Will Baude gives a short appraisal of The Gates and focuses on the work's civic context:
Incidentally, I am pleased that Christo decided to spend his own money on this flight of fancy rather than to collect rents from the citizens of New York. Still, it would have been nicer if he had not been given the massive, massive subsidy of 2 weeks free rent in Central Park.In Christo and Jeanne-Claude's defense, I think this falls somewhere between inaccuracy and mischaracterization. We can't know for sure because the breakdown for the tab for The Gates has not been disclosed, but as Greg Allen notes in his estimation of the bill, C&J-C paid to play:
C&J-C will also pay for NYPD to patrol the park and for Gates-related expenses of the Parks Dept. & CP Conservancy. I used $500,000, or half of the Conservancy's $1mm/month on maintenance and operations budget for the entire park, as a plug. Other expenses include: liability insurance indemnifying the City and the Conservancy and a restoration bond to ensure the Park is returned to its pre-Gates state.There are intangibles, of course, associated with the most prominent park real estate in the world, but then the millions of visitors that The Gates lured seems to add up to repayment with interest. More interesting is Baude's speculation about speech implications for Central Park:
I think New York City may be opening itself up to some First Amendment claims, if it refuses to grant use of the park to the next public artist who wishes to use the park for some megalomaniacal megaproject. To be sure, since Christo used only his own money for this, the number of other people willing to spend 30 million dollars to drape the park with flags may be small, but because Christo used only his own money, the city would be particularly hard pressed to argue that this was not private speech but government speech.He concludes that there likely exist applicable caveats that would cover NYC. I'm hardly interested in a footnoted legal debate with Will Baude, but Wendy Steiner's The Scandal of Pleasure might proffer an account of how it could go down. In her survey of the arts theatre of the 80s/90s culture wars, Steiner documents a few significant cases on visual art and speech, specifically the catalytic Mapplethorpe obscenity trial and National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley. If you recognize the artists in those titles—photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and performance artists Karen Finley—and know that former Senator Jesse Helms was involved, you could probably guess that these cases involve the suppression of speech. That's not what Baude's discussing, really; but in the Mapplethorpe trial (and to a lesser extent, NEA v. Finley) the prosecution attempted to reclassify art as pornography, and the defense was tasked with proving to a jury (or Court) that art was, in fact, art. From my uninformed perspective, it seems to me that the bureaucratic mess that would ensue from a corporation or political party demanding the access to Central Park enjoyed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude could spiral into a thorny, mitigating evaluation of what makes The Gates art, why they represent a distinct sort of speech from even materially similar banners featuring corporate or politically disfavored speech, and why the city has an interest in promoting the former while denying the latter in a way that is consistent with the First Amendment.And since it has opened up a public forum (parks are traditional public fora, and Central Park is the ultimate park) for one speaker, it will have a hard time explaining why it won't open up the same park to later speakers who want to make similar use of it. This means that when the neo-Nazis wish to drape Central Park in swastikas, when NARAL wishes to drape the park with pro-choice propaganda, when I wish to drape the park with ads to come visit Crescat, the city will be hard pressed to explain why we cannot, so long as we are willing to do so on our own dollar.
UPDATE: Of course—if this unlikely hypothetical ever came to pass, the faux-gates would probably just be relegated to the same bureaucratic pigeonhole that The Gates were tucked into for 30 years. I don't mean to suggest otherwise. As Wendy Steiner describes in Scandal (which I highly recommend, if I didn't say so above), it's under unusual circumstances that controversial art comes to the attention of those who are willing to cry foul and also have the political authority to do something about it. There are far fewer family watchdog groups patrolling the nation's biennials than you might imagine, and most people don't seem to react so viscerally to controversial art. (In many genres; recall the revelation, for example, that a lone activist group, the Parents Television Council, was responsible for 99 percent of television content complaints made to the FCC.) Only by odd routes did Piss Christ enter Jesse Helms's sphere of attention, opening the floodgates to popular conservative criticism of contemporary art. I halfway expected a fury to follow Andrea Fraser's Untitled (warning: link features thumbnail images of nude, mating humans), but it never arrived, ostensibly because no one who saw it ever telephoned Senator Santorum. Or, for that matter, Catherine MacKinnon. I guess everyone has bigger fish to fry.
I've been looking over Caryn and Jessica's shoulders and all I can say about THING at the UCLA Hammer is that I've never felt so envious over a sculpture show. Mindy Shapero really intrigues me, in part because her work looks great but also because it's hard to completely tell from JPEGs what her work is doing just at the factual level. (Is anyone else tempted to pick up The Orb to see how substantial it is? It looks as if it either weighs tons or could tumble in a strong breeze.) And then there's Kaz Oshiro's work, but I take it that misunderstanding his work on a factual level is the point. I can't very well say more, not having seen the show, but let me note that I would very much like to have a (real) pink Marshall stack.
Someone woke up on the wrong side of the fringe this morning:
If people have never felt the need to think about art before two weeks ago, I maintain that we do not have a responsibility to listen to their dissertations now. If it takes so many tons of orange plastic in their back yard to get people going on art, maybe art isn't their subject. Gary Condit or Scott Peterson might make better areas of inquiry for them. Friends, let's take art out of the water cooler conversation and put it back in the galleries and museums where it belongs.Forget the elitist–populist criticism continuum—what James Panero is saying is that this model has one dimension too many. His negative review of The Gates is the canonical one, there is no room for competing opinions about the work, the people seeing The Gates are cultural philistines, and positive opinions of the work are those belonging to a flock of dimwits. Roll back Vatican II and give the man a mitre—I do believe James Panero wants to be Art Pope. The word from On High? Let them eat CourtTV!
The Swiss art critic, curator, multiple Venice Biennale and Documenta 5 director, and director of the Kunsthalle Bern, died last Thursday at the age of 71. He was instrumental to the careers of many of the artists I admire the most; consider his groundbreaking 1968–69 "When attitudes become form," an exhibition that showcased such in-the-rough luminaries as Eva Hesse, Walter de Maria, Joseph Beuys, and Richard Serra. If I recall correctly, he left after the deluge of negative reactions to that show (!), but not before he permitted Christo and Jeanne-Claude to wrap the Kunsthalle.
(If someone would be so kind as to translate one of his long-form books into English, I'd appreciate it. . . .)
I don't remember whether anybody else caught it, but I noticed an exceptionally gamy bit of humor in the new MoMA over the weekend. There's an insubstantial partition centered in the Jackson Pollock room. On one side hangs Jackson Pollock's She-Wolf (1943). Back to back with that painting? Lee Krasner's Untitled (1949). Rimshot!
Greg beat me to the good jokes, but this is really the funniest thing anyone's ever tried to pass off in the name of fearmongering. Your favorite scarecrow and mine, Michelle Malkin:
Actresses Angelina Jolie and Christina Ricci did it. So did Courtney Love and the late Princess Diana. . . . The destructive practice has been depicted in films targeting young girls and teens (such as "Thirteen"). There is even a new genre of music—"emo"—associated with promoting the cutting culture.Oh, that kills me—that slays me. If I think about it, I can get worked up about Malkin calling a severe impulse control disorder a "new teen craze," but I'm just not sure I can get beyond that emo business.
These guys will surely play The Promise Ring in the series of Oxygen and Lifetime cutting dramas that Malkin no doubt launched with this column. Hide your daughters! And what about Sunny Day Real Estate? So bad.
Robert Olsen's "Elements, Particular" show at G Fine Art closed over the weekend and I had the chance to see it a few weekends back. I'm posting a few images but heavily caveating—though a JPEG is no way to get even a brute impression of what an artist is working at under any circumstances, images of Olsen's work are flatly misleading. I was stunned to see (live), for example, how evident his hand is in his work—not by any articulated brushstroke, but by the plain evidence of the process in his pristine paintings.
No one gets as dark as Olsen does—by dark, I mean he vulcanizes his Mars Black of any impurities. By dint of an intensive layering process Olsen arrives at a pitch black that is aptly (and often) described as creamy, a point from which he rebuilds with the slow revelation of light on surfaces. He rebuilds by applying fades, bleeds, and dollops that allow his brush to redirect light's path back to its source, which he imbues with authentic luminescence. Olsen accurately paints incandescent light, but much more importantly, he paints with mimetic attention to the way that light works: the action of traffic light halos, the pixel blare of LED signs, the bend of light around the objects that house their sources. Olsen is the immediate heir of the mantle left by Dan Flavin; insofar as they both strive to work art out of light, it's prosaic to think twice about the disparity between their media.
There are satisfying narrative components to Olsen's work—nighthawks drifting down lost highways and the like—but I couldn't get past the technical bravado to really appreciate them. West Coast readers should make it a point to see him at Susan Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in June. More (flatly misleading) images of Olsen's work can be found here.
Robert Olsen, Walk, 2004. Oil on panel, 10.5 X 8.75 inches.
Robert Olsen, Untitled (Green Light), 2004. Oil on panel, 11.5 X 8 inches.
Robert Olsen, Untitled (Red Light), 2004. Oil on panel, 9.4 X 9.8 inches.
And yes, I feel an appropriate share of ridiculousness for writing greedily about a showdown between pundits named such as they are. Can't let shame interfere with Pundit Kombat, especially when the match-up is between evolution and (some variant on) Creationism.
For background purposes, PZ Myers/Pharyngula is a biologist; John Hinderaker/Hindrocket is a lawyer. PZ went after Hindrocket, who's recently been in the buzz for calling Jimmy Carter a traitor to his nation, an allegation he recently expanded to encompass the entire Democratic Party (excluding Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman).
Just as when challenged to clarify whether he really thinks that Jimmy Carter is a traitor, Hindrocket clarified that he really thinks his opinion of evolution has no bearing on his potential ability to evaluate evidence and draw conclusions. Deacon, one of Hindrocket's cobloggers, came to his defense, clarifying that Hindrocket's analysis of evolution has no bearing on his potential ability to evaluate evidence and draw conclusions. PZ Myers proceeds to gently demasculate Hindrocket and his the claim that evolution is an "orthodoxy." Much fun.
One thing that Hindrocket Deacon does that really gets to me—a common trope from the Creationist/ID right—is to shift the burden of proof to those he believe the claims of modern science. How in the world do supernaturalists get away with asking empericists to "prove" that evolution is true? As Ogged puts it:
Fine, I'm not going to change your mind, but why not take PZ up on his offer and debate him? Or, if you don't want to leave the house, try this: in all of America, find five biologists with PhDs who don't believe in evolution. Do you understand what a ridiculously low bar that is? And that you can't clear it?Is the Time magazine Blog of the Year up to the task? If Powerline can't, it's the draft for them!
Susan and I at The Gates. We stage highly elaborate Air album-cover photo shoots whenever we travel together. Think Juergen Teller and Stephanie Seymour.
Congratulations are in order for Todd Gibson! He gives us the snowy view of The Gates from the stork's ward but neglects to tell us the name or sex of his newborn. Which is it—Christo or Jeanne-Claude?
No photo alteration performed whatsoever by Justin.
I was in New York over the weekend and spent a crisp Saturday afternoon with SueAndNotU in Central Park seeing The Gates. Pictures are below the cut. I think Christo and Jeanne-Claude did a nice job of transforming the place—that transformation accomplished as much by the scores of people talking about The Gates as the gates themselves—and in that sense, I think it's a fine piece. Nodody but Christo gets scores of people swarming a park and buzzing about the limits and purposes of contemporary art . The Gates put Gates-goers in a convivial spirit even if some of them disliked the work; walking the park made for excellent art-related eavesdropping—let's hope we see some choice cuts on Overheard in NY.
I'm not sold that The Gates is a great artwork or even among the better half of C&J-C's public projects. (The Gates haven't killed anybody so far, so it's definitely not their worst. I know, cheap shot.) Cutting through New York City's red tape is a feat, but NYC's no East Berlin; Greg Allen's speculations about the cost of the piece also helped to cool my expectations to some degree. I think the glimmer of disappointment that has marked the critical reception of The Gates is that the externalities—so critical to C&J-C's work—are either not there or not all that impressive. For comparison's sake: C&J-C needed something of a deus ex machina to get both The Gates and Reichstag off the ground, but, with all due respect to Mayor Bloomberg, his election wasn't exactly the fall of the Iron Curtain. It's no one's fault that the piece isn't more dramatic than it is, but I think that a proper evaluation of extremely social, public art invites an assessment of those social factors that make the art work in the first place.
But! since I'm a total sissy, by the time I left I had fallen completely in love with The Gates. As Susan and I were leaving, we saw a man stepping onto the trail, swinging two little tots in tow. He was explaining to them (in Dad-voice), "This is your only chance ever to see this art—the orange gates will never be back here again. But you can always remember that you saw Christo's artwork when you were little kids!" and the kids were all "WOW!"—and I melted like the gooey butterball that I am. Susan proceeded to mock me for going all schmaltzy democratization-of-art on her, demanding to know where her proper liberal elitist boyfriend had disappeared to. Enjoying art with the people, Sue, with the people!
Susan is the shutterbug in our relationship, but every once in a while I'll catch her in the rare moment when she's not actively despising the aesthetics of the proletariat.
I checked out of my Williamsburg on Sunday, and the large duffel bag I was forced to haul around Manhattan around prevented me from getting up to the roof of the Met (or anywhere else) for the bird's-eye view, but I'm sure they can be found online.
If you can't tell by the way that I've been phoning it in today, I've been busy preparing to get out of town—I hope to have some quality content from my trip to NYC. In the meantime, check out the Tournament of Books, hosted by The Morning News and complete with brackets. I could've seen Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell going all the way (I'd bet that Crooked Timber and Will Baude would back me up here) but I don't know what you can honestly expect 19th century wizards to do against Holocaust literature. In this regard I think you'll get a strong showing from The Plot Against America, who has the boosted advantage of playing in a comparatively weak conference. Entirely unexplained—how I Am Charlotte Simmons is alive after the first round.
Answer: Christo.
Link courtesy of Tyler.
Apropos of nothing, I highly recommend this story from the Washington Post Magazine from a few weekends ago. I am always amazed by the degree to which truth resembles fiction under extraordinary circumstances—it's as if irrevocable change forces people to respond by adhering to form. There's nothing in that tale that hasn't appeared in every screenplay ever written about money, but it's astonishing nonetheless to identify such a comprehensive pastiche of these themes in one community.
Given the fact that the Times magazine blog of the year saw fit to imply that Jimmy Carter was a traitor to his nation today, you'd think that former President Carter had burned a flag, performed three gay marriages on himself and a pomeranian, and belted out a nasty version of Lee Greenwood's "Proud To Be an American" on his fu-ckin' Stratocaster. Turns out that all he did today was have a nuclear submarine named after himself—the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter was commissioned today, alongside the U.S.S. Johnny Taliban and U.S.S. Godfather 3. But back in September 2004, former President Carter stuck the first treasonous feather in his big treasonous cap by expressing doubts about the timetable of the Iraqi elections. Power Liner Hindrocket said:
Jimmy Carter isn't just misguided or ill-informed. He's on the other side.Some dare call it treason, don't they! Truthfully said, I see a lot of room to wiggle in that predicate: on the other side. Clearly, the wording could indicate that . . . Carter was a Republican? Regardless, you'd be right to say that it's no way for an influencial blog to mouth off about a former president of the United States (one who, in fact, served on a submarine).
Worst still, it's no way to speak. Hindrocket quoted Carter from September 2004 and said that he "isn't misguided or ill-informed." No shit—he was plainly wrong. Was plainly wrong, back in 2004, which is when Power Line is fulminating about. A fine feature of the English language, that past tense.
The United States acknowledges flying aerial surveillance drones over Iran. The Iranian National Security Council has apparently decided not to engage the drones, which I immediately read to be a bracing acknowledgment of our inability to mount a credible threat. But apparently swatting the drones would reveal critical information about Iran's defensive capabilities, so they're holding their fire.
Putting aside for a moment the uniquely 2002 brand of eerie about the recent Iranian developments, is this development in particular wholly negative? Iran has made it clear that it won't give up its nuclear ambitions or provide complete transparency, so we develop a deterrence plan. On the carrot side, the EU (with Russia) are Iran's most significant trading partners; as Ezra Klein notes, if the EU is now ready to maintain a credible threat of sanctions, Iran would have to seriously wager its progress toward the bomb against the potential for a North Korea–like state of economic instability. Coming at a time when Iran has made gestures toward entering the global arena, the threat of sanctions could be a legitimate deterrent if Iran is still some ways away from the bomb. But you need the stick, and the EU doesn't have one—so we send in unmanned aerial sticks that happen to collect precisely the sort of data that will indicate (if it can be determined) how close Iran is to the bomb.
The Pentagon, Aerial Surveillance Drone, 1995. Bet they look cooler now.
Since the Bush administration didn't respond whatsoever when it was revealed that A. Q. Khan had built single-handedly a nuclear black market, I don't have much enthusiasm in the Bush administration's ability to assert a robust nuclear deterrence policy. I also don't see much reason to have confidence in the state of US intelligence about either Iran or nuclear proliferation—but airborne Geiger counters don't lie. (Not in the Judith Miller sense of the word, anyway.)
Caroline Wiess Law, heiress of the Humble Oil fortune, bequeathed her estate to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston—to the tune of a $450 million endowment (link courtesy of MAN). "[T]here will not be as much pressure on the operating budget to build the new building as there was on the budget when we built the Beck building" is putting it lightly; as Tyler notes, they'll surely be bringing on a "starchitect." So long as the MFAH doesn't end up Gehrified, this is absurdly cool news.
My dog could eat Joshua Micah Marshall's dog. What a weiner!
Okay, the most consequential piece yet written about The Gates has to be Greg Allen's evaluation of the $20 million cost. Shame on the rest of us, and especially the paid pros, for not giving a second thought to the price tag. By Greg's calculations, it's tough to account for as much as $10–15 million.
Holy shit, right? As Greg notes, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work has an emphatic social component to it. Whether or not it's still true, C&J-C sell their drawings to buyers with the understanding that, though the individual pieces aren't really expected to appreciate in value (they make so many of them), the buyer contributes to the execution of a largescale work. (Their visibility and mass production also means that, quite independent of their vision, some buyers see their schematic drawings as affordable art by prominent artists.) Both artists often describe the preparations of their pieces as crucial to the art; if they blew $10 million or flubbed their timesheets, it doesn't sound like they prepared very well. Greg wonders how long a period C&J-C might be billing for; as Blake Gopnik notes for the WaPo, the piece's working title is The Gates: Central Park, New York, 1979–2005—sounds like we have an answer.
But look—we're basically talking about commie frogs here, aren't we? Should we be so surprised that the market didn't deliver? Artists don't have accounting departments, right? Oddly, you'd think that this is something that the cultural gendarmes over at National Review would be serving with a Coke and a smile, but reports from The Gates have come back as so family-friendly that you could very well imagine them playing defense here.
Read over Sarah's review of Jeremy Deller's American debut of Acid Brass. What I always hear about the guy is that Texas sympaticos think Memory Bucket is unfair to the Lone Star State, and that the British, while publicly pooh-poohing Deller's art as too socially oriented, eagerly hand out prizes for making fun of Texas. I agree with Sarah—these criticisms are tiresome and simplistic.
Ed Ruscha gave a lecture at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday to commemorate the Washington, DC opening of his retrospective, "Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha" and your humble correspondent took notes on both. His presentation was extremely informal, more family patriarch showing you pictures of that first beloved Ford than I was led to expect. He showed slides from works that influenced him and discussed (fairly superficially) his own works. Ruscha offered a book signing in lieu of a Q&A, which, all things considered, struck me as a wise decision; I don't know that an artist who's completely paid his dues ought to have to endure a burning question-statement from a student who just knows that Ruscha's work is about the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. Anyway, notes below the fold.
I learned from one particularly useful wall text that Ruscha calls the font that dominated over much of his career "Boy Scout Utility Modern," which he employed to "escape the stylishness of pre-established typefaces." (See here.) Even using that uniform font, Ruscha introduces inaccuracies in and enhancements to the shapes of letters in certain pieces—all indistinct but intentional effects. And different from the rush or imprecision that can be detected in those drawings that were meant more as studies (of which there are few). Once I noticed these tactics (or the lack of them) I felt a stronger engagement to each drawing; on the same note, the retrospective, arranged chronologically with each room typically bearing featuring works of one style, seems to discourage that sort of appreciation of the individual works. Which is fine, but I might've appreciated less hand-holding in the chronological presentation.
The NGA Web site features several images from the show (which NGA kindly sent me on request but were too large to upload), and it should be noted that his use of uncommon materials like gunpowder, onion juice, rose petals is as even as his graphite and acrylic applications. That you walk away with a clear impression of Ruscha's technical merits is one of the benefits to the retrospective; another is that it should do real work toward bolstering the prominence of Ruscha's status among post-60s artists.
I would think that a prominent critic such as Roger Kimball would gracefully bow out of the discussion following the death of a beloved artist whose work or politics he finds untolerable. But no—when opportunism knocks, Kimball answers:
Let the bouquets begin. The playwright Arthur Miller died yesterday at 89. An icon of the left-liberal establishment for decades, Miller has already been showered with a diabetic's nightmare of saccharine eulogies from . . . well, from just about everywhere. I won't intrude into this love-fest except to note that a measure of scepticism about Mr. Miller's halo of sanctity is in order.Ah, but intrude he does. He continues with a selection from a 2000 New Criterion piece in which he plays patsy to the longstanding but sputtering effort to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy and revise the history surrounding the House Un-American Activities Committee. But that's neither here nor there. I find Kimball's tone snotty considering the fact, but even that is a matter of decorum. What is revealing is that Kimball seems to suggest that because Miller shared a widely maintained political orientation that has since been determined to be wrong and unsophisticated, we ought to discount, for example, Death of a Salesman. If Kimball wants to revise Miller's godhead stature in American theater, he has to get past Willy Loman first.
I'm convinced that Miller earned his "halo of sanctity" with Willy Loman alone, but the criticism can be made. I'd guess that a minority report exists as to how the importance and centrality of Death of a Salesman has been overstated; I can even picture the rough outlines of a New Historicist's complaint that the work is wrong. But what Kimball offers is either a callow attack or extremely unorthodox. If Kimball's theory is based on an artist's position on the proper role of the state in production, then here he is consistent (if enrolled in a pointless exercise). If he exposes artists to a political or moral litmus and rejects artists with heterodox opinions, I don't know what to say. He might find more satisfaction in taking up the cloth; religion is the business of indoctrination, not art.
It's possible that Kimball does not find fault in Miller's work and is just wasting everyone's time with this reverse hagiographic chore. If he has something to say on Death or the other works that define Miller's distinguished career, he's not saying. But "Arthur Miller, Communist Stooge"? Hardly an analysis up to the task of handling the man's death. Useless, really.
Envision a horde of gestural abstract expressionists storming the National Portrait Gallery, or a civil war erupting between the east and west wings of the National Gallery of Art, and you’ll have some idea of Ian Whitmore’s painting. The artist makes breezy representational works with an eye fixed on the history of art and then stresses them—threatens them, frankly—with bombastic abstraction. Elaborating on this technique, which he introduced in his March solo debut last year, Ian Whitmore extends the scope of his hybrid painting style with the sold-out “Mirror Mirror” show at Fusebox in DC.
While the conflicts on his canvases range from detente to total war, the temperament of “Mirror Mirror” never strays from playful, as Whitmore’s dry-as-ice humor, plain intellect, and attractive palette cool the violence; the results are smart and satisfying. In merging representational and abstract painting, Whitmore borrows from the themes and histories incumbent to each school. The works are dramatized by another conceit: each piece in “Mirror Mirror” bears a formal or narrative correspondence with another work. The allusion count, accordingly, is high, but it’s a testament to the levels of wit at play that viewers with different art historical educations will find and enjoy different connections.
That wit derives from Whitmore’s curatorial sense of source selection. He obliges the subject of Westernized, which is nominally a portrait of an 18th century gentleman, with an admiring grace, the effect being an authentic-sounding statement of noblesse oblige. The painting is, in fact, a reading of Tom Jones—not the 1749 novel but the randy 1963 film adaptation starring Albert Finney. The dandy way that the rococo 1960s revived the Rococo of the 1700s seems all the more foppish when presented in a stern, purse-lipped, heroic portrait such as Whitmore provides in Westernized. (In other words, what exactly do you get with a serious portrait of the Scarlet Pimpernel?) And all these redirections take place while Whitmore’s abstract brush corrodes whatever integrity the viewer chooses to invest in the portrait itself. Each transaction indicts the artist as a serial manipulator, refracting his sources with alternating lenses of earnest appeal and kitschy fascination.
Ian Whitmore, Westernized, 2004. Oil on linen.
With “Mirror Mirror,” Whitmore introduces several strategies that ought to appease those who see too much of Cecily Brown in Whitmore’s now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t abstract brushstroke. Impasto marks Toiler and Stand-in; in Woodsy, 60s fashion iconography are revealed to varying degrees against pastoral imagery stained directly onto the canvas—staining being a Washington, DC signature. In a further nod to his Color School forebears, Whitmore employs ungessoed canvases and Gene Davis–style stripes throughout the show. But better than all these tactical variations, the artist knows how to scale his effects. My favorite moment in the show comes in a painting titled Bridge, in the form of an uncontroversial series of small, neon graffiti horses stamped across what looks to be the tunic of a Breton girl (a thematic figure in art history). With these stamped marks and a few stray dollops of paint, Whitmore invalidates the painting’s pretensions to portraiture. Just a spattering of incongruous marks exposes an otherwise whole and accurate depiction. That’s the challenge for the viewer—to accept Whitmore’s premise of content giving way to form, representation receding before a coherent, total approach to surface value.
Two instances in the show vary from Whitmore’s larger body of work. Though in other senses a typical example of Whitmore’s style, the whirligig boudoir scene of Belletriste is pocked by several tiny alphabetical symbols. The letters, signs in themselves, wander from Whitmore’s visual vocabulary to Rauschenberg realms of collage. In Death From Above, viewers are greeted with the pitiful vision of a dead cartoon bird, seemingly struck right from Snow White’s shoulder and cast to the floor of an Albert Pinkham Ryder forest. The Pop incongruity between the painterly olive drab of the forest and animation tones of the bird signals a departure from the primarily Easter-hued palette that has characterized his work so far. Not wholly consistent with the feel of the rest of the show, but evidence that Whitmore can concentrate on one theme without exhausting himself.
Ian Whitmore, Belletriste, 2004. Oil on linen.
Pox, a multi-paneled meditation on Christian eschatological painting, commands central attention. The most narrative piece in the room, Pox features themes and figures (and a display) drafted from Baroque frescoes, but muted so that the action only vaguely resembles any given apocalypse. The pastiche of these vague actors and gestures, recognizable from so many modes of Christian calamity painting, combines with a contemporary abstract brushstroke that augments the ecstasy and fever of the tradition Whitmore cites—and as with the rest of his work, it’s the act of synthesis that’s so irresistible.
Ian Whitmore, Pox, 2004. Oil on linen mounted on four panels.
Pox (detail)
[On view until February 19 at Fusebox (1412 14th St NW, Wash DC). All images courtesy Fusebox.]
Hot on the heels of the Crooked Timber–Instapundit tangle comes a Juan Cole–Jonah Goldberg manly-man smackdown. Now this is the sort of left-to-right dialogue I can endorse. Both of them dither for a bit about who said what and who knows more about Iraq until Juan Cole finally calls Goldberg a pussy cat. Goldberg responds, clarifying that he's no pussy cat—he's a chickenhawk. Now that the argument has graduated from who's smarter to who's braver, I think the reader can be declared the unambiguous winner.
I'm sorry to say, though, that all oversimplification and fun aside—and oh man, did The Editors ever outdo themselves for this one—Cole doesn't bolster his case by calling Goldberg out. It's a kick to the groin, frankly, a surefire way to gin up even more namecalling than Goldberg regularly earns for himself, but it's no argument.
Is Cole surprised that the entire right wing of the commentariat did not clear the bench when the war began? Are the arguments of seasoned citizens like George Will to be treated suspiciously since he's not eligible to put his money where his mouth is? I don't really think so. Definitely, a war supporter should be willing to fight if it is of asked of him. The pressing need for soldiers in Vietnam is what separates Goldberg's reluctance and Tom DeLay's cowardice. Though it's a tough question, I think that so long as the volunteer army is sufficient to the task in Iraq, an individual can judge President Bush's plan to be just and worth dying for and not necessarily commit himself to fulfilling President Bush's plan. Goldberg's answer to the question is sufficient. I'd argue, odd notion that it is, that Goldberg did more to advance the war in Iraq in his capacity as a prominent rightwing boob than he would have as a junior officer in the military (who may or may not be deployed in Iraq (though he probably would be)).
Point of rhetoric: I don't think that Cole means that everyone who determined that the war was worthwhile should pack his duffle, but he doesn't tell us where he draws the line—surely not at all war supporters, which included people who reluctantly agreed to the war for a variety of reasons. It's also unclear how the WMD lies should temper Cole's challenge. Cole says that Goldberg doesn't know what he's talking about (and he doesn't) but then says that he should match his conviction with enlistment; but to be overly generous to Goldberg, many smart people were duped by the Bush administration? I definitely understand why some people chose to believe the 45-minute apocalyptic claims of the leaders of the free world—we can't all be Iraqi scholars with time served in the field. "Support" for the war just can't be rhetorically reduced to a black and white distinction.
But that isn't really my biggest complaint with Cole's argument. Even granting Cole that the chickenhawk charge is fair to introduce, needling Goldberg the way that he did strikes me as an attempt to "out" him on personal grounds. Goldberg answered the charge, and I don't think he should have (though not answering would have been a hash under the pussy cat column). He said that he isn't fighting because he's 35, his family depends on the income, and he's physically unfit; whatever you make of his answers, in answering he is submitting a defense of himself to Cole and his supporters. And that takes a public admission about the sort of very personal facts that define our families. How should Goldberg have answered if he had a sick family member or undisclosed illness? If it were me and I were dealing with extenuating circumstances, I'd probably admit that fidgeting is my primary form of exercise and nothing more personal than that. To return to my point, the only thing we can assume about Goldberg is that Goldberg can't think straight—the proof is in the punditry. Beyond that, I'm not comfortable with the assumptions that Cole must have made about Goldberg's life in order to demand an answer. How rude! Let's stick to ideas and positions in conversation with one another.
(It just struck me that it wasn't Cole but a reader who called Goldberg a pussy cat; Cole published Andrew Sullivan–style the reader's e-mail, and I take he endorses his reader's view.)
Anyway, boo! I hate to throw a wet blanket on this party. Can we make Pundit Kombat requests? Majikthise versus Jane Galt? Fafblog! versus Oxblog? What about Michelle Malkin versus a rabid hyena? This has to be the reason God made the blogosphere.
UPDATE: I see I arrived late to the enlistment debate; there's a good one going on at Unfogged. I still own the two-blogs-enter, one-blog-leaves angle, though.
UPDATE II: And I think Yglesias and I are on the same page, though he thinks that current troop levels and the heavy reliance on the National Guard places some added pressure on chickenhawks to enlist. The troop situation in Iraq is a moving target, and optimistically one assumes that troop requirements there will decrease from here, though that's not at all a given.
Healthier than the sausage variety:
Julie Mehretu, Empirical Construction, Istanbul, 2003.
I'm going to New York next weekend and though I know I'll see The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude while I'm there, I don't know how I plan to see them yet. Anyone have an optimal suggestion for viewing Central Park from above? Best I've heard so far is the view from the garden roof of the Met, but I'm open to suggestions. You can sneak a look at how the project's going here if you're interested.
UPDATE: Speaking of the Met—in April they'll be showing one painting that I've wanted to see for years for the Max Ernst retrospective. It's always nice to scratch those itches.
Max Ernst, The Fireside Angel, 1937.
Do read Michael Kimmelman's New York Times Magazine full-length on notable desert crazy Michael Heizer. Whether you have any affection for his brand of Earth Art, you can't help but feel some awe for a man who expressly threatens to shoot anyone who approaches his extraordinarily vast sculptural work, City, which is now more than 30 years in the making. Along with quotations that make Ward Churchill look like Joe Lieberman, Heizer allowed the NYT to publish a new look at the "45º, 90º, 180º" segment of City's various Complexes, images of which are hard to come by because of that he'll-shoot-you clause. The "45º, 90º, 180º" is named such, as many of Heizer's works are, because the viewer's perception of the work's dimensions (apparently) changes with regard to the viewer's spatial relation to the work. (I'm picturing that scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the one near the end where has to cross over the chasm on that rock bridge—remember?—but I couldn't really say for sure.) Equally notable about this article is that it enabled Nick Tarasen, author of a comprehensive Heizer fan site, to pinpoint the location of City (link courtesy of Todd Gibson). Don't say you weren't warned.
Michael Heizer, "45º, 90º, 180º" (from City), 1972–present.
Charlie Finch peers into the future and sees an art world very different from our own. As with all portentous prognostications, it's a scary place indeed. His next-gen art schemata feature OnDemand artists instantly transmitting sound, graphic, text, and video files directly from the e-studio to the consumer's iPad—unthinkable with our primitive technology! Dinosaur elitist institutions will be decentered and replaced by interactive, real-time criticism—but where will they find that? More shocking yet—in the future, Charlie Finch will still be able to muster his unfathomable hatred for Christo.
Now Tom might tell you that any future whose most remarkable characteristics can be traced back to a progenitor in the person of Cory Arcangel is a dystopian future at best. Be that as it may, Charlie Finch's future simply does not compute. The fact is that once the constitutional robotocracy is installed in 20X6, all human activity that does not lead to the creation of tasty sprocket snacks for our robot overlords will be outlawed. We'll count our lucky stars if we can sneak paperclips back to our sleeping pods to make secret Mark di Suvero–style doodads. Better hope to God there are paperclips in 20X6.
After Fontana Labs revealed that Ward Churchill doesn't actually have a Ph.D. and Henry Farrell cited sound data to prove that terrorists aren't grown in Western comp lit departments, it's hardly worth the bother to say that Roger Kimball, still beating the Churchill drum, is still wrong. Everybody else seems to be ignoring him, but since he's made considerably more noise about the faults of Western academia over the course of his career than a clamorous couple of Instapundit posts, I think his name should enter in the mix. Kimball's just as good as Glenn, too—look where Kimball can get to given one leftist screwball's ridiculousness:
[A]cademic freedom is not the same thing as free speech. It is a more limited freedom, designed to nurture intellectual integrity and to protect those engaged in intellectual inquiry from the intrusion of partisan passions. The very limitation of academic freedom is part of its strength. By excluding the political, it makes room for the pursuit of truth.You always, always know that a critic is about to sell you some grade-A snake oil when he tells you that his opinion is free of politics. The only critics who use those terms are the ones whose principal occupation is the politics. It's in the name of "excluding the political" that conservatives cry foul when wonderful and fresh writers like Zora Neale Hurston edge out wonderful but exhausted writers like Ernest Hemingway from the modernist syllabus. What a critic like Roger Kimball wants you to believe is that a college education absolutely must cover every book that you cannot help but find otherwise on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. And that straying from the European canon in order to include forgotten, suppressed, rehabilitated, or outsider texts amounts to shoehorning art into the canon (which is, by the way, college course schedules we're talking about, frankly). And this interrupts the process by which universities stamp a uniform civic identity on American minds. As Kimball understands them, those minds, naked and unmyelinized before the age of 25, cry out for universities to protect their hosts from unkosher texts and reasonable car insurance rates.
Maybe he believes that student minds aren't up to the task of seeing the whole cloth and cutting away the bad. If they're unprepared to filter out Ward Churchill, I'm afraid that they're ill-prepared to handle the mind of Voltaire—but anyway, I'm sure that that's not Kimball's point. I think there's a meaty subtext to the academic freedom/freedom of speech distinction: Kimball implies some bizarre belief about whom a university ought to be allowed to employ. (At least I think that's where's he going; maybe you can tease some better sense out of, "I should think that freedom of speech still translates into a freedom from employing troglodytes.")
But as I said, it's hardly worth the bother—especially now that John Holbo has written the exhaustive rebuttal to this newest outbreak of anti-academia hysteria. Huzzah, JH.
Apropos of David Adesnik's Weekly Standard story on superpowers/heroes.
Gilles Barbier, L'Hospice, 2002. Installation view.
Same thing, different installation view.
Courtesy of the Begging To Differ forum comes this jewel from the Boston Globe:
WASHINGTON—The Bush administration has provided White House media credentials to a man who has virtually no journalistic background, asks softball questions to the president and his spokesman in the midst of contentious news conferences, and routinely reprints long passages verbatim from official press releases as original news articles on his website.Here's one example of the relief pitching Gannon provides for Scott McClellan:Jeff Gannon calls himself the White House correspondent for TalonNews.com, a website that says it is "committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news coverage to our readers." It is operated by a Texas-based Republican Party delegate and political activist who also runs GOPUSA.com, a website that touts itself as "bringing the conservative message to America."
Called on last week by President Bush at a press conference, Gannon attacked Democratic Senate leaders and called them "divorced from reality." During the presidential campaign, when called on by Press Secretary Scott McClellan, Gannon linked Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to Jane Fonda and questioned why anyone would dispute Bush's National Guard service.
Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy: Harry Reid, who's talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. You've said you're going to reach out to these people. How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?Both the "soup lines" and "verge of collapse" lines were auteured by Rush Limbaugh, a fact confirmed by a Rush Limbaugh transcript that's posted on Jeff Gannon's site. The GOP mails you the "divorced from reality" line (with a Cokie Roberts instructional video) once you publicly profess your desire to carry water for the administration. How is Daily Kos supposed to get a good grind on his ax if hacks like Gannon hide this stuff in the open?
Garrett Graff wants to do to Jeff Gannon what the Tampa Bucs did to Rich Gannon in Superbowl XXXVII. (Sack him a lot, block his passes, etc. . . . don't act like you didn't watch it, even if it was the Bucs.) But Choire Sicha thinks that asking the White House to revoke Gannon's press credential is bad business. Much as it shames the institution of the White House and American journalism that Bush gives preferential treatment to this douchebag, I'm with Sicha—Gannon deserves the credential so long as the White House wants to extend him that privilege. Every editor who has a problem with Gannon as McClellan's go-to man ought to clear out some space above the fold for the long overdue series of blistering feature-length 36-point-font reports on White House media abuse. Make these motherfuckers pay the rent! But as far as the White House itself is concerned, "press" and all those associated freedoms, especially in the age of the mighty, mighty blogosphere, has to include schmucks with keyboards—not just media-elite Medilldos.
And I understand what kind of respect and enthusiasm the White House brings to the media ethics conversation. When they keep Gannon around, it's because they agree with my in theory, not because they're Soviet creeps, right? Jesus.
You'd think that after submitting myself to two hours of Music From the Kazakh Steppe, I'd've built up some substantial credit with my girlfriend, worth maybe a few NCAA-chicken-and-beer tokens or a Saturday night special feature or possibly even a Get-Out-of-Picnic-Free card. But you'd be surprised how much political capital you can spend while walking through the central concert hall of the Kennedy Center with one ill-timed comment about the good people of Kazakhstan and their goats. Now I've got nothing but the memories. I'm still not convinced I was wholly offbase. . . .
"Underdog", Kelly Towles's first solo show, closed at David Adamson Gallery over the weekend after a run that earned emphatic nods from both the Washington Post and Times. Saw lots of those gravy red dots while I was there, too, so it looks as if it sold pretty well. Towles further distinguished his first exhibition by dragging the street into the gallery.
Kelly Towles, "Underdog," installation view. Courtesy of David Adamson Gallery.
Sharp installation. He emphasizes the olive palette in his work with the frames provided by the oversize dunces. I'm not sure that there's a great deal of correspondence between the macro gallery presentation and the individual works; the unorthodox appropriation of the gallery highlights the fact that the works themselves come from a tradition that's unsuited to a downtown art gallery.
That street aspect is paradoxical for gallery work, I think, but it's only one source that informs Towles's work, which draws equally from the Basquiat and grafitti approaches to urban animation. With real synthesis at times, too—my favorite moment in the show comes in Towles's marking system for On the Razor's Edge.
Kelly Towles, On the Razor's Edge, 2004.
As to the works in the show, I very much admire Towles's consistency with his characters: particle-board stooges in boxing gloves, Mexican wrestlers, dopey birds, pop gun–toting goons—all artifacts of a moral system in which actions and uniforms make the best descriptors, and everything else amounts to an impressionable, pliable underbelly. (I loved what Jessica had to say about Towles's galaxy.)
While I see why Towles isolates his creatures in portraits, I'm willing to bet that some larger interactions would bring to the fore in a sweet way that street/gallery dynamic that he taps by hanging his U.S. Postal Service prints. I've heard talk of a street festival for 14th Street—sounds perfect. I'd also recommend that he take to the natural format for his work: murals. I'm thinking of, say, Kingpin (a bar on U Street). Everybody loves that bar, and—to be opportunistic about it—now that it has burned down (but is being rebuilt), why not approach them about installing a mural? I think it's great that Towles penetrated the downtown gallery quarter, but I don't see a formal commitment there that ought to prevent him from doing the grafitti and murals that his work so clearly lends itself to.
And Towles'd probably be the first to tell you how he intends to do exactly that—he has real energy he intends to spend in the District and has proved that he plans to upend even the art galleries that show him. The better for us.
All apologies for the lack of material—I wasn't able to access the admin site all day. Then I came home to find that the DSL wasn't working. Now the information superhighway is up but my landline isn't, and seeing as I'm one of 4 North Americans without a cell phone, I'm hoping against a total blackout. Note that President Bush's State of the Union address begins in 15 minutes, then ask yourself: Who doesn't want Kriston's voice to be heard?
. . . but don't answer that.
UPDATE: Has anyone seen my keys?
