Continue reading ‘San Suzie Photo Diary: 20 Hours to the Rose Parade.’
Author Archive for SanSuzie
Page 2 of 5
Artist Mike Kelley in a diaper at a press conference for West of Rome Public Art. Correction: Um, that’d be Michael Smith. Der. (Photo by San Suzie.)
Cheerleader by Dona Ann McAdams. (Image courtesy of Opalka Gallery.)
Last year when we spent the year slacking around Rome, we were fortunate to spend many of those hours wandering the streets with photographer and activitst Dona Ann McAdams — the artist best known for Caught in the Act, a book of photographs chronicling the work of performance artists such as Karen Finley, Eric Bogosian, Blue Man Group, Meredith Monk, Ethyl Eichelberger, Ann Magnuson, Bill T. Jones, and Allen Ginsburg, among others. McAdams, a street photographer in the tradition of Henri Cartier Bresson, was a pretty funny companion, riffing on everything she saw. But what we didn’t always notice is that even while she gabbed, she was skillfully zeroing in on her surroundings without breaking pace or even stopping the conversation, snapping away with a three-decade old Leica. “Ninety percent of what I shoot is crap,” McAdams once remarked when we happened to see the hundreds of rolls of black and white film in her refrigerator. Despite what she may say, her filter nonetheless manages to catch startlingly beautiful, humorous, unguarded moments that are intended as much to be chronicles of McAdams interest in social activism as pure beauty.
The work is now the subject of a Some Women, a comprehensive mid-career survey (a sampling, McAdams calls it) at the Opalka Gallery in Albany. The show centers on McAdams longstanding interest in women as subject matter and it’s is well worth the drive, especially this coming Wednesday, December 9, when Paul H-O’s film Guest of Cindy Sherman in which McAdams appears, will be shown in conjunction with the show’s final week. To promote the exhibit and the film, McAdams has agreed to submit to our interrogation.
San Suzie: What’s the biggest stereotype about photography?
Dona Ann McAdams: That it can illustrate an objective truth, and bear witness to an event. You can’t look at a photograph and know what’s going on. It’s just one person’s point of view.
If you could change one thing about the art world what would it be?
The way it’s looked at. Art should be in grocery stores. I’d like an exhibit at Sam’s Club.
What artist, living or dead, would you most like to party with?
I’d like to be at a jazz club in Harlem with Roy DeCarava and Tina Modotti. We’d be listening to Miles.
If you could have any work of art to hang in your bathroom, what would it be?
An original panel of Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland.
What two artists would you like to watch duke it out in a celebrity death match?
How about Caravaggio and William Burroughs dueling with pistols? But I’d rather see Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag play chess.
If an alien from another galaxy landed on Earth and wanted to take back a single work of art to represent all of humanity, what would you give them?
Duchamp’s ready-made urinal. It says it all.
What imagery do you think is overused in art?
The self-portrait.
If you were to die and come back as a piece of art, what would it be?
I’d be Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider Maman and live in the Cortile at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.
If you could vandalize any work of art, what would it be?
It would have to be Damien Hirst. But then he’d get even more press he doesn’t need. If you’re not going to eat the animals, put them in the ground or leave them in the ocean.
If art could kill, how would you like to die?
Listening to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. That kills me every time.
A bile-colored chandelier just brings the whole Phillipe Starck-designed spa together. (All photos by San Suzie.)
If the city of Miami gave a prize for the hotel that most embodies the anything-goes glamor of the December art fairs minus the pretentiousness of artistic content, the winner would surely be the new Viceroy on Brickell Avenue. The brainchild of Miami-based developer Jorge M. Perez of the Related Group, the Viceroy offers Fall-of-Rome narchitectural splendor realized by the design triumvirate of Miami-based Arquitectonica (exteriors), interiors maven Phillipe Starck (spa) and design wunderplaymate Kelly Wearstler (hotel).
Located on the lower 15 floors of the center of three soaring and mostly unsold condo towers, the hotel’s art-inspired grandiloquence begs the question of whether buying pricey originals makes any sense in trying economic times when design-based knock-offs can appear just as ostentatious. Fortunately, guests will have ample time for such contemplation while getting “non-surgical facelifts” at the marble-clad, chandelier-encrusted, 28,000 square-foot spa — a studiously tranquil environment permeated by the pungent scent of excess.
Click on images to supersize. Waaaay more after the jump. Continue reading ‘The Viceroy: The Official Hotel of C-Monster.net at the Basel Frazzle 2009.’
Nubian goat Lizzie (or Nisa or Penny…). After you finish Goat Song you’ll feel like you have a whole herd of goat pals. (Photo by Dona Ann McAdams.)
I just finished devouring Brad Kessler‘s Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A short history of herding, and the Art of Making Cheese. No pun intended, folks. Reading Kessler’s memoir of what it’s like to leave the New York art and literary world to make goat cheese in Vermont — with his photographer wife Dona Ann McAdams — is about as mouth-watering a reading experience as I can remember. Written in lush but straightforward prose, with beautiful photos by McAdams (the one-time chronicler of the downtown performance art scene), Goat Song made me want to run out and buy a little Nubian doe and start milking. The book is a surprising mother lode of information about art and culture. (Did you know that both the devil’s horns and cloven hooves and the shape of letters in the alphabet all owe their origins to herding?) It’s also a page turner, with hair-raising chapters about staving off coyote attacks and hilarious passages about goat sex. (“It’s like a frat house,” writes Kessler, of a male goat’s post-coital preening around his fellow bucks.)
And because when you finish reading Goat Song, the first question is, naturally, “Where’s the cheese?” — as in where can I taste Kessler’s home-aged tomme? — C-Monster.net is proudly offering a cheese giveaway courtesy of New York City’s Les Enfants Terribles, the only restaurant in the city that serves it. Tell us why you “cut the cheese” in the comments below and the Canal Street bar-restaurant will send you a coupon for a free fromage sample.
In the meantime, be sure to pick up a copy of Kessler’s book. You can find it right here.
DEAR ART NURSE:
My question is kinda no-frills, but I hope you’ll answer it: Is there a definitive conservators’ opinion regarding oil paint on acrylic gesso?
I was told by some old-schooler types in graduate school that the only genuinely archival method for oil painting is rabbit’s skin sizing and oil ground, and that it’ll hurt your success at being collected if you don’t use the ‘archivalest’ of the archival. But Gesso is so ubiquitous, it seems like it’s impossible for conservators not to have to deal with it.
I’ve heard it has more to do with how you stretch – if you’re making strainers instead of stretchers, the supports can’t move with the painting’s expanding/contracting, so acrylic gesso would actually be more stable in that scenario. Is this true?
- Sam
DEAR SAM:
We at the C-Mon art hospital like to think we know everything about all types of art, but when it comes to matters such as gesso and canvas we like to defer to our illustrious conservator colleagues who work on paintings. In this case we were fortunate to get some advice from one of the true greats, Will Shank, former chief conservator at SFMOMA, now living the high life in Barcelona. He tells us that using rigid oil paint on flexible acrylic ‘gesso’ preparations is okay according to the experts, but the reverse – acrylic over oil is ‘an absolute no-no.’ He also gives you kudos for recognizing that the problems of bad paint adhesion comes from improper stretching tension. He recommends avoiding strainers and always using expandable stretchers. That will help you keep your paint on the canvas and not on the floor in front of it.
He also points out – and this nurse could not agree more – that the word ‘archival’ is meaningless in terms of oil painting – or bronzes, or plaster, or stone, or for that matter, anything that isn’t specifically made of acid-free materials (like paper).
Rx, San Suzie
Have a question for the Art Nurse? E-mail her at suzie [at] c-monster [dot] net.
DEAR ART NURSE:
I made a sculpture about 4 months ago, mostly comprised of candle wax. I had no idea how to preserve the wax from breaking and melting away if it was put in high temperatures, so i decided to coat it with shellac, primarily out of fear of using resins, due to their toxicity. A few weeks ago i was moving the piece to a different location, left it temporarily outside and realized that the wax was getting soft. Now that i know that the shellac is not working the way I intended it to, I have no idea what i should use to preserve the piece. Whatever material I use, it must be clear, and must protect the piece from melting… Any suggestions?
– Daphne
DEAR DAPHNE:
Good question! This raises one of the most common misconceptions in the art world: whether something made of an inherently soft, degradable, or otherwise delicate/unstable material can be protected by coating it with something. The answer: No. You can’t keep a soft surface from melting in the heat by protecting it with a coating — whether it’s shellac or a synthetic resin. We love the suppleness and depth of wax sculpture just as much as the next art medical professional (think: Medardo Rosso, or the heaving animatronic breasts of Britney Spears at Madame Tussauds). But all waxes, whether paraffin, beeswax or microcrystalline are sensitive to heat.
The only thing you can do to keep it from melting is to keep it cool, that is, indoors and away from heat sources. In the future, if you want to use wax for sculpting, look for wax with a higher melting temperature. If you’re getting your wax at the 99-cent store, try using the ones that don’t have a scent (they tend to be harder). If you don’t mind materials that melt, however, I’d like to recommend lard. If the piece doesn’t work out, you can always cook with it.
– Rx, San Suzie
Have a question for the Art Nurse? E-mail her at suzie [at] c-monster [dot] net.
Second Chance Nurse, by Richard Prince.
As part of the expanding line of services here at C-Monster.net, we are debuting a regular new feature called Ask the Art Nurse, which will be headlined by the extraordinary San Suzie (who has written on conservation issues on this blog in the past). A sculpture and architectural conservator with 20+ years of experience, San Suzie has restored everything from Civil War firearms to sculptures by Claes Oldenburg to John Lautner’s Chemosphere house to a steel mill’s worth of abstract public art works. As part of her daily grind, she regularly treats pieces that are battered, bug-eaten, cracked or poorly made to begin with.
To help all you genre-busting artiste-types avoid the latter category, she has kindly agreed to let C-Mon‘s readers pick her highly knowledgeable brain. So, if you are in the process of creating a piece, and you don’t know your polymers from your Pearoefoam or want to try welding beer cans or casting in lard, now would be the time to submit your technical questions – before some budget-strapped museum has to contend with your disintegrating piece of brilliance. If sculpture or installation isn’t your specialty, no worries. San Suzie will consult with her extensive cabal of conservator-colleauges, who can let you know what that coat of varnish will do to your oils.
E-mail all queries to suzie [at] c-monster [dot] net. (Do not leave them in the comments below.) San Suzie will choose the best questions and answer them, at periodic intervals, on the blog. If you so desire, your identity will be kept in the strictest confidence.
xox,
C.