busy busy busy

So much has happened during the past 2 weeks I hardly know where to begin. For starters, my friend Monica visited from Philadelphia and that was a great treat since it had been more than 2 years since we were last together. While she was here I gave my talk at the Carnegie on "Understanding Abstract Art for Art Phobics", subtitled " Why Jackson Pollack is a REAL artist". That Tuesday lunchtime talk brought out about 20 people, at least half of them people I'd not previously met. They were an amazingly attentive and enthusiastic audience.

The same could be said for the audience the day before of about 80 at Indiana University SE for a lecture by Kristen Grey aka Justin Credible, an MFA student and performance artist from Ohio U whose talk was sponsored by the IUS Ceramics Department. The lecture was promoted as relating to art themed gender issues and transsexuality, neither my usual area of interest but something both Monica and I thought would be worth considering. We were wrong. This very attractive and articulate young person was totally obsessed with genitals and with other people who make "art" by photographing and/or using their genitalia as the subject for visual documentation. Some of the slide images were truly offensive. They might have possibly have been less offensive if there had been more historical images (readily available) shown beforehand as reference material to prepare the audience for all the up close and personal photographic crotch shots. Meanwhile the talk centered around this person's personal decision to hormonally manipulate her birth gender by beginning a course of testosterone treatments to become more overtly masculine while electing not to identify as either gender. He/she/it does a performance art piece entitled "Ask a Tranny" which places him/her/it into a public setting such as London's Hyde Park Speakers' Corner for direct interaction with people passing by. The stated goal was to demystify transsexulaity to the point of having him/her/it simply become "the tranny next door who you'd ask to bottow a cup of sugar". All in all Monica and I felt it was adisappointing presentation but the students were enrapt. I had sat next to an artist friend on the faculty who is a lesbian and her negative response to some of the images was more dramatic than mine. We both questioned the legitimate use of such images in what was billed as an art presentation when it was, instead, a personal journey about sexual choice.

Somehow in the scheme of things that poor but effective promotional "come on" resonated in my mind the next day when I was giving my talk about how to understand art that doesn't tell an obvious story. The nice part for me was the fact that after speaking for an hour and 20 minutes about half of the people wanted to go up to the gallery and ask direct questions about my exhibit. This question and answer period lasted for nearly another hour. It was an amazingly gratifying experience. I now find myself wondering what might have happened if I had slipped a crotch shot or 2 into my slide presentation just for the sake of  "keeping it real"!!!!! Naaahhhh!!

My gallery talk last Saturday was fun because there was a Cub Scout troop at the exhibition and I love speaking with kids. These young boys were especially well behaved and attentive and both asked and answered questions about the artwork. My adult audience told me later that they thoroughly enjoyed my encounter with the kids. That was great because they could easily have resented my decision to direct the initial half hour of the gallery talk to the boys instead of the adults. But I felt my mission in giving gallery talks was to service those who patronize those who attended the program regardless of age or level of art sophistication. It was fun for me to see the lightbulbs turn on one by one in the boys' heads. They were working for their "art badge" and I seemed to have helped fulfill that requirement. I told the troop leader to send my art badge in the mail!