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.
