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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Islam, art, and museums
It would really tick me off that Ed Winkleman is so often correct except that I think he bought me a martini last time I saw him.
I'll add this: Name all the post-9/11 shows about Islamic art at American museums. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is this NGA show, a muddled, meandering survey of stuff from another museum's collection. The season's great hope is MoMA's Without Boundary, which has, for some reason that may become clearer once the show opens and I've actually seen it, added Mike Kelley and Bill Viola to the roster.
Related: The last time an American museum tried to do a vaguely (very, very, very vaugely) controversial show from the Muslim world, the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University found itself in the middle of a completely bizarre controversy.
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Ecstasy @ MOCA, Part I
Even before MOCA's Ecstasy is about the art in the show, it is a really good example of an arts institution doing lots of things right -- and a show that could really only happen in LA. I'm going to do two posts on Ecstasy today. This first one is about the idea of the show and not the art. The second post will be about the art.
Ecstasy asserts the role of the contemporary art curator, positioning him somewhere between exhibitor and evangelist. Too many contemporary art curators make shows for each other, exploring narrow concerns within obscure sub-categories. MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel's Ecstasy is an exhibit intended to share contemporary art with people who want to go to a contemporary art museum but are afraid they won't understand what they're looking at. It's also a show smart enough that everyone this side of the New Criterion will enjoy the heck out of it.
Ecstasy could never happen in New York or Washington, mostly because those cities don't have a sprawling, single-floor space in which a seemingly random show could be installed. Maybe one of the reasons New York (and Washington) don't offer interesting group shows is because much contemporary art is tuck-proof and can't be shoehorned into square, vertical spaces built to conform to the urban grid. MOCA's Geffen Contemporary is somewhere between a parking lot, Little Tokyo, a masturbating Dov Charney, and LA's City Hall. (When I walked out of Ecstasy and looked up at City Hall, made famous around the world as the phallic visual lynchpin of the TV series Dragnet, I laughed myself into an altered state as I remembered Dragnet's moralizing anti-drug preachiness.)
Finally (for this post), this show is a wicked argument against government funding of arts institutions. Can you imagine how politicians would use this show if MOCA received substantial public funding? (Nevermind that there's plenty of plausible deniability built into the exhibit.) Fortunately for the artists, the curator and for us, only one percent of MOCA's FY 2004 revenue came from government grants (that's pretty close to its recent norm, too). The result is an institution free to welcome visitors into an exhibit with an allegedly drug-laced fountain, an immediate challenge to the viewer. Do you believe? Or are you at least willing to suspend belief? Can you imagine this show at the National Gallery of Art? (The NGA version of this show is here.)
Related: I Get My Show on the Road.
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Next: Ecstasy
As soon as I fix a glitch: MOCA's Ecstasy show.
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Storylines
This could be a big week or three for art-world news:
- With the Getty Villa opening out of the way, will LACMA (finally) introduce a new director?
- Will the eye-popping compensation package that LACMA is offering make it into print? (And does the blogosphere count as 'print?' Because if it does, the answer is 'probably.')
- The Met and the Getty have been in discussions with Italian officials about allegedly looted antiquities. Officials from both museums should be back in the US this week. Will objects go back to Italy? Or will a standoff create an ongoing story?
- Will anyone else notice that this Chaim Soutine, which will be offered at Christie's on Feb. 6, has an eye-popping provenance? (Gee, what was going on in France in February, 1943...)
- Will Disney, having bought Pixar, make an offer for MoMA?
- Will the NGA's Cezanne show break attendance records?
- Will AICA respond to Todd Gibson? (Disclosure: I'm a member.)
- Will the non-regional press pick up on forthcoming annoucnements by the Clyfford Still Museum and the Vancouver Art Gallery on building plans? (They should, and thanks AJ.)
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The NYT on the Getty Villa
It's been Getty Villa week in the international arts media. It's not just me here or on a radio gig -- all the big media outlets have been abuzz about the Villa. The LA Times did a big package on the Villa opening. The New York Times sent an art critic who produced a glowing review. Newsweek wrote -- hold on, wait a second...
Uh... wow, don't I feel lame. Actually: No NYT art critic has reviewed the Villa. That's gotta be embarrassing. I think someone had better tell the New York Times that there are non-stops between JFK and LAX...
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Anselm Kiefer at MAMFW
Pret
There are not many artists about whom you can say this: The bigger the scale on which they work, the more outsized and ambitious they build, the better they are. And Kiefer, unquestionably, is at his best when he's working huge.
Anselm Kiefer is not a painter. Sure, there are some gouaches and some watercolors in this show, but with one exception they're the weakest works here. And sure, there is some oil paint on some of his big canvases, but those pieces aren't about oil paint. Kiefer seems to use only two painterly compositional devices: acute perspective and strict horizon lines. He is especially fond of putting those horizon lines somewhere near the top of the canvas. And that's about it for Kiefer as a painter.
But Kiefer as an object-maker is pretty darn cool. His works overwhelm the viewer with scale, material and layers of meaning. In a piece called The Milky Way, Kiefer shows us Germany's scarred earth and shows us how
Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth continues the art world's trend toward colonization.
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Latest stop on the Villa tour
 I'm doing another media appearance related to today's opening of the Getty Villa: Later tonight (EST) I'll be BBC World Service's The World Today. I'll try to post a direct link to the segment (if there is one) sometime on Sunday.
If you're coming into MAN via the BBC, here's some recent MAN coverage of the Villa:
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Around the blogosphere
On the post below this one: I keep hearing that some of KCRW's links are broken. If you'd like to listen (and you'll hear me coin a new word: inavoidable), click here and fast-forward to the 13:20 mark.
Today's major news story is certainly this one. I'll have more on it later.
Five posts yesterday. That means that today I let other bloggers do the work:
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KCRW's "Which Way, LA?"
UPDATE: I keep hearing that some of KCRW's links are broken. If you'd like to listen (and you'll hear me coin a new word: inavoidable), click here and fast-forward to the 13:20 mark.
I'll be on Los Angeles NPR affiliate KCRW's "Which Way, L.A.?" this evening. We'll be talking about the Getty Villa. You can listen in live at 7 PM PST, listen to the replay, get the podcast here, or, well, ignore it altogether.
If you're coming into MAN tonight via the show, here's some recent MAN coverage of the Villa:
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Ten spaces to watch (part two)
Finishing what we started this morning...
6.) Marfa Ballroom (flash warning): Last summer's Treading Water show was more fun than you'd think. Something about being in the middle of the west Texas desert, I guess.
7.) White Columns: Sure, maybe it's too big to be on this list. But no NYC contemporary space does more intelligent shows more often. Most young artists I know really, really want to be in a show here.
8.) Provisions Library: A little-known DC space where activism and the arts intersect. Its 2003 Emily Jacir show was ahead of the curve -- so ahead of the curve that Alexander and Bonin has curiously left it off of her bio.
9.) Exit Art: I like Exit Art, but all coherence on it has been beaten out of me by that annoying dude with a whip on their webpage. (The only time he doesn't whip you, of course, is when you click on the give-money link.)
10.) Eyebeam: Outside NYC Eyebeam might be best-known for it's killer-cool blog, reBlog. But its Chelsea space frequently features cool shows about video work that Eyebeam has helped artists to produce.
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O'Keeffe speaks from the grave
Probably a major Fisk-sale development: The Tennessean has found a Dec. 11, 1949 NYT Magazine article by Georgia O'Keeffe. In it O'Keeffe writes: "After twenty-five years they (the paintings from his collection) can be sold if the institutions have no further use for them."
That runs counter to a June 8, 1949 letter O'Keeffe wrote to the president of Fisk. This one's getting interesting....
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Villa to open, trustee flees
Nota bene: Looks like today will be a busy day on MAN. Lots going on in the art world. Expect lots of posts so check back often and be prepared to scroll.
I live in Washington so I don't get to see a print version of the Los Angeles Times. But after my morning perusal of the LAT website, I'd be shocked if there are more than two or three stories in today's paper that aren't about the Getty. (Heck, who am I to talk? In the last ten days I've had six Getty posts, including a particularly incestuous link to myself.)
First, the Villa. As we've said in two posts and one NPR commentary, it's fantastic. LAT critic Christopher Knight has the morning must-read: a top-notch, front-page review that hits all the right points. Christopher Reynolds' walk through the Villa (which is "about the size of your neighborhood Ralphs") will provoke LOLs. He also has a side full of fun facts.
But away from the Villa, the headline Getty item is that Barbara Fleischman has abruptly resigned from the Getty board. The meat of this li'l item is that she resigned just 72 hours before the Getty's triumphant opening of the Villa.
Even if you missed this morning's LA Times, you may have heard of that little project. The Villa is filled with hundreds of antiquities from the Fleischman collection. You may have heard of the Fleischman collection. The Italians sure have -- several dozen items from that collection are at the heart of Italy's case against Getty curator Marion True and an antiquities dealer. Oh, and you may have heard of Marion True. She's the Getty antiquities curator who resigned after it became known that she accepted a $400K loan. From Barbara Fleischman -- and also from a colleague of the antiquities dealer who is on trial with Marion True. Quite a little circle there. No wonder Fleischman won't tell the LAT why she quit. Maybe she thinks the "Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater" sign at the Villa is just too big. (Aside: I'd love to show you a Flickr image of the sign but there isn't one. Drat.)
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Ten spaces to watch (part one)
We all enjoy visiting major museums and commercial galleries. But often my favorite venues are small, smart alt-spaces that program with the art world -- particularly artists -- in mind. So today: Ten of my favorites. In no particular order, here are the first five:
1.) Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design. One of LA's 83 art schools, Otis is about a nine-iron from LAX. It's currently showing a Dave Hickey-curated show called Step into Liquid. (LATer Christopher Knight calls it a "significant show.") That's no surprise because Maltz frequently hangs significant shows, such as 2004's Robert Williams survey. (And somehow Doug Harvey reviewing a Robert Williams show just feels right.)
2.) REDCAT. CalArts' over-capitalized gallery is in Frank Gehry's Disney Hall. Like all good small, alt-spaces, REDCAT hits and misses. When the recent Walker-originated Julie Mehretu survey touched down in LA, this is where it stopped. And kudos to REDCAT for not just launching a Margaret Kilgallen retro, but for not destroying Kilgallen's art when the show was over. (Ed.: Is there a statute of limitations on LACMA garage jokes? Me: You mean like how there's a statute of limitations on art at LACMA?)
3. & 4.) Anderson Gallery and Solvent Space at Virginia Commonwealth University. While Richmond will be a little bit quieter for the next year or two as the Virginia MFA begins its building project, these two spaces will ensure that the city is worth a trip. Shows at both venues made my 2005 top ten list. And with the VMFA closed, curator John Ravenal's Artificial Light show will debut at Anderson this fall before traveling to MOCA North Miami just in time for Miami Fairs Week 2006.
5.) CCA Wattis Institute. Director Ralph Rugoff recently won the big-bucks Ordway Prize (and looks appropriately artsy-raffish in the press release photo). 2003's Warped Space is one of my favorite group shows of the last few years. Think of it as the father of Ecstasy.
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Spurling wins Whitbread
The second volume of Hilary Spurling's Matisse bio, Matisse the Master, has won the Whitbread. (The Beeb website has video, too.) I've plugged the book here before and I'll do it again: The two volumes make up one of the best art biographies I've read.
Related: It's been a really good couple of years for art bios. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp's Full Bloom on Georgia O'Keeffe is the best GO'K bio yet. De Kooning, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan won a 2005 Pulitzer. And Yale is just out with Sue Prideaux' Edvard Munch bio.
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Update on the Fisk maybe-sale
I've been keeping an eye on Fisk University's proposed sale of an O'Keeffe and a Hartley because it's such an unusual deaccessioning. (I explain why in that link. The key issue for me here is the care and preservation of the work. Fisk shouldn't keep the two paintings if it can't afford climate control or conservation. Or worse: The paintings shouldn't be kept at Fisk if the university's security systems are so substandard that...) Some new developments:
The state of Tennessee has filed papers to become involved in the dispute between Fisk and the New Mexico-based Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation. This, by itself, isn't very interesting, But this Tennessean story on the filing suggests that the O'Keeffe Foundation's endgame might be to force the 'return' of the two artworks to the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation.
Meanwhile the Nashville Scene's Christine Kreyling takes a look at Fisk's plans, contextualizes them within the Nashville arts scene and argues why -- and how -- they should stay in Nashville.
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Installation art, White House-style
One of my favorite recurring features in all the blogosphere is Greg Allen's series on Scott Sforza, the Bush lackey who stage manages Our Leader's public appearances. Today Greg catches Sforza accidentally turning W into Saddam.
Related: Greg should develop a Sets of Sforza exhibit. Here's the complete Sforza series from May, 2003 to the present.
Transition to the post below: Larry Mann ran for Congress as a write-in candidate against Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.).
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"What Remains," Part II
 Yesterday I started talking about Steven Cantor's new documentary about Sally Mann, What Remains. It is premiering at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
One of the juxtapositions between Mann's work and her words is the way Mann talks about the dead and the way she photographs the dead.
In Cantor's film, Mann expresses incredulity that anyone gets worked up about dead bodies. She can't imagine that people give a flying fig if their ashes are scattered over the Ganges or what-have-you. She's almost indignant about it.
But as I noted in my review of her 2004 Corcoran show, she treats every dead thing she sees with reverence.
The most shocking installation in the Corcoran show was a tiny gallery of snapshots of an escaped prisoner who committed suicide on the Manns' property. The prisoner shot himself in the woods, just at the edge of a clearing, plainly within sight of the Manns' home. (Mann speaks of being threatened by him, but only vaguely.) Shortly after the corpse was removed, Mann walked out to look at where he had shot himself.
"Right there, where his head was, was a little pool of blood." Mann says. "It was strangely dark, like chocolate. And I started to put my finger on it... and it moved."
The blood was absorbed into the ground. Mann's telling of this story is mournful, respectful, fascinated. The same emotions are there in Mann's photographs of her dead dog Eva (at left), and of Civil War battlefields.
The obvious pop psych explanation is that she's watching what is happening to her husband's body as muscular dystrophy affects more and more of his musculature and that Mann's photographs about the dead are her way of working through that.
"I think I'm in denial about his illness, I really do," Mann says. "I hate that sort of psychobabble business, but I just don't think about it. It's just like age itself and I don't think about it, and when I glance out the window and realize that he walks with a big hitch now... it's almost like he has to drag one leg, you'll see it. I think oh my goodness. Ooh. It seems so sudden. And unfair. And not us."
Mann professes to dislike the analytic thing and several times in the film she says she hates it when people subject her family to it. (Early in the film Cantor shows us a scene of Mann and her children, the famously photographed, no-longer-little ones, discussing whether or not Mann wants to launch another exhibition or book of her family series. Guided by Mom, the family decides that no, that's not necessary because they'll all be quizzed and pop-psyched to death about them all over again.)
That dichotomy is both puzzling -- a multi-year project on dead things practically screams out for psychological explanation -- and natural -- artists like the work to stand for itself and not for the life behind it. But Mann's work is intensely personal, a photographic memoir of both Mann's life and her inner-most thoughts. It's the humanity in Mann's work that makes it great.
Expect "What Remains" to continue on the film festival circuit for a while, to have a brief theatrical window in the spring, and then to debut on HBO and on the BBC this summer.
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Shulman on Lautner
 The last of our posts on Julius Shulman: Today, a quote from a Shulman conversation with USC history professor Phil Ethington about his photograph of John Lautner's Malin House, also known as the Chemosphere. (Thanks to the Getty for providing a CD of the Q&A that ran in the GRI gallery during the show.)
In this passage, Shulman discusses Lautner's house, its role as a (failed) challenge to development-as-usual, and how he took the photo. (While we think of Shulman as a photographer of strict, sometimes cold modernist architecture, whenever he could Shulman placed shrubbery or trees in the foreground of his photos, as if to soften structures.)
"John Lautner had been associated with FLW for many years and when he pursued his own practice in the 1960s he designed this house in the Hollywood Hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley. But John Lautner had this concept [of] angrily denying the rights of developers from bulldozing land just for the sake of making a flat path for a lot. He said let’s not disturb the terrain, let's recognize and honor the native quality of the Hollywood-type hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Let us show that we can build a house by excavating just a pod of cement and concrete and support the house by a unique construction, by a single column without excavating the whole piece of property.
"He was hoping he can get builders in the area to design the house and build it with him, which would exercise the openness of the property, the views from the property. At twilight even in daytime towards the San Gabriel Mountains is spectacular...
"This house was constructed in the factory with steel framework holding the house and the floor. You see the steel members supported by a single concrete column. It’s a sound structure, it’s been there for many years, over 45 years now.
"You will notice in this photograph that there is a cloud shadow floating across the valley below the house in the distance. The exercising of this point of visual perception in the part of the photographer makes this photograph successful. I had noticed as I was preparing this photograph that there were cloud shadows floating across the sky, sweeping across the valley. And just as I was ready to photograph this scene, the sunlight below the house, I saw a shadow coming towards the valley below the structure of the house in the distance, and being swept by the winds in exactly the right position I needed it to delineate the form of the house."
Related: Another reason to spotlight Shulman on Lautner: The UCLA Hammer Museum is preparing a Lautner retrospective for 2007ish. The John Lautner Foundation has more photos of the house, including one by Shulman in color.
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Sally Mann documentary @ Sundance
 In late 1969 a flood swept through the Mann family plot in Virginia. It dumped a huge boulder in front of a cabin door, and Sally Mann’s father wanted it out of the way. He asked Sally's then-boyfriend, Cee Turner, if he knew anyone who could help move the boulder. Cee did, and the three men all tugged mightily at the stone in an attempt to dislodge it. It didn't budge. Then Cee's friend looked at the other two guys and stood back.
"[He] said let me do this," Sally says. "He reached down and he lifted the stone by himself, put it up on his back, moved it to the front door of the cabin, put it down, and turned around and looked at them as if it were effortless for him. Cee Turner told me that he knew at that moment I was going to marry Larry Mann. It was like love at first sight."
Sally Mann tells this story in a new documentary titled "What Remains." Directed and produced by Steven Cantor, the film debuts this week at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2004 on the occasion of a Sally Mann exhibit at the Corcoran (from which this film takes its title), I wrote that Mann "must be the most personal artist in America. Her camera is her diary, her photographs its entries." Cantor’s film is a wonderful, lilting look at Mann and the motivations behind her photographs.
The relationship between Sally, her husband, and the "What Remains" photographs is at the crux of the documentary. Mann’s series is about death -- that is, not the process of dying, but about things that are dead. Each part of Mann’s series is presented in the film, just as they were in the Corcoran show: photographs of the bones and skin of Mann's dead dog Eva, wet collodion-made images of Civil War battlefields (are those mounds of earthen hills – or graves?), snapshots of a place on her farm where an escaped prisoner shot himself, decomposing corpses, and close-ups of her children's faces.
The film also includes the first images I've seen of a series that art world folks have known about for a while: Sally's photographs of Larry. Mann calls the series "Marital Trust." It includes everything from bathing to shaving to working in the garden, to sex.
"I think of this series as an aesthetic savings account," Sally says. "I know they're there and I know they're good. Maybe they'll never come out. Maybe they'll come out after I kick the bucket. But it's a very comforting thought to me that those pictures are in that box in my darkroom."
Sally, lying on the bed as Larry gets dressed after modeling for her, mentions that two-thirds of their lives have been spent together. Larry doesn't quite know what to say. "That’s weird," Sally says, more to fill the silence than because it is.
In the next frame of the film, with a couple sentences of text, Cantor explains the quiet: In 1994 Larry Mann was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. The disease is weakening his muscle tissue – especially in his right leg and his left arm – and is incurable.
More tomorrow.
Related: The catalog from What Remains at the Corcoran, Cantor's Stick Figure Productions, the Roanoke Times' Kevin Kittredge on the documentary, Sally Mann on art: 21.
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Getty Villa on NPR's ATC
I was on NPR's All Things Considered tonight with a commentary about the confluence of the opening of the Getty Villa and the Getty/Italy/Greece antiquities dispute:
"[H]ow many visitors will care if some of the art might have been stolen?
Sure -- people who've followed the Getty controversy will whisper to each other at the Villa cafe. But subconsciously at least, the Villa is designed to say this to the controversy: eih."
You might have to hear "eih" to understand "eih." (The commentary is about two minutes, thirty seconds long.)
Related: MAN's first look at the Getty Villa, some follow-up notes. And if you're new to MAN: Welcome. Please have a look around. For some more of my non-blog writing, check out the right-hand column, a screen or two down.
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Shulman @ the Getty, Part II
 Last August, 85 years after Julius Shulman moved to California, the Getty Research Institute acquired Julius Shulman's archive of over 260,000 negatives, prints, and transparencies. (I hear that Shulman celebrated the purchase by jumping on a plane to Mexico. When he got back he returned to shooting houses for private clients. Last I checked, his fee is $10K a pop.)
Shulman is best-known as an architectural photographer, a picture-taker who was more interested in making architecture look good than in pursuing any particular artistic vision of his own. He is not a great photographer, but he has taken great pictures.
Along with Ezra Stoller, Shulman became the foremost photographer of American modern architecture. His photographs of mid-century modern California homes emphasize their clear glass walls, their basic right angles, and their stunning views of California canyons, valleys and the Pacific Ocean. The bright light in Shulman's photographs always comes from the bright California sun, or the headlights that fill the Los Angeles night. Shulman's photographs have so completely defined what it means to live in California that it's impossible to know if Shulman captured California as the people in his photographs lived it, or if his photographs helped create the ideal post-war California lifestyle. Even today, Shulman's photographs of homes by Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler, Pierre Koenig, Charles and Ray Eames and other American icons serve as the visual sourcebook that movie directors, advertising executives, artists -- and virtually everyone else – use as shorthand for comfortable California-ism.
Just in the last week I've noticed: A new TV ad with Heather Locklear cribs off of the photo at the right. And an Acura magazine ad. Countless movies have borrowed that shot too.
GRI Related: I love the small GRI exhibit space. If you want to see a smart, intensive, non-pandering-the-masses show in LA, that's the place. Recent shows have included: The Business of Art: Evidence from the Art Market, and Photographs of Artists by Alexander Liberman.
Shulman related: NPR's D2D on the Shulman show; the LAT's Craig Nakano profiles Shulman in March, 2005;
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Thursday read-ems
More on Julius Shulman later today -- I'm slamming on a tight deadline.
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Where oh where....
A while back I gave ex-Barnes boss Kimberly Camp a hard time for losing a piano. I mean, how do you lose a piano? After all, one of those things must weigh 500 pounds!
Well, turns out that disappearing pianos are, relatively speaking, not much: Yesterday I read that the Reina Sofia lost a 38-ton Richard Serra.
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Julius Shulman at the Getty
 I don't like posting 1,000-word write-ups because I think that's not very blog-friendly, so over the next day or two MAN will feature several posts about photographer Julius Shulman. A small show of Shulman's work is on view at the Getty Research Institute through Sunday. A four or five-city tour will begin later this year.
Julius Shulman's photographs of modernist California architecture are the work of a true believer, an evangelist for modernism. In his photographs California sprawl is beautiful, convenient, and futuristic. Shulman celebrated the promise of modernism wherever it reared its head: in homes, banks, gas stations, movie theaters. That photograph on the left is of a Mobil station in Anaheim, Calif. It promises ease-of-use, style, function, and a little bit of top-down California sex appeal. Now gas stations are monuments to corporate standardization.
Shulman was not born into the modern world. In the years before and during World War I, Julius Shulman grew up on a farm in rural Connecticut. It was a classic early-20th century American family plot: The Shulmans fed themselves (and the local fox population) with a coop full of Rhode Island Red chickens, pumped water from a hand pump on the kitchen sink, made do with outdoor toilets and used Sears Roebuck catalogs for paper. They had no electricity, just kerosene lamps and a coal-fire stove for heat and cooking. When a Shulman wanted a bath, he'd set up a tub in the middle of the kitchen, boil water on the stove, and bathe.
In September, 1920, Julius' parents decided that they wanted their 10-year old son and his two siblings to grow up not on a rural farm, but in America's new land of promise: California. They boarded a train in New York and became part of one of the first waves of migration into the Southland. Shulman graduated from LA's Roosevelt High School in 1928, and the next year he attended UCLA as part of the first class on the Westwood campus.
Related: Julius Shulman's oral history at the Archives of American Art, Taschen's Modernism Rediscovered (35% off), Taschen's Julius Shulman: Architecture and its Photography.
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A pox on art-mag publishing
If you're not reading Edward Winkleman's blog every morning, you're really missing out. Today Winkleman tells the art world's dirty little secret, and (correctly) calls foul on a newish art news website.
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Getty Villa notes
Building on yesterday's post about the new Getty Villa...
- The Getty's visitor plan is to allow 1,100-1,200 people per day (five days a week, plus school groups on a sixth) until July 31. At that point the Getty will re-evaluate traffic flow and may increase the number of visitors;
- The best thing at the new Getty Villa is a video of this goal -- the most incredible I've ever seen -- by Capitals stud Alex Ovechkin yesterday. (Alternate link.) OK, OK, that's not at the Getty Villa. I just wanted to link to it. I mean: Wow.
- One of the most striking parts of the Villa experience is the way the architects have created sightlines. My favorite: From about the second or third step of the theater, through the (open) front doors of the Villa, right through the building;
- Theatrical productions will begin in September. Actors will be able to enter the stage from the museum or perform from the museum's balcony;
- Getty Museum director Michael Brand is interested in bringing Villa-appropriate contemporary art exhibits into the Villa's five exhibition galleries. The Villa exhibit schedule is set for 2006, but 2007 is unprogrammed. (The Getty Center's museum schedule is set through 2008.);
- The more pop culture changes, the more it stays the same: In a gallery featuring much Dionysus, an actor squats and points to his rear end as he puts two fingers into his mouth to make a, well, socially unacceptable sound. (Plumbeus et Plumbeus-er?);
- My favorite Q&A from the Getty Villa FAQ: Q: I've got a big rig. Can I park at the Getty Villa? A: Parking is available for vehicles up to 6'10" and of standard car length and width. There is no parking for RVs, motor homes, limousines, and other larger vehicles; and
- Tickets to both the Villa and the Getty Center are free -- kind of. In reality the Getty charges $7 per carload.
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Getty Villa: First Look
 (OK, it's the third look. The NYT and LAT ran architectural reviews of the Villa on the same day in November.)
It's beautiful. There is no question that the newly refurbished and expanded Getty Villa is beautiful. Everything from the installation of the Getty's antiquities collection to the landscaping to the ancillary buildings is overwhelming.
And for $275 million, I'd expect nothing less. (The project was designed by the Boston-based firm of Machado and Silvetti.) The Getty Villa, closed for renovation since 1997, reopens on Jan. 28. The paintings are gone, transplanted to the Getty Center in Brentwood. In their place is the Getty's antiquities collection. But however wonderfully manicured the whole presentation, throughout the property there is the sense that the whole thing is an illusion: the Villa, the gardens, even the collection.
In a way, that's classic California, a state that for decades has believed that if it builds big enough -- from acqueducts to movie studios -- illusion will become reality. Certainly no one at the Getty puts forward the Villa as anything but a copy. But like the Met's remodeling of its Greek and Roman galleries, the subtext to the Getty Villa is the illusion of permanence: We've built special places for the antiquities and that legitimizes our claims -- legal and ethical -- to them.
The most monumental illusion is at the center of the property: the Getty Villa itself, a remodeling of a re-creation. The original Getty Villa, conceived in 1968, was designed with the Villa dei Papiri, a Roman country house buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, as its conceit. (The Villa dei Papiri was excavated at Herculaneum in Italy in the 1700s, and may have been the home of Julius Caesar's father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. The structure was mapped in the 18th century and the Getty Villa is based on those plans.)
The Villa's new galleries are installed thematically rather than chronologically: gods and goddesses, monsters and minor deities, glass, silver, religious offerings, athletes and competition, and so on. The presentations are uncluttered. The display cases -- built to withstand a 9.0 earthquake -- recede into the background. The galleries are open and airy -- several are lit with natural light -- and visitors can pretty much wander where they want. This is not a forced march through antiquity.
 The Getty expects the average visitor to spend 3.5 hours on site, but I could have spent that much time just in the museum or just in the gardens. A visitor first encounters the Getty's landscaping during the dramatic, sidehill walk out of the parking garage. Every view is pre-determined and framed by Machado and Silvetti and landscape architect Denis L. Kurtz Associates: Here's the Villa, turn, the gardens, turn, the Pacific Ocean.
The plantings are designed to recreate the natural environment of the ancient Mediterranean. Naturally: For decades southern California has bought into the idea that it is the new Mediterranean, both climatically and culturally. (California has long looked to southern Europe for how it should live and has copied what it can. For example when a previous California mogul, William Randolph Hearst, built his castle at San Simeon, he built in the Mediterranean style.) But the gardens too are a reminder of illusion: southern California, the Los Angeles Basin, is a desert built up into lushness by one of the largest industrial water-moving projects in world history.
Evidence of the dichotomy between nature's California and man's California is on view as you drive up Los Liones Drive toward the Villa. To get to Getty property, you must drive past Topanga State Park, a patch of classic coastal California mountainscape. Topanga is full of dry scrub oak and golden, sunburnt grass. Literally across the street, the Getty's gardnes are rich and green.
As William Mulholland knew, transforming the land takes money. The Getty spent plenty: The parking garage is hidden under a man-made meadow and behind green plantings. Walls are topped with translucent African onyx, a material more commonly used sparingly in cuff links than as an architectural flourish in art museums. Copper inlays on a wall of travartine marble will make the wall look like it's sweating. The classical theater -- with its removable lightstands -- will be used only 35-40 nights a year. The indoor theater is equipped with surround sound, including speakers under the seats. But despite the opulence on view -- or maybe because of it -- the Getty Villa seems illusory, like something we'd better enjoy before it's taken away from us. (What will the gardnes look like during the next California drought?)
 The Getty Trust is the third-largest foundation in America, so the bills are paid. (This isn't like the federal government, $8 trillion in debt, funding foreign wars with money borrowed from other nations.) But what about the antiquities around which the entire Villa project is built -- will they be here in a few months, or in a few years? Two foreign governments -- Greece and Italy -- have demanded that the Getty return antiquities that they say are looted. And even if those contested antiquities (a few dozen of 1,200 on view) are here in a few years, should they be?
Inside the museum, I had been so caught up in the presentation that I hadn't thought much about the ethical and legal issues of antiquities ownership. Then, as I walked out of the museum, onto the stage of the Villa's theater, the biggest permanent sign on the property brought all the news stories of the last year rushing to mind: "Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater." The sign is red. You can't miss it. I remembered that the Fleischman collection is at the crux of the Getty's current problems with Italy.
Could some of the antiquities I just ogled be here today, gone tomorrow? Just as the Getty is re-opening Villa, it's enduring the scrutiny associated with Marion True's trial in Italy, the Getty's dealings with dealers Giacomo Medici, Bob Hecht, and Robin Symes, and the recent insistence by the Greek Ministry of Culture that the Getty return four antiquities that they say were illegally removed from Greece.
As I left the Malibu Villa, a 2006 remodeling of a 1968 Californian structure that was based on a 1900-year old floor plan from a Roman country house, a building that was now full of antiquities, some of them contested, from another place and era, I thought back to my college Latin classes. Our word 'illusion' comes from the Latin word, illusio, which means 'to mock with irony.' The Villa isn't mocking -- the Getty would be hard-put to display art objects more earnestly -- but it's certainly ironic that the Getty is opening the Villa just as an international debate about its antiquities is front-and-center.
Related: Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times; Michael Z. Wise in the LAT on the architects; Christy Hobart in the LAT on the Getty's gardener.
Tomorrow: Bullet points from the Getty Villa.
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Monday must-reads
Later today: The Getty Villa.
First: Three big weekend stories, two (more) on deaccessioning. The Met is caught red-handed, says Michael Kimmelman. (Aside: Why is Kimmelman, the NYT's chief art critic, writing a news story about the Met's bungled deal when he should be railing against it?)
And Tom Freudenheim catches the American Jewish Historical Society in a similarly unfortunate transaction. Deaccessioning is an arts institution scandal that is growing by the day. More later this week on MAN.
Finally, the Philly Inky's Ed Sozanski on the latest Barnes Foundation news, including word that the move now seems set for 2009.
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Some January highlights
Sunday note: I'm quoted on Dana Schutz in the NYT today, and the NYT attributes my quote to something I said on "another blogger's message board." Actually it's from this post on MAN. And if you're new, here are some January highlights. December highlights can be found on the sidebar on the right, about one screen down.
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de Young a big hit
Between the de Young's opening day on Oct. 15 and the end of 2005, the museum attracted over 380,000 visitors, a bit under 6,000 per day. That's pretty good for a museum that requires a special trip: The de Young is in Golden Gate Park and it's within walking distance for fewer than 10,000 or so San Franciscans. It's not near any shopping or business districts.
By comparison, in MoMA's first year it drew 2.67 million people, an average of 8,600 people a day. Nothing shabby about that either, and I don't know that one number is necessarily more impressive than the other. While I'm at the comparison game: The New York Mets outdrew MoMA by only 150,000.
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Getty Villa: Phase one sold out
First on MAN: As of today, according to the Getty's ticketing website, every currently available Getty Villa ticket -- that would be all 144,000 or so of them from the public opening on Jan. 28 through July 31 -- is reserved.
UPDATE: More tickets have magically appeared on the Getty website for a couple weeks in early May.
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At SFMOMA
 I tried to post this yesterday, but my cable modem connection was not cooperating...
The best show not of Chuck Close at SFMOMA is the Wangechi Mutu exhib up on the museum's fifth floor. (Curated by Tara McDowell, the show is part of SFMOMA's New Work series.) Mutu's work is assembled sometimes with collage, sometimes with a sledgehammer and drywall, sometimes with other non-traditional sculptural objects. At SFMOMA she also uses red wine and chairs. (Strangely: No red wine scent in the gallery. Hmmm....)
Mutu says her work is about myth and gender, both in Africa and the West. I don't know any African myths about gender. It doesn't matter. Her mylar pieces are touchingly human. They may be inspired by myth, but Mutu's best works have their own sense of narrative. (As a side benefit, her work makes Fred Tomaselli's similar clipped-from-magazines collage technique look shallow and cheesy.) Mutu is no longer a future star. (That image is a detail from Bloody Old Head Games, which is in the show.)
Have I ever mentioned that it's remarkable that SFMOMA doesn't have any Wayne Thiebauds on view?
Kiki Smith is really inconsistent. At least SFMOMA bought what's probably the best piece in this Siri Engberg-curated show: Lilith.
SFMOMA's fifth-floor permanent collection contemporary galleries look the best they've looked in several years. Highlights include this Olafur Eliasson (which SFMOMA just bought), the kitschiest Koons, one of the best Vija Celminses in any museum collection, Toba Khedoori, SFMOMA's iconic Gerhard Richter, a Ricci Albenda that the museum doesn't have in its online database yet (which is OK -- the SFMOMA online collection database is one of the best anywhere), and a just-purchased-from-a-New-Works-show Marilyn Minter.
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Installing
NYTer Randy Kennedy has an interesting piece about the challenge of installing work in the Whitney's Breuer Box. (Donna: Smile!) Gallerist Ed Winkleman nods knowingly.
I've been at the Whitney during installation-time and it's definitely an, er, interesting environment. Everyone cares and no decision is a single decision. What does the light meter say? Is there glare here? What will the impact of 25 people in this space be?
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Chuck Close Self-Portraits @ SFMOMA
 The problem with seeing a Chuck Close paintings show at Pace (such as his May, 2005 show in Chelsea) is that only a small snapshot of Chuck Close's practice is on view. The temptation is to look at the most recent work and think, 'I've seen that before.' But Close is an artist who works in incremental departures from previous reprentations.It makes him an artist well-suited to a lilting survey show.
The Close self-portraits show currently at SFMOMA (by SFMOMA's Madeleine Grynsztejn and the Walker's Siri Engberg) is just such a show. Walking from Chuck Close, 1969 to Chuck Close, 2001 is the kind of visual-narrative fun that appeals to both people who capitalize art movements in their own minds (Process art! Conceptual art!) and to 16-year olds amazed by how'd-he-do-that.
Over the course of 15,000 or so square feet, the show takes us through Close's self-portraits from 1967, shortly after he finished Yale's MFA program, to the present. We see Close the painter slowly, over 38 years, move from an artist working with the vaguely photo-realist (vague when you're up close, photo-realist when you're 50 feet away) to work that relies more and more on mere suggestion. If there's one constant in Close's painting, it's that he is always building things from abstraction instead of deconstructing something into abstraction. Even his earliest self-portraits are assembled abstract cubes. The shallow-focus photograhs in the show seem built from abstraction too: Close's nose and glasses and the parts of his face that project toward the camera are in focus, but they're built up from a fuzzy-focused layer of cheeks, ears, high forehead, chin and the like.
There are probably only a handful of artists who have been written about more than Close (here's one I want to read but haven't bought yet) and I don't think 900-word blog reviews are very readable, so a couple more random thoughts:
- I think this was on my SAT: Chuck Close : human face :: Susan Rothenberg : horses;
- There are two major Chuck Close shows traveling right now, this one and an excellent prints show titled Chuck Close: Process and Collaboration. The prints show is on a 12-city tour. Seriously. Twelve. And that's just the US portion of the show. Twelve;
- This show will go on to the High and to the Albright-Knox;
- A wall-text in the show says that Close's work reminds us of our own aging and mortality. First: Wall text should never, ever tell me what I think. (SFMOMA is a repeat violator on this. Keyboards should roll in their Department of Wall Text.) Secondly: No, it doesn't. Didn't think of that once during the entire show;
- Chuck Close SFMOMA podcast is here, the Walker Channel's Chuck Close Q&A with Grynsztejn and Engberg is here; and
- More on SFMOMA later today.
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Q&A with Terry Riley, Part Two
Part one of my conversation with new Miami Art Museum director Terry Riley is here. Our Q&A is continued below.
MAN: Will you build an architecture program at MAM?
Riley: It's possible... The architecture scene in Miami is very dominated by commercial real estate and they can afford the advertising and they wind up dominating the discourse because of the high visibility.
When I was at MoMA I became aware that during a building a program, no matter what you do the building program is really the architecture program. It soaks up a lot of the attention of the institution and the curators. That said, you don't necessarily have to have an architecture department to do shows on architecture. And certainly expect we'd do an exhibition -- at the very least -- on the architect we select [to build the new MAM].
MAN: Do you have an architect in mind?
Riley: I would say I could easily name a dozen architects that would be appropriate but we're just beginning the process so I need to talk to the trustees more to find out as much as possible, see what their aspirations are, and such.
MAN: Will you hold a competition?
I'm not against competitions as some people are, but I'm not ideological about them. I think they're good when they're appropriate. In the case of MoMA it was appropriate because it involved a very dense urban condition where we were aware that some or a large part of our existing building might be or could be torn down, so we really had to get a sense of what the architect might do before we could select them.
[Miami] is a green-field site, so I think one could learn just as much about the architects from going to see their previous work. Competitions are time-consumptive in the sense that the competition work is part of the design work. It talkes longer to pick an architect, but by the time you pick them they've designed a good part of the building.
MAN: What can you take from MoMA and incorporate into Miami?
Riley: I think that's one of the reasons the trustees were interested in me. I feel most institutions have to hire architectural experience on the outside of the institution [to do a building project] and with MoMA having had an architecture department for 70 of its 75 years, it was in a position of not having to do that. What I've noticed in other institutions is that when they don't have that expertise -- or worse when you have a total lack of experience -- the leadership of the insitution becomes very intimidated by the building project, and that's when you hear about the most disastrous fights between the architect and the director or maybe the trustuees. You hear about badly handled projects that are wrapped in almost paranoid secrecy.
This is what helped MoMA. It was very self-confident about having a competition. Then it did the improbable thing: Once the three [finalists] were selected, having an exhibition where you don't disappear the other seven competitors and you show all the [designs].
What I credit MoMA with is having the self-confidence not to be intimidated. We did show all 10 at the end, and the three finalists we showed very publicly. There's a certain confidence I'd also like to see surround the project down in Miami.
Remember, this is a small project in terms of contstruction. I remember when Renzo Piano got the tour [of the Tate Modern site] with [Tate director] Nic Serota, Renzo said this after touring that vast Turbine Hall: Serota asked him are there any questions, and Renzo replied, 'I thought you said this was a big project?'
We have some trustees who can say, 'We have this nice project on the bay...' and at the scale some of these guys are building [the museum] is indeed a nice little project.
MAN: And on the flip side, what will you not take from MoMA, or what's so different that the lessons of MoMA are not applicable?
Riley: One aspect that is definitely differet from the get-go and it does appeal to me: MoMA is, in terms of modern art and to a lesser extent incontemporary art, the 800-pound gorilla and it's the museum of record for many aspects of 20th century art. It's got a spectacular collection that demands first attention. It's deeply wedded to a particular architectural history which it not only featured, but helped promote. So to the extent that there were certain aspects to the design and execution of the Taniguchi building that were in the broadest spectrum conservative -- or more conservative than you might see elsewhere -- that's to some extent to be expected.
MoMA is not a new museum of contemporary art. This is modern, 20th century art presented the way we now see it as a renaissance. There's a huge historical implication that this is not a frivolous century. Miami doesn't have that... I don't want to say encumbrance -- at least in any argument you'd have to recognize that such an obligation is both encumbrance and advantage. Miami doesn't necessarily have to deal with all those things.
Miami is different, more of a blank slate that has both positive and negatives. When I interviewed, one of the things I said to the trustees was that I didn’t think the institution should strive to be a 'little brother' kind of encyclopedic museum which will always mean having a second-rate status. Rather, Miami should look to other museums that have established themselves as having a unique and signature identity which the art world and curators don't see as second-rate, but as specialized. I'm thinking of the Menil, the Walker, the Louisiana. These are all institutions that museum people love and they're absolutely not trying to be smaller versions of the big encyclopedic institutions.
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Q&A with Terence Riley, Part One
Last week I inadvertently set off a (very) minor tempest when I noted that most of the Miami art blogs appeared to be uninterested in Terry Riley's appointment to the directorship of the Miami Art Museum. My point wasn't that the bloggers were asleep at the switch, it was this: While some of us northerners think MAM has lots of potential, in Miami the museum is not a cultural leader. Its collection numbers only 300 items and the museum occupies a small, dated, 36,000 square-foot building. None of the 12 biggest American metro areas has a flagship visual arts institution that is as immature.
 But there's plenty going on in Miami. Art Basel Miami Beach is the biggest and most important annual (or biennial) American art exhibition. Collectors such as the Rubells and Marty Margulies have opened up galleries in which they display their collections. The city recently approved a $100 million bond issue for a new, 125,000 square-foot MAM at Museum Park.
Over the weekend Riley and I talked about MAM's building project, Miami's need for a nationally-competitive MFA program, its private collector-dominated scene, and the impact of ABMB. We did not discuss Pixar. (You have no idea how much self-control that took...) I'll run this in two parts, with the second part coming this afternoon.
MAN: Let's start with something you said to the New York Times last week: "There has been a push and a genuine flowering of the art scene here without a big institutional presence... the interaction between critics and curators and trustees can't be replicated in a private realm." Why not?
Riley: In NYC or in DC you have the large official museums and then there's the presence of the completely private realm, collections that are open to the public. In Miami it's really inverted where the biggest presence at the moment seems to be the private collections. I think the city has a chance to change this. I do think that the private collections aren't enough to make the art integrated with the public's view of ithe city.
MAN: In recent years most of those major private collectors have not been engaged with the museum. Can MAM be successful without involvement from the big Miami collectors? (Two of Miami's top modern/contemporary collectors are on MAM's board: Craig Robins and Ella Fontanals Cisneros.)
Riley: I'm somewhat new to that situation of course. I don't know that anyone understands the cause of the past relationship between the collectors and the museum at this point. Collectors have their concerns about maintinating their collections and at some point it's not unusual for collectors to think about how a collection might be maintained or who might take care of it [long-term].
In making a selection like that one set of criteria a collector would use is: Does this institution need this? Will they cherish it? Will they conserve it? Can they conserve it? MAM is really small right now -- 36,000 square feet. There's no chance of expanding [the existing building]. On most collectors horizons I think MAM represents a limited set of options -- but I don't think there's any bred-in-the-bone hostility. I don't think that MAM was the kind of institution that was capable of being the kind of institution that collectors might favor in a certain sense. I think that could all change quite rapidly. Both in terms of credibility once the building design is underway and because I think that there will be some growth in terms of the staff.
MAN: How well do you know Miami's collector class?
Riley: I don't have a sense of that yet. I have met and become pretty familiar with Rosa de la Cruz, Craig [Robins], and so on and so forth. I know many of the people. I don't have a plan all worked out yet, but I think I'm going to have to continue to get to know these people for all sorts of reasons.
The thing about Miami that's interesting is that I have many friends -- both my age and older and younger -- who have suddenly and surprisingly found Miami to be quite interesting. Some of these people are people who were dragged to Miami by their parents and stayed at the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc for the holidays and have nothing but kitschy nightmares about it, and they're surprised to find out how sophisticated it is. And then there's a certain kind of very sophisticated international Latin American class who quite frankly has always bypassed Miami because they think of it as middle class. I found that this very elite international type of Latin has suddenly found Miami quite interesting also. It's changing itself and it's doing it in many different ways.
What I find interesting is that Miami's success is of course going to depend on support from local community. I say 'of course' because I don't think any museum can succeed without that support.
As an example: Museums are not good businesses. They do not have strong balance sheets absent endowments and absent heavy fundraising. The only thing that saves museums when times get tough is local support. People who love the museum will not let it go under. That's the only way it ever works really. The Guggenheim in Las Vegas is an example of an institution that had -- other than a corporate arrangement -- no local support. After 9/11 there was no one to step in and say we have to take care of this institution. It just closed. So No. 1 is local support.
MAM has not been big enough to actually embrace its potential support outside of Miami. This is something that I think will be very much what I try to do there. I don't think the people who are going to donate money and art to MAM are only in Dade County.
MAN: Does Art Basel Miami Beach and Fairs Week make your job an easier one or a more difficult one?
Riley: It makes it easier. The thing about being at a New York museum that makes one's life as a curator easier is that everybody comes through New York sooner or later. And the problem with being in, say, Omaha or something, is that people aren't going there and when you want to have a lecture series or when you want to try to meet someone you're either going to them or you're constantly trying to arrange things so that they go your way. Miami is now a place where people pass through town. You can count on people being there and knowing who you are and that's terrific.
That's not the only thing that's happening in Miami either. If it's an art fair alone, a once-a-year, week-long thing, it isn’t enough. What I'm encouraged by is not only the art fair but now there's a lot of talk locally with serious steps taken, to open a top-quality MFA program. And there's a lot of people who wisely have noted that you’ll never get artists coming for extended stays in Miami or for lectures or artists in the community without a substantive, long-term studio arts program. So this is great. The parties are ok everyone loves Art Basel, but that alone isn't going to cut it.
Related: Previous MAN entry-interviews: Michael Brand (Getty), John Buchanan (FAMSF).
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Visiting the Getty Villa
On Gett
Admission to the Villa will cost $7/car but is free to those who walk. (Hah!) The first six months of tickets the Getty has made available are nearly gone: Only four dates in April (the 10th, 13th, 17th and 27th) are still available. As the Getty is allowing 1,100 visitors to the Villa per day, that means that about 140,000 free tickets have already been snapped up.
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DC's Fusebox is closing
 In September of 2001, a new contemporary art gallery called Fusebox opened on 14th Street NW in Washington. It was a strange area in which to open a business. The intersection just south of Fusebox was the best place in the city to pick up a hooker. Just north of the gallery was a string of auto garages and other occasionally abandoned, occasionally light-industrial businesses. Tiny Studio Theater was nearby and Hamburger Mary's had just opened (bringing a few bad-burger-loving gay men into the area). A Whole Foods had recently opened. But the neighborhood was still best-known for drugs and dames-for-dollars.
Fast-forward to today: Fourteenth Street is Washington's hottest address. The area is home to new million-dollar condos, boutiquey retail shops, a much-expanded Studio Theater, and more. Now, just as the neighborhood has bloomed, Fusebox is closing. Owners Sarah Finlay and Patrick Murcia are moving to San Francisco.
Fusebox didn't just change 14th Street, it advanced the visual arts in Washington. Finlay and Murcia invested in building a ground-floor, fronting-on-the-street, built-out, we-wanna-look-like-and-compete-with Chelsea art gallery. "Fusebox is fabulously cool," I wrote here in July 2002. "One measure of its success will be whether or not it spawns other contemporary art galleries here. All of us would LOVE to see that 14th & P area turn into DC's Chelsea."
It did. Before Fusebox, most of the top DC galleries were in brownstones, on second floors of mixed-use buildings, and the like. Their display spaces and lighting were subpar. DC's best galleries responded: Numark has a new space on 7th Street, and G, Hemphill and Adamson all moved to 14th Street. Only Conner Contemporary -- which clings to a second-floor space not much bigger than a suburban walk-in closet -- has resisted.
Fusebox built its program around local artists like Jason Gubbiotti, Jason Falchook, and Ian Whitmore, all of whom graduated from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. The gallery augmented its young studs (as with most contemporary art galleries, the men far outnumbered the women) with established DC artists such as the Dumbacher twins, Chip Richardson, Siemon Allen and Kendall Buster. Outsiders (including LA's Patrick Wilson and NYC's Vince Szarek) rounded out the roster. Gubbiotti, the Dumbachers, Buster, Allen, Marisa Telleria-Diez, and Susan Smith-Pinelo have entered museum collections or have been featured in museum shows.
 Fusebox was the only DC gallery at the first two Art Basel Miami Beach fairs, and it traveled to major European events (such as ARCO) too. Again, other DC galleries followed.
My experiences with Fusebox were... bipolar. The gallery demanded fealty from collectors and critics alike. Unhappy with a lukewarm review I wrote about a Patrick Wilson show in 2003, the gallery's owners all but stopped talking to me. (Just five months earlier, DC's alt-weekly had called me a "Fusebox partisan.") Later the gallery refused to give a magazine images for a review I wrote about a show -- and then called my editor to demand that he fire me. That was more aggravation than I needed, so I just stopped writing about Fusebox and its artists.
That hostility has always bothered me. I prefer to remember a Sunday afternoon in Miami in 2002: Fusebox had just finished its first Miami presentation and I was killing time by helping the gallery pack up for the trip home. Later that night I went out to dinner with Sarah, Pat, two collectors, and a couple of their artists. At dinner Sarah encouraged me to think bigger about the blog, to write for readers outside DC -- so I did. (I was on the way to Fusebox's 2002 Christmas party, I think, when a prominent West Coast critic emailed me to tell me that something I'd written about Blake Gopnik and him was incorrect and that I should fix it. It was my first realization that anyone outside of DC read MAN. I proudly/shamefully told people about it all night.)
MAN probably wouldn't be as much fun for me today if Sarah hadn't pushed me to expand its scope. I'm sorry that Fusebox is leaving. No DC institution -- commercial or museum -- has had a greater impact on the arts in Washington in the last five years than Fusebox. It will be missed.
Related: Kriston Capps has the press release.
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Kenneth Baker is right; I'm wrong
From Thursday: The response to the UCLA Hammer Museum acquisitions post (it's right here) has been more than I can reply to. Yes, it will be a monthly feature. Yes, if you work at a museum I'd be thrilled to have your 2005 acquisitions list so long as it's the complete list.
About a month ago a Jerry Saltz column about recent art writing sent me into paroxysms of pique about all kinds of things. Among other things (the rest of which still sound pretty good to me) I wrote that Kenneth Baker, the SF Chron's art critic, writes "nary an opinion." That was wrong, as piles of viewer mail and blog postings made pretty obvious. I should have written... well, Kenneth Baker wrote in just after Christmas (when MAN was on hiatus) and his email is essentially what I meant to write (but did not). He gave me permission to post it here (I've edited it a teeny-bit for HTML formatting):
I always appreciate a mention in your blog, but your last stoops to inaccuracy.
It's true that I don't lead with opinions because I think that my judgments, like nearly everyone's, generally come as cheap and unbidden as dandruff.
I do deplore the thumbs-up/thumbs-down mentality that the culture biz encourages. It's just more thoughtlessness masquerading as something fun and informative.
It's also true that I write far more feature-y stuff that I would like, though the consequent encounters with artists are often very involving. But that's explained by a shortage of staff here (and increasingly everywhere) in our dying industry.
Here, FYI, are a few recent opinions excerpted from reviews. From July 2, 2005 [on Richard Tuttle at SFMOMA]:
Some people who enter "The Art of Richard Tuttle"…will undoubtedly say to themvelves - aptly for once - that they or their kids could do as well.
Remarkably, Tuttle's work cleanses this response of the resentment it commonly expresses. His art makes us feel capable, rather than competitive, and itchy to try our own hands and eyes at the sort of gentle magic he works…
Those who try to "make a Tuttle," though, quickly discover that he knows things they don't: how not to force things, how not to overburden something with intention, how not to confuse fussiness with precision or size with impact...
...No one has come up with a term, other than his title "Wire Pieces," for Tuttle's delicate constructions of wire, pencil line and cast shadow. These may be his most original inventions, not in their use of materials or the wall, but in the register of response that they open up. Almost nothing else in modern art touches it. The wire pieces complete a thought we can imagine having crossed the mind of sculptor Alexander Calder, a thought whose fulfillment required the context that New York sculpture of the '60s provided for Tuttle.
Don't tell me you don't find plenty of judgment operating here. Nearly every reference and word choice is angled with opinion. If a reader has to follow a review to the end to know what I think, too bad: that's as it should be. I can't tolerate slack writing or slack reading. From Nov. 19, 2005, on "Kiki Smith: A Gathering" at SFMOMA:
Across the room sits "Tale" (1994), a naked female figure on all fours, an epic turd trailing from her body like a tail. Samuel Beckett may come close to this in words in "How It Is," but in no other sculptor's work do exaggeration and degradation meet as poignantly...
...An untitled 1989-90 floor sculpture reminiscent of a Richard Long stone array has 230 lizard-size crystal spermatozoa chasing one another's tails in circles on a square mat of black rubber. This work churns with associations, suggesting a satirical feminist view of reality as a cosmos of blind (male) instinct going in circles. But again, its physical beauty alone can silence criticism. It has the strange air of artistic inevitability that much of the greatest modern sculpture shares.
From Nov. 29, 2005 on commissioned works in the new de Young:
Set aside the context problem, for an artwork emblematic of the institution by dint of where it hangs, the Richter makes a cold impression on the entering visitor. It presupposes a sophistication that most people cultivate only after years of inquisitive museum-going. But the Richter, for all its aesthetic ruthlessness, outshines the weak link in the de Young's chain of commissions: Ruscha's "A Particular Kind of Heaven" (1983/2005)
The de Young asked the Los Angeles artist to turn the painting so titled — which it already owned — into a trptych. Now the central panel,a generic ocean sunset over which the title runs in dropped-out white, hangs flanked by two equally large canvases that continue the panorama. But like overlapping snapshots of a landscape from the same vantage point, the side panels repeat letters at each end of the title phrase.
Ruscha has thinned further an already thin performance. Never mind that we can view the original picture and its expansion as a California landscape, nature seen through a catchphrase. The expanded version enriches very little the play of word and image for which Ruscha is renowned.
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