Scribble on the wall with crayon

Result #1

and a pallette with an absolutely terrible smell. When I came in to see it, I tried to get up and made some friends, but they were a bunch of head-scratching, to be sure, but nobody took notice. They werent even any good. You cant really tell whether the delicate brushwork is real or an artwork, and if its a drawing or a painting, theyre probably just not all that interesting.And the best part—to be honest—is that you can look at this and think, Wow, thats fascinating. Its really good. That, plus the fact that you can go back to the drawing, is all. Just as you can go back to photographs, movies, and books. As a compliment, this is the kind of artwork thats typically only seen in its entirety by its artist in a museum or museum, and is never a gallery show or a commercial gallery. The only alternative is to find a way to make it yourself. Thats a much better way to do it.

Result #2

markings, apply silicone lacquer to smooth and shiny the surface of the drawing, and smear the images onto the wall; by the end, the image has blurred and blended with the background, becoming completely transparent. A subject that could be taken for a greeting-card pose or a free-falling figure is instead a more direct reference to the body, of which it is a part. This strategy is both naïve and cunning: as you peer into the piece, the paintings partially disappear, leaving only the harsh white of the black paint behind.The works title is a maxim: Remember that the body is a long, small pipe, that can be bent into many different shapes, and that can be explored in many different ways. Thus, in The Artists Body, the smoking body is reduced to a circle—a small bottle, a cigarette, a cigar, a guitar, a soccer ball, and a napkin. The figurative field expands, and a voice can be heard singing a love song. While listening to these and other sounds, it is easy to miss the body, and the canvas is completely empty. However, once you look closely, one sees a person. The paintings, and not the artist, are the bodies. The forms are not meant to remain on the wall, but to be something else altogether, like the words on the comic-strip tag that marks the bottom of one of the paintings. The body in the paintings can be seen as a body falling, but only from a distance, as in Faces, 2004, a series of collages that consist of written portraits of discarded objects—a beige rock, a red-black rooster, a pair of boots, a teddy bear, a necklace, a bracelet, a brown choker, and a necklace. They are all mangled, and redolent of destruction, even as they are devoid of all feelings.

Result #3

Scribble on the wall with crayon on paper that looks like scratch paper but is in fact newspaper, or take a walk through the gap between two columns of wood—Carta de Arte Moderna II, 1987—which looks like the outline of a geometric figure on a page of paper. For all the allusions to Bunyati and Bokhara, there is no clear point of view: the viewer is always fixed on the most literal or plastic perspective. The result is not an authentic insight but a model of perspective. The body appears as a series of angles in space. The circle appears as an infinite regression of angles. In Agostini, the circle becomes the head of the stooges, as in Anima Sola Dormida, or a pure kinetic element that is all angles. But the public image, and the sculptures the artists have created with it, looks as if it were made of the most flexible stretchy paper imaginable, for example paper covered with crayon, and a plaster cast of a glass, with a difference: one glass is tilted to one side and the other is partially open so that the figurine can see through it. This trivial intrusion on the idea of reflection makes a perfect reference to classical Greek drama, and in a sense makes a painting about painting.To pass from references to Greek and recent art to a questioning of the authority of the original, to a sophisticated and theatrical presentation of the self, is not to lose sight of the fact that the show can be seen as a critique of the art object, which itself is a residue of memory. The monumentality of the sculptures in front of the gallery is in reference to this documentary memory, but it also refers to the ceremony of celebration.

Result #4

and marker and write the statement PAROLAS IS A BURGLARY. [with a deep heavy-handed tone] In the ensuing madness, I thought I had written it all down. I had lost it all along. In our rush to conform, we forget that such a small thing as a monster or a monster image can become the subject of a thousand emails.

Result #5

Scribble on the wall with crayon, chalk, and erasers, making eye-popping, ever-so-slightly grotesque drawings. If art has moved on and other hobbies have grown less important, I imagine some new subgenre of body art to spring from this.Owen Donaghue, an artist I really respect, made some interesting paintings out of large, single-curve plywood strips: pretty elegant shapes, with grids and curves of various shapes and colors arranged in the series of minor figures in a field of choice colors. His works are on display at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. They also are on view at the Book Depository, where they are available for you to borrow and please give. They are nice, and I could do them all over again.The visual art world is always going through an awkward, awkward recovery, which makes its way all the more gratifying when an artist reaches an acceptable artistic medium. But now the recovery has started. The general lack of skill and tenacity in many young artists leads to some quite different views. This is the case with Carol Costello and Virginia Dwan. Costellos work is at once a little too inventive and too vulnerable. It seems like an odd place for her to display things, let alone to publish them, but her pieces do, and her image of what she does can be a little creepy. She can spin small things together so well that it loses its novelty. Dwan has developed a more elegant and personal vocabulary that is more suggestive of the invention of a hip guy than of a drug dealer. A new series of wall reliefs, Insects, shows Dwan combining her insects with a kind of string that forms spines of various sizes, and also has her wordy wordy writing printed on the stem. And of course theres always the man. All sorts of people are hanging around, maybe their best friends.