10.31.2002
Out of Lascaux has an
interesting post on how children should be/can be introduced to art. The last point is the most interesting: we assume art education in schools is a good thing, but is it?
posted by Tyler at 3:26 PM
Not sure why the mega-critics (defined by moi as Kimmelman/Cotter/Smith, Gopnik, Schjeldahl, Knight and -- alas -- Perl) have so far ignored the sudden cavalcade of early American modernist photography shows. To recap:
*
Dorothea Lange @ the Getty;
*
Horace Bristol @ the Getty;
*
Charles Sheeler @ the Boston MFA; and
* the upcoming
Margaret Bourke-White show @ the Phillips.
If the comment boards are working pipe up as to why so much early American photography is going on right now....
posted by Tyler at 12:54 PM
The
legal battle is officially underway in the Barnes Foundation case. Basically, three students want to be the "plantiffs" that prevent the Barnes from moving. Not much news in the filing, other than the Barnes response confirms that the installation of the collection in the new museum will be the same as the (goofy) installation of the collection in the old museum. Expect a spring trial.
Snide aside: Do you think the Barnes will argue that it's going bankrupt in part because of their inability to raise any money? Heck, I'll do my part...
they can quote MAN's data!posted by Tyler at 9:50 AM
In honor of the showing of Cremaster 3 tonight at the Hirshhorn, we bring you
this t-shirt from greg.org.
posted by Tyler at 9:37 AM
10.30.2002
Thanks to a variety of readers for their suggestions (including Kaushik Banerjee who runs the occasionally art-focused
kaush.com) on new comment systems. I'm testing a couple now and I'll probably have a new system up by the end of the weekend.
posted by Tyler at 10:36 PM
Regular readers know that there are two things I do here that occasionally annoy them. In this post, I'm going to do both of them, namely writing about stuff no one but me cares about and writing about the Barnes Foundation. Spurred on by
this morning's vacuous New York Times piece, I'm back on the BarnesWatch!
There is nothing in journalism more lazy than man-on-the-street reporting. And much of this AM's NYT piece is man-on-the-street reporting. The NYT continually refers to how bad a job the Barnes board does when it comes to fundraising, but provides no data to back that up.
The NYT vaguely questions "what [Lincoln] university has done in recent years to develop its custodianship of the Barnes." Well, lazy Ralph Blumenthal didn't bother to look. MAN does! In the non-profit world, custodianship is defined as fundraising, which enables further custodianship. Here's how much money the Barnes took in/raised in each of the following years:
1997:
$64,411. While this is pathetic, even more pathetic was the Barnes' 1997 fundraising budget: $0. Equally scandalous was how much the Barnes spent in 1997 to conserve its beautiful, important and billion-dollar trove of art: $9,914.
By measure of comparison, a comparably-sized collection, the Phillips Collection, brought in $3.5 million in 1997.
1998: You thought the 1997 fundraising was bad? How about a grand fundraising total of
$6,270 for 1998?
In 1998 the Phillips brought in $4.7 million.
1999:
$867,813. The Barnes launched a $15 million fundraising campaign in the summer of 1999. Inexplicably, they launched it without announcing a major donor or two as a way of building momentum. Unlike the Phillips IRS forms, the Barnes didn't release statements indicating where/for what that money came in (nor is it required to). The art conservation expenditures were under $20,000.
The Phillips took in $3.4 million.
2000 (the last year for which Forms 990 are available):
$854,605. For 2000, the Barnes did release the Schedule of Contributors. The bulk of the money was raised from the
Getty Trust and Museum: $500,000.
The Phillips took in a staggering $11.4 million, including single gifts of $3.7 million and $3.1 million.
It took me 30 minutes to look this up (and even less time to split that infinitive), Ralph.
posted by Tyler at 1:21 PM
Artnet.com has news. The GuggEnron in Vegas is closing. MIT List Visual Arts Center curator Kathleen Goncharov is organizing the U.S. pavilion in Venice.
posted by Tyler at 9:30 AM
Courtesy of
ArtKrush, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (that's the one across 3rd Street from SFMOMA) has a show up called
Bay Area Now, a look at what's going on now in SF in visual arts, performance and film. The website is definitely worth a look. I don't know if
this is the exhibit catalog, but it might be.
posted by Tyler at 9:03 AM
10.29.2002
The speed of the comment system here is driving me bonkers. Anyone know of a free/really cheap alternative?
posted by Tyler at 4:47 PM
Ah, Bonnard! I finally did my second slow-tour of the exhibit at the Phillips this past weekend and really enjoyed it. (I hear that Tony Bennett and John Cleese enjoyed it this weekend too.)
I still don't get the early and late title/thesis of the exhibit. I'm glad I gave up on trying and just focused on enjoying the purty pictures. Random thoughts...
* Bonnard is tres cinematic. Some of the paintings -- the Met's Terrace at Vernonnet (1920/39) and Stuido with Mimosas (1939-46) -- look like film stills.
* In the very last room of the exhibit, I found the juxtaposition of two paintings very interesting. Both are from late in Bonnard's career. Both remind me very much of important works by other artists... and I wondered if Bonnard was intentionally doing some late-in-life measuring up to other artists. Look at The Small Window (1946). It is Matisse's Open Window, Collioure, right down to the size of the canvas. (Without looking it up -- I should -- I'd bet the two canvases are within 10 percent of being the same size.) Look at Blossoming Almond Tree. It reminds me of the trees (the Compositions series) that Mondrian painted to work his way through cubism and toward linearism.
* The next Bonnard show should be at Fogg or somewhere similar and should focus solely on Bonnard lithos.
* I've always thought of Bonnard as geometrically rigorous, but that really stands out in some of the canvases in this show. Witness the Phillips' own Early Spring from 1910. The red dots/hats/etc. form a triangle that sets up the whole painting. Or Reclining Nude on the Blue and White Checkered Cloth from 1909. The body seems to lie most remarkably on graph paper, accentuating its pose.Or Grape Harvest, from 1926.
* It's fun when art history/biography overlaps with a canvas in a way that is so obvious you can't ignore it. In Young Women in the Garden from 1921-23 and 1945-56 Bonnard paints Marthe and another lover. He uses the green chair in the foreground as a wall between the two. The blonde -- front and center. Marthe? Shunted off to the periphery. Catfight, anyone?
* I'm sure I have color field on the brain, but look at the tile floors of some of the Marthe-in-the-bath paintings. They remind me of some of the overlaid Alma Thomas paintings, such as the one in the Baltimore's BMA.
* Lots of paintings from Europe in this show. Bet that wasn't easy.
* Any MAN readers know what an original copy/first edition of Paul Verlaine's Parallelement goes for? I couldn't find it online. Hot hot hot.
* I'll work on finding links for the above references. Bonnard isn't extensively internetted in the way, say, Picasso is, but I'll try.
posted by Tyler at 4:43 PM
Maggie Michael opens at G Fine Art in Georgetown tonight.
Read up on her and her chat with ubiquitous Faith Flanagan here.
posted by Tyler at 1:45 PM
From the Department of the Preposterous:
A Christie's official on an upcoming Warhol item up for bid: "No image is more American than the Campbell's soup can."
Uh, the flag?
posted by Tyler at 9:14 AM
10.28.2002
It took Rachele Riley pointing it out to me for me to focus on this, but in his review of the trompe l'oeil show at the National Gallery,
Blake Gopnik extends the history of conceptual art by several hundred years.
As we've all learned by now, a common Gopnikian tactic is to drop a mini-bomb in the middle of a review. Here's the relevant Gopnikism, about half-way down the review: "Trompe l'oeil, I would argue, is the first truly conceptual art, more interested in what it has to say than in what it ends up looking like."
Really? For the sake of argument, let's measure Gopnik's case (which I'm not going to summarize -- read the review!) against Christopher Knight's
semi-definition of conceptual art in this past Sunday's LAT: "textual, ephemeral, humorous, acutely aware of its context, devoid of visual interest, mechanically produced, eloquent as an idea but not as an object."
Is trompe l'oeil...
Textual: No.
Ephemeral: No -- some of the works in the show are hundreds of years old.
Humorous: You betcha.
Acutely aware of its context: This is the argument on which Gopnik hangs his hat. It's hard to disagree with him on this point.
Devoid of visual interest: I think that much conceptual art has visual interest (Sol Lewitt). I think trompe l'oeil has lots of visual interest.
Mechanically produced: Often tromple l'oeil tries to look mechanically produced, which is enough for me to agree with Gopnik on this point.
Eloquent as an idea but not as an object: This criterion is probably the one that is the most open to individual taste. Escher I think is often eloquent as an idea. Friends of mine vigorously disagree.
I think I agree wtih Gopnik.
posted by Tyler at 1:57 PM
Also, a preview of coming attractions:
* Is trompe l'oeil the first conceptualism? Blake Gopnik thinks so and we'll measure up his claim using Christopher Knight's definition of conceptualism.
* I finally made it through the entire (fantabulous) Bonnard show at the Phillips here in DC. More on it later today.
* Reminder: It's a big art week in DC. Tuesday is Maggie Michael's opening at G Fine Art, Thursday (and Friday) is
Cremaster at the Hirshhorn, Friday is Leo Villareal at
Conner and Saturday is a
Fusebox opening.
posted by Tyler at 9:50 AM
It was a good art reading weekend...
Christopher Knight
assesses John Baldessari and makes the case for the relevance of painting.
Blake Gopnik finds the sculptural in Modigliani in
Rock Me Amadeo. (Blake, could Amadeo have not painted the eyes of his nude models because they were high/drunk out of their minds?)
One of those
defenses of elitism that I enjoy so much.
posted by Tyler at 9:45 AM
10.26.2002
Dig Albright-Knox's cool
Modigliani website. Scuttlebutt is that there's a Blake Gopnik/WP review coming any day.
And
Five Things is new!
posted by Tyler at 10:09 AM
10.25.2002
Headline
Time Magazine's "arts & entertainment" coverage on their website this week is this story: "The High Art of Jackass: Megastar masochist Johnny Knoxville creates a new kind of comedy, a movie all about hurting himself."
posted by Tyler at 5:50 PM
Carol Vogel had real news this week:
Fred Wilson will be da man at the US pavilion in Venice. The other two notes though were throwaways.
posted by Tyler at 4:06 PM
Vrille is bursting at the seams with news about Wolfgang Tillmans exhibits.
I really enjoyed Tillmans' work in the Hirshhorn's suprise summer photography hit,
Open Cities.
Vrille says that Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum is the first US museum to launch a
Tillmans show. After Harvard, the show travels to Philadelphia in the fall of 2003.
Vrille's the place to be for Tillmans today, featuring the museum press release, a BBC story and an Art Critic London story.
Reminder: The other photography exhibit MAN is looking forward to later this fall is the Emmet Gowin show at the Corcoran (previously at Yale).
posted by Tyler at 9:54 AM
10.24.2002
Interesting
note on artnet.com about a collaboration between the
Whitney and
Printed Matter on artist's books. Neither has a release up on their website, but the gist is that the two institutions will collaborate with artists to make artists books more available. The first round of artists will include Vija Celmins and Ed Ruscha. Sounds worth watching.
posted by Tyler at 2:55 PM
Courtesy of Lorraine Adams and the Washington Post,
here is the most fun you'll have reading an art story this week.
posted by Tyler at 1:33 PM
Linda Carroli on
writing about art.
posted by Tyler at 10:32 AM
10.23.2002
Some things I've been reading...
* Martin Gayford's mostly interesting essay about Barnett Newman in the current
Modern Painters magazine. (Note to regular readers: I was wrong -- Newman did travel outside Philly, just not in the US. It's at the Tate Modern.)
Newman may be the ideal artist with whom to begin a self-conversation about the concept of how we experience art. Gayford raises Greenberg's easel-painting-vs.-wall-sized-painting polemic as a way of discussing what about Newman is different and special.
There is a feeling that you can enter a Rothko and be eneveloped by it, its vibrating hues surrounding the body (paging Dr. Turrell, Dr. James Turrell). Looking at a Rothko produces the same sort of visual sensation that looking at a freshly poured draft of cascading Guinness produces. I find myself wondering what it would feel like to stand in the middle of that cascade or in the middle of that Rothko. It seems to me that those extra-body experienceswould be similar.
By contrast, I never, ever want to stand in a Newman work. Newman's work, as Gayford points out, heightens the viewer's experience of what space is. As you stand in front of a mammoth Newman, you're highly conscious of where you are in relation to the zips (which seem to vibrate with their own frequency) and in relation to the mammothness of the canvas. In other words, while Rothko makes you feel like you could be in the canvas, Newman's canvases remind you that you can't be. They push you back away from the work and pull you toward it, but never invite you into it. They challenge you to think about where you are, not where you could be.
The show is
at the Tate until January 3. London out of Dulles on Virgin for $260 RT.
* Walter Robinson has an
interesting artnet.com piece that simultaneously features drawing at MOMA, Peter Jennings on ex-wives, Jeff Koons on fatherhood, Keith Richards on being surrounded by corn and the latest from Basquiat's estate. Yes, it's that much fun.
posted by Tyler at 11:15 AM
10.22.2002
DC indy curator Andrea Pollan checks in with this too-long-for-the-comment-boards email about my
ArtKrush post. ...
For well over a decade, different artists, curators, gallerists, and the rare high-powered and more prevalent lesser-powered collectors have batted about this idea of an ICA. I would be thrilled to see a real ICA come to life in this international city, but there have been too many stalled attempts that lacked real curatorial vision and funding. (Witness the Washington Arts Museum, that was initially supposed to be a visionary ICA but caved into local art political pressures and then apathy.)
Does the Hirshhorn fulfill this need? It does some wonderful contemporary programming but leaves one hungry for much much more. And continuous contemporary programming is not in its official mandate. Kudos to Ned Rifkin for trying to change much of that with the support of a newly galvanized board of trustees. However, that puts him in direct competition with:
The Corcoran, which has had a vision problem trying to be something for everyone while it fundraises for its Gehry addition. Personally, I have high hopes in curator Jonathan B's abilities and sensitivity to artists, but don't think the Corcoran will let him unleash his full potential during a risky fundraising season and a sluggish economy. (BTW, isn't this the 3rd time the Corcoran has tried to do expand historically? Why did it not work in the past?)
Certainly money is always the big stumbling block. Levy publicly announced that his fundraising is stalled at around
$60m. Then, even if one can raise the building funds, can one then sustain a level of support for aggressive programming, staffing and overhead?
Then there is DC's transience problem. But, as the city becomes more of a business center offering support services to the federal and local governments, this will begin to change, and people will stick around more. See, some light at the end of a tunnel!
OK, back to the ICA concept. WPA (before it was subsumed by the Corcoran) served somewhat as a regionally-oriented ICA with constantly growing programmatic (read national and international) ambitions. But then, as always seems to happen, the local constituents it served became ticked off. It has been a wounded entity ever since, despite many subsequent heroic noble efforts. Memories are peculiarly long here.
This is a global world we live in. Artists do come in from all over the world for residencies, but the most interesting ones seem to be coming into the suburban arts centers like Pyramid Atlantic, MPA and RAP. Alas, they are then frequently cut off from an already decentralized art world here.
But I am not giving up hope. Many of the ICAs along the Atlantic seaboard started out small (Boston, Philly, Pittsburgh's Mattress Factory jump instantly to mind). And they have managed to grow slowly while maintaining interesting Zeitgeist-y programming.
I still believe it can happen here and remain stubbornly optimistic.
Needs (not necessarily in order of sig.):
1. Artists who want to shake things up seriously.
2. Risk-taking donors whose egos are not bound up in engraved museum wall status and want to make a difference.
3. Support from the area art and other communities to see internationally contextualizing and stimulating exhibitions/media projects/performances/publications that focus intellectually and emotionally waaaaay beyond the beltway. (Not that the aesthetic discourse here is so awful, but there are already so many spaces and galleries dedicated to regional artists.)
4. A strong collector base. Hopefully this next generation of 20, 30, and 40-somethings have all taken at least one art history course and can get genuinely excited by innovations in visual art.
5. Penetrating critical voices and curatorial perspectives. Lots of guest critics/artists/curators to keep it interesting.
posted by Tyler at 1:49 PM
While I was gone over the weekend, Greg Allen put up
an interesting post about photographer Liz Deschenes.
posted by Tyler at 9:12 AM
10.21.2002
One more thing about the Philly Museum: They have up
a work by Richard Hamilton about Duchamp's Large Glass. It's hung on the wall in a way that makes it impossible to see without a ladder and a pillow on the ground. It's slightly absurd. I figured out why when I looked to the left: in the gallery is a note that offers a version of the work in the gift shop for $13. Shame on Philly: Gallery space should not be used to advertise the museum shop.
posted by Tyler at 3:50 PM
Cool!
I'm on ArtKrush this week. Comments on the boards here would be fabulous...
posted by Tyler at 10:14 AM
Back from Philly with a few thoughts...
* Is there a museum space in the US with a greater sense of whimsy than Philly's Institute of Contemporary Art? Latest examples:
Amy Cutler and former political cartoonist
Damian Ortega.
* The Philly Museum wants you to know that they own Picasso's 1906 Self-Portrait and Matisse's Portrait of Mlle. Yvonne Landsberg. So even though they're in the Matisse Picasso show (now in Paris), the PMA leaves a little placard in their usual gallery to remind the museum-goer that they own those canvases.
* Roberta Smith was a
great read on Friday. Carol Vogel wasn't.
* No Christopher Knight reviews up on the LA Times website in about a month and only one in seven weeks. Odd.
posted by Tyler at 9:39 AM
10.17.2002
MAN's man has been workin' overtime today, so quiet postings. I'll be in Philadelphia over the weekend, so new content Sunday night or Monday.
In the meantime,
Five Things is fresh.
posted by Tyler at 6:13 PM
10.16.2002
ArtsJournal points out an interesting Toronto Globe and Mail piece on the
lack of communication between the arts community and the non-arts community. Once upon a time a visual artist (Jackson Pollock) could be on the cover of a major newsmagazine. That's simply inconceivable now.
I'm not sure that this was avoidable. American culture has become more segmented in the last 20 years. Most, if not all, forms of mass pop culture are experiencing declines in favor of niche culture. Network TV ratings are down. Music CDs that appeal to broad groups across all spectrums are few and far between. The crossover hit is all but dead. Movies are made for specific market niches: teenage boys, families, chick flicks, etc. So too contemporary art, which is being produced for an intellectual and artistic elite (as well as those who feel they can buy their way into those circles).
posted by Tyler at 2:34 PM
I forgot this bit from Bonami yesterday: he said that the curator of the U.S. pavilion at Venice will be a woman. No names. Comment boards, anyone?
posted by Tyler at 9:34 AM
10.15.2002
MAN has been quiet all day because I spent the middle part of the day at a talk given by Francesco Bonami (he's the guy who is curating
some little art fair that's going to be held for the 50th time in Venice next year). Some highlights:
* Bonami is taking a long hall and giving it over to six curators who will each produce a mini-show. The six topics/themes are: utopia, conflicts, individual systems, shantytowns, zone of urgency and Mexico. Also, there will be a pavilion/area that specifically highlights younger artists who are outside of the usual biennial scene spotlight.
*
Bonami, who works at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, said he's been thinking a lot about biennials and museums, the now vs. timelessness and legacy and temporality vs. wisdom.
* Bonami talked a lot about conflict in the world (and impending conflict of course). While he ducked a question about whether the Venice Biennale will respond to Documenta, he repeatedly hinted that the violence inherent in conflict (and to a nearly subconscious extent, pacifism) will be a theme of the shindig.
* Quote of the day from Bonami on his feelings toward Charles Ray, who once presented him with a 7.5 ton sculpture: "It's conflict if not an act of passive hate."
* The Venice show only gets 300,000 visitors in six months.
* Unlike the Whitney Biennial and Documenta, the Venice Biennial show will not neglect painting. As Bonami said, when painting isn't in a show, everyone asks where it is. No one ever asks why video work isn't in a show. Bonami will highlight what he calls the 'dictatorship of the viewer.' A video can require 20 minutes to see where as one can see painting at one's own pace.
posted by Tyler at 5:07 PM
Three Barnes Foundation art students have
filed suit in Montgomery County, Pa., to stop the move of the Barnes.
posted by Tyler at 9:36 AM
10.14.2002
Drama in Hartford, where the director of the Atheneum
just quit even though the museum is in the middle of a $160M fundraising drive for a new building. This is a pretty good regional museum with a strong collection of minimal/conceptual art (thanks to Sol Lewitt mostly), so this one bears watching. (Plus it threatens to become a soap opera and those are always fun.)
posted by Tyler at 10:14 AM
Around the blogosphere:
* Out of Lascaux tells us that the 15th century sculpture that fell from its platform at the Met was
resting on plywood.
* Greg Allen has an interesting post on
the impact of comtemporary art on film. His Renzo Piano post right after that one is thought-provoking too.
* I recently discovered
Travelers Diagram. IE users only.
* Vrille
goes comprehensive on the Frida Kahlo biopic.
posted by Tyler at 10:01 AM
10.13.2002
It's Ned Rifkin Week in Washington. The Hirshhorn head honcho is the coverboy of both the
Citypaper and the
Washington Post Sunday Magazine. The Lorraine Adams piece in the Citypaper is the best of the two.
I'm sure Rifkin is doing a fine job. But he needs to show the same attention to the display of art that he shows to the availability of brochures (see the WP piece). Simply, the Hirshhorn should be embarassed by the installation of
minimalist art in its downstairs galleries.
A stunning number of works are misdisplayed:
* An Annie Truitt piece is mounted on a pedestal (it should be on the floor). It's also only lit on one side, so you can't see the other three sides.
* An Ad Reinhardt black-on-black painting isn't lit at all.
* An Agnes Martin -- one of Rifkin's favorite artists -- is lit oddly. The middle of the painting is well-illuminated but the top and bottom are in the dark.
* The Stella next to the Martin is lit in such a way that you can only see the bottom half of the painting.
And all this is in the first room of the exhibit! Granted, the downstairs area at the Hirshhorn receives no natural light and it's probably a pretty major lighting challenge, but the effort is weak.
posted by Tyler at 6:03 PM
10.11.2002
I just noticed that the National Gallery's
press website is better than their other website.
posted by Tyler at 3:15 PM
Pulitzer
winner Lorraine Adams has a
fantastic profile of Hirshhorn honcho Ned Rifkin out in the CityPaper this week. It's half a great read on Rifkin and half a great read on what it's like being a curator in 2002.
posted by Tyler at 2:47 PM
I had a VERY art-filled day yesterday, so I'm having trouble figuring out where to jump in on my thoughts from yesterday.
* First, the
Bonnard photos mystery is a mystery no more! Beth Turner, who curated the
Bonnard show at the Phillips says that when Bonnard took the photos in 1900-01 that he sent the roll of film to Kodak to be processed and developed! So Bonnard likely never conceptualized how he wanted them printed, he just shipped em out. What then are we to make of the high-contrast prints at the Phillips? I'm not sure. They're beautiful -- no doubt about it -- but I'm just not sure that's how Bonnard saw them. He sure didn't paint that way.
*
Leigh Conner convinced me that I was wrong to count auction price progression as a factor in determining whether an artist is back in vogue. She thinks it's just too small and weird a segment of the market.
* Having seen the Bonnard show a few times, I'm ready for the Bonnard v. Vuillard fight to begin. I want to see Blake Gopnik (in Vuillard's corner) slug it out with Michael Kimmelman (in Bonnard's corner) at a public program in the National Gallery's auditorium in February. Critic v. critic, debate style.
posted by Tyler at 1:25 PM
Friday... Carol Vogel... actually pretty good today! The lead note was the usual bit of semi-interesting auction news, but the Calvin Tomkins note was interesting, as was the SFMOMA/Richter note. A rare 'B' for Vogel.
posted by Tyler at 1:13 PM
I don't talk about music here, but here in DC it seems like we should be listening to Springsteen's
Nebraska CD
right now.
posted by Tyler at 1:03 PM
10.10.2002
If you're in DC, here's a must-hear event for your calendar: Francesco Bonami will be
speaking at the Hirshhorn on Tuesday, 10/15 @ noon. He's the curator of the next Venice Biennial.
posted by Tyler at 10:31 AM
Modern Painters'
American Issue is out.
posted by Tyler at 10:26 AM
10.9.2002
Thomas Downing at Conner Contemporary. First off, check out that link. Leigh Conner did a nice job of making this show accessible via the web. Of course Downing's canvases must be seen to really be seen; the turpentine soaking that makes the dots and canvases vibrate don't translate well through electronic or print media.
Franck Cordes' description of Downing's work stuck with me as I was lookign at the show: Downing's best paintings live on the canvas. They seem to move, vibrate, bounce, project and recede. Clearly the star of the show is Blue Tender, a canvas whose geometric and coloristic simplicity harkens to what Sol Lewitt might have created if he'd worked with dots.
In fact, this morning I was reading Schjeldahl write about the color field vs. minimalism battle of the 1960's and I began thinking about Downing in this context. You could make an argument for him fitting in both categories: his canvases are literally color-soaked but are executed with a maximum of simplicity and linearity (which is a word mostly because I say it is).
The best canvases in the Connor show are the simplest. The denser canvases seem in need of an editor -- they get a little muddled and some of the strength of Downing's geometry gets lost.
There's a minimalism group show opening at LA MOCA next year. This Downing show, combined with the permanent collection show @ MFA Houston and a few other blips make a case that it's time to revisit the color field group with museum show. The last one was in Philly in 1970.
posted by Tyler at 3:45 PM
If someone knows how to create a new folder via FTP through Netscape 4.7 or Mozilla, please post it to the comment boards. I'm stymied.
posted by Tyler at 2:39 PM
Answers to
the question MAN asked about the Bonnard photos @ the Phillips Collection are coming in. Bet we have the mini-mystery solved by the end of the week.
The Phillips did not print from Bonnard's negatives. The photos in the Phillips show come from the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, which printed them for the Phillips. The prints are larger than the originals. MAN is reliably informed that the prints in the current show that are in the downstairs galleries are similar to how the original prints would look. (MAN will be paying extra-special attention to those prints tomorrow when I'm at the Phillips.)
More Thursday night!
BTW, artnet.com checks in with
a review of the Bonnard show.
posted by Tyler at 9:21 AM
10.8.2002
I've been pledging to write more (and more intelligently) about local galleries and such. So here's my first real attempt to follow through on that promise (EDIT: made somewhat more difficult by a little bit of a problem with Blogger's editing software. As of 545pm ET the whole post should be here).
Jae Ko at Marsha Mateyka. For non-DC types, MM is outside the DC Big Four-Plus (Fusebox, Hemphill, Numark, Conner plus G Fine Art).
Ko's work is wall-mounted, densely-coiled paper that is dyed a variety of colors. Each piece projects from the wall 5-12 inches in a manner that recalls the visual embodiment of something out of Tron, that is each work emphasizes depth. To me, each work emphasizes depth at the expense of emphasizing anything else. Ko's work is hung on a wall in the manner of a painting and introduces depth in the manner of a sculpture. That's neat and is visually interesting in the way that vanilla Coke is an interesting riff on Coke. Neither are particularly new: sodajerks were putting vanilla syrup in Coke 50 years ago and artists have been hanging sculpture on walls for years. Ko's work is momentarily formally notable but not visually arresting or conceptually intriguing.
EDIT: Jason Gubbiotti writes about Ko at
Five Things better than I do. Clearly I still have to learn to write better about art.
Tomorrow: Thomas Downing @ Conner Contemporary.
posted by Tyler at 3:28 PM
The Post
finally gets around to the Barnes Foundation story. With a stringer. (Weak!) It's an add-nothing story that addresses none of the interesting points about the Barnes saga. I fully understand that I'm more interested in this story than anyone (I've noticed that my Barnes posts elicit somewhere between zero and zero comments on the MAN comment boards), but there are serious questions about arts administration and funding that no one seems to be raising here.
posted by Tyler at 2:13 PM
For fun: Coudal's
Museum of Online Museums.
posted by Tyler at 9:41 AM
10.7.2002
Greg Allen makes a good point about a
gap in the DC arts scene (it's at the bottom of the post). It would be nice if American, GW or Georgetown had a large, active contemporary art gallery and the funding to curate shows in an effort to fill this role. This is something Transformer have been made to do, but I'm not holding my breath. Anyone else have other ideas? The comment boards await.
posted by Tyler at 2:01 PM
Thanks to all who came by MUSE last night at the DCAC. It was a blast. (Here's a link to Jason Gubbiotti's much-praised
Richter thoughts.)
It's a Phillips Collection kind of morning because MAN has Bonnard on the brain. I spent about 90 minutes at the Phillips on Saturday and saw the first half of the
Bonnard show. A couple of preliminary thoughts (preliminary because I haven't really slowly worked through the whole show yet):
* Bonnard is full of surprises -- all those decentralized compositions, figures at the edges, shifts in perspective within canvases -- but the biggest surprise for me so far has been a canvas I can't believe I'd never really seen before: Woman with Basket of Fruit from Baltimore's Cone Collection. Bonnard's line in this canvas is as strong as it is in any of his work. It's a small canvas and it's in the corner of the first room, but it has stuck with me.
* The photographs on the second floor of the exhibit are from a series of 22 photos that Pierre took of his galpal Marthe in 1900-01. However the prints in the show are contemporary prints. Each features a light bathed Marthe surrounded by apparently dense, dark foliage. The contrast between (very white) Marthe and (very dark) flora is high. I don't know, however, if that's what Bonnard had in mind when he took the pictures. Did he leave diary notes or notebook jottings to indicate that he envisioned that he would print these photos in such a high-contrast manner? Did he leave any clues at all? Or did the show's curator have them printed this way to fit within the context of the room in which they're exhibited. The accompanying wall text gives no answers. (I haven't read the exhibition catalog yet.) These photos (the negatives are from the Musee d'Orsay) are among the gems of the collection. MAN will be trying to learn more!
Other Phillips dish: If you have $12.5 million lying around, the Phillips wants to hear from you. Word is that the museum is only halfway toward having raised the $25M necessary for their expansion. Philadelphia has old-line, old-money foundations such as Pew and
Annenberg to fund this kind of thing. Too bad so much of DC's money is new, too new to have that kind of foundation set up.
posted by Tyler at 9:47 AM
10.4.2002
The Camp story develops quickly! (Or at least I'll pretend it's a story. But it IS developing quickly.)
A reader forwarded
this link, which I didn't see on the Philly Inquirer site when I surfed on Monday. (It's a Sunday story, maybe it didn't get onto the site right away.)
Here's the key paragraph in a story that explains that the Lannan, Annenberg and Pew Foundations didn't offer to put up $150M themselves as originally reported but pledged to help round it up: "Fund-raising began quietly - one millionaire soliciting another, in some cases -
many months before the financially strapped Barnes Foundation asked Montgomery County Orphans' Court on Tuesday for permission to move the gallery (emphasis added) downtown."
Depending on when Camp talked to ArtNEWS, she almost certainly didn't tell them the full story. Do I understand she didn't want to break her big news in ArtNEWS? Of course. But if she fibbed to Beck, that was not a good way to build credibility when you need to raise $150M.
posted by Tyler at 4:33 PM
A week ago the Barnes Foundation announced its intention to move to downtown Philly as part of a $150M agreement with a couple foundations. You'd think that this deal took a while to put together, non?
Well, Barnes ED Kimberly Camp apparently told ArtNEWS (in an interview published this month) that she planned to keep the Barnes in Lower Merion, Pa. This raises questions: Is the Barnes-to-downtown deal a haphazard thing thrown together rather quickly? (Certainly the press announcement and conflicting reports between and within the Philly Inquirer and the NYT lean toward this suggestion.) Did Camp simply tell a fib to ArtNEWS, which wouldn't seem like a good way to build credibility when you're probably going to have to raise some money for your move. Or is Camp not in control, with the foundations basically calling the shots? Jacqueline Trescott! Carol Vogel! Ralph Blumenthal! Someone needs to look into this. (MAN's choice: Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter Lorraine Adams, who covers cultural stuff for the Washington Post.)
EDIT: Another (less likely) possibility is that ArtNEWS writer Ernest Beck misunderstood Camp. I think that's unlikely because the possibility of a move was
the key question around the Barnes when the story was being written. That's been the key question about the Barnes for almost two years.
The relevant paragraph reads like this: "Camp vows to keep the Barnes in Lower Merion and to abide by Barnes's will to leave the collection and its "ensembles" unchanged, as they have been since his death."
Well, that's slightly off -- the collection toured a few years back. But nitpicking aside, Beck's paragraph seems pretty rock-solid. If Beck or a friend reads this, feel free to pass on any info/notes and I'll post them here.
posted by Tyler at 3:48 PM
Friday jottings: Carol Vogel. Press releases galore, save the Guggenheim note MAYBE. I'm checking on it. I would kill for that piece of journalistic real estate.
If you're in DC, don't miss MUSE on Sunday night at the
DC Arts Center. Starting at 730, Jason Gubbiotti, Sacha Cohen and I will participate in one of Faith Flanagan's fabulous salons. This month's topic is arts writing on the web here in DC. Rumor has it NYC/DC
blogstar Greg (
greg.org) Allen will be in attendance too.
One of the fun things about being an art fan is talking with people about art and artstuff. Last night
Gubbiotti and I were up til quarter 'til one flipping through old gallery catalogs. We had a variety of conversations, including a quick musing about why he sometimes avoids making the center of the canvas central to a work (who says what Matisse was doing isn't still somehow influential?) to discussing some contemporary artists.
The catalogs we spent the most time on were those of
David Reed,
Thomas Nozkowski, and
Lari Pittman. Fascinating stuff -- also fascinating to hear Jason described what he liked in what we were looking at. I now have three artists to go read a lot about.
Today I met Greg Allen, which was also fabulously cool. Greg collects, which I hope to do in the not-too-distant future and listening to him talk about that was informative. Greg tells great stories and even agrees with me about the value of Annie Truitt and Charles Sheeler revivals. Greg gave me lots of great stuff to learn more about too -- Frank O'Hara, Spike Magazine, etc. The arts are not a solitary vacuum.
On Monday I heard about Rachele Riley's gallery wanderings around Manhattan Isle last week. Rachele and I are going to start a little web project together -- hopefully we'll get to launch it late next month. Watch here for news. (And if you own a server and are feeling generous, email me!)
This is a long way of saying that I hope that our Sunday chat @ DCAC ends up being a continuation of these conversations, a discussion of how the web is enabling dialog about the arts in DC. We'll see!
posted by Tyler at 3:14 PM
10.3.2002
Greg Allen has put together THE
contemporary art tour to end all contemporary art tours.
posted by Tyler at 12:41 PM
The art history-focused blog formerly known as Remembering to Forget is new as
Out of Lascaux. Check it out, and not just because she said nice things about MAN.
posted by Tyler at 12:17 PM
Good collection of
contemporary art links from The Broad Art Foundation.
posted by Tyler at 12:12 PM
10.2.2002
Ah, Jed Perl's New Republic essay (link and excellent greg.org thoughts ("he's wrong in almost every possible way") viewable
below).
What the frickin' heck is Perl talking about? I have so many problems with his essay that I barely know where to start.
First, it's journalistically and intellectually lazy. When a writer slips into talking about what "people" are thinking without telling us who those people are, that raises big flags for me. Perl tells us that "gallerygoers are stirred by contemporary art and museumgoers are having extraordinary experiences, there is a widespread belief that nothing really adds up..." WHO are these people?
Frankly, while I understand that I just quoted Perl's thesis, I'm not sure what his thesis is. I guess Perl is arguing for prolonged evaluation of artistic output/careers instead of show-by-show flighty consideration, but I just said that a helluva lot clearer than he ever does. That's a pretty mundane, ho-hum idea around which to build a four-page essay. Furthermore, I'm not sure who it is that ISN'T evaluating artists in this manner.
When critics write nothing but essays that bitch about everything (Perl & MOMA, for example) they run the risk of just sounding like grouchy fogeys that wish ice cream cones still cost a dime and that Cadillacs still had tail fins. Perl has reached that point.
posted by Tyler at 3:12 PM
From the See, Art Critics ARE Smart People file (and artnet.com): "The International Association of Art Critics has canceled its 36th annual congress scheduled for this month in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, because of the civil war there."
posted by Tyler at 3:04 PM
If you enjoy the GuggEnron's permanent collection,
get ready to see a lot more of it over the next year or two. Massive budget cuts and staff cuts coming at the house that Thomas Krens is allegedly managing. I bet the Rosenquist retro goes bye-bye.
posted by Tyler at 9:17 AM
10.1.2002
This is Jed Perl's new
least favorite book.
Buy it for me. :-D Read
Perl's essay in this week's New Republic (User name: ajreader; Password: access) and be prepared for our discussion of Perl and his need for a high calonic on tomorrow's MAN.
posted by Tyler at 5:04 PM
Roger Kimball writes on the Wall Street Journal's ardently rightist op-ed page that
the Barnes Foundation should stay where it is, exist as an educational institution and that the sanctity of wills and estate planning is at stake. Well, Mr. Kimball, who's going to pay to keep the Foundation running, given that Barnes wrote such a crappy will that he didn't provide the resources for his "educational institution" to operate? (I think Kimball is playing cheap semantics here -- just about every museum is incorporated as an 'educational institution' because that's the way the US tax code works.) At some point doesn't a court have to step in to prevent the deterioration of priceless works?
posted by Tyler at 3:08 PM
If you're in DC,
Politics & Prose's October history book group will discuss John Russell's
Matisse: Father & Son on Oct. 24 @ 730 pm.
posted by Tyler at 10:11 AM
This month's ArtFORUM had a
travelogue about Nico Israel's trip in search of Robert Smithson's
Spiral Jetty in Utah. It's a fun little story about how passion for art drives a poorly planned journey. Oh how a good GPS receiver would have made Nico's life easier!
Yesterday greg.org, who has visited Spiral Jetty, checked in to update his readers on
his refreshingly spirited discussion with Israel on ArtFORUM's message boards. Basically,
Greg found Spiral Jetty, thought about some macro-issues around it and Israel wrote a lighter travel piece. Gotta agree with Greg though -- Israel's "whoops, couldn't find it!" travelogue looks a little half-assed after the
Jetty was exposed by falling lake levels this summer.
posted by Tyler at 9:33 AM 
