Wynne Greenwood is a motherfucking genius.

As a queer feminist, I find representations of myself in American culture seldom. When I do, it’s more often in music (Le Tigre, The Gossip) than in the art world. Seeing Wynne Greenwood‘s video work with K8 Hardy last Saturday night made my queer feminist little light shine brighter than it has in a long time.

New Report, 2005. With K8 Hardy.

At Hiawatha Artist Lofts, she showed several of her and K8′s videos as the first event in Feminist Form, Wynne’s screening series of feminist and queer video from the Pacific Northwest. The screenings will take place monthly, with future locations and dates to be announced.

The videos were pretty simple in form, yet boundless conceptually. In several, Wynne and K8 were news anchors, both named Henry. They plodded forward in their pursuits as news anchors without entirely knowing what they were doing. They were pregnant with. . . motivation, mostly. The videos are hilarious, but at the same time, breathtakingly serious. I think I was sitting on the edge of my seat the entire screening.

For one, they’re sitting as though on a panel; the panelists are Henry Iragary (K8), Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Wynne), a furry pussy (K8′s, we presume) and a breast (Wynne’s, supposedly). Henry and Henry are pregnant with deliberation as they try to talk about the objectification of women. I, for one, felt pregnant with anticipation during their attempts— which were all the while animated by the dislocated (“cut off– as if by a knife”) body parts floating sheepishly next to them. Oh yeah, also: K8′s legs are spread under the table with a camera pointed at her crotch, and Wynne’s shirt is haphazardly pinned up to reveal her left breast.

There are so many things that can go wrong when one attempts to represent feminism that the disappointingly few self-proclaimed feminist artists seem to have largely given up.  A self-proclaimed queer feminist, Wynne Greenwood has not given up, and when you encounter her work you forget that feminism was ever considered a bad word. At least, that’s the way it seemed last Saturday. And each month the crowd is just going to get bigger.

Thank you, Wynne. I’m so glad you live in my city. And I’m so glad the city we live in knows you’re a genius.

Matthew Offenbacher

{Matthew Offenbacher, Untitled, 2009, from the series “Some new paintings of my cat and other things.”}

When I see a piece of [good] art, I’m usually struck by an excitement of ideas. I’m noticing that I think it’s good, and wondering why that is. I ponder the intent of the artist, and consider the way the piece is presented. I make connections between the work I’m studying and those of other artists.

Sometimes though, something entirely different occurs when I look at art. It happens very rarely, and when it does happen, the objects of my attention tend to be paintings. What happens is: I can not formulate a single cohesive thought, nor can I articulate anything. All I can do is look at the thing/painting and cuss like a teenager. Because it’s so good.

So, Matthew Offenbacher. DAMN.

{Matthew Offenbacher, Medium Owl, 2006, from the series “God, sex, the great outdoors.”}

The thing with Matthew Offenbacher is that when I look at the sheer variety of his creative endeavors, my excitement over an individual work multiplies. In addition to painting, he also writes. Well. In addition to painting and writing well, he gathers artists and writing artists together in a unique and meaningful way. Most amazingly, all of his various projects are top notch.

{La Especial Norte, Second Issue, 2008}

I’ve been thinking about something Regina Hackett said on her blog post about Robert Yoder: “Not all artists can be as successfully chameleon as Bruce Nauman. Many best serve themselves by mining a single vein. Life is short. Art’s best chance of being long is internal coherence.”

Yeah, maybe if an artist is looking to secure the cultural memory of their career with the linearity of an ad campaign. Art that reproduces itself over and over (and over and over and over), simply out of habit on behalf of the artist and the audience, is boring. It beats you over the head with its self-proclaimed preciousness until you submit or run away. If I ever turn into that kind of artist, someone take my paints away and put me to work in a bakery. The best art is that which the artist simply had to do; not because it was the right career move; not because it’s consistent with past choices in materials and methods.  Offenbacher’s varied work breathes the crisp air of necessity, whether it’s a painting or a community project or piece of writing.

{Matthew Offenbacher, Painting With Picture of Its Own Construction, 2005, from the series “Constructivist beavers.”}

This month Offenbacher begins Gift Shop at the Henry.

He’s also a finalist for the Betty Bowen award. And he has a show coming up at Howard House.

And last but not least (and probably unrelated, yet not considered insignificant here at this blog called “Getting To Know You Better”), Matthew Offenbacher is a really nice person. I haven’t really met him; I only attended the Klatch that hosted him on the panel. As soon as he started talking, I was like, “WHO is this sweet guy??” He’s not fakey-polite; he just seems like a genuinely good person who looks for the good in people. It’s refreshing and unexpected, just like his work.

L’Orangerie, Paris (Favorites, No. 3)

Monet’s cycle of eight Nymphéas are not so much paintings as they are an installation. Many people “know” them (or have a vague sense of the water lily paintings in general) via their reproduction on umbrellas and calendars, but you really must be at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in order to see them in their entirety. I guess this could be said about any painting and its reproduced incarnations, but here I’m being literal. Over 19 feet long, the paintings are too big to take a picture of. They will not fit in a singular field of view; rather, they are a field, and the viewer is surrounded and suspended in it.

Wrapping the walls of two oval-shaped rooms, the canvases are not flush against a flat wall; they are convex on a curved wall, so that to stand in front of them is to move into them in space, literally. They are an environment, complete with an elliptical sky of diffused light above. It is precisely the installation that Monet intended.

I felt alone in these rooms, even though there were other people stumbling around. I felt submerged in color, thrilled to the core, yet peaceful at the same time. As paintings, the Nymphéas are flawless, whether viewed up close or fifteen feet away. I might say that this is my favorite work of art, ever. And damn, I love the French. They let you take pictures inside their museums, saying “Here, this is for you, too.”

Favorites, #2: William Kentridge’s Stereoscope

Thank heavens I made it to the Henry last weekend the day before the William Kentridge show closed. 

What can you say about William Kentridge, that would be better than the language he uses?

Blue lines connecting things at a quickening pace with telephones ringing and cats screeching and wheels turning and squares breaking. Lines become sound and make a tower fall down, and make one man look at another. Tinsel cat runs; film tape spins a web. Gun shots, protest, number explosions, attack. Black cat shape-shifting into a bomb and cat hairs sink into the blue lines so the only thing left is a pleading GIVE FOR. FOR. GIVE. FOR as the sad man’s coat pocket brims with blue waterfalls and waters rising. 

Favorites, No. 1: Mariele Neudecker’s Winterreise

On days that I would like to get out and be inspired by art in person, but the baby is not wearing his sociable face, I will revisit my favorite works of art seen in days past.

I saw Mariele Neudecker‘s Winterreise (A Winter’s Journey) at Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin in 2005.  Projected large on the wall in a dark room, Winterreise is a series of 24 short films with music.  The films correspond to Schubert‘s 24 songs in the song cycle also titled Winterreise. Schubert’s 1827 Winterreise sets to music 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller.

In Neudecker’s Winterreise, Schubert’s song cycle, with voice and piano, plays on a loop along with the film. Müller’s poems float as English text over slowly changing imagery.  The film uses scenes of landscape and life on the 60th degree of latitude on the globe. Winter. Iceland, Russia, the Shetland Islands. Sometimes the images mirror the poems in content, sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes the images breathe contemporary content into the poems, striking and perfect. There is the feeling of being held in suspension between the old and the new, with the combination of the old music and the new medium of video/installation. They go beautifully together.

I sat through the whole cycle with eyes like saucers, in disbelief at how perfect it all was. Then I came back the next week and sat through it again, taking pictures of each scene. I wanted to have something to remember it by.