Paul McCarthy (b. 1945) & Mike Kelley (b. 1954)
       stills from Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone, 1992, video and installation (second image from top courtesy of Hauser & Wirth gallery)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     I know, I know, it’s been awhile — I should prolly rechristen to “Art of the Month” at this rate. Or “Art of the Indeterminate Multi-Weekly Interval”. And with that mega-syllabic title, I launch into another, that of today’s Art of the Day: “Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone” (1992) by Paul McCarthy & Mike Kelley.
     I saw five or ten minutes of “Heidi” in an NYC gallery years ago, I don’t remember which, might’ve been MOMA. I remember strolling about and suddenly finding my peripheral vision arrested by some kind of onscreen frenzy that disturbed me before I understood why, before I’d focused my full attention on it. I approached it and stood watching, embarrassed, compelled, fascinated, repulsed. If I remember correctly there was a man and a woman, both were manipulating some kind of mannequin torso, struggling to push what appeared to be sausages down its cavity & which exited the doll’s anus in some kind of basin of liquid. The adult figures went about their activity with haste & focus and urgency, splashing and slipping and wrangling with the doll in this weird pointless (and simultaneously deadly important) ritual of forcefeeding that sort of resembled midwifery or operating room surgery in its energy and concentrated involvement with the body. It was a weird tangle of fluid and skin and wet that suggested birth, death, defecation, abuse, parental care, discipline, emergency room, horror movie, the list goes on. It was just so stacked with meanings, so many of them charged and taboo.
     But it wasn’t just that richness of disturbing referent that compelled me to watch. It was the camera framing, the man’s monotone voiceover (disconnected from the immediate action), the direction, the focus of the piece that all helped it transcend mere grody viscera thrown in your face. A vision and a narrative structured all the onscreen juice & frenzy, even if I didn’t get to stand there long enough to see it all play out (eventually embarrassment got the better of me and I walked away). The memory of watching that video snippet remained with me for years whenever I’d see some video artist attempt to mine similar body-shock territory (rarely with anything close to the focused & thoughtful transgression I saw in that brief bit of “Heidi”).
     Fast forward about ten years to just the other day, when I was reminded of “Heidi” again, and decided finally to do some net-hunting for the artist(s) and title (I’d forgotten both years ago). After several wild weird online goose chases involving lots of amusing & pornographic Google results, I finally realized McCarthy & Kelly were the artists and “Heidi” the piece. I was thrilled. If anyone out there’s ever had an art object — be it book, poem, film or sculpture or whatever — whose title and creator you’ve forgotten gnaw away at your mind you’ll know the thrill I mean. You get this little pop of relief and excitement — because up until that moment the entire experience had begun to seem to me like some kind of incorrect dream from a decade ago, some amalgam of other artists, other videos, some bizarre sticky psychological stew I’d whipped up that had no reality-referent.
     At any rate, I didn’t find the full video, but I did manage to scrounge up some stills that (unfortunately) only hint at the sheer primal birth/sex/death/family/shit/pain/horror power this piece communicated. And I learned more about the artwork itself — it stems from co-creator McCarthy’s interest in Joanna Spyri’s 19th century novel “Heidi” (the chronicle of a young girl’s travels and experiences & Switzerland’s most well-known literary achievement) and, in his words, “consisted of a fabricated set, a group of partial and full life-size rubber figures, two large backdrop paintings, and a video tape shot entirely on the set.” (from eai.org). Enjoy & see the full-length version if you can/want. Oh & in the more-info links section below is a link to a small clip of the video I found on Vimeo — be warned, it’s pretty graphic.
 
 
 
 

A short clip from “Heidi” (warning: graphic) at vimeo.com.

More about McCarthy & Kelley’s “Heidi” at arttorrents.blogspot.

More Kelley at pbs.org.

More McCarthy at Hauser & Wirth.

       Artist(s)/ Artisan(s) unknown
       Two views of a pair of Louis XV rococo ormolu chenets, ca. 1740s

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Ormolu was a painstaking process whereby finely-ground high-karat gold was applied, using mercury and kiln-firing, to a bronze object d’art. The effect achieved is said to have been unequalled in terms of lustre & richness of color (and based on the examples I’ve offered here, I can see why). But the process was also pretty heavy on the mercury fumes, so gilders didn’t live very long, and in 1830 mercury was banned from this kind of gilding process. When I look at these two pictures I think of the gilder (or gilders) who helped create them and works like them: probably forgotten, brainpans swimming with quicksilver and dead early, unwitting sacrifices to… what? Rococo? The refined tastes of royalty? A R T ? Look at these andirons, licking up into the void like the flaming logs they were designed to support, beautiful, serpentine, alien — who made them & what kind of lives did they lead? I wish the love and praise lavished on these objects could somehow add to the souls of those whose lives were cut short crafting them. That they could somehow witness what’s come of their efforts in whatever incarnation their souls inhabit, bear witness to how their poisoning wasn’t in vain.
 
 
 
 
 
 

For more related info, check out this great post about 18th and 19th century gold leafing, ormolu, & other related decorative methods over at Decor To Adore.

       Robert Frank (b. 1924)
        From the top: London, 1952-53; Elevator—Miami Beach, 1955

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     ”London” belongs in that special class of photograph that is not only strikingly composed but is also able to generate a powerful & complexly emotional narrative interest. Why is the woman running in the rain? Is it even raining or just damp and dewy out? Did she jump from the back of the car to rush to some appointment? Late for work? Look at the way the car’s backdoor window frames, like a camera, the person across the street. Look at the long beam of flagstone sheen flanked by dark bricks and the black of the car. Look at the haze settling over everything like a blanket. I see this and feel so many things at once… fear, thrill, gloom, curiosity, a sense of delight and discovery, wonder.
     Love the Miami shot as well, the way the camera finds her and her eyeroll while socialites pass out into the rotty flowered hall. Does she envy them? Or does she it all clearly as sham? Is she resentful, jealous, or just bored? Elevator operator or hanger-on lagging behind? And does she know she’s being snapped? We share her viewpoint no matter what, we become her, unite with her as she stands still, out of step with everyone but following them all closely with her eyes.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Great article on Frank, including more of his work, over at Transmopolis.com.

   S. Brown, “Somebody Order a Pie?”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Just a sad, partially-animated face-fusion hungry to understand the answer to one of life’s great questions.
 
 
 
 

More of Brown’s work here.

       Willem de Kooning (American, born in the Netherlands, 1904-1997)
        The Cat’s Meow, 1987, oil on canvas

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Joy, joy joy. I respond right away to the rhythms of this, the open spaces, the subtleties of warm hue — much more so than the savage murky-colored gouge-work of earlier de Kooning. I love the allotment of color across the canvas, the magenta working into the red, the smudged & slightly anemic blue of the sky, the mixed feelings the linework gives me of nervy squiggle and dance. A few things for me nudge this piece toward a kind of thrill of unease (which makes me love the piece even more): the wide open caffeinated eyeball on the top left for instance, and the biomorphic disarray.
      I’m reminded of Debussy’s stated desire to write music “whose form was so free it would sound improvised” — to me “The Cat’s Meow” triumphantly delivers the visual equivalent, communicating both raw improvisation and the sense of thoughtful composition at the same time.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

For more de Kooning, check out this great article over at Art Market Monitor.

       Odilon Roche (1868-1947)
        Repos, date unknown, watercolor on paper

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The lighter stripe along the blonde’s leg. The way the brunette’s arm rests on the blonde’s hip with their fingers almost touching. The blonde’s hair echoing the golden smears worked into the purple behind them like clawmarks or licks of flame. The green silk (or water) wrapped around the blonde’s wrist. Golden bracelets near the light chestnut tuft. Smoke & violet. Suggestion of something other than repose about to begin or just having ended.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

More of Roche’s art at artnet.com.

       Yin Yanhua
        Pink Sofa 18, 2006, oil on canvas

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Cotton Candy cushion explosion. Reminds me of a huge rotted old mushroom cap I found in a field once, purply-brown and upturned. The meat of the cap was dried and tufted like shredded insulation. You toed it and it puffed out its dead spore powder. Pink sofa’s blurry pouf makes me think of that. —————— What else? The initial innocence of a nice pink sofa and how it’s gradually undone: first by its cushions’ frowny sag, then by the way the pink reveals undertones of unhealthy blood-glow, finally by that creepy nimbus of rosewater fog. Or is that fog? Maybe something else: a naked body, mid thrash, post- or mid-coital. Terrific & troubling work.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

More of Yanhua’s art at artnet.com.