4 very brief things:
1) Anne Truitt’s Daybook is a great resource and a salve to my tired mind. Her words are inspiring and restorative. I am reading a new Kindle edition that has Turn and Prospect added on. I recommend it.
2) I have long loved Sol LeWitt’s art. I have just recently started culling quotes and outlining an article length piece called LeWitt on LeWitt. It’s in an embryonic state and I will happily take any and all help I can get.
3) Walid Raad’s retrospective at MoMA closes Sunday and I recommend you go see it. His work, introduced to me 20 years ago when he was briefly my teacher, is a complicated and sometimes confounding lesson in the intersections of biography and manufactured history. Raad constructs narratives and lets us choose to believe or deny. It forces a critical reading of history, biography and authorship.
4) Writer William Boyd concocted a story about an artist named Nat Tate, which was offered as a biography with no real hint of it being a work of fiction. David Bowie and Gore Vidal were in on the joke and wrote dust jacket blurbs to sell the farce in the late 90’s. I am revisiting Nat Tate as I think about the creation of biography, real or imagined. It’s worth a read.
-Jeff Bergman
January 2016
