February 2007 Archives

Bracketology run wild: Pick your curatorial final four. I've got Rugoff, Schimmel, Tsai and Higgs. (But the bracket is missing Auping, Zelevansky, Fogle, Grynsztejn and plenty of others.)

In recent years we've seen curators realize a number of artworks conceived -- but not made -- by artists before they died. The most prominent of these projects is Nancy Spector's realization of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres for the U.S. pavilion in the upcoming Venice Biennale. The Venice presentation will "feature a never-before-realized work in the entrance courtyard of the Pavilion: two adjoining reflecting pools that form a figure eight, the sign of infinity, as both a silent mirror on our collective culture and a beacon of hope," wrote Spector in her show proposal. FG-T originally designed the piece for the sculpture park at Western Washington University.

This week MAN will feature Q&As with Spector, Hirshhorn director Olga Viso, and Andrea Rosen Gallery FG-T guru Michelle Reyes on realizing the unrealized. Today: Nancy Spector.

MAN: How's the run-up to Venice looking?

NS: We're pretty much on track. We're still waiting for some loan forms to be returned, we're fund raising actively. Other than that, we're ready. It's right around the corner.

When creating an unrealized work of art, a piece that an artist conceived before his/her death, do you have a set thought process through which you work in deciding whether or not to make the artwork, or is it entirely artist-specific?

I think it depends on the artist, that frame of mind. Felix [has] a whole list of possible materials you can use to realize a piece, which is the case for the stacks and the candies. But for the pools, it's not really the same, salvaging a decaying medium.

In my Q&A with Hirshhorn director Olga Viso (coming tomorrow), she talked about how she considers this question similar to the questions conservators face after an artist's death, how to maintain the integrity of the artwork as the artist intended it.

I don't know if it's a conservation question but a question of trying to stay as true to intent and aesthetics. I guess that's what conservators do too. It's working forwards and not working backwards. Maybe for certain artists it's closer to a conservation problem.

We have something here [at the Gugg] called the variable media initiative which has become in conservation circles and in digital art circles a well-known process that's being shared by a network of museums. It really deals with re-fabricatable work or work that has components that will become obsolete. And we do extensive interviews with living artists about how they can imagine their work migrating to different forms or emulating different forms or making the charge that there would be a point where it can't be exhibited anymore. Take, for example, Jenny Holzer's use of LED signs: She could, in theory, say you can't use new technology, which is actually not the case but you get the idea...

We didn't have a conversation with him about this piece, but his work has served as a case study. What do you do when the candy is no longer made? When the company is going out of business, which is happening. For obvious reasons, you can't stockpile candies. What's most important: The color? The shape? Each candy piece of Felix's, I think you can reduce it to one of those things. In some case it was flavor and color... Those are things that we deal with in talking to our conservators.

As we get into re-evaluating conceptual-heavy artists of the 1970s and 1980s, is this going to become an emerging trend, a question that we examine more and more often?

I would say for me it's case by case, because it's not something that I would plan on doing. Or really see myself as a curator who would take that on on a regular basis This is a very specific situation where I'd worked with him during his lifetime, and I knew this unrealized work and I knew that I wanted to make this proposal to Venice and having this element that had not yet been seen by the public.

This is not something I'd do with an artist's having not had experience working with the artist personally. I don't want to say never, but the realization of the Smithson barge: I don't think any of those curators had worked directly with Robert Smithson (though obviously Nancy Holt had). But for me it was much more coming out of some confidence of having many, many, long conversations with Felix and knowing that there is this re-fabricatable aspect of his work and that there is no one way with materials. As with the stacks and the candies, the pools exist in a couple different sketches, They first appeared in 1992 as a proposal for Western Washington University. And then as part of a project in 1994 at the CAPC in Bordeaux. Both sketches are untitled and weren't given a subtitle.

That [Bordeaux proposal] involved a pool embedded in the ground indoors with a sound element, and at the same time he made sketches for an outside set of pools. The outdoor pools don't have a sound element. It's a motif, the touching circles, as you know with the clocks, the nickel silver rings, the edition he did with Patrick Painter.

What did he leave behind about the actual building of the piece, so to speak?

He left drawings and descriptions of different kinds of materials, from local stone to just stone to concrete, so it's kind of a variable range. The other things were dimensions for the diameter. And a suggestion of height. I'm researching the writings now, the correspondence between him and the curator in Bordeaux.

Will the artist's process be presented in any way, as part of the exhibition, in a catalogue, etc.?

We will probably not exhibit the sketches, which is the decision of the [Felix Gonzalez-Torres] Foundation. But I'm certainly going to write about the process in an essay for the catalogue because I think we should be very transparent about how we did it, the research and such in terms of what people will be looking at. There's also a reference to astronomical events [in his writings], and he'd he'd wanted an astronomer to write for the Bordeaux catalog.

This just arrived in my email. It made me spit water out my nose.

UPDATE: MoMA has a different sense of humor than I do -- the Holzer card is gone, alas. Paddy Johnson has some of it here.

On the Cusp lists the ten artists chosen for the Indianapolis Museum of Art's massive new art and nature park. It includes MANfaves Andrea Zittel and Los Carpinteros, as well as underrated DC/Richmondite Kendall Buster;

Watch the limos to see how Philippe de Montebello's reign will end at the Met?; and

SFMOMA has just unveiled a cool new website called A Hidden Picasso.

If you saw the Apple iPhone commercial during the Oscars you probably immediately thought Christian Marclay. The Apple ad appears to be a direct crib from Marclay's 1995 Telephones. (Various editions of the piece are owned by the Orange County Museum of Art and the Toledo Museum of Art. It's included in this YouTube clip.)

Previously: Nissan loves Matt Johnson. Ford loves Damien Ortega.

On Sunday the NYT Magazine's Arthur Lubow checks-in with a long profile of Jeff Wall. Justine Kurland shot a photo of Wall. Alec Soth discusses fine-art photographers and editorial assignments.

Glasstire has posted a provocative poll about the MoMA trustees/Glenn Lowry situation.

I'll be the first to use this groaner: This site is Wack.

But seriously: This is a new way of doing an exhibition website. It'll be interesting to see how it works/evolves....

UPDATED 3:43 EST: See below.

Two good Nashville Tennessean stories on the Fisk University art sale over the more-or-less weekend : First, Ralph Loos ties the Fisk sale to other university sales, including Thomas Jefferson's Eakins deal. And Jonathan Marx looks at whether Fisk is selling its O'Keeffe for dimes on the dollar.

Roberta Smith's smashing review of the MoMA/SFMOMA Jeff Wall show.

How toothless is the art "press?" Ionarts reports that MoMA boss Glenn Lowry was at a presser and wasn't even asked about his museum's shameful end-around tax law. Lee Rosenbaum reports that she sorta got Lowry to give her a kinda answer to a scandal-related question at an ADAA event. And that she made two attempts to get Lowry to talk. If LTB Media, Artforum, and the like went the way of the dodo, would anyone miss them? Heck, would anybody know?

I don't get this: Miami Art Museum director Terry Riley is back to avoiding the media on his institution's merger with Miami Art Central. (It seems to me that if you're a museum director and you're making a major change to your city's art scene that you should step up and tak about it. Riley has refused to talk to MAN about the merger, and now he's refused to talk with one of his town's alt-weeklies.) The other news in this Omar Sommereyns SunPost story is that MAM is essentially shutting down MAC's exhibition programming. Maybe that explains part of why a new signer of this letter is out-of-town kunsthalle director Terrie Sultan (Houston's Blaffer Gallery).

LA Weekly scribe Doug Harvey ponders the Getty's forthcoming Tim Hawkinson show. Harvey also says that Hawkinson's recent survey was fantastic... but strangely fails to mention that he wrote for the catalogue. UPDATE: Editor Tom Christie tells me Harvey included this and that he edited it out.

Ten days ago MAN broke the story that the de Young is only the second art museum in the world to take the infamous AEG King Tut show. I also reminded you why art museums had avoided the show as if it were a Thomas Kinkade show -- until John Buchanan foolishly took the show for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Here are five shows that the de Young should be giving San Francisco instead of insulting it by using city property to enrich a private corporation:

Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series: It's time for this show. FAMSF owns one of the best, too. Maybe the de Young and LACMA should organize it together -- this show is near the top of shows LACMA should be doing instead of 'contemporary glass.'

David Park retrospective: Twenty years ago Richard Armstrong organized a Whitney show of David Park paintings from the 1950s, and in 1977 the Oakland Museum gave Park a full retrospective. In recent years it's been evident that Park's influence on contemporary painting is alive and well: See Schutz, Dana.

Architects: Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, Bakewell & Brown: Three major California-based architectural biggies. The de Young should probably do all three.

Clyfford Still retrospective: Abstract expressionism was quite possibly born in the East Bay shipyards where Still worked during World War II. Maybe the de Young and the Clyfford Still Museum should partner to tell that story.

Mel Ramos retrospective: Just for fun.

With the art world doing the NYC fairs today, MAN will be nearly dark. (There's one PoN post coming up later today.) Good lineup of posts coming next week, including a three-day series of Q&As with Nancy Spector, Olga Viso and Michelle Reyes. The topic: With Spector's Venice Biennale presentation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres coming up, what goes into decisions to create (or not) the unrealized work of a deceased artist?

Each day this week I'll spotlight one female artist that didn't make the cut in Kirk Varnedoe's Pictures of Nothing, a story of abstract art that is unfortunately heavy on white, male New Yorkers. Previously: Alma Thomas, Lee Bontecou.

You had to know I was going to post about Anne Truitt this week, right? I've written plenty about Truitt before, especially about how Truitt's home region likely influenced her work. And MAN was also the first to tell you about the Hirshhorn's upcoming Truitt retrospective.

This is MoMA's Catawba, from 1962.

In this morning's post (below) I suggested that Dia and Lead Pencil Studio get together. The Stranger's Jen Graves notes that there is already a link between the Seattle-based duo and Dia.

With the selection of National Gallery of Art curator Jeffrey Weiss as its next director, one of the art world's favorite parlor games is renewed: Where in New York should Dia emerge?

As we know, Dia's Chelsea location shut down several years ago. Since then Dia has been without an NYC venue, though it's sprawling Beacon venue is a short, annual-pilgrimmage-length train ride away. So what should Dia do?

In theory it could re-open in Chelsea, though if that were a likelihood it seems as if Dia already would have done that. Therefore the options -- which exist only in my mind -- appear to be three: Emerge as the cultural anchor of the West Side railyards development, open in Brooklyn, and open in Long Island City. Unfortunately there's no NYC constituency for this, but I'd rather see a Dia:Los Angeles, a Beacon-type facility full of light-and-space art, earth art, and the like.

What else should be on Weiss' plate at Dia? Continuing the partnership between Dia and Chinati. Helping the Judd Foundation find its way. Dia's collection is embarrassingly short on women and it should address that. Given that Dia's key facilities are in Beacon and in the hinterlands of the American West, it should bring audiences in touch with its artists and artworks via the web, through podcasts, vblogs, and the like.

But most importantly it should return to commissioning bold, unlikely artworks from ambitious, talented young artists. If I were Jeffrey Weiss, I'd make an early phone call to Lead Pencil Studio, and then fund them to do something significant.

And I'm not impressed. Reason No. 1: AICA members don't have to have seen a show to vote for it to win an award. I wrote about my disinterest in the enterprise last September.

Related: Todd Gibson on the awards.

The cleverest critic of NYC museums is artist Filip Noterdaeme, whose take on the latest MoMA scandal is wicked smart. Funny visual + funny letter = cutting critique.

(Aside: The NYT op-ed page should run this as what it calls 'op-art'. I'm not expecting to hear from Michael Kimmelman on this MoMA mess, are you?)

Related: Noterdaeme's Homeless Museum.

Each day this week I'll spotlight one female artist that didn't make the cut in Kirk Varnedoe's Pictures of Nothing, a story of abstract art that is unfortunately heavy on white, male New Yorkers. Yesterday: Alma Thomas.

In recent years curators have rushed to recognize overlooked artists who happen to be female. Elizabeth Smith's Lee Bontecou retrospective was one and it's been/being followed by Ruth Asawa, Joan Mitchell, Anne Truitt, Cecilia Beaux and probably a few I'm forgetting.

And who didn't learn a lot from Smith's Bontecou show? Bontecou's late-50s/early-60s wall-mounted sculptures are full of drama, allusion to violence and militarism. The Bontecou shown here is MoMA's superb untitled piece from 1961.

None of the artists in LACMA's Magritte & Friends show is as close to the exhibit's central Magritte as Jeff Koons.

We haven't visited this show in a while, so here's a quick catching-up: LACMA owns Magritte's most famous painting, The Treachery of Images. (You know the one: Underneath a painted pipe Magritte writes This is not a pipe.)

Koons isn't just the artist in the show most closely related to Treachery, his best work is a direct descendant. My favorite Koons is Lifeboat, a bronze sculpture from 1985. It's a half-scale, true-to-reality lifeboat, complete with oars. It's Koons' first great piece, possibly because it touches on his autobiography. (The piece is emblematic of the struggle for many '80s East Village-based artists. Art was a way out of the East Village, a way to move up to, say, the Upper East Side -- where Koons now lives. For Koons, the lifeboat provided escape. Many other artists simply sank.)

But of course it's no more a lifeboat than Magritte's pipe was a pipe. The only conceptual difference between the Koons and the Magritte is a line of text.

Having found a formula, Koons stuck with it and he has repeated himself for the better part of two decades. (Who can blame him? This is his best work.) Puppy is not a puppy. Balloon Flower is not a balloon, it is not a flower, and it is not a balloon flower. Cracked Egg is not an egg (and it's not cracked either, actually). The Made in Heaven series is not porn, it's, well, deflating. This is not a New Hoover Deluxe Rug Shampooer, it's art.

Which brings us to Koons' LACMA fantasy. It's Magritte-ian too: Trains move horizontally, not vertically. And I've never seen one head straight into a tar pit.

Who says that Calder-ian modernism can't be cute?

Each day this week I'll spotlight one female artist that didn't make the cut in Kirk Varnedoe's Pictures of Nothing, a story of abstract art that is unfortunately heavy on white, male New Yorkers.

I've considered myself an Alma Thomas fan since I moved East. (There isn't much Thomas in California museums.) I think the first Thomas I saw was Baltimore's Evening Glow and I was instantly hooked. (The image here is SAAM's Autumn Leaves Fluttering in the Breeze.)

But I've always considered her a certain kind of artist, someone you had to be willing to consider rather than someone you had to consider. A year ago that changed. The Hirshhorn has long devoted most of a gallery to the work of Agnes Martin. About a year ago curator Anne Ellegood replaced one Martin with a Thomas, Sky Light. To my surprise, the Thomas more than held its own, it commanded the room.

Note: I'm on jury duty today. I'm auto-posting and email replies will be much-delayed.

Non-profit institutions make two kinds of mistakes: Sometimes they err in how they treat their audience. Call it the middle-down breach of trust. The other mistake is in how the museum treats the law, be it state, federal, or rules made by by governing associations to which the museum belongs. Call it the middle-up breach of trust. When you have an institution that makes both kinds of mistakes it's time to question the quality of that institution's management, from its trustees down through senior staff.

Stephanie Strom's slobberknocker in last Friday's NYT reveals that MoMA is up to its fifth floor in problems. The Strom story indicates that MoMA -- or at least three trustees -- have decided that that IRS rules on the disclosure of executive compensation don't apply to it. (In a related story: How'd you like to be the MoMA employee or trustee who signed your Hancock to one of those 1995-2003 tax filings? Either you signed, knowing that the compensation figures in the return were inaccurate -- or you were hung out to dry.)

The problems that MoMA has with its audience are just as head-shaking. Exhibit A is the Armando Reveron show currently on view at the museum. Reveron is not in the top rank of Latin American modernists due U.S. retrospectives. He ranks somewhere well behind Clark, Matta, Gego and Soto. Joaquin Torres-Garcia hasn't received an American retro in almost 40 years. So why Reveron? Might it have something to do with MoMA trustee Patricia Phelps de Cisneros? She has the largest private collection of Reverons. A former curator of hers 'consulted' on the show. I think I have an idea of why Reveron got the retro.

MoMA's other breaches with its audience have been discussed her at length in recent years, so I'll just quickly list them here: dumb deaccessioning, the $20 admissions price, opening a new building with a kiss to UBS, the frankly pathetic sell-out to Pixar (a show that MoMA curated... and that Pixar managed after it left NYC). None of these is as earth-shattering an error as those revealed on Friday, but combined they demonstrate that MoMA is governed more by hubris than by common sense.

In the wake of a scandal such as the one engulfing MoMA now, it's easy to call for the head of the director. That's not a real solution here -- not when trustees are involved in so many of MoMA's missteps. But it's obvious that MoMA director Glenn Lowry can't fix these problems -- he's too personally indebted to the three trustees who set up his $5.4 million fund for a Lowry-involved investigation to have any integrity. And the compensation issue is hardly the only MoMA problem that deserves examination.

So here's what I think should happen: First, Lowry should stop ducking questions. He should call a press conference and answer whatever he's asked. It's better for MoMA if he chooses to talk to the press than if he has to talk to the Senate Finance Committee.

Then he and his board should convene a blue-ribbon panel of outside observers to examine how MoMA is being run. That panel should be charged with making recommendations about how MoMA can clean itself up and regain its institutional integrity. No one on the panel should have ties to anyone named Gund, Shapiro, Rockefeller, Lauder, or Lowry. (I know: It's gonna be a short list.) I'm thinking of people such as James Wood, Harry Parker, or Marc Wilson -- not an old boy's club but a men's council. (Given that some of the problems at MoMA are exhibition-specific, toss in a Michael Auping-type too.) That panel's report should be made open to the public and the board should accept its recommendations. If you're MoMA that's gotta be a better solution than potential investigations by the U.S. Senate or the State of New York.

MoMA is broken. It needs to be fixed.

Related: The Oregonian's DK Row makes a good point about how many museums augment directors' salaries -- and do it transparently.

This is today's only post. Enjoy the holiday...

NYTer Roberta Smith on NYC painting trying to keep on keepin' on;

This Mary Abbe Minneapolis Star Tribune story about Kara Walker coming to town features this line: "Kara Walker is unrelated to the museum's namesake, Minneapolis lumber baron Thomas Barlow Walker."

LATer Diane Haithman on Damien Hirst.

Also, two stragglers from Friday: James Tata digs a Swiss library in Oregon and Ian Hill picks an interior.

Robert Olsen: One of my favorite painter's favorite building would be in my top 15.

Daniel Flahiff: His third choice isn't too far from Andrea Zittel's desert HQ.

Jeff Jahn: Can a top-fiver be both great and gimmicky?

Jen Graves: Who needs right angles?

Mark Barry: Finally a lighthouse.

Marshall Astor: If California were to secede from the US, this building could be its Capitol?

Matthew Guerrieri: Skyscrapers then and now.

Edward Lifson: If I can pick the Gateway Arch, then Lifson can pick this?

Kriston Capps: Can unbuilt buildings make the list?

Last night MAN broke the story that the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has picked up the for-profit AEG King Tut show. It'll be at the de Young in 2009. (The other scandal of the day is in the post below this one.)

Because it's been almost two years since we discussed the folly of this show, a quick recap: This version of Tut was not organized by a museum, but by two private, for-profit corporations: AEG Live (which owns London's Millennium Dome and produces Celine Dion's Las Vegas stage show) and Arts and Exhibitions International. National Geographic is the exhibit's educational partner.

I love this quote: "I'm not sure there's so much difference between Tutankhamun and Celine Dion," AEG head Tim Leiweke told USA Today in 2005.

The AEG Tut show has no scholarly merit. It doesn't belong in a respectable art museum. Instead, it should be in a venue such as, oh, I don't know... London's Millenium Dome. As coincidence would have it, that's the London venue for the show.

Yes, the august de Young Museum is now sharing a spectacle with a venue that has hosted the Nintendo Pokemon Championships, the Miss World beauty pageant, and which was recently used as a homeless shelter. Justin Timberlake will re-open the Dome with a concert before King Tut arrives. Apparently the de Young considers the Millenium Dome more of a peer institution than, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Next at FAMSF: Celine Dion's dresses?

First, don't miss the MAN excloo in the post below this one. And the Hartford Courant is following MAN on another story that was here first.

Then don't miss the slobberknocking story by Stephanie Strom in this morning's NYT about MoMA's secret Glenn Lowry cash stash.

The fascinating side-story: Super-collector and super-trustee Agnes Gund seems to find herself on scandal-plagued boards again and again. Gund was on the Getty Trust board while Barry Munitz drove the institution off a cliff (in a Porsche Cayenne), Gund has been on the Barnes board while that organization fritters away any credibility it once had, and Gund was one of two MoMA trustees who set up Lowry's quiet money.

Only on MAN: The Anschutz Entertainment Group's for-profit extravaganza, King Tut, has a new U.S. stop: San Francisco's de Young Museum. FAMSF spokesperson Barbara Traisman confirmed that the pay (and pay and pay and pay)-for-view extravaganza will arrive in the Bay Area in 2009.

Tut is currently on view at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia through September, and then in London from November through an unspecified date. It has previously been on view at LACMA, at the Fort Lauderdale Museum and at the Field Museum in Chicago. The de Young is only the second major art museum in the world to allow AEG to profit from their visitors and from their space.

The addition of the Tut $how to FAMSF's exhibition schedule is director John Buchanan's first major misstep. The de Young is one of America's best-attended art museums, and the re-opening of the de Young in Golden Gate Park is one of the more substantial triumphs in recent American museumdom. The de Young doesn't need Tut.

Furthermore, the city of San Francisco supplies about 30 percent of FAMSF's budget and the city owns the buildings that house the de Young and the Legion of Honor. Here's hoping that San Francisco's Board of Supervisors examines why FAMSF is handing city-owned galleries in a city-owned building to a private company owned by a right-wing billionaire.

(Buchanan's de Young persists in a milder misstep: visually destroying an important piece of California art.)

AEG's Tut show is best-known for being attached to a string of embarrassments: AEG & Co. bought a billboard in Times Square advertising Tut as "The King of Bling" (What did the rental galleries known as American museums get out of this? Zip.) LACMA charged $102.50 for some tickets to the exhibition -- and this after allowing museum employees to see the show only once, at 7am on a Saturday. In Fort Lauderdale, AEG's political connections likely ensured that $1 million of public money was spent "improving" the museum so that AEG could make more money by sending more bodies through the show. I wonder what San Francisco will contribute to this list...

Looks like it's on again: Yesterday we found out that Marti Mayo is leaving the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Today: Word that Willard Holmes is leaving the Wadsworth Atheneum.

Links to your five favorite works of architecture tomorrow at noon. Don't forget to make sure I can see them in Technorati.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is moving toward having a complete set of Big Germans. It already owned works by Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth -- and it has recently purchased Candida Hofer's 2005 Igreja de Sao Francisco de Assis, Salvador Bahia II. (The image above is courtesy Sonnabend Gallery.)

At about six-by-eight feet, the PMA's new Hofer is one of the photographer's largest images. It portrays the interior of a Baroque church in the colonial city of Bahia in northeast Brazil.

My favorite feature of Hofer's interiors is that they don't lead the viewer into the image so much as they make the viewer feel engulfed by it. There's a down-and-back quality to many of Hofer's photographs: The eye goes down to the end of a room... and then Hofer brings the eye back to the viewer. This effect might be most evident in Hofer's libraries.

Philadelphians should be plenty familiar with Hofer: A retrospective of her work, Architecture of Absence, touched down at the Philly ICA last year. The biggest thing I took away from that show was that Hofer's smaller images were stronger than her massive ones. The compositions hold together better, the colors, lines, everything was more intense. So I'm curious to see whether I think the same about Philly's Hofer, which is bigger than I am.

Up until now I've written about artists that I think should have been included in Kirk Varnedoe's Pictures of Nothing but weren't -- artists who don't fit Varnedoe's apparently favored mostly white, male, NYCers. But this post is about an artist I've had a hard time knowing what to do with: Nathan Oliveira.

For about a decade in the late 1950s and '60s, Oliveira made some of the most commanding, haunting, mysterious paintings in America. (I wrote about Oliveira's retrospective in 2003.) He was a major American painter: Oliveira was included in Peter Selz's New Images of Man show, for example.

After that show, MoMA bought one of Oliveira's paintings, 1959's Standing Man with Stick. It's a fascinating image, an on-canvas battle between representation and abstraction played out directly on a suggested figure. You can't see it from this rather dreadful, over-bright, something's-screwy-here image (the only one I could find, sorry), but that paint on the figure is squeezed directly out of the tube onto a rough outline of a figure. Oliveira mashed it around, palette-kniffed it and pinched it into shape. It's a little oil paint sculpture right in the middle (literally) of the canvas. Standing Man is one of my 15 favorite paintings of the post-war era. Whenever Jerry Saltz writes about how MoMA gives us only the greatest hits of modern art and none of the depth, I think first of Standing Man with Stick.

This is how I wrote about Oliveira's figures for Artnet:

There is a temptation to see a certain Goldwater conservatism in these early Oliveiras: one man, liberty, individualism victorious! But that's not quite right -- these paintings are too stark to evoke thoughts of triumph. Instead of seeing the power of one man, these paintings make me wonder if one man has power.

Over and over again, Oliveira shows us a person, alone, suspended against a streaked haze. These figures are rarely tied to anything more substantial than a chair; instead they hover against an abstract background. The canvases are marked with brushwork, but the figures are the product of hands-on exertion: They are pinched, rubbed, molded, knifed, scratched out and scratched in. If there is individual triumph here, it is of the action-painter type, the creator conquering his canvas, his paints, his subject.

But after a ten-year period during which he made these figures, Oliveira gave them up and wandered into the wilderness of hunting-lodge art. Which makes it harder for us to know what to do with him. I don't know that Varnedoe should have included Oliveira, but when he didn't even mention Richard Diebenkorn or David Park (and when Clyfford Still gets only one dismissive paragraph), I know Oliveira never had a shot.

This is a little bit complicated: It seems likely that the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum will buy Fisk University's Radiator Building -- Night for $7 million, and that Fisk will sell Marsden Hartley's 1913 Painting No. 3 on the open market. Those two sales would take place only after a 30-day period in which Fisk will try to sell the paintings to a buyer that would pledge to keep them in Nashville. (Given Fisk's fundraising history: Don't hold your breath.)

The $7 million price that the O'Keeffe Museum represents a substantial discount on a 2005 appraisal of the painting. Back then Christie's appraised each painting at $8.5 million. (Why, in this art market, anyone is using a two-year-old appraisal is beyond me.)

The Jonathan Marx Tennessean story on all this is quite thorough. If you're interested in the ethical questions raised by deaccessioning and how people (from university presidents to attorneys general) deal with them, it's worth a look.

My love of art comes from my mom. I know that's not very specific, but it's the best I can do.

Mom painted watercolors. My grandmother's house is full of them: colorful, twisted trees on the California coast and brushy abstractions of the cats next door, especially the fat one, Big Bertha. The paintings I like best are her Sierra Nevada landscapes.

Something occurs to me as I write this: I don't remember seeing Mom paint. That's not to say that she only painted in the absence of us kids, or when my father wasn't around. It's just that I remember the family experiences that surrounded her painting instead.

Especially the Sierra watercolors. Each year we took a family vacation to Silver Lake, a quiet mountain retreat undiscovered by people who need second homes. From there we took near-daily ten and twelve mile hikes. For a boy who spent 50 weeks a year in a comfy suburb, hikes past a mountain of shale called Elephant's Back into backcountry territory known as the Desolation Wilderness was roughing it. Sometimes we saw marmots.

Mom liked something simpler: the light. Mom didn't paint traditional mountainscapes. She liked to take a short, two-mile hike to a puddle surrounded by vast sheets of granite. We generously called it Granite Lake. She painted it so much that my dad nicknamed her 'Janet Granite.'

My mother was hardly the first person to fall in love with the Sierra's exposed granite. John Muir, who thought of the Sierra as a father thinks of a son, called the high country the "Range of Light." Muir wasn't speaking metaphysically: The granite that covers much of the surface of the Sierra Nevada is shockingly white. Sierra granite is inlaid with xenoliths, highly-reflective crystals that magnify and bounce light back up into the ionosphere. The result is a blinding brightness that emanates not from above, but from the ground.

That whiteness is in all of Mom's Sierra landscapes. The paintings are straightforward compositions with straightforward mountain colors. Blue: Water. Green: Trees. Grey: Dead trees. Mom liked dead trees. But what's striking about Mom's watercolors is how she played with that white. She clearly noticed that watercolor paper hints at both the texture and the brightness of Sierra granite; her best Sierra watercolors are spare, empty, much unpainted. Sometimes she heightened that effect by using watery dabs of opaque black to suggest the lichen that grows on granite, or to reference the shiny black chunks of xenolith in the rock.

To me Granite Lake was a big zero. No dramatic mountaintop rose from it. The landscape was barren because trees could hardly put roots down into granite. Joan Didion wrote something that I think of when I look at one of Mom's granitescapes: Certain places seem to exist mostly because someone wrote about them. Didion was talking about Faulkner and Oxford, Mississippi, or Hemingway and Kilimanjaro. For me, Granite Lake exists only because Mom painted it.

I wish I remembered being around my mother when she was painting, but I don't. Watercolors aren't that exciting to a 10-year old kid, so when Mom was painting I was off skipping stones or searching for summer snowpack from which I could start a snowball fight.

Most of what I remember about Mom and art has to do with what she did before and after painting. I remember going with her to Bowers, a Burlingame, Calif. art supply store that had narrow aisles and two big glass windows in front. The woman who ran the place (Mrs. Bowers?) was so nice that I was embarrassed to go into the store -- I was too young to know how to be nice back.

I remember driving to nearby Belmont where Mom took painting classes. Mom went to grad school at Stanford and didn't need art lessons in a suburban community center, but she probably liked being around other artists. While she painted, I sat in the car, a 1979 VW camper bus with a pop-top, reading books about a boy detective named Encyclopedia Brown.

I don't remember our family going to art museums - except for once. When I was ten, my parents took me to a Juan Gris retrospective at the Berkley Art Museum. Actually, my mother went to the exhibit and, by virtue of me-too groupthink, the whole family tagged along. I was induced to peacefully participate through the promise of a trip to a family-friendly cheeseburgerie called Fat Albert's. They made really good milkshakes.

I don't know why I remember that day. I'm sure I'd been in a museum before - and that I didn't really like them. On a family trip to Kansas City, Mom had wanted to go to the Nelson-Atkins. "But Mom," I had said. "We have museums at home. You can see paintings there!" The Fat Albert's bribe was intended to prevent such outbursts.

But at the Gris show I looked at the art and asked Mom questions about it. I don't remember if she answered them. I was impressed with the quiet authority of paintings hanging on a wall, and with the reverent way people responded to them. (How could all those people stand so still?) I passed the time trying to find objects - faces, guitars, cups - in Gris and feeling pretty proud of myself when I found them. Odd: I know I wanted to go to Fat Albert's, and I'm sure we went there after the museum, but all I remember now is Juan Gris.

Gris was one of my mother's favorite artists. I have no idea why. Mom was no particular fan of Spanish art and she was no cubist. There is no discernable Juan Gris influence in any of her watercolors.

But for some reason Mom was adamant about buying the Gris catalog. I have no idea why she was so set on it, and I have even less of an idea why I remember that. But I do, perhaps because her insistence on buying the catalog made it clear that art mattered, that Gris' art really mattered, and that paintings weren't something you looked at and then forgot about. If you liked them, you bought a book about them. Then you read it over and over.

And read it she did. For months I saw the Gris catalog everywhere around the house - in the kitchen, on our back porch where Mom frequently painted, in our den. It had a black cover and Gris' name on it in big, silver letters. There was also a Gris painting on the cover - a cubist composition of a blue guitar-table of some sort. Sometimes, when she wasn't painting or doing mom things (Mawwwwm, I'm huuuuungry), I saw her pencil notes into the catalog.

I'll never know why mom liked Juan Gris, what she thought about the Berkley exhibit, or what she wrote in that catalog. Less than two years after that afternoon in Berkeley she was dead. Today is the twentieth anniversary of her death.

Years later I sent family members searching through houses and basements in an effort to find that catalog. Why did Gris matter to my mom? Why did any artist matter to her? Why painting? Why watercolors? Why art?

It's my own fault that we never found that Gris catalog. I didn't realize that it was important to me until I was back in Missouri and in college, when I realized that I wanted to go to the Nelson-Atkins after all.

This is an actual press release. I swear.

Rüsselsheim/Kassel - The Swedish premium brand Saab, one of the main sponsors of this year's documenta, delivered five exclusive Saab models to the event's organizers on Wednesday. Starting today, they are in use for the exhibition's preparation. Willi Fey, Managing Director of Saab Germany, presented the keys for a white Saab 9-3 Convertible to documenta's artistic director Roger M. Buergel...

"The presentation of these vehicles heralds the start for all those associated with the documenta," says Willi Fey. "With our individual, sporty and environmentally compatible cars, the documenta team can now set off on the home stretch of opening this year's exhibition. Embossed with the distinctive documenta logo, the models are really eye-catching."

Buergel draws a poetic image to describe the combination of color and form in his new company car, "Real coolness comes from within: on the outside, my car shows the formal elegance and effortlessness of a white cloud." By choosing a white Saab Convertibel, Buergel also happens to hit the "current color trend of premium class vehicles", as Willi Fey stated...

No sooner do I wonder, than... A Georgia O'Keeffe abstraction show just opened at the Norton in West Palm Beach. It will travel to the MIA and to the GO'K in Santa Fe.

A useful museum podcasts resource, complete with semi-tended blog.

Texas artzine Glasstire has a new site.

Prompted by AIA's rather bizarre list (blame the methodology, to which I can't link directly), these are my five favorite works of architecture in America, in order. One note: I'm only listing buildings that are publicly accessible (so no, say, Rick Joy houses in the wilds of Arizona):

Gateway Arch, St. Louis, MO. Eero Saarinen. I learned to love modern art under the Arch, America's greatest public artwork. If someone visiting the USA from abroad asked me what the most quintessentially American experience was, I'd tell them to go have a cold, adult, St. Louis-brewed product under the Arch on a summer evening, wander across I-70 into downtown to share a pre-Cards-game beer-and-a-brat with 40,000 red-clad St. Louisans, and then head into new Busch Stadium to watch the Cards take on the Cubs.

Dulles Airport, outside Washington, DC. Eero Saarinen. One of the great things about living in DC -- maybe the greatest -- is taking early morning flights out of Dulles, or flying into Dulles late at night. At those hours Saarinen's magnificent terminal is empty, a modernist lantern-cum-aircraft-wing. Even when I'm almost late for a flight I take time to gawk. Dulles is also the airport that first gave us modern air travel. (And how rare is this: When it was expanded it got better.)

Lever House, New York, NY. Gordon Bunshaft. It helps to forget Bunshaft's museo-disasters, such as the Hirshhorn or his soul-less Albright-Knox addition. Air seems to have been a building material here. Lever House makes the Seagram's Building look like a clunker, a misplaced IBM mainframe. Now if only they could dump that gawdawful Damien Hirst sculpture somewhere. Bonus: The Lever lobby's art program is pretty groovy. Peter Wegner and Sarah Morris were recent standouts.

Disney Hall, Los Angeles, CA. Frank Gehry. My favorite little-known fact: There's a park on the roof -- and a mini-amphitheater too. To get the trees for it LA Phil boss Esa-Pekka Salonen went door-to-door in LA asking residents to donate plants that he'd seen and liked. Also: Enjoy Gehry's U.S. masterpiece while you can -- with all the empty, unbuilt space around it, Disney Hall seems to be a rose-by-FOG, rising above downtown. CalArts' Redcat gallery is also inside, an exhibition space that misses as much as it hits.

San Francisco de Asis Church, Rachos de Taos, NM. Unknown. This tiny church, about 10 miles south of Taos, is so beloved that it's been maintained for about 200 years. Last time I was in New Mexico I insisted on stopping at it every time a friend of mine and I drove in and out of Taos. It's organic, abstract, functional, beautiful, and seems to change with the weather. (Think of how much it preceded!) I'd love to see it in the winter, surrounded by snow.

Bloggers: List your top five and I'll link to them on Friday afternoon. (Make sure you link back here so I see it via Technorati.)

From the New Museum's Location... podcast, Cooper Union art school dean Saskia Bos:

"Visiting a well-informed art capital somewhere else on the globe is very beneficial for most [art students]. For although the New York art scene seems more than vital to me, it is outdated to believe that all important international artists will have a show in the many galleries and museums here, and therefore one would not need to leave this wonderful city -- at the risk of becoming provincial."

With this, Bos finished her talk. Blissfully provincial NYC audience too stunned to know how to react. Reason enough to listen to the podcast right there. Two minutes later, from NYTer Nicolai Ouroussoff:

"Provincialism 'is not an issue in this country, except for New Yorkers ... who still believe in the idea of a cultural center or magnet."

Shouldn't MoMA's local-artist-makes-good Elizabeth Murray show (alas: that's a Christopher Knight line, not my own) or the Whitney 'Picasso and New York Art' show have settled this once and for all?

In a related story: I love that MoMA sends out press releases with sentences like: "The first U.S. retrospective of the celebrated Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón (1889-1954) introduces the work of one of Latin America's most important artists to an international audience." Uh, well... no. MoMA introduces Reverón to a New York audience.

Related: Regina Hackett quoted Ouroussoff last week, but I didn't realize where it came from until I heard the podcast over the weekend.

Miami Art Museum director Terry Riley wouldn't talk to me about the Keep MAC Alive hullabaloo, but he couldn't say no to his hometown paper. Daniel Chang's story doesn't answer all my questions or dig into any of the relevant issues, but he gets collector Rosa de la Cruz to talk too.

I'm not sure how this slipped past the ethics stewards at the Washington Post: Art critic Blake Gopnik's wife has taught at the Corcoran College of Art and Design for some time. (She's apparently not teaching there this semester. Corc PR did not reply to an email.) So then why is Gopnik semi-profiling her boss by way of previewing the Corc's big Modernism show without disclosing that? (My girlfriend taught at the Corc in the fall; my last Corc-centric post was on July 27, 2006.)

I love the LA Weekly's Doug Harvey. He's easily the most underappreciated art critic in America, the most entertaining+smart art read around. (If only he wrote weekly!) His latest, a review of a Vija Celmins drawing retro, builds to two glorious finishing paragraphs.

The Cincinnati Art Museum is hiring a contemporary curator for the first time in years. A photo curator too.

LATer Suzanne Muchnic finds that David Hockney digs Constable, which doesn't stun anyone, I reckon.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer's Steven Litt explains how Monet loans are got.

We Wayne Thiebaud fans would likely partuclarly enjoy the Allan Stone documentary discussed by Kathryn Shattuck in the NYT.

This post follows the questions I raised at the end of here. It's been delayed for a few days because of interesting things in Miami.

When I think about artists who mixed abstraction and representation in single canvases, I think first of the Bay Area Figurative school. And the first artist there who brought the two together was David Park.

According to Bay Area legend (mostly debunked by Caroline A. Jones), in late 1949 David Park decided he was fed up with abstraction. He took all of his abstract paintings -- regarded at the time as the most influential work in California -- to the Berkeley dump and tossed them. Early in 1950 he turned to the figure. Park died young -- at 49, from cancer -- but the ten years of work he left behind could serve as an example of what Varnedoe wrote about 'drawing forms out of the world and adding forms to it.'

Park's first representative painting, Rehearsal, hints that Park's break with abstraction was nowhere near as dramatic as the dump story would indicate. About half of the painting is filled with an abstraction of a piano, and the insturmentalists all have their backs turned toward the painter. Only in Park's first few representative paintings are figures as clearly delineated as they are here. Within a year or two Park was expressing much more painterly ambivalence about camp-picking, happy to mix abstract and representation within nearly every canvas. (As above, in 1959's Boy-Girl.)

Even his most figurative canvases, such as Nude-Green, feature figures built from big, gestural, abstract patches of paint. Even more dramatic: 1959's Torso, from SFMOMA's collection, which consists of a ghost-like figure emerging through broad, oily swaths of paint.

So why does Varnedoe exclude Park? Is he too representational? No, not if Varnedoe includes Koons' Rabbit or Gerhard Richters such as Waterfall. I'd guess it was mostly geography -- Park had absolutely no NYC footprint.

Related: Emailers apparently dig Waterfall. Yes, I know the image is screwed up. It's the Hirshhorn, not me, not your computer.

After yesterday's posting about the Keep MAC Alive open letter that's making its way through Miami's art scene, I emailed the Miami Art Museum press office and asked if director Terry Riley was available for a quick chat. I figured that it would be a short Q-and-A during which Riley would address the letter's key points, say all the right things, and that would be that.

I figured wrong. In an emailed reply to my request, MAM merely sent me this statement, signed by Riley:

The MAC @MAM alliance is one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to MAM as an institution. We fully agree that MAC has established an enviable record for presenting programming of outstanding quality over the past three years. We could not be more honored that Ella Fontanals-Cisneros has decided to ally the resources of MAC with those of MAM. We want to ensure that MAC's legacy is not only maintained, but strengthened with the combined resources of both MAC and MAM.

Related: Keep MAC Alive website.

Check out the latest 'Around the blogosphere' here.

The most frequently forgotten American abstract painter is Georgia O'Keeffe. Many of O'Keeffe's best paintings and works on paper are abstractions, yet she's most-known by the broader public as the painter of oft-sexual flowers. To the best of my knowledge, there's never been a 'abstract O'Keeffe' museum survey, but there probably should be. (At left is 1921's Blue and Green Music.)

Like many of America's best abstract painters, O'Keeffe's path to abstraction came through the West. According to biographer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp (whose GO'K bio is a must-read), O'Keeffe started painting abstractions as a teacher in Amarillo and Canyon, Texas. And she never stopped, painting abstractions almost right up until she made her last oil painting in 1972.

In Pictures of Nothing, Kirk Varnedoe mentions O'Keeffe once, in the context of an Ellsworth Kelly painting, and no more. And true, many of O'Keeffe's abstractions were painted before Varnedoe's arbitrary start date, the mid-1950s.

But that confuses me too. Why did Varnedoe start in the mid-50s? Strangely, I think his explanation actually makes the case for why he should have considered O'Keeffe more thoroughly:

[The mid-50s seem] simultaneously to present a new form of abstraction and a new resistance to its premises. This contradictory development is what I want to document and explore... I want to show how strains from two seemingly opposite camps -- from Johns and Pollock, for example, or from Picasso and Duchamp -- overlapped and blended, and how the emergence of important new artistic languages depended precisely on those unexpected hybrids.

O'Keeffe spent her entirely painterly life making abstract paintings and then grappling with them, resisting them, even. But, of course, O'Keeffe has always been a hallway artist at MoMA, an American during a time period when MoMA's story is Euro-dominated. Also: O'Keeffe was at least partly a Westerner, and in PoN Varnedoe is most interested in New Yorkers.

But perhaps most of all, she was a woman. O'Keeffe's abstractions are rarely muscular, and virtually all the artists discuss in PoN make big, beefy, testosterone-laden abstraction.

This looks so much like a shiny-clean version of the Ilya Kabakov installation at Chinati that it's a little scary.

America's 150 favorite works of architecture? Yikes. I think it's almost time for another MAN list....

Who needs to see Philip Johnson's Glass House in Connecticut when you can buy his NYC pad instead?

Who needs status when you have brains?

One of the five neat-o-est-installed works in America?

I love this: Bloggers/MSMers debate the merit of a Seattle Art Museum acquisition -- and SAM's new contemporary art curator.

The Frank Gehry-for-Barry Diller building in Chelsea is about to open.

Are these the ten(ish) best contemporary female photographers?

If you liked the Damien Ortega post or the Ford Super Bowl ad, you'll love this post about Paul Veroude and Stefan Sous' webpage.

Last December MAN told you about how the engagement between the Miami Art Museum and Miami Art Central. I thought it was a sign Miami's fractured art scene was moving toward cohesion -- and greater national and international clout.

Apparently some of MAC's fans are worried that the engagement and possible marriage might water-down MAC's strong, often ambitious exhibition program. For a couple of days the Miami art-interested blogs have been buzzing about an open letter that urges MAM director Terry Riley to support MAC's programming:

"[W]e would like to express our deep concern over the prospect that the internationally distinguished exhibitions and programs developed at MAC may be compromised as a result of the merger of the two institutions. Our community has benefited enormously from the scope and quality of MAC's acclaimed exhibitions and educational programs, the product of the creativity and hard work of its Executive Director and Chief Curator Rina Carvajal and her talented staff, with the generosity of MAC's founder, Ella Fontanals Cisneros."

I've heard nothing about anything at MAC being comprimised. And Riley's only been on the job for about a year -- I don't think this is a sign of local animus. But, all the same, it's hard to ignore a letter signed by mega-collectors (and non-MAM trustees) Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, dealer Fred Snitzer, and artist Mark Handforth. You can read the letter and see the ~160 signatories here, at Keep MAC Alive! (I've confirmed none of the signatures, but I've talked with several Miamians today and they all say that the art scene is abuzz.)

Bigger issue: When was the last time you can remember a city's art scene reacting so loudly to something a big, local museum was doing programmatically? Miami is cracklin' with energy. More on this here soon.

Like Diebenkorn, Philip Guston is completely absent from Pictures of Nothing. And like Diebenkorn, Guston gave up abstraction for something else.

I confess: I've never liked Philip Guston's representational paintings. I know, I know: This is a serious character flaw and I should be doomed to sitting in a Thomas Hirschhorn installation, but I just don't. (Related story: The NGA has recently installed a bunch of Gustons it received from the Broida collection.)

But I love Guston's abstractions. (This one is MoMA's 1954 Painting.)One of my favorite installations in recent memory was a roomful of Guston abstractions in the recent Michael Auping-curated Philip Guston retrospective. The room, which I saw at MAMFW, was revelatory on a bunch of levels. It established that Guston developed his palette in the 1950s, and that he stayed remarkably true to it for the rest of his career.

The room also started me thinking of Guston as a pre-perceptualist, a forerunner of Bob Irwin's early light-and-space paintings (and what came later, for that matter), Larry Bell's cubes, etc. Guston was, in fact, included in an early Ferus show and Irwin talked about the impact that had on him in Lawrence Weschler's superb Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees:

I remember one time, for instance, seeing this small Philip Guston hanging next to a large James Brooks. Now, the Brooks was a big painting on every scale: it had five major shapes in it -- a black shape, a reed, a green -- big areas, big shapes, with strong, major value changes, hue changes. Next to it was this small painting, with mute pinks and greys and greens, very subtle. It was one of those funny little Guston kind of scrumbly paintings, a very French kind of painting...

[m]y discovery was that from 100 yards away -- this was just one of those little breakthroughs -- that from this distance of 100 yards, I looked over, and that godd*mned Guston... Now, I'm talking not on quality, and not on any assumption of what you like or don't like, but on just pure strength, which was one of the things we were into. Strength was a big word in abstract expressionism; you were trying to get power into the painting, so that the painting really vibrated, had life to it. It wasn't just colored shapes sitting flat. It had to do with getting a real tension going in the thing, something that made the thing really stand up and hum... Well, that godd*mned Guston just blew the Brooks right off the wall.

And Irwin goes on about the Guston for several more paragraphs. And he's right. Guston's colors seem to hover and blink on the canvas, coming into and out of focus, kind of like London in Monet, or clouds in Turner. (I can't find any good link-to-able examples, alas.)

But mostly Guston's early abstractions remind me of what the California coast is like early on a foggy morning. Which both Guston and Irwin would have known all about.

Remarkable: Richard Diebenkorn isn't even mentioned in Kirk Varnedoe's Pictures of Nothing. Diebekorn certainly wasn't the first American abstract painter, but for me he was the best. His absence from PoN was the biggest disappointment of Varnedoe's Mellon Lectures, and of the book, too.

The most obvious explanation is that Diebenkorn was a Californian, and as I've said earlier that means he was a likely candidate for exclusion right from the start. (At right is 1954's Berkeley No. 8.) But I have another idea: Maybe Varnedoe wasn't interested in artists who moved back and forth between representational and abstract painting. Here's Varnedoe:

I prefer to... insist on the constant cycling between representation and abstraction, between drawing forms out of the world and adding new forms to it. This is true neurologically, in the way that we perceive and interact with the world, and it is also true socially, in terms of abstraction's history: there has been a constant cycling between seeing and inventing, representing and abstracting.

This is from the beginning of chapter two, right after Varnedoe had discussed Jeff Koons' Rabbit, a work which mixes representation and abstraction. I think that when Varnedoe is writing about mixing ab and rep, he's talking about in one work, and not over a career.

I wonder: In his search for "the case for a logic of abstract art," in his pursuit to answer the questions "Does it work? What do we get out of it?", I wonder if Varnedoe worried that artists who vacillated between representation and abstraction lacked faith. The question I'd most like to ask Varnedoe is: Did artists who weren't monotheists weaken the case for the utility of abstraction?

Today on MAN I'll take a look at a number of artists not mentioned in Varnedoe's book who went back and forth between abstraction and representation in their careers. Tomorrow I'll post about a few artists who would seem to fit into the quote I blocked above, but still aren't in the book.

I'll be back on Thursday.

Regina Hackett didn't agree with my take on NYTer Holland Cotter's Johns review. My only post about the show so far took a look at the differences between an LA Johns presentation and a DC Johns presentation.

From time to time I notice that something has migrated from contemporary art into (TV) commercial culture. Here's the latest one. At left is an untitled 2002 Damien Ortega installation. (I saw it at the Philly ICA.)

Just before kickoff, Ford ran an ad for a new, sized-so-super-it's-beloved-by-OPEC pickup truck. See it here. I wonder if Damien Ortega has?

Related: Nissan loves breadface. Ford leaked some video and some narrative to the autoblogs before the Super Bowl: Jalopnik, Autoblog.

Housekeeping: Tonight I'll be participating in this panel discussion at Virginia Commonwealth University. If you're in Richmond, come on by. This also means today's MAN posts will be on auto-publish... which I've never used before. And that I'll be a day behind on email.

I don't usually publish reader mail here -- most people who email me are emailing me, not MANation -- but Greg Allen wrote in with a point I should have addressed yesterday morning:

Art history gets made the same way art does: by people in places interacting with other people. At the outset of his lectures, Kirk set for himself the following challenge -- and the following caveats: 'Even though these talks will focus on individual works and creators, I am going to try to indicate the connection of these artists and their art with broader histories... While I make no pretense to inclusiveness, there is so much ground to cover that I am necessarily going to paint, time and again, with comically broad brush strokes. Thus those who pefer reductive generalization and crude caricatural summary will probably find a lot to like.'

... I think he made... ambitious and interesting arguments about the relevance of abstraction and its value to the larger culture--of art and beyond. Why not hold up some of the actual ideas, or his close readings and interpretations of works, to scrutiny?

Agreed. But I think it's hard to defend the relevance of abstraction before first including all the artists who deserve to be a part of the argument. By excluding many of the greats/importants, including nearly all of the voices who aren't white NYC males, Varnedoe makes it difficult for his successors to take up the defense. It'd be like the Colts taking the field minus Dwight Freeney and Bob Sanders. We can't play the game until all the players are on the team.

The next few posts on Pictures of Nothing will take this morning's post as their jumping-off point, and will feature artists and works that go beyond Varnedoe's focus on white, male artists with New York ties.

When Kirk Varnedoe trots out an example of a hard-edge abstractionist, he gives us... Peter Halley?

[Pop art's critique of minimalism] forces open an issue -- the relationship between abstraction and mere design -- that has lingered as a haunting doubt within the idea of abstract art... Lichtenstien's jab at Stella seems lighthearted or dryly iconic once compared with what begins to happen in the 1980s, with paintings such as Peter Halley's Two Cells with Circulating Conduit of 1985... Halley argues that there is a resemblance between Newman's paintings and diagrams of computer chips, and that this resemblance is not in fact coincidental because the strictures and pretensions of hard-edged abstraction emerged at the same time that the hegemony of control and order because the dominant feature of modern society and philosophy.

So Why, when Varnedoe wants to point at a hard-edge painter who is poking at the tropes of, say, Barnett Newman, does he pull out an '80s New Yorker instead of going back to... Californians John McLaughlin or Emerson Woelffer?

McLaughlin's pioneering hard-edge paintings didn't come out of Foucault (they preceded him), but out of his experiences living in Japan in the mid-1930s and from continued exposure to Asian cultures during WWII. McLaughlin's paintings mixed transcendence with meditative space with Newman, Mondrian, and Malevich to create a unique pictorial perceptualism. The eye is drawn in, moved around, and held by a good McLaughlin the way it is moved around a good Newman. And McLaughlin wasn't shy about challenging Newman, either. 'I can be even more minimal and still get the same effect,' McLaughlin seems to be saying.

Woelffer's pokes at Newman touch on a different psychological trope. In some of Woelffer's paintings we see what happens when all those firm, hard, stiff minimalist lines become too excited: They spurt.

Related: Chris Ashley.

When Dia:Beacon opened I called it 'Six Flags Over Minimalism.' Perhaps LACMA boss Michael Govan took that moniker to heart, because LA Weekly's Tom Christie says he is interested in helping Jeff Koons bring the theme park experience to Wilshire. (The LAT and NYT have since followed the story. Gee, we have experience with that.)

Is there a finanical irregularity of some kind at the Dallas Museum of Art? Hope someone in TX is digging on this...

Boosterism?: Our building is great -- really. If the critics liked it, they must be balanced! If they didn't like it...

Why wasn't this in the business section?! In a related story: E-tailing is new? (In a story related to the related story: Why do I even open Sunday A&L anymore?)

I'll never forget Kirk Varnedoe's Mellon Lectures, a dying curator's final love-letter to modern art. The strength of Varnedoe's presentation was in his urgency, his need to share with us his thoughts on the connective tissues that hold together abstract art. Varnedoe's final summation, delivered as a walk through a Richard Serra torqued ellipse, is one of the most emotional anythings I've ever seen or heard.

So when the book version, Pictures of Nothing, came out late last year, I was eager to re-experience Varnedoe's summation of post-war abstraction. I ended up surprised: The book didn't hold up anywhere near as well as the lectures did. Naturally Varnedoe's urgent diction doesn't come across the same way in print. And with the emotion turned down we're left to focus more on Varnedoe's ideas and less on his evangelism.

Pictures of Nothing is a memoir in lecture form. It is not a considered, complete history of post-war abstract art. The gaps in Varnedoe's lectures are enormous and reveal his biases: He rarely considers American artists who were not New Yorkers, women are mostly absent from the narrative, and white artists dominate. This is a very particular narrative, one that loses substantial power because of whom it excludes.

Over a few posts this week I'll point out some of the gaps in Varnedoe's story.

At the Indianapolis Museum of Art, they dig their team too. And no animal-related confusion here. I mean: Bears, lions, whatevs.

Related: And in Chicago...

Flabbergasting paragraph in Holland Cotter's review of the Jasper Johns show at the NGA:

The National Gallery show, organized by the museum's curator of modern and contemporary art, Jeffrey Weiss, has mysteries of its own. It isn't a survey of the decade 1955-65, but a selection of 90 Johns works from that time organized by visual theme: targets, "devices," words and the human body. Other motifs at least as important to that phase of his career, like flags, numbers and maps, are nowhere in evidence. Nor can the connective "allegory" proposed by the exhibition title be readily discerned. No matter.

No matter?! What's the point in reviewing the show if... you're not going to review the show? Respect the art and the curator enough to engage with the exhibition. Take seriously the ideas the curator is presenting. But apparently: Curators? Ideas? Installation? Art history? No matter.

I don't believe in the art-criticism-is-dead meme, but increasingly it seems that art criticism at the NYT is dead. Or at least it's too-often seeming to transition into something else, such as feature writing. The paper-of-record gave us no review of the important and exceptional Magritte show in LA, of Olympic Sculpture Park, of the Hirshhorn's recent contemporary sculpture show, of Icons from Sinai at the Getty, and so on. Sad.

Worse: The NYT increasingly thinks it can deal with non-NYC shows with inert, foam-padded Sunday features. Take a look at the Times' coverage of Seattle's OSP. Its context-free, dumbed-down story fawned all over the money and donors that enabled the park, putting them at center-stage... and never mentioned a single curator, not even OSP founding curator Lisa Corrin. Oops. No matter?

Related: MAN on the problem with the Johns show.

As you can see, it's a Chicago tradition to put Chicago Bears helmets on the Art Institute's lions when the Bears are in the Super Bowl. (Ditto caps when the White Sox are in the World Series or when the Blackhawks or Cubs... nevermind.) For a little more fun: In April the AIC will give away one of the helmets to a museum member. [via, which has evidence of the AIC's failed first attempt to helmet its lions.]

Also: A Chicago TV station reports that Bears gear is decorating art all over the city (links or pix, anyone?):

There is a Bears hat on the Picasso in Daley Plaza, a Bears jersey on the dinosaur in front of the Field Museum, and Bears blankets on the horses of the statues "The Bowman and the Spearman" at Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway.

UPDATE: Picasso too.

MAN's scoop about the PAFA-Cello Player deaccessioning is here. So are the links to the stories that followed.

Only on MAN: The Hirshhorn has scored one of New York sculptor Robert Lazzarini's best pieces: 2002's payphone. The piece debuted in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, where it had an entire room to itself. It has been exhibited widely ever since, including in John Ravenal's 2003 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Lazzarini exhibit and in a Carla Hanzal show at the Mint Museum of Art in 2006.

payphone is made from the exact materials a New York City pay phone was made out of: Steel, aluminum, Plexi, gunk, materials and processes requiring 45 fabricators. The work's distortion gives it a futuristic feel -- even as pay phones are increasingly out-of-date. As I thought about the work last night, for the first time I thought of it as vaguely dystopian.

One of the best artist interviews I've ever read is Todd Gibson's 2004 chat with Lazzarini. Be sure to check out parts one, two, three, four, and five.

The work isn't actually at the Hirshhorn yet (board approval is pending), so no word as to when it will be on view.