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I am entertaining myself with a list of critics and artists who will hate "©Murakami," a retrospective of the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami (b. 1962), at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway) to July 13, 2008.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Takashi Murakami, DOB's March, 1995 © Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.

All Rights Reserved

 

Or, if they have passed on, would have hated it. The list is composed largely of those who despised Pop Art the first time around -- mostly because of an emotional, poetic, and/or economic stake in Abstract Expressionism. The fear was that Pop would replace the well-worn, familiar feeding-trough, the A.E. hierarchy, and hard-won standards of seriousness -- and machismo. At the same time, Minimalism, neither friend nor foe of Pop, was another threat that needed to be squashed. How could you have art without obvious self-expression? Without the traces of the artist's hand?

 

                                                        

Long Live Pop

I will not share my list with you, because some Anti-Popsters are still alive, if not exactly alive and kicking. You can come up with your own. Suffice it to say, I myself was prepared to hate Murakami's slick and oddly sticky offerings. How dare this artist appropriate manga and anime -- two well-known Japanese mass-media forms -- with such cynicism, such determination both to shock and please? How dare he, like a certain mastermind of marketing, place some of his paintings on top of his own wallpaper?

I hated Murakami's Reversed Double Helix (2003) when it was shown at Rockefeller Center a few years ago. It seemed gaudy and small. There was no way it could reach the grandeur of Jeff Koons' miraculous flower puppy.

But I hope I am not giving too much away right here at the start. I'll begin by saying that I was greeted by a Reversed Double Helix doppelganger called Tongari-kun (Mr. Pointy) smack in the middle of the BMA's silly glass entrance. I've said it before and I will say it again (art critics never forget, never forgive): when is the next hydrofoil ferry leaving? And for this they ruined the grand stepped entrance?

Although the sculpture was iffy, the floating DOB's March balloon at least has some teeth to it. The cute but snarling DOB figure is said to be the artist's surrogate. On the way in, I was already warming to the forthcoming charming but disarming stew.

But not quite yet.

 

 

 

The exhibition begins in the fifth-floor rotunda. I breezed by some Murakami paintings that did not at first impress and took a quick look at the ultra-cute Miss ko2 (1997), a painted fiberglass statue of a perky, fetishized waitress. My exploration of anime (rented from Kim's Video on St. Mark's) of over a decade ago had clued me in to the salaryman's schoolgirls-in-uniforms fetish. Cute nurses-in-uniforms also figure in anime soft-core. So I guess I need to add cute and perky waitresses-in-uniforms to my useless list.

Smack in the middle of the rotunda was Murakami's three-part Second Mission Project ko2 Advanced (1999-2007). Miss Cute Waitress, in three steps -- Human Type, GA-Walk Type, and, yes, Jet Airplane Type -- is transformed into a scary, deadly, no longer cute jet airplane. Well, that bears thinking about. Nevertheless, my first response was that I had already seen such things in the second-floor Japanese toy store a block from where I live: transformers are now universal, right? But what does it mean to transform a cute and perky waitress into a jet airplane? That stopped me in my tracks. I'm still not sure.

 

 

 

Takashi Murakami
Installation view of Miss ko2 (Project ko2) (1997)
at Wonder Festival, Summer 2000
Oil, acrylic, fiberglass, and iron
100 x 46 x 36 in.
Courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Galerie Emmanuel
Perrotin, Paris and Miami, and Tomio Koyama Gallery Tokyo
Photo by Kazuo Fukunaga
©1997 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved

 

I have been to Japan a number of times on various projects -- as the U.S. commissioner for an international survey of figurative painting, to write a text about a contemporary ceramics artist, and once to attend a glass-art conference in the little city of Seto. I should also point out that I live in a colonized East Village. There are so many Asian students at nearby NYU that the area could be called Little Tokyo. Strange fast-food chains with names like Very Berry and T-Kettle are dotted along St. Mark's Place, no doubt soon to edge out tattoo parlors and other tidewrack.

Bubble tea is not my favorite thing in the world, nor is any of the Japanese pastry, which has more eye-appeal than taste. But I shop routinely in the totally Japanese, Stuyvesant Place Sunrise Mart above the St. Mark's Bookshop on The Bowery. I also seek out the latest secret ramen joint, occasionally have exquisite sushi at Hasaki on 9th Street, and will happily slurp cold noodles or hot udon at Soba-ya, also on 9th.

 

Promo for rapper Kanye West, designed by Murakmi (not in exhibition)

 

Cuteness-hating, salaryman-hating, good old me, I wandered into the Murakami films, which are being shown in a dark room just off the rotunda. The first one up was a music video for rap star Kanye West's Good Morning, called not surprisingly Good Morning. A cuddly-cute bear wearing cute shades barrels through a number of cute and not-so-cute ultra-urban encounters.

Wait a minute. Those are my sunglasses, white ones with slats instead of glass. The cute teddy bear is wearing my new glasses. I bought them at a sidewalk stand on St. Mark's and Second Avenue in front of Gem Spa just a month ago, but after a great deal of debate. Would I actually wear them to the beach this summer? Would they protect my eyes? I think not, said the Indian man stationed at the outdoor sunglass rack. They are for parties. And what color should I get? I looked at orange and Day-Glo green, but settled on stark white as much more becoming. They were only $5. Alas, upon minute inspections mine are slightly different from those in Murakami's music video. Mine were designed in Italy and "hand-polished in China." Nevertheless, I will keep them forever, even if I do not wear them to Ho-Hum beach.

You can see Murakami's "hip-hop" music video on (click here) Myspace and I am sure you will agree that although I may now fear I will look like a cute anime teddy bear, my nearly identical sunglasses must be extremely cool.

Next on the bill were two episodes of Murakami's Kaikai & Kiki (2007). Bunny-cute Kaikai has protrusions on his/her head that could be mistaken for bunny-cute ears. Kooky-cute Kiki has three and sometimes five cute-Keane anime-type eyes.

When I was back in the East Village, I decided I needed to look at some anime again: not Akira or cute perky-breasted porn featuring cute nurses nursing (each other), but Sailor Moon (barf!) and Demon Beast Invasion (surprisingly lewd and violent). You see, in terms of the latter, muscular demon giants on steroids once ruled the earth and had to leave when the atmosphere changed and now they are back trying to impregnate cute human girly-girls so their demon offspring will be born acclimatized...The big demon seems to have not-cute tubes coming out of his not-cute nipples and other places that he uses to... Well, never mind. Until he meets the cute heroine who can't get enough of those demon tentacles, his stock response to his own failure to implant his demon seed is: "Another inadequate earth girl." Earth girl dead, bloody dead, gruesomely unpregnant and dead.

What happened to cute? Did I miss something?

Demon Beast Invasion did have an extra that tried to explain some anime conventions to the uninformed. Yes, Japanese men have a schoolgirl fetish. The weird hairdos are so we can easily differentiate all the cute and perky, squeaky-voiced teenage girls. The big eyes? They come from Betty Boop, which was an early cartoon import from the U.S., and not from Margaret Keane's bug-eyed children.

Long Live Poop

Oddly enough, Episode I of Murakami's Kaikai & Kiki is called "Planting the Seeds." No, not those kind of seeds, not demon seeds, watermelon seeds. It is really all about poop.

Poop Alert! Poop Alert!  Click here for a preview.

The seeds need poop to pop. The sophisticated audience giggles on cue every time the word poop is used. When the seeds refuse to pop up, Kaikai provides some human fertilizer. Very educational.

Infantilism! It's as if that other favorite of mine -- the cunningly cute, British-born Teletubbies -- somehow got crossed with some coprophilic Japanese daydream. Episode II features even more poop. I've heard that body functions are treated cavalierly in Japan, but not pubic hair, as I myself found out when a Philip Pearlstein painting for the exhibition I was curating for a Japanese department store was stopped by Japanese customs. Or is Murakami just being naughty? Will we ever see episodes of Kaikai & Kiki on PBS?

Next we are treated to the "preview trailer" for Murakami's first live-action feature, to be called Dharma. The film, which so far looks very, very chic indeed, will feature an impotent assassin who meets his doppelganger in Tokyo.

The films - and I am being serious -- set the right tone for the exhibition, and I recommend that you see them first. Don't even look at Miss ko2 until you've seen the films.                                     

I am not sure if it is the exhibition layout over two floors -- in and out of rotundas and some odd side rooms, here and there, and even down a staircase, papered with Murakami wallpaper -- that is non-linear, or the oeuvre itself. The highly publicized Louis Vuitton boutique featuring Murakami's not very original handbags is dead center. The staff is immaculately white-suited. That's the most interesting thing about the embedded boutique, certainly not the handbags. And then there's a cheaper gift shop with Kaikai & Kiki souvenirs and $100 stuffed toys, all more to my liking than the logo-speckled bags. But I don't remember seeing my white, slated sunglasses. That is a retailing mistake. 

The exhibition feels immense, but to me -- at least the first time around -- there were two highlights. I count the two statues called Hiropon and My Lonesome Cowboy as one piece, at least the way they are here installed, facing each other, in a room "decorated" with "cream" splashes.

 

I was amused to see the mom of a well-heeled mom-and-pop team trying to explain to her seven-year-old daughter (and with a straight face, while daddy shrank to nothingness nearby) why the young lady with the enormous breasts was squeezing her cute cherrylike nipples to spurt a cute circle of milk that was like a dairy hula-hoop. While poised on one foot.

If you can't explain Hiropon to your seven-year-old, then you probably can't explain her companion, My Favorite Cowboy, who is spurting a rope or whip of "cream" from his erect, hand-held penis. Leave your seven-year-old at home.

 

 

 

You can hear the artist himself trying to explain his My Lonesome Cowboy by dialing 718-362-9589, followed by 10#. This is the BMA's cellphone gallery guide, which can be called from anywhere. Here you will learn that Murakami has never seen the film Lonesome Cowboys. Guess who made that film?

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                         

 

My second highlight is Tan Tan Bo Puking (718-362-9589, 21# for Murakami's explanation). Made in 2001, it is a large painting about...puking. Like pooping, everybody does it, but Murakami blows it up to Peter Saul proportions: throwing-up on acid, I suppose. But without disgust.  

  Takashi Murakami
Tan Tan Bo Puking - a.k.a. Gero Tan, 2002
Acrylic on canvas mounted on board
141 3/4 x 283 7/16 x 2 5/8 in.
Collection of Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann
Courtesy of Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and Miami
©2002 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved

 

If you want more of Murakami's "explanations" or the sound is just not good enough on your cellphone click here for MoCA's artist tour. MoCA is where the exhibition originated.

 

 

 

Murakami: Summon Monsters? Open the door? Heal? or Die? and Kaikai and Kiki

©2001 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved

 

 

And then there are the cute "flowers" and the very Miro/Kandinsky-cute "jellyfish." Even the "death's head" A-bomb blasts are radioactive cute. In writing about Murakami, nearly everything has to be put inside quotation marks. Even "Murakami" has to be put in quotes marks, for he has a huge staff. He is a huge staff. The crawl for one of his films goes on and on for an eternity.

And  throughout the survey there are countless cross-references.

The early mushroom death's head cloud (both on canvas and on wallpaper) rimes with the saccharin toadstools that come later. Somewhere well into the exhibition you will come across the Inochi cycle (c.2004). Inochi is a kind of hydrocephalic space alien. One loony theory is that the real aliens look like this because the oversize head will remind us of infants with their big heads, and thus we will go all warm and protective. But there is a Inochi on a flat screen in what appears to be a TV ad promoting milk as a healthy beverage. Did the Hiropon and Cowboy manikins start out as proposals for a national drink-milk ad? 

 

                                                                                    

 

Here are some generalizations:

1. Pop did not go away. It was only in hiding. Since art history is most productively seen as a braid with several strands, it is obvious that Koons first and now Murakami have ended the Pop occultation. Murakami has appropriated image types and even themes from Japanese popular culture and used them to create a weird, off-center language to address fecundity, mortality, infantilism, and, yes, commerce.

2. Although one way to make new art is to apply old principles to new materials and thus generate new images and new thoughts, I still wonder if Murakami's obvious success is due to exoticism more than innovation. We have already seen artists appropriate comic-strip and cartoon material from Western mass media. Is referencing Japanese mass-media imagery a big step forward or only a shuffle sideways? Does it matter?

3. In the days when the only "mouse" other than the trappable kind was Mickey, I am told that pornographic versions of Walt Disney offerings and Looney Tunes escapades were made sub rosa. And lewd Dagwood and Blondie comic books. But would paintings or videos of Minnie and Mickey pooping and puking instead of doing the old in-and-out be as effective as Murakami's Nippon-centric efforts?

4. In terms of Japanese culture, one is initially attracted to the austerity of the tea ceremony, sumi ink drawings, Zen rock gardens, or the dry tearjerkers of Ozu, which, for all their focus on the quotidian, are in their own way as mysterious as any koan. They are so ordinary that they're almost not there, even while you are watching them. And yet we are forced to care about a daughter growing up or some other banal family crisis. But in Japan there is a gaudy, bawdy shadow that balances restraint. Think of all that neon putting Times Square to shame. I can see how austerity can become oppressive, and one might be driven to seek excess to keep sane. Extreme decorum needs to be balance by extreme décor. Murakami represents that excess.

On my way out -- obviously brainwashed by too many flowers, too many Betty Boop eyeballs, too many mushrooms, too many jellyfish, too many colors -- the Mr. Pointy sculpture at the entrance now made perfect sense. Psychedelic Buddha? Why not. But shouldn't he be pooping and puking?

Footnote: For samples of manga comics in English click here. The titles of these comics are in themselves poetic: Bleach, One Piece, School Rumble, Vampire Knight Air Gear, Eyeshield 21, Full Metal Alchemist, Bitter Virgin....There are highly segmented manga categories: boys, girls, of course, but also salaryman, "ladies" and, yes, adult (meaning porn). No porn here, sorry, but most you usually have to read them back to front and from right to left. There's a diagram on the site to help you out. There are also on-line manga shrines devoted to particular comic books, but you will have to search for them yourself.

If you want a taste of anime, click  here. The site is a little bit difficult to figure out and full of pop-ups and ads, but if you can find them, I recommend a 23 minute episode of the sugary Bleach (an anime version of the comic book) with English subtiles and the pro-peace Soul Eater.

 

                                                          

 

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The most thoughtful, thought-provoking and provocative gallery show this season has to be "Dan Flavin: The 1964 Green Gallery Exhibition" at Zwirner & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, to May 3, 2008.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Installation view (detail) at Zwirner & Wirth.

Flavin Redux

I remember the original well. I even wrote about it for the now long defunct Art International, coming out of Berne, Switzerland. If a gallery can appropriate a long-ago exhibition, then I can certainly feel free to re-deploy my equally ageless and at last uncensored review:

Dan Flavin is no doubt the most irritable man alive. To make matters worse, he tends to rage and rant in the form of single-spaced, badly typed missals, often five or six pages in length on airmail paper, to save money on postage or to make it seem he's writing from the front. But the battleground is only in his mind.

In spite of the enormous chip on his shoulder, at last Flavin has had his breakthrough moment at the Green Gallery this month. This doesn't mean he'll stop his tirades. The kind of work he does leaves him with lots of time on his hands to get angry.

We were previously aware of his fluorescent light "sculptures" and now there's an array of seven recent pieces that marks out some of the possibilities of his readymades-on-display. Calling them readymades risks evoking one of his letters, for, like the critic Don Judd, I am told Mr. Flavin despises Marcel Duchamp. Perhaps because Marcel has always been a gentleman of the worst sort.

Well, Flavin's ultra-cool fluorescents are really about placement rather than semantics, but like the 1917 urinal signed R. Mutt, Flavin's store-bought tubes are also philosophical. Clever choices and specific display in art contexts is what makes these obdurate propositions art, but not self-expression.

But how many ways can you vary the placement of fluorescent light fixtures?

Let me count them: 1. the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Robert Rosenblum) is an eight-foot fluorescent light placed - you guessed it - diagonally; 2. a primary picture is a square on the wall made up of red yellow and blue fluorescents, the colors of which wash the inside of the square like the pastels in a Jules Olitiski painting but also bleed out along the wall; 3. gold, pink and red, red is an eight foot configuration placed directly on the floor; 4. red and green alternatives (to Sonja) is a symmetrical wall arrangement that could be a minimalized Chevy or Frigidaire logo; 5. alternate diagonals of March 2, 1964 (to Don Judd) is a 12 foot, diagonal wall piece; 6. the nominal three (to William of Ockham) is one vertical fixture/tube next to two next to three; 7. pink out of corner (to Jasper Johns) is a fluorescent standing in a corner, washing the two walls with pink.

So here you have the ingredients: number of fixtures, arrangement of fixtures (either vertical, horizontal or at a 45 degree angle, colors of the fluorescent tubes. One wonders if Flavin will come up with more variations, but I doubt it. For all their austere (here comes that letter!) Platonism, this ultra-cool exhibition in Dick Bellamy's hot-spot is a serene antidote to the Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and George Segal exhibitions that came before, but can also be seen as Pop. Hardware Pop. Or Color Field paintings painted with light directly on the walls. It is no doubt extremely difficult to strip light of metaphysics, but Flavin has done just that. Almost. Now if he would only drop his sentimental or suck-up titles....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dan Flavin: pink out of a corner...(1963). Exhibition Copy, Courtesy of Stephen Flavin.

True Confessions

Now that I have had a second look at that 1964 exhibition, I still stand by my words. Of course, I wrote them today and not 34 years ago. Since 1964 he came up with many variations. Just search Google Images for a taste. But I could have written the above review in 1964. I was already writing about art then, but not for Art International, which came a bit later. In any case, next week I fully expect to receive a single-spaced badly typed letter from the Beyond.

I wish, however, I had saved the one I really received from Flavin (1933-1996) while he was alive. I don't remember the occasion or the horrendous offense against art and Flavin's ego I had committed. I immediately tore it up and flushed away the shreds. If I had saved it, I could quote from it and it would give him back some of his humanity, now that he is fully sanctified. We do wonder how an artist who made such sublime work could have been so paranoid.

Although I hate to admit it - since I am Mr. Antiformalist - in some cases it might be better not to have ever met a particular artist, or received a letter from him (or her) or better not to know anything biographical. Aesthetic intentions or critical program? Any artist can put his foot in his mouth; but to be born with your foot in your mouth is truly a curse. You know what they say: time wounds all heels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flavin, red and green alternatives...(1964). Collection of Sonja Flavin.

In the Neck

The first thing, however, I did think of when I turned off classy East 69th Street into Z & W was that something was wrong. I had indeed been in the Green Gallery ages ago and I assure you it was not on street level. It was also one large room, which is not the case with the Z & W which has a small front room with a roll-up window onto the street then a narrow trunk or neck or hyphen to a larger back room.

The drawings opposite the reception counter in the neck were not shown in the original exhibit, but someone saved them; someone found them. One is a sketch made by Flavin of the installation he wanted. There is one room and one room only. Suspicions confirmed.

We have to refine our description of the current exhibition; it is not a recreation of the 1964 show because the space is different and anyone who knows Flavin's work appreciates how important installation is and how placement in a specific room cannot be divorced from the component or components involved. What we are really seeing is the works from 1964 reassembled, reunited in a totally different space. And as such, they are different works.

You cannot step into the same stream twice, even when it's art you are stepping into. The fact that the 1964 fluorescent works are being shown on the chic Upper Eastside and not 57th Street where the Green Gallery was, makes the work look different. If the recreation were in any other of the Z & W galleries, whether in Chelsea or Zurich or London, other attitudes would apply.

And art has changed. The art world has changed. And I have changed.

Most importantly, unless this is the first Flavin fluorescent pieces you have ever seen, you will see these knowing what came later: more of the same. And more and more. He stuck to his guns.

Back then we thought of Flavin as stubborn, obstinate, stuck in one place or, more positively, as dedicated, committed, forthright, uncompromising, even anti-artworld. Certainly anti-Pop as well as anti-Abstract Expressionist. The works could even be interpreted at anti-commercial, for who would spend good money for a few fluorescent lights?

We did not think Flavin was merely establishing a brand. Nowadays if you were limiting yourself to fluorescents that is exactly would you would be doing. And you would, alas, be praised for it, for that is what the customers currently understand and want.

We cannot see the work afresh. It is like seeing art entombed, which is the destiny of all art that is honored enough to be saved. Or, because it is so timeless, is this art perpetually fresh? Timeless? Who ever would have guessed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flavin: the diagonal of May 25, 1963...Private Collection.

Serious Games

This week's art game: Are there other exhibitions you would like to see re-created?

I, myself, would like to see the 1950 Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery once on 57th Street, but only if the space itself could also be recreated so we could experience the much touted shock of scale. But also for another reason. My friend Lil Picard (1889-1994) artist, critic, and what she called a Wiemar Republic Coffee-House Girl, long lamented not buying a small Pollock out of that historic exhibition. It was only $100 and she circled the block several times before deciding it was too expensive for her budget. I want to see the original price list.

Then I could really go for the 1953 Rauschenberg/Twombly exhibition at the Stable Gallery once on 58th and 7th Avenue. It included the first New York showing of two of Robert Rauschenberg's all-white paintings made in 1951 at Black Mountain, and came with a text by his friend John Cage: "..No subject/No image/No taste/ No object/No beauty/No message/No talent/No technique...I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing in these paintings that could not be changed, that they can be seen in any light and are not destroyed by the action of shadows..."

I would certainly want to revisit Robert Smithson's 1968 "Non-Site" exhibition at Virginia Dwan's 57th Street venue. There were geometrical bins of rocks brought in from mapped sites. The pieces look better and better every time I see them, although at the time I thought Smithson was "cheating" by bringing Earth Art indoors---which is not really what he was doing.

And are there ancient and nearly forgotten but important museum exhibitions I would like everyone to see or see again? Here's my initial list:

Marsha Tucker and James Monte's 1969 "Anti-Illusion" at the Whitney. I remember Rafael Ferrer's pile of leaves and blocks of ice at the entrance to the museum. Ferrer was an Artopian before there was an Artopia. Will time have tamed the art?

Kynaston McShine's 1970 "Information" at MoMA. Would I now crawl into Helio Oiticica's "nest"?

Thomas Hess' 1971 Barnett Newman retrospective at MoMA, but with the Stations of the Cross in a room with an entry that would allow them to be read left to right, not from right to left, as shown in '71.

Alanna Heiss' 1977 "Rooms," the inaugural exhibition at P.S.1. Could that old schoolhouse be returned to its inspiring state of crumble and decay so that the recreated site-specific works would once again make sense?

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Gustave Courbet The Desperate Man, 1844-45
Private Collection, courtesy of Conseil Investissement Art BNP Paribas

The Greeks Had a Word for It

The two current museum exhibitions that should have been physically juxtaposed are not "Jasper Johns: Gray" (to May 14) and "Gustav Courbet" (to May 18), now cheek by jowl at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the Johns and "Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today" (to May 4) at the Museum of Modern Art.

The easy trick would be to oppose Johns and Courbet; the first all intellect, the second all fury and sleepy pink, plump sex. Although with more than two centuries and the Atlantic between them, both were innovators and realists.

Johns, inspired by Duchamp, early in his career understood the realism of things through his refusal to separate objects and images, emblemizing both -- whether flat like paintings (flags, targets, maps and less successfully arrays of flagstones or zones of hatching) or fully three-dimensional like beer cans, plaster casts, flashlights.

According to the textbooks, Courbet invented realism because he proposed that what he was depicting -- which was slightly outside the salon and academy conventions of the time -- was how things really looked rather than how they were imagined. Well, sort of.

On the other hand, both artists wallow in allegory, so how realist is that? One of the artists (Johns) has been studiously apolitical; the other (Courbet) supported the Paris Commune, refused the Legion of Honor, and indulged in self-imposed exile.

At one period in my career I wrote a great deal about contemporary realism, even a tome on the drawings and watercolors of Philip Pearlstein, so I know that Courbet has many descendents. Nevertheless, I love only the deranged oddities of his oeuvre, for instance The Desperate Man (1844-45), the self-portrait logo of the exhibition. Was the artist having yet another bad-hair day? But even darker is the unfinished self-portrait called The Man Mad With Fear, from the same period. Courbet's painting of his sister (The Clairvoyant or The Sleepwalker) is also creepy.

And then -- to demonstrate how various subjectivites determine what we see -- I will confess I named my 1980 cube, constructed of six inwardly facing square mirrors, The Origin of the World, in homage to Courbet's female crotch-shot of the same name. Courbet's Origin should not, cannot, be missed. You should of course see it in real life, rather than Google it. It is definitely not on the Met's website. And now that I am making art out of jejune found-seascapes. I was particularly interested in Courbet's four seascapes of 1869, all called The Wave. They are really trashy.

The art dealer Marcel Duchamp (yes, he seems to have survived by selling Brancusi sculptures and arranging exhibitions for his artist friends) once denigrated the acclaimed and much-loved art historian Meyer Schapiro. "I don't like Schapiro's approach to art in general," wrote Duchamp to his patron Walter Arensberg, "... because he uses art to write about Schapiro." I found this stupidity in the recently remaindered Affectt Marcel, The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp. Now I know why Surrealist pope Andre Breton once referred to Duchamp as the most interesting and the most irritating man he had ever met.

But enough about me and Courbet. At the risk of exposing you to what no doubt is yet another classical Greek rhetorical device, instead of comparing Johns and Courbet, I prefer to compare the Johns exhibition with "Color Chart" at MoMA.

 

 

 

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Jasper Johns, Map, 1962.The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Marcia Simon Weisman. © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Photo: Brian Forrest

 

The Attack of the Grays

Johns' relationship to Duchamp is old news. His breakthrough works were first referred to as Neo-Dada. Now we are offered instead a narrow formalist view or a more psychological view. We are led to believe that over the years Johns used so much gray in order to drain his pieces of the emotions that colors inevitably evoke. Or so proclaims the introductory wall text. Whether this idea is a curatorial conceit or a conceit of the artist himself, it is an odd notion indeed.

Gray is somber, withholding, sad, moist and foggy, and even wise -- as in gray beard. Or scary, which is why the aliens among us are called the Grays. In fact, once you look at gray as a color rather than the absence of color, there is a rainbow of grays, a color chart that encompasses (although I know not in what order), elephant gray, marine-dress gray, lead gray, pot metal gray, greyhound gray. Fedora gray, mouse gray, Grey Gardens gray,

Gray, no matter of what hue, as a surface covering reduces the play of illusionary depth that the juxtaposition of various colors inevitably constructs.

Johns' grayed-out objects, cast from real-life things, paradoxically look more sculptural than the originals. This is because, although lead gray, they evoke the monochrome of Roman marble sculptures, or Greek works seen, as is now the case, with all their original paint removed.

Would any other color work as well? Think of the blues of Picasso's blue period; think of Cubist browns and tans. Think of Yves Klein's sponge paintings -- sponges and grounds uniformly soaked with International Yves Klein Blue (or pink or gold). Think of George Segal's all-white plaster casts, which are not surrogate marble sculptures but solidified ghosts.

I will leave for some other time why Johns' efforts declined around 1972 with the hatch mark and flagstone paintings, and then the disappointing "Four Seasons" paintings and on downward, to rally suddenly with the Catenary Series (beginning in 1997). The current investigation would have been much better if it had stopped in 1972, when somehow Johns got off-course.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bryan Kim, Synecdoche, 1991-08

  

 

Color Me Dead

On the surface, "Color Chart" at MoMA is related to the Johns show because the theme is equally trivial, although more entertaining because of the gaggle of artists.

Color charts are designated as the jumping-off point of the exhibition, and this apparently allows color chart colors, paint sample colors, and other readymade hues in various arrays and displays.

The MoMA web version of "Color Chart," unlike the Met samplings of the Johns and the Courbet, is complete and is certainly worth visiting if you want a preview or you really want to avoid the crowds (see below). The found colors of the exhibition are simple enough to read well on computer screens. Scale is lacking, but texture (except for the Duchamp and the Rauschenberg) is not an issue.

The puritanical fear of color and the related fear of emotions that may not fit commercial schemata are the subtexts, whereas in the Johns show the fears are more personal, more existential. At MoMA what is really being charted is the undermining of mixed color/invented color as the norm, and along with it perhaps the denial of uncharted emotions. If we accept readymade objects as art, then why not readymade colors? Well, we already have.

It is significant that Duchamp, who invented the readymade with his prescient (see immediately below) urinal titled Fountain, also pioneered the use of readymade color charts, as proved by the magnificent Tu m' (1918) shown here. Later, in The Bride Stripped Bare by Bachelors, Even he would turn the groom of his disembodied bride into a group of mechanical bachelors, not catching up with Courbet's crotch shot until his last work, a peephole view of Eve.

In 1954 Duchamp had his enlarged prostate gland removed, because it interfered with urination. He reported the success of the operation in a letter to his old buddy Henri-Pierre Roche (author of Jules and Jim): "I must admit that being able to pee just like everybody else is a new-found and immense pleasure (one I haven't known for 25 years)."

But enough of Duchamp and back to the business at hand...

Although there is wit in "Color Chart," the context sometimes makes otherwise honorable works look as superficial as the theme.

Surely monochrome and/or the use of readymade colors or a found color system/chart are both part of the contemporary art identikit. Do we need exhibitions to tell us this?

The outstanding works here (aside from the Duchamp and Rauschenberg) are Yves Klein's Peintures (1954), a pamphlet that "documents" his "Monochromes" before he painted them; Sherrie Levine's version of Le Corbusier's samples for a line of painted wallpaper; Byron Kim's Synecdoche (1991-2008), which charts skin colors.

The problem with theme shows is what I call the stamp-collecting fallacy. The job is simply not done until we -- the institutional "we" -- have an example of every postage stamp issued in the United States that has an airplane or a beaver or a vice-president on it. Or every gray artwork by Johns and every artwork that uses readymade colors, regardless of achievement. Just because I have not been to Norway but have been to every other Scandinavian country doesn't mean I have to visit Norway. Or does it?

Artopians Unite!

Seeing all three shows in one week was a revelatory exposure to art tourism. Both museums were packed. I did not come down with a case of Stendahl's Syndrome. Instead, at a certain point I was afflicted with an nearly overwhelming sense of sadness. What were all these people doing here -- people of all races, ages, genders, nationalities, heights and avoirdupois -- studiously reading explanatory introductory texts, moving eagerly, inquisitively, even joyfully from painting to painting? Why aren't they home making art? Why are they consumers rather than creators? Is it a lack of talent? Surely, many so-called artists whose products are on display in museums and galleries have no talent at all. And then I remembered the Artopia motto (one of many): "There will be no happiness on earth until everyone is an artist." Or its variant: "....until everyone realizes he or she is already an artist."

 

Correction: Alexandra Peers on portfolio.com wrote that the Whitney Biennial "omits or slights some of the art world's usual suspects -- superstar dealers such as Barbara Gladstone, David Zwirner and Jeffrey Deitch" -- not that they were totally unrepresented, as I indicated in the previous Artopia entry by saying that aside from Deitch, neither had a single artist in the show.

Should I have changed this the moment I heard from Peers (who was delighted to be mentioned in Artopia) so you'd never suspect I was being inaccurate? One can do that, you know, but it would be a slippery slope. Or should I have done the more acceptable "update" - which sounds less like a mistake? What would keep me from going back to something I wrote in March '07 and changing my opinion, not just some dumb error? Online archives are forever; Artopia is about honor.

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Fritz Haeg: Animal Estates (detail)

Quantifications

Don't believe everything you read; the Whitney Biennial isn't all bad. In fact, as a crystal ball, it is cause for hope. But before we start reading tea leaves, we can indulge in quantifications.

Some of us tally women. There are 28 out of 81 artists by my count. On the other hand, some search out artists of color. Some list painters. And there are legions who quantify regions: 29 from the West Coast. In regard to regions, do artists who have moved upstate to either bank of the Hudson -- the new Hamptons -- count as New Yorkers anymore?

And how many curators? Alas, this Biennial gives me the feeling of too many cooks. Only a committee could include photo-realist painter Robert Bechtle, photo-conceptualist Louis Lawler and abstract painter Mary Heilmann. There are too many lookalikes and almosts. Could this be because Henriette Huldisch and Shamim Momin, the curators of record (both Whitney staffers), were "overseen" by chief curator Donna De Salvo and advised by Thelma Golden, Bill Horrigan and Linda Norden? Or perhaps this mix of voices is responsible for whatever success is in place.

But it's the dealers who really count, right? Which is why I like "Who Won the Whitney Biennial?" by Alexandra Peers on Conde Nast's portfolio.com, although I hope she is being satirical.

In olden days, as soon as picked by the Whitney curators, an unaffiliated artist was immediately corralled in time for that all-important free ad: "Courtesy of Gallery X" on the wall label. In most cases, however, the curators had already let the dealers do the walking. How else can you find the up-and-coming? An open call? Or maybe visit the art schools, as some art dealers now do?

Which dealers have three or more artists in the Biennial? Elizabeth Dee is one. Suzanne Vielmetter of Culver City and Berlin has five. And according to Peers, the losers are: Barbara Gladstone and David Zwirner, neither of whom had a single artist. She was wrong about Jeffrey Deitch: Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black is offered courtesy of Deitch, or so reads the Armory handout.

But there is more news.

Less Is More

Bozidar Brazda: Our Hour: Radioff (detail)

This time we are confronted by 81 artists as opposed to the 114 presented in the '06 survey, which allows a clean, clutter-free installation -- of a lot of clutter. New Museum please take note: Art still needs space around it. Space is a frame.

Installations of various kinds have a higher visibility than ever before; the addition of the gloriously Victorian Park Avenue Armory as a venue allows more room for the site-specific.

Installations I particularly liked at the Whitney:

Phoebe Washburn: While Enhancing a Diminishing Deep Down Thirst, The Juice Broke Loose (The Birth of a Soda Shop). Genre: funky, funny, fake machine -- in this case, apparently to produce Gatorade.

Fia Backström: Let's Decorate and Let's Do It Professionally. The curators were invited to make clay letters that spell out: Toothy Smile, Expresso, Communal Focus Group, but it is not clear if the curators or the artist chose the words. This art-therapy installation includes Whitney logo wallpaper, tablecloth and napkins. Should be on sale at the gift shop, but they are not. Yet.

For some reason the artist left out: ties, pens, pencils, potholders, umbrellas, and totes, available elsewhere with appropriate museum logos. I would add condoms.

Mika Rottenberg: Cheese consists of videos of goat-tending by women with really long hair, displayed in a scrap-wood shack.

Daniel Joseph Martinez: Divine Violence. A hundred-and-twenty-five panels listing the names of groups attempting "to affect politics by violent means."

And at the Park Avenue Armory (643 Park Ave., at 67th Street, to March 23) standouts were:

MK Cuth: Ties of Protection and Safekeeping. What Is Worth Protecting? Participants write their answers on flannel strips that are then braided with artificial hair, the results draped about the ornate Library/Silver Room. Another hair piece. Is this a trend?

Bozidar Brazda: Our Hour: Radioff. An inverted, hanging metal chair serves as an "antenna" for prerecorded songs and live ambient sounds in another of the ornate Armory rooms.

Bert Rodriguez: In the Beginning... Artists holds prebooked "therapy sessions" inside a white cube. You can't really hear what's going on and, since all appointments are already booked, you can't get in. Another therapy piece. Is this a trend too?

Olaf Breuning: The Army. Thirty lamps made of Chinese teapots with lightbulbs and globes adds up to a roomful of "disifunctional" soldiers, entirely appropriate to an Armory.

As usual, I did not have the patience to linger over the video offerings. Couldn't most films and videos be available online? Unless there is an installation component, I don't see why not.

Olaf Breuning: The Army

Is This the End of Art for Dummies?

We may be getting only Beuys-Lite, Acconci-Lite, and Haacke-Lite, but art is back on track. The '80s hijacking of art by bombastic egotism and Picabia parodies suddenly seems an ancient, commercial diversion.

If the current reorientation of art has not yet produced major results, this is possibly because art criticism is not fully tracking, evaluating, or rewarding this return to art values, as opposed to market values. The collectors are out of control and sometimes function as art dealers themselves, with a big, quick, high-profit turnover -- aided by the auctions. The auction houses are still seen as trendsetters and the true measure of artistic success. The auction houses and art fairs make traditional art dealers seem like guardian angels.

Nevertheless, if the Biennial is a true measure of what's happening now and what is ahead, we are finally emerging from the swamp of dumb painting and the stupid, counterproductive commercialization of art. I'd like to think it is merely a case of higher values winning out, the perennial need for meaning, and talent, talent, talent. But because nothing is ever as simple or clear-cut as we might like it to be, I suspect it has to do with selling, too.

Conceptual work -- which is sometimes quite entertaining -- functions as a loss leader, pulling customers into galleries, priming them for purchases of more saleable art, sometimes by other artists. In today's inflated market, even installations can be sold.

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Carolee Schneemann: Portrait Partials

What Feminism Was

"WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" is a chance to take a look at the pioneering days of feminism in art, from 1965 to 1980. This huge survey originated at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and is now at P.S. 1 - MoMA, Long Island City, to May 12. Capturing the raucous, contentious, feminist diversity, Connie Butler (who in '05 moved from MOCA to MoMA, where she is now curator of drawings) demonstrates that much of the art by women in this ancient period was superior to dead-end formalist painting and many of the largely male prerogatives of the time.

Without an equal place for women artists, we cut ourselves off from the talents and perceptions of more than half the world. Art, as far as I can tell, is not gender-specific. Hence the effort to rediscover forgotten women artists and the self-consciously feminist art that began in the mid-'60s.

Feminist art, however, cannot be seen as another art-market niche. It may have been an art movement, but it is clearly not a style. Although there were attempts to position feminism as anchored either to centered imagery or, oddly enough, the thoroughly decentered grid, neither trope stuck. Proponents seemed not to notice that both formats had already been readily used by male artists. Certainly some of Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers can be seen as vaginal, but so are Kenneth Noland's targets, right? And I never quite understood why grids were particularly womanly. For every association with weaving -- which is sometimes a male pursuit too -- there's an association with graph paper and chessboards. I suppose it must have been shocking for certain male artists to find out they were unintentionally making "feminine" artworks.

Martha Rosler: Nature Girls (Jumping Janes)

And Then What Happened?

If the truth be known, feminism in art, as in life, was political, and this is probably why it was suppressed in the '80s and '90s. That S-word might seem excessive, but I can think of no other term. It may have outwardly been a benign suppression, frosted over with exhibitions for a few good-girl or bad-girl artists, but look in the galleries now. After so many successful feminist actions by feminist pioneers, the slippage has been appalling. Art history may be cruel, but commerce-driven art is merciless.

We do indeed now have the Elizabeth A. Sachler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, at the center of which is the permanent display of Judy Chicago's breakthrough Dinner Party -- still controversial, still moving. But in spite of the opening exhibition last year -- "Global Feminisms," curated by Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly -- that attempted to survey feminist art since 1990 -- we still need WACK! to gather up the feminist pioneers.

Now more than ever we need their inspiration. Discrimination continues. Here is an appalling example: The inaugural exhibition of LACMA's Broad Center of Contemporary Art sports only four women artists out of 29. You can blame that on the collecting habits of Eli Broad -- currently our favorite whipping boy, since he apparently reneged on his implied intention to give his collection to LACMA -- or you can blame whomever approved the less than broad Broad show.

What "WACK!" Lacks

First of all, I would like to point out there is a difference between feminist art and art by just any woman. The uninformed indeed might walk away from "WACK!" thinking that all art by women is feminist.

Perhaps because it is difficult for women to make art?

Doubtful, since half or more of all art students are women, most of whom graduate, which means quite a few people have agreed that they are able to make art of some sort or another -- even their male art teachers.

Because it is difficult for women artists to achieve art visibility?

This was certainly the case before the '70s, and despite that window of opportunity -- here honored -- we still face that general situation. It is perhaps a tiny bit easier for women artists now, but not much.

And why is this so? Why do male artists dominate the marketplace and its servants, the art media?

I do not blame the critics, who haven't had much of a say in anything for years. I do not blame the curators; they usually follow the galleries. I do not blame the galleries; the economics of their situation makes it imperative for them to follow the collectors, their customers. These, more than ever, claim power and can threaten to buy directly out of studios at discount prices and even from classrooms. As investors, they go by what they know. No art by a woman has ever gained the astronomical resale value of the art created by males. And yet we know, don't we, that artmaking is not gender-specific.

The apolitical and anti-activist provisos might apply to male artists too: why aren't the politically informed works of Hans Haacke or the devastating, accusatory paintings of the late Leon Golub even within monetary spitting distance of any of the current auction superstars? At least, as male art, their work gets shown. Golub, as demonstrated currently at LACMA, was collected even by Mr. Broad.

Lynn Hershman: The Roberta Breitmore Series. Photo courtesy Lynn Hershman Leeson.

Why You May Be Confused

It may be clever; it may be subversive; on the other hand, it may be totally fallacious. But curator Butler has a thesis.

Provoked by the dizzying diversity of more than a hundred artworks, the confused viewer might want to take a look at the catalogue, since no wall text clearly explains the incongruent display. Yes, Feminist Art is not a style, but it was -- or is? -- an art movement.

Butler writes:

Many of the artists in "WACK!" do not necessarily identify themselves or their work as feminist .... It is my contention that -- whether unintentionally or lacking the language or cultural context to support a feminist idiom -- the artists in this exhibition contributed to the movement and development of feminism in art, if only by reinforcing two central tenets: the personal is political, and all representation is political.

To her credit and armed with some serious catalogue essays, Butler is trying to reexamine feminism in art beyond the well-worn doctrines. Nevertheless, the more one delves into the art selections themselves, the stranger it all gets, so let me offer some clarity.

I do not buy the idea that all women artists, even given the difficulties of achieving both critical and market recognition, are feminists by default. Nor do I think women artists who have profited careerwise by feminist actions qualify as feminist, either. But, to give "WACK!" a positive spin, let us say that the show is about the influence of feminism or which particular art efforts may have fed feminism, rather than about what I or anyone else deem to be the feminism that's politically correct.

One way to read "WACK!" is to go through the exhibition and try to determine what kind of feminist, if one at all, each artist is:

Feminist by virtue of both content and activism.
Feminist by virtue of activism.
Feminist by virtue of content.
Feminist by virtue of feminist support.
Feminist by virtue of being a woman artist.

Audrey Flack: Marilyn

Feminists By Virtue of Both Content and Activism

At the top of my list has to be artwork made by a feminist that embodies feminist principles or subject matter. Examples: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Brooklyn and much of the work preceding it; both the early geometric work by Miriam Schapiro at P.S.1 and her later "femmage" (not included). Certainly the performances, photo-pieces and sculpture of Ana Mendieta.

The realist painter Sylvia Sleigh was very active in the women's art gallery A.I.R. and other feminist causes. Her painting of the members of that fabled gallery certainly counts as feminist, as do her male nudes that turn the tables on the male gaze.

The still underappreciated Lynn Hershman is here represented by her brilliant "Roberta Breitmore Series," consisting of documentation of how she fully constructed and assumed another identity. Is this about the fact that women must go to great length to construct their personae, even to assume (metaphorically here) a false identity? I call this the Vertigo Effect -- after Kim Novak's masquerade in that Hitchcock masterpiece.

Now more than ever (with a simultaneous array of her photo-collages at the New Museum) it's clear that Martha Rosler is an artist to be reckoned with -- ghastly news images invade consumer-perfect living rooms and kitchens. Outside that picture window or even inside the perfect suburban home is the end of the world.

Nancy Spero is also finally getting her due -- in "WACK!," at the New Museum inaugural show, and in MoMA's current new-acquisitions survey. Never before have words, images, and politics been so movingly combined.

Joyce Kozloff? She is certainly also a feminist activist. Her work is a riff on Islamic patterning, which as far as I know was itself a male pursuit. On the other hand, patterning insofar as it is associated in our climes with the "merely decorative" has traditionally been considered women's work. Kozloff's work, at its best, is therefore quite sophisticated and destabilizing.

And I should also single out for special mention Audrey Flack's still glorious and still oddly disturbing photo-realist Marilyn.

Alice Neel: Linda Nochlin and Daisy

Feminists by Default?

Skipping to the bottom of my list, two possible examples of feminists by default are Louise Bourgeois and Magdalena Abakanowicz. Bourgeois's bad Surrealism will always remain a mystery to me. Her work unfortunately suggests what some sexist Surrealists thought: a woman's proper role was as muse, not artist, because women don't really have a subconscious. Abakanowicz, on the other hand, is extremely talented. But isn't she a fiber artist and therefore a craft artist? No matter to me; in Artopia we have abolished such sexist and class-based discriminations.

The problem with both artists is that they went out of their way to assert they were not feminists. I guess a woman's word does not count. Or perhaps they have changed their minds?

Furthermore, the really wacky and to me always interesting Lee Lozano is also included, and there it is, plain as day, in one of her notebook pages on display: "Do not answer any of Lucy Lippard's phone calls." During the '70s, of course, Lippard was a highly visible feminist critic and well within Lozano's circle of friends. Lozano may have had other reasons for avoiding Lippard, yet she resisted the siren call. No sisterhood for her.

Expressionist portraitist Alice Neel certainly had feminist content when she painted pregnant women, and she gladly accepted the help of feminist artists who successfully petitioned for her first retrospective at the Whitney. But as a Communist (since the '20s), she could not declare herself a feminist since feminism was deemed a distraction from the struggle of the workers.

And our beloved Hannah Wilke is here too. We appreciate her snapped-together latex wall-pieces in the exhibition, but she's also represented by her unfortunate 1977 poster: Marxism and Art/Beware of Fascist Feminism. This reminded me of how anti-feminist, anti-sisterhood Wilke actually was. Her personal issue and only issue was that she felt her one-time artist paramour, who had become incredibly famous, had ripped her off artwise. She would not understand that perhaps he got away with it (if her claim were true) because he was a male artist. It was not that the political was personal or vice versa -- the mantras of olden days -- but that for Wilke the personal, alas, remained personal.

Lygia Clark: Structuring the Self, 1976-81

Is Feminism International?

"WACK!" attempts to be international, like "Global Feminism." Yet outside the Anglo-American and Northern European worlds, feminism is, as far as I can see, not a major practice. Racism and economic issues of various sorts remain more important. Or none of the above.

Lygia Clark from Brazil? Marta Minujin from Argentina? I admire both, but by no stretch of the imagination can they be considered feminists. Neither, to my knowledge, has directly addressed women's issues in their art or been an activist in feminist groups.

Nevertheless, please watch the Clark film in the little room devoted to some reconstructions of her astounding work.

Minujin's mattress hut on the second floor was the site of one of her performances on opening day. Clad in a white jumpsuit, wearing dark, dark sunglasses and using a bullhorn she demanded that those entering the mattress house had to know her name. Well, at least her first name. And as they were let in, they had to shout "art, art, art." Then the ice cello was delivered, and Minujin proceeded to "play" it, using a saw and a hammer, until it was destroyed. Was the cello a woman's body? Why was a gentleman inside the mattress house wrapping himself with blue tape like a mummy? I loved it. It was my kind of zany, but I leave it to you, dear reader, to figure out the feminist symbolism -- if there is any. In the meantime, I think the doctrinaire Surrealists were dead wrong. Women do have a subconscious, even Minujin.

What Can Be Done?

Feminism in its heyday involved collective action. Why has that been pushed to the background? Because collective action threatens the status quo? Women just might get the idea that the feminist effort needs to be rekindled. The Guerrilla Girls have never given up, but nowadays it looks like everyone else has.

Or was it just exhaustion? There are only so many meetings you can go to. No, I think what happened is that the commercial art world triumphed. Most collectors are conservatives. They have the money. Where did they get it? Therefore, there can be no political aesthetic. Male artists who express a political or dissident bent may be suppressed too, since the art market reasserts ego, profit, product. And the buck goes on.

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Other Worlds

The art world can too easily be seen as monolithic. What is bought and sold as art and makes a profit is the definition of art. Until quite recently, linear, evolutionary lineups were routinely used in exhibition catalogs and critical writings to provide a cursory justification of assumed historical outcomes. This reverse engineering was applied not only to formalist abstraction -- where the ploy was coined -- but could be jiggered for other styles, even the Dada/Surrealist one: Duchamp leads to Johns, Johns leads to....

But in Artopia, if asked to picture art history, we see a braid of many strands instead of any particular line concocted to verify sales or taste or objectify power. Furthermore, we see the reality of art as existing outside of objects. This rarification may be attained through objects, but this is not necessarily the case.

It may seem that the Art World Proper -- as opposed to the Art World Improper, which is synonymous with Artopia -- has become supremely product- and profit-centered, but we have hope. Slowly but surely we see the kinds of art once off the map or simply inadequately charted reappear. In truth, the Art World Proper is insatiable. Not only do curators constantly need new fodder to secure their reputations, graduate students have to come up with new subjects for their dissertations. Even art history can be ironic.

In spite of their anti-object, ephemeral profile, performative art forms such as Events, Actions, Street Works, and Performances are beginning to make the grade. No longer are museums so beholden to objects that nothing but stretched canvas and chunks of matter will suffice -- leaving craft as the embodiment of materiality, but letting it sneak into the panoply through deceptive labeling. George Ohr pots are in MoMA's Design collection. A Ronnie Horn thick rectangle of red glass is in Painting and Sculpture. Across the street, the Museum of the Arts and Design, formerly the American Craft Museum, now seems ashamed of the word craft.

And then there's Latin American art.

Does the Latin American Art World, like the craft world, overlap the Art World Proper, forming a parallel universe of discourse? Doesn't it also deserve to be another strand in the Big Braid?

Like U.S. and Canadian art, Latin American modernism was inspired by European developments. But aside from the important Mexican mural movement, not much of it represents a shift from the Euro-Modern.

More important, as the international (i.e., Euro-American) styles kept twisting and turning, from Pop to Minimalism and onward, it was difficult to really nationalize the changes of fashion.

By the early '60s, artists and their art traveled everywhere. Outside the Europe/Americas axis, other art stories and timelines fluoresced. For instance, are we sure what the new art of the last century looked like throughout Asia? But that's another story, as is rampant globalism -- how globalism differs from common internationalism.

Hélio Oiticica, Metaesquema II,1958

Geo-Latino

The modest MoMA sampling of Latin American art -- "New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930-2006: Selections From a Decade of Acquisitions" (through February 25) -- favors abstract art, the best examples of which are the Neo-Concretism of the Brazilians Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. And as the title might suggest to those attuned to such fine points, this cool exhibition does not include much art by Spanish-speaking artists north of the equator.

Most of the art displayed are works on paper, complemented by a few sculptures, of which Oiticica's Box Boilde 12, 1964-65, and two "variables" by Clark are outstanding. Viewers were originally urged to reach inside and experience the sand and cloth. Here the elegant presentations screams "Don't touch!" In fact, I had the feeling the nearby guard would arrest me if I tried.

Shown in the third-floor section of the exhibition, Clark's 1960 hinged Sundial, displayed in a vitrine, is also presented with no indication that it is a variable and can be changed at will. Only when we come upon her Poetic Shelter on the second floor are we informed that her Bichos (Critters) -- of which this piece is one of many -- are interactive.

We are not offered examples of the later, more important works of either artist: Oiticica's "Parangoles" (Capes) or Clark's over-the-top healing ceremonies. I searched for them on MoMA's website -- which, granted, gives you access to only 7,895 of 150,000 artworks-- but no "Parangoles" or healing works were in sight. I am not sure at this point if this is because examples were accessed prior to 1998 or there are real gaps in the collection.

(MoMA's "online collection" is free to all and is a great resource. Most entries include images. Teachers, you can assign curatorial exercises to your minions: For next week, select 30 images of artworks from the MoMA collection, according to your own scheme or theme.)

Are the late works of Oiticica and Clark so difficult to acquire? Or is it that Oiticica commits the sin of tropicalism. Tropicalia, sometimes called Tropicalismo, was a late-'60s, short-lived Brazilian art movement named after an Oiticica art work. Along with Oiticica, Clark and other artists, poets and musicians such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil joined the "cultural cannibalism" espoused. Central to the cause was the sly embrace and transcendence of Carmen Miranda-ism, enabling Rio's carioca revenge on Europe and North America -- before the group was shut down by the military government. The great Brazilian music stars Veloso and Gil went into exile.

Is it that late Clark is based on Brazilian shamanism, her rituals reportedly effective treatments for schizophrenia, and that she abandoned art to work with the mentally ill? A friend who experienced one of her rituals -- in which he was wrapped in cloth and pebbles placed on his eyelids -- told me he immediately began to hallucinate.

Although "New Perspectives" is a conservative survey of Latin American art, some concept-oriented works are included, for instance Brazilian Cildo Meireles' rubber-stamped cruzeiros from the '60s, but such works are rare. One hopes that the MoMA Latin American collection or future selections will open up a bit to go beyond what looks good to what is innovative and perhaps even a bit troublesome. It seems to be happening in other departments. Just take a look at curator Deborah Wye's current painting and sculpture collection selection called "Multiplex." David Hammons' hairy Rock Head! Jackie Windsor's Burnt Piece! Nancy Spero! Lynda Benglis!

In the meantime, to counteract the we-hope-unintended MoMA message that Latin American artists have uniformly sidestepped the political or the experimental, one must visit "Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960-2000" at El Museo del Barrio, Fifth Avenue at 104th Street, to May 18.

On the Other Hand...

Rafael Ortiz, Destruction Ritual, 1967

Just as Alexandra Munroe's book Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky filled in the Japanese performative-art gap, "Arte ≠ Vida" will do the same for Latin American art. The catalog is supposed to be ready in May, and I advise you to order it now.

The panoply of excess charted by "Arte ≠ Vida" is the real deal. Through the lens of performative art forms we get a sense of the breadth and depth (and continued relevance) of the Latin avant-garde, from Argentina all the way north to Cuba and Puerto Rico and even Nueva York. Cuba-born Ana Mendieta is included, but is not in the MoMA show (although they have a great piece in their collection). Destruction artist Rafael Ortiz, the founder of El Museo, is shown in full force, destroying pianos -- there are even some piano guts on display. And the Brazilian Tunga is here too, represented by his photo of young twins joined by their long braids. This is an Artopia icon! And Marta Minujin's Parthenon of banned books. Other Artopia favorites represented: Rafael Ferrer from his performance/anti-form days, Alfredo Jaar, and Mexico's Francis Alÿs.

Full disclosure requires that I point out that although not Latino, I am represented in the El Museo exhibition. I gave El Museo a Xerox of the Street Works flyer I designed in 1969. The curator was interested in works by the Argentine Eduardo Costa -- coauthor of the famous Buenos Aires "Happening That Did Not Happen" hoax piece -- but who also spent many years in New York. In 1969, along with myself, Costa was one of the five organizers of the four New York Street Works actions that brought artists, poets, and even art critics out on the streets to perform artworks of their own devising. I am also represented in the exhibition by Tape Poems of that year, co-edited with Costa. You can therefore hear sound works by Vito Acconci, Hannah Weiner, Costa, myself, and others.

But how far do we want full disclosure to go? Do you need to know that Ana Mendieta was my graduate student in Iowa City? Do you need to know that I shook hands with Lygia Clark in New York in 1967, when the French critic Pierre Restany brought her around to meet people during the course her hand-shake piece? And that over the years I have routinely shared air-kisses with Marta Minujin?

In any case, curator Deborah Cullen's gigantic El Museo exhibition -- a true blockbuster -- sets the groundwork for a better picture of Latino art than MoMA's Good Neighbor template. First, "Latino" is a more generous, more adventurous and I think more accurate term for the New World Spanish/Portuguese-speaking world of art discourse. There are Latinos in the Caribbean. There are Latinos in our midst, in case you haven't noticed. This does not mean there are no differences, for example, between Mexican and Brazilian art. But we can worry about that later.

In Artopia, we have it both ways. It is not a question of either an all-embracing transnational art history or a series of particularized national histories. We deserve both, and more. The braid model does not preclude thematic internationalism; in fact, it requires it. A survey of world-wide performative art may now be possible, but this does not nix enriched, time-pegged surveys of all art forms in their raucous simultaneity and their interactive braidedness.

And, oh, by the way, a little bit of criticism. I think the title of the El Museo survey, although paradoxical and provocative, is misleading. Art Does Not Equal Life? In Artopia, at least, art does indeed equal life.

Marta Minujin, Parthenon, 1983, banned books wrapped in plastic

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Francis Alÿs, Fabiola (detail) .

Divorce in Art

First multiple Santas in the last Artopia posting and now multiple Fabiolas!

But multiplicity wasn't invented yesterday, nor by Andy Warhol when he multiplied his Campbell's soup cans, Marilyns, and Jackies. Think instead of the myriad figures in a Tibetan tanka. Or those dying genres, photo-booth samples and sheets of postage stamps. Admittedly the photo-booth samples are usually images of many different grimacing customers or one-off strips picturing singles or couples in a variety of poses. Andy Warhol based some of his silk-screened portraits on photo-booth pictures (art dealer Holly Solomon, for one), but I am not sure any booths survive.

In terms of Warhol, it was not new to make the same painting over and over. In some sense, Ad Reinhardt was already doing that with his all-black paintings, and almost any artist committed to exploiting a signature image could be so accused. What Warhol did that was different was to lay out silkscreened variants of a single image as one artwork. Some might say that the subject did not matter, it was the repetition that counted. Dumb repetition was the real subject.

Belgian-born Francis Alÿs, presently living in Mexico, until now has been most noted for his Dia-sponsored Thief screensaver (1999)...

and for his 2002 MoMA parade from Manhattan to the temporary MoMA-QNS in Queens. His Modern Procession involved 200 participants carrying art replicas and the actual Kiki Smith across the Queensboro bridge...

Now we are privy to his collection of nearly 300 images of St. Fabiola. Most of the images are paintings, but some are needlepoint and others are emblazoned on cheap jewelry. Alÿs's Fabiolas are now on display at the Hispanic Society of America (Broadway between West 155th and 156th streets, to April 6. FREE).

"Fabiola" is a collaboration between the Hispanic Society and the Dia Art Foundation. Is it art? Lynne Cooke, Dia's curator, wrote the informative handout, but curiously avoids the issue. In Artopia we are not timid. This indeed is art. It is found-art multiplied.

Obviously, the Dia Art Foundation is eager to regain a foothold in New York City, searching for renewed visibility and needing a positive spin after the decampment of director Michael Govan for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the subsequent walk-out and divorcement of Dia Beacon funder Leonard Riggio (founder and CEO of Barnes & Noble).

Fabiola was a 4th-century Christian saint, a protector of nurses and abused wives. A wealthy Roman, according to the oddly condensed syntax of the Catholic-Forum's Index of Saints, she was ...

Divorced from her first marriage after being abused by her adulterous husband. Widowed in second marriage. Friend of Saint Jerome, Saint Paul, and Saint Pammachius. Founded the first hospital in the west. Built a hospice in Porto for the area poor and sick pilgrims. After doing penance for her divorce, she re-entered communion with the church by dispensation of Pope Saint Siricus. Wanted to live as a hermit in Jerusalem, but never managed it.

So why isn't she also the patron saint of wealthy matrons or of the divorced? Or, as we shall see, of lost paintings? Or of would-be but failed hermits? And I love the last phrase: "Never managed it." Why not? Would she have had to give up her scarlet hood?

Centuries later her reputation was fueled by the hugely popular The Church of the Catacombs (1854), by a certain Cardinal Wiseman. In turn, this potboiler led to the painting of the now lost, icon-generating Fabiola by the little-known French academic Jean-Jacques Henner. Judging by the copies of copies this fantasy depiction generated, Henner's St. Fabiola showed her in profile, wearing a scarlet hood.

Alÿs has been collecting these popular replicas of replicas for a number of years. He had thought of flea-marketing for da Vinci's Last Supper, but there were simply many more Fabiolas.

And here they are: nearly 300 Fabiolas at, of all places, the quaint, wood-paneled North Building Galleries of the Hispanic Society, looking ... well, fabulous.

So who is this Alÿs? Although he tends to get others to do his work for him, his output is refreshingly sparse. He avoids a signature style or even format. He has not yet been packaged.

In 1997, he pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City.

Alÿs, The Paradox of Praxis .

For When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), he attempted to move a sand dune in Peru with the aid of 500 volunteers....

What connects these works to Thief? And the Modern Procession?

We await a larger sampling of Alÿs's art. "Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal" is now at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (to Feb. 10).

In the meantime, the Fabiola depictions range from plausible to draw-me-matchbook dull and coloring-book crude. It is the multiplicity that charms. Although most of the profiles face viewer-left, some look stage left as if we are seeing Fabiola in a mirror.

Taking in these Fabiolas is a peculiar way of seeing the original. Imagine if we knew Goya's 1797 Portrait of the Duchess of Alba (The Black Duchess) only through amateur copies or cheap photographs of less-than-famous actresses dressed as majas.

Fortunately, right there on Audubon Terrace in the Hispanic Society's South Building across the way is the real Goya maja, arguably the signature artwork of this undeservedly obscure institution. I myself years ago had made a pilgrimage to Washington Heights to see the Duchess. Or was it to see the El Grecos?

Divorce on Parade

Many art lovers, whether tourists or local repeat visitors, go to museums for signature artworks. If art is merely loaned out piecemeal here and there -- as patron Eli Broad has now decided will be the case with his 2000-item collection, most of which many assumed would go to LACMA -- it is unmoored, divorced from any consistent institutional context and will not really belong to the public.

You go to MoMA to see Manet's Water Lilies or a particular Mondrian. Or you need your Picasso fix. You go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see The Bride Stripped Bare By Bachelors, Even. Or maybe not. Not everyone "owns" the same paintings, but there are certain artworks that are emblems of certain institutions.

So where's the art? Who's got the art? Here and there and everywhere, or in storage. Or constantly on the road, which can't be good for the art. Foundations are quirky entities.

In terms of the Broad "scandal," as others have pointed out, artists need to beware of the "private foundation Catch-22." Sales are sales, of course, but a foundation can dump artworks on the market with impunity. Museums at least have a stake in not exposing their mistakes or their need for ready cash in a hot market. Most museums have or should have clear guidelines for their deaccession committees.

I am not saying that Broad will dump artworks; he doesn't need to. But there is always the next $20 million art bargain just around the corner, and other retired moguls have been known to go for the deal they cannot afford to pass up. Buying and selling is a high.

If Broad really believes in art, he should really start his own museum and make it free to the public. And endow it well enough so that it stays free. Where are the Andrew Carnegies of art? Andrew Carnegie set up free public libraries all across America.

Although the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art at LACMA is set to open thanks to Broad's $60 million, galleries are naming opportunities for additional donors. For a mere $10 million, Marc and Jane Nathanson will get a gallery named after them. Further happy news: It was just announced that Zaha Hadid will be the architect for the forthcoming Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at the University of Michigan. Broad's $26 million covers a little more than half the cost.

Can Art Be Divorced From $$$?

I am usually divorced from these art-world topics, but they keep intruding like unwanted auction news. It used to be that show business was everybody's business. Now art is.

And while I am at it, I am also fed up with all the praise being heaped upon the now retiring Philippe de Montebello. I suspect his rise to power and his 30-year tenure as director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has something to do with the hatred accrued by predecessor Thomas Hoving. De Montebello has managed to add some exhibition spaces to the museum and straightened out others. He did the basics: kept the institution from collapse, lawsuits, and outright scandals. He had the good sense to return some stolen artworks to Italy.

But I would like to remind all Artopians of the following: (1) He has never really supported modern and contemporary art. (2) As the Met's CEO, he has been responsible for annual operating deficits that have recently run as high as $3 million. (3) He oversaw and actively defended the constantly increasing admission price, which is now $20. This tithe is "voluntary," but it is not readily perceived as such by most visitors.

I did a little research:

Until 1941, the Met charged admission only one or two days a week. In 1940, the admission was 25 cents on Mondays and Fridays. From 1941 to 1979 it was totally free. Those were the glory days, the democratic days.

In 1970, under Hoving, a regular admission of $1.50 was instituted.

I remember how angry I was when the Met started charging admission. It was like having to pay to get into your own living room. I had very little money, but was hungry for art. I suppose I could have paid $1.50 by skipping lunch, but on principle I never shelled out more than a Rockefeller dime, which was the old man's customary sign of largesse.

Five years later, under de Montebello, admission was increased to $1.75. It was $6 in 1993; in 1999 it went from $8 to $10. Oh, yes, said Philippe back then, they had lost some money once promised by the Reader's Digest heir. Oh, the fickle rich. And then in 2006, admission moved from $15 to $20.

The Whitney and the Brooklyn museums were once free too. As for MoMA, we never expected it to be free. The rumor was that when old man Rockefeller was asked by his daughter-in-law Abby Aldrich if they should charge admission to her new museum, he answered that no one would appreciate the art if they didn't.

If we pay $20 to look at art, is it better than the art we can see for free? And if so, would a $40 ticket make the art look twice as good?

I think free art looks better because you have more time to look at it. You don't have to rush through to get your money's worth. You know, if it's two o'clock, I must be in the Greek and Roman Galleries. If it's three, I must have already covered the Renaissance.

Therefore:

If I am elected mayor of New York on the Pro-Art Barnett Newman Party ticket, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is housed in a city-owned museum and receives free heating and electricity, will be free to all, with no challenges like the tiny Pay What You Want But Pay Something sign. The hard-working citizens of New York and even the tourists on their Euro spree already pay their share by way of the city sales tax.

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Santa Babies

One Saturday before Christmas after my merry rounds uptown, searching here and there in galleries for art rather than looking at art, I was on my way back to my East Village lair, when....

I was treated to the spectacle of multiple Santas. They were hanging out on historic St. Mark's Place. This uncomely but vital boulevard, once the home of the Dom and Andy Warhol's Plastic Floating Inevitable, is now a battleground between bustling tattoo parlors (Whatever Tattoo, Dots NY, et al.) and serenely empty, mostly Asian, supermodern fast-food franchises, looking like beta versions of concepts ready to take over the post-dining world: Good Dog, Very Berry, T Kettle, Pinkberry. BAM Automat is the exception. It's a glistening stand-up with little coin-liberated windows offering slider-size burgers, corn dogs, macaroni and cheese, fried Spam, and the $2 grilled cheese sandwiches that are much too much my favorite grab.

The largest gaggle of Santas, however, was in front of a bar near Kim's, my essential video provider. Santas not outside the saloon smoking were inside hoisting tankards of beer or throwing back the potent contents of shot glasses. It obviously takes a great deal of liquid reinforcement to parade around in a Santa suit in broad daylight. My digital at hand, I snapped away. I don't know if this was before or after the Santas were instructed by text-messaging to dance their brains out further east in Tompkins Square, where once in the Roaring '60s there was a Be-In.

I had experienced my first SantaCon, which is short for Santa Conference, the performance form that generated Flash Mobs. I have been so enthralled by the official art world -- the scandals, the auctions, the cash piles and the career crashes -- that I had remained blissfully unaware of SantaCons, or what I would prefer to call Santa Swarms. They are of suspicious origin, but apparently date back to 1994 and are arguably the precedents for Flash Mobs, which are even more suspect.

So once I found SantaConNYC on the internet I immediately hatched a plan to join up next year and, clad in Santa drag, as an Artopia spy, get the inside dope. Unfortunately, the august New York Times, ever ready to destroy new art by labeling it a trend, scooped me with "Naughty Santa Reveals All." Well, not quite all. Is it really true that most SantaCon Santas have not met before? Has romance among Santas bloomed? Do you get to keep your Santa togs? Are there repeat offenders? Do any of the Santas know they are making art? And since Santa Conferences have been going on for at least 13 years, does Santa Swarming run in families? I also wonder if Kris Kringles participate in other Flash Mobs?

Once I started Googling, I couldn't stop.

On the SantaCon website I count 65 official SantaCons this year: not only in New York and San Francisco, but also Asheville and Philadelphia. Not only in London, Munich, and Paris, but also Bangkok, Mumbai, and Phnom Penh.

If you still not have had your fill of Bad Santas, for more images and the full N.Y.C. itinerary go to this site.

There are now Zombie Mobs every year. This Flash Mob variant had its origin in San Francisco, that city known for its seriousness and good taste.

And Pillow Fight Swarms worldwide.

Nomenclature

The term Flash Mob has been around since 2003. That indisputable source of all factoids, Wikipedia, credits Bill Wasik (a senior editor of Harper's Magazine!) with launching the first Flash Mob (according to Wasik himself), which seems to have involved getting hundreds of young men and women to go through the motions of purchasing an expensive rug at Macy's.

Flash Mobs happen in a flash. They are inexplicable, so they are sometimes referred to as Inexplicable Mobs.

Not only are they public, anonymous and quick, they have to be senseless. Participants are instructed by e-mail, cell phones, or text-messaging.

What I dislike about the terms is not the "Flash" or the "Inexplicable," but the "Mob." It all sounds criminal and/or mindless, which may have been Wasik's intention, since he seems to have wanted to make fun of disaffiliated youth or D. Y.'s on a spree.

Since most Flash Mob organizers insist on appropriate respect for persons and property, which is a good way to keep out of jail, I prefer the less negative Swarm and Swarming. But Mob, I admit, does have a certain Jimmy Cagney frisson.

Although they are mostly apolitical and do not involve igniting stuffed manikins, Flash Mobs may have a darker, historical origin: the Anglo-Saxon tradition of effigy-burning while dressed up in costumes, once adopted by unfairly treated tinsmiths, tailors, and the like, in pre-Draft Riot, pre-Santa New York City. I have been reading Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class (1788-1859) and found this toss-off reference to antebellum protest.

Nevertheless, no matter what the deeper genesis or whatever the nomenclature, SantaCon -- at least in Artopia -- is the origin of all Flash Mobs and Swarms, and not some editor of Harper's. It is about time we gave the Santas their due.

Drop Till You Shop: It's the Idea That Counts.

Another Christmas-appropriate art form is Shopdropping.
It is, as the clever name implies, the opposite of shoplifting. Handmade merchandise, replicas, and altered products are inserted next to the real things in stores to surprise, politicize and/or aestheticize the unwary shopper (or checkout clerk).

There has already been an exhibition of Shopdropping at the Pond Gallery in San Francisco in 2005.

Zoe Sheehan Saldana, upon the occasion of her show at real Art Ways in Hartford, had her 10 minutes of fame, courtesy of the N.Y. Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She made and inserted exact copies of Wal-Mart clothes, later exhibiting the originals along with photos of her facsimiles.

But Is It Art?

Are Swarms or Flash Mobs art? Well, they certainly allow the free play of signifiers and thus participation/co-creation by interpretation -- both sure signs of modernism/postmodernism. Art historical anchors are Actions, Events, Happenings, Performances, Kusama's nude street extravaganzas, or the more individualistic and elitist Street Works of 1969. However, a few cues are missing. Authorial attribution is scant. Signs of artistic intention, such as direct address of art media and art audiences, are virtually non-existent. So far there is nothing for sale. And luckily there has been no institutional ratification.

At this point, my feeling is that Swarms are closer to celebrations, pageants, and parades, than to signed art, but they are art in the largest, if not the highest, sense.

Well, I take that back. Why not highest? Like Mardi Gras floats, Halloween parades, Christmas lights, and roadside memorials, they are art of, by and for the people -- in this case mostly young and cyber-savvy, not all of them male.

Little of this applies to Shopdropping, which is usually not collective. Although Shopdropping can be aligned to Appropriation Art, and like Swarms is seriously interventionist, the shopdropper is looking over his or her shoulder at the art world. I do not mean this as a condemnation, but as a description. Normal paradoxes therefore come into play and irony has its day.

When Flash Mobs swarm into stores and malls, they are not unrelated to Shopdropping. Context is all. An example would be the Shirtless Flash Mob, perpetuated by Charlie Todd's ImprovEverywhere. On October 13, at Abercrombie & Fitch, Fifth Avenue, over 100 young men took off their shirts. Here we have an "author." And we certainly have a critique of advertising and shopping.

Abercrombie is noted for its successful ads and photo-décor of hairless, bare-chested, gym-boys with perfect pecs. In the web-photos, the contrast between real guys and the homoerotic youths depicted in the Abercrombie campaign is telling. Unanswered, of course, is the question of why such depictions successfully sell clothes to young men of all persuasions. I guess for somewhat the same reasons that skinny fashion models sell clothes to women of all sizes. Who you REALLY are is not important, but who you want to be is what counts.

* * *

Shopdropping According to Jonathan Swift

Artists, I fear, have upon occasion Shopdropped their art into galleries and museums. Some are now wanted by the art police, some are in art jail, some are still getting away with it. I will not mention names.

In 1958, James Lee Byars (1932-97) debuted in New York City with a paperwork in an empty MoMA stairwell. Reportedly it only lasted a few hours and was approved by the highly respected curator, Dorothy Miller. Since it did not go through regulation channels and was unpublicized -- but most likely went unseen by the public -- is this an early example of Shopdropping?

And what do you with Giorgio de Chirico, who faked his own earlier work, "dropping" into the art market 18 backdated versions of his 1918 The Disquieting Muse? How do you handle a venerated abstractionist who delivered still-wet, freshened versions of his old paintings to his museum retrospective? Were these also just more sophisticated versions of Shopdropping?

Dots used to appear next to artworks. Red meant sold; half-a-red or a blue signified reserved. Now the truth can be told: some dots were fakes. This intervention -- whether perpetrated by the artists themselves, gallerists, or strangers -- must have gotten out of hand, because nowadays dots are nowhere to be seen. Maybe this is an effort to give art shops the aura once attached to museums.

I think the red dot system should be embraced again, but by art museums. Because exhibitions are expensive and government funding is scarce, most museums contract to keep a percentage of sales of artworks. In order to help museums with their bottom lines, I also suggest that price lists be readily available, just as New York State law requires of for-profit galleries.

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As Far As The Mind Can See

While sauntering through the fourth floor of the Whitney ("Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE," 945 Madison Avenue, through February 10), I was jotting down words in my notebook. The person I was with said: I can tell which ones you like by where you stop and write down the titles. You like the early pieces that involve something physical.

Right.

My favorite: A 36" x 36" removal to the lathing of support wall or plaster or wallboard from a wall (1968); closely followed by A wall cratered by a single shot-gun blast (1968).

Here is Weiner's 1969 "Statement of Intent":

1. The artist may construct the work.
2. The work may be fabricated.
3. The work need not be built.

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

Although this loaded statement now seems like a Condition of Sale decree, at the time it was almost a call to arms, both extending Minimalism into contradictory anticapitalist realms and criticizing art's market profile. Or so it seemed to me.

Now it looks like just another avant-garde test or tweak. Nevertheless, by no account is Weiner considered a raving commercial success. I will give him that. But works are for sale, works are sold. I am not sure there is much of an auction record yet, but at least the adventurous collector can sport a green badge of courage.

Most of the art in the current retrospective consists of Statements, artworks that are manifested only as words. The words can be on manhole covers, as in front of the Whitney (IN DIRECT LINE WITH ANOTHER & THE NEXT, 2000), across the top of the Whitney building (AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE, in yellow letters outlined in red), or the untitled take-what-you-want pad (1970), credited to the collection of H. & N. Daled, that offers, on separate oracular sheets: RIGHT OF CENTER; MIDDLE OF THE ROAD; AND LEFT OF CENTER.

Most of the art surveyed, however, consists of words stuck to walls, e.g. FERMENTED, WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE. AT SOME GREEN TIME. TO THE EXTENT OF HOW DEEP THE VALLEY IS AT SOME GIVEN TIME. A GLACIER VANDALIZED.....

There are too many words, too many artworks on each wall, in too many colors, in too many sizes of type.

We love words, but we like them naked.

I left thinking that the exhibition should have taken up all floors of the Whitney. The words and sentences could have been allowed to breathe; the instructions would have had space to grow in your imagination. The words do not have to be deployed at angles, in color. They can speak for themselves. As I left I couldn't help imagining the same words -- which singly can be very effective -- in some vast Dia-like display; one piece to a wall.

Since I am a poet (as well as critic, artist, etc.) I am attracted to words. I like the way they look, sound, feel, along with how they mean various things. Words are not immaterial. Contrary to the long-forgotten cultic language therapy of General Semantics, words are things.

Weiner is not a poet. He actually thinks he is saying something with his words: that art need not be any more material then letters on a wall. He is right, of course, because art is not what it is materially, but what it does.

How do Weiner's words relate to Aram Saroyan's severely reductive, one-word poems of the 1960s? These were recently reprinted by Ugly Duckling Press, in their Lost Literature Series, as Aram Saroyan: Complete Minimal Poems. One reviewer was enthusiastic about the 12 minutes of reading time this 280 pager requires. Some will prefer the trickier poems, like the National Endowment Award-winning "lighght." But I prefer the severity of "Shakespeare!" "guarantee," "Judd..." (!), and "oxygen." Saroyan once published a "book" of poetry that was all empty pages and took the form of a ream of blank typewriter paper.

Words in art are not an issue. There are sometimes words in Cubist paintings, in the early work of Marsden Hartley, and certainly in Stuart Davis. And then in Pop Art too, when the comics are appropriated, as in early Warhol and all of Roy Lichtenstein.

Words as art is something else. Weiner's instruction pieces are not a problem, because there is something physical that completes the picture: a hole in the wall, a stain on the floor. My solution to the problems posed by the wallworks is that Weiner's words are not in themselves the artworks; instead they are instructions or hints meant to stimulate various kinds of mental activities, some of them quite abstract.

The obverse universe is made of poems that are not printed out, but are spoken from a score or, in the case of my own "whisper poem," according to an instruction: for instance, "Whisper the following into someone's ear or into the ears of many different people, one at a time, at a gathering of any kind, the phrase: no one is drowning in the beautiful lake." I performed this in 1967 at a poetry event (Michael Benedikt, John Giorno, and myself) in the chapel of the former orphanage that was then Robert Rauschenberg's New York studio.

* * *

Kara Walker at the Whitney too is also worth seeing, for a different kind of politics -- more overt. Walker continues to address racism and sexism through silhouettes that are blunt and sometimes lewd, befitting the subject matter. My only criticism is that by ironically exploiting the Victorian and extremely ladylike silhouette tradition - exploding it with irony, as it were --- Walker is more or less locked into cliché images of the Deep South. We do not take this to mean that racism existed only in 19th-century Mississippi, Alabama, etc., but one now begins to wonder if the silhouette leaves the North and the present too much off the hook. Agitprop does not work by implication.

The Building Is New, But Is the Art?

Yes, I have visited the New Museum's new Sejima and Nishizawa building in the Lower East Side (235 The Bowery at Prince). The building is as striking as its photographs: irregularly stacked "cubes" of different sizes. The insides are yet to be proved. The narrow and I assume heavily U.V. protected, sliver-like skylights on each floor are unnecessary. They do not abate the claustrophobia inherent in the closed, or nearly closed, rooms. In fact, they only tantalize. They remind you that you are in fact in a closed space. We do not like the fluorescent lighting at all. If they do not flicker perceptibly now, they will. And in any case, it's a bit like being in the Whole Foods basement on Union Square. (There is fluorescent lighting there, too.) The difference at the New Museum is that the food has been removed.

And the exhibition? There are some outstanding works here and there in "Unmonumental," but the universal scale - taller than persons, but not by much; or smaller -- and the casual jumble of materials wears everything down. The exhibition looks like a solo retrospective of an artist who has looked too long (but not hard enough) at Rauschenberg's combines a