NEKKHAMMA

Stripped from its remedial connotations, the word convalescence has a strange soothing effect upon the ears. Perhaps its the early appearance of the mellifluous ‘V’ sound that glides and resonates throughout the entire articulation. Maybe it’s the warm gravy of descending vowels that contributes to its tranquilizing effect.

I’ve taken to use the word more often these days, as in “I’ll be back in the studio after a brief convalescence in San Miguel de Allende,” or “Why be alone? Why not convalesce with me at my house,” or “No sense convalescing now, wait till things really get bad.”

That felt pretty good on the tongue.

I recently swore off texting because I sensed it was making me dumber. If paraphrase is anathema to prose what then is an Instant Message?

To the developed world the twenty-first century has come wrapped in a frictionless bow where technology has spared us the bad breath and body odor of actual conversation. I can buy a handbag on Ebay, break up with my boyfriend, check if my Mom needs any more disposable diapers and watch an episode of Outlanders all at the same time!

If this is not what the Buddha meant by the “path of non-attachment” I don’t know what is.

Compared to the casual formality of ‘chat’ the air-kiss seems like a weepy wet embrace.

Well my blood runs toward the warm. I still sizzle with anticipation at the prospect of ambiguous body language. I love the frisson of touch, the lift of laughter and the harsh truncheon of words spoken with conviction.

I’ve quite had enough of this foolishness!!

Silicon Valley, I’m not sure how you deal with rejection but if you’re anything like my last boyfriend, you’ll get over it.

Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo

As unlikely as it seems coming from a long-time, multi-tasking freeway ferrying denizen of Los Angeles, I love to walk. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to peregrinate through the narrow and near empty sidewalks of this sprawling, axled and Arcadian megalopolis.

My friend, the French painter Currado Malaspina, refers to me as “mon petite flâneuse,” and despite the affectionately patronizing modifier I’d have to say he’s right. From the brackish opulence of seaside Santa Monica to the rickety retrofitted bricks of Boyle Heights, I’ve mangled a few heels and torn a few dead soles strolling through this lonely trafficked town.

I generally carry a light purse containing just the bare essentials: My phone, my keys, a Diet Coke or two, a #08 black micron pen and a 5×5 inch gridded Rhodia reporter’s pad.

I jot down notes as I walk unless I’m visited by a raging muse who makes it a point to incite me toward a long-winded drawn out jeremiad or a cynical mean spirited aperçu. At such times I look for a bus shelter, a park bench or even a dreaded Starbucks to sit down and write with greater care and at greater length.

Like Bellow’s Herzog I typically have a target and I compose these screeds as letters which of course I never send. Like the time I found myself dilating for pages and pages about how totally overrated I thought Buddhism was. It was meant as a letter to the Dalai Lama and it’s a good thing I never put it in the mail because, after all, it might have resulted in some seriously negative karma.

 Or when I offered my passionate dissent against the consensus that blithely asserts that if it comes off of a fancy food truck with a vaguely ethnic hyphenated name then it must be good. I was particularly mad the day I wrote that one because I had a pretty nasty dose of diarrhea that I attributed to a plate of shrimp and  jalapeño bánh xèo that I bought from a double parked behemoth called Pho-Pas .

I’ve written fake letters to the mayor, to the pope and to all the senior curators at MOCA and the Getty. I’ve written to the school board, to the owner of the Lakers, to Ted Cruz and to that sweet hispanic girl on all those Planned Parenthood billboards. I write to my parents all the time and to my brother who I haven’t spoken to in fifteen years. The other day I even wrote a nasty letter to myself pointing out that though lying is often effective it’s also extremely unethical.

But between all those miles and all those grievances at the end of the day I’m too tired to hold a grudge. All that rhythmic introspection, step after silent step until I’m floating in a trance of resignation and antipathy.

Hey … maybe there’s something to Buddhism after all!

CALL AND RESPONSE

Some people collect speaking gigs like stamps or bottle caps. Others milk honoraria like fatted goats hopping from one symposium to another delivering the same tired truisms over and over again.

I get invited to lecture all the time but not only am I extremely discerning about which offers I accept,  I also make sure that I never deliver the same talk twice.

For example, in May I spoke at the graduation of my alma mater. I easily could have slapped on a few retreaded inspirational talking points about vision, opportunity and decency but instead I pushed for a more strident tone. I told the crowd of over two-thousand students, parents and faculty that “… artists are the vanguard, scholars are the rear-guard and critics are the Right Guard.” That got a good laugh though most of the 22 year-olds had no idea that I was referring to the deodorant and instead thought I was citing the hip-hop tune Right Guard for the Wrong Time by the UK band Risible.

A few weeks ago I spoke at the annual Physicians for Nutrition convention in Atlantic City. They invited me because of my work with Artists Against Excess and there I spoke about the need for creativity in public school cafeteria menu planning.

At the pre-gala MOCA trustees meeting a few days ago I gave a full-on powerpoint introduction to Post-Dada sound-sculpture and its relationship to the poetry of Paul Claudel. I knew it would be a bit highbrow for that crew but I refuse to be uplifting just for the sake of some fleeting intelligibility.

My most memorable presentation took place a few years ago at a luncheon for midwestern museum curators that took place in Iowa City’s largest reform synagogue, Congregation Rodef Shtuyot. Their sanctuary seated over 700 people and as waiters in pressed white shirts and black silk vests served delicious plates of bagels with smoked whitefish I showed slides of works by Denis Ambatiya, Micah Carpentier, Puna Rahandrapatha and Albrecht Amgott. I never competed with smoked whitefish before and its not exactly something I would recommend to the faint-hearted but I seemed to hold my own and maintain the assembled crowd’s attention more or less intact for the entirety of my 40 minute talk.

What made the late morning meeting memorable was the Q and A following my lecture. A young independent art impresario asked me with complete earnestness if I thought it was important that a curator believe in someone’s work if they were to include them in an exhibition. Hiding my astonishment I decided that it might be an interesting exercise to test the intellectual integrity of the assembled audience. “No, of course not,” I replied, steeling myself for an onslaught recriminatory rebuttal.

Instead I was met with stone cold silence and without missing a beat asked if there were any more questions.

MY CAREER HITS A WALL

The global reach of today’s art world is simply staggering in its scope. When I was a little girl in Huxley, Indiana the only culture available to us was the annual performance of the Nutcracker by the amateur dance troupe from neighboring Carpesville. Nowadays, even among the amber waves of grain, Language poets and documentary filmmakers are appointed to government posts and art advisory commissions.

Significant opportunities for visual artists, once the exclusive purview of Manhattan, not only has spread to the far-flung reaches of the outer boroughs but now extends across the entire globe. A performance artist from Baku is just as likely to get exposure as a painter from Paris or a sculptor form Sao Paolo.

Blue chip Art Fairs take place in locations as diverse as Istanbul, Macao and Montevideo and there is never a shortage of curators, collectors or an interested, eager and informed public.

We may indeed be living in a Golden Age.

Micah Carpentier (courtesy of Martí Images)

As the great Cuban artist Micah Carpentier wrote a generation ago,  “when commerce and culture collide all barriers are breached and all unreasonable hazards are foiled.”

I have friends who have held teaching jobs in Myanmar, had fellowships in Beijing and staged public installations in Bahrain and Qatar. I know artists who have had extensive gallery exhibitions in Indonesia, museum surveys in Moscow and who have participated in high-profile conferences in Africa with colleagues from Kenya, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Name the country and I know someone who either worked or who had their work shown there. Though from time to time people inadvertently get tainted by some local controversy like censorship, torture, female sexual mutilation, governmental surveillance, targeted killings, coercive theocratic extremism, draconian interdiction of homosexuality, slavery, honor killing or child prostitution, these never prove to be more than minor impediments.

As we were all taught in art school: You’ve got to get the work out there!

I too have had my share of international exposure and it’s a great feeling to cross borders and communicate in the universal language of art.

By far, the best experience I’ve ever had was showing my work at the Bet-Bablot Municipal Museum in Tel Aviv. The catalog was published in Hebrew so I have no idea what they wrote about me. (My friend Zev assures me that it is wonderfully hyperbolic yet well within the respectable Israeli norm for scholarship and art criticism).

It was really wonderful but when I got back to L.A. my dealer told me that some of his old faded British rockstar clients called to tell him that when they get back from touring in North Korea they would start an international boycott of my work.

LOSING MY APPETITE TO LIE

One of the most irritating collateral impacts of fame is the constant cannonade of invitations to lecture on my work. I’m not a natural extrovert – after taking the Wade-Ghillet psychometric personality questionnaire I learned that I was an intuitive/feeling-perceptive/rational/solitary brooder – and I welcome these opportunities to speak publicly with a dread bordering on panic.

But when I was recently summoned by my alma mater to participate in their annual  Women in the Arts forum I couldn’t possibly refuse.

It’s very important to me to benefit from my prestige not only for personal gain but also to act as a powerful role-model for young women just starting out.

So there I was a few weeks ago, wearing a very officious steel-gray suit and a bright pink top flipping through a slide show of some of my most recent work.

The students were wonderfully receptive and I was praying the whole time that they wouldn’t notice the droplets of sweat – in my imagination they were the size of hailstones – dripping down my temples and wreaking small havoc on my mascara.

There’s something fiercely humbling about seeing one’s work projected larger-than-life on a bright screen in a darkened room. Gone are the press releases, the inflated resumés, the prestigious provenances and the high-flown critical hyperbole. Absent the clean gallery walls, the felicitously chosen well-dressed art opening A-list accessories, the din of loud conversation and the glare of halogen spotlights the works have to stand on their own. All the special pleading on my part with my bloated arsenal of adjectives culled from countless back issues of out-of-print art magazines can’t cushion against the innocent question as to motivations and intents.

These young artists are full of idealism. They are certain that Art has the power to redeem. They have yet to be tainted by the harsh reality that they are destined to become toys and ornaments in the hands of the cultural elites.  They don’t yet know that success only means becoming a minor spectacle in the carnival of overcrowded art fairs, biennales and seasonal auctions. Without any commercial renumeration their best hope lies in the increasingly elusive tenure track position and some decent health insurance.

Of course, I can’t tell them any of this. I maintain the company line that what we do matters. The fleeting sequins of celebrity that attend to the rare few are always held up as the likely outcome of their efforts. They see me as the perfect embodiment of their dreams and I don’t have the heart to tell them that they’d be better off marrying an accountant.

And so click to the next slide and continue reciting from a script that never grows old and never rings true.

“This next piece is from the Tongue That Never Cloyed series which deals with reactionary gender patterning and the inherited hierarchies of post-industrial commodity-driven economics of scale.”

THE SOUND OF HARPERS HARPING ON THEIR HARPS

When I began The Harps of Heaven I never suspected that I would attract such an ardent and allegiant readership. I basically set out to edit the kind of art journal that I personally would take the time to read. As a graduate student I was fascinated by periodicals like Minotaure, Cahiers d’art, 291 and Le Festin d’Esope. I longed for a lost time when artists, in the words of Robert Lowell were  “… asked to be obsessed with writing”. Mostly I grew tired of the journalism of grievance, the transparently bitter screeds of the excluded, the cynical and the second-rate.

I remember sitting at a quiet corner table at the Aoyama Café with the art historian Orestia Shestov discussing the sorry state of visual literacy among the rising cadre of critics and curators. She spoke passionately about her research and how difficult it was to attract academic interest in her definitive biography of the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts. We both agreed that it was time to stop grousing about an alleged glass gallery ceiling and to start doing something intellectually exertive in response.

I’m thrilled that what began with a heated conversation over lactose-looted lattés in some far flung over-priced bistro has evolved into a vibrant and controversial arts journal read regularly by thousands of avid enthusiasts. I want to thank my contributing editors, essayists and proofreaders for all their hard and devoted work and I look forward to publishing many more densely packed issues in the weeks and months to come.

“Within our hands are instruments of glory.” The Harps of Heaven, Sydney Thompson Dobell

THE SHOCK OF THE OLD

There is little in life that can maintain the awesome ability to shock. With our new century come new horrors and new light on older atrocities. Cable television has blessed us with intimate angles on the most deranged behaviors turning the crazy into the commonplace and the aberrant into the average.

The art world has suffered a similar fate. It’s quaint to think that not so many years ago people were aghast at the sight of a dead shark immersed in formaldehyde prominently displayed within the scrubbed interior of a fancy gallery. Cubism is now a crowd pleaser, Mondrian a neck tie, The Rite of Spring a sound track for a cholesterol reducing medication and Ubu Roi soon to be streaming on Netflix.

What might truly prove surprising is if some enterprising artist set out to simply please. Void of ideas, free of any abiding agenda, an artwork that refers neither to art nor to life would truly be refreshing. Art students today are prodded into justifying their work within a suffocating conceptual underpinning. Failure to do so will subject the innocent aspirant to a tirade of clichéd denunciations. The result is that young artists retrofit their work with arbitrary explanations which are nothing but transparently vacant alibis for their simple love of making things up. Critics collaborate with this charade the same way mortgage brokers love foreclosures as it is the ugly grist of their carrion craving careers. (Full disclosure: I am both an art critic and an editor)

Now with that screed out of the way I have to confess that I too am vulnerable to the jolting titillations of  puerile bafflement. I was recently invited by the Los Angeles artist David Schoffman to an auction preview of an illustrated Italian translation of The Plum in the Golden Vase, the sixteenth-century Chinese novel dealing with the corrupt licentious life of a  provincial merchant who somehow managed to maintain a harem of six  assorted wives and concubines.

Now that, my friends, was shocking!!

THE CRISES OF PUBLISHING AND LITERACY

Although the response to the inaugural print edition of The Harps of Heaven has been almost uniformly positive, many people have questioned my editorial decision to put myself on the front cover.

People think that it diminishes the seriousness of my intent. They say it makes the journal look tawdry and exploitive.

I have three responses:

First – If a man edited an arts publication and put himself on the cover of its premier issue, would there be a similar outcry?

Second – If I were less attractive, frumpy and bespectacled  would my sincerity and high mindedness still be questioned?

Third – Does anybody out there realize how impossibly hard it is to sell magazines these days!?

Thank goodness for my advertisers.

Will I favor the galleries and auction houses that buy ads? You bet I will! I want this periodical to thrive. Will you find negative reviews of exhibitions? Of course not – nobody prints any real criticism anymore, not The New York Times, not ArtForum and especially not L.A’s Art Scene. Even Coagula after its first few petulant years reads like the Easter issue of Ladies Home Journal.

Should I be any different?

What you will find in the print edition of The Harps of Heaven will be honest, incisive, scholarly essays by some of the best art journalists working today.

We will encourage a healthy and vibrant dialogue and will solicit and print our readers’ letters and emails.

I will publish a personal editorial in each issue and I vow never to shrink from my responsibility to maintain the highest standards, even if I do include the occasional photograph.

RELIGION AND REDEMPTION

We are by nature doubled. Within ourselves resides another. Perhaps possessed, maybe halved or shadowed, we are more mysterious to ourselves than we care to admit. Beneath the skin of my professional duplicity is a husk more pure but less dependable. For years I buried a host of overlapping internal contradictions until the seams of my self-deception tore into my soul with an angry vengeance. I dealt with it with drugs, with drink and with a careless trail of raffish, worthless lovers.

Then I met a man who has changed my life forever.

Rabbi Dov in his Los Angeles library, 2013

His name is Rabbi Dov-Baer Bar Sheten, sometimes known as ‘the hipster’s rabbi.’ Rabbi Dov is the wisest, most flawless and inspiring person I have ever met. He is a limpid wellspring of sagacity and discernment. Brilliantly erudite, he has the uncanny ability to turn abstraction into intelligence. For him ecumenical jurisprudence is merely a means to an end and his primary focus is not on observance but on enlightenment.

Among his many apostles is a veritable who’s who of young Hollywood heavyweights and at a recent Hanukkah party at his Topanga Canyon bungalow I felt like I was at Sundance with latkes.

I know I sound predictable and I admit that right now it seems to be deplorably trendy but I’ve decided to convert to Judaism. Heck, why not?

Rabbi Dov thinks that ever since I made the decision I’ve been walking around with what he calls a Yiddishe aura. I’ve become funnier, more natural and casual, and I’ve even seen a marked improvement in my digestion. I notice that I see the world differently. I’m more skeptical, a bit more fatalistic and though I’ve never believed in God I find that I’ve developed a small grudge against Him.

I find that personally, I’m no longer so easily hurt but every time a rock star from the UK pops off about Israel I’m gripped with an irrational urge to do contemptible things to my CD collection. And whereas before I entertained myself with a series of more or less conventional crushes on movie stars and start-up CEO’s, now I find myself having fantasies about Paul Krugman and David Brooks. (Which reminds me – I have to leave a Christmas tip for my newspaper delivery guy).

As far as my art career is concerned, well, it’s probably a wash. Being a Jew doesn’t seem to help but I suppose it couldn’t hurt.

Vista from the Holy Land, charcoal on paper, Dahlia Danton, 2013

THE 10 ESSENTIAL RULES ALL YOUNG ARTISTS MUST KNOW

I am so touched and overwhelmed by the wonderfully supportive response I have received since I began ‘exposing’ my most intimate reflections. One reader from San Francisco wrote “Go girl, you rock! You lift, inspire and embolden me!!”

Wow!  … Right!?

Another woman from the midwest forwarded me this article about Micah Carpentier adding: “Your passion is so obvious in everything you write. Your honesty and energy is so refreshing. If you’re not familiar with Carpentier, you should! You remind me of him in so many ways!!!

I think she meant that in the kindest of ways though the comparison with Carpentier remains a bit disturbing.

Anyway, in the continued spirit of frank, confessional blogging I would like to make an important announcement.

I am an impostor! Or in the words of one of my favorite poets Arthur Rimbaud “Je est un(e) autre.” (Literally translated: I is another)

What I mean is, what my peers won’t admit about themselves but that I will readily concede is that I’m carrying off this whole professional artist thing by the seat of my pants.

I learned next to nothing in graduate school and even less in undergrad unless you include the basic protocol of kissing the hairy asses of curators, critics and collectors. I learned to make sure that everyone drinks more than I do at openings and that working as an artist’s assistant is better than working at a gallery.

Sincerity, my dear readers, is suicide. The pie is way too small to indulge in the twin luxuries of quality and integrity. The critical thing is to always look good.

Sure I have a studio and of course I churn out work but to be honest, as long as you have some sort of gimmick, some sort of easily recognizable and accessible style you’re fine. The rest my friends is marketing.

So here are a few tips specifically designed for young, aspiring artists:

1. Figurative art is better than abstract.

2. If you insist on abstract art make sure to be decorative though never admit to it.

3. Don’t waste time learning to draw. There’s a reason digital cameras were invented. Duh!

4. Never call an art dealer an art dealer. Call them ‘gallerists’ – they love that.

5. Remember – consensus is everything. You can appear hermetic without  actually being so. Find just the right degree of ersatz unintelligibility.

6. Aim to please. You’re not out to advance Western Civilization – you’re out to advance your career! Think Madonna not Hegel!!

7. When having a studio visit be careful never to appear more intelligent, better read or more widely travelled than your interlocutor. You’re looking for allies, not rivals.

8. Never, and I mean never, ever express an honest opinion about anything until you have fully considered the full professional ramifications of said opinion.

9. The art of networking is the art of discernment. Acknowledge that there are only two types of people: Those who can help you and those who can’t. Cultivate the former and ignore the latter.

10. And finally, most important of all, relax and be yourself.

NOT!!!