Mr. Joel

I love visiting my cousins in Scotland. I love seeing my family, I love the countryside, and I love the food. Now, if you know anything about Scottish food, the last part of that statement may stick out a bit. Scottish food does not have a reputation for being good. British food does not have a reputation for being good. But it is. At my cousin’s farm it’s fantastic; because the majority of what they eat is homemade, local, and seasonal. The foodie trifecta.

Now, Yorkshire Pudding is not the best nom-able that I’ve had at my cousins; but it has the best simplicity to deliciousness ratio. Also it is the one that is most often paired with gravy. Yorkshire pudding was invented in Yorkshire, England; it’s not really pudding in the American sense. It’s pudding in the ‘food made of a batter that rises when it is cooked and is yummy’ sense. The pudding is typically made as part of a big dinner with a roast and potatoes and carrots and such. The batter at it’s simplest is one part eggs, one part, milk and one part flour. It is baked on hot oil in the oven. The oil is usually the drippings from the roast, which makes the pudding extra yummy. It used to be that you would make one big pudding and cut it up into wedges when it was served; but now it’s the style to make mini puddings in muffin pans and eat them like dinner rolls. Which is what I did.

The Recipe:
(this made 22 mini puddings in my muffin pan)

four eggs
1 cup milk
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
pinch salt
roast drippings, lard, or vegetable oil

Heat the oven to 450 F. Whisk the eggs and the milk together in a bowl. A large one is good but it doesn’t have to be super large, just large enough to hold all the ingredients listed above. Let the mixture stand for 10 minutes. Then sift in the flour, baking soda and salt. You want this to be a smooth mixture, so take your time and stir a lot. When your done let this mixture sit for 30 min. While it’s sitting get out your muffin pan and put about a half tsp of roast drippings, lard, or vegetable oil in the bottom of each cup. Pop that in the oven and let the oil heat until it is almost smoking. Or let it heat until it is smoking, it’s easier that way, your smoke alarm will let you know when they’re done. You’ll notice this is a great recipe to make while you’re preparing other things. It was invented that way. It assumes that you’ve got your roast going and that your mashing potatoes and boiling carrots and preparing other good things too. That’s part of why I like it. I often have a lot going on in the kitchen while I’m cooking. I’ disorganized like that. When the oil is hot fill each cup 1/3 to 1/2 way full. Put it in the oven and let it cook until they’re golden brown. That’s about 20 min. When they’re done let them cool for a minute, pop them out of the pan, heat up more oil and make puddings until there is no more batter. Serve fresh with gravy or stuff them with some other edible.

P.S. These do not reheat well, so if you want them hot, eat ‘em fast. However, they are also very good cold with jam for breakfast the next day.

I know that this is a subject that has been raked over a more than hot coals in hell, but it’s something I have been thinking about recently. As tinabeans set off into the Atlantic with her iphone and her Kindle I found myself swallowing a surprising amount of ire at digital readers. And I’ve realized, what my main point of annoyance is. You can’t share them.

Now, I don’t mean that in a DRM is awful if only we could just boink our readers together so I could give you the book or upload it and send it to you somewhere or isn’t it horrible how you don’t own your Kindle books, you’ve only licensed them and they could disappear without you knowing about it (though I don’t like those things either now that you mention it). I mean that if I’m backpacking through Europe I can’t leave an ebook on a hostel shelf in Paris and take a new one. I read forty books in the summer of 2009 while I was traveling. I started with seven, bought four more in Europe and came home with three. One of those I kept the other two were given to friends. The rest are still out there.

Here are all the books that I have acquired in the four months I have been in nyc:

That’s thirteen books. I’m not speaking with any kind of authority here, but that seems like rather a lot. Now of those thirteen two have been gifts, and I’ve paid for one of them. The others were free. Here in nyc when people are done with books, or anything small thing that still got some use in it, they set it out on their stoop for people to take. I love it. Ten free books. Just left out for me to take. And it’s not like I’ve picked up every homeless book that I’ve seen, I’ve actually left far more than I’ve picked up. In addition, they’re good books. Books from authors I’ve heard of or have been meaning to read for a while now. Now most of these books are not books that I want to keep, but that’s fine. When I’m done with them I will simply leave them out for others to take or trade them for other books the next time I am out traveling in the world. That’s what I like about books. Now, yeah sometimes it would be great to look up a fact or word while I’m reading but I can usually do that with my iphone and if I can’t I’m usually in the middle of nowhere and a Kindle couldn’t help with that either. tinabeans pointed out that Kindles are good for nonfiction books that you read once and are done with and that’s true. But if I’m home I can get that book from the library and if I’m not I’ll cough up some money and take it with me traveling with the intent to trade it for another book.

There are other things I don’t like about ebooks. That they’re crap for art books is an easy and obvious one. Another thing is that you can’t get them signed. I don’t like to admit that, who likes to admit to celebrity fetishes, but being able to get a book signed or inscribe it to someone else gives me immense satisfaction. But really, my main gripe is that you can’t set ebooks free when you are done with them.

[Edit: Also http://www.offbeatearth.com/quiet-at-the-library/]

I have always found visiting artist’s studios inspiring and enlightening. I love to see how other artists work. And so does Joe Fig. He makes paintings, prints, and photos of painters and their studios. And models. He makes fantastic scale models of artists in their studios.

I first saw his work in the back room of a gallery in Boston. I don’t remember which gallery and how I was let into the back room, it must have been a field trip, but it was absolutely fantastic. I’m fairly sure that it was this one:

Here is the interior:

It was so difficult to get a good look inside the model. You had to crane you neck and stand on tiptoes to get a look in the sky lights and barn door. Now, I have my doubts about the art as art content of this work. I always feel like it could be more, that it could do more, and there is more to care about than art and the creation there of. But as a curious person, I enjoy to see the charting of different modes of working. And as an anal retentive person, I adore the painstaking reproduction. It’s like going to see the displays at the Natural History Museums, but for artists. Fig recreates contemporary and historical studios, though he seems to stay within the era of photographic documentation. There is a
Van Gough, based on the painting of the artist’s room at Arles, and it feels gimmicky. So it’s good that Fig sticks with the photos.

Dana Schutz’s workspace:

Fig has also written a book about artists in their studios entitled Inside the Painter’s Studio. He interviews artists, from Chuck Close to Ryan McGinness, about their process and photographs their studios. Much like the similarly named Inside the Actor’s Studio, this book comes across as a bit dry and self serving to those involved, but is both informative and something of an indulgence to people who love the craft being discussed. I was just thumbing through it at the New Museum, and now I know what I’ll be reading after I finish Smiley’s People (by John le Carre. Inventor of the spy genre. As if you didn’t know)

www.joefig.com

Inside the Painter’s Studio

All images are poached from joefig.com, copyright Joe Fig.

Dear Mr. Joel,

It’s been a while. It’s not that I have not been thinking about you, I have. All the time actually. I’ve been doing all sorts of things that I want to tell you about. Recently I went to a book signing that a hero of mine was giving. This resulted in both the most fleeting, unsatisfying celebrity encounter I have ever had and one of the best reflections on what I want to do with my life. And that’s not all. Just this night I went to a party that an art collector was giving in his Chelsea apartment. I attempted to rub elbows with some people in the New York art world. It did not go well. They did not like my elbows. But I am so glad I went. I went to the Guggenheim the other day too and let me tell you, I am so way over Kandinsky.

I do all these things and I think ‘oh, I’ll write about this’ and then I don’t. After it all goes wrong I make these promises that I’ll change, that I’ll be better in the future, and for a while I do. For a while we’re good together. But after that, I’m up to my old tricks and I’m neglecting you. I am like a bad girlfriend to you. Mostly it’s the little things that get me down; I’m tired when I get home from work or I just don’t know if that one thing I’ve been thinking about all day will really make a good post. So I do nothing. And that’s wrong. I have to stop thinking about that and I know it.

But there is another thing that has been weighing on my mind recently. This is hard to say, so I’m just going to blurt it out. You’re just so ugly. Really. Imagining how bad a post is going to look after I’ve posted it actually stops me from doing anything. You need a face lift. And some organizational structure, maybe some categories rather than just a messy tag cloud. I’ll do my best to see you through this, but it may be time that we both sought some serious help. Really, we might want to call someone.

Also, as I was thinking about how nice and organized you may be one day I began to wonder what I really wanted out of this relationship. There are several projects that we’ve got going on that I rather like. The food one is nice, I made this really good spaghetti sauce the other day that I have to tell you about, but the project that I really like is the artist a day one. It helps me keep tabs on all the art that I’ve seen as well as forcing research on artists I think I know. But it really needs more detail, more tags, and to be more like a searchable database. I also want to get into some sort of digital sketchbook thing with you too. I’ve been using delicious for all the links and such that I churn up while stumbling the internet, but I have all this paper ephemera as well that I just don’t want to keep in real life. I was thinking you might take care of that for me.

Also, and this is an in general, we need more images. Pics or it didn’t happen is an internet truth. I’m excited about recent developments on this front. I have secured a new digital camera (body) for Christmas and have procured a nice lens and sizable memory card. So that should do us for a while.

I hope this is the beginning of some lasting change that will be rewarding for us both.

As always thank you for listening,
your content provider,
Jess

Mmmm… dinner.

So this is what I made to eat this week:

Braised Kale It’s more or less the same as the spinach, remove the harder bits, blanch until soft as you like and then braise in butter. I didn’t measure this one, when it came to the butter part I started with enough to coat the bottom of the pan and then added more as I went until it was the right taste.

Yummy mushrooms I fried about a a quarter of a pound of bacon until it was crispy and put it aside to crisp up. Then I caramelized some onions, it was about a half a raw onion, in vegetable oil. I discarded the bacon fat because if I used it the mushrooms would be far too bacon-y. Then I added the mushrooms. It was one regular sized package. I have no idea what this is in real measurement. The mushrooms cooked, I added the bacon bits back in as well as salt and pepper to taste.

Roast Potatoes/They’re actually home fries Red potatoes and parsley in the oven. I didn’t think they were crispy enough so I fried some when they were done cooking.

And an egg because I was protein deficient today. I just threw this in the hot oil left over from the potatoes.

And it was all delicious.

But, it does highlight something I have been noticing more and more. Butter. Grease. Oil. Fat. Now, normally I don’t worry about this at all. Firstly because I don’t sweat the calories and secondly because I live in a six floor walk up, so even if I did I’m more than making up for it. However, after eating this for dinner I felt…heavy. This happens after I eat a greasy meal. I just don’t feel good. I feel slow and dehydrated. So. There is something else to watch. Less lipids. Usually I don’t have lots o’ fat in my starches, ie rice, so I should keep up with that. Also I’ve noticed that I don’t actually need oil to ‘fry’ an egg, my pans are non-stick enough that the egg just doesn’t stick. So there’s that too. 2/4 seems like a good ratio so far. Yummy.

Spinach. I already know that I like it raw, but cooked it turns into slime. Heavy, nasty, metallic tasting slime. However, I was reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking (“Cross references are always a problem. If there are not enough, you may miss an important point, and if there are too many you will become enraged.” oh Julia.) and there was this great looking recipe that was for spinach braised in butter. oOOh. So, apparently the secret to making lovely, tender, melt in you mouth cooked spinach is blanching it and then allowing it to soak up as much butter as possible. In hind sight this seems like an absurdly obvious point, the blanching makes the spinach soft and the butter makes it yummy, but it is wickedly delightful.

The recipe called for far more spinach than I had, so I just kind of went with it. The blanching was super simple, boil salted water and throw in spinach stop when soft. Braising was ever so slightly less simple. The recipe called for three cups of cooked spinach to four tablespoons of butter. I had about a third of a cup of blanched spinach, so I decided to use as much butter as I felt like. Also I decided to add a little crushed garlic. Because garlic is delicious.

You can see the tiny bit of spinach there along with all the butter and the excess garlic that I didn’t want to mix in with the spinach because then it would be too much.

And there is all the spinach on top of the red lentil curry I mentioned last time. Oh so good. It made me wish I had more spinach. It was that good.

I’ve started an experiment. Two weeks ago I realized that I could count all the vegetables I had eaten the past week on one hand. That’s right. One hand. I’m lucky I don’t have scurvy. So I made a big decision. I’ve decided to become a half vegetarian. I’m trying to cut the amount of meat I consume in half. Don’t get me wrong I love meat. If you are in any doubt about just how tasty animals are allow me to refer you to this diagram:

Because meat is like that. Just like that. But veggies are good too. Also, eating less meat is good for the environment. That’s what tinabeans told me and I believe her, so should you! So far it’s been a week and I’m doing great. I made this fantastic curry from all recipes: red lentil curry. It’s fantastic if you eat it fresh, but it defiantly looses something after being reheated. I doubled the spices by accident (what a time to mix up tea and table spoons) but it is still excellent. I’d say up the ginger and watch the cumin, but whatever. Also I’ve been trying to eat more apples and spinach and less rice, because eating less meat is not actually better if you eat tons of rice instead. Which is precisely something I would do because I live rice so very much. So there you are. Hopefully more updates to follow. If you have any good vegetable suggestions let me know.

First week interning at a real New York Gallery. I’m basically the assistant’s assistant, which means I’m in charge of the mailing list, and random other things. So far it’s basically the grunt work that one would expect from any internship. The first day was particularly rough the postcards for the next mailer had just come in from the printer so I spent the day sticking the 1,600 address labels and stamps on the postcards. Now I have to wait for all the misaddressed postcards to come back so I can update the mailing list again. So that’s fun. On a slightly more interesting note, I also have to look through lots of art magazines for any mention of artists that the gallery works with. That’s fun, but the scanning, resizing, and saving gets a bit tedious.

Far and away the most interesting part of the internship thus far is simply being in the room while the directors conduct business. It’s amazing listening to them organize, arrange, network, and chat about the interesting and inane. Thought-provoking question of the week: is art for everyone? At first glance the answer is yes, of course. Art is for everyone.

But it’s not. Art is not a democracy. Not everyone can walk into a museum and a gallery and pick something that they like or even understand. And you shouldn’t expect that they should. Art is made by people who have spent years studying art, in or out of school, for people who have also spent a significant amount of time thinking about art. Art is for people who already understand how art is speaking, who are familiar with tropes and conventions and are willing to learn new ones. The end of such connoisseurship is effectively the end of art. If art was for everyone then there would be study groups and beta testing before any new show went up. We would have to reach for the lowest common denominator.

So they say.

Roxy Paine is an artist who investigates the relationship between the natural and the created. He is also a dude. I mention this because all the Roxies I know in real life are female and after seeing his work on the roof of the Met I thought that he was a girl for about two weeks. I do not want you to be confused. He was educated at the College of Santa Fe as well as Pratt and started showing in Brooklyn in the early 1990s. His early work is mainly detailed sculptural reproductions of hallucinogenic flora displayed naturally in a gallery setting. He is also known for his art making machines the Paint Dipper, PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit), and SCUMAK (Auto Sculpture Maker). These machines are designed to produce art autonomously, mostly through repeated action.

I saw one of these paintings at the Rose Museum at Brandeis University (which, thankfully, does not look like it will be dying after all) that was made by a machine that sprayed white latex paint over the same area of the painting. Eventually the painting began to look like a cross between topographic map and stalactites. Paine produces an organic effect through an assembly line process that identifies the disconnect between the creative process, the creation of work, and the end result. As well as producing something visually nifty, a new twist on automatic drawing. I like these paintings.

More recently Roxy Paine has been producing large sculptures that look like giant metal trees and are called dendroids. He takes this form and makes them out of shiny silver colored pipe. And he makes them huge. His most recent dendroid is Maelstrom, on display on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art until November 29, 2009.

Maelstrom is very impressive, but mostly because it is big and shiny and it is a marvel that they got the thing up there. If you are going to make a giant metal sculpture that looks like arteries the Met roof is the place to show it. However, as a study of the relationship between the natural and artificial world Paine’s dendroids just don’t do it for me. The notion of humans creating something that looks like the natural world that is both cheerily inviting and ominously threatening to strangle everyone is such a well trodden scifi theme. It’s even a well trodden Goosebumps theme. It’s, dare I say it, just not that original.

Now, I am fully aware that nothing is original original but this is an idea that I, and many other scifi geeks, hit upon in high school (seriously, I did a bad painting of a metal tree. That’s all I’ll say.). I want something more than a cross between Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors and the swarm of metal beetles from The X Files. The notion that nature, what we can learn from it, and what we can create from it are both bigger than us and very cool is a great thought that we should think about more. And this sculpture is very big and shiny. And Maelstrom is fun to be around; it glints in the sun and casts fantastic shadows that crawl all over everything and everyone on that roof. But it does not show me anything that I did not already know and, more importantly, it does not make me wonder.

And an added mark against them: They do not have the benefit of being made by robots:

Taryn Simon is a contemporary photographer. She received her degree from Brown University and is also a Guggenheim fellow. She has had her work featured in major news outlets (The New York Times Magazine, CNN, and The BBC News) as well as collected by major museums (The Pompidou Center, The V&A, and the Whitney); she currently shows with the art world megalith: Gagosian Galleries.

Simon carries on the exploration of the relationships between photography and fantasy. The themes and aims laid out by artists talks and gallery biographies seem cliché, revelations of worlds unseen, recording the ‘American experience’, and the deconstruction of truth. But unlike so many others plodding on this well worn path, her work is not boring. It is mesmerizing. At the moment her two bodies of artistic work are The Innocents, a series of photographs of wrongfully convicted individuals who served significant jail time, and An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, a collection of images of places that are restricted from the general public. It is this latter index that I find so especially amazing. Simon has been granted access to some of the most interesting sites that I never knew existed in the US. When she went looking for the American strange, she did not skimp. The photographs range from cryogenic storage facilities to hibernating black bears to custom’s confiscated goods room at JFK. These seemingly fantastical objects and locations are made real by her detailed large format photos and yet even in their candidness fail to settle into something that I can except as existing. I have not really seen it, and I don’t fully believe it. But I can’t stop thinking about it.

That last part is true. I first saw the book of An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar while I was visiting the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2007 and I would have bought it on the spot if the exchange rate hadn’t kicked the price up to $95. Since then every so often I recall Kenny the retarded white tiger and the Braille edition of playboy and marvel that such things really do exist. (If you are wondering I still do not own a copy of this book and would like it very much for Christmas/my birthday. Just saying.) I find it fascinating, and gratifying, that Taryn Simon works as a fine arts photographer as well as a documentary photographer for the main stream news media. I’m glad that a career that exists between the two can really be pulled off. Or maybe it can’t and she’s just exploring the relationship between news and the arts and it’ll all come out in her next book. That would be nice too.

See some of the photos and text from An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar here.

She did a TED talk if you are interested:

Also, I really want to know what she studied at Brown. Wouldn’t it be great if it were advanced mathematics?

http://www.tarynsimon.com/#

http://www.gagosian.com/artists/taryn-simon/