My show and this Alex Katz painting
October 25th, 2006
I think the paintings of Alex Katz were an early inspiration for my show, Sexual Intercourse: American Style. I look at a picture like this (which was taken from a book so the quality is a little shitty) and I think, “yes! That’s exactly what I want SIAS to be like.”
The whole painting is wonderfully artificial and strange—just these flat, bourgeois couples, stiffly holding each other, surrounded by nature. I like how everything looks like a Land’s End catalogue. You say to yourself, “wait, is this a joke?” No, this is not a joke. This is deadly serious.
[EDIT: Wordpress won't let me go past a certain size picture so here's a detail:]
October 25th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Conicendentally, I was at Alex Katz’s studio today, moving a painting for him. I love his paintings, and I also love how he is this gruff-ass, salty old New Yorker. He sounds like Johnny Ramone when he talks, and yet makes paintings like this…
October 26th, 2006 at 12:25 am
The best of both worlds
October 27th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
I like how this helps place SIAS in the context of YOUR other visual art, Mitch. The more I think about it, it really is part and parcel — it makes me TOTALLY want an episode of SIAS set at a gallery opening for a Mitch Magee show. That would RAWQ SOOO HARD!
October 27th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
Oh yeah, forgot to mention, there’s an interview with Katz in the 8th issue of Combo magazine which is in some ways terribly awkward — he basically evades a lot of the questions and leaves Abby Susik (poet & art history grad student at the time) squirming — but also has some interesting comments in it He says of his own painting, “I never thought of it as ironic…I do things in multiple but they’re not ironic. They’re very straightforward. At least that’s the way I try to make them. That’s my intention.” Or “I don’t have any beliefs in anything.”
Etc etc.
November 2nd, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Now those pictures make me blush because I am thinking about what those people are talking about. And its pretty raunchy.
November 11th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
I’m bored of Alex Katz. His paintings are like an unmade bed after an evening of lovemaking.
November 18th, 2007 at 1:57 am
Dyna,
I hope your bed is not made after an evening of love making.