The Bad Art Cafe

Beat Women, part 2

The fire you like so much in me
Is the mark of someone adamantly free
But you can't stop yourself from wanting worse
Cause nothing feeds a hunger like a thirst
Baby I'm tired Of fighting . . . . .
Liz Phair "Exile in Guyville"

Hettie Cohen Jones - The Facet
Hettie Jones was reconcile with her mother. The problem was, Hettie had married a black man named LeRoi Jones, and had 2 biracial children, Kelly and Lisa. Hettie preferred to live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, because it was cheap (they were both broke, although LeRoi was becoming more famous by the minute), and because all her friends were there, all the jazz people, all the art people.

The Beat Women, part 1

The Bad Art Cafe has reopened for business: it is now expanding it's subject matters

"I'm a 47 year old woman with permanent sense of impermanence. If time were like a passage of music, you keep going back until you got it right."Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters

My interest in the Beats was auspicious. My friend Michael who read all the Beat books said I was like another Joan Burroughs raking lizards out of the tree, high on Benzedrine.

may queen

a fuzzy, soft focus victorian beauty in a pictorialist photograph, with hair flowing wild down her 19th century white gown of silk mouseline, or cotton lawn, rows of tiny pin tucks, delicate ruffled edges accented by a large picture hat to protect fine white english skin in india. dreamy-eyed, and ethereal expression of a pretty lady caught up in a mysterious studio background, holding a garland of white flowers to symbolize the queen of may, or the may day queen - these were the pictures Julia Margaret Cameron was famous for.

she started to photograph at the age of 48 when her six children were grown, and used her maids as dark room assistants & models, also all her beautiful relatives, the neighbors children, and sometimes men of state.

a rose is a rose is a rose

she was known for being a political revolutionary, another famous art photographer's girlfriend on the side, and silent movie actress from italy, but what she really was, and what she really goes down in history for, is her art photography.

roses, mexico by tina modotti is one of her most famous photographs, and one of her earliest efforts.  she moved with edward weston to mexico & operated his photo studio, but what she really did was start taking photographs, even as she worked as his model.  roses, mexico (in phaidon's the photo book) is a portrait of roses looked at for their sculptural quality.  the many lines on the photograph are difficult to follow, and according to the text, it's a "typical purist picture of the 1920's".  meaning, I suppose, she was an artist who looked for purity in all she did, although the roses appear to be a little over grown, into the next stage of wilting after they bloomed.  they look pretty, but a little decadent, lush, but not fresh, and some critics goes as far as to say they represent the modotti/weston relationship at it's prime.

I'd like to think that the viewer is finding out about roses in the same way gertrude stein said a rose is a rose is a rose, that's a purist line from the 1920's too . . . .

Lee, the Action Widow*

(*daubed this by art critic Harold Rosenburg)

The Guerilla Girls Beside Companion to the History of Western Art by the Guerilla Girls imagines a fictionalize conversation between female American painter Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984), and female American painter Alma Thomas (1891 – 1978). They are sitting down and having either tea or a double scotch together in art heaven somewhere, comparing career notes. Lee tells us what it was like to be in the shadow of her famous painter husband, Jackson Pollock:

“We white women abstract expressionists didn’t think we were being mistreated, although that’s what feminists would have us believe. Most of us were involved with the men who created the macho aesthetic. We loved them!

(Elaine de Kooning, and Mary Frank, to name a couple others)

“Critics and historians want to believe new ideas come from a single individual . They make art into a horse race. I couldn’t avoid it (being compared to her late husband, usually for the worse) even after Jackson died. Being married to an art world genius didn’t always work in my favor.”

Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers, The Guerrilla Girls Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes

I’M NOT an
aunt jemima, ballbreaker, biker chick, bimbo, bitch, bombshell, bra burner, bull dyke, butch, call girl, carmen miranda, china doll, dumb blond, fag hag, femme fatale, feminazi, geisha, girl next door, gold digger, good catholic girl, harem girl, ho, homegirl, hot tamale, indian princess, jewish princess, lady boss, lipstick lesbian, lolita, mother teresa, nympho, old hag, old maid, pinup girl, prude, slut, soccer mom, squaw, stage mom, supermodel, tokyo rose, tomboy, trophy wife, valley girl, vamp, wicked stepmother or yummy mummy!

DON’T STEREOTYPE ME!

from the advertisement for the Guerrilla Girls’ (“conscience of the art world”) latest book

Playing with the Edge

(from 7/8/00) Just bought the book Playing with the Edge, the Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe by Arthur Danto. On the cover is a black & white self-portrait of RM in a feather boa and make-up, and curly feminine wig. Wait, on closer inspection, it’s a long hair natural fur piece around his neck. His lips are painted with a glamorous luster, and it’s an eerie picture of him looking tres feminique. All of RM’s self portraits are on the eerie side, even when he’s dressed “normal”, as in a tuxedo (that picture is like a haunted house picture; the eyes follow you everywehre) – or how about the self portrait of him naked, staring intently into the camera, holding his cock out for everyone to see. It’s a very sexy picture.

LAMENT.

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

THE NEW DISEASE CAME
I LEARN THAT TIME
DOES NOT HEAL

“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

Gorgus

2 little blond girls in this black & white photograph are playing beauty salon in bare feet outdoors. The older sister, around 8 years old, is making up the younger one, who is maybe 6, in a rural area behind an old pickup truck. The beauty accessories are laid out on the ground – behind the truck in a dark shadow, hand mirrors, lipsticks, eye shadows, some pressed face powder for the impromptu little girl extreme makeover.