Frances Stark - A Craft too Small (on Bas Jan Ader) in Frances Stark Collected Writing: 1993-2003

“Recently my mother lent me another Ouspensky book, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, a series of lectures. In the introduction he states he was motivated to give lectures because people would always ask him what he was working on and he found it too difficult to consolidate the information; only a lengthy series of lectures could begin to do the job of explaining his work. I like the generosity in this, probably because I always find it particularly impossible to give an answer when people ask me ‘what is your work like?’ upon my foolishly having revealed to them that I’m an artist. I feel like my non-answer is often misinterpreted as ‘I’m too deep to tell you’, but usually I’m just thinking a description of what I do is going to make what I do sound really un-worth doing. …While worrying whether something sounds as if it weren’t worth doing, as I mentioned above, I must also hold inside me the belief that not only is it worth doing, but the knowledge that it’s also worth a couple thousand dollars to someone else who thinks so too. This hidden-agreement-to-believe is even more difficult to explain to people than the ‘actual’ art, but it might just be the thing that convinces me I’m doing self-work and not self-help.”

Sharon Lockhart at MoMA November 11-17 2010

Double Tide. 2009. USA. Directed by Sharon Lockhart

MoMA presents the New York premiere of Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide (2009), a luminous and meditative portrait of a woman digging clams in the mudflats of the Atlantic Ocean. Filmed in Seal Cove, Maine, a historic site for commercial clamming, during a rare natural phenomenon—when low tide occurs twice during daylight hours, once at dawn and once at dusk—Double Tide depicts an ageless tradition of backbreaking work within the sublime and quiet beauty of a wild coastal landscape. The film, which also exists as a double-screen gallery installation, continues the fascination with ritual and labor seen in Lockhart’s other recent works, from her choreographed study of Japanese farmers piling hay (NO, 2003) to her recent look at Maine shipyard workers at rest (Lunch Break, 2008) and leaving the factory at day’s end (Exit, 2008). As with many of her films, Double Tide occupies the liminal space between stillness and movement, and between actual time and subjective time. Jen Casad, the clam digger who appears in the film, will join Lockhart in a Q&A following the opening night screening on November 11.

Artist Statement: Josephine Meckseper

Josephine Meckseper

(an example of a ‘parallel’ text)

On a bluish spring day two men are dragging a large mirror along Fifth Avenue like a piece of sky. That morning a woman on the subway platform had on a tight silver polyester top that made her chest look like a metal sculpture. She wasn’t very pretty. Opaque pantyhose. Nude heel. Seamless stretch. An electrified albino played the violin at the still-dark Prince Avenue station. Hat with change next to his sunshy feet and most people listening. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Makhov again began with a vulgar simplification of Marxism. “Our only revolutionary class is the proletariat,” he declared, and from this correct premise he forthwith drew an incorrect conclusion: “The rest are of no account, they are mere hangers-on (general laughter)… .”

A perfect day to be uptown. Everything is high, the buildings, the sky, the people. The glass, the metal, the bright light. Buses rushing by and the cars. Even the handicapped tourists look good now that the dust has settled. Mannequins in shop windows are still wearing bathrobes. Belts made from lost ties of careless businessmen. Thousand points of light, bail bonds, soft money. Low prices every day. The London crowd in Engels and The man of the crowd in Poe. Coffee grounds in white snow on the sidewalk and water dripping from the Empire’s windows on the world. Consequently, resistances to command continually emerge within Empire.

I am late, jumping into a taxi heading south on Fifth. Towards the sun, the Bank of America. Left lane must turn left. The avenues aren’t much better. Eventually they all end in the water. The numbers on the note turned out to be a hotel address. And a room number. And a time. Wooden furniture, beige wallpaper. Television from 1987 and a small terrace. Ornament as crime. Once out on the terrace, two girls with long legs and blond hair so light that yellow seems white and white seems yellow. The same faces and laughter, from dusk to dawn. And further west a condemned building, and then the unused elevated train with grass growing on its tracks, people living in damp boxes under it.

Artist Statement: Dana Schutz

Dana Schutz

“Recently, I have been working on a group of paintings loosely hinged on the act of painting a fictional man from observation, and representing the objects that surround us. The paintings are premised on the imaginary situation that the man and I are the last people on earth. The man is the last subject and the last audience and, because the man isn’t making any paintings, I am the last painter.

The pictures oscillate between observational paintings of him posing for me and hallucinatory arrangements of objects, mirages and visions of transitory events. The paintings float in and out of pictorial genres. Still lives become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive. I am less interested in the narrative of survival, i.e. how we would find food and what sticks we would use to build the house, than in the man as a subject.

The psychological and representational implications of painting in a world where reality is relational between two people, or, in a world without anyone to check reality against, is a starting point for these paintings. The man disappears from the paintings and then reappears. When the man is not present, the paintings become hallucinatory, symbolic and irrational. Tangents are important to my way of thinking and way of working. Often, the paintings’ meanings or interpretations are contingent on their relationship to one another. Earlier this year, I was making paintings based on groups of beginning sculptors. The sculptors would go out into nature to make sculpture and then go home, leaving their sculpture behind. I was also painting sneezes, and the gaze of people who could see the future. The disjunction between what is presented and what remains unseen is central to many of the paintings. In my work, I imagine a place, a moment, and a fictional situation, which meshes the premise of a practical situation with the absurd.”

- Dana Schutz, November, 2002