Read or finished:

33 Artists in 3 Acts by Sarah Thornton

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

John Currin articles:

a. John Currin, Painting’s Male Provocateur, Turns his Brush to Men [GQ Sept 2019]

b. Irresistible, by Peter Schjeldahl [12/7/2003, New Yorker]

I assumed that Currin’s skilled, sly, ineffably old-fashioned work—pastiches of Old Masters and hack illustration, in easel paintings fit for a bygone Beaux-Arts salon—would remain a renegade taste, marginal to video, photography, installations, and other dominant, paint-allergic modes of contemporary art.

But to resist Currin’s claim to preëminence in art’s present state and near-future course suddenly seems beyond anyone’s ability.

[. . . .]

You wouldn’t think that resourceful, unremitting, honed offensiveness would be a winning artistic strategy. By rights, Currin’s radical conservatism ought to disgust art-world cognoscenti, and conservatives should abhor his poisoned-sugar erotica. So what’s up?

I hazard that in Currin’s art manifold pleasure disarms revulsion—without eliminating it. He demonstrates the power of the aesthetic to overrule our normal taste, morality, and intellectual convictions.

[. . . . /close of article/]

He announces a situation in which artists, wielding art, trump critics who enforce ideas. If his paintings are to be effectively countered, it must be by other, newer, better paintings.

c. Lifting the Veil by Calvin Tompkins [New Yorker profile 1/21/2008]

[the lede]

The painting shows three young women standing close together in a room. The woman in the middle faces us directly, head held high; her dress is falling open, and her bra has been pulled down to expose both breasts. On either side of her, the other two—one nude, one wearing a chic cocktail dress unzipped in back—touch her erotically. The canvas is eighty-eight inches high by sixty-eight wide. It has the scale and pyramidal structure of a Renaissance altarpiece, but, according to John Currin, who began work on it four days ago, the immediate source was an Internet porn site. What struck him about the image, he explains, was “this completely archaic pose, like the three witches or something. I think of them as Danish, because of the thinning blond hair and the gaps between the teeth. They’re not pretty enough to be Swedes. Oh, and I want to do a still-life down there in the lower right corner. I don’t really know where this picture is going yet, but I think it’s going to work.”

[ . . . . /A complication; rising action/]

A reason presented itself soon enough, in the headlines about riots in the Islamic world over twelve Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. “The response to that totally shocked me,” Currin said at dinner that night. “That the Times decided that it was not going to show the cartoons—O.K., they’re terrible-ass cartoons from a quality standpoint, but the idea that those thugs get offended and we just acquiesce, that was the most astonishing display of cowardice. And also the killing of Theo van Gogh, the film director, by some jihadist in Amsterdam—all of a sudden the most liberal societies in the world were having intimidation murders happen. That’s when it occurred to me that we might lose this thing—not the Iraq war but the larger struggle.” When I asked how this tied into his making pornographic paintings, Currin talked about low birth rates in Europe, and people having sex without having babies, and pornography as a kind of elegy to liberal culture, at which point I lost the thread. “I know how right wing this sounds,” I recall him saying, “but I was thinking how pornography could be a superstitious offering to the gods of a dying race.”

[. . . ./ the closing grafs/]

A week before Christmas, the painting suddenly came together. The body of the right-hand figure, indistinct until now, looked fully three-dimensional, with luscious flesh tones and a sensuous play of light and shadow on her belly. Currin had sketched in grisaille a still-life of bone-china cups and plates at the lower right, and he had turned the bed behind the three figures into a distinct presence, with a rumpled sheet and a curvy leg copied from his and Rachel’s flamboyantly rococo bed at home. Right now, he planned to concentrate on the three figures. “There’s not enough depth in them,” he said. The painting, he said, would not be in his upcoming show in London. Larry Gagosian had told me earlier that he would like to have this one himself—something dealers are inclined to say when they want to establish a record price.

Currin had agreed sometime earlier, rather reluctantly, to let me watch him paint, but somehow this had not happened. Today it did. He set up a palette, choosing three tubes of Robert Doak oil paint from a worktable piled high with several dozen others, and squeezing out small dollops from each. The colors were yellow ochre, vermillion, and Turkey umber, which registers as blackish green. From a lineup of liquid mediums in glass bottles, each of which had a different consistency and drying time, he selected a mixture of stand oil and balsam and poured a little of it into a small cup that was affixed to the palette. “And here’s the white I’m so excited about,” he said, squeezing from a larger tube of lead white. He went to work right away, dabbing a rather large bristle brush first into the white, and then the umber and the other two colors, mixing them quickly with a little of the oil medium on the palette, remixing until he had the brownish tone he was after, and then applying it to the leg of the central figure with quick, deft strokes. He walked back ten or twelve paces, looking, then added more vermillion and went over the section again, making it darker at the outside edge of the leg and lighter toward the middle.

I was surprised to see how fast he worked. After about ten minutes, the brownish pigment, applied over the white ground, had made its magical transition into live flesh. “I have about an hour before it gets sticky and becomes unworkable,” he explained. Now and then, he used his index finger to blur or blend the paint. “Say I want a sort of purply knee, slightly bruised or something,” he said. “I go in with black and red, maybe a little yellow.” He did so. He switched to a sable brush, much softer than the one he had been using, to work around the knee. “It starts to multiply, the grading of tones, until it becomes thousands of tones,” he reflected. “Some are accidental and some are intentional. It’s great when the accidental becomes indistinguishable from the intentional. That’s when it begins to seem like a living thing.” Watching him, it occurred to me that every brushstroke, every gradation in tone reflected a body of knowledge and a capacity for intuitive decisions that reached backward and forward in time. Also, that the art of figurative painting, which has been around for twenty thousand years or so, retains enough challenges to keep us enthralled for an additional millennium or two.

Currin stood back to look at what he’d done, then picked up a soft cloth and began wiping it off. The central figure’s legs, he said, would eventually be sheathed in green stockings. He had just been showing me how he worked.

The demonstration made me think of three other things he had said during our talks:

“The meaning of the painting is what you do with your hands.”

“The way things are painted trumps everything else.”

“So much art now doesn’t want to look like art, but painting can’t help it.”

The artist who devours the world by Scott Indirisek, [profile of Katherine Bernhardt, GQ Sept 2019]

“I guess that's my aesthetic,” Bernhardt says, “raw, stained, messy, using-your-hand-in-it art.”

[. . . .]

But when it comes to her own practice, Bernhardt is reserved, if not mildly uncomfortable. She seems uninterested in unpacking the hows and whys of her paintings: the meaning of an oversized Star Wars stormtrooper, her thoughts on Jerry Saltz dubbing her a “female bad-boy painter.” It seems enough that Bernhardt has made these things, launched them out into the world, let them speak in their own self-assured, proudly doofy way. She'd rather bitch about the way crypto-bros have driven up rents in San Juan, or tell me about how obsessed she is with the emo rapper Juice WRLD (Shout your name in hills in the valley, goes her current favorite track, “Desire.” Whole world's gonna know you love me.) And while she does read her own reviews, Bernhardt puts more faith in a different audience. Recently she had a solo show at upstate New York's Art Omi—Pink Panthers posing with cigarettes, Scotch-tape rolls, clusters of bananas—and she was psyched to learn that the center's youngest visitors were responding to the work. Classes were being held. A future generation was learning that art can be as weird, scuzzy, and funny as you dare it to be. “When kids like it,” she says, “I know that it's good.”

Getting the World into Poems, by Charles Simic [NYRB 6/25/2010, reviewing Koethe, Armantrout, and T. Hoagland]

Nothing There: The late poetry of John Koethe, Robert Hahn, Kenyon Review, July 2017

Re-read

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (title story) By J.D. Salinger

Hot, Cold, Heavy Light, by Peter Scheldahl [essay on Beuys, Peter Hujar, profile of Harrison, Whistler]

A Sense of Direction, by G. Lewis-Krauss [first two parts]

Reading

Whistler, life for art’s sake, Daniel Sutherland

The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan

The Burning House, by Hanya Yanagihara [paris review website]

A Writer’s Berlin, by Jeffrey Eugenides [food and wine]

The Use of Beautiful Places by Angie Mlinko [FS&G website]

Whole Earth Troubadour by Angie Mlinko [review of W.S. Merwin, NY Review of Books 12/17/2017

The Aesthetics of Enchantment by Rebecca Ariel Port [review of Angie Mlinko Marvelous Things Overhead, LARB 11/10/13]

The questionnaire interviews Angie Mlinko [LARB 3/15/13]

5 days in Tokyo with Justin Theroux by Cam Wolf (GQ, Sept. 2019)

To be read (aspirations in progress)

Zen and Japanese Culture, D.T. Suzuki [Purchased Kawaza Museum in Oct. 2018, been “reading” Since then]

Swann’s Way (Davis) [Week One:   through page 14]

Compare Howard:

This teasing inflicted by my great- aunt, the spectacle of my grandmother’s vain entreaties and of her efforts, doomed in advance, to take the liqueur-glass away from my grandfather, were the kind of things you grow used to later in life, to the point of smiling at them and blithely siding with the persecutor deliberately enough to convince yourself that no persecution is involved; but at the time they so horrified me that I wanted to hit my great-aunt. Yet as soon as I would hear “Bathilde, come and stop your husband from drinking cognac!” already a man in my cowardice, I did what we all do, once we have grown up, when we confront suffering and injustice: I chose not to see them.

with Davis:

This torture which my great-aunt inflicted on her, the spectacle of my grandmother’s entreaties and of her weakness, defeated in advance, trying uselessly to take the liquer glass away from my grandfather, are the kind of things which you later became so accustomed to seeing that you smile as you contemplate them and take the part of the persecutor resolutely and gaily enough to persuade yourself privately that no persecution is involved; at that time they filled me with such horror that I would have liked to hit my great aunt. But is soon as I heard: “Bathilde, come and stop your husband from drinking cognac!,” already a man in my cowardice, I did what we all do, once we are grown up, when confronted with sufferings and injustices: I did not want to see them;

Old Masters, by Thomas Bernhard [10 pages in, need to start anew]