|
|
MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Everyone knows everyone, how nice!
Yet another bit of interconnectedness from the Getty board's super-board of evaluators: Getty vice-chair Louise Bryson's husband is John Bryson. John is the CEO/Chairman of Edison International, a large energy company.
What attorney represented Edison during the California energy crisis? Ronald L. Olson, the attorney hired to help guide the Getty board's "independent" review. John Bryson has also served as a member of the California Commission for Jobs and Economic Growth. The co-chairman of that commission is... Ronald L. Olson.
Can't imagine that Olson will help find the Getty board partially to blame in the mess over there, can you?
|
Questions the Getty board must examine
The Getty board has awakened from a long slumber and has appointed a committee to examine, uh, well, to examine the kinds of things the board should examine without having to announce they're examining something.
First, I can't help but notice that the committee is stocked with allies of Getty boss Barry Munitz. The LAT noted the incestuous mix:
In addition to Biggs and Bryson, the committee members will be Lloyd Cotsen, Jay Wintrob and Luis Nogales. Cotsen, Wintrob and Nogales have links to Munitz.
Cotsen is a philanthropist, archeologist and former chief executive of Neutrogena Corp. Munitz sits on the board of Cotsen's family foundation.
Nogales, the former president of Univision, sits with Munitz on the boards of AIG SunAmerica and KB Home. Wintrob is chief executive of AIG SunAmerica. Both companies were founded by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, a close friend of Munitz.
In December, The Times reported that Broad purchased a Brentwood property from the Getty for $700,000 less than its appraised value. Records show that Munitz directed his aides to delay listing the property publicly so he could discuss a transaction directly with Broad. Munitz has acknowledged that his involvement with the deal would have posed a conflict of interest, given his friendship with Broad, but has denied being directly engaged in the land sale.
Yeah, that sounds like a real neutral bunch.
Here is a list of just a few of the questions that this committee (and anyone who investigates the Getty -- you listening Bill and Chuck?) must consider:
- Why is it Munitz knew about Marion True's ethically questionable dealings for three years before acting earlier this month?
- Are Munitz' expenses out of line with his peers at other foundations? (Hint: Compare to Gates, Ford and Pew.)
- Has the Getty board itself been too lax in its oversight? And if so (ahem), why?
- Is it proper for the Trust to give grants to Los Angeles organizations so that those organizations can give awards to... Trust leaders?
- It's clear that the Getty has in its collection some antiquities with murky pasts. There are ethical questions, legal questions and geo-political questions here, all in equal parts. Are these Getty problems or are they problems for American museums in general? Maybe this problem shouldn't be solved by the Getty alone.
|
Italians, Gettyites, and ex-Gettyite, oh my!
To recap the weekend in antiquities:
The LAT now owns two stories: The re-emergence of problems with antiquities at US museums, and the ongoing scandals at the Getty. (The NYT owns the following stories: Auctions and the rich people who play at them are gee-whiz cool. That's it.)
I don't want to do one mega-post on all of this because these three stories are pretty different. So I'll kick-off the day with this post, and then follow-up throughout the day.
|
ArtForum conflict No. 3
For a couple of weeks now I've been chronicling ArtForum's abundant conflict-of-interest problems. So far I've wondered about why Brian Sholis is writing about D'Amelio Terras shows, and why Jack Bankowsky was allowed to write about art fairs. (Aside: If the fair in London is called Frieze, why not now call the Armory Show the ArtForum Show?)
Two readers wrote in and pointed out the latest missed-by-me ArtForum conflict-of-interest. Why did ArtForum allow Linda Yablonsky to write about MoMA, for whom she recently ran a program? (Yablonsky was the program director of WPS1.org. Update: Would Fortune allow a Kellogg, Brown & Root VP cover Halliburton? No.)
I'll add that the blame doesn't necessarily rest with Yablonsky and Sholis. Writers pitch and writers write what they're allowed to write. It's up to editors to say no and to establish standards. ArtForum loves its incestuous cabal more than it loves credibility -- or art.
Related (kinda): abLA has the scoop on how European art mags (kinda) are moving into LA.
|
LAT: Met's Euphronios krater looted
 Today, the LAT team of Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino report that Italy has what it considers proof that the Euphronios krater, one of the finest antiquities in the Met's collection was looted. This is dynamite stuff.
That the Euphronios is of dubious provenance is no secret. The LAT reports that the Italian government can says it can finally prove that the krater was looted. The first published accounts about the likely looting of the krater were in 1972-73, when the NYT ran almost 20 stories about the krater, pointing to a place near Rome from which the Times said the krater was taken. As I recall, however, the Times' sourcing was shady and thin and anonymous. (Oh! Kind of like the krater's provenance!) I'd read the stories myself, but that'd get mighty pricey. Any journos who want to volunteer some Nexis work, please email me.
The Euphronios krater was purchased for the Met by former director Tom Hoving, and it was the subject of much discussion in his memoir. (The relevant portions on The Hot Pot are posted on Artnet.)
Uh, remember when Tom Hoving claimed to have seen the light on antiquities theft, and then offered to advise the Getty? MAN put together a short, tidy timeline pointing out that Hoving was, er, maybe not so reformed. And there's this in his account:
Should it go back to Italy? Hell, no. Despite our suspicions, we bought it in good faith and it arrived legally to U.S. customs. There's nothing the Italians can do about it or should.
A week or two ago here on MAN we said that the next parts of the Getty antiquities story would not be about the Getty, they'd be about other museums. Clearly that stage of the story has begun.
(People pretty embarrassed right now: Hoving, Met curator Dietrich von Bothmer, and the LAT op-ed editor who ran this even-more-totally-hilarious op-ed. It is no longer online -- hah! Yo, LAT folk, we know you read: Make it visible again, outside the archive.)
Related: Modern Kicks.
|
LA Weekly goes art-wild
My favorite alt-weekly, LA Weekly, is out with an all-art issue, online now. I'm just starting in on it now, but it looks quite substantive. Lots of Doug Harvey, features on Annie Philbin and curator-of-the-moment Paul Schimmel, LACE's new director Carol Stakenas, a thick list of prominent Angelenos, an article on artist-collectors, an essay on the over-education of young artists (that should hit 'em in LA, where they have eight art schools)... looks like fun to me.
I'm sure I'll be posting more about it tomorrow and on Monday -- and I bet lots of other blogs will too. Buzz is that ArtForum thinks it's youthful and hip. (Tee hee.)
|
Rauschenberg's Rebus III
A week-ish-long series. Part one here, part two here, I skipped yesterday because five posts seemed like plenty.
MoMA could have had Rebus for a heckuva lot less than $30M -- and almost did. From Calvin Tomkins' account of the impact of the Jewish Museum's 1963 Rauschenberg survey:
Victor Ganz, probably the leading American collector of Picasso, stood for forty minutes in front of Odalisk, scrutinizing the collaged images (nudists, comic strips, old family photos), walking around it, "seeing" Rauschenberg for the first time; the next day he went to [Leo] Castelli's and bought Winter Pool, the first of his many Rauschenberg purchases. Alfred Barr, coming upon Jasper Johns in one of the crowded galleries... asked for help in understanding the work. Barr said he knew Rauschenberg was important but that he still could not respond to him. Which of the works would Johns suggest the museum buy? Johns recommended Rebus. The museum did not get Rebus (Victor Ganz did, several years later), but in 1964 Barr prevailed on Philip Johnson to buy First Landing Jump... and donate it.
|
M$20MA can't make this one go away
Last night MoMA boss Glenn Lowry spoke at the Hirshhorn. (It was a typical MoMA Expansion is Great speech.) During the Q&A, WPer Jessica Dawson asked Lowry if, given how he'd spent much of his talk discussing how MoMA had a mission to popularize modern art and to educate the public, a $20 admissions charge wasn't just totally insane?
(OK, Dawson didn't quite put it that way. She put it more calmly and more effectively.)
Lowry quickly rose to peeved. He's obviously tired of answering this question. That people are still asking it, 11 months into the new M$20MA, should be a sign to him and his trustees that they screwed up. His answer was unfortunate.
First, he made it sound like M$20MA was forced to charge $20. We don't have the benefit of free federal money, he said, referring to the Smithsonian. Well, no one was suggesting that the only two options were $0 and $20.
Next he made a good point: Admission is free to children 16 and under and to most NYC collegians. True and bravo to that. Wouldn't have helped me when I was a young, just-out-of-college journalist making about $20K a year, but it's a start.
But then Lowry veered off into an unfortunate metaphor: "If you want to go to Harvard, you'd better be ready to pay $40K a year," he said. "Culture is not free."
The Harvard analogy is the wrong one and it reveals that Lowry and his trustees are sadly out of touch with their audience and with their peers. Harvard has need-blind admissions. Anyone who applies to Harvard, is admitted, and wants to attend school there, may do so regardless of their financial situation.
MoMA's lack of commitment to access for the non-upper middle class continues to be an embarrassment. By comparing MoMA's situation to Harvard's, Lowry shows that he and his trustees do not adequately understand the impact of their admissions policy.
|
Tying up loose ends
I hinted at this yesterday, but now I have official word: The Art Basel Miami Beach folks write in to say that Hurricane Wilma isn't slowing down the fair, affecting its venues, or anything of the sort. All of their systems are go.
And on Monday I tried to link to a Scott Timberg piece in the LAT about how LA museums are all about comics right now. Sometime in the middle of Monday the link went goofy so try clicking here.
|
abLA good, GawkerForum bad
Caryn Coleman gets it right on the latest GawkerForum cluelessness. As usual ArtForum treats the west-of-the-Hudson art world like it's Mars. In ArtForum's worldview all the LA artists are "youngsters," and somehow major galleries such as Regen Projects and ACME are considered tots. And Kordansky and Telles are notably absent "strong California contenders?" (I'm sorry -- is California some kind of JV-level qualifier? Where there "strong Chelsea qualifiers" that were absent?
It's been a particularly bad week for GawkerForum, what with Linda Yablonsky's golly-I-was-so-excited-to-be-invited gush about MoMA's Elizabeth Murray fete. (She saw famous artists! And Rob Storr was sooo nice!) Who knew getting into parties was the art world's raison d'etre? I guess we know what matters to ArtForum.
|
CV gets one right
I mentioned Carol Vogel's surprisingly in-tune piece on deaccessioning in this morning's first post. Some other thoughts:
I'm OK with deaccessioning as long as works that are truly superfluous are the ones being deaccessioned. (MoMA's deaccessioning of a de Chirico a year or two ago, for example, was a mistake. That was a truly great, important de Chirico.) And in today's market, when a great work by a great artist goes for an obscene amount of money (Rauschenberg's Rebus cost MoMA $30M), it's hard to fault a museum for selling minor works that don't fit their collections' focus.
Kudos to institutions that have resisted offers to buy major paintings out of their collections. I'm looking at you, Corcoran.
Here's an example of good deaccessioning: A year or so ago SFMOMA sold a Monet. The painting plainly didn't fit their painting/sculpture collection, which essentially starts in 1906. (I've always thought that there was something vaguely poetic with SFMOMA beginning its collection with the earthquake.) With the funds from the sale of the Monet, the museum bought its first Giorgio Morandi (which, curiously, is not online).
Another thought: Arts writers and critics -- me included -- do a lousy job of writing about museum collections and acquisitions. Every museum in the land tries to spike an item in Carol Vogel's Friday NYT notebook (they know they can count on friendly treatment)... and that's it for museum acquisition news. That should change. Using another SFMOMA example (gee, who do you think does a good job of telling me things?) when they bought Hans Haacke's landmark Blue Sail, only MAN reported it.
|
Rauschenberg's Rebus II
Continuing a week-long focus... part one here.
When Rebus was first installed oin Robert Rauschenberg's first show at Leo Castelli's gallery, it inspired furious opposition. While Rauschenberg's first show succeeded a sold-out Jasper Johns exhibit, only two Rauschenbergs sold. (One of them was Bed, which Castelli bought and eventually gave to MoMA.)
Rebus provoked the most outrage. A visitor wrote "Fuck You" on it in crayon. Rauschenberg collaged over it. So far as I know, that's still a part of the piece on view at MoMA. (Anecdote taken from Off the Wall, by Calvin Tomkins.)
Addendum: No curator supported Rauschenberg's career as much as did Walter Hopps, who selected Rauschenberg for the Smithsonian American Art Museum's (that's what it's called now -- back then it was the National Collection of Fine Arts) 1976 bicentennial show. Next Tuesday, Nov. 1, the Getty will host a special program on Hopps. Scheduled participants include James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha and Robert Williams. Click here to make a (required) reservation.
|
Greece says, "Me too! Me too!"
UPDATE: A reader tips me off to this Barry Munitz Q&A in the LA Daily News. I have been unable to confirm that the questions were prepared in advance by the Getty's PR firm. OK, full disclsoure: I haven't confirmed it because the Q&A reads so much like the questions were prepared in advance by the Getty's PR firm that there didn't seem to be any good reason to call. I mean, even five minutes of research would have been a good idea, don't you think DN?
When I was a small child, my brother wanted to do and to have everything I did. My grandfather nicknamed him 'Metoo' because all my pronouncements were met with my brother saying that. I'd like to introduce my brother to Greece.
Today's LAT is out with the news that Greek officials have decided that the Italians are on to something in wanting objects back from the Getty.
I hope Marion True writes a tell-all book. That would be so naughty.
And I gotta believe that museum-types in Cleveland, New York, and elsewhere are watching this nervously. The $9 billion Getty Trust is a natural first target for foreign governments, but Cleveland and New York museums are great secondary targets.
Related: LAObserved reads the grape leaves.
|
Rauschenberg's Rebus
NOTE: Sorry for the lack of posting today. AJ's software has been down all morning. I think we're back operating normally. (Posted at noon ET.)
 I was all alone in MOCA's galleries. It was either a Tuesday or a Wednesday, so there weren't any other visitors or guards around. I think Visual Music was up, while a show of abstract art from MOCA's permanent collection filled the rest of the building. Included in that show were about 15 Rauschenberg combines.
The installation was essentially an advertisement for MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel's upcoming Rauschenberg combines survey. (It opens at the Met in December before traveling to LA. The catalog is almost $30 off here.)
The combines knocked my notebook off. I had always appreciated Rauschenberg more than I'd enjoyed him. Of course, I'd mostly seen the combines in reproductions, or from a couple feet away. (The NGA regularly exhibits a combine in its permanent collection installation, and MoMA has a few on its fourth floor, but who else?) On that day at MOCA I could get really, really close to them. I stuck my face into a couple of them. From a distance you can see that there are scribbles or pasted photographs on some combines. From a few inches away you can see what those scribbles say or what's in those photographs.
The Schimmel preview/ad worked. I've been primed for the Dec. 20 opening of the combines show at the Met ever since. I've set off the motion detector in front of the 1959 Canyon (not on the web, somehow) half a dozen times, trying to get a similarly good look at it. On ensuing trips to MoMA, I paid special attention to the Rauschenbergs (one of which is MOCA's). And when MoMA bought Rebus, I couldn't wait to go see it.
MoMA has installed Rebus in the atrium, on a wall of its own. There is a bench in front of it -- which is good because to look at Rebus is to read it. (As usual at MoMA, seeing the painting can be a headache-inducing challenge because of the repeated flash bulbs going off. If MoMA cared one whit about viewing experience, it would ban cameras. Gee, which do you think is more important to MoMA: Busloads of $20 bills or providing a pleasant environment for art-seeing?)
There's so much to look at and to think about on Rebus: Is the line of color strips in the middle of Rebus a bit of Rauschenbergian smirking at his Black Mountain teacher, Josef Albers? (Look teach! Color is color, it doesn't matter how harmonic it all is!) Or is it color as a music-like procession, the student's way of showing the teacher that yup, color sequence does matter?
And then there's the funnies. In 1961 Roy Lichtenstein brought comics into art with Look Mickey. Rebus, painted six years earlier, includes a strip of the comics page from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the surface of the painting, right next to a reproduction of Botticelli's Venus. Comics are hip in art right now -- 50 years after Rauschenberg pioneered them as a source material.
In the middle of a Twombly-esque (and possibly Twombly-made) scribble, there's a painted white, dripping phallus. Is it Rauschenberg's witty way of referring to his relationship with Twombly?
There's quite a history between MoMA and Rauschenberg, MoMA and Rebus, and between Rebus and the New York viewing public. Each day this week MAN will feature a part of that story.
Related: MOCA has a fantastic online gallery of the Rauschenbergs in its collection, including Small Rebus (1956).
|
Nicholas Nixon: Nationwide
 On Saturday, the George Eastman House will open an exhibit of photographer Nicholas Nixon's The Brown Sisters. The series consists of annual photographs that Nixon has taken of his wife and her three sisters each year since 1975. The four women are posed in the same left-to-right sequence, and Nixon shoots them with an 8-by-10 camera. The series was (and still is) printed in an edition of 50.
That's not all: Next month the National Gallery will open an exhibit of the series. On September 14, as part of its re-hanging of its second-floor contemporary galleries, MoMA installed The Brown Sisters. And up until a couple weeks ago, The Brown Sisters was on view at Seattle alt-space Western Bridge (whose recent program looks absotively fantastic). And last week a complete portfolio through 2004 of, well, you know, sold at Philips for $180,000.
That's NYC, DC, Seattle, and a famed photo museum in Rochester, NY. (Readers: Am I missing any?) So why so much Nixon now? Does Fraenkel Gallery have something to do with it? Or someone else? Or is this all coincidence?
Related: View the series (through 2004) here. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle points out Nixon's long history with Eastman.
UPDATE: A Nixon show, which included the series, closed at the Cincinnati Art Museum on May 1. Sotheby's sold the series too, for $192K.
|
Morris Louis is (almost) back
Almost 20 years ago, John Elderfield put together the last Morris Louis retrospective (for MoMA). Next October, the High Museum will launch a 30-canvas survey of Louis' work. The show will make its last stop at DC's Phillips Collection, about three miles from where Louis painted in his dining room while his wife worked in the DC schools. (Louis' home on Legation Street is a ten-minute walk from MAN HQ.) The Phillips galleries will be a tight squeeze, but the Phillips has the best Louis I've ever seen. Unfortunately they keep it behind plexi (yes, plexi), so I've never really seen it.
In a related note, the High is whack: It's raising general admission to $15 next month. Puh-leeze.
|
Time to start reading GawkerForum (kinda)
Well if they're going to be this slyly clever, I'm going to have to start reading GawkerForum. From a recent "post" on Pierre Huyghe:
The audience had been informed that Huyghe's cameras would be trained on them, too. In other words, they'd be extras as well as spectators—a taxonomic slipperiness that analogizes the project's polyvalent status as a journey, a performance, a film, and a text narrative (published—full disclosure—in last summer's Artforum).
I just love, love, love that ArtForum is getting serious about ethics and conflicts-of-interest! Welcome to the party, lovelies! So now that we know they care, when will they apologize for that Bankowsky bit of incest?
|
Rauschenberg's Rebus
Earlier this year I was in Los Angeles for who-knows-what. MOCA was showing an installation of abstract art from the museum's collection.
Amongst the Rothkos and such were about 15 Rauschenberg combines, essentially an advertisement for MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel’s upcoming Rauschenberg combines survey. (It opens at the Met in December before traveling to LA. The catalog is almost $30 off here.) I was floored.
I had never really responded to Robert Rauschenbergs. I appreciated many them – the white paintings, Erased de Kooning Drawing, the way the combines were post-cubist collage-on-steroids – but I’d never really enjoyed them the way I enjoy, oh, a nice Jasper Johns.
On that visit I loved what I saw. What converted me was the way in which I was able to see them. First, museums don't put out combines very often, probably because they're delicate and because it seems likely that visitors will handle them. Among museums I've visited in the last year or two, I think that only the NGA, MoMA and MOCA have had combines on view. Second, MOCA was closed, but they let me in because I was reviewing a show or something. This meant there were no guards around. For the first time I was able to get really close to Rauschenberg's combines. I was able to see things in them and on them that I'd never seen from eight feet away. I was amazed -- but mostly had how little of them I'd been able to see.
Fast forward a year to MoMA's acquisition of Rauschenberg's Rebus. The museum has installed it in Newman's Cavern,
|
Five museum best practices
Five things museums do that I like:
- MOCA charges just $8 for its Ecstasy show (as does MAMFW for Kiefer), half what special exhibs go for pretty much everywhere else. The St. Louis Art Museum, the Getty, and the Menil charge nothing. Over the summer, the Hammer was free too. Compare that to what you’re paying wherever you live. Kudos to their trustees. (And for anyone who argues that museum admissions charges are not/should not be a burden, hear this: Martin Puryear grew up south of the Mall in Washington, DC. His family wasn’t poor, but they weren’t well-off-enough to have a TV. So after school young Martin would wander up to the Mall and into the museums because it was something he could do for free. Years later, when he realized that being an artist was a profession, he realized from where his interest in the arts came.)
- The Walker streams many of its programs on the internet, free of charge.
- The Pulitemporary tells you how the Pulitzer and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis work. (Today’s example: how to install a Don Judd.)
- Museums with flexible or unusual hours: The Philadelphia Museum of Art is open until 8:45pm on Fridays. MOCA stayed open until midnight one night a week during Basquiat. The Hirshhorn tried a 24-hour night during a Douglas Gordon show and did another late night during Visual Music.
- Everyone who skips the wall text on title plates.
Bloggers: Others?
|
Tooba three
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.
|
Tutini: The winners
Last week I told you that LACMA will be serving "Tutinis" to anyone needing fortification to make it through Tut again (well, almost). Here are some suggestions as to what the drink will be:
- Caryn Coleman suggests vodka mixed with ash, sand, and a sprinkle of gold powder.
- Dennis Christie actually did some research and found this on the National Gallery of Australia website: For the Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands, to the north of Darwin in the Top End of the Northern Territory, art and cultural life are inter-woven and inseparable. The ceremonies that honour the past and remain important influences in daily life provide the key sources for Tiwi design, much of which is derived from ceremonial body painting, or jilamara. Jilamara, which also translates more broadly as ‘creativity’, is an integral part of the central pukumani ceremony, a funerary or mourning ritual that involves the production of tutini (carved and painted totemic grave posts), pamajini (armbands) and tunga (bark baskets).
- Josh Feldman points out that the Egyptians did not have hard liquor, and that a Tutini should be made with Mareotic wine mixed with papyrus juice.
- Franklin Einspruch offers: 2 oz. Golden gin, 1/2 oz. vermouth, 1/4 oz. Tut Shahia Premium Extra Virgin Olive Oil and 1/4 oz. formaldehyde. Served in this.
|
What's next for the Corcoran?
The Corcoran is a mess. Its budget is out of whack, its building requires $40 million in deferred maintenance, its proposed Frank Gehry-designed addition was a pipe-dream from beginning to end, its curatorial program is a laughingstock (handbags, J Seward Johnson, something about Jackie O), and that's just what happened at the end of the David Levy era. It's been no less rocky for the Corc since he left. The museum has inexplicably scheduled a show about art and banjos. (Yes, really. And Steve Martin is paying for much of it. Yes, that Steve Martin.) The Corc's development director and CFO are also recent departures.
Amidst more turmoil than exists at any U.S. museum this side of LACMA, this week the Corcoran will interview the finalists for its directorship. Why would anyone want the job?
Well, people like to run museums, and the Corcoran has some potential. It's in the capital of the free world, a block from the White House. The Corc has a major collection of 19th-century American art. It has a school that can be a revenue-generator.
So with a hire to make, what should the Corc do?
Find someone grounded in American art history, someone with some directing experience, and maybe someone with academic experience. A DC background wouldn't hurt, but it isn't imperative. (Here's one logical fit.) If you want to restore credibility to your institution, hire someone with lots of it and give him carte blanche to clean house -- including on the board of trustees.
If the Corc can't get someone with all of those qualifications -- and its directorship isn't a top job anymore, so who knows -- trustees should be willing to take a chance on someone who will bring excitement and pizazz to the place. (DC's other museums are safe and often dull. Witness.) There's room for an edgy outsider in this town.
Regardless of what happens with the directorship, there are programmatic details that the Corc must address:
The Corcoran should make it a priority to become the museum that most looks like Washington. (Strange moment at the David-Levy-is-toast press conference: Corc chief curator Jackie Serwer gave a spiel on the allegedly exciting shows the Corc had scheduled. After listing what she thought was the lot, she sat down. After another speaker or two, Serwer realized she'd forgotten one show -- the Corc's then-upcoming Sam Gilliam retrospective. She jumped up. The Sam Gilliam show! He's from DC! He's African-American! And she sat down again.)
Making the Corc a museum that looks like the community can start with who the director is, or it can start with the new director's staff appointments and programming decisions. Whatever the merits of the Gilliam retrospective at the Corc, it's a good start.
Next, make clear that the Corc is out from under the Mapplethorpe shadow. The Corc needs credibility -- and banjo shows won't bring it. Schedule a Nan Goldin retrospective (the last one in the US was at the Whitney, in 1996) or some similarly risky show. Make it clear that the museum has guts again, that it won't just program watered-down Warholiana.
Finally, regardless of who is hired, the Corc must do something about its biennial. Biennials as a rubric are over, dead, and even annoying. The Corc's last two biennials have been garbled and aimless. Either dump the thing and replace it with some other form of commitment to contemporary art, or conduct a thorough rexamination of what the show can be. Because right now it -- and the Corcoran -- are completely ignorable.
|
The Tutini
On Oct. 29 LACMA will host a pre-Halloween costume ball. (We hear that LACMA itself will honor its 'involvement' in the Tut show by shopping here for its costume. Pimp-tastic!)
At its pre-Halloween event, LACMA will be serving a signature drink: The Tutini. (Under terms of LACMA's contract with AEG and AEI, 70 percent of the proceeds from the drink's sale will go to Tut's corporate organizers. OK, OK -- that's just a joke. Or is it...)
So MAN readers, here's this weekend's contest: What is in a Tutini? Send in your answers before Monday night and I'll pick three winners.
|
Hirshhorn PPV update
For about six weeks now I've agitated about the Hirshhorn's moronic new policy of charging the public for admission to educational events, especially exhibition-related artist's talks. Here's what happened at their first attempt to do so, here's what's wrong with the policy, here's how the policy has, er, evolved as writers such as me have attacked it. ("[T]he museum's educational mission strikes me as more an obligation than a priority, and should be administered by a different hand than manages the general ledger," wrote Kriston Capps.)
The policy may be dead. None of the Hirshhorn's upcoming talks or panels have the $100/annum price tag attached. (Upcoming H of H events include: Pixar flack Glenn Lowry on Oct. 26, artist Christoph Girardet on Oct. 27, a public art panel discussion on Nov. 3, a Jim Hodges lecture on Nov. 16, and an Alfredo Jaar lecture on Dec. 7.) (Aside: We love, just love how right after I rip MoMA for the silly Pixar show that they change the show's title to try to give the exhibit a little heft. It's now Pixar: 20 Years of Animation.)
When I repeatedly asked a Hirshhorn official whether the pay-for-view policy would ever be returning , I was repeatedly told that there was no PPV requirement for any of the events currently "planned" or "scheduled." So either the Hirshhorn is reserving the right to charge for its educational programming in the future... or the museum is having a heckuva time admitting it made a mistake.
|
Shirin Neshat's Tooba, Part Two
Continued from yesterday.
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.
|
Shirin Neshat's Tooba, Part One
If you're looking for the Bankowsky/ArtForum post, please click here.
Several years ago, before MAN was on AJ and before, well, anyone read this site, I posted an essay about Shirin Neshat's narrowly-seen-in-the-US, post-9/11 film installation, Tooba. Between now and Friday I'll be reposting that essay in three parts. I mentioned Tooba in the Neshat profile I wrote for Sunday's Los Angeles Times.
 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.
|
Amusing NYT corrections
It amuses me that the NYT refuses (as usual) to run a Carol Vogel-related correction, but that it runs this correction:
A sports article in some copies on Sunday about Texas' 45-12 defeat of Oklahoma in college football misstated the dominant color worn by Oklahoma fans. It is crimson, not maroon.
|
Another ArtForum conflict
How do they think this is OK?
In this month's ArtForum, Jack Bankowsky writes a long (confusing) piece about how art made for art fairs is an important genre of some sort.
The problem is Jack Bankowsky is one of the last people who should be writing about art fairs for anyone. Once again, ArtForum has erred by publishing a piece by someone with ethically-troubling personal connections to his subject: Jack Bankowsky's boyfriend is Matthew Marks. Marks is one of four people who founded The Armory Show, and Marks shows at art fairs and derives (some of) his living from them.
So to summarize: Bankowsky writes in the most-read contemporary art magazine in an effort to validate contemproary art fairs. ArtForum found nothing wrong with publishing Bankowsky's piece, despite Bankowsky's well-known and much-chronicled relationship with Marks. (Artnet has raised an eyebrow at the Marks-Bankowsky-ArtForum connection, and New York magazine mentioned it too.) And ArtForum allows Bankowsky to snipe at Jerry Saltz because Saltz did not attend his boyfriend's fairs. (Is Bankowsky pissy because Saltz gets it right on GawkerForum?) Shameful. ArtForum owes its readers an editor's note of explanation -- and an apology.
How about it, Tim Griffin? (And if you still think Bankowsky's opus is OK, explain why. I'll even publish it here on MAN.)
|
de Young Week
San Francisco's de Young Museum opens its $200 million Herzog & de Meuron building this week. (I posted a ton on Sunday and Monday (good, oft-newsy stuff, I think), so if you're just back from the holiday, take a scroll.)
|
Munitz' land deal = True's loan?
I was just reading this in the Getty Trust's Statement of Ethics from January, 2004: No individual may use a position at the Getty for personal gain or to benefit another at the expense of the Getty, its mission or its reputation.
Seems this is the passage that probably got Marion True ousted -- but not until three years after Barry Munitz found out about it.
Got me thinking about Munitz' Eli Broad land deal, chronicled by LATers Jason Felch, Robin Fields and Louise Roug. How is that deal not a violation of the same part of the Getty's code of ethics?
|
Neshat outtakes
Some unused bits from my conversations with Shirin Neshat. I profiled her for yesterday's Los Angeles Times.
Neshat on poetry and metaphor in Iranian art: "Some tendencies are really inherent in an artist and I think the visual language, the poetics [in my work] is because I'm Iranian. Because of the way I deal with the world and because I'm so emotional and because of the way I express myself -- it is so Iranian. Maybe all the Iranians really like the poetic language. For me poetry is religion... Iranian people have also suffered many political hardships over the time of history and poetry has been a system that has allowed them to survive and transcend the pain, but also to express themselves.
"We have grace and great tradition and metatphors and literature and art, and I think this is a given in my mind. I think the way I compose things always contains a sense of duality that I see in [Iranian] culture. The good and bad always coexist. If anything, the work really does not try to deny the reality about this culture. I think that something I may subconsciously have done is reclaiming respect and pride for my culture because I believe it is that way. I want people to embrace and to see a cultural and artistic heritage, not a victimization of Iranians. I want people to see the complexity behind the culture."
Neshat on being seen in America as an Iranian artist-spokesperson of sorts: [Americans] overestimate what my work can claim and can be, and I can see how an Iranian living in Iran would be furious. 'Great, now we have an Iranian who hasn’t been to Iran since 1996 being our speaker and how could that be?' I don’t make work anyway that could be an opening to the truth, [my work is] not a documentary. I don't make work that could be informative in the way that people could want it to be in terms of information. To read too much into it would be a mistake. This doesn't diminish the fact that I'm deeply interested in the [political] issues. I could not possibly take the task as an ambassador.
Neshat on the beauty in her work: "Sometimes really horrible things you can turn into a weapon of beauty.
"The one thing that comes to my mind immediately is the veil, which stands for so many things. It can be a symbol of repression and submission, but it can be a symbol of liberation and a rejection of Western ideas. It's very politically loaded symbol and icon. At the same time if you put it all aside and look at a woman walking down the street wrapped in the black cloth, and you think of all that other iconography and all those definitions, there's something incredibly beautiful in that.
"Or the gun -- a symbol of violence, and yet you could put that in the arm of a woman and it could be subversively sexy. It's visual poetry -- and beauty -- to see this one moving black thing in all this stationary space. She's alive and everything else isn't moving. The scene has color and she doesn't, yet she’s moving and flowing. There's something about this relationship between this piece of black fabric moving around this woman moving around this landscape around her.
|
Stunner: Carol Vogel errs
Carol Vogel is popular among auction-house and museum PR types. To the rest of us she's, well, not. On Friday, Vogel checked-in with another correction-deserving doozy:
The paintings are van Gogh's "Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat" (1890) and Gauguin's "Bathers" (1902), and they once hung in the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas, which was founded by Mr. Wynn, and were included in a 1999 catalog of the gallery's holdings. (When Mr. Wynn sold Mirage Resorts to MGM Grand in 2000, MGM transformed the gallery from a place to show Mr. Wynn's art collection to a kunsthalle, a museum without its own collection that presents loan exhibitions.)
Carol, Carol, Carol. There is no kunsthalle at the Bellagio and there is no museum at the Bellagio. There is a rental gallery, a commercial space operated by a subsidiary of art-world behemoth PaceWildenstein. The Bellagio rental gallery shows paintings rented from collections, museums, and from anyone who will accept a check. (Aside to Carol: Here's the definition of the word 'museum' because you seem to need it.)
|
NYC Wa/onderings
Ritual self-promotion: Please check out me in the Los Angeles Times on Shirin Neshat.
UPDATE: A Gordon Matta-Clark retro is coming to the Whitney, circa 2007. Thanks to Brian Sholis for the tip.
I've spent six days in NYC in the last two weeks. Here are some thoughts on some things I've seen. (And at right, Five to See is all new. And there are a couple rare Sunday posts down there...)
 Adam Cvijanovic at Bellwether. I can't figure out what I think of Cvijanovic. That's usually a good sign -- when you have to think about an artist over and over again to come up with a coherent thought, there's usually something there. Cvijanovic's show picks up where Jason Middlebrook leaves off: chaos, destruction, all of it hitting close-to-home in typical American sub(urban) landscapes. (Parallel to the present: Lots of artists in the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark (it's retro time someone!), Barry Le Va, etc., tearing things apart as America was falling apart. Same thing going on now in lots of contemporary art.)
I'm attracted to Cvijanovic's contemporary chaos, but little things bother me: Strips of the art peeling off of the wall, seams of paper that are all-too visible and that distract the eye from the totality of the work. It just feels a bit sloppy. Jerry Saltz likened Cvijanovic's chaoscape to Tiepolo, and I thought about the link between Cvijanovic and the frescoin' greats too. But I can't help but think that a Cvijanovic would more apocalyptically poetic as a fresco.
 MoMA's new second floor contemporary installation. Well, they're figuring it out. Watching MoMA figure out both contemporary art and what to do with its cavernous second-floor space is like watching a (wealthy) baby learn how to walk. It falls down a lot. The good news is that Installation II is much better than Installation I. But anything would have been, so that's faint praise.
There are some absolutely inspired moments in Installation II: Janet Cardiff's 40 Part Motet. A reworking of Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis (right) is glorious. Nicholas Nixon's The Brown Sisters encouraged me to look at my old college ID -- and to throw it out.
I was thrilled to see David Wojnarowicz at MoMA, even if the Wojnarowicz they have is tame. A Vija Celmins litho is uplifting, a James Turrell is better-than-average. Finally there are some LA-based artists on view (and there were several more in the third-floor installation that just closed). A Michael Snow mini-installation is hypnotic.
But there are some duds: Dana Schutz' Presentation looks youthful, overblown, and market-hyped -- why not let a painter with potential start to make mature work before turning her into a star? (Here's Saltz on Schutz, circa 2002.) Dieter Roth is -- surprise -- uninteresting. Marlene Dumas looks out-of-place, and sound problems plague a William Kentridge.
Ian Burns at Spencer Brownstone. Can you have more fun at a gallery show? Probably not. The show's messy construction is a little troubling, but there are some smart ideas here. Burns is right: Americans love an amusement-park-style thrill-ride... and there are those among us who forget that some of the thrills are tragic and aren't from rides.
Quick hits: At Sperone, Evan Penny's distortions are amusing, but ultimately kind of pointless... Joel Sternfeld's Luhring show appears to be 40 essays in search of photographs. About five of the essays find good mates... By contrast, a couple doors down at Cowles, Edward Burtynsky's China photos (with more at the Brooklyn Museum) are photographs in search of their place in history... I saw a preview of MANfave Robert Olsen's forthcoming Plane Space show. The painting of a towel and the painting of a sunbather are knockouts... DC's Adam Fowler shows well in a group show at The Drawing Center... my previous post on NYC now.
|
Sunday special: Five things
I've got a lot of posts for Monday, so here's a newsy Sunday special. Also, the Five to See at right is all-new. (Finally.)
- Vanity Fair is working on a story about the Getty/Marion True saga.
- Spotted in Sunday's NYT Style Mag: An ad touting "museum-quality loft-residences," because who isn't jealous of people who live in museums. (Right?)
- StL P-D'er David Bonetti trekked up to Davenport, Iowa to see the Figge and to intuit what David Chipperfield will do with his St. Louis Art Museum addition.
- Continuing pet peeve: Museum-quality exhibition catalogs without indices.
- Greg Allen's post about MoMA, Martha Stewart and Gordon Bunshaft is one of the most interesting blog posts I've read in a very long time.
|
Shirin Neshat in the LAT
 Me in the LA Times on Shirin Neshat. Her next NYC show opens at Barbara Gladstone on Oct. 15.
I'll have more on Neshat throughout the week, including Q&A outtakes, a re-posting of what I wrote about Tooba a couple of years ago (pre-AJ), and who knows what else.
|
Revisiting Tomaselli
Reminder: I did a late-in-the-day Getty post on Tuesday.
Reading Suzanne Muchnic's LAT writeup of the forthcoming Ecstasy show at MOCA reminded me of Fred Tomaselli's talk at the Hirshhorn in July, 2003. Here's the fun I had with it, pulled out of the pre-AJ archives:
 There was a moment at the end of Fred Tomaselli's lecture at the Hirshhorn last night that could only have come at a Fred Tomaselli lecture. After Tomaselli finished a slide talk about his psychoactive-material-filled art, he took questions. A man in a yellow-ish green Hawaiian print shirt raised his hand and Tomaselli called on him.
"Given the materials you use," the man asked, slipping into a stoner lilt, "Aren't you worried about The Man stompin' on your buzz?"
Tomaselli, dressed to understand in a loose, short-sleeved, semi-ironed orange plaid shirt and tennis shoes, chewed on his gum a few times and peered down at his questioner. He appeared to be entering his deepest concentration of the evening.
"What?" he replied.
Tomaselli probably would not have been Jesse Helms' first choice for a Hirshhorn lecturer, but the Right has given up on the visual arts part of the culture wars and the Hirshhorn has been asserting itself of late. In roughly the last year the Hirshhorn has hosted I’m-loud-and-I’m-proud leatherdyke Catherine Opie for an artist's talk (complete with discussion of her cutting but without discussion of her Mapplethorpe-inspired 'O' portfolio), held a Cecily Brown show of paintings about the joys of penises and fucking, placed a Felix Gonzalez-Torres piece on the side of their building, and now it has hosted Tomaselli. Maybe we now understand why the outside of the Hirshhorn has only one narrow window.
Tomaselli either was or wasn’t in fine form last night. He moved through his slide lecture with the proficiency of an artist who has spent years talking to MFA students on the grad school circuit. Kind of. Painting titles proved to be a problem.
"I forget what it's called," Tomaselli said when reaching a painting called, well… "It doesn’t matter what it’s called."
So Tomaselli moved on to the next image.
"This led to…" Tomaselli scratched his head, clicked to the next image, and examined it. "Well, it didn’t lead to this."
A few minutes later, Tomaselli was again perplexed. "It doesn’t matter what it’s called. It does matter… uh, uh… Lisa, can you help me? Oh." Tomaselli apparently received the right answer and announced: "It doesn't matter."
Apparently it didn't; the crowd had a chuckle and Tomaselli didn’t seem too bothered by his aw-shucks forgetfulness. When Tomaselli couldn’t remember something, he’d just reach down the back of his shirt, scratch his upper back and toss out a few "ums" and move on to the next image, picking up where he’d spaced out.
"This one’s called… something," Tomaselli thought about it for a second and nodded. "It's called Untitled."
Or: "This is called untitled but you can call it, Rug."
Tomaselli delighted in discussing the materials in his work, but not in the naughty way he could have, given that he was seven blocks from Capitol Hill. While not at all ashamed of his materials, Tomaselli didn’t go out of his way to tweak conservatives or to boast about what he is getting away with. After all, his pieces are made out of Prozac, cannabis leaves, Zoloft, aspirin, Tylenol and all manner of other pills. Several paintings were also dotted with saccharine.
"It's not really a drug but it gives you the illusion of sweetness and that's good enough for me," Tomaselli said.
Tomaselli's talk was full of these quarter-leaps of half-logic, none of them profoundly insightful, all of them amusing and funny. As such, his lecture style has a lot in common with his paintings. Tomaselli's work is inevitably fun to look at: Hey, that’s coke! And that’s a pot leaf, tee hee! But I find that after I leave a Tomaselli show I remember the pills and the leaves and the other bits, but I don’t remember much else. His recent show at James Cohan is a case in point. I remember the dozens of penises and breasts apparently cut from porn magazines and placed into the work, but I don't really remember the whole images. The canvases often don’t hold together. I’ve decided that Tomaselli has either created a perfect metaphor for psychoactive experience, or the works trend toward gimmicky. I can’t decide which. Maybe it's both.
Still, Tomaselli's work has thematic focus and each of his works is polished and attractively finished. In one of his rare cogent moments Tomaselli made the case for his paintings as windows to another world, as a way to lose self in the "oblime" an experience formed by a mix of the oblivious and the sublime. At some level, Tomaselli discovered the "oblime" as a child when he would go to art shows and go back home to the family tract in the suburbia of L.A. Tomaselli particularly liked the work of Chris Burden, best known for his Russian roulette approach to art (and guns).
"That was a big inspiration to me," Tomaselli said of Burden. "That art could make my mom mad."
|
Who was Marion True's protector?
Yesterday I pointed out that this was the key passage in the LAT's most recent Felch/Frammolino Getty expose:
Internal Getty records obtained by The Times show that museum officials knew three years ago about the loan [Marion] True obtained for the vacation home. The Getty declined comment on the documents.
The LAT story doesn't say if Trust officials knew about Marion True's loan. It does, however, refer to "internal Getty records." Last time the Times referred to Getty records, the Getty cried 'Theft!' Not this time. Interesting.
Is Barry Munitz directly or indirectly laying the True problems at the now-departed feet of Deborah Gribbon, whose severance agreement prohibits her from addressing the True issue? The Times story has the True paper trail ending at Gribbon's desk:
Getty attorneys in Los Angeles first learned of True's loan in 2002, when Ludovic de Walden, the Getty's London counsel, informed them of the transaction, records show.
De Walden said the transaction was carried out through a lawyer who worked for Symes and Michailidis in Athens. De Walden didn't name the attorney. He said he doubted the Italians would find out about the loan. That information was conveyed to Getty General Counsel Peter Erichsen and then-museum Director Deborah Gribbon, who questioned True about the transaction, records show. Getty officials declined to say what True told them at the time about the loan. Efforts to seek comment from Erichsen were unsuccessful. Gribbon declined Sunday to talk to a reporter.
That passage begs the questions: What action did Gribbon recommend? To whom did she recommend it? Munitz? If so, what did he say? Is it Munitz who has kept True around for three years, despite knowing of apparent ethical violations? (I think the answer to that one is pretty clear...)
|
Rebuilding the Jetty?
Greg.MoMA went to the Whitney's Smithson symposium and picked up this gem:
[A]lthough one potential bombshell was dropped, it went seemingly unnoticed. In answer to the moderator's question about ever rebuilding the Spiral Jetty by allowing new rocks to be piled onto it, the artist's widow and executor Nancy Holt didn't reject the idea.
That would be stunning and disappointing. (Greg reports that Holt said similar things about Amarillo Ramp.)
Last night a friend of mine and I were talking about Nicholas Nixon's series of annual portraits of his wife and her sisters, and Emmet Gowin's less regular photographs of his wife. Visits to the Jetty are like that too -- special and unique because they become a way of telling time, of becoming aware of the passage of the time. Here's hoping the road to Rozel Point gets maintained -- but that the Jetty is untouched.
Semi-related: Speaking of Gowin: I heard him talk at MICA last night. He drew a much bigger crowd there than Janet Cardiff drew at the national museum of contemporary art on the national Mall. Shame. And for background, click here.
|
Getty: No jokes. Again.
I miss Barry Munitz' umbrella-shopping. At least it was funny.
L'Affaire Getty continues its turn toward the less-personally scandalous with today's LAT news of Marion True's resignation/retirement. True's departure came after the LAT found out that she had received a $400K loan arranged through an antiquities dealer with whom True and the Getty did business. If the ancient Romans had as much fun with their language as we do, they might have said this comes close to being a backkickay.
The most remarkable sentence in the Jason Felch/Ralph Frammolino story is this:
Internal Getty records obtained by The Times show that museum officials knew three years ago about the loan True obtained for the vacation home. The Getty declined comment on the documents.
So the Getty knew about this for three years and did nothing. The emperor becomes more naked by the day. (And at some point ya gotta figu | | |
A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for the NY Observer about how Tom Krens was the most influential museum director around. Here's more proof, from LTB's artinfo.com: 
The best contemporary group show I've seen so far this season is 
