The Call, select quote
“These are not just physical works. There’s a radiance here, as though we’re looking at visions of saints, not of the saints themselves, but of what they see when they behold the world ecstatically.” - Alexander Nemerov
“These are not just physical works. There’s a radiance here, as though we’re looking at visions of saints, not of the saints themselves, but of what they see when they behold the world ecstatically.” - Alexander Nemerov
The Call, audio, art historian Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University, Palo Alto), Stockman Salon, New York, NY
The Call, transcript, art historian Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University, Palo Alto), Stockman Salon, New York, NY
Alexander Nemerov:
Thank you all for being here. I'll speak for just a very few minutes. And then hopefully we can have some time for questions. I'm really grateful for you all being here, and also, of course, to Jennifer for hosting us. And really, it's a special occasion beyond what I could have dreamed up because actually, I met Sarah at an event in Palo Alto a few years ago. And it just struck me and perhaps you'll forgive the sort of notion I have of how important art history is to art. Because you might say art history is not important to art at all, really, it's ancillary to it, but I felt like wow, this is a serious painter who, if she works steadfastly and gravely and joyously all by herself, it would be nice for there to be an event around her work. So, I asked her if she wanted to do a salon where, where I would talk about her work, and, and we agreed, and then COVID happened and it didn't happen. And then once things began to loosen up a little bit earlier this year, then we did have one of these events.
And this is the second one and it's in the spirit of supporting a contemporary artist, but I also think, in the spirit of, what is the relation between words and images, words and works of art, which we might all grant there's some purpose or impact fullness to that. But it can also seem that they're really opposites too. We want people who are talking too loudly at the museum, and I'm sure I'm have been one of those people talking too loudly to shut up. I think what I'm about to say is a little bit awkward in the name of the concert, as well as perhaps the dissonance between words and images.
So, with this picture, at our side, I think it's useful just to think about why abstraction now. Why abstraction by an artist who is a woman now? And to think in terms of our setting here about New York and of course, the times from seventy/sixty years ago and abstraction, abstract expressionism, starting here.
I think of one artist in particular, just to start things off with today, Helen Frankenthaler, as perhaps embodying a little bit about what abstraction. To some extent, what Sarah's own version of abstraction might be about. So I remember, Helen Frankenthaler felt that her work should be effortless or should appear effortless. And that caused a lot of misunderstanding in her time. Some of her good friends Grace Hartigan, for example, really felt that a work of art to be a proper work of art had to have a lot of struggle about it. It should really be the kind of raw record of a kind of desperate confrontation that, ideally would have been made in a fifth floor walkup apartment in lower Manhattan with cold water only in the midst of coffee driven cycles of despair and exultation. Helen wasn't about that, she would come in, at her best, spend a few hours in the studio and there'd be something and then she would not want to touch it.
What Helen said is “the lightest touch is the hardest of all”. That’s a phrase, I think that resonates for me when I think of Sarah's paintings. She's told me and perhaps it's evident in this picture and the other ones here that, anytime she begins to work in angst about one of these things, she knows it's off and it's gone, gone bad. And that doesn't happen very often. But what she's trying to do is make works as it were kind of fluidly, effortlessly, quickly and without struggle, which I'll just hold out tends to be our perennial sign of like, artistic integrity and seriousness.
So right away, there's this notion of like, no struggle is serious. And you could add, like beauty is serious too. I think this is something of the question or the open proposition that her work puts before us, like these are all are made during COVID. You know, some 60 works she's made in the past six months or so. All of these colorful works that she's been making are all from the COVID time. But if they're serious, which they are, it's not because they're seriously commenting on the times or deigning to be dark and grim and melancholy. It's exactly the opposite.
So there is that, and I think she has that in common with Helen Frankenthaler. The notion of doing things without effort, which are just, very fluidly, actually reminded me while I was walking around today, thinking of my father, who was a poet. He was from New York, so I'm kind of communing with him a little bit from beyond the grave, on this visit, and he had a poem called Lion and Honeycomb, which is about writing poetry. And he described it, I mentioned this to Sarah, that a poem ideally should be like a child skipping stones. It should just be easy like that. And I think that comes to mind when we think about just the process here.
Sarah has a table in her garage in Northern California, sort of halfway between San Francisco and Palo Alto. And she has buckets and jugs of water, and sponges and so on, that's keeping the canvas wet. She’s working fast, she's moving around the 360 degrees of the table to just kind of keep the spontaneous reaction to the work or making of the work very present for her.
And that word present, I think a presence is key here. Because when we think about what does this kind of picture have to offer us now? Because you could say, well, this kind of painting habituate, a 60/70 years ago. Sure, Sarah's work is different but this is a different moment etcetera. But let's take seriously the idea that maybe it's still pertinent. That word presence is sort of kicked around a lot where I come from, which is academic art history, because everything is supposed to be about skeptical distance and kind of holier than thou suspicion about everything that savers of flowers, and gardens, and the human body. That all seems a little too lush and romantic and uncritical.
But I'm here to say, that, for me, I think I'm drawn to Sarah's work because the way it makes the world present and makes the artist’s feelings and sensations present strikes, an appealing note, a serious note. So the idea of working quickly, not belaboring things, not struggling is to try to get this presence here which is something that is immediate, that's fresh that offers something to the viewer. That continues to feel long after it's dry continues to feel wet so as if it's in process and is made by the beholder’s perception.
So that presence for Sarah is so much connected to her own body, not just imagisticly, but also in terms of the size of these pictures, which are really scaled to her body. I feel like there's some kind of weird way that they mirror you, I imagine you, you know, leaning over the table, and then they kind of are looking back at you.
And so again, things that seem often very discredited now because there's, if you'd like, a minimum of skepticism in these works. They are all in lush and romantic and very physical and sensuous. And they sort of remind me of how people used to talk, for example, about Morris Lewis’s paintings. A perceptive critic in the early 60’s wrote about some of Lewis's veils and unfurls. They kind of felt like the most embarrassing scenes in movies, where the violin music comes up and kiss, the people start to kiss and. But the critics point was it was praise, it was a compliment, you know.
I think there's a way that the kind of intense emotions for which we have emojis and then on up to, let's say, more complex significations of how we feel, are fine as kind of stand ins for this lush, intense, almost adolescent kind of genuineness that we all experience probably every day. But we rarely see it in works of art --So unavowedly, unapologetically.
And, that's what I recognize in Sarah's work. It's not about her feelings. it's not saying this is who I am, look at me, I suffer I live, I enjoy. If there's an italics in a word, like, in a phrase, like I enjoy it, the italicized word would be enjoy not I. This is what pleasure is or what sensation is or what sticking your face in kind of a garden might be in terms of the fragrance and the curves and the textures of the plants. All the things that if we saw someone doing that on the street, we might step to the other side of the street or something like that. Yet we all know, to have, in the phrase of a critic I like, an emotional truth.
So the artist is someone who actually is willing, not with bravado, but just because she is who she is to, to kind of name an emotional truth or to portray it without-- There's no editorial urging or commentary it but there it is. And I think that kind of modest honesty, is so refreshing, I think. As much as I might like, to as much as the next person to look at a work that is extremely, I love this piece by Josephine Meckseper, cerebral and difficult if you like.
I guess I'm blown away by romantic art. And I feel like it's not as though its day has passed. And we don't think like that anymore. The way I think of it is-- it's always present, always capable of being revived or brought before us by the intelligence and commitment of someone who is sincere. And then we recognize that art over and against our sense of what stylistically in tune or out of tune, or what's popular, or what's new, what's old, we just recognize it as having a kind of continual validity.
So the presence I spoke about, is that of Sarah making her work in the moment. So being true to her own sense of what it is to make the picture. Her own sense of what's fresh to her. what's emotionally truthful. but what's really even what's more riveting for me event and kind of gives me goosebumps is and I've talked with Sarah about this. It's like it's true for her whole to her whole life. Here in explaining that, Sarah would be the first to say is not about her.
It's not we're not dealing an autobiography, or anything like that it's the principle here is more the way a work of art portrays the whole some of the life of the person who made it such that we can experience the fact that we ourselves are not just sort of ruthlessly segregated, sort of temporarily segregated beings, who used to be children, then we became adolescence, etc. But we're actually living all those moments kind of continuously whether we realize it or not. I know Ruth Ann is nodding her head because I've seen pictures that RuthAnn made when she was five years old. And I've seen paintings she's making today and they're non repetitively related, for sure.
So, just with Sarah, I'll just say, and I asked her if I could bring this up. She said it was okay. But she was a star athlete in high school and in college. I mean, really a star athlete. She was a soccer player. And she was striker so, she was a goal scorer. And we're talking about you know, Final Four, Women’s Final Four.
Sarah Blaustein:
I think it was eight.
Alex Nemerov:
Sarah said to me, with total modesty, you can see how modest she is.
That she still remembers some of her best goals, like physically. She can remember how they were score. Did you score with your head with your left foot, right foot at all? She said oh all of them. Yeah.
What I want to say here, first of all, is that there's a kind of athletic muscle memory in this and the fluidity and no struggle. The skipping stones, is a part of that. It’s like, all that Sarah has ever been, let's take soccer, as an example, is present in these works. There's, you know, the fluid, athleticism is one thing. But I'm talking about more about memories and emotions that we have within us from all of the times of our life that stay with us whether we realize it or not, in which an artist is capable of portraying.
So, I use soccer as an example. But of course, there are many other things, if you like dark things or melancholy things that wind up being in these gestures, too. So when we talk about presence, I'm talking about the way we're all present. All parts of our lives are present for us all the time. And it's a good thing, we can't really keep track of that, or deny that, or repress that, otherwise, life would be an exceedingly difficult thing. And I'm not just saying that, because I joined the Guggenheim board, and you taught me about the real world.
I'm saying because even on my own, I would sense, like, No I don't want to be present to all times in my life all the time. No, thank you. But unfortunately, there's a framed artifact called a painting that is able to kind of distill. This is why there are artists to able to distill this sum of sensations into a kind of miraculous immediacy that we can experience every day.
So maybe the last thing I'll say about all this is maybe to come back to the COVID thing a little bit. It would be possible to think about these works once we know a little bit. To say that okay, this person made the art at this time, and it's about a kind of recovery of joy or possibility. You could almost conscript these paintings against their will into a narrative having to do with rather unpleasant phrases, to me at least, like self-care and like different kind of glib. Glib terms that we all use, but nonetheless have a kind of packaged feel to them about our emotions. That say, Okay, right, like, there is beauty in the world and so on. But I think there are a couple things I'll just say last that I feel for me militate against that, in these works.
One is the gravity of them. You know, just the sort of plummet of the central line and work like this. Literally implies a kind of gravity. Sarah has spoken about this to me. But I just think more than that, just metaphorically. This makes me think that beauty is grave. You know, like, you come upon a field with a blue stream kind of moving through it and seems to exist for a moment. For you alone. With the aster's on either side of the blue water. It does exist for you alone. And you made it in that moment. It's devastating. Because we're all mortal. When the world kind of is unconcealed like that, it's so startling to have the veils lifted, and to see suddenly how radiant, almost overwhelmingly so, the world is.
And I feel as though Sarah’s paintings, precisely because they go there to that place of deep feeling, without apology, have that same kind of startling radiance that field does. And that's a grave thing. you know, oh, isn't it beautiful? That's the glib way of saying it. Another way is to say, I have to step outside, I just read this poem. I'm sorry, I can't be with you right now. And in my trade, people say what a jerk. And are sort of stuck out or something like that. But in fact, it's kind of the opposite, it’s about a solidarity with other people that is based upon the way that we all share is that we all cannot speak of how devastating it is to be alive. I mean, devastating in the beautiful sense.
You know, that's why we have small talk and conversation and politeness and all kinds of mostly good things. But meanwhile, we're all kind of flowering. And thank goodness for artists who again say Oh, yeah, that is, that's a little bit closer to my heart of hearts, like to this sort of thrumming heartbeat of actually being alive.
And I'll just say last on that note, that these are, I was telling Sarah today, these are not just physical works, her body and the imagery and some of their metaphysical, they feel like there's a kind of grace to them too. That there's something religious in her way of working, which is very hermetic, Jennifer spoke about, Sarah's just making these works in her garage.
But in her method with the water, and so it feels very ritualistic. These are not just physical works. There’s a radiance here, as though we’re looking at visions of saints, not of the saints themselves, but of what they see when they behold the world ecstatically.
I think what's interesting, and I invite comments at this point, but it's interesting to me is again, how we all have been there, we all know those experiences. And this little one-night show is called The Call with that idea of being called, either by a work of art or just by an experience in life.
We all know that experience we've all had that experience. You know where you're at dinner and somehow the other person sees that you're not paying attention and you’re moved. It's not because you're watching the football game on the TV over their shoulder. It's because something epiphanic you know, in the James Joyce sense happened. We all know that that happens. It's a deep part of ourselves, but we don't acknowledge it. We don't avow it. It's easier to be smart I think. Easier to be distanced and perspectival about everything. And I guess in my teaching, as well as tonight, through Sarah's paintings and through Jennifer's hospitality, I feel I'm also speaking in those terms, you know that there is such a thing as emotional truth, and kind of being present in the world. Thank you.
Alexander Nemerov:
Thank you all for being here. I'll speak for just a very few minutes. And then hopefully we can have some time for questions. I'm really grateful for you all being here, and also, of course, to Jennifer for hosting us. And really, it's a special occasion beyond what I could have dreamed up because actually, I met Sarah at an event in Palo Alto a few years ago. And it just struck me and perhaps you'll forgive the sort of notion I have of how important art history is to art. Because you might say art history is not important to art at all, really, it's ancillary to it, but I felt like wow, this is a serious painter who, if she works steadfastly and gravely and joyously all by herself, it would be nice for there to be an event around her work. So, I asked her if she wanted to do a salon where, where I would talk about her work, and, and we agreed, and then COVID happened and it didn't happen. And then once things began to loosen up a little bit earlier this year, then we did have one of these events.
And this is the second one and it's in the spirit of supporting a contemporary artist, but I also think, in the spirit of, what is the relation between words and images, words and works of art, which we might all grant there's some purpose or impact fullness to that. But it can also seem that they're really opposites too. We want people who are talking too loudly at the museum, and I'm sure I'm have been one of those people talking too loudly to shut up. I think what I'm about to say is a little bit awkward in the name of the concert, as well as perhaps the dissonance between words and images.
So, with this picture, at our side, I think it's useful just to think about why abstraction now. Why abstraction by an artist who is a woman now? And to think in terms of our setting here about New York and of course, the times from seventy/sixty years ago and abstraction, abstract expressionism, starting here.
I think of one artist in particular, just to start things off with today, Helen Frankenthaler, as perhaps embodying a little bit about what abstraction. To some extent, what Sarah's own version of abstraction might be about. So I remember, Helen Frankenthaler felt that her work should be effortless or should appear effortless. And that caused a lot of misunderstanding in her time. Some of her good friends Grace Hartigan, for example, really felt that a work of art to be a proper work of art had to have a lot of struggle about it. It should really be the kind of raw record of a kind of desperate confrontation that, ideally would have been made in a fifth floor walkup apartment in lower Manhattan with cold water only in the midst of coffee driven cycles of despair and exultation. Helen wasn't about that, she would come in, at her best, spend a few hours in the studio and there'd be something and then she would not want to touch it.
What Helen said is “the lightest touch is the hardest of all”. That’s a phrase, I think that resonates for me when I think of Sarah's paintings. She's told me and perhaps it's evident in this picture and the other ones here that, anytime she begins to work in angst about one of these things, she knows it's off and it's gone, gone bad. And that doesn't happen very often. But what she's trying to do is make works as it were kind of fluidly, effortlessly, quickly and without struggle, which I'll just hold out tends to be our perennial sign of like, artistic integrity and seriousness.
So right away, there's this notion of like, no struggle is serious. And you could add, like beauty is serious too. I think this is something of the question or the open proposition that her work puts before us, like these are all are made during COVID. You know, some 60 works she's made in the past six months or so. All of these colorful works that she's been making are all from the COVID time. But if they're serious, which they are, it's not because they're seriously commenting on the times or deigning to be dark and grim and melancholy. It's exactly the opposite.
So there is that, and I think she has that in common with Helen Frankenthaler. The notion of doing things without effort, which are just, very fluidly, actually reminded me while I was walking around today, thinking of my father, who was a poet. He was from New York, so I'm kind of communing with him a little bit from beyond the grave, on this visit, and he had a poem called Lion and Honeycomb, which is about writing poetry. And he described it, I mentioned this to Sarah, that a poem ideally should be like a child skipping stones. It should just be easy like that. And I think that comes to mind when we think about just the process here.
Sarah has a table in her garage in Northern California, sort of halfway between San Francisco and Palo Alto. And she has buckets and jugs of water, and sponges and so on, that's keeping the canvas wet. She’s working fast, she's moving around the 360 degrees of the table to just kind of keep the spontaneous reaction to the work or making of the work very present for her.
And that word present, I think a presence is key here. Because when we think about what does this kind of picture have to offer us now? Because you could say, well, this kind of painting habituate, a 60/70 years ago. Sure, Sarah's work is different but this is a different moment etcetera. But let's take seriously the idea that maybe it's still pertinent. That word presence is sort of kicked around a lot where I come from, which is academic art history, because everything is supposed to be about skeptical distance and kind of holier than thou suspicion about everything that savers of flowers, and gardens, and the human body. That all seems a little too lush and romantic and uncritical.
But I'm here to say, that, for me, I think I'm drawn to Sarah's work because the way it makes the world present and makes the artist’s feelings and sensations present strikes, an appealing note, a serious note. So the idea of working quickly, not belaboring things, not struggling is to try to get this presence here which is something that is immediate, that's fresh that offers something to the viewer. That continues to feel long after it's dry continues to feel wet so as if it's in process and is made by the beholder’s perception.
So that presence for Sarah is so much connected to her own body, not just imagisticly, but also in terms of the size of these pictures, which are really scaled to her body. I feel like there's some kind of weird way that they mirror you, I imagine you, you know, leaning over the table, and then they kind of are looking back at you.
And so again, things that seem often very discredited now because there's, if you'd like, a minimum of skepticism in these works. They are all in lush and romantic and very physical and sensuous. And they sort of remind me of how people used to talk, for example, about Morris Lewis’s paintings. A perceptive critic in the early 60’s wrote about some of Lewis's veils and unfurls. They kind of felt like the most embarrassing scenes in movies, where the violin music comes up and kiss, the people start to kiss and. But the critics point was it was praise, it was a compliment, you know.
I think there's a way that the kind of intense emotions for which we have emojis and then on up to, let's say, more complex significations of how we feel, are fine as kind of stand ins for this lush, intense, almost adolescent kind of genuineness that we all experience probably every day. But we rarely see it in works of art --So unavowedly, unapologetically.
And, that's what I recognize in Sarah's work. It's not about her feelings. it's not saying this is who I am, look at me, I suffer I live, I enjoy. If there's an italics in a word, like, in a phrase, like I enjoy it, the italicized word would be enjoy not I. This is what pleasure is or what sensation is or what sticking your face in kind of a garden might be in terms of the fragrance and the curves and the textures of the plants. All the things that if we saw someone doing that on the street, we might step to the other side of the street or something like that. Yet we all know, to have, in the phrase of a critic I like, an emotional truth.
So the artist is someone who actually is willing, not with bravado, but just because she is who she is to, to kind of name an emotional truth or to portray it without-- There's no editorial urging or commentary it but there it is. And I think that kind of modest honesty, is so refreshing, I think. As much as I might like, to as much as the next person to look at a work that is extremely, I love this piece by Josephine Meckseper, cerebral and difficult if you like.
I guess I'm blown away by romantic art. And I feel like it's not as though its day has passed. And we don't think like that anymore. The way I think of it is-- it's always present, always capable of being revived or brought before us by the intelligence and commitment of someone who is sincere. And then we recognize that art over and against our sense of what stylistically in tune or out of tune, or what's popular, or what's new, what's old, we just recognize it as having a kind of continual validity.
So the presence I spoke about, is that of Sarah making her work in the moment. So being true to her own sense of what it is to make the picture. Her own sense of what's fresh to her. what's emotionally truthful. but what's really even what's more riveting for me event and kind of gives me goosebumps is and I've talked with Sarah about this. It's like it's true for her whole to her whole life. Here in explaining that, Sarah would be the first to say is not about her.
It's not we're not dealing an autobiography, or anything like that it's the principle here is more the way a work of art portrays the whole some of the life of the person who made it such that we can experience the fact that we ourselves are not just sort of ruthlessly segregated, sort of temporarily segregated beings, who used to be children, then we became adolescence, etc. But we're actually living all those moments kind of continuously whether we realize it or not. I know Ruth Ann is nodding her head because I've seen pictures that RuthAnn made when she was five years old. And I've seen paintings she's making today and they're non repetitively related, for sure.
So, just with Sarah, I'll just say, and I asked her if I could bring this up. She said it was okay. But she was a star athlete in high school and in college. I mean, really a star athlete. She was a soccer player. And she was striker so, she was a goal scorer. And we're talking about you know, Final Four, Women’s Final Four.
Sarah Blaustein:
I think it was eight.
Alex Nemerov:
Sarah said to me, with total modesty, you can see how modest she is.
That she still remembers some of her best goals, like physically. She can remember how they were score. Did you score with your head with your left foot, right foot at all? She said oh all of them. Yeah.
What I want to say here, first of all, is that there's a kind of athletic muscle memory in this and the fluidity and no struggle. The skipping stones, is a part of that. It’s like, all that Sarah has ever been, let's take soccer, as an example, is present in these works. There's, you know, the fluid, athleticism is one thing. But I'm talking about more about memories and emotions that we have within us from all of the times of our life that stay with us whether we realize it or not, in which an artist is capable of portraying.
So, I use soccer as an example. But of course, there are many other things, if you like dark things or melancholy things that wind up being in these gestures, too. So when we talk about presence, I'm talking about the way we're all present. All parts of our lives are present for us all the time. And it's a good thing, we can't really keep track of that, or deny that, or repress that, otherwise, life would be an exceedingly difficult thing. And I'm not just saying that, because I joined the Guggenheim board, and you taught me about the real world.
I'm saying because even on my own, I would sense, like, No I don't want to be present to all times in my life all the time. No, thank you. But unfortunately, there's a framed artifact called a painting that is able to kind of distill. This is why there are artists to able to distill this sum of sensations into a kind of miraculous immediacy that we can experience every day.
So maybe the last thing I'll say about all this is maybe to come back to the COVID thing a little bit. It would be possible to think about these works once we know a little bit. To say that okay, this person made the art at this time, and it's about a kind of recovery of joy or possibility. You could almost conscript these paintings against their will into a narrative having to do with rather unpleasant phrases, to me at least, like self-care and like different kind of glib. Glib terms that we all use, but nonetheless have a kind of packaged feel to them about our emotions. That say, Okay, right, like, there is beauty in the world and so on. But I think there are a couple things I'll just say last that I feel for me militate against that, in these works.
One is the gravity of them. You know, just the sort of plummet of the central line and work like this. Literally implies a kind of gravity. Sarah has spoken about this to me. But I just think more than that, just metaphorically. This makes me think that beauty is grave. You know, like, you come upon a field with a blue stream kind of moving through it and seems to exist for a moment. For you alone. With the aster's on either side of the blue water. It does exist for you alone. And you made it in that moment. It's devastating. Because we're all mortal. When the world kind of is unconcealed like that, it's so startling to have the veils lifted, and to see suddenly how radiant, almost overwhelmingly so, the world is.
And I feel as though Sarah’s paintings, precisely because they go there to that place of deep feeling, without apology, have that same kind of startling radiance that field does. And that's a grave thing. you know, oh, isn't it beautiful? That's the glib way of saying it. Another way is to say, I have to step outside, I just read this poem. I'm sorry, I can't be with you right now. And in my trade, people say what a jerk. And are sort of stuck out or something like that. But in fact, it's kind of the opposite, it’s about a solidarity with other people that is based upon the way that we all share is that we all cannot speak of how devastating it is to be alive. I mean, devastating in the beautiful sense.
You know, that's why we have small talk and conversation and politeness and all kinds of mostly good things. But meanwhile, we're all kind of flowering. And thank goodness for artists who again say Oh, yeah, that is, that's a little bit closer to my heart of hearts, like to this sort of thrumming heartbeat of actually being alive.
And I'll just say last on that note, that these are, I was telling Sarah today, these are not just physical works, her body and the imagery and some of their metaphysical, they feel like there's a kind of grace to them too. That there's something religious in her way of working, which is very hermetic, Jennifer spoke about, Sarah's just making these works in her garage.
But in her method with the water, and so it feels very ritualistic. These are not just physical works. There’s a radiance here, as though we’re looking at visions of saints, not of the saints themselves, but of what they see when they behold the world ecstatically.
I think what's interesting, and I invite comments at this point, but it's interesting to me is again, how we all have been there, we all know those experiences. And this little one-night show is called The Call with that idea of being called, either by a work of art or just by an experience in life.
We all know that experience we've all had that experience. You know where you're at dinner and somehow the other person sees that you're not paying attention and you’re moved. It's not because you're watching the football game on the TV over their shoulder. It's because something epiphanic you know, in the James Joyce sense happened. We all know that that happens. It's a deep part of ourselves, but we don't acknowledge it. We don't avow it. It's easier to be smart I think. Easier to be distanced and perspectival about everything. And I guess in my teaching, as well as tonight, through Sarah's paintings and through Jennifer's hospitality, I feel I'm also speaking in those terms, you know that there is such a thing as emotional truth, and kind of being present in the world. Thank you.