less strict

CALLE: He began by telling me that he loved my work but that many of my shows looked like open books on the wall.

NERI: That’s a provocative criticism to make to an artist who has always worked with words and images. You are a distinctive writer, much admired in literary circles.

CALLE: Daniel [Buren] said this after he visited my house and saw my walls [The walls of Sophie’s house in Paris are adorned with groupings of artworks and artifacts]. He thought they were more playful and free than many of my shows. His criticism wasn’t about my writing—it was that for many works, I chose one format and repeated it many times. He wanted me to be less strict. As a result, I had much more fun in Venice. I played so much that I was even afraid to be too much like a student who wants to experiment with everything! Sophie Calle with Interview Magazine

Les Dormeurs, 1979, Sophie Calle

and then

I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says. It’s the ingestion and then the gestation. You’ve got to know the character. You’ve got to believe in him. You’ve got to feel that he is alive, and then, of course, you will have to do a certain amount of picking and choosing among the possibilities of his action, so that his actions fit the character which you believe in. After that, the business of putting him down on paper is mechanical. William Faulkner via the gf 

Joseph Pielichaty’s Blue Skies via Vic

big feelings

I used to stop by the Creativity Explored Gallery when  lived around the corner. I'd check out the current show, maybe buy cards or gift wrap, but I never ventured back into the studio to meet the artists or watch them work. I was probably in a hurry, or more likely just thought I was in a hurry. I imagined if I stepped over that threshold, all sorts of things could happen. What if I got into a long conversation I didn't know how to get out of? What if an artist wanted me to buy their art and I had to say no?  What if I couldn't understand what someone was saying to me? What if I was so overcome with Big Feelings that I cried? What if I didn't want to leave? From Tell You What: Friendship by Beth Lisick

Painting: Vincent Jackson: Bold and Beautiful

what are you looking for?

For the past few years, leading up to the birth of my daughter, I have spent five mornings out of the week standing in a small walk-in freezer, unloading and organizing food products. Before that, I was a fishmonger in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve often stopped to muse, as I unload packages of frozen Pacific cod and salmon pieces, on the sad tomb these fish have arrived at after their monumental struggle against the open ocean. In a way, it also helps cast my new role as a parent, no longer at loose in the northern wilds among freshly caught whole fish, but in the quiet domesticity of an environmentally controlled storehouse with processed blocks of bland, solid-colored cubes of once wild animals.

I take solace in the discovery that my daughter appears to be at least as feral as anything stalking through the Columbia Gorge. Excerpted from Caveat Emptor by Jason Novak in The Paris Review

Painting: Agnes Martin Stars via Lisa Congdon

adobe books

All the books are now 60% off, but Andrew McKinley, among the kindest and most generous bookstore owners on earth, will still try and make you pay even less. Peter Orner on Adobe Books in The Rumpus 

Photo: Adobe Books by Chris Cobb

of romance, vanished european cities, long-dead ballerinas

Around 1964, Cornell, himself sixty, was looking to try sketching from a live model. The thirty-five-year-old Kusama, an admirer of his, was sent over to pose. There is a strong possibility that this was the first time Cornell had ever seen a naked woman. As Deborah Solomon notes in her biography, the sketches he did that day look as if his hand “was trembling.” From "Alchemy of Inspiration" by Jessica Lott in the Art21 blog.

Photo: Yayoi Kusama and Joseph Cornell c. 1971

cross off and move on

Adela, Bernice, and Charna, the youngest—all gone for a long time now, blurred into a flock sailing through memory, their long, thin legs streaming out beneath the fluffy domes of their mangy fur coats, their great beaky noses pointing the way. From "Cross Off and Move On" by Deborah Eisenberg, full story on NYRB

Painting: Confrontation 1 (1988) by Gerhard Richter, via Tate

the wide river of rain

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who—when he has been seriously noted at all—has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, 'Speak to him: he hasnt seen you yet. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

Painting: "Imogen Grey" 2011 by Suzy Barnard

it's complicated, of course

I've been thinking about writing, how we create from life. It's complicated, of course. Stephen Elliott in today's Daily Rumpus.

Painting: Narangkar Glover, Shangri-La Girls School: A Thousand Stairs, 2010

leitmotif

The leitmotif is constant change. Nina Yashar in W Magazine.

Photo: The Sartorialist

luck - is not chance

As an artist so much of one does is based on faith - in a belief that exceed or ignores society's interest. Roni Horn in a 2006 Keynote to the Graduating Class of the Iceland Academy of Arts

Roni Horn, Still Water (The River Thames for Example), 1999

for books I like

Two close friends blurbed my first novel. I am forever in their debt, and I found the whole process a bit humiliating. No strangers were willing to blurb me on the strength of the book itself, and my editor asked many people, far and wide. The whole thing made me feel jaundiced and annoyed.

My later books were beautifully blurbed by a several generous fellow writers I barely knew—people I now adore and feel indebted to, although I still barely know them.

I happily, freely offer and write blurbs for everyone I know or sort of know or who know people I know, and even people I don't know if I like their books, which, come to think of it, disproves my assumption that all blurbs are personal. I write blurbs for books I like and people I like. Kate Christensen in an interview with The Awl

Painting: The Lantern Parade by Thomas Cooper Gotch via Books vs. Cigarettes

others who possess this urge

Simon likes to record things that do not officially exist, did not happen, and cannot be seen. Others who possess this urge generally write fiction. Simon sets out to photograph the impossible and the forbidden: posing the unjustly convicted at the scene of crimes they never committed for “The Innocents,” her breakout show at MoMA PS1 in 2003; capturing the braille edition of Playboy magazine, the CIA’s art collection, and a repository of nuclear waste in “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” her 2007 one-woman show at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and documenting every prohibited ­curiosity, counterfeit handbag, and drug confiscated from passenger luggage at JFK Airport in the space of five sleepless days and nights for “Contraband,” exhibited at Manhattan’s Lever House in 2010. Taryn Simon in W Magazine

Photo of the artist by Rineke Dijkstra for W Magazine

angels in america

Act 1, Scene 6

First week of November. In the men’s room in the offices of the Brooklyn Federal Court of Appeals. Louis is crying over the sink. Joe enters.

JOE: Oh, um...Morning.

LOUIS: Good morning, Counselor.

JOE (He watches Louis cry): Sorry, I...I don't know your name.

LOUIS. Don't bother. A word processor. The lowest of the low.

JOE (Holding out hand): Joe Pitt. I'm with Justice Wilson.

LOUIS: Oh, I know that. Counselor Pitt. Chief Clerk.

JOE: Were you...are you OK?

LOUIS: Oh, yeah. Thanks. What a nice man.

JOE: Not so nice.

LOUIS: What?

JOE: Not so nice. Nothing. You sure you’re...

LOUIS: Life sucks shit. Life...just sucks shit.

JOE: What’s wrong.

LOUIS: Run in my nylons.

JOE: Sorry...?

LOUIS: Forget it. Look, thanks for asking.

JOE: Well…

LOUIS: I mean, it really is nice of you.

(He starts crying again)

Sorry. Sick friend…

JOE: Oh, I'm sorry.

LOUIS: Yeah, yeah, well, that’s sweet.

Three of your colleagues have preceded you to this baleful sight and

and you're the first one to ask. The others just opened the door, saw me, and fled. I hope they had to pee real bad.

JOE (Handing him a wad of toilet paper): They just didn't want to intrude.

LOUIS: Hah. Reaganite heartless macho asshole lawyers.

JOE: Oh, that's unfair.

LOUIS: What is? Heartless? Macho? Reaganite? Lawyer?

JOE: I voted for Reagan.

LOUIS: You did?

JOE: Twice.

LOUIS: Twice? Well, oh boy. A Gay Republican.

JOE: Excuse me?

LOUIS: Nothing.

JOE: I'm not...

Forget it.

LOUIS: Republican? Not Republican? Or…

JOE: What?

LOUIS: What?

JOE: Not gay. I'm not gay.

LOUIS: Oh. Sorry.

(Blows his nose loudly) It’s just…

JOE: Yes?

LOUIS: Well, Sometimes you can tell from the way a person sounds that...I mean you sound like a …

JOE: No I don’t. Like what?

LOUIS: Like a Republican.

(Little pause. Joe knows he’s being teased; Louis knows he knows. Joe decides to be a little brave)

JOE (Making sure no one is around): Do I? Sound like a…?

LOUIS: What? Like a…? Republican, or…? Do I?

JOE: Do you what?

LOUIS: Sound like a…?

JOE: Like a…?

I’m...confused.

Louis: Yes.

My name is Louis. But all my friends call me Louise.

I work in Word Processing. Thanks for the toilet paper.

(Louis offers Joe his hand, Joe reaches, Louis feints and pecks Joe on the cheek, then exits.)

Drawing: Kiki Smith, Silver Bird, 2006 at Brooklyn Museum

liquidity

My lover's love is an illiquid asset. Gleaned from Christian Nagler's Market Fitness.

Photo: Robert Kinmont, 8 Natural Handstands on view at BAM

today

At Headlands Center for the Arts.

Photo: Cybele Lyle's studio by In the Make

this kind of muted stance

My work is all about living vicariously. I'm very easily embarrassed, and I think there's a lot of me that has a difficult time with people, period. All this angst, about myself, and about things I have no control over, is somehow in the work. I didn't really get English, and I lost my Russian. As far as expressing myself, I feel like I have bones in my tongue. Language is so crucial, but I think my pictures really do come from this kind of muted stance that I took. When you draw something, the drawing speaks for itself. Dasha Shishkin in an interview with Tina Barney, Vogue, June 2011.

Dasha Shishkin, Pity is an Agreeable Sentiment, Uplifting Like Military Music, c. 2007-2008

and good luck at it

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it. Joan Didion in a commencement address at UC Riverside via Inspiracioh

Photo: Rolf Henke's farm via freunde von freunden

i constantly questioned the ownership of sound

Watching: Todd Selby x Christine Sun Kim on Nowness.com

turning out shirts

Artists can change and move on and that's much more interesting than being like Chagall, who painted the same damn thing all his life. Don't you think? I think that's like turning out shirts. Dorothea Tanning in The Guardian, 2004

Photo: Inès de la Fressange via Miss Moss