What a great Internet this morning. I hopped on early and started chatting with my friend about Ruskin and Turner and received in a flash an essay by Ruskin, one that draws heavily from his journals; in it he mentions watching sunsets with Turner. This I mention maybe followed the end of the Napoleonic wars, after which Turner, for one, taking advantage of the newly restored freedom to travel abroad, ventured widely—studying and painting in Tuscany in particular. They say it was Ruskin who coined the phrase "soapsuds and whitewash" that got attached to Turner's Snowstorm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author Was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich (1842)—though Ruskin only meant to lampoon Turner's critics.
Blah blah, sunsets and storms, and then this catches my attention (via @cmonstah):
It's a seven-minute video by artist Marie Lorenz, recorded as she swims back to shore in Ostia (in Rome) after being shipwrecked. It's enthralling. Something about the project—she has the presence of mind to stick her camera in her mouth as she escapes from her damaged boat; somehow "project" isn't the right word here—reminds me of Bruce Nauman's Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), a resemblance that is confirmed by the jarring flash of hands near the end. Don't miss it; read the whole thing; digg and RT.
Now I hasten to note that Keri Oldham is one of my best and oldest friends. She's visiting for a few days after Christmas and if I hope she'll stay through New Year's. Anything I say to you about her work will carry the slant of my extraordinary bias for her as a friend for more than a decade and going. So take someone else's word for it! Lanie Delay talked to her for KERA Public Media and the Q&A examines some of the best aspects of her practice, which includes criticism and theater, too.
Pivoting from her work specifically, let me pick up on something she says in the interview: "Galleries closing doesn't mean that there can't be shows." It's interesting to me the way that geography informs this attitude.
As recently as spring this year—when the nation was firmly in the grip of the Great Recession—people back home were still telling me that Dallas (and Houston, and Austin) was recession proof, that home prices were stable and the market was still growing. That may even still be the case today in Houston—I don't know.
But it's a bad scene now in Dallas, where a lot of galleries are being forced to close. In my (admittedly limited) experience living in DFW and writing some reviews when I visit for the Dallas Morning News, the few devoted dealers and artists in Dallas have enjoyed strong support from collectors and the luxury of Chelsea-sized white cube spaces along Dragon Street and elsewhere. This is not to say that the Dallas art market was ever pampered, but it was never forced to rely upon a strong DIY scene to survive. A stable white cube scene has been destabilized and I don't think there's a back burner guerrilla scene in place where artists can rough it out and find support. (At least, not to my knowledge.)
Now, in the District, the extraordinary growth over the last decade has attracted a number of people—or better put, retained those people—who come not for jobs in political journalism or the federal government but for jobs in culture and entertainment or with the sort of squishy nonprofit work that allows them to devote a lot of time to do those things. While the District enjoyed the sort of boom that saw white cubes springing up on 14th Street NW, a dedicated collector class—like the kind that well-to-do Dallas has or had—never totally materialized. So even though a few galleries in the District have been forced to close (if only to re-open elsewhere) the Great Recession has not taken a huge psychic toll on D.C. artists—who are all too familiar with the struggle. Game's the same, just got more fierce.
In Philly, to take another example, it seemed as though artists were never able to totally capitalize on the boom. I don't know why. A curator explained to me at a meeting with someone from the National Endowment for the Arts that a lot of our discussion didn't much matter for Philadelphia, because Philadelphia isn't run by grant-requesting arts nonprofits—but rather loose collectives, revolving-door fun-scene kids. I would totally guess that's the same for Baltimore. I don't know whether money didn't coalesce into a certain sort of professionalization here because of something attitudinal about the city or because the money was never there. Either way, Philly's art scene looks from all appearances unchanged. Same with Baltimore.
That's maybe wrong in the case of Philadelphia, but put another way, there is an infrastructure to help artists survive the Recession that is more developed in Philly and Baltimore than in D.C. and much more so than in DFW.
Jessica Dawson follows up on the 16 artists Mera Rubell selected for the 12 slots she was tasked to fill. I'm nodding my head to this comment: "A few on the list come as a surprise, given her comments during the tour." Rubell had it in mind to recognize some artists and to push others. Which just goes that much further to show: She wasn't here handing out power rings forged in the flames of the Venice Biennale. Rubell is merely one curator picking work for the Washington Project for the Arts auction and she's made her decisions based on a variety of factors. (Next up: Chiara Sartori.)
It is significant that Rubell is expanding her footprint in the District, buying art here, hosting BYT pool parties and so on. But this project wasn't an art audit of the city. Say that it were: It isn't as if she only found 7 artists when she was asked to pick 12. She liked enough of what she saw to pick 12 and add 4 more.
The image comes from the Guardian story on the petty thieves who allegedly pilfered the Arbeit Macht Frei sign from Auschwitz. There is a detail to that story that drives at the widespread and totally wrong misapprehension about how art theft happens:
[Polish police commander Andrzej Rokita] refused to be drawn on reports in the Polish press that an unnamed "crazed" collector of Nazi memorabilia could have been behind the crime.If it was, it would be the first time in the history of art theft. The black market for art commands billions of dollars, but never on the bequest of any mysterious Dr. No looking to appreciate it in his loft hidden inside a volcano in Midtown. I would be shocked, shocked, if an artwork has ever been pilfered for the private satisfaction of any individual. Even if there were one such case—and there isn't—that would hardly justify the Evil Mastermind who is always cited as the first suspect in any notable art theft case. I do appreciate that this villain is distinguished for being an Evil Neo-Nazi Mastermind: Usually the rogue is merely of the ludicrously gentried class."Robbery and material gain are considered one of the main possible motives, but whether that was done on someone's order will be determined in the process of the investigation," the deputy investigator, Marek Wozniczka, said.
The reality, however, is exciting! When an artwork is stolen and a reward—or more likely, an insurance adjustment—is named, that artwork has a fixed value against commodities on the markets for arms and drugs. See Ulrich Boser's convincing thesis connecting the Gardner heist to the Winter Hill Gang. If you ask me, the old chestnut that art theft fits into a plot lifted from James Bond is tired. David Simon would have been doing the art and criminal worlds a lot of good had he portrayed just one scene with the Greek carrying some Utrecht painting mailing tubes.
Anyway, no one knows why these suspects may have taken the Aushwitz sign. I bet it was for prize money, not for Hitler. What a grim job to reassemble and reinstall it.
When I spoke with Kerry Brougher about the new positions that this would open for the Hirshhorn, he told me that the museum would immediately start looking for an associate a contemporary curator and think later about an assistant curator. So there's a demotion happening there. I asked him whether they would hire locally for the assistant curator, and he said that they'd be doing a global search for the associate curator and a national search for the assistant curator. So there's a demotion, and the stakes are higher!
Now, if you listen to new Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek tell it, the museum's about to get a lot more curators. From Tyler Green's April Q&A with Koshalek:
Koshalek: The other thing about research is that I see us having two curatorial staffs: The people who are here -- there are some extraordinary people here, they're the primary curatorial staff for the institution. The other I think is the curators that exist in the larger world that do extraordinary things, curators who are scaring me because they're breaking new ground. I have a list of people who are re-thinking the world we live in. We see them as our second curatorial staff. We're going to use them to bring in more of a comprehensive look at what this institution can be.Green: So you anticipate the Hirshhorn having more adjunct relationships?
Koshalek: Exactly. And from different institutions -- not just museums of modern and contemporary art, but also from broader, historical institutions.
UPDATE: I caused some confusion with my gloss of my own conversations for this story. Per the AiA story: The Hirshhorn will hire a contemporary curator to replace Anne Ellegood, and then an assistant curator to replace departing associate curator Kristen Hileman.
My Art in America report about G Fine Art closing is here. Now, this morning I'm leaving for Atlantic City for the Food & Wine Festival, and shortly after I get back I'm heading to Dallas to then drive to New York. See you!
G Fine Art, one of the anchor galleries in the 1515 14th Street NW gallery building, will close at the end of its August show, which opens tomorrow evening. I'll have more when my story goes up.
Cara Ober and I discuss the exhibit at the BMA, the jurors, the artists, and the outcome.
If I'm a Sondheim Prize finalist in 2010, I'm thinking that I need to put a Baltimore Zip code on my resume and highlight my teaching experience and spend a few hundred hours volunteering in the city from the semifinalist round forward. As you say, the winners of the Sondheim Prize since its inception could all point to their civic work in Baltimore—though none of the winners, except for the Baltimore Development Cooperative, would point to their civic work as their submission for consideration.
That's a critical point that distinguishes the BDC from past winners. There are, after all, other commonalities between past winners that are clearly not cause for concern. All the winners are also MICA alumni, for example, yet I don't think—at the very least I haven't heard anyone express it seriously—that only an artist with a degree from MICA stands to take home gold.
Putting aside the fact that the BDC claims their civic interaction as art work in a way that past winners like Geoff Grace do not, the concern about artists' civic qualification is one I shared after the award ceremony. It's hard not to, particularly as a Washington resident. Coming into the awards ceremony, with Baltimore's mayor and a Baltimore newscaster introducing the prize to a primarily Baltimore-based audience, artists hailing from D.C. or Virginia must feel like they're playing an away game. Add to that this issue that the past winners are conspicuously important to the Baltimore community and you have the makings of what seems to be a fix—maybe not deliberate but there, nevertheless.
So when I reported my story about the Sondheim, I spoke to Gary Kachadourian at length about this issue. I asked, specifically, what instructions or other guidelines the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts gives to the jury. He was unequivocal about it: none. No fix for social justice or community activism or what have you. He said that he asks jurors to consider the work. He noted that the BDC didn't make it through the first round for the 2008 prize, to give an example of how mercurial the jurying process can potentially be. So social activism, or the benefit to Baltimore, is not being considered as a qualification for this prize—Kachadourian was very clear on this point.
However, there is an interview segment to the award. I think you could argue that the interview benefits artists whose practice is conceptual, off site, untethered to an object, and so on. Artists like Leslie Furlong, Jessie Lehson, Molly Springfield and the others in the finalists' circle are given an opportunity to clarify the work that they've put up for consideration. On the other hand, the BDC has an opportunity to expand upon the work they put up: They're able to tell the jurors that the work is much more than what's on display there at the BMA. It's maybe a structural advantage for artists who engage in a more conceptual practice—maybe.
CO: Well, we could argue a lot of things, in terms of potential strategies and also conspiracy theories. There is ample ambiguity in the process, and you can’t help but to see patterns. I can see your argument that DC-based artists are seen less favorably in this process, which is an idea I hadn't bother to consider. When the Trawick Prize is given, there's no interview process, and there seems to be no bias in terms of choosing Baltimore or DC artists for the top prize.
That said, I do not believe that community activism is a necessary component in an artist’s resume in order to win the Sondheim Prize in Baltimore. Most, if not all, artists volunteer their time, donate their work, and give back to the larger communities. However, I think that AFTER the jurors choose their favorites, the interview process can’t help but to give an advantage to the artists whose projects are most expansive and inclusive.
Every year the jurors are different, which seems to guarantee objectivity and fairness, a fresh start for each new competition. However, upon closer inspection, the national and international art world is small. Many of these jurors have studied under the same teachers, have exhibited in the same museums, and read the same theorists and critics. Despite the differences in jurors from year to year, there is a surprising degree of sameness in their choices. The Sondheim has only existed for four years, yet we see the many of the same finalists year after year. In a pool of several hundred artists, this seems odd. If we look at the CV's of Karen Yasinsky, Molly Springfield, Geoff Grace, Baby Martinez, and the BDC (as Camp Baltimore), what similarities emerge? Are there certain experiences—residencies or exhibitions, not just the work—which mark these candidates, year after year, as heavyweights? And if this is the case, how can we expect jurors to choose ‘fairly’? Building on this, is it wrong to expect a degree of fairness and impartiality from a juror?
Like any other competitive sport, certain athletes and teams are always in the playoffs. Not to say that they always win—that's always a surprise, but the finalists mostly are not. The interview process, conducted the day the awards are given out, seems to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
If the exhibit is the proof, why is an interview necessary? The interview process may actually be counter-productive, in terms of choosing the strongest body of work as the winner. There’s no interview in choosing the semi-finalists, so why should there be one for the winner? Why can’t the works speak for themselves? The BDC had three individuals to answer questions, as opposed to just one of each of the individual artists. Doesn’t that give them an advantage?
KC: Last week, someone sent me a link to a blog post by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson that expresses something that could be material, given the interview process. She writes, "The intent of the BDC, on paper, seems admirable enough. Get through the chewy curatorial jargon and hyper-politicized prose explaining Participation Park and you learn that their stated intent is to gather the community around a vacant plot of land in order to foster democratic public space and a dialogue about development."
Now, Dickinson brings up a lot of concerns about the work that are valid—I recommend reading them and would echo a lot of those points. They are concerns that ought to have come up to a jury, but even she expresses caution about voicing them out loud because she doesn't know the work very well. But she's able to speak in an informed way about some issues surrounding Participation Park—issues about Baltimore's history and politics that a jury just is not going to know.
I'm a fan of Bravo's Top Chef. I watch at home with friends and we bitch and moan about an episode's winner when it seems like the better contestant was snubbed. But at the end of the day, this is sort of absurd: As an armchair food critic, I can't taste the food, so how can I judge?
Would the Sondheim Prize lose something if the work up for consideration were restricted to the objects on display—the stuff that jurors can taste firsthand? Or would that eliminate performance art, activism, and other conceptual, post-object practices from consideration altogether?
CO: I don’t think the prize would lose anything if the work on display is the sole factor in picking the winner. I think the Sondheim Prize would actually become more equitable and less frustrating for everyone who does not get to participate in the final interview process. What is the point of having the exhibition if a half hour conversation can tip the scales? Each artist has a written statement on the wall in the museum and submits other written materials. This should be adequate. The more I think about it, the interview process seems skewed and unnecessary, and downright disadvantageous to the artists who aren’t smooth talkers, magnetic personalities, or pious souls.
Kriston Capps and Cara Ober discuss the exhibit at the BMA, the jurors, the artists, and the outcome.
KC: Who did you think would win and why did you think that?
CO: Every year I am stymied by the Sondheim winner, so this year I decided to do a reader's poll on Bmore Art, asking who did readers think would win. Notice, this is quite different than asking who deserved to win. For a couple of weeks, people solidly believed Karen Yasinsky would take it, so I did, too. After the show was up and photos of the exhibit were posted, I changed my mind. I thought that Ryan Hackett was a shoe-in. The room he occupied felt elegantly curated, thematic in a way that made each piece more interesting, and tactile in an intellectual, scientific, and sensory way. Hackett handled concerns of space and color with finesse and walked a fine line between sterile and warm/fuzzy in a way that I had never experienced before. Hackett's 'room' could be equally enjoyed by an art theorist and a five-year-old, challenging yet accessible.
I thought that all the artists put together interesting exhibits, but felt most strongly about Hackett’s work after viewing them all. Judging from the six finalists, I thought that the jurors seem to favor intellectual precision, an integration with technology, a contemporary narrative, and an unemotional editing process. Five out of the six finalists embodied these terms – everyone except the BDC.
From the beginning I thought the BDC was the black sheep of the group; their content and their craftsmanship appeared to be completely different. They seemed to be the anomaly, rather than the front-runner.
How about you, Kriston? Were you surprised by the outcome of the prize? Who were you betting on? And what, in your opinion, should a jury consider when choosing the winner of the Sondheim Prize?
KC: I get sucked in by the Kremlinology involved in trying to guess what the judges will like. This year I thought there were a lot of clues. Knowing Ellen Harvey's work and the shows that Elisabeth Sussman made and would have seen and so on, I guessed that Karen Yasinsky would be out because they would have seen a lot of work by Nathalie Djurberg over the last year: a solo show at Zach Feuer, stuff at the Biennale, stuff at the New Museum. Djurberg's work was in "The Puppet Show," which traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston this year, so undoubtedly Valerie Cassel Oliver was familiar with it. Yasinksy's video piece strikes me as very familiar but not as advanced as Djurgberg's.
I felt the same way about the Baltimore Development Cooperative: The work liked too much like what I'd seen (and what I was sure the jurors would have seen) at the last WhiBi and the big NuMu Unmonumental exhibit. Of course, when I first toured the exhibit I was just considering the work on display, and not the careerwide practice that in all likelihood earned them the top nod.
It's not wrong to consider the broader art-world context when doling out the award—that's presumably why the Sondheim folks bring in outside, established art-world figures to serve as jurors. At the same time, I think that limits the extent to which the jury can determine the work's effect within the community, such as you might need to judge with the BDC's work if you're not just looking at the physical artifact. Is the group's community garden area (Participation Park) as integrated within the east Baltimore community where it's located as the artists say? I know that only a couple groups have signed up to use the geodesic tent (The Pavilion) outside the museum.
For their work, evaluating their success on their own terms seems really crucial to determining whether it's good work. The impression I got is that they have yet to really realize these utopian projects. And if that's the case—if they aren't socially integrated activist projects—aren't they just lo-fi, cardboard sculptures with high aspirations?
So, sure, I was disappointed with that decision. I have a hard time squaring the fact that the jurors used this criterion for the BDC's work that they didn't or couldn't apply to the other artists in the show. And it's a criterion by which the BDC arguably fall short. But maybe you can elaborate on that: What is their effect within the community? What sort of research is involved in their practice? I got no sense of that from the work, from their site, etc.
CO: I am not sure about the effect of the BDC within the community. In certain art-based social circles, the three members who won the prize - Scott Berzofsky, Dane Nester, and Nicholas Wisniewski – are well-respected names, but before the prize was given, I could find nothing documented online about the group - no website, no publications, nothing. In terms of research, if you read the literature provided by the museum, the BDC “uses the strategies of art, research, and activism to critically engage with urban spatial politics.” This sounds admirable, but what does it mean? I asked a random sampling of people about the geodesic dome in front of the BMA and very few people seemed to understand its purpose or intended political statement. Only a very elite group of artists seemed to 'get' the dome's egalitarian purpose, which, to me, seems like unclear communication.
I think this group has good intentions and good ideas, but there is an element of rigor that is missing – both visually and in content. When I think about art historical examples of activist art, Mierle Ladderman Ukeles comes to mind. She did a project with the NY city sanitation department, set up a desk there, conducted research, and then did a series of performances to educate the public and to contradict commonly held assumptions about sanitation workers and garbage men. Her work was conducted with a pointed humor, and was precise – in terms of message and media. In contrast, the BDC’s work at the BMA seems incoherent and vague.
Looking back, it seems that every year the winner of the Sondheim Prize is chosen based on community activism or contributions beyond the body of work displayed in the museum. Laure Drogoul, the first Sondheim winner has been a tireless volunteer and participant in Baltimore community art projects. Tony Shore, the second Sondheim winner, is the founder of Access Art, a youth art center in Baltimore’s Morrell Park Neighborhood. The third Sondheim winner, Geoff Grace is a public high school teacher who integrated some of his students work into his installation. If we look at the three previous winner, the obvious connection is not media or content – it is community involvement and service.
While this civic activity is noble and beneficial to Baltimore, especially, I fail to see why this should be considered as criteria for naming a top visual artist. When you look at Sondheim Prize literature, there’s nothing explicit about community involvement. In theory, the Sondheim Prize is supposed to be given to the best artist, the best body of work. Do you think this element of community activism is an invention of my imagination or there is a connection between an artist’s politics and the outcome of an art award? If so, what does it say about the credibility and mission of this award?
The Baltimore Development Cooperative wins it. You can read my writeup for Art in America here and some further reax at Cara Ober's site. She and I are chatting about it now and I think we'll both update with some excerpts from that conversation, so don't get sick of hearing about it in the meantime.
During the NEA art journalism institute (that would be art camp), several of us visited the Lynda Benglis/Robert Morris show at Susan Inglett in New York and came away impressed enough to write up the show. Jen Graves reviewed the show for The Stranger and Rachel Wolff had a writeup for New York Magazine. Collect them all.
Now, everyone thinks dildos are funny and since this exhibit involves double-pronged cast-metal dildos it's especially something. But is it possible that there's a viewer out there who doesn't know about the editorial history of Artforum? Would that person look at this show and think: frivolous, nostalgic, navelgazing? There isn't a lot of work to the show and it all plays a supporting role; at least, I didn't feel that the letters and controversy surrounding Benglis's 1974 Artforum ad illuminated any of the works or images on display. If anything, it read like a director's cut of the controversy itself, complete with deleted scenes, bonus content, etc.
Maybe it is inside baseball—but it was definitely a significant curatorial effort, and the feminist critique and journalist's credo themes are broadly relevant, and again, dildo. Much more exciting than your average Chelsea summer show, which looks a little something like this:
Rachel Whiteread, John McCracken, and Anish Kapoor.
That's up the road at Fredericks & Freiser. Has this work ever looked so boring?
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Ministry of Photoshop has been working overtime. Via Cory Doctorow, a marked-up image from a pro-Ahmadinejad rally:
You'll recall the digitally altered photograph that was circulated by the PR department of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Agence France-Presse (and other outlets). That photograph was subsequently retracted, but not before it inspired Oliver Laric to consider the international incident in terms of its ramifications for the authenticity of the image.
Oliver Laric, Versions, 2009
A video piece, pew pew pew! It's part of a show called "Image Search", which wins out in the category of group show titles this year.
On the rally image, the Ahmadinejad administration must be doubling down on domestic audience. At this point any image they file is going to be scrutinized by image nerds, but the benefit at home must outweight the cost abroad.
Maggie Michael, To Make a Long Story Short, 2005–2008
My feature review of Maggie Michael's solo show from a while back appears in the issue of Art Papers that's currently on newsstands (I think). Finding a permalink to the review online was tricky, so you'll have to click here for the Google cached version. There's a lot of discussion of text and "text" as those things work in painting today. Here's a snippet:
In the end, Michael's recent work references uprisings: found objects, text-as-markmaking, proto-Pop strategies, and New Wave cinema. The works cite pivotal discoveries in abstraction, the uprisings that ushered the transition from the modern to the contemporary period. Michael has redirected these upheavals toward her own formal concerns: symmetry and coherence. It's a conflict theory of contemporary painting, with one formalist urge supplanting another, which makes for a sort of progress with an uncertain exit strategy. A Farewell to Arms, 2008, provides a bare-boned, bleak assessment of the state of abstraction. Like To Make a Long Story Short, it features text as a transparent window through which we see a veiled composition, whose features barely register through the narrow pane of the letters. The outer abstraction is textured but featureless, rendered in foggy gray.And you'll have to read on for more.
So anyway. When I was writing this story, I had an interesting conversation. I'd mentioned to someone who'd asked me what I was up to that I was working on this feature. He replied (and I paraphrase) that of course Maggie Michael would warrant this kind of larger review spot in a magazine—the sort of slot that not many D.C. gallery shows receive. I don't remember what I said at the time, but thinking on it now, I think yes—that's right.
I don't hold to a hierarchy of media and have done stuff (and hope to continue to do stuff) for magazines, newspapers, Web enterprises, this blog, whatever. But I wouldn't think about doing the same things for all those places. Let me refer you to Jeffry Cudlin, praising this think piece by Blake Gopnik:
Blake did something really fabulous in this piece that made me want to jump out of my chair and applaud him. Did you notice? In laying out these practices, Blake examined international/Biennale artists, and offered them as a context for both what's happening in D.C. museums right now—including what Vesela Sretenovic's doing at the Phillips with this is not that Café, a project I am terribly remiss for not discussing here—and what's going on in local galleries, with a mention of Chan Chao's recent show at G Fine Art.That strikes me as the right approach and really praiseworthy. I think newspaper reviews are at their best when critics draw from the broader universe in order to illuminate the local, unknown artist or artwork. Magazines, on the other hand, are better for figuring out how the star fits into the constellation.
Charley Harper, from the Golden Book of Biology, 1962
Take a look at that vry srs article on Iran again and then read these reviews from the Dallas Morning News. First up, I try to explain to a print audience what a YTMND means, an effort to catch up with a 2001 meme that leaves me entirely out of breath. (I've so been punk'd by And/Or Gallery.)
Further, I wrote up a retrospective of the graphic artist Charley Harper, a show I enjoyed almost in spite of myself. It's tempting to dismiss it as something that it's not. Neither a great painting show nor a stellar print show, it was instead a terribly fun and surprisingly tight little design exhibit.
For the Guardian I wrote a story about efforts by U.S. terrorism victims to seize ancient Persian artifacts to satisfy default judgments for hundreds of millions of dollars against the government of Iran. Read that here.
While the judgments have been discussed in the news at length, they were brought to the fore again by reports in Iranian state media that Iran's Ministry of Culture refused a loan request from the National Gallery of Art for a Gauguin painting. The National Gallery of Art neither confirmed nor denied the story, expressing that the museum could not comment on future exhibition planning.
What is known is that a judgment to seize the Persepolis Fortification Archive—a collection of rote administrative clay tablets that provide an exceedingly rare glimpse into the daily goings-on in Persepolis under Darius, Xerxes, and their successive Achaemenid Empire rulers—can do disastrous harm to U.S.–Iranian relations. Which are, I'll grant you, not all that warm. But they show signs of improving, with President Obama's holiday message and President Ahmadinejad's motions on behalf of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi being examples of diplomatic overtures that would be unthinkable a year ago. Dividing and auctioning the Achaemenid tablets and other Persian artifacts would be a bad thing for improving relations, but also just a bad thing for world history.
It's tempting to pose that it's the judgments, not the fallout within the sphere of cultural lending, that pose the real block to relations. But the categorization of lending as a commercial transaction between sovereign nations is a new and mighty strained legal reading. Read on here.
I was watching something or other on TV the other day and paused it to do something or other else. I came back to see this image, which I think is fantastic, Ruscha-esque picture.
I'm probably wrong about that, and it's in fact really dumb.
Robert Irwin, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?, 2007–8.
The line belongs to Lawrence Weschler, writing in The Believer about an improbable debate between Robert Irwin and David Hockney that has taken place entirely through his writing. (Improbable, but not unbelievable: Weschler has just published two books totaling 30 years of interviews with the former artist and 25 years of interviews with the latter.)
A nice line, anyway! I believe we are now at "to determining who is permitted to do the seeing."
Mel Chin, SAFEHOUSE, 2008.
Got a real brief preview in the new DECIDER of Mel Chin's FUNDRED/PAYDIRT project now showing at the Arlington Arts Center. The show is both an active collection site for area Fundred dollar bills and the local extension of Chin's artwork.
After talking with Chin, I feel extremely comfortable thinking that this project is a very significant contemporary artwork. It is first and foremost a petition: Chin is very plainly, if ostentatiously, asking Congress for something that he (and scores of scientists and thousands of New Orleanians and millions of schoolchidren) wants Congress to do. Now, a petition as art is no more unlikely a form than any any other strategy that has come to occupy the notion of "project." But FUNDRED/PAYDIRT is a crowdsourced piece, and for that, sourced by a very unlikely crowd. The crowd is primarily children, yes, but further, it is a representative swath of Americans: How often can anyone say he has reached out to that group?
Henrique Oliveira, Tapumes, 2008.
From an installation at Rice Gallery in Houston. At first blush I would say the work has a strong painterly identity, like the work of Chakaia Booker. Some of her work, anyway. Maybe another way to say it is that Oliveira's piece makes me want to see his painting.
Henrique Oliveira, whirlwind for turner, 2007.
My guess is that tonight's James Turrell lecture at the Hirshhorn will be fantastically crowded. It's hard to pass up the prospect of seeing slides from Roden Crater. Then again, tonight's talk by Kathryn Cornelius for the Red Tape series sounds like the grittier city event—a talk with a local performance artist hosted in somebody's living room by a gallery with no physical space. Haven't decided where to go but I'll be scribbling notes somewhere tonight.
Notes! Soon I'll post some thoughts from the last talk I attended. Soon!
Dawn Black, The Quarrelsome Shepherds, 2009.
Over at Art in America, I've got a review of Dawn Black's "Masquerade" show at Curator's Office. Jessica Dawson wrote up the same show for the Washington Post.
Back at AiA, be sure to check out Joseph Del Pesco's take on the SECA Awards show at SFMOMA. I'll put my own notes on that show up tomorrow.
Flying out to San Francisco, my first trip there (!), to speak on a panel with Stanford Proust scholar Joshua Landy and Molly Springfield about Springfield's Translation project. That work opens at Steven Wolf Fine Arts on Friday. Kenneth Baker wrote a preview for the show here, and Springfield herself prefaced the project in the pages of NY Arts in December 2007.
I'll also write up a few other things and eat about 400 tacos with Tanner and Matty. Back soon.
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.
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.
For New York Magazine Jerry Saltz writes: "The good news is that, since almost no one will be selling art, artists—especially emerging ones—won't have to think about turning out a consistent style or creating a brand. They'll be able to experiment as much as they want."
This is as close to conventional wisdom as you're likely to find in the art world about how financial crises affect artists and institutions, but at best it is intuited knowledge and either not provable or untrue. For weeks now this notion has bubbled up in writing and conversation with artists, curators, and journalists. Though Saltz writes that "hardship and poverty aren't virtues," the myth that art improves when it isn't selling registers a traditional anti-capitalist note.
When this disappears:
"Major support for this exhibition was provided by Peter Norton and the Peter Norton Family Foundation. Additional support was provided by Tim Nye and the MAT Charitable Foundation. Significant funding was provided by the National Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art."
then this disappears:
Tim Hawkinson, Überorgan, 2000.
How is that good for art?
Today comes the news in the Financial Times that Intrade is opening a predictions market in contemporary art. No doubt, investors have been clamoring, Where is a safe place to invest in the midst of this global financial calamity? Well let me introduce you to contemporary art futures, my friend! For too long has the commoditization of art been slowed and strangled by obsolete notions of objecthood. Your entrée into the contemporary art world has been for too long governed by those gatekeepers of the élite: museums, galleries, critics, even art itself. No longer!
Late capitalism sure is cooky.
The picture above is from a different (and altogether more encouraging) story in Der Spiegel about the financial crisis. The U.S. Treasury is considering a move to buy ownership stakes in banks in order to bolster capital markets, something that smart observers like Matthew Yglesias have advocated since the introduction of the first bailout plan. Bank ownership is the basis of the British rescue plan, and if that's something that the U.S. adopts, that's good news.
But that picture—rather appropriate for a new art market, don't you think?
UPDATE: Bonus markets-related art!
Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism Series: NASDAQ, 2005.
Tyler Green discusses Dia's proposed buffer zone along the beach of the Great Salt Lake. Dia really ought to consider buying property inland, too. One of the things that Pearl Montana did not clarify in its lease application is how materials would be transported. As I recall during my reporting on the Pearl Montana bid, for various reasons it was highly unlikely that the company would ship materials on a path that passed by the Jetty. (A glance at a map will confirm as much.) But if drilling were successful, you might expect much, much more development along the promontory.
Perhaps Dia would buy out enough oil-lease acreage in the Great Salt Lake expanding outward from the Jetty that no other company would have a lease close enough to the promontory to make development or staging operations a very likely option there. Maybe, but that's a lot of acreage: Pearl Montana was about 5 miles out from Rozel Point and planned to build its staging base on the promontory. There just doesn't seem to be any other land access to the populated side of the lake except for the promontory.
Jose Ruiz, Placemakers.
This is a goofy conceit for a show. Sure, you might attribute design in the second half of the twentieth century to Cold War competition. Or you might also say that the world's two superpowers wound up designing a lot of the great design in the second half of the twentieth century. To prove that the Cold War prompted a design arms race, you need to identify an ideological component, communist or capitalist. One is especially evident on the Soviet side in the first half of the twentieth century and sort of evident on the Western side in the second half of the twentieth century, but not strongly or simultaneously evident at any point. Only the space race really counts toward this thesis, and how many of the objects manufactured by the space race do you count as design alongside an Eero Aarnio chair? Sputnik—fine. What else?
Meanwhile, this exhibit was to follow "Postmodernism" at the Corcoran, for a design hat trick ("Modernism," "Postmodernism," and "Cold War Modern"). As I'm told, plans for that show are dead in the water.
UPDATE: The Corcoran's press director Kristin Guiter writes in to say that the museum never had plans to show "Cold War Modernism." (My source says that at one point this plan was in the works.) Guiter also notes that I have not interviewed curator Sarah Newman or Corcoran officials about "Postmodernism." (That is correct. I am told that plans for that show are frustrated. The Corcoran's Web site reads: "Currently, Newman is working on an exhibition of contemporary British painting as well as a major exhibition on Postmodernism, scheduled for 2011.")
I reported in my April American Prospect feature on oil drilling in the Great Salt Lake near Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty that the viewing experience at the site ("viewshed") dominated the list of concerns in letters, e-mail, and phone calls receive by the state of Utah. Complaints about the impact on Smithson's earth artwork outpaced by far parallel concerns about the impact on the local environment—the unique native brine shrimp population and pelican hatchery being the main features—as well as the greater impact on the Great Salt Lake. Tyler Green confirms as much in his Spiral Jetty week feature.
But the status of the Pearl Montana drilling application today has nothing to do with Jetty or art. It has much more to do with environmental impact than concerns about viewshed. While the state has heard a lot from people who are concerned about art—enough so that they pushed back the deadline for community feedback on the application—the application itself has yet to even reach the stage where those concerns might come into play.
Green writes:
Mostly as a result of a blogs-driven, international 'Save the Jetty!' outcry that resulted in Utah officials receiving over 3,000 emails, Pearl Montana's application was delayed. On August 7 state officials rejected it. Thanks substantially to blog readers, art won.It would be more accurate to say that Pearl Montana defeated themselves. According to Jim Springer, spokesman for the Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining for the state of Utah, the Division returned application paperwork to Pearl Montana two weeks ago. Several times prior to September, the Division had asked Pearl Montana for clarification and further information about the transportation of materials to and from the drilling site. (I've spoken several times with Springer since April, and every time, he's said that the Division is waiting for Pearl Montana to provide more information.)
About the application, Green has more:
Eight months later it's clear that Pearl Montana's initial application to explore and drill for oil just west of Spiral Jetty won't be industry's last attempt to treat the Jetty's neighborhood as a commercial resource. It's also clear that drilling is just one of many threats to the Great Salt Lake and to the Jetty. Conservationists are confident that Pearl Montana will be back with a revised application soon, that the company is waiting for the initial 'save the Jetty' fervor to die down.Now, I believe Green that conservationists (Friends of the Great Salt Lake) are pressing this argument—but there's not much to it by my reporting. Pearl Montana is required to file a detailed planning document; what they instead gave Utah was general, even vague. So the Division asked for more information, and Pearl Montana never responded. Then the Division returned the application. At any point until January 2009, Pearl Montana could simply fill in the gaps and restart the application process. Then the public outcry over the Jetty might come into play—or it might not. And if Pearl Montana waits until after January 2009, it still owns the lease. So if it chooses, it can just apply again. Of course, it may be harder to apply and win by that point, since the Great Salt Lake is experiencing a record decline in water levels and rising mercury levels, and new regulation may account for these changes and provide protections for the Lake.
The time is now, in other words, for Pearl Montana—and Pearl Montana isn't interested. I asked Springer how often the Division waits, after requesting further clarification, before they return the application. "Normally we don't have to," he said.
And neither has any other company submitted an application to exercise a lease in West Rozel. The thing that's worth remembering is that Salt Lake crude is in many respects like Canadian shale. It costs a great deal to extract, transport, and refine. Salt Lake's oil has a high sulfur content that renders it most useful as a road base; moreover, Utah refineries aren't set up to refine Salt Lake crude into conventional gasoline. As with Canadian shale, there is a global oil price point at which it becomes worthwhile to get involved in high-cost extraction. The lack of interest in GSL oil—industry has never successfully extracted GSL oil—would suggest that we're not there yet.
If and when Pearl Montana or a similar company does come knocking, the state of Utah is going to continue to pay attention to things like environmental impact. I haven't yet seen at what point viewshed enters into the state's viewfinder—whatever impact the art world has had hasn't come into play yet. Fortunately, we may not have to test that out.
UPDATE: Added image. Also, more chatter here.
Ed Ruscha, Five Past Eleven, 1989.
Of course it's self promotion that prods me to dust the cobwebs off the weblog. But I'd hate to fail to mention that I'm giving a little gallery talk at the Hirshhorn Museum about this Ed Ruscha painting tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. Marginally employed types and art enthusiasts and everyone else are encouraged to attend! I pledged extra credit for any of my Terps grad students who show up.
So long as I've got the window (mirror?) open, I'll mention that I have reviews and news in current and newsstand-bound issues of Art Papers, Sculpture, Art Lies, Art Voices, The Onion, and Art in America. Buy subscriptions of and place advertisements in these publications!
I know this post is beyond grating, but one more note: My band Gestures is playing Comet Ping-Pong on Saturday night. We won't require you to read anything.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude spoke at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on Saturday, sort of. In fact they did a Q&A after a screening of Running Fence, a cinéma vérité docu on C&J-C's Running Fence—which American Art recently acquired. Sort of. The fence itself was, of course, ephemeral, existing for only two weeks in 1976, and its component parts belong to the ranchers on whose land the 24-mile fence stretched. What American Art received was an archive of the preparatory drawings and research materials associated with the project.
I'd already seen the film, so I knew that much going in. Although the Q&A was nearly derailed by a guy with one of those lengthy-essays-posed-as-a-question, the couple was every bit as charming as they're famed to be. I didn't know that the couple were friends with Charles Schultz, but that explains Wrapped Snoopy House.
One thing I didn't get: They didn't talk about the archive. At all. The acquisition was never brought up. I think I have an idea of what's coming to the museum, but I haven't seen much of it. The movie, while a really good introduction to the piece from 1972–76 didn't give any indication of the preparatory drawings and so forth that the artists sell to pay for their projects.
Instead, the artists spent some time describing their upcoming project for the Arkansas River in Colorado, Over the River—doing a nice little favor for the Phillips Collection, which is exhibiting C&J-C stuff for that project next month.
Note: I am a former contributor to Eye Level, the American Art Museum blog.
Did anyone know that Leo Villareal spoke at the National Gallery on Saturday? I didn't, because his commission was announced only two days prior. Again, good on the National Gallery for letting the New York Times dictate its schedule to them. Sure, it's no good for getting word to local press about an important talk at the museum or in any other way making sure that people attend or even know about it, but hey, you got 250 words from Carol Vogel on page E24!
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:
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.
Via Jezebel: Would Kara Walker agree that her success is "a form of oppression"? She certainly seems to have anticipated that notion with her work.
Walker's medium is the cut-out, the silhouette. That medium, to put it plainly, is cheesy. With only a few exception in portraiture, it barely has any history or precedent in fine art. It has some commercial applications—I'm thinking of cartoons, or the zoetrope—but more than anything it falls within a folk category of images. Certainly, it doesn't hang in a traditional hierarchy of media: It's not painting, it's not sculpture, it's not drawing. It's not pedigreed.
So Walker is setting her work up for exploitation. It's folk-ish and it's concerned with black historical narratives, but it's sold and seen by a world that is predominantly white and moneyed. Walker isn't naive to these facts. She's staging her works to be considered in that context. What you see in her work is one narrative, but when you see them—the see-ing of her works—that's narrative, too. And it's a somewhat different narrative from that in her works: A level of institutional critique to add to work that might otherwise come across as resonant but potentially one-dimensional.
Betye Saar never gave her enough credit when she said that Walker sold out black women. At root Walker's images are about the sale of black people—about chattel slavery. What makes them great contemporary art is that their situation makes a similar statement. When you see Kara Walker's work in a museum, alongside the typically white painting and sculpture with which they're inevitably paired, you cannot help but notice those circumstances.
Not every black working artist is going to appreciate or care for this fact about Walker's work, or necessarily agree that her consciousness approach to her situation matters absolves her from potentially playing token in a commercial art world that will only take diversity so far. It's that tension that Henry Thaggert and Jeffry Cudlin had in mind for "She's So Articulate", I think, and it's that tension that both Jessica Grose at Jezebel and Jessica Dawson in the Washington Post are responding to.
To my mind, Kara Walker holds the same controversial ground that Louis Armstrong did in the 1940s and 50s.
Other musicians, most notably his peer Dizzy Gillespie, were uncomfortable with Armstrong's peripatetic relationship with white audiences. Armstrong's performer persona was a minstrelsy shtick that set white fans at ease but simultaneously interrupted the language that white oppressors would use to mock a man like Louis Armstrong. Even Armstrong's critics within the black community would have to acknowledge that even if his humor failed to present a progressive model, he was the leading figurehead of the most subversive, liberationist art form of the generation, possibly even the century: jazz. Walker, like Armstrong, knows exactly what she's doing.
Dia hires Philippe Vergne, chief curator at the Walker Art Center, as its director, less than one year after the organization hired Jeffrey Weiss, who resigned. [Read an interview with Weiss here.] Weiss left after nine months, saying that he felt he didn't have the time to focus on curatorial and scholarly work. If there's a lesson there, it didn't take at Dia, who tapped another prominent curator for its directorship.
Vergne specifically comes as a surprise appointment for Dia, though his departure from the Walker is no surprise. By all accounts Vergne was going to follow Kathy Halbreich to MoMA—so he may well be foregoing a very prominent research position for a more administrative role.
In any case, Vergne's our man at Dia. My question for Vergne remains the same as my question for Weiss: Is moving back to the Chelsea space out of the question? Why not, with the High Line space gone? And is finding a new New York space still the board's priority?
UPDATE: Note that Paul Schmelzer broke the news. Schmelzer writes, "Vergne, who co-curated the '06 Whitney Biennial, has been a driving force behind some of the more interesting Walker shows during his 10 years in Minneapolis, from the recent Huang Yong Ping retrospective to his three-artist Heart of Darkness show (which featured Thomas Hirschhorn's haunting Cavemanman) to 'How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age,' a curatorial group effort that benefited mightily from his vision."
On newsstands soon(ish), featuring reviews and articles I've contributed.
Were I a teacher, I'd make it a point to take my class to see "Diebenkorn in New Mexico" at the Phillips Collection. It's a show of works dating from the painter's 1950–2 stint in Albuquerque, a surprisingly productive but little-known period in the artist's life during which he completed his Master's degree. Several works from his academic thesis are on display; the works as a whole serve as a sort of thesis, a discrete examination over a defined period during which Diebenkorn confronted one macro problem (the New Mexico landscape) and several issues therein concerning palette and line.
Best of all, everyone knows what Diebenkorn did next, so there's no guessing about what lessons he would take or leave behind. You can reverse engineer from what you know about the artist—to some extent—to arrive at a few transitional moments in his career.
Diebenkorn was already an emerging artist by the time he left the Bay Area for a stint in New Mexico, so it would be wrong to say that the period was marked by discovery. He defined his problems from the start and he set about solving them.
Unfortunately this exhibit will no longer by up by the time I do have a class. Yes! I'll be teaching a graduate colloquium at the University of Maryland for the 2008–9 academic school year. The class will be divided between critiques and a curriculum that's still mostly TBD. I'm grateful to the UM art department for the opportunity. In short order my explanations for long blogging absences will change from "I was at the beach" to "I was grading papers."
Matthew Yglesias goes on vacation and his blog gets culture. Guest-blogger Alyssa notes a Smithsonian magazine list of the top 10 art heists of all time. Only three of those cases also pop up on the FBI's top-10 list, which just goes to show that the black market for art is storied.
Alyssa writes, "Prints are cool, but it's fun to imagine having the real thing tucked away to look at." But that's only ever been the established motive in one case: the theft of Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, which was stolen by . . . Dr. No. Megalomaniacal art connoisseurs don't exist—but fabricators, petty burglars, and insurance defrauders do, and they commit crimes that set the industry back $6 billion annually.
It's insurance fraud that does the worst damage. Most every high-profile, celebrity-art crime is motivated by the same form of extortion: Third-party insurance companies arbitrate the payoff between museum and thief. It's an incredibly high-risk, incredibly profitable, and incredibly routine process.
The only way to prevent against art theft is to make sure that priceless works stay priceless: Art museums should not insure their paintings against theft.
Lee Siegel on Cy Twombly in 2005:
You cannot fully understand Twombly's art unless you know that he is gay. It's often fatuous to reduce an artist to his or her sexuality, but Twombly is working in a tradition that associates homosexuality with an ideal human freedom.For art writers that sentence stands as an example of what's to be avoided in art criticism. It's not merely wrongheaded analysis. It's shoehorning the biographical into the critical, conflating the two as though they're one and the same. Or worse, as if knowing some gem about an artist's life or disposition is the key to judgment about that artist's work.
I didn't mention the fact that Robert Rauschenberg was gay in my obituary for the Dallas Morning News, an omission that one friend picked up on the day it ran. Later it surfaced as an item in Tyler Green's roundup of article that he claims heteronormalize Rauschenberg's work, career, and life.
One point to make is that Green's picking up on a metanarrative. Individually, a press omission about Rauschenberg's sexuality may be benign and even reasonable. What part of his career or work should the writer under space constraints neglect in order to discuss his sexuality? What about an obituary of a person for whom simple binary modifiers don't seem to fit or for whom sex doesn't seem especially significant? Or the publication that's past all that?
In sum, however, it's a different story. I don't think that a gloss of the obits on Rauschenberg reads straight-by-omission—though a reader wouldn't know any better about certain aspects of his life if every article had ended with the old journalistic obit trope on confirmed bachelors: "He never married." At the media level (as opposed to the sole press account), Green's point holds.
That Rauschenberg's relationship with Jasper Johns was sexual as well as professional might be a detail that writers, in an overabundance of caution, neglected to mention so as not to appear to indulge in salacious reporting. That wasn't my thinking—I was focusing very specifically on his work in Texas and wrote in one draft more extensively on his influence today over sculpture, and I wasn't planning on discussing Jasper Johns at all—but that sort of thinking might occur to me.
Green's examples of hostility toward homosexuality in press accounts (specifically in the Baltimore Sun) strike me as flimsy. His suggestion that my reference to Rauschenberg's charity work on AIDS was a workaround to acknowledging that he was loud and proud isn't right and undercuts the importance of that charity work to Dallas.
Still, one gay artist asked me later, "Why didn't you talk about Rauschenberg as a mo?" Fair question—and it's good for the practice that Green is bringing the discussion forward. I didn't talk about that because I don't think it's crucial to the work. I find those readings of works like Bed and Monogram as dedicated statements about sexuality to be provocative but lacking. I don't think that identity politics were so significant to arts practice at the time and I don't think that he opened up an era for that discussion. He did use gay imagery—but he was a devourer of imagery. He didn't shy away from his sexuality—but the barriers he trampled right over were different ones.
To be sure, I don't think his sex is irrelevant to his work. But you can fully understand Rauschenberg without knowing that he is gay.
I reported for DCist on the city's move to close "Here & Now," an art exhibit staged at the 14th and T Streets NW building that used to house the Church of the Rapture. And on the goldfish that are still trapped inside.
Here is my obituary for Robert Rauschenberg for the Dallas Morning News, focusing on his career and influence in Texas.
Knee-deep in deadlines but I should have more up here later today. Just a quick note—come by Project 4 this Saturday at 2 p.m. 3 p.m. Both the artist and I will be speaking about the work (and I suppose to one another). In the mean time, read the essay I wrote for the show—my big contribution to the effort.
UPDATE: Due to a competing event, the talk's been pushed back to 3 p.m.
Christine Gray, Rabbit Terrine, 2008.
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 salaries. It's a concern for journalism itself, and one for which the answer is clear cut, across fields and across publications: One has to look out for conflicts of interest, because journalism only happens in their absence.
Some of the responses Green rounds up seem inappropriate to me. Maybe Viveros-Fauné ought to have known better, but by his own admission, he is not by training a journalist; he came to criticism by way of his specialty knowledge, having owned a gallery. I would hardly call it shameful that Viveros-Fauné erred, even if his efforts to excuse his shortsightedness by pointing out the mote in every critic's eye came off as desperate. At the risk of being too kind, I'd go so far as to say that even his logorrheic casting-about for some internal logic behind might be excused—coming as it does in a Q&A, which does not always suit everyone. Certainly, the result was the right one.
Here, for the record, is my hat.
Jessica Dawson on the current show at Project 4:
The show missteps only once, but royally: Anthony Goicolea's video work "The Septemberists" attaches designer-clad young men to a slim narrative that's really just an extended ad for fashion designer Thom Browne. What with the film's three separate credits for its actors' hair, Goicolea did indeed Bumble and Bumble.Nice line. That's the hair product I use, when my hair is shorter (I keep thinking about growing it out). In any case, you can and should see the show this week, which features work by an old friend from Texas.
Already I have received a couple of responses taking exception with the point I put forward over the weekend in this Guardian piece: that departing Met director Philippe de Montebello will be remembered as an international arbitrator who paved the way forward for resolving provenance disputes over antiquities. What to make of the 30 years over which de Montebello exacerbated the Met's conflicts with Italy?
That's a point, I don't dispute it. But with respect to de Montebello's legacy, it is the resolution of the conflict that matters more. Now that the the color and the shape of Italy's bargain with the Met has been announced—the museum will receive three Greek vessels, dating from the 6th to 4th centuries B.C.&mdash, to display for four years;a clearer assessment of the Met's deal will emerge. Details notwithstanding, already we have witnessed the MFA Boston adopt the same general framework with respect to its own holdings and its dealings with Italy. So has Princeton University's art museum. Italy's high-profile case against Western museums has informed and enabled older cases against the West, too, for example, Peru's claim on works held by Yale University that were excavated from Machu Picchu in 1912. In September 2007, Yale and Peru came to an agreement emphasizing "the collaborative stewardship of cultural and natural treasures".
Of course, de Montebello's legacy will not be decided by the Met's final framework alone. The person the museum appoints as his successor will immediately affect his legacy. If that nominee is Art Institute of Chicago director James Cuno, then de Montebello's role in liberalizing the institution's policy toward antiquities will be downplayed. Cuno takes a hard line on whether modern Italy is within rights to lay claim to a world's worth of antique objects disseminated from the geographical area of Italy (Cuno argues that it is not). But even a reversal in the political-philosophical direction of the Met can only be taken so far; after all, it's not as if a less sympathetic director can take the helm of the museum and somehow take the Euphronios krater back.
Claudia Rousseau, writing about Amy Lin for the Gazette:
The work of emerging regional artist Amy Lin, now on view at the Heineman Myers Gallery in Bethesda, presents something of a conundrum. The interest it has generated, and the sales, threaten to make it suspiciously too popular to be taken seriously. Couple that with a widespread fascination with the artist's technique — hundreds of small circles of varying sizes hand-drawn in curving strings with little tail-like ends — discussions of Lin's work tend to be on the level of a "temple of toothpicks" rather than the kind of analytical response usually accorded abstract compositions. What passes for commentary on her work has tended to focus on the amazing number of dots, the sort of thing that could be done with a computer in short order, but which Lin tediously, obsessively, draws with colored pencils. But does this emphasis on the "wow" effect do it justice? If there were no more interest here than the dazzlingly meticulous way they are made, would they really be worth looking at?That lede alone is easily one of the most useful things written about Lin's work so far—though there has been no shortage of articles about her. Outlets that have crowned the young artist include the Washingtonian, which listed her as one of 2007's forty Washingtonians under age 40 to watch. The Washington Post has heaped praise on the artist to the point of redundancy.
Rousseau continues:
The fact is, once past that level, there is much to be seen and thought about here, and the artist's much overlooked serious intent, particularly in terms of self-expression, deserves some attention.That is where our opinions on Lin's work diverge. (For reasons not least of which being that artist's intent is cited as the work's saving grace.) I have never seen an inkling of the Eastern influence, artistic or philosophical, that Lin's admirers seem to find in her work. I don't think her work shows incredibly obsessive markmaking—in fact I wouldn't even think to describe it in those terms, even if she does draw many circles on medium- to large-scaled canvases. I don't understand either why this technique is fascinating. Frankly, I don't buy that people truly believe it is. Lin's work is colorful, it's precious, it's easy and accessible, market friendly, decorative. The work I have seen by the artist (which does not include pieces recently shown by Heineman Myers) is out of step with any conversation about abstraction, medium, composition, etc., taking place in the art world today. It escapes me why her work has garnered any attention at all; at best, she's the poor man's Linn Meyers.
The other day Becks was complaining that she never wanted to hear Rihanna's "Umbrella" again. She's wrong about that song, though she might have an ally in Paper Rad.
Paper Rad, Umbrella Zombie Datamosh Mistake, 2007.
A press release tells me that on Friday, the New Museum will debut two new works by Paper Rad for its "Continuing Education for Dead Adults" series—how f'ing great is that name!—and that one of those pieces is called crank dat spongebob batman dropdead robocop. Spencer and I will be paying close attention.
UPDATE: I would explain why Becks is so wrong, but Ben Wolfson's reading of "Umbrella" can't be improved upon. Wolfson:
"Umbrella" is an expression of an extremely weak hope in an extremely bleak world, and a knowing one at that—it's not just an expression of a hope that happens to be weak but also an acknowledgement of just how weak that hope is. In this, of course, Rihanna is not without antecedents. The really vital part of the lyrics comes in the chorus, where one would expect the core thematic material to be sounded, but even in the verses we find support for this reading. The very first two lines (ignoring Jay-Z's introductory bit, which serves, as far as I can tell, no purpose whatsoever, except perhaps to establish rain as a bad thing ("when the clouds come we go") as opposed to, say, a symbol of rejuvenation) serve to vastly deflate our expectations: "You have my heart / And we'll never be worlds apart". Not being worlds apart is, one would like to point out, quite compatible with still being quite far apart indeed. In the second verse the worldliness of the world is explicitly recognized as being corrupting ("these fancy things") if not outright harmful (the war; references to bad hands being dealt); at the end she expresses once again the quietism already emphasized in the chorus ("So go on and let the rain pour").The relevant portion of the chorus perhaps ought to be quoted at length:
Now that it's raining more than ever(That's not much length, but it's enough.) What is this except a reiteration of the Arnoldian plea, "let us be true to one another", a cry for a separate peace even while acknowledging the flimsiness and temporariness of such a solution? We are here as on a flooding plain: but at least we've got an umbrella. And, of course, just as Arnold's imprecation does not really make much sense, given that "the world . . . Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light / Nor certitude, nor peace" (you're going to be true to your love in that world?), so too Rihanna's attempt to carve out some happiness comes off as at least a little self-deceived: as if an umbrella were a roof, as if even a roof would suffice!
Know that we'll still have each other
You can stand under my umbrella
My year-end galleries column for the City Paper, concerning art parties I don't really enjoy and the final nail in Dupont Circle's coffin. Click click. Jeffry Cudlin has written the report on museums—read that one, too.
Just about all my photos from Miami are up, and they're available here. Some didn't turn out, and I didn't take my camera out every day, so there's plenty I can't show you: Red Dot, Aqua Wynwood, and of course the things that for whatever reason just did not catch my eye.
In other online image news, the Wpa has at long last put its art registry online. They'll still publish the physical catalog, though.
In the Washington Post, Jessica Dawson all but savaged Jayme McLellan in the lede to her piece on why dealers from the District were participating in Art Basel Miami. It seems like Dawson chose to pick on the n00b—this year was McLellan/Civilian Art Projects's first trip to the fairs—but in fact, nothing about the hierarchy that close observers might identify among galleries in the District extends to the fairs. This year, success had to do with placement, not pecking order. Every dealer I spoke to at Aqua Wynwood was strained by the lack of traffic and sales. Dealers at the Aqua hotel fair, on the other hand, seemed to do much better business. None of this has anything to do with these galleries' relative stature. So I don't see how helpful it is to compare the interests of established galleries and those of younger galleries; once they arrive in Miami, they're almost all in the same boat.
I do believe dealers mean it when they say that they go to the fairs in hopes of gaining a wider exposure for their programs and their artists. Fairs do this. Which fairs end up doing this, though, is difficult to say; with 33 fairs over the course of 4 days, some of them just won't get any traffic.
At my Flickr page you'll find photos from Miami. Right now I'm uploading photos from the main fair, with some quick thoughts wherever I dashed them. Caveat emptor: I was point-and-shooting in a hurry and am no great hand with a camera, and I won't be taking the time to make them presentable. For this page, though, I'll upload a few better images of some specific works worth the mention.
First, though, I wanted to introduce you to a new friend of mine, Art Astronaut:
In Chicago's Millenium Park, near Cloud Gate
At the Art Basel fair in Miami Beach
Art Basel wouldn't be complete without a Big Toy installation (e.g., 2006). Meet Arcangelo Sassolino.
Terrence Koh and Kirstine Roepstorff at Art Basel.
Today I walked the perimeter and latitudinal aisles of Art Basel, then scurried up the beach for a few of the satellite fairs. Some broad observations about Basel: Male n00dz are in, the abstraction is staid, and photography is surprisingly absent. One exception is the Koh and Roepstorff installation at Peres Projects, but it's work that everyone has seen by Koh, if not in this exact configuration. (Which is to say, butt seks.) Quite a lot of the photography I saw at the fair was more of the same or hardly recent.
Someone in the media lounge just suggested that the beach is blanketed by free WiFi, so the city doesn't bother wiring the convention center. You are spared a screed.
UPDATE: That doesn't really make much sense, does it? Why would that WiFi signal not penetrate the walls of the building? Where are the power outlets outside? You're still spared the full screed. Photos coming up.
For close to two decades, Art Miami has shown in January; this year, the fair finally answered the siren call of ABMB week in December. I am told that the transition did not happen without a hitch. Yesterday, the structure that houses the fair—along NW 2nd Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets—was plagued by power outages. Though there were rumors of power outages persisting today, a representative of Art Miami said that everything was running smoothly as of this morning; she suggested that the problem owed to the fact that the temporary structure was built from the ground up to house the fair. Another report suggested that installation continued yesterday, the first day of the fair, with trucks running the aisles. Ilana Vardy, director of Art Miami, is also the director of artDC.
Loughborough University classifies Miami as a gamma world city, but come the first week in December, it's the alpha and omega, at least as far as the art world is concerned. If that weren't reason enough to visit, it's supposed to snow in the District, starting tomorrow. So I'm skipping town early in the morning; check in this week for updates from Art Basel Miami and lots of gloating pictures in porn shorts and other beach attire.
Stuck in the District? Assuming you're not snowed in, you should attend Robert Storr's lecture at the Phillips Collection on Thursday. Price of admission gets you a seat in the auditorium.
Last year I spent an unreasonable amount of money in Miami on cabs, often only to idle in Miami traffic, which is worse that I'd ever been lead to believe. The fairs advertise shuttles between South Beach and the Wynwood District, but I found that they never arrived. So this year i'm thinking about renting a bicycle, or, if that's not an easy option, buying some beater from a pawn shop or secondhand store, just for the week. Miami's flat, so getting around by bike should be easy—thing is, I don't remember seeing anyone actually riding a bike while I was there, so I'm wondering if a bike isn't a good prospect for some reason. Too much sand and not enough road? Too many little friends to say hello to? Anyone know?
This is a reasonable depiction of what I'm hoping to accomplish (soundtrack included).
Torontoist reports on Ontario College of Art & Design student Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson, who is sought by police for questioning after he built a pipe-bomb replica, placed it on the steps of the Royal Ontario Museum, and went about making a lot of people nervous with phone calls and YouTube videos. In an interview with Torontoist, Jonsson sounds suitably embarrassed about derailing an Aids gala and finding himself suspended—but what about OCAD? The school is saying that the hoax "was not part of any OCAD assignment or course." But the college is also saying that "The faculty involved have been fully cooperative and have been suspended with pay pending the outcome of the investigation."
(Courtesy of Sommer)
I'm in New York for the weekend to see Molly Springfield's solo show, Antony Gormley's solo show (look! someone vlogged it!), the Richard Prince retro at the Gugg, and the New Museum opening. Back on Monday.
Julian Sanchez responds to two New York Magazine items I mentioned below, heaping praise on Saltz's piece and ample scorn on the gender rundown addendum published by the magazine. On this, I should note that "art world institutions" is my phrasing, a broad umbrella to relate institutions as diverse as Matthew Marks Gallery and the Frick Collection. That drives at the problem, Sanchez argues: There's no basis for comparison.
In fact I think the Frick serves as a foil to the other listings—an historical baseline. If gender symmetry isn't entirely to be expected among artworks representing the 20th century at MoMA, it's certainly not for centuries prior; a 99/1 breakdown between men and women is about what you'd expect at the Frick. (If anything, the Frick Collection is too small to serve as a truly meaningful base, but no matter. Any collection of Old Master paintings will break down the same way because the Old Masters were all, of course, men.) Compare that ratio, then, with the ratio of institutions that all operate in a postfeminist age—and by that I mean institutions that persist or came into existence after three waves of feminist thought and activism. What you find is not what you (not what I) would expect. Or, rather, not what we should accept: That art by men is always considered more commercially palatable and historically significant than art by women according to a range of institutions whose activity, taken in totem, represents a complete cross section of the contemporary art world. And to be perfectly sanguine about it, it's not as if these agents each act in a bubble. Matthew Marks co-directs the Armory Show, which, in a pinch, could stand in for Art Basel Miami Beach.
Sanchez writes, "It might at least be moderately telling to compare six similar art festivals or six otherwise similar galleries." Two listings offer exactly that in and of themselves: Art Basel Miami Beach is a trade show featuring artworks by hundreds of international galleries, and the Venice Biennale comprises artists selected by nations from six continents. For both, roughly one quarter of participating artists are women.
Another set of statistics might come closer to satisfying Sanchez's standards for rigor: Brainstormers compiled in 2006 gender breakdowns for 200 select Chelsea galleries. (The group does not provide a methodology—this work is more activism than social science. From a casual glance, it's apparent to me that all the selected dealers work in the primary market and represent artists.) The results: map one and map two. Readers will know that I'm usually thrilled to see so much burnt orange splattered on a page—but in this presentation, the orange alert signals an overabundance of testosterone.
This graph could easily have been formatted to depict not just ratios but numbers to address Sanchez's sensible point that at "smaller and (almost by definition) more idiosyncratic galleries . . . the numbers are apt to be highly sensitive to a swing of a few works or artists." And we'd really be getting somewhere if the graph could plot sales by gender throughout Chelsea, but these data aren't available. Nevertheless—and acknowledging that New York Magazine failed to make the case for context—it's crucial to consider the activity of dealers alongside the activity of curators because the one informs the other. (As Jeffry Cudlin ably noted last month, in contradistinction to Blake Gopnik's oddball assertion that museums drive the market.
So do we march through the borough with quotas and clipboards? No, that isn't the solution: Artworks are not fungible, and any single gallery choosing the ten best available artists for its stable may select ten men. But given that, in 2007, MFA enrollment (a reasonable indicator for young artists) breaks down even-Steven between men and women, we should not suspect all the galleries to go for the guys. They do, though, by a non-negligible margin. I strongly suspect (and anecdota suggest) that the reasons are principally social—owing to the same myriad problems women face entering and succeeding in every other sector of the workforce.
Saltz writes, acutely, "[I]t has become bitterly clear that MoMA's stubborn unwillingness to integrate more women into these galleries is not only a failure of the imagination and a moral emergency; it amounts to apartheid." If a failure to integrate MoMA amounts to apartheid, the lack of integration in Chelsea is Jim Crow.
UPDATE: On the other hand, Martin Bromirski has a suggestion for New York Mag: Data collector, collect thyself.
Jerry Salts Saltz says that time is up for the MoMA to deliver on promises to display "multiple narratives" in its permanent installation—that is, work by women. New York Magazine follows up with a run-down on gender dynamics at other art institutions:
THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ARTBringing women into the conversation is the biggest problem facing the art world.
Men: 85%
Women: 15%
That's for the permanent-collection items on view; Kara Walker's show is downstairs.MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY
Men: 85%
Women: 15%
Four women on an otherwise male roster.THE 2007 VENICE BIENNALE
Men: 76%
Women: 24%
As recently as 1995, the lineup was just 9 percent female.ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2007
Men: 73%
Women: 27%
The upcoming fair will be enormous: 2,859 artists, about 715 of them women.MARIANNE BOESKY
Men: 75%
Women: 25%
But it's 50-50 in the gallery right now, with work by Liz Craft and a two-man show.THE FRICK COLLECTION
Men: 99%
Women: 1%
There are two sculptures and one print by female artists in the collection, plus some anonymous work.
Kathryn Cornelius pulled me aside at the Transformer auction benefit to tell me that in this pick on her show I did not peg the notion that the images in Common Ground (version 1.0) are stills from video, not photographs. I understood that about the piece. Nevertheless I felt that "photographic triptychs" described the work better than "triptychs featuring stills from video" would have—insofar as the final work is neither film nor video, and given space constraints, readability concerns, and so on. But to be clear on the point, the source for the triptychs components is video, not photography.
JMW Turner, Snow Storm - Steam Boat off a Harbor's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author Was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich. 1842.
Now up at Guardian America: my review of the Turner show at the National Gallery of Art. Here's a teaser:
When JMW Turner arrived at the Royal Academy in 1799 just short of his 25th birthday, Britain needed to know him. Auld acquaintance at the turn of the century would not be forgotten, but the best in British arts and letters nevertheless were gone. Collins, Pope and Swift all were dead. Gibbon and Hume recently had passed. Keats and Shelley, on the other hand, were mere babes.And so on. As a result of writing the piece I have developed a fascination with Royal Academy politics. As a result of writing the piece I have also developed some outstanding library fines. So if you have a copy of James Fenton's School of Genius that you'd like to let me borrow, I'd be much obliged. . . .Among painters, Benjamin West - the painter of epic representation and then-president of the Royal Academy - was perhaps the only artist who measured up to Turner's talent, even in those years of his youth. John Constable, who would become the other looming figure in landscape painting, was an outsider. As Turner achieved prominence, Constable has some success in France but couldn't sell his work at home.
So when Turner joined the Royal Academy as an associate - the youngest inductee in the fraternity's history - he posed something of a problem to the group's longstanding but humble achievers. Well before his membership, even, Turner posed a challenge to academicians such as Thomas Girtin and Philip de Loutherbourg. Yet the young buck faced no resistance. If Britain's historical dip contributed to Turner's painterly rise, so much the better: a retrospective of Turner's work - the largest ever to appear in the United States, currently showing at the National Gallery of Art - surveys a comfortable career that nevertheless embraced experimentation.
Via Towleroad, Baltimore legend John Waters gives some advice to the New Museum's Lisa Phillips on how to throw an "ungala" for the NuMu opening next month. How inadvertently appropriate: The museum's opening with a massive sculpture show called "Unmonumental".
I won't pimp this article any more, I promise, but I scanned the tear sheets for the ARTnews piece I wrote on this opening. Feel free to strain your eyesight reading the PDFs: pages 1 and 2.
I don't remember whether I mentioned it here, but I'm contributing at the brand-new Guardian America imprint. It's edited by Michael Tomasky, former editor of The American Prospect. It's not to be confused with http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa, which is just a category page.
Check in later this week for a review of the Turner retrospective at the National Gallery.
Of course the great advantage to the blogosphere over print media is its boundlessness; and after reading the Art in America roundtable on art blogs by Peter Plagens with Regina Hackett, Tyler Green, Jeff Jahn, Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof, and Edward Underscore, my one complaint—beyond the fact that the article isn't available online—is that Plagens's questionnaire really calls for a survey. Art bloggers can demonstrate the topics at hand by exploding some traditional boundaries of a print article.
So I'm going to answer Plagens's questions here, and then I'll kick this to a few bloggers I know will contribute smart answers. Any writers out there with blogs and opinions about art should give it a go. Forgive the navel-gazing, and apologies for the meme—very 2003 of me—but maybe this will help Plagens to understand. "In a sideways version of the time-honored Dewey-esque tradition of learning by doing, I decided to do a story on art blogs," he writes. We can help with that story.
Click below for questions and answers. In proper meme fashion I want to trouble a few select bloggers for their answers—Jen Bekman, fellow District writer Jeffry Cudlin, Global Warming Your Cold Heart, Hungry Hyaena, Paddy Johnson, JL, Arthur Whitman—but the list could go on and on and anyone who wants to take the time for a little self indulgence should give it a go.
What's the purpose of your blog?
It's a medium for writing about art, politics, and rhetoric. In the past I have done some original reporting here, although I tend to reserve that work for traditional media outlets these days. Once or twice I've published Q&As, panel writeups, that sort of thing. It's a decent journal for keeping track of things I've read, and blogs are one way for writers to keep up with friends and colleagues. There on the sidebar are links to recent articles I've published so I suppose my blog, like all writer's blogs, helps to promote my work.
It's an appropriate place for the odd news tidbit—for instance, the suggested attire on the invitation to the Corcoran Gallery of Art's annual ball is "natural glamour in black and white". Is "black tie" always couched in a euphemism? Note the British spelling. (I did not get an invitation.)
What are the boundaries of your blog?
The length and height of your monitor? I don't advertise artists or shows; I'm no cheerleader. I don't particularly think of myself as a blogger who is democratizing art though I know others who claim that mantle, and I'm sympathetic to that view. Peter Schjeldahl said something like, "If people don't like art, bully for them," saying he wouldn't do a dog-and-pony show to try to bring viewers (or readers) under the big tent.
On the other hand, promoting visual literacy—that's something that Roberta Smith talks about—sounds like a worthy goal, but I would hardly suggest that everything I write here serves that function. Some bloggers are very disciplined and write only about a single topic; I'm easily distracted and can't resist writing about politics, literature, and Texas football. I seek out journalism that is never concerned about going over my head. There's no reference to obscure for my blog, if it's a helpful one.
Tyler has cited Joy Garnett's NewsGrist blog [hyperlink added —ed.] as doing a great job of "placing art within a sociocultural and political context." What I see on NewsGrist is a magazinelike interspersing of short profiles, exhibition reviews, op-ed pieces on how other people are covering things, and Village Voice–like political takes. But what does Tyler's comment mean to you, and why are blogs in general better positioned than print to do what he describes?
Le race, milieu, et moment, n'est pas? Medium notwithstanding, it's the critic's goal to do this work.
Funny to me that here Plagens relates Garnett's blog back to print in all these ways, but it's important to consider that there are aspects of blogging that are unique to the medium. Newspapers have the same Web technology as bloggers now, and they've adopted some Web-based practices but few newspaper blogs resemble blogs by the grassroots.
Why can't blogs go further, to the point where there's hardly any discernible difference between artist and critic/commentator, blog and work of art?
I don't know if I understand what Plagens has in mind, but I don't I suppose there's anything preventing a blogger from doing what he envisions. Suggesting that all blogs might do something, though—sounds like herding cats.
What scope and degree of editorial control do you exercise over your blog?
Complete. Absolute unlimited power!
What about posting comments from readers, and what about anonymity?
I'll allow it. I might give someone hell who jumps into a thread to attack me or someone else from the veil of anonymity, but only if I'm cranky.
What's "trolling," and why don't some of you allow it?
Here I defer to Ben Wolfson, who has written widely on the art of trolling. Would that a troller were to come along with a proper troll, such a figure would be permitted, even welcomed. Alas, today's pale imitations are urged to peddle their pathetic wares some other place.
Is trolling really so easily identified and universally bad? Is having posters register a solution?
Again, see above. But comment registration isn't a solution for much anything, especially in a low-rent (i.e., low-traffic) niche of the blogosphere like art blogs.
What about liability coverage?
Like if I fall and break my rib? I don't have any. With all due respect asking a blogger whether he has liability coverage for his content betrays a Web-ignorant mentality.
What's the economic model of your blog?
There isn't one although I do get enough clickthroughs from the Amazon widgets there to occasionally buy a new paperback. It's still an open question of how online publications with far larger audiences can make money, so I'm not surprised that a model hasn't emerged specifically among art blogs. There might be money and readership enough to sustain a nationally focused macro-blog—something that would in some ways mime and other ways sidestep the art glossies—but so far no model has yet to emerge. It's something all of us are thinking about, though.
How do you see your blog's relation to the established print art media?
Blogs are or can be part of the art media. They stand to note errors and injustices, expand coverage, and praise good work; bloggers can perform meta analyses that print media rarely will. Of course, the media-hound-dog role is an especially cherished, privileged position: It's the reason blogs came up in the first place.
Tyler and Regina, what's the relationship between your blogging and your work in the print media?
I'll hazard an answer on this one, too. The blog is one more pocket—some things I think to write, I'll tuck into an article, whereas other things wind up on the blog. It's hard for me to establish a narrative the way that, say, Tyler Green has, because I end up moving the little ball under all these shells and that's hard to follow. Over time I think this blog will find a bit more structure and narrative.
How do you attract readers/posters other than by word of mouth?
It helps to have friends and colleagues whose blogs are more prominent than mine—that accounts for a lot of eyeballs. Readers who stick around, though, stay for shared interests, I'd guess, and I wouldn't know how to reach those people except by word of mouth.
In general, is blog art criticism more open and liberal, and print criticism more closed and conservative?
Not strictly speaking, no. I think it rarely lines up so neatly as "liberal" and "conservative" or "open" and "closed"—more like "discriminating" and, well, "not."
Here in the District, bloggers and others in the arts community clamor for more coverage, no matter the coverage. I'd rather see (and write) more expansive consideration of shows and artists and issues that merit the coverage.
Some people say that there's a dearth of art criticism at length on blogs. Is this true? If so, does it have more to do with reading on a computer in general, or with art criticism in particular?
It has nothing to do with reader on a computer. I subscribe to only a few romantic notions about print media—I like my Sunday Times in print—but my brother, who's seven years younger, thinks that's totally ridiculous.
I agree that there's a dearth of longer-form art criticism on blogs. I can't actually afford to write things on my blog that I could get paid to write, but if I were in a position to I'd love to use the blog to publish some off-beat arts critical ideas. JL at Modern Kicks writes long-form on his blog and we're all the better for it. Frankly, those with the knowledge to write art criticism just aren't inclined to write blogs. We're talking about a small number of people total.
Art magazines come out once a month. Newspaper art reviews usually appear once a week. Blogs appear more or less daily, and sometimes have updates by the hour. Do you think that the faster pace of blogs will start to affect the pace of art-making.
No. I just don't see why bloggers updating more frequently would affect practice any more than Artforum changing its print stock or the Times switching from Times to Georgia might. To say that this sphere of commentary has that sort of reach risks hubris.
Tyler just said that there's more good art being made by more artists in more places than at any time in history. Is this true? And if so, what's the reason?
In the West, possibly. Artists, designers, and media figures make up only a small percentage of the creative class but that group is expanding or has expanded over this generation. I'm not sure Tyler's making the sort of claim that can be proven out entirely, but for restricted fields of comparison I'd guess that he's right.
Do blogs help correct the geographical bias in print art criticism, i.e., the tendency to think that most of the important stuff happens in New York or Los Angeles, and the difficulty of art outside those places to get national attention?
Yes—for people living outside New York and Los Angeles.
One index of a city's gravity as an art center is young artists—perhaps recent MFAs—from elsewhere coming to set up shop. Is that happening in Philadelphia and Portland?
Erin Killian wrote a piece in the spring for the Washington Business Journal about city planners who were brainstorming ways to make the District a larger destination for artists than it is today. Here's a crucial item from the report: "Closer to home, Arlington, Fairfax and Montgomery counties each fly the 'creative economy' banner, promoting their areas' abilities to attract and retain all types of creative professionals." Jessica Dawson glanced on these issues in the Washington Post in her report on arts in Bethesda, Maryland.
It can't be overstated the degree to which municipal divides in the region frustrate the city's art scene. There are two states suburban to the metropolitan center of Washington, D.C., both of which hope to skim the profits generated by the urban creative class. There's only so much pie in the greater metropolitan region, and suburban areas like Arlingon, even exurban places like Reston, establish art centers that each take slices from the whole. There hasn't been a viable creative downtown in D.C. and to the extent one exists, it is retarded by the drag, the creative "sprawl," of outlying arts nonprofits. This city can't support the number of arts nonprofits that exist here. Do es the city need a Wpa, a Grace, and an Mpa? To some extent these organizations' programming is redundant—the defining difference is geographical base, and between these there's a difference of dozens of miles at most. It would certainly be better for the District if there were fewer of these nonprofits and those that existed put on better, bigger-profile, and more differentiated shows.
Is there any constructively negative edge to your blogging and, if so, what is it?
This is probably a question to ask the people and institutions I've taken on. I don't think I ever write anything snarky or angry that doesn't implicitly or explicitly suggest how to shape up.
Let's throw something back into the mix: naked human ambition. Unknown bloggers want to be little bloggers; little bloggers want to be bigger bloggers; and bigger bloggers want to be called, as is Tyler's Modern Art Notes, "the most influential of all the visual-arts blogs" by the Wall Street Journal.
I like Green's answer here: "Readers are excellent at distinguishing the Anchor Steam beer from the generic Natural Light." If the question is what do I want to be when I grow up, it's a hybrid journalist, the sort that new media is inoculating: writing investigative journalism, criticism, and meta-media ombudsman–type blogging.
Where will your blog be in three to five years?
One plank in my formidable media arsenal? The last embers of my burned-out career? If I'm still doing it I don't suspect it will be so different. I hope that in three to five years the visual template has changed once or twice.
Reading over a 2002 Artforum essay on Barnett Newman by Yve-Alain Bois I was struck by a detail that I'd either missed or forgotten:
Perhaps the most lethal label is Newman as Conceptual artist, for it prevented people from paying attention to the extraordinarily varied quality of his touch, to the wide range of his pictorial effects. Sadly, it also provided a good excuse for what can only be described as a criminal lack of care for his canvases—Mondrian's work dramatically suffered from a similar misconception: Why worry about painterly qualities if everything is just cosa mentale? Newman's paintings almost invariably came back damaged from exhibitions and have been frequent victims of outright vandalism—perhaps more so than those of any other artist in this century. What's more, they have not always been afforded the best treatment by restorers.Fascinating. I wouldn't know how you'd go about putting a quantitative label on the damage done to a painting since you have no great basis for comparison between, say, an acrylic on gessoed canvas and an oil on ungessoed linen. Maybe a label measures the absolute amount of effort a conservator puts into a piece of work—but then, it's imaginable that certain techniques require far more effort than others outside any proportion to the actual restorative work that they do.
Isn't it something, though, that a conservator would get her hands dirty like that? Mucking around with the whether and the how of art rather than eyeing strictly the what of the pigment and support. By that same token the image is charming: a spurned conservator, frustrated by this notion of a conceptual art that does not require execution, compelled finally to lash out in passive-aggressive rage against the thing itself.
Grab a copy of today's City Paper and check out my cover story on the Corcoran Gallery of Art, will you? It's about Modernism, staffing, the board of trustees, the state of the building, and future programming—roughly, a survey of the institution's fortunes following the resignation of David Levy and appointment of Paul Greenhalgh. If these names don't mean anything to you, read on.
In the same issue you'll find a feature review of two exhibits—the Wpa's 2007 "Options" and "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution"—both of which are ongoing. Feel free to compare notes in the comments.
I'll be back with more later, but right now Wrecky and I are going to go indulge in a spa and pedicure day. That's how I'm framing it, anyway; point of fact, I'm taking him to the Laundro-Mutt to give him the hose, and on the way he will resist by barking, snapping, pulling, running if he can make a go for it, and eventually falling totally limp in protest. At which point he's eighty pounds dead weight.
Artnet has listings for artists participating in "Unmonumental," the four-stage show that will fill every gallery of the New Museum for its opening on December 1. From Kristen Morgin to Thomas Hirschhorn to Michael Bell-Smith to Language Removal Systems, it's an impressive menu of artists. The 30-hour opening party on December 1 sounds like an event not to be missed, if perhaps an event not to be enjoyed in its entirety.
Jiha Moon, Jade Cycle, 2007.
Read about that show here. And if you grab the paper that's on stands today, you can read about Nelson Vergara's "Anni" at Meat Market Gallery.
I paid £5 for In Rainbows, which was like, twice as much as my cheapskate friends put down.
I mentioned a while back that I was selected to participate in the Maryland Art Place Artists and Critics Residency program. So were two other writers: Darcy Bleau and Robert Jason Fagan, whose work I haven't yet had the pleasure of reading.
Here's the deal. We selected critics, along with a senior critic—this year, that's Robert Berlind, a contributor to the New York Times and Art in America—will do a host of studio visits, select works for a show (to be hosted by MAP), and contribute essays for an accompanying catalog. The first big chunk of that work, we'll do this weekend, when we drive around the mid-Atlantic to do studio visits with the following artists:
Vincent CarneyI've only ever done studio visits mano a mano. When I was taking a studio class in Italy in 2001, I participated in a show organized by the college, and some visiting Georgetown professors stopped through and talked with each of us about our work. That's my only brush with group critique; I hope it's not stressful for the artists to field questions by four writers. And, of course, I hope we don't all pass out by the end of the afternoon on Saturday.
Timmerman Daugherty
Dennis Farber
Symmes Gardener
Catherine Kleeman
Isabel Manalo
Jacqueline Schlossman
Jacquelyn Singer
Diane Szczepaniak
Some of those names are known to me, but more aren't. Saturday morning I'll be catching an early ride to Baltimore, then returning fairly quickly to meet with Isabel Manalo, then on to the next stop. See you back on Sunday.
Oh—speaking of Berlind—did any New York readers attend this panel on art criticism?
For Artnet's art market watch column, Richard Polsky writes:
The market will decline, this season or next, for Chinese contemporary art. The price rise in Chinese contemporary is a sucker bet based purely on speculation rather than on the quality of the work itself. There's nothing innovative here. In fact, other than its specifically Asian content, the work is totally derivative of Western art.It's certainly reasonable to suggest that a correction in the West's art market will affect the booming Western market for contemporary art from China. That said, it's a mistake to talk about China as a monolith. There's a crude Orientalism supporting the feverish market for Chinese contemporary art. As if there is any sense in the notion of "Chinese contemporary art," a Sinicized style in a nation so geographically and demographically vast. A projection like "There's nothing innovative here" is as baseless as the endless march of gallery shows exhibiting "the new trend" in China.
But we may still talk about a Chinese contemporary art market because, as yet, the infrastructure for the market is still immature and depends on a great deal of Western investment. Building out this infrastructure is good for the West, good for China, and good for Art. However, it's also work paid for by suckers. Economist blogger Ryan Avent and I have been chatting about this issue this morning (read: I've been peppering him with questions over IM), and he points to this Slate column by Daniel Gross that introduces Gross's book, Pop! Why Bubbles Are Good for the Economy. In short: Booms make for lots of bad investments that nevertheless build infrastructure. So the question is, then, whether the avenue connecting Chinese studios and Western collectors has been sufficiently paved by the sort of speculation Polsky decries to survive the bubble's collapse.
I had to be a little late to the story on the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran, now the Wpa, but click for some reporting about the organization's long-term plans. I've been working on some other projects (that's why, as of late, this blog is little better than a graveyard for puns).
I missed my chance to use the best lede for this story. That one got swept up by Mike DeBonis: "Copy editors across the District rejoice: The end of that infernal fucking backslash."
UK police seized a Nan Goldin photo, titled Klara and Edda belly-dancing (1998), from collector Elton John, on grounds that the image constitutes child pornography. I looked around and couldn't find an image to put up here, but it shows two naked girls horsing around at home. The image is provocative because one of the girls' bodies is distorted in such a way that her vagina is presented directly to the viewer. The viewer is supposed to confront the fact that the young girl is entirely vulnerable and yet totally safe. The photo was published in The Devil's Playground and has been exhibited in a whole lot less liberal places than London without a peep. Surely the police will come to their senses: No one actually believes that viewing this photograph within the context of a museum exhibition is tantamount to practicing pedophilia. Absolutely no one believes that's what's going on.
UPDATE: A reader writes in with an image, noting that the auction details list the title as Edda and Klara Belly Dancing. I'll go with that title in the tombstone text.
I will accede to the inevitable howls that the image is not safe for work and post it below the cut, but let me remind all of my standing policy: Reader, if ever an employer gives you trouble over an image seen on G.p, I offer to call that employer and explain, in whatever detail proves necessary, the difference between art practice and pornographic function. Should your employer prove immune to a deontological appeal, I'll happily craft a consequentialist argument (a lie, if need be) that you are not a pervert. Click with confidence.
Nan Goldin, Edda and Klara Belly Dancing, 1998.
The Stranger's Jen Graves discussed the piece in a short review from 2006:
There is plenty of variety in the images, but you stop dead in your tracks when you hit Edda and Klara Belly Dancing, Berlin (1998), a Nan Goldin photograph that came into the museum's possession just last year. Both of the young girls are laughing and playing; one of them is wrapped in a scrap of sheer costume fabric and the other is lying on her back, her knees bent under her, her legs spread wide for the viewer. Though this is a perfectly natural moment, the dark open hole of the girl's vagina is harrowing. My first thought is that she is about to be raped, or maybe is being raped already, by me, by my looking. I come to my senses. She's at home, playing with a friend and laughing. She's fine. I'm the one who's afraid.
Christopher Büchel finally responds to Geoff Edgers's questions with a prank of an answer. What a messy divorce between Büchel and the museum. Does anyone think he'll be seeing exhibition time in the next decade? And woe to the next artist who shows at MASS MoCA, who will no doubt be asked to wade through a trial's worth of legal documentation before setting foot in the space.
I recommend you check in with Modern Kicks for closing statements.
Emerging from the salt mines to note that I've been selected to participate in this year's Maryland Art Place Critics' Residency program. I don't have a ton of information for you—I only just got the call last night, and I couldn't totally hear what she was trying to tell me because I was in the midst of a nonpolitical journalists' happy hour. But I'm pretty sure she said I was in, and that means I'll be spending some time in Baltimore. More details to come, I'm sure. Back to work!
It must truly warm the cockles of Jed Perl's heart to see Joan Snyder listed among this year's bunch of MacArthur Foundation prizewinners. And for Snyder, this award falls under the category of just deserts.
By the 90s, Snyder felt so snubbed by the art world that she was eventually led to write about it. In a 1992 essay she titled, "It Wasn't Neo to Us", she complained about the early 90s emergence of so-called Neo-Expressionists, young bucks like David Salle and Julian Schnabel who were greeted by the art world as the revitalizing, restorative figures who would save painting. But we're still here and we've been here all along, Snyder was saying. Since the 70s, she (and several peers, mostly women) had never strayed from an expressionist program, but the critics and curators had nevertheless left them behind, only to fawn over more of the same when it was done by men in a more masculine fashion and with less success.
Typical. This time around, the powers that be recognized the oversight, and she's begun to receive her due. Following a critically regarded retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 2005 comes half a million dollars to close out the decade. Schnabel has that kind of coin many times over, no doubt, but no one's calling him a genius. Way to play the long game, Snyder.
Joan Snyder, And Always Searching for Beauty, 2001.
On a side note, I love the MacArthur Foundation prizes. It's so affirming to read about progress, and to see parity across all the fields of human endeavor: the robotics researcher standing shoulder to shoulder with the soprano, everyone wearing laurel crowns, humanitas ascendant.
UPDATE: "Way to punch above your weight," says ModKix, referring to the Danforth Museum of Art's Katharine French, who organized the Joan Snyder show that graced the Jewish Museum.
A piece on Noelle Tan in this week's City Paper. Writing this piece made me realize that I desperately badly need to take a road trip. I'm more of the summer/desert driving sort than the Vermont/autumn turning kind, as evidenced by my affection for America's "Horse With No Name." The research is vigorous, the methodology beyond reproach: It has been proven absolutely that only those people who really get off on the idea of driving around in an El Camino in the glare and the heat will tolerate that song. The point being, I'm planning a road trip for next summer, and you're going to read this article now.
There's nothing quite like hearing Benjamin Buchloh growl the word "Rauschenberg". So I'm sorry that I missed his lecture on Saturday morning during the "Issues of Content: Museums of Modern and Contemporary Art Today" conference at the Phillips Collection—if not merely for more opportunities to hear him speak. Following his presentation, speakers made glancing references to Buchloh's presentation, which, by all accounts, was maximalist and incendiary, so in addition I'm sorry I didn't have the chance to listen to his lecture.
Buchloh's topic: "Museums, Formerly of the Public Sphere, Now of Spectacle." That shouldn't have come as any surprise to a roomful of people who follow his writing, right? The recap I heard from an art historian covered all the familiar topics: Art suffers from the dilapidation of the tripartite, antagonistic system between critical, historical, and museum functions that, in tandem, serve to keep art honest. The breakdown of this system has resulted in a "competency of judgment crisis". That's as best as I can say, gleaned from secondhand sources and conversational references—familiar stuff.
Jeff Koonz, Blue Diamond, 2005.
The next speaker to present a paper was psychoanalyst, critic, and curator, Suely Rolnik (“Lygia calling"). I didn't think we were doing the whole Semiotext(e) thing any more, and I was predisposed to take a dim view of what she had to say. It was certainly a broader presentation on Lygia Clark's work specifically and Neo-Concretism generally than I'd been exposed to; and notwithstanding a few mentions of the benefits of psychoanalysis in art criticism, it was not so offensive as I would have expected from a lecture on the "therapeutic" value of Clark's work. Here, Rolnik means something other than the generic value for this notion, "therapeutic": If I understand her correctly (probably don't), she means for a post facto understanding of the subjective relationship between artist and work and also between work and viewer, after the fact of art's "instrumentalization" by the market. Working from memory and scratchy notes, I take it that she means that there was this subjective potential meaning between Clark's work and the audience, but that was "neutralized" by the interference of the market, which codifies both spaces and conditions under which art can be experienced and categorized.
A bellowed "so what?" might have derailed her presentation. She laments the loss of the therapeutic, clinical value of art in the marketplace. Is that essential to the experience of art? It would seem not, as her answer in the case of Clark is to provide thorough documentation of her performances ("proposals") alongside whatever artifacts remain. I don't understand how this evades rather than accedes to the trappings of the market. But she never establishes what this clinical value is supposed to impart, except a vague sense of political well-being.
The art market being what it is, Rolnik asked (and I paraphrase), how is it possible to convey work that is ephemeral but renewable? (She meant it as a rhetorical question, but really, someone's already answered that: Félix Gonzáles-Torres.)
One concrete bit of information Rolnik extended that I will in turn pass onto you, fortunate reader, is that Lygia Clark resisted the Tropicalia movement as a category for her own work, and Neo-Concretism should be rightly considered divorced from Tropicalia altogether (though I don't know why). Labor under your illusions no longer!
Left: Abdel Abdessemed, Real Time, 2003. Right: Abdel Abdessemed, Birth of Love, 2003.
Manolo Borja ("What To Do?") presented a more optimistic paper than his hand-wringing title suggests. He began with a graph comparing the modern museum with the postmodern museum (please imagine some triangles in there somewhere):
Modern Museum
After a tangent on the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art that detailed some of these problems, he offered his prescription: Museums should reevaluate the property-centric nature of collections in favor of an "archive" format, in which orality and micronarratives are encouraged. I don't believe he clearly explained the nature of this new decentered art, but he gave as examples some guerrilla stuff, some reproducible stuff.
In short: Hakim Bey, ontological anarchy, Temporary Autonomous Zones, that sort of thing.
Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, 1963.
The final segment featured a panel of museum directors—a gang of four, really, who almost to a one bucked his canned statement in order to respond to Buchloh. The panel: Bruce Altschuler (NYU museum studies), Neal Benezra (SFMOMA), Jay Gates (Phillips Collection), Kathy Halbreich (Walker Art Center, exiting director), Lisa Phillips (New Museum). More on that later.
Fellow District citizen and art blogger Tyler Green says that it's high time that the city's museums had a come-to-Jesus meeting.
They don't program contemporary art and, in a rare convergence of frictional unemployment, a number of them don't have the staff to show contemporary art. The Hirshhorn is without a director; the Corcoran Gallery of Art has no contemporary art curator; the National Gallery of Art has no contemporary art curator. (Two of these three things will change.)
In the next six months, we'll have some better sense of where the District stands on contemporary art. One thing that won't change, unfortunately, is the lack of a dedicated contemporary art space. The District needs a Kunsthalle, either a New Museum–esque space for temporary exhibitions or a dedicated contemporary extension to the National Gallery or the Smithsonian.
I know for a fact that there's institutional interest in re-purposing the Mies-designed and much-maligned Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library as a contemporary-art center. It would take a larger meeting of the minds than has assembled to date, but it's something that people think about. I was more supportive of the notion back when it looked as if the building itself might be in jeopardy because it houses a deficient library, but as the terror alert level on that threat has fallen, so has my desire to see the library turned into something other than the library. I still use it as a library, and I think it could be a great library.
And in any case, there is all of Northeast to consider! Warehouse space abounds; while gentrification has transformed some of the available area, it will be a long time coming before Trinidad gets the full Logan Circle treatment. To be sure, a space in the warehouse district in NE is far from the tourist circuit. You know—so what. The people who want to see, say, John Bock's Zero Hero will surely find the Red Line and hop on the train. The people who are merely curious will, too. (People actually like contemporary art, quite a lot. They'll find it.)
It would take the kind of corporate philanthropy that Olga Viso says this city doesn't see, and it would demand the sort of curatorial vision that the city can't seem to keep. The city might have the collector class to do it—certainly something like this doesn't happen without the support of people like the Ernsts, the Lerhmans, Lorie Peters Lauthier, and Mitch Rales. One snag: Mitch Rales—who happens to own his own contemporary art gallery—also serves on the board of the National Gallery, which has proven reluctant to invest in develop its contemporary art holdings. Then again, National Gallery trustees don't have to advocate for the National Gallery's interests, so perhaps he could work on another project. Given his investments and his stature, the most likely (and I think, the best) prescription is for a collection-free Kunsthalle.
Point of fact: There isn't a space in the District to show Bock's Zero Hero. (That's my example because it's the last rilly big installation piece I saw.)
UPDATE: Made some minor language edits.
A conversation from last night's Options opening has stayed with me all day today: What's wrong with the National Museum of Women in the Arts? I can hardly even tell you what's wrong with them, because they don't talk to anyone and no one talks about them. They have no presence. They have no programming. They have no press people. They don't support local artists. They don't cater to women who aren't white and ludicrously rich. It's as dead a museum as they come. You'd scarcely guess that they're hosting a major West Coast exhibition ("Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution") based on the utterly deafening silence about the show within this city. I'm told they had the option to book "Global Feminisms" to run next year, but declined. Why? Why not host these shows back-to-back and make it the conversation in the District? These shows represent the two most important surveys of women artists done in the last 30 years—at least. The NMWA won't pony up for both?
What they also don't have: a director. Maybe that means they do have an opportunity. But before they so much as peak at resumes, Mary Mochary et al. need to get religion. It's time the board sat down for a serious come-to-Jesus meeting.
Carol Vogel scoops all the local outlets with the news that Olga Viso is leaving the Hirshhorn. She'll be the new director at the Walker. This satisfies the loudest rumors about changes over at Bunshaft's Bunker, but I hear that's not the end to personnel changes there.
Photo by Matthew Worden
Holy shit. For the Love of God is in an edition of three.
For The American Prospect I wrote a piece about Jonathan Yeo's pornographic portrait of President Bush, with a focus on artists' treatment of administrations past and present. That's up now. As for the portrait, you need to see the print for the full effect, but images and details are here.
Everyone's talking about Randolph College, whose Maier Museum art collection, if you'll recall, is on Alice Wanton's shopping list:
In related news, the state of Tennessee ruled that Fisk University can't sell its collection to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum when there's a better offer on the table from Crystal Bridges. However, before Fisk University can proceed with the sale to Walton, it must prove in a separate case that it did not forfeit its hold on the Stieglitz collection entirely by violating the terms of O'Keeffe's original bequest, which mandated specific guidelines for displaying and maintaining the collection. Diverse has the detailed report.
Last week, the Bethesda Urban Partnership announced the winners of the fifth-annual Trawick Prize. The winners include painter Jo Smail (first place: $10,000); painter/installation artist Nicholas Wisniewski (second place: $2,000); painter Bruce Wilhelm (third place: $1,000); and photographer Kathleen Shafer (young artist award: $1,000).
Shafer's just a great selection for that category—no question. And Wisniewski's work, while perhaps not as strong as some of the finalists (many of whom simply have more proven bodies of work), is easily distinguished by its political–social content; I see an argument for investing in his work, but perhaps not awarding it, at least not over the more established artists at hand.
Smail and Wilhelm, on the other hand, are disappointing selections, especially given that the set of finalists includes a few very strong contemporary artists. Smail's work contributes nothing new to the conversation in painting. Wilhelm's work holds up better: He has a Guston sense of humor, and the style is a welcome update on the glut of Marcel Dzama derivatives that have flooded drawing shows over the last few years, but the work is also very placeable along a chart of contemporary developments in this quirk/twee vein.
But winner selection, nothing doing—that list of finalists is problem enough. To my mind, there's no accounting for a final round that puts Mary Coble—arguably the most deserving artist in the contest—on par with Linda Hesh. It's hard to reconcile the (altogether competent and proven) members of the jury with the decision to put Hesh in such company.
Oh, and Baby Martinez? Gabriel Martinez, what are you trying to pull. I am surely not buying this "Baby" business.
Are Kanye West's sunglasses Jeremy Scott or Takashi Murakami? I'd've bet that he just picked them up off Oriental Trading for $2.95 a dozen.
On Campus Progress: Reviews of new stuff from Travis Morrison Hellfighters, Montag, and Stars—a veritable cornucopia of indie blather. Later today or this weekend, I'll put up a link to a piece on The American Prospect on presidential portraiture and the controversy surrounding an (un)official portrait of President Bush.
Greg Allen responds to Lee Rosenbaum's LAT editorial on the crisis facing public collecting:
The "crisis" Rosenbaum imagines now has existed almost from the founding of both these great American museums [Met and MoMA]; they have almost always been too cheap, too slow, or too risk-averse to collect cutting-edge art, so instead, they collect collectors.Tyler Green punches the numbers and finds that, whatever museums are buying, they are, in fact, buying:
The story is that American museums, especially contemporary art museums, are extraordinarily committed to purchasing art, and that this serves us (and artists) quite well. The commitment American museums have to acquiring art is one of the great under-told stories in American museumdom.I can't elaborate right now, which is just fine, since these two hit the points that need to be made.
Two pieces in this week's City Paper:
Caitlin Phillips, Curlers, 2006.In the Washington Post, Jessica Dawson reviews "Subtext," a group photography show at Randall Scott Gallery. She writes:
At Randall Scott, Caitlin Phillips's work proves particularly enervating. She's an attractive woman, slender and young, and she takes pictures of herself. In one picture she wears a simple dress and cute shoes and holds a tea set while looking blankly at the camera. In another, she stands on a beach, masked and perfectly still, dressed in a flowery shift. In a third, she's nearly naked, in curlers and hose, pouting for the camera.On first read, I couldn't make heads or tails of Dawson's question. Is she asking whether Phillips is denigrating herself in the imagethat she depicts or by doing the photography she does? The fact that Dawson writes "woman artist" and not "woman" leads me to believe that she's not interrogating the text—that is, discussing the figure as she is depicted or suggested within the narrative of the portrait. If she had asked why this woman (or this figure, person, etc) denigrated herself, she'd be talking about the figure as if she were a character in that narrative. The "nearly naked" line is confusing bit of misdirection as it is followed by a line about denigration; but I'm convinced think that Dawson is asking why Phillips—the photographer, not the model/character—is denigrating herself by stooping to a photographic trope.What possesses a woman artist to denigrate herself like this? Photography, in its many forms, dominates artmaking. But can artists use it wisely?
Conveniently, that's the opinion I hold of the work. In the City Paper, I write:
The evidence of spotty printing lingers like a haze over Caitlin Phillips' languid self-portraits, which are heavy with references to life in the South: sundresses, hair rollers, tea pitchers, malaise, disrepair. Thematically and technically, her romanticized pictures are Polaroids writ large; unfortunately, the results are all too common in Southern photography.At this late date, Phillips is using a tired bromide. My basic response to seeing Phillips's work was a feeling that her photographs were inaccurate. I don't believe the South is so seersuckered out any more; of course, your mileage may vary (I'm sure it does). Whether it's accurate or not, I think it's not compelling or significant as an observation.
(There's more of the work available online here, but I'm afraid you might not take away a reasonable impression from the Web images. You can see the overexposure just fine, but you really can't detect the high grain in the film she's using.)
Now, I don't bring this up merely to share notes with Dawson. In fact, I was prompted by Lenny Campello's response to her review, which is unreasonable:
Here's the question that her editor should have asked the critic: "Since you are asking the readers this question, did you ask the photographer?"Portraying her as socially inept is just mean. And presuming to speak for most DC gallerists is unfair. But expressing outrage that the critic didn't ask the artist's intent just gets it plain wrong. Dawson is interpreting the piece, and it is for her to say whether she believes that the artist doesn't know what she's doing. It's often important to ask artists technical questions, and I like to gossip with dealers, but critics don't go around asking artists to tell them what to write in their reviews.Of course not, Dawson's vitriol is generally reserved for the written word, and as most DC area gallerists know, and in my experience, she rarely asks questions when visiting a show, or even speaks, other than the social "hello," when she first arrives, and the occasional "ahah" when spoken to.
Conner Contemporary, the most prominent contemporary art gallery in the District, is moving from Dupont Circle to H Street NE. I write up the details in today's Express.
Time's Richard Lacayo writes about Alice Walton's offer to Fisk University for its Stieglitz works and asks the right questions about joint custody:
Whether it happens or not, these sharing arrangements are getting to be an ever more common proposal for cash-strapped colleges looking to turn their art collections into revenue. But the deals leave open a lot of unanswered questions. Here's just one. If Walton's offer were accepted by Fisk, would her museum be allowed to lend works from the Stieglitz bequest to other museums? Would Fisk have any say over where the works could travel? When institutions "share" collections, who makes the rules? My guess would be the partner with the checkbook.Furthermore, is Fisk allowed to travel the collection (if their future financial situation made that a possibility)? Who restores the works, if restoration is ever necessary? Insurance—who pays for that? Do students and scholars working with Fisk University have access to the works (and associated research materials) when they're off campus?
These aren't impossible questions to navigate. And money isn't a question for Crystal Bridges. But though it's a fifty-fifty split, the two interests aren't approaching it as symmetric partners.
Jonathan Marx reports in The Dickson Herald that Alice Walton "has offered to purchase a 50-percent share in Fisk University's Alfred Stieglitz Collection."
That introduces a fourth party to a table where negotiations are already in play. Previously, Fisk University earned opprobrium from both the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper for rushing to deaccession works from the Stieglitz collection, which contains 101 paintings and photographs. The two most notable (and valuable) works in the collection are O'Keefe's Radiator Building—Night, New York (1927) and Marsden Hartley's Painting No. 3 (1913). Time's Richard Lacayo surveys the controversy:
In 2005 the school's president, Hazel O'Leary, came up with an idea that could not only pay to renovate the frayed campus gallery where the Stieglitz Collection has languished but also pump millions of dollars into Fisk's general budget. Why not sell off just a bit of that famous art? But when the school moved to bring Radiator Building to market, it triggered what became a lawsuit by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., which moved to block the sale on the grounds that it violated the terms of the painter's bequest. In February the museum offered Fisk a deal. It could sell Radiator Building, but only to the museum, and for $7 million, a price much below what it would go for in the current art market. If Fisk said yes, the museum promised not to block the sale of another painting from the collection, a Marsden Hartley, on the open market. Fisk said yes.That hearing is planned for September 6, and the parties will determine whether the university can move forward with the settlement agreement that is already in play (i.e., the deal between the O'Keeffe estate and Fisk). If the court rejects the O'Keeffe Museum settlement, Fisk University officials may then consider Walton's offer.That was where things stood until April 5, when Tennessee attorney general Robert Cooper, whose office has the power to approve or disapprove charitable arrangements, rejected the arranged sale because of the difference between $7 million and what Fisk could get on the open market. Now lawyers for both sides plan to sit down in a judge's chambers to see if a new deal can be worked out.
Given the chance, should they? Walton's $30-million offer for the collection is always-low-prices territory—though the institutions would be going halfsies. I have criticized repeatedly Walton's collecting practices: Crystal Bridges is bolstered by an unfair, sweetheart sales-tax exemption from the state of Arkansas that applies only to Crystal Bridges acquisitions. When the Crystal Bridges collection is finally realized, it will tell the story of bent or broken bequests and money always trumping art's best interest. Given the history, I am not moved by Walton's plea to donor intent. An excerpt from her letter published by The Tennessean:
We believe there is a creative way to honor Ms. O'Keeffe's desire to keep the collection intact and on permanent public display both in Nashville and at Crystal Bridges; and to provide significant financial support to one of the nation's most historic and important institutions of higher learning.That was not a sentiment she harbored, apparently, when she made offers to buy and remove Philly-unique Eakins paintings from the city's financially strapped art institutions.
That said, Fisk doesn't have many great alternatives. I agree with Tyler Green: The best thing for the Stieglitz Collection would be a long-term loan to the Frist, where the collection has been stored since 2005 anyway. That's a decision in the best interest of the art, the academy, and the community—but it's not in Fisk's best financial interest. The arrangement that the Fisk is currently hashing out in court would split the collection, with the O'Keeffe going to the estate (for cheap), the Hartley going to market (perhaps to Walton?), and the other 99 works staying at Fisk (for now?). On the face of it, Walton's deal seems like the better offer.
As Lee Rosenbaum noted back in April, the state of Tennessee is the only institution that seems to have the public's best interest at heart. It is discouraging that the Fisk has tried to part with its best bequests at bargain-basement prices. In this case, when the community did not rally to preserve these works for Tennessee, Tennessee has at least argued that the community shouldn't get stiffed on the deal.
UPDATE: Lee Rosenbaum: "I am not one of those who have criticized Alice Walton for buying important works from the collections of cultural institutions. [ . . . ] But now, Alice has exceeded the limits of my tolerance."
Cara Ober reports with a tour of Robert Storr's show at the Venice Biennale. I'm bemused by the way she writes off a room of Elizabeth Murray's paintings with an "I hated them," but you should give her a read—she's very accessible and touches briefly on a lot of the artists in the show.
Though I'm only linking to it now, Ryan Avent responded in a very timely manner to my question about highly skilled labor organization, saying that the Chinese art sweatshop isn't an extraordinary example:
Even for workers with valuable skills, wages are determined by supply and demand. If there is a large pool of similarly skilled artists, then the wages for such workers will be bid down. In the sweatshop case, ability with a paintbrush shouldn't be viewed any differently than other artisanal skills.Emphasis mine. This is an aspect of art that changed totally with the Victorian concepts of authenticity and author, breaking entirely from previous (i.e., Renaissance) ideas about the artist. Consider Elaine Sturtevant (who, it seems, now goes just by Sturtevant): Her work consists entirely of copies of other artists' work. So far as I know, she has not in 40 years created an original artwork (for a typical value of "original"), instead laboriously re-creating painting, sculpture, film, and performance by artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Paul McCarthy. (You may recall her Duchamp copymades in last year's Whitney Biennial.)The big jumps in bargaining power and wages come from other avenues. On the one hand, skilled craftsmen can organize and erect barriers to entry. Guilds had this effect, as do modern professional organizations; both guarantee quality—to an extent—but also reduce labor supply and push up wages. The Chinese sweatshop workers, like many other skilled and unskilled workers before them, would no doubt have difficulty putting together a Monet Knock-off Painters Union.
On the other hand, a truly outstanding talent offering a unique product can remove himself from the system and develop pricing power. Damien Hirst, in other words, has a monopoly on Hirsts. This allows him to limit supply and raise the price of his art. Plus no one can enter the Hirst market and compete with him.
Despite the fabricated nature of her work, Sturtevant nevertheless has a monopoly on Sturtevants, so to speak—her works are sold at rates she sets, independently from the value of the works she references but also higher than the value of reproductions like prints. A Sturtevant copy of a Duchamp readymade object is categorically different from a Chinese factory reproduction of a Vermeer, even though the activity is essentially similar. ("Rather a long run for such a short slide," says A Fistful of Euros.)
On the original question of art produced by Chinese sweatshops, Megan McArdle says, "I am willing, indeed eager, to listen to an argument from Mr Capps that this is culturally or artistically a Bad Thing." Sorry to disappoint, but I don't think it is so culturally or artistically Bad. People who hope to buy gauche home decor at Wal-Mart, by all means, have at. In fact, people may buy all manner of Chinese-manufactured widgets at Wal-Mart, these paintings among them. I just don't accept that it is art that these Chinese painters are producing. Sweatshop-produced paintings don't meet this economic precondition of Western art: Art is produced by an artist who has a monopoly on that art, no matter what it is.
Megan McArdle asks whether Chinese art sweatshops resemble Renaissance art apprenticeships. I say nope. Apprenticeships are one stage along a professional track, whereas sweatshop labor is not. Sure, as far as income goes, apprentices don't make anything—that's a full two or three cents less than what these Chinese copycats are paid. But of course the opportunity cost that an intern pays is an investment in big bucks down the road.
Now, I get the sense that McArdle is baiting her readers (and this writer) to deliver forth an encomium to Art and Apollo and to denounce the Chinese for this cheapest debasement of the canon. And, because I know McMegan socially, I know that she wants to stake out the counterintuitive ground here and defend these reproductions as desirable against real and perceived critics who abhor them. But the art reproductions aren't the real issue (and not just because they aren't the real deal, though I am tempted to launch into a tangent on the problem of authenticity). The fact is, insofar as the global art market is concerned, a Dafen Holbein doesn't account for any more than a Soundgarden poster—they're both examples of cheap decor you can buy at Wal-Mart.
Which is not to say that China won't or has not already had a massive impact on the market. But with regard to this story, the significant point is that economic conditions in China are such that highly skilled labor can be organized (or exploited, if you prefer) as if it were the most basic unskilled labor. I'm not the professional economist, though, so I don't know whether this collapse of categories is an unprecedented or even significant aspect of the global market. Ryan? Felix? Tyler?
(Confidential to Sadly, No!: I was so thrilled to get a link from your page—S,N! is one of very few sites that I will read before I have even put on pants— so I was saddened when it turned out to be merely part of a slam on Megan McArdle. Which is fine, whatever, she's my friend who says crazy things about torture. But I'm confused by this specific issue, which is, what, again? Megan threw up some bat-signals and asked for expert opinion from bloggers she knows personally (to whatever extent). Are we not doing that any more? Really, that's deprecated?)
Elizabeth Murray, Bop, 2002–2003.
The news of Elizabeth Murray's death this week is sad, and especially dispiriting given all the artist's recent activity. Not just the long overdue accolades she received—bestowed in the form of a fine retrospective as well as sometimes-grudging critical recognition that painting existed, and even thrived, during the 1970s, with Murray foremost among the painters who kept on keepin' on. But also the paintings she did right up until her death. For all the reasons she was able to bootstrap her way into an art world that was in no mood for her work, her recent paintings continue to thrill: Foregoing prescription and the prevailing theories for the pure possibility of form and never-ending experiment.
Commenter Joseph notes in comments below and a few people e-mailed to point out that Mark Wentzel's chair, which I describe in this shorty about "Useless" at Project 4, is a super-inflated Eames Lounge Chair, not a Barcelona Chair. I confused them—my apologies.
Mark Wentzel, Xlounge, 2006
The show is on view through September 8.
"It's tempting to be snooty about Starbucks' attempt to enter the world of fine art."
Summer is the time when a young man's thoughts turn to metafictional devices. And no less fine a young man than Julian Sanchez is puzzling over one of Richard Powers's literary strategies. Sanchez writes:
[Powers] routinely alludes to a familiar company or institution, making it clear beyond any doubt which he's referring to, but then either scrupulously and pointedly avoids naming it, such that the absence of the name almost becomes a distracting presence itself, or else he gives it a phony name.I've never read any of Powers's work, so I can't say anything about that. For what it's worth, the author chimes in and largely consents to Sanchez's reading.
Sanchez's prompt launched my own flight of fancy: on Matthew Barney. Barney's take on brands might be the inverse of Powers's. According to Sanchez (and the author), Powers provides the reader with the context to situate a fictional institution within the world in which the reader lives; that world, the real world, runs parallel to the world Powers creates, if I understand what they're getting at.
Barney, on the other hand, presents brand symbols without any context—in inappropriate contexts, even. And his world is magical, to say the least.
Matthew Barney, Cremaster 1, 1996.Take Cremaster 1: How does the Goodyear blimp fit into a film about zygotic gender determination, featuring a Busby Berkeley musical staged on Boise's Bronco Stadium? In the narrative, the twin blimps are ovaries; inside each, a character (named Goodyear) coexists. (Right, in both of them. What'd I say? Magic.) Goodyear fiddles with some grapes, arranging them in various patterns. In one blimp, the grapes are red, and in the other, they're white. Meanwhile, the kick line on the field marches in the shapes dictated by the grape arrangements. It's a gradual but tremendous sculptural process—the magical miracle of life, you see.
Ovaries, okay—but why Goodyear blimps? It's tempting to consider this decision like any other in his series—as layered and oblique. If I consider the Goodyear brand, I might think expansively about vulcanized rubber and Hephaestus (god of sculpture, you know). But I think that when Barney selects a brand symbol, it is irreducibly that symbol, in order to open up different schedules of meaning in an object. Sometimes a blimp is just a blimp.
And these blimps are there to be Goodyear blimps. They hover over the football field; so does Barney's camera, as he reproduces Busby Berkeley's soaring, signature shots. Barney's thinking about framing, and how he can use film to develop his sculptural ideas. Inside the blimps—with the girl and the grapes—he's recording a narrative that is fundamental, microscopic, and subcellular. But outside—well, it doesn't get much bigger than a dancing chorus broadcast via the aerial blimp cam.
So the brand-name blimps have a place in the narrative, but they're also there because they line up vertically with other elements in the movie that are about film and not just a part of Barney's plot.
"Part of the point is to stop and slow readers, to make them look again", says Powers over at Sanchez's lounge. Powers doesn't want readers forgetting that they're not in the real world. Barney doesn't need to worry about this—but he is clear about the fact that he's working with cinema in a particular way.
In this week's City Paper, I penned a pan of "A Good Time Is Now" at KNEW Gallery—although I reserve praise for Michael Ciervo's work.
Michael Ciervo, Fawns, 2007. (Note that Ciervo's Web site lists this work as Untitled; KNEW Gallery gave me the title I used for the article.)
Ciervo is based in Philly and is new to me; since his CV lists his most recent show as a student exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, that's presumably the case for a lot of people seeing his work now. There are some things in this painting that go unexplained: Why, for example, are the figures rendered in a nearly Mannerist scale, when other figurative elements—what can be seen of the house and deer—are depicted more exactly? Nevertheless I appreciate the lancing effects of the light, the way that he has used the surface as a refractive lens between figurative and abstract realms. (I've only got a second to post this, so I'll have to expand on the reasons that his work intrigues me some other time.)
And on the City Paper's Web site, but not in the print edition, is an item on Kata Mejia, who is performing courtesy of Randall Scott Gallery for two more nights on 14th Street each night. This article was bound for the print edition, but there was a minor misunderstanding owing in part to the fact that I had the idea to do the piece only after visiting RSG on late Saturday afternoon—well after pitch deadline. In any case, Mejia (another Philly artist) performs tonight and tomorrow.
Anil Dash and Kieran Healy explain that some publications have taken a shine to square pie charts. Here's the example they've both posted (the left chart taken from the New York Times; the right, from Wired):
Stylish, maybe, and the pie format certainly has its shortfalls, but Healy explains why square doesn't take the circle:
The main problem with this [square] style of presentation is that it uses two dimensions to display unidimensional data. As the graphic on the right, especially, makes clear, the layout of the subcomponents of the graph is arbitrary.My first thought was about the use of color, and how color (and of course, pattern) could be used by scheming editors and their nefarious art departments to sway in subtle ways a reader's appreciation of the graph. If you were to remove the data tags, after all, you would have forms that would read in appreciable ways to a viewer.
Josef Albers, White Line Square VII, 1966.
What would Josef Albers say? Here are some potentially pertinent lines from a 1964 concrete essay, "The Origin of Art":
THE ORIGIN OF ART:Wordy guy, that Albers. (That's the long and short of that essay.) In another essay from the same year, titled "The Color in My Paintings", Albers expands on the function of color within the set pattern of his "homage to the square" series:
The discrepancy between physical fact
and psychic effectTHE CONTENT OF ART:
Visual formulation of our reaction
to lifeTHE MEASURE OF ART:
The ratio of effort to effectTHE AIM OF ART:
Revelation and evocation of vision
[Colors] are juxtaposed for various and changing visual effects. They are to challenge or to echo each other, to support or oppose one another. . . .Of course, all the concrete abstract painters working at this time were thinking experimentally and focusing on the theatricality of abstract painting, though I'd say that Albers was one of few to do the science right and narrow that focus down to a single variable. Given his belief that color value is contextually determined, I doubt Albers would agree that color could be arbitrarily assigned, which has perhaps not a whole lot to do with data presentations so long as you are trying to have a very serious Friday.[ . . . ]
Such action, reaction, interaction—or interdependence—is sought in order to make obvious how colors influence and change each other: that the same color, for instance—with different grounds or neighbors—looks different. . . .
[ . . . ]
Such color deceptions prove that we see colors almost never unrelated to each other and therefore unchanged; that color is changing continually: with changing light, with changing shape and placement, and with quantity which denotes either amount (a real extension) or number (recurrence). And just as influential are changes in perception depending on changes of mood, and consequently of receptiveness.
All this will make [us] aware of an exciting discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect of color.
[For last week's City Paper, I wrote an item on "Strange Weather", a show of nine paintings by Joy Garnett at the National Academy of Sciences. Sadly, the piece fell through the news hole. The show ended this week, so I'm printing the review here—and, far from the reach of copy, I expanded on a few ideas.]
Joy Garnett, Evac, 2005.
Like the images on which they're based—photographs of New Orleans snapped during and after Hurricane Katrina—Joy Garnett's paintings are sensational. "Strange Weather", an exhibit of nine landscapes in oil, show both political and painterly acumen. The New York–based painter takes the long view: She selects, or rather appropriates, artistic and journalistic photographs of the devastated city, most of them snapped from significant physical remove. By painting from these landscape and aerial photographs, Garnett adds another remove—one that has the result of making the images more immediate.
The fact that she paints these images changes their context. Certainly, her expressionistic style adds intimacy; Garnett is a patient painter, and she chooses carefully when to depart from her expansive brush stroke. Consider the thick dobs of light paint that rise off the surface of Strange Weather 32 or the melee of Flood 5. Moreover, Garnett has chosen to treat Katrina through the unlikely lens of landscape painting, a genre that has its own associations for viewers. And when it comes to political art, no one expects a landscape exhibition.
Viewers have associations with the root images themselves—varying degrees of horror with the storm, its consequences, its political implications, and its depiction in the media. By the images Garnett selects and by her mediation of these images, she addresses all these responses.
Joy Garnett, Flood 5, 2006.
Flood 2, for example, looks like no catastrophe so much as the smiting of Sodom and Gamorrah: A great tower of smoke rises in the background, while in the foreground a hot cherry fireball burns brightly. Buildings and other evidence of human activity are lost in a tidal wash of sea, ash, and oil.
For Evac, Garnett selects a stretch of lost highway on which only one vehicle moves, the landscape black and the sky crimson and yellow. This image is ambiguous—it's impossible to tell whether the vehicle is coming or going, first or last.
In the most vivid painting in the series, Flood 5, flesh-toned fire and choking smoke are reflected on a madly painted, oil-slicked body of water. Garnett pushes this image to the point of voyeurism, to match and comment on the original photo, finding something that the photographs don't—calling to mind Kasimir Edschmid's lines, "The expressionist does not look, he sees."
Paul Gaugin, The Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling With the Angel), 1888.
Here's a painting that really might be a contender for the 20th century title, if it weren't 12 years too early: Paul Gaugin's 1888 The Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel). To my knowledge, this is the first instance of a painter using abstraction to distinguish some phenomenological state. The red field is on the pictorial plane, but it is not of the pictorial plane.
Peter Plagens asks in Newsweek: Which is the most influential work of art of the last 100 years? Plagens lists the candidates commanding the most support in the primaries (Kazimir Malevich, Jackson Pollock*, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol). The presumed frontrunner has the critics sounding a lot like the pundits this week: How are Les Dems doing in the polls?
Les desmoiselles d'avignon, the inevitable victor, is doing just fine—though it's hardly garnered the support of the talking heads. Beyond Plagens, who sums up the conventional support for Picasso's cubist invention, and Clare Margetson, who remembers in hushed tones seeing a slide of the painting for the first time, no one's taken up the funky femmes in their Fortress of Solitude.
Jeffry Cudlin and Tyler Green form a Matissian bloc, backing, respectively, The Red Studio** (1939) and Blue Nude (1907). I've a hunch that when The Modern Kicks weighs in on the campaign, JL joins the Matissian center, too.
[Sidebar: You know, I wish that there were still sculptors. Like Dick Gephardt wished there was Big Labor in 2004, I wish there were sculptors. Some party to take up Alexander Calder's standard, boasting that no painter reshaped painting like Calder reshaped sculpture. I could get behind that. But sculptors don't identify "sculptor" these days—they all work in "media".]
I'll take a leftist tack and argue for Malevich's Black Square.
Now, as far as influence goes, Malevich runs into the same problem that Matisse's supporters have to argue down: Malevich's collectors and boosters were the wrong sort of people. Cudlin notes that "the wrong Steins—Sarah and Michael, not Gertrude and Leo—bought some of [Matisse's] boldest early pieces." Of course, in Malevich's case, the consequences of ignominy were somewhat more dire—and also ran the opposite direction. Consider poor Fedor Kumpan, director of the Kiev Art Gallery, arrested and sentenced to prison in 1929 for mounting a one-man exhibition of Malevich's work.
By that point, Malevich had long since completed his grand Suprematist experiment, which lasted him all of three years. That's all it took him to grandfather automatic painting. He identified with Black Square a singular form that could not be found in nature, and in ensuing paintings, transposed and commuted and revolved that square like a four-letter sequence of DNA to build his Suprematist body: up, over, through, in color. His 1913 masterpiece opened up a unique set of strategies that later artists, gratefully or not, would adopt and expand. I see towering over Frank Stella the shadow of the Kaz.***
Malevich later deviated from strict formalism to re-imagine the peasant, to create the new Soviet man. This work looks less good, and it was the work that found him trouble. But it was work not unlike that being done by Malevich's art-historical cohort—Arp, the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Schwitters, and to lesser extents Chagall and then Mondrian, all artists of immense influence. Malevich's project ground to a halt by the forced collapse of the kulak class under collectivization, and he wasn't seen again until Glasnost. His work collected actual dust for something like six decades. That'll cut short an artist's reach.
Nevertheless several questions survive him. One question that surrounds him is immediate and apparent to artists today: the nexus of art and politics and the will to power and the responsibility or usefulness of art within a society. One question that Malevich himself asked was how paint could operate as pure abstraction, entirely removed from a representational context, a question that artists continue to quote and critique.
* Confidential to MSNBC: The name is Pollock.
** Which of these is The Red Studio?
*** Every time I close my eyes, in fact.
My tribute to Herb White is now on newsstands and, while you can read about his rather remarkable life online, I recommend that you grab a physical copy of the paper if you're able. City Paper art director Pete Morelewicz did a wonderful job putting together a map of the city with pinpoints linking to blurbs showing, location by location, the span of White's influence on the District. I'm grateful that he didn't say "No wtf" when I asked him for "map maybe with bubbles lol".
It was affecting to write an observation about a man I've never met, especially given how many people tracked me down to say some words of respect about the man for the record.
Consider dropping by DCAC on July 3, which the city is recognizing as Herb White Day. Councilmember Jim Graham speaks about White here.
Anyone going to the reception in McLean for Strictly Painting tonight? Want to give me a ride? E-mail me: specialcapps $ gmail # com.
It's so hot outside, in fact, that the G.p server melted, no joke, taking it with it all the thrilling content I've posted since last week. You'll have to content yourself with a couple things I wrote for this week's City Paper: first, an appreciation of Herb White, an arts patron, restaurateur, and founder of DCAC, a guy who left a large footprint in the District. For the appreciation, I focused on the places on the places he shaped in the city, so look for a map with a story about his patronage. For more about the man's life, the Washington Post's obit is here.
Also in this week's edition, I've got an item on Strictly Painting. Which made for my annual adventure into North Virginia. This time, I carefully copied down the one-two punch of Metro and city bus directions that would take me from home to hinterlands, but then, five steps into the furnace called outside, I called Charles and asked to commandeer his car. Wheels with A/C: score! Driving in NoVA: problematic! After the McLean exit failed to materialize (and signs for Manassas appeared), I bailed for Vienna. (Having been lost there during my last adventure, it was the devil I knew.) After taking the exit and dialing up my GPS system, I found my way to McLean, with a brief pit stop at Jamming Ja-va, which is known to your correspondent to serve the best chili in town. Pork and tomatillo. See the painting show and make a day of it.
Another Corc kernel to pass along: Sarah Newman, who replaced Stacey Schmidt as junior curator, is curating "Postmodernism", the followup to the Corcoran's "Modernism" show. That show started at the V&A and traveled to the Corc with Paul Greenhalgh; the Postmodernism starts here and will wind up there. More about Newman here.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the V&A is also staging an intermezzo exhibit that won't travel stateside: "Cold-War Modernism". Never heard of it.
After a thorough consideration (I'm sure), Documenta 12 denies Terence Koh "accreditation" as an artist. Marc Spiegler has the goods.
BONUS: AFC selects some T-Koh favorites.
Jonathan Binstock, contemporary curator of art at the Corcoran, has left that position for . . . Citibank?
1. Sarah Hromack explains that Serpentine Gallery pulled the plug on a light projection piece by Paul Chan about life in Baghdad before the Iraq War. Why? Because Fox News was hosting a party at the gallery. Serpentine, your new name is Sniveling.
2. Not only does Antonin Scalia defend Jack Bauer at an international justice conference, he also—no, let's take a moment to consider that. Whew, that's sorry to read. I understand that it's only a conference, and the attendees are like people at any other conference—they hope the hotel has HBO, they'd like to catch up on real work between sessions, they hope not to run into exes, whatever. But Scalia isn't a middle manager or a lowly graduate student, he's a Justice of the Supreme Court, and there is a dignity to that office that flows with its holder wherever he goes. Scalia should bear his office much better than he does. Watch all the 24 you like, sir, but remember that you have one of the highest duties in the entire world.
Anyway, the Globe and Mail:
"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.The correct answer is, yes, Jack Bauer has the right to a jury trial, and if reasonable evidence is put forth saying he broke U.S. laws or U.S.–signed treaties, then yes, a jury will convict him, but nevertheless, yes, sometimes doing the right thing involves breaking rules, however, the only world in which doing the right thing necessitates lifting the ban on torture is the world of fiction. In the real world, there is never perfect knowledge of ticking time-bombs, and anyway, torture is not a useful way to interrogate people if it's reliable intelligence (instead of cheers from the audience) that you're hoping to gather. (Yep, we're fucked.)
Alexander Chancellor passes on this item about David Hockney and the UK smoking ban:
The imminence of the smoking ban, which starts on July 1, has goaded David Hockney to speak out once more against what he sees as this gross infringement of our civil liberties. His main point, of course, is that we should not have "dreary people" telling us what to do, but he also plays down the dangers of smoking. Many great artists smoked, including JMW Turner, he said at the opening of Tate Britain's Turner exhibition this week; and some of them, such as Monet and Picasso, lived to a ripe old age. He didn't go as far as to say that smoking could be good for you, but he sort of implied it.Huh, I would've guessed that living in LA would have cured Hockney of this particular prejudice. Or at least inured him to busybodies.
Elsewhere in the UK: Did Damien Hirst's For the Love of God find a buyer? In the Guardian, I comment on what Hirst's piece is not.
In the Express today I have an exclusive on seven new acquisitions by the Hirshhorn:
A dealer passes on this Artinfo article by Sarah Douglas on the "Venice effect": How (and whether) Venice shapes Chelsea. I'm working on a related piece—on the converse effect, in fact—so keep an eye out for that.
Jeffry "Cuddles" Cudlin passes on some Ian and Jan–esque video by Marina Abramovic. I'll see his YouTube clip, and raise him some Bruce Nauman:
Whoops—guess not. Burned DVDs of Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967–68)? Soaring off pirates' shelves. Bit-torrented Bruce? Clogging all ur tubes. Anyway, you can watch the video here, but you have to sit through two minutes of Pinchneck (1968) first.
UPDATE: What's an Artists' Rights Society, anyway? Turns out, that's the local branch of the Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d'Auteurs et Compositeurs, a busybody organization that's been squabbling with the European Union recently over interests that dealers, estates, users, and the market are much better able to regulate themselves.
When the Vija Celmins drawing retrospective closed at the Hammer in April, I figured I'd be seeing it soon on the East Coast or pricing out tickets for a Midwest flight. I just assumed, never bothering to check, and then—nothing. No more U.S. dates. How did one of the most important contemporary shows of the year find only one venue stateside?
Today, after several rounds of telephone and e-mail tag, I spoke with Jonas Storsze, curator at Centre Pompidou, the institution that organized the exhibit. It wasn't for lack of interest that the Celmins retrospective didn't find another taker. Storsze explained to me that, given the sensitive nature of the medium and concerns about overexposure, there were never any plans to travel the show to more than three venues, tops. He explained that SFMOMA expressed interest at an early stage, and Pompidou later spoke with DMA, the Menil Collection (how great would the show look there?), and Museo Tamayo (in Mexico City), in addition to several museums across Europe.
As these things go, none of these institutions committed to the show. There can be any number of scheduling, financial, or temperamental reasons why each institution decided to pass. But Storsze proffers a plausibly prime explanation:
The third venue would have been a smaller version [of the show] anyway; there were several institutions and collectors who did not wish to lend their works for more than two. Vija Celmins's body is very, very small; we had two-thirds of her production in the show. The people who own her drawings are very careful and do not wish to overexpose them.So much the worse for those of us living elsewhere. Christopher Bedford's review of the Hammer retro for Afterall serves as a great primer on Celmins.
Cathleen McGuigan notes in her Newsweek piece that Thomas Eakins was fired "in 1886 for removing a male model's loincloth during a class with female students". The Art Bulletin summarized critical characterizations of Eakins: "a truculent individualist, a salty realist, a martyr to Victorian prudery, a psychological introvert, or a sexual pervert". A friend who is studying photography from that era regales me with pervy stories and points to this page of Eakins images, and, yeah, I can see letters of resignation following naturally from those.
Now I'm inclined to look up the collaborations between Eakins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Walt Whitman in Philadelphia in the gay old 1880s—this article seems to be a good place to start, if you're so inclined.
