What?

I thought I was getting a handle on Contemporary Art when I could explain Félix González-Torres' “Portrait of Ross”. (The pile of candy). But now, again, I feel like I'm back at square one. I think I'm getting it that the idea is more important than the craft that goes into the work, but now, not so much.

I thought the idea was to avoid kitch, but the collages I'm seeing are kitchy and frankly, I'm underwhelmed. When Samantha left for college, the walls on her room were covered with ads from magazine pages, Ambercrombie and Fitch and I don't know what else. I think I liked her room better, except there was an issue of it being a fire hazard.


I judged a quilt show in Florida last weekend. The other judge, Pepper Cory, is pretty much a traditional quilter, and knows much about the history of quilting. I am considered to be more of an "art quilter". (Which I now consider odd, you wouldn't say you are an "art painter" if you did portraits, but some quilters make quilts for beds, some for walls. Personally, I'm in between, my quilts don't go on beds, and they do on walls, but they aren't cutting edge. In any case, our task was to decide which quilts received monetary awards, and then to go through all of them and offer some words of critique. We had to form a consensus about each piece, whether it received an award, the comments  we made. We were each also tasked with choosing a judge's choice award.

 I chose a very traditional Baltimore Album quilt as my judge's choice. This type of quilt has a formal structure and formal content. They include a lot of careful handwork. I would not do this type of quilt, and yet I admired this one very much. So I chose it. Pepper chose a quilt that featured a landscape, at least it appeared to be a landscape, that was done by a techique called "discharging". Not a medical term in this case, it refers to a technique in which bleach is applied to black or dark colored fabric. Some fabrics discharge to pure white, others to various shades of tan. It depends more on the dye that went into making the fabric black in the first place. In this case, the maker appears to have brushed and sprayed thickened dye onto the fabric. You can do this with Sunlight dishwashing liquid. In fact, I have inadvertently done this to my t-shirts when I was cleaning the kitchen. So I now avoid cleaning the kitchen. Perhaps I should be saving my accidents for my next retrospective.