Tonight is the final night to see Jenna McCracken's Living Sculpture, a performative piece by an artist who is, in my opinion, the best performance artist in the area. From the look of it she's got a very Drawing Restraint show going on. Which isn't so surprising—there are a lot of parallels to be drawn between McCracken and Barney. She draws from non-arts training (she has a degree in anthropology) and her performances, from what I've seen, are ordered, repetitive, and fantastical. She keys into the anodyne and the narcotic—like Barney, her performances are slow, languid, but not endurance oriented. McCracken uses many assistants and does not seem to hang her performances on her own person. Do I even need to say that Barney's a little bit more self absorbed?
I wrote about McCracken's last piece, Stasis, for the Washington City Paper last year: read that here.
Haven't seen Living Sculpture yet, but I've been waiting all week for the opportunity: tonight, 7:30 p.m., Project 4 Gallery. It's the last performance/the conclusion. A few thoughts before the show:
Roberta Smith's Sunday NYT piece, arguing that public art is enjoying a renaissance, puzzled Artsjournal's Tyler Green: "[Jeff Koons's] Balloon Dog (Yellow) couldn't be any further from public: It's owned by hedge fund-enabled impresario Steven Cohen. It is on temporary loan to the Met, where it sits stands on the roof."
What's got me scratching my skin is that Smith never mentions development in her analysis of trends in public art. Public sculpture was as dead as a doornail in the 1960s and 70s—but so were the cities where public sculpture is commissioned and seen. Can Smith be so sure that formal developments best explain why artists are working with cities more often now than they were then? What about why cities are more open to working with artists?
Peter Fuss, Who Killed Barack Obama?, 2008.
As Sam Boyd notes, it is something that this news hasn't made bigger waves in print and cable media: It's responsible. Endless, recycled speculation about a thwarted, disorganized, improbable assassination attempt would change the tenor of the race. The media haven't ignored the story: It's below the fold on the NYT homepage, and that's where it belongs.
Never forget, would-be nutjobs.
The Red October Chocolate Factory is one of the enduring symbols of Russian culture, not that you'd know, because it's not open to the public and Russian chocolate doesn't taste good. Still, it certainly looks like a place where revolutionary chocolate is made, and for that reason if no other it's treasured in Moscow.
It's no longer a house of chocolate, though. Last year, all of Krasny Octyabr's chocolate-y goodness—its nougat-factory center—was removed to the suburbs, leaving a pretty brick building with a funky sign primed for the sort of enormously expensive condos that paved the New Arbat. (Who wouldn't want to hold real estate situated inside one of the enduring symbols of Russian culture?)
Preservationists will passionately argue that evacuating Moscow's chocolate factory has left an empty shell that used to be home to part of Moscow's soul. If it does nothing else, contemporary art lives to fill this sort of void, hence Gagosian Gallery's preciously and yet ominously titled show, "for what you are about to receive", which opens next month inside Red October.
Now, Moscow is a very wealthy city, crowded by the newly rich who surfaced when Russia's industries were privatized and whose fortunes have enjoyed the rising tide of oil prices. There should be no surprise if the art market runs red with rubles. Tastemakers like Dasha Zhukova are steering Russian interest, and Russian investment, toward contemporary art. So long as Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow, is going to tear down old Moscow anyway, it might as well be contemporary art that takes its place.
Still. When Larry Gagosian comes to Moscow, filling a hollowed-out factory named after the Bolshevik revolution with Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, it's hard not to brand him as Woland from Master & Margarita on a return tour.
Two looks at the electronic whisper mute for saxophone. I don't live in a city quite so dense (or practice so frequently, ahem) that I feel that I'm disturbing roommates and neighbors too often. So I don't exactly need this. Plus it inhibits bell tones (i.e., low notes), some users say, leaving me to to wonder how useful this even is for practice. However, it appeals to me for reasons the developer probably never considered: as a way to potentially mute the acoustic sound while still projecting an amplified sound in a live setting using the mute/case's built-in pickup. That sound could be manipulated electronically, distorted, looped, and so on, with diminished acoustic interference. Which is possible with an electronic wind instrument that offers no native acoustic sound anyway, sure; but the e-sax whisper mute can be played with a standard saxophone—ideally, this 1935 Beuscher "Aristocrat"—affording all the same effects you can get with an EWI but sacrificing none of the action or subtlety. Of course you'd rather be playing a Selmer Varitone like Eddie Harris, but let's be realistic.
Still, even if it does look cool, the thing costs about twice what it would to just buy a Barcus Berry and try to project through the pre-amp and not through the bell—know what I'm saying?
Elsewhere, a four-piece bass clarinet ensemble covers Radiohead,
There was no opportunity in the Guardian piece to make the point, but: Doesn't Pangu Plaza look like it could only serve as the hidden-in-plain-sight lair of the nefarious Mandarin? And on that tip, has there been a more unappealing concept/design package since Spiderman 2099?
Pangu Plaza is shaped like a dragon; it's seven football fields long; it's made of stone and television screens; and it's home to offices, a shopping mall, a "courtyard in the sky", and a seven-star hotel.
After crossing out persistent rumors that Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Henry Kissinger have made it their home-away-from-home (or straight-up home, in the case of Gates), the International Herald Tribune finds developers pitching the place this way:
[T]he owners of Pangu Plaza do acknowledge that "someone very, very important" resides in the building; that Buffett considered renting a courtyard space (all of which are on the top floor of the lower-rise buildings) and that Kissinger was a guest during the Olympics.It's hard to blame the developers for an article whose intent was to fish out quotes about what immensely wealthy and powerful clients the building attracts. Still, in an obvious showy sense but also as an unintended critique of explosive growth in Beijing, Pangu Plaza captures some sense of what's happening in this moment in China better than the Bird's Nest or CCTV Tower—truly, noteworthy buildings that Western architects might have built anywhere."We have had a lot of very important guests," said Cai Xiaomin, a spokeswoman for Beijing Pangu Investment, the Chinese developer.
The Olympic news peg is going to fade from view as quickly as the blue skies in Beijing but I hope to explore some related growth/architecture issues in greater depth. In the meantime you shouldn't deprive yourself of reading James Fallow's coverage, if you haven't been following his Beijing-bureau dispatches for the Atlantic. Start here and work backward.
That's the next Olympic stadium that architecture critics, professional and armchair alike, will be harping over four years from now, when the Games arrive in London. It's a curiosity that the Olympic Games have come to be defined in part by set-piece architecture. Beijing's success with Bird's Nest almost guarantees that the arms race will accelerate.
Among the many Olympic post-mortems you read today, please consider this piece I've written for the Guardian Web site about architecture that competes as the Olympians themselves do and why it's unhealthy.
On a side note, now that people everywhere are familiar with the work of Herzog & de Meuron (they are the architects behind the Bird's Nest), more people will relate with the residual anger I still feel over the blundered episode that was the University of Texas's near miss with a Herzog design.
Nam June Paik, Dadaikseon (the more the better), 1988. Erected for the Seoul Olympic Games. Youtube.
Games people play:
Shortly I'll be on a plane bound for Texas, where I'll be attending this guy's wedding, and I couldn't be more thrilled for him and his wonderful bride. While I'm home, I'm getting fitted for a tux for my brother's wedding (!), recharging for a couple days in Austin, and writing up a few Dallas gallery shows: "Senshuct" at Light & Sie, Margo Sawyer at Holly Johnson, and "New Texas Talent XV" at Craighead Green.
Back next week. Surely this wide world web is enough to keep you company, but if you're interested, here's a short item I wrote for the Dallas Morning News on recent acquisitions at the Dallas Museum of Art.
Chris Jones, Repair Is the Dream of the Broken Thing, 2008.
Hot mess edition:
I'm really taken with the title Kafka gave to the journals in which he stashed his collection of erot/ica and p0rnogra/phy: The Amethyst/Opals. Believe it or not, the existence of the journals—ignored or buried by Kafka scholars—is the subject of a Times exposé and a lot of hand wringing in what one young brooding academic calls the "Kafka industry".
So let's grant John McCain his premise in this most recent campaign ad and say that Barack Obama is, in fact, the Anti-Christ foretold by the New Testament. If Barack Obama truly is the Seducer,* then mustn't he win the election? Losing elections is no way to establish a transnationalist empire. We have already seen in the evangelical community the instinct to support counterintuitive means for millenarian goals—John Hagee's support for Israel and the Jewish community, for example. So when John McCains asks whether Barack Obama is ready to lead, why isn't the answer—according to the Book of Revelation—that he was born ready?
Scott McLemee has figured the way out of this problem. Barack Obama is not the Beast, but rather he is the other Beast from Revelation 13: The false prophet, the antipode to John the Baptist who will prophecy the coming of the Anti-Christ. And this second beast doesn't get so much as an ANC commissioner post, so McCain is in the eschatological clear. Whew! For a moment there, I thought his campaign had gone utterly crazy.
* Also the gist of his "celebrity" campaign ad, right?
Did the UK strike a pact with the Mahdi Army to sit out Basra? The American Prospect links to conflicting reports in the Times and Guardian, both citing British defence officials. The distinction hinges on whether the British had a "secret deal" to stay on the sidelines, which would (somehow?) thereby encourage the Shia militia to move toward the mainstream—as the Times has it—above and beyond the known "accommodation" between Moqtada al-Sadr and the UK, which the Guardian says had no bearing on their military (in)action during Basra. I have no instinct one way or the other—frankly, I am here merely to submit the hed above—but I will bet you that Spencer Ackerman will have something to say about these stories.
An unrelated but much, much better hed comes courtesy of one of my editors, who observes with respect to this NYT story: "Mladic Was a Hero to Most, but He Never Meant Shit to Me".
In the year after his death, Time published an article by Andrei Sakharov in which he accounted for the many differences in style and principle between himself and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It's defensive—polite but prickly. Still, it captures something about the spirit of the public debate these men were having (as, all the while, they battled the Politburo and fought for freedom and transparency and wrote billions of words). Solzhenitsyn as the unreconstructed czarist gets lost in the obituaries, justifiably overshadowed by Solzhenitsyn the monumental exposer of Soviet crimes; but late in his life, the patriarchal character whom he always hoped would do the work that Gorbachev made possible appeared—Putin—and the faith that Solzhenitsyn sometimes expressed in Putin puts him at ends with those who imagine Putin quite differently. Sakharov did not live for long enough to debate Solzhenitsyn over Putin and Russia's future, and now both of them are gone, but the debate continues and on nearly the same terms as when Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn both began thinking past the end of the Soviet Union and toward Russia's future.
John Mark Reynolds offers that Solzhenitsyn was "a man of a better future living in a twenty-first century still caught in the backwash of 1914–1918. . . . Solzhenitsyn lived in his heart and mind in a world that was ruled by Christ." On the advice that one should not speak ill of those who speak highly of the dead, I will just say that that is another point of view.
This news from Austin, on the other hand, is much better: The Met is loaning 28 sculptures to the University of Texas on a long-term basis. The NYT has more. The modern and comtemporary pieces will appear around the campus, inside some buildings, and in Bass Concert Hall—just in time for that building's renovation.
Bass Concert Hall
The Austin American-Statesman hosts a poll asking readers to identify the best art gallery in town. Readers give the top nod to Art on 5th, an art outlet that, while hip, sells primarily by consignment and doesn't exactly exhibit shows from the bleeding edge of contemporary art. In response, Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, the paper's arts critic, takes to the blog ("Seeing Things") to complain (in the grand tradition of critics) about the wisdom of crowds—and slams the paper for running the survey.
Someone at the Statesman took notice and by all appearances wasn't pleased—the post's been scrubbed from the blog. (Hat tip: Eric Zimmerman.) Deleting published articles is messin' with critics at its worst. The Statesman ought to clarify whether that's what's happened.
I'm reading this item from HealthDay about drastically upwardly revised Aids statistics in the U.S. when I receive a call from Washington General hospital, where I recently donated blood. "Your blood profile was returned to us," she tells me, causing my blood (which I suddenly believed to be totally skank) to run cold. A vast silence, and then the followup: "Could you confirm your mailing address?"
Physically returned—not rejected. Despite the heart attack–inducing head-fake phone call, I'm no worse for wear. Someone's even benefiting from some A+ blood. But it never matters how improbable the bad news might be—when hospitals call it just seems eminently reasonable, even obvious, that they're going to tell you that you have dengue fever. Not the call you want to receive, well, ever.
On the other hand, I would like to hear from Dan, author of Iconoduel, but the listed e-mail address seems to be out of commission. Dan, if you're reading, could you drop me a line? (Um, promise, totally not bad news or hospital related.)
A Gerhard Richter–esque photo makes the BBC's lede art today:
That's an Agence France-Presse photograph; the AFP story features other generic images from file—nothing taken from the attack. Probably only state media are allowed to cover the story. That context lends a subtle subversive quality to the BBC's photograph selection, don't you think?
Iván Navarro, Assembly Line, 2008.
From time to time, a piece seems set to run but falls to the wayside for one reason or another. A story might fall through the news hole. Features stack up: A backlog of reviews as an issue's coming together might leave no room for a recent submission, even though it's been accepted. And whether it finds a space in the next issue depends on any number of factors.
The following is a small item I wrote for Modern Painters that, unfortunately, didn't find its way into print. (And as such, it shouldn't be considered a review by that publication. But I thought that readers here in the District who saw the show might be interested nonetheless.)
Iván Navarro's Assembly Line is an open metal toolbox, inside which the artist has placed a fluorescent light bulb between a mirror and a one-way mirror. Standing over it and peering down, the viewer sees a series of light tubes descending into eternity—a staircase that eventually appears to wind, owing to slight, accumulated refractions. For Blank Verse (Armoire), Courtney Smith repurposes pieces of furniture, lacquered white and arranged in a dense geometric block, their original constituent functions anonymized and bent to a design that suggests modularity but is totally prohibitive. "Remake," a joint show at G Fine Art, finds both artists (who each hail from South America and now share a life together in New York) contributing distinct visions about objects, function, and application. Smith has based her the shape of her works loosely around the Tangram, a familiar Chinese geometry puzzle that was likely based on a Song Dynasty furniture set. New forms in the absence of function are the focus of Smith's Tangram, featuring squares and triangle shape blocks hacked out of whole chests-of-drawers. Knobs, handles, and gaps delineating shelves appear decorative and use-less. Navarro, on the other hand, has approached the show from a political bent: In a video installation titled The Missing Monument for Washington, D.C., he celebrates Victor Jara, a Chilean poet and political activist who was tortured and machine gunned during the U.S.–backed military coup that established Pinochet's junta. The work reflects the social prerogative hinted at by his sculpture, in which workaday materials give a glimpse of eternity. But it is Smith's overriding interest in frustration that dominates the show. In their single collaborative piece, Navarro has set a lightbulb-and-mirror abyss in the center of a rickety platform Smith made from shelves and other bits of loose furniture—which obstructs, or at least challenges, the viewer looking in.
Iván Navarro and Courtney Smith, Kitchen Sink, 2008.
Pencil in a chat with me over lunch for September 19: I'll be at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, discussing work from the permanent collection. Plan for another Friday gallery talk on September 5, when Horn of Hirsh associate curator Kristen Hileman will discuss "The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image". Both Krist/ns start at 12:30 p.m.
If my blog were a Terminator movie, we'd be some ten minutes from the credits, with G.p sandwiched in some gigantic trash compactor, seemingly dead, likely impaled, and utterly defeated. All the skin and pleather brutally stripped away, a once coolly efficient CSS engine exposed, looking like so many pirated parts dumped on a trash heap. The uncaring fires of industry reflect off a symbolic, and symbolically smashed, pair of Ray-Bans. Our cause—admittedly, a vain and rather modest one—seems in peril. Yet then: a blinking red indicator, a snare drum, two snare drums. A helpful clarification: the deus ex machina is in fact an alternative power source! Do you see that tiny techno flicker of life in that forgotten corner of your RSS reader? That's no garbled signal—that's hope for a sequel.
I've got a lot of metaphors to catch up on, so let's not waste any time switching gears. I'll spare you the tediously long story and say that I'm paying much closer attention to my domain registration now.
Hello, blog. I see that you're still here.
