Crying in Baseball (and art)
Closing baseball season, it seems like recently so many of us are in transitions; babies, homes, health. All of these are life events that move us. The following Visual Art Quarterly is devoted to works of art (and artists) that have moved me to tears.
Robert Ryman
at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC
I was at the MoMA, probably in 2000 or 2001, before the big renovation. the "old" MoMA, as you might know, was small rooms, fairly intimate- I always came away from the museum thinking about the hand of the artist. No museums (and the MoMA reno) are constructed to house HUGE installations and big painting and sculpture. What has come out of that, in my opinion, is a loss of scale and loss of appreciation of the intimate. Anyway...back to Ryman. His work I have covered, but not in the context of having cried in front of a work of art. The below is the white work in MoMA's collection.
Philip Guston
Guston was a gutsy painter who had the balls to part ways with his non-objective minimalist peers (he was a fellow) and begin to make figurative work in the 60's related to racism and the termoil on that decade (there's a great book on him). I cannot remember where I saw this piece, but it must have been in NY as well. His return to representation was met with scathing reviews, but has had a long stretch of support since.
see a studio visit: http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/178
Felix Gonsalez Torres
His bio is fascinating. He lived on Manhattan in the 80s, was part of the (then) small art community there. He died young of AIDS and made work that spoke into the sense of mortality, intimacy and pain but in such simple and thoughtful ways. He "made" work in mulltiple, and made the work to speak about the gift economy, offering viewers to take a piece of paper from a stack or a piece of candy from a pile. The works' intimacy with viewers and his generosity of mind have always been stellar to me. My friend and Nashville-based artists, Ron Lambert, wrote of his work really well in the Scene recently. I used to have a work of his (paper), not sure if it made the move from Boston.
Eva Hesse
Had we had a girl, we would have named her partly for Eva Hesse. I'm a big fan of her sculptures, but her drawings are what have moved me most. Her bio is tragic and beautiful as well, dying in her 30s of cancer, probably related to the toxic stuff she used in her work at her tiny studio in the top floor of a Bowery building. When I was a resident at Cooper Union (2007) I took a photo of her place, and left a bouquet for Eva at the doorway of the shop.
An exhibition of her drawings toured in 2005. I was able to see the work both in NYC and in Houston (Menil Collection), and would make the trip again to see the same work over and over. Someone wrote that she did the most to humanize minimalism, and i think that has in large part to do with the fact that she (and Agnes Martin) were women in the movement.
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