October 2008 Archives

I'm going to see the Franz West retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art tomorrow. I'm feeling full of the participatory, Westian spirit, so I'll Twitter my visit to the show. Click here to follow my tweets.

So what to do with Alexandra Peers' gloom-is-here story in yesterday's WSJ?

Peers argues that the sky is falling for American art museums. That's certainly the conventional wisdom. Here's the real story: So far the sky is still in good shape.

Yes, some museums will have to trim some expenses: Five percent here and there. Under-endowed museums may trim a bit more. That is not a crisis, that's not "trouble" and that is not a particularly "tough toll." (Arts people might want to read the whole paper: "Trouble" and a "tough toll" is when an entire American industry -- say, the auto industry -- is on the brink of extinction.) Or think of it this way: A non-profit cutting five percent of expenses during a recession isn't a crisis, it's standard operating procedure.

As if to prove my point, Peers cites a bunch of weak, often speculative examples:

• The Parrish Museum is waiting to begin a construction project until it raises more money. That's not a sign of doom, it's prudence;
• The Nelson-Atkins is trimming hours. That's true, but a minor adjustment in hours is hardly a sign of crisis;
• New York museums in particular are accustomed to raising lots of money from bankers. Who knows what will happen with them now. True. But that's about donors, not about museums. (Yet. Plus there's no data to indicate massive problems with donor follow-through, and the only museum staffer Peers found who would address that question shrugged it off.)

In fact, Peers only cites one museum facing major problems: The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu. Peers' line about Honolulu is the best independent clause in her story... and it is almost immediately followed by the most ridiculous: "the Museum of Modern Art in New York has instituted a hiring freeze and won't host any parties at Art Basel Miami Beach this year." That's a sign of a "tough toll?" Are you kidding me?)

I'd argue that the real story here is that the top 50 or so American art museums are so well-run that that 45 (or more) of them are well-positioned to weather this recession. That's a sign of an industry's health, not a sign of pending crisis. (In a related story, a few months ago a major business magazine asked me to write a version of Peers' story. I reported it and found little cause for gloom and doom. The magazine, expecting cultural carnage, killed the piece.) However, that brings me to my last point...

So far Peers' story is just goofy, a misguided waste of space. It becomes journalistically embarrassing when you consider this: Peers and the WSJ run a whole story on woe-is-the-museum and they missed -- flat, completely missed -- the one major American museum that actually is facing doom-and-gloom: The Detroit Institute of Arts. Oops.

Last month I warned LACMA about the celebrity-for-celebrity's-sake turn some of the museum's programming was taking. This just in: Christopher Knight piles on. 

• Add your own fave Obama art to this BuzzFeed page.
  
• Yes but no but yes.
• Obama street art: 1,293 strong on Flickr.
• The Obama Art Report -- a blog about Obama art.
• Artists for Obama: Blue-chip work for MoveOn and the NAACP Voter Fund.
• Gemini G.E.L.'s Artists for Obama, featuring prints by Johns, Serra and Marden. The images are here.
  
• Eva Holland with lots of pics of Obama-themed street art, design, etc.
• The Obama Craft Project.
• The Warhol/Nixon/McCain t-shirt? [via]
  

A few weeks ago I noticed that Greg Allen had dipped into the Obama store to buy for a Jonathan Hoefler print. I wondered: Is any of the work at the Obama campaign's Artists for Obama site any, well, good?

First: What is this Artists for Obama part of the Obama store anyway? It's just like any other prints store: For a 'donation' of $60-$2,500, you can buy a limited-edition print with an Obama theme. A really clear, beat-you-over-the-head-with-it CHANGE-style Obama theme. (Note: The Obama store's efforts are different from approximately umpteen other 'artists for Obama' sites and efforts. I'll have links to many of those this afternoon.)

The Obama store features Rafael Lopez, Lance Wyman, Gui Borchert, Robert Indiana, Lou Stovall, Antar Dayal, Scott Hansen, Shepard Fairey and Hoefler. (Work by unlinked artists is sold out.) Most of the work tends more toward graphic design or illustration rather than art -- no surprise given that it's made as a campaign fundraiser.

The Hoefler is the best piece. It vaguely reminds me of a reverse-Ligon, but with a hopeful Obaman twist. It also recalls the opening of a sci-fi film, perhaps the animated opening to Star Wars. It's also blue. Blue is the Obama campaign color. Blue tends to look good on things. It's really quite nice.

The Indiana is, of course, a riff on Indiana's famous Love. Love, hope, same diff. The Lopez is classic illustration-with-a-sunburst. It almost screams out si se puede. The Dayal is more of the same. The Wyman is 1970s graphic design retro-cool. It's catchy, but it's more Emerson, Lake and Palmer than Led Zeppelin. The Borchet seems to be inspired by a blog-style word-cloud. The Stovall is, er, probably printed with NutraSweet, an unfortunate reminder that too much hope-speak can mask substance. The Hansen looks like it's ready to be an iced tea label, but heck, everyone likes iced tea. And of course, the Fairey-for-the-campaign is very Obey (the Giant Obama head).

Notably: None of it is about the other guy, a la Warhol's Vote McGovern.

Related: Have your own favorite Obama art? Share it on BuzzFeed.

Last in a series. Links to previous posts: Re-introducing Doug Wheeler. Talking with Wheeler part one, two, three. LAT art critic William Wilson reviews a 1968 Wheeler show.

Today Doug Wheeler is 69. He lives in New Mexico, on the San Ildefonso Pueblo near Santa Fe. He has a studio there and he can park his plane nearby. (He flies around the way some of us drive. Among his regular trips is the flight from New Mexico to California, where his wife lives.) Wheeler is surrounded by friends: Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha, Ken Price, Bruce Nauman and Susan Rothenberg all have places nearby. He sees each of them a few times a year. And he is still making work.

"I'm working on something now I don't feel comfortable talking about it," Wheeler told me. "It's about space, but then again space has always been the main thing I care about, how I can create in a space. The twisting and the torsional qualities I can give to a space. Now I'm trying to activate space in a different way than I have before, and hopefully get out of the same arena Irwin and Turrell were all mixed up in. I love to be in that same company, but we'll see. It's risky. But still I am who I am. I'll still do a lot of these big projects along with you-wouldn't-be-surprised kind of things."

One of the things that Wheeler has been working on involves how sound impacts our perception of space. It's not a totally new concept for him -- he's made drawings that relate to that idea since at least the mid-1970s. Wheeler also created some pieces that Panza owns that deal with microwave absorbers. "They trap sound so that you have a really silent place," Wheeler said. "They've never been realized so they're things that -- other than working with them in my studio -- they've never actually been. The Guggenheim owns one, I think."

As we were winding down our chat, I asked Wheeler how much art history and his place in it matters to him, how much he thinks about it, whether he's frustrated at how scholars seem to forget that he was as much a part of the beginning of Light and Space as anyone.

"You know, I completely keep away," he said. "I don't know why. I never felt that I had a home [in the art world] so I just don't... It's like this: You are an artist regardless. You can't do things that can damage that, so I don't do things that will damage that. If that means I'm completely unknown that's OK with me so long as I don't lose my love for what I do.

"I had to make choices a long time ago that people told me I was crazy about. I turned down Leo Castelli, which was crazy. But the situation would have been one that I was subject to a kind of control. I didn't want that. I could see the control he had over his artists. He explained to me why he picked the people he picked. He had this whole elaborate scheme of how he did things. It was brilliant, but at that place in my life I couldn't keep taking one step forward and ten back. I couldn't do that anymore.

"As far as the art world, I don't know. I don't see scholarship in it. So I lost faith in it. My job is to make what I make, and if I want to do that or not. Then, do I want to share that or not. So it's kind of like that.

"I have a number of things I really hope I can do, but I'm not good at courting the people I need to court. Rich people I don't really like very much, so it's kind of like that. I don't need to prove anything at this point in my life. I do what I can do and if I can, that's fine. I went to art school to be an advertising person and after I while I felt, 'this is all messed up.' Then I got my first offers from two major ad firms in New York. I had to make this decision, was this what I really want to do? And I thought I'd make art. I won't make money but I'll be in really great company. That was my decision.

"So that's kind of where I'm at. I burned bridges because I don't give in very easily. Later in life I have compromised some, but not enough I guess. At least not as much as people would like. It's kind of what you have to do, you have to do the best you can possibly do. I guess I'm always striving for perfection but I know I'll never get to that."

Previously: Re-introducing Doug Wheeler. Talking with Wheeler part one, two, three. LAT art critic William Wilson reviews a 1968 Wheeler show.

[Photo at top: Wheeler's Eindhoven Environmental Light Installation (1969), on view now at the Hirshhorn.]

A few weeks ago I noted that a couple of museums were beginning to explore making content more available via the web: LACMA posted a few catalogue essays, lots of museums now have Flickr streams, and so on.

Here's a logical next step: Putting old, long out-of-print exhibition catalogues online, Google Books-style. LACMA, which has apparently decided to challenge the Indianapolis Museum of Art for the title of Most Web-Creative Museum, has launched an entire site dedicated to its 1967-71 Art & Technology project. You can browse the project online artist by artist or you can download the project catalogue as a PDF. At LACMA's Unframed blog, Tom Drury discusses why the whole project is exceptional. (Aside: Why don't more museums put old catalogues/scholarship online this way? No idea. Who wouldn't love to see all of Arthur Wheelock's Dutch art publications at one URL? I asked LACMA if it was possible to break out the cost of the A&T-->WWW project, and LACMA said it wasn't.)

In a related story, the project is substantially funded by the Getty. For years critics (including me) had complained that the Getty was lousy at being a part of the Los Angeles art scene, that hiltopping was in danger of becoming an intransitive verb with its etymological roots in Gettian behavior. But as Suzanne Muchnic first reported in the LAT on Sunday, that's changing as the Getty funds a series of major art historical shows throughout Los Angeles. Next step for the Getty: Funding not just exhibitions but enabling collecting at some of those museums.

Related: When Jim Wood took over the Getty, he talked with me about the importance of the Getty coming down from the hill. And in his very next breath, he talked about collecting. Suzanne Muchnic on LA's art-historical awakening.

In the early 1970s Doug Wheeler was a Light and Space darling who exhibited across the United States and Europe. He was featured in shows not only in the U.S., but at the Stedelijk, the Tate and the Moderna Musset. Then, as quickly as he'd emerged, Wheeler seemingly disappeared. As James Turrell and Robert Irwin continued to exhibit widely, the art historical narrative around Light and Space focused around them and increasingly excluded Wheeler. So what happened?

There's no one reason. For a year and a half Wheeler and his wife moved to Italy, to oversee a plan of Panza's to turn empty Italian 'castles' into places where Panza's contemporary art collection could be shown. That ambitious plan failed when Panza came under attack for owning too many American and European artists, and not enough Italians. Wheeler left Italy and moved back to California, where he had studios in Ocean Park and in Venice. Before long he gave up Los Angeles for New Mexico, where he lives now.

Over the last 20 years Wheeler has spent little time focusing on exhibiting in commercial spaces. Regardless, he's never stopped making art and designing new environments. (More on that tomorrow.) Wheeler's most recent museum commission was for a Panza-related show at the Bilbao Guggenheim in 2000.

"They delayed the opening and I kept working on it," Wheeler said. "Then they started letting people in anyway. I was flummoxed by that. Then a woman came in, very attractive, with her son. He was only so big [about four feet tall]... So the piece I was working on, when you enter you first walk into this enormous gray gallery type of space, with carpeted floor, white walls white ceiling. It looks like a white wall, only the white wall isn't a wall, it just looks like one. So the mother and her son both stop at the edge of the carpet. He puts his hands up -- and then he realized it's not a wall. I realized that it works! I can leave! Children are the most open and see the best. The look on that little boy's face was great, and I realized that. Those are the kinds of things you look for."

I asked Wheeler if the ephemerality of his work and his spaces, how difficult they are to photograph and even collect had helped hurt his place in art history.

"I never worried so much about permanence because I make things that you experience, and then it's in your mind. Most of my stuff is site specific or site-related, but I feel that's what we do in life. We have first-hand experiences, and those are the ones we don't forget. They stay with us and hopefully they're meaningful enough that they're with you the rest of your life. That's pretty much what I've always been after. I've always tried to do that stuff that has an effect on you that you never forget the first time."

Tomorrow: Where Wheeler is now, what he's working on, and how he feels about what he calls "keeping away." Previously: Re-introducing Doug Wheeler. Talking with Wheeler part one, two. LAT art critic William Wilson reviews a 1968 Wheeler show.

Related: Speaking of experiences, earlier this year Wheeler was the artistic director for an exhibit at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris: Upside Down: The Arctic Regions. [Photo above.] More here.

[Image at top: A 1971 Wheeler acylic-and-neon light encasement in the collection of the Ludwig Forum for International Art.]

The Huffington Post's Sam Stein reports that the Republican National Committee's unusual expenditures aren't limited to turning the governor of Alaska into Caribou Barbie. The RNC also just spent $6,000 on... art restoration? Details anyone?

Suddenly it's not just art made by artists that's hot, it's stuff collected (and installed) by artists that's hot. First example: Francis Alys' Fabiola paintings, which are on view now at LACMA.

Also on view now: Rachel Whiteread's dollhouses (left), at the MFA Boston.

Other artist-collections-o'-stuff that come to mind: Andy Warhol's time capsules (the Warhol Museum put Time Capsule 21 online), William Christenberry's old advertising signs...

Several recent posts have elicited some reader mail that seemed worth sharing.

Regarding Friday's post about Election Day art museum-style, in November Charlotte's Mint Museum of Art will try out a kind of 'vote for art' event. The selected work will land in the Mint's American art collection.

Regarding today's post on baseball and art, readers checked in with several favorites. There's Philip Evergood's Early Youth of Babe Ruth from the Hirshhorn's collection and Lee Walton's 162 Instructions for Drawings. I completely forgot about (and love) Morris Kantor's Baseball at Night, at SAAM. And how could I forget Raymond Pettibon? His I Followed Him is at right. (A bigger version is in the jump.)

Picking back up with Doug Wheeler (re-introduction, conversation part one, two)... I referenced the following review here. I thought it was too fabulous not to share. It's surprisingly sexual, religious and... well, just enjoy. It's by William Wilson from the June 3, 1968 Los Angeles Times.

Doug Wheeler, a young Los Angeles vanguardist, brings forth immaculate concepts in plastic and neon. Two of these electric "paintings" glow on the walls of the Pasadena Art Museum's pristine art lab, Gallery II, even the floor of which has been painted white for the exhibition.

Suspended like electronic-age icons on facing walls of the divided room, are two shallow 6-foot-high boxes. Sheet-plastic fronts covering neon tubing are opaque white except fo ra narrow border strip that allows a thin line of light. In the dim room this strip makes centers appear dark. The whole is rimmed in white lucite that allows a cottony glow around the objects. One has a slightly warm tone, the other is cool.

Work of Art
They feel like Mark Rothko's spilled from their frames, as coldly exciting as beautiful sexless angels, as jarringly attractive as a virgin princess in an ice palace.

The object is the kernel of the artist's statement. The whole light-suffused room is the work of art. Space and light are dimensional while the work seems to have been conceived two-dimensionally like an old-fashioned painting. Oblique angles are jarring.

Even modified, no normal architecture is prepared for such dustless purity. Every imperfect detail becomes a smudge -- the glow broken by the line of the floor, irregularities in the room. Footprints on the floor are as obscene as mud on a communion gown.

• Jerry Saltz plays both Kreskin and Oprah. I admit it: I miss the old Jerry, the scrappy, smart, all-seeing Village Voice Jerry, the Jerry who was more interested in art and who didn't have to write these New York magaziney pieces that are about The Place of the Art Market in the Cosmos.
  
• The August Sander of Ellis Island? The Boston Globe's Mark Feeney on photographer-administrator Augustus F. Sherman.
• Kenneth Baker talks with Andy Goldsworthy about his vertically monumental Spire, which just went up in Ess Eff.
  
• The LAT's David Ng on the Cindy Sherman docu that isn't.
• Suzanne Muchnic asks: Is Los Angeles finally insisting upon its place in art history? (Yes, finally.) Christopher Knight notes that LA still has a permanent display issue.
  
• The Stranger's Jen Graves is puzzled by the Seattle Art Museum's rental of space to an exhibition of art being circulated by a bourbon maker. Yes, really.
• In the Washington Post, Jessica Dawson says that artists and the art world have long resisted sport, but are now embracing it. I don't know how far I'd go down that road -- George Bellows comes to mind. But true: There isn't a lot of (any?) great art out there about, say, baseball.
  

More Doug Wheeler next week. But I wanted to post on this...

Yesterday Ed Winkleman did a nice post about the UK National Gallery's attempt to hold on to a couple of Titians. The gallery has created a website in an attempt to gin up public support -- including actual currency -- to keep at least Titian's Diana and Actaeon in London. (Washingtonians: I bleev you know one of Titian's models.)

This isn't a new idea. Thirty years ago, when Louisville's Speed Art Museum wanted a Rembrandt, it launched a similar public campaign. Children held bake sales and wealthy Kentuckians wrote checks. The museum got its Rembrandt. The museum's 'credit line' acknowledges "the entire community of Louisville."

So a question: Why don't museums do this more? I don't mean with Titians or Rembrandts -- I mean why not let the public pick which of, say, three works a museum buys? I know there are practical reasons that make that tough: The museum would be asking a seller to at least delay a sale until a referendum could be held. But I think a smart museum could figure out the attendant issues, and the benefit of involving the community in a meaningful way would make the hassle worth it.

John Ravenal is the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. This is the last in a series.

John Ravenal: Yukinori Yanagi's USA & USSR is one of my favorite works of art dealing with the American flag. It consists of two shallow plastic boxes filled with colored sand to make images of the two superpowers' flags. Clear tubes lead to a third box in the center. Hundreds of ants have tunneled through the flags and carried grains of sand into the center box, making an abstract heap of blue and red striations that only vaguely recalls its sources. The piece was made in 1994, several years after the USSR had dissolved into Russia and other separate nations. But the continued tensions with the US over military, economic, and social issues -- despite significant post-cold-war thawing in relations -- made the message of this piece still pertinent, then and now. 

Yanagi first worked with ants in the mid 1980s, welcoming them as an unpredictable and disruptive force that could introduce new possibilities into his art. His ongoing concern with social and political boundaries led to his first major ant farm piece in 1990, the World Flag Ant Farm (Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Japan). This work consists of individual sand paintings of the flags of all 170 members of the United Nations, through which the ants dug a vast network of visible channels and carried sand from flag to flag. In Asian culture, ants are traditionally considered "righteous insects" for their orderliness and subordination of individuality to the group. In contrast, Yanagi uses them for their total disregard of the sanctity of fixed symbols of national identity, and thus as a way to address the illusion of national separateness, which, he notes, is continually eroded by international trade and mass migration. In another work, part of his Studies in American Art series, Yanagi took on the American flag via another iconic image, Jasper Johns's Three Flags. [Images courtesy of the artist. Full caption here.]

The LA Times has the story. It's the lead, cross-the-top story on LAT.com. The LAT is updating the story as developments warrant. Getty Center will be closed today.

UPDATE, 9:15am PDT: The fire appears to be out, but Getty officials say they have retained Sitrick & Co. just in case it flares up again. (Rimshot.)

Arthouse Texas curator Elizabeth Dunbar suggested Gordon Parks' American Gothic.

• The UK's Nick Strauss suggests an appropriate flag: Robert Mapplethorpe's;
• The flag as rile-'em'-up near-propoganda device is nothing new. Check out this 1861 Frederic Church courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum on Fire;
• Something about Cigarettes and Purity's Nina Berman is just right for now;
• Paul Nelson reminds us of Dread Scott's flags;
• Ethan Ham has the neat story of a Portugese news magazine running a series on flags. Naturally it included the U.S. and it has all kindsa good Euro-tude;
• The National Museum of the American Indian is launching a Fritz Scholder show next month. Here's a flag painting with political overtones aplenty; and
• Regina Hackett reveals Jack Daws' fascination with the flag.
• Also: More over at BuzzFeed.

When I saw Doug Wheeler's Eindhoven, Environmental Light Installation (1969) at the Hirshhorn yesterday, I was confused. The documentation I had from the museum said that the work was made of nothing but neon. That couldn't be right: There was a seemingly unusual white paint that covered the walls and ceiling of an entire gallery. The corners of the room looked like they had disappeared. The light appeared to come from behind a scrim. Finally it looked like there was fog in the gallery, the kind of winter fog that moves hovers above a snowy field. The space wasn't just activated, I thought it had been changed. The light was tactile.

So I asked the museum to give me the actual list of what Eindhoven was made of. Reply: 'Neon. That's it.' It was installed in the 'coves' that make up Gordon Bunshaft's weird Hirshhorn galleries. I felt both awed and stupid.

Doug Wheeler was not the first artist to use neon. Mario Merz, Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman and others were all there first. But none of them used neon as cleverly as Wheeler. With one exception (this SFMOMA work-on-paper), all of the Wheelers in American museum collections are neon pieces. I asked him how he went from being a painter to using neon.

"Neon wasn't a thing of itself for me. I was making paintings, white paintings. I basically wanted the plane of the canvas to be..." Wheeler trailed off, unsure of how to describe the effect he was after. "I put neon behind the canvas' back, and then I sprayed the edges [of the painting] with color. If you want to know what it looked like, look at [Robert] Irwin's later paintings. Same effect, in a way, and mine 'floated' on the wall. The reason I picked neon is that it's an incoherent light. It's very soft on the wall.

"Then when I saw what Bob was doing, I quit canvas. I felt I had to find another way. He was a more established artist. He was someone I knew, and he was doing these things that were way too close to what I was doing, so I changed to plastic encasement. Then I put the light inside. I made not many of those, but I did make a number of those playing with space and light. I wanted the freedom of activating space without an actual object, and that's what I went to with the thing we've got here at the Hirshhorn.

"For me neon goes back to '65 and '66. I didn't have any money in those days, so I didn't do that many. I had to make them myself. I didn't have any support or a gallery. Irving Blum was going to pick me up at once point. He said something to me, asking me what they cost. I think it was something like $1600, $1800. And he said, 'Your aesthetic is only a $700 aesthetic.' I shrugged. I said, 'I guess I'm not going to sell them then.'

But curators were intrigued. Light and space -- and Wheeler's neon installations -- were such a hit that by 1970 Wheeler, Larry Bell and Bob Irwin were the subject of major exhibitions at the Tate in London and in a Fort Worth Art Center show that traveled to the Stedelijk in Amsterdam.

"It was a very clean show," Wheeler said about the Stedelijk exhibit. "I got the museum to turn all the heat off. Otherwise the place would be sweaty feeling, and it was really cold outside and it really benefitted the space I did. I think someone wrote about it being like walking into an ice cube."

Previously: Doug Wheeler's work. Talking with Doug Wheeler part one. [Image above: LACMA's 1968 Untitled (Light Encasement).]

Two things have motivated me to spend the last couple weeks talking about contemporary art and the American flag. First: At a time when many conservatives are claiming that non-Republicans are somehow anti-American, I wanted to post examples of artists, curators and art-lovers being thoughtful about what America is and what it could be. There are lots of ways for art-worlders to express patriotism, but perhaps the clearest artistic patriotism is to reflect on America through the use of the country's most famous symbol, the flag. Broadly speaking, artists refuse to define patriotism as the allegedly benign status quo. Instead they poke and prod, urging America to more completely fulfill its ideals and to more completely make good on its promises.

Which brings me to the second motivation: William Pope.L's Trinket, which was on view last month in Kansas City courtesy of Grand Arts. (I did not see it in person, alas.) Trinket consists of a giant, 15-by-40-foot flag, propelled through the air by man-made, 35-40-mile-per-hour winds. It was patriotic -- it's a flag! -- and it was dangerous -- do not step in the way of that massive flag as high winds are snapping it back and forth. It was a brilliant commentary on today's right-wing jingoism.

Don't miss: The Kansas City Star's video feature on Trinket. (That's a still from it above.) KC NPR affiliate KCUR's Laura Spencer here. I'd link to what KC Star critic Alice Thorson said about Trinket, but the Star won't let me.

Previously on MAN: Intro to the series, complete with a Pulitzer-winner. David Rubin picked Sam Wiener. Anthony Huberman picked Lutz Bacher. Connie Butler picked David Hammons. Rita Gonzalez picked Juan Capistran. Lawrence Rinder picks Eduardo Paolozzi. Michael Taylor picks Marcel Duchamp. Readers picks, part one. A BuzzFeed page where you can contribute your own favorite examples of the American flag in art. (So far: Twenty-nine contributions and counting...)

Oh yes she does.

Conversely: The patriotism of artists.

I started by apologizing to Doug Wheeler for knowing so little about him. I had surfed the Archives of American Art and I'd paged through book after book about California and light and space art looking for a place to start. I'd even gone through the catalogues of two recent shows at LACMA and the Guggenheim looking for information. Time and time again: Wheeler's work looked great, but it was clear that no curator or writer had talked with him enough to include anything about his work in the book or catalogue. Worse: It seemed as if over time curators and historians had effectively reduced the triumverate that had effectively started Light and Space art to an Irwin-and-Turrell twosome. I told Wheeler that I was sorry that I was going to come across as dumb and unprepared, but that I'd searched and searched. I was relieved when he chuckled at this, and jumped right in.

"William Wilson -- he was the art critic for the Los Angeles Times back then -- wrote about a Pasadena show I did," Wheeler said. He was talking about a solo show he'd had at the Pasadena Art Museum in May, 1968. "Wilson basically was saying that it was the first time he'd seen where the whole space had a featureless space that was all white, and I had these light pieces in there and I made the ambient situation that was right for it. He wrote about how it was so unnerving that it was like stepping on a bridal veil."

That sounded pretty good to me, even poetic. [Wheeler's memory was good: Wilson's actual exit line was "Footprints on the floor are as obscene as mud on a communion gown."] Wheeler took a breath and continued.

"A couple years after that, I was in another exhibition at Ace and Wilson said something like, 'Doug Wheeler, following in the line of Judy [Chicago]...' and he named a whole bunch of people who were using white rooms and it really pissed me off. So I just wouldn't talk to those guys."

Nearly 40 years later, there we were at a Starbucks in downtown Washington conducting what Wheeler said was his first interview since then. (As I noted yesterday, Wheeler was in DC to install his Eindhoven, Environmental Light Installation (1969) at the Hirshhorn, which recently acquired the piece. It goes on view this week as part of The Panza Collection. Above is a photo of the work, taken by Lee Stalsworth.)

Wheeler is 69 but he looks 15 years younger. He has a full head of wavy white hair that falls to his shoulders, a neat white mustache and eyebrows that suggest his hair was once black. He was dressed like a rancher in black jeans, a brown leather vest and a light-blue shirt with shiny silver buttons. He had just arrived in DC not from his home in New Mexico, but from France, where he recently designed an installation at the Musee du Quai Branly.

It took me a couple days to realize this, but the first thing that Wheeler told me may have been less about Wilson and Wheeler's reluctance to talk about himself than it was about the way art history has included -- or failed to include -- him as one of the three key figures of light-and-space art. In other words, Wheeler was telling me that in 1968 the LAT's art critic had initially -- but perhaps unawaredly -- recognized Wheeler's central role in the creation of what would become known as light and space (Wilson described the work's "space and light"), but that within a year or two the critic had chunked it up and lumped Wheeler in with ham-handed installationists rather than with the actual movement he'd helped create.

In hindsight, Wheeler's part in the triumverate is obvious: Wheeler's show was the third John Coplans-curated Pasadena Art Museum exhibition in less than a year: Turrell showed in Pasadena in September, 1967, Irwin showed his then-new discs in early 1968, and then Wheeler. Curators around the world quickly seized on the new LA-based abstract art. Irwin, Wheeler, Larry Bell and others began receiving invitations to exhibit from major museums. And that's where we'll pick up next...

• SFMOMA does a neat thing on their blog with 'curated' collection selections. Heidi de Vries does the latest 'installation,' complete with soundtrack.
• Greg Allen just visited Michael Heizer's iconic Double Negative and posted about it here, here and here.
• Artist Zoe Strauss tries to explain why her photos of Philly sports celebrations are never any good. (Phillies vs. Rays is coming soon to a World Series near you.) Strauss fails because... the photos are awesome!
  

Links to entire series here.

James Turrell and Robert Irwin are rightly famous. Doug Wheeler, the third great pioneer of '60s-'70s Light-and-Space art is not. That's too bad.

If Turrell was the set-designer of light-driven installations, then Wheeler was the guy who understood that 'the set' wasn't limited to the stage or one wall, that it could take over an entire environment. (This is a concept that Turrell has taken to extremes in the Arizona desert.) If Irwin was a master of subtle art that builds to a low, intense burn, then Wheeler was the guy who realized that if you controlled an entire space, that you could ratchet up the intensity level right away.

Early Wheelers -- vacuum-formed acrylic squares or rectangles with neon around or behind the edges of the square from the late 1960s and early 1970s -- are fantastically demanding. They hang on a wall or fill it, emanating visible bandwidth into an all-white space. They absorb the white cube and co-opt it. Being inside a Wheeler isn't an experience, it's a sensation. It is enveloping, mysterious, meditative and a little bit disorienting. (These qualities are unphotographable, which makes the infrequency with which Wheeler's are installed especially problematic. This picture (above), of MOCA's RM 669 (1969) is about as close as JPEGs get. The picture below is MOCA's own picture of the same work.)

While Wheelers are child-graspable fun, they're also smart and demanding. They're obviously about light, a focus of hundreds of years worth of painters. (Irwin, Wheeler and other Light-and-Spacers started out as painters.) In many ways, Light and Space art is impressionism for a late-industrial period: It makes light the primary focus of art that addresses industrial production. (As TJ Clark has argued, impressionism often addressed the birth of French industry.) Is it a coincidence that Light and Space emerged from LA at the same time the Cold War-driven aerospace industry was booming in Southern California?

Wheelers also present a delightful paradox: We're encouraged to enter Wheeler's lit environment, so we do. The temptation to walk across the white cube toward the pleasure-providing acrylic and neon-emitting shape is irresistible. But as we walk toward the object, it becomes less powerful, less pleasurable. Better to retreat and to continue to enjoy. Wheelers are surprisingly controlling.

Sure enough, Wheeler was (and is) obsessive-compulsive about his installations, a lovable throwback at a time when Thomas Hirschhorn-style scattertrash installation art is en vogue. That intense attention-to-detail is a remnant of Wheeler's background as a painter, a medium in which every mark can be artist-controlled. (Irwin's OCDish dot paintings are another good example.) Wheeler has tried to control every imaginable detail of his installations, including how a museum, gallery or collector installs it and how a viewer is allowed to experience it. Example: The first time I saw the Wheeler now in LACMA's collection it was in curator Lynn Zelevansky's Beyond Geometry show. The museum required visitors to remove their shoes before entering Wheeler's all-white space. Visitors gleefully submitted: Each time I saw the show there was a line to get in.

Wheeler has both benefited and suffered from that exactitude. He has refused projects or pulled out of shows in which he didn't have enough control over his work, including the Pompidou's landmark 2006 show about post-WWII art from Los Angeles. (Wheeler complained that the Pompidou's installation staff was clueless and irresponsible. He was prescient: The Pompidou's staff eventually accidentally damaged or destroyed several works in the show.) No matter, Wheeler has been simultaneously influential and under-appreciated. It's not just Turrell who has benefited from Wheeler, it's Erwin Redl, Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Holler, Nathaniel Rackowe, and more. It's no coincidence that those artists are European. Wheeler and other Light-and-Space artists have shown more widely in Europe than in the U.S.

Partly as a result of Wheeler's fastidiousness and his focus on Europe, Wheeler installations are rarely seen in the U.S. So far as I know they're in the collections of only five American museums: LACMA, MOCA, MCASD, the Guggenheim and the Hirshhorn. The Guggenheim and the Hirshhorn acquired their Wheelers by way of Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, the Italian art collector who sold and gave parts of his collection to those institutions. (MOCA bought its Wheeler in 1984, the same year in which MOCA acquired works from Panza.) The Hirshhorn, which acquired work from Panza last year, will show its Wheeler for the first time when The Panza Collection opens this week.

Two weeks ago Wheeler visited the Hirshhorn to help install his Eindhoven, Environmental Light Installation (1969). While he was here he agreed to a rare interview with me. (Wheeler wasn't sure when he'd last talked to an American writer -- "I'm not sure I've ever done it," he said.) I'll start posting about it tomorrow.

Links to entire series here.

• Kenneth Baker names the two works of art that "formed his sensibilities." (Good idea. Memo to self: 'Borrow' this idea sometime.)
• In the NYT, Karen Rosenberg has a nice take on Rachel Whiteread at the MFA Boston. The Globe's Sebastian Smee likes it a lot less.
  
• Christopher Knight tells LACMA how to improve a Jorge Pardo exhibition design, and LACMA partially complies.
• Speaking of Knight, I love his take on Carleton Watkins, who is contextualized at the Getty.
• There's a bunch of good stuff at the top of the Houston Chronicle's arts blog -- Christopher Rothko, Marfa, etc. -- so just click and scroll.
  

Michael Taylor is the curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Introduction to the series here.

Michael Taylor: The biting satire of this portrait of George Washington reflects the artist's nihilistic mood during the Second World War, which had brought back painful memories of the jingoistic patriotism that had led to the senseless loss of so many of his friends and even family members, including his oldest brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon, during the First World War.

When Alexander Liberman asked Duchamp to make a portrait of the first President of the United States for the cover of the February 15, 1943 issue of Vogue magazine, Duchamp produced a mocking collage image based on the profile portraits of Washington made popular by the English painter James Sharples in the 1790s. This inflammatory 'stain' portrait consists of a double image, featuring Washington's right profile and trademark wigged coiffure when seen head on, and a map of the United States, with part of Mexico and Canada in black on either side, when the work is turned on its side. This visual trick alludes to the artist's interest in the 'Wilson-Lincoln' effect, an optical illusion where the interchangeable portraits of Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln were made to appear simultaneously through a two-way mechanism, such as a lenticular photograph or an accordian-fold system, which had so intrigued the artist when he first lived in New York in the 1910s.

Perhaps unsurprisingly Duchamp's entry was rejected by Liberman and other members of the editorial staff at Vogue, who deemed the shoddy and highly suggestive materials used in the assemblage, which is made from padded material covered in surgical gauze that had been soaked in iodine and then fixed to the cardboard support by thirteen gold-colored stars, to be inappropriate for a portrait of the father of the country. Although the red-streaked gauze, redolent of bloodstained bandages or a used sanitary towel, was intended to represent the red and white stripes of the American flag, there can be no doubt that the disturbing associations with violence and death perceived by the Vogue editor reflect Duchamp's anti-nationalistic attitudes at a time of flag-waving, patriotic fervor induced by wartime propaganda. The artist perhaps wanted to remind the magazine's readers that the first President of the United States was a slave-owning war-monger, with not just blood on his hands, but saturated over his entire profile.

When Duchamp called Liberman to find out why Allégorie de genre did not appear on the cover of the February 15 issue, the embarrassed editor told the artist that the offending work was 'not right for Vogue' and returned it to him, along with a check for fifty dollars for 'expenses.' Duchamp immediately sold the work to his close friend André Breton, who published a reproduction of it on the cover of the Surrealist magazine VVV later that year, thus highlighting the narrow-mindedness of Vogue's censorious editorial board. [The piece is now in the collection of the Pompidou.]

Also: David Rubin picked Sam Wiener. Anthony Huberman picked Lutz Bacher. Connie Butler picked David Hammons. Rita Gonzalez picked Juan Capistran. Lawrence Rinder picks Eduardo Paolozzi. A BuzzFeed page where you can contribute your own favorite examples of the American flag in contemporary art. (So far: Twenty-one contributions and counting...)

Here's one of my picks. This is Hans Haacke's Star Gazer (2004). It obviously references the hoods American guards used on Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. (It's less clear if the hood also references practices at Guantanamo Bay. Gitmo protesters have frequently marched or sat-in as 'hooded inmates,' but I don't recall seeing photographs of hooded Gitmo detainees.)

In 2005 I wrote this post about a season's worth of Chelsea shows. It leads with a Haacke installation at Paula Cooper. As I re-read the post this morning, I thought, 'Artists are often prescient.' (The Chris Doyle in the post reminds me of the the Colbert Report's show-opening sequence.)

Lawrence Rinder is the director of the Berkeley Art Museum. Before heading BAM Rinder was the dean of the college at the California College of the Arts and a curator of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Lawrence Rinder: This is Eduardo Paolozzi's As Is When (Wittgenstein Suite): Wittgenstein in New York (1965). Paolozzi's image of the American flag appears as part of a cacophonous cityscape in which image and object, inside and outside, public and  private merge and interpenetrate. The flag itself is composed of proto-digital pixel-like forms. Tossed into play within a topsy turvy meaning game, the flag in Paolozzi's screen-print takes on an ethereal, virtual presence, waving stiffly over a bizarre, flattened world.

(This is a silkscreen print from the collection of the UC Berkeley Art Museum, a gift of Peter Selz in honor of the 20th anniversary of the
University Art Museum. Which reminds me: Peter Selz's most recent book/show was Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond.)

Previously: David Rubin picked Sam Wiener. Anthony Huberman picked Lutz Bacher. Connie Butler picked David Hammons. Rita Gonzalez picked Juan Capistran. A BuzzFeed page where you can contribute your own favorite examples of the American flag in contemporary art.

Rita Gonzalez is a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She recently co-curated Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement with LACMA's Howard Fox and Chon Noriega. Introduction to the series here.

Rita Gonzalez: LA based artist Juan Capistran's Do You Want New Wave or do you Want the Truth? is made up of over one hundred Xeroxed 8 1/2 x 11 sheets with collaged images and texts done in the manner of punk rock flyers tiled in the formation of the American flag. In this political moment in which terms like "maverick" and "outlaw" are being co-opted by conservative politicians, Capistran's piece presents the stars and stripes as a zone of symbolic dissonance. The American flag is as likely to surface as a patch on a Hell's Angel as it is to be green screened as backdrop to a political spectacle. Capistran has been repurposing the objects and monikers of the American Revolution as part of a larger series titled The Minutemen Project. In the (counter-) tradition of Jamie Reid's graphics for the Sex Pistols, Capistran unmoors the nativist rhetoric of the Minutemen and hurls it into the contested debate of who controls the rights to patriotic discourse and symbolism.

Related: A detail from this piece is here. Phantom Sightings is the best show I saw in 2008 that I didn't review here. The catalogue is well worth a look.

Previously: David Rubin picked Sam Wiener. Anthony Huberman picked Lutz Bacher. Connie Butler picked David Hammons. A BuzzFeed page where you can contribute your own favorite examples of the American flag in contemporary art.

I'm receiving lots of email with links to American flags in art, and next week(ish) I'll be doing a post featuring many of the works you've been sending. But because so many of you are emailing, I thought I'd try something new: I started a flags-in-art page on BuzzFeed. Help contemporary art leave its ghetto of self-love by contributing relevant links, JPEGs, etc. there, too. (Signing up took me mere seconds.)

• On Monday I linked to Christopher Knight's post about Picasso's Le Reve going on view in New York. Knight also blogged about a Picasso closely related to Le Reve: the Norton Simon's fantastic Girl With a Book. In the last year or so I've blogged incessantly about the relationship between Henri Matisse's 1931 Georges Petit show and Picasso's 1932 Georges Petit show and how much Matisse's exhibition drove and inspired Picasso. (And, later, vice-versa: Picasso's 1932 rejoinder to Matisse's 1931 show motivated Matisse for years: For example, he painted major 'Dreams' in 1935 and 1940.) As I blogged in June, the Norton Simon painting is a fine example of how Picasso married Matisse to Marie-Therese Walter in arguably the greatest portraits of his career. (Knight points out that there's an abundance of Ingres here too.) In a related (personal) development, I just added the story of those two shows to the list of books I'd like to write.
• Robert Irwin's Light and Space III is now on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (which commissioned the piece). Here's the first picture I've seen. It looks like a cool riff on an idea Irwin developed while in residence at MCASD.
• LACMA's Unframed wonders why the heck Ed Ruscha's The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire is in the Hirshhorn's collection -- and proposes a trade. (Why DC? Because Joe Hirshhorn bought LACM from Irving Blum right after Ruscha finished it. Why didn't LACMA or an Angeleno? Back to you, Unframed.)
  
• Bloggers: Post your art-about-the-American-flag faves and email 'em to me at LinksforMAN-blog (a t)yahoo(d o t) com or share them via Twitter.
  

Connie Butler is the chief curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art. Prior to joining MoMA, Butler was a curator at MOCA. Among her recent exhibitions is "Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution." Introduction to the series here.

Connie Butler: This work (African-American Flag, 1990) has all the poetry of David Hammons' spot-on riffs on popular American culture. As an object it is both poignant and intense. It is clear and succinct in its meaning and visually engaging as a sculpture which hangs on the wall. Here [Hammons] takes the American flag and drenches it in the African red and green making an icon of a culture colored with its hybridity and multi-ethnicity. Truly this is a symbol for these times when we may elect our first African American president. Hammons is one of our keenest cultural critics and a master of powerful symbols that are pitch-perfect for our time.

Related: Holland Cotter points out that Hammons has been using the flag for years (image included). Another image of a 'body prints' work with flag here. Several other ways of 'hanging' Hammons' African-American Flag are on Flickr.

Also: David Rubin picked Sam Wiener. Anthony Huberman picked Lutz Bacher. Rita Gonzalez picked Juan Capistran.

Anthony Huberman is the chief curator of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Prior to joining the Contemporary, Huberman held a variety of posts at the Palais de Tokyo, New York's SculptureCenter and at PS1. This is part two in a series. Introduction here. David Rubin picked Sam Wiener.

Anthony Huberman: Lutz Bacher's piece is completely about the American flag, about America, about the monuments America has built, about how they've collapsed, and about the experience we have watching it all happen...either in alcoholic stupor or in drunken excitement... Live from the heartland, swing-state-style.

The piece refers to Cady Noland's America as much as it refers to St. Louis's America...it finds the triumph in the ruin.

Related: A Bacher exhibition is on view now at the Contemporary. Someone has uploaded the Bud advertising sign (above) to YouTube. Just for fun: Huberman in a clown wig. There's one more Bacher image in the jump.

In 1994 David S. Rubin organized Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art for the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. (The show's catalogue is here.) Rubin is now the contemporary art curator at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Part one in a series. Introduction here.

David S. Rubin: I have great admiration for Sam Wiener's Those Who Fail to Remember the Past are Condemned to Repeat It (1970). Created at the time when Minimalism was still in vogue, this sculpture takes the form of a simple cube on its exterior. But looks are deceptive here, as Wiener infused a Minimalist form with significant and timely social commentary. As viewers peer through slats along the sculpture's upper edges, we see endless rows of flag-draped coffins, an effect created by a mirrored interior. (Image courtesy Sam Wiener.)

Wiener conceived the sculpture in response to the rising death toll during the Vietnam War, and included it in "The People's Flag Show," organized in 1970 by Faith Ringgold and the Guerilla Art Action Group (Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche) to protest New York's flag desecration laws that had led to the conviction of the art dealer Stephen Radich. Wiener originally titled the work 43,928... and Counting, but changed the digits to higher numbers with each new set of death statistics. While the sculpture's potency as an artwork has never waned, the work is, sadly, as relevant today as it was almost forty years ago.

Related: Mark Vallen. Sam Wiener's website. His political work.

Throughout this year-(plus)-long presidential campaign season, the American flag has been an issue in a way last seen in 1992, when flag burning was a major topic.

For Republicans the flag been a litmus test for patriotism and all-American-ness, a test that's so reductive that right-wingers might as well be rallying to the banner of their favorite NFL team. Worse, the GOP seems to believe that a focus on lapel pins has served a useful political purpose: To remind the country that their opponent in the presidential race is a guy named 'Barack Obama' who has a Kenyan father and who attended elementary school in Indonesia. For months Obama refused to pander to the lapel-pin mafia and refused to wear a flag pin, which helped the Obama-is-a-Muslim narrative (created by right-wing hitman Andy Martin) gain traction.

Democrats have used the flag too, but in more subtle ways. For example, the Obama campaign has used iconography from the flag in its campaign logo. Obama visually draped himself in the flag at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, but instead of bludgeoning viewers with super-size stars-and-stripes, his image-makers chose to present flags as they might be behind the President at White House speeches or press conferences. Most often the Democrats don't try to out-flag the GOP, they simply point out the Republicans' hypocrisy. "Everyone knows Republicans love America," Jon Stewart said on the Aug. 27 Daily Show. "They just hate half the people living in it."

When I've thought of the flag in the last week or two, I've remembered a photograph taken by the Rocky Mountain News' Todd Heisler (above) and a series of photographs that The Memory Hole forced the Pentagon to release under the Freedom of Information Act (right). In each of these pictures jingoism is replaced with respect. These photographs and the way the flag is present in them don't roust the dopamine of the rabid right. Instead they command our attention, our awe and our gratitude in a way a thousand lapel pins never will.

Artists have used the American flag in art for decades. I've asked many contemporary art curators to pick a favorite or particularly relevant work of art and to write a few words about it. Each day this week I'll feature their selections. At the end of the week I'll add a couple of my own. (Bloggers: Post your faves and email 'em to me at LinksforMAN-blog (a t)yahoo(d o t) com.)

A quick holiday update:

• FAMSF continues its shameful run under director John Buchanan: Tut is coming. (Finally. As you may recall, several years ago the museum said it was taking the show, then it dropped it.)
• Christopher Knight on an exquisite "modern sex painting." (And he lands a clean shot on John Richardson, too.)
• Steven Litt unveils the 2008 Xmas stamp. Hint: It was made round by Botticelli, squared by the USPS, and provided by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
• LA Weekly's Doug Harvey says that Martin Kippenberger was a sleazy alcoholic trickster, which rocks.
• The New Orleans Times-Picayune's Doug MacCash previews Propsect.1.
  

• No wonder the National Mall is a mess;
• Cathy Opie takes cooler vacations than I do [via];
• Shepherd Fairey to receive the mid-career treatment from art museum;
• Is it just me, or are the MFA Boston's Monets never in, oh, I dunno... Boston?;
• I have no idea what this is, but I love it; and
  
• If fog envelops a Vienna building, you can bet that Olafur Eliasson is near.

New York painter Elizabeth Peyton is everywhere this month. Calvin Tomkins profiled her in the New Yorker. Roberta Smith reviewed her NuMu show today.

If it feels like this has all happened before, it's because it has. Five years ago Tomkins' wife, Dodie Kazanjian, profiled Peyton for Vogue. The rather stupefying story inspired one of my favorite MAN posts. (Background: There's a Blake Gopnik-related joke in the post that made more sense back in 2004, right after Gopnik had reviewed a Corcoran show by far-too-vividly describing how something at the Corc inspired him to want to vomit.) Anyway, for a riff on art writing and arts journalism at its silliest, click here.

LACMA's blog is my new daily obsession. (And not just because I screwed up a link to it yesterday.) Today: The neat-o story of a curator who really, really, really wants an installation to be juuuust right for the museum's visitors.

1.) I continue to be disappointed in the strange behavior of many of Washington's under-performing museums. The latest unfortunate trend: DC museums are teaming up with dealers in their programming: The Hirshhorn has signed up at least one dealer for a talk. The Phillips and the University of Illinois placed three salespeople on panels during a recent symposium. And then there's the Corcoran...

Later this month a DC commercial space, Irvine Contemporary Art, is hosting a show of Shepherd Fairey, Al Farrow and Paul D. Miller. That's fine, that's great, there's obviously nothing wrong with a commercial gallery doing a show.

But there is a problem when a non-profit art museum (and school) explicitly promotes a business, which is what the Corcoran is doing on on Oct. 17 when it hosts a Fairey and Farrow Q&A with a Corcoran curator in the Corcoran auditorium. Worse, the Corcoran admits that it's eager to promote the commercial exhibition: "We most certainly coordinated our program around the exhibition opening for a number of reasons -- from availability of the artist to building buzz through cross-promotion of the program and exhibition," a Corcoran spokesperson told me via email.

The Corcoran is making a mistake so obvious that it's hard to believe no one inside the museum flagged it. That kind of non-profit-promoting-a-business is discouraged by both museum industry association guidelines and by the federal tax code. The Corcoran should immediately cancel this promotional event.

2.) As good as New York is this exhibition season, I'm pretty excited by the mid-Atlantic too. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts hosts Dan Cameron's well-received Peter Saul retrospective and, as I mentioned last week, a Franz West retrospective is coming in Baltimore.

3.) Quick preview of next week on MAN: Throughout this year-(plus)-long presidential campaign season, the American flag has been an issue in a way last seen in 1992, when flag burning was a major topic. Republicans have tried to make patriotism an issue, strangely seizing on American-flag lapel pins as a kind of litmus test. Progressives such as Jon Stewart have pointed out that Republicans love America and symbolism, but that they seem to have less regard for Americans. Meanwhile, artists have used the American flag in art for decades. So next week: Prominent contemporary art curators will share favorite works of art that include or address the American flag.

4.) Art Institute of Chicago boss Jim Cuno is featured on this Bad at Sports podcast.

5.) I think I'm developing a slight obsession with Francis Alys' work. C-Monster has great pics of the Fabiola installation at LACMA.

Some links on MAN got switched around this morning. To read about some fabulous WW1 and WW2 propaganda posters on view at the Norton Simon, click here.

Snap! Oh no they did'n'! This morning I linked to this minimalist Obma button. Now, from the unclear-on-the-concept file: The Paln version. [via]

• Haven't done any of these in a while: Severed-head rhymes. I'll add this one and this one.
• Christopher Hawthorne says this man is the world's most underrated architect.
• Who says minimalism has to be apolitical?
• Ed Winkleman has a reminder to museums regarding their missions.
• I've always loved U.S. war posters from the early and mid-20thC. Apparently the Norton Simon and Unframed's Austen Bailly do too. (Complete with a Colbert reference!) BTW, those US propaganda posters are a plain influence on this recently ubiquitous artist/work. Not exactly related: Considering the Obama logo. (More here.)
  

This post was getting a little messy with back-and-forth between Sotheby's and the University of Iowa Museum of Art. So here's where we are:

• The University of Iowa Museum of Art says that its report to the University of Iowa regents was not accurate: In 2007 a previous UIMA director and administration approached Sotheby's about selling Jackson Pollock's Mural. UIMA's acting director, Pam White, says that while the sale issue is closed at UI, the museum will amend its report so that it no longer says that Sotheby's proposed the sale of Mural.
• White confirmed what UIMA previously reported regarding Max Beckmann's Karnival Triptych and other pieces. (From the report: "Sotheby's also suggested the possibility of selling other UIMA pieces, such as Max Beckmann's Triptych..." Sotheby's refused to specifically address that passage yesterday.) "We have a letter from Sotheby's that simply says that if you are interested, here are some other pieces that would be good [to sell]," White told me. So once the fox was in the henhouse, it looked around and licked its chops.

The moderator of tonight's Obama-McCain debate is an art museum trustee. Christopher Knight asks: Might we finally get a cultural policy question?

Here's the exhibition website of the season: Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet.

The ambitious project, which was organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego with an assist from the conservation group Rare, is a mix of artist residency and exhibition. The concept is straightforward but it must have been a challenge to execute: The two museums and Rare arranged for artists to spend time in ecologically sensitive parts of the planet and to make something in response to those places. The show is at MCASD until Feb. 1, 2009, and at BAM from Feb. 25 to June 28.

The website is both smart and accessible to all ages. There are the usual bios of the artists, but there are also photographs and other documentation of their trips to UNESCO World Heritage sites, description of their projects, and information about the conservation issues at each site. (The website will be updated throughout the show.) Several of the artists created spin-off features: For example, Xu Bing created an installation that utilized drawings of children who live near Mount Kenya National Park. Xu is now selling those drawings on this website, with all proceeds going to benefit reforestation efforts in Kenya.

Best of all, the website (and probably the show, which I haven't seen yet) does what more contemporary arts organizations should do: It demonstrates how the voices, experiences and work of artists can help engage the rest of us in global issues. "Art changes the world by changing the way you see," artist Diana Thater says on the site. "People can change the world through conservation, but we have to realize that the way the world is depicted also changes the world. That's what's interesting about this project. There is a certain percentage of people who will say, 'Ah! That's beautiful! What is that?' And you can change the world that way."

The entire site is well worth a surf, but here are some of my favorite parts:

• Ann Hamilton's (Galapagos) video installation;
• Mark Dion's (Komodo National Park, Indonesia) account of his visit, project;
• Rigo 23's (Atlantic Forest South-East Reserves, Brazil) photos documenting his inclusion of local artisans in his project; and
• Dario Robleto's (Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, US/Canada) discussion of his visit, project, and interaction with a glaciologist.

Related: MCASD installation shots. The SDU-T's Robert L. Pincus on the show. Wunderkammer has pics of the show at MCASD. Podcasts related to the project.

In the paperwork that the University of Iowa Museum of Art filed with the University of Iowa regents that I quoted on Friday and again this morning, UIMA said that Sotheby's "proposed" to sell UIMA's Jackson Pollock, Mural. Here's the relevant passage from UIMA's filing to the UI regents (emphasis added):

In 2007, Sotheby's, Inc. proposed to assist the University in selling Mural. A draft proposal from Sotheby's provided that Sotheby's would offer Mural for sale for a period of 120 days at a purchase price that would result in payment to the University of an amount not less than $150,000,000. A Sotheby's representative held a preliminary meeting with Howard Collinson (then director of UIMA) and Nancy Willis (then chair of the Museum's Advisory Committee) and then forwarded the draft proposal to Ms. Willis, who delivered it to the Office of the General Counsel at the University. The matter was discussed extensively by administrators at the University, and Director Collinson discussed the proposed sale with the Museum's Advisory Board. The Museum's Advisory Board recommended strongly against selling Mural. Then-Provost Hogan did not approve the deaccession, and the University did not further pursue the matter with Sotheby's.

Sotheby's also suggested the possibility of selling other UIMA pieces, such as Max Beckmann's Triptych, although the exploration of such possibilities is not documented further. No agreement to offer any of these works was ever executed.

This afternoon a Sotheby's spokesperson called MAN to dispute that the auction house was the protagonist. From a Sotheby's spokesperson:

While our conversations with the University of Iowa  were and will remain confidential, all information we provided to the UI was in direct response to the specific requests of the former Director of the University Art Museum and there was no proactive contact on Sotheby's behalf.

Obviously if Sotheby's responded to solicitations from UIMA regarding both the Pollock and the Beckmann (and other UIMA pieces), Sotheby's has not been acting in a predatory fashion, as I said earlier today.

To that point, I asked Sotheby's if UIMA asked the auction house for a proposal regarding Beckmann's Karnival Triptych. (As noted in the quoted passage above, UIMA's report says, "Sotheby's also suggested the possibility of selling other UIMA pieces, such as Max Beckmann's Triptych.") Sotheby's would not specifically address the Beckmann, saying that the "comment [above] covers everything."

As of this posting, UIMA has not responded to a request for comment. UPDATE, 10/07/08: UIMA says that it made the initial contact to Sotheby's regarding the Pollock. It stands by its report regarding Sotheby's and the Beckmann and other pieces.

• Kate Taylor, recently of the New York Sun, surfaces in the NYT with a fine story about a major collection of New Guinea art currently at FAMSF's de Young -- a collection that might not be at FAMSF for long. Apparently this is what it takes for the NYT to cover a big arts news story (and well): Someone new.
• Speaking of Ess Eff, Timothy Buckwalter has a three-part interview with Chron art critic Kenneth Baker: One, two, three.
  
• I snuck this onto the blogroll last week: LACMA has a blog. And it's good.
• Fine Marjorie Garber essay in the Boston Globe about how the arts are a huge hit among students at college campuses. Someone should distribute it to the University of Iowa regents...
• I feel better knowing that I'm not the only one fascinated by Titian's dogs.
• A Bechers as inspiration for a photo-exploration of a neighborhood.
  
• Fritz Haeg talks with Jeff Jahn about artist-as-ecologist. Or vice-versa.
• If you have or read a particularly smashing post that you want to make sure I consider for linkage, email it to LinksforMAN-blog (at) yahoo(d o t)com.

The news of the weekend broke late Friday: The University of Iowa regents unexpectedly released the University of Iowa Museum of Art's assessment of its famed 1943 Jackson Pollock, Mural. The evaluation reveals that in 2007 Sotheby's guaranteed UIMA $150 million if it could auction off the painting, a shameful bit of unseemly predatory behavior. The Los Angeles Times' Christopher Knight called the offer "shocking."

(Reminder: The University of Iowa regents are only looking at the value of the Pollock when it comes to considering its flood-related costs. They have not evaluated the worth of UI's science labs/facilities, the books in its library or its medical research facilities for possible sale.)

The UIMA report inadvertently makes the case for a legislative re-evaluation of auction house behavior: The New York state legislature should make it illegal for auction houses (and dealers) to approach non-profits with the purpose of encouraging them to violate the basis of their tax exemptions. Such legislation should extend to keeping predatory auctioneers from targeting not just 501(c)3s, but related institutions, such as universities and their art museums. (UIMA is not a separate, independent (c)3. Perhaps it should study becoming one.)

UPDATE, 10/6/08: Sotheby's disputes that the auction house was the protagonist; would not specifically address the Beckmann. If Sotheby's responded to solicitation from UIMA regarding all paintings, Sotheby's has not been acting in a predatory fashion, as I said in this post earlier today. UPDATE, 10/7/08: UIMA corrects itself, says that it made initial contact with Sotheby's on the Pollock. Still waiting for information on the Beckmann, etc. UIMA stands by its report regarding Sotheby's and the Beckmann and other pieces.

In a related story, this is the biggest art world news story of the last couple months. The Wall Street Journal, the LAT and Time have all covered it. Bringing up the rear: The Des Moines Register and, of course, the pathetically oblivious New York Times, which seemingly runs only art-news items first leaked to its staff. (Meanwhile, from NYT 'Weekend' editor Jan Benzel last week.: "I mean, don't you want to know how Daniel Radcliffe spends his time between 'Harry Potter' shoots? I certainly do.")

• Robert L. Pincus examines director Hugh Davies' tenure at MCASD via acquisitions. Unfortunately Pincus opens the piece with the most misunderstood quote in 20thC art history.
• I dig the lede of Richard Lacayo's story on Renzo Piano's new California Academy of Sciences. (It's in Golden Gate Park, across from the de Young.)
  
• The Minneapolis Star Tribune does all it can to screw up a neat Linda Mack story about the last building Eliel Saarinen designed before his death: Minneapolis' Christ Church Lutheran: In cutlines it gets the name of the architect wrong, and it cuts the story off a third of the way through. So a little link jujitsu: Here's a full version of the story, here's the slideshow.
• In the Village Voice, Ben Davis reviews a Bronx Museum show in which artists respond to failed urbanity.
• In the NYT, Dorothy Spears on Mary Heilmann as the new 'hero' artist: No macho, just a painter who perseveres.
  
• I Twittered myself into a political pundit, and the Minnesota Indy picked up my explaining the similarity between Sarah Palin and Matthew Barney.
• Via Jen Graves, this is cool.

According to a document the University of Iowa Museum of Art prepared for the University of Iowa board of regents, in 2007 Sotheby's offered the University of Iowa Museum of Art a $150 million guarantee if the museum would sell Jackson Pollock's 1943 Mural. Sotheby's also wanted to sell a major Max Beckmann painting in the UIMA collection. UIMA refused all offers.

The board of regents required UIMA to submit the document because it wanted an assessment of the painting so as to evaluate whether it might consider selling the painting to raise money for flood relief. UIMA's director, the director of the largest museum in the state, the Des Moines Art Center, the chairman of the relevant AAMD committee and the governor of Iowa have all come out against the sale of the painting. The regents' next meeting is October 29-30 in Ames.

Publicly traded companies are in the business of making money, but attempting to loot and plunder (healthy) university art museums is ethically reprehensible. (Imagine what might happen if the auction house making the same offer to the Met or to MoMA!) Sotheby's should be embarrassed.

UPDATE, 10/6/08: Sotheby's disputes that the auction house was the protagonist; would not specifically address the Beckmann. If Sotheby's responded to solicitation from UIMA regarding all paintings, Sotheby's did not act in a predatory fashion, as I said in this post on 10/6/08. As of this updating, UIMA has not responded to a request for comment. UPDATE, 10/7/08: UIMA corrects itself, says that it made initial contact with Sotheby's on the Pollock. Still waiting for information on the Beckmann, etc.

Apparently unrelated confluence: Right now the Nelson-Atkins is showing an exhibition called Art in the Age of Steam: Europe, America and the Railway, 1830-1960. I haven't seen the show, but the website has lots of images and it looks cool. (The KC Star's Alice Thorson dug it.)

If you planned your trip for a couple weeks from now, you might leave Kansas City on the Southwest Chief bound for Chicago, switch over to the Lake Shore Limited and disembark in Rochester, NY. The Eastman House will feature three RR shows: The photographs of O. Winston Link, Tracks: The Railroad in Photographs from the Eastman House Collection and an Andrew Cross video installation.

(Feeling really adventurous? A major exhibition of Carleton Watkins and his contemporaries opens at the Getty later this month. Watkins and his peers did a lot of work for the railroads. Take the Lake Shore Limited out of Rochester, then in Chicago switch to either the Southwest Chief or Texas Eagle.)

When I went through the Tomma Abts show at the NuMu I found myself thinking, 'Why isn't she a sculptor, too?'

Abts paintings are precisionist not so much in a way that recalls Sheeler, Demuth, or the precisionist most inclined toward abstraction, Ralston Crawford. They're precisionist in the adjectival sense: They're absolute, controlled, and fantastically careful. They have tightly-contained topography, complete with ridges that intersect in acute angles. They are tactile. The colors are unfashionable, muted, even severe. Sometimes I think that if Jay DeFeo has made The Rose small, it would have been a Tomma Abts.

(I thought that again when I read Ken Johnson's NYT review of Abts' NuMu presentation: "Stylistically the paintings seem oddly out of sync with the present; they could be recently rediscovered works from the 1950s or '60s," Johnson wrote. Defeo was behind the curve too.)

This is all a long way toward saying: Abts has made sculpture. In 2006 she made this cast alumninum sculpture, Aeid. It's a little bit smaller than her paintings: Aeid is 18.88 by 14.94 inches, Abts' paintings are 19.8 by 15 inches. The Walker Art Center just bought it. You can see a quite different picture of it here.

Related: Christopher Knight's scything take on Abts at the Hammer.

In a swipe at the way museums lacking contemporary expertise rush toward the contemporary, I said that the Getty Villa was hosting a Jim Dine drawings show. That was a mistake. There was a Jim Dine drawings retrospective at the National Gallery in 2004. The Getty Villa show is of Jim Dine sculpture.

• The Polaroid timeline.
• Museums are beginning to play with Twitter.
• Are photographers taking inspiration (in part) from photo-realist painters?
• Obama: The campaign in photographs.
• Love this: Gallery give-aways as wrapping paper, and other ways of interacting with commercial galleries.
• Collage: How to build a Sarah Palin from an Anita Bryant.

One of the things I like about Franz West's epoxy-resin-and-fiberglass sculptures from the late '90s and '00s is that they're specifically ambiguous. They bring to mind lots of familiar shapes and even art historical references, but before you can nail them down to any one thing, they slither away.

At left is West's Swimmer (2005), which the Baltimore Museum of Art has recently acquired in advance of the museum's presentation of the first American West retrospective.

In this series of work, West's references begin with the body. Swimmer starts as a friendly, fleshy, gummy vagina dentata? Unless it's an open mouth. Is it ecstatic or anguished? Or maybe it's another orifice altogether.

But body references aren't all that West plays with. After he leads with a potentially vulgar shape or implication, he abstracts away from it until the sculpture touches on other points of familiarity. I think of the body being for West what the landscape was to American abstract expressionists: A place away from which to work. (In a related story, is Dorit a sex toy... or is it a clever riff on seriality? Another recent Baltimore acquisition, Violetta (below, with Swimmer), is a jarringly comfortable lavender intestine-cocoon-sofa.)

One of the hallmarks of West's best work is that it resists immediate identification with anything, a trait he shares with many European and American artists of his generation. West was born in 1947 and spent his formative years during the years pop art and minimalism were king (or at least ducal). West's work often seems to be a reaction against the tidy shapes of minimalism or the ready imagery of pop.

Swimmer is a good example: The surface recalls Oldenburg papier-maches. There's the bright, poppy color that recalls both McCracken and Pepto Bismol. And please don't fetishize the art object: You can sit on Swimmer, which is fantastically democratic, but also a little creepy. (There's no reason to think that West would have thought one whit about Copley's Watson and the Shark, which is at the National Gallery of Art, but I sure do.)