2013-04-21: Artsy-fartsy pretentious tripe

Last year Mr Mo and I went to “Gallery Weekend Berlin” on the last weekend in April. We ended up visiting quite a few galleries in several different locations around central Berlin (“Mitte”) — many in repurposed factories. (I think I took a fair number of photos, but it seems that they were among those that didn’t get backed up before my laptop was stolen, alas. I will have to ask Mr Mo if he took some.)

Anyway, what prompts this little entry is the explanatory sheet that we were given about a particular artist’s work, which also came with another sheet showing thumbnails and the dimensions of the paintings on display. Gosh. About the best I can say is that I didn’t despise Michael Williams’ “This Means Something to My Horse” exhibit as much as I totally hate most of Cy Twombly’s stuff, but it was a clear runner-up.† Here is the amazingly creative, best-face-on-it description of his work: 

Michael Williams paints the uncanny, with a tendency toward the outright ludicrous. (‘Ludicrous’ — got that part right.) His colorful, large-scale paintings combine automatic (read: ‘unplanned’) drawing, images appropriated from thrift store finds and discarded pictures(!!), and an array of abstract forms and gestures, all rendered with a freely diverse range of painterly techniques. Often beginning with thin, doodle-like drawings made with an airbrush, Williams layers his canvases with glazes or denser passages of paint squeezed from the tube or slathered with a knife, creating a surreal optical disorientation and depth. (Polite way of saying “an incoherent mess.’) Williams’ inventive approach to painting and his idiosyncratic visual vocabulary recall the visceral, sun-bleached narratives of Don Van Vliet or Sigmar Polke’s 70s psychedelia, exploring with wit and humor the boundaries of the strange and familiar.

A hallmark of poor art for me is how much curator blathering is required to convince people that what they’re seeing is truly art, instead of trusting their own crap-meters. As with Twombly’s scribbles, I am amazed that anyone takes this sort of “art” seriously at all. (Fine, fine, chalk this all up to jealousy on my part. — I’d have more to be jealous about if I were actually producing more art and trying and failing to get noticed, of course.)

† OK, fine, there are a few pieces of Williams’ that I actually kind of like — e.g., “Do you need it with mustard?” (Alas, the link to the thumbnails page for the exhibit no longer works, so “judge for yourself” no longer applies, though I’ve now found a link to a mention + illustrations.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2017-07-30: Waiting for “elle nous a quitté”

(Originally published on mofembot.com) I received a note the end of July from the sister of Odile, my grenobloise friend, telling me that Odile’s health had taken a turn for the worse and that she no longer fully recognizes her surroundings. And two months ago, C wrote to say that “parfois elle est consciente de son état, autres fois, elle espère encore” — “sometimes she is conscious of her state, other times, she still hopes” — a sentence I find so poignant that it still brings tears to my eyes.   I have not heard from C since, although she has said that my weekly emails are appreciated. As is so often the case for those suffering from long-term illness, no direct contact with anyone other than a tiny circle of intimate friends and family for many months means that it is easy to be — not forgotten, exactly, but no longer a focus of attention among one’s larger circle of friends and colleagues. This is normal. I feel I owe Odile so much that I want her — or at least her family...
Read more

2009-10-18: Archivist or packrat?

Okay, I know the answer to this one, especially after having spent part of today wallowing in a sea of receipts, museum and movie tickets, birthday and anniversary cards, brochures, maps, photos, and other potential/real memorabilia. Not to mention Papers That Must Be Kept for tax purposes for a minimum of seven or ten years or whatever the current French or American statute requires. (In reality, of course, such papers may abide with me eternally.) I have a respectable box full of papers that will go to the recycling bin tomorrow. But the box barely makes a dent, as certain Family Detractors will no doubt point out with a mix of glee and exasperation. Andy Warhol kept a lot of papers as well, with each year’s worth of invitations and programs and suchlike deposited into its very own large drawer. It is the stuff of dreams from a researcher’s point of view, or at least a biographer’s, I suppose. I don’t know if Warhol’s collection includes anything quite so pedestrian as receipts from ...
Read more

2009-02-27: Cutting-edge adventures

“Adventure” is a bit strong. This post is about cutting. No, not self-mutilation (although I had to deal with that god-awful phenomenon when I was a school principal), but more like cutting out paper dolls. Only what I’m cutting out (endlessly, endlessly) are the zillions of doodles I’ve drawn over the years (nearly always during interminable meetings of one sort or another). First of all, the doodles: I figured out that doodling is not a distraction: rather, it helps me focus. It is the manual equivalent of something I seem to do subconsciously when driving: humming/singing the same tune over and over again (but in a “theme-and-variations” kind of way). I have not been formally diagnosed with ADD (attention deficit disorder), but I sure have all the classic signs, and yes, the “extra activity” (be it humming or doodling) takes up enough of that part of my brain that is distractible to allow the rest of my brain to focus on the meeting at hand (to listen and actively participate). My ...
Read more