R.I.P. On Kawara

I learn that everyone dies on Twitter. Yesterday I retweeted MOCA's "I Got Up At..." and created an homage of my own (I haven't woken up at 6:15 AM since I drove West and was operating on a different time zone = a very rare occurrence that I am up before the sunrise).

The next Postcard Collective round is fast approaching. The theme is "you are here" and it may be time for another tribute.

R.I.P. Nancy Holt

Jacinda Russell, Snow Burial for Nancy Holt, 10 February 2014

Sometimes actions and images speak louder than words. For everything else I ever wrote about Nancy Holt.  One obituary can be found here.

Gayle Wimmer R.I.P.

I signed up for Gayle Wimmer’s fibers course as my very first elective in graduate school. The description emphasized installation and the use of photographic processes though I knew absolutely nothing about fibers. I would take this class four more semesters, still knowing very little about the medium by the end of my graduate degree.

Gayle turned into one my most influential mentors at the University of Arizona. I enrolled in her class every term and she would have served on my thesis defense if she was not in Poland on sabbatical. On a technical level, she taught me a process I utilized in my MFA show (ethyl acetate transfers onto cloth, Kleenex, and paper bags). Artistically, she helped place my interest in family as subject matter into a broader context. It was also through her thoughtfulness, kind demeanor and interactions with students that I learned how to become a better professor.

She had great impact on me as a woman with an international art reputation, one who lived alone with her beloved cat dedicating her life to her work, and one who traveled extensively to fuel her practice. I learned about grant writing through Gayle as she planted the idea that applying for Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships were essential. It was through her practice that I learned what I could become through hard work and dedication.

I became familiar with Petah Coyne’s installations with horsehair from Gayle. Whenever I see a photograph of an Eastern European haystack, I think of her. I can clearly see her staring at me over the rims of her glasses after asking a poignant question and I could recognize her distinctive blocky handwriting fourteen years after last seeing it.

Recently, I decided to make an artwork dedicated to our last phone conversation in January 2007. I searched for her online, hoping that I would not find an obituary, but that was indeed what I discovered. Last month while I was on the residency in Wyoming mapping out a plan for this artwork, she died at the age of 69 in Pennsylvania the very same week. This information brings great sadness and makes it imperative that I create this piece.

All the obituaries mention the impact she had on her students. I am not alone when I say that a great artist and professor passed away last month. Gayle Wimmer will be missed.

R.I.P. Walter De Maria

For Walter De Maria:  

On 3^rd July 2009, I walked the perimeter of Lightning Field in awe as a deer ran through the poles before twilight. A thunderstorm rolled in and we watched lightning strike for two hours from the cabin’s porch. I could fill the rest of this post with superlatives, yet no words or photographs adequately describe what we witnessed.

The following morning, I pocketed a few smooth, yellow stones from the center of the field, substituting them for a red rock from the base of James Turrell’s Roden Crater. “From one earthwork to the next,” I thought as I hurled the pebble collected from Lightning Field into Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp a few days after.

I was deeply saddened after learning Walter De Maria died last week. Before leaving for Texas, I photographed a hardened chunk of loam from the New York Earthroom. I am racked with guilt by its presence but now I know what I must do with it. I am sorry that it took a great artist’s death for that revelation to occur.

RIP: Masahisa Fukase

Twenty years after falling into a coma, Masahisa Fukase died on the 9th June. James Luckett first introduced me to The Solitude of Ravens in 1997. It remains one of my favorite books that I perused regularly at the Center for Creative Photography and still show his images to my students today. The Guardian published this article by Sean O'Hagan in 2010 and the paragraph below captures his intent behind the series:

"In an essay entitled The Art of Losing Love, Oborn notes: 'Fukase's best-known work was made while reeling from loss of love.' She points out that Fukase began his pursuit of the ravens just after Yoko, his wife of 13 years, left him. 'While on a train returning to his hometown of Hokkaido, perhaps feeling unlucky and ominous,' she writes, 'Fukase got off at stops and began to photograph something which in his culture and in others represents inauspicious feeling: ravens. He became obsessed with them, with their darkness and loneliness." The Solitude of Ravens, then, is a book of mourning. (Yoko, tellingly, was Fukase's main subject before he turned his camera on the ravens.)'"

O'Hagan also writes: "In Japanese mythology, ravens are disruptive presences and harbingers of dark and dangerous times – another reason, perhaps, why the photographer was drawn to them during his darkest hour. In 1992, five years after the book was published, Fukase fell down a flight of stairs in a bar. He has been in a coma ever since. His former wife, now remarried, visits him in hospital twice a month. 'With a camera in front of his eye, he could see; not without,' she told an interviewer. 'He remains part of my identity; that's why I still visit him.'"

We lost Fukase in 1992 yet his passing in 2012 is still as sad and foreboding as his photographs.

[All images are from Masahisa Fukase's The Solitude of Ravens.]

RIP David Weiss

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Mr. and Mrs. Pear and Their New Dog

David Weiss died yesterday of cancer at the age of 66. My love for both artists runs deep from their ingenious, rickety photographs (above) to their elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque installations (below).

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, The Way Things Go, 1987

I will never forget seeing Patrick Frey's documentary of the making of The Way Things Go (above) at the Matthew Marks Gallery about five years ago. At times it was frustrating to watch with all of the mistakes that routinely happened with a tire not quite rolling in the right direction but it certainly makes The Way Things Go seem all the more impressive as a 30 minute short film.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Fashion Show from Sausage Series

David Weiss will surely be missed.

Mike Kelley RIP

It's been exactly nine days since I heard about Mike Kelley's death. I have been thinking about how influential he is, not only in the art world but how often I referred to him in many of the classes I teach. I was always drawn to his mixed media approach - he was certainly an object maker of the highest order but I was equally interested in his photographs. Some of my favorite Mike Kelley pieces follow:


Mike Kelley, Color and Form, 1999


Mike Kelley, Chinatown, 1999


Mike Kelley, Ahh Youth, 1991


Mike Kelley, Dustballs, 1994

So sad that he is gone yet I do look forward to seeing his work in the Whitney Biennial next month.

Kodak Files for Bankruptcy

Images via. I am thinking that Kodak filing for bankruptcy will affect my teaching more so than my artistic practice. Ever since Color Photography class at Boise State, I was always a Fuji gal.



It's still sad that an icon like Kodak never managed to embrace the digital revolution despite inventing the digital camera.

RIP: Cy Twombly

Image by Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly with Artworks at Fulton Street, 1954

My appreciate for Cy Twombly grew exponentially while living in Houston constantly visiting the Menil Collection. In addition to wandering through Renzo Piano's gallery devoted entirely to Twombly's artwork, the Menil's 2000 exhibition, Cy Twombly: The Sculpture was most memorable. My first interaction with his paintings began in undergraduate school while writing a research paper on Jean-Michel Basquiat comparing their use of text.


Cy Twombly, Poems to the Sea


Cy Twombly, Untitled, Jupiter Island, 1992

I wasn't only interested in his scrawls but also his use of white (barely white, once white, no longer white). I associated this impure neutral with the colors he must have been influenced by while living on the Mediterranean.


Cy Twombly, Untitled

Some of his paintings reminded me of penmanship exercises in elementary school with backgrounds simulating a chalk board. Their scale of the canvas engulfed me as an adult much like the daunting task of suddenly learning cursive as a child. I often compare my handwriting to his paintings, styling a signature as abstract as a Twombly line.

It's sad to see the legends go. Here is a one of the best written obituaries from the Guardian.

RIP Miroslav Tichy

Miroslav Tichy died yesterday at the age of 85. He was the master of the voyeuristic photograph:



handmade matboard:



the disheveled appearance hiding a camera a camera so odd people did not believe he was taking photographs:



and the makeshift darkroom in which he took soot from the fireplace to paint his walls black.



Tichy was the anti-establishment, discovered far too recently in his career.



He repaired his clothing with wire and was kicked out of the local public swimming pool for photographing the patrons. Instead he chose to point his camera through the fence and catch their expressions when they did indeed realize his cardboard camera took a photograph. His eccentricities will be missed.

RIP Dennis Oppenheim

Sad news discovered this evening. Dennis Oppenheim died last Friday at the age of 72. From the New York Times:

"He first became known for works in which, like an environmentally inclined Marcel Duchamp, using engineers’ stakes and photographs, he simply designated parts of the urban landscape as artworks. Then, in step with artists like Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria and Lawrence Weiner, he began making temporary outdoor sculptures, soon to be known as land art or earthworks. “Landslide,” from 1968, for example, was an immense bank of loose dirt near Exit 52 of the Long Island Expressway in central Long Island that he punctuated with rows of steplike right angles made of painted wood. In other earthworks he cut abstract configurations in fields of wheat; traced the rings of a tree’s growth, much enlarged, in snow; and created a sprawling white square (one of Modernism’s basic motifs) with salt in downtown Manhattan."

I have been thinking about Oppenheim's Annual Rings seen recently in a previous post. While perusing his website I found One Hour Run also featuring snow. Like much of his earlier work, it is a duration piece. I've always been drawn to his ephemeral approach to earthworks and body art.


One Hour Run, 1968 (six mile continuous track)

Here are four of my favorite Oppenheim works of art:


Rocked Hand, 1970



Parallel Stress, 1970


Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970




Annual Rings, 1968 (a better version)

Sigmar Polke's "Photographes 1969-1974"

I recently checked out this book on interlibrary loan. First of all I cannot believe Boston College doesn't keep it in their Special Collections because it is an amazing book full of loose images. Secondly, I am enamored with this photograph labeled "Untitled (Die "Nachtwache" Im Petis Palais, Paris"), 1971. It predates Thomas Struth and gives the impression of a photograph fifty years older due to the faded quality. I have always loved his use of alternative processes, hallucinogens and all.

RIP: Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois by Robert Mapplethorpe

I don't want this blog to become a list of obituaries but two important people died this week and I feel compelled to acknowledge them both. I'll never forget my first museum encounter with Louise Bourgeois's artwork in 1995 at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. There have been many since and the only one that was as profound as the Paris retrospective was seeing this installation at Dia Beacon. Thank you Louise for making art until the very end - in that regard you and Agnes Martin are truly inspirations. Update: Rebecca has a great post about the artist over at Design Ingenuity.

The Dennis Hopper One Man Show: 1936-2010

Left to Right: Bruce Conner and Dennis Hopper, 1973

In 1967, Conner stole the name of his friend, Dennis Hopper, and used it to present 26 of his own collages. Hopper was ignorant of the plan and so was Conner's art dealer. The act raised many questions including who the work belonged to, who would receive the money upon its sale, would people confuse Conner's work with Hopper's own art, and so on.


A Bruce Conner collage in "The Dennis Hopper One Man Show"

This also ties in with my family's relationship with Dennis Hopper dating back to the mid 1950s in San Diego, California. In 1954, a mutual friend of my father's and Dennis Hopper drove them both to school. Hopper was a year ahead of Dad at Helix High School (and was voted Most Likely to Succeed in Dad's yearbook). I can hear Dad imitating Hopper's voice right now when he said, "Why do we always have to pick up this asshole?" pointing to Dad in the backseat. No love was lost between them.

One of my favorite articles of clothing is a belt Dad wore in high school. I can't help but imagine that he had it on at least once when riding in the back of the car with Dennis Hopper in the front seat. I wore that belt today thinking about Hopper's death and my father's past. Incidentally, they both shared the same birthday though Dad was one year younger.



Once in the early part of this decade, I bumped into Hopper at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. I was amazed at his short stature. How could I be taller than Frank Booth in Blue Velvet? Yet apparently, I was. Part of me wanted to say something to him but I walked away pretending that I had no idea that I almost literally ran into my father's high school arch nemesis.