Margaret Meehan, detail from Sugar Mountain, 2008.
I took a look at Margaret Meehan's exhibit at Road Agent Gallery in Dallas and wrote a review for the Dallas Morning News.
Now, it turns out that the full title of the exhibit ("On Sugar Mountain. Up Shit Creek.") is something that a family newspaper cannot print. (Which is a bit funny given the work, or my read of it.) In circumstances like these I think that newspapers ought to take the lead from the funnies and print long strings of symbols ($%&@!!1) to stand in for bad words. Just last night I chanced upon Bill Safire's column on the printed profanity, and he finds that dailies prefer the "[expletive]" or "****" workaround to dealing with such pottymouthed copy as the transcripts of Rod Blagojevich. Those wouldn't be my solutions for bad-boy copy, but it's not my #$%@!!1 call. In any case, click-click, and know that the DaMN snipped the exhibition title.
Margaret Meehan, detail from Sugar Mountain, 2008.
Julie Heffernan, Self Portrait as Everything That Rises, 2003.
Sounds like the fire at P.P.O.W. didn't seriously damage the work or space but massively inconvenienced staff and Teun Hocks, whose opening tonight has been moved to a temporary space. P.P.O.W. is a premiere space for figurative work and I'm surprised at how often I generally like what I see there when I visit.
Further to what Ed Winkleman is saying here about Obama's plans for art and cultural advancement being too vague — and given that even arts supporters feel a need to play defense when it comes to institutions like the NEA — what about if President-elect Barack Obama were to scrap the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities altogether and start with something fresh? I like a U.S. Department of Culture for the branding exercise alone. Right now I feel that the best way to show more support for the arts is to find buyin from the arts world. The usefulness of the NEA as a wedge has waned with the Republican brand and culture wars more broadly speaking, but the scars are still fresh in the art world and cynicism dominates. There are other good reasons for doing this, but branding is the one I like best.
Edward Burtynsky, Bao Steel #8, 2005.
Speaking of the EPA, Brad Plumer passes along a Philly Inky profile of Stephen Johnson, the Gaius Baltar–esque head the EPA, appointed by President Bush in 2005. For more tales of incompetence that will astound and amaze you, read Plumer's survey of the scene at Interior and the job cut out for incoming Secretary Ken Salazar.
Bonus environment feature! Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" performed by Radiohead's Phil Selway and Ed O'Brian with up-and-comer Liam Finn and artists-who-need-no-introduction Johnny Marr and Jeff Tweedy. Sounds nice!
Over at Time, Richard Lacayo considers a Cabinet-level Department of Culture and decides against it:
[I]n the hope of getting federal dollars, would museums find themselves tempted to avoid mounting shows that might make the U.S. Department of Culture unhappy? In which case, what happens the next time a conservative Republican is in the White House?What happens under a Republican administration is the U.S. Department of Culture doesn't do anything at all because its budget is slashed to all hell. It's not like the Environmental Protection Agency became a toxic terror during the Bush administration—it was merely prevented from doing its job. You might find under the Grand Old Party's watch an increase in Shakespeare in the Park and jazz festivals along with a decline in fewer biennials and traveling midcareer exhibitions. I'd worry more about other powers that might wind up in a Department of Culture, like the copyright enforcement regimes you see in Departments of Culture elsewhere in the world.
Which is not to say that there is no reason to be concerned about art in the public sphere. I wrote a story along these lines for the Huffington Post after the death of Sen. Jesse Helms:
"More insidious" than conservative challenges to contemporary art "is the chilling effect Helms and his like have had on museums, universities, theaters, and other arts-presenters," writes Wendy Steiner, the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, via e-mail. In The Scandal of Pleasure, Steiner provides the authoritative account of both the public-funding and obscenity-trial scandals associated with the NEA in 1989. "Right-wing politicians do not have as much offensive publicly-funded art to complain about these days, because publicly-funded institutions will not show it."And here is what this intimidation sounds like (and this ought to date the piece):
John McCain's rhetoric has even come to parallel the culture warriors in its reductive simplicity. Steiner explains in Scandal that Helms's counterpart in the House (Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)) once threatened his colleagues to support legislation penalizing the NEA with the statement, "Make no mistake about it, we will alert our members that you are on the record as supporting tax-sponsored pornography." John McCain registers a similar note when he goes on about his friends who author pork-barrel spending legislation: "I'll make them famous, and you'll know their names."But when elected Republican representatives huff and puff about art, the point isn't to actually dial back First Amendment protections. Rather the point is to throw some red meat to voters and win elections. Outrage itself is a constructed thing, cultivated by radical morals groups who benefit from certain structural features of the complaint process. See Ars Technica's Matthew Lasar break down the way that the FCC handles complaint statistics and you'll see that the nation is not so full of shrinking violets as their numbers might have you believe.
Culture wars haven't won conservatives anything recently. A failed culture-war campaign might ultimately cost Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper his job. (Another story I wrote up for HuffPo.) And while the GOP brand is failing, liberals are picking up executive and legislative branches. The opportunity just might be right to push more aggressively for public support for art, what with all this change in the air.
But only, of course, if there's a case to be made for public support. Lacayo's post highlights a concern with government arts administration but doesn't really address the status quo. To do that you'd need to change the question: What happens when museums that are overwhelmingly dependent on private support fail when the economy tanks? To my mind there are worse fates than the specter of censorship under an arts czar.
Paul Richard argues six reasons that Walt Disney should be included in the fine-art canon. He cites Disney's animist and anthropomorphic style and notes his surrealist imagery. Richard hails Disney's technological accomplishment, citing the Eadweard Muybridge–ian achievement that is animation, while also noting that Disney's studio practice resembled that of Thomas Eakins in at least one respect: To make Bambi, Disney obtained and vivisected a fresh deer carcass so that his artists could correctly portray deer anatomy. Then there is the fact of the artists he employed (his studio art school became the California Institute of the Arts) and collaborated with (Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Hart Benton, Frank Lloyd Wright). Disney was on the board of the Museum of Modern Art—clearly some important someones in the art world at the time considered him a colleague.
Richard then goes on to describe a number of artists he would like to see paired with Disney in a retrospective: Murakami, Koons, Crumb&mdahs;you know 'em, the usual (unusual?) suspects. My first thought was of an exhibition with an ear closer to the ground: I'd pair Disney's pink elephants and broom slaves with Ken Kagami, Michael Veliquette, and David Godbold. (All being artists I saw at Art Basel Miami Beach a couple years ago.)
But it occurs to me that rehabilitating Disney isn't about the imagery, it's about the identity. Richard is talking past his argument when he says that Disney's work sometimes falls flat, as that isn't one of the arguments against Disney. Those he doesn't confront, and they are: Orlando, family programming, Pixar, the commodification of Disney's work, the commodification of childhood, the ubiquity of Disney, the peerless promotion of the copyright regime by the Disney family, and so on. I rather appreciate that Richard doesn't bring up these points because I would like to believe that Richard is operating as Johanna Drucker argues in Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity that the art world has moved beyond a framework of oppositional politics that decides what is or isn't art. Then it's not a clever counterintuitive article, but a proposition worth evaluating.
And if that is the case my answer on Disney would ultimately be "no." Political context and other sorts of considerations that make the canon what it is may not any longer actually be useful to determine what is fine art. They still matter in deciding what goes in museums, though. To admit Disney would be to open up a massive new genealogy in visual art that includes all the things that are visual but aren't called art. So it wouldn't be Disney and Murakami or Disney and younger fine artists but Disney and the makers of Final Fantasy or Disney and the Coca Cola designers. That might all be defensible, but it would get very confusing very quickly.
Just because something is important does not make it visual art and at the end of the day, just because something is visual art does not mean that it is represents the most important visual thing. Rather this notion of visual art you find at museums offers a streamlined conversation within visual culture, one that (one hopes) influences and is influenced by other conversations in the broader culture. But museums cannot hope to archive all those other conversations, too.
A thoughtful piece by Richard and sadly, possibly his last for the Post; I understand that he will not be writing for them in the future.
