Studio visit: Brece Honeycutt

Dara and James write:

The history of modern art features many groundbreaking collaborations between artists and poets. "Inventing Abstraction," the exhibition now on view at the Museum of Modern Art, includes several examples of such collaborations. One favorite is La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, by the poet Blaise Cendrars and the painter Sonia Delaunay. More recently there was Breath, a collaboration in the early 1980s between the sculptor Christopher Wilmarth and the poet Frederick Morgan, who had translated seven poems by Mallarmé. Poets House maintains a collection of many additional examples. 

The Bushwick nonprofit Norte Maar, which is dedicated to "collaborative projects in the arts," has now underwritten a number of publications bringing artists and poets together. When the artist Brece Honeycutt was selected for an upcoming project, she approached Dara to contribute original poetry (Brece had heard Dara read at Norte Maar's celebration of John Cage.) Their book is slated for publication this spring. 

As Brece works through ideas for the book, she welcomed us at her studio in Sheffield, Massachusetts. 

Brece works in an antique barn that was transported from Vermont and recently reclad in a new timber facade. The light above was repurposed from a nearby train station. (All photographs by James Panero.)

The light-filled workspace overlooks a small pond that used to be the town's skating rink.

Brece works in a variety of media. Spools of yarn, vintage washboards, books on flowers, and papery wasps nests are all integrated into her diverse practice.  

Brece has many projects going on in her studio. Here she is at her loom creating a rag rug.

Brece spins and knits her own fiber sculptures. 

For our collaboration, Brece is using various plants, vegetables, and objects to hand dye paper. 

Brece makes her own dyes from leaves and plants she has collected in the area. Here the leaves are soaking in water, which will be used to stain the pages. 

Goldenrod, drying in the attic, will be used for additional dyes. 

Once Brece has the stains, she adds additional objects as resists and presses the pages together overnight. When she opens them up, she discovers how the foliage and other elements have left their marks on the paper. 

On one wall Brece has pinned prototypes for the book. Here Brece has written out one of Dara's poems on hand-made paper (above) and hand-stitched the binding of some pages (below). Dara and Brece are experimenting with different page formats and working through ideas of how best to translate Brece's handmade book art to multiple production. 

Brece and Dara look over pages in production. Brece's stand-along paper sculptures hang on the back wall.

A panorama of Brece's studio. 

The Takeaway: The Armory Show at 100

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) by Marcel Duchamp, a centerpiece of the 1913 Armory Show

James writes:

It was a pleasure to discuss the centenary of the 1913 Armory Show with John Hockenberry and Barbara Haskell on NPR's The Takeaway.

This Sunday will mark 100 years to the day that this groundbreaking show of European and American modernism opened its doors at the Lexington Avenue Armory in New York. I wrote about its legacy in The New Criterion in December.

What should we do to celebrate? This weekend The Montclair Art Museum will open its survey of the American art and artists in the Armory Show. And this Friday, the outer-borough art scene of Bushwick, Brooklyn will stay open late for Beatnite, where ten alternative spaces will play host to a moveable feast of contemporary art followed by an open after-party.

The anniversary of the 1913 Armory Show is the 4th of July of the arts, and I plan to celebrate with these two vital events.

Hogwash, abstract & the rest: an exchange

Interior of the 1913 Armory Show

THE NEW CRITERION
February 2013

Hogwash, abstract & the rest: an exchange

To the Editors:

It mystifies me that, continuing under the editorship of Roger Kimball as previously under that of Hilton Kramer, The New Criterion persists in intermittently admiring in the visual arts the very decline and fall of culture that it so well and rightly militates against in government, politics, theater, music, and the media. Not seven pages after the editor, in his obituary “Jacques Barzun, 1907–2012” (The New Criterion, December 2012), gives with one hand by approving of Jacques Barzun’s apt indictment of the modern art scene—“ ‘When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent’ ” and suffers “a progressive loss of resistance to humbug”—James Panero takes away with the other hand in a review that sets up the Armory Show (“The Armory Show at 100”) as embodying the work of “like-minded souls who helped nurture and propagate a renewed vision for culture.” “Renewed vision for culture”? Whom is he kidding? The Armory Show itself was the beginning of that end of art of which even The New Criterion disapproves.

Though Panero seconds Barzun in objecting to the present-day “professionalized museum class [that] dictates the story of art to an increasingly passive public,” he praises the “energy” of the Armory Show, which consisted of what he calls a “resurgence in art [that captured] the vital spirit of the times” in revolt against “the dry bones of a dead art.” He fails to see the modern decay as the inevitable fruit of the deracination set in motion by the radically revolutionary Armory generation. Is it now possible to deny that Mondrian, Kandinsky, Brancusi, and Duchamp have led the art troops onward and downward inevitably through Pollock, Moore, and Warhol to the present-day depravities that Barzun rightly deplores? Does a legitimate critique of late nineteenth-century academic formalism require Panero to lionize the Armory as a “vital” reaction to it when the show, despite displaying some works admittedly excellent of their kind, initiated the long succession of spiritually empty self-absorptions marching toward oblivion—abstract expressionism, pop, op, conceptual art, postmodernism, and blah, blah, blah?

Look, we’re all fighting losing battles here, complaining of a decay of culture that no amount of complaining but only vision could counteract, and there is no secret storehouse from which vision might be stolen. It comes, like the inspiration of the muse, in its own time in its own mysterious way. But can’t we at least get together in The New Criterion and agree that the extravagant claims for twentieth-century abstract art and the rest were hogwash?

Gideon Rappaport, Ph.D.
San Diego, California

Armory Show poster, 1913

James Panero replies:

Dr. Rappaport, Ph.D., is entitled not to like “twentieth-century abstract art and the rest,” just as an admirer of Mozart may find distasteful the innovations of Beethoven. This is true even as some of us believe, as I do, that modern forms of aesthetic experience, rather than contributing to the “decline and fall of culture,” can in fact offer comfort, reflection, and beauty that mitigate against this decline.

Dr. Rappaport is not entitled to insinuate, however, that his particular taste should dictate ours, or, worse, that a reductive reading of history should dictate to us all. The New Criterion is a magazine about critical distinctions. This is why we can identify differences among “Mondrian, Kandinsky, Brancusi, and Duchamp . . . through Pollock, Moore, and Warhol” in a way that Dr. Rappaport seems unable to do. We will furthermore defend these critical distinctions from the mindsets that see artistic achievement only in black and white.

On the subject of the 1913 Armory Show: It says something about this particular achievement that the discussion of modern art it inspired continues today. We may come down on different sides of the conversation, but I hope we can agree with the Armory’s mission statement: “We do not believe that any artist has discovered or ever will discover the only way to create beauty.” For this reason we should consider art broadly and find the joys in its contemplation.