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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
The Jetty
Today I'm catching a plane for the Southwest. I'm heading out to Quemado and Marfa, and I can't wait. (Posting Wed-Fri? No idea. Maybe.) My mind is full of earth art, in part because of where I'm going and in part because I revisited Smithson at the Whitney over the weekend. Here's what I wrote about visiting the Jetty last September:
 Understandably, the greatest Smithson isn't in the retrospective either. That work, titled Spiral Jetty, is a 6,650-ton, 1,500-foot spiraling installation of rock that extends out from the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake. The Jetty has long been a point of pilgrimage for art lovers; with MOCA's exhibit and a renewed public interest in earth art, attendance is up. According to a National Park Service ranger at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, in the last couple of weeks the number of visitors to the Jetty is running three-to-five times normal.
After seeing the MOCA show, I went to the Jetty to see for myself whether it is great art or if those who have made the trip talk it up as a way to justify the trek into Box Elder County, Utah.
After flying to Salt Lake City, renting a truck, driving two-and-a-half-hours, and after finally swerving my way down a rocky, rutted road only an SUV could love, I was ready to believe that the journey begat the Jetty legend.
Once arrived, I extracted myself from my battered SUV, looked out at the Jetty and became a believer. After five minutes of staring at it my entire face was sore, just like it is after a roller coaster ride. I couldn't stop smiling.
I walked out onto the Jetty, following its spiral curve to the center. Most art isn't made to be touched, let alone walked on. The Jetty is. Like virtually no other artwork, Spiral Jetty transforms art viewing into a five-sense experience. I smelled brine, I heard chirps and voices carried over the flat by the light breeze; I tasted the lake on my lips, I felt the crusty salt crystals that cover the black basalt of the Jetty, and my eyes happily ignored the topographic drama around me so they could fix on the Jetty.
Until now, like most people, I had only seen the Jetty in photographs. Jetty images usually fall into two categories: aerial shots that make it look like something big enough to be seen from space, or pictures shot from over the lake, looking back at the shore. No one, save a few pilots, sees the Jetty that way. The way to see it is from land, with northern Utah before you.
In pursuit of the best view, I scrambled 300 feet up a hill of volcanic debris called Rozel Point. To my left and right mountains looked down on the lake in front of me. Islands far, far away provided visual depth, reminding me how huge the Great Salt Lake is. From Rozel Point, the Jetty is just a doodle on the landscape. It is art as ornament, Smithson-made bling-bling for Mother Nature.
The Jetty is one of the masterpieces of American art. It explodes the 19th-century landscape painting of Frederic Church and his contemporaries, exposing it as the art equivalent of transitional technology. Here Smithson doesn't merely borrow land as a subject, he uses it as the canvas for his art.
A few hundred yards east of Smithson's spiral is an old industrial jetty, used for oil exploration from the 1920's to the 1980's. It is rotting toward dissolution. While he didn't write about it, Smithson saw it when he was building Spiral Jetty. He must have known that the oil jetty would eventually decay and disappear, while his artwork would survive, forming a partnership with nature. It will last.
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Around LA
I did some Ess Eff gallery/museum notes last week. Today some sightems from around the Southland...
 Dmitri Kozyrev at Cirrus: Kozyrev is a landscape painter who has changed what landscape painting is. If Julie Mehretu paints globalization, Dmitri Kozyrev paints the movement that makes globalization possible.
Americans experience the fruited plain (or the fruited subdivision) at 75 miles per hour. Sometimes we fly over it at six times that speed. So that's how Kozyrev paints it.
Each canvas is made up overlapping planes of color. Among them are distant horizons, some sunny, some cloudy, some dotted with buildings, some not. Strips of road -- or maybe runway -- run through the paintings, appearing to be going somewhere in the distance. Strangely, you can follow them from the inside of the paintings into the foreground, but as they get closer to the viewer they dissolve. Other landscape elements sit amongst the planes: flat farm buildings, smokestacks, freeway overpasses, onramps, valleyes, rock outrcroppings.
American landscape painting has long been about stasis, about sitting and enjoying a pretty scene. Americans do not sit and look at pretty scenes anymore. (Kudos to Cirrus for putting high-res Kozyrevs on their website. As with a lot of painting, small JPEGs don't do it.)
Daniel Dove at Mark Moore: Dove is the perfect example of an equation artist. Richter's squeegy + Kiefer's sunflower + David Schnell's geometry + Michael Wesely's photos of process + Butterfield's horses + Smithson's favorite idea = Daniel Dove. These paintings are amalgamated appropriation as originality. They're too slick, too clean, too pretty, too easy.
Amazingly, it often works. Dove's paintings are about the buildup and then the decay of American environments. Thirty years of entropy happen instantly in one of Dove's paintings. The things he paints, say an Applebee's-style exubran food shack are an amalgamation of styles themselves. (Aside to MM: The painting is 96 inches tall. The JPEG doesn't even make it to 96 pixels.)
 Invader at sixspace: An artist named Banksy has been getting a lot of pub by invading art museums and installing fake paintings in galleries. The idea seems kind of lame, the exact kind of thing that a general assignment writer at AP finds exciting, but that everyone else finds tedious.
Much more clever is the work by a French artist who goes by the way-too-gimmicky name Invader. He treats built-up environments, like Los Angeles, as if they were the playing field of a video game. At night, during a recent stay in LA, he drove around the city and 'invading' areas by placing his little tile-and-resin critters on buildings, billboards, signs, and the like. Some critters look straight out of Pac-Man, others like pixellated versions of pop-culture iconography. (And by installing at night, Invader mimics the look-and-feel of early video games, which were made up of colored dots on black fields.)
If you've driven around Los Angeles in the last week or two you have probably seen Invader's work on LA landmarks, lightposts, on the entire side of a building (somehow), on the boardwalk, or on the beach. I was strangely thrilled to find one on La Cienega, in the Culver City gallery district.
I can't imagine that they feel as right anywhere else. (Invader seems made for the festivalism of the biennial circuit, I suppose. Yawn.) The entertainment industry (+ Eli Broad) runs LA. Movie and TV billboards are everywhere. A few times a year a porn company invades the Sunset Strip with a risque billboard, sucks up the hoped-for publicity, and then limps away. Why shouldn't art invade the urban environment too? (Disclosure: sixspace owners, and art.blogging.la webgods Caryn Coleman and Sean Bonner are good pals.)
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The Getty story rolls on
If you're at the Getty, say in communications or in Barry Munitz's office, you really, really, really, really, really, really, really wanted the LA Times' expose of Munitz and the Getty to go quietly away.
Isn't gonna happen. Today's headline is "Senator Rebukes Getty," but the story indicates that it isn't just Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, who is upset with the Getty. There is much more trouble coming Barry "Koz" Munitz's way. The Munitz/Getty story not only has traction, but it's rolling downhill...
P.S. Grassley doesn't screw around. When the Washington Post exposed problems at The Nature Conservancy, Grassley's committee slappled TNC around pretty good. If I'm at the Getty and close to Munitz -- or on the board -- I'm aware that I'm about to get slapped around too.
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Around the blogosphere
Because I love reading other people do all my thinking for me:
- Permanent collection displays rock. Has anyone else noticed that artists appreciate them more than anyone?
- No matter how good a show, some exhibits are bittersweet. A survey of Margaret Kilgallen's work, for one.
- Normally here in AtB, we try to come up with a clever way to link to a post. But Edward Winkleman has so many good posts up on his blog right now that you should just go read the whole front page. And you should do that everyday.
- Herzog & de Meuron's Walker just opened and the de Young opens in October. Kriston Capps reminds us that there could have been a Herzog & de Meuron museum at the University of Texas, and the blow-by-blow is funny, sad, and image-filled. (Added bonus: Kriston loves Herb Caen too.)
- Newspapers are getting into culture blogs (broadly defined). First up: The San Francisco Chronicle.
- What is shiny, twisted, occasionally overheats the neighbors' homes, houses a concert hall named after an animator/entertainment tycoon, and wears boxing gloves? It's a Gehry-fight! In one corner: That Brutal Joint. In the other: City Comforts.
- Photos of Renzo Piano buildings, taken from above the planet; and
- Today's funniest picture ever.
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Because I've been lax...
While I've been busy with Tut, Clyfford Still, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, the rest of the art world is focused on Venice and Basel, which aren't so different. (I've been trumpeting that line for two years now, so it's kind of nice to see some other folks agree.)
The Telegraph (UK) is the latest to agree on fairs and biennials. Still, this line from Colin Gleadell's story reveals a remarkable amount of cluelessness about how the art world works:
The fair is considered the most important of its kind because its organisers rigorously select the dealers who can supply the best quality from early 20th-century classics to the latest art fashions.
Right, and art gallery world politics have nothing to do with it.
In Slate, Marc Spiegler writes about the Venice Biennale art fair. At Louise T.'s Artinfo.com, Sarah Douglas and unnamed contributors blogged days one, two, and three from Basel, but LTB ran it in an old-media format: a notebook. (Blog it people, blog it.) At least it was dishy and entertaining. Oh, and Artinfo also noticed that Venice is an art fair and that Basel is an uniennial.
Artnet's Walter Robinson engagingly mixed scene reports with some critical writing in his first Venice dispatch, and tackled some broader ideas with a chattily entertaining top ten list.
So it's official: Art criticism and art writing is now mostly writing about the market. Why? That's what fascinates art world folks and with only a couple exceptions it's American art pubs who sent people to Venice.
What else do you expect when America's major regional papers don't send their art critics to Europe? I haven't read anything on Venice with a Boston Globe, Philly Inky, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, or San Francisco Chronicle byline, just to name a few.
Meanwhile, NYTer Michael Kimmelman and LATer Christopher Knight (he has strippers!) and even WPer Blake Gopnik took the more traditional approach, finding actual art and ideas between the parties and dealmaking that preoccupied everyone else. Strange isn't it -- to the general-interest pubs it's about the art, but to the art world pubs it's about everything else.
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Hoving on... Hoving
Yesterday former Met director Tom Hoving op-eded (verb: tr.) on Tut in the LAT. Kind of.
Mostly, the current Tut extravaganza provided Hoving with an opportunity to remind people that he was responsible for the Tut I back in the 1970s. In fact, every paragraph but the first one is about how great Hoving himself is, and how wonderful it was that he could bring Tut and other big shows to the Met when he was the director there.
The only exception to the Hoving love-fest is the first paragraph, in which he chastises LATer Christopher Knight for railing against blockbuster exhibitions. Which Knight hasn't done -- his criticisms of Tut have nothing to do with the bigness of the show and everything to do with how the show was put together and how it ended up at LACMA. (I'd offer a link, but everything Knight wrote during the behind-the-wall era at the LAT is still hidden. Can't you LAT.com people fix that? This piece on Andrea Rich mentions the crux of Knight's argument.)
If you've read any of Hoving's books, you're probably accustomed to his self-promotion, but even by his own standard the LAT piece is pretty extraordinary.
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Rumsfeld, Peale and George W.
 While I was at the de Young last week, I noticed that they have one of the 80 or so versions of Rembrandt Peale's 'porthole portrait' of George Washington. (Yes, eighty.)
A few days later I bought a copy of Esquire to read on my flight to LAX. As usual, Esquire is featuring a list that involves dubious but entertaining superlatives. I think this month's is 'Ten Men' or some such thing. (Who knew that to count as a 'Men' you have to be heterosexual? I'm pretty sure that a Chelsea gallerist or two could point Esquire to some examples of men at their best. Er, ok, bad example.)
As I was reading, I noticed a photograph of Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon office. Behind him is one of Peale's porthole portraits of Geo. Washington. (White House image-builder Scott Sforza would be proud of this background: a modern laptop, a traditional portrait, a smiling leader.) It reminded me that Peale considered it something of a life mission to spread Washington's visage across the land. How perfect. Peale used the power of repetition to drum the greatness of a leader into the national conscioiusness. Think of it as hagiography as substitute for the studying of history. Kind of reminds you of the administration of which Rumsfeld is a leader, eh?
Related: The Sforza Files.
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Tut Tidbits, Vol. 1
From time to time this space will feature examples of the nuttiness to which the King Tut show has driven a museum (or museums). These examples will almost always be an example of what goes wrong when a museum sells out to a conglomerate and thus loses control over the space, their mission, and, well, much of their integrity. Today's Tut Tidbit:
LACMA, after much hand-wringing, decided to allow employees into Tut without charging them $25-30. Employee viewing was held this past Saturday. At seven in the morning, until ten. So generous of AEG/AEI/etc. to allow that. (Aside to MK: Please don't bother hunting for the leaker. It's half your staff.)
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Previewing the de Young
I'm back in DC after a weeklong trip to San Francisco and Los Angeles. I'll be back on a normal posting schedule this week, including a bunch of SF/LA posts...
 Last week I took a walk-through of the new Herzog & de Meuron-designed de Young Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. It's the centerpiece of FAMSF's $202M capital campaign, and it is awfully good. The inside of the building is shaped like a bloated X-chromosome. H & de M have 'invited' the park into the negative space of the 'X' by planting eucalyptus trees and ferns. From many places in the museum, you're reminded you're in Golden Gate Park, which is pretty durn cool.
I love the new Walker, but it's clear that H & de M had a ton more money to play with here. In the African & Oceanic Art galleries many of the exhibition cases are made from the same wood, a kind of eucalyptus. The building's most obvious signature feature is a nine-story-tall tower. I grew up in Ess Eff before moving away at 18. I've never seen a better view of the city than the one from the top of the tower.
Architecture critics will, however, have something to say about the exposed heating/cooling vents in the gallery floors. I found them distracting.
 When I walked through last week, most of the paintings galleries were installed and the rest of the collections were at various stages of installation. (The building was done.) Fans of California painting will love what they see. The de Young has fantastic examples of work by all my/your Bay Area faves, including a never-before-seen 1954 Jess painting called Boy Party. (Uh-huh.) You'd expect fabulous Theibaud, Diebenkorn and Park, and it's here. So too a marvelous Mark Rothko from 1949 (slide show No. 8), which may have been painted when he was teaching at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. (If you saw the Rothko 1949 show at Pace last year, this painting wasn't in it, but it would have been the best painting there.)
In a few spots de Young curator Timothy Anglin Burgard has mixed modern canvases with earlier American paintings. Burgard hasn't done it so much as to be statement-making, so each of his selections retains its oomph. My favorite was a Charles Sheeler that hangs next to several paintings given to FAMSF by John D. Rockefeller III. It reminded me of the Sheeler still in the Rockefeller's house in Colonial Williamsburg.
The sculpture garden is still a construction site and only some of the permanent commissions are in. (The Richter looks great, the Goldsworthy flirts with hokey, the Turrell looks like an unfinished Turrell, and the Kiki Smith should be pretty dreamy.)
Related: The de Young website has a ton of photos. All over. It's impossible to link to any one javascript pop-up window, so go click and enjoy. Anna L. Conti has been to the de Young more than I have. And here, here, and here.
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Tut excerpt
UPDATE: David Pagel's LAT review is here.
From what I wrote for Bloomberg:
This version of Tut was not organized by a museum, but by two private, for-profit corporations: Anschutz Entertainment Group (which owns London’s Millennium Dome and produces Celine Dion’s Las Vegas stage show) and Arts and Exhibitions International. National Geographic is the exhibit’s educational partner. The companies will share in the profits with Egypt, which will use its share to preserve historic sites and objects.
This arrangement, by which a public art museum has allowed its space to be used so that private corporations may profit, is unheard of. And profit they will – tickets cost $25-30 and about 300,000 have been sold in advance. Already the first twelve days of the exhibit are sold out. The show may already be a success for AEG and AEI, but it’s a mark of shame for LACMA. No other major American art museum was willing to allow its galleries to be used in such a manner.
(Listen to AEG head Tim Leiweke to understand why: "I'm not sure there's so much difference between Tutankhamun and Celine Dion," he told USA Today.)
During Wednesday’s show-opening press conference the commercial nature of the show was on full display. Behind the speakers were signs promoting the show’s sponsor and the organizing corporations. Conspicuously absent was signage for the museum at which they were assembled. When officials were asked about some of the details of the arrangement, they preferred to talk about the objects on view. Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities even answered a question by plugging his own memoir.
The way Tut was built has led to the show’s principal fault: It is an amalgamation of objects thrown together by a corporation rather than a coherent exhibit organized by a curator. While it is broken into 11 loosely themed galleries, the show lurches from object to object and it’s never quite clear why the art on view is the art on view.
Still, many of the artifacts are beautiful and they've been sensitively installed to make it easy for the huge crowds to get a look. Every object is in a spotlighted Plexiglas case. Occasionally the dramatic lighting makes it difficult to see the works on view, but for the most part the lighting will keep visitors focused on ancient Egypt.
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Around San Fran
 I spent the weekend in San Francisco, mostly on Clyfford Still and my family. There is no relation between cantankerous Clyff and my family. Mostly. Though I am truly inspired to write the story. Yuks all around.
I spent most of Saturday at SFMOMA, particularly in their Still gallery. (Doh!) If you're a New Yorker who forgets that places like Buffalo and San Francisco exist (which is to say, most of you), you don't get to see much great Still. SFMOMA's six Stills are far superior to the ten on view at the Met. (MoMA's one on-view Still is pretty fantastic, but it's bizarrely installed in a little corner between Pollock and Newman, which makes Still look like an afterthought. More on all this in my story.)
Some other thoughts from around Herb Caen's city (and that fifth quote is one of the all-time great one-liners):
James Turrell at Haines Gallery: On view is one of Turrell's Magnatrons. The piece consists of a hole in the wall the size and shape of a 1960s television. Hidden from the viewer, at the base of the wall, is a turned-on television. It projects the colors (or lack thereof) on the screen up into the empty space. The piece is relaxing and meditative as all good Turrells are. My mind also wandered to a probably-absent conceptual underpinning: Watching the transmitted light of Turrell's indirect TV is a heckuva lot more delightful than watching actual TV.
Collage and Assemblage in California in the '60s @ 871 Fine Arts: (I hate it when galleries don't have websites.) The best show I saw in San Francisco. This show of mostly small assemblage pieces by Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, George Herms, Jess and others reminded me how California artists were criticizing pop culture and consumerism while New Yorkers were basking in it. Great show, but I'm not going to blab on about it because I can't show you any of it.
Jessica Snow at Rena Bransten: Snow makes meticulously built abstract paintings that combine aerial landscapes and organic systems. Snow mixes flat plains of color with sculptural oil paint to built three-dimensional surfaces that feel vaguely alive, like organisms under a microscope. The influence of Jonathan Lasker, Tom Nozkowski and Laura Owens is maybe a little bit too clear, but I don't care. Her colors are vibrant, her compositions smart, and her execution is crisp.
William Swanson at Heather Marx: I've kinda liked Swanson's traced/cut-out landscapes for a while. Now I can remove the qualifier. Swanson's new paintings at Heather Marx (Engineered Slope, above) reveal more interest in painterliness, color, perspective and composition. Swanson's new paintings remind me a little bit of Jason Middlebrook's recent work -- both artists are exploring decayed, post-apocalyptic environments.
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Haacke to SFMOMA
This just in: As predicted by, well, everyone, Kimberly Camp is out at the Barnes. The Barnes is still forming the search committee that will fill the job. (Agnes Gund, anyone?)
I'm on the West Coast, here for the opening of the King Tut whatever-it-is at LACMA. Posting will probably be light all week, though I hope to have a mini-SF gallery roundup posted tomorrow sometime.
An only-on-MAN news item from Calif.: SFMOMA has just purchased Hans Haacke's 1965 Blue Sail (at left). Haacke made the work in an edition of three: one is in the collection of a French regional museum, one is owned by Haacke, and SFMOMA just bought the last one available. It's on view now, hung in a gallery with an early Ryman and a Judd stack.
Also new at SFMOMA (and also on view): a Wangechi Mutu that looks fabulous at the entrance to the permanent collection.
Finally: Yet another institution is starting a blog: the Smithsonian. Congrats to MANpal Kriston Capps, who will edit it!
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Headline tease of the day
UPDATE: I'm updating the LAT Munitz/Getty story with blog links as I find them... good stuff there. Click around.
"The Modern will create Smithson's 'Floating Island' project in September." -- New York Times, front page of Weekend Arts.
Inside: Whoops. Carol Vogel tells us it's not MoMA, it's the Whitney. Of course, since you read MAN you knew this two weeks ago. And about six months ago you knew the Whitney had the project under development.
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LAT does Munitz, the Getty
Barry Munitz did not spend $6,000 of Getty money on a shower curtain. Otherwise this morning's LAT Barry Munitz expose reads like Tyco-on-a-hill, Kozlowski-goes-to-Brentwood. The details -- the chronicling of Munitz' use of Getty funds -- are disturbingly amusing. The LAT piece is a must-read.
If I'm one of Munitz' bosses/trustees, I'm pretty darn embarassed this morning. I'd have found out that Barry Munitz gave an organization a grant so that the organization could give Barry Munitz an award. I'd have found out that I threw away the wrapping paper on a gift Munitz gave me -- and that the wrapping paper could have been more expensive than the bauble. And that the Getty paid for both.
Of course, if I work at the Getty and my budget has been cut, I'd be even more livid. My budget was cut so Barry could kick it with Eli and Dick Riordan in the Mediterranean? And jet around Cuba, arranging chess matches between mayors and Stalinist dictators? C'mon.
The comparisons between Munitz' abuse-of-position and Dennis Kozlowski's use of Tyco are unavoidable. (Well, except that Tyco was accountable to its shareholders and, eventually, prosecutors. There's no evidence that Munitz is accountable to anyone but a hand-picked board that has eagerly funded his lavish living.)
The Getty is trying to hire a museum director. But why would a top-notch candidate want to play second-fiddle to a man who treats the J. Paul billions like his personal expense account? When both cultural treasures and Getty-logoed umbrellas appear to be equally important to Munitz?
Hello, Congress. For a year or two I've been spotlighting abuses in the museum world. Congress should investigate dealings at museums and arts-related non-profits whose activities and expenditures are extravagant, or who use their tax exemption to benefit others (whether those others are individuals or corporations). I'd love to see Barry Munitz and Malcolm Rogers sitting next to each other at a witness table.
Related: fishbowlLA, LA Cowboy, Modern Kicks.
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Quote of the year, at least
"I'm not sure there's so much difference between Tutankhamun and Celine Dion," says Tim Leiweke, head of [Anschutz Entertainment Group], who jokes about packaging Tut and Celine on the road. "It's about entertaining people, moving them emotionally, making them feel good about the time and money spent." -- from USA Today.
If ever there was the teeniest doubt in your mind that the King Tut show is a boondoggle, that it should not be in an American art museum, and that it has no curatorial integrity whatsoever, there it went.
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Maybe Nico has an excuse now
(That headline is very funny if you click here, and click through to the Jetty-fight. Otherwise... not so funny.)
One of the things that I find interesting about earth art is how it interacts with its landscape. In Marfa, animals have given birth in Don Judd's 15 untitled works in concrete. In southern Nevada, Michael Heizer's Double Negative is eroding, providing a unique way to see geologic process on a human-life-scale. And Greg Allen must really, really pissing off MoMA by sharing another art world item that doesn't preach the glory of the house that $858M built. (let's see if they go all 'geologic process' on him, eh?) Spiral Jetty is just about underwater.
One of the problems with getting humans to do anything about global warming is that it's such a macro-process that it's hard for most people to see how their actions affect the planet. With earthworks artists have not just made awesome things, they have shown us how the earth works.
Related: Ed Burtynsky's work takes a whack at human impact too.
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New blogs
I feel bad about posting this today because MAN's readership will likely be at year-long lows the next two weeks (helloooooo Europe), but I've added three new blogs to the blogroll:
- Personism, with a great first post partly about Frank O'Hara, from Jen Bekman of the eponymous gallery and recently of Unbeige;
- January Blog, from a Brooklyn foursome; and
- Art at the Katzen, from director Jack Rasmussen and the Katzen Arts Center at American University (here in DC).
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The weekend that was
I didn't pass within two blocks of a museum this weekend, and that's OK. On Saturday, I finished Hilary Spurling's Matisse biography (which has been released in the UK but not here). It's solid and informative, but it leaves room for other writers and art historians to fill in some blanks. Most of all, I'm still wanting to learn more about the relationship between Matisse and other artists, notably Picasso and Bonnard. Spurling tells us a good bit about how Matisse and others interacted up until about 1925 or so. Not so much after that. Still, as I've noted here before, this is the first full Matisse bio. I have around two dozen books on Matisse and I learned a lot I didn't know. (There's also a bit of naughty delight in discussing Matisse with curators/museum directors/etc. and starting a sentence with, Well actually, because the book debunks a number of Matisse myths. Picasso too, for that matter.)
(It's also a good time to read up on the end of Matisse's life. (Less relevant here.) And there are a bunch of Matisse books in French that have not been translated into English. Would make a good project for an academic press.)
My favorite time of the weekend was probably spent on two projects: a Clyfford Still magazine story I'm writing and on the show I'm putting together for DCKT Contemporary later this month. I'm amazed at how little has been written about Still in the 25 years since he died. Of course, two-thirds of his paintings and all 1,408 of his works on paper are in his estate. They've been seen by no one but Still and his family. There is much Still scholarship and popular writing to be done.
And on Sunday, the Walker announced that its marketing manager, chief conservator, retail manager, janitor, parking-lot attendant, and coat-check boy have all left the museum. OK, I made that up. Or did I...
Finally, I was surprised by a Greg Allen art post that did not mention how great MoMA is. (Does MoMA know about this? Actually it's a nice Cy Twombly story. And Greg breaks the news that the Gugg is still open. I thought they'd closed years ago.)
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"Much of the energy of the blogosphere is poured into deflation." -- Lee Siegel, talking about, well, me.
As proof that I take criticism to heart (and becuase I care about Slate's art coverage), I'm going to put some of my energy into inflation: I'm going to inflate Lee Siegel's Basquiat write-up, which recently ran on Slate. I hope my inflation offensive helps elucidate Siegel's prose.
Siegel: I can't think of an artist more difficult to judge than Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Me: Basquiat's use of drugs is well-known, but he was never convicted of a crime. As a result, he never stood before a judge, hence the difficulty.
Siegel: Most problematic of all, Basquiat was black.
Me: Because white people just don't understand. As you may recall, you cannot fully understand Basquiat's art unless you are black.
Siegel: [Basquiat] had to honestly reckon with his race.
Me: Because to do so dishonestly would have really whacked him out, what with all the heroin in his veins and all.
Siegel: How much of [Basquiat's reputation has to do with] the cynical exploitation of the racial and social facts of his life, or with his resentful reaction to the perception that he was less an artist than a commercial fabrication?
Me: I don't get this shit, and I think it's because I'm white.
The strangest read of the weekend was reading Lee Siegel's musings about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Siegel's M.O. is clear: He starts with his lack of knowledge about an artist and then attempts to explain it away. Some examples from the intro to Siegel's piece, with translation by me:
Siegel: Most problematic of all, Basquiat was black.
Me: This is a problem because I'm white. As you may recall, you cannot fully understand Basquiat's art unless you are black.
Siegel: [Basquiat] had to honestly reckon with his race.
Me: Because to do so dishonestly would have really whacked him out, what with all the heroin in his veins and all.
Siegel: How much of [Basquiat's reputation has to do with] the cynical exploitation of the racial and social facts of his life, or with his resentful reaction to the perception that he was less an artist than a commercial fabrication?
Me: I don't get this stuff, and I think it's because I'm white. |
Fleeing.
Will the last curator out of Minneapolis turn out the lights? If you're in Minneapolis, beware of falling curators. I mean, what is going on up there?
Today the Walker (and other museums) announced Walker chief curator Richard Flood is leaving for the same job at the New Museum. And Doug Fogle is leaving for the Carnegie, where he'll run the next International.
MAN (hearts) the Walker. But director Kathy Halbreich's press release quote is too good to pass up: "Change often comes after the completion of a major project such as the Walker's expansion," she said. Yes, and what with half her curators cashing in their Northwest Airlines frequent-flyer miles, I wonder...
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Rembrandt and martyrdom
This show opens at the Getty next week. I didn't post it here when it was at the NGA, but after yesterday's news I thought I might as well.
 The apostle Paul looks off to his right, his face bathed in warm light. The second-brightest part of the painting is Paul's hands. They sit in his lap, one folded into the other. A book is next to Paul's hands, but his gaze is fixed well-above the book.
Finally, in the dimly lit left-hand side of the painting, our eye finally discovers why Paul is lost in a stare of a thought. There rests a sword, the instrument of his martyrdom. His eyes are looking beyond the sword, beyond his own death, to the heavenly reward he presumes is beyond. Paintings that foreshadow beheading don't get much quieter than this.
An Elderly Man as the Apostle Paul is part of Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits a tight show of 17 paintings at the National Gallery of Art. [Sixteen will be at the Getty.] This is a wonderful exhibit, a bite-sized opportunity to see paintings Rembrandt (1606-1669) made in his mid-50s and to try to understand why he painted them and what they mean to us today.
No one knows why, near the end of his life, Rembrandt painted so many religious figures who devoted their lives to spiritual goals and who were killed for it. Arthur Wheelock, the NGA curator who put together this show, brought these paintings together in an effort to spark some thought on the question.
The usual guess as to Rembrandt's motivation for this series of paintings is rooted in his own biography. At the end of his life Rembrandt suffered financial difficulties and his relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels was condemned by the Protestant Dutch Reformed Church when the couple had a child out of wedlock in 1654. This combination of events may have inspired Rembrandt to focus on targets of persecution.
Like many painters before him, Rembrandt was fascinated by martyrdom. The symbols or implements of martyrdom – a sword for Paul, a knife for Bartholomew, a cross for Simon – are often visible here. In other paintings the symbol is unnecessary – Christ hardly needs to be shown with a cross for us to be reminded how he was killed.
But like with that portrait of Paul, for Rembrandt tranquility trumped gore. Rembrandt wasn't interested in the bloodiness of Caravaggio or the drama of El Greco. He felt no need to show us a beheading or a stoning. He trusted his powers of evocation. He showed us the empathy he felt with these saints.
Without exception, these are tender, soft portraits of people late in their lives. All are shown in Rembrandt's trademark murky brown light, most are shown in with their heads gently tilted, or leaning forward, apparently deep in thought. 'These are no fools,' Rembrandt appears to be saying. 'These people died for what they thought would outlive them. I probably will too.'
Rembrandt's contemporaries were also painting Biblical martyrdom, but they didn't do it like this. Two of Rembrandt's depictions of Bartholomew offer an especially rich contrast with the way his contemporaries depicted martyrdom. Not far from the Rembrandt show, the National Gallery has on view a Jusepe de Ribera painting from 1634. In de Ribera's painting Bartholomew is bound, naked, and spread. In mere moments he will be skinned alive by the determined-looking knife-wielder at the left of the painting. Bartholomew's eyes are looking toward heaven even as the rest of his face is locked in the rictus of terror.
Rembrandt took a different tack. Both of his Bartholomews in this show are simple half-portraits of the seated saint. In a 1661 version owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum (above), Bartholomew is elegantly attired but humbly posed, a mustachioed man of means. His furled brow is wisdom personified. He casually holds his attribute, a knife, with his right hand. There is no skinning going on here. There isn't even a single drop of blood in the entire show.
Rembrandt's treatment of martyrs wasn't just different from his contemporaries' paintings, but his martyrdom paintings are like nothing we see today. The starkest counterpoint is between photographs that militant Palestinian groups take of mostly young men before they blow themselves up in suicide bombings. (These groups distribute these images these as martyrdom portraits and the bombers themselves are referred to as martyrs by the groups.)
In those pictures the men are looking right at the camera, defiance mixed with wide-eyed stares often revealing fear. The Palestinian martyrs often pose while wearing or clutching their implements of destruction – suicide vests or machine guns.
Just as now is a time of battle in the Middle East, so too was the Netherlands in Rembrandt's time. In the seventeenth century the Dutch fought wars with the Spanish and the British. The First Anglo-Dutch War ended in 1654 (and naval skirmishes continued for years), just a few years before Rembrandt began the paintings shown here.
As with Vermeer's paintings, you'd never know that Rembrandt lived surrounded by war. (The presence of several hushed Vermeers in a gallery adjacent to the Rembrandt show underscores this point.) Rembrandt's quiet portraits reject blood and violence in favor of humility and introspection. I can't help but think that's part of why they still look so great today.
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Around the blogosphere
Some news, some notes, some Tom of Finland...
- Calvin (and Hobbes) explain art. Later this year, life imitates comics;
- Harvey S. Shipley Miller and MoMA like the kinky side of life;
- A nation using its aesthetic tradition and cultural heritage for militaristic purposes? Never. (OK, that's not the best American example. Readers?)
- I do not understand why John Wilmerding is still a National Gallery trustee after his clear ethical lapse. Which continues. Very publicly. (Dear Washington Post: I know you're all obsessed with your own past greatness at the moment, but what about covering a major arts story right under your nose?)
- And speaking of the Wal-MArtMuseum Crystal Bridges, everyone is;
- Larry Gagosian has mayo. You don't. Nyah-nyah;
- The Walker has this cool projection thingy that serves as its marquee. If you're a geek, you'll love how it works. If you're not, you'll love how it works;
- Gee, isn't it nice to be "allowed" to take pictures in a public park?
- Renzo Piano's takeover of the world continues in Chicago;
- Macroblogging a city's visual art scene: Check out PORT. Is it the future of arts journalism? (I'm ducking, but I'm serious.)
- Federal architecture (with pix) -- its own style?
- ArtKrush, which, in a previous incarnation, may have been the first art blog, is back with its seventh "issue." It's improving every time out. Still too much old news/links, but there's enough good original stuff there that I can look past that.
- A month or two ago we told you about Buk. Now LA Weekly does too. (via, which is why it counts in AtB, kinda sorta)
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Matt, Katie, Tut
I do not usually watch the morning gabfest that is The Today Show. But there was a segment on King Tut today -- Life Magazine is making the show its next cover story -- so I flipped on the TV. (Today's Today web headline: "Hair today, gone tomorrow. Special three-part series on baldness.)
 As you might expect, the Today segment on Tut was a total puff-piece joke. Matt Lauer asked the Life dude why a ticket to the show ($25-30) was so expensive. The Life guy responded that the money would promote tourism in Egypt and fix up an Egyptian museum (presumably he meant the Cairo Museum). Of course he did not add that the show is a for-profit enterprised designed to line the pockets of American business, notably reclusive Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz. Matt asked why the show wasn't going to the Met or other big museums in New York. The Life guy didn't give the real reason to that one either, and just hedged about the Met and admissions charges.
Who'da thunk that NBC News would be a party to such journalistic cluelessness? Shameful.
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Two links
Been meaning to post these for a couple of weeks:
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Women & directorships
One more thought on Olga Viso rising to the top spot at the Horn of Hirsh (a story broken here yesterday): I noticed one thing that got little play in the morning write-ups of her promotion: A woman taking the helm of one of America's major museums.
Why did it get so little play? Easy: Women running major museums is nothing new. Until recently, Des Moines, LACMA and the Getty were run by women and the soon-to-retire director of the Miami Art Museum is a woman. Currently women run the Walker, the Hammer, the New Museum, the Philly ICA, the Studio Museum and that's just off the top of my head. At the Smithsonian, women already ran the American Art Museum, and the National Museum of African Art.
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