Be My Baby
Be My Baby
High Heel, Disco Ball & February’s “Angel of the Month”
On the other side of the mini fridge, beyond the supplies barrier, a finished painting is propped on white plastic tubs of gesso. It shows a dark owl figure holding a disco ball and a woman’s leg in a heeled pump, both bright red, while a thermos and a banjo protrude from under the owl’s wing. The low, barren horizon rolls along the bottom third of the picture, the sand and sky both tawny. When I visited a week ago, there was a small snail riding the horizon, and a piece of paper taped above it, roughly the color of the sky. Now it has been painted out. Over the owl’s head is a large yellow sun, oblong like a grape that is also an eye, staring down at a spherical eyeball chained to the owl’s leg. Its beak is a puffy vertical of Winsor & Newton “Flesh Tint” piped directly from the tube. “I thought of it as a wanderer, walking with all their stuff under their jacket, all their belongings. If I were to re-do it I’d add a gun,” she says, laughing.
“Counterclockwise”— my essay structured as a 360 degree pan around Dana Schutz’s studio on one day back in February 2020—is included in the catalogue for her retrospective Between Us at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, which opens February 9th (and runs until June 6th).
Last September I was a guest on Nate Heiges’s “Selection Committee Radio Show” analyzing my obsession with the morally problematic music of Phil Spector alongside my undying love for Ronnie Spector. The episode is now available on Spotify, as well as on Nate’s site.
On February 16th I’ll be part of a reading to celebrate the paperback edition of Doon Arbus’s novel The Caretaker at McNally Jackson, South Street Seaport location—6:30pm, 4 Fulton Street, NY, NY. Please RSVP with McNally Jackson here
And finally, I’m pleased to announce February’s “Angel of the Month”:
