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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Being an Artist vs. Making Art

BEING AN ARTIST AND MAKING ART are not the same. One is self-conscious, the other is directed outward, as Jacques Maritain observed, to the good of the work—to the perfection of the work of one’s hand (if you are a visual artist) in its service to the eye and a cultivated sensibility. The first is largely a theatrical posture, the second is a commitment to something larger, more enduring than oneself. That something, it is hoped, graces its time in some incalculable way. Continue Reading

Not Failed, Just Unrealized

BEING AN ARTIST MEANS you never have to say, “I failed.” Think of the advantage that gives artists over the rest of the plodding classes. Artists never have to admit the lack of wit, talent, or stamina needed to conceive of work, realize it and see it through. All they have to do is rummage through their junk pile and declare everything in it “unrealized.” At least that is the drift of “A call for unrealized projects” broadcast by the Agency for Unrealized Projects (AUP), a conceptual scheme devised by artists Julieta Aranda, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Julia Peyton-Jones, and Anton Vidokle in collaboration with London’s Serpentine Gallery. Continue Reading

Art, Still Not Dead!

I CANNOT TELL A LIE, much as I would like to. This wonderful bit of Photoshopping was sent by a reader who calls himself Mr. Eyeballs. I wish I could say I found it myself. //// Who knew just how contemporary that Mona Lisa smile could be? A stylized expression in Leonardo’s day, it suddenly looks quite current removed from a Renaissance setting and inserted into a post-modern one. The bloody amputation might be a bit over the top, but the figure’s facial mien—part simper, part sneer—would do nicely in a Vogue photo shoot. Continue Reading

Disposable=Sustainable

IN CASE ANY OF YOU WONDERED WHETHER SUSTAINABILITY was, at heart, an ideological love affair with subsistence living, take a gander: /// Take this as a fashion forecast of our new footgear when the sustainable crowd finally erases the Industrial Revolution and its works from the planet. The shoes on the left are a bit hard to see in their full splendor but they are made completely of plastic packaging. In good weather, we can always go barefoot. Look again at the one on the right: //  How uncomfortable to wear! Continue Reading

More on the Pointing Finger

READER SAM’S REFERENCE, in a comment on the previous post, to the biblical story of Adam naming the animals lends thrust to Tallis’ argument on—for lack of a better term—the metaphysics of pointing.// The Genesis narrative distills into a simple, vivid anecdote the substanceN of Raymond Tallis’ thesis in Michelangelo’s Finger. The mythical Adam could hardly identify every beast of the field or fowl of the air. He did not emerge from the dust of creation a systematic taxonomist on the qui vive for all that tagging and classifying. Continue Reading
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