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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
News and notes
Lots of really good arts reads/looks out there today.
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WSJ Response
Admin note: Yesterday I mentioned how AJmate James S. Russell has more good stuff on Zaha Hadid's Pritzker. I suggested that you read it. Then I goofed up the link. Sorry about that. Try clicking here.
The Wall Street Journal's web page has a posting of some responses to what I wrote yesterday.
Responses in my email were a little different. More than a few people emailed me to say that they grew up in small towns and how great access to a national Whitney Biennial would have been for them. New Yorkers, except for those from outlying areas, generally had the opposite view.
Quite a few Texas readers wrote to point out that I could (or should) have included Houston and/or Dallas-Fort Worth in my list of areas with great access to contemporary art. Definitely a fair point. My response was that I'm not sure that those areas have the gallery/artspace depth of the other cities on my list, but I certainly agree it's a debatable point.
Two museum admin types wrote to say that while the idea is good, it is nothing unless loan fees are extremely modest. Good point.
In fact, I received a lot of email about the funding equation and how that would work. Clearly doing something similar to what I outlined would require a substantial chunk o' cash, probably $3-5 million per Biennial. Given the state of government arts funding, I can't see the NEA contributing. They're too busy funding national tours of Shakespeare (because Shakespeare is so hard to find in this country!), and tours of safe, not-very-good, early American modern painting. I think that the sources of income would have to be private, say a corporate or philanthropic foundation, plus some state money from each of the non-NYC venues.
(And then there was the reader who wrote in with a fake name, fake business and fake email address who felt he had to tell me that all Palestinians are terrorists.)
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Today's most transparent art world fib
In Carol Vogel's NYT write-up of Sotheby's $5.4M estimate for a Vermeer that is coming up at auction:
"There's every indication the painting will do a lot better because of its rarity and because Vermeer is such an iconic artist," said Alexander Bell, head of Sotheby's old master paintings department in London. "We wanted people to concentrate on the picture, not the price."
Yeah, right.
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Around the blogosphere (and more)
Just coming in from the WSJ? Here's an explanation of what the heck MAN is.
UPDATE: Earlier today, I suggested that someone come up with a name for the Eli Broad space at LACMA. Readers sent in about a dozen suggestions, but Deborah Knuckey contributed the easy winner. It requires some pronunciation-tweaking and a killer Mae West-inspired logo. The winner: The Contemporary Broad.
Make sure you pick up a New York Times tomorrow. The paper will run a "Museums" special section. Stories will include: a write-up of the Eli Broad Contemporary at LACMA (boy does that need a clever shortening, a la the Temporary Contemporary), a profile of MoMA boss Glenn Lowry, the bursted bubble that is/was internet art, the Williams College art mafia, and the Marjorie Merriweather Post art collection in Germantown, MD.
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WSJ response (ongoing)
Throughout the day I'll update this post with some responses to my WSJ opinion piece...
From LA collector Alex Worman:
"A traveling Biennial is a good idea. However, cutting the group down to 8-12 artists is not going to happen. First, Whitney curators would lose their jobs since 3 people are not needed to pick that few artists. Second, the 50-100+ galleries (ie "the art world") that make mucho bucks from having their artists included in the Biennial would be all up in arms. So what would happen is that the New Museum or MoMA would step in and create their own standing-room-only Biennial with 100+ artists to compete with or supplant the Whitney. And finally, as much as I love the place, New York will NEVER do anything to lessen its arts & culture dominance. New York is not interested in heartland America. If it doesn't happen in New York it doesn't matter."
Alex raises some good points. Historical note: Once upon a time, the Whitney only had one curator. I think galleries would be annoyed, but I'm not sure how much impact gallerist-whining would have. I think curators love being able to make friends in the gallery world by including certain artists, and they'd lose that. I don't think that another institution would step in with an alternate/related show, at least not more than they have already. And the NYC cultural dominance issue is real. Museum boards aren't interested in providing much for Omaha. (But the NEA or private foundations should be.)
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Me in the WSJ
In today's Wall Street Journal I toss out an idea for how the Whitney Biennial could be a different, more important show:
"The Whitney Biennial should be the most important presentation of contemporary art in America. Instead, we usually dislike it by degrees. The problem is as often the execution of the concept as it is the art itself. Instead of nitpicking at a single show, let's explore how the concept of a biennial survey of new American art can be most effectively used."
Read the details here. (And if the link doesn't work, the paper is only $1.)
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Welcome to MAN
Welcome to Wall Street Journal readers coming to MAN for the first time.
This is my chronicle of my thoughts of and passions for modern and contemporary art. It's updated several times every weekday.
(Yes, the name of the blog is a lie. For over two-and-a-half years years I've written here 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. This is a good thing: 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, 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: New York writers write about New York and not much else. L.A. writers write about L.A., sometimes San Francisco, and not much else. Between my day job and my love of art, I get around a pretty good bit. I try to write about what I see.
(I also write about anything that has something to do with art, kind of. For example, MANfave Cathy Opie was on Showtime's The L Word this week. I'll get the videotape today and I'll probably gossip about it later.)
You'll find some links to things I've written and links to some recent favorite shows and such over on the right-hand side. In the upper-right you'll find the archives (I've been on AJ since December 2003 and those archives are much more easily navigated than the old stuff) and my email address. Feel free to write. There are not enough places where people can discuss contemporary art. There are nowhere near as many blogs about visual art as there are blogs about the literary world, to name one other arts-minded subculture. Several times a week I try to link to as many arts-minded bloggers as I can.
Finally, I thought I'd guide new readers around a bit with some links to some recent (and relevant) writing. You can also scroll down through this page to read more. In the last month or so I've written about the Scope and Armory fairs, the Barnes Foundation, and a variety of other, broader topics.
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Joint MAN/abLA Gathering in LA
Inspired by the success of the ArtsJournal get-together in New York a few weeks ago, abLA and MAN are teaming up to copy the idea. The concept is simple: we pick a bar, you show up and buy us drinks, and we all have a good time. (OK, the "buying us drinks" part is optional.) So here's the skinny:
Date: Friday, April 9
Time: 8 pm to whenever
Place: The Gallery Bar in the Millenium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles (map here)
Parking: abLA, which is important enough to be written up in LA Weekly, tells me that the Biltmore has $3 valet parking!
Hope to see lots of you there!
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Reasons to look at art
Sometimes the best reason to look at art is being able to avoid what others have to say about it. Examples from the weekend that was:
- MOCA LA curator Paul Schimmel quoted in an incoherent NYT story on painter Laura Owens: "This reluctance to lay claim to a fixed position might at one time have been attributed to youth but is now an integral aspect of Owens's methodology."
- In a talk at the Hirshhorn, Curatorman Dan Cameron repeatedly referring to "using" artists in the Istanbul Biennial. Not showing them, "using" them. In two hours of talking, Cameron never once said he liked or loved an artist's work. He did, however, repeatedly refer to his poltical world-view and how he "used" artists to build a show about his world-view.
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Weekend roundup
Some recent posts for weekend reading:
Or dash to your nearby newsstand/Whole Foods Market to pick up a copy of Black Book magazine, wherein I discuss Cathy Opie.
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Last Joywar post
It's 70 and sunny in DC today. Translation: Don't expect a lot of blogging.
Remember Joywar? This is the funniest link (and the last one, I promise) yet.
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MAN's Five Fave Young Biennialists
First, MANfave Cup of Chicha wrote about some Whitney faves a few days ago and I inexplicably missed it. I rarely get to link to Chicha, so go check her out.
Much has already been written about the mix of the mature artists with the younger artists at the Whitney. The most interesting thing about it to me is this: there are standard-bearers in this show, artists against whom all the young turks may be measured. For me, it makes it easier to point out some young (say, under-35) artists that I'm looking forward to following. (Cecily Brown would be on this list but she was already in my five faves list.) The ages I give is their age at the end of 2003. Here they are:
1.) Chloe Piene (31). Chloe Piene is the luckiest artist in this year's Biennial. Her drawings are in The Masturbation Room, right next to two Cecily Brown paintings of a woman finding joy in her own dreams. The juxtaposition of Piene and Brown makes for a vibrant, energetic room. Drawn at sex-level, the shaky line of Piene's drawings is so unsteady as to make the viewer (well, me) wonder if the drawings are made by the masturbating woman herself. While Piene's drawings raise the question, the answer doesn't really matter. The energy in her line is seductive in its own right. And oh yeah, her video was captivating. But those drawings...
 2.) Emily Jacir (33). Jacir's mix of conceptual art, documentary, biography and photography didn't work for me the first time I saw it. I have no explanation for why, but it is the mark of good work that it grows on you over time. (That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.) Perhaps I've just been seeing all documentary-style work through the New Topographics lately, but Jacir's work reminded me very much of New Topo California landscapes. Instead of chronicling the incursion of man into the desert, for example, Jacir chronicles the incursion of law into the dailiy life of ordinary people. As the New Topos ostensibly made neutral photographs but in reality loaded them with wistfulness (see Deal, Joe), Jacir's photographs at first appear commonplace, but the accompanying text loads them with sadness.
3.) Amy Cutler (29). Cutler is a story-teller. There are not many story-tellers in the visual arts. There are fewer still with her visual sense of humor. Her works are installed in the Kusama Fireflies line, so they'll either get lots of viewers or they'll be lost behind the line.
4.) Julie Mehretu (33). Much has been made of how Mehretu's canvases are growing and that this is a good thing. (One of her Whitney pieces, Empirical Construction: Istanbul, is her largest ever. New York Magazine (click on Top Ten Young Artists link for the Flash) is one of the outlets that noted this.) It is nice and good and rare that Mehretu can work at a large scale, but what is really wonderful about her work is that her large works hold together as tight bundles of energy just as well as her smaller works. This is a very rare thing in contemporary art.
5.) Erick Swenson (31). Like Cutler, Swenson tells a fairy-tale-style story but does it with surreal animal-centric scultpure. His Untitled sculpture of a deer on a carpet (in the first room of the show) isn't my favorite Swenson, and it doesn't quite belong in the room, and it was a 2001 piece in the 2004 Biennial, but it was nice to see a Swenson all the same.
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Museums & joint video art purchases
UPDATE: You don't think Vogel soft-pedals stories in exchange for the excloo do you? Artnet.com noticed it in Vogel's handling of MoMA's upcoming sale of some significant modern works. (See the fourth item.) Artnet is right. Kind of like how Vogel pretends news is news because she's the only reporter who bit on it... (see the following)
I tried, I really tried to lay off Carol Vogel's morning missive. But I can't help myself.
There is no news in Vogel's story. Museums have been teaming up to buy art and to co-commission video art for years. So why the this-is-news-toned story?
Furthermore, video art certainly isn't necessarily so expensive that half a dozen institutions have to team up on it. (For example, Christian Jankowski's The Holy Artwork, which was on view at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, cost virtually nothing to produce.) Three major museums, the Tate, the Pompidou and the Whitney, teamed up to buy a Bill Viola several years ago, a joint acquisition that (as I recall but can't find documentation of), prompted the Met to make their first video acquisition -- a Viola. It's not even news on the West Coast. SF MOMA teamed up with a European museum to commission a Christian Marclay a couple of years back.
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Free ideas, get your free ideas here
One of the great traditions of this website is my propensity to throw out brilliant ideas that the world promptly ignores.
MAN's latest idea is a shout-out to the National Gallery of Art. (I can hear the blue-blooders blanching already: What is a shout-out?) It involves the large, stone wall inside the atrium of the East Building of the NGA. The wall once housed a particularly awful Miro tapestry (known locally as the Snotty Miro because it resembled, well, uh, yeah) and is now the resting place for an increasingly stale Ellsworth Kelly installation.
This is a really big wall. Over time it seems to swallow anything that is hung on it. So here's the latest MANidea: Why not make that wall a Turbine Hall-inspired space for installations by living artists? (I can hear the blue-bloods now Living artists? Oh come on, we just did Jim Dine. How many living artists can there really be?) The installations could be rotated quarterly, thus providing a bit of buzz. The prominence of the space would instantly make it a great get for artists. For the first year, MAN nominates Carter Potter, Michal Rovner, Leo Villareal, Ed Ruscha, Bill Viola or Toba Khedoori. It would also be interesting to see what Anselm Kiefer, James Turell, Michael Heizer or Robert Irwin could do with the space as well. And that's just off the top of my head.
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Kristine Moran @ Sis Boom Bah (Toronto)
If one of Cecily Brown's paintings were involved in a car crash, the kind of car crash that spun it into a Julie Mehretu-like cycle of energy, it would come to rest as a Kristine Moran painting.
 This is both compliment and encouragement. Moran is young, just about to be out of art school (the Ontario College of Art and Design) and she's working her way through her favorite painters, learning how to synthesize their visuals and their technique in a way that emerges as a Kristine Moran painting. She's not there yet, but a series of paintings at Toronto's Sis Boom Bah Gallery show (full set of images here) that Moran knows what she wants a Moran painting to be and that she is on her way.
Moran's paintings are about speed: both going fast and what happens when fast-moving objects suddenly stop moving. Moran represents speed by building planar, architectural landscapes and then using fast, straight lines (Mehretu!) or flat but thick application of paint to create the feel of fast. Crashes are represented by orgies of built-up, splattered, squeezed, shmooshed paint (Cecily!). These oil-and-enamel-on-panel paintings make you smile: they're easy to read and they're fun to re-read.
Cecily and Mehretu aren't the only influences here. Moran's paintings read a little bit like what would happen if the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote had cars and were driving through Tron. In that way they remind me of so much recent drawing, where artists place their characters or narrative on white paper, completely devoid of context or background. (Ubiquitous and overrated Canadian Marcel Dzama's work is the best example of this.) With the exception of those Tron-like 3-D architectural spaces, Moran paints her speed scenes on bright backgrounds of a single color.
I wonder if Tron, the early 80's videogame, is a subconscious influence on many artists in their upper 20's and early 30's. In Tron, the focus of the game was on the action created by the player -- early video game computing was primitive and slow and providing active backgrounds would have consumed too much computing power. (Same with Asteroids, for example. The Whitney Biennial installation by Cory Arcangel is a more simplistic and less engaging example of video game influences.)
Much of the energy in Moran's paintings comes from the entertaining way in which she's mixed Cecily's brushstrokes with the flatness of cartoons and videogames. I'm looking forward to watching her grow as a painter.
Kristine Moran's show, blast radius, was at Toronto's Sis Boom Bah Gallery from February 20 to March 6, 2004. Her show at Angell Gallery opens on May 20, 2004.
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Shameless Commerce Division
What do the following items have in common?
- A mailbox that looks like a carp;
- A stapler shaped like a trout;
- Shiny, velvet seascape pillows;
- Sea salt;
- A notepad with an inflatable pen;
- A bathrug (or possibly dog rug) shaped like a fish;
- A plastic lobster;
- Crocheted dresses;
- Over-sized ceramic sea shells;
- An inflatable marlin;
- A pufferfish alarm clock;
- An oyster puppet (which, actually, looks more like a talking cheeseburger);
- Fishnet stockings; and
- A salt-and-pepper set shaped like two ends of a bass.
Answer: You can purchase each and every one of them in the store outside the Philly Museum of Art's Manet and the Sea exhibit. And I didn't even mention the silliest item: Skimpier-than-thou Hooters-style tank tops and short-shorts that say "Manet" on them and have "PMA" printed over an anchor.
Oh! How was the exhibit? I forgot. I can't stop thinking about how the PMA managed to fit fishnet stockings into a museum store because they, apparently, fit the Manet and the Sea theme.
I've been in a lot of bad museum stores, but the Philly Museum should be exceptionally embarassed.
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Arts Advocacy Day
It's not too late to get to DC for the annual Arts Advocacy Day, staged by Americans for the Arts. Here's the lineup for events running from March 29-31. Collectors and arts organizations will be especially interested in this Monday afternoon panel:
- Bill Ivey, Panel Moderator (Ivey was Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, from 1998 to 2001.)
- Karen Carolan, Chief, Art Appraisal Services/Chair, Commissioner, IRS
- Linda Downs, Director of Davenport (Iowa) Museum of Art
- Ann Garfinkle, Whiteford, Taylor and Preston, Attorneys at Law, Washington, DC
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MAN does Armory
Friday update: Check back this afternoon for a post on Arts Advocacy Day -- maybe other bloggers can see what's going on in their communities (if anything) and can post events too. Let me know and I'll be sure to link to them.
No intro, just some art I noticed at Armory:
Koen van den Broek @ White Cube (London). (You've got to click through to the 'artists' section to see images, but you can do it!) I first saw van den Broek's work at SF MOMA last year when they exhibited an abstraction of his that they had recently purchased. I don't know if it's just my eye or if the influence of Matisse and Diebenkorn is going on in a significant way in lots of recent painting. (Recently there's van den Broek, Dmitri Kozyrev, Stan Kaplan, and more.) Also, American precisionism is prominent in van den Broek's figurative work. I like what I've seen of van den Broek so far, but I also feel like I haven't seen enough of his work to have a coherent thought (he hasn't had a US show yet), so I'm mentioning him here as one to watch.
Thoralf Knobloch @ Galerie Gebr. Lehmann (Dresden). Knobloch would fit right into the essay/review I have up on artnet right now. Conservative painter, solid images, psychological tension in each painting of his I've seen. One of the benefits of fairs is that you see artists who are new to you, artists you want to keep an eye on. Knobloch, like van den Broek, is one of those.
Thanks to artist Patrick Wilson who made sure I spent some time with Tom La Duke at Angles. Both La Duke and Kelly McLane were awfully impressive, but I'll leave it at that because Angles has no website...
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Fun with Fundrace
Everyone in the blogosphere is having fun with Fundrace.org, so we will too. (Fair disclosure: I was a Dean guy.) Presidential contributions by your favorite art world stars (more to follow, especially if readers send them in):
- Larry Gagosian: $2000 to Bush, $1000 to Lieberman
- Barbara Gladstone: $1000 to Clark
- Sol Lewitt: $2000 to Dean
- David Salle: $1000 to Kerry
- Larry Rinder: $250 to Clark
- Eli Broad: $2000 to Kerry, Lieberman and Clark, $1000 to Dean
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Joywar
I didn't find out about this until yesterday evening, after my essay/review about painting, Joy Garnett and Ian Whitmore went up on artnet.
Garnett, whose paintings are based on photographs, often from newspapers, is being sued by a photographer over her painting, Molotov. To read more about the issue, check out this page on Rhizome, this page, set up by artist Michael Szpakowski, or the complete guide to Joywar. (My personal favorite has to be this site.) To see more Garnett images, images over which she has not been sued, check out the Debs & Co. Garnett page.
Also: I updated everything over on the right, so click on through. Between all that and Garnett/Whitmore on artnet, I've typed enough to wear everyone out, even me. Back with some Armory favorites tomorrow (except, as per the new MAN website/images policy, nothing about the artists from Angles Gallery in Santa Monica, hint hint).
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Me on artnet: Joy Garnett & Ian Whitmore
On artnet, I review Joy Garnett and Ian Whitmore within the context of rich conservatism in contemporary painting:
"Ever since the Festival of the Chromogenic that was Art Basel Miami Beach, I've found myself all the more attracted to painting. I've become especially aware of an interesting trend: the best painting I've seen lately has been conservative, but rich. It's like an Armani tux that takes its quality from its tailoring and its fabric, not from its daring difference. This conservatism does not necessarily equal regression or even stasis -- it's nice to be reminded that paintings must be great paintings before they can be good art."
While you're there, Walter Robinson has some good detail and dish from the weekend that was in a Weekend Update column.
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Update on Malcolm Rogers and MFA Boston
Backgrounder: I first discussed the Malcolm Rogers/MFAB situation here, and followed up here.
MAN hears that it is unlikely that Malcolm Rogers will be sanctioned by the Association of Art Museum Directors. However, I understand that the Rogers issue has been discussed at the highest level of the AAMD, with some museum directors worried that their boards will push them to make the same kind of deal that Rogers made. Several directors at the group's senior level want the for-profit and non-profit distinction to remain clear.
Here's hoping that AAMD issues new guidelines -- guidelines with teeth. After all, industry associations decide who is allowed to join their association and the conditions of their membership.
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MAN does Scope
(First off, if you haven’t read yesterday’s ‘Around the blogosphere’ post, it’s really worth some clicking. It’s chock full of news items, a couple new blogs and some interesting Whitney/Armory/Scope weekend responses.)
Speaking of which, I wanted to spend a little time on Scope this morning. (Quick backgrounder: Scope was a piggyback fair, held in a hotel in the meat-packing district. Each gallery rented out a hotel room for around $5K for the duration and showed art in it.)
Gallery-goers will remember Scope as The Place to see bestiality art, child-infused sex art and art built around children's toys. (A couple of friends of mine and I set the over/under on the number of artists we'd see using toys in art. I set the over/under at 12 and we blew past it with almost a third of the fair to go.)
Gallerists will remember Scope as absurdly disorganized -- the front door to the hotel broke shortly after the fair opened, the (new) hotel was still putting beds in rooms as gallerists were trying to set up their spaces, and a couple of bathrooms didn't have showers yet. Gawker will remember it as the fair from which it got to gaze at Soho House.
I'm trying to forget about the animals and the toys to focus on the interesting art I saw. Some faves follow. (Aside to gallerists: your artist may have been a favorite of mine, but as per a new MAN policy, if you don't have a website with images of the artist I'm not talking about your artist. I'm not going to spend blog space rationalizing/explaining this, but feel free to email me. If you're an artist and you don't like that, complain to your gallerist, not me.)
 Christina Ray @ DCKT (NYC): I've written about Christina Ray on MAN before, on the occasion of her last show at DCKT Contemporary. Ray's new precisionist drawings demonstrate that documentary-inspired work can be made with the hand and not just the lens. Ray's drawings are primarily black-and-white but are often highlighted with bits of color: a yellow light here, an ochre building there. Everywhere I go lately I see artists making drawings on plain, empty, context-free white backgrounds. Ray's drawings/gouaches are grounded in specific places and this gives them an energy that much contemporary drawing (see Dzama, Marcel) lacks. (As of this posting, Ray's website is crawling...) Aside: Ray is working on a documentary-ish project for the new New Museum and I can't wait to see what she does with it.
Dimitri Kozyrev @ Cirrus (LA): Dimitri Kozyrev is Russian but he's clearly spent some time in California. His work is influenced by California painting, especially the landscape-based abstractions and the early representational cityscapes of Richard Diebenkorn. There's some Thiebaud river delta painting here too. Kozyrev mixes planar abstraction with human-made structures built up tightly along a horizon line. To look at a Kozyrev is to feel like you're in a small plane, at only a couple thousand feet, looking out ahead of you. Only the plane isn't quite stable and you're swinging to-and-fro a bit. His paintings are both disorienting and grounded. Kozyrev and some artists I saw at Armory reminded me that most of the good young paintings I've seen lately have come from California, especially LA.
Miklos Gaal and Ola Kolehmainen @ sphn Galerie (Berlin): sphn is a photo gallery (it's a flash-based site, so click around) based in Germany, but their Scope offerings weren't nearly as Becherly boring as you might expect. Two photographers stood out even though they both make (dreaded and ubiquitous) c-prints. Miklos Gaal riffed on the toys-in-art trend by taking photographs that looked like they were full of toy sets and toy people. But they weren't -- the people and places are real but Gaal plays with focus and perspective in such a way as to trick the eye. I've only seen half a dozen Gaals so I don't know if he's a one-trick pony, but I liked the wittiness of what I saw.
Speaking of wittiness, Ola Kolehmainen shoots in, at first glance, the Becher style. But as I spent time with his images I saw how much he was infusing Becherian documentarianism (yes, I'm making up serious-sounding words because the Becher school cranks out serious-appearing art) with puns, art historical references and other references that have nothing to do with Becherian documenterianism. In one image Kolehmainen shot the reflection of a tree in a strictly gridded building that had a couple of big, yellow panels across the front of it. The image read as a nod to Mondrian, thanks to the grid, the yellow and the nod to the role a single tree played in helping Mondrian from representational painting, through cubism and into abstraction. Kolehmainen's work was colorful and smart without coming across as the Brainy Smurf of post-Becher photography.
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Damn good quote
"Criticizing flawed exhibitions isn't hating them. It's a way of treating them with respect."
-- Jerry Saltz
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Minimalism in NYC, LA
NOTE: I'm updating the "Around the blogosphere" post throughout the day, so please scroll down. Most recent update: 7:00 pm ET.
I had planned to write about Armory or Scope today -- fairs are hot! -- but a happy confluence of events changed my mind. (I'll post about one of the fairs tomorrow.)
The best exhibit I saw in NYC all weekend was the Gugg's Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) show. Over this past weekend, MOCA LA's minimalism show (A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968, catalog here.) opened. Christopher Knight reviewed the MOCA show in the LAT today and you should absotively read about his encounter with the show. Viewers view (and participate in) minimalism differently than other visual art and Knight writes about that experience as he walks through the show. (The jump is here. Username ajreader; password access.)
(Private complaint: Apparently museums feel like they have to use maximal show titles for exhibits of minimalism.)
First off, the Gugg's show is not a complete show in the way that the MOCA show is conceived to be. It's a show of minimalist works from their permanent collection. There are gaps, too many to list here (Truitt, Smithson, Heizer, Hesse...). Still, it's a beautiful show to ramp-walk. The highlights:
 Robert Ryman. The Gugg pulls Ryman's Surface Veil triptych-ish out of storage and standing before the three canvases is like standing before a waterfall. (Ignore the caption on the image to which I link -- the Gugg is in error. The link is to Surface Veil II. From another place on the Gugg's site, here is Surface Veil I, Surface Veil II (left), and Surface Veil III.) The Gugg doesn't quite have the galleries necessary to display the Veils on one wall, in a row, but they make the best of what they've got. The Surface Veil paintings echo (and pun) Goya's late Black Paintings (example). The Black Paintings are frescos, and Ryman's build-up of the bluish-white surfaces of the SV paintings recalls fresco technique.
Frank Stella. Stella's early line paintings are both mesmerizing and inaccessible. The early Stella here, Yugatan, was painted in 1958, when Stella was 22. (I couldn't find a link -- readers?) It is mesmerizing, but accessible. In the front right of the painting, rail tracks pull you in, but there's nowhere for the viewer to go but a black void. An abstract wall on the left of the painting compresses space even further. It's great art historical fun to see Stella invite us in only to trap us like a spider web traps a fly. Within a few years he was rejecting the idea of letting the viewer past the surface of his paintings.
On first view I didn't respond to Stella's Yugatan. But the more I walked around it and viewed it from different places in the gallery, the more I saw. Some of that is a good painting working its mojo on a viewer, some of it is was the way the painting reflected some of the lighting in the room. Regardless, Yugatan, which is still in Stella's personal collection, is worth examining and enjoying.
Sumblimity reigns supreme. Works by Marden, Laib, Lewitt, Kelly and Judd were all well-installed and transportive. I particularly enjoyed the echo of hanging some of Kelly's panel paintings on the Gugg ramp but within view (through an arch) or Rauschenberg's monumental White Painting. The installation of Judd's Untitled, February 1, 1973 was just above a short flight of stairs, allowing me to view the sculpture from different visual access points. (Or, as non-art people say: heights.)
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Around the blogosphere
A quick blogosphere roundup (likely updated throughout the day) before I post more about NYC things later today. Today's NYC post (with an LA hook!): The Gugg does a minimalism show that they aren't calling a minimalism show.
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My Whitney Fave Five
I've always rejected the notion that biennials such as the Whitney mark the start of trends, the end of trends, the feeling of a trend, the sense of a trend, the whatever of anything having to do with trends.
So I'm not going to write about it that way here. I'll make one broad statement about what I liked: The more mature work by more mature artists really stood out. (I'll have more to say about that later this week.)
I judge a show like the Whitney based on how much I liked the best 15 artists I saw, not by the worst 15. So here are my Best Five from the Whitney ongoing (there will be a couple more Whitney Top Fives as the week goes on). In no particular order, this is my list of what I liked best:
 1.) David Hockney/Elizabeth Peyton. (Yes, I'm cheating. My site, my rules, mwa ha ha!) Their shared room was the best example in the show of mature work by mature artists. (Oh, there was someone else in that room too? Eh, fuhgeddabout 'im.) Often in the Whitney I see young artists going back to, oh, Paul McCarthy for inspiration, so it's refreshing to see a couple of artists who go back, back, back to Matisse, Bonnard, Vuillard and the like. As we all know by now, Hockney is an art history nut and it shows in his work. His watercolors at the Whitney are thoroughly informed by those three French artists. His garden scenes reveal that he's spent a lot of time with Bonnard and Vuillard recently. Peyton's little portraits look simple, but the closer I got to them the more I saw how subtly built-up they are. Enjoy them together.
2.) Craigie Horsfield. Vija Celmins does video. Horsfield's four-screen installation was transportive and meditative (a welcome relief from some of the gawdawful installation art in the preceding galleries). On four nearly floor-to-ceiling screens, Horsfield projected images of the landscape, seascape, and people of the Canary Islands. I heard birds chirping, animals breathing, something walking; I felt happily lost in the middle of a middle-of-nowhere landscape. The context of the piece was delicious -- I was in the middle of an urban area and Horsfield's video installation transported me to another place. When the wind blew, his camera moved with it. I was there.
3.) Yayoi Kusama. Fireflies on the Water is threatening to become my favorite installation piece of all-time. I'm hesitant to write about what I felt in Kusama's installation because I think part of the piece is experiencing it, full of awe, for the first time. (Maybe I'll re-visit this at the end of the Whitney and write a little more.) So for now I'll just say this: There will be a long line to get into the Kusama. Get in line. It's worth it.
4.) Cecily Brown. I'm totally in the bag for Mlle. Cecily. I love what she does with paint, imagery and ideas and the way she just kind of eases the viewer into the sex in her paintings. In her two paintings at the Whitney, a single figure lies on a bed, gently masturbating while her dreams float above her on a black, mostly matte finish. These are not shiny, wet, well-lubed Cecilys, they're more lazily happy than frenzied. Cecily is maturing before our eyes. The bright flesh tones are gone, replaced with muted, contemplative colors, even greys. (Yes, grey flesh tones in Cecily!)
5.) Cathy Opie. Opie's photographs of surfers adrift in the pale green ocean reward a thorough gaze. Look for more, find more boys. Keep looking... find the horizon line and let your eyes linger and wander at the point where the ocean and the horizon barely meet. I do that at the beach, I do that in Opie's photos. Opie's work is also infused with her now-familiar theme of the individual and the community. Each surfer does his thing alone: him, his board, a wave. But they're all out there together in the ocean, a group with a common affiliation, waiting for their solo turn. (And oh yeah: I profiled Opie in the current Black Book magazine.)
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And turtles? And turtles.
Bestiality is the new black. Turtles are the new gerbils.
That's the verdict from the Scope and Armory fairs. I have never seen as much bestiality in art as I did this past weekend. At least 15 artists, mostly painters, were showing art where animal-on-human play was the primary subject of the work. I must have missed the memo -- I don't recall seeing any bestiality-inclusive art in recent fairs or gallery crawls. (I did see Joyce Wieland at the Art Gallery of Ontario a couple weeks back.)
Turtles and goats and dogs, oh my! On Saturday (at Armory) and on Sunday (at the Whitney), friends wandered up to me and we started the usual conversation about what we'd seen around town. I'd say something about how bestiality was everywhere and the reply kept coming back, "I know! What's with that?" And this wasn't just one or two conversations -- this was how pretty much every weekend conversation I had with an art person started.
I saw a turtle with a woman. A dog performing oral sex on a woman after, apparently, biting her, mauling her and leaving her a bloody mess. There were the usual goats and sheeps and women with blissy gazes and their dogs. (At least they became quite usual by late Saturday afternoon.) One or two examples of this and I wouldn't have even noticed, probably. But well over a dozen? And a turtle? (I mean, how...)
(Meanwhile, over at the Whitney, a Sue de Beer video installation urged viewers to "sit on the animals" in the room. I noticed that I wasn't the only one who winced at the sign.)
It wasn't just animals and humans in sexual situations that was ubiquitous, it was children in sexual situations. And then there was the whole children's toys in art trend. At Scope on Friday, I counted at least 15 artists who had used children's toys in art. Friends of mine and I had set an over/under of 12 and blew past that somewhere on the third floor. I mean, is there a listserve that is laying down the word on What to Make?
Have painters (and artists who work on paper) become so desparate to match the imagery created by photographers that they have resorted to creating images that they know photographers can't create?
Are they following the lead of collectors like Miami's Dennis Scholl, who had this to say to the New York Times: "You want be uncomfortable with your collection. And I don't mean necessarily about content, because we're beyond that. We've got works that are nasty. I've got Vito Acconci masturbating in my living room, O.K.? So it's not about imagery, but we want to be uncomfortable in the sense that we want to be taking risks when we buy work."
Are they following in the tradition of Paul McCarthy, the Chapmans, and Charles Ray?
All week, MAN will feature some notes on what I saw at the fairs, at the Whitney and maybe one note from Toronto that I didn't have a chance to get to last week. I promise, no more turtles.
UPDATE: AJmate John Perreault beats me to the Whitney punch. At the WP, I like the way Blake Gopnik approached the show -- artist-by-artist instead of a Kimmelmanian overview.
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More on Ruscha to NYC
Ever since this post, I've been hearing more about the Ruscha/LA/Whitney axis of events. So from a well-placed MANsource, here's the skinny:
Before there was really the possibility of a combined gift/sale, Whitney photo curator Sylvia Wolf visited Ed Ruscha. The two had a conversation about photography in Ruscha's work, and Ruscha showed here a bunch of work that Ruscha thought no one in the curatorial community knew about. Wolf expressed interest, both personally and for on behalf of the Whitney. It was important to Ruscha that the later work: the paintings, prints and artists books not be viewed by a collecting institution as mere mechanical 'copies' of earlier (European) photographic discoveries.
(At this point, it's worth pointing out that the Whitney has some history with Ruscha. He was in their 1967 survey of American painting and the Whitney was the NYC venue for Ruscha's 1980 traveling mid-career retrospective.)
So, according to my source, Ruscha did not share the extent of his photographic collection with Los Angeles institutions such as LACMA, MOCA and the Getty. The Getty apparently made an offer, but the Whitney's more thorough offer and their history of interest easily carried the day with Ruscha.
The Ruscha photographic work will be shown when the Whitney stages a Ruscha drawings retrospective later this year.
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Art fair tips
Art fairs are the new black. NYC hosts two of them this weekend: The Armory Show and The Scope Fair. (And then there's the Whitney Biennial, but that's for all the bridge-and-tunnelers who don't, you know, keep up.) In case you've never been to a big-deal art fair (or if, um, you've never killed at one), here are some viewing tips (which we may add to during the day):
If you want to appear intelligent and learned in front of large, bright, color photography, just stroke your chin and say, "Yes, the German influence in this artist's work is both primary and prevalent."
Don't drink white wine at an art fair! That is sooo "gallery opening."
If you want to appear intelligent and learned in front of a painting, just stroke your chin and say, "Yes, painting is back. I hear that Louis Vuitton designer might make a painting this season."
When asked what you think of the fair, just say, "Roberta nailed it." You don't have to know who Roberta is. Everyone else does. (She's the one who knows where Chelsea is.)
If you want to make dour gallery types laugh out loud, ask them if they have any Richard Serra torqued ellipses available.
You will sound co-nnected if you walk down 26th Street, gawk at the brown door, and tell your friends that you really prefer the Gothamist and then move on to, "Well, at least I liked his Observer story... and I hear he did Anderson!"
Grab a friend. Go to the Gagosian booth. Talk loudly about your job at the IRS.
If you want to look connected but you are afraid that the person listening to your conversation might peg you as a fake, just drop the phrase, "Yes! We just added Peter Norton to our board! We're so thrilled!"
Fun fact: Did you know that by law, there must always be 16 Sol Lewitt shows up in New York City?
If you want to sound like more than just a big-deal collector, tell everyone about your dear friend Sofia. (If you want to sound like a lot more than just a big-deal collector, tell everyone you've been to her parents' Rick Joy-designed house in the California wine country.)
When you see a group of high-powered chicer-than-thou collectors huddled, make sure they hear you say, "Yeah, the amount of rodenticide I saw at the corner of Twelfth Avenue and 50th Street is truly remarkable. And in another story, I heard that the Warhol Authentication Board is meeting at the Royalton tonight."
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A DC season of photography?
Yesterday I shared Christopher Knight's Sunday LAT photography review/wrap-up with a friend of mine. In his essay, Knight pulls together four LA photography shows and builds an interesting narrative of photographic history around them. (The shows; Arbus at LACMA, Street Credibility at MOCA LA's Temporary Contemporary, The Last Picture Show at the UCLA Hammer, and Photographers of Genius at the Getty.) The review isn't online, but I have a copy... (hint, hint)
So this MANpal had a darn clever idea: DC has a range of museums and historical spots unmatched in the United States. Wouldn't it be fun if the Smithsonian and other institutions got together to hold a Season of Photography? You could have important photographs from our nation's history on view at the National Archives, contemporary photography at the Hirshhorn, photography from the space program at Air & Space, and on and on all over town. Much better artistically and for driving tourism than the idiotic pending party pandas.
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Around the blogosphere
Every once and a while I look up and think to myself, "Why on earth don't I link to this blog more?"
Right now I'm thinking that about James Wagner's blog, a must-read before you head to NYC for the Weekend of Insanity. (The Weekend of Insanity is brought to you by Grey Goose. OK, brought to me by Grey Goose. In fact, I'm considering the following policy: Buy me a very dry Grey Goose martini over the weekend and I'll guarantee you a mention on MAN.) James has some great stuff up on his blog now, including his guess about the next big gallery neighborhood and he an overview of the Brooklyn scene. Best of all, James sounds mighty Raymond Chandlerish:
"There seems to be room for more [galleries]. Especially in New York, people want art. Art just seems to make us happy. Sometimes it makes gallery people happy too. It's best when that happens."
Erik ________ says some nice things about me at Erik's Rants and Recipes, which guarantees him a link. (Note: Nice thing said about me in blogopshere = martini purchase.) Actually, he guaranteed himself a link by breaking down Paul Wonner. And mentioning Joan Brown. Discuss amongst yourselves: Has Carla Klein spent some time with early Paul Wonner work? I know, it sounds crazy, but...
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Museum expansion + program expansion
Not only is the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum building an expansion (where, presumably, much of Clem Greenberg's collection will be on view), they're raising money for programming, etc. as well. My guess is that this is not the norm during the recent age of art museum expansion. So let's build a little chart: If an art museum in your city has expanded in the last few years (or is raising money to do so, a la LACMA), email MAN. Tell me how the art museum(s) in your town has planned to give it a go. How much money are they raising, how much is for the building and how much is for programming. I'll try to roundup the answers next week.
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It's art fair week in NYC
It's Armory/Scope/Whitney week here on the East Coast. Art people are quite excited. In fact, many of my friends in art are so excited that they're going shopping this week. It doesn't get much more exciting than that, I guess.
I'm going to be in NYC for three days this weekend. By the end of it my feet will hurt, my liver will file a complaint with the proper authorities and I'll have seen one heckuva lot of art.
I've skipped Armory in recent years. It's pretty quick after Miami Basel and by virtue of it being in NYC it's a lot less relaxed than is Miami. I'm going for a couple reasons: I can get a lot done art-wise in three days, and I think fairs are, oddly, becoming rather critical for art lovers and not just art buyers. I will get to see a lot of art in just three days.
I think that the profusion of biennials has had the ironic effect of making the big fairs (Miami, Armory, and Basel on the contemporary side, maybe Frieze in London too) all the more important in terms of getting work seen by artists who aren't named Do-Ho Suh. (Is it just me or is Do-Ho Suh in every biennial on the planet? How many Do-Ho Suhs do we need to see?) At the fairs there is lots of new work to be seen. The good stuff sticks.
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Bontecou speaks
Lee Bontecou, currently the subject of a retrospective at the MCA Chicago (previously @ the Hammer, coming soon to MoMA QNS), sat down for a one-on-one with Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner a week or so back. (Username ajreader, password access) A favorite passage:
"Q. The art world has never meant much to you, has it?
A. The art world is the artists and the work. I was reading Vincent van Gogh's letters. Now what the galleries want to give you is like stardom. I think what Vincent had was maybe healthier, made better art than now when everything has to be 'new.'"
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Ideal art mag
At the bottom of his weekly Artopia post, fellow AJ'er John Perreault throws out some ideas for his ideal art magazine. (Perhaps if JP gets enough feedback via blog or email, he'll post daily for a while...)
He's right about the corrupting nature of gallery advertisements. I gotta believe that those ads contribute to the flat, disinterested, passion-free tone of back-of-the-book reviews. He's right about a tight crue of a dozen writers and great color illustration. (After all, the problem with most art magazine is that they're not writer-driven. Actually, I'm not sure what drives them, but there's nothing in the writing quality to indicate that they're writer-driven.)
In fact, the only thing he writes that wouldn't work would be publishing it to the web. Web writing is too easily shared, etc., to make a subscriber model viable. (Hence... blogs!)
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There be children's books in the air!
Last night, I finished a review/essay on which I was working for Artnet Magazine. I decided to celebrate by pouring myself a dram of 15-year old Bowmore and by reading what some other critics had written about the two artists I was reviewing.
Like many writers, I don't allow myself to read what other people have written about a show if I know I'm going to write about it too. So I had saved Paul Richard's Washington Post review of Ian Whitmore's Fusebox debut, and it was with great pleasure that I opened it. Richard's review included the following sentence:
"Look into the splatters of the picture he calls 'Feted' (2003) and you will find a flock of fat and fleecy sheep gamboling among them. It's sort of like 'Where's Waldo?'"
When I read this sentence I just about fell out of my chair (but did not, it should be noted, spill one drop of the precious Bowmore). I've heard that somewhere, I thought to myself...
Last May, I reviewed a painting show that was at... Fusebox. It was an exhibit of an L.A. painter named Patrick Wilson. My review included this passage:
"Once you've found Wilson's Eames plywood chair or the little squares of paint at the bottom of his canvases, you've found all the subtle rewards of the painting. Wilson's paintings remind me a little bit of those Where's Waldo books: It's fun to look through the crowds and to look for Waldo. But once you've found Waldo, you can move on."
Now, I don't think Richard cribbed from my review. It's too unusual a reference for that (plus he doesn't seem like the sort to keep up on art criticism published on the www). It's just kind of amusing that the same reference popped up in two reviews of Fusebox shows!
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Biennial goes live on the WWW
Take a look at the Whitney Biennial's Flash site. In 2002 the Biennial didn't (really) have a website. Instead, the Whitney put a CD in the catalog and tried to coax $$$ out of museumgoers. Good to see they have a site this time.
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Couple of art blog notes.
New-to-me artblog called, I think, honest art talk.
And Franklin has redesigned artblog. It looks much cleaner now!
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Ruscha in NYC, not LA?
I guess I'll give Carol Vogel half-credit for having an interesting note in the NYT today. The problem is, she missed half the story (again).
Vogel reported that the Whitney is getting a major cache of Ed Ruscha works. This is, no doubt, a good thing for the Whitney. It's always nice to be able to announce major acquisitions of a major artist just days before your most major show opens. But how could Vogel miss this question: How is it that this Ruscha trove didn't get snapped up by one of the major Los Angeles museums? I guaran-darn-tee you there's a story there. And MAN's ears are open...
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Is Turrell the new Lewitt?
For a while, every art museum had to have a big Sol Lewitt wall painting in a prominent place. Think SF MOMA, Atlanta, and Indianapolis, just to name three. Something about Lewitt indicated seriousness, engagement with contemporary art, and probably other things (we're big enough to have a Lewitt!), too.
With the news (scroll down about two-thirds of the way down the page) that SF's de Young Museum will have a James Turrell Skyspace piece when it opens in 2005 (fun construction photos of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed building are here), the de Young joins the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle featuring a permanent Skyspace. The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh has a Skyspace on view too, but I'm not clear on how permanent it is. Are there others I'm forgetting?
Update: MANpal Kelly Vrana says that the Smithsonian American Art Museum should put in a Skyspace for their perpetually not-quite-yet reopening. Works for me. Or, how cool would it be to have a Turrell Skyspace where the Hirshhorn's big central fountain is?
Update2: A perpetually anonymous MANpal tells us that the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas has a Skyspace too.
Update3: I should have remembered this one! Fellow artnet'er Stephen Maine reminds us that a Skyspace went into PS1 in 1986.
Update4: Reader Paul Schmelzer tells us that the Walker is also planning a new Turrell as part of their Herzog & de Meuron expansion. Are Skyspaces a package deal with H & de M buildouts? (BTW, the Walker has a new website.)
Update5: Reader Patricia Barnes adds the Scottsdale (Ariz.) Museum of Contemporary Art to the list.
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Architecture rules the day?
Is architecture the dominant visual art form of the day? You can't watch a night of TV without seeing Frank Gehry's Disney Hall in an advertisement. Lower Manhattan is so full of architectural possibilities that New Yorkers are passionately involved in what will emerge there. (The New York Times is even reviewing temporary structures.) Museums that once invited their boards of directors and only their boards to select designs for new buildings see that the public is interested in architecture and are opening the doors of the process. In Denver, for example, the Museum of Contemporary Art has picked finalists for its new building, and each finalist will make a public presentation to anyone who wants in (or is allowed in by the fire marshal).
In New York, Santiago Calatrava's proposed apartment building earned the architect a front-page blurb in the New York Times. Websites normally known for photos of cute cats and the publishing of Jayson Williams' bar tab are weighing in on the building -- and readers are flooding the comment boards. (If readers want to send in more examples of architecture getting broad public attention, I'll add to this post...)
Admin note: Yes, I know the archives appear not to be working. They drank a lot of red wine last night and are feeling a little hungover.
- Greg Allen has two well-timed posts about Calatrava and about the intersection of art and architecture.
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News & notes
Will be updated throughout the day:
- 2 Blowhards likes Paul Wonner and other Bay Area Fig Ex'ers. I'm with them on early Wonner, but late Wonner is mostly kitschy realist stuff that is too tame and dry to be of much interest.
- Anna Conti on artists' models.
- LA's Disney Hall has been the go-to site for advertising companies of late. Just late night I saw it in a Chevy Trucks ad. I know I've seen it in other ads too but I haven't been smart enough to keep a list. Sounds like a good project for City Comforts. (Or just an excuse to plug them.)
- Everybody loves Manet and the Sea at the Philly Museum: Karlins and Tuchman, both at artnet.
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Around the (AJ) blogosphere...
For whatever reason, I assume that a pretty good percentage of people who read MAN also read the other kick-ass AJ blogs. But in case you don't...
Terry Teachout is excited about Helen Frankenthaler. I'm looking forward to hearing why, because I'm not. (Terry's also much better at promoting his blog than I am, so I'm going to try a Terry-ism: Right now, e-mail a friend or two or three of yours to tell them about MAN! Or I could just link to TMFTML and look forward to the photos of Terry from tonight's AJ event.)
James S. Russell also enjoyed My Architect.
Andrew Taylor on how to start your own blog. I was amused he was mentioning how bloggers don't get quoted in film reviews and how this annoys some of them. I was thinking about this yesterday in the context of art (of course). During The Most Shameful Show Ever, the Corcoran blurbed the NYT in its advertisements, never once telling advertisement readers that the quote wasn't from a review of the show. So sometime in the next few weeks, I'm going to pick an awful museum show and write a shmucky review about it, the kind that gets quoted in movie ads in the LA Times. We'll see if anyone picks it up... (Mwa ha ha!)
And of course there's me, in the current issue of Black Book magazine. It's a Catherine Opie profile, just in time for the Whitney and her upcoming NYC solo show at Gorney. Look for it at your neighborhood newsstand. (Scroll down a bit to see the cover.)
All of which gives me entre to remind you that the AJ bloggers (minus on-deadline me and a few others) will be holding forth tonight in NYC.
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Some thoughts from Buffalo's Albright-Knox
On Sunday I drove from Toronto to Buffalo to visit the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (and then drove back to TO to catch my flight home). Some thoughts from the Albright-Knox permanent collection:
- The AK (as they call it in the building) has quite a good permanent collection. The collection is especially strong in the area of French early modern art. I rarely see Jean Helion, Francis Picabia or a Delaunay on view in American museums, but the AK had fine examples of two of the three. (The Helion was good but not great. Memo to museum curators who care about my personal happiness (ha, ha): All three are overdue for U.S. retrospectives.)
- Dear AK: Put in more benches.
- Dear AK (2): The bold, gold, and old frames you have on most of your early modern paintings are about as garish as they could possibly be. It seemed like some of the frames had more surface area than your paintings. Among the paintings particularly wronged was a precious 1902 Matisse fauve cityscape of the Seine and Notre Dame. As ye who have read the first volume of Hilary Spurling's projected two-volume bio of Matisse (The Unknown Matisse) know, Matisse was headed toward Fauvism before a political scandal involving his wife's family delayed the birth of Fauvism. (I just summarized 60 pages in about 12 words. Read the book. Good news: MAN hears that the final volume of Spurling's bio will be published in 2005.) The AK's 1902 Matisse is a rare example of one of those extra-early fauve paintings. Unfortunately, the painting is overwhelmed by a completely silly frame.
- Clever collecting: A 1913 Robert Delaunay features a little plane of the Kitty Hawk-variety. Upstairs, the AK owns a Richard Serra sculpture called Kitty Hawk that features Serra's take on a plane of the Kitty Hawk-variety. Great rhyming within the AK's collection.
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The medium doesn't make art, people do
One of my least favorite art writer-isms reared its ugly head again on Sunday. (Art writer-isms bad. Cliches, apparently, OK on MAN!)
In his otherwise interesting Sunday Times story on artists making art/architecture out of ice in Finland (really, it reads better than that sounds and the slide show that the NYT provides is fantastic), Alan Riding tossed off this final sentence: "But one question has still to be answered: as art, do snow and ice have anything else to say?"
This reminded me of a line the WP's Blake Gopnik wrote a while back in a Gerhard Richter review: "Richter has done everything he could to question all the things that paint can do while proving that the ancient medium still has things to say."
As if the medium does the talking. The artist does the talking and makes the work, not the medium.
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Back from Toronto
I'm just back from a four-day trip to Toronto. Later this week I'm going to review a couple of the gallery shows I saw while I was there (pending image arrival, of course), but I also wanted to post some quick-hit thoughts:
As anyone reading Sally McKay or Unfolio knows, Toronto is both excited and disappointed in the Frank Gehry design for the remodeling of the Art Gallery of Ontario. I am a selective Gehry fan and I think that his design for the AGO is pretty darn cool. One of my Gehry complaints is that often his buildings don't work well with others. His AGO design fits wonderfully onto a street that is a sort of border between downtown and a residential district. You don't see it in this image (there's a thorough slide show here), but Gehry has also designed a sculptural staircase reminiscent of his cardboard furniture. The staircase makes the design. The other big plus: The design will increase gallery space by 40 percent.
The AGO itself is good fun. Their Henry Moore sculpture gallery is well-installed and is a special delight. Most non-American: I can't imagine that an American institution would have put together a show of nudes and frolicking on the level of the AGO's Robert Markle and Joyce Wieland show. I can't find evidence of the show on their website (the exhib closed yesterday so it may be up in their exhib archive in a day or so), but here's a quick snippet of what I saw: a bear boinking a (human) babe, two beavers suckling a (human) woman, a woman receiving oral sex from a fox, and lots of conventional man-on-woman art. The show had both governmental support and a corporate sponsor. Canadians are not prudes.
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Catherine Opie in Black Book
 For the first time in several years, my byline is on printed paper. I've profiled Catherine Opie for Black Book magazine, which you can find in the culture section of your local magazine stand. (For the urban vegans, it's at Whole Foods Markets too.) It's a strong issue and is full of art stuff, including a commissioned series by Nikki Lee. I'm pretty sure that you'll find out some things you didn't know about Opie and the story ends with some exciting-to-me news about her work. I think the piece is readable (beyond that I never can tell), so please give it a whirl. Here's an excerpt:
"Sometimes it's jarring to see where someone comes from. Catherine Opie is a superstar artist. Major museums all over the world own her work. She's the photographer whose career took off with a series of portraits of leatherfolk — you know, the ones who pierce each other with needles, cut each other so they bleed, and do something called fisting—that were first exhibited in 1993. She's the lesbian Robert Mapplethorpe, the bulldyke shocking us with her kinky little niche, right?
"Not exactly. Yes, when Cathy curates a Mapplethorpe exhibit, she places a portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger within inches of a portrait of an erection. So Cathy is one kinky leathergrrl, but to understand who Cathy is, to understand why she makes art, we're going to have to understand that one person can need different things; that when she walks out of her studio, laughs a big laugh and says, 'Yeah, I have a car seat where I used to have whips,' that the car seat is part of the plan."
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