Intro

• Collection of essays and criticisms of artwork, mainly from last half century

Artists’s Lives

• Jean-Michel Basquiat → New York artist, started off in graffiti, collab with Warhol
• Agnes Martin → first works = grids, then painted, carefully-planned stripes of pastels; almost all abstract except very last drawing of a plant
• David Hockney → one of Britain’s most famous artists, reinvented and explored many media and themes (swimming pools, LA, etc.)
  • Always learning to look, remembering that looking brings joy
• Joseph Cornell → boxes, collages (Surrealist?), movie-making
  • Collab with Yayoi Kusama
• Robert Rauschenberg → “combines,” the film Rocky
• Georgia O’Keefe → took one subject matter and painted it over and over to truly understand: flowers, wall with a door, cow skull
• Derek Jarman → Modern Nature, on gardening
  • It’s how we all go, in and out of the dark— but what a thing it is to have given off such a blaze (something like that, from Song of Solomon)

Freeze Columns

• Protest form of stitched-mouths: silence = death, in response to AIDS and refugee crisis
• Art less about making objects than opening conversations
• Ali Smith’s writing = epitome of “and, and, and”

Essays

• On Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts— like much of her work, defies classification by genre; uses personal experiences to analyze culture, how obsessed we are to binaries
• What is the job or task of the artist? There is none: the duty of an artist is to be free.