Colescott and Guston

Last week we focused on John McCracken's Black Box, being one of two pieces artist and writer Pat Boas would focus on at the museum's monthly artist talk. The other piece, untitled, by Philip Guston, we haven't shown you yet.
The essence of Boas' talk boiled down McCracken as the eternal optimist always looking to create a pure form (ie. something that beings from another planet might leave on earth) and Guston the eternal pessimist, who's work is a reflection of living with racism, the vietnam war and the struggles and abuses man does to man. Guston's style is cartoon like, at one point Boas quoted someone else who said Guston painted "satanic with a smile".
In the descriptions of Colescott's work I am coming across the words "cartoon" and "personal narrative" and "satire", these descriptives remind me of Guston, the light blue background, the hooded figure with the red speckles on his cape and also on the bed-like figure behind him, the giant red wound in the middle of the piece and the oversized cartoon hand whose finger is pointing at it. Take a look at this Guston:

The figures are not that different from the one in the painting at the art museum. The cartoon nature of Colescott and Guston's figures and the social commentary they wish to share, the sick sadness behind the myth, the bright colors they choose to paint them in, these things hold these two artists together. Look at these two images, one is Colescott the other is Guston, I'm sure you can tell which is which. They are like two rooms in the same building.

Robert Colescott ~ Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder and Appropriations

Robert Colescott's Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder (1979) was given to the Portland Art Museum in 2007 by Arlene and Harold Schnitzer. The presentation was made in honor of the appointment of Brian J. Ferriso, The Marilyn H. and Dr. Robert B. Pamplin, Jr. Director of the Portland Art Museum! Painted in the seventies, it's not surprising to see Colescott use Matisse's La Danse as one of the themes of the painting. During that period Colescott was appropriating masterpieces of art history and combining them with his own racial, sexual and political themes. As Amy mentioned about the four other works being shown at this time at the Portland Art Museum, Robert Colescott's paintings are provocative. David Lefkowitz commented about Colescott's work with his own provocative statement... "There is something in this work to piss off nearly everyone, regardless of race, sex, and class, and attitude to the history and craft of painting. It's no coincidence that those categories are the primary subjects of his art."

Take a look at this very short video on Robert Colescott. In it you'll get to see Colescott himself talk about Eat Dem Taters. Taters was painted in 1975 and is a riff on van Gogh's The Potato Eaters, 1885.

Beauty is in The Eye of the Beholder

Robert Colescott was born in 1925 in Oakland California. This painting was done in 1979, it currently graces the lobby of the Portland Art Museum with four other highly provocative pieces by Colescott. The title of the painting, also the title of this post, is written on a little piece of paper at the bottom left, and in the painter's eye is you, the viewer. The painting within the painting is a reference to The Dance by Matisse.
Matisse's piece is Fauvist, primative, and was done in 1910. Colescott uses irony to expose his personal narratives. Take the half nude white woman as she dresses, with her stockings and her black bra. All her parts hanging out, in her red high heels and her dyed blonde hair. She too, is in the eye of the artist, the one who beholds you as you behold him, and all this to expose some beauty in the world....to make me ask myself what beauty is.
These paintings grab you, shake you out of your thoughts, beckon you to get closer, then open up like that long black coat on a flasher in the park that you'll never forget.

John McCracken ~ Sketchbook and Kindergarten

Yikes, I was all set to write about John McCracken's process. You know, what it takes to make those beautiful, luminous objects -- the cubes, the planks, the rectangles. the blocks, perhaps a pyramid. Then I saw a review of his newly published book entitled Sketchbook and was taken totally off track. The image of the book above is from Amazon. Click this link to see a different version.

The book itself is a compilation of McCracken's sketches from 1964 to 1968. Zane Fischer, the reviewer tells us "The sketches frequently are accompanied by his scrawled thoughts, and there is an easy harmony between the evolution of the blocks on the page and the philosophical and metaphysical meanderings of the mind behind the notes." He goes on to offer this nugget about play and creativity. "The sketches are a demonstrative thesis on the value of play and the correlation between hand and mind, object and idea. If play were still valued over performance, performance would improve and translations—particularly for physical and visual objects—would be unnecessary."

That discussion leads into Fischer's suggestion that we all leave a heap of Froebel blocks (Friedrich Froebel was the inventor of kindergarten back in the early 19th century) on our kitchen table when we have guests over to our homes. No one will be able to resist stacking the blocks and no two people will stack them the same. Froebel evidently had a significant influence on Frank Lloyd Wright as well other architects and artists including Braque, Klee and Mondrian.

Who knows if John McCracken had any Froebel blocks. What we do know is he continues to create these beautiful objects, thinking of them first and then producing them himself. He will spend hours upon hours mixing colors and sanding surfaces. At one point he hired an assistant but that didn't last; McCracken is too much of a perfectionist. So each and everyone of McCracken's sculptures has been part of him for many hours. As a person who time travels, John McCracken could also be there with you the next time you visit the Black Box or any of his other sculptures. Look for him in the reflection off the Black Box; he's the very tall, very thin man looking into the distance.

Inspired by Pat Boas

Why did Pat Boas choose Black Box? To get the answer to this question is the main reason I look forward to the artist talk. It is a week of wonder, what will she find to talk about for half an hour with this seemingly silent object? It won't hurt that she is a writer, and here are some of her words:

"In my work I explore the vernacular structures with which we communicate, often finding visual poetry in the ephemeral, ambiguous nature of their common codes. Examining the play between word as image and image as word, I have come to regard reading and writing as mysterious acts—ones that bind us together yet are intensely private."



This is Pat Boas' installation space for the Portland Building. Her comment about the mystery of that which both binds us and is private reminds me of how I felt about Buck's jar- the things that are inside and yet visible at the same time. And I agree that something about McCracken is ephemeral, I will keep my notepad handy to capture her visual poetry about it.

John McCracken ~ Stonehenge, Planks

Why wasn't I surprised to see a tall thin man standing erect, pillar like, when I found this image of John McCracken outside his New Mexico home? Later when reading an interview with him he was asked if his planks weren't like portraits of himself. He had to admit that they probably were and he could see himself more often creating portly sculptures if his own body type were not quite so lithe. He very much could be part of Stonehenge himself.

Looking at the photo again and seeing this tall thin man looking skyward, it also wasn't surprising to find that McCracken has a connection with the paranormal, UFO's and aliens. When asked if he is a follower of Eastern philosophy, his response is that he finds it like Western religion, philosophy and psychology -- a bit stilted and rigid. His interests run to Casteneda and Edgar Cayce and the channeled entity called Seth. When describing his own work John McCracken has said:

You've got a physical object that exists in different lighting conditions, environments and you're mixing different states and atmospheres of mind. So you have many possibilities for different kinds of perception. Sometimes my work looks like junk to me-stupid and brainless. And other times it looks like messages from the world I have interest in.

Others have described his work with their finely finished surfaces as being dramatically alive, perhaps like a computer screen or a pool of water. Or somewhere in between -- I know that the Black Box can evoke all sorts of reactions but they're all very positive. Ultimately McCracken's work whether it is the Black Box or his planks is very positive and optimistic.

Stonehenge in Washington

One of the best things about Stonehenge, for an Oregon girl, is that you don't have to go all the way to England to see it, you can see an almost identical replica of it right across the Columbia River from Biggs Junction, just an hour east of Hood River. I was there a month ago, after visiting Maryhill Museum. I was with my uncle and my niece, she's nine. She sat in the car while we wandered Stonehenge because she was so mad at us for taking her through the Rodin collection at Maryhill museum, so much erotic nude sculpture really shook her up. We didn't realize exactly what we would see downstairs in the Rodin exhibit, just past the hundreds of chess sets from the world over. When she said lets get out of here, we did. She still wanted to sit and stew while we surveyed the blossoming orchards of the Klickitat county just above the Columbia river. Nine year olds do better with McCracken Black Box's in my experience, than they do with Rodin's sculpture. If you're not nine I hope you go to Stonehenge and Rodin at Maryhill very soon.
As for healing powers, I have no doubt McCracken's art has some, but I won't be chipping off any of his sculptures for health reasons, these are made of plywood with a coating of fiberglass finished off with a polyester resin. It reminds me of the book I'm reading by Tom Spanbauer, Now Is The Hour, when the main character Rigby John plays the game poison with Puke, the bologna breath radio obsessed boy from his grade school. They go around the farm and put every toxic chemical they can find into a bucket, the whole time I'm reading I'm thinking, please don't let them drink it.

This one is called light and was made 5 years ago. It was just up at David Zwirner in New York last fall.