'porque comprar é um acto político'

como sempre, para ler, rosa pomar.

(e ainda encontro a gola que me matei a procurar antes, total love)

a rosa é um farol de luz intensa para muita gente, e ali me incluo.

«uma camisola feita por nós que vestimos a um filho tem um valor que o dinheiro não paga»

filho, as coisas mais valiosas são as que o dinheiro não paga e os olhos não vêem.

John Baldessari (2)

an interview taken from artnet, here.  "Blue Torso and Pink Arm" (2007) is part of the Listen Darling, the World is Yours exhibition at the Ellipse Foundation.

Interview with John Baldessari
by Nicole Davis

Nicole Davis interviewed John Baldessari in his studio in Santa Monica, Ca., on Apr. 12, 2004.

John Baldessari: So, fire away.

Nicole Davis: What led you to become an artist?

JB: I always had this idea that doing art was just a masturbatory activity, and didn't really help anybody. I was teaching kids in the California Youth Authority, an honor camp where they send kids instead of sending them to prison. One kid came to me one day and asked if I would open up the arts and crafts building at night so they could work. I said, "If all of you guys will cool it in the classes, then I'll baby-sit you." Worked like a charm. Here were these kids that had no values I could embrace, that cared about art more than I. So, I said, "Well, I guess art has some function in society," and I haven't gotten beyond that yet, but it was enough to convince me that art did some good somehow. I just needed a reason that wasn't all about myself.

ND: I'm sorry, I hate to interject, but how tall are you?

JB: 6 feet 7 inches.

ND: You're so tall! It's amazing!

JB: I know.

ND: Okay, sorry, how did you end up in Los Angeles and why are you still here?

JB: Why am I still here? A job. I was born south of San Diego in a kind of service community. That's a euphemism for ghetto. I taught at a couple of schools, and then I got a job teaching at the University of California in San Diego. Then, the chairperson of the art department there was asked to be the new chairperson of the art department of Cal Arts, and he asked me if I'd want to come and be on the faculty here. So, I changed because Cal Arts at the time had all this buzz that it was going to be "the" art school of the U.S. You know, that sounded really attractive, so I moved up here, and, the first studio, it's still here.

ND: So this is your first studio?

JB: Yeah, I've had it since 1970. So I came here in 1970. "Why am I still here?" I thought for a moment about moving to New York, but I was then married and didn't want to raise children in New York. I had taught the prior summer at Columbia, and they had offered me a job there, so I could have gone, but you know I wanted to abide by what my wife wanted to do, so I stayed here.

ND: Did you feel like you wanted to be in New York because that was where more action was, and where more artists were?

JB: Probably, yeah. Probably, of course. You know it was the art center. I don't know if it is now. In one way you could say yes. In one way no. I think it still has the best museums. I think also art is more in your face there. You can't avoid it. Here you can, which is good because one gets a lot of work done that way.

ND: Do you think your work would have been different if you moved to New York?

JB: That's a tough one. It just seems logical that one's work is effected by where he or she is living. It's a moot point, kind of. I don't know if you know the artist Allan McCollum, he's from here, and he used really bright colors and even sparkle dust in his paintings. Then he goes to New York and all of a sudden he's doing all these black paintings.

ND: That's a little extreme. How do you feel that the esthetic and lifestyle of Los Angeles effects the art work created here?

JB: You know, there is just so much trading of information in magazines and web sites on the internet, I don't know that it pertains anymore. But, I always thought there was this kind of "why not" attitude. You can't call this a European city. We have no history, relatively speaking. I remember way back in the late ‘60s, hanging out in New York at Max's Kansas City. You'd just go there every night, and it's like every artist, always at least six, ten or eight artists at the same table. And, I said something, some art idea, and you could hear a pin drop. And someone said, "Well, how does that fit into art history?" And, I'm thinking inside, "Who the fuck cares?" Out here you don't worry about how things fit into art history. You just do what you're going to do.

ND: Who were some of the first artists that you were having a dialogue with in New York?

JB: Well, you know, because I was doing all that text stuff and text with photography, at first I was directed to painters, and they said, "This isn't painting." And then, there's this one guy, Dick Bellamy, he was a very famous gallerist for a while, the Green Gallery, where a lot of Minimalists had first shown. He looked at my work, and he said, "I don't quite know what you're doing, but there are some people here in New York that you might want to meet." And so, there are people who are now good friends of mine that I was introduced to, like Lawrence Weiner, Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt and Bruce Nauman.

ND: Are you still friendly with them?

JB: Oh, yeah.

ND: What was the mission behind your early works?

JB: My mission for my own art I think was to break the certain "no-no's" and "taboos" for galleries. One: that you never saw photographs in art galleries, they were always in photo galleries. So, I wanted to do that. . . photography as a tool that an artist can use. Then, I was very much interested as using language as a tool for art and just information, rather than something visual. Both of those battles have been won.

Now, you see so much photography and text stuff. Do I have any mission right now? My current one is that I'm somehow trying to jam the media world together with what we would call the "real world." And sort of, like a square peg in a round hole, I keep on doing that, like a kid, trying to make it work. Also, on a formal level, I'm trying to make something that's neither painting nor photograph.

ND: What do you feel is going on in the art world in L.A. right now?

JB: You know, one of the reasons I teach is to get a sense of what's going on at the grass-roots level. There is one thing that came up in the painting department just a month ago. We didn't see any really good abstract painters. What I saw in painting that I thought was interesting was translating photographs into paintings. The kids are taking snapshots and then using it as the basis of their paintings. So, this is a curious fusion of photographic vision into paint.

ND: Did you like it?

JB: I see a lot of it. For me it's not particular. I just like good art when I see it. Doesn't matter where I see it. That's what excites me. It can happen any place. Sometimes, it's done by an artist I really hate. That's a real falsity; there is no connection between the artist and the work.

ND: Well there is, but you can still somehow appreciate the work.

JB: A lot of times, you've probably gone through this, there is an artist you really like and you wish their work was better, and you really want to like it. One of the most obnoxious people in the world, I've known him forever, is Richard Serra, but he does great work.

ND: Who would you consider to be a breakthrough artist within the last decade?

JB: There are certain artists that interest me. Not so much in what they're doing now, but why there's attention given to them at a particular time. For example, in 1985 I did a two-person show in Chicago with Gerhard Richter. Neither of us sold anything, which was not unusual back then, but the paintings he had in the show were the candle paintings, which are now $23 million each. I find that so puzzling. What was wrong with them then? Plus, he was doing pretty much the same art when I came across him in the late ‘60s. He didn't have much of a following.

And in the ‘80s there was this surge of interest in German artists in the U.S. The one that was embraced by everyone was Anselm Kiefer. I don't think he was the most interesting artist that was available. I think it was the whole thing about German guilt that the Americans seemed to embrace. And now he's completely off the radar. You can't say he's on everybody's tongue. It would be Richter, wouldn't it? And of course, we are going to get tired of Richter. I think the best of them is Polke. But, I think he's just a little bit too much for everybody. And somebody who had always wanted to inherit that position, but unfortunately died, was Kippenberger. But, he's now getting revered in Germany. And there's a big show of his at the Tate.

ND: Yes, and there's a huge explosion of interest for German artists right now, young German artists.

JB: I guess it's like fashion. Why something gets embraced at one moment and then it's dropped. Well, so, anyway, all I was saying is someone who interested me some years ago is very popular. He's always interested me as a painter. I don't know why.

ND: Are you still friendly with Richter?

JB: Oh sure. Yeah, yeah.

ND: I would almost be a little wary of work that is accepted immediately.

JB. Yeah, you know something that just struck me, do you know the artist Thomas Kinkade, who does these schlock paintings? He's a huge industry. He has all these satellite galleries that sell his work. He's licensed all of his imagery so there's all his tchotchkes out there. It's enormous. Just enormous. There's even now been a housing development with cottages that look like his paintings.

ND: A housing development? Where?

JB: It's up in Northern California. So anyway, the point I'm trying to make, if you listen to Kinkade's argument, it's exactly the same argument as Jeff Koons. Exactly. "This is what America likes." The only difference is that they operate in two different territories. Jeff operates in the avant-garde art world, and this other guy operates on the other end of the spectrum, but they talk exactly alike. He went to art school, he went to Art Center. He just figured out what America wants. They want Hallmark Cards. I thought it would be great to have a public debate with Kinkade and Koons. Well, it wouldn't be a debate. They wouldn't argue. It would just be the two of them talking.

ND: To me, someone like Kinkade is a big turnoff. It seems to be all marketing and branding.

JB: Kinkade probably thinks he's being totally genuine. I don't know. I would just love to hear him talk. Jeff I know very well because we show in the same gallery. And that guy I can't. . . I still can't. . . that's part of his mystique because nobody can figure out whether he's just tongue and cheek, or whether he believes this stuff.

ND: And he looks so...

JB: Like Howdy Doody.

ND: Exactly! It's almost like pathological liars. You do something enough, you tell a lie enough, and you believe it to be true. So really, they blur the lines themselves.

JB: Everything is getting blurred now. I mean between fashion and art. A couple years back they came up with the idea of pairing up an artist with a fashion designer. Now architects are trying to be artists. It's all turning into one big soup. Frank Gehry is an old friend of mine, and he's designing everything. This weekend there's a party for an unveiling of a vodka bottle that Frank has designed. Last time I saw him he was designing a car for one of the Japanese brands.

ND: What next, hygiene products?

JB: I mean I've done some things. I did a few T-shirts, and I did two posters for New Order. Then I started to get phone calls. I got a call from Lenny Kravitz and I didn't know who he was. I said, well can you send some tapes? The first time was fun, but then I said this is has to stop. I don't want this to be my life.

ND: Well, music is different. You know, there's something about artists and musicians, they've always had a running dialogue.

JB: Yeah, yeah. Michael Stipe from REM used to live around here. This woman who runs Blind Spot Magazine, she knows Michael. She said he was interested in photography, "He wants to come visit you is that okay?" So, I had dinner with him. We talked about photography, and music, and so on. And there are continually all these crossovers going on.

ND: What is inspiring your work right now?

JB: One of the questions that I've always pursued or has pursued me is, "Why is something art, and why is something else not art?" That I always find fascinating. And, then another thing is that I never want to copy myself or repeat successes. So, now we've just finished this project for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the next show I have to do is a show in New York, which is, you know, a tough place to show.

And I'm always thinking about that, and what it might look like. So, right now it's just this hazy image in my mind. I want it to go beyond the Deutsche Guggenheim.

ND: Where did you get the photographic images that you use in your work?

JB: I collected them for years. They are all the stuff that nobody wants, because they're always from some movie that never made it. I used to buy them for 15 cents each. I use found photography a lot. I think I'm going to continue using photographic imagery and painting. Right now, I got fascinated with orange, as you can see.

ND: Why orange?

JB: I don't know. I think, why it might be, I have this house, which is an old Arts and Craft house that's being redone by an architect friend of mine. That's actually another story with Frank Gehry, but anyway, I made this one bathroom downstairs all orange tile. It just seemed the right thing to do, I don't know why. And then my kitchen is all cobalt blue tile. Then the upstairs bathroom is this beautiful green.

So, I have these three colors, but you can never see them at the same time, you just have this memory. I think what it is, every morning taking a shower in this orange bathroom. It seems so simple minded. I think it's a lot about how that color feels, you know, that I've never been around orange.

ND: Do you think orange is an unnatural color?

JB: Well, you have oranges and you have carrots.

ND: Yes, but even when you see oranges in a tree they seem so striking and unnatural.

JB: Yeah, I see what you're saying. It's an interesting thing. It's between red and yellow. It doesn't have that memory of blood so much. It seems friendly, but you can also think of fire. Yellow, for me, always signals some kind of craziness. So, I don't know if I want to do that. I thought maybe I could try another color for New York. I want to see when I'm done with this stuff if I have orange out of my system. I don't know; we'll see.

But, I think what I want to do, because I realized that the work prior to this was using images of slapstick comedy, which gets really physical, so, if you just see them as shapes, they get really abstract. I think what I'm going to do is a lot of research, and find a principal shape that is a thing rather than a person that's really big, and then go from there. I think what's happening is that the orange stuff is occupying more and more of the space of the picture plane. I would like to up the ante even more.

ND: Who represents you in New York?

JB: In the last three or four years, I changed galleries, and that was like a divorce for me. I got divorced and that was probably worse than getting divorced.

ND: Which gallery?

JB: I was at Sonnabend Gallery in New York, and you know, they're a fantastic gallery, and after over 30 years, I've gone to Marian Goodman Gallery. They are both very powerful women, but I began to panic a bit about what would happen to my kids after I died, and how they would support themselves. With Ileana Sonnabend, she has all the money in the world, and so she doesn't have to make money, and they only have a staff of about five or so, and they were just overworked all the time, so they could never pay attention to things. She didn't go out actively and try to sell work, and so I just decided I had to get somebody who was a little more aggressive, and Marian Goodman, I looked around, and she seems the best for me, but it was really really difficult for me after 30 years.

ND: Are you reading anything interesting right now?

JB: Two books just came in the mail yesterday, you're gonna laugh at this one. One, is the South Beach Diet. . .

ND: No, you're not going on a diet, are you?

JB: No, no. I'm always curious about why some foods are not good for you and others are.

ND: You know who loves that book, Bill Clinton.

JB: Yeah, well, I pick up certain things. Like, I've always had orange juice in the morning and that's a no-no.

ND: No more orange juice to follow your orange shower?

JB: No.

ND: What was the other book?

JB: Godard at Seventy.

ND: Are you into movies?

JB: Yes and no. I am into people that are creative.

ND: What about the whole movie thing here in L.A.?

JB: You know there's no crossover, at least for me. I know a couple of people involved. I am interested from a distance, but I don't want to be close to it.

ND: Do you go to the movies a lot?

JB: I'm pretty much a workaholic. I used to go to movies a lot, but now I don't do that, because I realized I used to go mostly with my son, and now he's agoraphobic. You know, I have Tivo, but I don't watch that much. But, on the other hand I draw a lot of my imagery from the movies.

ND: Why's that then?

JB: Well, I think it's just that it mirrors the real world, but it's in another place. It's always set up. And, when it gets really confusing, especially like when I'm traveling some place and watching a movie and a lot of locations are around Santa Monica, and then you say, "How can this be a movie," because I live there. The worst it ever got, was when I was married, and I was living up the street, and I came down here to my studio and there were movie trucks all over. In the parking lot out there they had some chairs set up and it was Jack Nicholson and Mike Nichols. They were doing this shot in Chinatown, and I said, "Pardon me, can I get into my studio?" I'm thinking, "Okay so, the line between reality is my door."

ND: "The line between reality is my door." I'm going to quote you on that.

John Baldessari (1)

 



"That's because art has become more entertainment, and those things just aren't entertaining. I'm on the board of trustees at MOCA – not that I go, but I do go to a few meetings – and you realise when you get in there, in the midst of it, that these museums are about ticket sales, and they have to have blockbusters. So what are we doing at MOCA? – Murakami. Man, that is going to bring them in. Now do you think if you had an Ad Reinhardt show that that would bring them in? I don't think so. Could you see a Reinhardt on a billboard? But it's more and more like that. And it's perfect. Because there's a huge Asian community: that's going to bring them in. Murakami is like Warhol: that's going to bring them in." (J. Baldessari) complete interview, here.

above, early works from the 1960's.

Ana Hatherly dois ou três

with a passion (from here to here)

from Mary Heilmann to Monique Prieto. Instant blood rise.


Yesterday and Today (2207)

Mad in Love

Tempting me a Thousand Times (2007)

Last Night's Dream (2007)

After so Many Vows (2007)

Then We Broke Up (2007)

important note: her sequence, not mine.
immediately thinking of PEZ candy.

Eleven Color Photographs (1966/7-70)

I could only get three, but here they are. By Bruce Nauman, my favorite artist.


Waxing Hot


Eating My Words


Self-Portrait as a Fountain

"I think the point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication is the edge where poetry or art occurs," (B. Nauman)

Here, "Make me Think Me" at the Tate Liverpool. And below, a good article by Jasmine Moorhead for the Yale Herald. Very comprehensive.

- - -
MoMA glorifies modernist art of Bruce Nauman
By Jasmine Moorhead

The Bruce Nauman retrospective which opens Sun., Mar. 5, at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan will be the third largest in the museum's history, third to Picasso and Matisse - not bad company. That MoMA has put so much energy and emphasis into an artist, especially one who is still alive, is significant. They are recognizing him as a major figure, if not the major figure in contemporary art. Anyone who visits this exhibit will be convinced that the museum is right.

Nauman, born in 1941, first came into recognition in the mid-'60s when he stopped painting and started doing sculpture. Beginning with materials such as fiberglass, latex, and concrete, over the last 30 years, Nauman's art has also experimented with neon, wax, wire, video, and sound. Upon first glance, Nauman might be associated with a recent generation of artists concerned first with the political, the innovative, and the shocking - a group of artists which may derive from his work, but pales in comparison. With any thought or small moment of observation, the viewer realizes that Nauman does not fall into that mold.

It is Nauman's primary aesthetic that carries the strong emotional pull. There is nothing political about it. Its genius is in the one-on-one game it plays with you when you look at it. Rob Storr, the curator of MoMA's department of Painting and Sculpture, in distinguishing Nauman's work from others' less sophisticated efforts in similar directions, said of the viewer, "If they're not puzzled, they're not getting it." Nauman is about puzzles and about the incomplete reconstruction of these puzzles.

Storr, in speaking on the complexity of the Nauman exhibit, justified his statements by noting that Nauman's work is "not obscure in the way people think it is when they hear of it second hand...." How often have pieces of "modern art" been caricatured as simply strange and shocking? "What is it?" they ask, and "Why is it there?" The caption might ask these very questions for Nauman's cartoon of a couple peering up at an enormous box, the triangular equivalent of the Kaaba stone, only in rough wood and slightly smaller. In this very piece ("Yellow Room"), fluorescent yellow lights from inside illuminate the ceiling above. A door, hard at first to locate, allows entrance to this asylum from the museum. The walls inside are white. There is nothing else but you.

Though a piece such as this one is surely about carnal consciousness and its objectification, there is nothing dogmatic about the way Nauman evokes this awareness. He does not pretend to have taught you something profound about yourself. His work is designing and building the sculpture. You and he can only smile because unknowingly, you have entered his world and he has entered yours. It is an equitable relationship, and likewise engaging.

Because of Nauman's fascination with play and puzzles, his concern with the intellectual side of art, and his recognition of chronological, art historical terms, the comparison between Marcel Duchamp and himself is inevitable. Like Duchamp (and Freud - see "Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious") before him, Nauman was entranced by the play on words. One of Nauman's early sculptures is titled "Henry Moore Bound to Fail." The sculpture is a wax over plaster cast of a human back and arms distorted, tied with rope. In Nauman's title, the central word is pivotal - "Henry Moore Bound" and "Bound to Fail." He calls attention to the ambiguityof the disparate associations evoked by this word; bound meaning held together by force, and bound meaning destined. Nauman has created a package which holds both these meanings. That is where the viewer lies, perhaps where Nauman believes humanity lies: in the space between an uncontrollable fate and our pitiful and limited attempts to hold things together.

Nauman, though, seems to have worked through Duchamp quite successfully. At the time, he had never really seen Duchamp's work, although he admitted "the information was just sort of in the air." The lineage is complex, but Nauman's approach is so fresh that he can hardly be called derivative. One of Nauman's "Eleven Color Photographs" (1966-1967/70) is "Self-Portrait as a Fountain," showing Nauman spewing water out of his mouth. This piece, consciously or not, relates to Duchamp's "Fountain" of 1917, a urinal signed and turned upside down. In Nauman's piece, the artist becomes not only the author but the object, the art. Nauman has taken the loaded image of Duchamp, who, close to 50 years before, had chosen and subverted such a loaded image as a man's urinal, and subverted him. Nauman becomes the active object, one that still spews water.

Nauman's work remains a healthy addition to the art world because he never stops believing that he is a sculptor. He is perhaps non-traditional only because of the media which he uses. Kathy Halbreich, the Director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, who organized the exhibit along with Neal Benezra, the chief curator of exhibitions for 20th century painting and sculpture at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, emphasized this point about Nauman: "Bruce is a sculptor." And his sculptures are constructions of constructions. "Musical Chairs: Studio Version" combines a metal circle, overlaid by a wooden triangle, and layered in that is a wooden cross. It is all held together by metal wires, suspended from the ceiling. It is what a sculpture should be: interesting from all angles. But it is not just visually interesting; it is fun, it is playful. For suspended in the midst of these shapes are chairs which seem to dance as you circle around this sculpture that hangs at eye level.

Nauman constructs objects at the same time he constructs ideas. Upon viewing "Musical Chairs," one might think of the light fixtures at a Bonanza Steak House which attempt in vain to achieve the effect of a western barroom. At the same time, one remembers kindergarten when the music stops and you are the one left standing. Nauman gives you the time and the visual cues to bring these ideas together, and you realize that a new combination of ideas has created a new arrangement of emotional responses in you.

The art world, in the progressive spirit of art history which modernism has adopted as its chief characteristic, has constantly striven for innovation. It reaches for the original, but often comes up with only novelties. But Nauman's work is strangely personal and circular - from the viewer to the neon sign or the fiberglass maze and back. Somehow, Nauman has remembered that the art must convey some piece of his humanity to the viewer or they (the viewer and the artist) are never going to meet. He does this very successfully. The exhibit of Nauman's work underlines his desire, if not to construct or create, at least to hold things together.

One of the most endearing things about Nauman is his ability to make us laugh at the frustration of the human condition. One of his sculptures (some might call it an installation, but I would like to avoid that term for the narrowness of its connotations) is a room with four color monitors and two video projections. You are well aware of this room before you actually see it. You hear the moans and groans, shrieks and yells from around the corner. Upon entering, you see clowns on all the monitors and screens. They are in different positions, but the common theme is their inability to complete their act. One cannot get off the floor; one cannot pull a broom off the ceiling where it is stuck. Nauman calls it "Clown Torture," but you laugh because they are clowns, and they make us laugh by assuming our own frustrations. Failure with anyone else would be agonizing, but with clowns this failure is their premise. I did not see anyone come out of the room who did not wear a slightly puzzled smirk on their faces. I laughed aloud, though mostly at myself. The Museum of Modern Art has indeed constructed a wonderful exhibit. No description can do either the artist or the show credit. You must go and hear the sounds and see the videos and walk around the sculptures yourself. Like any exhibit it has its high points and its low points. (Unfortunately, I found that the weakest pieces were also the most recent.) You should go, for not only will you remember him, but history will as well.

Uma wordgirl elevada a cada letra: Jenny Holzer

Xenon Projections

Since 1996, Jenny Holzer has used xenon projectors to cast text onto buildings, mountains, rivers and assorted public sites in Europe, Mexico and South America. During the xenon event, a powerful lamp creates a procession of text; the writing is in constant motion, like credits rolling at the end of a film. The flow of light and text over the shapes of buildings, land and water transforms the night. Spaces appear to be enveloped, but what reemphasizes the lines of architecture, or dictates a path in the reflection of a river, is the scrolling language. "Seen and absorbed rather than read," much like advertising and public announcements, xenon text has ambled the Spanish Steps in Rome, slid along the Olympic ski jump in Lillehammer and lit the Louvre's courtyard and facade in Paris. In Rio de Janeiro, Holzer threw text onto the beach and bay. Words rose on the backs of waves only to fall into foam; location and projection fused.
(Daqui)


Os poemas de Wislawa Szymborska.





Eu que passo a vida agarrada às palavras gostei das letras de Jenny Holzer assim que as vi. Vieram para exposição na barra esquerda do blogue onde vão ficar durante um tempo, mas sem o efeito espectacular que têm ao vivo. Estas palavras são do tamanho de prédios e monumentos, espalham-se pela rua no escuro, brilham à noite. Podem ser os seus truismos ou poemas. Ou apenas palavras. Neste caso, definitivamente, a forma ultrapassa o conteúdo.

Jenny Holzer: Kulture Flash
Jenny Holzer na Tate Collection
Jenny Holzer

BECAUSE THERE IS NO GOD SOMEONE
MUST TAKE RESPONSIBILTY FOR MEN.
A CHARISMATIC LEADER IS IMPERATIVE
HE CAN SUBORDINATE THE SMALL
WILLS TO THE GREAT ONE. HIS
STRENGHT AND HIS VISION REDEEM
MEN. HIS PERFECTION MAKES THEM
GREATFUL. LIFE ITSELF IS NOT SACRED,
THERE IS NO DIGNITY IN THE FLESH.
UNDIRECTED MEN ARE CONTENT WITH
RANDOM, SQUALID, POINTLESS LIVES.
THE LEADER GIVES DIRECTION AND
PURPOSE. THE LEADER FORCES GREAT
ACCOMPLISHMENTS, MANDATES PEACE
AND REPELS OUTSIDE AGRESSERS.
HE IS THE ARCHITECT OF DESTINY. HE
DEMANDS ABSOLUTE LOYALTY. HE
MERITS UNQUESTIONING DEVOTION.
HE ASKS THE SUPREAM SACRIFICE. HE IS
THE ONLY HOPE

Um dos Inflammatory Essays (1979-82)

Rigo 23

Rigo, nascido Ricardo Gouveia, é pintor, muralista e artista político nascido na Ilha da Madeira. Emigrou jovem para os Estados Unidos e estudou no San Francisco Art Institute obtendo, em 1991, o BFA e. em 1997, o MFA na Stanford University. Reside em São Francisco, California. É particularmente conhecido na comunidade de São Francisco por ter pintado sinais públicos de “sentído único” em ruas principais da cidade. É um dos fundadores do Colectivo Clarion Alley Mural Project e foi membro activo até 2006. Participou com diversas instalações na Bienal de Liverpool. É considerado por alguns críticos e curadores, pertencente à primeira geração de artistas saídos da San Francisco Mission School. Desde 1984, Rigo utiliza dois dígitos do ano como parte do seu nome, p.ex. “Rigo 23", em 2003.

Este é também o texto que descreve Rigo na Coleção Berardo que tem três obras deste artista madeirense, agora californiano, imagino que seja o texto da Colecção Berardo que tenha sido utilizado na wikipédia.



Rigo 23, em entrevista: "There are potentially as many roles for art in our society as there are artists. In fact we live in such a pluralist and overstimulated environment that there are even different societies being addressed by different artists. The type of role I see for myself is to remain part of the open and sensitive strands of whichever society I'm mostly engaged with. As artists we argue for the consideration and acknowledgement of cultural phenomena that might otherwise be overlooked. As artists we are communicators, and for me there is no bigger thrill than to communicate with as varied an audience as possible."

Outra biografia, esta do SF MOMA:
"Rigo came to the Bay Area to study art from his native Madeira Island, Portugal. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 and his MFA from Stanford University in 1997. Rigo has been awarded public commissions including murals for the San Francisco International Airport, the Gerbode Foundation, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. He creates images that are direct comments on culture and society. His San Francisco murals One Tree, Innercity/Home, and Sky/Ground have made him a popular spokesperson for urban residents. Rigo was a 1999 SECA Award recipient at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and has shown his work extensively in the Bay Area as well as internationally. He is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco. "



Rigo prefers to follow his own Direction, um excelente artigo do SF Gate:
The signature work of Rigo 98 is not inside SFMOMA but just outside, on two walls of the adjacent Williams Building. Down the east wall a huge painted arrow says ``Ground'' and points in that direction. Up the south wall the arrow says ``Sky'' and points up.

Both arrows are painted black and white, offset by bold stripes in the fashion of street signs.

``People are trained to look at them for instructions, so it follows a good delivery system,'' says the artist, now called Rigo 99. His name advances with the year, as it has since he arrived as Ricardo Gouveia from Madeira Island off Portugal and reinvented himself as Rigo 85, wall muralist.
Working mostly South of Market, he uses traffic-sign language and script, which he describes as ``official iconography that I am self-appointed to use.''
As a street artist, adding life to bleak buildings, Rigo has painted about 20 walls, either on small stipends from the landlord or by covering the cost himself.

``I like the direct access of it,'' he says. ``It's addictive. I walk around and see a bare wall, and the juices start flowing.''

At 32, he is finally being paid for his imprint. He's just been commissioned to create a mural for the concrete exterior of the Berkeley Art Museum. He's thinking about prisons and computers, ``the two fastest- growing industries in California,'' he says.

The two-sided mural next to SFMOMA was made with a $30,000 private grant. Rigo approached it as he always does, by walking in the vicinity to get a feel for political undercurrents.
The Williams building is historic and must be preserved, but a huge condo complex is scheduled to be built around it. The sky will be raised and the ground dropped when construction crews arrive to follow Rigo's bold directions.
``It's addressing the development in this area,'' he says, ``where the sky begins farther up.''
At nine stories, it is his tallest work, and Rigo is afraid of heights. He works from a swing stage, the kind dropped for window cleaners. It is kitted out with a drop line, level and paint roller. He diagrams each piece in his Excelsior district studio. Once he gets on the scaffold, he works daybreak to dark to finish as quickly as possible and maintain the element of surprise.

For his SECA project, Rigo climbed higher still, to the top of the Pac Bell skyscraper, which looks down on the back of SFMOMA, west across Yerba Buena and out to Twin Peaks. He painted a canvas mural of that cityscape. Included, like little hidden pictures, are several of Rigo's other murals.

The canvas, called ``Looking at 1998 From the Top of 1925,'' covers one wall of his room at SFMOMA. On the opposite wall is a California Bear flag with the bear cut out. This flag desecration might infuriate native Californians if it weren't so spot- on true. The grizzly bear on the flag has been driven near extinction and is headed for a door marked ``Emergency Exit.''

That conveys Rigo's sense of irony. He started by copying advertising, and now he's noticed the advertisers are copying him. ``They're using the same strategy I myself was appropriating,'' he says, ``so it's hard to be upset. But it's amazing how fast things are co-opted.''



"One of my favorite San Francisco artists named Rigo did this piece. He also did the most excellent public art piece in 1995 called One Tree. You can view it here: here. This one lonely tree is situated in a fairly industrial part of town, warehouses and freeway entrances abound. I love coming across it when I drive in that part of the city. " (em super hero design)



É muito curioso encontrar este artista português a mudar a paisagem em São Francisco. Mais, saber que pertence a uma corrente artística americana, afinal um país de adopção. Ricardo Gouveia andou no liceu na Madeira mas frequentou depois o ensino superior artístico em São Francisco, minha cidade americana favorita. Aqui está em casa, aqui é exposto e aqui recebe bolsas para poder desenvolver o seu trabalho. Esse trabalho, ironicamente, inclui uma crítica impiedosa ao país que o acolhe. No contexto de um recente texto sobre imigração/integração, devo afirmar e reafirmar que os Estados Unidos são de facto um grande país. E do trabalho de Rigo 23, gostei mesmo muito.




Rigo Artwork, Painting by the Numbers
A conversation with Rigo'00
In Full Site: Rigo '99
This Space for 'Huh?'

Mr. Trash-Porn, Thomas Schostok Aka THS

Vi-o primeiro na Proteus. Depois a página e as fontes. Os sapatos, uma variante da skateboard art. E o que mais me gostei, os gluebooks. Thomas Schostok, um alemão de Essen muito alternativo, ou talvez nem tanto, numa altura em que a alternativa é a via central. Seja ou sendo o que seja, gostei das imagens a bruto, do grosseiro à vista. E o gluebook, nada de nada, um objecto que não é nada do que devia ser. No site do criador, uma colecção destes objectos-folha.


Converse


Espai Pupu, Barcelona/Spain


Pepe Jeans

Thomas Schostok was born in 1972 and raised in Essen a small, dull town somewhere in Germany. He worked as a salesman for bathroom tiles. He never studied Art or Design because he thought, to study design is brain washing. In 1999 he founded {ths} design, working in his own studio for international and national clients. BlahBlahBlah. He had always a passion for Fonts and Type and founded the Cape-Arcona Type Foundry together with Stefan Claudius.He was real. He was slim. And boy, was he shady. Designer Thomas Schostok (aka THS, aka Mr. Trash-Porn) repulsed us all the way to the bank. Well aware that he was that old story - a boy never rewarded for mastering a trash art form - he earned critical cred with brilliant, gymnastic design.But his design, dripping with hate for uniformity and boredom, made parents reel, gave pop-culture-bashing pols a poster boy and posed critics a conundrum: Where does new-school rebellion stop and old-school bigotry begin?
[Thomas Schostok, June 2004]