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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Shirin Neshat's Tooba
It is one of mankind's best ideas. No human creation has given rise to more religious legend, more art, more literature. It is the rare idea so universal that nearly every culture between China and England has adopted it. It is the garden, paradise.
Gardens probably started in Iran, 3,200 years ago. The idea has been appropriated by invaders from Europe and by traders from the East. Six hundred years after its Persian genesis, Buddha created his belief system while sitting in a garden, at the base of a tree. For Christians and Jews, the Garden of Eden is where their peoples begin. For Persians, it has been central to spiritual and daily life for thousands of years.
This is how the Persians created their gardens: Choose a mountaintop, plant a tree, surround it with flowering plants, and build a wall around the plantings. Nursed from parched, gravelly land, pairidaza was a refuge for the body and the soul. The Persian Sufis, who became the primary mystic order within Islam, made pairidaza a fundamental part of their tradition. Shabistari, after Rumi the second-greatest Sufi poet, wrote about pairidaza as the secret garden of promise and paradise, the earthly manifestation of absolute beauty and perfection. To Shabistari, the heart of paradise was the tree, which he described as "the perfect face of the Beloved." This central tree was unimaginably large, its branches spanned unimaginable lengths, the milk and honey at its base was unimaginably bountiful. Through Shabistari’s poetry, the garden and its tree, the tooba, became the Sufi’s place of hope and promise. For Sufis, Shabistari was their Winthrop, his garden their city on a hill.
 Enter Iranian-American Shirin Neshat, artist-examiner of the conflicts between Islam and the West. With the mythical Sufi garden as her foundation, Neshat’s 2002 film installation Tooba looks at emigration from the Islamic world to the West, the dark circle of leaders whose fundamentalism impels the journey and what the journeyers find when the reach the West. Tooba shows us that while middle easterners people may try and try to escape the violence and oppression in their backgrounds, while they may think they have found an Eden to which they can emigrate, they find that the modern journey does not end as simply as the mythical Sufi journey.
Film installations pose special challenges to arts essayists. Within a nearly 12-minute installation such as Tooba, there are dozens of gripping images, each as rich as a painting. (Neshat has herself acknowledged this by selling editioned photographs based on images from her films.) It is impossible to discuss every frame, every scene. Instead I will discuss the key symbols of Tooba and argue that Neshat’s narrative is an intensely personal response to 9/11.
Tooba is Neshat's latest exploration of cultural conflicts, but in Tooba Neshat goes beyond the gender conflicts that dominated her previous work. Here Neshat focuses on national identity and geo-conflict. The symbol Neshat uses to explore these themes, the canvas on which the installation is created, is the garden.
Neshat's utopia is the simplest of Sufi gardens. It is in virtually every shot of the film. The garden sits at the top of a hill, a single tree, about fifty feet high, surrounded by a brick wall. There are no flowering plants, just the tree in the garden’s center. Surrounding the garden is parched earth, ground that grips clumps of thirsty scrub, neither nourishing it nor letting it blow away. The sky is blue and the few clouds are white and puffy. The land will remain athirst. Only the squared garden provides shade, sanctuary, promise.
The beautiful simplicity of the tableau is Neshat at her best, both in terms of the image she creates and the way she explores a concept. By making the garden the centerpiece of Tooba, Neshat refers to both Judeo-Christian and Sufi utopias.
Within Neshat's symbolic garden utopia are two visual examples of Neshat updating traditional meanings. Witness: Neshat’s garden has its roots in historical symbolism, but I believe it also serves as a contemporary metaphor. The garden is America, the promised land of freedom to which repressed people have journeyed for decades.
As a student, Neshat left the Shah's Iran for California, later became a UC Berkeley student, and stayed in the U.S. after the Islamic Revolution. She now lives in New York City. She has lived the journey portrayed in Tooba. As a member of the Iranian exile community, she understands why middle easterners have fled their homelands for America. Furthermore, she understands the persecution and suspicion they have faced from the American people and from the Bush Administration. Witness: Embedded in the tree of paradise is a woman, the wrinkles in her skin echoing the bark of the tree. She is in paradise, encased in the tooba tree which provides all the pleasures of paradise. She is mute, existing within paradise without being a participant, a metaphorical reference to the way many middle easterners feel in post-9/11 America. Her eyes are closed, she is alone with her thoughts, her memories. It is as if the tree of paradise protects her from those memories.
What are her memories? We don't know, so we must leave the static visual image to return to the installation's narrative. As we see the first shots of the woman-in-tree at the opening of Tooba on one screen, on the other we see men, scores of men, scurrying through the hills that surround the garden. At first we cannot tell that they are moving toward paradise. Seconds later we understand: The first time we see that the tree is inside a garden is the first time that we see people moving through the landscape. This is also the first moment that the viewer understands that the two screens are telling one story. People are journeying; they are journeying to the garden. Having made clear the unity of the two visuals, Neshat tears us away from the travelers by panning the camera up into the clouds and introduces us to the third element of the installation. While utopia remains on one screen, on the other screen Neshat is about to take us into a different world.
While our eyes are still accustomed to the bright, open spaces of the mountains and the garden, one screen pitches into blackness. In the darkness sit men in a circle, uniformly clad, chanting as one. As Neshat's camera slowly moves from man to man, the lighting and camera angle show us only the shapes of the mens’ heads and their attire. Neshat does not allow us to see features that distinguish one from the other; we see them as a cadre. In previous installations Neshat has used the circle as a symbol for closed cultures or subcultures. Here I believe that Neshat's circle of men symbolizes fundamentalist, dictatorial religious cliques that reign over many Muslim societies. More specifically, Neshat's reference in Tooba is to her own homeland, Iran, a society that is as closed as the circle. Neshat loves ambiguity and rarely gives more than hints as to her intended meaning, but I believe that Neshat's clue about this intimidating circle is clear: Iran's ruling Shi'a clerics wear brown robes. In Neshat's circle, all the men wear brown robes.
Meanwhile, on the screen opposing dystopia, the tree and the wall are more fully revealed as a Sufi garden. As the viewer becomes aware of the garden and the screen-to-screen confrontation between utopia and dystopia, the screen showing the dystopic circle jump cuts back to the journeying men.
As I watch Tooba, I feel another dramatic disconnect, the second visual disruption in just a few seconds. This is the first uncomfortable moment in Tooba. So many things come together at once: journey, woman, tree, garden, the circle. So much begins to fall into place. The circle of men, in their uniform garb, their pseudo-religious collars, the way they are indistinguishable from each other because it doesn't matter who is who. They are why there is a journey. They are why the journey is to paradise. They are who the woman in the tree remembers having left.
The middle of Tooba continues the narrative of the journey, the circle and the garden. I want to move forward to two other critical scenes later in the installation.
 At the end of the journey, the scores of travelers reach the garden. Neshat presents their arrival in a way that underscores the tension between the travelers from the middle east and the paradise to which they have traveled. On one screen, Neshat shows us views of the travelers encircling the garden, their hands on the top of the brick wall. Each of the shots is taken from a different vantage point outside the garden. All of the shots, shots of the paradise to which these people have journeyed, are grand, panoramic and beautiful. I believe that Neshat is reminding us how the travelers view the land to which they have journeyed. It is paradise, it is the promised land. After a journey filled with hope, dreams and idealized visions of a new place, the immigrants have arrived.
Counterpoint: On the other screen, Neshat shows us the travelers ringing the garden, filmed from inside the garden. The garden wall, which looks like an inconsequential barrier in the panoramic shots, suddenly looms as a barrier to be overcome. With their uniform dress, their piercing stares, the travelers now look threatening. I believe Neshat is showing us how the inhabitants of the promised land feel about the coming immigrants. The immigrants are threatening, they dress differently, the intensity of their gaze is jarring. The promised land is afraid of them. The psychological charge of these two images, one on each side of the viewer who stands in the middle of Neshat's installation, is discomforting.
The travelers are not to be deterred. Having arrived at paradise, the journeying mass jumps over the wall and enters the garden. They walk up to the tooba tree and stare at it, a scene Neshat shows us for a full ten seconds. Each of the travelers wanders a few steps away from the tree and appears to be lost, confused within the garden. I believe that here Neshat contemporizes millennia of Muslim history. For thousands of years, Muslims have searched for an Islamic utopia, a place where they can live in a society that allows Muslims to prosper both spiritually and materially. For the immigrants who choose to travel away from Arab or Persian lands, the garden, the promise of America, seems to offer much of that possibility. But the men who wander through the garden look lost, unsure, as if what they expected to find in paradise isn't there. They don't leave the garden, but they don’t look at home, either. I believe this is Neshat's commentary on the Muslim experience, even the immigrant experience, in America. The United States presents itself to the world as The Melting Pot, the place where all peoples can come to live free. In Tooba there is no happiness – just disjointed discombobulation. They travelers stay; They are, perhaps, safer within the garden, but they’re uncomfortable, out of place, and not altogether welcome.
***
While I believe that Tooba was created specifically with the events of effects 9/11 on middle eastern immigrants in mind, its beauty and the breadth of the themes it addresses take it beyond above the temporality of a single event (no matter how momentous). Tooba is an exceptionally good work of art that deserves a place alongside great art about traumatic events. Why? Consider:
How big a theme does Neshat take on in Tooba? In a 12-minute installation, Neshat addresses the conflict between the West and Islam, the psychology of the immigrant experience, and the promise and disappointment of the promised land. No other contemporary artist has even attempted to address these issues surrounding 9/11 and its aftermath in the comprehensive way Neshat addresses them. Art that does not strive to be great is never great. Neshat strives.
Ambition does not automatically create success. Ambition is nothing without execution. Execution is nothing if the resulting work of art is not visually engaging. Tooba is beautiful. Tooba’s beauty is not a facile construct. Neshat and her collaborators (the installation’s credits read more like a feature film credit roll than wall text in an art gallery, complete with a nod to the Iranian novelist who inspired the work, Shahrnoush Parsipour) built the garden. They costumed the characters. Their attention to detail results in a work that demands repeated examination. The robes of the men in the circle, the way the camera speeds up as it examines the individuals in the circle, the way the travelers surround the garden before entering it, each of these scenes rewards multiple viewings. Detail in point: There are three shots taken from inside the garden, looking out at the people ringing the wall. In one shot there are nine people looking into the garden, in another shot there are 11. Coincidence?
It is nearly impossible for a work of art to be great if it exists clumsily within its medium. Cinematographically, Tooba is impeccable. There are no wasted shots or scenes. More importantly, Tooba represents Neshat’s finest use of her two-facing-projections technique. Tooba demonstrates that the physical space Neshat creates between her projected images is not just ‘the space between the screens,’ but an actual part of the installation. To see a Neshat, the viewer must make decisions about how and why to look at a particular screen at a particular time. By involving the viewer in the work in this way, Neshat demands physical and psychological involvement. This fits perfectly within the story Neshat tells in this work: In Tooba, Neshat presents the story of characters torn between two countries, two traditions, two cultures. The viewer is also torn: between the two screens, between the tranquility of the garden and the conflicts playing out on the opposite screen. Neshat’s characters make choices, so too must the viewer.
For centuries Sufi women have perpetuated the mythology of the garden. Tapestries featuring the Sufi garden, one of Islam’s most lasting artistic images, have traditionally been woven by women and hung on the walls of their homes. In many ways Tooba is an updating of that tradition: Neshat’s garden is projected onto a wall, displayed in the same manner as an ancient Sufi tapestry. The circle is complete.
(1) Florence Lederer, foreword to The Secret Rose Garden, Mahmoud Shabistari, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Phanes Press, 2002, p, 15.
(2) As Tooba is an installation on two screens, it would be more accurate -- and more tedious -- to say that the garden is in virtually every shot on one of the two screens onto which the installation is projected. For the sake of brevity and clarity I've shortened that phrase here and elsewhere.
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Knight on Eliasson
If you receive the daily LAT email, Christopher Knight is free today. If not, here's an excerpt (I have the full version, which more fully describes the show...) Here's a link to some photos of the house in which the Eliasson is installed:
 "Olafur Eliasson went to art school in Copenhagen, considers Reykjavik to be home and has his studio in Berlin. He might be a quintessential citizen of New Europe but spiritually he is a Los Angeles artist.
The 10 works in Eliasson's captivating new exhibition in Pasadena employ light, space, color, perceptual events that include transparency and reflection, and an acute consideration of architectural and natural environments as frames for human experience. Robert Irwin, whose revolutionary work has set the highest standard for Light and Space art since the 1960s, is his primogenitor. And the collective precedent will be found in the diverse sculptures and environments made here during the last 40 years by Larry Bell, Maria Nordman, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler and other such artists.
The Pasadena exhibition is a marvel. As always with Eliasson, it reasserts a basic proposition of Light and Space art. Simply put: Our perception and understanding of objects and events are the foundation of reality; things do not exist outside of human consciousness.
Phenomenology, in short, is the wellspring from which this art flows. This year marks the centennial of that movement's breakthrough in the writing of philosopher Edmund Husserl, but Eliasson is not just restating established principles in his art. Instead, he puts them to work."
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Five Observations
1.) Why does Slate treat its readers like they're visual-arts-stupid? These museum wall-text-recalling slideshows (I borrowed that phrase from an emailer, but I forget whom -- email me for credit!) are as annoying as, well, as hyphenated groupings of words. All you need to know about Witold Rybczynski's Barnes essay is that he starts it at the Bilbao Gugg... and wanders around the world's museums wondering, barely, what a new Barnes might be like. In the end he endorses nothing in particular. I still, still, still don't understand why a reasonably smart magazine is so often so unreadable on the visual arts.
2.) If you go to see the Sol LeWitt roof installation at the Met, pay close attention to the weather. They shut the roof down yesterday after six drops of rain fell in a 10-minute period.
3.) AAMD and AAM should kick the Boston MFA and director Malcolm Rogers out of their organizations. They won't, so the two groups should be substantially disbanded, because they're toothlessly semi-useless. (Exception: Museum accreditation programs, and maybe one or two others... but when you can't enforce your own ethical and membership standards, you stand on shaky ground.) Malcolm Rogers should be drummed out of his profession.
4.) ArtForum is, as usual, late to the party. ArtCal already does that (in NYC anyway) and does it well.
5.) Andy Goldsworthy moves from Washington to Ess Eff. More on Goldsworthy (and Max Ernst, Greater New York, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Matisse and Persian painting) later today.
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On travel
I'm on travel today, back tomorrow. While I'm gone, here's a golden oldie. No particular reason for posting it, just you know, I happen to think, for no specific reason anyway, that it's worth re-visiting.
(It's also worth noting that I'm a bit behind on email. I'll catch up on Friday, I promise.)
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Zittel wins Lucelia
Smithsonian types leaked Andrea Zittel winning the Lucelia Award -- America's Turner, kind of, well, not really, actually, not even close because there's no exhibit of the nominees and no national discussion and, well, nevermind the Turner comparison -- to Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post.
In a related story, the Smithsonian did not leak the story to Lee Siegel, who we hear was preparing a slide show essay that would have included this passage: "You cannot fully understand Zittel's art unless you know that she is a woman. It is often fatuous to reduce an artist to his or her gender, but Zittel is working in a tradition that associates womanhood with escaping men by living in the desert and enjoying househhold chores such as cleaning house, knitting clothes, and doing the dishes." (Oh, by the way, I added some links to the bottom of the Siegel post... and I'll continue adding them as people discuss it in the blogosphere.)
In yet another related story, Gopnik filed the story not from New York or London, where most of his bylines have come from of late, but from Washington. Which was kind of a surprise, because so far in 2005 Gopnik has written nearly as often from non-DC datelines as he has from DC datelines. (At least I think so -- the Washington Post Gopnik page has a strange Gopnik history between 2/27/05 and 6/10/01.) For a Washington Post critic, Gopnik sure does a good job of writing about shows and artists not in Washington. I wonder why that is...
Anyway, Zittel won the Lucelia award. I believe she was informed of her award by carrier pigeon.
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Something about Cy Twombly being gay
Two weeks ago Lee Siegel wrote: "You cannot fully understand Twombly's art unless you know that he is gay." What was he talking about? What does that mean?
For several weeks no one has challenged Siegel on this argument, which he makes in his review of the Whitney's Cy Twombly show. I can explain that: No one takes Siegel seriously as an art critic, so when he writes something ridiculous it gets ignored. But it's one of the most outrageous lines of alleged art criticism I've seen in a long time, and it needs to be examined.
(By the way, you cannot fully understand this blog unless you know that I am heterosexual.)
Here is the entire passage on why it (allegedly) matters that Twombly is gay. It is from slide four in Siegel's review:
You cannot fully understand Twombly's art unless you know that he is gay. It's often fatuous to reduce an artist to his or her sexuality, but Twombly is working in a tradition that associates homosexuality with an ideal human freedom. This tradition strives for an art unfettered by purpose, function, or meaning. You find such a style in Frank O'Hara's casual aimlessness and in John Ashbery's aimless obscurity—both poets think in the strokes of a subtle crayon. Such a sensibility derives from Walter Pater, the gay Victorian aesthetician who prized in art the quality he called "diaphaneite," a crystalline transparency that "crosses rather than follows the main currents of the world's life"—a "happy, unperplexed dexterity." Update Pater's notion with the brash off-handedness of so much postwar American art—think Pop art and cool jazz—and you arrive at the doodle. I have no idea if Twombly knew about Pater's ideas or cared for them if he did. But his art, distractedly crossing rather than following the main currents of the world fits Pater's values to a T.
Huh? Siegel's argument, which I have quoted in its entirety, boils down to this: Abstract art -- or any art "unfettered by purpose, function, or meaning" is, somehow 'gay art.' Then is a Pink Floyd laser light show 'gay art?' Is all counter-cultural expression, anything that "crosses rather than follows the main currents of the world's life" necessarily 'gay art?' (And does Twombly know that his art apparently lacks meaning?)
To put it more directly: Siegel argues that art that is decorative is 'gay art.' Siegel goes on to write that all gay men have limp wrists and love show tunes. (OK, I made up that last sentence. Or did I...)
So Siegel thinks it's 1951. But what's Slate's excuse for running this? How did this get by an editor? (As noted here previously, Slate is completely clueless when it comes to the visual arts. But this isn't about art writing -- this is about a silly false sterotype.)
Related on MAN: Siegel on women artists too?
Related: Greg Allen, towleroad, Houndstooth, Wasters of Cinema.
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The Weekend That Was
For the first time in several weekends, I had no writing deadlines that forced me to sit in front of a computer for ten hours a day. So finally, after weeks of seeing little art in my hometown, I ventured out into Washington.
My prime target was In the Realm of Princes at the Sackler, an exhibit of 15th-century (mostly) Persian paintings/manuscripts. The Sackler has done a few Persian painting shows in recent years (including 16th and 17th century Persian paintings in 2001-02, and some 12th-15th century Persian manuscripts in 2003-04), which suits me just fine. I'm reviewing this one for Bloomberg this week so I don't want to scoop myself... but go see the show.
On the way to the Sackler I walked by Numark Gallery, where Dan Steinhilber is receiving his first big DC solo treatment. It's a good show, and is stuffed into every corner of the gallery. Dan will be in the show I'm doing at DCKT this summer -- his first Chelsea exposure, bleev it or not.
My other weekend highlight was a stroll through the Phillips' permanent collection. (The Phillips is hosting the traveling Modigliani show, I skipped those rooms because they were jammed.) Many of the Phillips' Greatest (Impressionist) Hits are on tour right now -- and have been for, oh, a couple of years -- but that has given the Phillips curatorial crue a chance to hang some rarely-seen gems. Unfortunately the Phillips has LACMA-itis: bulb after bulb was out. Many paintings were overlit, many were underlit. It was kind of frustrating.
For example, the Phillips has installed an entire gallery of Bonnard on the second floor of their annex. The Terrace, one of Bonnard's huge Mediterranean from-the-porch-scapes was half-lit, and half in-the-dark. Maddening.
Nicolas de Stael has most of a room to himself too. Looks great. Overlit, but oh well. (The galleries are tiny -- sometimes I can't find a place to view paintings without being blinded. Why am I so sensitive to this at the moment? Probably the after-effects of being at the perfectly-lit Walker.)
Other highlights included (or should have) a wonderful turquoise-blending-into-teal Morris Louis painting that I'd never seen up at the Phillips before. It was encased in a plexi box that rendered it sadly inert. I can't tell you anymore about it than that -- it's myseriously absent from The Big Book, the Phillips' exceptional collection catalogue.
I also loved seeing Emblems, a 10-foot long Roger de la Fresnaye cubist treatment of books, a globe, a table, a cloudy guitar and a violin. (No image available -- the collections part of the Phillips' website is pretty lame.) And it's been a long time since I saw so much Jacques & Raymond Villon in one place, and his work holds up really well (a Villon/Duchamp brothers show, anyone? Philly?). The Phillips' drippy Pollock collage, Collage and Oil from about 1951, is up, as are a lot of grid-built Bradley Walker Tomlin paintings.
My favorite find of the day was Maria Elena Vieira da Silva's Easels, from 1960. It's an abstracted view of stacked easels on a gray background. On the flip side, what is it with the Phillips and Raoul Dufy? Ick.
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Around the blogosphere
It'll be a day of rubrics here at MAN. First, AtB. Also, I didn't have any deadlines this weekend, so I actually looked at some art. More about that later in The Weekend That Was.
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Free museums in Europe
Over the years I've often advocated that American museums examine how European museums work to increase their audiences. The latest continent-wide effort is a massive free museum day, which sure sounds like something American museums could copy. I wonder how much lost admissions revenue would be made up by store/restaurant sales?
In the last few months a number of museum administrators have told me that the real growth area for museums in terms of hiring/etc. is marketing staff. Well marketing staff, here's an idea...
In an unrelated story, didn't this show just happen? Why are they doing it more-or-less again? And why didn't the relevant reporter ask?
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Walker blogs
Earlier this week I took a wee shot at the Walker Art Center's blogs. Turns out that my PC just wasn't opening them properly. (This was probably the first sign that I had a PC problem... a problem that led me to reinstall my entire system last night.) Whoops. In actuality, they look pretty good.
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Harvard's Fogg to move?
Welcome back -- apparently MAN/AJ had some kind of hiccup this morning and most visitors were unable to view the site. We seem to be only partly back online and only partly functional...
Back in January, Harvard Art Museums boss Thomas Lentz told the Boston Globe that his museums had to expand:
''Physical expansion," says Lentz, ''is my number one priority."
But lack of space is only one of the challenges facing Lentz. The share of Harvard's priceless holdings that lives in the Fogg Art Museum is endangered by the very architecture it inhabits, which lacks the climate control and other basic conditions expected in museums of the 20th century -- never mind the 21st. Most of the Fogg isn't air-conditioned. It's sweltering in summer. The electrical wiring is the original, from 1927. Lack of other basics, including a loading dock for ferrying massive artworks in and out of the building, only adds to the problem.
''The infrastructure is so poor," Lentz says, ''that it's beginning to impact our operations." Asking other museums for loans is difficult when you can't match the conditions the works enjoy in their home institutions.
MAN hears that a letter, endorsing a Fogg Art Museum move and signed by at least one Boston museum director, is circulating in Boston civic circles. The letter suggests that the Fogg move to the South Boston harbor district, the area where the new Boston ICA is being built. The site mentioned in the letter, just off of Congress Ave. and Stillings St., is presently home to a a 4-5 story industrial building. (It's the white one on that Google Satellite map.) The area is already home to the Fort Point Arts Community, Inc. and many artists' studios.
If the Fogg moves, it would continue a Boston building boom. The MFA is planning to expand, as is the Gardener (MAN was the first to tell you about the Gardener's involvement with Renzo Piano), and, as I mentioned above, the ICA.
UPDATE: Fogg PR staffer Matthew Barone confirms that the Fogg is considering sites outside of Cambridge or Allston: "[We] are not a part of any letter discussing a museum site in Boston. I can safely say that the Art Museums are considering many sites for our alternative location -- Boston and Cambridge as well as other locations are being considered. No decision has been made."
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Oh. My. God.
I have no idea what to say about this. (Example of why, as published in a major UK daily newspaper: "I have a really big problem, I cannot have sex with men with little dicks. Oh, I've tried, but I just can't do it. But lots of people do. Thus, I have not had sex for two years." -- Tracey Emin.)
Related: Grammar.police, with, er, perspective.
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Five favorite installations
 I haven't done a list in a while, so I thought I'd come up with a completely arbitrary, almost silly one. Here's my list of five favorite installations at American museums. I've tried to keep the list down to single works (or groupings of works by one artist) instead of whole galleries. These are also permanent installations that have been up for a while -- that's why MOCA's Rauschenberg combines installation or SFMOMA's Doris Salcedo installation, for example, isn't here.
1.) The Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth: Ladder for Booker T. Washington, Martin Puryear. I can't imagine that I will ever see anything installed this perfectly. The architecture of the building and the installation of the piece add to the poetry of the art. When I know I'm going to Texas, this is what I most look forward to.
2.) Dia: Beacon: Torqued Ellipses, Richard Serra. The scariest experience at an American museum. Walking through a Torqued Ellipse as a train goes by on the tracks about 30 yards away is chillingly exciting.
3.) Philadelphia Museum of Art: Fifty Days at Iliam, Cy Twombly. When the Philly Museum remodeled its modern and contemporary galleries a couple of years ago, they created a fantastic space for this ten-canvas cycle of paintings inspired by Homer's Iliad. Amazingly, there's barely a mention of the installation on the Philly Museum's website.
4.) Harwood Museum: The Agnes Martin gallery. The Harwood, which is in Taos, NM, built this eight-sided gallery to house seven Martin paintings. Martin, who lived in Taos, would often wander over to the Harwood, sit on one of the gallery's Don Judd-designed stools, and enjoy the space. I wrote a little bit about the gallery here. (The Harwood website has some nice images/etc. of this gallery, but as of this typing their website is down. Check back later...)
5.) Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts: Blue Black, Ellsworth Kelly. As the Flash animation on the Pulitzer website demonstrates, sometimes architecture, natural light, and painting come together to create a viewing experience that feels vaguely spiritual. Kelly on Blue Black: This is "the best thing I've ever done." Kelly's work seems made for Tadao Ando's buildings... but then again, whose art isn't?
Close-but-not-quite: The Robert Gober gallery at the Walker, Diebenkorn at Stanford's Cantor Center.
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Americans in Chicago
This morning AJ picked up Alan Artner's Chicago Trib write-up of the new American galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago. (You'll need this.) Artner's write-up is a little confusing (Gallery 171 has this, the chronology is thematic, etc.) and the AIC website doesn't offer anything on the newly-hung spaces. Therefore I'm not real sure what's there and what's up, so I don't want to make sweeping generalizations about how American modernism is playing in American museums. Still...
It's hard not to think of a major museum reinstalling their collection in -- apparently -- an American moderns-inclusive way as a reaction to MoMA's continued disinterest in art made in America pre-Pollock. (MoMA, of course, consigns its American moderns to hallways and exit spaces.) In the last few months I've noticed some Americans sneaking into permanent collection installations -- Helen Torr in San Francisco, and her hubby Arthur Dove in a bunch of places, to name two. The next museum that will present an Americna-focused stroll through art history will (naturally) be the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which re-opens in July, 2006.
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Art writing: The future is the present
More in Los Angeles and in The Art Newspaper than here, panel after panel has been convened to consider the future of art criticism/writing. (No word on whether they're also holding panel discussions about the use of the passive voice. And I just loooove the dealer in The Art Newspaper story who says that critics have no influence... but then won't give his/her name for fear of pissing off critics.) While everyone talks, I've noticed two new places where arts-related publishing is happening.
 Here in DC I've noticed that people are doing less talking and more writing. DCist, part of the often poorly-behaved -ist empire, has rounded up a few arts bloggers and encouraged them to review area shows for publication on DCist. Sure, DCist had a false start or two -- notably a gallery owner and dealer wrote reviews until blogger Kriston Capps called DCist on it -- but they're off to a good start. Among the contributors have been Charles T. Downey of the fantastic Ionarts, and JT Kirkland of Thinking About Art. (Meanwhile, Grammar.police's Capps has been focusing his writing energies on magazines.)
Meanwhile, arts people have also whined a-plenty about a lack of arts-book publishers. Into that void steps Buk, a new publisher of arts pamphlets that is trying to update the history of pamphleteering. Buk is brought to you by the folks at Art issues Press, who made Dave Hickey a star. Buk won't just be publishing arts pamphlets, but the first round of offerings is arts-heavy, including LATer Christopher Knight on the national Mall. The website is simple, easy, and clever. At only $1.49 per Buk, what's not to love?
Related: Unbeige.
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More on the Walker
Some additional thoughts on the Walker:
- Talk about a museum that understands the web! The Walker has fantastic websites for its permanent collection, for Minnesota artists, and for the Walker Channel. Only the Walker's blogs need some work. (There must be a smart Walker curator that would enjoy blogging...) The permanent collection pages are particularly good: Click on the works below for examples.
- I love how much confidence the Walker curators show in their audience. I can't think of a permanent collection installation that more respects its audience than the Walker's. The wall text is minimal, often absent. As I wrote in my review, there is nothing glitzy or flashy here, and there is nothing meant to educate gallery-goers. It's just art. Come look. Enjoy. If you don't, that's fine too. (This quality is precisely what several of the bloggers I've linked to below don't like about the Walker. I wonder if they'll feel the same way after a few visits. And I wonder if people are so conditioned to exact spectacle in museum architecture that when they don't get it, they're disappointed.)
- The benches in the Walker's Turrell Skyspace are heated. (And this isn't the first time a Turrell Skyspace has had heated benches.)
- The Walker has a too much Takashi Murakami for my taste. They have (at least) two sculptures and way too much wallpaper.
- This Vija Celmins, installed in an end-of-a-hallway gallery of its own, is fantastically precious. This is probably the best Celmins installation in America.
- The reaction to Dia:Beacon-style spare installations, especially of minimalist art, has begun. The Walker's galleries are stuffed, especially the minimalism gallery.
- The Walker's collection catalogue is the best I've seen in quite a long time. If you have a serious art library, you gotta own it.
- The Walker owns Chuck Close's first self-portrait, and will co-originate a show of Close's self-portraits in July.
- David Hammons looks great. He looks great at MoMA. Hmmmm.
- Some lighting designer, somewhere, really needs to organize a symposium on lighting Rothkos. It's obviously not easy. Apparently the Walker has taken a cue from the NGA on lighting Rothkos. (MOCA seems to do it nicely...)
Related MSM: Minnesota Public Radio, LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne excerpted, NYT architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, NYT art critic Holland Cotter, Newsweek, Me. There's probably something on the St. Paul Pioneer Press site, but their registration is so ridiculous I skipped it.
Related blogs: Twin Cities Babelogue, photos galore at Hyperstation, Josh and Josh, Eyeteeth, Sacred Threshold, A Daily Dose.
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Not even the writers can believe it
This just in from GawkerForum: Not even the writers (in this case, David Rimanelli) can believe how silly GawkerForum is:
"You want me to cover a T-shirt launch?" I said incredulously to my editor. Indeed. So I hauled my art-critic carcass over to the Stella McCartney boutique on far West Fourteenth Street to attend a party celebrating underground-comics legend R. Crumb's collaboration with the designer...
What next? Gelato?
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Hawthorne on the Walker
Here are the last few paragraphs from LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's review of the Walker (which is hidden behind the LAT's content wall). The photo is of the decoration to which he refers. The vertical part of the decoration -- from the floor to the ceiling -- is the gate that "closes" a gallery. It slides into the wall.
 "In a few places, Herzog and De Meuron's design for the Walker is not just contemporary but edges toward trendiness, a quality that marks a real departure for architects who made their reputation with work that aimed so directly for the timeless and elemental.
This is true, first of all, in the Walker's lighting design, by Arnold Chan, who is best known for his work with Ian Schrager and has provided the museum with the sort of discreetly chic illumination you'd sooner associate with a hotel than a place for looking at art.
It is even more true when it comes to Herzog and De Meuron's use of decorative ornament. The architects have taken a swirling lace pattern, blown it up to almost cartoonish proportions and then used it, in various colors and materials, to cover the thresholds to the galleries, the walls of the theater and even the concrete entrance gate to the underground parking garage.
In their new interest in carefully controlled blasts of decoration, Herzog and De Meuron are following the lead of furniture designers such as Patricia Urquiola as well as architects such as Gehry (in his Walt Disney Concert Hall upholstery) and Rem Koolhaas (in his interiors for the Central Library in Seattle and the student center at the Illinois Institute of Technology).
The Walker suggests that the thus far tentative decorative revival in architecture - call it ornament creep - is growing bolder. But because decoration is now being used with a good deal more wry restraint and less empty irony than it was during the first flowering of postmodernism - and because it continues to offer such a refreshing antidote to the predictable, airless quality of the luxe minimalism of the 1990s - it is cause for enthusiasm more than worry.
The approach seems most effective when it pairs, as it does here, sleek, ornament-free exteriors with bold decoration in limited sections of the interior. That tension is the key to the Walker's newfound vitality. The theater, in particular, with its black-on-black wall designs in embossed
aluminum, is a marvelous example of how figurative pattern can be deployed to create dark intrigue instead of sunny nostalgia.
It will be fascinating to judge the results, though, when a prominent architect grows bold enough to put ornament back on a facade, where it is still pretty much taboo. For all their architectural daring, Herzog and De Meuron still weren't willing to go that far in Minneapolis."
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The Walker is back
A slightly-modified-for-the-art-world version of what I wrote for Bloomberg. This will be the first of several Walker posts today. Later: some random thoughts by me, and an excerpt from LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne.
The remarkable thing about the newly-expanded Walker Art Center, open on Sunday, is that there's nothing remarkable or dramatic about it. The Swiss architectural firm of Herzog & de Meuron has created no soaring entry like there is at the Museum of Modern Art and there's no grand hall like there is at the Tate Modern. There is no big-name signature artwork installed in an effort to give visitors a 'wow' moment.
Instead, the Walker presents itself as quietly confident in itself, its curators its collection, and its audience. For many years the Walker has been one of the American museums most respected by art professionals. With this expansion, the Walker should become one of America's most admired museums, period.
 The Walker's approach to expansion was simple: It simply tacked a $70 million rectangle of crumpled-looking aluminum mesh that is broken up by geometrically creative windows onto its 1970 Edward Larrabee Barnes building and then installed its permanent collection in both its new and old galleries. (The $70 million figure does not include $25 million that the city of Minneapolis spent on a new parking garage on land owned by the Walker.)
Compare this approach to the nearby Milwaukee Art Museum. In 2001, the MAM spent $113 million on a construction project with a building designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava at its core. Two years after the new MAM opened, the museum faced $32.6 million in post-construction debt and was forced to lay off curatorial staff. While the MAM relied on its building to attract an audience, the new Walker plays it safe and relies upon its collection.
The installations in the new wing look good, in part because the lighting in the new galleries is superb. While the Walker has no clearly-presented first gallery through which visitors are meant to enter the collection, the arrangement of the addition encourages visitors to begin their visit to the Walker in a gallery of Ellsworth Kelly works.
Kelly's paintings look fresh and exuberant. "Red Yellow Blue III" a three-canvas installation from 1966 that features one canvas of each color, seems to hover off of the wall on which it is hung. "Green Rocker" a1968 Kelly aluminum sculpture of a creased disc, seems to similarly float above the gallery's floor. I've never seen Kelly look better.
The Kelly gallery is part of a cluster of four galleries, one of two such clusters in the new building. Each of these eight galleries presents an artist that the Walker has collected in depth for many years. The quality of the work on view is a testament to the institution's admirable willingness to commit itself to focused, long-term collecting of particular artists.
Beyond the Kelly gallery, the first cluster includes galleries devoted to Robert Motherwell, Joan Mitchell and Jasper Johns. The second cluster offers work by Matthew Barney, Sherrie Levine, Robert Gober, and Kara Walker.
The Motherwell and Levine galleries feel dated and tired, but Gober has rarely looked better. Gober, who represented the United States at the 2001 Venice Biennale, is an artist whose installations can feel distant and unaffecting. But the Walker's installation creates a space that feels made for Gober. The walls are painted a slate grey, different from the white of the surrounding galleries, giving visitors the feeling that they are entering a special space. The room includes one of Gober's earliest works "Slides of a Changing Painting," a slide projection of Gober sketches that present his themes of memory, sexuality, and loss in a gentle sequence that approaches animation.
The effect of the new galleries is a credit not just to the curators who installed them, but to the design of the spaces. In recent years it's been fashionable for museums to build new galleries with 'hanging walls' that stop an inch or so above the floor, leaving empty space. The Walker and Herzog & de Meuron rejected that approach, and their galleries feel more personal and intimate for it.
The Walker has re-installed its permanent collection throughout its original Barnes building as well. Notable installations include a series of photographs Catherine Opie made of the shacks that Minnesotans place on frozen lakes so that they may ice-fish in the winter, and a gallery of mostly American painting from the 1950s and 1960s.
While the Walker's installation is straightforward, it is denser than most museum presentations of contemporary art. In most galleries this works well – it encourages viewers to physically approach the art that interests them. But occasionally the installation is over-crowded. In the gallery of 50's and 60's American painting and sculpture, an untitled color-saturated 10-feet-by-7-feet Clyfford Still painting, seems to be shouting over two small, contemplative Ad Reinhardt paintings hung a few feet away. (To see the Reinhardts I found that I had to hold a piece of paper up to the side of my head to block out the Styll.)
In addition to expanding, the museum has raised $21.4 million for its endowment. (One couple, Judy Dayton and her late husband Kenneth, donated $16.4 million of the $91.4 million raised.) In Milwaukee, the museum has struggled to pay for its splashy new building and has had to lay off staff. The Walker, in quietly playing to its strengths, will have no such problems.
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At the NGA, Toulouse-Lautrec & Montmartre
This is a much more pointed discussion of T-L&M than ran on the Bloomberg wire. That piece was shorter and much more descriptive.
Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre sounds like the title of an interesting book, which it is. Unfortunately, the museum exhibit of the same title on view now at the National Gallery of Art, is not a poor accompaniment to the book.
 The blockbuster show, stuffed with about 250 objects, provides a snapshot of a bohemian Paris neighborhood by placing the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) at its center. It is a pithy exhibit, a sanitized version of place, full of mediocrities. Amazingly, the most bohemian, wild neighborhood in end-of-the-century Paris comes off as a bore.
That's too bad, because Montmartre and Lautrec are rich subjects. Lautrec was a syphilitic alcoholic, a neighborhood artist-mascot who, in part, promoted his favorite entertainers with his work. He sketched dancers, the middle-class partying with their 'other women,' and created promotional posters that are among the most famous advertising images of all-time. Several Lautrec posters are here, including one that promotes the Moulin Rouge with both typographical flair and a blonde dancer kicking up her heels surrounded by, mostly, men.
While the best work in the exhibit is a few of the 123 Lautrecs, most are minor, uninteresting works. An exception is Lautrec's delicate, nine-inch-by-six-inch portrait of Carmen Gaudin (at left), in which a burst of light gives Gaudin's hair fiery life.
The exhibit is broken into a series of themed galleries such as 'Advertising Montmartre,' 'Café-Concerts,' and 'Dance Halls.' Most of the work selected hints at Montmartre's hedonism but does so with restraint. The NGA's installation is consistent with its curating: All of the themed galleries have English names, save one. 'Maisons Closes' is a gallery about Montmartre's whorehouses.
Only one of the show's ten rooms is a knockout. A room of artists' takes on American dancer Loie Fuller succeeds at capturing the interplay between performers, partiers and artists that made Montmartre a legendary home to creative folk. Fuller's act was based on manipulating flowing, translucent gowns while dancing. Many artists tried to capture her mix of action and sensuality, and Lautrec's lithographs did it best. Fourteen (borrowed from nine different institutions) are on view, each featuring the same image of Fuller, but with Fuller surrounded by different colors. Each individual lithograph seems a near-abstraction, but when viewed together they almost seem to move.
There are hints in the show that guest curator Richard Thomson recognized that most rooms in the show needed a boost. While Thomson's catalogue essay says that his intent was to capture the Montmartre of Lautrec's 1885-1895 heyday, the show is spiked with Picassos, Manets and Degases from outside that time period.
But why? Once you've bent the calendar for Picasso, who was four years old when the show theoretically starts in 1885 and who didn't even visit Paris until five years after the show's window ends, why not also bend it for Matisse, who made hundreds of drawings of Montmartre?
The strained inclusions reveal this show for what it is: a hoped-for blockbuster that has sacrificed a tight theme in an attempt to attract crowds. ("A Taste of Montmartre" buffet brunch is available at the NGA on weekends during the show, and you can buy a pewter statue of Fuller – whose dances were all about light and flowingly flimsy skirts -- in the gift shops.)
This exhibit is a missed opportunity. Blockbusterhood and quality need not mutually exclusive aims: A 2004 Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition of the poster art of Toulouse-Lautrec and his contemporaries covered the same time period and many of the same artists. The result was a fantastic show that drew crowds. The NGA's show will merely draw crowds.
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Google meets Garnett
 The blogosphere is excited about the launch of Google satellite mapping. According to blogosphere linkage guide Daypop, Google Sightseeing is the second-most linked to site in the last week. (As of this posting, GS is up. However, GS has been fighting traffic overload all morning, so if at first the link doesn't work, try, try again.) Google Sightseeing finds cool landmarks by using Google's satellite feature, and posts the pictures -- that's the Saarinen-designed Gateway Arch at left.
Americans' fascination with overhead photography is nothing new: William Garnett made a career out of it, and aerial photography has also been explored by Emmet Gowin (that's a fab link) and David Maisel, who recently had a strong, Garnettish solo show at Von Lintel Gallery in Chelsea.
While aerial photography pre-dates WWI, it was during the world wars that photographers most explored the potential of aerial image-making. (Aside: Has any curator put together a show about artists and their experiences in WWI and WWII --and especially about how their military service impacted their future work? If not, someone should. If so, email me.)
 When WWI broke out, Edward Steichen quickly found himself in the Signal Corps' Photographic Division, where he made several scientific breakthroughs in the field of reconnaissance photogrpahy. Once he was out of the Corps, Steichen did not revisit aerial photography, leaving the field empty for Garnett, who made a career of documentary-style aerial work. (The UC Press published a book of Garnett's work in 1994.)
In hindsight, Garnett (that's his Finished Housing, taken over Lakewood, Calif. in 1950, at right) was the father of the New Topographics. His often witty, from-on-high photographs of the development of California during its boom years anticipate the the documentation of human encroachment into landscape that the New Topos explored in the 1970's and 1980's. His photographs also anticipate the minimalists' focus on seriality. As we've noted here before, the Getty recently purchased a trove of work from the 89-year old Garnett.
Related: MANfave Beverly Tang points us toward more satellite photos, and to a discussion of the eco-enviro importance of the photographs. Another elder statesman of the New Topos will have a show in Chelsea this fall: Hank Wessel at Charles Cowles.
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Cultural tourism
As AJ points out in visual arts stories from the Sunday roundup, Boston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are all beefing up their cultural tourism offerings (read: museums) in an effort to attract big bucks. (I could link to each story, but AJ already compiled them. You'll need this BugMeNot SN/PW to access the Minneapolis stories.)
Here in DC, where we take our cultural tourism offerings for granted so much of the time, the National Gallery and a bunch of others are offering "Paris on the Potomac" cultural packages, spotlighted by one of the cheesiest websites ever. (I love that the "Paris on the Potomac" name had to be licensed from Potomac Party Cruises, Inc., best known for offering us dandydinnerboat.com.)
More on the cornerstone of the Paris on the Potomac effort, the NGA's Toulouse Laturec and Montmartre show, on Tuesday. (Yes, I changed my mind -- I have something else I want to post later today.)
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LAT on simultaneous vacancies
As of this typing, LATer Suzanne Muchnic's story about how unusual it is for two major museums in one city to be in the market for a director is available, so click it while you can...
MAN's list of open museum top jobs includes (and please email me to remind me what I've missed):
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Des Moines Art Center
- Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
- J. Paul Getty Museum
- Indianapolis Museum of Art
- Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art (and who knows what will happen with the Broad Contemporary?)
- Minneapolis Institute of Arts
- Williams College Art Museum
The most recently filled top job was at SITE Santa Fe, which hired MassMOCA curator Laura Steward Heon in February. I hear that Williams is down to two finalists -- one from Washingotn state and one from Louisiana. And I haven't heard anyone mention it in print, but artfolk know that the Met's Philippe de Montebello turns 70 next year...
UPDATE: OK, OK, I get it. A dozen emailers have asked me what LACE is doing up there. Short answer: I'm a nice guy.
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Around the blogosphere
Welcome to MAN, on the first Christopher Knight-free day this week. (Well, for now...)
- The career path every artist dreams about: is included in group show at commercial gallery, receives solo show in gallery, has their art used to sell panty liners.
- Because you cannot "fully understand [Cy] Twombly's art unless you know that he is gay?" (Because you cannot fully make fun of Lee Siegel unless you are an art critic. See, that's not true either.)
- The neo-precisionism I see often in recent painting (Alfred, Rohrer, etc.) has worked its way into photography, too. (See Sheeler, Charles. And OK, the photos aren't exactly neo-precisionism, but they are neo-Sheelerism.)
- I agree on museum wall-texts. My version of this story: At MoMA last week, I saw two fantastic parents with a well-behaved child who was clearly having a ball looking around. The family were in the minimalism gallery, taking in the Sandback, the Judd, the Hesse and such. The child looked at the Andre and asked her parents why it was on the floor. The parents had no idea, and looked around at the nearby people, hoping for an explanation. So I offered a quick explanation and walked onto the Andre. The kid followed me, horrifying her parents. Then they followed both of us, and couldn't stop grinning.
- Michael Kimmelman, happily following a blog.
- Forward Retreat likes what I like. (MANhint: I would say that there's an 80 percent chance that you that you'll see Rosana Castrillo-Diaz in Chelsea this summer.)
- Steichen, re-created.
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LACMA's Rich addresses LACMA's staff
On the heels of LACMA boss Andrea Rich's resignation earlier this week and a LACMA board meeting yesterday, Rich addressed her staff earlier today. The highlights:
- Rich said that her resignation had been planned for quite sometime because of declining health. (She told the LAT that medical concerns played a minor role in her departure.)
- Rich said that there was no power struggle between her and the board or any particular board members, but every bit of reporting that's been done on her departure indicates that there was a power struggle over the new Broad Contemporary.
- Rich took swings at LAT art critic Christopher Knight, saying he'd had it in for her from the beginning. She added -- and I'm only keeping this out of quotation marks because I wasn't personally there, but I've heard the same phrase from two people -- that Knight never lets facts get in the way of a good rant.
- Rich promised that staff would be included in the director search, but did not give specifics about how that would happen.
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Knight on Flavin @MAMFW
Here's a thorough butchering of Christopher Knight's review of Flavin in Fort Worth. (Full version, my email address is up there, yadda yadda.)
Sounds like Fort Worth has installed the room of early work first, whereas at the NGA it was up last. And like I did, Knight discusses religion and Flavin's work.
I can't imagine, however, a more exquisite environment for Flavin's fluorescent lights than the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
The museum's acclaimed new building by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, which opened late in 2002, is a poetic essay in contemplative volumes of luminous space, constructed from simple industrial materials in serial arrangements. Since that also describes Flavin's art, they seem made for each other. I didn't see the exhibition in Washington, and it travels next summer to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art before heading to Europe, but if you want an unforgettable experience, Fort Worth is a sure bet.
***
Flavin's lights, however physically fragile, also exude an institutional toughness I had never recognized before. Like many young artists in New York in the 1950s -- especially self-taught artists like him, who needed to make a living while their work developed to maturity -- Flavin held down jobs as a guard in several of the city's formidable cultural institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of Natural History. A museum's purpose, of course, is the collection and preservation of objects whose time has receded into history. Perhaps that explains why Flavin's sculptures virtually demand the enveloping embrace of institutions, to keep the lights on and the art "alive" for the future. They illuminate our institutionalized society.
***
 More common [than a dud Knight identifies, hey, email me] are breathtaking pieces like a green fluorescent "fence" from 1973 -- the only work in the retrospective not installed on the second floor. It fills instead the central glass-walled pavilion on the ground level, which abuts a large outdoor reflecting pool. Twenty-one modular units, each 4 feet square and determined by the standard commercial size of the light pans and tubes, overlap slightly as they march across the narrow room toward the glass wall and the water beyond.
Inside, at the darker end of the gallery, the green glow is intense, but as the sculpture nears the windows it mixes with the filtered and reflected daylight. The atmosphere assumes a strange reddish hue.
This, like all Flavin's sculpture, is a machine that produces a condition of acutely self-conscious perception and discernment, and it does so in the neighborly configuration of a backyard fence. That's an artistic function that will never be obsolete.
Related: MAN reveals the secret behind the Flavin catalogue. Greg Allen chats with Dan's son Stephen.
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LAT hates theory too
I like the LAT's arts coverage for lots of reasons. Yesterday, on the op-ed page, the times ran this Frank Whitford piece in which he argues for an end to Octoberism. A sample (but seriously, go read the whole thing):
There are theories at the bottom of the jargon, theories derived from psychoanalysis, feminism, structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction. The trouble is that the theories come first and the art afterward, if at all. It's as though art historians fear that no one will take them and their discipline seriously unless they litter their writings with polysyllabic words and quotations from trendy (or once trendy) philosophers, almost all of them French.
Related: Todd Gibson hates theory too.
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My museum wish list
- That MOCA builds a place to install its fantastic permanent collection. (The installation of abstraction from their permanent collection, on view now, is the best permanent collection installation of post-war art in America right now.)
- That major American museums and major American regional museums create libraries that are open to the public. The model would be the library at the Pompidou in Paris, a place where anyone who wants to pop in and flip through 30-year old catalogues or new art magazines may do so.
- That Pew or Rockefeller or Carnegie or some foundation would fund a new museum professionals organization that would embarass AAMD (shouldn't be too hard given that AAMD is only too happy to embarass themselves with regularity) and render it obsolete. The museum world needs this -- museum ethics have become a joke and some recent museum practices take hallowed halls big steps closer to installations at the Mall of America. (We're thinking about you and King Tut, LACMA.) If museums want to maintain their place of privilege and respect in our society, and if the money that cares about cultural heritage thinks that the integrity of the industry is important, someone must step up and soon. It wouldn't take that much money...
- Biennials are broken. The concept is tired, the execution is fantastically dull. This is one way to fix one of them.
- The National Gallery has a huge photo collection and a huge works on paper collection. They are rarely, rarely seen. You have the money and the board, NGA. Build.
Other bloggers: Post similar lists and I'll do a posting of links later this week.
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Rep. Kathleen Harris, painter
Too bizarre. From The Hill, via an eagle-eyed reader:
When her constituents and fellow members receive correspondence from Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.), they may notice that her signature looks a bit more impressive than others.
That’s because Harris signs nearly every piece of her correspondence in calligraphy.
"She has signed her name like that ever since I can remember," a former aide said.
Since the fourth grade, to be exact. That's when the artistically minded Harris — she also paints photo-realism in her spare time — first started dabbling in the ornate style of penmanship.
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LACMA: LAT's Knight explains
LAT art critic Christopher Knight checks in with today's must-read follow story on the LACMA mess. Here's an excerpt (and I've become exceptionally good at forwarding full-length versions on request). It all sounds about right to me:
A job listing had recently appeared in London's Art Newspaper, announcing a search for a LACMA deputy director for contemporary art. Usually directors hire their staff, deputies included, but in this instance museum-watchers were puzzled. What was the ad doing in London's Art Newspaper? That is not where American directors of art museums normally post their job listings.
The two most commonly used professional venues contained no notice of the LACMA job. Even LACMA's own website, which lists available positions ranging from director of conservation to head librarian, made no mention of it.
They still don't. That's because the deputy job isn't really available.
Broad, the trustee who pledged $60 million to develop a quasi-independent museum on LACMA's grounds, has a couple of candidates already in mind. One is Bruce Ferguson, dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Another is the longtime deputy director at New York's troubled Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lisa Dennison. Broad has always been deferential to the New York art establishment, and he who pays the bills often expects to call the shots.
And yet: Even junior administrators know it's intolerable when their "deputy" actually works for someone else. Try getting that scheme by a museum director who's an experienced former bureaucratic in-fighter at UCLA.
So the jockeying began. In a March 7 interview about the highly unusual job listing, Rich told The Times: "They [the board's search committee, who placed the peculiar ad] are doing a search in the classic, university way. They will come up with a slate of candidates and present it to me and I'll decide."
Whether that method is indeed "the classic, university way" is a matter of considerable doubt, and why it should have any bearing on an art museum is anybody's guess. The bizarre characterization made one wonder whether LACMA's director even knew a "help wanted" ad had been placed. Either way, battle lines were drawn.
Later that week, Dennison came to town for interviews. Certain discrepancies apparently emerged between Broad's vision of the deputy director's job and Rich's conception of it. Those conflicts now seem to have been resolved. Rich, 61, will be gone by November.
Everybody is trying to put the best face on the sudden "retirement." LACMA still has tens of millions of dollars to raise for construction and endowment in its multiphase expansion plan, and now there are two big jobs to be filled, not just one. (Perhaps the nascent deputy will be promoted.)
For that, unfortunately, LACMA will have to go to the back of a lengthy line; major director searches are already underway at heavy-hitters such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Cleveland Art Museum and the Minneapolis Art Institute.
But what ended badly, started badly. The vacuum in professional conscience from both the boardroom (expected) and the director's suite (unexpected) means LACMA has been a rudderless ship for longer than a decade.
***
Rich's departure also coincides with a repulsive profit-sharing agreement forged between LACMA and a corporate entertainment conglomerate to present "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" this summer.
No other major American art museum (except innovative, unique L.A.'s) was willing to countenance that smarmy scheme. Pop-culture consumerism was trotted out as artistic populism - but it's tough to claim a principled commitment to struggles against unfair privilege when you're also setting a national record for highest ticket price ever ($30) to see a for-profit art exhibition.
Like I said, there really isn't anyone to root for in this mess - except perhaps the forgotten art museum public. Everybody loves the abject underdog.
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Elderfield on Spurling
In Search of the Miraculous, writer Brian Sholis' blog, is back from hiatus (and it's back on the blogroll too). Brian points us to MoMA chief curator John Elderfield's review of Hilary Spurling's Matisse the Master. It's an interesting read, especially because Elderfield implies that Spurling (a much-praised biographer but not an art historian) should not be writing about an art person.
The answer is of course she should. Art historians don't have a monopoly on biographies or on placing artists in the context of their place and time. (Part of the reason the first volume of Spurling's Matisse bio was so good was because Spurling looked beyond Matisse's canvases and into his life to explore how events in his life impacted his art.)
Elderfield raises some other good points about Spurling's use (and non-use) of some available documents. I'll keep an eye out to see if Spurling responds.
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LACMA: Rich resigns
Last Thursday MAN broke the news that LACMA had held an emergency board meeting and that director Andrea Rich might not be long for the museum. Rich resigned on Sunday.
LACMA has a regularly scheduled board meeting on Wednesday. Indications from Los Angeles were that a "major announcement" was scheduled for that meeting's agenda. The question is was that Rich's resignation or will there be something else coming on Wednesday?
The LAT also reported this nugget:
In early March, the Art Newspaper posted a job opening for a deputy director of contemporary art to lead the museum that will bear Broad's name at LACMA. Rich said that she had disagreed with Broad about how that position should be filled but said that the disagreement did not precipitate her resignation.
MAN hears that the disagreement was pretty straightforward: Will the deputy director for the Broad Contemporary report to the LACMA director or someone else? Rich, naturally enough, thought the deputy director should report to the director.
Who's next: Rich's resignation is effective Nov. 7. While I've heard nothing about this from either LACMA people or the Gribbon camp, I've got to believe that if ex-Getty Museum director Deborah Gribbon is interested that she's the odds-on front-runner.
Contextualizer: When have more big American museum directorships been open? Museums in search of directors include: Cleveland, Des Moines, the Getty, and LACMA.
Related: Broad, Rich, Renzo Piano and LACMA building together -- until now.
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David Hockney @ LA Louver
Intro paragraph here
Watercolor is usually considered a hobbyist's medium. It's easy to picture a weekend painter, wearing a herringbone jacket and khakis, heading out to the country in his car. He might perch his watercolors between the car's front seats, rest his watercolor paper in his lap, look out the window, and paint what he sees.
At least that's how David Hockney, 67, has done it in recent years as he's worked on his latest body of work. The result, a show at L. A. Louver gallery titled, "Hand Eye Heart," is Hockney's first American exhibit of new paintings since 2000. The artwork is personal and wonderful, beautiful and sad.
Hockney is a British artist who has spent most of the last few decades making art about the light, landscape, and men of the American West. Hockney's interest in art history has been a constant throughout his work – his colors, his line and his pictorial space come from Matisse, the neo-cubism of his photo collages come from Picasso. Hockney's new watercolors incorporate his love of art history with his own recent biography.
The last four years of Hockney's life have been turbulent. In 2001 he published a much-discussed book, "Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters," in which he theorized that painters had long used optical assistance devices as a guide. After completing the book – and many, many post-publication defenses of his theory – Hockney was hungry to get back to painting.
Just before the book's publication, Hockney found that life events, including the illnesses of a close friend and Hockney's own mother, caused him to travel frequently back to Yorkshire, where he was born. (His mother has since died.)
Then just after the book came out, events conspired to drive Hockney out of Los Angeles. One of his closest friends died, as did Hockney's beloved dachshund. Finally, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security refused to let a close British friend of Hockney's re-enter the U.S. to visit him. Hockney felt frustrated with life in the United States and he decided to return to England.
Looking for a new challenge, Hockney took up watercolors, a medium he had never seriously explored. Hockney quickly became interested in painting the Yorkshire landscape, but felt that it had been done. (For centuries painters such as J.M.W. Turner have combed over the hills of West Yorkshire.) Hockney wasn't sure he had anything to add to their efforts, but eventually realized that painters had mostly ignored East Yorkshire. Driven by a friend, and with bottles of pre-made watercolors in his pockets, Hockney headed out into the countryside.
The best paintings in the show feature stark, leafless trees perched on gentle hills, and the landscape beyond. Trees are a common art historical metaphor for life -- trees grow at a rate similar to humans and often have similar life spans – and Hockney almost certainly saw himself in them.
"The East Yorkshire, 24 III 04" is one of the clearest metaphorical examples and one of the finest paintings in the show. A sturdy tree, painted in dark watercolors, takes up nearly half of the surface area of the paper. The tree is surrounded by fields, in mostly grays and steel blues, that fall away from it. Above and behind the branches, the sky is mostly cloudy. The tree leans to the left, over a road. The tree's lean directs the viewer to a patch of clear azure sky, the only blue sky in the painting.
Several years before Hockney made this painting, he scattered his mother's ashes over the fields of East Yorkshire. With this painting Hockney seems to be telling us that he may have lost people close to him, but he's still here, older but sturdy, and that he sees some bright spots through the tumult.
These paintings are also full of puddles and water, which provides Hockney the opportunity to paint reflections – often of trees -- in these puddles. This is no accident of the British winter. Here again, art history is Hockney's guide. Throughout Matisse's life he inserted mirrors into his paintings as a way of putting himself into his paintings. Hockney is also familiar with the use of mirrors and reflection in art from his work on "Secret Knowledge," too.
As mirrors do not naturally occur in the East Yorkshire landscape, Hockney makes do with puddles. "Traffic Light and Rain, Bridlington III" is particularly straightforward. Rain is falling, forming ringlets on the ground. The traffic light of the painting's title is terrifically substantial, a monumental black rectangle with a red light, both perched on a blue pole. The light and pole are reflected in the surrounding rain water. The pole is solid, but the body of the light is wavy, distorted, even shaky. I see Hockney himself as the subject of the painting. The leaflessness of his trees serve as a reminder that Hockney is no longer in the summer of his life, and the wobbliness of the reflected traffic light does too.
Watercolor is an intensely personal medium. It is deeply human. Every movement of the painter's brush, including mistakes, is revealed in a line of color. Because watercolor is a popular weekend painter's medium, many of us know a watercolorist. We feel like we have a personal connection to the medium. In this series of paintings, we feel like we know David Hockney, too.
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