Karen Lepri on Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt and NanGoldin

Last August in Annandale-on-Hudson at Bard College, I heard poet Karen Lepri read a piece on two 2012 exhibits in New York by artists Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt and Nan Goldin. I enjoyed the swerves the writing makes and I asked her to share it with xpoetics, and she has.




Karen Lepri

No Cock Sorry

 

There are no cocks—sorry—male members—visible in the three pieces from PS 1’s Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt:
Tender Love Among the Junk showcased on the museum’s website, but walking through the exhibition feels like the inverse of Where’s Waldo—he’s/his is everywhere though unlikely to show up had I photographed the work, the rainbow glare of foil in every hue, the dominant tinge of all-over gold, and the almost pointillist fanaticism and fibrous, microscopic details washing out—or shall I say, tenderizing—the hundreds of cut-up black and white male nudes.

 

My mother always counseled, No one will even notice!, when two shades of black were “off” from each other, or when I was the only girl at First Holy Communion wearing vestment and tights with rubber-soled white sandals (as opposed to white patent leather Mary Janes), but in the photograph with my skewed smile I still notice.

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Lollipop Knick Knack (Let's Talk About You). c. 1968-69. Mixed media. 9 x 16 x 5 1/2 inches. Courtesy Pavel Zoubok Gallery. Photo fromMOMA PS1



Lanigan-Schmidt’s work builds a bomb out of the sacristy, out of outer layers, priestly garments, doilies, altars, confession booths, plastic wrappers, lasagna trays, all things used to hide behind, masturbate behind, conjure a dual sense of salvation and condemnation … behind—exploded, exposed, the shards comprise a renovated, effervescent object d’amour, or rather embody out-right worship. 

Nan Goldin’s nudes have almost always been house-enough themselves, meaning, one with other surfaces, structures, enough to hold what’s human inside.

 



Nan Goldin, The nap, Paris (2010). Image via Matthew Marks Gallery.



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In Goldin’s retrospective Scopophilia at Matthew Marks last Fall, the photographs of Classical sculptures and Renaissance paintings of female nudes acted as our tour guides to the irreverent or simply luscious moments within a gaze of the total work—here fingers pinch a nipple, hair dangles between breasts, stone returns to painted surface returns to flesh—Medusa’s stare reversed.

 

Is my attraction a form of penis-phobia (it’s so small—how do I find it?) or does every viewer’s eye lynch onto the protruding form, its muddled shadows, assured epicenter of every male nude photo collaged into one of Lanigan-Schmidt’s pieces? 

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My friend tells me how a boy on the playground tells her daughter, You must like princesses because you’re a girl, to which she replies, lying, No I don’t, to which he retorts, scientifically, Then you’re not a girl, to which she rebuts, plainly, and in my opinion unknowingly losing the battle, Some girls play with boys’ things and some boys play with girls’ things.
 

A key difference between the photograph of the painting detail on the left and the photograph of “real women” on the right in Goldin’s 2010 The Nap is that in the painting detail photo we can’t see the women’s hands, can’t see how they sleep or play.

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 “Lesbian bed-death” is where a non-incestuous sexual relationship between two women, or lesbians, transforms into a potentially incestuous non-sexual relationship through meta-physical, not physical, bonds—or so I have heard.

There is nothing to dramatize about the cruelty of ceasing to desire the body of your lover or your sister before it even barely begins to die, meaning the desire, meaning unlike Oedipus and Jocasta or Claudius and Gertrude, Gertrude being not a sister but by marriage, still wrong enough, or simply fast enough, to pulverize Hamlet’s mind.

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In The Nap, the paired couples seem joined at the legs, one body with four torsos, four heads, diametrically positioned, the thigh of each bottom figure rising to meet at the juncture of two frames, the left-hand arms peeling away to expose four breasts, the huddled right-hand arms forming an ‘X,’ a literal coat of arms.

 

After Lanigan-Schmidt, my two friends, boyfriends for five years plus, and I are finishing our “snacks” at the museum restaurant when a waitress drops a glass that shatters everywhere, and Paul, ever a comic, throws a wine bottle to the ground, catching it on the bounce, the embarrassed waitress now smiling, glad to be doubled, her blooper refracted back to her as if to say, Yeah, we noticed, but nobody cares.

November 27, 2012


Karen Lepri is the author of Incidents of Scattering (Noemi, 2013) and the chapbook Fig. I (Horse Less Press, 2012). Lepri received the 2012 Noemi Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in 6x6, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, Mandorla, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Queens College.

Leigh Hyams' Obituary

Leigh Hyams

1926 to 2013

 

Leigh Hyams (Martha Mae Nickerson), age 86, passed away on Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at her home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with her children by her side.

 

Born in Papillion, Nebraska on April 22, 1926, she was the daughter of Mae (Baxter) and Ralph Nickerson She decided in the third grade that she was an artist and never wavered from that conviction. She studied art at Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, earned a B.F.A. at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an M.F.A. at University of Guanajuato’s Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende. She did post-graduate work at New College Fine Arts Institute in Sarasota, Florida, where she had the honor of being studio monitor for Philip Guston.

 

Over the years, her painting subject matter ranged from European megaliths and Mayan temples, Brazilian rain forests and Yosemite waterfalls, to giant images of imaginary flowers, Mexican folk art, dogs, cows, and her family. Her work was distinguished by an edgy line quality and luminous color. She said she was driven by “a passion for what frees us, makes us aware of a deeper reality, and brings us closer to the universe around us and the one inside ourselves.”

 

Her drawings, paintings, and artist’s books are in the permanent collections of the Achenbach Foundation in San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California Art, Des Moines Art Center, Joslyn Art Museum, Palácio Imperial in Curitiba, Brazil, and University of California at Irvine, as well as private collections in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Her museum exhibitions included solo shows at the Paco Imperial Center for Contemporary Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and at El Museo de la Ciudad de Santiago Querétaro in Querétaro, Mexico. She was represented by Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, California.

 

She was a Fulbright scholar, having received a Western European regional research grant for her series of paintings based on Megalithic sites, as well as the recipient of ten painting fellowships, including Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, American Academy in Rome, and George Rickey's Hand Hollow Foundation. She served as founding executive director of the Djerassi Resident Artists Project in Woodside, California.

 

A beloved teacher, she worked as an adjunct professor of art at San Francisco State University, San Jose State University, John F. Kennedy University, California College of Arts and Crafts, and University of California at Berkeley Extension. She taught art in mental institutions, Athabaskan Indian villages in Alaska, and at retreat centers in exotic locales, among them Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and La Serrania in Mallorca, Spain, for a devoted following of painters from around the globe. For many years, she also led international art tours for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

 

She published a book about her artistic journey titled “How Painting Holds Me on The Earth: Writings of a Maverick Painter and Teacher” and produced a half-hour video about her teaching philosophy titled “Making Marks: On the Excitement and Importance of Making Art.” For more information about her work, see www.artsreal.com.

 

She loved to travel. Her first husband, Robert Bolling, was a Navy pilot, whose work led them to live in Hawaii, Alaska, Texas, and Rhode Island. She divorced him when their sons, Kris and Jan, were little and moved to Mexico, where she lived for four years before marrying artist Ralph Hyams, who had two sons, Charles and Nicholas. They lived in New York City and later in Sarasota, where they ran the education department at the Ringling Museum of Art. The couple had a daughter together, Gina.

 

When she divorced her second husband, she changed her first name from Martha to Leigh and moved with her young daughter to San Francisco. She never had much money, but she managed to take many trips to Europe, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, as well as to India, Russia, and South Africa. She also enjoyed dancing and singing, doing yoga, reading thrillers, and eating Snickers candy bars. She spent her last dozen years in Mexico, where she relished the colors, sunshine, and humane pace of life.

 

She was predeceased by her son Jan Bolling and stepson Charles Hyams, and leaves behind her sister Joan Prior, son Kris Bolling, daughter Gina Hyams, son-in-law Dave Barrett, and granddaughter Annalena Barrett.

Wendy Kramer's "Diagrams & Examples"

It is my pleasure to share with you one of Wendy Kramer's recent comics poems. This one is Called "Diagrams & Examples" and was created for fellow artist and archivist Tanya Hollis.

Here's what Wendy says about it:

This collage is a comics poem that I made for Tanya Hollis's birthday last year. Comics poems are my attempt to make visual poems that have multiple panels, with meaning moving both within and across the panels. While I did use some actual cut-outs from comics, a comics poem doesn't have to have traditional or found comics in it. Also, a comics poem doesn't have to be a collage--it's just the medium I'm used to working in. I hope at some point to draw some comics poems too.

The jagged pencil drawings in the piece are from an exercise I did from Betty Edwards' book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The drawing of the hand is my drawing of my own hand.

Wendy Kramer is a collage artist, poet, and public librarian/archivist living in San Francisco. She owns a digital camera and image editing software but uses them rarely, because she prefers the feel of cutting and pasting with scissors and paper and paste. She also prefers writing poems with a pen in a notebook instead of on her laptop. You can see more of her work at her web site here.