In today's Dallas Morning News I have a story on the Vogels' "Fifty Works for Fifty States" gift. In the article I explain in some detail what Texas will receive—the list's only recently been made available to press (and to the museums).
Jen Graves in the Stranger has some posts about the gift that Washington (state) received.
Sam Taylor-Wood, That White Rush, 2007.
One image that's stayed with me since the art fairs last December? Sam Taylor-Wood's That White Rush.
Taylor-Wood, who is known for her photography, gives her medium a gentle tweak and winds up with one of the best video artworks I've seen in a fortnight. Taylor-Wood pictures the tryst between Leda and the Swan through a grainy video loop that plays at only a few frames per second.
Her take is both comic and earnest, acknowledging the absurdity of the visual: the nude woman reclines, propped up by her hands, and receives the ministrations of the taxidermied waterfowl, its wings fanned wide. Enhancing a comic effect is the low-fi porn production, which signals to the viewer that the perversion of the gods is best understood through the lens of the celebrity sex-tape. Taylor-Wood diminishes the deception of Zeus and the corruption of Leda as two very distinct effects within the myth. Instead, she focuses on the sex and how it acts as an equalizer—it just looks silly, silly in the way that only sex can, even sex between a mortal and a god.
Yet the scene and setting offer a stark contradiction to the porny production: no hotel mattress illuminated by lime-light night-vision, but instead stark wood floors bathed in wan sunlight. The set is ascetic, signifying revelation or ecstasy or their possibility. It's the same wood paneling favored by Anselm Keifer, who also investigates the divine, visitation, and the supernatural manifested in the real world. In Parsifal III, for example, Keifer depicts a wooden attic—a space invested with significance after the Holocaust and one that appears frequently in his work about heaven and earth. [For more Kiefer, click-click.]
Anselm Keifer, Quaternity, 1973.
Taylor-Wood's video painting takes its name from Yeats's 1922–23 poem, one of the myth's greatest depictions (and one of the poet's greatest poems):
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,So mastered by the brute blood of the air
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Cy Twombly, Leda and the Swan, 1962.
Click to enlarge.
As in Yeats's characterization, Taylor-Wood has captured Leda in consensual contradiction: receptive, cautious, stimulated, curious. Yeats described Leda as resisting the swan with mere "terrified vague fingers", casting doubt as to whether she even put forth that much effort. Taylor-Wood has simulated that doubt in stilted frame captures—the breast caught heaving, the thigh caught shifting.
Yeats's poem breaks neatly into two halves, with action initiating the octave and climax resolving into sestet. In Taylor-Wood's piece we witness the moment suspended between "a sudden blow" and "a shuddering in the loins"; she has elected to promote perspective as the narrative insight. And in so doing she keys into Yeats's great, telescopic bound from myth to history: A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead.
Although the work is video, That White Rush doesn't capture the sort of context needed to assess what's happening between Leda and the swan. That ambiguity has always driven both the myth and its depictions. Photography and especially video are supposed to dispel ambiguity, and Taylor-Wood is certainly attentive to this idea. Her work is a religious painting caught on security camera. The momentary glimpse of sex (the nip-slip, the up-skirt cam) is a totem for sex, sexuality, and consent.
Art history provides two great precedents for Taylor-Wood's version. Michaelangelo's 1530-ish composition features important Mannerist tendencies. Leda's elongated, curling fingers, for example, give lie to the notion that she is asleep, suggesting permission. Michaelangelo could be a rather dirty old man, and he's reduced the act of penetration into two ambiguous details: the swan's tail meeting with a conspicuous fold of red drapery underneath Leda's bottom, and the swan's beak entering Leda's mouth rather than trained on her nape. And here for the first time (I believe), Leda is depicted in (welcome?) supine repose.
Cy Twombly's far more recent abstraction obviously involves a great degree of ambiguity as far as figure is concerned. The square window form is the anchor to the real, granting the architectural space of this mythical moment unexpected prominence. Taylor-Wood's piece reverses the configuration: the action is unexpectedly graphic, but the space is mysterious.
Leda and the swan as a motif? A welcome throwback. Not only is it one of art history's favorite myths, but confident dialog between contemporary art and a long art history is simply a relief in comparison to often confrontational appropriation tactics favored by would-be dragonslayers and debutantes. Taylor-Wood is not only pinging the canon but, doubly boldly, saluting Bill Viola, her contemporary, so well known for capturing the ecstatic in slow-to-unfold video works. To do so with a nod to Yeats and others? An unexpected achievement.
Here is the Harvard Crimson, comparing Yale's Aliza Shvarts's to Cornel West, a tenured professor who had the audacity to record a rap album. I'd expect that fellow students would take more seriously issues of academic freedom and institutional incursions into student speech (indeed, students are surely better placed to talk about it than me) and so it's disappointing to see the columnist mount a narrative critique of "sociopolitical progressivism" as manifested in a work that neither she nor anyone else has seen because the school has censored it. To read about the institutional dimension, you must turn to the august American Prospect, where Dana Goldstein has my back.
It only occurred to me this morning to dial up Yale's art and art history journal to see whether it had anything to say about the matter. A quick look at the Dimensions blog finds students who, as you might expect, would like to steer the debate toward context. Interestingly enough, on the Dimensions contact page is an image of a sculpture by Shvarts, the materials of which are plaster, vaseline, towels, rubber bands, and latex gloves. That would seem to suggest thematic continuity in the artist's work, the possibility of which her critics, the Crimson included, have dismissed. But who can say? The work will not be seen, not even by her fellow students, who lament, "[s]ince we'll never see it, we'll never know what she really did, or even what she intended to install, and that is the biggest ambiguity of all."
So I've mounted a defense of Yale student Aliza Shvarts's controversial art project involving induced abortions over at the Guardian. Or rather, I'm criticizing Yale's response to the outrage that the project has predictably (and reasonably) provoked. The art, nothing doing: I haven't seen it, I don't know.
Suffice it to say, Guardian readers are not convinced.
Mark Cameron Boyd has a must-read epistemic critique of Zwirner & Wirth's recreation of Dan Flavin's epic 1964 Green Gallery exhibit—the first in which he showed nothing but fluorescent-light "propositions". One detail that Boyd has not gotten quite right: The lights that the Flavin estate uses today are indistinguishable from those he used nearly 50 years ago. As Greg Allen wrote in his NYT piece that everyone else wishes they'd thought to write, the bulbs Flavin used have taken on an artifact quality that he never intended while, at the same time, disappeared from manufacturers' everyday production. Allen mentioned last month, though, that despite the change in GE's fluorescent formula, the Flavin estate still had original bulbs as recently as 2004 and has "documented the chemical formulation of the coating of each color of light bulb, and when it needs more, it has them fabricated in small batches." In a broad epistemic sense, these special-order lights aren't the same as the ones anyone could acquire through the 1980s, but the color and light are precisely the same.
The press for Zwirner & Wirth's redux show has been, shall we say, glowing. ("The freshest, most challenging and uplifting exhibition in town," says R.C. Baker.) I'm inclined to cross my arms and harumph on the sidelines with Boyd: As a show that recreates the original and revolutionary 1964 experience, it's thorny for all the reasons Boyd mentions—basically, it's site-specific installation set in a whole new situation. But as a show that strives instead to offer a historical experience, it comes quick on the heels of a similar effort that visited New York, Fort Worth, and the District. Needless to say, it's a testament to the artist's lasting vision that mounting his work invariably brings up difficult issues.
Christine Gray, Pat Match Stand, 2008.
Christine Gray's show at Project 4 opens on Saturday. I curated the show, though that's a word I'll use lightly, since the artist knew what she wanted to do when I approached her and did exactly that. I think her work represents an incredible culmination of considered study and practice, and it's my pleasure to introduce her to the area. (She's now teaching painting at VCU, so I imagine area readers will be seeing more of her.)
For more, you'll have to read the essay. (I'll link it when it's available.) The opening's on Saturday from 6 to 8:30 p.m.
One story I've always kicked around but never put to pen and paper concerns a beloved piece of art that turns out to be a fake—and the political and professional cataclysms that cascade from the revelation. As it happens, truth may be stranger than fiction. Questions have been raised about Goya's El Coloso:
Doubts were first cast on El Coloso's authenticity — and that of another celebrated Goya work, La Lechera de Burdeos (The milkmaid of Bordeaux) — by the British Goya specialist Juliet Wilson-Barreau, a member of the scientific committee that organised the Prado's new exhibition.Artinfo notes the weak sauce that the Prado is feeding the Independent ("Citing a lack of energy and bad display"), as does Tyler Green and The Medium."The works lack energy and a good display within the framework of the painting, faults that are completely abnormal in the trajectory of Goya," Ms Wilson-Barreau wrote in Spain's art review El Periodico del Arte in April 2001. Giving El Coloso the definitive thumbs down, she added: "Almost all the specialists are in agreement that it is not by Goya." Ms Wilson-Barreau's doubts were shared by Manuela Mena, the Prado's senior Goya expert and curator of the show which opens tomorrow.
However, they were furiously dismissed at the time by the Prado's then director, Fernando Checa, who insisted both works were authentic. A year later, Nigel Glendinning, professor of art history at London University, wrote an academic study robustly defending the painting's authenticity. Almost nothing further was heard about the disputed El Coloso until this week, when it emerged that the canvas was excluded from the forthcoming celebration of Goya's war paintings.
Why would the Prado not clean the painting and come clean on its provenance? Politics, it would seem, are stranger than truth, science, or fiction.
Former director Checa came to his office when his predecessor announced the discovery of a significant new Goya—only to be discredited by the Prado's own archives, which listed the work as a major painting by a minor artist.
Checa himself left the museum after former Spanish defense minister Eduardo Serra staged a coup in 2001, quite literally taking the director's office for himself. Serra supplanted Checa from his position as chair of the Patronato (the Prado's board), a position to which Serra was appointed in 1999 by José María Aznar.
Having successfully obtained the reigns at the Prado, he had trouble handing them over at first. Serra was unable to persuade Miguel Zuguza to take the position as director at the end of 2001; various accounts have it that Serra then offered the position to Jesús Urrea, only to rescind it when Zugaza announced publicly that he would be taking the job, thereby putting Urrea's nomination (if not his very brief career as director) to rest.
With the election of Zapatero and the Socialist Party in 2004, the conservatives were out and with them, Serra. Rodrigo Uría replaced him on the Patronato. When Uría died three years later, Plácido Arango, by accounts a much more powerful figure, was appointed.
From 2001 to the opening of "Goya in Times of War" today, there has been plenty of opportunity to publish the findings. As director Zugaza told the Independent, "Our knowledge of Goya's work has advanced greatly in recent years, and doubts over the attribution of El Coloso are widely accepted by the museum's scientific team." But the political will to own up to an embarrassment? Apparently lacking. The concern was originally published in 2001, when then-director Checa squashed it. It would seem reasonable to count Checa among the "specialists" in a position to speak about the provenance of a Goya, so I'm inclined to view Wilson-Barreau's statement with some suspicion—although given his tenuous hold over his administration, Checa was in no place to incur any negative press.
Why haven't those findings been made public—or even investigated—since? As London University professor Nigel Glendinning (and Coloso defender) asks, "If the museum doesn't like it, they should tell us why." But what they really don't like is public embarrassment: It seems that the Prado is more interested in the reputation of the Prado than the reputation of El Coloso. If political currents have not afforded an ideal opportunity to discuss this work's provenance by now, when will they?
Speaking of Goya and the war between the Spanish and the French, the government of France proposes to pay citizens to take an interest in French art. Advantage: Spain.
Image courtesy of Dalylab
Today my American Prospect article about Spiral Jetty and oil drilling is the lede on the home page, which means you can read it for free now.
Also, Kyle Winslow of TAP has a Q&A with artist Nancy Holt and Friends of Great Salt Lake director Lynn de Freitas that further explores topics raised by the piece. And if after all that you're still hunkering for a couple more paragraphs on the matter, you can read here about where things stand as of today. Here's a hint: Utah may not end up deciding matters after all. Click click.
Becky Alprin, Melissa Dickenson, Dawn Gavin, Geoff Grace, Maren Hassinger, and Molly Springfield. The $25,000 award will be named in July. Much more info at Bmoreart.
G.p pal Genevieve Smith has a piece in Portfolio on an upcoming Christie's auction that will include a major Clyfford Still painting, 1946 [PH-182]:
Given the rarity of such an event, one might expect a startlingly high price for 1946. Yet the current record holder, 1947-R-no. 1, which was auctioned in November 2006, fetched a relatively paltry $21.3 million. Christie's has priced 1946 (PH-182) at $8 million to $12 million. But "it could very well exceed our estimates," says Christie’s senior contemporary art specialist Robert Manley, overseer of both sales.Read the whole thing for more on Still's commercial history. As far as valuation is concerned, there's a perfect storm of anticipation about Still's never-before-seen work and a "relaxing" of the art market, with speculation declining and trust in reliable figures driving sales. (More on that later.)Still's prices have lagged in part because there's been such a limited supply of his work to fuel interest. At his death, in 1980, only 150 of Still's paintings were in circulation—most in permanent museum collections, with as few as 25 in private hands. "They are Vermeer rare," says Dean Sobel, director of the new Clyfford Still Museum, which will open in Denver in 2010.
[ . . . ]
The Denver Art Museum previewed a selection from Still's estate last summer, marking the first time many art historians and collectors laid eyes on some of his major works. The show was so popular, drawing 100,000 visitors, that the museum extended it through November.
The upcoming Christie's sale will be the first since the Denver preview, and though it certainly won't be the last, the sale will prove whether it whetted collectors' appetites for more. While the 13 works in the preview, like the rest of the estate, will never be up for sale, the attention the museum will bring to Still's work might mean that the timing is right to invest in a piece like 1946.
Aesthetically speaking the timing is "right" for Still, too. It always seems to be. One decade after another, in context, his work continues to be important but moreover abundantly relevant.
Why, just this morning I was discussing with a friend the benefits of membership at the Tate. An excellent club space and view for members, quality museums of course, but also association with BP and its annual rolling programme of events. BP Saturday looks good to me!
You have only until Sunday to see young artist Benjamin Jurgensen's BFA senior thesis project, "we are will smith, or whatever", at the Corcoran, but I recommend that fans of Matthew Barney, Jessica Stockholder, and Banks Violette as well as those simply curious about young talent in the District check it out and see for yourself. I don't see all the BFA/MFA shows by any means (for example, I've seen zero so far this spring), but Jurgensen's shown work around town and it sticks out in recent memory among young graduating artists.
His sculpture is accessible, almost to a fault: some familiar compositional strategies presented in a familiar medium (MDF). Yet I don't see compromise in his work for the sake of broad appeal.
Benjamin Jurgensen, put we to your ear and hear yesteryear's ocean, mute affairs, mortarboards, merman graduate shit, this is just future love like water dripping down her inner thigh, teardrops as diluted thoughts filtered through the mainstream, twenty thing-a-ma-bobs, treasure troves, spear-fishing, love's fragile future only safe speaking through cartoon thought bubbles and coral thieves, lured into the deepest oceans of fantasy, flipping fins, marquees wash up on shore, legs required in the seas of change, reprimanded daughters, breathing the same air, just done differently, 2008.
Benjamin Jurgensen, cell phone tower disguised as structural column, 2008.
Benjamin Jurgensen, everyting crash, this is a chaos race, not your typical dark skinned disney villains, 2008.
The least that can be said is that it's a coherent sculpture show, a pleasant surprise for a thesis exhibition. I imagine I'll have more to write about when Jurgensen has a solo at Meat Market in a few weeks.
Why did I call former Phillips Collection director Jay Gates "a hero" in 2008 when I wrote just last summer that "it's a somewhat mixed legacy that Gates leaves as he resigns from his position with the institution"?
That's not exactly how one reader put the question to me. A reader raised some skeptical points in response to my high praise for Gates in this City Paper review on "Degas to Deibenkorn: The Phillips Collects", when I know full well that Gates made decisions that threatened the integrity of the institution? Here's what I wrote:
"Degas to Diebenkorn" is of a piece with other changes over the last few years at the red brick house on 21st Street. The Phillips celebrated a dramatic expansion in 2005 that added five stories and 3,000 square feet of gallery and studio space. That same year, it closed a $29 million capital campaign—its first ever—some $2 million over its target and two years ahead of schedule. Last year's announcement that director Jay Gates would retire sees the Phillips Collection's fifth director departing as a hero.But here's what I had to say for the Washington Post Express at the time, back when the director resigned:
JAY GATES RAISED THE ROOF of the Phillips Collection, in a literal sense: The director oversaw the museum's 30,000–square–foot expansion, completed last year. But Gates also threw open the doors of the venerable collection by lending works to casinos on the Vegas strip.It's not that I changed my mind or forgot that Gates made some poor decisions as director. For certain, the buoyant state that the Phillips enjoys today does not excuse Gates's decision to strike an arrangement with the Bellagio at the risk of injuring Duncan Phillips's original vision or sacrificing the integrity of the institution by renting out curatorial decisions about the works.What happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas. The decision to lend principal works from the collection to the Bellagio in 2000 stunned observers, who thought that Gates' decision indicated that the museum was straying too far into the commercial realm. It's hardly that casinos are seedy and historic Dupont Circle townhouses aren't; it's that casinos don't offer the license to hang whatever piece of art that belongs, whereas museums do (or ought to).
[ . . . ]
So it's a somewhat mixed legacy that Gates leaves as he resigns from his position with the institution.
Nevertheless, his legacy is a positive one. Dorothy Kosinski begins her tenure as director with a vastly larger museum, strong budgetary footing, and most importantly, an institution whose reputation has withstood some rocky moments.
I might have curbed my enthusiasm. But, between between villain and hero, Gates belongs in the latter camp. There are other institutions that have underwent expansions, capital campaigns, and renovations and come out less secure and self-sure for it.
Tim Conlon @ Arlington Arts Center.
There's conversations here and here about a City Paper review I wrote on "Collectors Select" at Arlington Arts Center. Specifically, the chatter's about the parts that deal with Philippa Hughes and Tim Conlon (and counting). Here's what I wrote:
[Daniel] Lavinas shows [the work of León Ferrari] without pretension: His biggest intervention is to have the gallery painted a deep shade of cherry-lambic red to match the heliographs. Philippa Hughes went further. The least experienced collector in the group, Hughes invited some graffiti artists—Tim Conlon, Bryan Conner, RAMS, and the Soviet—to tag her room. The intervention is the work here. But Hughes is bursting through a door that's been open for nearly three decades. There's still room for innovation in graffiti, but graffiti in a room isn't innovative alone (even if it shares the room with floor-to-ceiling Tiffany windows, as it does here). Context notwithstanding, the work by Conlon (which takes up most of the room) is dull in any formal sense. As tags, they're not particularly intricate or witty; as abstraction, they don't offer much.I encourage you to "read the whole thing" because that's what we writers always say, but also because my estimation of Hughes's show fits in against my estimation of the other exhibits. There are several curating strategies on display, some more successful than others, and that's not something to ignore when the shows are set in contradistinction to one another.
The entire show consists of six smaller shows—it's a federal showcase of smaller independent showcases. Hughes's room might be more independent than the rest, though. For example, she's hosting "Wreckfast @ Tiffany's", a closing party for her room. In a sense, that adds as much context to consider as the Tiffany glass does. If her argument is that the show succeeds because the audience it's designed to attract will benefit from it, then you get into questions about whether and to what extent young, hip, gallery-party attendees will be exposed already to the notion of graffiti in a gallery—or, on the other hand, whether they'll be prepared to accept that.
Hughes is staking a Roberta Smith claim, that there is a responsibility to increase visual literacy. (I put Roberta Smith on a continuum with Peter Schjeldahl, who says if people don't like art, bully for them. And those two are talking about art criticism and its purpose, of course, but let's project laterally to curating.) I don't believe that a work's instrumental value to the audience merits its inclusion in a show.
One way or the other it's a context-driven piece. I think, though, that the intended context isn't the only context that the critic needs to consider. On the other hand, Cudlin says, "Complaining that it isn't succeeding at something it doesn't set out to do just isn't productive."
But I'm on the verge of writing ex ante about the show and I don't want to do that. It's odd to have this public conversation with the show's curator and administrator—well, I'll back up and say it's novel, not odd. Transparency is for the best in criticism, particularly in new media, and I do as much (I hope) to put the negative feedback I receive out there as I do to put my work out there.
It turns out that Pulse London and Photo-London have canceled their upcoming fairs. This bit from Art Info gave me a chill: "Organizers [of Photo-London] say they are restructuring and hope to bring back a more competitive offering in 2009 but a representative for the fair also told the British Journal of Photography that due to economic troubles in the United States only one U.S. gallery had signed up for 2008 and it was 'a bit ridiculous to have an international fair without the Americans.'"
In a series of posts (here, here, and here) Tyler Green examines the trial balloon floated by the Albright-Knox in February—that is, the museum's aspirational pledge to build a 50,000–square-foot expansion. I'm not quite sure that I fully understand what he means by one comment:
[M]useum directors should stop pointing to tourism as a rationale for whatever they do. A museum's most important audience is is its hometown crowd.but I think I disagree in this case. If the Albright-Knox is only able to commit to this expansion by attracting public support, as seems both perfectly plausible given the circumstances and straightforwardly implied by A-K director Louis Grachos, then increasing the Albright-Knox's profile as a destination is exactly what the museum will need to do to attract that support.
Rather, I don't disagree with Green. I think there isn't necessarily a conflict here. Is the Albright-Knox's most important audience its hometown crowd? Sure. Does the museum do a disservice to the hometown crowd by expanding in a way that's sure to draw eyes from outside Buffalo? No, not necessarily. Whatever decision it comes to in re: campus expansion, architect or starchitect, etc., the A-K will need to brand that decision as one that's going to bring jobs and eyeballs and expand tax revenue, in order to receive the sort of support (e.g., tax-increment financing) that has proved a boon to institutions whose trustees can't go it alone.
I would think that the satellite option might have been more appealing to state and local government, actually: The A-K brand name grows in two areas of Buffalo. But the powers that be say no. I expect, like Green, then, that the museum will hang its case on the strength of its expansion design. Hey, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Yes, $2,500 is quite a lot to pay for a private tour of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum with Michael Govan. But it's an entire order of magnitude lowerr than what trustees paid for tickets to the BCAM opening ($25,000).
Thinking more on Cudlin's post: At Art Basel Miami in December, I found a great deal of figurative and representative painting, as well as some painting in installation and other noncanvas formats. There was less abstract work to be found. What I did see tended to be ordered and mannered, featuring some of the same compositional strategies Cudlin highlights but with markmaking imported from a few external realms—comic illustration, architecture, psychedelia. There is almost no unanticipated gesture in these abstractions: They are meticulously planned and executed.
Some of the works that I snapped (forgive the poor image quality):
Mark Chariker @ Rhys
Aaron Noble @ Pavel Zoubok
William Swanson @ DCKT
Jacob Magraw-Mickelson @ Richard Heller
Jeffry Cudlin skewers the dominant mode with a name-that-painter quiz, featuring only paintings done in the familiar, "globalized" abstract style. I can name with confidence 9 of his 14 examples.
A conversation today about art-music videos reminds me that the Wpa hasn't hosted a lecture in its Experimental Media Series in some time. I hope it's an ongoing program that will return to the Corcoran soon.
In the meantime, and acknowledging that I'm totally copping out on the lack of posts around here lately—art videos!
OCDJ!
Dan Deacon!
Videohippos!
All good things come from Baltimore. Note that if you play all these videos at the same time, it sounds like any song by your run-of-the-mill, cool-kids Baltimore DJ.
Finally, this gem:
I can't explain that one but I adore it.
So artDC is leaving DC. Should DC be concerned? I don't think so. There were organizational problems with artDC—and with the Convention Center—from the start. I'm not as convinced as some that this market can support an international fair but I'm certain that the failure of artDC does not prove that the city can't.
Turner arrives in Dallas and the Dallas Morning News has a review claiming that "No artist has a greater claim to being the last of the traditionalists and the first of the moderns." I register a similar note in my review for the Guardian, though I am less sanguine about what it means for Turner to be such a transitional figure. There's a premium for transitional painters, and I think that we can get carried away in the search for those missing-link artists who bridge modernism and what came before: "A 1966 exhibit of 100 watercolours and oils that visited the Museum of Modern Art - not the Met - enrolled Turner in the ever-expanding chronicle of 19th-century painters whose work would prefigure the advent of Modernism."
Frankly, I think it was seeing Constable billed as the first modernist just several months before the Turner show (in the same museum, no less) that gave me pause. Had Constable painted for another 20 years, he would not have arrived at the earliest Impressionist works. Had Turner worked for another 10 years he would have—though, had his mental state not deteriorated to the degree that it did, he would not have arrived at the canvases that are most often greeted as Modern. There's a limit to these kinds of counterfactuals—what an artist might have discovered given the time to follow down some road he started on—and yet that seems to be what we are saying when we say that so-and-so non–Modernist painter was in fact the first Modernist painter.
This video portrait business by Ryan McGinley on actors nominated for Oscars is just gay. How is this not parody? We're all going to be doing this on Facebook or whatever we're using in a year's time. (Courtesy the Governess)
Semi-finalists for the $25,000 Sondheim Prize (artists from the District listed in bold):
Becky Alprin, Laura Amussen, Rachel Bone, Ryan Browning, Mandy Burrow, Linda Day Clark, Brent Crothers, Melissa Dickenson, Eric Finzi, Laurie Flannery, Shaun Flynn, Dawn Gavin, Geoff Grace, Maren Hassinger, Kay Hwang, Courtney Jordan, Bridget Sue Lambert, Youngmi Song Organ, Beverly Ress, James Rieck, Christopher Saah, Lynn Silverman, Molly Springfield, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Calla Thompson, Edward Winter, Erin WomackMany fewers artists from the capital this year than in last year's crop.
Matthew Langley, Stylus, 2007.
A short item in the City Paper on Matthew Langley: "His paintings draw easy comparisons to a host of latter-day abstract-expressionist titans, from Agnes Martin and Sean Scully. Make no mistake, Langley courts those comparisons—his emphasis on the grid places him squarely within that Lacanian camp that finds the sublime through repetition, variation, and trauma."
And so on. The artist keeps a blog—here he mentions former WPA director, Jock Reynolds. I have heard that Reynolds's name was bandied about for director of the Corcoran after Levy's departure, back when.
Eric Powell, Untitled, 2005.
Mary Early, Untitled, 2007.
Check today's City Paper for a feature review of two ongoing gallery shows: "15 for Philip" at Curator's Office and "New Sculpture" by Mary Early.
The crooked angle in that Powell photo drives me absolutely bonkers.
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970.
Nancy Holt, widow of Robert Smithson, has sent a note around alerting people to a proposal before the state of Utah that would permit oil drilling in the Great Salt Lake near the site of Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
Here's a map showing the proposed location for the drills:
And here's another map showing where the Spiral Jetty stands relative to the drills:
Gunnison Island is the mile-long float of land in Gunnison Bay, for reference. That puts the nearest drill easily within two to three miles of the Jetty and would mean for infrastructure, roads, construction, and noise within sight of the famous Earth artwork.
I'd draw in arrows to make the sites clearer, but the window for consideration on this contract is narrow and drawing to a quick close. Protest should be lodged with Jonathan Jemming at (801) 537-9023 or jjemming@utah.gov by close of business today (7 p.m. EST). If you call or write to complain, refer to application #8853.
Link, email, call, and write. Roads and industry threaten to undermine the work. The site for the Jetty was chosen for being remote, austere, inaccessible, and useless. Call or write now if you'd like to keep it that way.
Download the contract in PDF by clicking here.
CORRECTION: Gunnison, not Guttison.
Left: Cara Ober. Right: Christine Bailey.
"Despite what the Baltimore Sun says, I am not angry about this any more," says Baltimore artist Cara Ober. She is the subject of a story on a Baltimore exhibit, one that sort of features her work. It's her work, all right, but by a different artist: Christine Bailey. For the show at 100 East Pratt Street in downtown Baltimore, Bailey made paintings that ape everything about Ober's unmistakable style.
"And I would be fine with this project if it had included 3 artists," says Ober, referring to Bailey's original vision for the show, in which she would style-check other artists, not just Ober. "And I would be fine with it if they had just named me from the start."
Now the Baltimore-based artist is fielding criticism from further afield: Blake Gopnik dismisses her in the Washington Post.
The newspaper's chief art critic, who writes a reported review of Bailey's show, discloses that his wife (artist Lucy Hogg) works with Christine Bailey. Bailey and Hogg are reportedly good friends, but never mind. Baltimore is a ways for a critic to travel who doesn't write the galleries beat. Not only is the show across the way, it's also not really a gallery show—Bailey's work is hung in the lobby of an office building.
By the Post's reporting, the show falls in line with the appropriation back-and-forth that's occupied artists for the better part of the twentieth century. (My favorite recent example is Jill Miller's mashup of Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott, John Baldessari, and herself, titled I Am Making Art, Too. This piece illustrates the way that appropriation almost always works: A younger artist samples a highly known piece by an established artist to make a point about practice, politics, or whatever. Appropriation is typically greeted as a sign of respect, a nod from teacher to student, and it tends to be more subtle, an Easter egg for critics on the lookout.)
Bailey's is a new escalation in a game of oneupmanship, Gopnik argues. Bailey and Ober are peers, both relatively unknown in the national context, and artists competing in the same market. That's something of a new commercial twist. In fact, there are a number of commercial twists in this show.
One is that it's hung in the lobby of an office building—a venue that's not adequate to the task of providing any historical or critical context for the show. Nor did Bailey and the exhibit's curator, Jordan Faye Block, make any effort to provide that context in explanatory text. The original text that hung with the show made no reference to Ober's work. In fact, it's arguable that Bailey obscured the fact.
"Combining imagery and text from various sources, including the web, pop culture, the urban environment and art history, the pictures are at once whimsical and melancholy," the original press release reads. That sounds like Ober describing the work, not Bailey. Bailey didn't mention Ober at all—not even in a roundabout fashion—until Ober threatened legal action. (Block has since posted a "clarification," a revised statement in which Bailey writes that she "used the work of Ms. Ober, among others, as a point of reference" in pieces that adopted the notion of "designer replicas".)
"However much the paintings might look like Ober's," writes Gopnik, "Bailey isn't using that look to the same ends that Ober, or an Ober forger, would." If Bailey doesn't mention Ober—and if Bailey makes claims about the substance and not the situation of these paintings—how can this be true?
Another commercial angle: Block, who represents Bailey now, used to represent Ober.
"I did my first gallery show with [Block] when she was the director at Gallery Imperato—'Femme Effect Part Deux' in April 2006," Ober explains. "The Femme Effect show was during the height of the housing boom and she sold a good deal of my work. Like 16 pieces. Most were small and inexpensive. She even bought one for herself." Block left the gallery, but Ober stayed on. "I decided to stay with Gallery Imperato for professional reasons."
Block describes her own split with Gallery Imperato as "a philosophical difference in vision."
Ober's contract with Gallery Imperato allowed her to participate in group shows at other spaces (provided that the show included five artists or more). Ober says that Block pursued her, and she agreed to participate in two of Block's post-Imperato shows—curated independently under the mantle Jordan Faye Contemporary at various sites.
One of those shows was "Believe It: 14 Painters", a May 2007 show at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson in Baltimore, in which Block came in for some criticism for painting her gallery logo—a Tiffany box–blue outline of a square—on the gallery floor. Some, like commenters and contributors on Ober's art blog, thought this distracted from the work. "After that show, I decided that would be the last show I worked with her on."
"The show's not about Cara Ober," says Block. "It's about authorship, originality, it's trying to question all those things. It's a conceptual project. I stand behind my artists. I think Christine Bailey is brilliant. I don't think I crossed any lines. And I didn't make any work—I'm selling the work."
"Cara is someone I don't know, so I had no personal connection and could be dispassionate about the work," writes Bailey on a January 21 post on Ober's art blog (where Ober offered Bailey a venue to address the growing controversy). Block cannot make the same claim—and much of the ire in comments to that post has been directed toward her.
"I was surprised that people were confused, as if I had made a mistake, which I didn't do," Block says in response. "I've been curating for over 9 years. I don't make mistakes."
Maybe not. But to answer that, viewers need more context than an office lobby affords, and more disclosure from the artist and curator than none at all. Post readers deserve more of both, too.
[Cross-posted at City Desk]
I had to do a double-take, reading the news that four California museums were raided by federal agents on suspicions that the institutions had knowledgeably purchased stolen art:
The detailed warrants gave the agents broad authority to search the museums' galleries, offices, storage areas and computer archives. They were looking for objects and records related to the primary targets of the investigation: an alleged art smuggler, Robert Olson, and the owner of a Los Angeles Asian art gallery, Jonathan Markell. Markell's Silk Roads Gallery on La Brea Avenue was also raidedRobert Olson—not Robert Olsen, a fine painter who happens to also call L.A. home.
In an interview with DCist, Philippa Hughes responds to some remarks I made back in December in the City Paper about her programming. Responding to the same article, J.T. Kirkland (whom I criticized for his role in curating "Supple") has judgments for everyone involved in his show, in particular Adrian Parsons, Molly Rupert, and the organizer of The Space.
Vanessa Beecroft is a douchebag:
Beecroft went to Sudan two years ago with a camera crew and photographer because, she says, she was interested in the plight of Darfur, though she concedes that she didn't know exactly where Darfur was, and never did get there.A souvenir of the like that fetches $50,000. You may be happy to know that Beecroft (the subject of The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, a documentary by Pietra Brettkelly that promises not to be hagiography) decided in the end not to adopt.Instead, she found herself in southern Sudan, where she visited an orphanage, found a pair of malnourished twins and offered each a breast, swollen with milk because she had left her own young child back in New York. Beecroft says she "fell in love" with the twins, that she wanted to "save" them, and began a quixotic quest to adopt the two infant boys.
Beecroft also photographed herself with the twins suckling her breasts. In an interview, she calls the work "a souvenir."
Credit is due to Jeffrey Deitch, who does not try to sell you on his decision to represent these photographs with some wretch-inducing line about Beecroft's bleeding heart. "There's never been anything like the double breast-feeding photo," he says. Hear that? Two boobs!
Tuesday evening at GWU, Transformer Gallery is hosting its latest Framework Panel. The subject is art school, and the panelists include artists who teach locally or were once themselves art students. Billy Colbert, Maggie Michael, Brandon Morse, Renee Stout, and Rex Weil make up the panel, and Dean Kessman will moderate. Is our children learning?
Art School, Confidential: Rethinking Art Education
GWU Smith Hall of Art
801 22nd St. NW
Tuesday, January 22nd
6:45-8:15pm
The Village Voice acknowledges that an appearance of a conflict of interest is tantamount to a conflict of interest and ends its relationship with Christian Viveros-Fauné, after Tyler Green discovered (revealed?) in a Q&A (!) with Viveros-Fauné that the critic "has been named managing director of two upcoming commercial art fairs" in New York and Chicago. The statement by editor Tony Ortega is careful to say that Viveros-Fauné never acted in a way to give the newspaper pause—an important professional courtesy, but not a statement that edifies the ethical gray area. A conflict of interest is not an ethical lapse in itself. A critic doesn't need to be caught switching caps, putting on one hat to support the interest he pursues when he's wearing the other hat, to have a conflict of interest. A conflict of interest is the potential for an ethical lapse. Critics can't wear two hats—critics should not even own two hats.
Of course, it's reasonable that a critic might want to switch hats at some point to find the one that fits best. Jeffry Cudlin made the switch: The former galleries critic at the Washington City Paper (that's the beat that I write now), he ceased and desisted writing about local galleries and artists when he took the job as Director of Exhibitions at the Arlington Arts Center. He continues to contribute to the CP on museum shows, where there is not a conflict of interest. Squeaky clean.
I, for one, know exactly how hard it is to write about art and make a reasonable living. Aside from a few contract editing jobs and some regular assignments on subjects outside the art world, I earn my keep by writing about visual art. It can be done: I've found that living in a city that's saturated by media, abundant with art, and populated by relatively few arts writers makes it possible (And, if I'm honest, living like a graduate student makes it bearable.) No one is entitled to a job as a salaried critic; there isn't a minimum pay-scale above which journalistic ethics apply.
The questions Edward Winkleman raises, while worth solving, especially if we are to arrive at a more specific understanding of what counts and what doesn't in the register of permissions and violations, his premise is complicated when it need not be. An eagle-eyed watch for conflicts of interest in journalism does not actually concern art, the art market, the prestige of critics or criticism, or the rise and fall of arts-writing salari
