The Veils of Aleppo: Photos of War-Torn Syria

                 These are recent photographs by the photographer Franco Pagetti taken in Aleppo, Syria. Residents use large sheets to shield their homes from snipers. http://www.exposureguide.com/culture/the-veils-of-alepo-photos-of-war-torn-syria/

love letter to an oil painting

What is it like to lose oneself in the image?

San Francisco detective Scottie Ferguson gasps and about to lose it as  his dream of the ultimate beauty is about to emerge from his bathroom (Vertigo, director Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

"It's more a nursing of an image that haunts me, and letting it sit and breed in my mind…" 

This is the reply given by artist Robert Gober in a 1993 interview when asked about the strangeness of his work where he sets up his sculptural objects in what he called "dioramas."  Whether it is a section of a body -such as a man's leg- that appears to be sticking out from a white wall, a disembodied torso-like object that is half-male half-female flaccidly propped up, or the distorted cribs that he calls "traumatic playpens,"  I get a sense that something traumatic was witnessed or felt- so much so that no amount of verbal complexity could pronounce it, and that the only recourse is to transform the experience into a highly sensuous and physical reality.  His installation of sculptured objects qualifies as that reality.  And it's a reality with an overarching sense of loss.

The sublime moving image dreamed by Daria (Zabriskie Point, director  mIchelangelo Antonioni,  1970)

Daria, who loses herself in the contemplation of the sublime blow up above. 

And so in matters concerning works of art, when I hear the word "lose" and "loss," Gober's work is the first thing that comes to my mind. But he is merely one among many artists throughout history who have broached the subject of loss.  As long as radical shifts occur from one cultural, social and political movement to another, perhaps it is reasonable to think that the artist who happens to stride that shift cannot help but feel and internalize the kind of aesthetic, theoretical and symbolic earthquakes and aftershocks that come when their meaningful contexts undergo frenetic transformation.  

There's Nicolas Poussin painting his "Et in Arcadia Ego," living in a time of religious conflict and excessively increasing monarchic authority in Baroque France, and so his execution of this painting must be in acknowledgment of the lost virtues of the restraint, rationality and order of the classical Greco-Roman past.  And of course, there's Edvard Munch who painted "The Cry," one of the most iconic paintings that emerged from Modernism- an almost unbearable, anguished and visceral scream from one whose psychic life cannot cope amidst the dramatic industrialization, urbanism and resulting loss of social cohesion that defined modern life.  

Even I myself am implicated in the use of loss as premise for some of my own work in the past- through the subject of nostalgia and displacement- as I tried to locate myself geographically, and subjectively into the new country I had immigrated to.  

Dr Ellie Arroway in the moment before she loses herself, along with a lifetime of cultivated doubt,  when she encounters the moving image of her deceased father (Contact, director Robert Zemeckis, 1997)

And not to mention Postmodernism! With defining qualities such as skepticism, unease, doubt, and excessive self-criticism and consciousness, what is ultimately lost in the postmodern condition is faith.  

US Army Captain Benjamin Willard hasn't lost it yet, and contemplating but barely reaching the accurate image of the unspeakable thing that happens later (Apocalypse Now, director Francis Ford Coppola)

"Loss" and "lose" -not only are they carriers of negativity in the verbal sense, but even numerically.  

Can "lose" and "loss" ever mean otherwise?  Can their implications be reversed to potentially uphold a narrative of positivity, and in turn uphold some value that we desire to attain? 

Because when values are the matter of discussion, it is "gains" and the "victorious" that we are conditioned to believe as worthy of our attention. We live in a culture fed into by the cult of the victorious, and in so far as this is concerned, anyone negating its treasured values will find themselves sectioned off into the outskirts of the glorified arena of perpetually competitive unrest.  

But what if we disconnect "lose" and "loss" from its widely accepted set of implications and locate it in some place where it can, sort of, shine.  On the other hand, "loss" already exists as a virtue existing with the varied scriptural, mystical and societal values of humility, charity, and self-sacrifice.  So perhaps the conversation here is to carry on the idea of "loss" as a virtue with a potential force and systemic usage as that of the "victorious."

Cecilia, embodying Robby's image of desire, stand in the presence of her beholder (Atonement, director Joe Wright, 2007)

Robby, losing it, in the presence of the image of his desire (Atonement, director Joe Wright, 2007)

Having said all this, in the impulse and the desire to lose oneself in the image, what is lost and where does the transformation lie?  Assuming the image is a visual or mental embodiment of our ideals, desires, beliefs, fears, ambition and so on, and at the same time also keeping aware of the inability of the image to uphold a stable meaning, to "lose" oneself in the image would be the greatest act of blind and ultimately romantic heroism.  To lose is already an act of privileging the other, perhaps out of a greater love for the other than for oneself.  But to lose to something that is fleeting, something that is an abstraction, something that is a mental construction, something that may or may not exist, something whose meaning and loyalties may fizzle off or lean elsewhere- to lose in this manner is the grace through which our completion and becoming mysteriously take place in the heroic act of our forced self-incompletion.  

Patrick Bateman, in the utter and complete surrender of the self to the image (American Psycho, director Mary Harron, 2000)

what can bleed through on truth?

Halsey Fabrics

    Halsey Fabrics is located at 91 Halsey Street in downtown Newark. I work with fabric to make sculptures and whenever I was in Newark I would visit Halsey Fabrics to get inspired. When I found out I

was going to have a studio at Gallery Aferro as part of the Studio Residency Program I stopped by the store. I asked an employee there if they knew of a hardware store near by. The employee spent 15 minutes researching and writing down names of hardware stores for me. Halsey Fabrics as well as having wonderful fabric has excellent customer service. Recently I asked the employees at Halsey Fabrics if I could interview them for this blog.

    I interviewed Mike whose father and grandfather started Halsey Fabrics back in 1959. Mike and his wife, Jane now run the entire business themselves. Halsey Fabrics is open six days a week from 8-4 on Monday, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, on Wednesdays from 11-4, and on Saturday 10-6. In addition to the store hours Mike works after hours to pick up the fabric at Port Newark. The store has a large assortment of fabric as well as upholstery, trim, thread, needles and anything you would possible need to sew. If you stop by later in the day or on Saturdays the store maybe crowded but unlike many other fabric stores it is organized and easy to walk around to find what you need. At the counter Mike and Jane are experts in giving advice on how much material you'll need or what color would work, and can can give you pointers on how to make your outfit, and what tools you need to use to make them. Mike told me they have many loyal customers that continue to come back year after year. The biggest obstacle though to the business is the parking situation. Mike said that people are driving into Newark now rather than taking the bus and there are few parking spaces, and you have to pay for them. People aren't willing to pay for parking and then spend a few dollars at the fabric store. More and cheaper parking would be a big help to businesses in downtown Newark. Running a mom and pop store is not easy. Mike keeps the prices as low as he can even though he has to pay higher prices for fabric. He wants to keep his customers happy. I asked Mike about the demolition of the buildings across the street and he said if they eventually have to move they will stay in Newark or the surrounding area.

During My Life

Peanut Butter 

 Eileen Myles

 

 

I am always hungry

& wanting to have

sex. This is a fact.

If you get right

down to it the new

unprocessed peanut

butter is no damn

good & you should

buy it in a jar as

always in the

largest supermarket

you know. And

I am an enemy

of change, as

you know. All

the things I

embrace as new

are in

fact old things,

re-released: swimming,

the sensation of

being dirty in

body and mind

summer as a

time to do

nothing and make

no money. Prayer

as a last re-

sort. Pleasure

as a means,

and then a

means again

with no ends

in sight. I am

absolutely in opposition

to all kinds of

goals. I have

no desire to know           

where this, anything

is getting me.

When the water

boils I get

a cup of tea.

Accidentally I

read all the

works of Proust.

It was summer

I was there

so was he. I

write because

I would like

to be used for

years after

my death. Not

only my body

will be compost

but the thoughts

I left during

my life. During

my life I was

a woman with

hazel eyes. Out

the window

is a crooked

silo. Parts

of your

body I think

of as stripes

which I have

learned to

love along. We

swim naked

in ponds &

I write be-

hind your

back. My thoughts

about you are

not exactly

forbidden, but

exalted because

they are useless,

not intended

to get you

because I have

you & you love

me. It’s more

like a playground

where I play

with my reflection

of you until

you come back

and into the

real you I

get to sink

my teeth. With

you I know how

to relax. &

so I work

behind your

back. Which

is lovely.

Nature

is out of control

you tell me &

that’s what’s so

good about

it. I’m immoderately

in love with you,

knocked out by

all your new

white hair

 

why shouldn’t

something

I have always

known be the

very best there

is. I love

you from my

childhood,

starting back

there when

one day was

just like the

rest, random

growth and

breezes, constant

love, a sand-

wich in the

middle of

day,

a tiny step

in the vastly

conventional

path of

the Sun. I

squint. I

wink. I

take the

ride.

 

Eileen Myles, “Peanut Butter” from Not Me, published by Semiotext(e). Copyright © 1991 by Eileen Myles.

morning hour with painting, Richter, and Mad Men

Still from Gerhard Richter Painting, film by Corinna Belz, 2011

"It's not working." 

It is uttered by Richter after the moment pictured in the film still.  After minutes of pondering the painting in question, the filmmaker Belz asked him if it is because of the blue- to which he replies yes.  

Richter is not alone in uttering this.  It is a deep but chronic sigh that is emitted from time to time in the studio of every painter.  These sighs are the painter's announcements that he or she is recognizing a sizable formal or conceptual conflict internal and external to a given painting.  Presuming that these conflicts are upon which the painting's ability to hold itself together depends on -and perhaps  conflicts for which the painting was undertaken - sighs are the decisive moments that are either followed by the painting's (or even the painter's) continuation, undoing or end.  

Fortunately, since it is a chronic utterance, time eventually allows painters to develop strategies on how to deal with these interruptions to their practice.  From my painting mentors/professors I learned to appreciate that when face-to-face with such a moment, I can consider to: A) just keep on painting; B) try another medium so your expectations are suspended; C) go back to that breakthrough moment. 

It is this morning that I'm pondering the third one, C -going back to that breakthrough moment.

It's not because it is the most effective strategy, but because of its romance.  And it's not just because painting is already tied to notions of the Romantic, but because just the word "breakthrough" evokes energy -an overt, heroic and outward energy: the energy to grow, advance and discover. At the same time it also evokes a more subtle inward energy: the energy at the beginning of something, of one's origins.  

My last reason is because the idea of "breakthrough" was just confirmed in this attached TV episode of Mad Men. I was watching it together with the Richter Painting film this morning.  In this episode, model-turned-housewife in the 60's Betty Draper instills to her 8-year-old daughter a lesson on the virtues and consequences of the first kiss.  

Betty (to Sally): "…The first kiss is very special… It's where you go from being a stranger to knowing someone.  And every kiss after that will be a shadow of that kiss."

As much as it made poetic sense in the dialogue in the TV episode, it seemed to also do the same to the painting practice.  All I needed to do was make the word substitutions appropriate to this discussion in painting:

first = crucial

kiss = brushstroke

stranger = unsure

someone = painting

With the substitutions applied, Betty's lines would be:

"...The crucial brushstroke is very special… It's where you go from being unsure to knowing painting.  And every brushstroke after that will be a shadow of that brushstroke."

First kiss, breakthroughs, brushstrokes, that blue that's keeping Richter's painting from "working," and perhaps many more applicable scenarios -Betty's few lines -plus substitutions- could fit all.

Lobster Lover's Dream

Some bits from a really spot-on essay by Anton Vidokle.
Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art

"It seems to me that MFA programs have become a tool of indoctrination that has had an unprecedented homogenizing effect on artistic practices worldwide, an effect that is now being replicated with curatorial and critical writing programs."

"Being a professional [artist] should not be the only acceptable way for us to maintain our households, particularly when most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three fields that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. I feel that we have cornered ourselves by denying the full range of possibilities for developing our economies."

"Unless hard-pressed by circumstances, we still think that the proper thing to do is to wait for a sponsor or a patron to solve our household problems and to legitimize our work. In fact, we don’t need their legitimacy. We are perfectly capable of being  our own sponsors, which in most cases we already are when we do other kinds of work to support our art-work. This is something that should not be disavowed, but acknowledged openly."

Skin and Image

When the February 2013 print issue of US Vogue Magazine was released, it included a piece on the British painter Cecily Brown.  On page 259 there was a statement by Brown that struck me.  So I marked it with a pen. The quote is above.  

Being a painter too, I can begin to understand what she meant.

From what I know of her work, sexuality and attraction are dominant themes. This implies the human figure, the other most striking visual presence in her work.  Whether darkly concealed, smothered, or surfacing in gooey, slippery and kaleidoscopic landscapes of oil pigments –landscapes that eventually come to form as recognizable places like a forest or a bedroom- the nude body or bodies emerge, by itself or moistly intertwined with another, in justified repose or intimate pose. 

With such overt and unapologetic sexuality in her paintings, at first it seems that it’s no surprise that Brown mentions the word "skin" in the interview. But it must be more than that: such as the idea of skin as an analogical device or formal metaphor upon where the meaningful viewing, necessary entanglements and deep comprehension of artworks bank their premises on. 

A favorite art professor of mine once wrote: “painting’s analogy to skin is not new.”  It sounds like a good place to start reconsidering Brown’s quote.

photo credit: Kamilla Bello

18 square feet –that is the measure of the skin of our bodies.  It is our body’s largest sense organ.  It is also the sense organ that is always on, in a “constant state of readiness to receive messages.”[1] It is also the outermost boundary of our body.  If put into analogy with our planet, our skin would be the Earth’s crust: it covers the entirety of the planet, it is the last place of contact when leaving the Earth, it is the first place of contact when meeting Earth.  But the Earth’s crust is extremely thin- it amounts to less than 1 percent of the planet.  Whereas skin amounts to 16 percent of our body weight.  This attests to skin’s significantly concrete presence.

And so I cannot help but find a beautiful yet uneasy dance between the words “skin” and “image” in Brown’s quote.  To “get under the skin of an image” feels like the equivalent of watching polar opposite creatures having a love affair that is destined to die.  

Image amasses its power in its elusive, shape shifting, and opportunistic nature.  It defies being exclusively possessed by anybody or anything whether by time, place, entity, language, idea, cause, or even by its object (if there ever was one to begin with!). Whereas skin is simply possessed by one body.

The breadth of image’s reproducibility is infinite.  Skin can only venture, well, skin-deep. 

The image is the flawless and timeless ideal that embodies desire.  Skin is flawed, rife with fissures, and is in agreement with time's conditions. 

The image is the “site of resistance to meaning.”[2]  The skin is the body’s first site of resistance.

To try to “get under the skin of an image” can only mean subjecting the image into an embodiment that it is not constructed to be, and implicating the skin into giving the image a surface that will only render it penetrable.  What is exciting about Brown’s quote is the violation of image and skin’s established conditions.

It is with this quote in mind that I am rethinking my series of photographs taken in certain natural environments in the Southwest and Northeast.  In it I photographed my hands gouging through sand, grazing through snow and sleet, grasping boughs, channeling through gashes in fallen trees, stroking the furrows of petroglyphs. 

As if my lived and sensory experiences of canyons, deserts, forests, snowstorms, and hurricanes aren’t enough to establish my sense of awe and wonder of nature’s otherness, I physically entwine my hands into the matter that contain, shape and define these places- and then photograph these acts!   I am reminded of Thomas the Doubter who needed to touch the wound of the resurrected Christ in order to eradicate his doubt and establish belief in the resurrection.

I can argue these photos as trying to “get under the skin of the earth" -that they are a lesser violation or semantic conflict than trying to “get under the skin of an image.”  But the creation of the photographic images nulls the argument.  When this or that experience is flattened into the photographic print, the sensory experience of getting under the skin of the earth now enters the realm of the image.  It is no longer about the skin of the image, but the image of the skin.

  

---

[1] Tiffany Field, Touch, (MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2001), p. 10

[2] Roland Barthes, Responsibility of Forms, (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1985), p. 21

Thank you Aferro!

I want to give a big thank you to Evonne and Emma for giving me the opportunity to work at Aferro for the past six months.  The residency seemed to fly by, as I was able to work on a large scale self-portrait.  

It was great meeting and working alongside such a talented, diverse group of artists.  Being apart of such a creative environment always seems to inspire my own process.

Look forward to seeing everyone at the opening this Saturday and good luck to all the incoming residents!

That Sad Desire

I wish I remembered my dreams more often.  Usually I feel completely tangled up in them when I first wake up. Then by the time I've had coffee and left the house I have no idea what it was all about. Here's one I wrote down before the spell was broken:

I dreamed I was in someone’s house.

I was with a crowd of people, artists.  They were interested in an artist that I know who was missing, though there seemed to be some of his work around the room. They wanted to see his films, and found an old VHS tape of “his movie” which I started to play for them.

The movie was a long (seemingly never-ending) series of micro-narratives, little vignettes each with a little joke as its defining thing.  The vignettes were family scenes, in or around a working class house.  The people all wore costumes, loose, sloppy furry outfits like sad comic theme park animal characters, big fuzzy caricatures of bears and dogs.  The sense of humor in the various actions of the figures was mildly scatological.

I paused the video to explain to the people watching with me (who didn’t know much about the absent artist) that when he and I were in school together, and for a while after that, he had been involved in a more occult and different aspiration in his work, that he saw and painted ghosts and strange spirits, but that later he turned from that and deliberately toward his idea of what is “good”.

My sense was that this film was about that turn to reach for goodness, but that in its form and structure as well as its abject gesture’s pathos and humor, it was helpless to not be an art better, bigger and more basic than that sad desire.

Semi text

I haven't blogged yet. And while there are a variety of pointless excuses for this, in reality it's because I often feel that words are my enemy. I can use them, manipulate them, choose superb specimens as an end to a means, and turn a nice phrase, but none of this matters because the WORD, language itself, is the nemesis of the image.

I communicate through images, they tell my stories whether it be tattooed on my hands or painted on a piece of wood. I often want to give language to the image, but the words do not come. The words laugh at me and tell me to keep my eyes closed and then I might understand better how to transform visual into aural.

It's not a dance, it's a duel.

Somehow I am still possessed of this idea to write accompaniments to my paintings, even though I truly believe the paintings should tell their stories without needing words.

Maybe I need the words. The WORD, to unlock all the stories in a single gush from my fingertips. Or maybe more like a flood of tears.
I could be afraid of the words because they are not as aesthetically pleasing to my mind as the images.

The sound of a woman wailing is the saddest thing you can hear.
I think sometimes if I let the words come they will only be a formless wail announcing to anyone who can hear all of my sadness and I don't really want any of you to know about that.

What Were They Thinking?

Looking at Jan Lievens' paintings from around 1631 it's interesting to wonder what was going on. Lievens was a contemporary to Rembrandt and some have confused the two over the years. I've been studying a few of his paintings and creating them anew through my eyes. My interpretation of "Boy in a Cape and Turban" above, depicts a milky faced youth, stuffed and stiff as nails, with all the pomp and circumstance of his exotic "Oriental" attire. Lievens spared no detail in his depiction of clothing and also the psychology that was going on with the subjects of his time.

Brick City Project!!

Hi all....stopping by to wish the current studio residents mucho love on their artist journey this season.

Also, Brick City Project makes an appearance in Metro 29 art show still goin on now for all who havent seen.  Stay tuned for more photos as i get closer and closer to completing the 1st installation of BCP....(super excited).....stayed tuned also for future  appearances by other bricks as the momentum gains.  Newark Museum and a few Nyc galleries are jus the appetizers  for this artistic cuisine. There are big, BIG plans in the making so keep your fingers crossed and your hearts open for whats to come.  Peace and Blessings....Malik

Art from the Outside Looking In

I would not consider myself someone who knows a lot about art. I love museums and galleries and frequent them often and I’ve taken an art history course in college (and loved it), but I don’t have extensive knowledge or a strong contextual art background to legitimize the way art speaks to me amongst the art community. But do I have to? I might not get it. I might see something and say, why? But isn’t that what is most important? That the artwork in front of me is making me think? While walking around the current show installed at Gallery Aferro, there was art that I “got” under my own pretenses, and there was other works that were, perplexing. Nonetheless, the space is beautiful and the show as a whole, was provoking and inclusive to all types of art. There is something for everyone. I think that art is a personal experience and that everyone has their own individual connection or misconnection to each piece.

I wouldn’t consider myself necessarily as a visual person. When I see things, I don’t necessarily feel things. The pieces that spoke to me the most had words and sounds, had an actual voice I could hear and read. As a media studies major, one of the most thought-provoking pieces was located on the floor in a black basket on the second story. Shani Peter’s Reagan, The Revolution, and Me explored her own personal “socialization and understanding of blackness and family through references to media and imagery I absorbed as a child.” Her piece exposed how the black family was translated through media, and it was eye opening. It struck a chord within me. I don’t necessarily know what chord that was, but do I really have to? It made me feel.

So who am I and what is this post all about and why are you reading it? My name is Brady Smith, a senior at NJIT in Newark and Gallery Aferro’s new social media intern! I’m excited to join this great group of people and learn in this new world of art that I’ve only topically explored. So if you see me around the gallery, feel free and say hi, or tweet me at @smithbradym (shameless social media plug).