Maverick
Arts
Boston’s
Visual Artsletter
By Charles
Giuliano
82 Webster Street
East Boston, 02128
Charles.Giuliano@GTE.net
October 1, 2000
Charles
Giuliano is an artist. curator
and critic. This is the third
edition of Maverick Arts, an on
line artsletter. Frank Conte, a journalist
and comrade in arms, has agreed
to carry this newletter on his
web site, www.eastboston.com. He will also
be archiving back
issues if you are
joining us for the first time.
Also, if other arts related web
sites wish to carry this
artsletter, please reach me by e
mail. A number of artists have
indicated that they are
forwarding this to their own e
mail lists. Please feel free to
do so as this helps to reach a
wider and targeted audience.
Today, October 1, I wish a happy
birthday, and get well wishes to
my remarkable mother, Dr.
Josephine R. Flynn. She is 93
years old and still as sharp and
witty as ever. Also birthday
greetings to my brother in law,
Dr. Yuri Tuvim, who is now 70.
Next
week, Astrid and I will be in
Montreal for the Second Biennial.
We will be visiting with Claude
Gosselin, the director of CIAC,
which organized the Biennial, as
well as, with the gallerist and
old friend, Rene Blouin. A full
report will follow. While we do
laundry and pack our bags, what
follows is the essay I wrote for
the Susan Baker exhibition which
is currently on view at the
gallery of the New England School
of Art and Design at Suffolk
University. Susan is a legend in
Provincetown and this is her
first show off the Cape in some
time. This essay provoked an
interesting range of responses,
Susan found it
"touching" the Boy, was
amused and Keith has stated that,
"My people will be in touch
with your people."
Susan
Baker’s Further Thoughts of
a Human
September 25
through October 18
In many
ways, this dense and diverse
retrospective of paintings,
drawings, zany sculptures, and
artist’s books by the
Provincetown/ Truro based artist,
Susan Baker, is a dream come
true. It is an honor to present a
mini retrospective of this unique
and original artist, for the
first time, in Boston, in more
than twenty years.
Although
she is a living legend on the
Lower Cape, home to a traditional
artist’s colony, and
enhances that mythic stature by
running the tongue in cheek,
Susan Baker Memorial Museum, in
her home in Truro, a wider
reputation has eluded her.
That may
all change, now that her second,
trade publication in the past two
years, "The Dogs of
Provincetown," follows on
the heels, yapping all the way,
of last year’s hilarious
hit, "The History of
Provincetown," which she
produced to mark the 100th
anniversary of the artist colony.
Another, more serious book,
devoted to the French author,
Marcel Proust, will be published
next year. And, she has
expectations to publish her
alphabetical, Tick Book, which
will be a fantastick volume when
it too receives wide circulation.
These commercially produced,
illustrated books are, at long
last, earning the artist national
recognition.
Will
fame and fortune rush to her
head? Probably not. In all
probability she will still rise
each day, as usual, from three to
five, and retire from seven to
nine. In between, her days are
consumed by such passions as TV
Soap Operas, reading Proust, from
cover to cover, ever word, over
and over, art making, sitting in
the shop/ museum tending to
clients, and non stop bantering,
punning and bickering with her
husband, the poet, Keith, and
their son, referred to simply as,
"The Boy." If you are
invited to sit in their kitchen,
salon, inner sanctum, you may
find yourself, literally, going
to the dogs. And much of the
entertaining gossip is about the
ongoing adventures of their past
and present pets. During out last
visit, for example, there was a
saga of the hound’s false
pregnancy.
Dogs,
you see, in the gonzo world of
Susan Baker, share equal status
with humans. There is, for
example, an over the top relief
memorial to dear departed Buster.
And you can follow the adventures
of P’Town’s illustrious
canines in her new Dog Book.
Man’s best friend and all
that.
Hanging
this densely cluttered show was a
bit of a daunting adventure. Just
unloading the van was a
day’s work. The all
suffering Keith rolled his eyes
and observed that, "If
it’s worth doing, it’s
worth doing to excess," is
part of the Baker family crest.
She also embraces the anti
Bauhaus motto that, "More is
More."
As the
installation progressed, we
filled every conceivable space.
Like hanging ornaments on a
Christmas tree she was delighted
when we found a way to wedge in
yet another work. "Oh,
that’s my favorite,"
she would say of almost every
object. And, of course, every
piece comes with a story.
"Oh that was when we,"
or "Oh yeah, that was the
time that."
Having
heard it all before Keith, more
or less, tuned out reading the
newspaper on the couch, as Susan
and I labored on. He had been
assigned to attach xeroxes of
pages of the Tick Book forming a
spiral around a post in the
gallery. She would take a break,
from time to time, to flog him
that he wasn’t doing it
according to her plan. Not caving
in, he prevailed that he was
doing a good job. I was often
asked to arbitrate, to which, my
constant answer was, " It
looks fine." No matter what,
you have to keep moving. Like a
shark, you drown in a sea of
Baker if you stop swimming.
But, as
the walls filled up, and spaces
disappeared, the net result was
just wonderful. The whole wacky,
wonderful, gonzo, Susan Baker
world took shape. There were the
bright, primary, cartoonish,
psychologically, confessional
early works, when she was one of
the crazies of the P’Town
bar scene. There are such
classics, as a dense clutter of
profiles in, "All the Men I
Slept With in the Sixties."
Or, a woman looking down her
blouse in, "Waiting for My
Breasts." And. a corner of
now iconic polychromed, papier
mache, sculptures. These include
a long stretching dog and another
pooch camped up as Nefertiti.
In more
recent years, the family has
traveled to Europe. The resultant
paintings are either primitivist,
outsider, straight renderings of
famous vistas, or, sometimes,
more illustrative. These range
from rather straight views of
churches in Venice and France, to
renderings of the family playing
scrabble with a view of Siena
through an open window. Or, the
family cavorting about the
leaning tower of Pisa. And, a
rented car in front of a view of
Parma. Where, of course, they
stopped for cheese.
But, the
Proust paintings and book
illustrations, that’s
different. This is where Baker
gets, like, all serious and
intense. Here passion for all
things Proustian approaches
religion. Looking back at her
Hippie bar days, definitely a
thing of the past, and all for
the better, who would figure she
would get so all serious whatall
or whatever. She has haunted the
scenes of his life and recorded
them in somber colors. It is
little Marcel here, and big
Marcel there, and finally, oh
well, dead Marcel. Yes, very
dead. Like not moving. You know,
dead as a doornail. Or, whatever.
Dead.
Which
means, perhaps, that we are
getting older and thinking about
our death, as well as that of
dogs, and friends that we have
known. Too many of our friends
are gone, too young, too soon.
This often comes through in the
work, and there are many
memorials. Remembrances of things
past. Which is probably where
Proust comes in. Or all that time
sitting in the kitchen, a virtual
kennel club, bantering with Keith
and the Boy, and pondering great
thoughts of dogs, people, and
ticks we have known. But, by now,
you get the point.
This
essay may not be real art history
and stuff but, hopefully, you get
some of the flavor of a truly
original and fascinating artist.
She does it all, her way. I just
love her spirit and independence.
It makes me feel free to be who I
am, and, hopefully, who you are,
as well.
At the
end of an exhausting
installation, she was
disappointed to take home a dozen
works that, try was we could,
just didn’t fit in.
"These are some of my
favorites," she said. While
Keith suggested we stack them
against the walls for a more
authentic Baker look. As they
parted the now cluttered gallery,
delightfully so, he was heard to
say, "I’m gathering
signatures on the
petition…" But,
that’s another story.
Y’All
Come Back
|
