CL called me 'reactive'. I can go back and forth between different mindsets. If I'm to see the Pollock and go swimming, I have to leave now. It will be late-afternoon.
Yesterday, after feeding M's cat (he likes the silver bowls with white interiors; give him two kinds of wet food; they come in pouches and cans; rinse the water bowl; take five liver treats and throw them on the ground: it will leave dust), I went down to the library to collect the books that had arrived: nothing of interest: but then I saw the Odilon Redon:
"Plastic art is dead under the breath of the infinite."
"The sun in its violent harshness shines without warming, it falls on the slender branches with a brisk ardor that burns them."
"What a pleasure to read in a quiet room with the window open onto the forest."
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unedited studio notes May 5th 2014
Half of what I'm supposed to do is catalogue ideas. I should begin cataloguing them. Is this for me or for you?
This morning when I woke I decided to go for a run but couldn't make it so idly walked back. I smashed in my car yesterday: I ran into a man driving a red car. He was nice about it: a thick-limbed man with premature gray: more like light-blond: a brentwood kind of man: you wouldn't see him on the east-side. Not that he looked wealthy - his car looked like a rental. He told me not to worry: I hadn't meant it: and of course I didn't glance back to look at my own car. I would discover I'd smashed in the hood later, after feeding the cat. In-between I drove up the coast to the Topanga beach so I could lay in the sun and go swimming. I hadn't packed sunscreen or any food although I had filled a bottle of water from the sink. At the beach, I was sandwiched between two families. The mothers kept offering things to their children: would you like a sandwich? I have grapes and strawberries and an apple. You like apples. A cheese sandwich. One family had three boys and the other a boy and a baby-girl that the grandpa kept bouncing up and down. She had a pudgy body and dainty lips. Her brother had a mullet (he must have been four): he was wearing a large baseball cap and his father looked young and they must live on the west-side too. These are the kind of people I can't imagine having a day-job: what do they do? I still haven't grown used to California-casual.
I wished to go swimming; I was reading Robert Walser poems (a book of 30) and intermittently napped and got up to put my feet in the water but it was rocky and rough and the only ones actually swimming were surfers in their wetsuits. Around 3pm I got up to leave and drove down to the Getty. I got lost on the way: I was using the app WAZE and it directed me up into Brentwood passed houses and a college called St. Mary's and when I got to where I was meant to stop the road said: No Access.
I drove back down and by the time I got there it was 4:15; they close at 5:30; I parked anyway, paid the $15 (I'm making more money than I used to be but still 70% goes to rent, I just calculated it, and it's my fault, really: one of the people who had my job before me is in under-earner s-anonymous: although it isn't quite fair for me to bring it up: that's not my position: I just am paying rent on my studio and my apartment and both of them could be cheaper than they are. My studio is large but not holistic: it doesn't feel spiritual, the way I like my studio to feel: and yesterday, as I walked back, I ran into my studio-mate who seems like a bum, really, except he makes these nice artist-books. His art looks like he wishes it was the 60s. I guess my art looks like that too: except they are different nostalgias. He's all Americana: fuck the USA. Anyway: when I walked back there, the lights were off and I heard some shuffling noises and I shouted hello and it turned out he was with a girl. So then I wandered back to my space as I am and imagined how other people would have responded: G would have laughed (a guffaw) and R might have given a great big "Oh!" of surprise. And I did neither really: just returned to my insular space which doesn't feel as insular as I'd like it to.
I went to the Getty to see the cleaned Pollock from '43 made for Peggy Guggenheim's New York apartment. I was excited to see it as a friend had stood in front of it for an hour and I was thinking about how I'd gone to see the Monets in Paris: so maybe I'd have a similar experience. I'd been thinking of the Pollocks while I was there. But it turned out to be not quite so similar. There was an aspect of containment. Pollock's words, these days (the end of easel painting: so he'll make murals) seems foolish - without broad-scope. Granted he's generally right. But it seems more like Odilon Redon's words: the end of the plastic arts. And people still want easel paintings because they're the right size to be able to hang up in their apartments. I've been painting portraits and they always want them easel size because it's easier to handle.
I noticed the motion most and eventually realized I was thinking about Kirchner and thinking about sex: I kept looking for holes and thinking about how the whole thing writhed a bit: the surface popping and receding. The other people there were looking for faces. I was wearing a short black dress and so felt comfortable in the now slowing cooling air: it's beautiful up there. I left the painting and returned and wandered into the next-room where there was a video playing describing the process they had undergone in order to clean and attempt to restore the painting to Pollock's original intention. They removed a layer of varnish and re-stretched the painting and revealed, through the cleaning, Pollock's "innovative use of paint."
I walked through the doorway into the adjacent gallery where there were three Leger drawings and a Leger book of circus illustrations in a plexiglass box. These touched me more than the Pollock, in a way: to look at hands and feet and the arrangement of color: there's motion in his line. It seems foolish to pit one against the other (especially as Leger has his huge paintings too) but, then, they were hanging opposite one another: the one, a grand motion, the other a group of simple drawings. And the drawings were made seven years after Pollock's painting (which is called Mural) in 1950. So I've ignored the part that I liked: the gritty urbanity of it: that it still looks present - contemporary - even though it was made 70 years ago, and the Legers look really mid-century or even older: there's no mistaking it. I know it's my need to position myself that makes me lean towards Leger (they're so pretty). Those pictures of Pollock standing with a brooding gaze like a loner cowboy with feet slightly separate touch me not at all.
I walked down the hill, as I've done other times before, and passed the honeysuckle in the sculpture garden. It looks like a film-still doesn't it? The honeysuckle is behind me to the left. I only noticed now how we can rely on the sun to make shadows just-so.
