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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Vogel, Weinberg and the importance of yoga
UPDATE: The first person to send me a photo (JPEG) of Adam Weinberg or Larry Rinder in a Whitney yoga class will earn some kind of prize.
Thank God for Carol Vogel. The dirt-digging New York Times arts journo is a reporter's reporter, digging deep into the complicated details of visual arts stories all over Manhattan. (Vogel is on a first name basis with museum directors all over America. She's one of the few people close enough to Barnes Foundation director Kimberly Camp that she can call her, "Beverly.")There is no journalist in America better at sitting by the phone, waiting for auction house publicists to call her with juicy, arcane tidbits of auctionana. We should be all the more impressed that Vogel apparently turned off her cell phone long enough to squeeze some embarassing news out of Whitney director Adam Weinberg. I can see the interview now, Weinberg squirming in his seat, Carol Vogel doing her best Mike Wallace impersonation, putting the screws to him, interrupting his every utterance trying to get to the heart of the story, trying to understand what the Weinberg Whitney (the Dub-Squared!) will emphasize in the coming years.
Whatever you think of Vogel's methods, they worked. Yesterday Vogel delivered a major scoop about the new Whitney. Weinberg, reported Vogel, is offering yoga classes to the Whitney staff. I'm sure that we can all rest easier at night knowing that a soothing yoga class will help take the edge off of Larry Rinder's hatred of America. Maybe this means that Larry's next exhibit won't loathe all of America, maybe it will just confine Rinder's repugnance to North Dakota.
 Yoga at the Whitney! This is such a good idea! It's obviously helping Weinberg be Weinberg. If firing a curator (Marla Prather) who was on leave caring for a seriously ill child was harshing Weinberg's mellow, he could always just sign up for the 4:30 Ashtanga class. Of course, before firing a key curator, you know Weinberg wasn't just relying on yoga to soothe his nerves -- he must have known that the board was behind him. They are.
"We were looking for someone who understood the key mission of the Whitney: to champion American art and living artists," Whitney chairman Leonard Lauder said. "Plus, Adam's Namaste gesture truly represents the belief that there is a Divine spark within each of us that is located in the heart chakra."
There is no better example of the Divine spark within each of us than the spark I want to light on each of those hideous John Currin paintings. I think I speak for everyone when I saw that after looking at the much crappy art that a little post-exhibit meditative experience would get me ready to spend big bucks in the Whitney store.
But I digress. Mostly I was complimenting Vogel for helping Weinberg open up. I mean, that little thing in The Art Newspaper about Weinberg maybe replacing the 2006 Biennial with some type of permanent collection hanging? Not important. (UPDATE: The Art Newspaper has run a correction of this item.)The Biennial might be moving to the Armory? Just not newsworthy. Weinberg's comment that while the Whitney has two-to-three years of shows on the schedule only "many" of them are good ones? I'm sure Carol found out which upcoming Whitney shows Weinberg thinks suck but didn't tell us because, because... well, why was that again Carol?
At least Vogel succeeded at one of the most difficult tasks in journalism: getting employees to open up and compliment their boss.
"[He's a] curator's director," curator Chrissie Iles said between bites of lunch in the Whitney's new vegan cafeteria. "He understands the mechanics of making an exhibition from an insider's point of view because he's done it. And for an institution as small as the Whitney, that's important. He's also a good listener. He's a people person. Except to Marla. Then he's kind of like those lions that eat their young."
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L'Affaire Barnes: A key question
Judge Stanley Ott has decided to allow the Barnes and its suitors to provide to him the following:
- A business plan outlining why a Parkway museum would fix the Barnes' financial problems; and
- An analysis of the value of the Foundation's assets, especially Ker-Feal.
Many Barnes observers, including me, had expected to charge some kind of special master or outside auditor with these kinds of chores. But Ott is allowing the Barnes (read: the Phoundations) to have a second chance. It was obvious from Day One in court that the Barnes should have done this before now. So why is Ott giving the Barnes a second chance?
Theory: In his ruling, Ott sounds reasonably open to the idea of moving the Barnes if the need be. Except for this paragraph:
"Dr. Barnes' indenture does not specifically state that the gallery must be maintained in Merion or cease to exist. Nevertheless, it is difficult to dismiss Dr. Barnes' choice of venue as a minor detail. Dr. and Mrs. Barnes lived on the site, in the administration building adjacent to the gallery. Dr. Barnes' indenture provided for the administration building to be used as classrooms for the art education program after his and Mrs. Barnes' deaths. The focus of the education program is the ensembles of art in the gallery... We need to be persuaded that the move to Philadelphia is the least drastic deviation that will stabilize The Foundation's future."
Ott then outlined what the Barnes can do to show him the move is imperative. He gave the student a make-up homework assignment, a generous second-chance.
In a backhanded way he acknowledged that the Barnes' management has underwhelmed him. If they couldn't do the right and obvious thing the first time, does Ott really think they'll get it right now? Ott chose not to simply rule against the Barnes, but I wonder if (instead) Ott is giving the Barnes leadership the rope with which to hang itself...
From around the web on the Barnes: The Philly Inky on Ott's spanking of the PA AG. The Inky's main story. LAT's Suzanne Muchnic here. Jumps to here.
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MANalysis: A First Reading of The Barnes Ruling
I think that today's Barnes ruling is just.
The ruling, issued today by Montgomery County (Pa.) Orphans' Court Judge Stanley Ott, reached several conclusions:
- The Barnes may expand its board to 15 members and may do so immediately;
- The Barnes may not move -- yet;
- The Pennsylvania Attorney General was derelict in its public duties in siding with the Barnes;
- The Barnes' neighbors are sniveling crybabies whose mania "border[s] on hysteria" (how can you not love that?);
- Ott wonders why can't an educational institution sell its art to raise money? Ott indicates that he understand the ethical considerations regarding a museum not selling art, but what about an educational institution?;
- Ott wants to see a business plan for the proposed Philadelphia location; and
- Ott seems to agree that the Barnes has been mismanaged and he won't allow a move unless the Barnes demonstrates that moving is the only option left for the Foundation to remain viable.
Ott ruled that the Barnes wasn't even close to making its case on this last point. For several years I have prattled on about what seems to me a dereliction of duty by the Barnes board and mismanagement by the administration. While Ott didn't use the phrase, "But at least you found the piano," (scroll to a posting from 12/10 in the archives) it's clear that these points bothered him too. He was amazed that the Barnes hadn't studied the financial implications of the move. He was surprised how thoroughly the Philly foundations were calling the shots. He wondered why no one had put actual financial figures before him, deriding the "guesstimates" of the Barnes team. Put most simply, he told them to go back and take their exams before demanding to pass the class. For proof he means it, here's testimony from Ott's ruling (emphasis added):
"We begin our analysis of this evidence with the observation that the fact-finding in this case has been seriously hamstrung by the total absence of hard numbers in evaluating these proposals. We have only a preliminary "guesstimate" about the real cost of constructing the new venue. We have no concept of The Foundation’s operating expenses at the new space. There have been no feasibility studies or pro formas projecting the success of the proposed venture. We don’t know how much it would cost to maintain the Merion facility for administrative purposes and for the horticultural course. And The Foundation’s plans for Ker-Feal are far too rudimentary and amorphic to assign any costs to them.
"On the opposite side of the coin, we have no hard numbers to evaluate options other than the Pew/Lenfest/Annenberg plan. Other than the offers for the land surrounding Ker-Feal, we have not heard even a wild estimate of the value of the items owned by The Foundation but not on display in the gallery in Merion. Nevertheless, the possibility of selling some of these holdings has been dismissed by The Foundation as too little, too shortsighted, or unethical. The move to Philadelphia has been floated as the only lifeboat in the entire sea. Since the outside charities are footing The Foundation’s legal bills in these hearings, we accept their single-option theory as the product of zealous advocacy. We find nothing, however, to commend the Office of Attorney General’s actions in this regard."
For all Ott's knuckle-rapping, he seems open to the eventual possibility of allowing the Barnes to move if financial analysis indicates no other option. "[T]he present location of the gallery is not sacrosanct, and relocation may be permitted if necessary to achieve the settlor’s ultimate purposes," he writes. Later on, he adds:
"The financial exigency having been demonstrated, there are still issues of necessity and the least drastic solution. There has not been an adequate showing that sufficient revenue can not be generated by other means. We need to be persuaded that the move to Philadelphia is the least drastic deviation that will stabilize The Foundation’s future. As we stated above, there is a dearth of hard evidence on the value of the assets that are not displayed in the gallery and could be sold. We heard from several witnesses about the ethical implications of deaccessioning in art administration. However, we are not here focusing on the gallery collection, and we are not convinced that the prohibition is or should be absolute in a non-museum setting. Otherwise stated, we question whether the same constraints on a museum not to sell its art bind an educational institution with works of art among its assets. On these unanswered questions, The Foundation must produce additional evidence."
As I said earlier, I think that this is a fair ruling. The board expansion was an easy call. The move is a tough call and Ott signaled that the Barnes shouldn't expect a cakewalk just because the Commonwealth and institutional Philadelphia wants it to happen.
I am concerned that Ott appears willing to allow the sell-off of non-gallery-hung Foundation assets to raise money. With the exception of Ker-Feal, I'm absolutely opposed to this. I hope arts institutions that have backgrounds somewhat similar to the Barnes -- I'm talking about the Phillips, the Gardner and the Huntington, for example -- file briefs with the court in opposition to this possibility. The Barnes' archives and Barnes' papers should stay at the Barnes.
(However, if Ott is bound and determined to sell off Barnes' papers or other archival information, I would hope that the Phillips Collection would find a way to buy them. The Phillips is building a new Center for the Study of Modern Art. Being home to the papers of both Barnes and Phillips would be a coup for them.)
More in the days to come, including links to tomorrow's LA Times and Philly Inquirer coverage.
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Barnes Decision In
Board may be expanded, the rest must be studied. Whether or not the move would help sustain the institution must be studied. No move allowed yet. From the decision:
"To that end and pursuant to our broad supervisory powers in the area of charitable trusts,[1] we direct The Foundation to undertake an analysis of its assets other than the works in the gallery in Merion. The goal will be to ascertain whether $50,000,000 or more can be raised for The Foundation’s endowment through the sale of non-gallery artwork and/or the real estate in Chester County."
Basically, the court is asking: Would selling Ker-Feal (and a few other things) fix the problem and keep the Barnes in Lower Merion?
Anyone who wants an MSWord copy of the decision should feel free to email me at the address on the upper right. I have no way of posting the whole thing here... Much more later today...
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Gopnik v. Schjeldahl
There are no two art critics in America more different than the Washington Post's Blake Gopnik and the New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl. Gopnik writes strictly, cautiously. (Well, except about JSJ.) Schjeldhal writes poetically and directly. Gopnik looks at art head-first, Schjeldahl heart first. This has never been clearer this past weekend when Gopnik penned an essay about neuroesthetics and the neuroaestheticians who love it headlined, "Science, Trying to Pick Our Brains About Art." Gopnik gives us a rundown of the conference, becomes quite excited about the prospect of neuroesthetics helping us to understand much about our response to art, and finally concludes that Duchamp will always defy neuroaestheticians. (Gopnik quite often prefers the idea behind an art object to the object itself.)
Meanwhile, the day before Gopnik's essay ran, Schjeldhal, who once wrote an essay titled, "Theory-itis," was speaking down I-95 in Richmond. Schjeldahl talked about the joy of basking in the full-body sensation we feel when we are in the presence of great art. I don't recall hearing Schjeldahl spend any time whatsoever on neuroesthetics. Then again, I don't recall Gopnik writing much about joy. So here follows a comparison of Gopnik and Schjeldahl (forgive the paraphrases of Schjeldahl -- there is no transcript of his remarks)...
Gopnik: "If our brains determine how art works on us, what does that tell us about art, or us -- could studying the way we're wired determine crisply that the "Mona Lisa" is truly great, or do we need some history to tell us how a complex painting speaks, or not, to all its different viewers?"
Schjeldahl: When I first saw great art, that moment I died and came back as someone else.
Gopnik: "For instance, if you stick people into a machine that does functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI -- a brain scan, in layman's terms) and then show them paintings they find beautiful, you can see certain characteristic bits of their brains going wild with delight -- or so suggests the recent research of Semir Zeki, an eminent neuroscientist at University College London who's recently also become a leader in neuroaesthetics."
Schjeldahl: When graduate students come out of lectures, where they see lots of slides, and go to museums, where they see actual art, they are often shocked. They are used to being academic participants, not personal, eyes-on participants.
Gopnik: " The old notion that art is centrally about making an "aesthetic" object whose "beauty" is supposed to strike a chord in us has started to look pretty thin, as we've begun to think about how a broad spread of human beings respond and have responded to a vast range of art objects."
Schjeldahl: I know something is beautiful when I am sure that it must not be violated, especially by me.
See Gopnik on Sunday at Faith Flanagan's monthly MUSE salon. Gopnik will share a stage with Hirshhorn board chair Robert Lehrman and gallerist George Hemphill. Showtime is 730pm at the DC Arts Center at 2438 18th Street NW, Washington, DC.
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Barnes Foundation decision coming Thursday
Multiple people telling MAN: Barnes Foundation decision to be announced around noon tomorrow.
My best guess: Move denied -- for now. A special master will be appointed. Ker-Feal will be sold. Renoirs to be burned and mulched in the arboretum. Move to Parkway will be studied by master, who will report to the court on finances and outlook in 12 months.
Just kidding about the Renoirs. (Damn.)
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Don't... take... away... our... parties
Earlier today: Terrie Sultan on Chuck Close.
This is the best idea any museum director has had in months. Most museums are guilty of failing to provide places to rest one's weary feet (Ed: Isn't that what the cafe and $4 lattes are for?), but because we delight in being snarkily specific: SF MOMA is the worst offender in the U.S. On my last visit there wasn't a single bench or resting place in the galleries on three entire floors. I see other art lovers have become rather fed up with SFMOMA's hospitality as well.
Speaking of SFMOMA, arts organizations should know better than to come between patrons, their alcohol and their parties. Say it ain't so: SFMOMA has cancelled its Valentine Ball.
 The real reason for the brouhaha is that SF's socialite class apparently has nowhere else to pick up taffeted boink buddies: "What they didn't take into account was how many people had counted on the ball," one donor told the Chron. (Of course a good man in the SF collecting class can skip regionalist balls and find dames on 57th Street.)
Or, an alternate translation: There are a lot of SFMOMA men whose wives don't know that they hang out at The Loading Dock and Daddy's and those men had promised to take their boys to the ball. Or maybe it wasn't about their boys, it was about their toys... after all, SFMOMA isn't all that far from California Hall...
It gets worse! Apparently the ball often features a fashion show and this year the ball was to feature sartorial splendor from Wilkes Bashford. Yes, that's right, the ball was to be the debut of Willie Brown's new career as a model. (Ed: Apologies to our East Coast readers, but we gotta throw some inside jokes to the Ess Effers amongst us.) And last year, guests received free Chanel fragrances. This was not mere Prada-class vanity: Given the near-total darkness inside SFMOMA's new James Turrell installation, it's helpful to be able to find the exit just by following the trail of Chanel wafting in from the nearest gallery.
"This is a scandal within the museum," another donor told the Chron. If this is a scandal, I can only wonder what that donor thinks of that gallery of awful Still paintings up on SFMOMA's second floor. Or of the museum's failure to own a single major figurative Diebenkorn.
But just as we were beginning to doubt that the SFMOMA bunch has its priorities in order, along comes Cathy Post, the head of the museum's fundraising arm. "This decision was fiscally responsible and demonstrated the integrity of SFMOMA," Post said. That's right, in case you thought that the integrity of museums was based on exhibition programs or their permanent collections (sorry, Ned), you've been set straight. Museum integrity is a direct function of the ability of a museum to cancel a party on which people were counting.
Some donors aren't buying Post's line. "It reflects badly on the museum," one said. And you thought a museum's reputation had something to do with art. No, no, naive MANpals, if you think that you're not reading your Charlie Finch. Never forget, the art world is about three things: money, sex and access to money and sex. Oh yeah, and art.
(Ed: Are those all legit quotes? Me: I stole them directly from the Chronicle. Somewhere Herb Caen is cackling in his grave.)
(In a related note, I'm tired of seeing only bad wine at art openings. From now on galleries that serve me decent scotch or good vodka at their openings will be guaranteed a mention on MAN.)
I've wanted a reason to link to this fine review of Robert Hughes' Goya, but I decided I didn't need a reason.
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Terrie Sultan on Chuck Close
Terrie Sultan is the director of the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston and is the curator of Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration, which recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sultan is also the author of the show's catalog. The show opened in Houston and will travel to nine more cities, thus possibly becoming the only show on the planet to visit anywhere near as many cities as the Corcoran's Gordon Parks photo retrospective. (Sultan used to work at the Corcoran...) MAN asked Sultan five questions about the show:
 MAN: Do you think of the show as primarily a show about the art of printmaking or as primarily a Chuck Close show?
TS: I think of the show as being about the art of Chuck Close's printmaking, which is perhaps different from many other approaches, because he is very much involved with the process and the collaborative nature of his experimentation, and he is really pushing at the boundaries of what traditional printmaking can be.
MAN: What do you think of the installation at the Met?
TS: I think the installation at the Met is beautiful, very linear in a good way. Nan Rosenthal set up some interesting juxtapositions that are different from what we presented at Blaffer Gallery. Each time a new curator works with this material the interpretations will deepen, and that's one of the things that is so rich about this exhibition. One can see it in different museums and have different experiences.
MAN: In addition to the Close show, there will be a Jim Dine prints show opening at the National Gallery in March. Is there a surge of interest in printmaking (among either curators or collectors) and if so, why?
TS: I think that many curators have realized just how important making prints are to a number of important artists who might be better known as painters or sculptors. In addition, I feel that there is more recognition that prints can be equally compelling as "unique" works.
 MAN: What attracted you to the idea of doing a Chuck Close prints show?
TS: I have known Chuck for ten years, and had often talked to him about process -- which is something that really interests me as a curator. Philosophically, I think of my curatorial work as being an effort to enhance an audience's understanding of what an artwork is, and the expectations of what an artist can do. When I saw the progressives and proofs of the big Alex reduction linoleum cut, it was something of an epiphany. Chuck has always wanted to do a show focused on the process and collaborative nature of his printmaking practice, and in a way this project was a partnership made in heaven.
MAN: In 50 years, when the world has had a little distance from which to evaluate Close's work and career, how will his printmaking factor into our assessment of him?
TS: Chuck once said to me that any innovation that is evident in his paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print. I hope that this exhibition will provide audiences the opportunity to make that same voyage of discovery. 50 years from now, I think that it will be impossible to separate Chuck's innovations in printmaking from the overall assessment of his career as an artist.
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Will there be a Whitney Biennial in 2006?
 The Art Newspaper looks at Adam Weinberg's Whitney and buries the lede:
"While Mr Weinberg has not decided how to organise the 2006 biennial, he is giving serious thought to 'an installation of the entire museum top-to-bottom with the collection.'"
Really! Would this mean that the traditional American-art-in-the-last-two-years biennial wouldn't happen in 2006? (That would save money, of course.) Later in the story Weinberg floats the idea of moving the biennial to the Armory building on Park Ave. Still, the story is unclear and someone from the Whitney should clear this up...
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Monday potpourri
Some Schjeldahl-in-Richmond notes today or tomorrow, meanwhile... Some news and notes from around the print media and the blogosphere while I try to catch up on email from last week:
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MAN's Weekend Reading List
Haven't had time to read everything on MAN recently? Here's your handy guide, ready-made for bloggers who want to link to something over the weekend but don't want to do too much work... (And I promise more pithy posts next week!)
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Lies, lies, lies: Robert Lazzarini @ VMFA
Last Friday was poker night. Once a month some buddies and I play seven-card, no-limit Texas hold-'em with re-buys. Last Friday's game was, for me anyway, as good as it gets.
By midnight, everyone in our game had gone bust and Walter and I were left playing heads-up. About 20 minutes into our mano-a-mano showdown, I got a hand. My hole cards were nothing to get too excited about: 9-10 off-suit, but I hadn’t played a hand in a while so I bet it stronger than I should have. Walter called me and we saw a flop. Two tens and a nine. Wow! Full house for me, bay-bee. I slow-played it, checking to Walter and he checked too. The next card was an eight. I checked to Walter again. This time he made a strong bet.
I made a big show out of having to think about what to do. Finally, I called. The last card: a jack! Four to a straight were on the board. I made a modest bet, the kind of bet that says, "If you have a real hand, you’re going to call or raise. But if you don't, you’ll go away and I'll win the pot." Walter played right into me, raising me huge. Now I knew: he had earned his straight on the river. But I had a tens full of nines, bay-bee. As soon as Walter’s raise was in the pot, I went all-in. He had no choice but to call. I was right, he had a straight. The pot was mine. A couple hands later he was broke and I had won the game and about $400. Triumph!
Well, except for one thing: I lied. I constructed an elaborate set-up, complete with the right poker-specific details, to try to convince you that I am a poker stud (bay-bee).
There's nothing wrong with that, is there? If the fiction is good enough, no one minds being lied to. We enjoy the tale and the telling and we walk away with a stitch in our sides, looking forward to the next time we'll all meet.
 So it was with the early-career survey of the works of sculptor Robert Lazzarini, curated by John Ravenal at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibit was an elaborately constructed lie from beginning to end. Everything in the show, from Lazzarini's hyper-real distorted sculptures to the flooring in each room, to the lighting, to the way the sculptures were installed, to the custom-built rooms themselves, every bit of this show was constructed to lie to the viewer. And golly was it glorious.
Lazzarini is the kind of artist whose work you only need to see once to remember forever. His distortions are too exacting to be discounted as merely clever. There’s all kinds of art historical stuff going on here but I can’t talk myself into caring: Looking at Lazzarini's objects is just too much damn fun. Art is rarely both inventive enough to inspire a child-like feeling of fascination, and perfect enough to make us question what is real and what isn't.
While Lazzarini's sculptures would be fantastically gee-whiz just about anywhere (I saw two of his cigarette-pack sculptures in a container at Art Basel Miami Beach and they elicited from me something in the gee-whiz range), his work requires a theatrical installation to lift them from gee-whiz to disorienting. At VMFA, they got it.
Right at the outset of the show mental confusion gave rise to physical unsteadiness. Just before entering the show, I saw a giant decal of one of Lazzarini's skull pieces adhered to a wall. The decal piqued my interested, I was ready to see more.
Ravenal constructed an entrance that required you to be all the way inside the first dusky gray room before Lazzarini's first work was viewable. At the end of the dark room was a brightly lit space in which a distorted violin hovered. At first -- and at second -- it was hard to tell if the violin was another decal on the wall or a trompe l'oeil painting or, well, or what. I wanted to walk briskly toward the violin to find out what it was, but thousands of years of evolution have trained humans to move slowly when we're unsure of what we’re walking toward. Once I arrived at Violin, there were no guards nor a motion detector telling me I couldn’t get real close to it. So I stuck my mug within an inch or two of the violin, examining it carefully. Only when I was right up close to it did the sculpture reveal itself as a sculpture.
 It is testament to Lazzarini's work and Ravenal's installation that even when I knew distortions were coming that they maintained their effect. A room of Lazzarini's four skulls was especially effective. Ravenal painted the walls in the gallery a light gray, only a couple shades away from the off-white of the skulls. The carpet on the floor was only a shade darker than the walls. The lighting was installed behind a uniformly translucent grid of panels, flattening the light in the room. When I entered the space, I felt vaguely like I was weightless, that at any moment I might float across the room like an astronaut chasing a globule of water on the space shuttle.
The installation was most effective when it created the exhibit equivalent of super-flat environments. In most of the rooms, there were no details to distract the mind from the confusion of the objects. There was molding on the walls, no spotlights, no wall text. In only one space did Ravenal and Lazzarini break from the flatness, the room in which Payphone was installed. Payphone was stuck in a seven-sided room, which somewhat blunted the effect of the piece. (Apparently the Richmond fire marshal was rather insistent that an exit be put in that room, forcing the build-out of a couple of extra walls.)
It is a terrible shame that this show did not (and will not) travel beyond Richmond. Lazzarini’s work only twice been on view east of Richmond. Fortunately Lazzarini and Ravenal collaborated on a catalog of the exhibition and it is a must-own.
If you missed the show in Richmond, here’s what you should do: Buy the catalog. Study it. Tell people you saw the show. Maybe they’ll know you’re lying, maybe not…
"robert lazzarini" was on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts from October 25, 2003 to January 4, 2004. www.vmfa.state.va.us
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Chelsea Notebook: Edward Burtynsky
Edward Burtynsky @ Charles Cowles: If Richard Misrach is our greatest landscape photographer, Edward Burtynsky is our greatest destroyed landscape photographer. (That link is to the monograph from his recent National Gallery of Canada mid-career retrospective.) Burtynsky's latest series, Before the Flood, is a walk through China's Three Gorges Dam project, an industrial mega-scheme that will create the world's largest dam and the world's largest dammed lake when it is complete. (Burtynsky's photographs often benefit from some backstory. Fortunately, a June 7, 2003 story in the New Yorker provides it. What a great read.) This is one of only a handful of super shows up in Chelsea right now. Don't miss it.
The color in these photographs, as usual in Burtynsky, is eerie and artifical. There is a simple rule in these photographs: The more vibrant the color, the more likely it is to come from something injected into the environment by humans. In the Three Gorges photos, there is no sunlight. The sky, when we see it, is the most neutral of grays. The water is never blue. In the one photograph where there is a hint of blue sky, it is obscured by pollution from open fires.
Instead, the color we see makes us wince. Once-beautiful landscape is marred by blue vinyl tarps, yellow construction trailers, red signs of Chinese characters, green cranes and red and orange shipping containers. In one photo of the construction of the dam, the surrounding water shares a color with AquaFresh toothpaste.
 Burtynsky loves to record destruction the same way Charles Sheeler loved to record the result of construction. Many of the photos in this show are wide-angle shots that show the mass of destruction of a huge place. In many images, rubble fills almost the entire frame. These are affecting images but they're not moving images.
There is one moving image in the show. It is the heart of the show, the one image that personalizes the scale of obliteration that Burtynsky captures so effectively. It is an image of a house, one house. Someone lived there. It was their home. Someone painted the door green and matched that color with the trim of the windows. In Burtynsky's photo the home is surrounded by and filled with rock, concrete, rebar and discarded wood. In a few months this home will be under water.
Edward Burtynksy: Before the Flood is on view from January 2 to January 31, 2004 at Charles Cowles Gallery, 537 West 24th Street, New York, New York 10011. (212) 741-8999. www.charlescowles.com
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The Return of Lawrence Small
Update on Review Week: It was a stupid idea. I'm not sure why I thought I could crank out that many words in that short a period of time, but I'll blame it on getting back from New York at something approaching 2 am on Sunday morn. So you'll find Robert Olsen below, and I will post my Robert Lazzarini @ VMFA review before leaving to hear Peter Schjeldahl in Richmond on Saturday (probably on Friday sometime). Look for Joe Deal at Robert Mann Gallery on Sunday or Monday. (In the meantime, order the Lazzarini book from the Lazzarini link above. It's a must-own. Here's a blurb from the publisher.) Now, an item or two that Gawker just can't match:
I mean, how could you top a story that involves Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist, a jabiru, a roseate spoonbill, a crested caracara, the voluntary surrender or a featherwork collection, and an apparently pending guilty plea by the head of the Smithsonian, Larry Small. (My favorite bit in the story: Less-than-intrepid Postie Jacqueline Trescott quoting Smithsonian Magazine's opinion of Small's bird-stuff collection. Stunner: the mag loved it.)
And because we love stolen art, there's $1.5M (well, Canadian) in ivory missing from a museum in Toronto. The Canucks are pleasantly and rather entertainingly all kerfuffle.
Artnet.com has a fine news roundup that just went up on their site. Good stuff about Arbus and lots more.
Finally, check out the monthly blogroll on the right hand side of MAN. There are some really good posts in them five right now.
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Robert Olsen: Painter of Modern Light
So this is what light looks like in the dark.
In Robert Olsen's paintings, light doesn’t take on any of the action verbs we have associated with it since impressionism. Shimmering, bathing, sparkling, dancing, radiating… Olsen's light doesn’t do any of those things. In Monet, sunlight shimmers off of a river. In Toulouse-Lautrec, dancers are bathed in gaslight. In impressionism, light lives out that which we would like to have happen to us. I love to be bathed. I think I would like to be shimmered.
 Robert Olsen paints industrial, fluorescent light. It comes from tubes of argon, mercury and phosphor. It doesn't do flitty impressionist things. As phosphor illuminates surfaces it attacks them. It exposes them. Most artists hate working in or having their work shown under fluoresecent light. But in Olsen's small paintings – each is about the size of a piece of paper – fluorescent light looks like the glow that comes from pearls. Olsen's light sits. It rests.
From the now-clichéd 'heavenly glow' of 16th-century Italian painting to impressionism to Dan Flavin, artists have long been fascinated by the effects of light. Today, light is taken for granted. The last artist I can think of that substantially changed the way we think about light in art was Flavin and he started making his light sculptures in 1961. Olsen could be next.
Olsen's paintings are born in details from digital photographs that he takes as he wanders the Los Angeles night. (Philip Marlowe would feel right at home in an Olsen.) Because he prowls after midnight, when light is most absent, Olsen has a terrific eye for how light exists within an environment. This is what he paints.
 Where the light is most intense in his paintings, his hand-painted lines (no taping-off here) are sharpest. When there is a gap between two aluminum panels in an elevator, Olsen drags a couple of strands of the brush over the gap so that a line of light just barely continues over the break. Olsen's attention to detail extends to how he builds the paintings: a layer of paint, then a wet sanding, a layer of paint, then a wet sanding, over and over again, 20 times or more. At the end of this process, the painted surfaces are flat and appear photo-realistic from a distance, but reveal themselves as abstractions of flat color when you move closer to them.
Still, for all the process, fluorescent light can't be this beautiful, can it? Somehow, it can. In a painting of a Getty Center elevator -- a typical industrial brushed-aluminum box -- Olsen paints the ugly into something seductive. We don't see the light source in this painting, but we see how the aluminum walls and the floor of the elevator catch, hold and soften it. I usually think of fluorescent light as cold and persistent. But because Olsen is more interested in the way light lands on surfaces and not the actual light itself, that cold effect is muted. The reflection of the elevator floor on aluminum makes the floor look like a gentle fog. The light bouncing off of the elevator inspection certificate lands on a wall of the elevator and appears to float. Even the direct reflection of the light in the aluminum, while harsh in the center, dissipates as it moves down the aluminum wall eventually giving way to a smoky gray.
 When Olsen paints the source of the light, he cleverly plays the white of the light off of the darkness of the surrounding spaces. In Untitled (Tram Interior), thousands and thousands of fluorescent photons fidget into forgotten parts of a tram car the way broccoli blooms nestle between your teeth. The result is a painting with one light source – the fluorescent light at the top of the painting – but with no fewer than 25 points of brightness where the light holds to hard surfaces.
One reason Olsen's light looks more seductive than phosphor ever should is because he understands that contrasts appeal to the eye. The best way to make harsh light look beautiful is to play it off its opposite: black. And Olsen's black is complete.
Most of our allusions to blackest black are associated with astronomy. We assume that the unknown voids of the universe are completely black because we have nothing else with which to color them. Black holes are unimaginably black. The space between stars is black. That’s the kind of black that Robert Olsen paints. His black is like the finest Armani tuxedo: It returns no light to the eye.
 My favorite painting in the show, Untitled (Night View, Elevator Exterior), shows Olsen's complete mastery of the contrast between black and light. In the center of the painting an elevator entrance is soaked in harsh light and the light spills out of the enclosure into the darkness outside. Where the light doesn’t reach, the blackness is total. The light doesn’t flow out of the enclosure, it timidly seeps.
There are nine paintings in this show, five from the Getty Center, one of a tattoo and three dark paintings of people showing off tattoos. The Getty paintings are the stars of the show and they are fine examples of what Olsen has been painting in recent years. The paintings of humans are new and not quite as polished as the Getty paintings. Still, the are clever in the way an Ad Reinhardt painting is clever. You have to look and allow your eyes to adjust to the light level in the painting before the details reveal themselves out of the dark. While Olsen's paintings are all about the effects of light, the light he loves can only exist where it is dark.
Robert Olsen: "re:moving" is on view from January 7 to February 8, 2004 at Plane Space, 102 Charles Street, New York, New York 10014. (917) 606-1266. www.plane-space.com.
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Chelsea Now
About halfway through a Chelsea gallery crawl on Saturday, I walked through Michael Kvium's show at DCA Gallery. I didn’t really like the paintings -– the flabby, post-coital geezers that anchor Kvium’s paintings annoyed me -– but I liked Kvium's handling of paint, the way he built up birch trees with a spatula.
"Well, there’s kind of something there," I said to a MANpal. "I mean, I almost like them."
My friend shot me a withering look and informed me that my standards were slipping. She was right. After having seen (at that point in the day) about 20 shows that ranged between mediocre and holy-cow-that’s-crap, my standards had slipped to the point where paintings of condom-clutching old farts were getting past my defenses.
 There are a lot of uninteresting -- even bad -- shows up in Chelsea right now. Case in point: The Claude Tousignant show at Jack Shainman (at left) is a leading contender for Dullest Show of 2004. I should have known it was going to be a stinker: Anytime a gallery’s press release mostly compares their artist to other, more famous artists, you can pretty much bet that the show will be horrid.
So what's in Chelsea that's so painful to the eye? Where to start! Little-known fact: Each Chelsea gallery is required by New York state law to annually show semi-erotic photos of pouty Tiger Beat boys. As a result, it's easy to find white, smooth-skinned, bare-torsoed boys in any number of galleries. (Gallery p.r. tip No. 2: People like me know that there is a direct correlation between the adjectives used in a press release and the art in a show. Take the David Armstrong show at Matthew Marks, for example. Press release adjectives included: quiet, romantic, idealized, gentle, soft, and delicate. As an added bonus. MM's p.r. included the phrase, "invested in beauty." Yes, the show was awful.)
From there it only got worse: Quilts. (Memo to artists: Never in the history of art have either poodles or pigs been the primary subject of great art. A reader suggests Hirst and Saville. Ick.) Post-fauve urban landscapes. Unfocused vacation photos. Marble sculptures that are supposed to be poignant with meaning but that instead come off as kitschy nods to art history.
I could go on and on like this, but Charlie Finch has a corner on the acidic curmudgeon market and he does it better than I do. For the last couple months I've been saying that Los Angeles is a more interesting place to see contemporary art than New York. I'm even more sure of that after my most recent Chelsea trip.
Still, I found some art to like. (Where are those artists from? SF, LA, Chicago, and Toronto. Not a New Yorker, not even a transplant, among them.) Later today I'll post a notebook of thoughts and sights from around New York City. (Fellow AJ blogger John Perreault is a better person that I am because he's already posted about his Saturday crawl. Read him on the Picabia, et al show at Sperone.) Here’s the (updated) schedule for the week:
Tuesday: Robert Olsen @ Plane Space
Wednesday: Robert Lazzarini at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Thursday: Joe Deal @ Robert Mann Gallery
Friday: NYC notebook (featuring Richard Misrach, Louise LeBourgeois, Edward Burtynsky and Chuck Close)
Of course, if the Barnes decision comes down this week, we'll interrupt our regularly scheduled programming. (I've always wanted to say that.)
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Finally! (What took him so long?)
Would you believe that it took until today for the Philly Inky's art critic to weigh in on the Barnes' move to the Ben Franklin Parkway? Today! For what was Edward Sozanski waiting?!?
Funny (to me) thing: I'm obviously the only one who thinks that the condition of the art on Latch's Lane is a concern. No one else mentions it when they write about the Barnes, not even the hometown art critic.
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Cooler than most contemporary art
The over-under on the guy who did this being signed by a Chelsea gallery is six days. I mean, this is much better than Jason Rhoades' crap, so why not Zwirner?
It gets better: The artist wants to "make a short film documenting the life and assassination of Trotsky using the Smurfs." That would make him more interesting than Matthew Barney!
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Friday potpourri
CityComforts, one of my favorite blogs, doesn't like my downtown LA arts district idea. CC's David Sucher asks if the concept has ever worked anywhere? He cites Lincoln Center as an example of an arts campus that has failed from an urban planning point of view. I'd add LACMA.
I'd suggest a couple of successful cultural districts: West Chelsea in NYC, which started with Dia and then attracted arts galleries by the dozens, and the Seventh Street/Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, DC, which is full of theaters, a sports and entertainment arena, galleries and two Smithsonian outposts (which are closed until, I think, 2006). There are several thoughtful comments @ CityComforts that discuss other places too.
In the shamelessly-stolen-link department (thanks to artsblogger and gallery owner Caryn Coleman of blogging.la), I bring you this article about Catherine Opie's new show at Regen Projects. The twist is that the story is from the website of the Van Buren Place Community Restoration Association, the largest website about the West Adams district of LA. (Caryn also gives me a chance to plug my forthcoming semi-profile of Opie which will be in the next issue of Black Book magazine.) The story is rudimentary but the photos are fun. Opie herself looks quite happy to be clutching a drink.
Speaking of clutching a drink, don't miss this week's installment of photos from around the NYC openings. Drunk artists and gallery-goers everywhere!
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Most expensive painting ever?
Longtime MAN readers know that I treat the spring and fall auctions a little bit like a sporting event. In the auctions you have expectations, players, the game, the post-game spin.
Well, the rush for spring auction-filler is on, and Sotheby's has snagged what The Guardian thinks could be a $70M Picasso, 1905's Boy With A Pipe. At that level, it would challenge Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet for the most expensive painting sold at auction. (Cynthia Saltzman wrote a fine book about the history of the painting and its sale. A must-read.) Van Gogh's painting went for $82.5M, so the Picasso would really have to out-perform Sotheby's estimate a bit. (The Guardian says $75M, perhaps a difference in exchange rates?)
(Worth noting: The Reuters story doesn't mention the challenge to Portrait of Dr. Gachet.)
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Is she great even though she... lost a piano?
I was going to leave this alone. Really, I was. But sourcegreaser puff-pieces are sometimes so willfully blind that they deserve to be called out. Such is the case with Dan Geringer's Philly Daily News fawning mini-profile of Kimberly Camp, the boss of the Barnes. Geringer is so busy praising Camp that he never once addresses the total mess that the management of the Barnes has exacerbated.
Quick recap: Camp is the executive director of the Barnes. The very same one who admitted on the stand in court that the Barnes has lost "hundreds" of works of art and other things, including a piano. The same one whose management skills were rather completely exposed in Judge Stanely Ott's courtroom. (I'm not going to reprise them all here, there in the December archives, about two-thirds down from 12/8 to 12/13.)
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The visual arts in second-tier cities
This David Bonetti essay about the state of the visual arts in St. Louis could have been written about anywhere but the four cities he mentions (NY, LA, SF, Chicago). I used to live in St. Louis and I went to college in Missouri (and I visited St. Louis a month or two back) and I think Bonetti gets his still-new town exactly right. (Bonetti used to write for the San Francisco Examiner.)
Beyond the value of an art school, Bonetti doesn't address what would help second-tier cities such as St. Louis. I'd add this: One component oft-discussed by Washingtonians is the need for an expansion of the collector class.
St. Louis aside: I just finished a magazine profile of Catherine Opie, who met her partner Julie Burleigh in St. Louis. In all of our conversations about their living in St. Louis, neither of them once mentioned a gallery or alternative arts space. And I didn't think to bring it up. We talked about SLAM and the Pulitzer, but nowhere else.
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Two upcoming events
If you're in the mid-Atlantic, here are two don't-miss events:
* On Jan. 24, New Yorker art critic (and poet) Peter Schjeldahl will be speaking in Richmond, Va. The talk, in conjunction with a show that Schjeldahl is jurying for 1708 Gallery, will be held at the VCU Business Building Auditorium.
* On Feb. 1, Faith Flanagan has lined up an all-star cast for her first MUSE salon of the winter. (Faith takes off January.) Stop into the D.C. Arts Center at 7:30 p.m. to hear Hirshhorn board chair Robert Lehrman, Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik, and George Hemphill of Hemphill Fine Arts hold forth.
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In favor of an arts district in downtown L.A.
There is something uniquely Los Angeles about the new Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall: it is both a building in a city and a building surrounded by virtually nothing. As visual excitement, the Disney succeeds in part because it seems to be blooming above a visually empty area. But as a building in the heart of a city, it will eventually have to co-exist with surrounding structures. The Gehry will probably still look marvelous, but what will surround it?
 (Let's pause for a moment to sketch out the area around Disney Hall. Gehry's creation sits on a hill above downtown Los Angeles. On three sides, downtown falls away from Disney Hall. Two of these sides are visible in the photograph above: the side between downtown and the Disney includes a grassy hill and a parking lot, the other side is a cheap steel and concrete parking lot. (The third side is a sunken city street not really visible here. Behind Disney Hall in this photo is the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.) As you can see, there are two sides of Disney Hall that are substantially undeveloped. This map, prepared by Eli Broad's Grand Avenue Committee (more on them in a minute), shows this all much better than I can describe it.)
 This means that there are two prime tracts that flank the Disney, both just begging for development of some kind. The most important of these two plots is the double-lot between the Disney and downtown Los Angeles. This tract, halved by a sunken street, is directly between Disney Hall and the Wells Fargo Center (visible here on the left-hand side of the photograph. Between the Wells Fargo Center and the Disney is the grassy hill/parking lot visible in the previous photo). This empty lot is across the street from The Museum of Contemporary Art and the Colburn School of Performing Arts, both of which are cut off from the left-hand side of this photo. (The Colburn's roof is visible in the foreground of the first photo.) This is the plot of land I want to talk about because it is this plot that holds much potential for creating a cultural district in downtown Los Angeles.
Eli Broad's Grand Avenue Committee wants to turn this area into a mix of retail, movie theater, residential, office and other such nonsense. There are lots of places in downtown L.A. to place humdrum projects such as these. And it's been done before in downtown LA to no great effect. There's no compelling reason that the land between the Disney and downtown L.A. should be 7+FIG north.
Here's hoping that Los Angeles instead seizes the opportunity to create a major cultural district downtown. I submit two alternate uses for those plots of land. One is my idea, one is the idea of a MANpal who lives in L.A.
 My idea: The current Los Angeles Museum County of Art campus is an abomination. (In fact, LACMA is so ugly, no one has photographed it in 30 years, so this postcard is the most recent digital image available.) LACMA is in the middle of mid-Wilshire, on an undistinguished stretch of Wilshire Blvd. notable mostly for being the home of LACMA. As with much of LA, there's no there there. Eli Broad has, in effect, hired Renzo Piano to design a new LACMA there on mid-Wilshire, thus conveniently making sure that LACMA will stay in mid-Wilshire and that it won't be interested in moving. (Amazingly, LACMA makes no mention of the Piano project on its website, so you'll have to go here for the LA Times story and here for what the Piano vision looks like. Oh wait, there is no Piano vision yet...)
So move LACMA downtown! Put it between the Disney and the Wells Fargo Center, thus moving away from the horrid campus-style complex on Wilshire, and helping create a vibrant cultural district downtown. Or...
MANpal's idea: The Getty has a fabulous collection of photography. At present, it goes largely unseen at the Getty complex. Why not build a Getty outpost to house the photography collection and put it right in the middle of downtown LA, in the same plot?
Either way, LA would be building itself a fantastic cultural district, complete with MOCA, the Redcat Gallery (which is already in the Disney), and the new museum. The Chinatown galleries are a three-minute drive away, as are the Bank District galleries, the latest (potentially) emerging gallery area in LA.
Is any of this possible, let alone likely? No. Eli Broad has his ducks in a row -- he's paying for the new Renzo Piano LACMA (and giving it much of his collection of contemporary art) and his foundation is a major funder behind the Grand Avenue Committee. Ah well.
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Monday Morning Potpourri
* It appears likely that the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art will loan a Francis Bacon triptych to the Tate. Would you believe that the Tehran MOCA has a website?
* LA arts blogger (and Sixspace gallery co-owner) Caryn Coleman posts about some upcoming LA shows. (And kindly mentions a magazine article I was in LA to work on a couple weeks back.)
* From a conversation with a friend on Sunday: The National Gallery has a staggering amount of work, especially modern and contemporary work, in storage in Prince George's County, Maryland. Why doesn't the NGA build some touring shows and send 'em out? (The NGA is pretty much immune from museum belt-tightening and had a $118M budget in FY 2000.) I can't recall the NGA having done this in years.
* I'm coming out as the emailer who prompted this Terry Teachout post. The parlor game started on a ride back from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' Robert Lazzarini show (once you've finished being amazed at the sheer superfluity of strip malls between DC and Richmond, parlor games are the only place to go) when a friend of mine and I were discussing what institutions would be a joy to serve and what institutions would be more work than it would be worth.
For example, if I were a board member at the GuggEnron, I might have had to see the Barney show more than once. That would have been unacceptable. Plus I'd also be somewhat responsible for shows having to do with motorcycles and clothing manufacturers. Nope, not for me.
My pick -- and it's an easy one -- would be the Phillips Collection. It does marvelous shows, it has a fantastic facility and it is more focused on its core mission than any visual arts institution I can think of. This isn't to say the Phillips is perfect: the current loan show from the Hartford Atheneum is uninspiring and the Phillips did loan a bunch of paintings to a commercial gallery in a Las Vegas hotel (something I defended on MAN because I thought they were loaning the paintings to the Guggenheim-run space in Vegas, not to the Pace Wildenstein-run space -- my mistake).
But there is no museum in which I feel more comfortable and more at home -- and in the era of 300,000-600,000-square foot museums, that's a rare thing.
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Welcome to the new MAN
Welcome to Modern Art Notes. For those of you who are readers of the old site, thanks for following me over to AJ. If you’re new, please allow me to explain what the heck MAN is.
This is my chronicle of my thoughts about and passions for modern and contemporary art. It’s updated pretty much every weekday, and occasionally on weekends when something particularly irks or emboldens me.
(Yes, the name of the blog is a lie. For over two years I’ve written about both modern art and contemporary art. When I originally started the blog, “contemporaryartnotes.blogspot.com” was too long for the (previous) software to handle. So the site became MAN. And really, it’s more fun to be cutesy with MAN stuff than with CAN stuff. CAN sounds a bit much like a neo-socialist co-op.)
I write about art. That includes broad ideas about the art world to specific thoughts about specific artists and shows. I live in Washington, but I travel to New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco many times a year and to lots of other places too. I think that too much art writing is one-city centric: for example, New York writers write about New York and not much else. Between my day job (as a political consultant) and my love of art, I get around a pretty good bit. I try to write about what I see. In the early days of MAN I listed some favorite shows, now I try to be a bit more thorough. That's one change regular readers will see: more 400-800 word reviews of shows I've seen.
For all the traveling, Washington is my home. You will read more about the Hirshhorn and the Phillips Collection and the National Gallery than you would if I lived in Dubuque. (And bully for that.) Washington has great museums with great programs (meaning not just exhibits, but lectures, symposia and all that stuff too). Washington has a perpetually emerging gallery scene, and when they warrant I write about them. Sometimes I'll write about them here, sometimes I'll write about them for artnet.com.
My pet peeves will be revealed to you over time (or you might enjoy a stroll through the archives). However here is the key to the site: Too much art writing is written by people with MFA’s and PhD’s who display passion for neither art nor writing. I come to art as someone who loves to experience great work, as someone who writes about art from my soul and not from a graduate degree. Art writing should come from a compulsion to share, not from preachy pretension and didacticism.
A couple of notes on site design: I find that blogrolls that are too long discourage me from clicking on any of the links. So MAN will feature five different arts blogs each month on the blogroll at right. Everything else will be updated more regularly than that, I think.
I think we have an interesting first week's worth of posts lined up, including some thoughts on Louis Menand in last weeks' New Yorker to what Los Angeles should do with the two empty lots between downtown and the new Disney Hall.
Finally but most importantly, thanks to Doug McLennan for inviting me to AJ and for creating the new site (which I never could have done!) and to Terry Teachout for his help too.
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