Shameless Promotion: Les Champs Artists' Cooperative

I've come out of my blog-dormancy to make a quick anouncement about a new Artists' Cooperative based in DC. Based, in fact, on U Street. Actually, based right here in this building: Les Champs Artists Cooperative.

My beautiful and talented wife is the founder of the cooperative, and they just had their first highly successful show this weekend at the Junior League of Washington's A Capital Collection. They sold a lot of art!

The cooperative is made up of many talented artists who do what I like to call "representational realism". In other words, artists who can actually draw and have a real sense of color and create beautiful, amazing pictures.

Perhaps I'm biased. But check it out!

Going Out Gurus Love Borf the Leech

Recently, Going Out Guru Julia reviewed the Borf show, The Consolation of Ruin, running through this weekend. The show, in an empty building on North Capitol Street, exhibits graffiti and multi-media stuff.

I usually like reading the GOG column, and while this piece was interesting, I couldn’t help but think that Julia was overly impressed with the whole Borf thing. She seemed infatuated with the “anarchy” of it all, and all but thrilled that she had to be blindfolded and led into the building.

That’s all okay with me. No accounting for taste. But then she writes that the show contains, among other things, a “pretty cool riff on the famous Eddie Adams execution photo made out of smiley-face stickers.”

I had to read that again to make sure I understood: yep. She said it. A “pretty cool riff.” Cool? COOL? COOL? Julia, what the hell is wrong with you? There is nothing romantic or cool or funny or ironic or anarchistic or radical or chic about this picture, about this death. The Borf Brigade appropriated it to use in their little side show of naval-gazing suburban angst because they are ignorant and self-centered. Julia, you should be ashamed of yourself for giving it any kind of credit.

So what’s this Borf show all about? Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few years, you know who Borf is. John Tsombikos was arrested in 2005 for spraying paint all over DC, and now owes DC twelve thousand bucks. The Borf Brigade hopes to raise money to help him pay his fine.

Tsombikos (and his Borf Brigade friends) is an artist. What’s more, he’s a protestor, and an anarchist, with important thing to say! Things like “grownups are obsolete” and, as the Washington Post reported in 2005, Borf “…doesn't believe in the state, capitalism, private property, globalization. Most of all, he doesn't believe in adulthood, which he considers ‘boring’ and ‘selling out.’”

I’m not sure if by “doesn’t believe in” he means that he doubts these are real things (sorry, Borf, they do exists), or he simply doesn’t like them.

I suspect it’s the first, because it couldn’t possibly be the second: Borf grew up in Great Falls, pays (or did) to attend the Art school at the Corcoran, apparently eats food and wears clothes, and even drives a car, and the spray paint he uses doesn’t grow on trees. All these things, plus the huge amount of free time and the freedom to come and go as he pleases, are all the products of “the state, capitalism, private property, globalization,” and yes, most definitely, “adulthood.”

Sorry, Borf (and your brigade), you’re a hypocrite.

Like all anarchists, Borf wants to believe that he supports the oppressed and down-trodden, the workers and the poor. But these are the very people who do things like go to work every day at places like spray paint factories so he can have something to steal from paint stores, where other working people work. You know why they work? So they can eat. And pay rent. (Steal enough paint, Borf, and they won’t have jobs any more.) Not everyone grew up in Great Falls, Borf.

And then people like me and the Metro bus driver and the bar tender and the bookstore owner and the minister and the paper seller and the packer truck driver and everyone else who lives in DC (but ironically, no one who lives in Great Falls) have to pay to have Borf’s spray paint washed off or covered up.

Borf Brigade, why not go out and study drawing and painting, and maybe a little history and literature while you’re at it, and then spend a few years working really, really hard learning to make the best art you can while trying to earn a living. Or, is hard work and studying and paying your own goddamn way also things anarchists don’t believe in?

Jasper Johns at NGA: Smashing Paintings Over Students Heads

The use of the word “inexplicable” in relation to Jasper Johns’ work is a waste of 12 perfectly good letters. Or so I thought, because I didn’t understand Jasper Johns’ work. I recently learned a few things at the Jasper Johns show at the National Gallery of Art. For instance, his early work was “intensely personal, gestural painting of the abstract expressionists.”

Now, that makes sense. His painting about naming colors is obviously intensely personal. Apparently, he was trying to remember the names of the colors he was using, but was having quite a bit of trouble. He kept making silly errors like using red when he wanted to use white. To make matters worse, the students in his atelier were snickering behind his back. To calm his frustration, he went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. There, he spilled coffee on his tie, and also realized that he had forgotten to put up the macaroni from the night before and it was ruined. His frustration grew into anger, and, looking to lash out at anything he could find close at hand, as was his want, he found that he had broken most of the crockery a few days before after a syrup stain sent him spiraling out of control (which led to his painting this). He returned to the atelier in a dark mood, only to find that his students, in the classic tradition of student pranks, had written in big block letters, directly on his canvas, the names of the colors he was supposed to use. This sent him into one of his famous blind rages, knocking over paint cans and smashing canvases over his student’s heads.

Not all of his art was done in the spirit of blind rages. Some of it was done in the coldly calculated manner of, say, an axe murderer. For instance, his target has an obvious message: he killed and beheaded four people (possibly students) and mounted their heads on pikes, and he’ll target you next, buddy, so watch out!

In 1962, somehow he became trapped in his atelier, and desperately tried to escape through a canvas, as this painting attests. I have my suspicions that it may have been his students (the same ones who had canvases smashed over their heads, although not the same ones whose heads were incorporated into his work, for obvious reasons) who barricaded him in a corner, perhaps in an attempt to escape yet another of his blind rages.

Referring, I believe, to this painting, Johns once commented that “a painting should be looked at the same way we look at a radiator.” The last time I looked at my radiator, hot greenish-yellow liquid was exploding out of it, stranding me on the side of the highway. This sent me into a blind rage, much the same feeling I get while viewing his paintings, further proof of Johns’ incredible genius!

It’s a hackneyed phrase: “I could have painted that,” with a hackneyed response: “but the difference is, you didn’t.” Jasper Johns is the truth behind this quip. Although, it should probably be modified to this: “but the difference is, you don’t experience enough breakfast-mishap-induced blind rages to be an artistic genius.”