Another Bouncing Ball: May 2010 Archives

When Stu Smailes died in 2002 at age 69, he left a challenge to Seattle. If the city would commission an artist to create a  "fully articulated, realistic male nude" and place it in a prominent public spot surrounded by a fountain, he'd underwrite it with $1 million.

Naturally, the city punted. (Where did Smailes think he was living, Florence?) The city passed Smailes' proposal to the Seattle Art Museum, then in the process of creating the Olympic Sculpture Park. Lisa Corrin, then SAM's curator of contemporary art, commissioned designs from three finalists, Anthony Gormley, Glenn Ligon and Louise Bourgeois.

Smailes was the kind of person who ate dessert before dinner. He wanted to leave behind him a lovely penis in a public place. Gormley entered in the spirit of the donor, suggesting a male figure from whose erect member water flowed. Ligon's idea was subtler, a male looking into a water pond and seeing his own reflection. Gormley's design was possibly too explicit, even for Corrin. And while Ligon's was quieter, it came with a less active water element than Smailes envisioned.

That left Bourgeois, who got the nod for Father and Son. Her design features the family pair facing each other as water plays over the surface of one body and then the other, forever separating one from the other. Bourgeois isn't known for fountains or for realistic nudes, male or female. But she's recognized for the range and flexibility of her  production. She dealt with the figure in both sculptures and drawings, leaning toward psychologically rich content with Freudian overtones. She was interested in how family dynamics shape lives. But most of all, she was interested in how she could use content, any content, to create art.

Bourgeois:

The subject is only the subject. So it's not a mystery. The mystery resides in what you do with it.

Bourgeois died Monday at age 98. (New York Times obit here.)

Her achievement is towering, but not in Seattle. After looking at her fountain for several years, I think it stands as her worst work ever. Even water jets cannot animate her awkward father and son, nude for no reason beyond the patron's stipulation. The water was supposed to cover one and reveal the other, but it tends to cover or reveal each together.

If only Smailes had harbored an interest in giant spiders.

(Image via)

If  Smailes were alive and allowed a vote, doubtless he would have gone for Gormley. I didn't have a vote either, but I would have gone for Ligon. On the other hand, Bourgeois threw in two sets of eyeball benches in black granite, and they rock. Kids growing up in Seattle will remember sitting on eyeballs, which could be all they need to jump start their lifelong  interest in art.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, ...
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
W. H. Auden

Poets matter to poets, musicians to musicians. Tributes to dancers come from other dancers. Rare are artists who inspire a legacy outside the arena of their endeavor.

Sixteen years after his death, the poet of power chords continues to matter to musicians, but the exhibition bearing his first name at the Seattle Art Museum isn't about them. Curated by Michael Darling, it's entirely about Cobain's afterlife in visual art. Given the narrow theme, the breath of the work is astonishing: from robustly celebratory to tender, fierce to funereal, funereal to forensic. The exhibit opens with the artists who knew him, Seattle photographers Alice Wheeler and Charles Peterson. (Previous post here.)

Everyone else came after.

For Elizabeth Peyton, he's a Russian icon remade in Oscar Wilde's dandy mode: bloodless as an angel, lovely as a wilting wildflower. Cobain is her most consistent subject, and yet deliberately there is only one small portrait from her in the exhibit, a single piece given an entire wall for maximum impact. On it, painted silver, her colors glow. Derived from the thinnest of oils brushed onto heavily gessoed board and leaking in faltering streams, the painted molecules of her portrait appear ready to fall apart at the slightest touch.

If Peyton is the cooked, Scott Fife is the raw. His Cobain made of cardboard drilled with screws from a gun rests like a severed head on the ground.


Jack Pierson offers the artist's name in mismatched metal lettering, like a ransom note. (Kurt Cobain, 1994, 40 x 56 inches)
The famous are their own tribe. They are interchangeable in their excesses and  anonymous in their particulars.

Douglas Gordon, Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe 1996.

From  Heart-Shaped Box, the lyric, "Cut myself on angel hair and baby's breath" inspired Joe Mama-Nitzberg and Marc Swanson's Untitled (Kurt Cobain), 2009. Wrapping the bouquet is part of a shirt from a French designer label Cobain favored after he hit it big. Turns out his flannel was not forever. Once the man had money, he wanted to look good.

Time slows around Banks Violette's Dead Star Memorial Structure (on their hands at last) from 2003.  Why do brights lights insist on burning out? The sculpture is a drum-set wreckage shellacked in place, as if that wreckage were the point all along, the price to be paid for creating youth's most haunting cri de coeur.

 Jordan Kantor is having none of that. His paintings of the death scene are both exact and unknowable. They chart the aftermath of violent death. Be it murder or suicide, fatal violence draws the cops. The people who bent over his body did not love it. For them, he was a professional puzzle to solve.

 

Drawn from Gus Van Sant's Last Days as well as images from Internets, Gretchen Bennett's colored-pencil drawings have a bleached intensity, the subject drained in the spotlight's glare, a private figure made of public moments.

Jennifer West's film Come As You Are features her and her son jumping on a trampoline. Like Bennett, she's interested in image decay as metaphor. Because for her Nirvana songs are all about expelling things from the body, she soaked her film in bleach, antacid, laxatives, mud and pennyroyal (all featured in Cobain's lyrics) for a ruined celebration. (DVD projection 16 mm film negative transferred to DVD. 2 minutes, 51 seconds)

Evan Holloway's Left-Handed Guitarist, 1998, is made of foam, paper, plaster and graphite, but mostly foam. The figure bent over a guitar looks as if it's made of Styrofoam that washed up on a beach. Cobain suffered from largely untreated back, stomach and intestinal problems. When he bent over his guitar in this posture, the intensity of the music was not the only reason.

Rodney Graham's unassuming slide installation, Aberdeen from 1998, plumbs the shallows of Cobain's home ground, its bleak nowhere. The effect, slide after slide, is hypnotic. It's a place where nothing will happen. The night will never fall, the car will never make it to the corner, and the kids who live there will not graduate from high school.

And yet Cobain goes on. After his death, Alice Wheeler collected signifiers of his influence on the bodies of the young, including the dyed blonde guitarist kid who made his way to Seattle and pitched a tent on the outskirts of the city in 1999, wearing the flannel like a flag of his country.

Through Sept. 6.

Note from Greg Lundgren:

Dennis Hopper is dead.. At 74 years old, it's kind of a miracle that he lived that long. For all of the crazy things he did in his life, for all the drugs he consumed with great enthusiasm, for the very address he resided at, it is amazing that something like cancer was what took him down.

Tomorrow most of us get the day off for Memorial Day. And I think Memorial Day should be broader than paying our respects to the military men who have protected our freedom for the past 234 years. There are those that defend our freedom with guns and uniforms. And there are those that defend our freedom through a life of art and action. We defend our constitution so crazy son of a bitches like Dennis Hopper can make films, take pictures, perform and generally test the limits of what freedom looks like. If our country was a jet plane, they would hire Dennis Hopper to stress test it. If our country was a piece of luggage, they would give it to Dennis Hopper to see if he could break it. What makes our country so great is that is permits people like Dennis Hopper to create and destroy and live in a way that most people don't understand or endorse.

Come on down to the Hideout tonight and join us for a drink in honor of Dennis Hopper. I am going to play the soundtracks from Apocalypse Now and Easy Rider, and probably round it out with Gram Parsons, the Stones, the Doors and maybe even a little Jimi Hendrix. It just seems like the right thing to do.

From Flashback. He can't get a word in vertical.

In a repeat of an event in Berlin,titled, Its Form Will Follow Your Performance, Alex Schweder is looking for five people in Seattle who want free architectural advice from a performance architect. Ideally, he says, the five will not be directly connected to the art world.

From Lawrimore Project, where the results will be exhibited:

These people need to be of limited means, and willing to have this process documented and agree to him exhibiting or publishing this documentation. He will then meet with these 'clients' for about an hour at Lawrimore Project and hear what is wrong with their apartments. He will then give them free advice about how to renovate their apartment. they will go home and 'perform' this renovation, document it and send it to him via email. They will then discuss the shortcomings and successes of the renovation and try it again. This will again be documented by the client. This correspondence will continue until they agree their apartment is renovated.

Schweder:

I am interested in taking what we usually think of as an object and understanding it performatively.

From Trouble:

Rather than suggest a rearrangement of walls or different paint color, Alex wrote a short set of instructions for each "client" to behave differently in their home. This shift in action constituted the renovation.

Its Form Will Follow Your Performance (Seattle) runs at Lawrimore from June 9 - 16. Prospective clients can email their interest to:  scott@lawrimoreproject.com  with the subject line "Free Architectural Advice."
Schweder is the 2007 Genius Award winner from the Stranger. Jen Graves story here. My review of Schweder's A Sac of Rooms Three Times A Day here.

A great gallery is a rarity in any city. For thirteen years, starting in his living room and moving into Belltown before establishing himself in Pioneer Square, Billy Howard had a great gallery. As each year ends and I look back on the memorable shows, Howard is consistently at the top of the list. Howard House will close June 12, Seattle's first major gallery to fall victim to the economy.

Nothing illustrates the depth of the gallery's lineup than the fact that five of its most stellar artists (Dan Webb, Victoria Haven, Leo Saul Berk, Alex Schweder and Joseph Park) walked out together in 2007. Those who wanted other galleries in the region found them on the top tier. Those artists were the cream, but skim the cream at HH, and most of what's left is still cream.

Below is a small survey of Howard House's greatest hits. It barely scratches the surface.

Park The Grand Odalisque, 2001 oil/linen 30 x 36 inches

Gretchen Bennett Hand-cut Walnut Wood-grain shelf paper on wall, 2005, 9' h

Debra Baxter Crystal Brass Knuckle (I am going to realign your chakras motherf*****) Quartz crystals, sterling silver 7 x 6 x 2.5 in 2009

Sean M Johnson Grandpa 2008 Rocking chair, Jack Daniels bottle, pack of cigarettes 60" x 46" 38"

Robert Yoder Harmon 2004 lego on wood panel 20" x 20"

Mark Takamichi Miller Thieves: Man at Party 2008 acrylic, wax, urethane, oil and glass spheres on canvas over board 48" x 72"

Jon Haddock Wang Weilen - Screenshot Series 2000 chromogenic print from digital file created in photoshop 22.5" x 30" Edition of 3

Karen Ganz Blue Puppet 2003/04 photogravure etching on paper 13" x 11.5"

Cameron Martin Conflation 2006 screenprint edition of 25 30" x 40" (Howard House had the first show for Martin.)

Lauren Grossman  Whithersoever 2006 iron, plastic, rubber 10" x 13" x 10"

Howard's goodbye letter here. Jen Graves on the end of Howard House here.

No water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles

Marianne Moore 1887 - 1972

Modernism scorned the decorative. More than a century later, its patterned flourishes are a kind of ghostly garden for Claudia Fitch, now showing at Greg Kucera.

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, 2010 Graphite oil pastel on Strathmore drawing paper 45.5 x 37 inches

The door leads nowhere, but the windows wake you up. So do her figures. Pried from plinths and niches, they wrap themselves in cultural influences and jump into 21st-Century space, landing lightly.
FLATSCREEN, 2009 Ceramic, steel, gator board, flocked paint 26 x 15 x 6 inches

Love the boots. Through June 26.

Loose from their strings or using them as weapons, puppets in contemporary video, collage and sculpture tend toward the coarse and the brutal. They clump through their lives with a relish that is almost obscene, hypnotized by their own desires.

Artists who stand out in this crowded field include Nathalie Djurberg, William Kentridge, Paul McCarthy, Sarah Anne Johnson, Cat Clifford, Kiki Smith, Nayland Blake, Kara Walker, Dan Webb, Dennis Oppenheim, Anne Chu, Thomas Schutte and Pierre Huyghe.

Add to that list Martha Colburn, whose Puppet Regime is at Ambach & Rice. Like Kentridge, she draws her tragedies from history, but she adds her own wild hair of pop culture and feminist humor. A dense collage of cutout, found and hand-colored figures collide in her videos and small Polaroid photos. Predator and prey flash by, trailing wreckage. Their score is chaos, and they never miss a beat.

Through June 27.

Magritte, The Lovers, 1928 (via)

Part 1: Big Kiss

Tanya Batura, Intricacies of Dreaming 1  2004 Clay, airbrushed acrylic paint

Ariana Page Russell, Heat Wave 2008, archival inkjet print, edition of 5 18 x 26 inches

Part 2 - can't breathe

Tanya Batura Inhale, 2003, Clay, glaze, china paint

Dan Webb, SHROUD, 2008 Carved wood (Redwood) 22 x 7.5 x 11 inches Collection of the Seattle Art Museum

If as John Russell maintained, a "painting is a vegetable construct that changes in time," a sculpture is a mineral construct whose longevity is marked by change.

Greek and Roman statuary is famous for the thousand-yard stare in its wide and empty eyes, but the Greeks and Romans who made it wouldn't know it from Adam. They painted their product with dark eyes and even eyelashes. (Think Goth, ancient world version.) Part of our relationship with the work is with what time, not artists, made.

Los Angeles sculptor Tanya Batura makes earthenware busts airbrushed with acrylic paint. They look fetal, even though drawn from adult models. Blank but wounded, they are gestating in time's garden, perfect but born past an unattainable prime.

At James Harris Gallery through June 19.

The princess who couldn't bear the burden of a pea was not an artist. She is an emblem of the useless sensitivity of a blue blood. In the human garden, royalty is a hot house flower on luxury's life supports.

Ariana Page Russell is more sensitive (and hearty) than that. She has dermatographia, which means her immune system is always on red alert for blistering news from the outside world. Even the lightest scratch will cause her capillaries to dilate and welt. While the situation doesn't scream opportunity, Russell turned it into one.

 In 2005, she began to draw patterns and words on her skin, which she photographed.

Index 2005, C-print, 11 x 16 inches, edition of 8

Flora 2006, C-print, paper size: 20 x 24 inches, image size: 13 x 19 inches; edition of 8

A couple of years later she turned images from her welted skin into wallpaper and temporary tattoos. Her body is her instrument, but it no longer confines itself to playing a dermatographic tune. Skin is the casing for everyone's sack of flesh. To ward off the ills it is heir to, desperate measures are taken.

In her current exhibit at Platform Gallery, Save Face, vulnerability becomes war paint.
Gush archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8 archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8 (Images of her belly button bloom across her face and chest.)

Seethe archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8 archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8 (Sensitive skin becomes sci-fi armor.)
Through June 29.

From Charles D'Ambrosio's Seattle, 1974, collected in Orphans, published by Clear Cut Press:

The Seattle of that time had a distinctly coma-like aspect and at night seemed to contain in its great sleepy volume precisely one of everything, one dog a-barking, one car a-cranking, one door a-slamming, etc., and then an extravagant, unnecessary amount of nothing. Beaucoup nothing. The kind of expansive, hardly differentiated, foggy and final nothing you imagine a coma induces. I read the silence as a kind of Nordic parsimony. An act of middle-class thrift. A soporific seeded into the clouds.

Christopher Martin Hoff paints the old Seattle alive in the new, what the town looked like before big money and business took hold in the 1980s, making the place famous for its opposite - hustle and innovation.

The Line 2010 Oil on Linen 30" x 24"

Living in Seattle at the tail end of its coma, New York photographer Joseph Bartscherer paused midway as he crossed against a late-night light in Pioneer Square and gestured around him.

You've got cars in the streets, lights in the buildings and towels in the bathrooms. Where are the people?

Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and out comes...nobody. The light in Hoff's paintings hits the street like a reprieve from death. Not wanting to be disloyal to death, locals stay home with their shades drawn.

The Blanket 2010 Oil on Linen 28" x 28"

There's a tenderness to Hoff's exactitude, bringing to mind Rackstraw Downes.

The Pulpit 2010 Oil on Linen 24" x 22"

Even when Hoff's scene is dry, his streets have the volume of the wet. The Doubloon, image below, has to refer to Captain Ahab's promise to the first man who spots the white whale. That man will be entitled to pry the coin off the mast and keep it forever in his pocket, unspendable at the bottom of the sea.
The Doubloon 2010 Oil on Linen 20" x 20"

I've been running Hoff's images on my blog as long as I've had a blog. (Hey! Look at this!) But you can't see their most distinctive qualities in reproduction, their quake and swell, their home-chord of silence, of light making a temporary appearance after a long season of gray.

Aside from other artists, few people know Hoff, even in Seattle. Modest with old-world manners, he avoids the necessity of using them, keeping to himself as he paints on the street instead of from photos in his studio.  For what it is and what it is building into, his work is insanely undervalued.

Through May 29 at the Linda Hodges Gallery.

Can wrap a stair in one.

From Kader Attia: Casbah Jonction Stairs 2

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day has proved unpopular with Pakistani censors, who did what they do best: block access.

Here are two of my favorites, anonymously posted to avoid death threats. And death. To avoid death. You want to kill for your fanatical understanding of your religion, we need to beam you back to the 14th Century, where you belong.

Anybody who writes a blog that allows comments gets pseudo-comments, otherwise known as spam. Why do spammers want to be published on blogs? I have no idea. As my grandmother used to say, when asked, for instance, how electricity works, "It's a mystery." (The Catholic imagination leaves little room for scientific inquiry.)

The language of spammers could be called English as a non-language. No matter how brief a comment, it can be counted on to contain a grammatical error. Its chief characteristic, however, is vagueness. When in doubt, I check the email address. It's never real.

Below, a sample of comments taken from a typical day. For every comment I publish, there are six or seven I don't, sometimes more, from spammers. The green circle on the left indicates a published observation. The gold triangle signifies one waiting to join it. In these cases, the wait will last forever.

Anybody know the motive behind this unending quest to penetrate an art blog?

In the mid-1980s, when Kurt Cobain was a high-school dropout with a guitar, Alice Wheeler was a punk girl with a camera, enrolled in Evergreen. They met in Olympia, both drawn to the music scene. Later, when everybody wanted to take his picture, he'd clear the room but let her stay.

Charles Peterson was the only punk-rock intellectual to graduate from Bothell High School in 1981. By the time he enrolled at the University of Washington, he had a Hasselblad tattooed on his left arm and was heavy into the Seattle music scene. He remembers the faculty telling him he was wasting his time photographing rock and roll.

Now at the Seattle Art Museum curated by Michael Darling, Kurt surveys Cobain's profound influence on visual art. (Review to follow.) Wheeler and Peterson are the only artists in the show who knew him.

Peterson's interest is motion, the way the crowd looked when the music hit it and the way the musicians folded their bodies around the sound to push it out from the stage and into the world. When he zeroed in on an individual, it was to count the cost.

Wheeler cares about relationships, hers to the subject, the subject to the camera, and the subject to the field.

Wheeler, early days:

Wheeler, a couple of years later:

Laura Casatellanos Castellanos collects messages written in the pavement, before the cement hardens. The one below she found across the street from Seattle's Millionair's Club Charity in Belltown, on Western near Wall St.

Previous message here.

The content in painting is always the painting, the question being not who but how. That's why it's possible for a painter to tip his hat to Max Beckmann with a bird painting even though Beckmann concentrated on the human, not the avian.

Max Beckmann, Double Portrait 1946 Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Image via)

Beckmann, Still Life With Fallen Candles, oil/canvas 1929 Detroit Institute of the Arts (Image via)

Brooklyn's Andrew Keating picked up on Beckmann's essential qualities and spun them into a feathered form whose fluid simplicity makes it contemporary. Keating's bird is contemporary with an early 20th-Century heart. Beckmann's rough paint handling is there, his coarse intensity and bursts of bright tonalities.

Keating Lucy, oil/linen, 2009  9 x 12 inches

Beckmann wasn't an abstract artist either. Seattle's Robert C. Jones takes a balcony lattice abstracted from Matisse and painted it as Beckmann might have, with black soiling his red silks.

Jones, Mexico Red, 2009 oil/canvas 20 x 16 inches

In painting, the new has roots in the old or it doesn't matter.

Why is it, despite their evocative shapes, that clams and mussels rarely make an appearance in art? Is it because of Marcel Broodthaers? To use them again is to stand in his shadow.

(Image via)

Andre Petterson, opening in June in Foster/White Gallery, is giving it a go from a different angle: Shells as evidence of geological layering bursting from the innards of an outdated machine. Except for the inexplicable addition of red, I'm with him.

Of course, the outdated machine he chose has already unraveled as a kind of signature for William Kentridge.

(Image via Greg Kucera Gallery)

You gotta know the territory. It's also true that artists who let the past stop them make no mark on the present.

Mutations make language stronger. A cheap toy becomes a treasure through its description.

What notebook has ever loved you more?

Both images from Engrish.com, via Christine Tokunaga. (First post, The Curse of the Monolingual, here.)

In 1991, Chris Burden wanted to hang a fishing boat off the side of the Seattle Art Museum, designed by Robert Venturi. Over my dead body, said Venturi. The architect is still alive. It didn't happen.

Fifteen years later, the idea reappeared in the work of his wife, Nancy Rubins. He was thinking of something rough and working class - roots music for a city with a working waterfront. For another waterfront town, she delivered a flamboyant tiara.

Pleasure Point, 2006, nautical vessels, stainless steel, stainless steel wire. Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Photo by Pablo Mason. (Via)

It's ignorance, of course, especially for those who don't understand a language that is printed on their shirt or tattooed on their body.

Case in point: Visiting a sister who lived in an apartment a short train ride from Tokyo, I joined her and her two small sons in a visit to a nearby park. Also in the park was an impeccably dressed young mother of my sister's acquaintance. The legend sewn in pink lettering on her crisp white sweatshirt was an invitation to engage in oral sex disguised as a platitude: Kiss All My Lips.

I wanted to tell her. My sister, who prevailed, didn't. She argued that woman wouldn't wear a sweatshirt in the city. Tourists didn't come to this suburb, so the chance she'd be laughed at was remote. Even if the woman encountered other English speakers in the park, they would be unlikely to say anything either. Confrontation causes face loss. What is not spoken of can be ignored.

My sister speaks four languages. She could afford to feel a touch superior, which she did and denied. Speaking only one, I identified with the woman's plight. At the corners of our single-language consciousness are other worlds we cannot enter, because we lack the linguistic pass.

Some monolingual English speakers fail to demonstrate the humility their condition requires. They're proud of what they don't know. Isn't simple jealousy part of the Arizona problem? Because they live in one world, they hate the sight (and sound) of those brave enough to attempt two.

The New York Times recently posted a series of photographs documenting the mangled English on commercial signs in Shanghai. As we laugh, we who do not understand Chinese should consider how well we'd do in Shanghai, relying on our English-Chinese dictionary to get the job done.

Image, New York Times

In response to this post, which notified the avid public that Seattle's Charles Krafft and Mike Leavitt are showing at London's Stolen Space Gallery, Krafft sent the following comment:

We (Mike Leavitt and I) were taken to dinner the night before last by Jason Zeloof a partner in the Stolenspace Gallery which is on Brick Lane in The Old Truman Brewery in London's trendy East End. Our fourth at the table was Robert Lands of Finers Steven & Innocent LLP who is the personal solicitor of the mysterious and beloved Banksy. Afterwards we repaired to the rooftop bar of the Shordich House, a private club in the neighborhood where I ordered a "Gay Butler" - soda and bitters on the rocks. There were lots of attractive women there. They were attractive because their blouses were lightly starched and their downy little arms curiously devoid of tattoos.

In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise
Auden

Consider the case of Bruce Nauman. Along with David Hammons, Nauman is point person for the late 20th Century, early 21st Century divide. He's the Samuel Beckett of the visual realm, documenting his body in space, from its most routine motions to its grunts and sighs, its failed dime-store dreams and dashed desires. Because his work has been absorbed into the body of contemporary art, it mutates every day into other people's uses of it.

In his studio on his ranch in New Mexico, however, the world that considers him a currency is far away. His ratty table before him, he sits on one of those expensive chairs favored by those with bad backs, his one concession to his status. Maybe he hears a horse whinny or a dog bark. He's alone but not as alone as he imagined. Flipping through a manuscript, he finds mice turds and nibbled pages.

Enter rodents, stage left.

Office Edit 11, a video loop from 2001, presents what a surveillance camera discovered when left on in his studio overnight, sped up for the video. Furry interlopers the size of a toddler's fist streak through space, stop dead and streak again, like paint brushes trailing invisible ink. Just as the human body is an instrument of its consciousness, Nauman's mice play themselves like violins.

His studio becomes a stage, and all the mice are actors on it. It's a tale told by a mechanical  idiot, otherwise known as a camera. The image shifts in tone, from porous and flat to an old-world shine. At one point, tired of verisimilitude, the image stands on its head.

Office Edit II is in Box with the Sound of Its Own Making at Western Bridge. The title comes from Robert Morris, whose 1961 sculpture of that title is owned by the Seattle Art Museum. The title is Morris', but the artists in it (who are not Nauman) have hitched their wagons to his star.

The brothers Elias Hansen and Oscar Tuazon are in the parking lot with Use It For What It's Used For, a piece that first appeared in New York in 2009 thanks to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. With poured concrete floor, skewered metal beams and solar-powered lights, it's best seen at night. Like Nauman pacing off the steps he takes to walk circles in his studio, Use It For What It's Used For  goes nowhere. Completing it would be a stain on its silence.

(Image via)

Jonathan Monk's Nauman tribute is direct, transforming Nauman's deadpan absurdity into visual vaudeville. Monk's white neon sculpture from 2007 is titled, The Space Between My Index Finger and My Middle Finger Enlarged to the Size of the Space Between My Legs, riffing on Nauman's A Cast of the Space under My Chair, from1965-68. (Nauman made that piece and moved on. Decades later, Rachel Whiteread picked up the theme and made a career of it. She is her own Nauman cover band.)

Three or four years ago, when Western Bridge exhibited Jason Dodge's Into Black from 2006, I thought the project came perilously close to nothing at all. Today the economy of its means strikes me as oddly moving. It consists of undeveloped photo paper exposed for the first time at sunrise on the vernal equinox 2006 in eight different places in the world. The sheets are blanks aspiring to color, darks groping toward light.

Maybe it's the company Into Black is currently keeping, not just the other artists in the show, but other work by Dodge, including your death (copper pipe) and a current (electric). Both are a lovely kind of pared down poetry.

That leaves Ryan Gander and his process wallpaper. (Image of detail from Felix provides a stage, from A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor, from 2008.

He failed to achieve a likeness, but his documentation of that failure is robust.

Through July 31. Open Thursdays-Saturdays, noon-6 p.m. Free admission.

Among the Seattle exhibits I missed writing about last month, when I was first in New York and later part of ArtsJournal's malware attack that shut the site down, is Adam Satushek's Annex at Platform Gallery.

His photos have a whistle-while-we-work nuttiness. With the lightest of touches, Satushek documents the exuberant irrationality of never-say-die. Missing is any sense of disdain, as if the photographer also believes that mice can be men, and a Mr. Fixit approach to decor can turn a tracked home into a forest.

The sun hangs like a phlegm in the dirty handkerchief of the sky in Oscar Tuazon's recent installation at Maccarone: post-apocalyptic desolation in a fine-boned body, corrosive content merged with grace.

(Tuazon images via)

Meanwhile, in Seattle, his brother Elias Hansen talked about his exhibit at Lawrimore Project last Saturday, the show's last day.

Here's Eli's sun:

It's a lens, the kind used to spark a fire in the woods, or maybe the bottom of a Coke bottle. Tuazon and Hansen see darkly, like fogs condensed, but there are differences. The former has the feel of a massive utterance, and the latter mutters into his hands, his useful, practical hands.

Another difference: Aside from collaborating with his brother, Tuazon appears to be a bit of a solitary. Hansen almost always works with others and makes art about being with others, specifically, what they did in their youths, looking for shots of sainthood through drugs and kids' salvage saved in cigar boxes under the bed.

Hansen is also a glass blower, which is inherently a collaborative medium. As Jen Graves noted, there's more than a touch of Dale Chihuly's Venetians in piece below, especially the concrete urn at the lower right:

Like Mark Zirpel, Hansen is a new future for Northwest glass. Stripped bare of an interest in the decorative, their brides no longer look to Versailles or Murano. They use the trains of their dresses to make tents, and the cakes they eat come from ovens they build themselves. (Previous post here.)

Seattle's Charles Krafft and Mike Leavitt are showing at London's Stolen Space Gallery, May 14-30. London is a tea and toast town, and that's exactly what Krafft and Leavitt have to offer - tea and toast.

Krafft:

Leavitt:

Via

Becomes a headline.

Dash Snow, Untitled, 2007, Collage on wood, 70 x 70 inches

Somebody's always throwing bricks...

Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.

Vachel Lindsay

Robert Arneson Brick with Hand of 1991 modeled 1972 bronze 9 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 4 inches

Before Robert Arneson achieved his signature style, he was so enamored by Peter Voulkos' corrosive clay that Arneson almost followed him from the Bay Area to L.A.

Instead, Arneson went North to teach at U.C. Davis, where the West Coast Funk dynasty took root and grew, partly inspired by Chicago's Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, key Hairy Who figures in briefly California, drawn by the prospect of a paying job (his).

Manhattan is not the first place one would be expect to see an excellent exhibit tracing the roots of Arneson's journey, from boundary-pushing potter to Rabelaisian, high-style story-teller, but New York is where you find everything; including, creeping in along the edges, an acknowledgment of the West Coast beyond L.A.

For this museum-quality trip through Bay Area art history, 1956-66, N.Y. can thank the George Adams Gallery. It proves that instead of starting out as a second-class Voulkos, Arneson was always himself. Although both were equally committed to clay, Arneson loved the world's cheap charm (and New York's Pop)  too much to be entirely comfortable in Voulkos' high-minded clay version of Abstract Expressionism. While Voulkos tore into his slash and burn, Arneson's achieved his own kind of comic and forlorn lumpiness, a version of Ab Ex unknown at the time but later explored to great effect by Philip Guston.

Arneson, Egg Pot 1959 glazed ceramic 10 1/2 x 11 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches

That pot eventually led to this glory: Pei-Pee 1964 glazed ceramic 9 x 19 3/4 x 14 inches.

Also terrific:

Richard Tuttle (drawings and installation) at Sperone Westwater. This must be a no-hard-feelings show, as Tuttle left SW for Pace. Tuttle is the 21st Century's Paul Klee. Nobody else who's now alive can take a line for a walk with such understated power.

Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone. Three large video screens, cheap jokes in the Richard Prince vein taken in another direction, haunting, heartfelt and unlike Prince's, genuinely funny.

Glenn Rudolph at Bruce Silverstein, selected by Matthew Higgs.

Rudolph Cherry Picker 2002 Archival inkjet print 30 x 30 inches

Nice to see Rudolph in New York, especially because, living in Seattle, he no longer has a Seattle gallery. I'd love to see Rudolph's train photos paired with Justine Kurland's from This Train Is Bound For Glory.

Higgs:

I first saw Glenn Rudolph's work in 2003 in Portland, OR. I was living in Oakland, CA, at the time and I'd been invited to Portland by the artist Harrell Fletcher to give a talk. The talk was held in a gallery space where Glenn's work was on display. I'd never heard of Glenn or seen any of his work. I'd no idea where he was from, how old he was or what he'd done before. His work immediately made me think of other artists' work - all great art has this effect. Glenn seemed to have absorbed the history of American photography and then distilled it into something uniquely his own. His work is profoundly local. This is important to acknowledge. Even though I knew nothing of the people and places depicted in his images, Glenn's evident empathy for his subjects made them strangely familiar. This is hard to pull off and it's not something that can be taught.

Catherine Opie at Barbara Gladstone. Opie at her most voluptuous. New York poet Eileen Myles is in this show, rounding out her life in photography. Robert Mapplethorpe shot her in the 1970s. On hearing she was a poet, he advised her to put together a band. The Mapplethorpe hangs in her tiny apartment in the East Village, in a bathroom too small for a shower, never mind a tub. Really good poet, but poets who do not form bands (and do not get tenure) tend to live large only in their spacious minds.

Obviously not a poet:

Jenny (Bed), 2009 Chromogenic Print; (37 1/2 x 50 inches)

Finally, Rina Castelnuovo at Andrea Meislin, documentary photos along the Palestine-Israel divide. Castelnuovo gives both sides full human weight, although the image of an Orthodox Jewish man casually throwing his drink at a cowering Palestinian woman whose only crime is to try to pass him on the street, upends the show. He is so casual in his contempt, and she is so afraid.

Via

Still the best word on art & DNA is Robin Held's 2002 exhibit, Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics at the Henry Gallery, my review here. 

Tongue, drool and/or vagina:

Ryan Peter

Or just tongue:

From This Isn't Happiness

Dave Hickey introducing himself to his students:

I'm happy you're all here. This is my e-mail, in case you have any questions, because I am paid by the university and I want to be a good employee. Personally, I don't give a fuck.

Hickey didn't write it, he said to his students in a class at the University of Nevada Las Vegas titled, LA Noir. We know this because student Simon Horning in the 2009 class took notes and published them with disclaimers:

Many sentences were reconstructed from fragments and memory. I did not use a recorder...This piece, therefore, is what I heard and not necessarily what Dave Hickey said.

I hope Horning got an A. As he remembered Hickey telling the class:

Get excited about telling a story. Make up the fucking material. When John Ashbery was asked how he wrote so much, he said, 'It's like television. There's always something on.'

Hickey is the great tap-dancing art critic of our time. He can link any X to any Y and produce the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I remember the specific thrill of reading his connection between Caravaggio's The Incredulity of St.Thomas and Robert Mapplethorpe's Lou, who is sticking a finger in his penis, in The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. (Individual essay online here.)

Hickey no longer teaches art because, as he told Sarah Thornton who quoted him in her book, Seven Days in the Art World, he doubts the value of the process.

My one rule is that I do not do group crits. They are social occasions that reinforce the norm. They impose a standardized discourse. They privilege unfinished, incompetent art... If you're not sick, don't call the doctor...I don't care about an artist's intentions. I care if the work looks like it might have some consequences.

He moved over to the English department, where he hopes to do less damage but still be paid. Below, to give the flavor, a few quotes from the text. (Thanks to Nathan Lippens for the recommendation.)

On aging:

I haven't had to look presentable for twenty years.

On non-rugged individualism:

I'm the one who stands on his own two feet, having no other available feet.

Reading the Bible:

In the West, high art and popular art can be divided from each other like the Bible can be divided into Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. The Proverbs tell you to be a good person, not to do drugs, be home before ten o'clock, and don't listen to Jane's Addiction at four in the morning. The prophetic books like Ecclesiastes are about death, violence, and protecting Israel, and this creates prophetic cultures that produce high art.

Understanding LA:

Los Angeles is a city of bubbles. You have body-builder bubbles, nudist bubbles, surfer bubbles, rich bubbles, poor bubbles. So, how do you write a novel about a city with all of these bubbles? Until Raymond Chandler came along and created the private eye, you really couldn't. The private eye can move from one bubble to another and tie them together. He's there to take you to all the places you can't go.

This stuff is not morally redemptive. I mean, Keith Richards is not morally redemptive.

LA is a city of secrets. LA noir is kind of about privacy because the private eyes are opposed to public eyes like the cops and the press. The classic image of the genre is a room with the blinds closed. This is important because of the decay of privacy we have had since these books were written.

Detective novels are designed to deal with people in stores.

If you lived in LA, you know it's a new world every day.

Referring to Auden's The Dyer's Hand:

Auden compares British noir novels with American noir and says that in the British novels, there is a snake in the garden, whereas in the American novels there is a presumption of the general corruption of everyone and everything.

Know your enemy:

I drive to think. I'll drive out to Red Rock. Then I'll drive to the Mormon church to remind me of who the enemy is. Sorry, Mormons, but it does look like America's going to end the same way as Rome. A bunch of crazy Christians are going to ruin it.

More on know-your-enemy:

My most famous colleague is a war criminal. So now everyone in New York wants me to write something about Professor Jay Bybee, who's a Mormon, and this endorsement of torture. I'll tell you my opinion of Jay Bybee. I don't think he just gave those torture memos to the White House. I think he gave them to the UNLA administrators and that people are being tortured somewhere on campus right now.

Writing advice:

Leave questions unanswered and digress.

Enrich scenes with pressure of the story.

The trick is wherever it's boring, put something weird. In students' drafts, I have written, 'Something crazy here.'

It's really a matter of feeling the pace of the prose. Pay attention to the speed of things.

On teaching:

It took me a few years to realize you can't talk to other English teachers about literature. You can talk to them about their pets, though. That's why you want to learn all the names of the professors' pets, so when you see them in the hall you can ask, 'How's Roscoe?' and they will go on for half an hour, and you can nod along and think about whatever you want.

Enter Douglas Unger, English department chair.
DU: May I please talk to you during your break?
DH: Yeah. That's fine.
DU: Thanks. (Exit)
DH: I hope he got my ounce.

The point of tenure is to fit in. The point of succeeding is to stand out.

Best blurb ever written, for Chemical Pink:

'Your fingers will stick to the pages.'

Also true of Lady Gaga:

Everything about Chinese opera is great except for the music.

My hero:

I left the Reese Palley Gallery when my boss wanted to show art by Yoko, and I said, 'Oh no.'

Life advice:

Stick with friends, and make good friends. In the early eighties, I was totally broke. I drove a '72 Datsun. When I was forty-two years old, I lived in my car for ten months. I t is better to have a car than a house. I got on the phone, called friends, and took one-semester teaching jobs at Texas, San Diego, and Albuquerque.

You will first wake up frustrated with the noise and the pressure of living in a big city and want to move to a place like Idaho where things are quiet and calm. There is a reason things are quiet and calm. It's because people are really fucking stupid. If you go, you will be the weird one. They will throw you in jail and say you're a pedophile.

I don't mean to bum you out. You can go from nowhere to somewhere, with eye contact, thank you notes, doing things on time, and avoiding dorkness.

The problem a lot of you had is that you made the assignment harder than it was. That's because you're doofuses. I do understand the ways of the doofi.

Outside the university, the cultural world is run by and for the young. The old feel insecure because they don't have a place in the world, they don't have the respect they feel they deserve, and they don't have hair. My friend Billy Joe Shaver wrote, 'I'm just an old chunk of coal, but I'm gonna be a diamond someday.' He was one of those kind who, on acid, sees Jesus.

It really is all about us. (Via)

There's a manual for their use and care.

Like a dead sun rotting overhead, Oscar Tuazon's stained orb drips on the floor of his latest exhibit at Maccarone in New York. Although his broken concrete blocks, bare-bulb fluorescent light, steel panels and cracked glass are the essence of industrial, his rubble has an innate elegance, more akin to Cy Twombly's than anything produced by process artists of the 1970s, from Eva Hesse to Richard Serra.

(Tuazon images via)

These sculptures come with texts piped into the galleries. Vito Acconci reads from his proposal for the Halley II Research Station, Antarctica of the Mind, and Tuazon reads a monologue about another kind of architecture, one that he could both climb into and carry in his body. As Alan Ginsberg wrote in San Jose in 1954, yes, yes/ that's what/ I wanted,/ I always wanted,/ I always wanted,/ to return/ to the body/ where I was born."


Meanwhile, in Seattle, his younger brother Eli Hansen is showing at Lawrimore Project, and elegant is not the first word that comes to mind. Tuazon has a brooding poetics with real muscle, but Hansen puts his muscle to more practical use. His work evokes his youth on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, where he and his brother and friends envisioned themselves as outlaw makers, using any x or y to get high, build a shelter, make a radio and reinvent their lives through scraps, discards and music.

Here's a piece they built together - Home Brew Bottle Wall, 2008, glass blown by Eli.

Hansen talks about his work on Saturday at noon at Lawrimore. He's showing at Maccarone in July.

Month in, month out, galleries try to move product. Even the desperate, hanging by thread, know they have to impersonate serenity to hope for success. Nobody wants to buy from a dealer too eager to sell.

Restraint is good, even when the art apes carnival. Dealer attempts to step into the conga line and shake a retail tail feather almost always falter. Case in point, Traver Gallery's announcement for its May exhibit, opening Thursday night:

I draw your attention to the imperative at the bottom in capital red letters - PIMP MY GLASS! Difficulties abound. Where to start?

A. The whole "pimp my" is played out. To attach it to an artist's work is to encase it in cliche.

B. The brothers Einar and Jamex De La Torre are Hispanic. The cultural implications are cringe-inducing.

C. Pimps are creeps. My heart goes out to sex workers, but those who most commonly mistreat them deserve contempt. Who's the pimp in this construct, the dealer?

On Manhattan's West Side, from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to 20th Street is the first section of the High Line, a stretch of formerly abandoned raised railroad that opened as a park last year. Its beauty is its truth to materials. The railroad theme inspires the simple benches, and landscaping features clumps of the hobo grass that rode the wind to find a home after the trains pulled out 25 years earlier. Eventually, the High Line will extend to 34th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues.

At night, you're walking on the city's lights. During the day, you're lord of what you survey. Designers, take a bow: Urban design firm James Corner Field Operations with the architecture firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Below, Richard Lacayo takes a tour with Ricardo Scofidio after the opening:

The Whitney would like to open a downtown branch next to the High Line's southern terminus. (Great idea, but not all board members are on board.)  In the meantime, the museum plans to open a series of exhibitions in the park.

Pared to 55 artists or artists' groups, the Whitney's 75th Biennial has no theme to refute, discuss, praise or satirize. Freed from anyone's definitions but their own, the artists were chosen for their ability to grip down, waken and start a conversation in each other's company.

Everybody succeeded, the sole exception being Charles Ray and his gallery full of  inexplicable flower paintings. I love Ray, but if these weren't his, their monotony would have guaranteed their exclusion. Ray's work is charts thinking, not noodling. Just because he can draw doesn't mean he should. Everybody else, however, produced something that hangs on to its moment, blooming either right away or afterward, in the mind.

Here are a few highlights.

Attention, Shoppers: Josephine Meckseper's 12-minute 2009 video, Mall of America, is set in the afterlife of those who worship consumption. They're there and not there as colors bleed around bright objects of desire that are ever present but unavailable.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation's post-Beuys' We Like America and America Likes Us, a white hearse with a video in the windshield, sports cutting commentary on American culture in a comical vein.

Rashaad Newsome, Untitled (New Way), 2009. Single channel high-definition, color, silent video; 6:48 min. He needs no music, because the music's in his motions, all culturally coded African American. They are silky supple and tough as nails.

Instead of just building something, Kate Gilmore prefers the pleasure of knocking it down, stomping through it in a party dress and liberating color. Still image from Standing Here, 2010. Mixed-media sculpture with video, color, sound, dimensions variable.

What if one person were a kind of weather? Kelly Nipper, Weather Center, 2009. Single channel video projection, black and white, sound; 5:11. Dance performed by Taisha Paggett and costume by Leah Piehl.

Ty Ziegel nearly burned to death in Iraq after a bomb attack. Instead of dying, he lives in a body whose skin is pudding. Photographer Nina Berman documented his (brief) marriage to his high-school sweetheart. She wanted to come through but in the end, just like us, couldn't.

Nina Berman, Ty with gun, 2008, from Marine Wedding, 2006/2008. Pigment print, 10 × 15 in. (25.4 × 38.1 cm)

Heir to James Ensor but painting on the elegant end of that form of grotesque, Storm Tharp gives his monstrous faces the grace of Fred Astaire. (He's at a big disadvantage in this show, sharing a gallery with video artist Marianne Vitale, whose mode is screaming.)

My favorite sign in a museum hangs next to Aki Sasamoto's installation, Secrets of My Mother's Child, 2009:

 Please remain alert when the artist is performing in this space.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins' work appears to derive almost entirely from a nose: the grandfather's warty proboscis in Domencio Ghirlandaio's 1490 portrait. Living things are lovely for a moment. Hutchins' ceramics sag. On a couch, they're potatoes.

Three more wonderful painters: Lesley Vance, Jim Lutes and Pae White. Vance punches out from the inside of 17th Century Spanish stilllife. Lutes favors Mark Tobey but with a B-movie heart, and White is shoveling seductive tendrils of smoke.

I've just scratched the surface here. Be sure to see current Biennial curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari's Collecting Biennials on the fifth floor, in honor of the 75th-year marker. If the art world could be said to rest of turtles, there are major turtles here, all the way down.

David Hammons, Untitled, 1992. Copper, wire, hair, stone, fabric, and thread, height 60 in. (152.4 cm)

Roberta Smith's review of  the Guggenheim's Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance was at best tepid.

The actual exhibition is for the most part routine and innocuous. Organized by Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman, the museum's curator and associate curator of photography, it swings rather listlessly between the arcane and the obvious, the overly familiar and the unknown, the important and the trifling. (more)

Her real quarrel, which she addressed in her first six paragraphs, is with the catalog. Holland Cotter never does this. If he has a problem with the catalog, he mentions it in an aside and moves on. The question for any exhibit is not the support material but what's on the walls and in the space.

The exhibit begins in the 1960s and is largely drawn from the museum's collections. Smith notes that with a few exceptions, it doesn't come to life until it gets past the 1980s. She singles out work from Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager for having a "been there, done-that predictability." 

She's referring to excellent pieces from all of these artists. I'm reminded of music critics who call for a moratorium on Mozart. They're sick of him, but he's not the one who has gone stale.

Haunted opens with Andy Warhol's Orange Disaster #5 from 1963: Fifteen shadow-smeared prints of electric chairs. Not visible in the image below is the Silence sign on the right, which serves as a kind of predictive haunting: Silence does indeed equal death.

The exhibit flows around the Guggenheim spiral, experience to experience.

How I love Anri Sala's Nocturnes from 1999, an 11-minute video with sound I watched twice through, back to back. Two men scarred by war hobble through their lives afterward. One cares for thousands of fish, the other is addicted to video games. Their identities blur in the flash of a fin and the pinging sound of artificial explosions. The first hides his fish from the public because, he says, they cannot stand to be stared at and flee to corners where they tremble and die. In lesser hands, this could be a mess, but even when Sala's content is heavy, his touch is light.

Born in Dachau in 1973, Janaina Tschape's video Lacrimacorps from 2004 features the interior of a castle in Etterburg, Goethe's summer residence that later overlooked the concentration camp of Buchenwald. Shot from above, a dancer turns in a great hall, a figure come to life from a music box, trapped in a routine beyond her choosing.

Paul Chan's 7 Lights from 2005-07, projected on the floor, springs from a reverse gravity. The shadow of objects float down, a lyrical residue of a disaster. 

In James Casebere's Garage from 2003, light is both austere and redemptive.

Formerly an obituary writer for the Daily Telegraph, Adam McEwen writes elegiac obits of the living, such as one here, for Richard Prince from 2007, printed as if it had appeared in the New York Times. I've never read anything better on Prince, whose father "did something in defoliants in Vietnam."

Sophie Calle's pair of large photographs from 1990 show graves with sinking headstones, one marked as "Mother," the other "Father." 

Sarah Anne Johnson, born in Winnipeg, choreographs a survey of photographs, both straight and manipulated, with real people and puppets, to document a rite of passage from her youth - planting trees in deforested stretches of Manitoba.

There are more than 50 artists in this show. Nowhere to be found is work that earns Smith's dismissal as trifling. None of it is.

I mind my own business with a restraint that puts me at the outer edge of normal (just barely), but suffer from a compulsion to know what other people are reading. Planes used to be good places to indulge, walking back from the lavatory down the narrow isle with a good view of seats on either side. Pickings are slim, these days. I don't care what's on a glowing screen. If pages aren't being turned, I don't bother.

What's left? New York City's subways. A recent trip suggests a New York Times' decline. If people are buying it, they're not packing it. Contrary to years' past, most of the newspapers I saw weren't in English. (One of the joys of NY is the range of languages, the daily reminder of living on the earth, not just burrowing through a single life's construct.)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo continues ubiquitous. Good book, although I skipped a lot of it, not being able to take the sick/slasher-on-girl action. I'm not even sure how it turned out, but my fondness for the main character remains. I keep hearing that nonfiction dominates. Not on the subway. For every person hefting a biography, history, self-help or textbook, there are five plowing through a once-upon-a-time.

After Henry Kingsley Amis expressed contempt for his son Martin's prose, a reporter asked Martin if he had a rejoinder. He quoted dad, who late in middle age told him, "I'm never going to read another novel that doesn't begin with the words, 'A shot rang out.' "

Lots of fictional shots ring out on the subway. Sadly, I saw nobody carrying John Godey's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, even though last year's movie remake must have brought it back. If there's more perfect subway-reading fare, I don't know about it.

On the other hand, transcending your surroundings is always an option. A young man in a bowler hat, jeans and vest with a lattice of tattoos running up his right arm got on at Columbus Circle to ride downtown. Out of his satchel he took a hardback copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and proceeded to lose himself in her pages. I mustered every shred of super-ego not to say, Thanks for the sight of you.

A New Museum low was a high for its curator, Jeff Koons: Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection at the New Museum.

Much has been made of the coziness of the arrangement. Joannou is on the New Museum's board, Koons is an important part of his collection. It's worth discussing, I suppose, but my heart's not in it. I'm not a cop or even a hall monitor. I've seen plenty of single-collector exhibits that were worth seeing. Plus, artists have always served as curators.

What's the problem? There isn't one, save for the show being an overheated, one-note mess. Koons packed the museum's art-unfriendly galleries with artworks that scream at each other. Flamboyant, dire, crude, assaultive: I'd be tempted to think Koons knows nothing about pacing except, of course, he does. He curated this show to bury everybody else.

Gleaming amid the wreckage is his own single entry: One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank from 1985.

In 1942, Duchamp came in after everyone had hung their paintings and covered a group exhibit with string, making it impossible to see anything but the webbing. (Mile of String) Koons does something similar in reverse. By placing himself as the still point in a carny world, Koons' liquid-light elusiveness makes all others heavy-handed.

Points to Koons, no points to the New Museum.

An exception to the sorry overkill might be Maurizio Cattelan's All, seen here (undoubtedly to better advantage) in its 2007 appearance at the Kunsthaus Bregenz Photo: Markus Tretter (Via)

All my pretty ones? Did you say all?

Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3

Too bad All isn't at the Met alongside The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy. Strictly contemporary types need to hop an uptown train to see the past kick the stuffing out of the present. Cattelan's more than good, but he pales next to mid-15th century French carvers Jean de La Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier.

I'd also like to see All in the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence, concentrated in 1492. Those who were wealthy but not extraordinary so could pay to be buried in the floor under prone marble statues. Over the centuries as people walked on those statues and wore them down, they began to look as if they were floating off the ground: Cattelan in spirit form.