an old alcoholic who buys a bottle of wine than immediately drops it on the liquor store floor
sorry guys
my brother with starbucks in the cart going thanksgiving shopping
fall
my parents were even less enthused about the hair being blue
spaghetti squash
MASH
i made the most unhealthy brussel sprouts
look how unhealthy! amazing!!!
i made two kinds of green beans
i dont even like green beans
turkey is funny when on floor
gravy making
family being cute
you know
“thanksgiving”
look at this fatty boom boom
fell asleep immediately
which is better, this tennis outfit or the last one?
drink the goddam water, dog
sigh!
this is my favourite one
he has dumb face
whee!
suburbia!
its funny to look at these pictures now because i am already in miami beach and it is so glamorous
it makes my parents sad that i will probably live in NYCFOREVR
had dinner with Jules De Balincourt
fabiola took me for a facial, first one ever, was pretty traumatic
just to go from my internal boil of stress to being in a dark room with a stranger talking about my pores was too much
i just was freaking out from getting off the treadmill
know what i mean?
oo orchids
its fun to cut your hair when you have weird colored hair
look at this thing!!
ok bye nyc
buy buy buy
buy~
ok omg
fab got the nicest house ever
matthew and i got here first
woo hoo!
all i got was the splash
we are gonna have so much fun here
the cab took a really long time to come so we ate street coconuts
srsly
ok! you guys have a job to do now: post this everywhere and send to your friends and lets sell a bunch of tickets for this amazing show at this old Silent Movie theater in miami. its going to be awesome!
let’s see if photobucket deleted my nude tree
sexy nude fall tree porn floods the internet!
ooh presents!
just in time for two days of freezing rain i got some awesome NATIVE MARC JACOBS boots in the mail
they weigh like one ounce
awesome!
made it easier to trudge through rain to the Mondrian Soho to check out their Sol LeWitt LES photo grid on the outside of the building
touching is not necessary
let’s check out what KC and Jordan are doing in LA with Patty Pat Pat
yay!!!!
installing a POSE and KC ORTIZ show at KNOWN GALLERY
opening … last night sorry guys forgot to hit POST last night on this entry :0
yay i love that i get to preview a show from across the country
and so do you, wherever you are
so you guys are not going to like be SUPER excited by these
they are much better maybe in your imagination?
the deleted puss photos from Carol Dunham show in Berlin
ha ha i guess they are pretty awesome
hmm i guess they get kinda scary too
i cant believe the photobucket algorithm got this as a vagina
i can barely tell its a vagina
it also deleted dash’s brother’s peen
and this other piece from DUVE that is clearly “art”
so what it better to see or to imagine???
well it looks like imageshack which normally loves hosting porn is also outraged at the hairy pink holes
this is me and fab and martin and alex going to a new museum party for a show that happens in February
there was an “art performance”
it was people reading lines from Paris Is Burning
which i watched randomly the night before
perhaps making performance less interesting to me because movie itself already so interesting?
art faces
arrttt faccessssss
no such thing as too cold to smoke
this is my version of party photography
since i hate bothering people and asking them to pose
like somewhere in there is jack and alec wek and michelle harper and who else
good morning!
christian came home at 1pm i think he might have had even more fun than me with Daniel Richter
i decided to be semi functional adult and walk around to galleries with Eddie and Sam and Andrea from Zieher Smith
better breakfast
amy sillman at derp derp derp
old people making cameraphone drawings
“grandma, get off the computer!”
awesome
kathy
kickin leaves
eddie says they put these outside galleries/?
carol dunham at galerie derpp
hoo ha!
im so excited there is some snatch in this post
we didnt actually go IN the jamburger banhoff but whatever
this georg baselitz was cool
now we are at DUVE
best young gallery in berlin
the DUVE!~
these phtoos are by Dash’s brother Max
the back of one of Max’ pieces
see no evil!
i will not touch upon this aspect of my visit
maybe later!
fuck fucking CFA is closed at 515pm arghh daniel richters in the dark
last glimpse at Eddie
i will interspersey my essay i wrote for book while we look!
EDDIE MARTINEZ
Dead or Alive
We have here an exhibition full of starkly black and white death’s heads and a exhibition full of rising and settings suns, and before I fall into a sort of intellectually lazy consideration of memento moris and our contemplation of death, I want to begin by saying how much I love Eddie’s paint and his painting, because that is why we are all here, so to speak, and “Eddie would have wanted it that way” ha ha.
I hope I am not the first to say this but Eddie is “a painter’s painter”. Not only do all my other artist friends love his work, artists of all ilk, even the weird lazy conceptual sculptors, even the esoteric video artists, even the feminist performance prancers and slickly minimal abstractors; but his work seems to be this universally appealing thing that anyone who is jaded and sad about art just thirsts for somehow. When people talk to me about his work they say something like thank god for Eddie Martinez and make it out like he is saving something that they hold very dear but never get quite around to articulating; that they are so grateful to him in some way.
I like this approach to the work; that we are saluting a brave soldier who is carrying the colors through an enormous bloody battle of aesthetics. I also like the idea of Eddie saving us from something, like we are dangerously close to a type of aesthetic laziness, a case of tired eyeballs. I like to picture Eddie saving us from loving art that is just sheetrock leaned against a wall, saving us from painting that is mere material-driven abstraction, or art that is just about art, because fewer and fewer people at the moment love painting, and Eddie’s surfaces make you fall in love with painting, again for most of us. The sense of optimism and renewal in his work is very seductive: the fact that his brush seems endless and inexhaustible, his imagery a continuous parade of odd objects and ideas.
Eyes like to look and there is so much to enjoy; from the minutiae to the universal, our regard has many options. On one level there is a saltshaker and apple core; a clock face with little black legs running away; a bowtie, a daisy, a clam, a sprig. Walking through the exhibition we glimpse a head, a head; a sun, a sun, a sun and a sun. These are things divorced from their symbolic meaning, largely, or rather optionally, and draw their raison d’etre more from their shape, energy and color. As your brain zooms out: a tray, a table, curtain; a pile, a thicket, a slab; a droplet, a wedge; a splotch, a patch, a remainder. Then finally we can consider a residue, a film and an expanse.
When I think of Eddie I think of the short list of artists who draw excellently with paint. From Picasso to DeKooning to Basquiat, the people whose lines are just as important as the image the lines are defining, the marks become compositional elements as opposed to outlines; they hold space while being neither foreground nor background; both perimeter and interior. And maybe it’s no coincidence that the eyes of his sculptural heads and skulls all have the blank, cow-like DeKooning eyes, or are doodled and scrawled up front like a Basquiat, or feature a repeatedly brush-stroked edge like a Picasso.
The background is often painted last so it overlaps the ostensible foreground: the sky or room is pushing up right against them—engulfs them. In Picasso terms, Eddie negates space with his backside up fronting, while his repetition of objects with only slight difference is something Warhol explored, especially in what Eddie seems to have been particularly drawn to: his Skulls series. The sculptural quality of the heads and their stark afternoon shadows of his suns also present to us a Freudian, mind-scaped DeChirico. Eddie’s paintings may not be surrealist in the sense of “a chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table”, but there certainly are a lot of things hanging out on Eddies tables. They are a banquet for the eyes, not for the unconscious, necessarily.
Texture provides an additional abbondanza: within each painting exists a range of textures from scratches to tears of paint, peltish combed-over areas, low-pressure spray spatters, thin smears and lumpy globs. The relationship also to German Expressionism and its new incarnations as in the work of Hamburg-born artist Andre Butzer is not lost on the artist or viewer, either: but where Butzer has frenzied between abstraction and figuration in many works, Eddie makes a terse, quiet and tensely frozen world, “everything in its place” like a still-life, while nonetheless problematizing the figure/ground relationship. There’s some Guston late-cartooning work happening here, too, as many before me have observed.
Eddies paintings are cartooned in a sort of darkly comic way perhaps: the pieces are very animated, in that they have an ambivalence on one hand from childlike amplified affect and on the other from an artificial lifelessness beyond mortality. It is not that Eddie is depicting life, but rather that he creates a world beyond this; a place to consider painting. Death is only the beginning. As opposed to a cold void can we not imagine instead an abyss of possibility? Perhaps this is what our artist community senses in Eddie’s work.
Which is why I somehow view Eddie’s portraits as portraiture of the dead. That is not to say old or stiff, or not full of energy—as all Eddie paintings are—but more like Eddie’s figures are corpses that he has dressed up in their Sunday best and laid out with all their worldly goods for a blackly comedic memorial portrait. Post-mortem photography was a fad in the Victorian era as grieving families propped dead people up onto divans kind of wonkily, then painted eyes onto their cold eyelids to simulate life; eyes that are looking never quite directly at you, looking in different directions, looking into the next world…
Maybe in this way Eddie is conjuring the dead and rearticulating life with gestural paint, and thus saves us from this death of all painting—painters and paintings that are actually dead—through his immediacy and inexhaustibility. I was talking with Eddie about this exhibition of paintings before it shipped, and he was drawing without even looking at the paper, talking to me about graffiti, drawing a bird on a box with a few balls scattered around whilst he’s just looking me straight in the eye and spacing out. I have seen each painting begin in this the same way, organically sketching and re-sketching onto canvas, responding to each development but not as though it were in the past, as though at every moment the painting is in the present. His paintings are perpetually immediate, visceral and sincere; he processes art history the way an intuit processes their past, naturally integrating it into the present without the self aware notion of updating or progress.
Eddie, then, takes the history of painting not as a linear graph, but rather as a 3D cubist thought: the back and front and side are simultaneous and all-encompassing. In this way, and in they way that each painting contains an amalgam of art historical approaches and techniques collapsed into one un-dead painting party, Eddie can be seen as scooping up a big handful of brushes, past and present, and lyrically re-animating them to our current generation’s edification and to painting’s.
sorry if that was a lot to read for Blog Attention Spans
buy the book from us! we have some! they are awesome
bye eddie!
more weird food
seems like everything has a weiner crammed in it
and we’re gone!
fall seemed to have advanced even further into nyc when i got back last night
awesome
here are some quick “artforumdiaryesque” photos courtesy Jens-Peter Brask (right)
oo and this is brewing in miami right now courtesy yours truly
and Nemel and Earsnot and KS
and Tony Goldman and Meghan
fuck yeah
i walked up to this dude and was like where did you get this weird aurel jacket and he was like
who
and i was like
WHAT
dinner after fun PERFORMA thingie
Matthew’s piece was unphotographable
this awesome fellow was in it tho
essentially it was this pitch black audio visual composition that was like 40 minutes of loud droning sound and a video through like a wormhole
it was meant to induce a shamanic state of mind
and induce half the audience to leave halfway 🙂
no not really though many of them did.
if you gave yourself up to it and let it work on you the effects were intense
and you were rewarded at the end as the lights went up a bit and there was Cello and Dancer guy and Laura singing opera
this is the terrified face of a lady who does not sing karaoke
this guy is partying
wow these colors are awesome
we stayed out until 4 something
drinking tequila and acting silly
“we became overserved”
i had a fantastic time
is this donoghue and hurricane?
a few fall days left!
let’s look at it closer
let’s grab it
let’s sniff it
let’s peer at it through plexiglas
let’s look for an opening
let’s….?
refract it through a series of plexi planes, various textures colors and new materials
let’s vivisect and splay it!
let’s say hi to andrea who worked on this David Altmejd show for Peter Brant polo house place
wearing BLAND
mirror art is always very popular with vain people
which is to say mirror art is always very popular with art collectors
i really like altmejd works
i like matthew photos better than my photos so i handed him my camera
i like the sorta assyrian relief met museum scale and the megaplinths
i like the word MEGAFAUNA
i love the word MEGADONKEY
did you know that MEGAFAUNA are “K-strategists”
many were wiped out during the Wurm Glaciation
did you know Australia used to have huge MARSUPIAL LIONS
did you know the Steller’s Sea Cow was exterminated by humans within 27 years of its discovery???
did you know there once were MEGASLOTH that were the size of elephants?
(and very slow)
i have seen (and photographed for blog) the largest living rodents, Capybara, when i was in peru
but did you know their ancestors once weighed up to one ton?
ONE TON RAT
did you know that in googling all this i came across the word “odd-toed undulate”
oh and it appears that one 8.2foot “terror birds” once walked around north america
there is also a thing for nightmares later called a MEGASCORPION it was a few feet taller than you are
hmmm
abyssian gigantism
monotremes as big as sheeps
i am only doing all this silly because it seems like david is into it, no?
i don’t like when the works border on kitsch tho. or maybe that is the wrong word
or maybe it is spelled wrong
ok camera back to me
why isn’t the Frieze tent like this tent
stacy engman looking awesome
marilyn minter showing off her ink
engagement and wedding ring!
nature showing off its wonders!
monk by the reservoir?
patrik scampering across the road
i love when digital cameras cant process visual info right
🙂
and matthew is asleep
why do i find it rewarding that we succeeded in exhausting him?
can we keep him in nyc forever please?? we promise to feed him and walk him
my hair is these colors
i am going to may’s house
how’s the above for same day reportage???
we have been having so much fun working on his show
art in the streets
may helping with the matt show
tomorrow we can see full installs
for now just snippits
snippy!
me getting my hair did in my kayak poncho
matthew watching jorge emerge from the origins of the universes
some details
like i said more tomorrow
this is me with dead tree branches attached to my scalp
i love my outfit
i am 100% happy with this photo
i am vagenerous and i am boobounteous
bun in the snow
where do you go
to the matthew stone show?
i look like a ferret
i can’t release the amazing Marina Abramovic photo yet but here is just a teaser
i promise we have real photos of the two openings not just my crappy
twenty of us went to congee village on way to afterparty
only photos i took at afterparty
sorry guys!
i was having too much fun at our huge openings and dinner and party to take photos
sometimes it just works out like that.
FUCK there were so many people and so many INTERESTING people last night, star studded, amazing
today i got to eat fancy lunch with nice peopl
came into the amazing shows and sold some f’art
not a bad life
the world has been vagenerous with me
