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[READ: December 11, 2023] “Understanding Great Art and the People Who Make It”
This year my wife ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my sixth time reading the Calendar–it’s a holiday tradition! Here’s what H&O says about the calendar this year.
The 2023 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individual short stories from some of the best writers in North America and beyond. Now in its ninth year, the SSAC is back to once again bring readers a deluxe, peppermint-fresh collection of 25 short stories from some of the best writers in North America and beyond.
The author of this story was Alexander Weinstein. Each day has an online component with the author with a brief interview.
It’s December 11. Alexander Weinstein, author of Universal Love, respects the velvet rope.
This is one of those short stories that’s not exactly a short story. It’s a series of vignettes. Each of these is a biographical sketch of a fictitious artist and the movement that they were were involved in.
This seems like it’s making fun of art, but I’m not entirely sure. I’ve always been puzzled by this type of story–making up a person and inventing a history about them to be told in documentary form. Typically I like tis kind of weird thing, I think I can’t imagine ever writing something like this so it’s mostly just a little weird to me.
This story looks at four artists
Josef Kouyes, a central figure of the Living Arts Movement. Kouyes bristled at the art world and felt that art should document the humdrum world. From 1956-1970 he made pieces like Frying an Egg and Grinding Coffee. He had other pieces like Shopping, Sleeping/Dreaming, Dinner with Friends. Then in 1970 he announced that he was leaving the art world entirely. The art world took this to mean that he was working on his crowning masterpiece. Untitled, was not a repudiation of art, but total submersion in it. His house was soon surrounded by videographers recording every moment of his life. It is his masterpiece.
Alaine Tozambique was a leader of the Unfinished Arts Movement. He challenged the :realist nightmare of closure” by leaving bits of canvas “unfinished.” In Blank Stare, a woman stares at the unfinished three-quarters of the canvas. And Spring at Toluze Gardens is a single yellow dot in the middle of an unpainted canvas. But his masterpiece is clearly Half Empty/Half Full–the glass of water left at his bedside at the time of his death.
Antonia Fillizzi mae pyramids. At the age of sixty-nine, after he death of her husband, she began tearing paper into pieces and making pyramids out of them. Then she began cutting them out using scissors. They became smaller and smaller. Pyramids (Installation #11487) features 258,000 pyramids in an area 18′ x 26. She had been committed to an institution soon after making it.
The Maunick School (various artists) used paints by Maunick the Magician who (it was later discovered) used cadaver skin in his paint. Painters flocked to this enchanted paint which actually moved on the canvas–characters getting ready for bed, husbands getting slapped, babies being born, you name it. But in some of the canvases, things went wrong and couples began fighting. But when the artist destroyed her canvas, she heard the screams and felt that she killed so many people. Indeed, most of the painters who used this paint abandoned art for good. And then soon enough, the figures in the paintings began painting the canvas black–leaving nothing but a black square where art formerly was.
Interestingly, Weinstein does explain what he was up to and why he made this work, and I love his answer and heartily approve
AW: The first piece came to me while visiting the Tate Modern in London. I really love the museum and have a great admiration for performance art, experimental and modern art, and installation work. At the same time, reading artist statements and descriptions of work can sometimes be near comical given one is looking at a large green dot or an upside-down urinal. I’d been reading a lot of Borges and Martone at the time and was very interested in playing with stories that pirated existing literary forms as well as creating triptychs/quartets/etc. I began writing at the museum and then worked on the subsequent pieces over the next months. The work was in tandem with a fictional tourguide I was writing (to a recently discovered eighth continent), full of museums that ate people and hotels of loneliness. In both of the projects I was exploring how to tell stories that exist outside of the “traditional” short story form. In general, I tend to be more classical (albeit speculative) in my writing, with stories solidly based in elements of fiction, such as character, conflict, and narrative arc. It was incredibly freeing to be playing with this new form while exploring humor, absurdity, and magical realism.
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I Just Read About That... 