I lucked out with Elaine Reichek.  She was in town for the unveiling of her facade project for the Gardner Museum.  It’s taken from the correspondence between Mrs. G. and Henry James.  David and his crew had just finished installing the piece when I met up with Elaine for a talk in the Living Room.  Elaine was the first artist to have a residency at the Gardner Museum and she produced the award winning MADAM I’M ADAM CD rom project there.  I still use the piece with my students. It gives another kind of vision to Mrs. G’s house and sort of foretells the augmented reality phase that is happening now.

Elaine is one of my favorite artists.  I first heard of her when one of my professors showed her work in class.  It was White Brushstroke 1 from the exhibition AT HOME AND IN THE WORLD.  In my education, it may have been the first time that I saw a white artist directly and confidently address their position of whiteness.  I was kind of stunned by the way she just turned all these things that were in the air at that time (appropriation, feminism, craft, text, history, erasure, race, and whiteness) on their heads with a cross stitch.  I remember going to the MFA Bookstore and looking for all the texts I could find about her.

In 2004, I was working as Dean at Skowhegan and Elaine was one of the resident faculty.  We became very close that summer and we talked a great deal not just about art, but about life, loss and the importance of community.

It was rainy when we started talking, but it cleared up.  Elaine and I talk about a lot.  We discuss her move to Harlem, gentrification, whiteness, maintaining a career, loss, love, food, galleries, and a bunch of other stuff, if you can believe it.  We went way over time, but it was worth it.  I love Elaine a great deal.  At this time in my own studio practice when things are so unstable and fraught, it was good to sit down with a friend who knows how to keep the work moving forward.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

― David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

I went on sabbatical from teaching last year.  It is one of those things that I, a kid of working class parents, could never have imagined when I was younger.  My institution was enabling me to take time off of work to concentrate on my artistic development: to focus on my studio the way that I have been focusing on my students for the past 10 years.  This time was hard-won, precious; I was looking forward to it opening up for me.  I had a lot of ideas that had filled my sketchbooks over the years.  Also, I had bookcases of texts I could not wait to devour.  It had been so long since I had read anything for pleasure that I was so looking forward to curling up with all the tomes I had purchased that work had not allowed me to open.  Also, to be perfectly honest, I was looking forward to getting some rest. I purchased supplies and cleared out my studio for new work.  I was cleaned up my email and finished up school business.  I got to a clutter-free place. I thought about what was possible.

Then Michael Brown happened.

While news channels kept showing his body lying in the street for hours, we found out about John H. Crawford, III.

And then Ezell Ford.  And Dante Parker.  And Kajieme Powell. And more.  And many many more.  Some captured on grainy videos replayed on television and computer screens.

In the studio, I could not stop thinking about this march of death.  I painted almost every day and every day this parade of killing was on my television and radio and social media feed.  Some of the dead became Twitter hashtags.  Some did not, but they were no less dead.  Why were some people more important than others? Did people think that some victims more worthy than others of not being shot to death, or tased to death, or run over, or beaten to death by the state?

I was on sabbatical, so I had time.  Time to create turned into time to think, and I couldn’t think about anything other than death.  I didn’t read any books.  I painted.

It’s summer (July) and I’m at dinner with a friend.  We are in a bistro with televisions all over the restaurant and bar area.  The sound is turned down but the images light the entire place.   The video of Officer Daniel Pantaleo choking Eric Garner to death plays over and over and over interrupted by silent talking heads. I wonder why are they playing this man’s murder on a loop? People eat, drink, laugh, walk about.  No one seems to notice that a man is being choked to death on television.  Then I start to think that maybe they do see it and that it doesn’t bother them.  This is the first time I witness this, a black person being killed on television.  It will not be the last time.  Not by any measure.

Over my sabbatical, I saw black people shot to death on television over and over again.  News casters and pundits would issue verbal warnings that the video they were about the show might upset “sensitive viewers.”  I tried to imagine a viewer that would not be upset about seeing someone like Walter Scott shot to death (or that his killer, Officer Michael Slager, planted evidence on his corpse).  Or Tamir Rice shot to death.  I wondered why they didn’t tell the “insensitive viewers” to hook up their DVRs.  When I am in the studio, the images fill my head.  I jump when cars backfire.

People would ask me how my sabbatical was going.  They would say, “I hope you are taking advantage of this time.”  They would tell me how lucky I was.  They would ask, “What is going on in the studio?”  I wondered if they watched the news at all.  I wondered if they know about what was happening.  I wondered how they felt about these images of black people being killed.  I posted about this stuff on social media and it is ignored for the most part. Ferguson explodes.  Social media does not believe in tears.

In August of 2015, two reporters are shot to death on live television.  Alison Parker and Adam Ward are killed by Vester Lee Flanagan, II who uploaded video of the killing.  Immediately, the television station, Facebook, and social media erupted with requests for people not to view of share the video.  To maintain the dignity of the victims, people begged the public not to watch the video.  It would be a terrible thing to give the killer satisfaction by watching his murder of the reporters.  

I started to wonder why black people are allowed to be killed on television.  Why we are allowed to be transformed from subjects to objects and left to lie in streets for hours?  Why is it acceptable to show the end of a black life on television?

I start to make work about the historical impulse to turn violence against black people into part of our domestic structures.  People continue to ask me what I am doing on sabbatical.  I think of Neruda and I wish I knew Spanish.  (“Come and see the blood in the streets….”)  I decide to make a work about all the people killed by police while I was on sabbatical.  I dismiss the idea as too agitprop.  I talk to my mentors.  One of them tells me, “Make the work.  Just don’t trivialize.”  I work with a friend and learn how to make photographs.  It is harder than I imagined.  I finish this work, Family Pictures.  I show it to a few people.  I finish my sabbatical.  I’ve read few books.  I feel surrounded by ghosts.

I paint everything I think.  I don’t trivialize.  I realize a new body of paintings.  My studio is full of murderers, victims, liars, and accusers.

I return to work in September.  In December, I am hassled and detained by the police.  I write about the experience.  Many people want me to come and talk to groups to “raise awareness.”  I decline.  They seem to be unaware that I would not like to relive a traumatic experience in public. People want me to talk about #BlackLivesMatter.  The college intervenes and offers to handle calls from the press for me. I am deeply grateful because this allows me to concentrate on my job and my students.  CNN calls the college and wants to know if I will talk to Don Lemon.  I tell the school that I will talk to anyone at CNN except Don Lemon.  I get hate mail.

Lisa Tung, the Exhibitions Director asks me what work I want to put in the biennial faculty show.  I decide to make the piece I thought was agitprop.  I call Carmine, my neon fabricator.  I want him to make a sign that mimics police light that spells out what is lost.  I research police killings of unarmed civilians.  I find no central list.  I find no definitive list.  I find no government statistics.  I rely on activist sources.  I rely on The Guardian.  I make the piece.  It is installed in the faculty show.  It is a timeline.  It’s information: date, name, gender, city, state, method of killing. I title it A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans who were Killed by Police or who Died in Police Custody During my Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2014-2015. 

There are 262 names.

A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans who were Killed by Police or who Died in Police Custody During my Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design 2014-2015

People tell me that they look at the wall and measure time.  They lift up the people in their thoughts.  Someone asks me if I am influenced by Maya Lin.  I answer that we all are influenced by Maya Lin.

Someone will say their names and they will be alive a little longer.

The edge of Gardner Lake in Connecticut.

I have been making watercolors for almost a year now.

I started by accident really.  It was around my birthday and my friends Susanna and her sister Jane invited me to come to their place in Connecticut for a few days to hang out.  My friend Linda came too.  Jane even made me an incredible strawberry shortcake with whipped cream for my birthday cake.  I finally began to relax after the grueling school year I had just had.  It was a wonderful time.

Linda and Jane were cooking and Susanna and I sat in the back yard under a huge tree.  There were stone steps down into the lake.  We brought watercolors and spread them out on the ground.  Susanna had a huge book of watercolors that she had been working on.  They were marvelous to see.  Very directly painted with some dry brush textures over luminous washes of color.  They captured the motif of the lake but also carried the weight of the air.  You could clearly see that the difference between the water and the air was just a question of a soft shift of color.

Susanna went for a swim and I started to make some paintings of my own.  I have to say that I never liked watercolor and even when I had to do it in school, I was not very good at it.  I had a very patient teacher, Donna Rae, who kept telling me that the medium was trying to teach me patience.  I didn’t know what she meant.

I soaked a bunch of paper in the lake.  I could see Susanna swimming back and forth and was taken with the way she belonged to two places at the same time.  The binaries kept flashing in my head: wet/dry, over/under, inside/outside and so on.  I also thought a lot about the way the water was all around her and separate from the same time.  I sat on the edge of the stone steps and put my legs in the water, watching the way the transparency of the water changed the color of my legs.  I pulled some paper out of the water and started to paint on the wet paper.

Susanna came out of the lake and sat with me.  We painted.  We talked.  Susanna has been a mentor to me since graduate school.  I have learned more from her than I could ever say.  That day, we talked about color and light.  We talked about loss and losing.  We talked about work and how to preserve your self and give to your students at the same time.  We worked.  She painted the motif in front her in luminous greys and humid yellows.  I thought about the movement of a body in the water and how to shift the sense of weight in transparent waves.  I remembered what Donna Rae was trying to teach me.  I didn’t realize I had learned.

I’ve made over 100 watercolors since that last time Susanna and I touched the water.  I was able to show about half of them at the Hudson Opera House earlier this year.   Because of its historic character, I wanted to have the pictures presented in a manner consistent with the venue.  I went on a scavenger/treasure hunt for a variety vintage frames.  I used some without glass so the viewer could experience the texture of the paper.  I also included 4 free standing paintings in the show.  One of them, you don’t deserve me was from my Samsøn show years ago, but the other three were new.  Their execution revealed some of the things that I had learned in the making of the water colors.

A lot of my friends have been emailing me about this article in the Guardian about the wonderful Dave Hickey deciding to leave the world of art. Doyen of American critics turns his back on the ‘nasty, stupid’ world of modern art.

I have nothing but love and respect for Dave Hickey and I applaud him for refusing to be part of the machine for making value in place of intellectual discourse. His BEAU MONDE exhibition at SITE Santa Fe was exquisite. His understanding of beauty as transgression was and is a theoretical construction that has been a tremendous help in my studio.

I don’t think of him as an “art critic.” I think of him as an intellectual who thinks deeply about art. I can’t blame him for not wanting his intellect connected to the assignment of quality for investors who care about return, and not art. There is nothing stranger than seeing collector tours, led by critics, museum directors or curators, on a forced march through an art fair. Hickey didn’t create that circumstance; the fair is a function of trading and selling, not criticism. And his writing is very much against what is posited but the idea of the fair.

Remember, Hickey was vilified by writers for THE INVISIBLE DRAGON. Artists embraced the book, because it valued the eye, the hand, skill, and commitment in the making of art. It was seen as reactionary. And I can remember seeing copies of AIR GUITAR in every studio I walked into (that is, every studio where someone was making something). It’s interesting now that a lot of the artists in BEAU MONDE are still working and making interesting work. (Josiah McElheney, Stephen Prina, Jorge Pardo, Pia Fries and Alexis Smith to name a few.)

I remember years ago when I was in graduate school and Hickey came to speak at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He smoked during the lecture. He was ribald and funny and was quick on his feet in responding to questions and challenges to his intellect. This was in 2000. Some one asked him why he was afraid of the internet. He laughed and said he wasn’t frightened of virtual reality; reality offered far scarier things.

He also said something about time-based art (which he talked about with an affected academic accent). He said, and I’ve never forgotten this, “Time-based art teaches you how to watch it.” I thought that was profoundly astute and liberating for someone who was making paintings. It felt like a confirmation, that I could do something that wouldn’t telegraph itself to the viewer, instead, the viewer could come to their own understanding of looking.

I don’t see myself as outside of the discourse produced, supported, and sustained by artists, educators, theorists, curators, critics, and institutions. That’s the artworld I’m in and the one that create(d) the context in which I work. Because of that, it is sad to see a thinker like Hickey leave the argument. I for one, think that artists have been too reliant on non-artists, critics, and curators for the framing of their work. It’s long past time that artists start writing about their work, the work of their peers and the culture at large. Some artists do this brilliantly and have been doing it for a while (the brilliant Mira Schor and Phong Bui at the Brooklyn Rail are making great contributions) but there needs to be more.

Hickey isn’t an artist and he doesn’t write or talk like an academic. He trusts his eyes. He talks about what he sees and why it is interesting. And when he doesn’t find something interesting he has the stones to say so, no matter who owns it. That is not a supported discourse in today’s artworld where the critic is a cheerleader for work based on its market value. Now that criticism is reduced to a game piece in the strategy of building market value, I can’t blame Hickey for wanting to be done with it. Who wants to play a game once the rules are changed?

I have to say, I really appreciate the responses I have received to my post about the ongoing situation at 1391 Hyde Park Avenue.  I was not really expecting it, but I have to say, I woke up today feeling a lot better about things. That is, until I started looking on the artspacefinder.

This is the thing about getting taken or duped or played for a sucker.  You feel deeply ashamed.  You think “I’m a smart guy, how come I didn’t see this coming?  Why didn’t I look deeper? Do I have a sign on my head that says ‘easy mark'”?  You ask yourself all these things.

And then you realize they are called con artists for a reason – and that smart people get taken all the time.  A friend of mine said that this is like the LAPD – either the guy is a criminal mastermind of a complete incompetent.  Either way, whether you’ve be taken by an Albert Einstein or a Sarah Palin, you’ve still been taken.

A lot of people have asked what they can do.  Honestly, I’ve no idea.  I’ve gotten some suggestions about how to start a non-profit, so I will be looking into finding an attorney who can help me with that.  I would like to get more media attention for this story in the hopes that news media picks it up.  A couple of people tweeted it to Sebastian Smee and other reporters and I think that is really helpful for the news media to know that people are interested in this story.  I’m thrilled that Big, Red and Shiny is coming back.  They have been very supportive and kind to me.

I would also like to hear from other people who have had dealings with this developer and I’d like to get their stories.  A couple of people have commented on Facebook and here on my blog.  I really appreciate that.

Below are the names and contacts of all the officials I contacted about this situation:

Michael F. Rush
Senator
D West Roxbury
State House
Room 519
Boston, MA 02133
T: 617-722-1348
F: 617-722-1071
E: Mike.Rush@masenate.gov

Angelo M. Scaccia
Representative
D Readville
State House
Room 33
Boston, MA 02133
T: 617-722-2060
F: 617-722-2849
E: Angelo.Scaccia@mahouse.gov
District Office
76 Fairmount Avenue
Hyde Park, MA 02136
Phone:617-361-4331

Thomas M. Menino
Mayor of the City of Boston
1 City Hall Square, Suite 500
Boston, MA 02201-2013
T: 617.635.4500
F: 617.635.2851
E: mayor@cityofboston.gov

Peter Meade
Director, Boston Redevelopment Authority
One City Hall Square
Boston, MA 02201
T: (617) 918-4201
F: (617) 248-1937
E: Peter.Meade.bra@cityofboston.gov

Clarence J. Jones
Chairman, Boston Redevelopment Authority
One City Hall Square
Boston, MA 02201
T: (617) 918-4336
F: (617) 248-1937

I think, as artists and people who are in the larger art world, we need to look at the ways the city uses the arts to create financial interest in property and neighborhoods and then abandons those artists after they have been the shock troops for neighborhood development.  I think it is really unacceptable that artists have to be vetted to participate in city housing programs but developers are not, or, if they are, are not held accountable to the city agency that supported their development projects.

Ori Gersht: History Repeating is a big show, both in terms of the amount of works presented, the space occupies, and the themes it addresses.  It’s always really exciting when a museum decides to give over a lot of space to a living artist.  You have the opportunity at these times to see what they have done, knowing that they aren’t finished making work.  I say to my students that they are fortunate to live in these times, mostly because they can go to museums and see contemporary art.  In the past, it was the job of galleries to show contemporary work.  “Museums are for dead people,” David Smith said.

Gersht’s work is full of death, from the Vanitas quotations to the “falling tree film” (The Forest) and everything between.  He uses the camera to frame death, decay, destruction, and loss actually or metaphorically. The actual suffers in this show.  The photos of the “masculine” cedars next to the “feminine” olive tree is cloying and reads as essentialist and reductive.  Seeing things blow up in slow motion to reveal their transcendence is right out of the Futurist Manifesto. Unlike Bill Viola‘s (somewhat overwrought) project of slowing things down to see particular details, Gersht manipulations simply reiterate the sense of loss that is inherent in the still life vanitas paintings he quotes.  (It’s kind of tough to get interested in a video of exploding flowers when there is an actual Martin Johnson Heade painting on the wall.) The photographs in their dimensions take on the scale of history painting and Gersht’s digital manipulations mimic those of Church and other painters who re-presented the sublime landscape a lot more sublime than it actually was.  Like Jeff Wall, Gersht is not shy about his connection to painting.

What makes his work compelling is the sites he chooses to represent (or re-present).  In the White Noise series, the blurred view out of a train window becomes an act of reconstruction and remembrance;  particularly since the train’s journey is from Krakow to Auschwitz.  Gersht makes a photo that could not be made. The text and titling become a major part of the work.  Language is key in connection the images to their meaning.

Where the exhibition reaches a level of exhilaration is in the films.  There are two brilliant and overwhelmingly beautiful films (Evaders and Will You Dance For Me) that moved me deeply while boggling my mind with their visual and technical achievements. From animated snow to the recreation of the 19th century landscape Gersht shows that he is adept at reconstructing art as historical investigation.  While the stories of each of the films is vitally important to they way one views them, I often found myself forgetting about the wall text “explanations.”  Gersht’s framing and presentation of the body in Dance  makes you feel complete jubilation in every movement, a feeling exacerbated by the knowledge that every movement is an act of survival and defiance.  Evaders is a perfect metaphor for the artist, journeying alone, against all odds, armed only with one’s work and a death defying determination to reach the light.

The smaller films never reach this level of transformative power (and nor should they) but Neither Black Nor White comes close. The single channel film of the an Arab village in Israel goes from impossible darkness to obliterating light.  The wall text references the blast of an explosion which I think is the easiest metaphor.  Gersht’s film mimics the elimination of information from the screen pixel by pixel, the active lights of the village disappear, consumed in an insatiable whiteness.  It is a powerful and chilling film.  While the exhibition makes no mention of the reasons for antipathy between Arabs and Israelis in Gersht’s homeland, this film spells out the situation in a clear and compelling manner.