kristo’s blog

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

I just heard yesterday that Jeanne-Claude had passed away on Wednesday...
and it got me to revisit a whole lotta feelings that are all wrapped up in my love for their work.

Amazingly enough...I actually found words that come close to describing those feelings...
i.e. they transport me directly into a fairy tale.
...and move me in (those famous) mysterious ways.

On the Christo and Jeanne-Claude FAQ page there is this response to the question:
Why are their works so big? What's the point?
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude's works are entire environments....
The effect is astounding.
To be in the presence of one of these artworks is to have your reality rocked.
You see things you have never seen before....
(It) lasts longer than the actual work of art....
There is no other way to describe the feeling of that effect other than to say it is magical.”

Indeed, it is.

more on what’s the use of art...

Dominic Eichler has a piece in the current issue of Frieze Magazine in which he attempts to somewhat obliquely answer that peculiar question...“What’s the use of art?”

You can find his rather interesting article here...

For my part...I find his preamble to be seriously interesting and engaging...but find the myriad particulars of his answer (e.g.“ art is the sibling of language, and sometimes they have good fights”) to be just the sort of thing that drains the Qi right outta me....

But that’s only because there is no “reasonable defence” of art...except maybe the experience of art itself.

And to my mind...that’s the issue. An experience. Because those in the art world couldn’t possibly be in that world unless there was an experiential passion driving them on. And without that experience of passion one would have to be awfully silly to remain there...just as it’s awfully silly to go bowling unless you truly enjoy it, and the friends you go bowling with.

Of course, then there is the professional. But a professional is someone who earns their living exclusively from their activity. And that definition makes amateurs of nearly every artist alive. (Not to mention the fact that a con artist should more properly be referred to as a con professional.) Now, if passion were the main currency...well...not only might art have the highest percentage of passionate professionals...but who then wouldn’t be willing to re-consider engaging more art in their lives tomorrow?

Those who would dismiss art (or bowling, for that matter) for any reason whatsoever can only realize that their experience of art is simply bloodless. Without passion. Or conversely, just too frightening to admit...or return to.

And perhaps the better question then is “Just where do you find your passion?”

Because the answer can only be “That’s where you find your art.”

Art doesn’t need a reason...or a defence. Neither does bowling. But if your passion is in danger of deserting you...well...maybe it’s time to rethink a few things. 

Richard Hunt is a giant...

so here it is...

my official review of:

Richard Hunt at David Weinberg Gallery Chicago
April 17 – May 30, 2009 

maybe it's too late for the show in question...

but Richard Hunt is much bigger than any single show...

and his work is timeless...

Richard Hunt’s public work is ubiquitous enough in Chicago that nearly everyone here can get intimate with at least one piece from his extraordinary oeuvre.

My opportunity began in 1992 after a show at the now defunct Terra Museum…a show in which I was enthralled not simply by his expertise with metal and abstraction…but by the integrity of his metaphors….

And because of that show I became interested in and intimate with a 3 part work by Hunt dedicated to John Peter Altgeld (an Illinois Governor whose fame is apparently of the positive variety)…and located nearly a stone’s throw from his DePaul neighborhood atelier.

I’ll leave the story of my Richard Hunt / Caspar David Friedrich night for another time…but knowing that every experience of Hunt’s sculpture can be a potential encounter with the sublime…I was drawn to opening night of his recent show at David Weinberg in Chicago, like a moth to the flame.

Now a gallery opening is neither the place nor time to study an artist’s work…but watching the calm, affable, unassuming figure of Richard Hunt move within the crowd of both well-wishers and his own work was a revelation.

Richard Hunt’s sculpture generally reveals 3 basic metaphors…

One is what I call the Bridge. A sense of iron / steel bridgework that most often speaks of Integration…in the best sense of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s work.

In this show, it was most vividly represented by the non-organic forms of a 1974 Untitled lithograph. Forms that supported organic, vine forms or plants…not in decay, like Roman ruins…but much more contemporary, and optimistic…almost prescient…relating to the changes vis à vis our country’s new presidency.

Two is what I call Oppression / Compression. Organic curves and sweeps, buds and branches that reveal the strength and vigor of new growth. A natural vitality manifesting despite the ruthless pruning or heavy handed restrictions of Discrimination.

Hybrid Totem, a 2007 bronze piece readily demonstrates this metaphor as something of an abstract, pruned grapevine. A form whose emphasis is not as much on the forces that shaped it…as it is on the simple vigor and exuberant life it manifests. Comparing this piece with a 1980 color screenprint entitled Purple…one can see that even back then…before the work of the Bridge metaphor had come to today’s fruition…there was good wine being made from these grapes. And it’s as if the artist was a visionary predicting today’s change.

But instead this is one of Richard Hunt’s enduring and most remarkable strengths…. that there is no bitterness in his Compressive metaphor. There is only sober strength, calm growth and optimism, and even a bit of giddy celebration.

The 3^rd metaphor, Flight, is the one most easy to observe. A nuanced example is Sculptured Place II. A whimsical bronze combination of mosque, cathedral, and Gehry opera house paradoxically sitting in the luscious forms of some beautiful liquid mud flat. As if the religious spirit in man requires just such rich alchemical depth in order to achieve the great heights Hunt apparently knows and trusts.

Richard Hunt doesn’t create meaningless abstraction….

And he doesn’t pose emasculated, intellectual conundrums for only cognoscenti to enjoy…

He surprises and delights.

And in this show I was surprised by what I sense to be a 4^th, new metaphor. One that could be called Play. A mixture of heavy, compressive, yet fluid forms with an immersion into depth.

It seems apparent in a startlingly different 2008 piece called Posiedon…with the form of a whale’s tail diving beneath some common oceanic threshold. And then seems confirmed in the 2001 piece Low Flight…with forms and rivets suggestive of an aircraft wing…yet possessing that same curious tail indicative of playful energy immersed in this compressed and concentrated form.

Among numerous delights were wonderful (and surprising) Self-Portraits…most notably perhaps was Incline With Rising Curve. An elegant homage to Julio Gonzalez with a cheeky reference to Chicago’s own Picasso…and saying here, as with each of the Self-Portraits…Twisted Fiddler, Legeresque, Harlequin, and Form in Evolution...I stand not alone, but on the shoulders of giants.

Well…there’s a new giant for the rest of us, and he lives (and works) in the City of Broad Shoulders.

Richard Hunt on a wild night in 1992...

Walking home from my office one mild October evening...and passing the northeast corner of Jonquil Playlot Park with Richard Hunt’s homage to John Peter Altgeld...(one Illinois Governor who actually deserved some genuine praise) it began raining like hell...

But the cool thing was, that there was heavy thunder with lightning flashing practically non-stop...and despite the rain (and possible danger), I stopped to watch...knowing that somehow this was a show that just shouldn’t be missed...

Fortunately for me, I was carrying my plastic Arrow camera...

My Arrow was a cheapo Diana clone whose shutter spring had finally given up the ghost after way too few rolls of film...leaving me with a toy camera that was pretty much useless except in two very particular situations.

One of those situations was meant for the near future, as I had decided to turn it into a pinhole camera. The shutter could be held open by tape...and closed whenever I figured I'd waited long enough for a decent exposure...

(and boy oh boy...did that ever get me into trouble...but that's another cool image and story for another day...)

So this other ideal situation for my poor, overworked Arrow...was staring me right in the face...

First of all...rain couldn't hurt my plastic camera in the least...

and second...holding the shutter open in the near pitch dark of the night would produce no image until one of those bolts of lightning would enter the frame...

I can't even describe to you how excited I was to be standing there and catching lightning on film...while that same lightning was actually illuminating something way more extraordinary than the night sky...

I just stood there with my heart pounding and tried to calmly frame my shots...focusing on those sculptures I respected and knew so nearly intimately...

and let the lightning (like some fantastic, sublime strobe light) do the rest...

And I use that word sublime maybe because I felt kinda like the way Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings look/ed to me...

and when I finally ran out of film...I was so excited and happy I was shaking inside...and so maybe those paintings really do come closest to describing the way I felt...

As if I had just been in one...

And I sure as hell just knew that some of those negatives were gonna turn out well and maybe show something of what had just happened to me...

I suppose the concept of a "peak experience" makes sense in this context...

But all I knew was that I felt more alive than ever...

Even if all I was doing was standing out in the rain with a toy camera, looking at some mildly abstract sculpture...

That October night was back in 1992...

about 4 years after the sculptures were created...but only 3 months after I had first studied Richard Hunt’s work...and I found that work to be maybe not so aesthetically beautiful...but conceptually, his work is always born of absolute artistic and human integrity...and his work easily and generously shares that integrity with whomever has any time at all to spend with it...  

Richard Hunt doesn’t create meaningless abstraction.... Far from it...

And he doesn’t pose some emasculated, intellectual conundrums for only cognoscenti to enjoy...

But (for now) I digress...

It has taken me all these years to get back to the task of scanning those negatives of that wild and happy night...

and now I have hopes of producing something more polished, coherent, satisfying and communicative than the many workprints of them I had produced so sporadically...

and so these negatives...which I hope to do some real digital justice to, constitute yet another important piece of my beloved, but terribly piecemeal photo portfolio...

Now that it’s nearly impossible for me to return to a darkroom...doing the best I can with whatever digital equipment I’ve got has suddenly taken a real shot in the arm...

and Richard Hunt’s late / latest show here in Chicago seems to have provided that boost of energy and enthusiasm....

I'm currently working on my notes and images from the show...and will soon have plenty more to say about Richard Hunt’s marvelous work...but getting back to these images after 17 years...i.e. my own work...is just a pleasure, despite the time devouring horrors of digital techno-hell and steep, slippery learning curves for this hard-and-soft-ware impaired photo geek / art critic....

Man...! I really was old school 35 mm, you know...? Doing my own color film and print processing... (that Jobo processor with the lift was a dream!)

and for sure...color was, and still is my favorite medium... thanks to some timely, perceptive, and sage advice from Robert Clarke-Davis...

The other half of his seriously helpful advice was to work harder and build up my portfolio...

so...despite the many unphotogenic detours I’ve often taken...I'm actually doing just that...

now I have to figure out why photoshop is taking so damn long to scan my second Richard Hunt Eagle negative...

At this distinctly Capricornian rate, my best work is all gonna find itself called Posthumous...    

Père Lachaise...

Okay...really....

I swear!

I’m on my way to the David Weinberg Gallery (one of the very best in Chicago) to see and take notes on the rest of the work in the Richard Hunt show....

I've been so busy with school and teaching and making a living that really living almost always has to take a back seat...

And for me...really living involves chewing on the metaphors of really great art.

But in order to find great art to chew on, sometimes it's necessary to take in all sorts of mediocrities...

and then actually figuring out that something is mediocre takes time...and attention....

I can’t simply write somebody’s work off as a mediocrity unless I’ve actually penetrated the metaphor...

And all of this takes time that I too often just don’t have...

(or worse...I've got...but can’t seem to change gears quickly enough to utilize.)

Maybe there’s an easier way than the one I choose to follow...which is to actually treat work as genuine art...until proven otherwise...but there’s no reliable shortcut that I've ever heard of...

I once asked a Famous Art Critic who lectured to us how she deals with the need to spend so much time with new work....

and her answer always struck me as cavalier...

She said that if it took her longer than 5 minutes to figure out the metaphor, she would essentially trash the work....

Of course now I can certainly appreciate her sense of Capricorn efficiency...

But I guess I'm personally intrigued by any and all so-called art works...good or bad...at least as a manifestation of the artist’s psyche...

Although I must say...that if somebody produces a whole lotta mediocrity...I can be awfully bored and disappointed...and not at all inclined to offer the gift of constructive criticism....

And then there's the obvious question...

Why not rely on the curatorial labors of one museum or another where "great works" tend to be reliably on display...?

And of course, I've got a long winded answer to that...

but let's just say that so many great museums are really not much more than art cemeteries...with a bunch of impressionist headstones and a few renaissance headstones and plenty of baroque headstones, etc...not to mention the picasso headstones scattered all over the place....

Visit one cemetery / museum like this and you’ve pretty much visited them all....

it's not the work I object to...or the artists...but the fact that it’s almost impossible to chew on master works when they’re presented (as they usually are) like just so many headstones in Père Lachaise....

Okay...it’s already getting late...and I gotta get moving or this Richard Hunt show is gonna close before I can finish writing about it....

Richard Hunt at David Weinberg Gallery...

we are just so fucking fortunate to have Richard Hunt living and working in Chicago...

He has a one man show at david weinberg here in Chicago that runs through May 30th, and if you don’t know all that much about him, it’s worth a visit...

but if you DO know something about his work...you’re going to be delighted...

I was assigned the task of writing an essay about a two man show at the now defunct Terra Museum back in 1992...

It featured the work of Richard Hunt...the abstract poet of bronze... along with the work of Richmond Barthé...another Chicago sculptor.... someone who could be called the romantic figurative poet of bronze...and both men depicted the real African Americans...not some figment of any white man’s imagination....

To view their work together was to be allowed a generous glimpse of the real African American spirit in a way that movies or novels or possibly even biographies have never done....

And coming now from a Traditional Asian Medicine education...I can say that they captured the Qi of African Americans in bronze...

The dynamism and muscularity of Richard Hunt’s abstracts in combination with the poetry of Richmond Barthé’s literal and abstract expressionist figures made for a powerful experience of education for me as a white man...and numinosity for me as an artist and critic...

And now today...I spent time paying attention to some of Richard Hunt’s more recent works and metaphors...

An hour in the gallery taking photos, identifying works, and then writing my personal insights about the metaphors I felt drawn to left me both exhausted and exhilarated.

It also left me with another room full of larger pieces and works on paper to study...

and so until I complete that study, I won’t be able to write a complete (and Virgoan) review with confidence...

But I can say that the image detail above...the one I've included here, is one small edge of a smaller piece entitled Sculptured Place II...

The piece is only 11 inches tall but looks almost like a fanciful combination of mosque, cathedral, and Frank Geary opera house...

And the form above is something of a beautiful liquid mud flat...as if this house of worship were placed exactly on the tidal flats of human conception...

Although the likelihood, knowing Richard Hunt’s usual turn of metaphor, is that this perhaps harmoniously integrated symbol of man’s natural religion / religious spirit has grown up gloriously out of the beautiful rich mud right along with him...and wasn’t just somehow placed there...

And okay...I’ll leave it all there for now...

but I've got so much more to share about my sense of Richard Hunt’s bronze poetry and metaphor...

if you wanna hear (and see) it....

And of course if you don’t...I’m still gonna have to talk about him and his work...

There’s a piece of my own soul that he’s generously pointed out to me...

And I would just be a fool to ignore that....

instead of being one of the crazy deranged fools that I am...  

baloney...

packaging may be one hell of an important thing...

but somehow I can’t help feeling annoyed by this...

and talk about annoyed...you should have seen the scowl the lady behind the deli counter gave me when I took this photo...

it’s like she was reading my mind...

but just now I remembered seeing Rauschenberg’s Coca Cola Plan for the first time...and realizing that he was doing (among other things) some very valuable, albeit subversive, deconstructing of advertising and packaging....

so...I didn’t take this photo because I wanted to be like Bob...

Robert Rauschenberg simply had a unique talent and genius for actually seeing what was right in front of him, and eloquently exposing the emperor’s new clothes....

I took it because I felt compelled...

Because somehow I always need to point at what I see in order to acknowledge anything and everything that feels important...

And what I was seeing here was something parading around in pathos...

so in my struggle to point out that somewhat gut-wrenching pathos, I tried (as I always do) putting a frame around it...

but don’t think I understood this at the time...

I was only annoyed...and acting somewhat sarcastically with my camera lens...

so of course that deli lady was miffed...

but I also know that I sometimes see clearly only after I've separated the image from its surroundings...

and that lady’s annoyance was only mirroring my own...

so maybe that’s one use of photography...

something I could probably call alchemy...

seeing clearly enough to turn my own ignorant annoyance into something much more valuable...

like empathy...

and that, for sure, is why it felt so fucking important...  

what’s the use of photography...?

to my mind this is one hell of an important question...

one that I’m sure has been properly answered by sharper minds elsewhere...

but since I carry a camera around with me everywhere I go, I find that it’s the camera that does the asking...

and somehow I feel that it’s still waiting for my own definitive answer...

after which, perhaps, we’re gonna get along famously...

no...it’s not national velvet elvis day...

but in reference to a semi-private conversation about the concept of owning a velvet elvis, I’ve been meaning to display my own, semi-treasured pink velvet elvis... and have now semi-successfully installed him on a semi-appropriate wall in my semi-strange kitchen....

now...what’s the use of having a velvet elvis...you (may or may not) ask?

and what’s the use of all this semi-silliness...you might (or might not) add?

well...being a Libra...I’d have to happily say “None” to the first question.

Art doesn’t have to be beautiful. It’s just gotta remind you of who you really are.

No...not literally!

But if an image doesn’t remind you that your life is beautiful...despite what that voice between your ears is constantly telling you...well...then it probably isn’t art.

and then...in response to the add-on...having too much Virgo for my own good hidden in my chart...I seem to have to qualify just about everything...

but here’s The Thing about Elvis....

he’s (a very kitschy-american representation of) the Khidr...

he’s immortal...and he’s found everywhere...

now...even in my kitchen...

 

spectacular art work on sale in walgreens!!!

forget MoMA, ignore Sonnabend, and screw Sotheby's. If you wanna see or buy great art... just walk into walgreens.... hell, there’s even a special on....

okay...so maybe you’d have to come to Chicago to see this particular work...which just may be a once in a lifetime - one of a kind masterpiece...

and just in case you think I'm joking... just look at the art historical inspiration for this spectacular curatorial gem...

wait!!! 

there’s more!

I’m also reminded me of the tomb of St. Josaphat beneath the altar of St Basil (in San Peter’s at the Vatican)...but I couldn’t find an image of him anywhere on the internet...

if any of you guys out there know of a link to him in his tomb...or actually have an image to share...I’d love to link to it here....

thanks...

kristo