Mondays are days when nothing can stop me from painting. I don't have to go to work. I don't have to be at a computer. I don't really have to do all that laundry or call old friends or take walks or make bread or eavesdrop at the coffee shop. Only, that's what I tend to do. I do know that the 'not quite rightness' of my studio is a crutch for avoiding the hard work of painting, and I do know that it won't change by itself, and I do know that my work grows from drawing and observing anywhere and anything.

Weather's nice and nothing was getting done at home so I got gone and my wandering has led me to a university campus where the eavesdropping is rich (so many romances, so many awful roommates, so many looming tests) and there are enough standing and sitting figures to fill any respectable figure painters gesture sketchbook (and a few pages of my messbook/sketchbook). There's a lot of coffee and ideas here and I've got a library card so I'm off to:

• look for elephants in the Index of Christian Art
• browse and possibly even (if I can remember how) read some journals of popular culture, like Americana
• find out more about contemporary art in Lithuania and Slovakia

But with all of this important wandering to do, I wonder why I'm still typing this in? If only to reveal a working process I've noticed in a good many artists/creative troublemakers...that of the open questioning, the blind research into a bunch of seemingly random things ( you know I'd have to research it, but I'm pretty sure that's how Dennis Oppenheim comes up with stuff like this , and the need to share.

I've noticed that a lot of my blog-energy has of late taken the space that used to be filled by painting and being social, working, etc. If you notice a slip of entries, it may simply mean that I've made another friend. Or, that I'm sitting in a small room making messes, some of which may be as exciting as the stuff the elephants make . A girl can dream...

see ya,
Rachael

Amazing but true, I realized tonight that sometimes people need permission to be creative. We need to know it's ok to play. We have to hear, see, or feel that we won't be punished if we break the rules.

The results of granting this permission, is a magnificent display of creativity, a community of makers, and an artshow that is not about the precious object but all about the ways in which we make, communicate and interact.

The Paper Sculpture show was a lot of fun but now I'm tired.

Accept this permission, grant it to others, and have some fun with ordinary materials. There is no good reason why you can't make something fabulous. (like a styrofoam print or a seed pod bracelet or just make your bed. But you don't need permission from me, you can give yourself permission.

goodnight,
Rachael

Short report. I'm hoping the stew of ideas in my head comes out as the meatiest, savory, thickest stuff. Just back from the Ramones movie with a bunch of questions about the business and inspiration of art. When your band becomes your job, I guess you can just troop around the world making powerful music with a guy you hate. The story was pretty sad, powerful too.

J.T's got a great little project posting art and artists comments on a subject. He tossed me fun and posted it today which made me feel a little special.

But special ain't nothing if you aren't helping other people, I call. So I'll walk some ladies across the street and do some good deeds.

I have to get back to painting but in my sketches at least, the crisis seems over. The babies are fitting into the bigger picture, finding their way around the tall, shadowy (Feininger-ish) men, the pinnate leaves, the big orange bird beaks, the intertwining forms, and..um...elephants. It's a good thing I don't have to know the whys. I think it's more important I make the stuff. Just prepare and serve the stew. Gotta get back to the stirring I guess.

Goodnight, troublemakers, take care,

Rachael

Oh and do you know about Cat Power? Even when she lived in our neighborhood, we were a little slow to discover, but gosh it sounds so lovely to me... More for the stew.

Over the past few days my motor has been on. I've been running around and around and around and then as often as I can, I've been stopping to stop. To slow down. To look more carefully. To figure out why I'm drawn to the figure again. And then just when I least expected it, the babies came.



A plague of babies has landed in my paintings (yes, I know you have theories, but no, big news soon, I got nothin' to tell ya). Sometimes this happens. I walk into my studio, I sit down to work, and imagery I don't expect emerges in my paintings.

When an idea erupts and surprises me, I'm prone to laugh and invariably it makes some sense. Of course there's a plague of babies! Ali is adorable, Little Sophia is a year old, good 'Sugar' Rae has been in this world a few weeks, teeny tiny Olive is brand new, and more are coming any minute. We've gotten half a dozen birth announcements over the past few months, I've been to my share of baby showers, and I'm no stranger to board books ...these vunerable little creatures are lurking everywhere. I'm especially amazed to see the way my artist friends have kids; they remain creative, productive, and flexible even if they are supporting another creature on the iffy incomes we are used to as artists.

The paintings here are very much in process and very likely to change radically. Honest critiques honestly accepted. I'm sure not sure of where they are going but the goal is not so much cute, as vunerable. I'm not a mother, I'm an observer and a messy painter.



And well, this auntie Rachael is excited about the paper sculpture show. They liked it in Pennsylvania and we'll like it here. I fully disclose that I work for the people behind the paper and I've seen lots of hard work go into putting on a good show . That's what I do, I observe, and lately I draw babies...You got a problem with that?

Good, I didn't think so...

take care,
Rachael

Oh, and Mark reminded me of the Cheap Art Manifesto from the Bread and Puppet folks , very inspiring and very much related to the ideas behind the manifesto I cribbed the other day. Yea, let's post these puppies everywhere ...

A few things have gotten me thinking lately. Sunday morning I heard this thought provoking interview on the radio and then opened my email to find a series of questions from Mark about my steps and missteps in making art sort of inside/sort of outside the art market. As I answered his questions, I took a break to dig around in my random files for a photocopy from a 1970 Art Journal.

I'll explain. I found a manifesto in maybe 1993 or 4 when I was a skinny little art history undergrad trying to figure out what the hell was up with performance art in the 1970s. Encouraged by my teacher I was trying to get my head around Gina Pane . I spent a mess of time sitting in dusty library stacks reading old art mags. I had recently become a student member of the College Art Association because I thought that might help me figure out and be a part of the big-bad art world.
That's when I found this editorial ARISE YOU PRISONERS OF ART HISTORY on page 35 (I think it was November 1970). I reprint it with full credit to give to the writers but only a faded photocopy to work from...

The College Art Association is the professional club for professional art historians in America. It guards and attempts to perfect the standards and disciplines of this comparatively new field; publishes a bulletin devoted to scholarly researches and reviews of the literature; holds meetings to discuss issues of common interest among its membership (also known as the “slave-market” because universities often recruit new staff at these events); and in general functions as a respected, respectful part of our increasingly specialized culture.

Recently a group of younger members of the C.A.A. have begun to attack the trend to professionalism and specialization which has led so often to pompous formalism and pedantry. Calling themselves the New Art Association, they have made their stand in the C.A.A meetings and also in three newsletters, the last of which includes the following manifesto:

We are against the myth of the neutrality of art.

We deny that esthetic experiences flow only into further esthetic experiences, for we believe there is a firm tie between the artistic imagination and social imagination.

We object to the study of art as an activity separated from other human concerns.

We are against the confinement of the esthetic experience to isolated, heavily guarded, disinfected objects contemplated under conditions of benign satisfaction.

We are against the reduction of art to an object of speculation and an ornament for exploiters. We are against the complicity of professors who act as hirelings to investors, publishing houses and galleries by masking with scholarly dignity wheeling and dealing in art.

We are against the commercial interests which deform the careers and choices of young artists.

We oppose the pitiful tasks which teachers assume as conveyer belts of stupid, isolated facts and dead data.

We oppose the abuse of the teacher’s power over the student to make him regard his ignorance as a crippling defect rather than an opportunity for knowledge.

We are against the degradation of teaching as inferior to publishing and the treachery of graduate programs which certify students for teaching jobs they are not prepared to do.

We are against the fetish of the doctorate, geared to the academic market rather than to the values of the field or the individual. We oppose as a crime against the human mind the exhaustion of immature students in specialized research before they have a wide grasp of human culture and a chance to probe the philosophical foundations of their field.

We are against the production by the graduate education industry of technocrats of art history — of inefficient, archaic human data hacks.

We are against the artificial segregation of the study of art from other disciplines — anthropology, history, etc— and its careful production from social issues. We are against the fragmentation of knowledge which suppresses the real implication of our cultural heritage by providing an ideology which upholds the racist, patriarchal, and class structure of society and justifies the power of the strong over the weak.

We are against the use of museums by self-interested wealth for its own prestige and financial aggrandizement, and the subservience of museum directors and curators to those interests. We are against self-perpetuating boards of trustees in museums, and the lack of representation on such boards of artists and other groups in the community.

We deplore the failure of all but a few art museums to represent and serve living artists in their community, and their failure to regard the museum's province the esthetic destiny of the communities outside their walls.

We are against pretentious, intellectually condescending exhibitions that are accompanied by catalogues swollen with mystifying verbiage.

We are against the patriarchal system pervading higher education and the museum world, in which adult students are treated as children and women are relagated to underpaid and subservient positions.

We want art and its study to exist in the center of life and not in its margins. We want art to reveal the value of human imagination and its role in reality.

The statement was written by Edward Fry, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum and president of the N.A.A.; Carol Duncan, a vice-president; Bruce Barton, it's treasurer; as well as by Arlene Corkery, Hunter Ingalls, Paula Gerson, Avram Kampf, S. Stephen Pepper, Lenore Street, Allan Wallach and Carol Zemel.

We applaud them all and their sentiments, even if three minor negative comments do come to mind... (the piece goes on with three notes and the initals T.B.H.).

One of the signers was my very own art history prof! There could be passion, there could be energy, there could be ethics in the art world and even a kid like me could participate in a new kind of art world. I was pretty damn impressed then, and well, I still am. This kind of passion is still around, but we do need an art world of ethics.

I haven't been a member in years, and I won't be in Atlanta when they convene the next "slave market" but I did find these guidelines for curatorial training programsand artist resumes and part time art employmentand professional practices for artists and ethics for art historiansand mfa ethics . It makes me think the shouting (but more importantly the teaching) had an impact.
We all can have a greater impact by simply continuing to make, continuing to communicate, continue to connect...

Arisen I is, and now off to draw...

Take care,
Rachael