Some Kind of Mind Thing
Off Paradise is pleased to present Some Kind of Mind Thing, a group exhibition featuring works by Clark Coolidge, Philip Guston, Olivia DiVecchia, Natasha Tiniacos, J Grabowski, Jason Morris, Bernadette Mayer, Colter Jacobsen and Cedar Sigo.
鈥淪ome kind of mind thing" is a phrase from the poet Clark Coolidge, quoted in Two Chairs on the Dance Floor. In a conversation with fellow poet John DeWitt, recently published in Distance No Object, 2020, Coolidge relates the remarkable wavelength he shared with the late artist Philip Guston, the unique collaboration that followed and their profound friendship during the last decade of the painter's life.
Shortly after being introduced at a crowded party in the early 1970s, Coolidge and Guston pulled up two chairs on the dance floor and began to talk. They talked some more. In fact, they never stopped and continued to talk for the next decade.
As Coolidge recalls, 鈥楾he first time we met, in the roaring context of a crowded Studio School New Year鈥檚 Party, he [Guston] soon said to me, 鈥淏ut of course words are your m茅tier.鈥� From there on there was no gulf between us as poet and painter.鈥� (Page ix, Philip Guston)
A frequent visitor to the Woodstock studio, Coolidge offered, as a poet, an immediate and unfettered response to Guston鈥檚 works. The artist reciprocated with his own unique responses to the poet's writings, and thus began a rich dialogue for four hands, resulting in what Guston called Poem-Pictures. A decade after Guston鈥檚 passing, Coolidge gathered these collaborative drawings and poems in a collection titled Baffling Means.
In his preface to Baffling Means, published by o路bl膿k editions in 1991, Coolidge writes: 鈥楾hese things were made between 1972 and 1976 in a process of seeing and talking, writing and painting and reacting, drawing ever closer in the service of getting further, of taking it to the point of nothing but further work. (A title we thought of for a possible book: To Work). Further in the sense of nearly unrecognizable as one's own.鈥�
Some Kind of Mind Thing assembles a group of artists and poets who have been in dialogue, close collaboration and friendship for a number of years, multiple decades even, and explores the kinds of unexpected transmissions that can occur between visual and written language when poems and drawings begin to 'read' one another across margins and across the room.
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Off Paradise is pleased to present Some Kind of Mind Thing, a group exhibition featuring works by Clark Coolidge, Philip Guston, Olivia DiVecchia, Natasha Tiniacos, J Grabowski, Jason Morris, Bernadette Mayer, Colter Jacobsen and Cedar Sigo.
鈥淪ome kind of mind thing" is a phrase from the poet Clark Coolidge, quoted in Two Chairs on the Dance Floor. In a conversation with fellow poet John DeWitt, recently published in Distance No Object, 2020, Coolidge relates the remarkable wavelength he shared with the late artist Philip Guston, the unique collaboration that followed and their profound friendship during the last decade of the painter's life.
Shortly after being introduced at a crowded party in the early 1970s, Coolidge and Guston pulled up two chairs on the dance floor and began to talk. They talked some more. In fact, they never stopped and continued to talk for the next decade.
As Coolidge recalls, 鈥楾he first time we met, in the roaring context of a crowded Studio School New Year鈥檚 Party, he [Guston] soon said to me, 鈥淏ut of course words are your m茅tier.鈥� From there on there was no gulf between us as poet and painter.鈥� (Page ix, Philip Guston)
A frequent visitor to the Woodstock studio, Coolidge offered, as a poet, an immediate and unfettered response to Guston鈥檚 works. The artist reciprocated with his own unique responses to the poet's writings, and thus began a rich dialogue for four hands, resulting in what Guston called Poem-Pictures. A decade after Guston鈥檚 passing, Coolidge gathered these collaborative drawings and poems in a collection titled Baffling Means.
In his preface to Baffling Means, published by o路bl膿k editions in 1991, Coolidge writes: 鈥楾hese things were made between 1972 and 1976 in a process of seeing and talking, writing and painting and reacting, drawing ever closer in the service of getting further, of taking it to the point of nothing but further work. (A title we thought of for a possible book: To Work). Further in the sense of nearly unrecognizable as one's own.鈥�
Some Kind of Mind Thing assembles a group of artists and poets who have been in dialogue, close collaboration and friendship for a number of years, multiple decades even, and explores the kinds of unexpected transmissions that can occur between visual and written language when poems and drawings begin to 'read' one another across margins and across the room.
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