NZArtMonthly

This masterpiece is an utter inspiration. The risk is total. The myths are real. The ambition is limitless. The horizon is up on the surface. Polke's vision, this alchemic chemist-magician, leaves nothing out. Everything is included in the painting. It's all or nothing. When people are taken to Gruenwald's Altarpiece to be healed, if sometimes they stand up and walk away without their crutches what happens in front of Paganini?

Sigmar Polke Paganini (1981-83) Dispersion on fabric 2230 x 5040mm Private Collection, Germany

Jackson Pollock's Number 16

In The Night Sky - Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Penguin Books, 2005, p 224), Ann Lauterbach writing on her friend Joe Brainard, describes classicism like this:

" ... art making was an act of simultaneous preservation and discovery, on pointing toward the past in the form of recollection, or retrieval, the other toward the future as structure distilled and revealed, each collapsing into the other to create a present, a presence, of consummate clarity."

Jackson's classicism has a transparent methodology that enables him to express himself directly, and in that moment of flow, be at One. All knowledge, all experience, all intuitive grasp, all desire, melt into the moment of gesture where content is formed.

Jackson Pollock Number 16, 1951 Enamel on paper 43.8 x 55.8cm, Collection: Eugene Victor Thaw

Fra Angelico

Tears as prayers; piety and humility as sincerity; faith as actuality. Fra Angelico's exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan visited three days ago, has the timeless themes of painting: the moment, the miracle, movement in stillness, the altitude of light, the stamped and incised gilded golden angel wings of consciousness, spaces between, the tension of the two main figures, perspective emerging in the primary plane with a delicious taste of visual geometry. Not a stroke wasted.

In Fra Angelico's Christ Crowned with Thorns (Paroccia di Santa Maria del Soccorso, Livorno [on deposit in the Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori, Livorno]), Christ's frown is so subtly perplexing. His bloodshot red eyes and death-black empty interior void of a mouth. The drops of blood every drop of paint that's ever been spilt. His frontal encounter with us, piercing. Time stopped; painting preserved; human cruelty continuing. In the hushed lower rooms of the Metropolitan Museum people being kind to one another in the face of this bloodbath. Fra Angelico often cried his prayers as he painted his favorite themes, the themes of mankind, our stories. We also cry for the pain of it all.

Fra Angelico The Annunciation, about 1425-26 Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Robert Creeley

When Wystan Curnow brought Bob Creeley to my freezing cold water loft on Quay St. on the Auckland waterfront in 1995 and Bob handed me the manuscript for The Dogs of Auckland I extended my hand to receive it and said something like "it's going to be effortless" and Bob slowly raised his head and his one piercing eye looked into me and he said "sounds difficult."

It was difficult. Over four years and sixty plus ink drawings of dogs, from life, the NYU Washington Square Campus dog run, Stephen Bambury's dogs at Bethels, Maura Robinson's studio dog Max, endless photos of dogs collaged from books and dog training manuals, professional model dogs like Rosie who took up poses (usually her tush), it was challenging. Bob Creeley's interviews are a benchmark. The light he turns on self is the clearest mirror I know.

Stanley Kunitz, who I'm going to visit next week, with 100 years of gardening under his belt, in Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz (Princeton University Press, 1993), says "The words of a poem are like a second skin. They are not apart from the self; they're interwoven with the tissue of the life." Years ago I realized my studio, same room since 1974, was a skin.

Max Gimblett Robert Creeley as Horus - 2, 1997 Ink on paper, 11 x 15 inches

Gibon Sengai, 1750-1837 (also known as: One-Hundred-Hut, Empty-White, No-Rules Study, and Gai)

Ink paint Mt. Taranaki as Mount Fuji. Contrast Maori parable with Zen Koan and Jewish Proverb. Hand paint in Sumi ink and silk scroll - "after Colin McCahon." Destroy the dualism of East and West. Learn from teachers.

Gazing at Mount Egmont it speaks, "To wash a clod of earth in the mud." (The Zen Koan, by Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, 1965, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, New York.)

Gibon Sengai Mount Fuji

Amitabha Buddha

In 1985 I took my Pratt Institute Undergraduate students to the Brooklyn Museum to see this exhibition. The golden spirit light stunned us, enraptured we stayed for hours. Kynaston McShine talked to our group.

I needed a short break from the students and went into a small back gallery on my own looking into the face of a bust of Amitabha Buddha. The Buddha spoke. It was not an auditory acoustical disturbance. It spoke. The Buddha said "go home and we will complete the painting together." The transmission continued for days as I was held quietly in a timeless space of surrender and acceptance. This painting, Buddha Amida (1985), is now in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery.

Amitabha Buddha, Korea, Koryo dynasty, 14th century Ink, color and gold on silk, 98.5 x 41.9cm The Asia Society, New York: Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, 3rd Collection.

Marina Abramovic's Seven Easy Pieces

Attending three of Marina's Seven Easy Pieces, I wrote the following short piece:

For Marina,

In the silence finally a burst of communication. A Queen bee sits at the earthed center of a temple of corporate dominance and the other chair is empty. The Queen and the King. The erotic other is absent.. The battle with male guns are guns everywhere, even in the hands of children. Life goes on around war as if only those directly wounded in their flesh were touched. We others take photos. Assets are safe. We elders have lost our power to protect our tribe. Grueling endurance lifted up as the higher self of sacred ritual. Our dignity as a people's of a survival species is not art, it is Life. It is not between life and art, it is Life. Marina kills time and liberates us and what are we going to do? This is not a performance. Brancusi's invisible pedestal is transformed into a living presence of Grace. This is Reality. Every day it changes. We are in the Wax Museum that is melting.

Pinch yourself and see if you can wake up.

Valie Export Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969, Munich Export, wearing pants with the crotch removed, walked through a cinema during a film screening, offering the spectators visual contact with a real female body. Walking up and down the aisles among the mostly male patrons, she challenged them to "look at the real thing" instead of passively enjoying images of women on the screen. This is the work that Marina Abramovic reenacted as part of Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum, NYC, November 11, 2005.

Albert Oehlen and Jonathan Meese's Situation

This collaboration creates some seamless works of art. Always one wants to know the Other.

After many book collaborations and collaborating on paintings with Stephen Ligosky, John Yau, and Lewis Hyde, again do some double up paintings with other artists. One recurring idea driving this impulse paintings curling up at their edges, rolling back like a magic carpet. There's painting skills one doesn't have the time to acquire, like standing in front of Velasquez looking up at a woman's blouse, a lifetime's application. It's the high contrast between the two styles that excites me with Oehlen and Meese.

The passing of the torch from one artistic generation to the next, maintaining and expanding the dialogue and language, that's the kind of trouble these two are up to.

Albert Oehlen and Jonathan Meese Situation, 2003 Oil paint and inkjet on wood 208 x 280 cm

Willem de Kooning's Door to the River

This was the door into American painting. Earlier my door into modern painting was the Kandinsky story of him coming home some evening looking through his window to see an abstract painting on his easel, the first abstract he had seen. Somebody had turned one of his Blue Rider paintings upside-down.

Reading On the Spiritual in Art in my studio in San Francisco 1965-67 de Kooning's painted me. Arshile Gorky taught me that the idea was to get the idea; my idea was to get so close to de Kooning I would pass right through him. It lasted about nine months and then I began painting people sitting at chairs looking at me (Barbara, my mother, my painter friends). I could catch a likeness and got a few commissions to draw babies. I was a baby in painting.

By the late 60s I was standing in front of Door to the River at the Whitney Museum. Fluid paint, up on the surface, striking light off water, all gesture and touch, all consuming paint-skin, all present in one moment but not flat. No Greenbergian nonsense about flatness. Volume volume volume. Spaces to be entered and passed through. Delectable moments of the most tender feelings rendered through light. Spaces to dwell in.

Willem de Kooning Door to the River, 1960 Oil on canvas 80 x 70 inches Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Gift of the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art