The Bad Art Cafe

Found in the Funny Papers: an art cartoon

Art Cartoon:

Non Sequitur by Wiley Ink in the Chicago Tribune, 1.30.08

a group of people are standing around a musuem gallery looking at pictures that appear to be cartoon versions of old masters (Wiley's a pretty good draftsman).

The box introducing the cartoon says:

Art Appreciation in the Laptop Generation

One guy standing there, looking at the "old master" painting says: "HMM....I wonder what software they used to get that brush stroke effect"

Calling Artists to Write to Bad Art Cafe

any artist with an original take on his/her artististic process please email me & I'll post it here with your link.

please write creatively, that's all I ask!

The Book

if this art blog was a real school, or classroom, it's top reading requirement would be: the philosophy of andy warhol, from a & b & back again.  it's found under "autobiography" but there is little autobiographical about it, or factual, or anything.  so why read it?

the philosophy is a really great parody of art theory by a well known artist, although it considers nobody's work, not even his own, except in vague, very vague references, and only a few of his movies.  yet it's a classic.  published in 1975, or thereabouts, the philosophy is a book taken from taped recorded conversations andy has with his friends on the phone, and that's about it.  it's to literature what 'found art' is to art.  it's 'found literature', but don't try to tell anybody that, especially an english teacher.  or any respectable writer, let alone a respectable arts writer.

it attempts to explain the theory of being & nothingness in a funny way.

one example:

'A: you take some chocolate . . . . and you take 2 pieces of bread . . . and you put the candy in the middle & you make a sandwich out of it.  and that would be cake.'

that always made perfect sense to me

there's a lot of chapter's to examine: but we will do that some other time. it is an art book I highly recommend to anyone who wants to know what it's all about, and yet can't spit it out on paper.  it's his best book, that's all.

from Zippy

I found this in the tabloid funny papers today: from Zippy by Bill Griffith

Griffy: There's an entire subset of modern, kitsch sculpture that spins off famous artists like Picasso, Brancusi & Matisse

Claude: "Picasso, Brancusi & Matisse"? I think they handled my Harley Hogg Insurance claim back last March . . . .

Griffy: You really ARE a classic philistine, Claude

Claude: Hey, Buckaroo, I take NO position on that Israeli Berlin Wall!

Griffy: We've tumbled a long way down th' cultural staircase when this kind of a thing passes for "inspirational" civic monument

Claude: I don't know art pardner, but I know what moves me!

So, how did Jean-Michel & Andy meet?

From: the Diaries of Andy Warhol, edited by Pat Hackett

Monday, October 4, 1982

Down to meet Bruno Bischofberger (cab $7.50). He brought Jean Michel Basquiat with him. He’s the one who used the name “Samo” when he used to sit on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village and paint T-shirts, and I’d give him $10.00 here and there and send him up to Serendipity to try to sell the T-shirts there. He was just one of those kids who drove me crazy. He’s black but some people say he Puerto Rican so I don’t know. And then Bruno discovered him and now he’s on Easy Street. He’s got a great loft on Christie Street. He was a middle-class Brooklyn kid – I mean he went to college and things – and he was trying to like that painting in the Greenwich Village.

2 Quotes from Dublin

From the Robert Mapplethorpe Retrospective in Dublin, Ireland 11/96 - 1/97:

“I don’t feel uplifted after seeing this display. Confused, maybe. A little startled, I guess. Maybe it’s just too American or something. Just not very cultured, unless you consider the flowers but there weren’t many of them, were there?”
11/31/96, Dublin, Ireland

“I thought the guy was old-fashioned because he relied n studio equipment for his work. So much of this stuff is controlled, brilliantly controlled. I personally like less contrived set-ups where the photographer has little say concerning what is going to happen”
12/6/96, Dublin, Ireland

LAMENT.

Jenny Holzer: LAMENT.
(1989 words a black granite slab)

THE NEW DISEASE CAME
I LEARN THAT TIME
DOES NOT HEAL

Calla Lily, 1988

“They are not fun flowers”
- Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1986)

It’s a white lily that shows only the flower top itself, and just a hint of the stem. It opens up in the picture perfectly halfway with an erection of a piston sticking out of it.

“The best photographs are often subversive, unreasonable, delirious."

“‘Until I studied with Lisette (Model) I’d gone on dreaming photography rather than doing it. Lisette told me to enjoy myself when I was photographing and I began to, and then I learned from the work. Lisette taught me that I’d felt guilty about being a woman. Guilty because I didn’t think I could ever understand the mechanics of the camera. I’d always believed that since painters rendered every line on a canvas, they experience the image more completely than a photographer. That had bothered me. Lisette talked to me about how ancient the camera was and how the light stains the silver coating of the film silver so memory stains it too.’”

-Diane Arbus, quoted in Diane Arbus by Patricia Bosworth

Andy on his Silkscreening Process

“With silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk,, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple – quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. My first experiments with screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month (1962), I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face – the first Marilyns.”

From POPism: the WARHOL 60’s

(NOTE: the date this appears on happens to be the anniversary of Andy’s death in 1987. Rest in Peace, Andy)