1997 The Quest for the Sublime, as a Deer Quests for Water

the Russian Series

This series addresses the social utopianism of Mies van der Rohe and Malevich. The certainties offered by closed systems. Russia is deeply embedded in its ritual attempts to rehabilitate the idea of exoticism. I used constructs of beauty as a sensibility, which promises escape from the banality of daily life. The hypnotic acquiescence of the consumer, a manifesto on contemporary spectator ship. Pixels are used as an effective sign of objects original status, the hand made and the mechanical mark. Persuasion is all about context to plant a seed of desire.

Attention is fractured in a Cagean valorization of noise in new and unauthorized use as a malignant mouthpiece for the consumer. I mixed contemporary art works with historical treasures. Cannibalized historic sources show an attitude toward the old masters, mixed with awe and contempt. The grand theme of history was a common ground of shared experience for psychical reality. The subject of psychoanalysis in which real and imagined, present and past, all have equal weight.

It becomes a shorthand for the reduction of the complexity of alien culture. A set of free-floating signs, which are available, to all takers unencumbered by the limitations of identity politics. The new work commemorates the Functionist tinged with subtle Eros of the Secessionist school. The military term, ‘avant garde’, was first applied to art the parallels between military and modernist terms of reference become apparent. I use charged icons to problematic issues of exoticism, otherness and authenticity. The globalization of art is no less problematic than the globalization of capital facilitated by the opening up by the western, or western style corporations in the hypnotic acquiescence of the consumer. Clement Greenberg long ago recognized the ‘umbilical cord of gold’’ that links Avant Garde to the ruling class. Difference is either subsumed into sameness or marginalized.

Kunstformen in der Natur (artistic form in nature) Beauty thrives in a realm somewhere between the patterns of Fractals geometry and holography. I painted in an almost mosaic like pattern. Shapes and patterns became increasingly important compositionally. The visible is camouflaged reality. Supremacist squares, within squares that climb the painting that recede in blocks of fractured spaces that undulate in rhythmic harmony.

346. L’Ange des Orages (angel of storms)

Pyroxolin on Celotex an elite/vernacular distinction in the materials of art, ecology and economics. Madonna’s invariably stand on a crescent moon in an allusion to the woman described in Revelations (12:1), “clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet”. Aimed to evoke something of the original viewing experience of alter pieces, consistently showing the larger figures poised high up on ledges where they could be observed from below. A new chaste instrument for a more restrained piety. An Annunciation-like goddess being, simultaneously lovely and menacing, the work suggested the dual nature of the feminine.

Splicing artistic and sociopolitical meaning, which allies the idealism of urban redevelopment with that of Russian Supremacy. The movement of light over the smooth cushion of flesh, barefoot stands on a sphere. Titled after the Russian Socialist paper of which Trotzky (Bronstein) became an editor in 1917, N.Y.C. After the revolution he became commissar of war under Lenin. He organized the famous Red Armies in Russia. After Lenin died in 1924, Trotzky and Stalin contested for power. Trotzky lost and in 1929 he was exiled. In 1937 he sought refuge in Mexico, at a fortified villa near Mexico City where in 1940 he was assassinated by one of his associates.

Wooden doors are using unstable Lithol Red with diluted animal glue as a binder, over which I applied an egg wash glaze. Inspired by Ariosto’s Melissa, the good fairy in the Orlando Furioso, who restores the animal, vegetable and mineral victims of spells cast by Evil Alcina, back to human form. Public works existed strictly in the service of power, sacred or temporal, making art the original newspaper.

347. APERCUS

A rather large black tar coated canvas painted in encaustic of the courtyard in Leningrad, where Stalin executed millions of Russians after Lenin’s death.

348. THE TEETH OF GLORY

GUM, the greenhouse built for the czar, is a vast arc, mapping a political immensity and calling the ego’s prerogatives into question. A physical metaphor for the city as a crystal structure. The grid defines the coordinates of time and memory rather than those of space. The anonymous crowd lives in a city, both prison and place of safety. The covert manipulation of desire through the creation and exploitation of rigid gender roles. Fashion, a morality that finds mass culture innocent of past lessons and impotent before the future. Indoctrination of consumers into patterns of conformity, a hybridizing tangent through advertising. I would appropriate different subjective paradigm and values, in this migration of form and effect. Chalk line was used—not unlike the chalk lines demarcating the limits of a playing field. I also gessoed wooden doors & ironing boards, stretched with padding or black tar canvas. Local subject matter embodied an infinite metaphorical capacity of everyday. The fugitive nature of the found object became emblems of hardship and ritual embody. Existential themes implying the ways creative expression may be displaced. A double logic of displacement, as an index of consumption.

349. THE ASHES OF PHOSEON

Taken from an inspirational work from the Liverpool Museum, engendering inchoate images and, ultimately, riper symbolic structures. The hands are held protectively near its androgynous face. (From a painting of the ashes of a man who’s country has been taken away. His wife returns to the place of execution, swallowing his ashes as a servant girl stands guard. The wife replies, “Your country will be in me”.) The black-pillared men holding up the roof to the entrance to the Hermitage are in the foreground.

Defunct representational systems collide in a rescue of cast off material. Inspired in part by Lucy Lippard’s “The Dematerialization of the Art Object ” and the Russian Constructivists’ sculptures based on physics equations. Surfaces are distressed and colors appear darkened and yellow with time. The backdrop, recalls the gloomy chiaroscuro of Renaissance landscapes.

350. TO DWELL IN ITS COMPASS

50x60 oil sand and shellac on wood and canvas

A combination of the train ride in and the wet morning cobble stone, inside the gates of the Hermitage. Undulating face is broken like perforated paper, by holes. Drill marks also suggest bullet holes left by a precision-trained firing squad. Uses actual extrapolations of Government Issue. These overlooked bits and pieces become the primordial building blocks of the cosmology.

351. A MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

50X98” encaustic and bridal on maps & wood

THE ZUEV CLUB One of the building erected for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution.

It was one of the most consistent representatives of Constructivists architecture by Goose near Kremlin.

A man who was Thursday was the name of a play by G. K. Chesterton, produced in Alexander Tairov’s Kamernyi Theater in 1922-23.

A horse’s bridle floats through the painting.

A model ship whose tall rigging, echoes their scrawny spiky limbs in contrapuntal curves, while grounded by pieces of 1920 school maps in English found in storage while in Moscow.

50” Egg tempra & oil on carpet padding

352. V MOLCH’INOCHL TAYNOY

(In the Silence of the Secret Night)

This painting of the black marble figures at the entrance to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Painted on carpet padding on top of a wooden ironing board with egg tempera and oil paint.

353. SHEPNULA DNYU ZARYA

(whispered dawn to the day)

approx. 7 x 11"

The contamination between eras. Unstated assumptions and power issues are explicated yet held in abeyance.

The new work commemorates the tension between international influences and nativism, the imponderable nature of cultural history exemplified as a shovel slung over the shoulder of a captive laborer’s. His body having several rear view mirrors connected to it, with the words “Objects may be closer then they seem”.

Series of 9 stain glass panels-each one no larger than the cover of a textbook, deal with the mosaic theme of time and motion.

There is a sense of from shards of crushed glass, evoking icy, fields glinting with beauty and danger.

Mahogany grout borders both deepen the color and fragment the space.

These figures are highly stylized grotesques, as feeble and hydrocephalic as the little creatures that suffer through both heaven and hell in Flemish Last Judgments.

Designed without frames in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhist tankas.

355. A DEN”, KAK BI ESHCHO DOVERYAYA

(and the day as if not yet believed)

356. SPUSKALSKY NA ZEMLYUA BLESTEVSHIYE VOKRUG RYADI” ALMAZNI”KH SLYOZ

(Came down to Earth wiping away the rows of glistening tears)

357. THE COPPER DRUM

50” diameter mixed media

360. THE BREAD OF ANGELS

Ongoing investigations into the use of fabric for artistic expression. A fragmentary grid, a memory trace of Cubist structure, addresses the specific character of the materials, evidence of a fragile existence.

363. THE AIR CRACKLES WITH A BLUE TONGUE

Saint Petersburg

Joy & absolute serenity, imbues and transforms tickets and programs to the sense of life; the metamorphosis of the visible and tactile life towards universality without form.

367. COEPERNICUS

Depicts a woman drowning herself in a tub filled with rose petals.

Eros is the reigning spirit dryade, and vision in an inescapable embodied operation.

The body in question seems emptied of the more unruly impulses in their place the inert materiel endowed with vivacity where sensuality and animism comes together.

The synthetic paradise suggests that parallels between Western and non-Western customs.

America’s history is itself a collage, a court jester of socially sanctioned anarchy. The individual as a psychological being, now independent of the collective state, has fallen into a pattern.

The painting, a quasi-hypnotic pattern on a field of jut. carry allegorical meaning in reference to highly developed packaging.

Depicts a woman’s stare to mock white from death to the artist she has just killed.