February 2008 Archives

Only on MAN: The director of the Dia Art Foundation, Jeffrey Weiss, has resigned.

Weiss had been at Dia for less than a year. The biggest event of Weiss' tenure was the sale of Dia's landmark Chelsea building for $38.55 million.

Prior to running Dia, Weiss had been the modern and contemporary curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Three New York museums/foundations are seeking leaders: Dia, the Guggenheim, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

UPDATE: NYTer Carol Vogel follows MAN.

1.) At a time when pretty much everyone in the art world is bemoaning the near-death of arts journalism in newspapers and magazines, the Warhol Foundation's art writers program continues to be an enormous dud. Once again, Warhol funds narrow projects that reach narrow audiences when instead the art world should be focused on replacing the outside-the-ghetto writing, journalism and criticism that can reach general-interest audiences. Here are this year's winners. But pay more attention to the judges: No one there makes their living from writing or editing!?

2.) Judging from my email, readers seem to love the idea of museums doing more small, one- or two-gallery shows. Lots of museums could do this right out of their collections...

3.) Speaking of collections and small shows: Phillips director-to-be Dorothy Kosinski wants to make the Phillips a little more contemporary. Here's an idea: Invite Martin Puryear to do a permanent collection installation when the Puryear retro comes to the National Gallery. I bet he'd start here.

4.) How much fun is it that the Kimbell can hang this Caravaggio and this de La Tour almost right next to each other?

5.) I really enjoyed NYTer Ken Johnson's review of Charles Demuth at the Whitney. In an unrelated story, how bad is the Whitney's website?!

February's must-read is this Christopher Knight piece about LACMA, MOCA, who has what, who doesn't have what, who needs what, and how the whole LACMA/MOCA/Broad Art Foundation situation could be simply, neatly, tidily, brilliantly, and legacy-enhancingly sorted out. (Photo credit.)

First: Knight is neither wholly nor merely imagining this scenario. (You did click, right?) Plans quite similar to the ones Knight outlines have been discussed by various actors. That doesn't mean anything is even remotely imminent, just that Knight is getting behind a germ of an idea that is good enough to deserve a little germinating. The version I've heard more than once doesn't involve a Geffen Contemporary-adjacent property the way Knight's idea does -- it involves the empty lot visible here, the parking lot that forms an "L" with Disney Hall and MOCA (in the center foreground). The mechanics of where a 'new' MOCA would go are less important than that MOCA gets the space it deserves. Like Knight says, MOCA is "the nation's most prominent contemporary art museum." Programmatically it's the best, too.

Next: I know that the Broads and the Broad Art Foundation team have said that the Broads aren't interested in building a museum or in a museum model. But in August, 2004 Eli Broad told the LAT that he wouldn't be building LACMA the Piano if he didn't intend to give it a lot of art. And he changed his mind. That's fine, that's his prerogative, but what's to say he can't (or won't) change his mind again? As I've written, the Broad Art Foundation is already set up more like a museum than anything else.

In fact, TBAF is already pretty good at showing art. The current Broad Art Foundation installation, overseen by director Joanne Heyler, is terrific. The Franz Ackermann on view (to the 'industry' and by appointment only) is awesome. The juxtaposition of Mark Tansey and Neo Rauch in one gallery has me thinking about both artists in new ways.

One of the problems MOCA has now is that it's the only reason to visit downtown LA during daylight hours. If TBAF and MOCA were within walking distance of each other that would change. (Better yet: Imagine a J. Paul Getty Photography Museum there too.) MOCA deserves something like this. The Broad collection is good enough to fill the Isozaki not just with one installation but in multiple installations. We can hope...

Admin: I'm back home and posting will (finally) get back to normal. That was going to start with more Francis Alys, but there are two other newsy items that will bump the next Alys post into Friday.

Yesterday evening, when the LAT report of Tom Krens' pending departure from the Guggenheim came across the e-transom, I blinked. I'm embarrassed to say that I'd actually forgotten that Krens was still around. The Gugg has become that irrelevant.

I think we're all familiar with the Tom Krens record. Bilbao was an architectural success, everything else failed. Bilbao opened in 1997, which means that Krens has spent 11 years pointing at one great building when someone, everyone, pointed out his repeated, multi-continental failures. A big part of the Bilbao legacy is this: It inspired Krens to chase dreams. It distracted him from New York, where the Guggenheim's flagship New York museum has languished. When was the last time you heard anyone in New York -- let alone anyone anywhere else -- talk about the Guggenheim?

It's been years since the museum had a recognizable identity. Under Krens the museum's exhibition program swung from "Russia!" to "The Aztec Empire" to Cremaster, a mystifying program for a museum built around a collection that had little to do with pre-modern Russia or the Aztecs. Often Krens' shows seemed more determined by the potential sponsor lineup than by curators, a shame because the Guggenheim's often exceptional collection-driven (and based) shows regularly out-drew Krens' fantasies.

The bottom line on Krens is this: His swashbuckling-dealmaker act grew tired years ago. His model for a museum empire was a thorough failure. The Guggenheim board belatedly realized this, finally recognizing that Krens' continued presence was the impediment to bringing a in a high-quality director in to run the NYC museum.

The next question is: How much difference will Krens' departure make to potential director candidates? The foundation's board is betting that it will matter a lot. It should: The Guggenheim is still a prominent museum in New York (which is different from being a New York museum -- as the museum's tiny membership figures show, it's been years since the museum had any real connection with its city). It has a fine collection. Its curators are still widely respected. Sure, the Gugg's a turnaround job, but the next director will surely enjoy a post-Krensian honeymoon. We aren't happy to see Krens go because we don't like the Guggenheim. We're happy to see him go because we want to see the Guggenheim succeed.

Today's Vogelism: "The move comes three years after Mr. Krens triumphed in a him-or-me showdown with the foundation's biggest benefactor, the Cleveland philanthropist Peter B. Lewis." Krens triumphed? Really?!?

Today's Rosenbaumism: "I always thought he truly believed his own hype and I know, from several conversations that we had, how convincing he could be in communicating his convictions to others." Great. That makes Krens George W. Bush.

Related: Tom Krens: The most influential museum director in NYC.

Paul Lieberman of the LAT has the story: Thomas Krens is expected to leave the Guggenheim today, but will stick around to run the Abu Dhabi project.

When I left off yesterday, I was writing about how artists had long depicted futility myths as a way of reminding underclasses that they'd better obey their rulers, or else. Francis Alys has taken this mythological and art historical tradition and he's tweaked it. In part because it's been a few years since artists needed to glorify royal patrons to make a living, Alys adopts storied myths for an artist's purpose, not a monarch's: He has used futile labor as a metaphor for contemporary social and political realities.

Take Rehearsal 1, Alys' 1999-2003 video that shows a red VW bug driving down a dirt road, trying to build up enough momentum going downhill to make it up the next hill. For 29 minutes and 25 seconds, the bug, for four decades a familiar, outmoded vehicle in Mexico, failing. Meanwhile musicians play on an audio track. When the musicians stop playing the car stops too, and rolls backwards down the hill. "It is a story of struggle rather than one of achievement," Alys has said of Rehearsal 1, "an allegory in process rather than a quest for synthesis." Titian might have said the same thing about his painting of Sisyphus.

Alys' allegory is set (more or less) in the present, in what appears to be a poverty-stricken slum. The roads are unpaved, the buildings are modest, the colors dead browns. (It's not apparent from the video itself, but Rehearsal 1 was shot in Tijuana.) It's easy to see the video as a metaphor for the failure of development in the third world. Time and time again wealthy countries promise to help. Time and time again wealthy nations promise that their rising tides will lift third-world boats. But so often they fail, and countries like Mexico stay stuck in a range, just like Alys' red bug.

When I was at the Hammer in December, just a few days before the Iowa caucuses, I also thought about the multi-national debate over immigration, particularly among the Republican combatants. I thought about how the candidates and the news media talk blandly about immigration policy, usually relying on vagaries to mask the less savory specifics: For the right-wing, 'immigration reform' is code for 'keeping Mexicans out' and 'sending Mexicans back.'

Alys' Rehearsal 1 also serves as a metaphor for the experience of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who have tried to illegally enter the US, have been caught and sent back, only to try again. More broadly, Rehearsal 1 is also a metaphor for the experience of many immigrants caught between two cultures: Having left one country for another, they struggle to fully belong or assimilate into their new home.

A child is to an adult what a VW bug is to a car? Probably not, but when I first saw Charles Ray's The New Beetle (2006), a painted stainless steel sculpture, that was my first thought. The Dallas Museum of Art has just acquired the piece, by way of the Rachofsky Collection, the collection of Deedie and Rusty Rose, and through the museum's own DMA/amfAR Benefit Auction Fund.

Like many of Ray's sculptures of children, this one is vaguely creepy. Maybe it's because the life-sized four-year-old is naked. Maybe it's because of the intensity of his gaze, his complete focus on his new toy. Maybe it's because we can gaze at him as intently as we want -- after all, he's white-on-steel, not the real deal.

The New Beetle was one of three works in Ray's November, 2007 Matthew Marks show, his first NYC show since 1998. Roberta Smith reviewed the installation here.

Yes, you've seen myths of the doomed before: Man tries to do something. Man fails. Man tries again. Man fails again. And again. And again. The cycle is metronomic, and perhaps because it is reliable and thus familiar, it has fascinated humans for thousands of years. There's Sisyphus, who rolls a stone up a hill for perpetuity, never succeeding in reaching the hilltop. Or Leto's would-be-rapist Tityus, who was punished by having his constantly self-renewing liver devoured by eagles and snakes. That worked so well that when it came to punishing Prometheus for giving man fire, Zeus apparently suffered a creativity brain-cramp: Prometheus was subjected to a perpetually-liver-eating bird too.

And there is Francis Alys' red VW bug. And that stripper. And the guy pushing the ice block through Mexico City. (A still from that video is above: Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing).) Don't forget the hundreds of workers outside Lima. All were on view in an often-terrific survey of Alys' work, "Francis Alys: Politics of Rehearsal," curated by Russell Ferguson at the Hammer Museum. The show closed on Feb. 10.

The exhibition revealed Alys to be working within a long tradition of artists and storytellers who have been fascinated with repetition and futility. Like many of them, Alys mixes futility with politics, resulting in a poignant examination of political systems, gender roles, power, and human resignation. But before we get to Alys, let's go back as far as we can, to the beginning of recorded futility myths.

The myths of Sisyphus, Tityus, and Prometheus seem to have originated at least 3,000 years ago. They were stories of what would happen to mortals if they failed to obey or properly respect their supernatural betters. The message of the stories was clear: Be devout, resist hubris, know your place, stay within it. If you don't: You will suffer punishment, eternal damnation with an extra, sadistic twist. Rulers of classical societies would have loved these myths because they served to remind their subjects to be, well, subjects.

It's no surprise that future generations of societal leaders would think the same way about these stories. For hundreds of years rulers have commissioned artists to paint these myths as reminders to their subjects. Take for example the Spanish royal family, which commissioned Titian to paint a series of canvases depicting, Sisyphus, Tityus, and other myths of the damned. The royals installed the paintings at the royal court at Alcazar, where they would remind anyone who saw them who was running the show. (Obviously the royals didn't much fret the substitution of 'gods' for 'monarchs.')

Several of these paintings were destroyed when Alcazar burned, but two have survived. (Today, both are at the Prado.) In one Titan shows us Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill, in the other we see Tityus bound, unable to defend himself as an eagle snacks on his liver. Nearby a snake waits its turn. In both paintings the doomed are portrayed as muscular, capable men. The message is clear: No matter how strong, how powerful you are, you are subject to the rules of the leader. Defy them at your own risk.

Alys brings these timeless, familiar themes into the present, and gives them modern twists. Tomorrow we'll look at how...

The installation of the Martin Puryear sculpture retrospective at MAMFW is nothing like the installation at MoMA. Whereas MoMA essentially installed the show in two large, open galleries, MAMFW has installed works in in little groupings of two or three. A few works are on their own, sitting on the Ando at the top of one of MAMFW's 'piers.' There's much more natural light in many of the MAMFW galleries too, which especially affects the works that have tar on them.

One of the things I like about seeing a show at multiple venues is it gives me a chance to revisit what I thought/wrote about a show the first time I saw it. (See below.) And yes, the near-total absence of Puryear's non-wooden works still strikes me as a real gap in the show.

Just for fun: I dig the Michael Auping story/quote here.

Previously: Puryear at MoMA, considering perspective; Puryear and Augustus Vincent Tack. Puryear and Ellsworth Kelly. Puryear and the Getty's That Profile, Photoshopping art history: Puryear and (possibly) Uccello. Puryear and 'the doubles.'

Just back from a few days in Dallas/Fort Worth. Some thoughts:

When I left off yesterday, I was writing about Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park No. 38. More specifically I was trying to perform some kind of archeology on it in an effort to 'solve' the painting, particularly its dominant diagonal.

No. 38 isn't the only 1971 Diebenkorn in the Phillips' collection, but it is the only one on view right now. After I got home from my Saturday visit to the Phillips, I dialed-up the museum's excellent American art-focused website and found the 25-inch-by-18-inch painting at left. It isn't an exact mirror image of No. 38, but key elements of No. 38 are in the work on paper and are reversed: The V-shape in the upper left of the painting, the twin diagonals, the thin yellow vertical block on the right edge of the canvas, and more.

With absolutely no justification whatsoever, I'm guessing that Diebenkorn made the smaller work before No. 38. With that assumption in place I wondered: Was Matisse's View of Notre Dame the jumping off point for Diebenkorn's smaller work, an idea which he developed into No. 38? There are so many similarities between the 1971 work on paper and the 1914 Matisse that I think Diebenkorn used the Matisse as a guide. By the time Diebenkorn painted No. 38, those guide-marks had evolved and the final work is much less about learning from the master, and much more of a classic Diebenkorn.

As always with Diebenkorn, color first. The blue that underlays the white in the Diebenkorn is strikingly similar to the color Matisse used in View. The green Diebenkorn uses in both 1971 paintings is almost identical to the mysterious green 'bush' in View. That Diebenkorn would take lessons from another painter's palette is hardly a surprise: From the mid-1950s on, Diebenkorn shamelessly riffed on the colors used by Mondrian, Bonnard, and, of course, Matisse. (Also at the Phillips, Diebenkorn's 1960 Girl with Plant is chromatically similar to Bonnard's 1921 Open Window, with the exception of the view through Diebenkorn's window, which is Rothko-ian.)

There are other relationships between the 1914 and 1971 paintings too. Diebenkorn paints a rectangle in almost the exact same height and place that Matisse puts his twin towers of Notre Dame. Diebenkorn's rectangle has just about the same proportions as Matisse's. And then there are the diagonals. Matisse's painting features two diagonals that run from the middle-right to the lower-left. Diebenkorn's does too, and they move the same way. In both paintings there is a faint third diagonal at the far right.

Also, at the top of the 1971 work-on-paper, two black horizontal lines run across the top until they are stopped by a vertical line of color. They're about the same thickness and distance apart as the two lines Matisse uses at about where the wall and floor of his studio would come together. Diebenkorn uses the same lines Matisse did, but he shoves them up higher in the picture.

And by No. 38, this is all deeply disguised. The grandson looks just enough like the grandfather for the lineage to be clear.

So on Saturday afternoon I found myself at the Phillips Collection, which had just installed a show of recent acquisitions that might as well have been subtitled, "While you're here, perhaps you can explain to us what in the name of Duncan Arthur Phillips three Elizabeth Murrays are doing here?!" when I bumped into an old friend, Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park No. 38.

I love the Ocean Park seris. As far as I'm concerned it's the apex of American abstract painting, a notch above Mark Rothko's color clouds and several notches above anything else. (Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, you're next.) Selecting my favorite Ocean Park painting seems mostly to be a function of which one I've seen most recently: FAMSF's, SFMOMA's, Hunk & Moo Anderson's (recently on view in San Jose, Calif.), MoMA's and of course, maybe the Phillips'.

One of the reasons these are such great paintings is that there are umpteen ways to approach them. What are those lines there for? Is there anything specific Diebenkorn has abstracted to get to this painting? To what is he referring with that diagonal or that color ? And as I find myself thinking about these things, I feel like I'm standing amidst the painting, that I've somehow entered the canvas.

The lines that most preoccupied me on Saturday were the diagonals that run up through the center of the painting. (One is visible in the picture above or by clicking here.) I squinted and tried to imagine the painting without them, and I couldn't do it. That primary diagonal -- the one you can see in the JPEG -- holds up everything on the canvas. It's support, sightline, atmosphere, color, guide, path, and hint, all rolled up together. So where did it come from?

The easy answer with Diebenkorn is that it came from Matisse. On Saturday, standing in the gallery, I remembered that Diebenkorn often claimed that people read too much Matisse into his paintings. So I tried hard to expunge Matisse from my mind, to think about the other great influencer of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings, Mondrian. While there are certainly Mondrianesque Ocean Parks, I couldn't find a way to get Mondrian into No. 38, and quickly gave up. No, this one is all Matisse.

In the catalogue for her 1998 Diebenkorn retrospective, Jane Livingston points to how important Matisse's View of Notre Dame (1914) was to Diebenkorn. He first saw it at just about the time he started the Ocean Park series: The Matisse made its first American appearance in Los Angeles in early 1966. By the end of 1967, the Ocean Park series was underway. The diagonals in No. 38 -- and in plenty of other Diebenkorn Ocean Parks -- come straight out of View of Notre Dame.

In the Matisse, the dominant diagonal line serves to flatten space, to bring the painting closer to abstraction. The diagonal is so prominent that the viewer forgets to look for the place where the wall with the window meets the studio floor. With an assist from a little patch of green (a bush?!) that effectively brings Notre Dame from outside Matisse's studio window into the foreground of the painting.

Diebenkorn didn't immediately bring Matisse's flattening diagonal into his work. (After all, he didn't start the Ocean Park series until late the next year.) Ocean Park No. 6 is a fine example of Diebenkorn learning how to build an Ocean Park painting: It's a mass of squiggly horizontals in desperate need of a supporting diagonal. By No. 38 Diebenkorn figured it out. Matisse used the diagonal as an abstracting element in one of his least representational canvases. Diebenkorn had no qualms about abstraction and seized upon Matisse's trick.

More on No. 38 tomorrow....

I wanted to share a couple links with those of you who are headed to the College Art Association annual convention. (I'm speaking on a panel on Friday.) First, don't miss Glasstire, which is all-Texas, all-art, all-the-time. I can't imagine going to Texas without it. And the Carter and MAMFW both have blogs.

This is a continuation of a Q&A with artist Saskia Olde Wolbers that began yesterday. When we left off, we were talking about Olde Wolbers' love of fiction and how what she reads impacts her art.

MAN: So instead of looking to art, contemporary or otherwise, for inspiration, you go to books.

SOW: Writers and novels have more information than art. I also look to architecture and cinema. But then of course when I'm making the object I think about contemporary art. But I'd say I'm not really interested in working or commenting on art. I'm more interested in life and stories.

MAN: What do you look at in movies?

SOW: The visuals. I especially look at documentaries. I think it's the way visuals and text are used in documentaries - often it will lead you or seduce you into the stories with a voiceover that doesn't necessarily lead you to the images. That happens especially in more conventional documentary or historical documentary, where you have to have something to look at as you hear the story. So narrative is very important, but I also don't mind it if people pick up half of it [in my work] or are seduced by the visuals. I think I also use narrative as a guide. I think if I didn't have the narrative I could make anything. It's good to restrict myself... I don't work with storyboards so the visuals are a help to the audio.

MAN: When you were in art school or whenever and when you started making work, did it start with writing or did it start with visuals or with video, and how did the two end up coming together?

SOW: I was just sort of writing really for fun, but not too much. Then I started working with video because my pieces were becoming more narrative, and I thought video was a great way to combine visual and narrative. I think it's problematic with art when you have to read a lot and look at something. In a way it's also very seductive to listen to a voice, and most of my images move or the camera moves and it's a good way of drawing people into a story.

MAN: Do you ever want to write anything that isn't part of a video installation? A novel, poems, whatever?

SOW: I wouldn't mind writing a Lonely Planet to some country. That'd be fun.

MAN: Where? A real country or a fictional kind of thing?

SOW: Anything. I don't know. A real country. I think I'd be more into something like journalism more than something like poetry.

NYT arts section coverage of Spiral Jetty, complete with erroneous headline: 174 words. NYT editorial on Spiral Jetty: 288 words.

The first time I saw a Saskia Olde Wolbers was at the Hammer in 2003, where Placebo (2002) was showing in a Hammer 'Projects' group show. I was hooked from the first moment: the lush, rich, oozing visuals were other-worldly. It took me a minute to hear the voiceover, and another minute to teach myself how to divide my attention equally between the video and the narrative -- and by then the six-minute video was up. I figured out how long it would be before Placebo (left) played again, went upstairs to see something else at the Hammer, and returned in time for Placebo to restart. I think I did that one more time that day, and several times over the course of that visit to Los Angeles.

Few video pieces have stuck in my mind like Placebo. It's catchy like Pipilotti Rist's Ever is Over All, it's visually sumptuous in the same way a Shirin Neshat is, and it's slow like a good Bill Viola. But while each of those artists shows us a narrative, Olde Wolbers writes us one. Her visuals are super, but it's her cleverness as a writer that keeps me going back a third or fourth or fifth time.

Placebo opens with a line that could have started a classic novel or the best vintage bit of Hollywood noir: "Here I am, lying next to my lover Jean, in intensive care, slipping in and out of consciousness in shifts. Life slowly dripping out of us..." So too Trailer (2005), which is on view now at the Hirshhorn as part of Kerry Brougher and Kelly Gordon's The Cinema Effect show: "Somewhere in the vast Amazonian forest, among plants whose indigenous, Spanish and Latin names compete with one another outside of their awareness, three species stood out self-consciously. There was the ancient red bark tree by the name of Ring Kittle. And in his shady undergrowth the Elmore Vella, a species of flytrap, used to go quietly about her deadly business."

For the next 10 minutes Trailer's narrative wanders away, folds over itself, slips along, and then doubles back in a too-real-to-be-true self-referential loop. Olde Wolbers' stories are like ice crystals: They're beautiful and complicated, and you have to examine them carefully to fully appreciate them. Then, just as you begin to figure them out, they melt and vanish. I'll have plenty of opportunities to 'solve' Trailer: The Hirshhorn has acquired the piece for its collection.

Olde Wolbers, who is Dutch, lives in London and has never had a solo show in the U.S. She visited the Hirshhorn for the opening of The Cinema Effect and I talked with her about Saskia Olde Wolbers, the writer. Come back for part two tomorrow.

MAN: Are you a writer?

Saskia Olde Wolbers: No. But I guess fiction is my main source of inspiration I'm constantly reading and writing things down, but you know I think writing is difficult. When I'm making actual work, I guess sort of it is ninety percent of it is making, making sets in the studio. In the studio I listen to a lot of novels on tape, so I am constantly engaged in ways of narrating. Even if I'm socializing, I'm looking for stories, so I'm definitely listening for stories. That's sort of an interest of mine, the way writers sort of filter experience in a distant way: They see the actual story as well as the emotional experience.

MAN: So when you're working on a piece, do you start with writing, with narrative, or do you start with visuals?

SOW: I usually start a piece with a very thin premise. For instance with Trailer (above right) I stumbled upon a documentary about Judy Lewis, who was the daughter of Clark Gable and Loretta Young, and by the time she found out Clark Gable was her dad she could only see him in his roles. So I started with that distance, how film creates something but it's not really personal per se.

I had just been in Los Angeles, so I started working on the idea of the cinema as a building, and the jungle as a sort of place for fiction. So I had different strands, but I never have one or the other finished first.

MAN: So you don't sit down and write out the whole story in one or two sittings?

SOW: No. I do the writing only in pieces. I have a notebook, so I make notes and then I put it into a PC and I end up with lots and lots of unrelated material. I add things I find along the way and then I edit it down.

MAN: Do you outline or go with flow?

SOW: Towards the end, when the visuals are almost done and the story has to come together, I do guide it a bit. But when editing I lay the narrative/voice over down first and then I can slot the visuals into it.

MAN: You've mentioned fiction a few times. Tell me what you read.

SOW: There are definitely some particular writers. There is a sort of particular feel I guess to what stories I like. I wouldn't read just anything... What did I just read? Oh, I just read Dave Eggers' What is the What and I really liked that. It was great company. [Olde Wolbers also emailed me her reading-plus list. Click below to see it.]

Earlier this week I posted about 'La Entrada,' a highway that threatens the calm and specialness of Marfa, Texas. Now in Time magazine Whitney Joiner weighs in on the same...

If there's one constant through the last 150 years of American art, it's that artists have a fascination with Niagara Falls. That continues with Wolfgang Staehle's Niagara (2004), an hour-long, pre-recorded video projection. The Hirshhorn just acquired Niagara, which is on view now in its The Cinema Effect show.

As I noted in a series of 2006 posts (see below), scads of 19thC artists painted Niagara Falls, including Birch, Catlin, Church, Hicks, Peale, Moran, Bierstadt, Twachtman, Cole, Hale, Kensett, Trumbull and others. In the 20thC artists have obviously captured the Falls itself, but they've also used it as an implied backdrop for modernist takes on all kinds of things: Margaret Bourke-White photographed hydro-power generators at the Falls, entropy-obsessed Gordon Matta-Clark took apart a building nearby, and Alec Soth treated the region as a faded, touristy relic.

Staehle's harkens back to the 19thC and revisits the sublime landscape, capturing it almost exactly where Frederic Edwin Church did in his Niagara Falls, from the American Side (1867).

In fact, the installation in 'The Cinema Effect' emphasizes the relationship between Staehle's video and 19th-century American painting: Curators Kerry Brougher and Kelly Gordon have installed Niagara as big as they could, from the floor to the ceiling. Church's painting is 8.5 feet tall and 7.5 feet wide. The Staehle is even taller. (Staehle's Niagara comes with no installation instructions, so the 'size' of the installation is up to the installer.)

Of course the difference between 19thC paintings of Niagara Falls and the way audiences saw them and how audiences today will see the Staehle are profound. When American landscape painters showed their 'Niagaras' they hoped to wow their audiences with the powerful scale of their work. The canvases were effectively metaphors for the ambitions of manifest destiny-obsessed Americans. Man conquered the landscape on canvas, why couldn't he conquer the landscape itself too? Today, when we're used to big movie theater screens, big home-theater screens (and to big canvases), Staehle's piece doesn't rely on size or sublimity. Instead it asks questions: Is a video projection of Niagara more or less impactful (or sublime) than oil-on-canvas? Beyond the obvious art historical, size-myself-up attraction, is Niagara Falls still a relevant subject? Can landscape art, even when made with contemporary digital materials, still capture the imagination? When I first saw Niagara at NYC's Postmasters gallery in 2004 and then again at the Hirshhorn, I thought, 'No.'

But then I realized I couldn't stop looking at it. People walked up to me and started talking with me, and instead of looking at them I kept staring at Niagara.

Related at the Hirshhorn: The museum owns George Inness' Niagara (1893).

Related: Spencer Finch. Andreas Gursky. Adam Cvijanovic. Gordon Matta-Clark. Alec Soth I. Alec Soth II. Clyfford Still.

Actual content will return tomorrow. But until then, enjoy this unintentionally hilarious conversation between the LAT editorial board, Eli Broad and LACMA boss Michael Govan. And as you read, please remember: STEP AWAY FROM THE BUNNY. THE BUNNY ISN'T GOING ANYWHERE.

Related: I'm pretty sure that it will be mere days before someone mashes up a LACMA t-shirt with the museum's new marketing slogan: 'We've got the bunny.' Or maybe 'Who needs a carrot or a stick when you've got the bunny?'

From time to time, me here at MAN is overwhelmed with off-blog matters. That time would be... this week. This doesn't mean that lots of interesting things aren't going on. There are. (For example: Expect a light bulb to go on over the Hirshhorn any day now. And I'll have a Saskia Olde Wolbers Q&A soon too. And did you really read all 900 words? I didn't think so.) This all means you get morning links.

Thursday/Friday UPDATE: AJ did a server switch this week and we're experiencing back-end hiccups. Thursday posts will be back, and hopefully Friday's will be up soon.

Whoa. Yesterday about 30 of you emailed me to share your favorite art history mystery authors/books. Before I email y'all with thanks, I thought I'd share your picks with everyone here...

The august New York Times, the paper of record, the paper that featured a strange not-really-a-story Spiral Jetty item last week, has this story filling the entire above-the-fold area in today's arts section. Wince.

Today is the deadline to submit Spiral Jetty comments to the state of Utah. Click here for links to more information and click here for contact details.

The only writer/blogger I've seen come out against the oil exploration/drilling proposal is Joy Garnett, who considers preserving the landscape south of Rozel Point to be "museumification." I find her post a little puzzling -- the oil exploration/drilling proposal has nothing to do with 'restoring' the Jetty. It has to do with ensuring that the Jetty continues to exist. Here's a chart that shows how interested bloggers are in this issue.

In other preservation news, Monday was the earliest day on which the Richard Serra's Shift could have been protected under the Ontario Heritage Act. To the best of my knowledge: Nothing (yet).

Have I mentioned this lately: An organization or two within the art world needs to build the capacity to lead people who care about art around these art-meets-public policy issues such as these. And it needs to do it fast. (Obviously Americans for the Arts isn't interested in these particular issues.) UPDATE: They did indeed send out an action alert, I just couldn't find it when I looked at the organization's websites yesterday. (And I still can't -- but I've seen the email the group's action fund send out.) AftA says that its action alert generated over 250 emails to the state of Utah.

"The give-and-take between Picasso and Matisse has been the subject of so much discussion in recent years that there is little to add," John Richardson claims on page 309 of the third volume of his Picasso biography.

As I noted yesterday, throughout Vol. III Richardson insists that Picasso exists as a solitary figure, an artist apart from his contemporaries. For someone intending to write the definitive biography of one of the century's two major artists, I think that ignoring the dialogue between Matisse and Picasso is rather odd. (In the few instances when Richardson refers to Matisse it's usually to note something along the lines of "Matisse was in [Picasso's] sights," rather than to note that Picasso's art was impacted by Matisse.)

Today I'll look at one specific period of Picasso's production from which Richardson expels Matisse, and I'll try to show how I think it deprives us of a fuller picture of Picasso's life and work. The years 1931-32 were a key focus of Yve-Alain Bois' 1999 Kimbell show. Richardson mentions the exhibition, and shrugs: "Bois, whose sagacious catalog preface, slyly subtitled 'A Gentle Rivalry,' tends to see things from Matisse's viewpoint..." Having unleashed a kindness, Richardson then shrugs and turns away.

Since Richardson brought it up, let's take a look at the two paintings that Bois discusses in that very catalogue preface. The canvas at the top of this post is Picasso's Still Life: Bust, Bowl, and Palette (1932) from the Musee Picasso in Paris. The second image is Matisse's Still Life with a Plaster Bust (1916) from the Barnes.

In 1931 Galerie Georges Petit launched a Matisse retrospective. This still life was not in it, but it was featured in a full-page reproduction in Cahiers d'Art that was published on the occasion of the Petit show. Picasso would have seen the 'zine, ensuring that the Matisse painting was in his mind. (Bois also thinks that Picasso saw it in 1919. As Richardson notes repeatedly, Picasso was the sort who remembered these things.)

"Picasso would return more than once to study his rival's work," Richardson writes of Matisse's Georges Petit show. Then the biographer, who throughout Vol. III dwells on tiny details of the influence of Ingres, mannerism, etc. on Picasso, fails to focus on any specific examples of how Matisse's work impacted Picasso deeply during one of Picasso's greatest and most hyper-productive periods, the early months of 1932. This enables Richardson to further his argument that Picasso was The Greatest, that he achieved alone, and that his peers were merely ancillary figures who just happened to be there.

Except as Bois shows, that's not the way it went. "Could there be a closer pairing?" Bois asks about these two canvases. "In March 1932, Picasso attends to Matisse just as he attends on other occasions to Ingres and to Delacroix: he does so with a purpose... To say that Picasso was thinking of Matisse would be an understatement. But why does [Picasso] offer a response to Still Life with a Plaster Bust at this particular time? Did he have something to tell Matisse -- a score to settle, a corrective to offer?"

Yes. As Bois notes, Matisse's 1916 still life was one of a handful of responses to Picasso's cubism that Matisse finished that year, possibly the best still-life of the bunch. (Those canvases include the AIC's Bathers by a River and MoMA's The Moroccans. Picasso famously responded to Bathers with MoMA's Painter and Model.) Bois points out that the still life we're talking about here references a number of Picasso's cubist innovations and paintings, notably MoMA's 1915 Harlequin.

So no question: The 1931 Cahiers d'Art reproduction of Matisse's painting was a clear provocation, the kind of painting to which Picasso would certainly respond. (Throughout Richardson's three volumes he makes much of Picasso's Spanish origins and how Picasso embodied certain stereotypical Spanish traits such as machismo. Richardson oft notes that Picasso loved to respond to provocations. But here, presented an opportunity to revisit a favored storyline, Richardson passes.)

And Picasso did respond. In early 1932, as we can see above, Picasso revisits that 1916 painting and cubist-era Matisse. Naturally, Picasso tries to one-up his rival. It is an example that makes so clear the impact Matisse had on Picasso (and vice versa) that Bois opens his book with it. The 1931-32 shows provided Richardson with an obvious opportunity to make clear how much Matisse and Picasso meant to each other. But giving a fuller account of those years and that artistic dialogue would have damaged Richardson's Lone Artist theory, so he skips them.

Oh, one more thing: Bois writes that after quickly making his still life in early 1932, Picasso held it out of his Georges Petit show. Maybe even Picasso knew that his still life revealed too much.

Related: An unusually high number of Picassos from late 1931/early 1932 reference Matisse, including Repose, which riffs on Matisse's Odalisque with a Tambourine. Matisse's 1907 Baltimore Blue Nude and its related reclining nude sculpture were also on Picasso's mind in this period. He made a bronze Reclining Figure in late 1931 that references the Matisse sculpture, and the Musee Picasso's Reclining Nude (day) is a clear reference to the Baltimore canvas.

With art theft in the news, I thought I'd confess that I love a good art-driven mystery. Aaron Elkins' series featuring curator Chris Norgren is super (as are all Elkinses) and Iain Pears' art history crime novels are good too. The protagonist of Daniel Silva's book is an art conservator and there's often an art-something subtext to his books. Others?

Sunday's New York Times featured an important Ralph Blumenthal story on the Trans-Texas Corridor, a project that could build thousands of miles of toll roads throughout the state.

Why does this matter to us? Because one of the proposed toll roads could go through Marfa, Texas, within spittin' distance of the Chinati Foundation (and the Judd Foundation properties too). The West Texas road is known as "La Entrada" and many Big Benders are gearing up to kill the project. Elsewhere in Texas, CorridorWatch.org is too.

Last week I wrote that art lovers were woefully unprepared (see No. 5) to make sure art in in the West will be preserved in the face of these kinds of industrial threats. This is another example...

I think the most honest-to-the-book, straightforward review of the third volume of John Richardson's Picasso biography has come from Robert Pincus in the San Diego Union-Tribune. While everyone else was gushing over Richardson, Pincus was nearly alone among reviewers in mentioning one of the biography's problems: "[Olga] Khokhlova never really acquires flesh and blood in these pages, and neither does [Marie-Therese] Walter," Pincus wrote. "This is the book's one notable weakness. Richardson is much better at looking at how Picasso's art echoed his life with the women."

Most other reviewers simply gushed. "Richardson leads us through the grand story with energy, wit and authority," Time's Richard Lacayo wrote. He later added: "Richardson is constantly illuminating on the sources of Picasso's art." The Washington Post's Michael Dirda is fascinated by the sex and gossip in the book: "Compared to the learned historicism of an E.H. Gombrich or the urbane connoisseurship of a Kenneth Clark, Richardson's tell-all biography reads something like a high-brow gossip column. The book is wickedly, sinfully entertaining." In the NYT Book Review, Jed Perl calls Richardson's book a "powerhouse."

Yes, Vol. III is entertaining. Richardson is fascinating and thorough on key questions that scholars have bandied back-and-forth for decades: How old was Marie-Therese Walter when Picasso picked her up? Did Picasso bed Sara Murphy? What were the specific sources of Picasso's neo-classicism? In fact Richardson is so thorough on these (and other) points that I can't understand how he could be so disinterested in and occasionally dismissive of much recent scholarship on Picasso's art and the artists who influenced it, most notably Matisse. Andrew Butterfield, writing in the New York Review of Books, never utters Matisse's name. In the NYTBR, Perl addressed Richardson's lone-artist theory -- and quickly explained it away:

"Richardson's Picasso is a colossus, a heroic figure whose achievements are so out of the ordinary that they quite literally defy explanation. This is a rather old-fashioned idea. It is also an idea with an enduring value. There is something reassuring about a biographer who is untouched by the modern inclination to contextualize everything, to regard every move a man makes as somehow conditioned or shaped by his environment"

Perl is half-right: Richardson certainly leaves a reader believing that Picasso was a solitary figure engaged almost entirely in dialogues with great art of the Italian or French (Ingres) past, totally disconnected from and nearly wholly unconcerned with the times and the artists around him.

Of course, Picasso wasn't. Given how prominent and thorough recent scholarship has been in examining the relationship between Picasso's work and the work of his contemporaries, I don't know why so many reviewers gave Richardson a pass on his exclusion of and disinterest in that work. (It's not new either -- Richardson's near-hostility toward Matisse is a constant throughout all three volumes of his biography.) Richardson's Picasso-on-a-pedestal take deserves a little more examination than it's received.

Over the weekend I re-read Yve-Alain Bois' magnificent Matisse and Picasso, the catalogue that accompanied Bois' show at the Kimbell in 1999. Over the next few days I'll share some of the recent scholarship on the dialogue that Picasso carried on with other artists -- and I'll point out how Richardson dismisses it or shrugs at it.

1.) In an art world where way, way too many people are way, way too full of themselves, Robyn O'Neil is having a kick-ass time. Good for her. Fresh off her Howard Stern appearance, O'Neil talks with Howard Stern fan and Boston Globe scribe Geoff Edgers. It's the must-read Q&A of the month. Robyn O'Neil is my new hero. (That's O'Neil's Homer-recalling 2007 The Fall at right.)

2.) I think that the reason the area around Spiral Jetty should remain as natural and unencroached upon as possible has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that Robert Smithson did or didn't write. At some point after an artist dies, it is up to us to determine how to take care of his art, not him.

3.) I think that people who have done no actual reporting and who don't know what's going on behind closed doors should stop throwing names at the Met job (and others) to see if any of those names stick. It's a lazy, amateurish practice that is relentlessly unfair to the people whose names they bandy about, to the museums at which those people work and to the boards for whom those directors work.

4.) Twice in the last couple weeks the issue of museums and the artists who happen to be women that they don't exhibit have been in the news. Christopher Knight pointed out the males-heavy installation at BCAM @ LACMA, and Timothy Buckwalter found SFMOMA's permanent collection to be mostly about men and talked with curator Janet Bishop about it. Jerry Saltz has been saying this kind of thing about MoMA and Chelsea for years. Ed Winkleman mea culpas. So why does nothing change? What will it take for this to change? I don't know the answer, but there are lots of smart curators who read this blog...

5.) In the last month or three: Dia has spent six days waiting to release a Spiral Jetty statement, Richard Serra's Shift has faced preservation issues, land bordering Chinati is/was for sale for development purposes, and Dia has been wisely raising money to buy up land around Lightning Field. There are long-term 'maintenance' issues with many iconic earthworks (and their cousins) and I don't see those issues being addressed in any kind of pro-active, save-the-art kind of way. Some group -- the National Trust for Historic Preservation in association with several art groups, perhaps? -- should come up with a list of the 10-15 most important earthworks, assess their condition and threats to their existence, and then should work to make sure they're preserved as best they can be. And this should happen soonest.

As Super Tuesday cycled through New York, I saw a lot of Barack Obama 'signs' on NYC-based blogs. I figured that was because art-folk tend to be lefty progressives and Obama is the lefty progressive candidate of choice.

Then I went and read the policy statements that various candidates sent to the Americans for the Arts Action Fund... and I began to think that there may be more to the art blogs' embrace of Obama than I'd thought. The documents the Obama campaign submitted to AAAF are more thoughtful and more thorough than his rival's submissions. Obama's staffers didn't write anything as laughable as "American Style Magazine has ranked Buffalo as the number one arts destination in our country," in defense of his positions like Hillary Clinton's did. (I love the Albright, FLW, etc.... but come on.)

But at the same time I'm not sure any of the candidates' answers tell us anything useful about specifically what they'd go to the mat for if they became president. I've never, ever, never heard the arts community outline the three federal/national policy things that are most important to us the way that, say, the pro-choice lobby has. Maybe we should. (And maybe we shouldn't.) More to come...

The only story that matters today (so far) is the critical response to the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA:

Last week Time's Richard Lacayo expressed disappointment that there are no big public art installations, commissions or events that arouse public interest in the US the way a Turbine Hall installation or the Turner Prize fires up the populace in the UK.

From time to time I've said the same thing here. One reason it doesn't happen in the US is because we're spread out across a continent. They have one major, center-of-the-country city, we have NYC, LA, DC, Chicago, SF, Dallas, Philly, Houston, etc. One in four Britons lives in metro London and many more live within a short train ride. Private donors here tend to be financially tethered to museums, not to public commissions. Lawmakers/administrators here think of public art as something decorative, not as something more thoughtful.

Maybe if more US museums considered public art to be part of what they do, Lacayo would get his wish. Imagine how Washington would be different if the Hirshhorn's program extended out into the city, be it to U Street or on the Capitol grounds. (At San Diego's inSITE, artist Javier Téllez and human cannonball Dave Smith recently demonstrated you can do pointed politically-relevant art with a sense of humor...) Ditto the MCA Chicago. Would the MCA dare do some kind of public art something within spittin' distance of the AIC? Imagine the press that would generate....

Update: I knew Lacayo had said something in this direction before but I couldn't find it. Until now.

I'm delighted that the NYT has (finally) discovered the Spiral Jetty story. I'm amused by its headline: "Artists Rally for Spiral Jetty in Utah." I'm further amused that the NYT mini-story has no mention of any artists doing any rallying. But best of all: This has been on blogs for a week, and the NYT, with all its resources, managed to add nothing new.

Also: Today Dia finally came out in opposition to drilling near the Jetty. Dia boss Jeffrey Weiss in a statement: "The expansive natural setting is integral to Smithson's artwork, providing an essential frame for experiencing the Spiral Jetty. Any incursion on the open landscape, including the proposed drilling, would significantly compromise this important work of art."

Finally finishing what I started last year: So when you do a show about the relationship between an artist's paintings and his sculptures, the first thing you want to do is install work that demonstrates that relationship, right?

And that's where the puzzling Matisse: Painter as Sculptor at the Baltimore Museum of Art fell apart for me. Too many of the show's groupings were flimsy or non-sensical. (Some, as noted here, were spot-on. And in my first post I talked about how the show's biggest problem was bloat.) For every strong pairing there was one such as these:

What was a throwaway 1906 Picasso drawing of two nudes doing with Matisse's Two Negresses? Totally flummoxed by the joining of two works that seemingly had nothing to do with each other, I turned to the catalogue. "A primitivizing formalism and exploration of duality can also be seen in works by Picasso, such as Two Nudes from 1906, the year Matisse was reported to have introduced the young Spaniard to African art," the catalogue suggests.

Uh, except that the Picasso drawing is Rose period through-and-through (not this pre-Les Dems Two Nudes) and has pretty much nothing to do with "primitivizing formalism." (The sketches may be studies for the girl in the Barnes' The Blind Flower Seller, with which they share a model.) Apparently the connection that led to these works being installed together is that Matisse made a sculpture from a photograph of two girls from Africa (Paris was somewhat obsessed with all things African at the time) and that Matisse introduced Picasso to African art... therefore a Matisse sculpture titled Two Negresses belongs with a 1906 Picasso drawing. Thin.

Later, Matisse's series of 1910-1913 Jeannettes (scroll down a page or two) was installed with SFMOMA's 1916 portrait of Sarah Stein. There is no relationship between the sculptures and the portrait. Still, the catalogue tries: "The simplicity and austerity achieved in Jeannette V [at right] extended into [Matisse's] paintings. In works such as Portrait of Sarah Stein and The Italian Woman, Matisse rendered the features of the models as a series of simple lines and planes. In both portraits, the side of the nose, orbital of the eye, and brow are again joined into a single line; the eyes and mouth are expressed as simple lozenge shapes, and the face and hair are defined as broad planes of contrasting tones."

I'll certainly accept the relationship between some areas in the painted portraits, but Matisse: Painter as Sculptor isn't a portraiture show. Jeannette V isn't anywhere near as "simple" or "austere" as Sarah Stein, one of Matisse's most gripping portraits.

Ultimately, as I said in my first post, the show should have been smaller, much smaller. As constituted in Baltimore I couldn't figure out exactly what the show was about, nor why much of the work was there. Matisse: Painter as Sculptor should serve as a reminder that a show big enough to allow an institution to justify a hefty ticket price isn't always better.

Previously: Part one, two, three.

Related: Roberta Smith treated the show as if it was a sculpture retrospective. Which it wasn't. At least I don't think it was. Which was part of my problem with the exhibition to begin with.

Late last week the Presidio Trust announced that it would work with Don and Doris Fisher to bring the Fishers' Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio onto the military base-turned-national-park.

"This is really good news for the Presidio and really good for San Francisco," said Craig Middleton, executive director of the Presidio Trust, a federal agency that has managed the 1,491-acre park since 1997. "San Francisco is a beacon to the world, and this adds to that, creating a place of innovative beauty, art and history."

But is it? It's great that art lovers will be able to enjoy what the Fishers have collected. But the question of whether the Fishers are selecting the right site for their museum is under-discussed. As I've mentioned here before the Presidio is a lovely tourist attraction. But that's the problem: It is significantly removed from the life of the city. A contemporary art museum, even a vanity museum, should ideally be sited somewhere within the city, not in an enclave effectively outside of it.

San Francisco-area historic preservationists are concerned about the project, especially because the process has essentially denied them any substantial input. The city of San Francisco has no jurisdiction over the Presidio, and the only approvals that the CAMP project needs are from the state and from the federal government. Both of those processes are presently controlled by Republican administrations, and the Fishers are among California's biggest Republican donors.

Everyone with whom I spoke last week said that while environmental impact reports will be done and that while those will involve some public comment, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Fishers' political connections will ensure smooth sailing. The only thing that can stop CAMP now, they said, was the discovery of some wholly unexpected environmental issue, such as the discovery of some small newt that exists only in a certain area of the Presidio.

Not likely. In two-to-three years, unless something changes, CAMP will be approved by all relevant oversight boards and agencies. However, everyone I have talked to about CAMP expects the Richard Gluckman designs to change substantially -- the principal building is so large and so out-of-place that it is likely to be substantially downsized. (Tellingly, the historical context of the Main Post is missing from Gluckman's drawings, such as the one above.)

That doesn't mean that outside groups won't try to stop Fisher's CAMP plans. MAN has learned that the Presidio has been nominated for the National Trust for Historic Preservation's 2008 'most endangered' list which will be finalized and released in late spring. Concerned San Franciscans say that the NTHP is their best hope for forcing CAMP to go somewhere else in the city.

I'm disappointed that there's been no discussion about where else CAM(P) might go. "No one else has stepped up to entice [the Fishers] to go somewhere else," a well-connected Bay Area preservationist told me. So here are two ideas: Numerous piers along the Embarcadero are available and would provide dramatic settings. There's also a beautiful, prominent, in-the-middle-of-it-all San Francisco site that would perfect for an art museum just south of where the Bay Bridge enters the city. The state of Florida's pension fund owns land there, and it may be available. Why not put CAM(P) there?

Last Eliasson post: Several years ago MOCA curator Ann Goldstein told me that she thought the minimalist most overdue for the retrospective treatment was Larry Bell. I mostly forgot about that conversation until I visited LACMA's otherwise disappointing SoCal show. There I saw Bell's 1964 Magic Boxes (at left) and had one of those a-ha moments: It's hard to tell from a two-dimensional photograph, but the smallest mirrored 'box' on this piece projects off of the wall and into the gallery. The things around Magic Boxes -- me, other works in the gallery, the lights, the floor -- effectively become part of the object.

Olafur Eliasson's Space Reversal is Magic Boxes turned inside-out. (You can kind of see it here. Third image.) Instead of projecting into the room, it is embedded in a (dry)wall. Instead of meeting the viewer halfway, it requires the viewer to enter it by sticking his head inside. Instead of mirroring the gallery environments, Space Reversal mirrors an environment inside the wall, complete with lights and more.

That Eliasson has taken a lot of cues from Light & Space artists isn't an original observation. (Christopher Knight has made the best case I've read, but it's no longer online.) But I think how much Eliasson has taken from Larry Bell is under-considered. (For example, Bell is only secondarily mentioned in SFMOMA's catalogue.) Take a look at Bell's 60/40 (1969), which is at the Pompidou. (Here's a video, too.) Then take a look at Eliasson's Reimagine (2002).

In 60/40 Bell shows us how a mostly clear sculpture can fill space and change (how we see) it. With Reimagine, Eliasson projects light up against a wall and eliminates actual space and depth. He effectively takes Bell's three dimensions, eliminates (actual) space, and shows how light and shadows can imply the third dimension. Or, to put it more simply: He uses light to show us new ways of thinking about space.

Related: Larry Bell's website.

Previously: Related: Olafur Eliasson meets... art history. Pieter de Hooch. Richard Serra. Vija Celmins. Ellsworth Kelly.

This past weekend, two of the three most prominent art critics in New York were billed as participating in a political event with someone they're charged with covering: dealer Lucy Mitchell-Innes. [via] The Feb. 2 shindig for Barack Obama at Mitchell-Innes' gallery was co-hosted by Mitchell-Innes and New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz. (The invitation says that Saltz is "unable to attend, but will be there in spirit.") Speakers were listed as including The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl, artist Matthew Ritchie, and New Museum curator Laura Hoptman.

Art critics who write for major publications are journalists. As such their ethics should be guided by the rules of the journalism world, not the flimsy, whose-your-buddy ethic of the art world. Would NYTer David Pogue co-host a Clinton event with Bill Gates? No. Is it highly probable that Schjeldahl and Saltz have had and will have the opportunity to make decisions on whether to cover Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery, Ritchie and Hoptman -- as well as scores of other people who attend their event (and who don't)? Yes. Think of it this way: If you're an artist, you don't want to wonder if you're not getting reviewed because your dealer didn't throw the right political party with the right critic.

This is not quite Christian Viveros-Faune/Village Voice territory. But journalists should not be partnering with people they're supposed to be covering.