July 2008 Archives

I'm taking a long weekend. See you Monday.

• SFMOMA's staff art show is on view, and it's occasionally hilarious. You can see it if you're on staff... or if you read the SFMOMA blog and surf Flickr.
• Has Ed Burtynsky found a way to make photo prints last for 10,000 years?
• This and the hidden cost, especially this.
• Why no one is discussing Puryear at the NGA.

For just about as long as I've done this blog, I've urged curators and museums to launch a full-scale Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park survey. There's been a retrospective, there's been a works-on-paper survey, but never has a curator and an institution done a show examining the apex of American abstract art, the body of paintings Diebenkorn made in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica.

And now it's coming: In October, 2009 curator Sarah Bancroft (who co-curated the Gugg's Rosenquist retro) and the Orange County Museum of Art will debut Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, 1967-1988. The show will travel to three or four TBD venues, including a likely stop in Washington. [The painting above is Diebenkorn's 1970 Ocean Park #36, from OCMA's collection.]

On the tenth anniversary of Robert Irwin's Central Garden at the Getty, Paula Panich Q&A's Irwin in the Los Angeles Times.

For a couple years now I've been talking about the possibility that there will be a permanent Robert Irwin installation at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Now it's confirmed: Chinati is moving forward on a permanent Irwin installation.

Chinati is presently working with an architectural firm and with Irwin on planning and drawing. Fundraising is ongoing, and the foundation expects to begin construction in 2010.

Irwin's design for Chinati has been the most open secret imaginable: Different stages of Irwin's 2002-2007 designs for the project were on exhibit in MCASD's terrific Irwin show. (Most of those drawings are promised gifts to the museum by way of collector LJ Cella. The piece shown here is Irwin's, and was also included in the exhibition.)

The Irwin work would be sited across the street from the entrance to Chinati, in the rectangular building at the center-left of this Google satellite image. During the Fort D.A. Russell days, the building was the Army outpost's hospital. As you can sort-of see in the satellite image, the structure is a concrete shell with a central pavilion.

Irwin's design (click on the image for a larger version) includes a series of scrims that affect light as it enters the windows that run the length of the perimeter of the building. The way in which the light is mediated by Irwin is revealed in the tops and bottom of the drawing. Can't wait.

Related: Irwin's 2006 temporary installation at Chinati.

I've got three Robert Irwin posts for you today...

First up: The Indianapolis Museum of Art has commissioned a massive, three-story Irwin for its three-story entrance hall. Titled Light and Space III, the new piece will be made out of fluorescent light and scrim. The museum has not made available a photograph of the design or of Irwin's drawings, promising donors a first-look at a museum event. However the museum's press release describes the work as:

... a 60x60-foot screen [that] will stretch across three adjacent planes by the main escalators. A series of white floor-to-ceiling scrim panels will bracket five channels of fluorescent light mounted in a grid-like pattern across the wall surfaces. Visitors will be blanketed by a tunnel of light as they move between the three gallery levels of the IMA.

It sounds like the Indy Irwin is related to this piece that Irwin did while in residence at the MCASD last year. Maybe. Possibly.

Last week I started a Q&A with Robyn O'Neil, who is included in the American Folk Art Museum show Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger. We're talking about influence and how the work of other artists finds its way into O'Neil's work. Here are parts one, two, and three. This is the final part.

MAN: So speaking of weather in your drawing, the Courbet and its influence: I think it's interesting that there's no real evidence of wind in the Courbet, which is titled, possibly or probably posthumously Gust of Wind [above], but in your drawing there's definitely wind: the grass in the lower left-hand corner. I'm guessing that's the title of the painting creeping into your thinking?

RO'N: Yeah. Let me think about that.

MAN: I mean, if you look at the storm and where it seems to be going, and the trees and how they're not exactly blowing... well, something doesn't compute. If anything in the painting is actually moving, it seems to be moving in opposite directions from the storm, which is Courbet mainly composing a massive diagonal to dramatize his fictional landscape.

RO'N: You're right, the [vegetation] would have to be much more feathery. The treatment of everything in the painting... it would have been more obvious that there was a gust of wind coming through. I probably wouldn't have seen wind were it not for the title. I wouldn't have seen wind as the main issue in mine or in the Courbet. But yeah. It got me going.

I think it's funny because those are tricks you can play when you draw or you paint trees to make them maybe look like they're blowing. And yeah, Courbet has his tree blowing in the opposite direction. But I knew that just kind of counting from the corners, just technically that's the way to go about it.

As a viewer of the scene in my drawing, it looks like you're peering into HUGE pieces of grass -- they're up to my thigh or something. [Ed: Staring  into the blankness, they fell in order to begin, is 76.5 inches by 144 inches. It's at left, and a detail is below.] So I thought it would be even more threatening to have the grass like that. It definitely doesn't look safe. The pastoral landscape which I've drawn as still and serene is really a trick. Some of the wind is coming from behind the viewer with the way it hits the grass.

MAN: The tree in the Courbet has recently fascinated me, probably because when the Fontainebleau show was recently at the NGA I noticed that there's some pretty serious art historical fudge on whether Gust of Wind is a Fontainebleau landscape or not. I'd bet not. Houston says yes, the NGA suggested, uh, no. I'd bet no - and my guess is that Courbet saw a Ruisdael print and based the painting on it. It's funny - Gust of Wind has or had never been considered a major Courbet - Gerstle Mack, Courbet's biographer, never mentioned it.

RO'N: There's one distinct tree in my piece that may be a very, very minor hint at the Courbet tree. The van Ruisdael -- I know what you're talking about. The trees are pretty much identical. Maybe we artist think we're real clever - just like the big diagonal weather in my painting gets at a part of the Courbet, I go the opposite direction with the tree, and hide it. We artists kind of disguise influence that way.

MAN: The last thing I wanted to ask you about is this big, dominant horizontal in your drawing. It's implied in the Courbet, behind the landscape and the hill on the right and all, but it's not even remotely visible.

RO'N: That's a good question. It has a lot to do with where my work has gone from the beginning of the days when I was making large scale work. I started making work that had so much to do with mountainscape and traditional landscape-type imagery in the background and using that as a stage set for what was happening with 'my men,' whether they're throwing a ball or fighting or killing each other or whatever. All of those things happened amidst a romantic landscape. If you did a timeline of my work it all was very mountainous and you never would have seen a flat landscape like that.

Then as the weather began enveloping what was happening in my work, the mountains -- they were always snowy landscapes and the snow began to melt and the mountains began to crumble and the men just got smaller and smaller and more and more in the dist.

There are no trees in my new drawing and in the early days of my work it was all about trees and mountains. The skies became bigger. The skies would be a tiny strata at the top of my drawing -- and here, now the horizontal line is way low, which normally you don't do if you have mountains. So basically it was knowing that the work was starting to be about nature winning over the men. It's more stark and bleak to have nothing.

MAN: So the MFA Houston should obviously acquire your drawing. You live in Houston, it may be the best painting in the museum. But they haven't yet?

RO'N: (Laughing.) Tell them to!

• Ken Johnson's review of an Iraq war-themed show at MoMA's PS1 was buried inside the Friday NYT. Too bad -- few institutions and curators have really explored how artists are responding to what has become a massive regional conflict. Aside: The show's website is beyond awful.
• While Johnson's review is the most important of the week (to everyone but his editors), Kenneth Baker's response to readers on the topic of Dale Chihuly is the most entertaining read of the week. In a related story, LATer Mark Swed is right: 'Elitism' is not a dirty word. (FWIW, Baker is wrong on bloggers. There are good ones sorting out exactly what he says they/we aren't sorting out.)
  
• Speaking of Baker, he notes a tiny gem of a Diebenkorn show at Stanford.
• Alice Thorson in the KC Star on the relationship between man and nature, as shown in a photo show at the Nelson-Atkins.
• Jen Graves notes emotional responses to this Janet Cardiff.
  

From Adrian Searle's delightfully entertaining podcast on being inside a Dan Graham:

The other thing about Dan Graham's pavilion is the flies. It seems to be a fly magnet. Flies like it more than people do in here. I'm sure we've got lots of different species. We've got little grommitty ones, we've got big fat ones, we've got the odd bee that seems to have managed to get itself stuck in here. There's quite a lot of fly poo about the place. They all seem to be waiting; I wonder what for. It suddenly strikes me that what this is like is being stuck inside one of Mr. Damien Hirst's vitrines and I'm not sure quite how I feel about that.

On Tuesday I started a Q&A with Robyn O'Neil, who is included in the American Folk Art Museum show Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger. We're talking about influence and how the work of other artists finds its way into O'Neil's work. Here are parts one and two. I originally thought this would be a three-parter, but it will actually be four. Part four will run on Monday.

MAN: It seems to me that Staring  into the blankness, they fell in order to begin [above, and the 'first' work in the Dargerism show] is deeply influenced by Gustave Courbet's magnificent Gust of Wind, which is in the collection of the MFA Houston, where you live.

Robyn O'Neil: Ahhh, Gust of Wind. [Left.] I love it as much as you do. The economy in the conception of this painting is so marvelous. It's a gust of wind. It's simple, but huge. It's invisible and it's not. It's so pared down that is is perfect. And that damn sky!  I was a volunteer weather watcher for most of my adult life. That means you log the highs and lows of the day and take rain gauge measurements, and then call them in to your favorite meteorologist. A true nerd's obsession. (Henry Darger was also obsessed with the weather and constantly wrote about the temperature.  He took particular pleasure in noting when the newspaper's weather predictions were wrong.)   I think it was the mere mention of wind in Courbet's painting that did it for me and I was reading a fabulous book called Defining the Wind by Scott Huler. It's basically a long essay on how The Beaufort Scale, and wind in general, is poetry.  Such a great sentiment. I also loved the quote in the beginning from Hemingway (writing to John Dos Passos): "Remember to get the weather in your goddamned book -- weather is very important." I couldn't agree more.

MAN: So I'm guessing that as you started Staring..., that you started in the upper left, with that dramatic bit of weather in the Courbet?

RO'N: Absolutely. That was the jumping off point. I don't know if it is to you, but I always thought it was a gorgeous passage but also so incredibly strange. Look at the way the weather is at a 45 degree angle, and on a diagonal. As someone who makes images, I look at nature all the time and you realize how those things happen constantly, things that look bizarre in a painting or drawing aren't bizarre at all. But the way you crop an image can haunt people and make them feel eerie, but it's natural in real life.

Courbet and Frederic Church did this as well. If that image, the Courbet, were cropped -- say he's planning the painting and we're it to cut off even six inches further on the left hand side than it does, the weird sweeping of the clouds might not have looked so weird. What I love imagining is a painter like Courbet knowing how much more strange and threatening it looked with that dramatic diagonal. That's one of the reasons painting resonates with people. Looking at it, it's a fucking wave, it's the ocean, it's a humongous wave in the sky.

Back to your very basic question: The wind and the weather. It's the weather that was definitely the main thread and connection between my drawing and the Courbet.

MAN: I noticed in the Flickr picture to which I linked yesterday [and at right] that you had tacked up onto the wall of your studio several pictures of dramatic cloud formations, and that next to them was a small sketch for Staring... Were you working off of those too?

RO'N:  I have those all over my studio. I forgot about hat. When I'm working on anything there's usually some image of weather hanging near it. What I've been doing for the last seven years is making the world eat up anything human-like. Anything that's living and is trying to maintain a life is being enveloped by nature or clouds or the weather. It has become bigger and bigger - the atmosphere has --  while the people have become tinier and tinier.

When I started doing these pieces many years ago, the men in my drawings were as big as my hand. Now they're barely the size of my pinky nail. I kept making them smaller and the world bigger so as to literally eat up the humans.

So back to these clouds: Being an avid weather-watcher, I have tons of weather books. I bought doubles of the National Geographic series on weather, so I could cut up one because they have insanely great images of clouds and weather. Those photographs have those pure blacks the way my drawing and Courbet's painting does.

• Artforum just reviewed the National Gallery of Art's Richard Misrach show. The gushing write-up was penned by Prudence Peiffer. I live in Washington, so I was a little surprised to see a local exhibition reviewed by someone of whom I'd never heard. In ten seconds of Googling I discovered that Peiffer is the recent recipient of a National Gallery of Art pre-doctoral fellowship. [Ed: Sorry, corrected.] It's a crystal-clear ethical conflict, the kind that even Artforum should recognize -- and it didn't take much work to find it. So who's on shakier ethical ground: Peiffer for writing the review-cum-thank-you-note or Artforum for running it?
  
• Worse: This tale of bought-and-paid-for critical sliminess is almost too shocking to be true. (FWIW, the critic in question won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994.)
• Unrelated: Christopher Knight's review of this Wifredo Lam show is superb.
  

Yesterday I started a three-part Q&A with Robyn O'Neil, who is included in the American Folk Art Museum show Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger. We're talking about influence and how the work of other artists finds its way into O'Neil's work. Here is part one.

MAN: One thing I like in your work is that you don't shy away from making your influences clear, from explicit art historical references. I'm thinking of "The Fall" [below] from last year, for example, which recalls Winslow Homer's famous "Right and Left." When starting a piece, do you start with a specific point of reference or influence and go from there? Or as you're conceiving of a drawing do favorite paintings just kind of pop up in your mind while you're game-planning?

Robyn O'Neil: I definitely have no hang-ups about these things. On the one hand, it's inevitable. Anyone who denies that is an egomaniacal idiot. Secondly, it seems important to riff off of one's influences. Furthering ideas and images that have already proven to be resonant can only aid in progression.

Homer seems to be the artist I "use" the most. I definitely felt like Right and Left was a gorgeous allegory, but doesn't it look a little goofy? I don't know if it's the face of that left-side bird or what, but I thought it could use a revision. Not an "improvement", of course. Just a revision. Another example is when I did my own version of The Life Line. [O'Neil's version is above] Rather than there being the slightly sexually provocative man/woman pose, [I used] just a lone male struggler. No real hope. [Below.] But I loved what Homer did with that composition. To have no idea from where that harness is coming from is just bizarre. These final hours embrace at last; this is our ending, this is our past (in the Dargerism show) also came from The Life Line's influence.

The way this happens for me is very natural. While looking at art, certain pieces stand out as something I will want to work with some day. I very consciously catalogue that thought or idea into a certain part of my brain and let it digest. Sometimes it sits there marinating for years. There are some van Gogh drawings that I've wanted to work with since I was in 5th grade, and that is not an exaggeration. Who knows when that will take place. That marination process ought to be downright rank by now, so that will surely be interesting.

I don't make sketches before making my drawings. I write down concepts and edit from there. Once an idea is solid, I'll quietly look at it and determine from where it came. Often I realize it came directly from the piece I catalogued in my brain years before. So, basically, I don't sit down and make concrete plans to find a certain piece from art history that will work with my next ideas. I do, however, naturally pull from the subconscious. That means, I hope, the work is closer to me and not affected. Not too overtly derivative.

MAN: Speaking of how you synthesize influences, I saw this image from your studio on Flickr.

RO'N: I make signs and put them all over my house. If I don't see something written down and in front of me, I won't do it. Besides drawing, nothing sounds all that enticing. I know I need to eat, but going to the grocery store? In that amount of time, I could have gotten two clouds drawn. Going to an opening? I can see the show during the week when no one is there and I'll see it in a quarter of the time it would have taken to see it when 150 people are in the space. I'm paranoid about not having enough time and not doing all I can. So, that is just one sign I made for myself. The ones like this, about trying to be healthy, are all over the place. I had a roommate in college who would write really mean signs to herself to get herself to eat right and work out. The one next to her alarm clock was, "Get your fat ass out of bed". One on the refrigerator said, "You're gross." I thought they were sad, but hilarious.

• Richard Lacayo visits Chris Burden at Rockefeller Center. Is it just me, or are those Rock Center installations increasingly about the mighty might of American builder-visionaries?
• Jerry Saltz asks whether Philippe Vergne can fix Dia, but includes a New York provincialism: "[W]ithout a permanent exhibition space in Manhattan, Dia is a ghost of its former self." Hogwash. Dia has a 240,000 square-foot space just 75 minutes from Manhattan. (That's more gallery space than MoMA.) Just because something's not on Manhattan Island doesn't mean it isn't superb, that it isn't relevant or that it doesn't exist.
  
• The Great Climate Change Park.
• The Guardian is splitting its art blog in two-ish. Now Charlotte Higgins and Jonathan Jones each have their own web-perches.
  

Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger, on view now at the American Folk Art Museum, is an unlikely, fantastic show. It features nearly a dozen early-career contemporary artists willing to be associated with a key influence. That's unusual: Often artists don't like to discuss or acknowledge influences until they're so far along in their careers that influences become supporting rather than defining material. Apparently the artists in the show trusted the curator, Brooke Davis Anderson, to demonstrate relationships rather than outright appropriation. For the most part, that's what's here.

I asked one of the artists in the exhibition, Robyn O'Neil, to join me for a Q&A about influence. This is the first of three parts. Part two is here. All but the last part was conducted by email. [At left is O'Neil's 2005 These Moving Bodies, These Numb Processions.] 

MAN: Artists are often wary of 'influence shows.' There's rarely a specific and direct relationship between two artists -- that is, good artists absorb a lot more than one or two artists as they determine what kind of work they're going to make. And then they often add lots of other stuff from other places before making work. So participating in a show as specific as "Dargerism" could be considered a bit of a risk. Did you have any trepidation about the whole idea?

Robyn O'Neil: I know there were artists who were asked to be a part of the exhibition that were concerned with that notion. That perhaps this would mean people would think their work is too derivative. My position is that anyone that had that concern probably had reason to worry.

As for me, It honestly never occurred to me to be uptight about it. I'm always breaking things down. It was as simple as, "Well, my work is certainly influenced by Darger and I know I'm not alone... I can't wait to see who else Brooke has noticed in relation to Darger." To me, this doesn't mean my work is derivative. It doesn't mean my work is a tribute. It means that there are particular artists who, when I've digested them, have left a piece of themselves in me. This happens at times when certain artists meld with my chemical makeup for whatever reason. With Darger it was the repetitive figures, re-occurring characters, catholicism, weather, and the apocalypse. Also, a cinematic scope.  

MAN: Speaking of Darger specifically, do you remember when you 'discovered' his work, and what in it you responded to? [At right: Darger's At Sunbeam Creek...]

RO'N: I first saw Darger's work in a small catalogue when I was in undergraduate school. I was about twenty years old. My professor handed it to me and I was quieted. I [flet] I had just discovered work that stood apart from anything I had previously seen, and that included a great deal of 'outsider' work. I found Darger to be more individualistic and more genuine. Also more beautiful. I know people can question and question that word 'genuine,' but I think at heart, we all know what it means. And most of us know it when we see it.

I think the most important thing I understood about the work was that he found a way to visually narrate a story that would never get old. It's a labyrinthine effort with infinite twists and turns. Great art should baffle, but how often does that truly happen? When images bewilder and quiet, they resonate forever.

Continued: Part two.

Over the last week or so I've talked about how the Cottage Industry show at the Baltimore Contemporary has mixed communitarianism with institutional critique. That's the equation that sums up The City Reliquary, a NYC-based history-'museum'-cum-community-gathering-place. (I think I would have enjoyed Bicycle Fetish Day 2008.) In Cottage Industry, The City Reliquary was represented by a traveling-salesman-style 'suitcase' of goodies of and from New York. It was interesting to look at, a kind of calling-card that would inspire exhibit-viewers to learn more about what TCR is. (It worked, obviously. The photo is of the Baltimore installation, plus Reliquarians Liz Gwinn and Matt Levy.)

All of the projects in Cottage Industry are small, focused and intense, personal reactions against big-boxism of all types. (Including in art/history museum form.) The City Reliquary and the John Erickson Museum of Art are the two most dramatic reactions: They're museums reduced to the smallest possible physical size.

There's a message here for art museums and related institutions: When you become big you become impersonal. When you become personal you fall out of touch with your audience, with your communities. Most of the projects in Cottage Industry are an attempt to re-connect with community, but also with art, history and neighborhood. Big institutions pay heed.

Related: The City Reliquary's Baltimore Flickr set.

For decades artists have had a love-hate relationship with museums. Ed Ruscha set one on fire. Michael Asher wanted to re-organize collections and Fred Wilson wanted to re-contextualize their collections. The John Erickson Museum of Art wants to pack 'em up and move 'em around. Which would seem profound and contrary to everything that museums do... except that museums are already doing it. (There are plenty of other examples, as surfable here in a 1999 MoMA show about artists and museums.)

As a result JEMA -- which is included in the Baltimore Contemporary Museum's Cottage Industry show -- is a wry commentary on how museums are behaving themselves of late. There is the Louvre, which plans to pack up part of itself, to plant it in the United Arab Emirates and to emerge as the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The Guggenheim has been trying the same sort of thing for years, with extremely limited success. The Art Institute of Chicago is renting out a chunk of its collection to the Kimbell Art Museum. Apparently museum directors have excellent relationships with FedEx.

In an effort to make mobility a little easier on museo-C-suiters, JEMA has created a "portable and thrifty" museum that comes in its own shipping box. If the Los Angeles County Museum catches fire (again), JEMA has a ready solution. (Above.) Sean Miller, the artist behind JEMA, describes:

JEMA's mission is to display and collect innovative and provocative con-temporary art and/or offer exhibitions that allow people to think differently about the nature of art and art practice. JEMA's design allows it to perform and embody numerous aspects of art and art practice in a simultaneous manner. JEMA is a museum, display case, crate, exhibition space, sculpture, photographic series, performance, installation, site-specific project, collaboration and web-based project. In fact, in its operation JEMA exhibits and demonstrates almost all media associated with visual art (sometimes simultaneously). In addition, it involves nearly all the realms of art practice and the business of art, revitalizing the roles of curator, artist, and viewer.

At the Baltimore Contemporary JEMA comes off as tight and cutting. Its JEMA 'mailroom' is a witty take on the silly art world cliche of 'encouraging dialogue' (whatever that is) and how museums love to solicit comments that inevitably end up in the round file. But Miller's WWW presentation of his project meanders -- kind of like a new museum that's trying to figure out what to do with this new thing it's found. The more specific JEMA's critique, the stronger the project is.

My Washingtonian story on the present, future and maybe-future of the National Gallery of Art is now online.

Having some PC/internet issues at MAN HQ, so I'll do my last post on Cottage Industry on Monday. In the meantime...

• Christopher Knight thinks he mis-assessed a Nancy Rubins;
• C-Monster has figured out how to make Chihuly at the de Young tolerable;
• What's scary is that I know curators/etc. who don't write this well [via]; and
  
• A fab observation about a Marsden Hartley and a fallen tree.

Yesterday I posted about my experience at Andrea Zittel's recent Token Exchanges installation at Regen Projects in LA. Picking up where I left off, an extraordinarily unlikely story from 20 Minutes into the Future.

So a few weeks ago I walked into Regen Projects' new space and saw all these tables. They had little cupped-out areas carved into them, and they were covered with carefully-placed stuff: Receipts, notes between friends, ticket stubs, books, CDs, and so on. Nowhere was there a sign explaining what was going on here, so I just walked around, looking.

Eventually -- and with the help of a little card I eventually found on the gallery's front desk -- I learned what was going on: Andrea Zittel had placed these tables in the gallery and had put random stuff on them. The idea was simple: Take what you want, just leave something of equal value (as determined by you, the visitor) in return and leave a note explaining the exchange. Easy 'nuff.

As I noted this morning, Zittel doesn't make traditional beautiful things. She makes engrossing objects, objects that are barely visually engaging enough to start you thinking... but once they get in your head they linger like a pop tune. I'm not much of an artsy-stuff participant, but as I walked around the 'show' I started thinking about what I could exchange. I'd only be in LA for a day or two. Aside from my notebook and the keys to my rental car, I didn't have any stuff with me. So I just kept looking at other people's exchanged stuff (all the while thinking of George Carlin, who had just died) while I pondered.

I found myself thinking about Carlin's riff on 'stuff,' about value, commercialism, retailing, the art market, and the role of commercial galleries in the art constellation. Given that this Zittel project was on view in Los Angeles' highest-end homegrown commercial space, it was superbly subversive. (Of course: All of Zittel's art is slyly subversive, so slyly that you don't realize how up-ending it is until you've fallen in love with it.)

Eventually I saw a Massachusetts state quarter on one of the tables. I've always liked the Massachusetts quarter.  It features a map of the state and a minuteman. It gave me an idea. I went out to my rental car and found a quarter in the change-holder. It was an Idaho quarter, which features a menacing peregrine falcon. I swapped them and left a note: I exchanged an Idaho quarter for a Massachusetts quarter. They are worth the same -- but maybe not to everyone.

This week I'm been posting about Cottage Industry at the Baltimore Contemporary. Today: Andrea Zittel.

While at times Cottage Industry isn't much to look at, it's a show that you can't help taking home with you. Whether it's Lisa Anne Auerbach's tracts or Andrea Zittel's smockshop, installation after installation encourages visitors to have art-ish what-if moments. (Most have online homes, which makes it extra-easy to follow-up on what interests you.)

Everything Andrea Zittel does gives me what-if moments. (More on this later today.) Zittel is a game-changer, an artist who mixes visual art with performance with interior design with architecture with activism with proprietorship to arrive at something completely unique. Her latest project, smockshop, is here. Zittel is uncommonly good at describing what she's doing without going all artist-statementy, so here's here explanation of smockshop:

A smock is a simple double wraparound garment designed by Andrea Zittel. These versatile garments are both attractive and utilitarian - each garment is one of a kind, and is sewn by an artist who reinterprets the original design based on their individual skill sets, tastes and interests.

The smockshop generates income for artists who's work is either non-commercial, or not yet self sustaining.

It's Project Runway-meets-Michael's and 19th-century New England-meets-21st-century Brooklyn. (And, with recent dress prices over $300 it's also artisan-upscale in a way that recalls the Whole Foods cheese counter.)

As something to look at in a kunsthalle such as the Baltimore Contemporary, it ain't much: A couple of dresses on dress forms in front of a painted wall and a 'smockshop' sign. [above] It's so stripped down that it makes Ikea's presentation style look over-the-top.

Which is part of the point: The idea is to bring utilitarianism back to retail, to reject a culture that values luxury and status more than people. Zittel's project is intensely communitarian, a kind of conceptual collectivism built around dresses. [That's a Maude Benton adaptation at left.]

(This in itself is notable: Most recent high-profile collectives are male-centric and are notoriously menacing: Think Jim Jones or Warren Jeffs. By making a dress the project's object-of-choice Zittel is putting women at the center of the enterprise. And by allowing her collaborators to riff on her design in any way they like, she's encouraging individuality in a way that male collectivists such as Jeffs don't.) 

Like most of Zittel's projects, smockshop is a little bit environmentalist (sewing creates no carbon emissions), a little bit all-for-one-and-one-for-all, a little bit clever and a little bit passive-aggressive: While Zittel allows artist-sewers to play with her basic template, most of Zittel's projects, dictate certain ways of living onto their 'users.' It's not performance art and it's not a 'happening' or a 'task,' but it is a way of melding performance with a life lived. In a show full of hyphen-artists, maybe Zittel is an artist-puppet-master.

• Monet meets Rothko at the Tate Modern, says Richard Lacayo.
• Another entertainingly out-of-control museum gift shop.
• A $50 million Frank Lloyd Wright renovation outside in Buffalo is the must-see of summer, says Bloomberg's James Russell.
• Architectural fantasy circa 1937 from Versailles, Indiana.
• Trevor Paglen has a super installation up at the Berkeley Art Museum. Here he talks about Mark Lombardi, which makes sense on lots of levels.
  

Yesterday I wrote that Cottage Industry at the Baltimore Contemporary Museum was a show full of hyphen-ists, artist-somethings that challenge familiar American places and institutions.

Fritz Haeg is an activist whose trademark project, Edible Estates, involves reconceptualizing landscape design. More specifically, he turns yards and other open spaces into gardens. These gardens are also considered a civil "morale booster" -- in that gardeners could feel empowered by their contribution of labor and rewarded by the produce grown. Oh wait -- that's not a line about Fritz Haeg's project, it's Wikipedia's description of World War II-era 'victory gardens.'

For Cottage Industry, Haeg worked with a Baltimore couple to re-make their front yard (above), his sixth such project. Haeg documented the process here, complete with pictures and more. At the exhibition, the project was presented in a series of slapdash photographs haphazardly hung, and a video. Of all the artists in Cottage Industry, it was apparent that Haeg was the most ambivalent about the gallery presentation of his work.

Which is understandable -- even though art institutions have embraced Haeg, he's more of an activist than anything else. (SFMOMA is also doing a project with Haeg. Tellingly it's being organized the museum's 'Live Art' effort, which "explores new intersections among visual, performing, and public art." I'm not sure which of those Haeg does, and while I'm enjoying SFMOMA's Haeg-related blog posts, I'm not sure they know either.)

Haeg is a leading figure in an increasing trend toward communitarianism-as-art. If we feel good about what someone is doing and want to be a part of it, so the art world's approach seems to be, let's claim it as art and feel good about getting together. It's where hippie meets hipster.

All that said, even if the Haeg here is a 60-year old idea with origins in wartime Britain, he fits what Cottage Industry is: A show that works hard to avoid art objects, that's more interested in a post-Brooklyn/Silver Lake utopia. Sure, a lot of the work here isn't really art, but it isn't really anything else either. That's fine. It's refreshing to see a kunsthalle such as the Baltimore Contemporary used as an idea lab. But of all the 'presentations' here, Haeg's is the least original and the least exciting. I'll get to the 'exciting' tomorrow.

MANscoop: Prado researchers will soon announce that this is not a Goya.

Cottage Industry, a group show on view at the Baltimore Contemporary Museum, is wonderfully  ambitious. Curated by Kristin Chambers and Irene Hofmann, Cottage Industry presents experimenters, dreamers, and community protagonists, a bunch of artist-hyphen-somethings, critiquing familiar American rubrics or institutions. The work in the show isn't always visually engaging or exciting, but the show's abundance of optimistic imagination makes up for that.

It's an exhibition for Barack Obama's America, not John McCain's, a show that engages change for progressivism's sake, a show full of artists willing to try something within the safety of the art-world cocoon with the hope that their ideas might escape the ghetto and rub off on society. What if typical, traditional suburban spaces were re-thought, asks a gardener-activist. What if fashion was re-cast to be more utilitarian and less status-driven, asks an artist-designer. What if the retail experience emphasized need instead of want, asks an artist-retailer. And so on. Throughout the week I'll be featuring the show on MAN. [Photo: Sean Miller, photographed here with the John Erickson Museum of Art mail room, actively encourages dialogue.] 

Most of the work here is descended from the artists who focused on institutional critique starting in the 1970s. Michael Asher, Fred Wilson and others pioneered making art and installations about how art museums functioned: How their collections were formed, how their collections are displayed, etc. Their work revealed (and continues to reveal) how narratives and history are created out of the collection and display of objects. The artists in Cottage Industry have exploded that idea out of the art museum and have used it to re-think many kinds of institutions.

Sure, the show is awfully heavy on written explanation. (At the opening many of the artists were present and engaged their public, which helped. A lot.) And several notable institutional critiquers are absent, most notably Filip Noterdaeme whose Homeless Museum of Art is the wittiest critique of big American museums and their oft-fungible ethics. [At left is Broken Flavin (2007) from HOMU's collection.]

But most importantly: The exhibition also reveals why and how funky, edgy, curator-driven art spaces are important to their communities. During a season when contemporary art museums have been seduced by the flash of Koon$ and Duma$, when they have shrugged at their own curators in favor of collector-driven shows of a narrow slice of big-dollar commercial art, Cottage Industry is a welcome reminder of what a contemporary art museum should be.

• The Dallas Museum of Art is pimping itself out to a for-profit company for a pay-per-view extravaganza. It is a disgrace to its audience and to all art museums. (It's remarkable that the art museum industry hasn't formally banned art museums from allowing companies to profit off of primary spaces such as exhibition galleries.) In a delightfully aggressive bit of journalism, Michael Granberry of the Dallas Morning News exposes the DMA and the exhibition as a museum's abdication of its mission. Among the highlights: The DMA's director comes oh-so-close to admitting that taking 'Tut' was a mistake.
  
• In case this got lost: Late Thursday I posted an update on how several Iowa museums are doing after the floods.
• SF Chron critic Kenneth Baker's appreciation of Bruce Conner has a super lede: "Having announced his death on two previous occasions, Bruce Conner actually did die on Monday at 74."
• Minneapolis has two new museum directors, both of whom come from far, far out-of-state. Shortly after one of them arrived at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts a popular curator who nurtured Minnesota artists was apparently forced out. What does this mean for Minnesota and for a model program, asks the Star Tribune's Mary Abbe.
• The Stranger's Jen Graves on obedience as art. 
• Should a major downtown Des Moines space be converted into a major sculpture park, asks the Des Moines Register's David Elbert.
• In the Washington Post, Jessica Dawson reviews the Baltimore Contemporary's 'Cottage Industry.' As coincidence would have it, I'll be discussing the show all week here at MAN.
• In the NYT, Mia Fineman finds advertisers learning from artists.
  

Since it's been almost a month since I updated readers on what was going on with Iowa museums after the flood...

University of Iowa Museum of Art: Interim director Pamela White told me that it's possible that the museum will abandon its current building for a new structure somewhere else in Iowa City. The reason: Not so much damage to its existing building (although that may end up as an issue), but the potential need to remove UIMA from the floodplain. (White said that a story in yesterday's Cedar Rapids Gazette slightly overplayed the likelihood of a move.)

All of the museum's artwork is now out of the building and White says that there is no permanent damage to any works of art.

Also possible: While UIMA determines what and where its future will be, the museum will likely launch exhibits elsewhere around the Iowa campus. ("We want to stay visible," White said.) Also: Because it may be quite some time before works from the museum's permanent collection are able to be on view in Iowa City, the museum may put together a small traveling show of its collection.

Cedar Rapids Museum of Art: Director Terence Pitts told me that his museum had sewage enter its collection storage areas. However 98 percent of the collection was safe. Pitts estimated that it will take $250,000 in uninsured costs to get back open and operational. The museum's entire collection is now in its second floor galleries and will likely remain there for 6-12 months. When the museum re-opens on Labor Day, it will only open its first floor. For now the museum is receiving climate control from massive machinery on its loading dock.

National Czech and Slovak Museum: The museum suffered the loss of its current exhibition and had 12 feet of water in its building. Only two trucks worth of its collection were removed before the flood hit.

1.) Why has LACMA been over-installed for so many years? Even when the museum launches a new building -- say, BCAM -- it over-installs it. Take the European paintings galleries: Presumably lovely Tintoretto and Ribera portraits are hidden behind a bunch of medals. A Bronzino Cupid is hard to see because of the intervention of a 16thC Roman bust and a set of 16thC French bronzes that intrude. And there's this fascinating Goltzius Danae majestically hung in the center of a gallery... behind and above a 16thC cassapanca. Grr.

2.) Among the puzzlements at FAMSF: Why is a Bernice Bing hung between two remarkable Richard Diebenkorns? Why....

3.) The Martin Puryear retro has touched down at the NGA. I visited on Saturday and saw multiple visitors walking around touching the art. As I've told people that story they've all nodded: They've seen it too. Time to wake up the guards, NGA. (MAN on the Puryear retro: 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.'

4.) One of the coolest things I saw in California was Ed & Nancy Kienholz's Double Cross (1988) at Stanford's Cantor Center. (It's a Gemini GEL-made multiple.) The piece is made of a plastic gas can, a 'TV screen' border, an antenna, a cut-out metal cross and a shotgun shell rifle cartridge. The cartridge is inside the cross. How many other 20-year-old pieces so directly address America's present condition?

5.) I'm grateful that traditional media such as the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News credited MAN with breaking this week's AAMD/DAM story. Artforum erroneously sourced the Denver Post. And, as apparent proof that I'm the Rodney Dangerfield of ArtsJournal, so did ArtsJournal.

• Bruce Conner has died. SFMOMA's blog has a nice post, so too Robert Olsen.
  
• What is Dia talking about in its wall texts?!
• Regina Hackett had a bunch of great stuff last week, including a Q&A with Christopher Rauschenberg, and a post on David Wojnarowicz.
• Re: Cathy Opie, agreed.
• Making LeWitt happen at MASSMoCA.
• Land art in reverse, sort of.
• Your moment of cute: The Henry Art Gallery has baby ducks!
• The presidential candidates and the arts: Where they stand.
• The Guardian's art podcasts are worth subscribing to. The latest: Pipilotti Rist.
  

The latest: Yesterday I reported that the Association of Art Museum Directors is examining the Denver Art Museum's recent Eakins-Deas-Anschutz transaction. Today the Denver Post picked up the story: Kyle MacMillan says that AAMD's focus will be discussed today at a previously-scheduled meeting of the museum's board.

In yesterday's post I wrote that AAMD is examining Denver's arrangement in the context of one particular passage in AAMD's "Professional Practices in Art Museums." There would seem to be a couple of other areas that could apply to the Denver situation too, including:

"The collections a museum holds in public trust do not represent financial assets that may be converted to cash for operating or capital needs, or pledged as collateral for loans;"

In the case of the Deas-Eakins-Anschutz transaction, DAM used a painting in its collection as an asset that was partially converted into cash in order to enable DAM and Anschutz to purchase the Eakinses from Philadelphia for a reported $8-10 million. True: Denver is not exactly using the Deas as a collateral for loans, but it's using half of the Deas as, well, something. When AAMD's guidelines were written and later revised, no one expected that a museum would deaccession half of a painting. Also:

"In fundraising, the concept of public benefit rather than individual benefit should apply, while recognizing that a variety of stakeholders may peripherally benefit, including sponsors, collectors, dealers, and artists;" and

And from the guidelines specifically on deaccessioning:

"Preferred methods of disposal are sale through publicly advertised auction, sale to or exchange with another public institution, and sale or exchange to a reputable, established dealer."

This morning MAN reported that AAMD was looking into the unusual arrangement between the Denver Art Museum and local billionaire businessman Philip Anschutz. Continuing discussion thereof...

One of the most unusual aspects of the Anschutz-DAM arrangement is that a cloudy non-profit associated with Anschutz has bought 50 percent of a painting that's been in DAM's collection since 1999. So when a museum deaccessions half of a painting, is it deaccessioning? I noticed that in the documents that the DAM made available to me for this morning's post that sometimes it called the Deas deal a deaccessioning, and sometimes it didn't. So I asked DAM director Lewis Sharp if he considered it a deaccessioning. Here's his reply:

"You know it's funny that you ask because at the time I was doing both the transfer with the Anschutz Collection, and doing my own paperwork. I sat there and wasn't entirely sure in my own mind whether it was technically a deaccessioning or simply because we still hold a 50 percent title to it, if it's kind of a hybrid in that regard. It's such a kind of a unique situation that I myself didn't know.

"It seemed to me that probably falling on the safe side, I decided to use the inflammatory phrase of 'deaccessioning.' 'Deaccessioning' is a technical term, and it simply means that youv'e taken it off the registrar's [list] at the museum -- and we haven't, because we still have fifty percent. So technically we haven't deaccessioned it, but it seems to me language that people understand... If I have the whole thing to do again, I prob would remove the term 'deaccessioning.'"

Two committees of the Association of Art Museum Directors are investigating the Denver Art Museum's recent partial deaccessioning of Charles Deas' Long Jakes [right] to a nebulous non-profit controlled by Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, MAN has learned. At question is whether the DAM-Anschutz arrangement is in compliance with AAMD guidelines as outlined in AAMD's "Professional Practices in Art Museums."

AAMD executive director Mimi Gaudieri confirmed AAMD's interest in the DAM-Anschutz transaction, as did Denver director Lewis Sharp and Peabody Essex Museum director Dan Monroe, the chairman of AAMD's art issues committee. A separate AAMD committee, professional issues, is also examining the DAM situation. The chairman of that committee, Georgia Museum of Art director William Eiland, did not reply to an email yesterday.

"I complied with the Denver Art Museum's bylaws for the deaccession and acquisition of works of art and with AAMD's 'Art Museums and the Practice of Deaccessioning,'" Sharp told AAMD in a May 19 letter that the museum made available to MAN. Yesterday Sharp affirmed to me that he still believes that his museum is in compliance with both its own guidelines and AAMD's.

The AAMD inquiry stems from DAM's April announcement that it had deaccessioned 50 percent of Charles Deas' Long Jakes to an Anschutz-controlled non-profit. In return, that non-profit gave the museum funds with which the museum purchased 50 percent of a Thomas Eakins painting, Cowboy Singing [below] and two related drawings from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Anschutz Collection also bought the other 50 percent Cowboy Singing. The Anschutz Collection and DAM agreed that each would take physical possession of Cowboy Singing and Long Jakes for six months of the year.

DAM's website describes the Deas as "[t]he crown jewel in the institute's collection," "the single most influential image in Rocky Mountain iconography," and claims that "Deas established the mountain man as an icon." The museum is planning a major Deas exhibition for the summer of 2009.

Sources tell MAN that AAMD is especially interested in whether the relationship between the Denver Art Museum and Anschutz, the Anschutz Foundation, and a third non-profit, The Anschutz Collection, violates this section of AAMD guidelines:

"No member of a museum's board or staff, or anyone whose association with the institution might give them advantage in acquiring the work, shall be permitted to acquire directly or indirectly a work deaccessioned by the museum, or otherwise benefit from its sale or trade."

Anschutz is not a DAM trustee, but he has an association with the institution as a major donor through his Anschutz Foundation. According to a DAM spokesperson, since 2000 the Anschutz Foundation has given "approximately" $7.6 million to the museum. Anschutz, an investor whose portfolio includes AEG Live, the company that is traveling the current 'King Tut' exhibit, ranks No. 41 on the Forbes 400 with a net worth of an estimated net worth of $7.6 billion.

The Anschutz Collection is a non-profit organization which had just $1,047 in assets at the time of the filing of its most recent publicly available tax return. (Between 2002 and 2006 the Anschutz Collection's assets were never more than $1,047 nor less than $1,041.) Between 2001 and 2006 the Anschutz Collection left blank the sections of its tax filing pertaining to its most recent charitable activities, and programmatic activity. The organization's mission is not explained in its IRS filings. MAN attempted to phone the Anschutz Collection for more information and for its most recent tax return, but the phone number listed in the Anschutz Collection's IRS filings goes directly to an automated recording at The Anschutz Corporation, Philip Anschutz's business conglomerate.

AAMD sources said that other issues surrounding the half-deaccessioning of the Deas are troubling, but that the relationship between Anschutz and the museum are under special scrutiny. (A post tomorrow will examine other areas in AAMD's 'Professional Practices' that AAMD may choose to examine.)

The AAMD investigation
While the Deas-Eakins deals are a critical moment for DAM, they are also a key test of AAMD, which in recent years has failed to aggressively challenge questionable art museum transactions such as deaccessionings and museum collection rentals to private companies affiliated with casinos. (The Wall Street Journal recently called AAMD a "toothless watchdog.") At a time when Congress has become more aggressive in looking for abuses in the non-profit sector, the DAM-Anschutz case is the first test of new AAMD president Michael Conforti's ability to ensure the industry is in compliant with its own guidelines. (Conforti, the director of the Clark Art Institute, declined comment for this post.)

"I think that the field is more watchful of these issues," AAMD's Gaudieri told me. "Times are changing in in terms of all sorts of administrative issues. We need to be totally up to date on current thinking and current law."

AAMD first requested that Sharp and Denver provide written explanation of unknown aspects of the Anschutz transaction in advance of its June meeting in Detroit. Sharp complied in a May 19 letter, and issues surrounding the Denver transactions and Sharp's letter were discussed in Detroit by the two relevant AAMD  committees. (Sharp did not attend the Detroit meeting.) Monroe and Sharp followed up on that conversation late last week.
 
"Dan feels comfortable with what I've done and so we've finished our conversation," Sharp told me yesterday. "What I understood from Dan was that with the additional info that I had given him, he felt comfortable reporting back to [his] committee. And we're good with that."

When I asked a Peabody Essex Museum spokesperson to confirm that account, she demurred. Through a spokesperson, Monroe (who was away from the museum with an illness yesterday) indicated that the conversation between his committee and DAM was still ongoing: "Two of AAMD's Committees... are working directly with Dr. Lewis Sharp... to gather pertinent facts regarding this transaction," Monroe said in a prepared statement. "Dr. Sharp and the Denver Art Museum have been very forthcoming and responsive. After acquiring and considering all of the relevant facts, AAMD will, in a timely manner, determine its response to and assessment of the transaction."

Multiple museum directors (and AAMD members) have told MAN that the Denver-to-Anschutz partial deaccessioning was a major topic of discussion at AAMD's Detroit meeting. Several sources told MAN that it wasn't just one or two hardcore director-ethicists who were alarmed by the DAM-Anschutz deal, but that the AAMD membership was unusually unified in raising questions, in part because museum directors do not wish to further arouse the attention of the Senate Finance Committee. Multiple sources expressed confidence that Denver and Sharp will have to make changes to the deal with Anschutz or face some kind of undetermined AAMD action. A museum spokesperson told MAN that the museum is not considering changes to the deal.

AAMD's Gaudieri says the Denver situation continues to be an ongoing focus and that there is no timetable for the resolution of the issues that AAMD has raised with Sharp and with the museum.

Later today: DAM director Lewis Sharp on whether he considers the Anschutz transaction a "deaccessioning."

Tomorrow: Examining AAMD's "Professional Practices" in the context of the DAM-Anschutz transaction.

About 30 minutes after seeing Jim Campbell's Home Movies 1248-1 at the Berkeley Art Museum, I couldn't remember what the heck the piece was about. I remembered the extravagant, near-floor to near-ceiling strings of wall-facing LED lights that make up the physical part of the piece. I remembered that Home Movies existed of shadowy objects, figures and shapes that I could make out on the wall. But I couldn't remember a single image or sequence of images. Considering that Campbell's work is substantially about memory, about what we remember and what we don't, about how we remember and how we don't, that seemed just about right. [The image at right is of a Campbell Home Movies installation, but not the one at BAM.]

BAM recently acquired Home Movies 1248-1. It's on view through Aug. 3. Also on exhibit is Campbell's 2000 Triptych (Fire/Freeway/Walk), another LED-driven piece that challenges the viewer to find subject matter in a reflected digital stream of light. You can 'see' the piece on Campbell's website here.

Campbell is one of the most under-appreciated artists around. His sophisticated digital installations rarely get in the way of the content of his work: Both pieces at BAM have a 'gee-whiz, what's that?' factor that keeps you standing in front of them in an effort to solve vaguely recognizable imagery. Just when you think you might recognize a figure or an object in a Campbell, just when you squint to double-check, it's gone. The best Campbells -- and the two works at BAM are two of the very best -- are smart, elegant reminders of the slipperiness of memory and identity.

While Campbell's use of indirect light is reminiscent of Doug Wheeler and James Turrell, his San Francisco roots shine through. (Campbell lives in SF.) Take Home Movies: Cambell's figures and shapes are readily decipherable. That's a car, that's a woman walking somewhere, and so on. But it's a  mostly solvable abstraction, a digital updating of the mix of abstraction and figuration that is so much a part of San Francisco's post-war art history.

Related: The main page of Campbell's (slightly out-of-date) website.

• San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker absotively tees off on Dale Chihuly and John Buchanan, the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Baker cites an atrocious Chihuly exhibition as proof of the degeneration of the once-proud FAMSF. (Chihuly is to sculpture what Siegfried & Roy are to performance art.) I saw this show a couple weeks ago: It's the worst exhibit, the worst installation, and the most embarrassing example of exhibition-related decision-making I've seen at an American museum since MoMA teamed up with Pixar (or since Buchanan's FAMSF allowed Peter Max to curate a Peter Max show). Buchanan's tenure at FAMSF is a civic embarrassment.
  
• Jesse Helms died over the weekend. In memoriam: Robert Mapplethorpe's 1979 portrait of Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter.
  
• Christopher Knight declares Peter Saul, who is receiving a retrospective at the Orange County Museum of Art, a "national treasure."
• The Mogaoku grottoes in China must have a heck of a press agent: First they help get the Getty Conservation Institute 25 minutes on NPR's Science Friday. Next they attracted the NYT's Holland Cotter. (Cotter's spread was gorgeous. If you can find it in print, find it in print.)
• In fact, Cotter had a superb weekend: His article on China's varied, sad and funny museum scene is riveting.
• (Worth noting: The NYT seems more interested in Europe and  China than the US. Cotter is in China, Michael Kimmelman has created a nebulous beat in Europe, and is anyone there doing comparable work around the US? No.)
• In the LAT, David Pagel finds that one of my favorite LA-based sculptors, Kristen Morgin, is coming into her own.
• The Boston Globe's Mark Feeney Q&As with Yale University Art Gallery director Jock Reynolds.
  

Before we get to the rhyme, your weekend bonus fun: Art critic Peter Plagens was featured on NPR quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! last week. I'm jealous. (And yes, I was on 'Wait Wait' once, but it was about eight or nine years ago and I was just a random call-in contestant.)

This morning's rhyme -- Pirkle Jones and Helen Torr -- was almost certainly pure coincidence. This one I'm not so sure. Pictured at right is Jacob van Ruisdael's 1665-1670ish Three Great Trees in a Mountainous Landscape with a River. It's in the Norton Simon's collection, and it's completely terrific.

After the jump is my favorite Courbet, MFA Houston's Gust of Wind. It seems possible -- if not likely -- that Courbet saw a print of the van Ruisdael.

I haven't done any visual rhymes in a while, so I'll do a couple today as an lazy way into the holiday weekend.

The first one pairs one of my favorite  paintings at SFMOMA -- Helen Torr's 1927ish Windows and a Door -- with a Pirkle Jones photograph Garden Detail from 1947. Windows is on view now in the painting-and-sculpture galleries. The Jones is on view in the photo galleries (and after the jump).

(Incidentally, I don't mean to suggest that Jones (who is a Californian) saw or knew of the Torr. SFMOMA acquired the Torr in 1980.)

• One of my pet issues surfaces in the LAT: Christopher Knight criticizes LACMA for fluffing Cheech Marin.
• The Indianapolis Museum of Art will not have to register as a pornographer after all, a judge rules.
• How Aperture books get made.
• I recently noted how much I enjoyed an early Carroll Dunham at MoMA. The Addison Gallery has launched a print retro.
  

I've all but stopped posting links and such of my off-blog writing, but I'm making an exception for this: Last December I broke the story of the National Gallery of Art's interest in expanding across the street, into the Federal Trade Commission's headquarters building. This month I've written about the NGA for Washingtonian magazine. It's not online and I want to update the story for the blog audience, so forthwith some excerpts, edited for a non-DC audience... [West building photo.]

What are the NGA's options [for expansion]? The most fantastic scheme involves a possibility for which I.M. Pei planned: building under the Mall. "The downside of that is that it would be enormously expensive," [NGA director Earl "Rusty"] Powell says.

But the NGA can't build underground to the west because Tiber Creek runs beneath the sculpture garden. So the National Gallery's best-case scenario for growth is finding a way to move into the Apex Building, the Federal Trade Commission's headquarters, which would provide 187,000 square feet of usable space.

"It is an obvious solution to everything," says Powell, "but we'll just have to see."

It would take an act of Congress to transfer the Apex Building to the NGA. The FTC would have to find a new headquarters, presumably in a way that consolidates the agency's two Washington offices... And Congress would have to move with speed. If the NGA is going to move into the Apex Building, Powell says he wants it to happen by 2012. That's roughly when renovation plans for the East Building should begin to be finalized. "We have till the end of this year," he says. "Then we'll know which direction this will all head in. If the Apex Building isn't an option, we'll address it in a different way."

Expanding into the Apex Building makes more sense than any other NGA expansion plan. It would put state-of-the art education facilities -- such as the ones built recently by the Met and the Museum of Modern Art in New York--on a new NGA campus. It would keep new galleries or study centers for graphics arts and works on paper near the rest of the NGA's collection. The NGA has determined that it could build an underground link between the Apex and the West Building, and it has publicly committed to raising $100 million for renovations and other costs of moving into the Apex...

Here's the problem: Congress isn't in any rush to move the FTC out of the Apex Building. In 2005, Representative John Mica, a Florida Republican who chaired the House subcommittee on government infrastructure, introduced legislation to transfer the building from the FTC to the NGA. Nothing happened. Mica said late last year that he planned to reintroduce it early this year, but that hasn't happened. His staff says the bill remains a top priority, but it doesn't offer any timelines.

Since Mica introduced his bill, Democrats have gained control of Congress, and the NGA seems to have few Democratic allies. In fact, powerful Democratic opponents to the plan have come forward: DC delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who chairs the House subcommittee on economic development, emergency management, and public buildings, and Michigan representative John Dingell, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, oppose
moving the FTC.

There are no estimates of what it would cost the federal government to find 350,000
square feet--or more--of new office space for the FTC. Norton, who seems stunned that NGA officials never approached her to discuss their space needs, refuses to speculate.

"They surely knew they weren't going to get a government building," Norton says. "This isn't news to them." While Norton seems adamant, don't count out the NGA yet. Its trustees are well connected...

Other than Apex, what options does the NGA have? There's no place else in the neighborhood to go. Would the NGA have to find a building somewhere else in Washington?

"Right now I would take nothing off the table," Powell says.

Even if it was 20 blocks away from the East and West Buildings?

"I would say we would certainly seriously consider any possibility so long as it is related to the gallery's collection and the gallery's mission," Powell says.

"They should come to talk to us about that," Norton says. "They've been fussing around with this one or that one. I don't recall them ever coming to talk to me. As the old song goes, 'You've got to come by me.' "

• Bring-you-a-smile story of the day: Building owner removes major public mural by depositing it in dumpster. Art scenesters converge on said dumpster.
• Do you own art that belongs to Brigham Young University?
• In the fictional matter of public art titans Chris Burden (LA + NYC) vs. Olafur Eliasson (NYC), I declare the winner to be Burden by KO. (As a result, the judges' scorecards don't matter.)
• Reconsidering brutalism?
• James Wagner, who finds more cool New York art than anyone I know, visits Andrew Piedilato's studio. If I were a young NYC collector (or dealer), I'd make Wagner my e-guide.

Yesterday I started talking about how a nice installation at SFMOMA reveals that Matisse's 1916 portrait of Sarah Stein and its related drawing (at right) mark the end of Matisse's cubist period and his transition to what was next. The Stein painting is up all the time; the drawing isn't.

It appears to be derived from Matisse's greatest cubist portrait, a 1914 painting of his daughter, Marguerite (identifiable by the black band around her neck, a legacy of a childhood surgery). The most distinctive feature of both the drawing and the painting of Marguerite is the radically flat nose that Matisse gives to both subjects.

Matisse made Stein's nose with two straight lines which end off center in 'V' (which is echoed in classic Matisse style by the 'V' of Stein's sweater). Marguerite's nose is a vertical black stripe, which is as flat as flat gets. The shorthand also recalls Matisse's famed 'green stripe' portraits, in which he painted his wife's nose with a scandalous green stripe. (It sits across an SFMOMA gallery from the 1916 drawing.)

The other shared distinctive feature is the v-shape of whatever both Stein and Marguerite are wearing. In both portraits it serves to push the viewer's eye back up toward the subject's face.

There are other parts of the drawing that remind me of the flatness of Matisse's most dramatic cubist paintings, especially Stein's brow. The 'twin eyebrows' give Stein a certain intense severeness, but the two sets of parallel lines also flatten her whole face. (Unlike Matisse's other portraits from about this period, Stein's visage never becomes mask-like, not in the drawing nor in the painting.) 

The 'flat nose' of the 1914 painting and the 1916 drawing is gone by the time Sarah Stein's portrait made it into oils. And it's not just the nose: Everything's softer in the painted portrait: The harsh 'V' of the sweater has been rubbed into a blur. Stein's nose becomes a single, elegant curving line. Her straight mouth has been softened into rounded lips. In the drawing Stein is menacingly staring off to our left. In the painting she is engaging us with a questioning look. (Perhaps she's asking, 'Why am I raising my arms?')