Cubism, Visual and Literal

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Georges Braque, Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, and Glass (1913)

A success, a success is alright when there are there rooms and no vacancies, a success is alright when there is a package, success is alright anyway and any curtain is wholesale. A curtain diminishes and an ample space shows varnish.

Louis Casimir Marcoussis, Still Life with Three Fish (1925)

One taste one tack, one taste one bottle, one taste one fish, one taste one barometer. This shows no distinguishing sign when there is a store.

Pablo Picasso, Table with Loaves and Bowl of Fruit (1909)

Any smile is stern and any coat is a sample. Is there any use in changing more doors than there are committees. This question is so often asked that squares show that they are blotters. It is so very agreeable to hear a voice and to see all the signs of that expression.

Georges Braque, Woman with Guitar (1914)

Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.

Text from “Rooms” section of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), in which convetional meaning becomes fractured, split apart, and reorganized.

My, what a big horse you have

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Gregory de la Haba’s Equus Maximus


Sometimes you see something that is just wrong:

“New York multimedia artist Gregory de la Haba’s not-to-be-missed masterpiece Equus Maximus is ambitious to say the least, involving life-size taxidermy show horses… The overall effect is at once baroque and erotic, emotionally charged, and animated by a certain primitive, tribal sorcery that lends a deep soulfulness to the tableau’s splashy titillation.” – Flavorpill

And you feel the need to correct it, even if you never were particularly motivated to talk about the art you first saw months ago. If you’ve been to Jack the Pelican in Williamsburg…you’ve surely noticed this in the back of their gallery:

It’s striking, and makes me quite uneasy as it’s crammed into a dimly-lit, small backroom and you really have to scoot behind the rearing horses with obscene huge sexual organs to see all of it. What I did not see was “a deep soulfulness” the Flavorpill writer mentions. Of course, I’ve also heard it described as awesomely amazing, which I don’t buy into either. The gallery website puts it best by saying: “Over-the-top doesn’t quite capture the incredible vulgarity of it all.” Has anyone else seen it? I’m not sure if I’m turned off by the calculated attempt at shock value, or if the sexual horse thing is just too much for me. Either way, I’m pretty sure the emotional primal sorcery was lost on me.

Now I’m going to try to find something to write about that doesn’t involve horse sex or butts.

From Richard Serra’s Mouth: Dick Bellamy

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One of the art dealers profiled in The Art Dealers is Richard Bellamy, and they refer to him as a dealer’s dealer. Other dealer’s profiles were sprinkled with references to him. But when I read his profile, I don’t know that I quite got why or how he was so important. He talks like this:

“In the early years I hadn’t formed any allegiances or opinions yet, so there was no static around the art that interfered with what I was seeing. Being unpracticed, I was registering things very clearly, with an innocent eye. I had an intensity of perception, where things just got interiorized immediately.”

Interesting, but something was missing. Then I came across this essay by Richard Serra in The Brooklyn Rail. Here’s an excerpt:

After I arrived in New York, Dick would phone me every morning. He would always ask the same question: “Richard, how is the weather downtown?” I would put the phone down, walk the length of the loft to the window, look out, go back and report: gray, sunny, fog, rain, snow, whatever. It took me a while to realize that the weather was the same uptown, and this was Dick’s way of keeping in touch. The fact that he phoned every day without fail gave me a sense of security that I needed. I knew that art was being made around the corner and I was nowhere, driving a truck for a living and trying to sort it all out.

The whole piece is great read; I recommend you check it out. The list of artist’s who had initial shows through Green or Hansa or Goldowsky gallery–including Serra–is impressive. Now I think the book should refer to him as the artist’s dealer.