some opinons and questions i have had about art in the last week

1. robert atillia luckas, like most obscenity, risked losing irrelevance or sliding into kitsch, when he moved out of fashion (ie kees van doegen, beardsly), his recent revival that slides on his love of meth, and his desire for redemption, is a perfect way to make him seem more like goldin or arakai.
   
2. his polaroids are a catalog of the expected transgressive: sailors, men in suits, infantilism, nazis, soilders, people shooting up, skin heads--so you can sort out exactly who is he cribbing from, and weirdly, the aesthetics become a kind of historical slumming--so you can trace his sailors, for example from demuth to cadmus and platt lynnes to pierre et gilles, or from documentation to camp, and you can trace his soilders from sargent onwards, or his working class men all the way from the 19th century edwardians, to hockney, to tillmans
   
3. the impt difference b/w tillmans photo set of the red braced skin head, and lukas, is that tillmans uses piss, the weird thing about these work painting, is though they feature cocks, they rarely feature the fluids that cocks produce, tillmans has used both semen and piss, and for work that is supposed to be about fucking, it is weirdly reclacintrent, or at least uses the political/social implications of neo-classical msm gazing, but does not like to get into the muck) or to put it in another way, the only fluids on this work is the paint
   
4. the weirdest thing about the whole mess, is how little it turned me on, considering my penis has a hair trigger when it comes to the photographs subjects.
5. the work though, with its weird light, the muted colours that a polaroid and a dark room can achieve, the narratives and compoistion that recall the best of hockney's collage instincts, sometimes work despite of their implications.
6. reading jed perls lovely and discursive book on watteau, a nice overlap b/w the instincts of a writer and an instinct of the painter, has yet to convince me of watteaus worth, which is weird because shallow and pretty are two of my favourite things.
7. saw what is hyde's defacto retirement show, a gorgeous low slung, anthony caro, in silver steel, with some nice repeating diamond patterns, close to the floor, and not butch at all, mostly horizontal, and a huge hide painted sculpture, traffic cone orange, framing what ammounts to a square hole, ryan mccourt is negatively influencing me.
8. michaelngo's last judgement, and titan's flaying of marysas painted in the same year, reading the body embalzoned by sadaw, about early reniassance ideas of anatomy, he brings up the connections i have been thinking about, allowing it to be much earlier (late mediveal) and later (milton) then i thot
9. qoute: The potential vioelnce of the act of creation has been supressed by Milton in favour of a rapt and trance like meditation on the nature of mortal surrendar to divine knowledge and yet the congruences between Goldings violent version of Ovid...and milton's dream like version of Gensis are startling . God/Apollo has created within the male body, "a whole wounde" (Golding) or a wide wound (Milton. But where in Goldings verses the subject is left quivering and vulenable to the compu;lisve gaze of sicnece, in Miltons much later account the subject is allowed the possiblity of witnessing not only his or her non bodly displeasurem but also a recompletion as another, a sight which allows the closure of the wide wound with suddenly tumesenct flesh.
10. Naum Gabou lived the last 8 years of his life in Conneticut, and remade some of h is earliest construcvist peices in perplex, the same material that Tim Scott used for Congruences, one of which is in the AGA collection. Both SCott and Gabou stopped using the mateiral because of its instability. Gabou's collectivism allowed him to have no problems with the creation of new work recreating old.
11. more photo shows in edmonton then ever before.
12. blair has four comissions on 118th, each conceptual and text based, edmonton is growingh up?
13. One of the earliest Flavin Flourscent peices, transitioning between the icons of 61 and 66 was a peice for Jasper Johns, leaning on the wall at an odd angle, and bright bright pink, depending on how friendly they were, a wink or a nod or a snide aside about Johns queering of Duchamps readymades?
14. lots of qoutes from Grisellda Pollock coming up.