round-up: 9/23
reading recs, quotations, an event (!), tweets, & more
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
An event!
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
My friend and favorite California poet Luke Johnson has a poetry collection coming out on October 1. I recommend preordering it and gobbling up his words at your earliest convenience. Back when I had the time and energy to run a literary journal, I got to showcase “The Unnamed Garden,” which is just one of the extraordinary poems featured in this collection.
An event:
Luke will kick off his book tour on October 8th in LA at North Figueroa Bookshop with Dare Williams, Gustavo Hernandez, and me as his openers. If you’re in LA, please come and buy his book!
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
I had been looking for a way to create a language of plasticity that would be effective and that people would be touched by since I decided to be an artist.
In my town were no museums, no galleries, no information about art whatsoever. We had a painting of the Virgin Mary in the living room. That was it. The only other art I saw when I was a child were the pictures hanging in the church, which were from the colonial period. They were copies of European prints or paintings. Perhaps my interest in this period comes from the fact that when I went to church I was transfixed by how smooth these pictures looked. For years that was what art was for me. Pre-Columbian art was there, of course, but you didn’t see it. Now everyone has pre-Columbian art, but at that time no one had it. No one could care less. Now there are museums for pre-Columbian objects and people collect pre-Columbian. I didn’t see it. I only saw these smooth figures in church. Now, of course, I study pre-Columbian art a lot because of its history and its element of originality. We Latin American artists have a need to find our own authenticity—some position that is not colonial. Culturally, we have been colonized by the United States and by Europe for centuries. This effort to find our own art has been attempted in many different ways.
I want my paintings to have roots. These roots give truth to what you do. You can’t take from the air; you have to go from the ground.
I don’t want to be colonized by anyone, to feel that Latin American art is being defined for me. Art should be independent. This is the beginning of real independence; only then can one have independence in thinking, in position, in language.
I felt outside it all. The attitude of Pop art was completely different, even in the repainting of art history that went on. When I did it I was saying, I want to belong to the tradition but I need to find the essence of how I belong, how I’m different, and how I can transform form. Pop art was saying that it didn’t want the tradition, didn’t need it, and that it wanted something radically new.
When you are from a provincial country you are in a way handicapped. When you’re American, you’re given internationality as an artist when you are born. Everything you do is international because you are American. Your subject matter is universal. If you do Coca-Cola, for example, it’s universal. If you are from a Third World country you have to find your feeling of universality. It’s not a gift you have when you are born.
Some people say to artists that they should change. Change what? It’s like saying, why don’t you walk differently or talk differently. I can’t change my voice. That’s the way I am. I work every day because I have never found anything that gives me more pleasure than painting. […] It is a great, great pleasure, and provides my stability. It is my continuum.
Basically, the image is an explosion.
The nighttime has a silence and inherent loneliness.…It reminds me of my vulnerability as a human, and acknowledging it oddly consoles me.
-Sarah Lee
We are so afraid of pain. I don’t like pain, but I think that pain is such an important element in human life. Suffering is like a kind of gate in order to understand the universe, in order to understand yourself.
It’s exposing having work on view that is unresolved, and I feel very protective of the work when it’s in embryonic form.
There is a word in Persian (Farsi), بغض (boghz), which encapsulates the physical knot felt just before crying or before letting out deep emotions, or the feeling of deep emotions accumulating in the chest or throat. In English we do not have such a word, or anything approximating it, perhaps because we are traditionally a culture of keeping things quiet, a silent seething or silent sadness chosen as the default rather than a more outward and expressive and vulnerable alternative—here I imagine more externally expressive and stereotypically passionate-sounding languages, like Italian and Spanish, the languages of places where perhaps proximity to the equator and a more constant warmth means that things just boil up and over more easily and naturally. This seems to be a trend, surely, that the colder the place the more contained the language?
Tweets:
Mood.
Yeah!
Me.
This is not new news but remains horrifying.
That’s all!
Have a great week!
