RECAP: DAY 3 :: Sunday, March 25

Today we went to Brooklyn to visit the studio of artist David Kramer and to see some of the galleries in Williamsburg.

First of all, I absolutely loved David Kramer. It was cook to get into the mind of “the starving artist.” Although I can understand that he’s a bit of a joker, it was interesting to hear his take on “the system” being the galleries, curators, artists, critics, etc. His video pieces were funny. I especially liked “It’s so hard to be an artist” and his confessional style. I definitely sympathized with his satirical plight of his art studio exploding in the wake of 9/11.

His drawings were cool. They were satirical and text-based pieces that showed his disillusionment with the notion of the American lifestyle he had formed from the media and culture during his childhood. There was something fun and refreshing about his style. I love text-based works most of the time, and a lot of his pieces worked for me. A lot of them reminded me of ads from and “American Ads of the 50s” I have. Maybe that’s why I liked them. They seemed to comment and borrow from advertising, which is my focus of study. I l also liked the way he explained his work and his process. It was cool to see how he works across mediums. His paintings were cool. What I found most interesting was how he revealed his thoughts about painting, and how he had some sort of reverence for painting with a capital “P”. Sitting and listening to his Woody Allen- like dialogue I agreed with his quote, “The job of an artist is to confuse yourself.” Very true.

After the stop at Kramer’s we looked at some galleries in Williamsburg. I thought the area itself was a neat enclave. Nothing really stuck out to me of the work we saw. Some stuff with yarn. A bird on a stack of broken glass. A light piece with two two-way mirrors was kind of neat. The only one I really remembered was "Fictional Neighbors" by Gerard Williams mostly because it was kind of offbeat.

We had the rest of the day to head to Brooklyn. I (um…needing time to process the day’s art) headed to a Irish pub (we were told the best in the area) to down a few beers and watch the Duck game. We failed to advance past Florida, but the it the beer was good.