The Gay 90’s: Old Tyme Art Show featuring the work of Mark Ryden opened on April 29th at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York City and runs through June 5th. If you’re in NYC, this exhibition is not to be missed. Ryden’s beautiful works framed in immaculate hand carved wood invite a good look and promptly challenge with rich symbolism. Make of it what you will. The images below were taken directly from the exhibition and are courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery.
From the press release:
In his hauntingly beautiful and masterfully executed oil paintings, Ryden creates his own contemporary mythologies whose archetypes include fairy tale creatures, historical figures, and pop cultural icons. Seamlessly juxtaposing macabre motifs like meat grinders and disembodied presidents with eye-pleasing ingénues and seductive landscapes, the artist produces a vision of society in which menace and comfort are inseparably interwoven. These labor-intensive canvasses deftly rework centuries of art history, combining the grandeur of Spanish and Italian religious painting with the decorative richness of Old Master compositions and the lush textures of French Neo-Classicism.
The central theme of The Gay 90s: Old Tyme Art Show references the idealism of the 1890s while addressing the role of kitsch and nostalgia in our current culture. “In the modern era, sentimentality and beauty have been disdained in the art world,” he explains. “This new work is explores the line between attraction and repulsion to kitsch, and between beauty and banality.” Through their visual richness and symbolic complexity, Ryden’s infinitely suggestive dreamscapes invite us to enter their world and to indulge our sense of wonder.
Mark Ryden was born in Medford, Oregon and received his BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasedena in 1987. Recent exhibitions include Wondertoonel at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and the Pasadena Museum of California Art (2004-2005); The Snow Yak at Tomio Koyama Gallery in Japan (2009); Tree Show at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles (2007); Bunnies and Bees at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, CA (2002); Amalgamation at the Outre Gallery in Melbourne, Australia (2001); and The Meat Show at the Mendenhall Gallery in Pasadena (1998). He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
I went to hear the New York Philharmonic last week with Tatiana because our family friend was singing. They did three pieces by Stravinsky. It felt classy as shit stepping out of the train with my lady, dressed up and going to hear some art. The music was something else! The sounds of the orchestra shook my soul, and I found myself wondering, “How many sounds can I hear at once?” Or “How many ideas can operate in music simultaneously before the air crowds and ideas are lost and only confuse each other?” (The art of counterpoint is concerned with this problem in a very pointed and refined way. When you hear Bach it’s full of these strains of melody happening at the same time, check out 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould). Every time I try to figure out the answer for myself I just end up enjoying the music and forgetting the challenge I posed myself a moment before. But if I had to find an answer, I would say 4. 4 parts, please. No more, sometimes less. At some point you are making up things that just don’t coexist in the ether, therefore overloading the listeners mind.
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Fela Kuti
Fela Kuti was straight up out of control with his recipe for music. Hopefully you’ve heard his work. If not, when you listen here the 2 guitars and bass together, and how the drums play melodic lines with them. This forms a sub group in my mind, when I listen to it, then the horns enter with their own section, often in two parts. So then you have 4 groups: 2 horns, 1 drum, 1 string (2 guitar and bass as a unit). This later will happen in his pieces with the keyboards entering the arena, and of course the lead vocals paired with the backgrounds.
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Much has been said about the sound of tape vs. digital recording, and most folks have decent arguments as to which method is better, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk backward through history. While I sit around writing about missing my 8 track, and how I cant seem to finish a song on Logic cause my mind is flooded with possibilities and I get soooo distracted by the computer; while I piddle through sound options till I forget what my idea was in the first place and water is dripping everywhere cause I ran outta the shower and rushed to turn the computer on and the email button lights up and tells me “Hello please read this” and “Hello you must read me,” while I have 20 reasons I can’t do this, someone else has traversed this path. Someone else has found a series of points to tie a string from post to post and link together a work of art in sound. Telepathe, Tortoise, TV on the Radio, hundreds of thousands of artists have figured out how to make real sound art on their computers.
My problem is the computer does whatever I want. Like this blog, writing whatever I want can seem impossible. I need a sparring partner, an audience, or at least a topic. So I started getting my friends to come over. That works great! My ineptitude with the machine has brought friends over by the half dozen. We eat, talk, and make music together on the computer. I guess that’s where I wanted to be all along, with some good friends making some little jams.
Continually, as October weeds out the majority of false Edens, the hollow Eve finds us sweet teeth bobbing for apples. Scratch us so we can start over, so we can turncoat through iron-maiden turnstiles. Crosstown ride where the Lord give uth and take uth away, flasher whose jimson got jammed in slamming doors. We might miss an apocalyptic eclipse, but the river-frontiers burst in the Eerie Canals. House and Garden Reader’s headphones corkscrewed as snakes whisper out, get the hell.
Michael Tyrell is a poet living in New York. His poems have appeared in Agni, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn.
It is the steam of ideas, addiction,
and 9 million tenant farmers
confusing their nesses:
Forget, Forgive
Cut fingernails on microchips and monitors,
battle exhaustion in a city the
zeitgeist claims never sleeps.
It is where the black haired, black eyed women,
angular and dripping mystique,
haunt the cement caves below
ulcered Dominican children who
vomit hope behind drapes of Spanish moss.
All promises varnished with importance,
in a place where not even a 70 story drop
can disrupt frenetic normalcy.
The subtleties are choked by scale
and everyone is a magician
who can turn nothing into nothing.
Burlesque troubadours dance to
spaghetti western soundtracks
and sell books on the streets.
The alleys are chapels,
and paper bag priests lead syringe
sermons and shudder with praise.
Those blessed with closets in the windowed statues
scent them of home:
family photos and favorite blankets.
But still the lease is a sentence.
And mom,
I’m not cracking windshields,
but the problems don’t fade with place,
and I’ve taken this 80 minute plane ride
only to find I’m more empty under the light.
