Wow, It's been a long time since I've written anything, I've been a bit distracted. Doing tours at the Phillips Collection undoubtedly enriches my thinking about art, but it takes an awful lot of time that I do not have. There was Margaret Bourke White, who I never liked-however I had fun with the tours-as the show only covered the first decade or so of her work, the information was audacious yet to the point. And I did not know about her being the first journalist in Russia (or the 'new' USSR in the late 20's ( trips in '29-'30 &'31, I think). Just goes to show that there is a six degrees of separation when it comes to research and celebrities too-look into something more that one or two layers and you'll find someway to apply it to yourself.

Now there is the Marsden Hartley show. Refreshing my reading on him is making me resent doing the tours, which I find funny. Talking about photographer exhibits or mishmash shows, things like 'Surrealist Still Lives of the Rich and Famous', has become second nature, easy to puke up the predigested on the tourist (though to toot my own horn a little, I often include subversive comments about conceptual art and it's modernist roots that occasionally get me in trouble with the tourists ) Now, when I have to talk about an exhibition on one specific painter, I start identifying and sympathizing with the artist and start resenting doing the tours BIG TIME. On a personal note I should teach, I really really really should. Doing this Hartley research has opened up new information about his early work done in Europe,and the Berlin work and the abstract portraits. Hartley was a "Big Eye" striving to observe his present-I've always liked his work and have now read quotes from his letters where he says things like he's got "No use for making his thoughts apparent in painting, but instead wants to show a true intuitive observing of the present." He loathes artists that are always explaining their work with theory and expect him too. He catches on early, from the 1913 trip to Paris and throughout his life, that there are a lot of artist's commodifiying their work. I can't help but think about the present state of affairs and the direction I am headed in exactly that-a-way, commodifying my skills, selling myself to sell my work-it's scary. I am going to have to create a thought puzzle about this, who are our contemporary Steigliz's & Hartley's

On a personal note when it comes to my work, I was reminded of all the PAINTINGS I've got laying around from back in the day, I've been moving away from them (the paintings) at semi-breakneck speed doing sculptures, finding quotes left and right from living artists about wanting to make 'things' that inspire other people to want to make things. It's all very stream of consciousness, not about money, very 'game-theory' economics, to win sometimes you don't destroy other people but protect and inspire them, even if it means you starve.

Of course in the a larger sense I am not going to starve and I wonder at these turn of the century artists who would go without food. In the contemporary U.S. I can't imagine starving, it's losing my health insurance that I live in fear of that keeps me tied to my pathetic job. I better stop writing now, I could whine about this more and I will.