New York City Garbage is Some of the Best Art /  by Mirena Rhee

I've always been in awe of New York City garbage, it's unlike any other place because I've had garbage in California and Florida and Cincinnati but in New York, there are rarely back alleys so everything is on the curb.

The cost of real estate is so high that it makes absolutely no sense to store anything at home, storage units and moving are very expensive. So a lot of the time, it's the easiest to put things you don't need on the curb. So other people who need them could take them home.

My friend furnished his entire studio from the garbage, including his work table, cabinets, stretcher bars and even canvases that he repurposed and repainted.

I didn't have any furniture in my apartment to begin with, but when I needed something, I took it from the garbage.

I moved my entire San Francisco apartment to New York City and then gradually shed stuff as I moved around the city. Before and after every move, I put stuff on the sidewalk.

Heavy hand-woven wool carpets I had bought in Bulgaria and schlepped all the way to my house in San Francisco and then to New York all of a sudden became useless and a huge burden. I had nowhere to store them, and selling them seemed like a big project that I didn't want to undertake compared to what I would make if I simply worked the same amount of time.

It's really surprising that when time and space are at a premium, a lot of stuff immediately shifts in value, and once prized possessions become burdensome to even give away for free.

There are many varieties of garbage on the curb, entire living rooms with cabinets and entertainment centers and lamps, entire bedrooms with beds and mattresses, and children's toys. There's beautiful packaging around Christmas and New Year's. And sometimes there are mountains of boxes and bags piled higher than a human for almost a city block.

Many of these were like spontaneous installations. I was really fascinated with photographing them. Many times, I observed arrangements that were more interesting than what was in the galleries in Chelsea.

Once I saw a show of Arte Povera, or poor art from Italy, at Hauser and Wirth on 22nd street. It was from the '60s. It was one of the most beautiful garbage I had ever seen. Italy is one of the most talented nations on earth, art architecture fashion cars opera, and it seems, garbage.

I did very little work transforming garbage objects into artworks because what was interesting to me was the unadulterated spontaneity of garbage. But sometimes I got inspired by specific objects I found.

Once I found a pristine tomato red sled, another time I found a thrown-away painting where the back looked much better than what was on the front. I painted the back white and hung apple peels on the wire. The apple peels looked very much like strange hieroglyphs made out of my favorite food, so I called the piece apple peels kanji, after my favorite minimalist country, Japan.

There isn't any garbage in Japan! Nah, just kidding. Of course, there is, but you have to look for it. I remember going at night to a seedy part of Tokyo, if there is such a thing, it may have been Akihabara, yeah, there was garbage in the street.

I don't know about garbage, but I remember sitting at a cafe in Tokyo once, and looking out and across the street, there was a teenager talking on the phone, pacing back and forth, and at one point he bowed, to whoever he was talking to on the phone. I swear.

One summer, I spent a month cleaning my local park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I spent a lot of time collecting garbage and emptying trash cans. It was back-breaking work, but I ended up meeting a lot of my Polish neighbors who came out to help, and talked to the people in the park. Some park guests used me for improvised therapy sessions, and one customer of the men’s restroom used my sunglasses instead of the broken mirror to fix his hair.

My idea for Zero Art came to me when I saw people carrying doggie bags and small garbage bags and randomly cleaning the park. What if people collected found objects in small bags, arranged them into mini installations, and took nice pictures? Ephemeral and useful Zero Art.

A friend and I once had the idea to go around and take pictures of ourselves getting comfortable in garbage bedrooms on curbs around Manhattan. We'd pretend to drink coffee in a curbside living room, we'd photograph ourselves against all kinds of trash, and make spontaneous art pieces out of it.

I always wonder about the lives of objects. People hoard objects and carefully care for them in their homes. And then all of a sudden, one day these objects are not needed anymore and then end up on the curb. An object was once very useful and beautiful and had a great relationship with its owner. It was cared for and carefully dusted. Years would pass, and the object would become a witness to many life events in a home. There was always a special purpose in how it was brought in, why it was brought in, how it was picked, and how it was used. Many gifts and family heirlooms, loved for a long time and with long histories inevitably land in the garbage.

There are very few generational mansions with stuff in the US. Even Grand houses often get sold and resold and redecorated, and the old stuff gets thrown out.

Once during the pandemic, I saw a picture of Gwyneth Paltrow posing with a mask on a plane, and I thought why don’t they put up pictures of the street sweepers of New York City and the garbage men who continue to collect our trash and sweep our streets despite the whole world going inside.

I remember vividly that I couldn't sell my taekwondo gear for some reason. I'm not sure why I couldn't push it through eBay or Craigslist. I had become a yellow belt at taekwondo when I lived in the suburbs of San Francisco and had bought all the responsible gear, including shin guards and chest guards. In New York, I had to fight for my life and art, so I had no time to fight people's shins anymore. I just left them all on the street in Brooklyn. It became just like one of my installations.

Salvador Dali goes to an abstract painting exhibition /  by Mirena Rhee

“In 1936, in Paris, I visited an exhibition of so-called abstract painting in the company of the late Maurice Heine, the erudite specialist on the Marquis de Sade, and he noticed that during the whole visit my eyes kept coming back to a corner of the exposition room in which no work was being exhibited. “You seem to be systematically avoiding looking at the paintings,” Heine said to me, “It's as though you were obsessed by something invisible!” “It's nothing invisible,” I replied to reassurehim, “I just can't help looking at that door—it is so well painted. It is by far the best painted thing in the whole exposition."“

A Little Note on Creating /  by Mirena Rhee

The idea is that there are certain phases to creating anything at all. Whether you weave a basket, whether you create anything really out there, you need all these phases to be completed, or to be looked at at least. Even if you weave a basket, you need a blueprint, even if it's a drawing with a stick in the sand. Even if you do a painting, even if you don't have an idea for a painting, and you have a procedural way of approaching art. Say you have an emotional way of creating, even in these circumstances, even in instances where you have an emotional way of creating, even in those instances, you need a blueprint. You need a modus operandi. You need that kind of flower, the lotus in your hand, in your head. So out of this cloud of ideas, you basically distill something. Whether it's a product, whether it's an idea or a very concrete thing, object. You need these facets, and you need to consider them.

Why I'm saying this is because any time I look at a project, commercial or fine art, where I need certainty, but I also need this innocence, a wobble of sorts. Anytime I'm about to create something, I hold this in my mind, where is this thing, where am I standing on that little schematic.

List of Colours Unsuitable for Artistic Painting by Salvador Dali /  by Mirena Rhee

List of Colours Unsuitable for Artistic Painting*

COCHINEAL CARMINE

CARMINE LAKE

ROASTED MADDER-LAKE

REDWOOD LAKE

CHROME YELLOW

LAQUE DE GAUDE

BROWN PINK

INDIAN YELLOW

STRONTIANE YELLOW

SCHWEINFURT GREEN

CINNABAR GREEN

GREEN LAKE

MALACHITE GREEN

MINERAL BLUE

PRUSSIAN BLUE

ENGLISH SKY BLUE

ZINC YELLOW

YELLOW ANTIMONY

RAW SIENNA

TERRE VERTE OR VERONA EARTH

GREEN OCHRES

EMERALD GREEN

PARIS GREEN

SCHEELE GREEN

VIOLET LAKE

RAW UMBER

BITUMEN

EGYPTIAN MUMMY

IVORY BROWN

BURNT UMBER

List of Permanent Colours Which Can be Used with Confidence by Salvador Dali /  by Mirena Rhee

List of Permanent Colours Which Can be Used with Confidence*

BLANC D'ARGENT—Possesses the secret of terrestrial and celestial opacities.

It is the Jupiter of colours.

LIGHT (ENGLISH) RED

MARS RED

VENETIAN RED—Possesses the secret of everything that is biological.

It is the Adam and Eve of colours.

INDIAN RED

PERMANENT MADDER-CARMINE

MADDER LAKES

ROSE AND RED (Unroasted)

BURNT SIENNA

MARS ORANGE

CADMIUM (in Orange and Yellow shades) —Possesses the secret of solar time. It is the Chrones of colours.

MARS YELLOW

AUREOLIN—To be used for everything that is to shine. It is the gold and the god Mercury of colours.

TRANSPARENT YELLOW

ITALIAN EARTH

PURIFIED YELLOW OCHRE

VERONESE GREEN—Possesses the secret of everything that is born from the sea. It is the Venus of colours.

CELADON GREEN

LAMORINIERE GREEN

LIGHT OLIVE GREEN

"MARIE COLLART” GREEN—Possesses the secret of everything that is vegetal and humid. It is the river-nymphs of colours.

COBALT BLUE COERULEUM BLUE

REAL ULTRAMARINE

GUIMET'S BLUE

COBALT VIOLET

MARS VIOLET

BROWN OCHRE

MARS BROWN

TRANSPARENT BROWN

CASSEL EARTH

BLUE BLACK

IVORY BLACK

On Art And Government /  by Mirena Rhee

Just like Salvador Dali says I basically used New York City to train my retina. He calls this the historical retina. Historical retina is very important.

In Silicon Valley, I was able to train my retina first on the best of commercial work, work with really great people, and second, I made some money, so I was able to visit the greatest museums in the world in person.

I think the biggest mistake tech people make is that they don't see much art, and they don't understand art which is terrible. Art can only be done in person, the screen is not the way to consume art.

Music, just like Salvador Dali says, is not really the greatest art because it doesn't employ the greatest organ, which is the eye. Music is an inferior art.

Throughout history, influential people understood art very well, they used art and architecture as part of their influence and understanding of the world.

Tech people try to understand machines. They do not concern themselves much with 1. Art and 2. The public good. Which I think are quite related.

Some very talented business people promise a future of abundance but we already have abundance because we are the richest country in the world. You go to New York City and see all the empty real estate and all the empty stores and then you go and see all the terrible homeless shelters where more than 100,000 children suffer being homeless. I don't see a reason why we can't reconcile the fact that we're the richest ever and the fact that more than ever, there are people who need help.

Of course, just like Martin Luther King Jr. viewed employment as a fundamental right and a cornerstone of human dignity, social justice means jobs. There will never be social justice without enough jobs, and this is what the politicians get wrong.

Politicians always just want to get elected so they think that social justice means more politics. In America, on top of that, we have campaign financing which is directly like a market economy for politicians. They only have an incentive and are beholden to the money.

Politicians have never been about the good of society. I think we should abolish politicians and strive for absolute and direct democracy. I think Athenian democracy should be the way we govern ourselves, of course, sans the slavery.

I think any average American will be able to perform any government job just as well as any other. So I really like the idea of not electing or appointing public servants but letting random people serve. In that way, we will avoid people getting entrenched in public service.

Five thoughts on art by Salvador Dali /  by Mirena Rhee

Five thoughts on art

1. The work of art must impress you without touching you.

2. If the classics are cold, it is because their flame is eternal.

3. The eclat of the romantics is that of a fire in a strawpile.

4. If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

5. Painting, as Leonardo da Vinci proved, is superior to all the other arts, because it is directed to the most noble and divine of all the organs, the eye. To compare the ear to the eye would be as absurd ae to compare the nose to the ear.

"Post-Cézannism” has erected into a system every one of the clumsinesses and the deficiencies of Cézanne and painted square mile after square mile of canvases with these defects. The defects of Cézanne, in his fundamentally honest character, were often consequences of his very virtues; but defects are never virtues! I can imagine the profound melancholy of the master of Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cézanne, when after having struggled so long to build a well-constructed apple on his canvas, possessed like a demon by the problem of relief, he had succeeded on the contrary only in painting it concave! Andinstead of keeping, as was his ambition, the “intact continuity” of the surface of his canvas, without making any concession to the illusory frivolities of verisimilitude, he finds himself in the end with a canvas frightfully lacking in consistency and filled with holes! With each new apple there is a new hole! Which, as the immortal Michel de Montaigne said in another connection, is “chier dans le panier et se le mettre sur la tête.”

If I say that this book is actually to be the book of justice, I must add that the eternity of this book will be that of its inexorable truth; for I shall be faithful to truth to the very marrow of the bones of aesthetics, and let the reader not be frightened at hearing them often cracking between the vigorous hands of my brain. Thus, let this be said: Modern painters having almost totally lost the technical tradition of the ancients, we can no longer do what we want to do. We only do “whatever comes out of us.” There is a Spanish proverb which defines the common people's reaction to a bad painter: “If it comes out with a beard, it will be Saint Anthony, and if it comes out without a beard it will be the Immaculate Conception.” Picasso, whose case is even more dramatic than Cézanne's (more gifted to begin with, destructive and anarchistic rather than constructive and patriarchal), has often quoted this proverb to me, taking it for his own and applying it as a devise to his own manner of painting. In other words, he does this on purpose: he knows perfectly well that white “enamel” for painting doors, which you buy at the corner store and with which he covers his canvas, will turn yellow within a year, like thenewspaper in his collages. Just as the anarchist who sets fire to a church is quite well aware that the effect of his act will be, not to preserve it, but rather to make it go up in flames.

The Catalonian sculptor Manolo, looking with bitterness at a statuette which he had just completed and which his friends—“modern art critics"—were praising to the skies, exclaimed philosophically, “You like only the things of mine which turn out badly, for what I wanted to do was a Venus, and all that came out was a toad!” Today the love of the defective is such that genius is recognized only in defects, and especially in ugliness. The moment a Venus resembles a toad, the contemporary pseudo-aesthetes exclaim, “It's powerful, it's human!” Certain it is that Raphaelesque perfections would pass totally unperceived before their eyes. Ingres yearned to paint like Raphael and only painted like Ingres; Raphael yearned to paint like the Ancients and exceeded them. There have been times when I silently admitted to myself, “I want to paint like Ingres,” and it turned out to be like Bouguereau. Nevertheless I irresistibly paint like Dali, which is already enormous, for of all contemporary painters I am the one who is most able to do what he wants —and who knows if some day I shall not without intending it be considered the Raphael of my period? But what needs to be said, and what I wish to say here, and what people will soon tire of hearing repeated, is that the moment has finally come for calling bread bread and wine wine; the beautiful beautiful, and the ugly ugly; defects defects and virtues virtues; and that the so-called modern painting, if it remains in history, will remain as an iconographic document, or be incorporated in a degenerate branch of decorative art, but never, whatever anyone may wish, as “Pictorial Art."

In 1936, in Paris, I visited an exhibition of so-called abstract painting in the company of the late Maurice Heine, the erudite specialist on the Marquis de Sade, and he noticed that during the whole visit my eyes kept coming back to a corner of the exposition room in which no work was being exhibited. “You seem to be systematically avoiding looking at the paintings,” Heine said to me, “It's as though you were obsessed by something invisible!” “It's nothing invisible,” I replied to reassurehim, “I just can't help looking at that door—it is so well painted. It is by far the best painted thing in the whole exposition."

This was rigorously true. None of the painters who had hung their canvases in this room would have been capable of painting that door. And on the other hand, the house painter who had painted the latter would have been able very creditably to copy any one of the paintings exhibited! I myself was quite overcome by that door, and I wondered, with genuine curiosity, how many layers of paint there were, what proportion of oil and turpentine, to have produced a surface so homogeneous, smooth and even, so noble in its material solidity, which had demanded a minimum of honest workmanship which none of the exhibiting artists came anywhere near possessing. Let us beware, then, of that kind of would-be painting, whether abstract or non-abstract, surrealist or existentialist, whatever may be the pseudo-philosophic label it bears, but which a painter of doors would be capable of reproducing and copying satisfactorily in less than a half hour. And the perspicacious reader cannot but be very grateful to me for confirming him in the suspicion which his wise prudence, as I assume, had already aroused in his ever-alert mind, namely, that the value of paintings that can be so easily imitated runs the risk of dropping below that of the very doors in question, even though these were not painted at all.

On the other hand, quite the contrary holds true for pictures painted according to the tradition of the ancients. I venture to affirm that such works become each day not only more precious because of the fact that they cannot be imitated, but also more living, more existing—if to exist is to act; for in contrast to the modern works which barely last a season, leaving a more imperceptible spiritual trace even than the collections of dressmakers, the works of the ancient masters are even now giving life to the painting of the near future, for it is they and only they who possess all the arts and all the prescience of magic. And while around us modern painting ages spiritually and materially, becoming so quickly outmoded, turning yellow, darkening, breaking out in cracks and all the stigmata of decrepitude, a painting of Raphael, for example the Saint George slaying the dragon, grows younger day by day, not only spiritually, to the point of appearing today as philosophically the most up-to-date, but also materially: for a well painted picture is the very contrary of the most beautiful ruins—each passing year, instead of impairing a little of its beauty, only adds to it; instead of tarnishing it time seems to give it a new and more subtle light. Every true connaisseur possesses the precise, intellectual appreciation of that “visual savor” which is added to every beautiful painting by the phenomenon, imponderable among imponderables, which is called “patina,” a phenomenon which I do not hesitate, this time, to call divine, since it is in the power of no man to reproduce it, being as it is the exclusive privilege of the god of time himself.

Where are the famous futurist paintings? It is curious to know that they died of old age twenty years ago. Raphael: there is a futurist painter, if by this one means that he will continue more and more to exert an active influence on the future! Yet history is tireless. Empires crumble. Extravagant changes of power and of will shake the world, accompanied by calm atomic explosions resembling idyllic mossy and mushroomy trees of a terrestrial paradise after all the hells of the heaven of the war just ended. All this is nothing compared to the patina of a beautiful painting! That is strength: a painting by Raphael or Vermeer remains immutable in the midst of the most totalitarian Capharnaums. Whatever the state, whether communist, monarchist or parachutist, all are alike in safeguarding the famous paintings as their most precious and their proudest heritage. What strength!

Salvador Dali visits a Modern Art Exhibition /  by Mirena Rhee

“In 1936, in Paris, I visited an exhibition of so-called abstract painting in the company of the late Maurice Heine, the erudite specialist on the Marquis de Sade, and he noticed that during the whole visit my eyes kept coming back to a corner of the exposition room in which no work was being exhibited. “You seem to be systematically avoiding looking at the paintings,” Heine said to me, “It's as though you were obsessed by something invisible!” “It's nothing invisible,” I replied to reassurehim, “I just can't help looking at that door—it is so well painted. It is by far the best painted thing in the whole exposition."

LIST OF COLORS UNSUITABLE FOR ARTISTIC PAINTING from the book of Jacques Blockx /  by Mirena Rhee

“Considering that it would be pointless to dwell at length on these colors, we will limit ourselves to pointing out those whose use is most widespread.

We will say, in substance, that among the coloring materials whose use we discourage, we include both those that rise too much in tone or that blacken, and those that fade or react with certain others by decomposing them. In a word, we reject any color that does not possess the qualities required to ensure complete stability in artistic painting.

We believe we must speak here, in a very particular way, about bitumen, which, as a pigment, is truly the worst material one could imagine. Bitumen acts on white, on madder lakes, and in general on all light toned colors laid over it, as tar would. That is to say, its oily component penetrates them and, over time, gives them a brownish tint. Bitumen never hardens. A relatively low heat softens it. It causes cracks that increase over the years, to the point of reaching several millimeters in width. We would wish for those of our readers who use this very pernicious substance to forget it entirely.

LIST OF COLORS UNSUITABLE FOR ARTISTIC PAINTING

Snow white.
Cochineal carmine.
Carmine lakes.
Calcined madder lakes.
Chrome yellows.

Note: Egyptian mummy has defects similar to those of bitumen.

Weld lake.
Stil de grain (buckthorn lake).
Indian yellow.
Zinc yellow.
Antimony yellow.
Raw sienna.
Green earth or Verona green.
Green ochres.
Paris green.
Scheele’s green.
Schweinfurt green.
Green cinnabars.
Green lakes.
Malachite green.
Cobalt green.
Mineral blue.
Prussian blue.
Violet lakes.
Umber.
Bitumen.
Egyptian mummy.
Ivory brown.

Many other colors could be added to this list, but since they are rarely prepared in oil, we do not think it necessary to mention them.”