Fragmentary Evidence

This painting by Gerhard Richter is my favorite piece of 9/11-related art or literature; in fact, it might be the only piece of 9/11-related art or literature that I’ve ever actually liked:

I first came across it in The Atlantic about 2 years ago, and it resonates with my own changing perspective on September 11th as the years have passed. I was fortunate not to know anyone personally who perished in the World Trade Center towers, but (like millions of other people who lived in New York at the time) I was powerfully affected, perhaps traumatized in some small way, and I felt the effects for many months—indeed, on the first anniversary I felt compelled to write a short essay and email it out to some friends. It was one of the more mawkish things I’m ever likely to write, but apparently it touched a nerve, because the next thing I knew I got a request from a stranger in New Jersey asking if he could share it with his high school students in class. (How much easier that all would have been if I had had a blog back then!)

What a difference eight years makes. If you had asked me in late 2001, when the smell of smoke drifted up the Hudson to my apartment and soldiers with machine guns stood guard at my local subway station, or in late 2002, when I wrote that essay, I think I would have told you that the events of 9/11 had forever altered the way I viewed the world. I suppose that they did, strictly speaking, but I don’t think I would have predicted how quickly other events (wars, elections, tsunamis, droughts, recessions, whatever) would overtake 9/11 at the forefront of my consciousness, and how quickly memories of that period would fade. Sure, I still think about 9/11 sometimes, and occasionally I even feel a momentary twinge of panic when I hear a plane close overhead, but for the most part, the terrorist attacks of 2001 have settled in among a lot of other horrific geopolitical/historical events in my mind, with little special prominence except that they happened to occur in my city and my country (and that the tragedy of those lost lives was compounded by the tragedies of the wars that have followed).

For me, Richter’s painting of the iconic smoking towers captures that phenonemon well. A mere eight years after a period when I was almost obsessed by the events of 9/11 (or am I misremembering that too?), it now all feels like a fuzzy memory. The passage of time, and the failures of memory, have a way of distorting and obscuring the past so much that it is almost unrecognizable. It sounds odd, maybe even ghoulish, to suggest that I feel a kind of nostalgia for such a traumatic period when so many people were experiencing such intense grief, but when I look at the painting, it evokes a yearning to reverse the distortions of the image—that is, to reverse the very passage of time that has allowed most people to “move on” more quickly than anyone expected. A somewhat similar (albeit less tragic) feeling of loss hits me when I look at another piece of art showing a very different iconic image—Warhol’s large National Velvet, which hangs at SFMoMA. It shows the young Elizabeth Taylor, the very picture of beauty and vigor and innocence, literally fading before our eyes, as Warhol manically tries to stop time by furiously reproducing the image over and over and over. Or at least that’s how it always seems to me when I stand in front of it, and it is surprisingly poignant.

All this naturally makes me wonder which of my current feelings and convictions will dramatically alter with the passage of time. I generally approve of taking “the long view” when it comes to current events, because it’s far too easy to become consumed by the fleeting minutiae of the moment, but the danger of the long view is that if your view is too long, then it’s hard to really care about the present. As John Maynard Keynes pointed out in rebuttal to more laissez-faire economists who argued that the economy would work itself out fine on its own in the long run, “This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”

Who knows, maybe in the long run my feelings about the Richter and Warhol works will change too—I guess I’ll have to revisit them in eight years to see how I feel then.

Some of you know my friend Pablo Manga. Some of you know the Awaken Cafe and gallery on 14th Street in downtown Oakland. Some of you may know both, and some of you may know neither. Whichever category you fall into, you should check out a show of Pablo’s recent work at Awaken this month, with an opening reception during “First Friday” festivities on September 4th.

The show will feature the “Linescapes” series produced in the last few years, which is something of a departure from Pablo’s earlier work. While adhesive tape is still his material of choice, and while not-quite-parallel lines are still in abundance, “Linescapes” dispenses with the vivid colors of his earlier pieces in favor of much more muted hues. I love the older work, whose bright colors delight one immediately, but in an odd way, the stark and minimalist newer work ends up offering a richer experience for the viewer—the subtle tones force you to take a closer look, and another closer look, and it is in those closer looks that the nuances of the work more fully reveal themselves.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it; you can see for yourselves when you stop by the show. The reception, which will have wine, hors d’oeuvres and music, begins at 5 pm on Friday, Sept. 4th. If you can’t make the reception, the show will be up through the end of September 30th. (Go for the art, and stay for the coffee! Or vice versa!) You can check out more of Pablo’s work at his website and see the reception’s event listing at Facebook here.

A couple of leftover photos that didn’t seem to fit with yesterday’s post, so they get a post of their own:

…the public
Is pushing through the museum now so as to
Be out by closing time. You can’t live there.

— John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

I was in that other city across the bay this afternoon, so I stopped in to SF MoMA to see the Robert Frank show before it closes later this month. While I was there, I saw the new roof garden, and checked in on some old favorites in their permanent collection. (I was happy to find that they had a lot more of their Joseph Cornell collection on display than usual, including several works that I don’t remember ever seeing before, even in the big retrospective a year or two ago.)

I didn’t take many photos of the art itself (why bother when there are much better images of most of them all over the web?), but I did have some fun fooling around with the camera in the galleries, and the resulting shots ended up with a theme of their own.

People, watching:

Babywatching:

Poodlewatching:

Self-Portrait in a Convex Brancusi (with apologies to Parmigianino and Ashbery):

This is sort of cool. I had to go out to the old Naval Air Station in Alameda again a few days ago (photos from previous visits are here and here), and I took some photos looking across the bay to San Francisco. Unfortunately, they didn’t come out very well, in part because some kind of distortion was introduced into the images. I don’t know what caused it—possibly something I did wrong (I’m still learning how to use the camera properly), or maybe the effects of the heat rising from the old runway where I was standing in the hot sun, or maybe…

Anyway, for whatever reason, the images aren’t very clear, but when I was looking at them in full resolution, trying to understand why they didn’t come out as well as I had hoped, I noticed that the distortion actually produced a pretty nice “painterly” effect, almost as if they weren’t photographs at all, but rather oil paintings done in a slightly impressionist style. I didn’t edit or manipulate them intentionally to create this effect—this is how they came straight out of the camera (I did crop them, so these are just small pieces of the full images).

That’s the Bay Bridge with Telegraph Hill (topped by Coit Tower) behind it. Here’s another one (from a different original image) of downtown SF:

If anyone happens to know what might have caused this particular kind of distortion, I’d be curious to hear an explanation. I checked some other photos that I shot from the same location with the same camera (and similar settings) a few months ago, and while they aren’t necessarily any crisper, they don’t remind me of painted landscapes the way that these do.

This is on Fruitvale Avenue, near the BART station. I’m not the only person who likes this sign: a local artist made a painting of it as part of a whole series on Oakland signage.

If you’ve set foot in an American city in the past few decades, then you are probably familiar with hipster T-shirts. They might be regular old T-shirts, but instead of having earnest logos such as “Dysart’s Truck Stop, Bangor, ME,” they have ironic logos such as “Dysart’s Truck Stop, Bangor, ME.” The sensibility is what makes the difference: If a working class guy in his 50’s in Milwaukee is wearing a “Pabst Blue Ribbon” T-shirt, then it’s probably not a hipster tee. When a guy in his 20’s on a fixie in Portland wears a “Pabst Blue Ribbon” T-shirt, then you can be sure that it is a hipster tee.

Unironic shirts donned with ironic intent are only one kind of hipster tee. Another variety are ironic shirts donned with ironic intent. When Seinfeld was the big Thursday night NBC sitcom in the 1990’s, Vandelay Industries T-shirts were born (“Importing/Exporting — Fine Latex Goods”). Now that The Office is the big Thursday night NBC sitcom, Dunder Mifflin and Schrute Beet Farm shirts are worn with pride from the Mission to Bushwick. With shirts such as these, one gets to wallow in corporate consumer culture while simultaneously showing one’s cool detachment from corporate consumer culture: hipster heaven!

I’m not a serious connoisseur of hipster tees, so I won’t try to explain the full taxonomy here, and I know that I’m lumping a lot of disparate styles under the rubric “hipster tees,” but I’m sure you know the sort of shirts I’m talking about. Many hipster T-shirts have a cool or funky design on them, or a clever phrase, or some combination of the two. As long as it is worn with an appropriate level of ironic distance, any T-shirt can be a hipster tee.

I was thinking the other day about what a quintessential hipster tee might consist of. Since many have a combination of word and image, and often a self-referential element that subverts the entire premise of putting a design on a T-shirt, this train of thought carried me to Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images,”  with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”).

Magritte, like a lot of the surrealists, was something of a protohipster (an ur-hipster? a hipst-ur?). Nothing is meant to be taken entirely seriously, the work tends to undermine itself in one way or another, and if you don’t like it…well, that just proves that you’re not in the know. If something is not said or done in earnest, then earnest objections to it tend to look silly (cf. David Denby).

Just as media critics ask, “Who’s watching the watchdogs?” and the movie ads ask, “Who’s watching the watchers,” I naturally asked myself, “Who’s ironizing the ironists?” Well, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it, so I have given notice at my job and have founded a T-shirt company that will try to out-hip the hipsters (probably a futile aspiration, I know). I’ve tried to come up with something for everyone, starting with the basics: (more…)

The same design is available on all sorts of other things from the seller at CafePress. I think I still like these “53 miles per burrito” shirts even more.

I shot this near the Oakland waterfront on my way home from work today. You can click the image for a larger version.

A lot of prominent names appear in the Bill Grimes’s New York Times obituary of Leila Hadley, the author and socialite: Vanderbilt, Luce, Brando, and so on. One person whose name does not appear is the artist Joseph Cornell. Hadley appears to have been the closest thing Cornell ever had to a lover, and superficially, you can’t imagine a less likely couple: Hadley was a world traveler and sexually free, while Cornell almost never left the city limits of New York and seems to have died a virgin.

It would be a mistake to dismiss their intimate relationship with a shrug and the cliche that “opposites attract,”  because Hadley was in fact precisely the kind of woman that you would expect Cornell to fall for. While Cornell never travelled farther than Massachusetts (and not even that far in adulthood), he frequently conjured up European hotels — or the entire solar system — in the magical shadow boxes that he created in his basement in Queens. While Cornell never had a proper girlfriend, he was an obsessive observer of women, and often turned his boxes into little shrines to the women he admired from afar, such as Lauren Bacall. or 19th century ballerina Marie Taglioni.

Leila Hadley, sexually alluring and worldly, might have seemed to Cornell like all of his lifelong fantasies turned into flesh and blood. Hadley told Deborah Solomon, Cornell’s biographer, that he even spoke about marrying her and traveling together, although those musings could simply have been more fantasies spun by a fantasist, one who ultimately could not bring himself to consummate his relationship with Hadley.

Joseph Cornell is a lot more interesting (and historically important) than most of the people mentioned in the Times obituary, including her four husbands and various lovers. It’s sad, but not altogether surprising, that Hadley’s affair with Cornell didn’t even merit a small mention in her obit. For while she was a figure who looms very large in Cornell’s life story, his place in hers, amid the marriages and affairs, looks negligible — although it probably wasn’t, from her point of view — and you can understand why an Obit writer almost 40 years later would not deem Cornell worth mentioning at all.

Okay, so it’s a bit rough around the edges. I’m no artist — or lawyer, for that matter.

(In case anyone is unfamiliar with the legal jousting between the AP and Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic Obama “HOPE” posters, you can get up to speed here.)

Later this month, a project by Joe Penrod called Orange and Blue will be opening at Oakland’s Swarm Gallery along with works by Jared Clark and Jake Watling as part of the ENTER/EXIT exhibition. I’m not especially tuned into Oakland’s thriving arts community, but I have known Watling for several years (I may have occasion to write more about some of his nice Oakland-inspired work in the future), so I happened to be looking at info about this show in advance. Penrod is based in Olympia, Washington, and much of his work has been devoted to the quixotic pursuit of shadowcatching, using blue painter’s tape and photography. Here is one nice example (images reproduced with the gracious permission of the artist):

10 and 4 by Joe Penrod

I assume that the title requires no explanation. Shadows have long had a somewhat uncertain ontological status, dating back to Plato’s cave allegory, and probably before. There’s no doubt that shadows are real — we can see them with our own eyes, after all — but good luck trying to touch one, or pack it up and take it home with you.

Penrod certainly isn’t the first artist to try to preserve shadows — one might argue that the history of photography has been one long inquiry into the preservation of shadows — but I love the playfulness of the bright blue tape, and the whimsy involved in trying to finish the taping and photographing before the shadow has moved. The movement of the shadows enables some of my favorite pieces, like this one on a Williamsburg street corner:

by Joe Penrod

Sometimes, too, it’s not the shadow that moves. These images are great fun (trying to catch shadows could be an amusing game for small children), but then you realize that most of these tape outlines will hardly outlast the shadows they are capturing, whether because they will be worn away, or deteriorate in the weather, or be removed by diligent city workers. Thus the need to photograph the outlines after they are complete. Is the blue tape outline the artwork, or is the photograph of the outline the work of art?

Both, surely, but how long will a digital photograph last? Forever, we hope, but in the grand scheme of things, those digital files may be as fleeting as the blue tape, which is as fleeting as the shadows themselves.

Stop Shadow by Joe Penrod

I was particularly interested in these works because my friend Pablo Manga, an artist here in Oakland, also works with tape, but with dramatically different results. You might think that tape would be a limiting medium, but Pablo’s works achieve very different effects depending on the kind of tape and the colors he chooses. Even variations in the manufacturing quality of the tape can create some fascinating effects. And that’s all before any decisions about how to place the tape, which produce an entirely different set of possibilities.

I don’t want to deprive Penrod’s work of its charm by spewing a lot of commentary about it, so I will spare my readers any additional thoughts. The best response to art like this, in my opinion, is summed up by this woman at Pike’s Place in Seattle:

By Joe Penrod

If you can make at least one person stop, smile, and point, then that’s an artistic success as far as I’m concerned. The Swarm Gallery exhibition, at 560 2nd Street near Jack London Square, will last from February 20th to March 29th. Among the many objects whose shadows Penrod has tried to snare are orange traffic cones, and his Swarm installation will involve traffic cones as well. You can also find more work on Penrod’s blog or his Flickr portfolio (there’s more than just the tape outlines, even though that’s all I’ve mentioned here.) Good stuff, I think, and I definitely plan to check it out in person when the show opens.