Reading Artists Two

A look at what six local artists have been reading this winter
by Susan Swenson

In researching images for his new work to be shown during April 2001 at the Christopher Grimes Gallery in Los Angeles, Charles Spurrier has been looking at various insect, moth and butterfly guide books. Although he began looking at them primarily for the images, he found them interesting to read as well. One volume he has on hand is Insect: Discover the world of insects in close-up—their behavior, anatomy and important role in earth’s ecology, by Laurence Mound. Another, more practical how-to manual, given to Spurrier by his wife, Mary O’brien-Spurrier, is Draw 50 Creepy Crawlies: The Step-by-Step Way to Draw Bugs, Slugs, Spiders, Scorpions, Butterflies, and Many More..., by Lee J. James with Ray Burns.

Spurrier finds that he has already read most of the novels his daughter Carter is assigned in her high school classes, but he usually re-reads them when she brings them home. The most recent book he got from her was Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. In this story, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes one morning to find he has turned into a gigantic, armor-plated insect. His family are at first horrified, then cautiously attempt to feed him in the hopes he’ll eventually return to normal, and are ultimately relieved when his carcass is found by the charwoman.

Around the same time Spurrier read The Metamorphosis, Mary gave him Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard which he is in the middle of now. He describes it as "almost...a Thoreau-type meditation on nature, but it is really brutal. [Dillard] talks about frogs that suck out the insides of insects" and other realities of nature. Whereas Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, ponders his idyllic, natureful surroundings, Dillard offers a more objectively realistic reflection on the gruesome as well as the beautiful aspects of nature. This led Spurrier to think "about what our ideas of nature are" and into the "realm of reconsidering nature, how we relate to each other" and to the natural world. Spurrier didn’t intentionally read The Metamorphosis or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while beginning on this new body of works — both books were given to him — but they are nonetheless proving to be interesting complements to the insect guides and the paintings he’s currently developing.

On another note, Spurrier is almost finished reading Lincoln’s Devotional, which is a record of Abraham Lincoln’s daily spiritual reflections. Spurrier says he "wasn’t planning on reading this during the [current] election but it happened that it was interesting" to do so. Interesting to "investigate or re-examine the spiritual claims of our political leaders, especially in America, because every president claims to be re-born. It’s not like most other countries where" the leader’s spiritual life is considered to be "separate from his political role. Where our political leaders stand spiritually is still important to us [Americans]. It’s good to have a record that’s like a daily testimony of that pursuit. Especially when both candidates make the same claims and yet" behave so differently.

Just after Spurrier quit smoking recently he picked up Cigarettes are Sublime, by Richard Klein, which Klein wrote while he was quitting. Spurrier found this volume funny and informative and it gave him a deeper understanding of why we smoke and what the pleasures of this activity are, rather than thinking of it as only a habitual behavior. Klein apparently chooses our vices for his objects of investigation—his last book was Eat Fat.

Michelangelo, The Poems (a new translation by Christopher Ryan) is a volume that Spurrier has been dipping into on and off. "This is something that I can pick up and put down. I really enjoy reading poetry. I feel like I can read a few lines, or half a poem and put it down, then go back to it. I may be wrong but, I feel like I read the way people write — if it took them a whole day to write one page, I can read one page and return to it, re-read it" and ponder it slowly. For Spurrier, the written word, like a painting, can be looked at again and again, fragment-by-fragment for new ‘readings’

While working on her upcoming show for the newly expanded and relocated Sara Meltzer gallery (opening January 25, 2001; Chelsea), Jude Tallichett has been "reading lots of manifestoes...political and social manifestoes. Like the Black Panther Party Platform, which deals with the political, social and economic reality of everyday life. At the end they printed part of the American Constitution. I was reading it and thought, ‘wow, this is really wild stuff,’ when I realized what it was I was reading." This and other radical texts can be found on the website www.institute4violence.com.

Other ‘manifestoes’ she’s been reading are the Unibomber’s statement to the world and the SCUM Manifesto, "which is another wild text" written by Valerie Solanas. SCUM is the acronym for Society for Cutting Out Men and in the book Solanas talks about ripping men’s heads off, among other juicy (and questionable) suggestions for repairing society. For Tallichett when reading these texts, "it’s like [you] enter a conversation inside these peoples’ heads and it gets all mixed up and really nutty."

Tallichett also read "Formulary for a New Urbanism," an essay written by Ivan Chtcheglov, originally published in 1953. Chtcheglov discusses utopias and states that "everyone will be living in their own Cathedral...." According to Tallichett, the Situationist art movement, and in particular the work of Guy de Bord, grew out of ideas developed by Chtcheglov in this text. "It’s where they got their ideas on ‘psychic geography,’ or ‘drifting’—drifting through cities, landscapes." He talks about "setting our habitat in the land." "Formulary for a New Urbanism" is referenced in What is Situationism? A Reader, edited by Stewart Home.

She then began reading the manifestoes of art movements, like the Futurists’ and Dadaists’, as well as various artists’ writings. "I wanted to compare the two. The artists’ writings are more dreamy" than the political ones. "It’s more about leisure, people with time to think, that aren’t worried about the basic necessities...the practicalities of life." In this category Tallichett has been reading the writings of artists Paul Thek, Robert Smithson, and Louise Bourgeois. The most comprehensive source she’s found for such texts is Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, by Kristine Stiles. In all of these manifestoes and artists’ texts she’s been interested in the underlying notions of utopia and dystopia.

Matt Freedman says he very "rarely goes out to find a book, then brings it back to read. We have so many things here, whatever boils up out of the underbelly...I pick up. At the moment I have a math text book on logarithms in my bag" for subway reading.

Freedman has also been reading Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. This volume was meant to be a companion to Flaubert’s last novel (Bouvard and Pecochet), and was originally published unfinished as The Dictionary of Received Ideas, in 1913. It ostensibly lists all the things that good petit bourgeois are supposed to know and believe. Flaubert suggested that it should include "everything one should say if one is to be considered a decent and likable member of society." Basic ideas they should be able to announce as necessary. Things like, "Christianity freed the slaves," "To have a strong breath is a sign of distinction," "A scarf is poetic," and "The sea is bottomless infinity." And when contemplating the sea one should always say "Water, water, everywhere water."

The Farmer’s Almanac is a text Freedman says he consults often, although not necessarily the current year’s volume.

Freedman is reading several books because they arrived in his mail. One, sent by his mother, 7 Steps to a Pain Free Life written by Robin McKenzie, is a book on managing and alleviating back and neck pain. Another, sent by a fledgling screenwriter acquaintance, is The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, apparently a must-read for screenwriters. According to Freedman it is a sort of mythology book which claims that ever story ever told is the hero’s journey into the inner world, then ultimate transformation, return, etc. It references the ideas of Joseph Campbell in particular.

The Starr Report was next in Freedman’s pile.

What he’s been searching all over town for, and been unable to find, are Road Runner images. "I’ve looked in almost every bookstore in the city for Warner Brothers and Hanna Barbara animations — Road Runner and the Flintstones. I need these repeating images, interiors and exteriors, for my work."

What Freedman plans to read next is Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.

"I read non-fiction all the time and that’s usually how I get inspiration for my work," says Phyllis Baldino. Currently, she’s reading Lingua Ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain, by William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton. This book "deals with the origins of language and syntax." It really breaks things down and is very clinical. I take from it what I want."

A favorite author of Baldino’s is James Gleick. She has been re-reading his book Faster which she says is "a very funny book about how everything is going faster. There is a restaurant in Japan, described in the book, where they charge you by how fast you eat." Customers enter the restaurant, take a ticket, and then are charged when they check out based on the amount of time they’ve spent in the restaurant. In the book Gleick claims that he has calculated that we spend sixteen minutes a day looking for lost things. This idea inspired a video Baldino is currently finishing, called "16 minutes," which documents people in the act of looking for lost items (some found, others never found), which will be shown at Pierogi in March 2001.

Most recently, between packing and moving her studio, Jane Fine has been reading Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of The Senses. The book is divided into five chapters, one for each sense. Fine found the chapter on smell, in particular, to be "fabulous".

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, by Brian Greene, is a science book for the layperson which is "all about string theory." Fine "read this [book] like a maniac for about a month, then put it down in a panic" when she realized how much work she had to accomplish.

A book which Fine says she reads all the time because she assigns it to students is Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar.

A Gesture Life, by Chang-rae Lee, was the first of "two fat novels" Fine read this fall. She described it as "a little like Ishiguro," and said it reminded her of Remains of the Day. "It’s the story of an older Japanese man," a retired pharmacist living in a small town in upstate New York "and his adopted daughter. It takes a long time to understand that he’s an old, sad case with this estranged twenty-something daughter."

The second hefty novel was Charles Baxter’s Feast of Love. Fine says it was "a great book, a really interesting kind of drama happening somewhere in the midwest. It’s all about love and is told from multiple voices. One narrator is a guy named Bradley with a dog named Bradley—endless really strange voices." Fine found Baxter to be especially good at writing in a woman’s ‘voice.’ The publishers describe the book as a "re-imagined Midsummer Night’s Dream, [where] men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children," etcetera, etcetera.

Two books by Indian authors were also in Fine’s stack of recent reads: The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy and Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri — a book of short stories, some set in India some set in The United States.

And finally Dorothy Allison’s Cavedweller, which Fine describes as "a good dysfunctional family story."

Roxy Paine’s reading time is limited as he’s working toward six exhibitions he will participate in this Spring. He’ll spend the month of January in southern Spain working on a new stainless steel tree, this one 40 feet tall (his first stainless tree was constructed at Wanös in Sweden). The tree will be positioned on top of a hill from which Morocco can be seen. In March 2001, SFMoMA will exhibit his second SCUMAK which will be larger in scale than the original and will make even larger Scumaks. In London, the original SCUMAK machine will be shown in the middle of the "Fakes and Forgeries" wing of The Victoria and Albert Museum. Several of the Scumak sculptures will also be shown in glass vitrines which normally hold forgeries from the museum’s collection. Then, a new mushroom field will occupy a gallery in Berlin. And finally, for the moment that is, Paine will have a solo show at the James Cohan Gallery on 57th street in April 2001.

Between getting all of this work ready Paine has amazingly had time for several books. At the moment he’s reading one that, unfortunately, he’s found a big disappointment — Universal Foam, by Sydney Perkowitz. "It’s in this genre that I like, focusing in on one material, or one subject and researching its history and getting into that. But this one is basically like ‘gee whiz, isn’t foam great? Look how much good foam has done. Beer is foam. Whip cream is foam.’ It tries to be too understandable and sacrifices a lot. There’s that fine line between understandability and vigorous research." Paine says that he likes "books that are about facts, more than fictional writing, but ones that transform.... It’s totally focused on reality, facts and information but somehow it becomes transformative."

Before Foam, Paine read Elio Schaechter’s In The Company of Mushrooms, A Biologist’s Tale. "This is obviously someone who’s spent their life among fungus so there’s a depth. It combines seamlessly history and his personal experiences and it’s an easy read, but it doesn’t sacrifice rigor for that."
Just before that Paine read "an excellent book on the history of code making and code breaking" — The Code Book: the evolution of secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots, to Quantum Cryptography, by Simon Singh. Paine has found that British writers who work in the science genre tend to "walk this line incredibly well, between very deep research and clear, lucid writing." The Code Book "is a good example of keeping to the facts but being very transformative, and [it] reads like a thriller as well." Throughout history "it’s been like a game of cat and mouse between those making codes and those trying to break them. The codes keep getting more and more sophisticated." Basically, you need the person who’s receiving the coded information to be the sole possessor of the key. Paine describes the book as also a history of the whole idea of secrecy and the transferring of information without it being intercepted by someone it’s not intended for.

The relationship between Paine’s interest in this kind of informative, or factual, reading to his own work (both the painting and sculpture making machines and the hyper-real mushroom, poppy, and grass ‘fields’) becomes clear when Paine says that "presenting the facts just as they are so they become transformative is something I strive for in my work. Using the basic elements...like the mushrooms. The simple facts without much embellishment." Paine prefers to present the ‘facts’ and let them speak for themselves.

Susan Swenson is a writer and is also editor/publisher of Pierogi Press.