the first annual memorial for ideas

I'm getting into Elizabeth Peyton's paintings lately. This bothers me. I always hated her paintings because they reminded me of a high school student's fan art. I now like her paintings for this very reason. Maybe I'm becoming more and more nostalgic for the kind of art that can only be made by people completely lacking in self-consciousness. But can I will myself out of my own tastes, my own accumulated knowledge? Isn't claiming to be "cool" with audience-friendly art or being "over" guilty pleasures just a weird New Sincerity bragging right? Is Elizabeth Peyton's art even audience-friendly? Whenever I see work like Peyton's, I half-assume that it's only "about" pedestrian painting, and then I get lost in doublethink. Sometimes when people blog pictures of Lil' Wayne in a red baseball cap next to a Titian painting (or whatever), I wonder to myself if we are all secretly Clement Greenberg.

Anyway, I really like Peyton's paintings of Chloe Sevigny. Socks with wedges used to be "my jam" before I looked at too many pictures of Sevigny on tumblr. Which is not to say that I hate Sevigny... Well, actually, I can't exactly claim to like her either. But what I do know is that girls post too many pictures of her to their tumblrs.

Nice paintings, though.

Even better than the paintings are these videos:

They are a total nightmare of eclecticism that could only be upstaged in real life by the inspiration list for a Rodarte collection (let us not forget the potent cocktail of "primitive rag-doll", Eva Hesse string sculptures, Japanese horror films, and Edgar Degas paintings that was their spring/summer 2008 collection). The videos beckon us to imagine friends having telephone chats about "irony, Fassbinder, or Proenza Schouler" and outfits that masterfully blend "half boots" with "mock-bonnets" and "ironic coin-skorts." The Chloe Sevigny of these videos pigeon-toes and throws forcefully lazy slouches that accurately mirror the actress's real-life mannerisms. Can't believe I just typed the words "forcefully lazy." I think this is my cue to leave. Also, I'm currently trying to write my thesis on irony, which just might be the biggest dick move of all time. So in case you were wondering where I've been lately - that's where I've been! Trying to forcefully insert an Henri Bergson quote about laughter into an essay on Hennessy Youngman (ew).

p.s.

If only there were such a thing as "mental forceps"

leigh ledare loves his mother

cosima von bonin (or, what art is v.s. what i want it to be)

Countless times, I've planned on posting Cosima von Bonin's work only to back out at the last minute. Do I really care that she organizes events with makeshift musical groups? Is it funny or infuriating that she once staged a meal in which she instructed participants to thread strings of spaghetti through macaroni? Even though I'm a feminist, do I actually like "feminist" art (I'm always weary of work that should have existed as a manifesto instead)? Just because the worlds of art, design, and commerce are inextricably linked, must artists' works reflect this? Is it strong-willed or merely feeble-minded to insist on making art that supposedly exists in its own world?

Surely this is what it comes down to. I don't particularly like the fact that "high culture" and "low culture" have mutated into a weird soup (I know they're not polar opposites, but am unsure if I buy the notion that they are one and the same), that the goals of Modernism aren't quite possible, that my generation is supposedly sincere and ironic at the same time (what is that even supposed to mean?), that subcultures cannot exist anymore, that a good part of my anxieties stem from the (seeming) necessity to maintain my "personal brand" (my apologies for using this term, a corny but useful one). But that is the truth of the world. But is art supposed to correspond with the truth of the world? I think so, I hope so.

Look, I'm not saying I didn't wish we could erase most cultural output from the last fourty years and go back to being formalists (or something), it's not like I don't read Clive Bell or T.S. Eliot and think HIGH FIVES ALL AROUND

And my peers are making art that pretends to be Modern art, or makes some comment about how the artist likes Modern art, or maybe "Ha ha ha, here's something made with MDF board that looks like Matisse," or something about "representation" or "telos" or "the meme economy" that looks like Brancusi rendered in Google SketchUp. And this kind of art looks pretty awesome sometimes, but I'm becoming less and less sure of it. What does it mean to use isms and art-historical movements as formal motifs, to reduce history to mere decoration?

So, reality sets in and I'm not sure if I can delude myself into thinking these things are true, as much as I'd like for them to be.

I guess what I'm saying is, maybe there's a reason why Cosima von Bonin's work looks like dying, flaccid crabs and stuffed animals and shopping bags and needlework and a thousand references to everything. It looks that way because it has to.

this michael smith drawing

http://elizabethleaving.tumblr.com/

Leaving me is a repository for the photographs Filip Olszewski takes of his girlfriend. Each photograph, taken through the window as if by a stalker or adoring lover, shows the same female figure exiting Olszewski's home. Launched in June 2011, Leaving is comprised of fifty-four snapshots (and counting), all taken within the last year.

Filip's studied effort to record and catalog his girlfriend may not be extraordinary on its own. Many of us take photographs of our significant others, eating spaghetti from twelve different angles or yawning in the morning. Maybe we write obsessively about them in our diaries, read then reread the letters they leave us, house the things they forget at our place in a shoebox. In Leaving, the archiving impulse of the lover is met with its match: the archiving impulse of tumblr. The tumblr dashboard is an archive of other people's archives; follow enough users, and you'll be met with the strange sadness that comes from knowing you'll never be able to look at all the images stored there. Tumblr's plain, symmetrical interface is like that of a textbook or a vitrine, lending it the ability to historicize images instantaneously. I would define this act of constantly looking at images - obsessively checking to see whether anyone has "liked" or commented on the images you have offered as avatars of yourself - as a sentimental and selfish one.

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes eloquently and critically on the sentimentality that comes with the territory of looking at photographs. Maybe it is an unearned sentimentality, one which can be activated endlessly and selectively so long as one keeps looking at the photograph. I suppose watching your lover leave has something to do with that decisive moment of the shutter clicking, watching a person pass from life into eternal stillness (in Olszewski's case it's disappearance, into the horizon or around the corner). To record this moment and store it for easy retrieval online is romantic in the strongest and scariest sense of the term. To quote Catherine Breillat:

"I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain."

Olszewski's project does not occupy the space of heaving bosoms and cozy morning-afters. Aptly titled Leaving me, it fixates unflinchingly on that terrifying thought, freezing and replicating that terrifying moment - that of his love literally leaving him - ad infinitum. This collection of photographs, in their strange way, allows him to keep that which he can never really hold onto completely.

http://elizabethleaving.tumblr.com/
http://elizabethleaving.tumblr.com/
http://elizabethleaving.tumblr.com/

muntean/rosenblum

"We are fascinated by, and investigate, how far you can go with the construction of the gesture of the figure. Because, we think the more artificial it gets, the more moving it is, even though, in the normal sense it is the natural that is the thing that moves you'" - Adi Rosenblum

meg cranston