November 2007 Archives

I've written a lot here about how New York art critics seem to be unable to write about art without mentioning the art market, complaining about the art market, moaning that the art market makes everything else irrelevant, and so on. My point has been pretty simple: You, the published critic, are in a privileged position. Assert yourself rather than complain that you can't.

So along comes this from the book world: In an effort to assert itself in the face of the (book) market, the National Book Critics Circle board of directors is starting this clever idea on its blog. [via]

There's more content coming later today, but...

As I'll be traveling next week, I'm delighted to announce that MAN will be guest-edited next week by Jen Graves, the art critic for The Stranger, Seattle's influential alt-weekly. (I'll do the weekend roundup on Monday, but after that it'll be all Graves, all week.)

Here's a show I'm bummed that I'm (probably) not going to see: Michael Auping's Declaring Space (featuring Fontana, Newman, Klein and Rothko) at MAMFW.

On the occasion of the show, Titus O'Brien and Auping do the Q&A thing on Glasstire. Auping gives great Q&A -- he describes now as "gluttonous," drops an Yves Klein pun -- so dig it. [via]

Thanks to reader Aleks Rdest, who has the Photoshop skills that I lack. This is Martin Puryear's That Profile at the Getty, juxtaposed against a c1450 portrait of a woman which may (or may not) be by Paolo Uccello. For more, scroll down to the post below this one or click here.

Previously: Puryear at MoMA: considering perspective; Puryear and Augustus Vincent Tack. Puryear and Ellsworth Kelly. Puryear and Uccello.

Related: Puryear at the Getty on Flickr.

A few months ago, when I was working on a writing project, I discovered that many 19th century art history text were available, in their totality and for free, on Google Book Search. I had a good bit of fun poking around, reading Vasari here, Baedeker's descriptions of art there. When I started thinking about Puryear and perspective I thought I'd let Google Book Search help me go back in time.... which brings us to Paolo Uccello, described thusly in [Michael] Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical: Uccello "painted landscapes, with ruins and figures, which, from his knowledge of perspective, were designed with a correctness and intelligence unknown to his contemporaries."

EH Gombrich shared Bryan's assessment, writing that Uccello was so impressed by his own perspective-related discoveries that he stayed up night after night, trying to make his studies all the more realistic. Gombrich says Uccello's work was substantially successful, that his efforts were not in vain. (Giorgio Vasari did not agree, writing in his Lives of the Artists: "It is certain, that the man who has not the needful endowments, let him labour as he may, can never effect those things to which another, having received the gift from nature, has attained without difficulty; and of this we have an example among the old masters in Paolo Uccello, who struggling against the natural bent of his faculties to make progress on a given path, went ever backwards instead.")

Which brings us to Martin Puryear, who was fascinated by the Renaissance painters who developed perspective -- and by the 20th century artists who abolished it. (I've been writing about this all week, see the bottom of this posts for links to background, previous posts.) One of the artists Puryear has cited as an influence is Uccello, who was brilliant, driven to madness, both, or, given Vasari's reliability, neither. I think that his 1999 installation at Getty Center, That Profile, is straight out of Uccello.

The painting above, from 1450 and in the Met's collection, has been variably determined to be by Uccello, the circle of Uccello, another unknown painter entirely, and my favorite art historical dodge: "attributed to Uccello," with its implied parenthetical 'but also maybe not.' (At the moment the Met doesn't consider it a Uccello.) While I don't mean to suggest that Puryear cribbed directly from this painting, the shape of That Profile and the form of the woman's head, presented in profile, is unmistakable. (If I knew how to use Photoshop better I'd overlay the two images, but I'm just a dumb writer.)

Several days ago I talked about how Puryear often mixed flatness and depth in individual works; this is one of them. As we can see from this sideview of the Getty sculpture, that's pretty much what This Profile is all about: It presents a flat 'face' to Richard Meier's Getty Center, but when viewed from the side it also recedes into space, toward the hills north of the Getty.

Previously: Puryear at MoMA, considering perspective; Puryear and Augustus Vincent Tack. Puryear and Ellsworth Kelly.

Related: Puryear at the Getty on Flickr.

Martin Puryear doesn't sit for a ton of interviews, so I wanted to be sure to post a couple recent ones:

After reading this SFMOMA press release about an upcoming show "from the Logan Collection," I understood that SFMOMA was exhibiting works in the Logans' collection, rather than Kent and Vicki Logan gifts to SFMOMA. I complained. Today a museum spokesperson shares this: "The exhibition includes works from SFMOMA's collection (fractional and promised gifts from the Logans) as well as works that are strictly in the Logan Collection (some are on loan from the Denver Art Museum). We're still working on the final checklist."

So my post, which was based only on the SFMOMA press release, may have been completely incorrect. My apologies for the confusion.

Previously: Puryear at MoMA, considering perspective; Puryear and Augustus Vincent Tack.

Obviously Martin Puryear was influenced by minimalism: His surfaces are exquisite and tactile, recalling Donald Judd. Many of his forms from the early 1970s recall Robert Morris and Carl Andre so directly that Puryear's objects (several of which are reproduced in the show's catalogue) appear to be only minor departures from their work. As early as 1977 the classic modernist cube -- here's Tony Smith's heroic minimalist version -- began to appear regularly in Puryear's work. (More on this later in the week.) And of course to this day Puryear's sculptures are reductive, almost tidy in their banishment of anything even potentially, remotely extraneous.

But in keeping with our theme this week -- Puryear and perspective -- there's a key way in which Puryear, who started out as a painter, responded to both minimalist painting and to painting that was flat and reductive. Puryear grew up and attended college in Washington, DC during the peak years of the Washington Color School, when super-flat painters such as Morris Louis and Gene Davis dominated DC art. Ellsworth Kelly, who famously married line with picture plane, was also ascendant in the late 1950s and in the 1960s. Puryear assimilated their work -- and then brought back the third dimension.

The image at the top and at the left is Puryear's Bask (1976), from the Guggenheim's collection. In the photograph at the top, Bask appears to be almost completely flat. That's a little bit what it looks like in person: Bask (made from stained pine) is a light-soaking black, and when it is installed on a white slab (as it is at MoMA) the light-dark juxtaposition seems to flatten it even more. But as you can see from the photo at left it has plenty of depth and multi-dimensional curve. (I've included a detail from a MoMA installation shot in the jump if you'd like to see more.)

Bask appears to be a direct riff on Ellsworth Kelly's curve paintings, a series that Kelly started with a series of black-and-white paintings in 1958 (in paintings on wood) and continued them into the 1960s. Like Kelly does in many of his curve paintings, Puryear reduces Bask to a single, uniform color. The object is line... but he adds depth, the element that Kelly expunged. (At right is Kelly's Green Curve, installed at the High Museum.)

Back in September, when I was talking about art, artists and 9/11, MoMA curator Ann Temkin and I discussed the ways in which a traumatic event effects art, how it seeps into work that might appear to have nothing to do with it.

Which brings me to a short piece on Artinfo by Robert Ayers about Richard Misrach. Back in 2004 Pace was the first to exhibit Misrach's On the Beach photographs, a series of extra-enormous c-prints of people sunbathing or wading in the shallow surf. The pictures are the subject of a new book from Aperture (40% off!) and were recently exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago. From Ayers:

[Misrach] discussed [with me] the "paradigm shift in the collective consciousness" that he feels occurred on September 11, 2001, and its importance for this body of work. "One of the key inspirations were the images of bodies falling from the towers that I pulled off the Internet," he says. "These people were in a horrific situation, but they were falling through space with such strange grace and ambiguity." Misrach kept three small prints of World Trade Center jumpers on his studio wall for the four years he worked on On the Beach. "On one level or another," he says, "they inspired the whole project."

In 1942 Duncan Phillips made his largest acquisition of the war years: He bought half of Jacob Lawrence's The Migration of the Negro series. The Phillips Memorial Gallery, as it was then called, bought 30 panels and the Museum of Modern Art bought the other half. It was an early example of the two museums cooperating. (My favorite: Duncan Phillips picked out the first Pierre Bonnard that MoMA acquired.)

Fast forward 65 years for another example of two museums cooperating: Most of the Phillips' half of the Migration series was due to go on view at the Studio Museum this month. Unexpectedly -- and just before installation -- the Studio Museum found itself with a humidity issue. So last Friday afternoon Studio Museum director Thelma Golden called her Whitney counterpart Adam Weinberg and before long the Whitney had agreed to take the show. Over the course of four days the Whitney, which has some fine Lawrences of its own, cleared space on the fifth floor and installed the works. They're up through January 6. Don't miss 'em.

As a writer originally from the alleged provinces (California and Missouri), I'm forever amused when the Manhattan pseudo-elites assume that people in the rest of America couldn't possibly get or enjoy art. So I hope midwest-dismissers note that over 57,000 people showed up for the 40-hour, overnight opening of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Continued from yesterday: It is not news that Martin Puryear started out as a painter before finding his way toward sculpture. Puryear grew up in Washington, a painting town through-and-through, and stayed in DC to study painting at Catholic University. Naturally, Puryear spent plenty of time as a young man at the Phillips Collection, the No.1 place for artists in Washington to be imbued with the spirit of the brush. And sure enough Puryear was deeply impressed by paintings he saw there.

There's a great tidbit in the timeline in the back of MoMA's Martin Puryear catalogue in which Puryear talks about art at the Phillips and names one artist who both surprised me -- and who made perfect sense: Augustus Vincent Tack, an early American modernist who painted some 20-years-ahead-of-their-time abstract landscapes even as he simultaneously painted portraits of Truman and Eisenhower. Tack was the sort of guy who could diplomatically move between Republicans and Democrats -- and between figuration and abstraction. (This is Cloud's Edge from 1935-36.) Puryear must have admired not only Tack's ability to go from presidents to abstractions, but the way Tack shoved his landscapes right up against the picture plane, eliminating depth.

The Puryear at right is a print, Untitled (LA MoCA portfolio) from 1989, the only print I'll show all week. (The MoMA show is sculpture-only; no prints, no drawings, etc.) It's a super example of what I described yesterday as Puryear's push-me-pull-you exploration of mixing depth with flatness in a single work. The shape in the print reads as an upside-down jug, or as a human head -- or simply as a flat abstraction that recalls familiar, round forms. But down at the very bottom of the print Puryear gives us a visually confusing hint: a circle, receding into depth. Puryear's abstraction manages to both sit flat and recede.

Related: You can see a nice selection of Puryear prints on the Art Institute of Chicago's website. Puryear wasn't the only artist to be struck by the mix of abstraction and representation in Duncan Phillips' collection: The Phillips was a major influence on Richard Diebenkorn too. And in convergences fun: Consider Tack's Cloud's Edge (above), Andy Warhol's camouflage paintings, and the distant trees in Bonnard paintings, especially those of Vernonnet.

I don't usually go to the Washington Post to see art critics take on ethical issues -- the paper didn't even mention it when the NGA was sued for plagiarizing part of an exhibition catalogue a few years back, and it still hasn't mentioned the NGA's fluff job -- but Jessica Dawson does a nice job of calling out three non-profits associated with a show "closely associated" with Jack Shainman Gallery.

Couldn't be much simpler, says Geoff Edgers in the Boston Globe: MFA Boston gives collector show of collection. Collector rides the wave and sells collection. Christie's admits that exhibit contributes to interest in work shown. (Climax = sale.) MFA Boston's museo-peers say it committed a major ethical transgression.

If Congress was waiting for a smoking gun to investigate ethically-in-error museums such as the Hammer, the National Gallery, SFMOMA, the Nelson-Atkins and the MFA Boston, here it is. And here's why it's a problem. (Heck, I'd settle for journalism. I'm looking at you, Washington Post and California papers.)

UPDATE: Please see SFMOMA-related clarification from 11/28/07.

Martin Puryear's work has everything sculpture was supposed to have: texture, shape, structure, color, and volume. It's romantic in the way it asks us to surrender to the classical purity of material and form. It's so simple, so spare, so minimal that just when you think a Puryear is as easy as it looks, it reveals itself in a whole new way.

The Martin Puryear sculpture retrospective, curated by John Elderfield and on view now at MoMA, is a pure delight. The show will travel to Washington, Fort Worth, and San Francisco, but it's hard to imagine it looking any better than it does in MoMA's sixth-floor galleries. While the second floor of the Taniguchi MoMA was built with Richard Serra in mind, Puryear's minimalist, handsy, detailed forms hover between fields of drywall, making it look like the sixth floor was made for him. (This should not be a surprise: After Kirk Varnedoe did his American Painters series of shows (Twombly, Johns, Pollock), he turned MoMA's attention toward David Smith, Serra, and Puryear. Smith ended up at the Gugg, but I think that it's no coincidence that Serra and Puryear fit into these spaces so well.)

There are 47 Puryears here -- 42 upstairs and five more in the atrium -- groupings that could have seemed overwhelming, but don't. The sheer number of sculptures reminds me of one of my favorite things about Puryear's work: Puryear's shapes lurk at the edges of recognition. Deadeye looks like a hot water bottle... but not quite. Brunhilde looks like, like, well, something I know I've seen before, I'm just not sure what. That vaguely familiar feeling keeps us looking, and as we look we see the grain of the wood Puryear used, its color, its texture. We see the armature that holds a piece together, and realize that it's not just holding a sculpture together, it's taking away from its transparence or it's adding to its solidity. We realize that a sculpture's size contributes to the object's familiarity but no, it's a little too big, or a little too small. And how did he get that wood to do, well, that? Large sculpture rarely feels intimate, but even Puryear's biggest pieces feel personal.

One reason is because of their size -- most Puryears in this show are no bigger than the human body (a scale Puryear regularly exceeds in work not made for the white cube). But another is because of the way a Puryear sculpture draws us into it. Puryears beg to be touched, but of course we can't do that. All those open spaces beg to be penetrated, but that would be wrong. No matter, visually they pull us in by steps: First toward the surface of the work, then into the (often) hollow core, then out the other side, which gives us a sense of the sculpture's volume, its relationship to the room, to other Puryears nearby. Puryear's sculptures remind me of Pieter de Hooch's keyhole paintings in that they suck us in, then in again, and finally out to somewhere else entirely.

Of course de Hooch's paintings are substantially studies in perspective, and that's the unifying theme of Puryear's art: Using abstract sculpture to explore the centuries-long, mostly painterly and representational art historical march from flatness to depth and back again. Ever since at least 1976-77's Box and Pole Puryear has regularly mixed perspective and the lack thereof in single sculptures. The result of that exploration has been the push-me-pull-you that gives his art its intensely personal sense of engagement. Even as you're looking into or through many Puryears, they maintain a solid, physical presence right in front of you.

Elderfield's show engages this duality mostly in MoMA's atrium, where MAMFW's Ladder to Booker T. Washington hovers above, where Desire runs away and holds its own, and where Ad Astra (2007) updates Box and Pole.

For all the Puryear that's here -- and there isn't a dud in the exhibition -- this could have been a more comprehensive show. Elderfield chose not to represent important outdoor installations, such as Puryear's masterful untitled piece at California's Oliver Ranch or his Getty Center installation. (Granted, including photos or models of outdoor pieces is always tricky and often fails.) Puryear doesn't often work in metal, but a metallic piece or two would have demonstrated much about Puryear and his use of materials. (There are two pieces in the show substantially made out of wire.) Major gallery-sized works such as Vessel, Vault, and the California African American Museum's Her and She -- Puryear's most underrated works -- are missing. Maybe other venues will make some additions.

Coming up: Each day this week I'll feature a post on Puryear's exploration of perspective, usually with works that aren't in the MoMA show (or couldn't be).

Texas is now on the blogroll. I also added C-Monster to the Lead List: It's daily digest is an absolute must-read, a better and broader daily visual art snapshot/roundup than anything anywhere else. Next: The midwest, roughly from Kansas through Ohio, not counting cities already on the 'roll. Please leave suggestions in the comments.

About 10 days ago some friends and I were discussing how much institutional critique-style art we'd seen lately. My blogging compadre Ed Winkleman shows Jennifer Dalton, I recently mentioned Filip Noterdaeme on the blog, and so on. I thought I might do a week's worth of posts on this kind of work. Then someone said: 'You don't have to. There's a show of it that's about to open.' True: Brooklyn's Momenta Art is featuring Air Kissing: An Exhibition of Contemporary Art About the Art World. I asked curator Sasha Archibald if she'd chat with me about it.

MAN: Who is the father of some of this work? Ed Ruscha? Michael Asher? John Baldessari?

Sasha Archibald: Those influences definitely. You can cast a wider net and include Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp. I attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and they definitely have a particular course of study that's unique to that program, which came about in the late seventies and has stayed pretty much the same since then. The big names talked about there are Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, and that generation. So in terms of my interest in doing this show, those are the more immediate influences.

You keep mentioning institutional critique -- I don't know if I classify the show as institutional critique. I think of institutional critique as a body of critical theory that stemmed from various movements in the late '80s, early '90s, generally termed "cultural studies." I see it as limited in time. I don't think it's irrelevant, but I think the conventional strategies of institutional critique are shopworn. I'm not sure they're as successful now as they were in the past. I know Fred [Wilson's] work best... he has gone from working in museums where there's a great degree of resistance to what he would come in and do... to where his approach is solicited, welcomed, celebrated.

Earlier you mentioned Jennifer Dalton: I don't think of what Jennifer Dalton is doing as institutional critique exactly, but maybe that's just my training.

MAN: Oh I think they are. Dalton, William Powhida, Elmgreen & Dragset as exploding the idea of institutional critique beyond bricks-and-mortar institutions, and are expanding those ideas and taking them to the entire system, to the entire art world, be it the market or whatever.

Archibald: But William [Powhida's] doing really well. [That's a detail from Powhida's Possible Show Titles.] I looked at his works list from a show in San Francisco and the show had sold out. [Correx from TG: Actually it didn't. Sorry about that.] Then I went to the Schroeder Romero show here in New York and every work but one had sold. And while I was there the gallery attendant was clearly courting a collector and the collector had pulled up a chair to one of his paintings, was reading the painting and slapping her thigh, laughing out loud and totally enjoying herself. I told William, and he took great delight in this, in the irony of the collector being crapped on and enjoying it. But you have to wonder if there's an actual "critique" going on, when there's such viable commercial value. The art world is very savvy now -- savvy enough to know it's better off embracing criticism than resisting it.

MAN: Why does institutional critique have to be commercially unacceptable?

Archibald: I guess my notion of critique is that it has to be unpalatable. It needs to come from a voice that's outside enough and disrupts the ordinary course of things. Maybe that's a more avant garde notion of what change is, but people should resist critique. It shouldn't be welcome. If it's painful to address, the institution's impulse is to ignore or deny or say it's not art, not snap-it-up. If it's as radical as it should be, critique hurts. [At left: Carl Pope.]

MAN: There's work in the show that hurts? And there's work there that hurts, say, you? Where did wanting to do the show come from?

Archibald: Well, I'd like that! Right now I feel okay about my place in the art world because I enjoyed putting the show together. But before that I was really intent on leaving the art world entirely. I felt very disillusioned and decided that I would go back to school and be re-educated to do something else. Then Momenta asked me to do a show and I said the only show I was really interested in doing was an anti-art world show. They were great and encouraged it.

There's a lot of chatter happening in the art world -- and it may be the equivalent of water-cooler chatter, and some of it is sour grapes or gossip or whatever, but there's a lot of complaining. And it's not often translated into journalism. In fact, usually it doesn't go anywhere because the people doing the talking are bound by what they can say and where. As much as they gripe, they want to get ahead too. So when I had the idea to do a show about that talk, it was a welcome relief to hear that people were interested in the show happening and really excited to participate. These are artists who want to succeed in the contemporary art world -- they aren't interested in jumping ship or operating at the margins -- and have legitimate problems with it. People are talking about these things, but no one's talking very loud.

MAN: I'm guessing that the whole idea or existence of 'The Market' came up a lot in doing the show.

Archibald: Few artists have a very good grasp of economics and how the market works, especially over time, so it's become a code word of insult and denigration to say, 'The market is the problem.' It seems to me that the words are swung around too easily. People are quick to rip the market and I try to avoid doing that, mostly because although I know the market is a problem, I don't have it better articulated than anyone else. There are a lot of good artists making money they deserve to make and there are a lot of collectors who are collecting wisely, collecting artists who deserve to be supported. There are other serious problems in the art world that get a lot less lip service than the market. [At right: James Mills.]

MAN: Given Christoph Buchel's mock heroics in Massachusetts, did you consider including something, anything about that? That's was the anti-art, anti-institution pseudo-statement of the summer.

Archibald: It's an interesting idea, but no I didn't, the timing was just a little bit off. There's a piece in the show that's self-reflexive of Momenta, though we didn't post it online. It's a piece by William Bryan Purcell. He made his piece out of paper mache and latex, a sculpture that's meant to look like a bloodied scalp, hung to a wall by a rusty nail. He donated that work to the 2007 Momenta benefit auction and there was a collector who bought it - he wasn't there but because of the way the benefit worked a piece was 'assigned' to him and sent to him. The collector actually returned the piece to Momenta with a letter saying he knows they represent underrepresented, emerging artists, but still this work was pathetic, I'm paraphrasing, and he didn't want to be involved with the auction or any other Momenta events. So I included the sculpture and the letter in the show because they said a lot about taste, the nature of these big fundraisers, this particular collector's logic about what he deserved for his money, etc.

From the Washington Post's website. This is the photo gallery that the Post was trying to feature. And here's a David Segal feature on Koons, pegged to the auctions. Speaking of Koons, Eli Broad's art team is telling anyone who asks that Broad didn't buy a Koons for $23.5 million last week. (Josh Baer also reported this yesterday.) But Carol Vogel and the Times haven't run a correction yet.

I think we all understand why MoMA's Jackson Pollock gallery is so central to the museum's story of post-war art and why Pollock got a gallery to himself: Pollock was Kirk Varnedoe's hero artist (in much the same way that Picasso was Bill Rubin's hero artist).

The last project of Varnedoe's life, his Mellon Lectures, was devoted to convincing us that American abstraction stemmed from Pollock, that Jack was the Abraham of American post-war creation. I've expressed my quibbles with Varnedoe's thesis here before: He (nearly) completely forgets that there were artists outside New York or that women make art too. He presents Pollock as the first with the most and the greatest, and at least two of those three just aren't historically accurate. As for the third, that's certainly a matter of taste. For me: Pollock spreads you around the field, Still plunges you into the void. Advantage Still.

To be clear: Nowhere in these posts (full links below) have I suggested that MoMA create a chronological post-war hanging to reveal this, nor have I suggested that it this was solely an architecture-generated problem: As I said last week, a curator (or three) chose to give Pollock a room to himself and to have other artists literally follow him. The Pollock gallery and its placement are a lovely de facto memorial to Kirk Varnedoe, but in so creating MoMA gives us a deadening installation that slights Still, Newman, Kelly, Diebenkorn, and others. (To be fair, MoMA doesn't have a pre-1966 Diebenkorn. No Berkeley, no Albuquerque, no Urbana. Donors may contact the museum at (212) 708-...)

So am I advocating that MoMA create a 1950 gallery? Nah. Blog posts do not equal museum installations. But I do hope that art lovers and art historians are having as much fun thinking about this parlor game as I have. My operating mini-thesis has been: The more you ponder American post-war painting, the richer and more varied it looks (even if it doesn't quite look that way at MoMA). And the more you consider American post-war painting to be rich and varied and not merely post-Pollock-ian, the more artists and histories you let into the room.

Oh -- the painting (or rather the mediocre JPEG) at the top of this post is by John McLaughlin. It's from 1950.

The series of posts: Jackson Pollock and Ellsworth Kelly. Franz Kline and Philip Guston. Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko. Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. Clyfford Still.

I'm sure that there is an alternate universe in which this makes sense: Yesterday the Smithsonian held a press conference at which it announced that it would launch a major capital campaign in an effort to raise operating funds and to address its $2.5 billion in building-related needs. Except that the SI knows it can't raise money with so many key leadership positions, including secretary, vacant. So it announced that it would announce a capital campaign some time between January and March. Or sometime after that. Or, to put this more simply: The Smithsonnian made an announcement of a coming announcement to be made after it finds, hires, and announces who the new secretary is. So that he can announce it.

"VANDERBILT??!?!!!" Was he a painter? The size -- and capitalization -- of the text above a painting in the first gallery of the Met's The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art would sure lead you to think so. But no, he was just a rich guy who liked the Met.

Donors are more important than art, or at least that seems to be the message of the Met's stupefying presentation of its remarkable Dutch Golden Age collection. In gallery after gallery the Met has chosen to spotlight when the museum acquired art and the donors who gave it, essentially depicting paintings as society trophies. (The second most inane installation in America is the Hedge Fund Shark as presented by Gary Tinterow, a dual monument to a curator's apparent belief that a museum should only wow audiences if it provides 'appropriate' context. Which actually isn't.)

The Met's installation is mostly a parade of missed opportunities to spotlight connections between subjects, artists, places, and scenes. Instead the show is hung chronologically by when the museum acquired the work, an act of institutional self-worship that presents the museum as more important than the art it has collected.

The best moment in the exhibition is the installation of this Vermeer (above), with a related ter Brugghen visible down a hallway to the left. The Vermeer, Allegory of the Catholic Faith, includes oodles of Catholic imagery, including a painterly sampling of Flemish painter Jacob Jordaens' The Crucifixion. The Met doesn't own the Jordaens (the Wallraf-Richartz in Cologne does), but it does own ter Brugghen's The Crucifixion, which is closely related to the Jordaens. It's a great art-centric moment, the kind of pairing that few museum collections allow.

Think of the connections that a smart installation of such a deep collection could have made. Take art about religion and consider Dutch religious tolerance: Vermeer was a quiet Catholic and Rembrandt might have been. During their lifetimes Europe and the Netherlands were awash in religiously motivated and tinged wars, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation raged, and the mostly Protestant United Provinces were a prime destination for European Jews who were fleeing other countries. Both Vermeer and Rembrandt had deep familiarity with minority Catholics and both almost certainly had contact, even friendships, with Jews. At a time in the U.S. when religious tolerance has often been replaced with religiously-motivated suspicion, imagine what the Met could have shown us about the Dutch and religious tolerance -- or lack thereof -- in their Golden Age? And how would that have led us to think about our own?

Consider, say, an installation that included the Baroque ter Brugghen, the referential Vermeer, and the Met's only two Dutch church interiors. (Yes, only two! The one here is bad-boy Emanuel de Witte's Interior of the Old [Protestant, of course] Church in Delft.) Surely the Met has a Golden Age print or three that shows a synagogue or a scene from Jewish life. (Dutch artists, including de Witte, painted synagogues. And artists such as Luiken and Veenhuijzen made prints of scenes from Dutch Jewish life.) The Met's failure to own one may reveal something about the Met that Calvin Tomkins discussed at length in his history of the museum: Its history of not necessarily welcoming Jews.)

Such an installation would provide lots of opportunities to compare the works, the approaches, and the reverence that Dutch artists did and didn't have for their religious subjects. I mean, you might not be able to see it in the tiny JPEG here, but de Witte got away with this... (Imagine how the president of the Catholic League would respond if an artist showed that in a painting of a Catholic church in 2007 America.)

One of the great things about great art is its timelessness. The Met's installation forces its Dutch paintings out of timelessness, and into the time of their acquisition.

Related: Holland Cotter's NYT review has a devastating final sentence.

As I've mentioned before, the art world loves Project Runway. So as I disappear for the weekend (what, the umpteen-thousand words here this week weren't enough?), here's a section of Nina Garcia's Bravo-based pseudo-blog that artists (and curators) should heed: Fashion hates wall-texts too.

Background on what I'm doing. Next: Texas. Please leave suggestions in the comments, complete with the blog's city of origin.

From yesterday: Considering a gallery that breaks up MoMA's Pollock-centric storyline/room, and that shows MoMA's great Pollock in the context of other works painted in 1950. (Also: When possible I'm going to post paintings from MoMA's collection.)

You didn't think I'd make it through these posts without talking about Clyfford Still, did you? At left is a Hirshhorn Clyfford Still painting from 1948 -- sorry, I couldn't find a decent image of a 1950 Still. Neither of MoMA's Stills is online, which is an inadvertently poetic measure of revenge.

For reasons that aren't clear, Still despised MoMA. After a major 1959 show at the Albright Art Gallery, Still wrote a letter to Albright director Gordon Smith, telling him about the NYC reaction to the Buffalo show: "Like roaches, they scattered at first. But the herd instinct reasserted itself and they all returned to their mother, the Great Gas Chamber of culture on 53rd Street [that would be MoMA] -- jackal-yapping the old clichés and lies to cover their retreat."

While Still hated pretty much everyone, near the end of Pollock's life the two were apparently on their way to a kind of friendship. (In one bizarre letter to a friend, Still claimed that if they'd been closer, sooner, that Still could have saved Pollock's life.) There's no way of knowing why Still warmed up to Pollock when he hated everyone else, but I'd like to think that subconsciously it had something to do with them both bein' boys from the Mountain West and because of how landscape (subconsciously) impacted their work. Putting a big Pollock next to a big Still would sure get that point across.

I'll close out these posts with a wrap-up thought tomorrow or on Monday.

Previously: Ellsworth Kelly. Philip Guston and Franz Kline. Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko. Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt.

Related: This Walker painting is from '50, but it doesn't look right via JPEG. I don't remember the color in the lower two-thirds of the painting looking so milky-consistent in person.

This morning I complained about NYTer Michael Kimmelman ignoring the Hammer's Ricky Jay fluff-job. I should have pointed out that SFMOMA deserves being called out for the exact same thing: In 2008 SFMOMA is showing The Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Logan Collection. Here's why it's a mistake.

UPDATE: Please see clarification from 11/28/08.

Yesterday, before Carol Vogel's latest mistakes hit MAN, I was moving through a series of posts about MoMA, Pollock, and 1950. Here's the intro.

So, back to the diversity of abstract painting practice in 1950, a diversity rather thoroughly masked by MoMA's Pollock-centric installation of its post-war collection. You wouldn't know it from MoMA's collection presentation (and maybe you shouldn't), but one of the most remarkable next-steps of American high-abex was the birth of minimalism. Yesterday I posted a 1950 Ellsworth Kelly painting that had almost nothing in common with what Pollock was doing in 1950. Today: 1950 paintings from Barnett Newman (that's Vir Heroicus Sublimis) and Ad Reinhardt (Number 107).

Newman, who was a particular favorite of Donald Judd, started painting minimally in 1948 when he made the Onement paintings. Onement I is on view at MoMA now and in part because of its diminutive size and in part because of where it's hung, it feels lost. (It's across a gallery from Vir Heroicus, which is such an awesome painting that it makes almost everything around it look like a speck.)

Imagine Onement I hung next to Pollocks' gigantic Number 1A, 1948, a painting 16 times as large. That would make it pretty clear that Pollock wasn't the only game in town. (More on that tomorrow.)

Ad Reinhardt's Number 107 is also shockingly different from Pollock (and Newman, Still, etc.) While Reinhardt fills space in much the way the others do, he does it with a maximum of painterly economy: Look at all that blank canvas. To what extent can the canvas stay naked and be full? (To no one's surprise: A 1960-61 Reinhardt is installed near/with MoMA's minimalists.)

Previously: Ellsworth Kelly. Philip Guston and Franz Kline. Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko.

UPDATED: Oops, NYTer Carol Vogel did it again -- last week, and before that last year. Earlier today MAN revealed that Vogel quoted the husband of a Christie's employee saying how great a Christie's sale was -- and failed to fully identify him.

Now we find this: Last week, on Nov. 8, Vogel quoted Andrew Fabricant, the husband of Christie's international director for contemporary art and deputy chairman Laura Paulson, commenting on -- and ripping! -- a sale at rival Sotheby's. Just as in today's story, Vogel did not identify Fabricant as having any relationship with Christie's or with a senior Christie's employee. From Vogel's Nov. 8 story:

''Every piece that didn't sell had a logical reason,'' said Andrew Fabricant, a Manhattan dealer. ''This was not some watershed moment in the market. It's what happens when the pricing is extremely aggressive and the material less than stellar.''

And from November 9, 2006:

"As crowds milled around Christie's after the sale, trying to make sense of it all, Andrew Fabricant, a Manhattan dealer, perhaps best echoed the feeling of the audience. ''I'm flabbergasted,'' he said. ''Not only did so much money change hands, but this sale it going to change the whole landscape when it comes to prices for postwar art.'"

Stepping out of 1950 and back into the present for a moment: If ever ye doubted that the auction industry keeps NYTer Carol Vogel in its back pocket, take note of this morning's Vogel write-up of Christie's contemporary sale. There, in paragraph two, is this doozy of a celebratory quote, the kind of quote Christie's would kill to place at the very top of an NYT story as a way of cementing the (alleged) pre-eminence of the market -- and especially Christie's -- in the art world:

"One million dollars is the new 10 grand," said Andrew Fabricant, a Manhattan dealer, as he left the salesroom. "This was supernatural."

Oh, wait... maybe Christie's didn't have to kill for that quote. Fabricant is the husband of Laura Paulson, Christie's international director for contemporary art and a Christie's deputy chairman. Vogel appears to be quoting an independent dealer on the success of Christie's last sale... but in reality she's essentially allowing Christie's to celebrate itself while in disguise. (Obviously Vogel should have revealed the relationship between Fabricant, Paulson and Christie's.)

UPDATE: MAN finds two more examples.

From this morning: Considering a gallery that breaks up MoMA's Pollock-centric storyline/room, and that shows MoMA's great Pollock in the context of other works painted in 1950. (Also: When possible I'm going to post paintings from MoMA's collection.)

One of the thing that bothers me about MoMA's current Pollock-centric post-war installation is that it is geographically goofy. In 1950 Ellsworth Kelly was in Paris, which probably means that a NYC museum will never give him the Pollock treatment. And here's one of the terrific paintings Richard Diebenkorn made in Albuquerque in 1950. (This untitled painting is in the collection of the University Art Museum at the University of New Mexico. It's now on view at the San Jose Museum of Art in the Harwood's Diebenkorn in New Mexico show.) In a related story, you'll never see Frank Lobdell, Hassel Smith or Edward Corbett at MoMA either. (Or in California, alas.)

Speaking of California, Mark Rothko had left the Golden Gate for New York by the end of 1948 (he had taught at the California School of Fine Art), just before his Still-influenced clouds-of-color breakthrough in 1949. Pictured here is Rothko's 1950 No. 10 from MoMA's collection.

Earlier: Ellsworth Kelly. Franz Kline and Philip Guston.

Related: I was going to end today's posts with this point but Modern Kicks beat me to it.

From this morning: Considering a gallery that breaks up MoMA's Pollock-centric storyline/room, and that shows MoMA's great Pollock in the context of other works painted in 1950. (Also: When possible I'm going to post paintings from MoMA's collection.)

Here are Franz Kline's Chief and Philip Guston's Red Painting. These works -- and the rest I'll show today -- all have one thing in common: Compositions that span the canvas, that don't build to a central (or non-central point) but that fill entire, often enormous spaces. These two sure do that. (Among the artists I'll show today, only Guston's abstract work sometimes moved in the other direction. And, of course, sometimes it didn't.)

Speaking of Guston, I know this image isn't ideal. A better picture of his work from this period is here: SFMOMA's White Painting I from 1951.

Earlier: Ellsworth Kelly.

Related: Wikipedia's timeline of 1950's major world events. Michael Kimmelman reviewed the Menil's Franz Kline: Black and White, 1950-61 when it touched down at the Whitney.

So, the Ellsworth Kelly-from-the-collection show at MoMA got me thinking... When you enter the fifth-floor galleries at MoMA, the installation encourages you to see American abstract art in a certain way: Here are the biomorphic (Barr's word!) abstractionists: Gottlieb, Gorky, and so on. Then there's de Kooning who was interested in the figure, but enough of that, and skipping right along... Out of Picasso and biomorphism came Pollock, and he changed everything. Here's Jack working through Picasso, here's Jack working through narrative, here's Jack working through Matta and surrealism. And, then, finally, here's a great drip painting, the culmination of all that (linear) achievement: One: Number 31, 1950.

Phew. Then you take a deep breath, turn around, and see what comes after Pollock: Newman, Rothko, Still, and, for the moment, that collection-based Ellsworth Kelly installation.

MoMA's installation, which is in part an accident of architecture and in part not (someone put all those Pollocks together and banished everyone else), encourages us to see Pollock as the titan, the artist who, along with Picasso and Matisse gets a MoMA gallery to himself. The not-so-subtle suggestion is that everything else in American hero painting stems from Pollock, that it all comes after him, that no one else is worthy of sharing his space. As proof, at MoMA those other artists all are after Pollock, not with him.

OK, but that's not how it happened -- and MoMA's smart Kelly gallery provides a nice entree to consider an alternate installation.

The anchor of MoMA's Pollock gallery is the great 1950 painting I mentioned earlier. By coincidence MoMA's new Kelly, Relief with Blue from St. Louis' Donald Bryant (that's another story entirely) is also from 1950. So for the rest of the day I'll be featuring American abstraction from 1950 as a way of demonstrating that Pollock was part of what was going on and that he wasn't everything that was going on. (In the case of heroic abstraction he wasn't even first -- as James Demetrion has noted, Still was there before any of his peers, including Pollock. For a variety of reasons having to do with Still's prickliness, MoMA's influence in forming the history of 20thC American abstraction, the confluence of the two, and on and on, Still just doesn't get much dap.) So check back often throughout the day as we enter the MAN-MoMA time machine and consider what a gallery of 1950 might look like...

The posts: Kline and Guston. Diebenkorn and Rothko.

Related: Jerry Saltz has long suggested that MoMA mix it up a bit more. Here's one of his suggestions.

Last week the NY Sun's Kate Taylor dragged out an old standby: Are art museums building too much, too fast? The piece was simplistic; I mostly skimmed it. Then an eagle-eyed reader sent me this link to a comment posted on the Sun's website. The commenter gave her name as Elizabeth Wilson, and contributed this:

[Y]ou fail to mention an extremely successful expansion at the nelson-atkins museum in kansas city, and some quotes from their articulate director. the expansion works as architecture, as a connection to the existing building and sculpture part and as a superb place to view a vibrant collection.

Apparently the Nelson-Atkins' director, Marc Wilson, is so articulate that when he asked Elizabeth to marry him, she said yes. Because the comment quoted above was left by Mrs. Marc Wilson herself.

A few months ago, in an Atlantic piece about the manufacturing boom in China, writer James Fallows detailed the nuts, bolts, and keyboard strokes of how the global economy works:

The other facility that intrigued me... handled online orders for a different well-known American company. I was there around dawn, which was crunch time. Because of the 12-hour time difference from the U.S. East Coast, orders Americans place in the late afternoon arrive in China in the dead of night. As I watched, a customer in Palatine, Illinois, perhaps shopping from his office, clicked on the American company's Web site to order two $25 accessories. A few seconds later, the order appeared on the screen 7,800 miles away in Shenzhen. It automatically generated a packing and address slip and several bar-code labels. One young woman put the address label on a brown cardboard shipping box and the packing slip inside. The box moved down a conveyer belt to another woman working a "pick to light" system: She stood in front of a kind of cupboard with a separate open-fronted bin for each item customers might order from the Web site; a light turned on over each bin holding a part specified in the latest order. She picked the item out of that bin, ran it past a scanner that checked its number (and signaled the light to go off), and put it in the box. More check- weighing and rescanning followed, and when the box was sealed, young men added it to a shipping pallet.

By the time the night shift was ready to leave--8 a.m. China time, 7 p.m. in Palatine, 8 p.m. on the U.S. East Coast--the volume of orders from America was tapering off. More important, the FedEx pickup time was drawing near. At 9 a.m. couriers would arrive and rush the pallets to the Hong Kong airport. The FedEx flight to Anchorage would leave by 6 p.m., and when it got there, the goods on this company's pallets would be combined with other Chinese exports and re-sorted for destinations in America. Forty-eight hours after the man in Palatine clicked "Buy it now!" on his computer, the item showed up at his door. Its return address was a company warehouse in the United States; a small MADE IN CHINA label was on the bottom of the box.

Which brings me to Xu Zhen's clever untitled contribution to Tomorrow, a two-museum contemporary group show and festival in Seoul at which I was effectively the critic-in-residence. Zhen's piece, pictured above and below, was a room-sized installation consisting of six or so weight-lifting machines, each with a corresponding remote control. The viewer was invited to pick up the remote controls -- picture the remotes you might use for a souped-up, radio-controlled car -- and move the levers to and fro.

Depending on what the viewer did with the remotes, the weight-lifting machines became 'active,' lifting heavy weights on their own, and then setting the weight down again. (The machines were invisibly operated with some type of hydraulic thingamajig.) A more direct metaphor for Fallows' Palatine-to-Shenzhen pipeline could hardly be imagined: Work is ordered remotely and it is invisibly done. And besides, the gizmos were a total blast to play with.

Art historically, Xu's work fits within the recent tradition of viewer-activated sculpture, a sub-genre pioneered by Bruce Nauman nearly 40 years ago when he merged sculptural objects that only became 'activated' when the viewer entered them. (These works include 1969's Performance Corridor and Live/Taped Video Corridor from 1970.)

For me, Xu's work is more directly related to Giovanni Anselmo's Invisible, a 1971 Arte Povera piece in which a slide projector is mounted on a pedestal. The projector is clearly on, but it doesn't seem to be projecting anything... until the viewer puts his hand in front of the lens. At the right distance from the projector the word "VISIBLE" is, well, yeah. With both Xu's installation and Anselmo's piece it is possible to ignore what we don't want to see: The man in Palatine dialing up a widget neither knows nor likely cares from where is widget comes. Once I began to play with Xu's remote control I wasn't particularly interested in how the machines' weight was magically lifted. I just saw that when I used the remote that 400 pounds went airborne. Anselmo's piece works on the same principle: You can't see something unless you try to. It kind of reminded me of the American 'return address' on those boxes from Shenzhen.

Related: Xu Zhen visited Everest. Or did he?

Previously: Inhwan Oh.

I'm off for the holiday, except for...

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has launched a new part of its website called Dashboard. It's designed to tell you more about how a museum works than you probably ever wondered, including:

MANpal Kate Shepherd's paintings are on view now at Galerie Lelong in NYC. The gallery has published a catalog of Shepherd's work, complete with a fascinating Q&A with controversial NYTer Deborah Solomon. I particularly liked this part:

DS: What about Sol LeWitt, whose work, like yours, reaches toward opposing poles of delicate linearity and brash color?

KS: I don't see him as an influence. He uses isometric perspective, which is purely diagrammatic, while I use two-point perspective and carve out painterly space. But I love how he draws on the wall and writes directions for the works. At a certain point, his work is about the clarity of his writing.

There's a lovely, well-documented Sol LeWitt up at the National Gallery of Art right now. Here's LeWitt's direction for Wall Drawing #65: "Lines not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random using four colors, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall." Here's that piece being made and here's how it looks.

Just to put the Art Institute of Chicago's rental (rental! rental! rental!) deal in perspective: The AIC is said to be getting $2 million. That's about 1.2 percent of the AIC's operating budget. Is it worth the attention, Chicago? (MAN's post on the residue from the rental has been doing boffo traffic. The hometown paper might have let you off the hook AIC, but...)

Ah the things we almost miss when we travel. Thanks to eagle-eyed readers for:

In South Korea, homosexuality is considered so bizarre, so unnatural that it isn't even referenced in any of the country's laws. The closest the country comes to codifying anything about gays and lesbians is catch-all statute about "crimes against sexual customs."

With that in mind, Inwhan Oh installed his latest 50 Places Where a Man Meets a Man piece in his hometown of Seoul, as part of Tomorrow, a two-museum contemporary group show and festival. (Oh started this series in 2001, the Seoul installation is a new piece.) It was my favorite piece in the 33-artist show, a living sculpture that is as smart as it is engaging as it is, well, fragrant.

Where a Man Meets a Man in Seoul is a nearly room-sized rectangle made out of green incense. A series of characters -- both Korean and English -- are raised across the piece, but jumbled together in a nearly non-sensical design. On the first day of the exhibition, Oh lit the incense with the expectation (or hope?) that the piece would finish smoldering on the last day of the show. As the piece burned, it revealed hidden words. Each of the words -- be they in Korean script or in English -- was the name of a gay bar in Seoul. (Banga Banga, Drago, Always Home, Uncle, Bar Code, and so on.) Oh's piece was cleverly installed in the basement of Seoul's Kumho Museum of Art so as the incense burned its scent wafted upwards and throughout the building. 'Want to ignore gay life and the quiet repression of gays?' the piece asked. 'You can't, it's all around you,' it answered.

I love how Oh's fiery sculpture says so much and does it within all kinds of art historical contexts. Any art that incorporates text brings to mind the explosion of text-based work over the last 40 years, especially the work of Lawrence Weiner. But as I watched (and smelled) Oh's work, I mostly thought of Charles Demuth's nine 'portraits' of friends, many of which allude in a careful, sometimes text-based way to the homosexuality of friends such as John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Gertrude Stein.

Related: Oh has installed versions of the piece all over the world, including in Copenhagen (above in red), Santiago, Berlin, Sydney, in Oakland and in Cleveland.

Dave Hickey is probably the most admired writer on art of the moment. (Y'all certainly click on any link that mentions him!) Which is fine and he's certainly fun to read. But I'm surprised at how little I hear art people talking about Lawrence Weschler.

True, Weschler doesn't write regularly about art anywhere in particular, but some of his most important books and essays read as fresh as if they'd been written yesterday. With MCASD's Robert Irwin extravaganza underway, I've noticed several writers (and also several artists) talking more about Weschler's superb Irwin book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the of the Thing One Sees. And I think that several of the write-ups in the Weschler compilation Vermeer in Bosnia are classics. The title piece might be my favorite essay, period. Finally, one of my favorite Weschler books, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, is recently out in paperback -- and is just $15.

Having heard lots about MOCAD on Ann Gordon's former (?) blog, I was eager to see for myself what all the fuss was about.

Said fuss was well-placed. MOCAD is an artist's studio made large, a barely-refined shell barely ready for contemporary art. The space, designed by Detroit architect Andrew Zago, consciously rejects the fashionable fetishization of both gallery space and art objects. In so doing art installed here doesn't look like a commodity or feel like someone's possession generously made available to us, the unwashed masses. Instead, art here feels like something made available to us by an artist, someone who has just created an object that is still finding its way in the world, something still fresh enough that it need not be over-fussed about. The artist cares most about this piece, and the curator cares second-most, I thought as I walked through. This is the way most artists want their art shown. This is the kind of space in which contemporary curators want to work -- or should. Barriers between viewer and art are absent. That is so cool.

I don't mean to suggest that Zago and the museum did nothing but install a front door. Someone(s) made the decision to let laissez-faire be an architectural style here. Walls are neither white nor any other particular color. They are not smooth, but then again they aren't necessarily rough. The walls have about as much consistent surface as they have normalized color. The floor is made up of whatever you happen to be standing on. MOCAD is the anti-Renzo, the anti-Gluckman, the anti-Miami Beach Convention Center.