Archive for the ‘Irving Weiss’ Category
Entry 1093 — Thoughts Regarding Minimalism
Saturday, May 4th, 2013
I suppose the minimalist artwork below is not bad, but seeing it in the latest issue of ARTnews depressed me, reminding me that minimalist painters, even mediocre ones like Hanne Darboven seemed from this one example to be, were continuing to make big bucks forty or more years after the birth of minimalism while someone like me is making the most money of his life after fifty years or so of adulthood because of food stamps. . . .
Note from 1 February 2014 when I was reviewing the past year. Apparently the computer problem mentioned in my next entry screwed up this entry. The reproduction of the Darboven visimage got deleted and all my further comments. No doubt they had to do with the following specimens of much better specimens of minimalism I found by bp Nichol (the top one) and Irving Weiss the other two:
I’m sure I had fascinating things to say about them.
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Entry 1092 — More Cursive Writing by Irving Weiss
Friday, May 3rd, 2013
I was going to discuss the minimalist works of the previous entry in this one but had so much trouble simply setting the entry up due to my deranged computer and/or my blogsite’s programming, that I couldn’t continue after losing half my commentary, who knows why. In desperation, I scanned another piece that was in Irving Weiss’s Number Poems (The Runaway Spoon Press, 1997) and managed to post it here:
Nifty visiopoetic portrait of a lady, I think. I haven’t tried super-hard to read the writing but suspect it consists of various scribbled female names–one is Echo. Wait, at the top are Scylla and Daphne. I now suspect these are all nymphs or the like who suffered badly at the hands of various gods and goddesses–hence, if full life only a moment. And en masse here a barely legible flurry representative of all the feminine magic and mystery of the old religions now long-gone.
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Entry 1091 — Waves
Thursday, May 2nd, 2013
I had all kinds of trouble getting the following images into this post, and I’m exhausted, so won’t say much about them until tomorrow. I will say that I consider the top one an example of what has been wrong with the arts world for the past 40 or more years.
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Entry 940 — Pronouncements & Blither, Part 2
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012
A few days ago, I got an e.mail from Irving Weiss. He made some nice remarks about my Scientific American blog, then said that neither “read” nor “peruse” satisfied him “for the way one sticks to looking at a work of abstract art or abstract expressionism or, for that matter, any visual poem lacking identifiable content and without a title to help the viewer. I muse: if you look long at a Pollock, Moherwell, de Kooning, what do you do with your looking mind? You have to avoid thinking of what the painting “looks like” on the one hand and going into a mystical mood or trance. It’s like, if you practice any kind of meditation you must try to avoid going to sleep. What kind of “looking at” is it you exercise while standing in front of a work of abstraction?”
Here’s my answer, to take care of this blog entry: “Glad you’re continuing to keep track of my blog, Irving! I agree with you about “pleruser,” but I do believe some such word is needed and so far haven’t come up with a better. Most excellent question you pose. I think I do a lot of different “looking ats” in front of something by Pollock, say. A kind of averbal analysis but a purely sensual absorption, back and forth, but maybe, if it’s possible, both at once? I hope other kinds of perception are going on, too. Sense of rhythms—associative glimpsing probably mostly unconscious to my own life-experiences but to other painters, other visual images. And I don’t go long without trying to think of words I could use to describe what the painting is doing for me, the writer’s gift or defect. I’m maxixperiencing it! I’m a maxixperient. Or “magniceptor,” “Magnicepting?” “a maxcipient?” My first good word for this was “aesthcipient,” but I gave it up because it was too hard to pronounce. Urp, Urp, and Away, Bob.”
Close to philogushy, but with some substance, I think.
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Entry 895 — “Gloss Twombley”
Thursday, October 18th, 2012
Here’s something from Irving Weiss’s collection, Identities, which is published by Xexoxial Editions (www.xexoxial.org). I’m posting it here so people following the discussion I’m moderating at ART=TEXT=ART, which so far has been almost entirely about Twombly’s “Untitled” of 1971, can come and see it.
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Entry 856 — Another from Irving’s New Collection
Sunday, September 9th, 2012
This one’s quite a bit different from yesterday’s–to show you the range of the work in Irving Weiss’s new Identities:
It seems wonderfully to represent the Jewish/Hebrew/Yiddish/Middle-Eastern experience–to Gentile me. I recognized “Moishe” as a Jewish name, but looked it up on the Internet to check and found out that, as I should have known, it is also a Hebrew (or Yiddish) Variant of “Moses,” which was Egyptian. But I’d already interpretted the work to be about the Exodus (“Moses” already being written in it)–and about the whole Jewish experience–the quest for a home, the struggle against . . . near-Hell? but certainly the hostility of the desert. But also, for me, the glorious triumph over, or out of, oppression both by Nature and by tribal enemies. The magical (note the amount of astrology in the piece) triumph. Knowing Irving, though, and having had a lot of Jewish friends throughout my life, and been exposed to a great deal of Jewish comedy–the Marx Brothers to Woody Allen (before he sold out to “seriousness”), I find a kind of irony, even farce in it–from its title, which suggests both an imploration of the Heroic Leader to get the tribe through its perils but also –well, calling a Jewish kid to dinner. But I also take “Moishe” as a pun for “Mercy!” which would make the piece essentially about a final escape into a promised land not yet attained.
I could go on into a sociological analysis of Jewishness, which I do think I have a good idea of because they don’t seem to me that much different from me, if different at all (one reason I got quite involved in geneology was the hope that I’d find out that at least one of my ancestors was Jewish; the closest were all the Protestants who were the heretics of their time). No time for that. I’ll just repeat that this piece seems to me a powerful, far-ranging expression of Judaism. And a wonderfully moving piece of verbo-visual art whatever it is taken to mean!
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Entry 855 — An Appropriately Titled “Untitled”
Saturday, September 8th, 2012
The following infraverbal masterpiece is the world’s first artwork given the title, “Untitled,” appropriately. It’s just one of the 78 pieces in Identities, a collection of work by Irving Weiss just out from Xexoxial Editions. It’s something to wonder through many more times than once, with a fantastic skitter through the arts, from low to high, 100% verbal to 100% visual, the comic to the largest ultimates (as well as a combination of both). I hope to say more about it here and elsewhere.
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