?

A few days before he died, Oscar Wilde said:

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has to go.

The wallpaper won.

Kelly Mark is interested in wallpaper –

– and I am interested in Kelly Mark. Sexual identity conclusions? Fortunately for the unruly and revitalizing complexity of art and life, there aren’t any. Yet we know gay art when we see it.

Jeffry Mitchell: Good Council and Good Council (on cracked ice). Click to enlarge.

As gay American founding father poet Walt Whitman put it long ago,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

From his Web site:

Sample detail below, click to enlarge but not at work.
.

Plenty of people are on the road, documenting this and shooting that. Stefan Ruiz stands out for the generous breath of his interests and the clarity of his presentation.

About his print, Don Jose from Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico, shot in 2003, Ruiz wrote:

This is a dump lord. He was very proud that everything in his office had been found in the dump: the television (which worked), the painting of the Mexican revolutionary Zapata, the desk, the rug, the trophy, everything. The plastic wall covering was kept in place with bottle tops nailed to the wall.

One of four exhibits organized for NYPH, May 13-17, Chris Boot’s Gay Men Play, is a global survey of the visual manifestations of gay culture filtered through a photographic lens. Seattle more than holds its own thanks to Steven Miller.

Miller makes something rare of bondage, something personal instead of stage-struck, such as the print below, of someone living in his head.

Miller also tackles science, such as his Proof of Homosexuality in Nature.