MixedMedia

Around the holidays last year I’d made a promise to knock out a washboard table with a collage top for a family member. I’d gotten the basic idea from the remarkable Victoria Romanoff in Ithaca, New York at a meet up we’d had years ago.This go around, I’d found a couple of pricier washboards with glass rubbing plates. Cleaning them was quick enough, and the greatest challenge was compensating for their irregular sizes, which was accomplished by simply adding a 1-inch riser to the top of the right board, allowing equal heights and the lining up of the joist piece.The collage top itself was a lot of fun to create. Given that the intended recipient is a family member, I had lots of raw materials to cull from: maps from trips we’d taken together, cutouts from visits we’d made to Nova Scotia and elsewhere, scraps of my daughter’s artwork, etc. The piece came together well – unexpectedly “white” but to good effect.For the joist piece I simply cleaned up a piece of antique board found in the barn, painted it white, and sanded it down to enhance the texture and integrate it with the top piece.The most pleasant discovery in this piece of work is that one can place a light within the recess of the table between to the two legs and achieve a very nice glow to the piece. Something to think about for future, more sculptural works might be having the table closed on all four sides and illuminated. 

Paris Review 188 has a lovely collection of eleven collages by the American poet John Ashbery, 81. He’s a very interesting fellow, and if I’d ever been at Bard would have enjoyed learning from him. Academically credentialed, literarily plugged in, culturally invested – at least through the ’70s. Its not clear to me what has roused him since.But what I like to see in these collages, some of which are recent, is a bit of the hiking up of the cultural skirts and having a good romp through the puddles of whimsy.Curiously, the New York Times published 11 of Mr. Ashbery’s collages in 2008, when he had his first solo New York Gallery show.

The German artist Martin Kippenberger who died in 1997 has a large installation of his work that sprawls among the white galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I’m not terribly familiar with this artist, but impressed that he’d turn a Gerhard Richter painting into a table – he’s as playful and anti-establishment as the range of media and styles suggests. The artist as subject, director  and actor in the social struggle to communicate. While the rest of us bicker about what’s a more relevant, authentic, salient, expedient or efficient mode of expression he tested them all, not binding expression to a fetish or a movement of the day. Perhaps that’s why “peter” – Martin’s term for all unnamed forms – is such an endearing and appropriate expression: compact, unadorned, slightly naughty (in the American context?) and affectionable. Holland Carter put it nicely in the New York Times: “If messy and raucous aren’t your thing, and tidy objects are, Kippenberger is not for you. Sometimes when I come up against his drunk-and-disorderly divahood I think he’s not for me. But he is, absolutely, or the idea of him is, meaning the model he sets for what an artist can be and do. His multitudinous recyclings, insubordinate temperament and generosity seem unexpectedly right for a non-party-time time. With the MoMA respective a new generation of artists will get to know him. I can imagine more than a few hitching themselves to his manic star.”

Andres Myers is a mixed media artist who’s work stands out from the usual. Its almost otherworldly. Familiar too. Layers of color like lacquer, applied carefully and used sculpturally – paper, cloth, plaster, tape, paint, wire – you name it, its there. Its also deliciously abstract – a lollipop that fell onto a sprinkles-covered ice cream cone melting in the summer sun in a little black box – vulnerable. Some of it, like the fissure works and those with clay, seem to have bubbled up from bizarre other worlds of color beneath tectonic plates – perhaps, “the space between the two- dimensional and three- dimensional, hybridizing painting, printmaking and sculpture” to nick her own words. Check out Andrea’s elegant site: Andrea Myers

Love this idea of the ICE – I just might have to enter for the fun of it:Artists each make 13 collages (more or less), size not bigger than A4 (about 8″ X 10″ or 20cm X 26cm), and send them to me in New Zealand, to arrive by 20th March, 2009. One from each artist will be offered for sale at an exhibition here in New Plymouth, New Zealand with the artist setting the price. 30% commission taken. That selling exhibition will also be on the Net on the Virtual TART site, at http://virtual.tart.co.nz allowing the world-wide audience the chance to buy these collages. If unsold, that collage will rejoin the exchange. One is part of a month-long exhibition on the Virtual TART site during April and is also exhibited at the PukeAriki Museum in New Plymouth for at least a month. It will then travel to Samoa, to the MADD Gallery school of found-art assemblage and collage. It will also permanently be on exhibition on the outofsight.co.nz Internet site. The other 11 (or 12 if you didn’t sell) are shared out into parcels which are sent back to each contributing artist.So you send 13 of yours, get back 12 others (or 11 and money from your sale), and you become part of a public collection. NOTE: if you can’t finish as many as 13, or you want to send more, that’s fine. You’ll just get fewer (or more) back in your parcel. Learn more at: International Collage Exchange