So you missed the Julie Püttgen lecture last night, but you're going to her opening at Material tonight and you don't want to feel bewildered? Well, I'm sure these notes will really help.
Here's what I was thinking during the lecture:
1. I'm glad I don't have an umlaut in my name.
2. Cloudmapping! I do that! I totally do that! . . . wait, I used to do that. I should do that again!
3. I wonder if she raises chickens . . . she keeps talking about egg tempera. I guess you probably can't travel as much as she does if you have a coop to clean out every day. I wonder if I would rather have chickens or plane tickets to India?
4. I'm definitely going to the Atlanta aquarium during Thanksgiving and they had better have an alive Whale Shark.
5. Is houseboating a verb?
6. This work is really morbid--one second we're talking dead whales, then pancreatic cancer, then brain cancer, then monsters who are hopelessly longing. Why are there so many hopeless monsters in these paintings?
7. How do you spell tanka? Thangka?
8. What kind of a person drags her husband, five ponies, and four staff members around India for the sake of a few paintings.? Could these paintings have been made without the investment in adventure? Maybe--but then this talk would be so much less interesting. Someone should make a movie about Puttgen's life. How can she have done all of this and still look like she's about 25?
9. When she starts talking about collaboration I can't help but think about the tortured metaphors my husband and I use when we talk about how extroverts and introverts are like vampires and batteries. I wonder if Püttgen is a vampire (extrovert) or battery (introvert). She totally intimidates me, so I'm going to guess she's more of a vampire. Then again, she's explaining the ways that "empty space must contribute to collaboration." That's a pretty introverted thing to say. Later, when I ask, she refers to a New Yorker article about robots and refers to herself as a bossy cow.
10. WOW THIS PARADE MOVIE IS AWESOME I WANT TO HAVE IT PLAYING ON A LOOP IN MY STUDIO ALL THE TIME.
11. This work seems totally unaffected by pop culture.
12. I wonder what's in her "current recipes" folder on her desktop. Food or recipes for performance/installation art? Her artist statement describes recipes for artwork, but maybe it's a folder full of veggie lasagna tips and tricks.
13. She uses the title "They say that gold will last" and inside my head a high-school know-it-all poetry student is screaming ROBERT FROST ROBERT FROST NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY OMG SAY SOMETHING ABOUT ROBERT FROST!
14. I wonder if the nun "Perdita" has as much in common with Sister Corita as with Püttgen. I think I need to buy this book.
15. www.unlessanduntil.info. Who uses .info? That's totally awesome.
OK, now that I've looked over these notes I realize they're totally baffling. You'll be much better off preparing for the show by looking at Püttgen's artist statement.
Puttgen's really one of those "universe in a grain of sand, infinity in an hour" kind of artists. I wonder what universe she's building in Material today?
