July 2009 Archives

Arts critic and filmmaker Robert Hilferty died over the weekend. There's more here and here.

I came to know Robert when we were both writing for Bloomberg. We became fast friends and kept in touch over the years. I wrote about art (or tried to) and Robert wrote about music, theater and film. Back then Bloomberg's culture desk was a ridiculously difficult place to try to do anything approaching good or accurate work, and without Robert's humor, good cheer and ability to handle the boss I never would have lasted as long as I did. In part because Bloomberg -- for whom Robert wrote for five-plus years, at least -- has yet to run an obituary or remembrance, I thought I'd share a Robert story here.

I particularly recall a late afternoon Robert and I spent in the Marc Newsom-designed eatery at Lever House, in New York. Neither of us were restaurant critics, but our boss decided that we should each end our next review with a dining recommendation. As a result, I was impelled to join a review of Jean Helion at the National Academy of Design with a Cafe Sabarsky recommendation and a look at Tony Oursler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a visit to Lever House's restaurant.

Robert and I thought the assignment was weird, our boss' latest way of saying to us that I don't care about your knowledge about your field and critics are disposable dilettantes who can write about anything, so just do what I tell you. Bloomberg had a dining critic and we were sure he'd rightly feel like we were stepping on his toes if we took the assignment seriously, so we decided to see how quirky a Bloomberg-mandated endorsement of the chosen eatery we could create.

With a totally over-the-top, campy mission in mind, we chose Lever House Restaurant, a Newsom design straight out of a Sean Connery-era James Bond film. We yukked it up good, made jokes about whether SPECTRE was listening to our conversation, guessed about whether the average age disparity between male customers and their dates was over or under 30 years, and so on.

Sometime over the course of looking at the dinner and drinks menus Robert hit upon how we should handle the assignment: I was the one who was writing up this meal, so I should order a drink that was completely incompatible with my entree and then present the pairing as the world's most natural duet. (Of course this plan left Robert eating something sensible and tasty.) Here's what I wrote:

I ended my art crawl at the Lever House Restaurant, a hyper-air-conditioned cavern designed by Marc Newson, a Brit who designs everything from eateries to watches and utensils with a sensibility that is simultaneously retro and futuristic.

Lever House Restaurant is in that vein: If Disneyland's Tomorrowland, which opened three years after Lever House, had included an jet cabin of the future, this is what it would look like. Several of the dining areas are even recessed into what look like over-sized airplane windows.

A friend and I supped over foie gras (for me) and poached turbot (for him). He accented his meal with a wine from Long Island, while I couldn't resist a summery watermelon-puree margarita. Our early dinner cost $125.

Washing back foie gras with a watermelon margarita was vintage Robert: Cloying, knowing, and completely silly fun. If you're in midtown tonight, order it up and think of him.

As expected, the Rose Art Museum trustees have sued Brandeis University over Brandeis' attempts to dismantle the Rose and to sell off (at least) parts of its collection. If there's a surprise in the news (which broke late yesterday) it's that the Rose board chair Jonathan Lee and his co-plantiffs are also suing Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general who was apparently unwilling to stop Brandeis from looting the Rose. I'm taking this week off, but here's what you should read:

• The Globe story;
• Greg Cook;
• MAN's two-part February Q&A with Lee, in which Lee saber-rattled, effectively presaging yesterday's suit; and
  
• The myth of the must-$ell.
  

• San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King should be an adviser to the Fisher family: Here's where King thinks the FishMu should go.
  
• A Richmond Times-Dispatch video feature shows off a new Virginia Museum of Fine Arts acquisition of German expressionism. (The Emil Nolde is especially fantastic.) The Amon Carter adds to its notable photography collection by scoring a key Edward Sheriff Curtis portfolio set, says the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Chris Vaughn.(Error in terminology mine, not the FWS-T's.)
  
• The LAT's Suzanne Muchnic reports that recession or no, many Los Angeles galleries are expanding.
• Richard Lacayo reviews James Ensor in Time.
• In the LAT, Diane Haithman has the 30-years-lost story of Billy Al Bengston, the LAT food section and the trompe l'oeil steak.
  
• No major journalism outlet does a worse job of covering art than NPR. The latest evidence is here.
• In case you missed it -- and while NPR was busy covering the scene at Michaels -- MAN is the only outlet to cover the newest potential threat to Spiral Jetty.
  

On Tuesday I posted about a substantial new industrial challenge to the integrity of the upper Great Salt Lake and to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Continuing...

The next step in the evaluation of Great Salt Lake Minerals' proposed evaporation pool expansion is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' completion of an environmental impact study (EIS). That should be ready early February. After the EIS, the Corps will solicit another round of public comments, with a decision likely coming in 2011. As reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, it seems that a key point of discussion -- and probably contention -- will be GSLM's attempts to expand the size of the evaporation pools they want to build: In 2007 GSLM proposed 33,000 acres of pools (22,700 acres of which would be just west of the Jetty). GSLM's new plan would impact up to 80,000 acres of wetlands.

Dia says that it will continue to monitor the process and to comment on it, but that short of that there's not too much more it can do.

"We are discovering this process as we go, but this will be along the lines of what Dia has done for the preceding issue we had with drilling," Dia director Philippe Vergne said. "That really is all the action we can take... but of course there is all the work we do on the Jetty almost every day. We have a constituency in Salt Lake City and we talk to people and decision-makers. I think that in that community they understand the nature of our concerns. They understand that they are the share-holders of the work and it is their responsibility too. Over the last few months we've been there twice talking to people, doing grassroots work, raising awareness of the people who could be decision-makers."

Part of the difficulty for conservationists around the Great Salt Lake is the mishmash of state, federal and local groups with an interest in or responsibility for the lake. Eleven months ago the state of Utah took a step toward addressing that issue. Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman created the Great Salt Lake Advisory Council, an attempt to "guide protection and management of the lake." Just as the advisory council issued delivered its recommendations to the governor, Huntsman accepted the Obama administration's offer of an ambassadorship in China.

A key problem for Dia (a year ago and now) is that there is little conservation-focused organizational infrastructure for Dia to work with, and there is no single state or federal entity responsible for examining issues that impact the Great Salt Lake. The largest conservation organization focused on the Great Salt Lake had expenditures of just $115,000 last year. That combination is something of a double-whammy that almost forces a whack-a-mole approach to issues such as this. What the GSL -- and Dia and Jetty-lovers -- really need is a larger, Chesapeake Bay Foundation-style organization focused on the lake. I wrote about this at length last year, and much of it remains relevant. At the time one of my criticisms of Dia was that it was thinking about just the Jetty and not the full range of lake-related issues that could impact the Jetty. Dia says that's changed.

"I think this issue shows that we're beyond the viewshed," Dia external affairs director Katie Sonnenborn said. "The framework of our thinking came out of the work we're doing to around The Lightning Field. The evaporation ponds issue shows that lakes are very different than plains. So yes, I think we need to be thinking more holistically."

Earlier this year the Los Angeles County Museum of Art decided that it's costume and textile collection had a lot of stuff it didn't need, so it deaccessioned. The museum then sold the objects on Feb. 8-9 at auction. Among the buyers was artist Robert Fontenot, who purchased seven lots, about sixty objects in all.

Over the last few months Fontenot has been deconstructing and re-purposing those objects for a project he calls 'Recycle LACMA.' He used a packet of 1961 Barbie sewing patterns to turn a LACMA-deaccessioned Korean women's garment into doll outfits. Guatemalan trousers are now teddy bears. A Korean wedding skirt, which cost Fontenot $73 at auction, became a garment bag. My favorite might be this 1950s brocade evening dress (left), which Fontenot wisely turned into an umbrella (below). Fontenot even found ways to meld LACMA's ex-collection with a 1972 Datsun, potholders, and a dog bed (with a built-in doggie bone).

For now the project is documented at Fontenot's Recycle LACMA blog, but Fontenot told me that he'd like to put together a gallery show of the objects. Even better: Fontenot would love to show the works at LACMA.(Fontenot has exhibited in both Los Angeles and New York, at spaces such as Elizabeth Dee, Andrew Shire, QED and Mark Moore. Tomorrow LACMA curator Rita Gonzalez will feature Fontenot's project on LACMA's Unframed blog. I'll post a link here and on Twitter.)

Fontenot is working in a long tradition of artists re-using something old -- say a panel painting -- into something new -- like a newer panel painting. And Fontenot's project reveals a particular respect for objects: For centuries artists have been inspired and motivated by previous art and have included references to their forefathers' art in their own work. Fontenot is similarly motivated, but instead of including just references in his work, he makes his work out of the actual objects that inspired him. (For centuries artists have tried to metaphorically usurp the work of their forefathers, a concept that Fontenot has taken a step further by leaving metaphor out of it altogether.)

But what makes Fontenot's project so clever, so much fun even is that his work is rooted in institutional critique. That part of the project is so fundamental to Fontenot that he's stitched LACMA's accession number for the 'original object' into each new object he's made.

The 'new institutional critique' is one of the smartest strains of recent contemporary art. It builds on a genre that was pioneered in the 1970s by artists such as Michael Asher and Fred Wilson, artists who made intensely conceptual work about museums, art about how museums installed art, exhibited art and so on. Their work revealed (and continues to reveal) how narratives and history are created out of the collection and display of objects.

More recently artists have examined not just collections and installations, but the full range of ways in which museums operate: The John Erickson Museum of Art ('founded' by Sean Miller) extends the focus of institutional critique to membership departments and the nature of traveling exhibitions. HoMu, Filip Noterdaeme's Homeless Museum of Art examines the intersection of ethics, Big Money and Big Art.

Fontenot has added deaccessioning to the list of museum practices examined by institutional-critiquing artists -- and he's shown that institutional critique doesn't have to appeal only to the brain, it can appeal to the eye too. (Even the best Wilsons and Ashers revel in didacticism.)

Which isn't to say it's not plenty smart. Fontenot's project argues that carefully considered collection-culling is the natural order of things, that a museum's toss-offs can be fuel for artistic creation. Fontenot's work is a tacit approval of institutional process: When Fontenot remakes a BBQ apron he's suggesting that the old item was correctly deaccessioned, and that he's making a new object that might better fit that space in the museum's galleries, storage locker, collection catalogue and so on. His project says that deaccessioning is normal, motivational, inspirational... and useful.

Previously on MAN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) at the Baltimore Contemporary.

Related: Such is the appeal and accessibility of Fontenot's project that even writers known more for singing lusty odes to museum directors than their interest in contemporary art have picked up on his project.

By sheer coincidence, today art21's blog features a terrific Richard McCoy-penned Q&A with Dia staff conservator Francesca Esmay about Dia's efforts to conserve Spiral Jetty (that is: Spiral Jetty the art work, (as opposed to Spiral Jetty the art-work-and-neighboring-ecosystem). The pictures are extra-cool. Don't miss it.

Related: Examining the latest threat to Spiral Jetty.

Dia Art Foundation leaders say that the latest proposed expansion of evaporation pools in the northern end of the Great Salt Lake significantly threatens the "integrity" of Robert Smithson's iconic Spiral Jetty and that the pools could change the Jetty's part of the Great Salt Lake so substantially that it would render a 'new' northern end of the lake unrecognizable.

On July 4 the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Great Salt Lake Minerals, the dominant industrial concern in the northern end of the Great Salt Lake, is hoping to expand its operations by 91,000 acres. (In 2007 GSLM proposed building 22,700 acres of evaporation ponds to the west of the Jetty. The new 91,000-acre development represents a near-tripling of GSLM's previously proposed footprint.) Eighty thousand acres of that expansion would take the form of new fertilizer-producing evaporation pools that would be on the lake and related wetlands. Most of the proposed expansion is west-by-southwest of Spiral Jetty. The plan is in the midst of a federal review process that will take until at least early 2011.

"Given the scale that they are [proposing] to do, the Jetty would be totally out of the water," Dia director Philippe Vergne told me. "I think more than that; the distance between the Jetty and Gunnison Island could be deprived of water. That would, of course, affect the water, the perception of nature and the integrity of the sculpture." [Photo: Gunnison Island is to the left of the Jetty.]

Among the ways in which the sculpture would be permanently changed would be the end of red algae blooms around the Jetty, a natural process that Smithson considered key to the work.

I asked Vergne and Dia director of external affairs Katie Sonnenborn if that meant that there is a possibility that if Great Salt Lake Minerals' plan goes through, that Spiral Jetty visitors might be able walk from the Jetty all the way out to Gunnison Island.

"One of the things we're concerned about is this: Three years ago they were talking about 27,000 acres and now they're talking about 91,000 acres," Sonnenborn said. "That would [create] a permanent reduction in lake level of 12 inches and in acre-feet that's a radical difference. The shoreline could be a mile further 'into' the lake than it currently is. We don't have a good idea of how that would effect Spiral Jetty. But yes, there's the potential that you could walk from the Jetty to Gunnison Island. The [GSLM] plan shifts the integrity of whole ecosystem of the Great Salt Lake."

[The undated Google Satellite image above shows Rozel Point at the top-right of the image and Gunnison Island at the lower left. The image shows the shallowness of the water just off Rozel Point and how the lake level appears to deepen as you get three-fifths of the way to Gunnison Island.]

In recent years the level of the Great Salt Lake has varied wildly. Today the lake's level is 4,195 feet, within a few inches of the 40-year-low established last summer. Scientists aren't sure why the lake level is so low -- is it industry? population growth around the lake? climate change? something else entirely? -- but uncertainty that has created concern. Vergne and Sonnenborn said that while Dia understands that lake levels have fluctuated for hundreds and even thousands of years, the changes that GSLM are proposing would be both dramatic and effectively permanent.

"The lake level would still fluctuate," Sonnenborn said. "This six to ten to twelve inches we're concerned about would be on top of that fluctuation."

Vergne said that another concern was the impact a drier lake environment, a permanently lowered lake-level, would have on the Jetty.

"When there's no water around the wind can blow and sand could cover the Jetty," Vergne said. "There are sand-saturated areas near the Jetty already. They're not yet really impacting it, but it's an issue."

Tomorrow: An update on how Dia is working to address these issues.

Later this afternoon: Art conservators and Spiral Jetty.

Previously on MAN: My six-part September, 2008 examination of changes to the Jetty's environment and Dia's stewardship of the sculpture. 

Related: A favorite quote from the July 4 Tribune story: "We've been here for 40 years," GSLM spokesperson Dave Hyams told the Tribune. "Birds have been adjacent to our ponds for decades. Co-existing with birds is something we know how to do."

Presumably Hyams mentioned birds in part because Gunnison Island is a major habitat for migrating birds, most famously pelicans. It's great that GSLM can co-exist with birds, but isn't the real question whether the birds can co-exist with GSLM?

• Geoff Edgers reports that the ICA Boston has found a simple route to attendance success: Show artists whose work doesn't require audiences to read acres of wall text. Seems obvious, but we all know curators who fall in love with long, art-explaining press releases (that they then translate into wall textese), instead of with artists or with artwork.
• I love the way LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne takes the broad, big-picture approach to discussing the import of late photographer Julius Shulman. Hawthorne also penned a more personal remembrance of Shulman. From MAN: Some early Shulman biography. Contrast it with his photography... what a century!
  
• A couple weeks ago I noted that 99.4 percent of the art in the National Gallery of Art's American galleries was made by white people. In the weeks since, several people asked me why I opened the post by quoting Pat Buchanan. Answer: More loudly than anyone else in American semi-public life, Buchanan clings to a view of early American history that includes and acknowledges only white people, typically white men. Buchanan reminded us of his bizarre views this week. The only other place in mainstream American life where I see Buchanan's America is the National Gallery. That says something, doesn't it...
  

Continuing from yesterday's post about Bruce Nauman's 1981 sculptures South America Triangle and Diamond Africa with Chair Tuned, D.E.A.D.: ... Both sculptures reminded me of American behaviors that I'd read about in the 2007 International Committee of the Red Cross report that concluded that the Bush administration tortured detainees. They reminded me of American-made horrors that fill every chapter of Jane Mayer's chronicle of Bush administration extra-legal detention and torture, The Dark Side. 

I started these Nauman posts by posting a strikingly direct example of how Nauman's work recalls Bush-Cheney-era torture techniques and environments so presciently that they provoke intense discomfort. It's tempting to engage Naumans that directly, especially 1974's Double Steel Cage Piece. But Naumans also abstract experiences and environments in ways that can be just as uncomfortable: References absent specifics can be even more uncomfortable than the space created by Double Steel Cage Piece. 

Nauman's two great 1981 sculptures, South America Triangle and Diamond Africa with Chair Tuned, D.E.A.D. (above) are minimalist abstractions: The I-beams may refer to confined space. The hanging chair is ominous. Nauman's sculptures are an affecting gateway toward thinking about how the United States tortured detainees during the Bush-Cheney administration.

On Tuesday I began these posts about Nauman by quoting Abu Zubaydeh's testimony to the International Committee on the Red Cross regarding his treatment at the hands of Americans. For the sake of continuity (I could quote passages regarding many other detainees), here's New Yorker writer and The Dark Side author Jane Mayer on America's treatment of Abu Zubaydeh (she spells his name slightly differently than the ICRC does):

"Zubayda's 'hard time' began when he was locked into the 'tiny coffin' for hours on end, which he described as excruciatingly painful. It was too small for him to stand or stretch out, so small he said he had to double up his limbs in a fetal position. Because of his recently healed injuries, he described this position as particularly agonizing, since it caused his wounds [suffered upon capture] to reopen. He described the box as black, both inside and out, and said that it was covered in towels, which he thought was an effort to constrict the flow of air inside. While locked in the dark interior, he had no way of knowing when, if ever, he would be let out. But he related that most of the sessions lasted less than a day at a time, and were started and stopped during the course of one week. A source familiar with Zubayda's account described the tiny coffin box as "unbearable, most terrible." Article 21 of the Third Geneva Convention -- which applies to all prisoners of war -- specifically prohibits such forms of curelty, which are classified as 'close confinement.' "

South America Triangle presents a confined space, and because of its shape it feels particularly aggressive. And then there's that hanging chair, a particularly eerie stand-in for a person, or for what might happen to a person confined to a chair. From the New York Review of Books, here's journalist Mark Danner's description of some of the treatment to which Abu Zubaydeh was subjected:

A naked man chained in a small, very cold, very white room is for several days strapped to a bed, then for several weeks shackled to a chair, bathed unceasingly in white light, bombarded constantly with loud sound, deprived of food; and whenever, despite cold, light, noise, hunger, the hours and days force his eyelids down, cold water is sprayed in his face to force them up.

One of the difficulties about having a national discussion about America and torture is that the torture techniques the United States used during the Bush-Cheney regime are so far from the experience -- even the imagination -- of most of us that it's hard to understand just what we did. Mainstream news outlets such as National Public Radio, the New York Times and the Washington Post even refuse to refer to American torture as 'torture,' a bizarre mis-locution that takes Americans a further step away from just how cruel and depraved the behaviors carried out in our nation's name really were.

Nauman's sculptures don't fill that void. They don't explain how we became a nation that tortured or what we did to other humans. They certainly don't spotlight the way the Bush-Cheney regime broke American and international law -- fortunately journalists such as Mayer and Danner have patriotically filled in those blanks. Still, the Naumans provide us with a crucial gateway toward some of those answers, toward understanding. Here's hoping both 1981 sculptures are on view again soon.

Earlier this week: Bruce Nauman's Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) and America's torture of Abu Zubaydeh. Bruce Nauman's hanging chairs, part one.

Related consideration of art and torture on MAN: George Grosz at the Hirshhorn, the Abu Ghraib photos part one, part two, the Hirshhorn acquires Martha Rosler's 'The Gray Drape.' 

Nauman in Venice: In addition to this website, the Philadelphia Museum of Art team responsible for the 2009 U.S. pavilion has contributed to a Nauman-in-Venice catalogue. You can buy it here at 35% off.

On Nauman: Accounts of Nauman's literary interests and inspiration can be found in an essay by Neal Benezra in Bruce Nauman, edited by Robert C. Morgan, and in Please Pay Attention Please, a collection of Nauman interviews and writings edited by Janet Kraynak.

In 1981 Bruce Nauman read two books that took his work in a stark new direction: V.S. Naipaul's The Return of Eva Peron and Jacobo Timmerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. The Naipaul is a collection of non-fiction that examines the ways in which some societies become unable to evolve beyond their painful pasts, pasts that include colonialism, slavery, ecological plunder, and institutionalized, state-sanctioned violence. It is an intellectual, multi-generational examination of legacy, an attempt to explain unhappy outcomes. Timmerman's book is blunter, an account of how the Argentine military imprisoned and tortured the author. It includes detailed descriptions of how Timmerman was bound to a chair and tortured with electricity.

Inspired by what he read Nauman created two sculptures, South America Triangle (1981) and Diamond Africa with Chair Tuned, D.E.A.D. (1981). South America Triangle (above) is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and has not been on view in several years. Diamond Africa with Chair Tuned, D.E.A.D. (below) is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. It was not included in the AIC's initial Modern Wing installation. Neither is on view as part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Nauman presentation at and around the Venice Biennale. Regardless, it was the PMA's Nauman project that started me thinking about these works, especially as details about the Bush administration's torture regime have become public, and as word of Vice President Dick Cheney's instructions that the CIA hide certain programs from Congress were revealed by the New York Times' Scott Shane.

Nauman's sculptures were not about the United States. In 1981 Nauman couldn't have had any idea that America would become a kind of modern-day post-colonial force in two occupied states, Iraq and Afghanistan. He couldn't know that 20 years on America would become a nation that engaged in extra-legal detention, a country that stuffed detainees into private jets so as to whisk them around the world to places where they could be brutally confined, tortured and, in several cases, maltreated to the point where they were killed or died. In 1981 Nauman's sculptures were about what happened to other people, people such as the Trinidadians, Argentinans, or Uruguayans in Naipaul and Timmerman. Today I look at Nauman's two 1981 artworks and I think about what the United States did in its fanatical, unprincipled pursuit of terrorism suspects and in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the things that makes art imperative is this: During its lifetime it can jump beyond its inspiration to become about us.

South America Triangle and Diamond Africa are variations on a theme, loaded with abstractions that hint at sinister, totalitarian behavior. In both sculptures steel I-beams create small, harsh, spare, controlled and controlling spaces. Both feature upside-down chairs hanging in the middle of the I-beam structure, references to a person who is lost, trapped, and tortured -- or a stand-in for many lost, trapped and tortured people. All of the elements of Nauman's sculptures hang in mid-air, a metaphor for a nether-world that might be inhabited by cowed colonial subjects or post-colonial people ruled by a dictatorial or other kind of unjust regime.

The two pieces are masterpieces of suggestion, raised eyebrows in steel and cast-iron. On one hand, there is nothing overt in either of them. On the other, what else could they be about, but the misuse of a human, the institutionalized infliction of terror. Both sculptures reminded me of American behaviors that I'd read about in the 2007 International Committee of the Red Cross report that concluded that the Bush administration tortured detainees. They reminded me of American-made horrors that fill every chapter of Jane Mayer's chronicle of Bush administration extra-legal detention and torture, The Dark Side.  

Continued here.

Yesterday: Bruce Nauman's Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) and America's torture of Abu Zubaydeh.

Related consideration of art and torture on MAN: George Grosz at the Hirshhorn, the Abu Ghraib photos part one, part two, the Hirshhorn acquires Martha Rosler's 'The Gray Drape.' 

Nauman in Venice: In addition to this website, the Philadelphia Museum of Art team responsible for the 2009 U.S. pavilion has contributed to a Nauman-in-Venice catalogue. You can buy it here at 35% off.

On Nauman: Accounts of Nauman's literary interests and inspiration can be found in an essay by Neal Benezra in Bruce Nauman, edited by Robert C. Morgan, and in Please Pay Attention Please, a collection of Nauman interviews and writings edited by Janet Kraynak.

"I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4m x 4m. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can't remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket. Water for cleaning myself was provided in a plastic bottle.

I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise."

-- Abu Zubaydeh, as told to the International Committee of the Red Cross regarding his detention in Afghanistan, where he was detained for approximately nine months from May, 2002 to February, 2003. The ICRC concluded that the United States' treatment of Abu Zubaydeh, more fully detailed in this ICRC report, was in contravention of international law and that "the ill-treatment to which [detainees] were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture."

To read first-hand reports of America's torture of suspected terrorists, including the rest of Abu Zubaydeh's account, see page 28 of the ICRC report. The report was first made public by Mark Danner in "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites" in the New York Review of Books, April 9, 2009. 

Image: Bruce Nauman, Double Steel Cage Piece, 1974, from the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. This is an installation shot from the ongoing Nauman exhibit at Ca' Foscari, part of the Bruce Nauman presentation at and around the 2009 Venice Biennale. Photo: Michele Lamanna, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Related: Bruce Nauman's 1981 'hanging chairs' sculptures become us. Part two.

One of the leitmotifs of this blog has been that art can help us consider and understand the world around us, that yesterday's art can inform our thinking about today and that today's art can inform our thinking about tomorrow.

For some time now I've been fascinated by the belated national debate about how a lawless cabal at the top of the Bush administration turned us into a nation-that-tortured. Over the last few months the public debate about Bush-Cheney-era torture has been muted by a president who wants to pretend it didn't happen, a Republican party that figures that it got away with torture and murder so the past ought to be left in the past, Democratic congressional leadership that's more afraid to look soft-on-terror than it is eager to look patriotic and principled and a great swath of the American public that is uncomfortable with knowing that torture was committed by leaders that we elected, re-elected, and who acted in our name. Fortunately, a few brave, committed journalists, people such as Jane Mayer, Mark Danner, Philippe Sands, Andrew Sullivan, Amy Goodwin and Glenn Greenwald have worked to keep the spotlight on these issues. Just this past weekend, Scott Shane of the New York Times reported new details about vice president Dick Cheney's role in covering up CIA activities during the torture years.

In many ways, art is the perfect medium through which Americans might consider torture. Artists are independent contractors, unbound by official, blue-suited, Washingtonian notions of propriety. (Have you heard any elected Democrat refer to Cheney aide David Addington or Justice Department lawyer John Yoo as war criminals even though an overwhelming body of evidence indicates that they are?) Artists are trained to consider big ideas in ambitious ways. A half-century of American art has particularly informed artists in how the language of abstraction can be adapted to challenging topics and concepts. Perhaps because they embrace ambiguity rather than reject it, artists often excel at embracing emotionally and intellectually difficult subjects.

With the caveat that breaking news of some sort could knock us off the chase for a day or two, for the rest of this week MAN will be examining art and artists that I think can help us consider the crimes against humanity during the Bush administration. I'll start later today with the first of two parts on Bruce Nauman, whose work is on view now throughout Venice.

Related consideration of art and torture on MAN: George Grosz at the Hirshhorn, the Abu Ghraib photos part one, part two, the Hirshhorn acquires Martha Rosler's 'The Gray Drape.' 

This week's posts: Bruce Nauman's Double Steel Cage Piece and Abu Zubaydeh. Nauman's 1981 'hanging chairs' sculptures become us. Part two.

Nauman in Venice: In addition to this website, the Philadelphia Museum of Art team responsible for the 2009 U.S. pavilion has contributed to a Nauman-in-Venice catalogue. You can buy it here at 35% off.

• Toyo Ito's first American commission will be the new Berkeley Art Museum. Nicolai Ouroussoff's NYT profile is a fine read. Here's a photoset of Ito's new Kaohsiung Colosseum.
  
• On the occasion of a Louisiana/SFMOMA Richard Avedon retro, Kenneth Baker on Avedon, self-exposure and Facebook.
• Christopher Knight rolls his eyes at Michael Kimmelman.
  
• The Boston Globe goes to the Berkshires: Sebastian Smee on Dove/O'Keeffe, the Clark's first-ever 20thC show, and Mark Feeney tells the story behind the Williams College Museum of Art's Prendergast in Italy. 
• The Stranger's Jen Graves has the review of the week, of the Seattle Art Museum's Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78 (and here, barely).
• David Bonetti reports that a blogger on MAN's blogroll is named director of St. Louis' Laumeier Sculpture Park.
• In the Houston Chronicle, Douglas Britt loves, loves, loves Leonardo Drew at the Blaffer.
  
• The LAT's David Ng shows us Anselm Kiefer's set designs for the Opera National de Paris.
  

The image at right is Goya's most famous etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. He made it sometime between 1797 and 1799 as part of the 'Los Caprichos' portfolio. The etching shows a man, almost certainly the artist, pained by the wildness or intensity of his own imagination. (Famed Goya scholar Eleanor Sayre argued that the image is intensely -- and immediately -- political: Goya made it just after France's Reign of Terror had ended and during or after the Napoleonic Wars. In the immediate aftermath of France's defeat of Spain, Goya seems to have feared French rule -- and that his acidic brush might get him into trouble.)

The Sleep of Reason is an image that artists have returned to over and over again for inspiration (and sometimes for, er, derivation). Yesterday Richard Lacayo posted part of his recent interview with Yinka Shonibare and led the post with Shonibare's take on the Goya. In a series of work from early in the 2000s, Cecily Brown used The Sleep of Reason as her jumping-off point, with some trademark eroticism tossed in for good measure.

Do you have other favorite examples of artists' riffs on The Sleep of Reason? Tweet them to me and I'll pass them along.

Yesterday I wrote about Jerry Saltz's MoMA-and-gender campaign and what it means about critical engagement and art. Today, a couple (random) notes:

• Art critics rarely write about acquisitions, permanent collections or permanent collection installations. That Saltz is interested in these topics is significant. Hopefully other critics around the country are noticing that collection installations can be as newsy and as much of a flashpoint as temporary shows. After all, there's a lot more to writing about art than writing about exhibitions...
  
• Saltz's MoMA campaign wasn't the exactly the impetus for this post about the Met's American period rooms or for this post about the NGA's American galleries, but I think that its all part of the same soup: Critics want to see the world reflected more accurately in institutional galleries. Why is it that critics insist upon that... and that some curators don't?
• The majority of art institutions accept criticism poorly. That's a mistake. Art museums should love being the subject of these kinds of conversations, even if their programs or installations are challenged. Why? Because these flareups remind us that art museums can and should play an important role in our communities and in our discussions about sociocultural issues. MoMA and its staff deserve credit for engaging Saltz. (In my hometown, the National Gallery of Art will engage a critic on a controversial issue sometime after Sarah Palin starts teaching at Harvard's Kennedy School.) A good next step for MoMA would be a public program of some sort, something creative... like an Oxford-style debate on the topic. Engage, engage, engage.
  

• The PBS station in Cleveland teamed up with the Plain Dealer to do an hour-long discussion on art museums with four Ohio museum directors. (OK: Three and one who's leaving for Philly.) Once you get past the, er, not-very-smart introduction, the panel is excellent. Here's the YouTube, here's the mp3.
  
• Celebrating the Fourth of July via a tour of the Nelson-Atkins' new American galleries. That last painting is a doozy.
• Philip Kennicott is tired of reading the same story about the Herb and Dorothy Vogel over and over. I agree. It's an example of a clever PR strategy trumping thoughtful (or well-informed) arts journalism. Truth told: Most of the 50-packs are made up of minor works, yet the city-by-city coverage has been major.
  
• The LAT's David Ng reports that Michael Jackson fans/rubberneckers are overwhelming LACMA security.
• A perpetually mysterious blogger on J. Paul Getty's Rubens. Van Dyck.

One of the more delightful things about being a critic, is that it provides a platform from which to push one's principles to an audience. For some years now one of art's best-known critics, New York magazine's Jerry Saltz, has used his position to question the Museum of Modern Art's commitment to artists who happen to be women. Most recently Saltz has taken his campaign away from his usual, traditional outlets and has conducted it almost exclusively via Facebook and through his email list. I wonder: Is this new, intensely-focused art criticism a positive development? [Photo: Saltz at a Creative Time benefit.]

First, some background (if you've followed all this, skip down to the next boldfaced section): Saltz first examined the male-female discrepancy in MoMA's paintings-and-sculpture galleries shortly after MoMA re-opened in 2004, when he was writing for the Village Voice. He's raised the subject periodically ever since. (Nearly three years ago Saltz moved to New York magazine, a tabloidy magazine typically more concerned with socialites' hemlines than intellectual examination.)

Over the last several months Saltz has taken his case to new media. Saltz has posted tidbits about artists who are women and MoMA's installations to his Facebook page and he's invited his 5,000 'Facebook friends' to pile on. They have.

Eventually MoMA spokesperson Kim Mitchell, responded to Saltz and his commenters. (Saltz, wanting some pickup in the blogosphere, emailed Mitchell's response to writers such as Ed Winkleman and me on June 3.)

"Hi all, I am (Kim Mitchell) Chief Communications Officer here at MoMA. We have been following your lively discussion with great interest, as this has also been a topic of ongoing dialogue at MoMA. We welcome the participation and ideas of others in this important conversation. And yes, as Jerry knows, we do consider all the departmental galleries to represent the collection. When those spaces are factored in, there are more than 250 works by female artists on view now. Some new initiatives already under way will delve into this topic next year with the Modern Women's Project, which will involve installations in all the collection galleries, a major publication, and a number of public programs. MoMA has a great willingness to think deeply about these issues and address them over time and to the extent that we can through our collection and the curatorial process. We hope you'll follow these events as they develop and keep the conversation going."

Two weeks later, Saltz sent an open letter to MoMA chief curator Ann Temkin, a letter that he also emailed out to a broader audience. (For the sake of tidiness, I've included the email in the jump.) Temkin agreed to have a drink with Saltz. After that meeting Saltz typed up his remembrance of the conversation, posted it on Facebook and again sent it out to his email list. (Winkleman also posted Saltz's thoughts here. Go ahead and take a look -- I'll be here when you get back...)

So aside from the gender-equality-at-MoMA issue, an issue well-worth discussing, does the Saltz Campaign merit further consideration? Yes. I'm uncomfortable with what the Saltz Campaign says about the arts in America and what it means for art criticism in today's fast-shrinking commercial media environment. (When it comes to arts journalism, there is nothing but commercial journalism, plus a few unfunded lone-rangers such as, well, me.) Here's why:

Once upon a time the authority of the mainstream-media art critic came from a carefully-managed professional distance from the art world, from an apartness that made emphasized independence. (Aside: I'm not talking about academics or social-climbers who write for the art-ghetto magazines. Their M.O. is apparent.)

Saltz has been in the vanguard of critics who have turned that traditional posture upside-down: He has never made any pretense of being anything but an art world guy first and a journalism-world guy second. Saltz writes for the mass media and he teaches at art schools. Like no other art critic in journalism he derives his authority from his deep involvement in and passion for a geographically-specific art world. Last year Saltz even co-hosted a political fundraiser with a New York art dealer. If a Los Angeles Times or Time magazine critic did that, he'd likely be fired faster than you could say conflict-of-interest.

Saltz has carried on his MoMA-and-gender campaign from an insider-who-cares position. It is because of his insiderhood that Saltz has been able to pursue the MoMA issue via places only accessible to, well, insiders: Amongst his Facebook friends and his email list.

So here's why Saltz's approach to the MoMA-and-gender issue makes me uncomfortable, even a little bit sad: Once upon a time critics were eager to explain to non-art-ghetto audiences why the art and art-related subjects that were important to them should be important to other people, to people outside the art world. Saltz is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. He has significant outside-the-art-world credibility. He has either been unable to or he has chosen not to use that credibility to emphasize or elevate the importance of the arts in the broader culture.

Given the dwindling of arts journalism and, in particular, the death spiral of mainstream art criticism, I'm concerned that more and more art criticism will look like the Saltz Campaign. When the ghetto is interested in talking with only the ghetto, how and why should anyone with a less specific interest in culture care about what we think is important? When art lovers talk only to those already in their circle, the circle will shrink.

• Last September I wrote a series of posts examining industrial threats to the area around Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, threats that may eventually endanger the Jetty itself. The posts also looked at the oh-so-passive role Dia's has played in preserving the Jetty. Ten months later: Is this a threat to the Jetty? TK.
• The SF Chron's John King notes that SFMOMA may be back in the running for the Fishers' collection. Good, because SFMOMA would be the best place for the Fishers' accumulation. Their collection would complement what's at SFMOMA and vice versa.
  
• Unclear-on-the-concept, museum director edition: The Orange County Museum of Art's Dennis Szakacs tells the LAT's Mike Boehm, "I don't know what context or what data people who are questioning the price [brought in for OCMA's recent deaccessioning] are using. Is it a number they're pulling out of thin air? Because the data we very carefully compiled says otherwise." Dear Dennis: When a museum deaccessions works, the onus is on that museum to be as transparent and above-board as possible. When you chose the least transparent method and process possible for deaccessioning famed works, of course your process is being questioned by your director peers, journalists, dealers, museum-lovers and the like.
  
• Jerry Saltz on James Ensor. (In the last paragraph of the review, Saltz turns a three-word phrase that brilliantly sums up the now. Make sure you click through to 'page 2' for it.)
  

Enjoy the long weekend. See you Monday.

Fresh from the morning papers: The Fishers abandon their plans for a Main Post-based contemporary art museum in the Presidio. Preservationists rejoice.

Continuing, sort of, from here and here...

The Toledo Museum of Art has acquired Wayne Thiebaud's 1963 Roast Beef Dinner (Trucker's Supper), at left.

Roast Beef Dinner is a quintessentially mid-20th-century American still-life. It's a square meal of the sort one would expect to find at, well, a truck stop. The white bread recalls industrially-processed Wonder Bread. The tomatoes look culinarily pro forma rather than a considered part of the meal, and the plating of the food is as bland and unimaginative as possible. (Those aren't French french fries, those are American-cut fries, too.)

Like most of the best Thiebaud pop-meets-still-life paintings, the subject of the painting is notable mostly for its ordinariness. Thiebaud didn't work from actual objects, so he may have been thinking about a San Francisco diner-ish eatery such as the legendary Zim's, or he may have been picturing a meal he ate in a New York coffeeshop. That's part of the point: The scene could have come from anywhere. (Albeit an 'anywhere' that puts its knife and fork on the wrong side of the plate...)

Toledo's new painting is an fine example of how Thiebaud's interests were different from other '60s pop painters. Thiebaud was uninterested in advertising-style images or in brand names. Instead his still-lifes from the early 1960s reproduce the then-increasing uniformity of American experience, especially food-related experience. While some pop painters nodded at the Levittown/Lakewoodization of American post-war life by creating flat, characterless paint surfaces (often working in super-flat Magna), Thiebaud slathered on the oils.

Related: This 1964 Rosenquist seems like a sly dig at Thiebaud.

Continuing from this morning...

Luis Melendez, the greatest Spanish still-life painter of the 18th-century, elevated simple, rustic objects into palace decorations for royals. A survey of his still-life paintings is on view at the National Gallery of Art until Aug. 23. This painting is the creatively-titled Still Life with Apples, Pears, Cheese, Jug, Boxes and Cask from 1760-1765. It's in a private collection.

The NGA show is small and dense: Thirty-one paintings installed in just two-plus cavern-like galleries in the NGA's East Building. The hanging is plenty assembly-line, but in this instance it sort-of works: Melendez frequently took a bit of an assembly-line approach himself: For example, the dead pigeons in this ~1770 North Carolina Museum of Art painting make an encore in this ~1774 Wadsworth Atheneum painting.

Throughout the day I'll be featuring some food-centric still-lifes on view now at American museums. Today's last post will feature a new museum acquisition.

This is Job Berckheyde's The Baker (~1681), on view at the Worcester Art Museum. Berckheyde was a minor painter of city scenes, church interiors (mostly of St. Bavo's) and this unusual (mostly) still-life painting.

Bread was a big deal in the Netherlands -- Vermeer's biggest contemporary collector was a breadmaker who may have accepted paintings in lieu of payment. According to WAM, the baker is tooting his own horn to announce that the morning's bread is fresh out of the oven and ready for purchase. The baker may be Berckheyde himself: Judge this portrait against this Berckheyde self-portrait.