Barbara Brody Avnet's drawings are so elaborately and insistently decorative as to be (sometimes) abstract. They're not all like this, but the ones I admire most are. Some of the works you can view on her web site have been recently exhibited. I've had the pleasure of seeing the work right there in her studio. If you click on her inspirations link, you'll have the sense that in some instances the studio itself (gorgeous) marks the start of the work. Here is an artist with a constant aesthetic sensibility: the way she lives.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
so decorative as to be abstract
Barbara Brody Avnet's drawings are so elaborately and insistently decorative as to be (sometimes) abstract. They're not all like this, but the ones I admire most are. Some of the works you can view on her web site have been recently exhibited. I've had the pleasure of seeing the work right there in her studio. If you click on her inspirations link, you'll have the sense that in some instances the studio itself (gorgeous) marks the start of the work. Here is an artist with a constant aesthetic sensibility: the way she lives.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
