Artopia

Jung's Secret Book, Aboriginal Paintings, and Mandalas

2009-11-02T20:15:15Z

What do these images have in common?

Top left is from "Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya"

at the Grey Art Gallery, N.Y.U., 100 Washington Square East, to Dec.5.

Top right is from "Mandala: The Perfect Circle: at The Rubin Museum, 150 W. 17, to Jan. 11.

Lower middle is from "The Red Book of C. G. Jung" at The Rubin Museum, to Jan. 25.

Codes, Maps, and Building Plans

Some images and objects we can only see as art by separating them from use, and, therefore, since use is meaning, separating them from meaning. This is not necessarily to fulfill some dubious agenda that defines art as form alone. It may be because we do not understand or want to understand the use intended or have no way of experiencing the belief required.

We are expected to appreciate cathedral décor whether or not we subscribe to Christianity. So if we forgive da Vinci (and, let's face it, Chagall -- whose work has some relationship to Judaism or Kandinsky who was Theosophical) then why shouldn't we make allowances for Australian Aboriginal paintings,

The Red Book of Carl Jung, and Tibetan mandalas. Most of us do. But should we?

In ancient times -- you know, like the Sixties --I was accused of at least three sins. "John," said one artist friend, "I love your writings, but you are always solving problems I didn't know I had." And then, from another: "You are always arguing with yourself." Finally, proclaimed another artist friend: "You are always writing about yourself," meaning, I still think, instead of writing about me.

The first is the critic's duty, which is to see what the artist is not aware of and to say what the artist cannot say. The second objection is also based on ignorance, but ignorance of the dialectical mode of expression. The third objection can only be answered in terms of the rhetorical disclosure of the personal as a sign of the instability of any statement. Unlike the royal "we," the first person in criticism reveals the possibility of bias in all writings, which is why it is usually forbidden. The author is not hidden. It is also an easy way to

include a wide range of material

Teaser: I am thinking of the Sixties because of "1969" at P.S. 1, but I hope to get to that exhibition, if only briefly, next time around. After all, I am in it, right?

In the meantime, I hope I am still solving problems you didn't know you had. The problems you know you have are most likely already solved. And nothing has changed, has it?

In regard to the second objection, I wonder what that artist would now think of my current writings, since herein the dialectical has been superceded by the braided.

In regard to the third objection, the only thing I would add now is the clarification that the first person is as much a fiction as the third.

But Is It Art?

Here I want to make the case that we should not look at Australian Aboriginal paintings, Jung's visionary drawings (1902-1913), or Tibetan mandalas as art, for to do so is reductive.

Yet so much depends upon Marcel Duchamp. Both The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1925-23) -- see above illustration -- and Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas... (1946-1966) are so opaque they seem to be resultants of alien equations, obscure investigations, secret rituals, maps of other states of consciousness.

This too is the charm of the Aboriginal paintings now at the Grey Gallery, the Tibetan Buddhist mandalas at the Rubin Museum, and the images from Carl Jung's long-suppressed record of his possibly transcendent ego-trip.

Because the forms in each of these exhibitions are determined by extra-aesthetic motivations and/or content is why they are so vital. They really are derived from alien equations, obscure investigations, secret rituals, maps of other states of consciousness. The forms, splendidly anti-compositional, could not be arrived at any other way. They were generated by other than aesthetic means.

Down Under

I knew of the Aboriginal paintings much before I visited Australia, but once there as Guest Professor of Something or Another in the capitol city of Canberra, I could not avoid them. They are even depicted on postage stamps. There are now as many Aboriginal artists as there are Euro-Australian ones, which means there is a higher percentage of Aboriginal artists within the indigenous population than the percentage of artists among the Euro-Australians. This does not mean that the art market has solved the poverty problem for indigenous peoples of the sub-continent. Art projects rarely solve economic problems, particularly ones based on colonialism and racism. Nor does it explain why some "dot paintings" go for more than any white Australian equivalent. The latter, however, explains why there are so many fakes.

After my teaching stint - punctuated by several trips to beautiful Sydney and a quick visit to my hero "Such is life" Ned Kelly's jail cell in Melbourne - I felt I had to visit sacred Uluru, dead center of the Australian desert. I needed something to balance Kelly's gallows irony and the fact that he, as the Australian Robin Hood, arranged that the mobs of well-wishers at his public hanging receive free press-photos of his Irish bandit-visage.

We flew to Alice Springs and then drove along that same straight-edge, one-lane, unpaved highway we had seen from the air, all the way to the Aboriginal sacred rock, once briefly known as Ayers Rock by the white guys. Although now surrounded with three rings of tourism, Uluru mysteriously still glows purple at sunset. There are three-tiered accommodations: Luxury Hotel, Mid-Range, and Camp Ground. And yet....I still felt I was on another planet. The indigenous peoples are right: this is a sacred place. I circumambulated the rock, or at least dreamed I did.

I didn't realize it at the time, but 150 miles from Alice springs on the Papunya reservation was where the dot-paintings began. They were sparked by the non-Aboriginal schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon in 1971.

Mick Namararri Tjapaltjarri (1927-1998), Uta Uta Tjangala (1926-1990), Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula (1918-2001) and other talented "artists" took to using acrylic, on boards and then on canvas. Herded together from different tribes, they embraced both the opportunity of giving voice to their 30,000-year-old (!) cultural traditions and the possibility of some ready cash.

Although at least once-removed from their origins in the story-telling, ground painting, body painting of the ineffable Dreamings, the paintings now at the Grey Gallery possess some of that numinous, unearthly aura that spooked me out at Uluru. Dreamings, after all, are one-part deed-keeping, one-part mapping, one-part conjuring, one-part creation myth.

The credentials of the works at the Grey Gallery are impeccable. They are from the first 1000 Aboriginal dot paintings ever made. All were painted at the beginning of the art movement and pretty much before tribal elders grew increasingly insistent that secret, sacred imagery be fully disguised by dots. It is ironic, therefore, that the works are sometimes known as "dot paintings" - i.e. paintings that feature imagery that has been erased.

Some of these diagrams or maps, like the illustration above, are still taboo for aboriginal women and children and are so-designated at the Grey Gallery, where such are grouped in the lower gallery. The images are ports of entry for ancient entities. The gendered nature of the Dreamings --- a bad translation of an Aboriginal term for timelessness -- suggests their initiatory character.

Tibetan mandalas can take the form of temporary sand paintings. Surprisingly far from Tibet, the Aboriginal paintings are inspired by indigenous sand-paintings, which, in turn, relate to mandala-like Native American ground-works.

Aboriginal ground-painting being made for opening of "Icons of the Desert," Johnson Museum, Cornell Univeresity. Earth, dye, dried flower petals.

Finished ground painting...image courtesy Ithica Journal.

Carl Jung would have been pleased by these synchronicities, but he would also have been pleased by more evidence of gender-divisions in the realm of the spirit, the perpetuation of which was one of his personal, very deep flaws. The man, as you shall see, had problems.

Too Jung, Too Foolish

C. G. Jung's The Red Book (1913-1916) has been suppressed until now. An expensive facsimile edition is now available from Simon and Schuster. Pages from this facsimile and other documents make up an exhibition at the Rubin Museum. At first one might wonder why a museum devoted to the art of the Himalayas would have an exhibition center around an early hand-calligraphed notebook by Carl Jung. But, don't worry, this too shall be clarified.

Apparently Jung's family and other interested parties thought The Red Book would put him and his discoveries in clinical psychology or depth psychology in a bad light. And yet Jung himself said it was during the strange, inward-looking period of The Red Book that he came across all the ideas we know think of as Jungian. Everything can be traced back to his scary experiment, probing or yielding to his own troubled depths. His idea of scientific research was to turn in on himself.

Some related material now on display at the Rubin are pencil-drawings of mandalas he made in 1917, when, as he himself later wrote, he found his anima, or, to simplify, his feminine side. "She" was not all sweetness and light. She - everyman's Lilith - never is. To some she may be Beatrice, but to Jung she was -- although he did not call her that -- Kalachata's Vishvamatr, but not so much as an embodiment of bliss, but rather as the personification of Kalachata's wrath. And yet the anima is also supposed to be the embodiment of every male's repressed spirituality. Who said Jung indulged in simplifications?

About his own mandalas he wrote:

"My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day...I guarded them like precious pearls....It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation...."

Jung's journey was the Orphic descent. If he had been more cognizant of Islam, one wonders if he would have had a Mohammedan ascent instead.

Are these pages art? Oh, no. In spite of the careful, obsessive calligraphy and the tidy pictures in the he Red Book were not intended as art.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), based on extensive interviews, Jung recounts his encounter with his anima and her insistence that what he was doing in his notebooks was art. "I said very emphatically to this voice [that of his anima] that my fantasies had nothing to do with art...No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature."

Further:

The anima might then have easily seduced me into believing that I was a misunderstood artist, and that my so-called artistic nature gave me the right to neglect reality. If I had followed her voice, she would in all probability have said to me one day, 'Do you imagine the nonsense you're engaged in is really art? Not a bit.' Thus the insinuations of the anima, the mouthpiece of the unconscious, can utterly destroy a man.

Now, I must admit, that unless you are attuned to Jungian prerogatives, to the tempting revelations of the Gnostic heresies, to Sixties New-Age ways of thinking, and to non-western spiritual traditions, you may find this material, if not extremely iffy, then totally insane.

I quarrel with Jung's quaint insistence upon radically different male and female souls. Excuse me. In my experience, women simply are not more spiritual than men, nor are men more logical than women. Jungian individuation may involve a symbolic androgyny, but this in Jung's theology is built upon a sexual dualism that is untenable.

Nevertheless, in Artopia we understand that Jungian therapy - and it's world-view - leaves more room for art than does Freudian psychoanalysis. Jung opened up new paths of inquiry and almost became the magus he thought he was. After personalizing and getting his anima under control, Jung delved into alchemy and the Kabbalah, as well as the I Ching and the Taoist Secrets of the Golden Flower. The woman who owned the gallery I showed with in the early Sixties never made a move without consulting the I Ching.

An exhibition such as this quiet display honoring The Red Book - the Jungian Holy Grail -- could force you to delve a bit deeper into Jung, which, I know, you have probably been avoiding. But just try to forget that not only Herman Hesse but also Jackson Pollock underwent Jungian therapy.

Peeling back the layers of time, you had also better be careful when you read about the Buber/Jung controversy. Nowadays perhaps better known as a champion of Hasidic mysticism and the simplifier of the Hasidic teaching-tales then as an Existentialist philosopher, Martin Buber in full philosophical fury accused Jung of being -- surprise! --- a Gnostic. In other words, a dangerous, polytheistic, dualistic heretic out to destroy monotheism. Briefly, Jung was "mystically deifying the instincts instead of hallowing them in faith" and thus promoting "a modern manifestation of Gnosis."

Jung gave empiricism as his self-defense. And then Buber responded to that disengenious claim.

Of course, Buber was right, although he himself seemed to have forgotten that Hasidism is rooted in the Kabbalah, with its suspicious Little Man and Big Man. And, yes, all those emanations and broken vessels. And is the Shekinah not God's partner? Oops.

We have had more than hints of Jung's shamanistic plunge before the publication of The Red Book. Jung's The Seven Sermons to the Dead, written in 1916, has been available in English since 1961 as an appendix to Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

This high-strangeness purports to be a text written by the real-life Basilides, a second-century Gnostic. Although much of it is pompous paradox -- Jung unlike Freud was never a stranger to pomposity --- the effect is hair-raising. It may have been automatic writing and/or dictated by whatever foot-loose and meddlesome spirits were hiding out in Zurich at the time or it may have been pieced together from texts of medieval heresy trials, but Jung was on the same wave-length as the Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi, much later. Basilides/Jung even claims Abraxas as the god of this world. Thus this creepy little hymn to dualism begins:

The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. They prayed me let them in and besought my word, and thus I began my teaching. Harken: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full....

Well, yes, sort of.

Gemstone with image of Abraxas, one of the Archons, n.d.

Inside A Tibetan Mandala

Onward and upward to the 5^th Floor of the Rubin Museum, for a breath of fresh air: The Five-Deity Mandala of Amoghapasha (8-9^th Century), The Kalachakra Mandala (c. 1650-1700), and many others plus a pixilated projection of a sand mandala being made, projected horizontally, but minus hands, monks, funnels.

Many years ago I watched a Tibetan sand-mandala being made, and saw it, as is the custom, then destroyed. I also interviewed the Dalai Lama.

As a kid, having read James Hilton's Lost Horizon, I identified with Tibet. An important character in that fantasy is a priest named Father Perrault, obviously a great-uncle of mine. My last name has been spelled both with and without the second "e." My imagined cousin, movie-star Gigi Perreau, dropped the last two letters. Here is a clip from the wretched 1937 movie version of Lost Horizon that features buildings in Shangri-La obviously, designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright's lesser students.

Both Father Perrault and Gigi (and soccer stars too numerous to mention) were obviously all descended like myself from Charles Perrault of the court of Louis XIV, first secretary of the French Academy and, more importantly, the transcriber of the Tales of Mother Goose, which include Cinderella, Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, and Little Red Riding Hood.There is also the notorious Perreault Gang of Canadian highwaymen, but let's not go there.

Charles Perrault (1628-1703)

Years after my brief encounter with the Dalai Lama, I visited Beatrice Wood - she who had been a cohort of Marcel Duchamp -- at her ceramics studio in Ojai, California. It was and is on land owned by the Krishnamurti Foundation. The woman sometimes referred to as the Dada Mama pointed out the view from her terrace. She was 100 years old. The distance hills, she claimed, had been filmed as the foothills of the Himalayas for the Frank Capra movie version of Lost Horizon ( 937). No wonder I felt at home.

To make a long story short, I have written about Tibetan mandalas before, and, although surprised by several aspects of the current exhibition, I was not planning to write again. Until I realized I had a triple-header on my hands.

The exhibition is, of course, a glorious array, showing some of the earliest mandalas now extant. But what impressed me this time was not so much the paintings on cloth, but the three-dimensional manifestations.

Briefly, the Tibetan mandalas in the Tantric Kalachakra tradition, whether painted on cloth or actualized as ephemeral sand-paintings, are air-views of temples. But these are no ordinary temples. Properly instructed and in the right frame of mind, as you wind your way around the corridors and up the stairways -- circumambulating the center and the pinnacle-- you will get closer and closer to Buddha-hood. Various "deities" will materialize, bur fear not, like everything else in this world, they are only illusions.

Kalachakra and his consort, bright-yellow Vishvamatr are at the center of the labyrinth, male and female united. At this center, which is also the peak of the temple, you will become the Buddha. All of this used to be top secret. However, unlike Aboriginal elders, Tibetan Buddhists have realized that nothing is so secret as what is readily available.

Two three-dimensional mandalas made of metal are at hand. They could be architectural models, but they are much more: aids to helping you visualize your path through flat versions of themselves. If finding your way through the pathways of the mandala is in order to increase your powers of visualization, then isn't a 3-D model cheating? Probably not. As far as I know you are not punished for being a few counts off in your required number of repetitions of the Jesus Prayer --- or any given mantra. Stories too are told of seekers repeating the wrong section of the Talmud or the wrong quotation from the Koran, but still attaining results.

In any case, through these metal "sculptures", you are led to really see that Tibetan mandala "paintings" are not only diagrams of the world, but temples you are supposed to enter. The digital version - which may be cheating to the third degree -- was made as a collaboration between some Tibetan monks and the computer department of Cornell University. It's part of the exhibition. Here is a a version:

Now do you understand it when I say that Tibetan mandalas -- like Aboriginal Dreamings and Jung's illustrations in The Red Book - are not art works? They are spiritual tools.

YOU TOO CAN HAVE AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT BY E-MAIL

CONTACT perreault@aol.com.

Ken Friedman: Fluxus Prodigy

2009-10-18T19:38:43Z

Refluxions

A recent exhibition at the Stendhal Gallery in Chelsea gave pause for thought. And another chance to play catch-up with Fluxus, during what might be a Neo-Fluxus period. Solidified just before Conceptual Art per se, Fluxus was truly international. To the accusation that Fluxus is just Dada in sheep's clothing, Fluxians would reply that unlike Dada, their religion accentuates the positive rather than the negative. Fluxus is often humorous, but humor in art is no laughing matter. Fluxus humor is not what the Surrealists called "black humor." It doesn't go for the jugular. Nevertheless, unlike a great deal of current art, the Fluxus institutional critique is structural rather than rhetorical and not just a barely disguised plea for membership in the club.

"Ken Friedman: 99 Events" presented that number of the artist's scores, plus 38 handwritten "drawings" (some with collage elements) documenting Events from 1982 to 1990, but executed in this format last year. In total, the 137 pieces (1956-2009) cover a wide range of Fluxus genres:

1. Instructions for activities in front of an audience.

Stage Reversal

Go on stage naked, covered with paint.

Wash

Dress and leave stage.

1966

First performed at the Avenue C FluxusRoom in New York in October, 1966.

2. Instructions for activities without an audience.

Hat

Mail a hat.

1966

3. Instructions for making exhibitions

Place things on the floor.

1970

Herewith, because it is so revealing about his approach to art, I append a slightly edited note about the piece, published in the online catalog.

In 1970, I had a conversation with the director of the art gallery at University of California at Santa Barbara about the possibility of an exhibition at the university. He invited me to visit him, asking me to bring examples of my work and some of the pieces I might like to exhibit...

I made an appointment to see him. The day that I left, I grabbed a selection of objects and projects from my stucio, threw them into a box, and took them with me. When I got to Santa Barbara, we spoke together for a while. Then he asked me to bring in my work...

I brought the box into his office, opened it, and unpacked the objects, placing them on the floor, along the length of a wall. He looked at the objects for a while. Perhaps it was a long while. I am not sure, but it seemed that way to me.

Finally, he looked at me and said, "But these are just ordinary objects."

At first, I thought he understood my work quite well.

Later, I realized that he saw these objects in a very different way than I did.

4. Instructions for making a nuisance of yourself.

Fast Food Event

Go into a fast food restaurant.

Order one example

of every item on the menu.

Line everything up

in a row on the table.

Eat the items one at a time,

starting at one end of the row

and moving systematically

from each to the next.

Finish each item before

moving on to the next.

Eat rapidly and methodically

until all the food is finished.

Eat as fast as possible

without eating too fast.

Eat neatly.

Do not make a mess.

1964

But that's not all. There are examples of Mail Art, Radio Art, Street Works, Earth Art, and much more.

Furthermore, the future is here:

The 99 "scores" can be perused in the free-to-download online catalog, here and there replete with very, very interesting, longish notes by Friedman. This, by the way, is the wave of the future. All gallery and museum catalogs will be available for free online. Think of all the trees that will be spared and all of the storage space now used for unsold tomes that will be released. Think of all the shelf-space that will be liberated. Think of those who will be able to see and read about a show who wouldn't have been able to do that before.

Prefluxification

Friedman (b. 1945), operating under Dick Higgins' advice that one should earn one's living outside of artmaking, after a long teaching stint at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo is now the Dean of the Design Faculty of Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

"99 Events" fully reveals Friedman as an important Fluxist. He has been consciously making Fluxist art since 1965, so he can have no Fluxus founder-claims. It is still between George Brecht, who inaugurated the terms for and practices of Events and Event Scores around 1961, and George Maciunas, who invented the Fluxus rubric in1962, which for all practical purposes subsumed Events.

Question: Which takes precedence, the form or the term?

But Friedman does have some bragging rights.

When Maciunas initiated him, our upstart had achieved the ripe old age of 16, making him the youngest Fluxian ever; not first, but youngest, and making Fluxus the first art movement to engender a second generation in the record time of three years.

However, in the online catalog, Friedman claims he was making Fluxian events before he knew the term and before Dick Higgins (first-generation Fluxist and publisher of the Fluxarian Something Else Press) convinced him he was an artist, sending him over to George Maciunas with one of his pieces in hand. Here are the Fluxus prodigy's instructions for said Pre-Fluxus work:

Open and Shut Case

Make a box.

On the outside,

print the word "Open".

On the inside,

print the words "Shut quick".

1965

A further description of the anointment:

Maciunas peppered me with questions. What did I do? What did I think? What was I planning? At that time, I was planning to become a Unitarian minister. I did all sorts of things, things without names, things that jumped over the boundaries between ideas and actions, between the manufacture of objects and books, between philosophy and literature. Maciunas listened for a while and invited me to join Fluxus. I said yes.

A short while later, George asked me what kind of artist I was. Until that moment, I had never thought of myself as an artist. George thought about this for a minute, and said, "You're a concept artist."

It always pleased me that I became part of Fluxus before I became an artist.

Friedman had made other Fluxus Events -- although he did not know enough to think of them as art works -- even earlier. Here is one the precocious lad from New London, Connecticut, made when he was 11 years old and the first to be documented in "99 Events":

Scrub Piece

Go to a public monument on the first day of spring.

Clean it thoroughly.

No announcement is necessary.

1956

This is amazingly pre-Fluxian. The assumption is that an activity, even if it is not conceived of as or presented as an artwork, can still be classified as belonging to an art category that has not yet been invented.

Both the Dadaist and Surrealists claimed certain artists and writers as their own ... retroactively. Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) was a favorite. But as far as I know, Jarry did not deem himself a Dadaist or Surrealist before the fact.

Fluxality: The End of the Game

Paradoxically, the only way we know the little we know about Fluxus is because of the object-based, ego-based, profit-based art system it taunted. Still, Fluxian questions are still relevant.

Can we have art without galleries and museums, art without art criticism, art

without investors, art without professionalized artists?

How many variations on a Fluxus score can you make? Are there gaps? Are there any possibilities left for "invention"? And for connoisseurs and marketeers here is the all-important question: stripped of signature and tell-tale context, can you tell whose work you are reading? Can you tell one Fluxus score from another?

If you can't, maybe that's the point.

Fluxus at its purest, like Dada, is a way of life. In other words -- please don't be shocked -- it's a spiritual practice.

I will let Ken Friedman have the last word:

Centre Piece

Imagine a life.

Live it.

2003

* * *

Well, not quite the last word.

An exhibition examining the work of George Maciunas is at the Stendhal Gallery (545 West 20th Street), opening Oct.31.

Many other Fluxians also need a second look. I am thinking about:

Geoff Hendricks (b. 1935) whose cloud paintings (!) stick in the mind.

Geoff Hendricks: Sky Pillow Cases, 1965

Fluxusatrix Alison Knowles (b. 1933) who is still actively creating Fluxus events, particularly abroad. Here is her re-flux (2008) of her earlier version (1962).

And shouldn't we look at Robert Filliou (1926-1987), who joined the French Resistance in 1943, was a trained economist, and invented: Homophonic Translation,Telepathic Music, Art's Birthday*, and (see Friedman's note on p. 25 of "99 Events") Poetic Economics..... Who was Filliou? He proclaimed about himself "nationality = poet/ profession = French."

*also: Art's Birthday Event, 2009.

In 1962, determined to remain outside the exhibition circuit, Robert Filliou carried his gallery in his hat. He became his own exhibition space: "La Galerie Légitime" [The Legitimate Gallery]. His works, gathered together in his beret and stamped "Galerie Légitime Couvre Chef ''Oeuvre" [Legitimate Gallery Masterpiece Hat], circulated in the streets with him (the idea is reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp's suitcase). He then met George Maciunas, the centralizer of the activities of Fluxus. "La Galerie Légitime" invited several artists to exhibit in it. This was an art made up of attitudes and gestures, rather than saleable works.

Catherine Ouy, NewMedia.org

FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT, E-MAIL: Perreault@aol.com

Allan Kaprow: The Retread

2009-10-05T00:50:09Z

William Pope.L,YARD (To Harrow), 2009; "reinvention" of Allan Kaprow'sYARD, 1961

Part One: Art By the Yard

Allan Kaprow's Yard, now in its 15^th reincarnation, celebrates the new quarters (32 E. 69^th St.) of Hauser & Wirth, formerly only of Zurich and London. From beyond the grave, Kaprow (1927-2006) is still posing questions of authority, authorization, and notions of the artist as author rather than maker.

The Hauser & Wirth exhibition (to Oct. 24) is by our esteemed forebearer because the gallery has commissioned three celebratory reinventions of his historic environment. There is also an entire room of documents. This is the kind of exhibition that in a better world we might expect a museum to launch. But a gallery can turn on a dime; museums take years to come up with their usually boring, unimaginative exhibitions.

If we delve a bit into Kaprow's post-Happenings oeuvre, we see that the inauguration of what he called "reinventions" was both a solution and an ongoing problematic. He allowed and perhaps required the reinvention rather than the re-creation of his "activities" and his ephemeral sculptures such as Yard (1961) or Fluids (1967), the outdoor structure made of -- and to be remade of -- blocks of ice.

What is important about Kaprow is that he actually accomplished what the wimpy postmodernist academics of the past three decades never actually did -- or did in word only. He de-centered art. And I don't mean he decentered it by moving to California to take advantage of teaching opportunities.

Which he did do. Which he could do, because he was famous, even only as the inventor of Happenings.

Allan Kaprow:18 Happenings in 6 Parts (detail), 1959.

Kaprow playing musical instrument.

Part Two: California, Here I Come

In the past I have found fault with the "activities" because they suggest the therapeutic, and to this day I am wary of Kaprow's exploitation of participation and collaboration.

For instance, here is a short section of an activities score for Match, 1975:

(in light)       A and B. silently exchanging

                    each other' others clothes

                    continuing exchanging



                    until clocked signals

                    15 minutes have passed

(in dark)       A. and B. lying on floor

              on opposites side of room



              A.     occasionally saying

                     "It's a perfect fit."

              B. precisely copying A.

                     until clock signals

                     30 minutes have passed

I am, however, relieved that his papers have ended up in the archives of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. That, not some museum, is the major repository of his work. A 2008 traveling exhibition called "Allan Kaprow: Art and Life" seems to have been mostly drawn from the Archive, and indeed the accompanying tome weaves together ephemera, media manifestations, photos and scripts; it is an invaluable resource.

Provisos notwithstanding, Kaprow is, as he hoped to be, Jackson Pollock's true successor -- not those painters of merely pleasing paintings that critic Clement Greenberg pushed. In Kaprow's hands (sic), theater became a positive value once again. He is also the legitimate successor to de Kooning, whether he would have liked that or not. Without Action Painting and de Kooning's violent expressionism there would not be messy Happenings, messy Environments.

Now, however, Kaprow seems merely the heir of Futurist and Dada "theater" and even Surrealist games and installations. It was not that these precedents were off his radar, but at the time they weren't a well-considered aspect of the art discourse. Happenings and other time-based inventions have nowadays made them essential.

Kaprow accomplished this antiformalist but not necessarily antimodernist coup by finding new heroes, such as composer John Cage, and in spite of his friendships with Pop artists, by going against the grain of received art-world wisdom.

That is why he had little or no critical support. How could he? He was not yet even indirectly tied to the art market.

Painter Fairfield Porter, then a critic, wrote in the Nation about Kaprow's first Happening, called 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, staged at the artist-run Reuben Gallery in 1959:

If he wants to prove that certain things can't be done again because they have already been done, he couldn't be more convincing...The "Eighteen Happenings" devalue all art by a meaningless and deliberate surgery. And the final totality is without character; it never takes off from the sidewalk.

In retrospect, one might think the painter Porter, who came to specialize in sunny porches and tidy domestic scenes, might have found some kinship with Kaprow's valorization of the quotidian. Porter was a better writer than a painter. At his best he managed the startling plainness of dance critic Edwin Denby. But he was, unlike Denby, a better writer than a critic.

With a reception like Porter's (who in person was a kindly man), it is no wonder Kaprow took pen to hand, not only to issue essays, now collected, but also in one case to write his own notice.

On Jan. 12, 1961, the Village Voice published an over-the-transom piece by a certain Theodore Tucker headlined "An Apple Shrine at the Judson Gallery." It was a review of Kaprow's labyrinthine environment of chicken-wire and newspaper -- written by the artist himself:

Beneath the surface of each confrontation with the work is the doubt that it is art at all. There is a distrust and fear of an expression that is short-lived by intention. As though this were subtly calling upon death itself.... Far beyond the "Apple Shrine's" actual content and humanity stands Kaprow's inadvertent quarrel with all the vapid glories, qualities and eternities which we think are history.

Part Three: Re-Tiring

The most direct reinvention of Yard is at Hauser & Wirth itself and is a lookalike reenactment by William Pope.L, who titles his version YARD (To Harrow). In this case, rented tires are jammed into the basement level of the building and not in the small courtyard out back, which had been the original site.

Allan Kaprow:Yard, 1961

Opening Reception, YARD, 1961. Kaprow second from right.

Yes, it is entirely fitting that this is the H.&W. inaugural Big Apple foray. At this very same address, the first Yard was the most attention-getting component of the Martha Jackson Gallery 1961 exhibition "Environments -- Situations --Spaces." There were also works by George Brecht, Jim Dine, Walter Gaudnek, AI, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Whitman. Brecht's piece, probably the only other work of lasting significance, was nearly the opposite of Yard: the presentation of a single chair. Here is dance critic Jill Johnston's description in her Village Voice summation:

George Brecht is always clean as a clipped wing, airy, cheerful and self-disappearing. He had a little white room just off the yard with a nice, white chair in it, comfortable for a Cape Cod porch...his first two statements [in the accompanying brochure] are A. nothing special; b. no theory.

But more about Brecht later.

FOUR: Yard Art

Vis-à-vis the original Yard, I remember that a few statues were concealed by tarpaper and you could look down upon the entire tire pile from a gallery window on the second floor.

Now, deep inside the building in William Pope.L's reinvention, black plastic covers a desk and all accoutrements. And there is a rack of very un-Kaprow body bags concealing manikins (according to the gallerina I spoke to) or ooze (according to the New York Times). Sound and on/off lighting have been added, but to no effect. Visitors may sit on the tires, which is historically correct and shows Kaprow's incorporation of audience participation. That the tires are not from 1961 is of no import. As we all know, used tires are eternal.

Pope.L's redo is darker then the earlier, plainer version. Suffice it to say, aside from constructing ecological Earthship homes out of old tires -- for a million plus -- we have still not figured out what to do with all those rubber tires filling up dumps around the globe.

Earthship (Biotexture) ecological house made of used tires and other recycled materials.

Further afield, the second Hauser & Wirth commission was offered by Sharon Hayes. Referencing Kaprow's image for an ancient Martha Jackson poster, an accumulation of handmade yard-sale signs were installed at the N.Y. Marble Cemetery on lower Second Avenue during the weekend of October 3

The third reinvention was by Josiah McElheny. Offered at the Queens Museum of Art, YARD (Junk Yard) was a gigantic projection of an aerial photo of the Iron Triangle junkyards of Queens, projected on the outside of the N.Y. Panorama (unfortunately only until Oct. 4). It was a breathtaking image, perfectly presented, and I searched for tires amid the wreckage. And found them.

Josiah McElheny: YARD (Junk Yard), 2009

McElheney: YARD (Junk Yard), detail

Allan Kaprow preparing 18 Happenings in 6 Parts.

Part Five: Some Thoughts on Kaprow and Art History

Allan Kaprow, justly acclaimed as the inventor of Happenings, certainly did not operate outside of art history. A professor of art history at Rutgers (when there were still such jobs to be had), he had studied under the great Meyer Schapiro at Columbia. So he knew where art had been, all the way up to Pollock and de Kooning. And as an artist he knew where he wanted it to go. Basically, his collages became assemblage (influenced by Robert Rauschenberg's early Combines.) The assemblage grew and grew and without even a polite nod to Kurt Schwitters became walk-ins or what he began calling "environments." another term he invented.

Under the influence of classes taken with our hero John Cage at the New School for Social Research, Environments became Happenings. Although anti-establishment, Kaprow did show in galleries when they were co-ops, like the Hansen, the Reuben, and the nonprofit Judson Gallery in the basement of Judson Church. Otherwise he steered clear (I first typed: "seered clear") of the blue-chip art market, which usually controls art history in subtle and not so subtle ways. Until recently, there was little of his work to sell besides pamphlets and posters.

Nevertheless, Kaprow is in most surveys of art. I shall hypothesize that his late-career entries into the museum milieu helped. Sequestered in various California art departments, he had time to reinvent himself and to re-deploy his time-based, virtually unsalable art.

How did he manage this feat?

He was not a cultural icon like Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol. Aphorisms were not his métier. Aside from a few bright students, he had no entourage. The very nature of his work emphasized the banalities of everyday life. There was no mystique. He was never shot down by Russian gunfire, to be rescued by peasants wrapping him in wool and fat. He did not wear a silver wig. He hadn't climbed along a ceiling dressed in only a jock-strap. He never painted himself wearing adult diapers. He never had plastic surgery to turn himself into a perpetually grinning 28-year-old corporate stand-in.

He did, however, have a peculiar cross to bear.

The term "Happenings" is pretty much his fault, but as his works became leaner, moved outdoors, and his scripts got boiled down to mere sentences, he began to call what he was doing "Activities." I imagine he was annoyed by the appropriation of his term to refer to raucous parties, love-ins, and sales events in department stores. There's even a Supreme's song called The Happening. The packaging ate what was packaged. But it also gave him a tag.

The Supremes

The reinventions reinvented his career. Key pieces were replicated, more or less, throughout the art world. The reinventions were intended to have the aura of the participatory, but some very strict rules applied.

Near the end, when contemporary curator Stephanie Rosenthal of the Haus der Kunst, Munich, was working on "Allan Kaprow: Art as Life" retrospective, she reports in the Getty catalogue/book that the artist offered the following:

Kaprow stipulated that wherever possible, responsibility should be given to a single leader. The form of the new version would be dependent upon the leader, the time, the place, and the participants...Kaprow's guidelines [for individual works] gave the new leader a point of reference to work with and against, so that he or she could avoid being overwhelmed by possibilities. Kaprow's only request was that he not be personally involved or asked for advice, although he wanted to be kept informed of events.

Part Six: Happening v. Events; Kaprow v. Brecht

George Brecht: Chair Event, 1966

And what of Kaprow's contemporary, George Brecht? Brecht (1926-2008) was a New Jersey neighbor and also a friend of Kaprow's Pop Art pal George Segal. Segal was a chicken farmer; Brecht, a chemist. Kaprow was teaching at Rutgers. In the last Artopia entry, focused on the Neo-Fluxus trend, I stated: "With the exception of works by the truly original George Brecht, Fluxus was pretty much an outgrowth and a minimalization of Happenings and/or a music phenomenon."

I have been gently called to task by a latter-day Fluxian who thinks that Fluxus was independent of Happenings and developed simultaneously. However, a little research will show that Kaprow and Brecht attended Cage's New School classes together. Yet Kaprow's first Happening is thought to be the 1959 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, which was slightly before Brecht's proto-Fluxus Event Scores. Brecht's earlier works had complicated scripts, like Kaprow's Happenings. The term "Fluxus," however, was invented later by facilitator George Maciunas in 1962. I am right! If only by a hair.

And here is something else to consider.

Whereas Brecht had no doubts about joining up with or fears of being subsumed by Fluxus, Kaprow himself wanted no part of it:

George and I couldn't get along. Indeed, he approached me as he did everybody else to sign my entire career away to him, and I thought this was a Fluxus joke. So I said, "Up yours." And he took it seriously. But he was a marvelous man. I mean the energy and cohesion that he gave to a disparate number of artists around the world was extraordinary. So I don't say this unpleasant part [of] history with any kind of rancor. It was like oil and water.



                                              Interview with Allan Kaprow, Dallas Library, 1988.

And here's a sample of Maciunas-iana:

HE MUST DEMONSTRATE OWN DISPENSABILITY, HE MUST DEMONSTRATE

SELFSUFFICIENCY OF THE AUDIENCE, HE MUST DEMONSTRATE THAT ANYTHING

CAN SUBSITUTE ART AND ANYONE CAN DO IT. THEREFORE THIS SUBSTITUTE

ART AMUSEMENT MUST BE SIMPLE,AMUSING, CONCERNED WITH INSIGNIFICANCES.

HAVE NO COMMODITY OR INSTITUTIONAL VALUE. IT MUST BE UNLIMITED, OBTAINABLE BY ALL AND EVENTUALLY PRODUCED BY ALL. THE ARIST DOING ART MEANWHILE,TO JUSTIFY HIS INCOME, MUST DEMONSTRATE THAT ONLY HE CAN DO ART. ART THEREFORE MUST APPEAR TO BE COMPLEX, INTELLECTUAL, EXCLUSIVE, INDISPENSABLE, INSPIRED. TO RAISE ITS COMMODITY VALUE IT IS MADE TO BE

RARE, LIMITED IN QUANTITY AND THEREFORE ACCESSIBLE NOT TO THE MASSES BUT TO THE SOCIAL ELITE.

FLUXMANIFEST ON ART AMUSEMENT

                                 by GEORGE MACIUNAS, 1965. Available at artnotart.com

Actually, looking through the Getty compendium, it is clear that as Kaprow began to call his works "Activities," he was becoming more and more Fluxian, in terms of the simplicity -- and sometimes the ambiguity -- of his instructions for pieces.

Here is an early example:

LEVEL (1970)

A block of ice and a bale of straw are

placed near on another somewhere.

The ice melts slowly.

The bale is reduced straw by straw

until nothing remains.

Compare this to Brecht's: Three Dances (1961)

     1.

     Saliva

     2.

     Pause

Urination

Pause

    3.

    Perspiration

Or the undated Air Conditioning

         (move through the place)

Am I splitting hairs? The very process of trying to make distinctions, even if they are only temporary, can help us see. Although Brecht was, I think, as thought-provoking an artist as Kaprow, he made the following horrible mistakes:

He was a research chemist and not a professor of art history. He participated in Fluxus. He did not invent any new art terms. He issued fewer art products than even Kaprow. And worst of all, unmindful of John Cage's advice, he moved to Europe.

The N.Y. Times obituary for cult-figure Brecht, by Times art critic Ken Johnson, ran and still runs under the Music category, which is more than odd. His piece consisting of dismantling a violin, might be an homage to his musician father, who committed suicide. And his Drip Music might be considered music. Nevertheless, whatever fame Brecht has is art-world fame.

FOR AN AUTOMATIC ATROPIA ALERT CONTACT perreault@aol.com.

Fluxus Redux

2009-09-19T01:53:30Z

Fluxconcert Performance

The End of The Art World, Again

Art galleries are closing down. Well, perhaps not enough of them. And, let's face it, museums are dull. As an exercise in nostalgia, we now have O'Keeffe, Kandinsky, and are looking forward to Man Ray, and (in Philadelphia) Gorky. But only Man Ray at the Jewish Museum promises revelations -- concerning his hidden identity. Wait a minute, we all knew he was Jewish, didn't we?

Oh, we are on to those museums, peddling proven pleasers. And then the new penny-saving trick is to offer fake exhibitions of single artworks or stuff from storage. The public is not fooled. In fact, if this is all museums can come up with, why offer special exhibitions at all? You know why: catalogs, posters, pencils, notebooks and other themed items might bring in some cash to our over-extended, cash-hungry institutions, now abandoned by those who once coveted the tax benefits of charitable donations.

Yet again, the art world has had its day and is withering away, right before our eyes.

So everyone is anxiously awaiting the success of The Bruce High Quality Foundation University. The apparently all-male Foundation is an anonymous collective founded to honor the fictional, dead artist Bruce High Quality. The Foundation's art world zombie movie (Isle of the Dead) was a summer hit on Governors Island, as was its art-education slide lecture last July, called Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull, which refers to the classic Joseph Beuys 1965 performance How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare.

The awful truth is that although an MFA seems to be required for artists showing at the New Museum and other once avant-garde venues, very few art majors graduate to self-sustaining art careers or, in fact, teaching gigs; actually, they never have. The numbers don't add up. Just compare the number of artists who make their livings from their art and/or the number of available teaching jobs to the number of MFAs, year after year. Well, dear art students, the odds are against you. And unless you duped your parents into funding your whole adventure, what you will reap is not art-world stardom, but debts beyond belief. That is why when one now eats out in New York, the waitperson is likely to have an MFA. Critics and curators have long known that they must watch what they say in restaurants. Loose lips sink art-world ships.

Otherwise on the mark, The Bruce does not point out that most art critics now depend upon the largesse of academia to survive. Not everyone can achieve a staff position at the New York Times, has a private income, or is amoral enough to function as a private art dealer. This is why art critics are silent about the MFA scam. Most of them teach and cannot afford to give away the show.

What then should be the function of art education? What are the proper goals? What should be taught?

Classes at The Bruce High Quality University:

OCCULT SHENANIGANS IN 20TH/21ST CENTURY ART

WHAT'S A METAPHOR?

BUILD YOUR OWN UNIVERSITY

PHILOSOPHY OF MOTION PICTURES

ART HISTORY WITH BENEFITS

ENVIRONMENTAL MUSIC PERFORMANCE

LIBRARY AS DETECTIVE AGENCY

EDIFYING

FUTUROLOGICAL POETRY

* * *

Fluxus Redux

Given the current art-market flux and the loss of faith, an art movement that was anti-object, cross-media, anti-establishment, and didn't have anything to sell -- a generation before Conceptual Art, which, after, all did manage to sell out -- is going to be instructive. When the auction houses lose half their sales, panic ensues, and dangerously insouciant, aggressively idealistic art looms.

But no, the '60s will not return. The Republicans, as long as they have a shred of power, will never allow that to happen. And the Democrats, because they are insanely committed to bipartisanship even when they have a majority, will always placate the Elephants as well as Elephants in Donkey drag.

The point is that you do not need a top-heavy, investment-driven art market for art to thrive.

With the exception of works by the truly original George Brecht, Fluxus was pretty much an outgrowth and a minimalization of Happenings and/or a music phenomenon. The latter has not been owned up to by music historians, who somehow have always preferred the charming Ned Rorem to John Cage, that total Zen Buddhist maniac.

Since many Fluxus practitioners came from music backgrounds and/or were influenced by Cage, it is not surprising that the koan-like instructions for those lean, mostly solo performances are referred to as "scores."

Some important artists and/or composers sometimes associated with Fluxus: Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, LaMonte Young, Yoko Ono.

Joseph Beuys John Cage LaMonte Young

Yoko Ono

* * *

Fluxus Among Us

Item: MoMA Accepts Gigantic Fluxus Collection,

The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently accepted a gift of over 3,000 scores and other Fluxus items from collectors Gilbert and Lila Silverman. Insiders await the decisions that will determine which little slips of paper, which words, which sentences, which blurry photos and disintegrating films will be part of the permanent collection and which will be stored in the archive. But never fear. According to the MoMA Press Release, the Silvermans' curator, Jon Hendricks, will work with MoMA staff "to integrate the Fluxus collections with the Museum's holdings."

* * *

Lana Z. Caplan: Painting to Hammer a Nail, 2006.

Series of photographs based on Yoko Ono instruction pieces..

Item: Seattle Museum Artist/Guard Fired for Interpreting Yoko Ono Artwork.

Yoko Ono's Painting to Hammer Nail includes the instruction to "pound a nail into the painting." On display as part of "Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-1978" at the Seattle Museum of Art, visitors complied, nailing announcements to the wall. Guard/artist Amanda Mae decided to add her own interpretation -- removing and cataloguing the various announcements -- and was fired for her efforts. Read the gruesome and surprising details on Artnet. Curator of Yoko Ono Exhibitions, Jon Hendricks (!), according to Artnet, wrote to Mae, urging her to have "greater respect for the artist ... you have to consider art in a much deeper, more profound sense than you do."

* * *

Perry Garvin: Floor Covering

Item: Director of Fluxconcert Goes Out on a Limb.

Fluxconcert, an Instruction-Based Performance Ensemble, presents programs of re-creations of historical Fluxus pieces and newly created Neo-Fluxian instruction-works. You can access to YouTube snippets and full-length programs on Vimeo on the informative Fluxconcert website.

Last Friday, artistic director of Fluxconcert Perry Garvin and two other young men -- all wearing disposable white coveralls and shoe-protectors -- performed one of Garvin's Floor Coverings. At Fluxconcert concerts, the "scores" are often readily available, as this was here. A sign read: "Cover the floor of a room in blue painter's tape."

The piece was performed in an empty gallery at the 111 High Street building in DUMBO. during Friday's monthly art crawl.

For non-New Yorkers and those outside the art-world loop, Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass is a swanky real estate development on the Brooklyn shoreline that features spectacular views of Manhattan and the Brooklyn as well as the Manhattan Bridge. Here, owners of fancy condos are served by design stores and high-end food purveyors. There are empty bars galore; inhabitants, wearing proper outfits, prefer to jog after work rather than drink. This tiny "neighborhood," however, has not yet discovered noodles. In Manhattan's East Village, noodles are the new pizza. In DUMBO., pizza is the new pizza.

You could watch Garvin and his two-man crew neatly laying blue painter's-tape on the floor by looking through the hallway window or stepping inside for a better view. The presentation was elegant indeed.

Even more uplifting was what Garvin decided to do when, after an hour, he used up all the blue tape. He ran out, but the local paint store, curiously enough, did not carry blue tape. On the spot, Garvin reinterpreted his own score by deciding that "covering the floor" did not mean that he had to end up with a totally taped floor. Instead, the performers began to peel off the already laid-down tape and applied it, piece-by-piece, to the previously untouched sectors. Later, Garvin confessed that he had "seriously misjudged the amount of tape we would need."

Here I need to add that there were two other excellent performances nearby.

1. Kata Mejia at the Randall Scott Gallery performed Castigo -- "a performance-installation in which a space is created that allows for the artist to express her

anger and symbolically punish the criminals who three years ago in Colombia kidnapped and killed her brother." At intervals, the artist belt-whipped a targetlike wall piece for 30 minutes at a time, shouting with each stroke, leaving a decimated emblem.

2. In another 111 High Street gallery, Illegal Art handed out sharpened pencils to visitors, who were instructed to make continuous lines across all the gallery walls. Founded in 2001, Illegal Art is "a collaborative of artists whose goal is to create interactive public art to inspire self-reflection, thought and human connection. Each piece is then presented or distributed in a method in which

participation is simple and

encouraged."

* * *

Pierog's The Boiler, Brooklyn

Item: Fluxfest Waves the Fluxist Flag

Fluxfest at Pierogi's The Boiler (on Sept. 11, with not a mention of 9/11) had the genuine Fluxus offhandedness and the historically correct disregard for ceremony or performance-niceties such as a printed program. The latter would have allowed the patient audience -- outnumbered by the performers, as is also traditionally Fluxian -- to ascertain authorship, date of creation, and performer.

Thus, 13 or so friendly Fluxians from here and abroad, most of whom had not met before, presented an hour-and-a-half of Fluxus pieces, old and new. For the record, they were listed in WAGMAG, the Brooklyn Art Guide (which I had picked up at 111 High Street) in anti-alphabetical order: Allan Revich, Reid Wood, Mark Bloch, Christine Tarantino, Carol Starr, Reed Altemus, Tamara Wyndham, Don E. Boyd, Melissa McCarthy, Keith A. Buchholz, Bibiana Padilla Maltos, Bradstifter, Mary Campbell, Pronoblem and more!!

Balloons were inflated, water poured from one plastic cup into another in a circle of plastic cups, jellybeans dispersed, toy instruments given out -- as were miniature versions of U.S. tender. Various classic Dada texts were read, including a poem by Louis Aragon called Suicide, which consisted of reciting the alphabet. (It is one of my all-time favorites.) But in another rather anti-Fluxian demonstration, a woman asked if anyone could love her as much as she loved herself. Obviously not. So shopping bag in hand, she stormed out, never to return.

The best was saved for last. The interlocutor, one of five participants wearing black hats, tacked a piece of paper on the wall behind him, then left. Other Fluxians got up, read what was on the piece of paper, and also left. Then members of the audience, myself included, did likewise. I copied what was on the piece of paper: "Word Event/Exit/ George Brecht, 1961."

* * *

Recreations

Questions raised by the reenactment of historical performance art -- as in Fluxconcerts and pertaining to half the pieces in Fluxfest -- are challenging. In Artopia, we subscribe to the ancient principle promulgated by our favorite Greek philosopher, Heraclitus: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river, and he is not the same man." I think this dictum also applies to women.

Last year in Colorado, I recreated my 1971 Whitney Museum performance called Critical Mass. This time, I did not make the large black "A" myself, as I had originally; the Laboratory for Art and Ideas (where Critical Mass 2008 was performed) saw to that, saving a lot of money on shipping and insurance. Also, I let the Lab staff choose the 25 remaining objects, one for each letter of the alphabet. As in 1971, I sat on the floor and tied all the objects to myself using black string, crawling off the performance space with the objects trailing behind me in a jumble.

But: The performance space was not the fourth floor of the Whitney. The Colorado audience stood around with their wine glasses, whereas originally an audience of 200 or so sat on bleachers. Critical Mass 2008 took all of 20 minutes -- then was reduced to less than five minutes for YouTube. Critical Mass 1971 took over an hour and had a sound component, now lost.

The artist in 2008 has short hair and a nicely groomed beard and wears a Brooks Brothers suit. Is Critical Mass 2008 a new piece? For the same survey exhibition -- In Plain Sight: Streetworks and Performances, 1968-1971 -- did moving the hot- dog stand of Hannah Weiner's Wieners from outside to inside make it a new work too?

What we must decide is whether reenactments are inevitably something new because their social, cultural, and artistic contexts are different. And, if performed by the artist, we have to remember that he or she is different, too.

Is Bach always Bach, no matter when or where or played by whom? In Artopia, we prefer period instruments and historical performance-practice. But does something similar apply to performance art? What would happen if I decided to act out a piece called How To Explain Art to a Dead Elephant?

Then there is the question of interpretation of instructions. Ancient but still surviving Fluxians, I am told, have become quite academic. They do not look kindly upon loose improvisations or contextual shifts, whereas by their very brevity, Fluxus scores are often ambiguous or -- the term I prefer -- "open."

Soon we will see a restaging of Allan Kaprow's famous 1961 Yard tire piece at the new Hauser and Wirth Gallery (opening Sept. 24). Yard is bound to be much more precious and artistic than it was the first time around. I hope the tires used will be vintage 1961. Also, "re-inventions" of Yard will be proffered by William Pope.L., Marion Hayes, and Josiah McElheny.

Recreations

When Japanese ceramists centuries ago tried to recreate a certain kind of expensive, very flashy Korean folk pottery, they created something all their own, now thought of as quintessentially Japanese. Keep in mind that when an elite group of late-16^th century Florentine aesthetes who called themselves the Camerata thought they were recreating Greek theater -- which was, yes, sung -- they accidentally created what we now call opera.

Surely, whether it is Dada, Fluxus or Conceptual, anti-object art is irritatingly perennial. Art, in any case, is an unbearable paradox since it is material and yet cosmic -- vestment and in vesture, too easily turned into investment.

Artopia hopes that Neo-Fluxus does not usher in just another turn of the wheel, wherein art rebels become blue-chip stars, forever producing meaningless commodities for the art racket. To become an art success, scandal is the first step, again and again. Rumor has it that The Bruce High Quality Foundation is already being offered a museum retrospective.

One reason the art world is still mostly for males is that it all runs on Oedipal steam. Killing Daddy results in new Daddies. The art world is still more Freudian than Jungian and denies Electra. How can we break the cycle?

FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT CONTACT perreault@aol.com

Governors Island: New Haunts for Art

2009-07-19T20:10:23Z

The Plot

Site-specific art has subjects. Content needs to be parsed. In the best examples, the artworks initiate a kind of dialogue between place and viewers, illuminating where we are. Dreary forms of personal expression are at least once removed. Furthermore, it gets art out of galleries, museums and penthouses.

What I have never said before is that site-specific art harkens back to a time before easel paintings and the tchotchkas and mementos that now pretend to be sculpture. Unlike murals and monuments, however, the site-specific artworks of our times are usually temporary, so artists are free to experiment and take risks; here today, gone tomorrow. Does this then make such artworks a subset of theater? Well, if so, who cares? Artopia does not celebrate categorical purity; if anything, we enjoy and encourage the reverse. Or, as Walt Whitman once wrote: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"

Not all of the works in Creative Times' "PLOT/09: This World & Nearer Ones" are site-specific, although the best ones are. All of them, however, are what the curator, ex-Londoner Mark Beasley, calls "site-sensitive," thus giving himself and the artists a bit more leeway. Perhaps.

Much more of the Artopian point of view will be revealed as I go through the various artworks that make up "This World," now spread over the 172 acres of mysterious Governors Island in New York Harbor. I say "mysterious" because New Yorkers have seen the island from a distance, but most of us have never visited -- unless we were stationed there during one war or another. Sold back to New York State by the federal government for one dollar in 2003, it is now ours to enjoy, at least on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays (until Oct. 11). The boat that leaves every hour on the hour (but check here because "schedule will vary") from the Battery Maritime Building to the left of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal is unequivocally, absolutely, mysteriously free.

But I also use "mysterious" because even curator Beasley proposes in his preface to A Guide to This World/ Nearer Ones that a number of his invited artists came up with works of a decidedly supernatural cast because they staked out their sites in the gloomy winter.

Of course, the old buildings left behind by the various military and government operations stationed on the island are bound to be haunted by history and long-gone events. Old structures are like that. Even in the harsh sunlight of July, there is something creepy about this island. We do not associate military sites with peace and joy, do we? Beyond the vale, dead soldiers linger.

Located between Brooklyn and Manhattan at the mouth of the East River, Governors Island is the perfect site for preventing any invasion launched from Jersey City or Bayonne, on the other side of the Statue of Liberty.

At the tip is Castle Williams, fortress then barracks then military prison, built between 1807 and 1811; its curved stone wall is visible from Lower Manhattan. Star-shaped Fort Jay at the island's highest point dates to 1776. It was thought to be impenetrable and even has a moat.

Now there are lawns galore. No cars. Bikes can be rented and picnicking is allowed. And there's art.

More interesting than the two forts -- although you can't beat an old fort for little-boy fun -- are the ordinary buildings, many of which have not been open to the public: the Officers' Houses along Nolan Park and on Colonels' Row, and a movie theater forgotten by time, as they used to say, that time being what, 1965? To enter the movie house, you have to sign a release, because who knows what lurks behind those moldy wall-coverings. The same is true for the much less interesting Liggett Hall gym.

Maps and What They Allow

Two artworks are visible even before you hit Mystery Island. I found Mark Wallinger's piece less than audience-friendly: One side of the ferry is labeled GOATS and the other SHEEP. Who is separating the sheep from the goats? Which group do you, dear visitor, belong to?

Pulling out from the slip, one may also notice Lawrence Weiner's work on the wooden fender-rack: AT THE SAME MOMENT in red-enamel letters. The relationship of this phrase to Governors Island, to the ferry, and/or to the fender rack is elusive. It could be placed anywhere and still have the same meanings.

There is a third artwork that involves the ferry and the passage across the waters, but I will save that till last because I did not find out about it until I was heading home.

Special bright blue flags designate "This World" sites on the island itself, but the artworks are so spread out -- as they should be if one of the goals is to give art-worlders a taste of Mystery Island -- that a map is really necessary. However, finding the Creative Times visitor center, which is House No. 20 in Nolan Park. requires asking a guide stationed at the top of the hill from the dock.

Why, I asked, are there no art maps available when you first arrive? The Parks Department does not allow the distribution of handbills or any single sheets of paper, was the answer. The only solution is to buy the $5 A Guide to This World/Nearer Ones at the hard-to-find center; it's mysteriously not available at the book and gift shop right off the ferry landing. You need a map to find the maps.

There are two maps you can look at online before you go. One from Governors Island does not indicate the art sites. The other is a Google map from Creative Time with signature pushpins. These when clicked give you art descriptions. If you click on the satellite view, you will get a good idea of the lay of the land, but that is of little use when you are on the island at ground level.

Furthermore, the maps in the Guide are not as clear as they should be. The numbering is curiously erratic. Thank goodness for the volunteers stationed at each art site. They were all very helpful at pointing out the direction I should take for whatever numbered site I pointed to in my Guide. Next time when Creative Time returns with what promises to be an important quadrennial, I am sure the mapping will be better. But this year perhaps there could be a trail of breadcrumbs from site to site.

Just kidding.

Also note that you should be prepared for quite a hike. You can rent a bike near the dock -- on Fridays bikes are free. My investigation on foot, including watching several films, took about four hours! This is nothing like a museum survey that you can breeze through in under an hour.

At House No. 20 you can also gain the temporary use of an iPod-like device containing a Patti Smith "tour" with piano music by her daughter, Jesse. It's free, but they hold your i.d. captive until the device is returned. This not a real audio tour. Instead, alas, it's a sentimental text called Message in a Bottle, and it neither illuminates nor amuses. Smith was more poetic when she hung out with Robert Mapplethorpe and was everyone's favorite punk star. Have a listen on the porch -- it's only 20 minutes, but one of the longest 20 minutes I have ever experienced -- and then return it as soon as you can.

Noted on my way to the Info Center but not seen close-up was Teresa Margolles' Shot-Up Wall, lifted cinderblock by cinderblock from the site of an organized-crime shooting in Mexico. Reconstructed, the wall is placed in the middle of Nolan Park and is pocked by bullet holes and flecked with what could be dried blood. I suppose it is a kind of anti-monument, the negative of heroic statues that might be found in a park, except that it is a markedly different kind of war that is being commemorated.

Margolles sounds like an interesting artist indeed. The Guide informs us she is one of the founders of the Mexico City collective called Forensic Medical Service (SEMEFO is the Spanish acronym). The group "uses cadavers, the clothing of the deceased, and morgue paraphernalia in works spanning from videos to public interventions." A 2003 work of her own called Papeles (Papers) involved creating portraits of the dead by "letting watercolor paper absorb blood and other organic fluids left behind."

Near by, in House No. 15, is Judi Wertheim's double video called La Tierra de los Libres/Land of the Free. Wertheim gave a Spanish translation of the U.S. national anthem to a group of dispossessed Columbian farmers trying to make a living as musicians and asked them to sing the lyrics with their own improvised music. Because the site is close to Ellis Island, the U.S. port of entry, the project makes sense here. What's really clever is that when you enter the bare living room of the house, you see a straight-on video projection of the group performing and then, when you circle the screen, you see another projection of them performing from the rear, with captions in English.

I next saw Anthony McCall's fog and light-beam moving sculpture called Between You and I in the pitch black Saint Cornelius Chapel. It was elegant but, on the whole, I am not fond of walking blindly into an unknown space. I would have rather seen the Chapel.

In another dark room, the assembly hall of the Officers' Club, I was able to see my way to the single bench available to watch Adam Chodzko's 13-minute video Echo. As sort of a cross between The Blair Witch Project and The 13^th Victim (plus Joseph Cornell's home movies), the fiction (?) here is that military brats once had a game of "loser wins." In other words, the winner would be whoever gave away the most valuable things for something of hardly any value at all. In 1624, the Dutch Governor of New Netherlands traded "two axe heads, a string of beads, and a few nail heads" with Native American owners Cakapeteyno and Pehiwas for all of Noten Eylant (Governors Island). And of course you can't help but think of the 2003 deal between the feds and N.Y. State, right?

A further fiction is that the archive of the "game" has recently been discovered.

Found footage and ominous music make the whole thing work.

I had 10 minutes to kill before the next showing of The Bruce High Quality Foundation's Isle of the Dead in the Fort Jay Theater. So I scooted ahead to take a look at Tue Greenfort's Project for the New American Century in the Brick Village, formerly Coast Guard housing. Following a path through the site demarcated by chain-link fencing, one sees the oppressive housing, derelict playground equipment, and other poignant debris.

Time for the Isle of the Dead screening. "Is this the zombie movie?" I ask. "Yes," says the volunteer.

There are only four of us in the audience. Why so few?

"Well, you know, ordinary people are afraid of art," one out-of-town visitor volunteers before the movie starts.

"Afraid of art? This is New York City," I answer. "People are afraid of their neighbors, not art."

The 19-minute film by the Brooklyn-based Bruce High Quality Foundation collective is terrific. We see the art world die at various locations: MoMA, Chelsea, the Whitney. Serious-looking people are dropping dead everywhere. The corpses are intercut with montage sequences of found material showing JFK, the Art Workers Coalition, The Guerrilla Girls, and much, much more. The steps of the Met are strewn with corpses. And then....

Spoiler ahead!

Guess what? The cast of hundreds, most of whom look like art students, comes back to "life" and begins to walk like zombies toward Governors Island, then on Governors Island, then they are sitting in the Fort Jay Movie Theater watching the same movie you are watching. The art world made up of zombies has now moved to Governors Island. When I leave the musty theater and reenter the blinding, leafy daylight, I affect a zombie gait.

The volunteers, who seem not to have seen the film, don't really notice. Or at least they don't let on. That is how real zombies behave; they're cool. And, in the video, they wear a lot of black eye-shadow.

As fate would have it, across the lawn, Klaus Weber's gigantic wind chime was tuned to the devil's tritone: "the mysterious diabolus in musica tritone, a musical interval that spans three whole tones, to dissonant and melancholic effect." See here (rather, hear here) Giuseppe Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonatas, one of my favorites. The tones indeed are kind of a downer, but the happy picnickers stationed below seem not to mind. Was this tree a hanging tree? Was the field a potter's field?

Then on to another haunting: Edgar Arceneux's Sound Cannon Double Projection, in Building 404A on Colonels' Row. We get to explore an empty house. But there are eerie sounds, mostly on the second floor. I hear a low rumble. The Guide reveals: "Researcher have suggested that infrasound ... might be present in certain allegedly haunted locations, and cause a feeling of uneasiness. Infrasound can induce bizarre feelings such as anxiety, extreme sorrow, paranoia, or even the chills."

Two houses down in 406A was the documentation for one of my favorite pieces: Insular Act by the Mexico City collective Tercerunquinto. One member, after much calculation and negotiation, threw a rock at a window in an historic building across the way, breaking the glass. The glass was immediately replaced. Again the question: why are certain building preserved and other not?

Readers may wish to know that having been the Visual Arts Director of Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, I have a particular interest in historic preservation. My office had been Thomas Melville's office when he was president of Snug Harbor, founded in 1821 to house "ancient, decrepit and worn-out sailors." When Herman Melville's ghost came to visit his brother Thomas' ghost, as Herman had visited Thomas in real life, I would see them both out of the corner of my eye while I was filling out loan forms and grant applications, which must have been a puzzle to them. Furthermore, I am now trying to save an old lodge in Brookhaven Hamlet on Long Island. The house, which has 14 bedrooms, was once the summer home of one G., or George, Washington, the inventor of instant coffee. We want to turn it into a cultural center ... with a coffee bar, of course.

More ghosts: In 407A we can peek through what could be glory holes and see the remains of Invocation of the Queer Spirits (Governors Island) by Canadians AABronson (formerly of General Idea) and Peter Hobbs: candles, flowers, empty bottles, dirty dishes. Hmm. No doubt Native American medicine men displaced by the Dutch gay soldiers and sailors once stationed on the island, and certainly the ghosts of all those shamanistic closeted members of the Coast Guards, came to visit during the séance.

Back across the way, however, Guido van der Werve's two interminable videos, I don't want to get involved in this; I don't want to be part of this; talk me out of it and The clouds are more beautiful, are not even site-sensitive, never mind site-specific. They would bore viewers anywhere, although some might thrill at the artist falling from the sky after playing Chopin in one and failing to get a rocket to work in the other, the humor of which escapes me.

Then I hiked to Nils Norman's tent city called Temporary Permanent Monument to the Occupation of Pseudo Public Space.

For good luck and to chase away the evil spirits, it was time for one of my interventions. I twice circumambulated the nearby Castle Williams and did a single spin inside.

Still had three more artworks to go.

I should have checked out Tris Vonna-Michell's No Deviation Possible: Folded in That Precise Triangular Fashion at the beginning of my tour, if for no other reason than to get inside Pershing Hall. Alas, in spite of the blue flag, it was locked up tight, and I then found out No Deviation had been a lecture-like performance that left no residue.

Exhausted, on to Krzysztof Wodieczko's Veterans' Flame, a video projection of a single candle, accompanied by taped interviews with veterans, deep in one of the Fort Jay "magazines" where ammunition was once stored. Fort Jay definitely needs to be circumambulated.

I missed Susan Philipsz' sound piece called By My Side, all the way at the end of the island. Will have to hear it some other time, since I was counting on a 5:30 ferry, the last back to Manhattan. This is what all the signs proclaimed. However, I noticed a huge line at the dock. It seemed that the last ferry for visitors was actually 4:30. The 5:30 trip was for staff only! It was four o'clock, but it would have taken me 40 minutes back and forth to Philipsz' piece.

Off the Map

And then, last but not least, as promised, another artwork inspired by the ferry. Jill Magid -- not Maggid, which means a Kaballah spirit guide. Magid prides herself on collaborations with nonartists (having shadowed a New York cop on his rounds and once been hired by the Dutch Secret Service to interview personnel to "humanize" them), began her project by talking with the Governors Island ferry captain, who wished he could make passengers aware of "the peaceful intrigue of the space between the islands." Magid's artwork, which you can discover, as I did, by carefully reading The Guide, was developed from this conversation. The idea became to stop the ferry at midpoint to allow the passengers to contemplate the unassisted movement of the boat on the waves, which of course could not be done. Instead, we are to imagine such a halt.

Ghostbusters

So why this spook show on Mystery Island? I think it is much more than the buildings that generated these hauntings. Other factors to consider might be the death of the art world, the death of the economy, the death of poetry, the death of the novel, and all the other endings that have been proliferating. Everyone has a favorite funeral to attend: print journalism, serious cinema, higher education, broadcast television, cheap energy, rock-n-roll, avant-garde music, jazz. For though we have long passed the turn or the century, we are at a turning point. It is at periods of great change that people, even artists, turn to the supernatural. Continuing to channel Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol may no longer be enough.

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Kusamarama: Art and Anxiety (Part II)

2009-06-07T21:33:30Z

Samuel Johnson Had It (And So Did Howard Hughes)

Samuel Johnson suffered from the need to engage in threshold rituals, was prone to repetitive step-counting and continual praying.

Yayoi Kusama can't stop painting dots and loops. At one time she also covered chairs, sofas, and entire rooms with stuffed "penises."

Obsessive compulsive disorder is obsessively referred to by the mental health profession as OCD. Are capitalized initials easier to remember than words? Are capital letters more -- or less -- frightening?

OCD, it is now agreed, is an irrational response to anxiety.

But since Kusama's response turns out to be art, perhaps we could think of Johnson's threshold rituals and his step-counting as predecessors of Acconci-like performance art.

Oh, it's the same old story: art and insanity, neither of which is all that easily defined or diagnosed. Insanity must at least be debilitating and prevent normal life, whatever that is. In contrast, art must be life-enhancing and, if sometimes puzzling, it should be psychologically, cogitatively, emotionally and mentally rewarding -- and, in the last analysis, of interest to other persons, not just your mother or father.

Art, alas, is social.

It is demeaning and stupidly romantic to confuse art and insanity. If you equate the two, you cannot easily reverse the terms. It may be true to say that art is insanity -- if art is defined as an activity without practical purpose -- but you cannot flip the formula. No one would think that insanity is art -- except yours truly, who would say it can be art like everything else, but it is usually very bad art. Here we part company with the Surrealists, who, when you come to think of it, were hardly crazy, which is why the adage "crazy like a Surrealist" has replaced "crazy like a fox."

Kusama, whose recent work is at Gagosian (555 W. 24^th St., to June 27), forces this topic. The exhibition is well-worth taking in, particularly if you missed the MoMA exhibition in 1998 or have never bothered to think about artmaking or the looking at or the purchasing of same as an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

Kasuma: I Want To Live Forever, 2009

Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride?

Kusama, now 80, can afford to live in a psychiatric facility near her studio in Tokyo. She returns there every night. In New York City she was once second in media fame only to Andy Warhol. Now she is the world's second most-famous victim of OCD. Soccer star David Beckham is the first.

[Beckham] has told media that he has to count all of his clothes, and that magazines have to lie in a straight line. If there are three soda cans in his refrigerator, he will throw one out to make an even pair, and if there are any more at home they have to be placed in a cupboard. He has explained that the reason he gets more tattoos is that he feels addicted to the pain of the needle. In hotels, any books that are on a shelf must be placed in the drawer..... Daily Mail, April 3, 2006.

Kusama has been quoted as saying: Art is my medicine.

We now know that OCD -- like asthma, 1 in 50 Americans have it -- can be cured or at least helped by ERP (Exposure and Response/Ritual Prevention). In order to prevent contamination by penises or stand-ins such as paint brushes, you may need to constantly wash your hands over and over until they are raw. However, you can slowly be cured by learning to deal with the anxiety by touching an object three-times removed from the offending thing, then another two-times removed, then you can come to grips with the offensive, anxiety-provoking enemy itself. First you touch a reproduction of a painting in a magazine, then you touch a real painting. Then you can touch a paint brush.

Although OCD is universally described as an attempt to control high anxiety, it seems to be primarily a neurological condition immune to psychotherapy. There are chemical solutions. And if all else fails, surgery. Can surgery cure art collecting? Can the scalpel relieve you of the need to make art?

This, of course, brings up a really forbidden topic: art as therapy [AAT] or ATT, the Art Therapy Taboo.

Artopia is built on the rock-solid principle that art heals. Furthermore, unlike the misguided idea that a representation of violence can cure you of violence, art can actually cure you of art. Sometimes, however, the punishment is worse than the crime.

If the NAS (the No-Art Sign) -- vis-a-vis the forthcoming three-year art srike -- were not now the OAI (the Official Artopia Insignia), then the caduceus would be.

You know; the winged staff with two intertwining snakes. Our founder's astrological sign is indeed Mercury. The staff is you-know-what; the two snakes are snakes in the grass; the wings are wings.

Casting Our Nets Wide and Far

Shortly after arriving in New York, Kusama had an amorous relationship with the otherwise reclusive Joseph Cornell. Later it was Donald Judd who was her inamorata. Why did Judd, at the time a practicing art critic, find so much to praise in her early "net" paintings? They are allover, thus genetically out-of-Pollock, proto-Minimal and use the same looping gesture over and over (i.e., process-oriented, systemic), looping one color over a one-color ground, thus leaving little bits or irregular dots between the overlapping looping. Amazingly this creates a complicated, misty, and somewhat mystical surface. The paintings are more radical than the sugary Jules Olitski and ahead of late Richard Pousette-Dart. One of them sold for $5,100,000 at auction in November 2008, which is reportedly the highest price ever paid for the work of a living woman artist, topping Rosa Bonheur in her heyday.

But -- and here's the rub-- we now know the Infinity Net paintings were the results of OCD. Kusama was merely trying to keep her deep-seated anxiety at bay. Although it appears her anxiety had a sexual basis, perhaps she was also anxious about not being famous enough -- which is, by the way, what we now label UAD, the Universal Artist's Disease.

Was this also true of the zany Pop Art polka dots that followed and the naked street protests in which Kusama painted dots on fully exposed butts and breasts to protest the war in Vietnam? These are not beautiful -- as the Infinity Nets definitely are -- but they are certainly fun. And who will ever forget Kusama's penis chairs and sofas and rooms (!).

Kusama, Accumulation #1, 1962 (not in exhibition)

In the Sixties, Kusama was a Fame Queen of the highest order. She even produced a prescient gay wedding at Judson Church. But it was the street events that back home in Japan got Papa-San's goat. Some resulted in police wagons loaded with stoned, dot-covered naked youths. Some resulted in tabloid headlines End of monthly stipend. End of career.

Yes, we were unfairly inattentive back in the '60s, thinking of Kusama as just another Japanese rich girl, like Yoko Ono, determined to become famous in New York. Once she was gone and out of the way, we hardly missed her.

Kusama: Untitled (Installation), 2009

I Want To Live Forever

The current exhibition is a mixed bag. The untitled, tourist-magnet installation, a dotted three-sided room open to the street, contains three gigantic "pumpkins." Inside, the Infinity Nets trump all else: the five-panel Day-Glo red-on-yellows I Want to Live Forever and the black-on-black (TT00X09) being my favorites. And we are always partial to white-on-white, having ourselves produced toothpaste paintings of that august color combination.

But the easily overlooked mirrored room called Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity has its virtues too. A guard allows a few people in at a time. And although I joked with said guard about what the elderly couple were doing inside for so long, when you close the mirrored door behind you, you are in outer (or inner) space.

Unfortunately, the self-portrait that greets you when you enter the gallery and the eye-painting deep inside the gallery are kitsch. Though they are art-size, if they were sketchbook-size, they would truly look like they came out of your neighborhood loony-bin.

Kusama (or her handlers) may be uneven, but she is not a joke. She too needs editing.

Kusama, Infinity Net TBBBTY, 2009

Dot.com Tour de Force?

For what it's worth, please read Alexi Worth's "Kusama Dotcom" -- IS SHE MAD OR MERELY CUNNING? WHILE THE ART WORLD DEBATES, YAYOI KUSAMA CLIMBS BACK ON TOP -- in the spring 2008 New York Times T Magazine.

What to do if your subject clams up? Writers and would-be writers, here is a lesson in journalism. After the introduction, after the author, on "page" three has watched an Araki photo-session with Kusama posing in her now signatory bright red wig, we read:

I told her it seemed odd to me that a woman whose art was so often comic, and even outrageously funny, should smile so seldom. ''I don't know what you're talking about,'' she answered. There was no anger in her voice, but she whispered something further in Japanese to an assistant. The assistant leaned over to me: that was it. The interview was over.

But not the article, which goes on for seven more "pages."

Off the Shelf

For a deep dip into '60s psychedelia watch Kusama's Self-Obliteration (1967). Although the scenario and art are by Kusama, the well-known experimental filmmaker Jud Yalkut is credited with the period-style underground cinematography -- full of superimpositions, and sometimes irrational zoom-ins and fast zoom-outs -- and the editing.

The first YouTube segment has a dotted nude on a dotted horse, and a poetic sequence of Kusama painting dots on water. Sections two and three will test you even further, since each is self-consciously wilder and wilder and then ends in the orgiastic. I keeptrying to recognize friends of my youth, but with no luck. Peter and John, where are you? The two guys who were married at Judson Church were Kusama street-event regulars, but now all that pasty-white flesh looks alike.

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Art Is the Cure

We must get used to the idea that art history is unstable. It is a process, not an idea. It is constantly being over-written, unwritten, rewritten. Artists are buried (Francis Bacon); but artists are also reborn (Kusama). In the latter case, it is particularly poignant that an artist can be reborn while still among the living.

Art is not the symptom; art is the cure.

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Francis Bacon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

2009-05-31T15:22:52Z

Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946

Bacon Fat

When it comes to Francis Bacon (1909-1992), less is more. The current "Centenary Retrospective" at the Metropolitan, on view through Aug. 16, is ample proof. One picture at a time can be quite effective, but seeing any Bacon that once might have taken your fancy (perhaps out of some deep-seated perversity) along with others of the same or far too similar ilk destroys any credence he might once have had as a major artist.

A deep appreciation of Bacon's fat is greatly helped if you are 13. That was probably when I myself saw a reproduction of his famous Painting, 1946, owned by the Museum of Modern Art: the side of beef, the open umbrella, the mouth full of teeth, the microphones. And later I saw, in other paintings, nude men doing unmentionable and possibly erotic things to each other. Were the figures taken from Muybridge's blatant studies of scantily clad male wrestlers? Of course. That made them even more naughty. Back then there was nothing worse than copying from photographs. Hmm. No, there was something worse: copying other artists. Bacon's major inspiration was midcareer Picasso, all bloated body parts and sometimes screaming mouths. And Bacon did copy Velázquez.

Bacon's screaming Velázquez popes? Anyone growing up gay in the '50s had good reason to hate the church, even if one had not been molested by the parish priest. Surprisingly, Bacon tried to deny that his work was in any way autobiographical. He denied personal expression. He denied story-telling. In art, loud and frequent denials are sometimes proof. During his checkered life, our artist of the moment -- now brought back from the dead -- stopped one biography from being published; but he was not above exploiting notoriety for career's sake. Bacon tried to have it both ways.

The love of his life, the chunky George Dyer, was a thief, and Bacon loved to say that he first met him when he caught him robbing his apartment. He painted Dyer over and over, for, you see, the artist had discovered early on that the best insurance against blackmail was to be truthful to all about his personal life. Or personal lives.

Nevertheless, in 1977 Bacon stopped the publication of what was to be Michael Peppiatt's Francis Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma, finally published in 1996. "As with several other projects to which Bacon initially lent his support," writes Peppiatt, "he drew back at the last moment, fearful -- for all his recklessness -- of revealing 'too much' about his life." It is my main source here.

Minus all the tedious art-world details and descriptions of the art, the book could be made into a movie, a horror movie.

Bacon: Study After Velázquez, 1950

Where's the Bacon?

If only I could like the paintings. If only I could be 13 again. And anguished. But contrary to the rule in most fiction, I wasn't anguished about my sexuality. Even I knew that the self-punishing homosexual was a self-hating, self-indulgent, literary invention by Proust, Gide, and yes, even Genet. Was I the only one who had read Walt Whitman? I was anguished because, down on the farm, I could not get any. I wanted love. I wanted action. Not torture and slabs of meat.

If Bacon's paintings are really about anguish in general and not about homo-anguish in particular, then I can live with them. Otherwise, they stand to confirm a demeaning text: gay men are not men, they are guilt personified.

So do we delight in the fact that Bacon let it slip that he liked to wear women's underwear? That he had a collection of twelve Rhino whips? Yes, we do. And we sort of wish these facts were on the Met's august walls. Instead, one text actually suggests that the paintings, done by an avowed atheist, are what the world looks like without God. Viewers stand in front of this so-scholarly assertion looking puzzled.

It would be more accurate to say that the paintings are what the world looks like without art criticism. Bacon let it be known that he destroyed a lot of his own paintings, apparently as part of his down-to-the-line studio practice. If nothing else, this exhibitions proves he did not destroy enough.

Bacon: Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962

BLT (Blatant Lascivious Teasing)

But I want more details on those wall texts. I want to know if Bacon liked wearing bras or panties or both? How British. And in terms of what was once called the English Vice, I want to know who was handling those whips, exactly what was being done with them, and how often. That would be more interesting than the proclamation of Bacon's atheism. After all, technically speaking, Buddhist too are atheists.

But please, if a new wall text goes up detailing Bacon's sexual fun and games, I would urge that it be spelled out that, at least in Great Britain, more heterosexual men wear bras and panties and use whips than gay men do.

Why was Bacon so over the top? Surely, if you are treated like a criminal, you will act like one. Bacon operated largely during a time when homosex could result in life imprisonment even if you were already in prison. (And before that, the gallows.) If you have everything to lose, than what the hell? This may explain some of Bacon's carryings on: gambling, rent sex, lipstick and dyed hair, and sex with his uncle -- in Berlin, where said uncle was supposed to make a man of him. This was set up by Papa Bacon, soldier, horse-breeder and man's man.

Papa Bacon simply could not understand why Baby Bacon broke out in a horrendous, possibly life-threatening asthma attack every time a dog came near or when he was forced to visit his father's much-cherished stables.

Francis Bacon, Untitled Rug, 1929 (not in exhibition).

The bad thing about Bacon's paintings is that they may be used to affirm the crazy notion that all gay men are heavy drinkers, high-stake gamblers, sadomasochists, high-society hanger-ons, interior decorators (which is how our Bacon began, along with designing modernist tubular furniture and rugs), homebreakers, walkers, and self-hating exploiters of the working-class hunks and handsome second-storeymen who are wandering around everywhere looking for someone rich to buy them a few beers.

I assure you, we are not. Some of us are even married -- to other men, at long last, much to the relief of the guardians of house and home and much to the profit of the matrimony industry.

Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1968

Although yours truly in his youth also had a second-storeyman as a lover (this is true), it was only briefly. Bacon kept George on for years, declaring him the most handsome man he had ever met and made him pose for the photos that became the paintings now so celebrated for their "anguish." Poor George. Judging by the paintings, he earned his keep, then died of an overdose. Tellingly, the run of portraits that proliferated after George was out of the picture are simply not as good: horror for hire, bread-and-butter bunk.

But more about Bacon's childhood, if you can stand it. In some sense, his childhood lasted all of his life.

The Nanny

Not only did Papa Bacon throw Baby Bacon out of the Bacon Irish Manor House when he was a mere teen, Mama Bacon didn't like him much either, telling him he was so ugly no one would ever like him. He was indeed a pie-face. Photographs do not lie. Possibly in revenge, he later "adopted" his childhood nanny, who had the thrillingly picaresque name of Jessie Lightfoot. She stayed on board until her death.

When times were hard, Nanny Lightfoot became Nanny Lightfingers and utilized her shoplifting skills to put food on the table. She would also vet the propositions Bacon received from ads offering his services as a "gentlemen's companion," which means exactly what you think. However, she was an avid advocate of capital punishment and "longed for the day when the gibbet would be re-erected at Marble Arch, with the Duchess of Windsor as the first public enemy to be hanged, drawn and quartered there."

Hanged, drawn and quartered? Sounds like something you might see in a Bacon painting.

Bacon, Sweeney Agonistes,1967

Here Comes the Judge

Artists are sometimes judged by their influence on other artists. Unfortunately, we would be hard put to come up with any painter influenced by Bacon -- except perhaps his friend, the older and very dreary Graham Sutherland. That artist's signature thorn-forms were clearly a reference to you-know-whose crown of thorns, but only under Bacon's influence did Sutherland attempt a crucifixion or two.

Brit critic David Sylvester's book of edited interviews (1975) reveals how dumb Bacon actually was, or at least pretended to be. He was certainly smarmy. And if he was trying to put himself across as an Abstract Expressionist who hated abstraction, or as a Surrealist, he failed. Sir Roland Penrose, when he was only Roland Penrose, rejected Bacon for his 1936 International Survey of Surrealism for being "insufficiently surreal."

You can catch two segments of the actual interviews on YouTube, notable now for the leading questions continually proffered by Mr. Sylvester. With a friend like that -- artists beware of critics with microphones -- you don't need an enemy.

On the other hand, now we can certainly say that Bacon influenced the face of cinema.

I Married a Queer From Outer Space

Desperate for something to watch, I recently turned to TCM on Demand and found, of all things, I Married a Monster From Outer Space, Gene Fowler Jr.'s crazed 1958 exercise in paranoia, with art direction by Henry Bumstead and Hal Pereira. I could not believe my eyes.

The movie's about a takeover of small-town husbands -- one by one -- by an alien all-male race that needs to find females to reproduce. It is really about gay men taking over the world. The "husbands" sulk and brood, bond with each other, and disappear in the middle of the night to go on long walks. But the "real" men -- breeders who have sired children and who own rifles and hunting dogs -- get them in the end.

Periodically flashes of lightning reveal the real faces of the alien husbands, who are without emotion and seem not to be able to impregnate their Westinghouse brides. This is how we know it is not just the zombie played by Tom Tryon who is a monster, but also several others, including the cops and a telegraph operator who stops a cable to the FBI. Do their real faces remind you of a certain artist's Picasso rip-offs?

Which face is the artwork?

[Scroll to end for answer.]

In spite of the socially and family-induced self-loathing, his acting out and acting up, and his profligate ways, Bacon has a life story and psychology (if you dare call it that) that are vastly more interesting and more entertaining than his ghoulish illustrations now on view at the Metropolitan. Although torture never goes out of fashion -- thanks to Cheney and Bush -- Bacon's dated specimens of beef, beefcake, and blood are at best paint-smeared, writhing footnotes to The Age of Anxiety. He would have loved waterboarding but have used it as titillation, not condemnation, or as just another metaphor.

Wouldn't we rather see a Leon Golub show at the Met?

Answer to photo quiz:

Left: Tom Tryon with alien face, I Married a Monster From Outer Space, art direction by Henry Bumstead and Hal Pereira.

Right: Francis Bacon: Three Studies for a Self-Portrait (detail).

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Strike Will Cripple Art Industry in 2010

2009-05-25T11:58:56Z

Received:

Art Strike 2010-13!

The refusal to labor is the chief weapon of workers fighting the system; artists can use the same weapon. To bring down the art system it is necessary to call for years without art, a period of three years...when artists will not produce work, sell work, permit work to go on exhibitions, and refuse collaboration with any part of the publicity machinery of the art world. This total withdrawal of labor is the most extreme collective challenge that artists can make to the state.

The years without art will see the collapse of many private galleries. Museums and cultural institutions handling contemporary art will be severely hit, suffer loss of funds, and will have to reduce their staff. National and local government institutions for the financing and administration of contemporary will be in serious trouble. Art magazines will fold. The international ramifications of the dealer/museum/publicity complex make for vulnerability; it is a system that is keyed to a continuous juggling of artists, finance, works and information--damage one part, and the effect is felt world-wide.

.......Gustav Metzger (b.1926) whose Years Without Art 1977-1980

said it all....and was almost completely ignored.

Strike Demands

Reinstatement of individual grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for artists, poets, and art critics.

Allow artists to deduct from their taxable incomes the full market value of their own artworks when these artworks are donated to museums, as is now the case for collectors and other investors.

Create a cabinet-level Secretary of the Arts.

The forced resignation of all art collectors and real-estate developers from the Boards of nonprofit art museums and art spaces, on the grounds of conflict of interest and profiteering.

Gustav Metzger: Untitled (Auto-Destructive Art), 1961. Acid on nylon.

Metzger: Untitled. Recreation of above, 2006.

Who Is Gustav Metzger?

As fate would have it, Artopia's proprietor came across a remaindered copy of Gustav Metzger History History, Generali Foundation, Vienna (ed. Sabine Breitwieser) issued upon the occasion of Metzger's retrospective in 2005 in Vienna.

Born in Germany in 1926, young Gustav, accompanied by his brother, were transported to London in 1939 by the Refugee Children's Movement and thus, unlike the rest of his family, escaped the Holocaust.

In the late '50s he was both an anti-nuke activist and the founder of what was to be called Auto-Destructive Art. One manifestation of Auto-Destructive Art was his own creation of paintings by spraying acid on plastic sheets, causing them to disintegrate by the end of the performance. He was the instigator of the seminal Destruction in Art Symposium in London in 1966.

Both Yoko Ono and Ralph Ortiz were participants. Metzger was the initiator of projected art that seeded rock concert light shows.

More recently, now over eighty, he has systematically affixed pages from daily newspapers to gallery walls and also installed what he calls "Historic Photographs" - blowups of horrendous atrocity photos, displaying them behind false walls or behind or under fabric. In one case, viewers were allowed to crawl under a canvas to experience the now defamiliarized image placed flat on the floor.

Metzger: Installation of "Historic Photographs"

Metzger: 'History Photographs" (To Crawl Into - Anscluss, Vienna, March 1938), 2005, showing viewer looking at photo blow-up.

Another installation: Metzger: 'History Photographs" (To Crawl Into - Anscluss, Vienna, March 1938), 2005, showing viewer looking at photo blow-up.

In a severely reductive way (which is how we control true innovators), we only seem to know, if anything at all, that Metzger's actions and theories inspired both John Latham's chewing up and spitting out of Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture and the guitar-smashing antics of Pete Townsend of The Who.

Why has there not been a museum exhibition of Metzger's work in New York City? Is his work too radical, too political? Could it be that because of the very nature of his art, there is too little to sell?

Here is Metzger himself in a recent interview:

Art Strike IV?

It should also be noted that Punk/post-punk novelist artist Stewart Home -- famous in some circles for dressing up as his drug addict/ fashion model mom--also initiated a three-year art strike in Metzger's footsteps: 1990-1993. It was equally effective, and I am sure you noticed that the art world changed for the better after 1993.

Now we have yet another art strike, but initiated anonymously by person or persons unknown.

Maybe this strike will work.

If you count as an art strike the one-day, anti-Viet-Nam war moratorium of October 5, 1969 --- now apparently only remembered for Jasper Johns' American flag print commissioned by his art dealer Leo Castelli, then this is Art Strike Four.

Four strikes and you are out!

You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Theory

What would be gained by a three-year Art Strike? Such an activity -- rather, radical inactivity -- would accomplish several things not mentioned by Metzger in his historic challenge issued by the ICA, London, in 1974, now quoted by this new effort at an Art Strike.

As Metzger further stated so long ago, an art strike would cripple galleries and museums. Galleries, of course, could coast for one or two years on inventory, which is why the three-year moratorium is an absolute.

Now we need to add that museums would have to start barfing up selections from their inventory, otherwise known as permanent collections. After three years of this, the public would be totally bored, since there are only so many ways you can slice a cake

An art strike is risky. It strikes fear in the hearts of artists as well as the public. But without risk, a political action just like an aesthetic action has no force. So what is at risk?

One: It is not certain that the public will really miss contemporary art.

Two: It is not certain that artists will really miss making art.

Three: It is not certain that the collapse of the art system will result in the demise of the collector and the collector mentality; tulip bulbs or light bulbs or clown noses may become the next new collectible.

Four: It is not certain that "artists" will find other things to do to keep themselves out of trouble. Sexual shenanigans, alcohol abuse, and dangerous drug use could escalate.

Five: It is not certain that preparators, receptionists, art-handlers, framers, and all the cooks and waiters working in nearby restaurants and lunchrooms will ever again find gainful employment.

Six: It is equally uncertain that critics, curators, and the like will be able to find other ways of making a living. It is certain that parents will no longer think of art as a safe career for their clean-cut spawn and will therefore force them to go to law school or study engineering. This will depopulate degree-granting venues and their compulsion to have everyone in the world earn increasingly dubious MFAs to prove that they are artists. It would also have the added effect of forcing artists and critics employed as teachers to find other, more socially productive, more intellectually challenging and culturally enriching employment.

* * *

Here, in the spirit of the anonymous Art Strike missive, are the questions that urgently need answers:

Will anyone make art if there is absolutely no chance of making money out of such diddling?

How much fresh air can the art world stand?

Once gainful employment is again the norm, will anyone have time for squeezing out art?

Will envy and competition disappear? Will bitterness and commercialization dissolve?

Previously:

"Pictures Generation" at the Met Please scroll down.

Oldenburg at the Whitney Please scroll down.

Ernesto Neto at the Armory Please scroll down.

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contact: perreault@aol.com

'The Pictures Generation' at the Met

2009-05-21T19:47:41Z

Not Every Picture Tells a Story

"The Pictures Generation (1974-1984)," now at New York's Metropolitan Museum through Aug. 2, proves that pictures will not cure you of photography, any more than the hair of the dog will cure you of rabies.

The exhibition offer as many insights about photography as it does about spinach.

The so-called "Pictures Generation" was never an art movement; it was hardly a trend. That two of the artists so packaged way back in the dim past have emerged as art-world superstars -- Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince -- may be more of an explanation for this investigation than anything else.

Why these two and not any of the others? In the first room of the exhibition, which features early work, Sherman's self-portraits jump from the wall. Or is this hindsight? Prince is virtually indistinguishable from the common lot.

Yes, there are photographs in "The Pictures Generation," and certainly Louise Lawler and Laurie Simmons are represented by their dull photographic fare. On the other hand, Sherman is as much a performance artist/ makeup artist as a photographer. She makes faces of her own face. She paints herself out of her pictures; she is myriad. She is the actor-artist.

Because of the context, both David Salle and Robert Longo -- artists I usually have no interest in -- turn out to look better than they have in a long time. Two paintings by Salle stand out because in a world of processed images raw paint always wins. Longo's iconic "Men in the Cities" Triptych, removed from the accumulation upstairs, holds its own in the Met's huge lobby -- which is a lot to be said for drawings, even big ones.

Otherwise, too much early work. Too much weak work. And we are left to sort through the mess. Art critic/art historian Douglas Crimp's "Pictures" exhibition at Artists Space in 1977 was, in theory, seminal --- launching the "Pictures Generation." That very dull little show, however, occasioned Crimp's influential Artforum essay. The concept at the Met seems to be that the assembled motley crew -- most of whom were not in Crimp's exhibition --- represents a kind of postconceptual image-making, retaining "concepts" from Conceptual art but illustrating them with images from the mass media.

None of this was new in 1977, with one possible exception: out-and-out appropriation -- as it came to be called -- by Sherrie Levine. She re-photographed Walker Evans' classic photos from reproductions in a book.

Otherwise, we could just as easily say we are looking at Pop Art Two.

Too bad the recent Walker Evans show at the Met is now closed.

The Pictures Generation isn't a generation like the Lost Generation or even like Generation X; it is packaging, which is ironic, considering the claims made. Critique of capitalism? Exposure of the image nation? Give me a break.

Does the Artopia 10% Rule for mediocre surveys still apply? Yes. Out of 30 artists, Barbara Kruger, Levine, and Sherman are the only clear winners

Previously:

Oldenburg at the Whitney Please scroll down.

Ernesto Neto at the Armory Please scroll down.

Forthcoming:

Art Strike Announced, Available on-line:Tuesday, May 26.

Never miss an Artopia installment! For an Automatic Artopia Alert,

contact: perreault@aol.com

Oldenburg at the Whitney

2009-05-20T11:10:26Z

Ice Bag Restored

Centered around the artist's newly restored Ice Bag - Scale C (1971) -- it inflates! it slumps! it rotates! -- Claes Oldenburg: Early Sculpture, Drawings, and Happenings Films (through Sept. 8) is drawn primarily from the Whitney permanent collection. Occasioned by the dire economics of the moment, this is one of those exhibitions that proves necessity can be inspiring. Who knew that the Whitney owned so many tasty Oldenburgs?

We love the absurdity of the Giant BLT (1963), French Fries and Ketchup (1963), and of course the Ice Bag is a hoot. The squeaky-clean musical-instrument collaborations between Oldenburg and his late wife Coosje van Bruggen ("The Music Room") are offset by a small collection of messy items from Oldenburg's project/environment The Store (1961), of which the painted-plaster Half Cheesecake, Potato Chips, and Pile of Toast are standouts.

Oldenburg's drawings -- post 1965 -- are too commercial and too academic. Maybe that's the joke. The same can be said for the most of the monuments. A giant fire plug is fun only once. And a drainpipe not even once. But wouldn't an exhibition focused just on Oldenburg's food sculptures be wonderful to see?

Also fully restored are a collection of films that give us glimpses of Oldenburg's legendary Happenings. Allan Kaprow may have been the first Happenings guy, but Oldenburg and many others - such as Jim Dine, Red Grooms and Al Hansen -- also joined the fun.

Although it is wonderful that these historic films have been saved and brought back to life, they are also reminders of how messy and unstructured Happenings tended to be, with one foot in Action Painting and the other in farce. Because the footage has been shot and then chopped up and edited by various filmmaker/artists -- Stan VanDerBeek being the most famous -- to make artworks of their own, there is no sense of what real time came into play. We get a mélange of images, actions, and guest appearances by Carolee Schneemann, Lucas Samaras, and Henry Geldzahler, but an understanding of the Happenings form (or lack of form) is not helped by the seven-screen presentation of seven different films simultaneously.

We are reminded why Performances (as perfected in the late 1960s by Vito Acconci, Scott Burton, Marjorie Strider, Hannah Weiner, and the founder of Artopia) were not Happenings, but much more conceptual presentations, reacting against Happenings.

Nevertheless, noting down the address from Oldenburg's poster that advertised The Store, I forthwith made a pilgrimage to 107 East 2^nd Street, now looking curiously like a vintage tenement, with bars on the ground floor windows....

Art Shrine Consecration

There are too many as yet undesignated Art Shrines in New York City. Artopia hereby recognizes 107 East 2^nd Street, the site of Claes Oldenburg's 1961 The Store, as the first official Art Shrine. Monies are now being sought for a bronze plaque that will eventually be put into place announcing this fact.

Certainly the site of the Judson Gallery in the basement of Judson Church in the Village Proper, as opposed to the East Village (the Village Improper), will also be considered, since it was the venue for many now-famous Happenings and Ralph Ortiz's Destruction Art chicken decapitation. We are also looking into 111 St. Mark's Place, the site of the One-Eleven Gallery, where in 1961 -- a seminal year -- Artopia founder John Perreault had his first art exhibition. It was also the site of a Happening by Al Hansen. Nominations for additional Art Shrines are now being accepted.

Previously:

Ernesto Neto at the Armory Please scroll down.

Forthcoming:

'The Pictures Generation' at the Met, Friday, May 22.

Art Strike Announced, Tuesday, May 26.

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contact: perreault@aol.com

Ernesto Neto at the Armory

2009-05-18T11:49:44Z

In The Womb of the Tropical Spider

Lycra deployed like tenting, like venting, like pastel parachutes and saliva, forming a gigantic "spider" with udderlike, fabric stalactites weighed down with turmeric, glove, ginger, black pepper, and cumin introduces the hallucinatory feminine into the splendiferous, all-male, historic Park Avenue Armory.

One needs people cautiously making their way through the fabric passageways; one needs children innocently romping to see the danger of this participatory venture.

Brazilian Ernesto Neto's anthropodino (through June 14), a jaw-dropping marriage of science-fiction and the nursery, is magnificently creepy.

Those of us who know a little about Brazilian art immediately see the references to the nests and participatory environments of Hélio Oticica (1937-1980) and the healing art of Lygia Clark (1920-1988).

Hélio Oticica: Paragoles (1965-79)

Oticica and Clark were co-founders of Neo-Concretism which progressed from Neo-Plasticism, to art variables, to multi-sensory and multi-sensual participatory art. Clark, in particular, was an artist who truly seems to have come from another planet -- a genius who has not yet received her due. Some of her healing rituals involved sand-filled fabric tubes placed on various parts of the body.

Lygia Clark: Baba Antropofagica [Cannibalistic Slobber], 1973.

In the meantime, Neto's vast playpen is a good reminder that there are art worlds within art worlds and fields of "otherness" not yet conquered because we stay too focused on what peaks and speaks (or used to peak) in auction houses.

Forthcoming on Artopia:

Oldenburg at the Whitney, Wednesday, May 20.

The Pictures Generation at the Met, Friday, May 22.

Art Strike Announced, Tuesday, May 26.

Never miss an Artopia installment! For an Automatic Artopia Alert,

contact: perreault@aol.com