The Stendhal Blues

Anna Noel and the Clay Studio

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:22:28 -0400

Hers isn’t the most extravagant, the cleverest or even the most finely-crafted work in the Clay Studio, but it’s the most sensitive.

Anna Noel is a Welsh ceramicist, but her influences are so wide-ranged that her work doesn’t seem confined by geography. Tomb statues, pre-Colombian art and earthenware folk art all can be tasted in her circus-like animals, soft color choices and raku firing. Even the owners of her work are varied; she’s got pieces in the private collections of Prince Ranier of Monoco and museum curator, landscape designer and mustachioed knight Roy Strong.

The use of old limericks does imply a strange, if distant, connection to her heritage, but the cartoonish, figurative proportions of her pieces are all current.

My favorite is her interpretation of the limerick “The Young Lady of Riga.” In her typical softly-grained style, she portrays a simple, almost primitive woman mounted on a white tiger. The base reads:

There was a young lady of Riga

who rode out upon a tiger

the tiger came back with a smile on her face

and the lady of Riga inside her.

She was guest artist in residence in 2010.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:49:59 -0400

Your mother, tumblrbot

Daniel Garber and the New Hope School

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:42:00 -0400

I always understood impressionism as art.

When I was a child, “art” was synonymous with New Hope, Pennsylvania, a riverfront community to this day dedicated to curios, antiques and free expression. Recent efforts by Bucks County officials to turn New Hope into a giant Starbucks franchise have hindered the community’s artistic side, but no yuppification can erase New Hope’s importance in Americanizing the impressionist movement during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Daniel Garber’s works embody the New Hope school perfectly. His best-known pieces are of the Delaware River’s serene curves, but his few surviving portraits, etchings and even advertisements are proof that Garber could do much more than survey and replicate light and shadow through pastels. Even some of the great European Impressionists such as Pissarro and Bazille had a tendency to fail at the intricacies and precision required of portraitists. Garber mixes the graceful fluidity of impressionist strokes with precision and attention to anatomy in pieces such as “Tanis” (1915), one of my personal favorites and the one sampled in this blog post.

Garber’s history is similar to artists I explored in Mexico City. Beginning his career in commercial art, he studied in Europe, bringing the most important elements of Europe to the United States and discarding much of the pretension. Garber was somewhat a Romantic, but his work was utterly modern.

As much as I enjoy viewing his works, especially the well-chosen pieces in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, his greatest contribution was as a teacher, where he could impact the new generation. His effect on American painting might not be that direct, but it exists in echoes.

The best collection of Garber’s work is apparently at the James Michener Museum in Doylestown, but I haven’t made it out there yet. We’re planning a trip April 22.

XV

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:36:00 -0400

Africa has an image problem. And, that is to say, Africa has an image. Comparing the Zulu nation to Ethiopia’s Coptic Christian empire is like comparing Dublin to Warsaw. But many people who should know better do anyway. To define Africa in a non-superficial way, UPenn’s archaeology and anthropology museum has a new exhibit called ‘Imagine Africa.’ It asks the community for input, a neat and positive concept. But they’ve already failed at proving they can provide a complete narrative of African cultures. The very exhibit doesn’t distinguish regions, presenting Moroccan bracelets aside South African masks.

It’s not as though UPenn has no frame of reference. The next room over has Mesoamerican artifacts. There, Teotihuacano artifacts are displayed separately from Aztec artifacts, and even a casual observer would get a grip on the difference between the Mayas and everyone else featured in the room.

So what’s the problem with Africa? It is not hard to portray cultural history free of excessive stereotyping, but the first step is to portray the differences in cultures of a region, especially a freaking continent. If UPenn wants its museum to portray the actual, not the colonialist, story of Africa, their first step should be to organize the exhibit by specific culture, so we as viewers can learn about how that culture varied from its peers instead of trying to find a definition of Africa.

Here’s some more info about the exhibit:

http://www.penn.museum/upcoming-exhibits/967-imagine-africa-with-the-penn-museum.html

Photo

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 22:46:58 -0400

Photo

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

XIV

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:26:23 -0500

Here are three bizarre, nonsensical and infrarrealist poems by the late Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, translated into English by yours truly.

I enter/ we say/ filled with the foam of echos

By Mario Santiago Papasquiaro

Alone & desperate

dry hair/ stiff cock

silent laughter/ bag empty of troy ounces

yesterday’s faith: burnt water

John Berryman, mute

incomprehensible untranslatable & suicidal

leapt off of 1 bridge

swallowed by fog

the same january that I wailed

the slow centipedes of my first songs

Plop plop/ 1 neurotic drops

gilled cosmo-nahuatl

writing your english but snorting

zero imitations

parodying the fat cows of weight watchers

this is the guy that lives as 1 enchanted bastard

close to the cold that forces your eyes shut

ignoring the dream that forces you awake,

calling to this sandwich-wrapper life,

and spewing as though vomiting.

without the brilliance to calm me,

I will wake to the sad sight of

him pushing 1 canoe, going hunting, perhaps,

for the rotund, paradoxical, deformed birds

introitus(I)

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro

The air slips away

the hilts the cunts

the same dust is not life

/The dawns never/

The day slips away

the haggard shadows, the eyelets

the eye of God that He hires out cheap

the sleeping blacks

of Purgatory Road

the Chiclets sellers

& Abyss brand condoms

the semicolon of sweat

that “ayayay” that gets her knocked up and abandoned

The straight man slips away

the stitched hetero

the motherfucking rambler

the shell without sugar

the coffee without cream

Christ slips away

my songs and my virgins

my bag of blames

in a full garbage can

the crater of my Diogenes

my dirty, vulgar liver

my sun is holding a circus

The battle cry slips away

the Teponaxtle drum never

I want to say that the corn mules

are my comal, my caress, my color and my bray but

what I had said slips away

& until today I spoke

in confidence with demons

I am 1 mute life,

he who forms the gestures, then

begets them/ molds them

I slip away

Yeah, I too slip away

Begin to Puke Light

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro

Love is not a mental equation.

Hatred, yes, scrapes the knees

Silenced lips / gray-haired children;

temporarily

no little phallic cartoon

on a chalkboard is life/

Because death

now walks upon us:

“Tarantula’s Power”,

Life cannot cannot continue being

a mere splotch of food

upon the clean clothes.

Not this,

And not a poster of Raquel Welsh

or Emiliano Zapata reduced to poster,

all at once;

Nor the fables of

Stalin or Samaniego

XIII

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 23:46:03 -0500

Seven facts about Mexico City

The first house I’ve lived in in a year and a half with a garbage disposal in the sink is in a country that is supposed to be third-world.
Condesa has every kind of whiskey and beer that I miss except for Dogfish Head. I won’t lie—it’s more expensive than in the States, but I think that’s just because people get off on spending money there.
I went from a city where there was no bookstore to a city where I accidentally went into a bookstore while drunk without even realizing it was one. Maybe that’s unfair since the city I came from was Laredo.
Vertigo Gallery. I need to say no more.
Pulque. See above commentary.
If there’s a place you want to go, you can get there by metro.
I can hear Celso Piña and Bob Dylan in the same evening…hell, the same DJ may play them, as tonight, and that may make for an awkward set list, but it makes for a happy Zach.

XII

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 23:29:22 -0500

Tlatlolco, 1968

By Jaime Sabines

(the original poem can be read here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/jaime-sabines/tlatelolco-1968-6/470329068584)

Youth is the theme

inside the Revolution.

The Government is the godfather of heroes.

The Mexican peso is strong,

And the country is rapidly developing.

Following the comedies and banditos on television,

we had demonstrated to the world that we are capable,

respectable, hospitable, sensible,

(What a marvelous Olympics!)

and now we are going to follow with the Metro

because progress cannot be halted.

Women of red,

men of blue heaven,

Mexicans parade in glorious unity

to construct the country of our dreams.

XI

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 12:23:05 -0500

Not all leads reveal clues. Some just reveal alcohol, apparently.

Hija de los Apaches was the pulqueria that Mario Santiago Papasquiaro used to hang out at. He even went as far as writing a poem about it, which, it is claimed, is displayed there to this day. It includes the vaguely horrifying verse “I will die sipping/garlic pulque/pirouetting/like a circus performer/in the Hija de los Apaches/of the good Pifas.” Anyone who has read my blog knows he wasn’t lucky enough to die that way, but garlic pulque is probably an easy way to kill one’s self.

Hija is full of plaques, signs and newspaper clippings, but none of them seem to be related to Papasquiaro, and the good Pifas was nowhere to be found, even though his image was immortalized on a half dozen boxing ads. The kid who was working has no idea who or what Papasquiaro was, but he gave me free reign over the bar to search. The closest thing to a Papasquiaro poem I found was a sticker which declared “¡Cuidado! El machismo mata,” which basically translates into “warning: machismo kills.” A good message for the youth of this city.

I was hoping to find someone old here who knew the late poet, but that doesn’t seem likely. Some of these kids were probably being born when Papasquiaro was dying in the street. At least they card, which is a rarity for bars in Mexico City and pulquerias in particular.

It was the second day in a row that I hit a dead end in my searches. The day before, I went to Toluca to find a mural by Chango Cabral, and came up with nothing. A second day of failure was both annoying and disheartening, so I got myself a beer and sat down with Miguel Angel Fuentes, a cameraman for Milenio. He filled me in on the details. The old bar is gone. The new bar is four times the size, and only a few blocks away, but it’s not where Papasquiaro drank. Dead end indeed.

I recommend going to the pulqueria on Doctor Claudio Bernard 144 even if it’s not the original bar. The pulque isn’t as good as that of Los Duelistas, but the fact that they sell beer is a nice relief, the scenery is great, there is frequently live music and the company is just as friendly as it is in every pulqueria I’ve been in. That, and the look on the taxi driver’s face when you ask to go to Colonia Doctores at night is priceless.

Fabulous tits, man!

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Fabulous tits, man!

X

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Vertigo Gallery at Colima 23 is pop art at its best—bright colors, silly puns, Star Wars USB drives for sale. It is probably the largest and least underground underground gallery in Mexico City. The gallery mixes Mexican and American art in the same place and blasts the Killers and early 1960s American rhythm and blues. There’s really only room for two featured artists and a small amount of additional work, but the curators know how to pick it.

Mitch O’Connell of Rolling Stone fame has his pop-kitch featured here. His work sets a high standard. It looks like tattoo art, but it’s far too complicated. Three of his works form a sort of backwards triptych (either that or I was walking through the museum in the wrong direction) which features naked women with cute animal faces playing pool, drinking tea and being attacked by aliens, respectively. “Fun!” “While…” “it lasted” are the words written on the pieces.

Just yesterday I lamented the state of contemporary art (if that’s what it’s called) when, in Toluca, I saw some crap that was only one or two black brush strokes across a broad piece of white canvas—O’Connell’s talent, as silly as it is, is also very real.

And he’s not the only quality contemporary artist displayed at Vertigo. The mischievous Mexican sculptor and interior designer Andrés Amaya has sketches and sculptures displayed here. It is also very silly. Whoever picks the art has a sense of humor. It is almost reminiscent of R Crumb. One sculpture is of a smoothly-shaped woman with enormous nipples and a detailed clitoris lounging like an 1800s bar painting…except that she’s green and has a tail and a lizard head. La Santa Patita is an armless cartoon duck with a halo and the same pert style of nipples as on his lizard woman. He draws Santa Patita over and over again, walking through a variety of scenarios, always with the same happy expression.

Santa Patita is not his only repeated image. He also enjoys sketching a fish with arms, legs and a bowler hat.

Amaya has an obsession with vintage toys, and that influences his sculptures and artwork, right down to the Subcomandante Marcos condom-holder you can buy on his website. He has modified some of the old toys which are displayed at Vertigo, such as placing a doll head on a deer body. Others, like an old Mr. Potato Head, are just presented without comment or modification.

O’Connell’s work is common enough that his work can be absorbed through a Google search. Amaya has a website, www.balastudio.com, although it doesn’t seem like it’s updated very often anymore.

IX

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 13:43:27 -0500

By the time Joaquin Clausell drowned in the Zempoala Lagoons on the outskirts of Mexico City, he had already introduced the nation to the surrealist movement. But his most shocking achievement is hidden in a corner of a museum right in the middle of Mexico City’s cultural center. The Torre de las Mil Ventanas, his studio space and former living space, is a schizophrenic work which is only impressionist in paint usage. Mostly, it is surreal.

And yes, I said that right. His studio space IS the artwork.

While it is located on the top floor of the Museo de la Ciudad de México just blocks away from the famed Zócalo, getting there is still a bit of a detective story. When I went there, I had to ask the woman at the admission desk about it by name for her to direct me. The museum’s first floor featured Mexican slam poets and a few sparse cultural artifacts. Nothing to write home about. The architecture was beautiful, but the galleries were mostly of maps of Mexico City. The second floor had a few displays, but a security guard asked me what I was doing up there. When I told her, she pointed me to another guard, who took me through a white-washed office with copies of Clausell’s more well-known works. At another set of stairs, around a corner, I was escorted into a dark room with one poor stream of light from outside.

The walls were painted floor to ceiling with contradictory images, some distinct and blocked off from each other, others melding and cavorting, Salome with John the Baptist’s head not far from Christ, twice, once crucified, once very alive but troubled and lost in thought, crucifixions of other people than Christ, thieves, traitors, strangers, men, women, all nailed to crosses, Lady Godiva on horseback, moaning and writhing, horse melting away into the chaos around it, beautiful women, ugly women, angels, birds, hybrids of birds and women, mixed sexual body parts, vaqueros, a thousand or more figures big and small, detailed and obscured, some women with glassy eyes, almost photo-realistic, others melting into the walls. And all in the impressionist style, as though he was painting the light that fell on the figures, not the figures themselves.

After staring at the walls for along time, I realized that a display case in the center of the room contained a few trivial artifacts—old tubes of paint, brushes, photos that show the artist as he deteriorated with age. For the artifacts, it helped to know some Spanish, as they featured a replica of the front page announcing his bizaare, almost silly drowning death, but his tower is beyond language.

I’d post a photo, but none do the huge, four-walled mural justice. Your only choice is to seek it out for yourself.

VIII

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 13:35:21 -0500

At Tlatelolco, I wished that I believed in God. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of students—Mexico’s brightest—were massacred here by an abusive and mad government, all so Mexico would appear harmonious during the 1968 Olympics.

I wished that I believed in God while standing on that hallowed ground so that I could believe that these kids got something. Those beautiful Mexican youth who would have changed their country. Anything more than just disappearing forever. Thy were too good for this place. I wish I could believe there was something better for them.

I also wish I could believe that Díaz Ordaz was burning in hell for his horrible crime, since he had no legal repercussions for it here on earth. No one involved ever did.

Today, we traveled to the ruins of Tlatelolco. They were poorly preserved, as the Spaniards had ripped them apart to prove how big their machismo was, to build a great fortress-like church right next to the sacred ground. But I was more interested in the Plaza of Three Cultures, where the whole affair happened.

Díaz set up snipers and blocked off the exits. His actions were premeditated, planned like a battle, even. Except the people he was battling had no military training, no weapons and no idea they were about to enter a battleground.

When the slaughter was over, it is said, the whole plaza was covered in bodies. Nobody knows how many. The government still refuses to admit how many people died that day. They barely admit anything happened at all. And the next day, the place was wiped clean. The papers didn’t mention it. The TV showed the Olympics, and everyone who watched without thinking of politics was at least a little complicit.

I try to avoid the subject of politics in this forum (I write about it enough at work), but Tlatelolco is an important place to see, and remember. It is where the Spaniards first defeated the Aztecs and where one crazed Mexican president proved definitively that the revolution of the poor was over, and had really been lost.

I can’t help but wonder what great art those kids would have grown to produce. I can’t help but think that if DF had had 1,000 more bright people, maybe the peso crash of the 1990s could have been avoided. Maybe everything about Mexico would be different today. Maybe the people could trust their government.

And, finally, I can’t help but want to make a pilgrimage to Díaz’s grave to spit on it.

Please read more about this important and tragic event. Here is a good place to start:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB10/intro.htm

VII

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 13:25:03 -0500

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón was and is one of the most important people in this country, and yet, she was a slightly deranged communist whose art, while painfully evocative for its subject matter, is not what any art critic would consider technically good.

The appealing thing about Frida and Diego for me is their story, not their art. That’s what makes the Casa Azul, their home in Coyoacan, so appealing. The gallery section is fine, although a tad expensive for the content, but it’s seeing their kitchen, bedrooms and work spaces that make the museum worth it.

The house once belonged to Frida’s father, who was a competent photographer and the one who seemed to first draw out the artistic spirit in her, but Frida and Diego reworked it to feature mesoamerican themes. That, and, of course, communism. One of the girls with whom I toured the house took one look at it and said, “It’s very communist.” That was her first comment about the place. And that it is. Square, sharp angles. Simplicity in many ways. They didn’t even have a gas stove in the kitchen, even though such a thing would’ve been easy for them to acquire at the time. But it also has a color palette that can only be found in Coyoacan, and a large ad beautiful garden that Frida wold have been able to view even at her sickest. The part of the museum that got me the most, I think, was a mirror. It was a mirror that sat on her work table and, as Frida’s most influential works were her self-portraits, and she composed many of them in Coyoacan, that mirror had undoubtedly held her expressions while she painted works that I have seen in museums across North America.

Frida’s portraits often bend styles and perspectives, but she never had an eye for realism. I’ve often heard people say that Frida is ugly. Between paintings and photos of her, I think she was actually a lot more beautiful in real life than she described herself. Much of her work seems a little flat, and although she was a pioneer, her work now seems dated.

I can’t abide these damn commies. This is something I’ll get to later on in the blog. I’ve taken extensive notes on the hypocrisy of the gallery at MUNAL, for example. Also, the idea of her and Trotsky sleeping together is probably the grossest famous people hookup of all time. But I appreciate the political puns of her work. One self portrait features the ghost of Karl Marx choking a turkey with Uncle Sam’s head.

But again, the house’s appeal is its decorations. Coyoacan is worth a trip if for no other reason than to get away from the hustle of Chilangos, since it is almost always peaceful, and the house is worth a trip to see the decorating style of people who thought that gas masks were acceptable nicknacks.

The former house of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Coyoacan,...

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 13:22:15 -0500

The former house of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Coyoacan, Mexico City.

VI

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:40:10 -0500

John Berryman, mute

incomprehensible untranslatable & suicidal

leaped off of 1 bridge

swallowed a cloud

the same january that I wailed

the slow centipedes of my first songs

- Mario Santiago Papasquiaro

When the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño looked back on his time in Mexico City in “The Savage Detectives,” he framed it as a quest for a lost poet, and I can see why. The mythic search may have been a failure, but failing is better than being bored.

I think about Bolaño a lot here, but not more than his friend Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. Papasquiaro is the closest thing I have to a saint right now, and I think about him every time I cross the street here, since that’s how he died. Run down crossing one of el DF’s notoriously dangerous intersections.

It’s not as though he was cut down in his prime. His writing had fallen off, but before he slowed down, he was the pioneer of infrarrealism, a branch of surrealism that he and other Mexican youths reawakened in the 1970s. While Bolaño has been translated into English by a dozen or so translators, I’ve never seen an English version of Papasquiaro (the segment above is my own translation), which naturally gives him a certain appeal. He’s ever been as popular as his more famous friend, probably because his work is not as approachable. In fact, it’s downright weird, but then again, it was birthed by a combination of surrealist thought, poverty and heavy drug use.

In honor of his and Bolaño’s search for their lost poet, and to give myself something to do in this city besides aimlessly wander the tianguis near the hostel pining over the absence of my girlfriend, I’ve decided to try to track down as many relics of his existence as I can get my pretentious little hands on.

Hitting the used bookstores on Donceles randomly does not seem like a feasible option, as they are oftentimes musty and filthy places whose owners do not know their way around their own collections and seem happy to let the books molder to dust.

Anyway, I got distracted and started wondering if I should by a Spanish copy of “El Gran Gatsby.”

The recently-published collected works of Papasquiaro should be easy to find once I suck it up and go to Amazon.com, but what I’m looking for is the 1976 anthology “Pajaro de Calor.”

One of his poems is about the pulqueria La Hija de los Apaches. That will be a good place to start tomorrow after work. The pulqueria on Doctor Claudio Bernard No. 149 has the poem framed on display.

Mario Papasquiaro from the website maintained by his widow,...

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:06:45 -0500

Mario Papasquiaro from the website maintained by his widow, http://www.infrarrealismo.com

Koji Onaka’s wonderfully complex cityscapes

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 23:52:31 -0500

Koji Onaka’s wonderfully complex cityscapes

IV

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 23:50:23 -0500

Much as I’d like to, I cannot deny that digital photography is capable of producing a deeper range of colors than most film. (I myself am shooting with a Holga just to be an asshole…and because I couldn’t afford a decent digital camera.)

The Museo Archivo de la Fotografia is hosting an exhibit of Japanese photography that would force any purist to admit that digital has its advantages. It’s a small museum off Republica de Guatamala, and it’s hard to think about photography when there are the ruins of a freaking Aztec temple about 20 feet away, but it’s worth stopping in.

Koji Onaka, a man whose skill with a lens is matched only by his love of food, creates colors so vivid that they border on surreal. Onaka’s landscapes are unremarkable but his crowded and garbled cityscapes present the modern international city in the way only one intimately familiar with the winding corridors and alleyways of the impoverished can. His journals, posted on the wall where other artists post their bios, are obsessed with minutia, and extravagance in the face of poverty, and his photographs are similar in content to his written work.

“A day without wind and with tranquil waves,” he says in the same journal entry where he talks about eating ramen and drinking cheap wine. His sense of humor endeared me to him more than the two other photographers I saw. I’m presenting one of his works above (or below…or wherever the hell it shows up).

Toshiya Momose’s photos of India are inspired and somewhat absurd, such as a photo of two tack-sharp cows under a bridge, peaceful while blurry traffic zips around them. But he does not seem to realize that his best work, such as that of an abandoned cart or an empty staircase in a degenerate hotel, is the simple. Momose has won the Photographic Society of Japan’s award and is a professor of photography, but he was the least interesting of the photographers on display. It’s not for a lack of talent, just that the others were more powerful.

The landscape master of the group is Naoki Ishikawa, who devoted a series to Mount Fuji. It’s hard to criticize the landscapes of Momose and Onaka in the face of Ishikawa’s love affair with Fuji. He photographs the mountain like only a devoted lover can. One cool thing about Ishikawa’s works are the angles, giving Fuji the impression of being at once an impossible adversary and a strangely seductive entity.

The top floor of the museum was closed when I visited, so I did not get to see Takeshi Dodo, Sayuri Naito or Hiraki Sawa, but the first floor was worth it.

Then again, the museum was free, so photos of dog shit would’ve been worth it, if they were presented with interesting lighting.