BirchLane.org

July 

Wednesday 31

Say Goodbye to July.

Tuesday 30

On The Beach. The movie. 1959. Nevil Shute’s acclaimed novel takes a subtle approach to delivering a anti-war message. Atomic conflict is over and Australia is the last site of human life. Until the radiation clouds arrive. Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner star in this quietly devastating film that condemns war without firing a single shot. Director; Stanley Kramer.

 

Monday 29

War is Hell. Part of a series on a theme.

Sunday 28

Lace. In our yard, Queen Anne's Lace. Or wild carrot, herb ( Daucus carota ) of the family Umbelliferae ( carrot family), native to the Old World but naturalized and often weedy throughout North America. Similar in appearance to the cultivated carrot (which is believed to have been derived from this plant), it has feathery foliage but a woody root. The tiny white flowers bloom in a lacy, flat-topped cluster (called an umbel) until they wither, when the cluster becomes nest-shaped (whence another of its names, bird's nest). The plant was formerly used in folk medicine as a diuretic and a stimulant. Queen Anne's lace is classified in the division Magnoliophyta , class Magnoliopsida, order Apiales, family Umbelliferae

Saturday 27

Father and Son. Late Saturday night.

Friday 26

Ursula. I met Ursula a few weeks ago. She works at the print shop where I have my greeting cards and issues of BirchLane printed. When I walked into the shop a few weeks ago and saw her for the first time I exclaimed, “I love your hair,” which was short and pink. I said to her you will love this greeting card and gave her a copy.  It was a photo of Carolina. I gave her the greeting card and the weird thing was she, too, like Clara, the photographer, was from Sweden. I did not have my camera but I asked her if I could take her photo sometime. Well, I was back there today to proof two new greeting cards and she was there was, too. She came outside with me and I took her picture.  She got hit in the face recently with a Frisbee, thus the scar on her chin.

Thursday 25

Klee's Best. There is much to see right now at the MET in New york City: Thomas Eakins, Gaugin, old photos of New York City, and "Klee's Best,"

"Color has taken hold of me; no longer do I have to chase after it," Klee wrote. "Color and I am one. I am a painter."

An installation of highlights from the Berggruen Klee Collection comprising watercolors, drawings, and paintings. The selection also includes the rarely shown watercolors that the artist created in Tunisia in 1914 when he was 35, which were instrumental for his path towards abstraction. From a review in The Guardian of a larger exhibition (Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation Hayward Gallery):

There are certain exhibitions, born of passion and insight, that redefine a dead painter for a new generation. Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation, a display of nearly 100 drawings and paintings, might have been among them. Curated by the artist Bridget Riley and the art historian Robert Kudielka, it unites her passion and his scholarship to present Klee as a master of formal analysis, prolific as Picasso, inventive as Matisse - the third king of European modernism.

You may think that this is no more than Klee's due, that he was always more than the author of those playful little images people like to send out as postcards. But there have been doubts since his death in 1940, partly because it is so hard to catch him by the tail. Klee made no distinction between drawing and painting, figuration and abstraction, the internal and external worlds. He left almost 10,000 works, none of them easily categorised by movement or period.

Selectively edited, these have been used to support any number of opposing versions of the artist during the past 60 years. So we have had Klee the Mystic - 'The Buddha of the Bauhaus' as his students called him - not quite as far gone as Kandinsky, but still convinced of a visual equivalent for every spiritual experience.

We have had Klee the Graphic Designer, with his arrays of symbols and glowing colours; and Klee the Comic Genius, inventor of that scratchy, endearingly pictographic style that would run all the way through Thurber and Ronald Searle to the illustrators and cartoonists of today. There have been thematic shows - Klee and Music, Klee and Tunisia; and a fabulous A-Z of his art in Edinburgh less than two years ago. But none has kept his written theories quite so rigorously in mind as the current exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

In mind, but not quite in sight - only a scattering of Klee's pithiest statements are included here: 'Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible', 'Formation is good. Form is bad,' and so forth. This is probably judicious, since Klee's published writings can be as hard to negotiate as Finnegans Wake. But it does mean the exclusion of more expressive revelations, such as his definition of a line as a point wandering through space. Or his description of a line with a squiggle curving back and forth across it as 'like the path of a man with a dog running free'. Even the most irreducibly basic elements of art inspired in Klee an immediate poetry.

Take a single line, straight and horizontal, and it becomes a tightrope, a boulevard or the calm surface of the ocean. Twenty or more, streaming in parallel across a page, and you have a shimmering river; an eddy introduced with the slightest fluctuation. Straight lines give direction, speed and dynamic motion. Vibrating across the gleeful face of The Old Man Reckoning , they increase the atmosphere of busy calculation, multiplying between his counting fingers in a delicate visual joke.

Or take the square, so essential to Klee's method. He begins with one, adds another and then allows them to proliferate, almost unconsciously, all over the page. They may form a kind of intermediate world, as, for example, in Dance of the Moth where the fragile insect performs a last dying ballet, trapped between the shaft of light squares at the top of the painting and the graduating darkness below. They may supply an abstract template, like the checkerboard in Ancient Harmony , a musical counterpoint performed in tone and colour. Or they may elaborate a loose, architectural structure.

In Abstraction of a Motif From Hammamet, Klee begins with an irregular grid. Some squares are then divided into triangles, others into oblongs. These shapes rhyme, contrast and repeat themselves. Ditto the colours. The motif - whatever it was - is no longer central. What you see is an open-ended abstraction, neither contained nor defined by the picture frame. And yet this abstraction is not entirely decoupled from local reality. In a row of white squares, a stipple of green dots and some hazy patches of yellow and cobalt Klee floats the gentle promise of villages, trees, sun, sea and sand.

This picture was painted in 1914, during the momentous trip to Tunisia where Klee declared that he had finally discovered colour at the age of 35. Before Tunisia, Klee didn't even call himself an artist. After Tunisia, his art becomes a continuous, exhilarating, celebratory experiment.

'Taking a line for a walk' may have become the catchphrase Klee unwittingly bequeathed to posterity, but it is far too modest a description of his gift for selecting, balancing and orchestrating lines so that they take the eye for a walk through fields of graphic energy.

You will need a great deal of time and quiet for the Hayward show because there is so much to read: from the throngs of coded symbols - arrows, flags, circumflexes, clefs - along the tightropes, down the fishing lines and ladders and via the grids and musical staves that act as an underlying grammar to Klee's private sign language.

The great success of this show is to draw close attention to the fundamental elements and principles of that language. These are outlined in Bridget Riley's catalogue essay, which brings Klee's analytical thinking beautifully to life. But it may be advisable to read this before visiting the show, where the texts are as inert as the atmosphere itself - each work isolated at measured distance from the next, the Stygian gloom of the Hayward lifted only by studious spotlights.

The selection, too, is strangely austere. What is missing is the extraordinary joie de vivre and spirit of Klee's art.

There is no emphasis on his experiments with materials, for example. Klee painted on cardboard, plaster, newsprint and glass, on handkerchiefs, wrapping paper and parachute silk. Here and there, you catch a glimpse of his serendipitous invention: the way he archaises a tablet of hieroglyphics by incising them in plaster; the way he suggests the sparkling heat around a shady garden with a simple frame of silver foil.

Pathos and humour are also deliberately played down. The show does include one of his quizzical avian assemblies, a couple of charming sexual comedies and the wonderfully preposterous watercolour, The Great Emperor Rides to War, in which the tin-pot Kaiser is deflated by a wilting phallus. But none of the cherished classics are displayed, let alone any of the hundreds of visual-verbal drawings, with their witty titles and comic exclamations. This, I think, is a serious omission. Humour was integral to the benign humanity of his art.

In his last years Klee was afflicted by scleroderma, a horrifying disease that slowly mummifies its victims. All his lithe mobility impeded, he relied more and more on pure abstraction to articulate his visions. The brush becomes broader, the colours more dazzling. The language is liberated into a grand and commanding song.

It's in this final, magnificent room that you see how much Klee would influence the future of abstraction from Miró to Rothko and onwards - and, perhaps, the climactic works this exhibition really wanted to give us all along.

 

Wednesday 24

A World in Crisis.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" Hillel taught in Pirkei Avot. "And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" Although his words were uttered centuries ago, they seem more relevant today than ever.

Tuesday 23

Out here there are no hearthstones,
Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry.
And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly
On the mind's eye erecting a line
Of poplars in the middle distance, the only
Object beside the mad, straight road
One can remember men and houses by.
A cool wind should inhabit these leaves
And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,
In the blue hour before sunup.
Yet they recede, untouchable as tomorrow,
Or those glittery fictions of spilt water
That glide ahead of the very thirsty.

I think of the lizards airing their tongues
In the crevice of an extremely small shadow
And the toad guarding his heart's droplet.
The desert is white as a blind man's eye,
Comfortless as salt. Snake and bird
Doze behind the old masks of fury.
We swelter like firedogs in the wind.
The sun puts its cinder out. Where we lie
The heat-cracked crickets congregate
In their black armorplate and cry.
The day-moon lights up like a sorry mother,
And the crickets come creeping into our hair
To fiddle the short night away.

- Sylvia Plath

Monday 22

Birch Lane, Storm Approaching

Sunday 21

In Our Garden Grows.

Saturday 20

Walk in the Woods.

Friday 19

Remembrances of Things Past.

Thursday 18

War.

crisis of the real

The prefix "post" is currently enjoying a widespread vogue in cultural circles. We speak of our times and world view as variously postmodern, postindustrial, post-Freudian, post-capitalist, post-Marxist, poststructuralist. We seem to want to beyond the past, to leap out across some imagined barrier into a brave new world. Instead, we find ourselves without absolutes, without standards of reference by which to make judgements. This is precisely what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has called the simulacrum, a socially constructed hall of mirrors with no external points of reference. For many, history has become entertainment instead of instruction, and the future is whatever we care to make it. Alas, cry these Chicken Littles, the real is no longer what it used to be. We return to Plato's cave and do not pass go.

-andy grundberg

Wednesday 17

Street.

Tuesday 16

Times Square. Today:

Monday 15

Planning. Getting ready for trip to New York City tomorrow. Catching 6:00 a.m. train instead of driving. Plan to finish reading "The Leopard" by Giuseppe di Lampedusa and finish layout for new issue of BirchLane. Busy day: Visit Jenni at Houk Gallery; meeting at Showtime, drop off new business card/samples/new greeting cards at American Museum of Natural History, Christies, Estee Lauder, American Bible Society, and Metropolitan Museum of Art---where I will then spend rest of day. Catch train home.

Sunday 14

Fourteen. Daryl turned 14 yesterday. We celebrated his birthday today. I made Grilled Chicken Berbere (The Red Pepper Paste of Africa).

1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon each ground cardamom, coriander, fenugreek seeds
A good pinch each ground cloves, cinnamon, and allspice
2 teaspoons minced onion
1 glove garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 cup paprika
1 tablespoon crushed hot red pepper
1 teaspoons cracked peppercorns

Put in ingredients in a heavy skillet. Over low heat, toast 2 or 3 minutes. Put in a blender and whirl to pulverize. Use dry ot make a past with a little water and oil.

Saturday 13

The Image. I have been thinking about something Jouke said.

He wrote:

the problems of 'image'

Whether made or found, constructed or scanned, composed or recorded, installed or laid out, isolated or copied, framed or posted, or all of the above in some mercurial media mix presence, all 'image' questions conclude in two major problems: the one of editing and the one of distributing, in infinite global production. What to post where, for who to see to what avail is the question—from none to post for none to see or learn ever, up to everything to be posted everywhere forever for all to access at any time, for all to know all. That is exactly the scope of choice that we are facing for cultural production today, in the Early Information Age. Each choice is 'image' content. The edit and distribution are the message.

near-none—one receptive eye all it needs

Our most disturbing images we receive when we are undisturbed by communication. They come from no direct source but from an incidental lucky 'pick', a moment of memory and experience. Such images are not 'ex nihilo' at all, but have an untraceable history, they occur in our dreams from an unknown desire, they occur in moments of forlorness, they occur when we actually imagine, for once. Such images will not be repeated but can be remembered, in ever different versions of an original appearance. These are the most daring, the least troubled by mediation, unconventional, true images—with that original image being a vision, a genuine visibility. Because of its undirectedness—since there is no sender, but a subject, a receiver who we can not name as such, because nothing was sent to, but simply arose in her or him—because of this unreasonable image lacking a destination, but to appear and disappear on one single site ever, at one moment, it's nobody's business, but the one.

All else is propaganda, poor pastime petty pastiche.

near-all—one productive screen all it gets

The more information we are exposed to, the more we (can only) hope to find direct content in a scene depicted, rather than in the depiction itself. Information of the image/object is replaced or taken over by information in the scene. A sentimental way of reading images is promoted here. Look at that...! Your selection of scenes from data is based on recognition of some striking situation/information, something you'd never had witnessed if not for the image that's taken from it. Certainly this goes for photography. And of course the photo-graphy of the image enhances a scene, heightening the contrast of this particularly picturesque with less dramatic events. You can not even try to look at this 'scene', without looking at the photo-graphy. It goes for any image. I'm not talking isolated images here, not the edited articulated isolated, but the spammed, industriously produced, networked endlessly flowing, in no particular direction, a product of 'information exchange'...

Then, the prime appeal, that which raises your attention, to awake you from checking endless pieces of data with little information (no news for you), is that scene, posted before you, suddenly standing out.

One Through Twelve.

Vacation Notes. (this is coming; lots of notes)