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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
MoMA's Int'l Program and WB
One of the questions I tried to get at in my Observer piece about Without Boundary is the way MoMA has matured into a corporate-esque institution. This isn't necessarily a positive or a negative -- as non-profits become massive, their cultures change.
Even before writing the story, I was interested in how MoMA's geo-political activity manifests itself today. During the Cold War that activity was overt -- the list of shows that MoMA's International Program circulated during from 1952-89 is 47 pages long. Dorothy Miller's famous The New American Painting show traveled to eight countries.
The political aim of MoMA's shows was no secrets to artists in New York, either. Clyfford Still refused to be in Dorothy Miller shows because he considered them to intend political ends rather than aesthetic ends. He didn't want his work seen in that context and did all he could to keep his paintings out of MoMA's traveling shows.
So what about today? Government fronts (and related philanthropies) no longer fund MoMA's budgets. Jay Levenson, the head of MoMA's International Program, told me that the IP substantially funds its own programming. For example, this year the IP is sending a drawings show to a museum in Shanghai and MoMA is paying for the whole thing -- even the dual-language catalog. Some outtakes from my chat with Levenson:
- Levenson on how the world has changed since the IP started: "We have all these photos in the archives. And one of them is from when the 'Family of Man' show was in Rome and there was a Communist demonstration outside the gallery. All the students were in coats and ties. Coats and ties!"
- Levenson on how global events changed his job: "The work I do, that we set out as our goal, was to try to get the museum in contact with parts of the world that we felt were important, that its activities didn't [typically] get it contact with. The museum has loads of contacts with western European museums, but I think it was actually after a conversation with Peter Norton after I arrived a number of years ago that I thought I would focus on Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Eastern Asia. That’s where I've been looking. Now I know form my own experience that there aren’t a lot of American museums that are able to do things in these areas because you need a certain money to get something started."
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More on Without Boundary
One of the reasons I really enjoyed writing about Without Boundary (my New York Observer story is here) was that I spent a lot of time talking with Emily Jacir, Shirin Neshat and MoMA's Jay Levenson about the show and about MoMA.
I also got to spend some more time with the work of artists I really respect. For example: Here's a Paul Schmelzer Adbusters story about Jacir, including more background on the "Sexy Semite" piece I referenced in the story, and others.
Here are some outtakes from Jacir and Neshat, and tomorrow I'll feature a few from Levenson.
- Neshat on what exactly a Muslim artist is -- or isn't: "One of the biggest challenges in organizing such an exhibition is how to avoid generalization of Islam. Most Westerners wrongly view the Muslim world, as one nation, where in fact Islam has been interpreted and is practiced differently in each country; according to its own unique traditional history. Therefore, the question that can be raised about such an exhibition is precisely what do these artists have in common? Why should their work be presented together?"
- Jacir's take on the same topic: "I think it is funny in the same way that having an exhibition of artists from the a "Christian World", and then including artists from America, Chile, Mexico, Australia, the Philippines, France, England, Mexico, Russia and Poland would be."
Related: Neshat's Tooba is now on view at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Until, well, March 26 Neshat's Turbulent was on view at the Nelson-Atkins.
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NYT's Ken Johnson on interventionist art
UPDATE: One Whitney Biennial advertising mystery solved. See here.
In this morning's NYT, Ken Johnson had a nice piece about the work of Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, on view now at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. (The image at left is substantially better than the B&W pic that ran in the Times this AM.)
Johnson's write-up discusses the institutionalization of work such as this, which wasn't intended for white cubes. A number of museums have become interested in this work lately: Hirshhorn curator Anne Ellegood has started a series of occasional public programs at the museum about this kind of art, and the Hirsh's Kristen Hileman is curating an Oliver Herring performance/intervention next month. In Los Angeles, Julie Deamer's Outpost for Contemporary Art semi-institutionalizes this kind of art by eliminating the gallery and replacing it with project-enabling organizational infrastructure. So too San Diego's inSite.
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The Whitney's NYT ad
UPDATE: One mystery solved by a Nexis-enabled reader. See the Newsday mention for details...
If you saw the dead-tree version of the NYT's museums section yesterday, you saw a full-page ad for the Whitney Biennial. It was one of those ads that appears to quote critics saying that they loved the show. Of course, the Whitney managed to make it sound like everyone loved the show. Uh... hmm. Let's just say that the Whitney's quoting was quite selective. I examined only a couple of examples -- I won't bore you by refuting the whole ad.
Whitney ad: "Cool art by cool artists. The liveliest, brainiest Whitney Biennial I have ever seen." -- Village Voice
Village Voice: "'Day for Night' is filled with work I’m not interested in; it tries to do too much in too little space; it is often dry and confusing." -- Jerry Saltz.
Whitney ad: "The Whitney biennial is the museum's defining exhibition, the one that takes more risks, goes out on more limbs, and rolls with more punches. This year's Biennial is no exception. Indispensable." -- The New Yorker. The Whitney doesn't tell us it was from Calvin Tokmins' profile of Adam Weinberg -- shich was not a review, of course. Also, the quote about the biennial in the magazine does not appear to be about the 2006 show.
New Yorker: "You are apt to find a visit to the 2006 Whitney Biennial pleasant enough, especially if it's raining out. Bland miscellany rules. Few of the artists display competitive edge or any other distinction..." -- from Peter Schjeldahl's 170-word mini-review.
Whitney ad: "Featuring more than 250 works from over 1000 artists in a range of media, The Whitney Museum is once again offering a snapshot of what's going on in contemporary American art." -- Newsday. Allegedly. It's not in Ariella Budick's review and I couldn't find this on Newsday's (confusing) site. And I'm sorry, is anyone at the Whitney proof-reading this ad? A thousand artists? A thousand?!!!! UPDATE: This was not from Newsday, this was from an Associated Press story written by Deepti Hajela on March 4. Not a critical piece, of course, just your basic wire story on the Biennial. It included the line: "Featuring more than 250 works from over 100 artists in a range of media." Not 1000. 100. Double doh.
Newsday: "[T]his year's Biennial is depressingly shallow. Oh, yes, and also heavy-handed, humorless, puerile and just plain boring..." -- Budick's review.
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Meanwhile, away from MoMA...
A couple of other stories (aside from my Observer piece on Without Boundary) that I want to spotlight today:
- The two Philly papers are covering themselves with ignominy in their coverage of Pennsylvania's $25 million Barnes move bailout. "Recently, the foundation has been hit with financial woes, which cast a shadow over its mission and collections," wrote Damon Williams in the Daily News. Uh, no, those woes go back a decade or so. "No timetable [for construction] has been set, but Rimel said fund-raising is going well," Williams wrote. Well then, it must be true! I mean, why ask for figures...
- And in the Inky, Stephan Salisbury leads with: "The vision of the renowned Barnes Foundation throwing open its doors on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and enticing swarms of visitors to the city with the sweet smell of art moved quite a bit closer to reality yesterday." The sweet smell of art?!?!??!!
- The Art Newspaper catches up on a year's worth of museum acquisitions news here. And today's NYT has a special museums section.
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Writers on Without Boundary
I've boldfaced the pieces that I think are especially interesting.
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On Without Boundary in the NY Observer
Here's why MAN has been piecemeal all week: For the New York Observer, I wrote a critic's notebook-style piece about Without Boundary: 17 Ways of Seeing at MoMA. In the piece artists Shirin Neshat (above) and Emily Jacir, who are both included in the show, speak out against the show's striking lack of political content, and I contextualize the show within MoMA's decades of involvement in geo-politics. I think the comments of the artists are particularly bold, and I'll have some more from them on MAN later today, as well as other WB-related content.
NOTA BENE, 4/13: Entire Observer story backposted for archival purposes:
As an Iranian-American artist who was effectively exiled from her homeland, Shirin Neshat was happy to be included in an exhibition of artists from the Islamic world. But when the opportunity came—Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking opened at the Museum of Modern Art on Feb. 26—Ms. Neshat was upset.
Without Boundary is the most important exhibit MoMA has launched in at least a decade, and it’s the first exhibition of contemporary art from the Islamic world in a major American museum since 9/11. The show features 14 artists from Islamic countries, an Indian born to Muslim parents, and two Americans (Mike Kelley and Bill Viola were added late in the show’s development). Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Turkey and Pakistan are represented in the exhibition, though nearly all of the artists from those countries now primarily work in the West. The exhibition is a reminder of the difficulties that museums face when it comes to merging—or not—art and politics.
“My immediate reaction was, how could anyone today discuss art made by contemporary Muslim artists and not speak about the role the subjects of religion and contemporary politics play in the artists’ minds?” Ms. Neshat said. “For some of us, our art is interconnected to the development of our personal lives, which have been controlled and defined by politics and governments. Some artists, including Marjane Satrapi and myself, are ‘exiled’ from our country because of the problematic and controversial nature of our work.”
Ms. Neshat is right: Many of the artists in the show have addressed the exilic condition and geopolitics in their art, but you wouldn’t know that from Without Boundary. There’s not a single reference in the show to the United States being at war in two Muslim countries, to its running intelligence operations in others, to its “war” against an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organization, or to how the civil liberties of many Muslims have been affected by the governmental response to 9/11. Without Boundary often seems more a product of RISD than Ramallah.
Much of the work in the show, such as Shahzia Sikander’s painted and drawn manuscript-style works, or Rachid Koraïchi’s silk tapestry, update traditional Islamic media. Mona Hatoum and Shirana Shahbazi present takes on the traditional prayer mat, as does Mr. Kelley. What relation Mr. Kelley has to the other artists on view is unclear, except that his piece pokes traditional Islamic art in the arabesque. Artists such as Emily Jacir, Ms. Hatoum and Ms. Neshat, who are best known for aestheticizing complicated sociopolitical situations, are represented by less sensitive work.
“Given the conservative nature of the United States and the restrictive policies in American institutions, there is not the freedom to directly address certain sociopolitical situations like Iraq and Afghanistan,” Ms. Jacir said.
That artists included in a show at the Museum of Modern Art would speak out against that show is highly unusual. MoMA is the most powerful art museum in the world, and the pressure from gallerists and collectors to not criticize the museum is intense. Outspokenness can hurt relationships that could lead to important sales or inclusion in exhibitions. For Ms. Neshat and Ms. Jacir to be willing to speak out is an indication of the complicated politics involved in this kind of show—and of how the show’s apolitical nature has frustrated its artists.
MoMA has ensured that its presentation elides global affairs. Museum director Glenn Lowry even wrote an essay for the magazine ARTnews about the exhibit, an uncommon step for a museum director to take. “The tension between old and new, past and present,” he wrote, “is still being played out today as artists from the Islamic world confront the challenge of making contemporary art for an international audience grounded in European values and ideas.”
The show’s introductory wall text also steers viewers away from thinking about geopolitics: “This exhibition addresses the application of the unexamined rubric ‘Islamic’ to contemporary artists,” wrote curator Fereshteh Daftari. (Ms. Daftari was unavailable for an interview, according to MoMA, as was Mr. Lowry.) “In the complex expressions that draw inspiration from different traditions and defy simplistic categorizations, these artists belie the mentality of division and the binary oppositions of present-day politics.”
In other words: There are no politics here. Come look at the pretty things that are all, somehow, ‘Islamic.’
“What I found disappointing was how, when Glenn Lowry wrote a lengthy article discussing the exhibition, he managed to reduce his discussion and analysis of so-called ‘contemporary Islamic art’ to only those who avoided the subject of politics all together,” Ms. Neshat said, adding that she had already shared these thoughts with Mr. Lowry. “Much of the discussion remained on, for example, how certain artists have succeeded in transforming traditional Islamic art and aesthetics into a contemporary interpretation.
“My conclusion was then that either Mr. Lowry had a distaste for political content in art, or that by avoiding discussion of political artists, he was avoiding political discussion altogether.”
Like her art, Ms. Neshat’s frustration is born from her biography. She was born in the Shah’s Iran, but left as a teenager to attend school in the United States. During the Islamic revolution, one of Ms. Neshat’s friends was killed, and the new government, headed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, stole her family’s farm. Ms. Neshat decided to stay in the United States. Then, after a 1996 visit home—and just as Ms. Neshat’s artwork was beginning to receive substantial international attention—the Iranian government detained her as she was leaving Tehran International Airport for home.
“They gave me just enough trouble so that the message was: I shouldn’t re-enter,” Ms. Neshat said. She hasn’t been back in 10 years.
On view in Without Boundary are two photographs from Ms. Neshat’s mid-1990’s Women of Allah series, which questions Islamic gender norms, and a photographic still from her 2003 film installation, The Last Word. That the photograph is here instead of the film is strange: The Last Word has never been shown in a United States museum. It is intensely sociopolitical and quintessential Neshat. It shows a woman being confronted by an interrogating oppressor, and how the beauty of Islamic poetry gives her the strength to defy her oppressor. The film is about hiding fear and showing strength in the face of dictatorial oppression and, less directly, about Islam and gender.
Ms. Jacir, a Palestinian-American artist, also makes work that directly challenges political arrangements. She is best known for art that spotlights the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government. In Sexy Semite, Ms. Jacir placed personal ads for Palestinians looking for Israeli mates in The Village Voice. “YOU STOLE THE LAND, MAY AS WELL TAKE THE WOMEN,” one ad said. In another work, Ms. Jacir took advantage of her U.S. passport to quickly pass through Israeli military checkpoints and to perform tasks for Palestinians in Palestine. She photo-documented her experiences, and pieces from the project were shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
In Without Boundary, Ms. Jacir’s video installation Ramallah/New York shows a series of scenes—a barbershop, a convenience-store checkout counter—from both Ramallah and New York, displayed side by side. In each scene, it’s hard to tell which video was shot in Ramallah and which was shot here. Ms. Daftari skipped all of Ms. Jacir’s more political work and chose to exhibit the tamest Jacir imaginable.
“Historically, any Palestinian narrative is regularly censored in this country,” Ms. Jacir said. “This makes it extremely challenging to show work here. So now with the fact that we are living under the Bush administration, with its policy of occupation, torture and detention, and are battling for civil liberties, freedom of expression and political activism, it is clear why contextualizing the political situation some of us in the show are coming from would be whitewashed.”
Historically, MoMA has been politically inclined, and it has often been willing to exhibit work with political content. During its recent installation of contemporary art from its permanent collection, the museum showed South African William Kentridge’s Felix in Exile, a video in which Mr. Kentridge revisits his country’s apartheid past, and Russian Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into His Picture, which addresses the repression of life in the Soviet Union. But those takes had the distance of time to soften their content.
MoMA’s political involvement has extended well beyond its gallery hangings. In 1952, MoMA inaugurated its “International Program.” A kickoff grant for the program was steered to the museum by MoMA board president Nelson Rockefeller, who was in charge of the U.S. government’s World War II intelligence operations in Latin America. Under Rockefeller, the overlaps between the Central Intelligence Agency, its front organizations, and MoMA’s board of trustees and funders were overwhelming. Rockefeller even hired a museum director, Rene d’Harnoncourt, who had worked for the same government intelligence agency that Rockefeller had led.
“There is no prima facie evidence for any formal agreement between the C.I.A. and the Museum of Modern Art,” wrote Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War, her remarkable history of the period. “The fact is it simply wasn’t necessary.”
During the Cold War, the International Program circulated dozens of exhibits that made clear the cultural glory possible in a free society. Today, that’s more difficult.
Circulating shows in 2006 is immensely more expensive than it was in 1956. Jay Levenson, the current director of the museum’s International Program, pointed out that now art is more financially valuable and has to be insured at a higher level. Shipping costs more. The museums, artists and collectors who circulate shows expect host institutions to have climate control and other modern amenities. And, perhaps most importantly, during much of the Cold War the dollar was much stronger than it is now. Still, Without Boundary may travel outside the United States, and maybe context will make the show seem more engaged.
“I think it’s still a possibility, if someone expresses interest in it,” Mr. Levenson said. “What sometimes happens with a show if they’re put together fairly late is that it’s not so easy to travel it, because most of the exhibition centers are planning their schedule several years in advance.
“Also, working with professionals from [the Islamic] world is something we’d have moved into earlier, but I don’t have a feeling yet how easy it is to get people back and forth,” Mr. Levenson said, referring to the visa problems that have plagued American cultural institutions since the federal government cracked down on foreign travel into the U.S. after 9/11. “It wouldn’t surprise me if this is the start of some additional discussions.”
Perhaps the real change between the way MoMA was involved in politics during the Cold War and now is the maturation of the museum. Today, MoMA is more corporate, more like General Motors or McKinsey than the New Museum.
At least by merely opening Without Boundary, MoMA has made it easier for smaller museums to create shows of contemporary work from the Islamic world. Now, if a curator in, say, Des Moines suggests this kind of show to her board and some of its members express unease with the idea, the curator can say, “But MoMA did it. And they included artists from Palestine, Iran and Lebanon. So why can’t we? Heck, we can even do better.”
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On Barnes: I waver
I've been in favor of the Barnes move from the start. My reason has been that the works aren't well-taken care of by the current bunch of trustees and that the most important thing is the art, not the hanging.
Well, when I read people associated with the Barnes say uninformed, even clueless things like this, I wonder:
"We're going to move the Barnes where it belongs, which is downtown on the parkway, where hundreds of thousands of people can enjoy it," said Bernard C. Watson, of the Barnes Foundation board of trustees.
Is Watson, the Barnes' board chair, that unclear on the history of the institution he leads? Or is this part of a PR campaign to re-write the history of the Foundation? (See the post below this one.)
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Rendell: Penn. to give Barnes $25M
The state of Pennsylvania is giving $25 million toward the Barnes move, bringing the movers to within about $25 million of their $150 million goal. Previously the three foundations leading the charge for the Barnes move -- Pew, Lenfest and Annenberg -- announced that they had raised $100 million.
In announcing the grant, Rendell spouted a bit of revisionist history: "Working together, we are helping realize Dr. Barnes' vision of making this collection available to anyone wishing to admire it." Actually, that's 180 degrees from Barnes' vision. Whoops. Hey Ed: When you buy history, you don't have license to change it.
Friends of the Barnes responds: "It would only take $25,000,000 for an endowment to keep the Barnes in Merion. Is the Governor confused about what constituency he represents? Rendell made millions in promises to Lincoln University to keep them out of the court case, now he is committing $25 million in state money to a stalled project to trash a man's will."
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Judds to go on view in NYC
Christie's has announced that some or all of the 35 Donald Judds that it will be auctioning off for the Judd Foundation will be on view at the auction house from April 3 to May 9, when the works will be auctioned off. (There is still no list of works online, and I'm unaware of any list of works that is circulating among potential buyers.) As I've previously noted, this will be the largest exhibition of Judd sculpture in New York since at least 1988. Christie's is, of course, using this as a selling point. Again: How does that serve Judd's legacy?
(Along with every museum professional I've talked to in the last month, I'm none too thrilled with the sale -- see part one and part two of why.)
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Today's daybook
This morning the Museum of Modern Art will hold a memorial service for one of the most powerful curators of the 20th century: William S. Rubin. The service will be followed by a lunch. (Public and press: Not invited.) We have not yet heard of the Rubin estate having found a publisher for his memoir, but we're curious to see if the memoir includes details on Rubin's purchasing and selling of art.
Then, at 2 pm ET, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania will hold a press conference to "make [a]significant announcement regarding [the] Barnes Foundation Collection." Rendell will be joined by Rebecca Rimel, the head of the Pew Charitable Trusts, which is bankrolling the Barnes move (or is it...) and Bernard Watson, the Barnes' board chair. Presumably, they will use articles. They will not be joined by the director of the Barnes because, well, uh... there isn't one. Is the move off? Will an architect be named? Will Rendell, Rimel and Watson buy the Inky and the Daily News? Nothing in the Inky this morning; we'll find out when you do.
And in an unrelated story, "writing about pop culture" is not arts journalism. (An Us Weekly editor? Hahahaha!) It's pop culture puffery.
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A good weekend in print
I'm furiously racing to make a deadline today, so no great profundity from me. (When I'm bothering to rip Artforum yet again, it's pretty obvious I'm going to the well, eh?) But here are some things I've enjoyed reading this weekend:
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Chelsea gallery vs. Barney's
 Cheim & Read is fed up with Barney's. This morning the Chelsea gallery sent out an email accusing Barney's of ripping off Jack Pierson's trademark found-letter sculptures. Worse: C&R says that Barney's isn't just dissing Pierson, they're dissing the whole art world, dude! Excerpted from the email:
Around a year or so ago, imitations or forgeries of [Pierson's] works began to appear in Barney’s clothing stores throughout the country saying such things as "fabulous, courageous, and outrageous". They are formally weak plagiarized versions of Jack Pierson’s work and we want you to know that they are not by Jack Pierson. Many people have assumed they are. They are, in fact, made by Simon Doonan, the chief window dresser at Barney’s. Jack Pierson has asked that he remove them but he has refused.
We regret this lack of integrity on the part of Simon Doonan and Barney’s. They obviously have no respect for artists or the art world.
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Arts and conservatives
Over the weekend The New Criterion's blog Armavirumque linked to a section of MAN's Whitney Biennial three-parter, so I popped over to the site to see what they'd said. James Panero offered this tongue-in-cheek (we think) preview of TNC's own review: "[O]n April 1, that sound you hear will be the Whitney shrivelling up into a insignificant little spec at the shame of having been so thoroughly done in."
The winking (we think), bombastic fatuity of the passage aside, it got me thinking to conservative reaction to the arts. (Yes reaction, not critique. Even winking, bombastic fatuity sometimes perfectly reveals its maker.) Well, just in time for me to be spared original thought, this morning AJ linked to this piece from The Times (UK). If you're American you'll have to skip the first three paragraphs. But once you get to the meat:"Now, concentrate: try to think of a contemporary piece of art that made a right-wing point? Or a British film, or TV drama, or play? No bells ringing, yet." Worth a read-through.
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Blog breaks story: Max Anderson to IMA
On Friday, Indy-based art blog On the Cusp broke the story that former Whitney director Max Anderson will be the next director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The Indianapolis Star follows OTC (By. Three. Days.) in Monday's paper. It's here, and, of course, fails to credit OTC with having the story long before the Star did. (Famously non-blog-friendly Artforum.com also fails to credit OTC.)
It's another sign of the maturation of the blogosphere: A visual arts blog broke the story and, I can't help but noticing, it wasn't me.
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From the realm of the ridiculous: So last week a part of the Smithsonian held a hard-hat press preview in advance of its July 1 reopening to the public. I missed the tour (deadline on a story), so no word on what the building looks like. Word is though that one of the museums will open with a substantial assist -- 25 works worth -- from the Hirshhorn.
And what is the institution? Well... take a deep breath. It's the Smithsonian Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, which houses the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.
They've got to be kidding. (No, they're not -- here's the explanation, kind of.) That's either a 10-word title or a 22-word title for a museum. I live here and I don't understand that -- what are poor tourists supposed to think? (Other than to just skip that place.)
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Fun things we find
 Earlier this week I was wandering the web, looking for some images for my post about Wayne Thiebauds in permanent collection. In so doing, I found one of those paintings that made me do a double-take. It's at left.
It's a painting of an electric chair. It was painted by Wayne Thiebaud in 1957, five or six years before Andy Warhol's iconic works featuring electric chairs. (Warhol's death-and-disaster series is receiving a Doug Fogle treatment. The show is now at the MCA Chicago and will also travel to the AGO. The catalog is here.) The painting was given to the Smithsonian American Art Museum last year, a bequest of Edith and Arthur Levin. (The couple gave the museum a number of works mostly from artists based in California, including Lobdell, Ruscha, and Woelffer.)
What a puzzling painting! There is nothing in Thiebaud's oeuvre that is anything like this painting (at least not that I know about). Why was Thiebaud painting an electric chair in 1957? Did it have something to do with leaving northern California for a New York City sojourn? Or was he back in California when he painted it?
The image here, from SAAM's website, is awfully low-quality so it's hard to tell much from it. SAAM re-opens on July 1, and maybe it will be on view...
(Aside: Does the Smithsonian American Art Museum have another new name? Good Lord. According to that website, SAAM is now part of a complex called the Smithsonian Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture. The complex includes both SAAM and the National Portrait Gallery. Got that?)
Nota bene: Back to Rauschenberg next week. I'm deadline-slammed.
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Things we notice
As is probably pretty obvious of late, MAN is obsessed with permanent collections. So when I was at the National Gallery of Art yesterday, I popped into their recent acquisitions photo show (which technically wasn't supposed to open until March 26, but oh well). The last acquisition in the show is a Bill Brandt picture from... 1945. 1945. Apparently not much worth their acquiring has happened in the last 60 years?
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Rauschenberg's Combines, Part One
 Robert Rauschenberg's combines are not, to use Marcel Duchamp's term, retinal. The eye isn't seduced by them, the way it is by, say Monet. They require a little bit of work. You must invest time into looking at them and then hope for a reward. "His esthetic garrulousness often turns his work into a department store: something scanned, not studied," wrote Jerry Saltz. The combines are modern art at its messiest, its most challenging, its most rewarding -- and its most human. MOCA's survey of Rauschenberg's combines, organized Paul Schimmel and on view at the Met, is slobberknocking good.
The combines are where Rauschenberg chewed up the first 60 years of modern art and spit out something completely new. They extend the third dimension that collage brought to cubism, channel the theatrical chaos of dada into objects, wring the subconscious, psychosexual gestures out of surrealism (those squeezed tubes everywhere, the white phallus penetrating the Twombly-esque squiggles on Rebus), explode the concerted, conceited messiness of ab-ex and come out the other side with assemblages that spawned two or three generations of descendants. (Have you seen this year's Whitney Biennial?!?)
And despite the mess, there's something intensely reverential about viewing the Combines. It's perfect that Paul Schimmel's show opens at the Metropolitan, America's high church of high art (and old art), before going to Schimmel's MOCA, America's best programmed museum of new art.
Viewing them at the Met is like approaching an apse. The Met has installed the combines on white platforms that hover a few inches above the floor and which extend from the wall out toward the viewer. The combines are installed back against the wall, safely out of reach. Walking between these platforms is like walking down an aisle. And you can get close to them, close enough to be tempted to touch, but the fear of God keeps you from doing it.
More on Friday...
Related: Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post, Jerry Saltz in the Village Voice, Ed Sozanski in the Philly Inky, Michael Kimmelman in the NYT, Christopher Knight in the LAT. MAN on MoMA's acquisition of Rebus (which, remarkably, was not loaned to this show): Part One, Part Two, Part Three.
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Visiting Thiebauds
 Last week, over dinner in San Francisco, a curator pal asked me if I'd noticed that two Wayne Thiebauds were now on view at SFMOMA. The friend knew that I've occasionally bitched (on MAN) that Thiebaud is often excluded from SFMOMA's collection hangings. (OK, OK: frequently bitched.)
I replied with a near-jump, bumping our table in my excitement to say that Yes! I had noticed! And they looked great!
(Display Cakes is at left, the other is Sunset Streets.)
I had just as good a time at the de Young's Mayan installation, with their Thiebauds, half a dozen wonderful Richard Diebenkorns, a fantastic 1949 Rothko that I spotlighted-ish on Monday, the Piazzonis (which got a razz), a great Aaron Douglas painting (and where did you last see an Aaron Douglas painting?), a Matisse-esque Hartley, and more.
As I thought about my SF trip on the way home on Saturday, I realized that I spent more time in collections galleries than anywhere else. I started wondering why. Was I embracing permanence? Constancy? Did I feel a need to visit time-tested, quality work? Maybe I wanted an escape from the crowds that sometimes clog special exhibition galleries. Or how about the lure of the local (hangings)?
I thought about something Jerry Saltz wrote about MoMA, that MoMA is the place "where we all come from, where we go to commune with our ancestors and become new again." I think Saltz is talking less about the specific art that MoMA owns and more about the joy of getting in touch with the established greats of modern art. I think that's part of what I was doing.
I've done this on other recent trips. In LA recently, I spent extra time with the collections at every musuem I visited. At the Norton Simon I enjoyed the Henry Moores, Indian art, Sam Francis and a creepily sensual Vuillard. At the Huntington I enjoyed Canaletto and a Hopper that reminded me of a Hopper at home, in the Corcoran's collection.
At the National Gallery, I've repeatedly found myself in front of Manet portraits in the West Building, and the fantastically underrated 1901 Matisse in the East. The Hirshhorn has just installed an entire room of Morris Louis and it looks great.
 I'm especially having fun making connections between work in Collection A and Collection B. This past trip I noticed that SFMOMA's Display Cakes was painted in 1963. For several months the Hirshhorn has had up an installation of four Thiebauds, all from that same year. Three of them, Balls, Blue Vendor, and French Pastries, were gifts to the museum from Joseph Hirshhorn himself.
Joe was famous for walking into artists' studios or art galleries, looking around quickly, pointing at three or four paintings, telling a confused clerk or artist that he would buy them, dashing off a check, and racing out. I'd bet $1 that he rushed into Allan Stone one day in 1964, pointed at Balls, Blue Vendor, and French Pastries, and snapped them up in mere minutes.
The Hirsh's fourth 1963 Thiebaud, Girl with Ice Cream Cone (right) was purchased by the museum only 10 years ago -- but it was on view in the same 1964 Allan Stone show as the other three. So why didn't Joe buy Girl with Ice Cream Cone that same day? And was Display Cakes there too? Or the de Young's precious 1963 painting Three Machines? And what about the NGA's Cakes, a five-by-six-foot painting from, yup, 1963?
Blame it on Hirshhorn's idiosyncratic eye or on his impatience, perhaps: The 1963 paintings he didn't buy are each better than the three he bought. I don't think we can blame him for missing Cakes -- the NGA's provenance note indicates that Allan Stone sold it in advance of the 1964 show. But one of the delightful things about permanent collections is going back in time and wondering how... why... what if...
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Arianna, Clooney, and... Picasso?
The blogosphere and the MSM have gone all kerfuffle about what Arianna Huffington did to George Clooney. If you're new to the story, here's the nutshell: Arianna cobbled together some Clooney quotes from The Guardian and CNN, and blog-posted them on her Huffington Post site. Except she did it in a way that made it look like Clooney himself was blogging, instead of Arianna doing a stitch-job of old stuff.
The NYT, still apparently clueless about blogs, said that the week of Clooney/Arianna coverage "ended amid knotty questions of journalistic integrity and the nature of blogs." Uh, no, it didn't. It merely exposed that Arianna has past experience with similar clip jobs. From Christopher Knight's 1988 review of Huffington's Picasso biography:
"...Huffington did manage to find one feature of Picasso's work to be eminently useful to her own. The Spanish artist was of course an inventor of the modern technique of collage. The Greek author, meanwhile, has now perfected the practice of cut-and-paste writing. Vast chunks of her book have been strung together from quotations scissored from countless other books and articles. The whopping 475 'notes on sources' at the end averages out to one per page of text."
It's not about the "nature of blogs." It's about Arianna's using other people's work.
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More critics, more good reads
Last week I walked out of Surreal Calder at SFMOMA shaking my head. (The show originated at the Menil.) The premise of the show is that Calder was influenced by surrealism. Well, yeah, kinda. Mostly the show reminded me that Calder was influenced by Joan Miro, and we've seen that show before.
When I got home and started to catch up on my reading, I saw that I was riding behind someone else's bandwagon: In the San Francisco Chronicle, Kenneth Baker thought the same thing. "Even at his darkest, Calder toys with the sort of nightmare and spookiness that fascinated the Surrealists rather than wringing terrors from them." Baker cited the Phillips Collection's excellent Calder Miro show too.
Exhibs in Buffalo get more attention in the Brooklyn Rail than in the NYT: Karin Davie talks with Joan Waltermath.
If you aren't reading LA Weekly's Doug Harvey regularly, you're not enjoying life as much as you might. In his review of the Courbet show at the Getty, Harvey positions Courbet as the grandfather of ab-ex, as a middle-finger waving rebel, and then closes with a paragraph -- and especially a sentence -- that will leave you stunned.
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Catching up on critics
In Paris, the Pompidou has launched a 326-object survey of art in Los Angeles titled "Los Angeles 1955-1985: Birth of an Artistic Capital." 326 objects. (That means it's only about 700 objects shy of the French presentation of Dada. And apparently the French love LA's version of modern art history, but only to a point: The English-language website for the show doesn't include the show's title and half the JPEGs are busted.)
 Christopher Knight reviewed the show for the LAT: "Taken whole it would make a superb permanent collection, worthy of a major museum," he says. Knight also uses his review to remind us that while New Yorkers are still in love with their version of art history, and that something was going on in California and that contribution has been under-studied. In both France and the U.S.
Having just returned from California, I'm accutely aware of the disconnect between what California museums exhibit in their permanent collections and what NY institutions show. Still, it surprised me that of the 19 Los Angeles-based artists Knight mentioned, only two (Ruscha, Celmins) have pieces on view in the big New York museums right now. (And mayyyybe Bruce Nauman. I don't think so, but I might be wrong.)
Knight's review is also a good take on how the French view Americans. Don't miss it. (If the NYT still hasn't sent an art critic to the Getty Villa, will it send one to Paris?)
On Artnet, P.C. Smith takes on MoMA's Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking. Smith's piece is the first review of the show I've seen, which is really sad. I'll say more on this show next week, in the New York Observer.
 On Artinfo, Barbara Pollack asks: Where has all the political art gone? Hopefully gone forever: Art as agitprop is dull and temporal.
But art that engages the human condition of the moment, perhaps rooted in a present political condition but artistically expressed in a timeless way (see Neshat, Shirin or Kentridge, William), is plentiful. Pollack writes in defense of the former: "It seems that 'didactic' has replaced 'derivative' as the dirtiest word in contemporary art." Thomas Kinkade is didactic but in a right-wing way; is Pollack down with him? Pollack also uses the George W. Bush Shortcut in discussing Hans Haacke. (Here's how I wrote about Haacke's Paula Cooper show.)
(Aside: Artinfo still tries to deceive visitors into believing ads for galleries are editorial content -- tsk tsk -- and it still makes silly mistakes, such as saying that a Kiki Smith retro opened at the Walker when it opened at SFMOMA. Artinfo is close to being good and smart, but this kind of stuff really hurts its credibility with the art-smart crowd it's trying to attract.)
More this afternoon...
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The critic speaks by barely speaking
Last week I wrote that the Whitney Biennial was broken and that the Whitney needs to do major surgery on the show to save the brand. As I was flying back from California last week I caught up on some New Yorker magazines. I noticed that Peter Schjeldahl didn't bother with writing a full-length review of the show, just a 170-word blurb in the front of the book. Moments in realization: When the major magazine in town is devoting only 170 words to your marquee exhibit, you've got a problem.
Aside: Several emailers have written in to defend the Leo Koenig piece in the New Yorker. Yes, it certainly had more backbone than the Meyer or Weinberg stories. But I think my underlying point stands: What about artists?
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Saltz piles on The New Yorker
I'm not the only one who has noticed that three recent New Yorker big-deal profiles of art people have had nothing whatsoever to do with, uh, hmmm, well.... artists. Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz also thinks that the New Yorker's recent coverage, the Meyer piece in particular, is strange. We've got a Big NYC Media Smackdown: Saltz sent this letter to both MAN and The New Yorker:
The New Yorker really drank the Kool-Aid in John Colapinto's wet-kiss to big-money fast-action art-heroes who sell art works to the highest bidder. How can someone conscientiously write an entire profile on Tobias Meyer, the chief auctioneer and worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby's, and not mention, even in passing, that contemporary art auctions are bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theater, and brothel? They are rarefied entertainments where speculation, spin, and trophy hunting merge as an insular caste enacts a highly structured ritual in which the codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight. Auctions are altars to the disconnect between the inner life of art and the outer life of acquisition, places where artists are cut off from their art. At auctions desire is fetishized, buying and selling become a sort of sacrament, art plays the role of sacrificial lamb, and the Ponzi scheme that surrounds it all rolls on. For The New Yorker to publish an article like this and not raise one discouraging word about auctions is more than a little discouraging; it is a sickening.
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Great, gushy moments in NYer arts coverage
The New Yorker's arts coverage (more on that later today) has gone gushy:
"One of the few criticisms I've heard about Adam Weinberg is that he might be too nice to run a museum." -- Calvin Tomkins, March 13, 2006.
"[Sotheby's contemporary art salesman Tobias] Meyer's stylishness and physical beauty are legendary in art and design circles, and can reduce even experts on such matters to near-incoherence." -- John Colapinto, March 20, 2006.
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FAMSF: Take down those bars
 I'm just back from a delightful trip to the Bay Area, where I enjoyed myself at a variety of art venues. More on the sight-ems all week, but first from the de Young...
Long-time readers are familiar with the story of the Gottardo Piazzoni murals that are installed in a special gallery at the de Young. (SF Chron writer Jesse Hamlin's entertaining, informative story about the Piazzonis is here.) And readers may recall that I'm particularly fond of the Piazzoni murals not just because they remind me of the California in which I grew up, but because they were key source material for Clyfford Still as he was transitioning out of figuration and as he created what would become known as abstract expressionism.
The way in which the de Young has installed the Piazzoni murals has bothered me since I first saw them last summer. The murals have a room to themselves, but each panel is obscured by a bar across its front. (The link is to a Flickr-archived image of the installation.) The de Young installation of the Piazzoni murals is one of the two or three worst installations in a major American museum.
There is no reason for the bars to be there. As is evident in two photos in the FAMSF's members magazine (which are not online and which were taken by Ansel Adams), the bars don't reference the original installation of the murals in the San Francisco Public Library. They don't protect the murals, which is the only possible justification for their presence. (When I was standing outside the gallery I saw a woman walk up to a Piazzoni and stick her hand on it.) If the de Young's goal is to protect the art, there are half a dozen better ways to do it, from motion detectors to raised-wood-bars on the floor. The current installation is simply disrespectful to the art and to Piazzoni's memory.
 No museum would dare do this to a Rothko, such as the wonderful 1949 painting that the de Young recently acquired. (Gee, how would that look...) Or the smashing 1934 John Marin, also on view now at the de Young. So why do it to the Piazzonis?
Last year, when the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco hired John Buchanan as its new director, I asked Buchanan if he would take down the railings. Having just been appointed and not yet on-the-job, he naturally demurred. Can't blame him for that. But Buchanan has been in San Francisco for six weeks, which is plenty of time to realize that those bars are horrid, and to remove them.
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Traveling Friday
Am on travel today... There are some updates to the post below this one. Here is the week that was:
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How much is 7000 square feet?
UPDATED: See below. On Tuesday we told you about the Getty Photo Center, which will fill 7,000 square feet in Brentwood. How much is that? The Art Institute of Chicago has 3,000 square feet of permanent photo galleries (that will increase to 5,000 square feet when its Renzo Piano expansion opens.) I have calls into the Met, MoMA and SFMOMA on their square footage. Others:
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Writers write the WhiBi
 MAN's major posting on the WhiBi is all done, so I thought I'd post reviews from other writers and blogs. At right is the Technorati chart of blog postings about the WhiBi. And at the bottom of the bullets, a Whitney 'curator' loves me!
Still to come: Schjeldahl, LAT's Christopher Knight.
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WhiBi: It needs surgery
The Whitney Biennial, in this form, has long since outlived its purpose. Once upon a time it was a survey of American art-making. Today, too much good art is made in America to fit into a few floors of a small building. And as the Whitney has acknowledged with this year’s show, the term 'American art' is about as meaningful as 'American oil company."
The Whitney Biennial has become just another of several dozen group shows that wield the word 'biennial' like a brand that once meant something. After all, these days International Business Machines doesn't make PCs.
Of course, the consulting firm called IBM knew the IBM name still meant something so it kept it, and so too the brand "Whitney Biennial." Those words bring in sponsors, donors, and press attention like nothing else the Whitney does, and they do it regardless of the quality of the show. Those words attract over 200,000 admissions at $15 a pop. The contemporary art world that has a lot invested here: Galleries want their artists seen in a headlining show because that means sales. Curators and collectors from around the world enjoy seeing their artist choices validated. And a lot of people have their only regular encounter with contemporary art through the Whitney Biennial. It's a brand worth saving.
Before the Whitney can re-build the brand, it needs to have the courage to perform major surgery on it. Adam Weinberg began work as the Whitney's director six months before the 2004 Biennial, so he had plenty of time to re-conceptualize the show for 2006. He chose not to. He seems more interested in being a builder than with fixing the Whitney’s marquee brand. (You can't blame him for that – the Whitney definitely needs more space.) On the other hand, a bigger aesthetic bomb than this year’s show could hardly be imagined, so maybe disaster will provide some inspiration.
So where to start? First, the museum must admit that there is no need for a survey show of 100 artists that shows people what is going on in contemporary art-making. For the ArtSet 1000 who require a survey of contemporary practice (for that is what the manics call it), we have the big art fairs. They are more democratic than a biennial and, this year, the art there is better installed. There is no wall text. Just art. Lots of it. The fairs are messy. Just like contemporary practice.
That's not to say curated shows aren't valuable. They are. Dozens of small shows in the United States, Europe, and beyond present slices of contemporary art every year. The best of them are tight, wonderful shows, pulled together by curators but dominated by artists. Paul Schimmel’s Ecstasy. Smaller exhibits with titles like "Landscape Confection" and "Girls Night Out" and "Thing" feature around just more than a dozen artists and have a tight energy that a 100-artist show will never have. With all these opportunities to see new art circulating from Miami to Orange County to Columbus to St. Louis and beyond, the Whitney should acknowledge that there’s just no need to survey contemporary art-making the way they do it now.
What’s left? I've used up my best idea: The proposal I floated in the Wall Street Journal in 2004 apparently wasn’t a good enough idea, or the Whitney would have spared us this year’s extravaganza.
So as I don't have another best suggestion for what else the show should be, how about some ideas that could help the Whitney along: Maybe the Whitney should create a wiki to re-conceptualize the show. Others?
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Getty Photography Center
 The Getty is expanding its photography galleries: From about 2,200 square feet to 7,000 square feet. They'll call it the Getty Photography Center. The LA Times has details too.
At present, the Getty photography galleries are on the Plaza level of the West Pavilion at Getty Center. They fill about 2,200 square feet and are dark 6-8 weeks a year.
The Getty Photo Center will be housed in the lower level of the West Pavilion, and will fill 7,000 square feet. The hope is that the new galleries will be open every day.
(How does that compare to other American museums? Uh, well, I'm on airplanes for much of today, but MAN will have that information soon.)
The space will complement the Getty's Photography Study Room, where visitors will have the opportunity to examine over 10,000 photographs. Right now about 750 people per year use the study room. Expect that to increase.
There are no current plans to show video art in the new galleries, though I'm told doing so would be technically possible. (The Getty recently purchased the Long Beach Museum's collection of video art. It is housed at the Getty Research Institute.)
In addition to spaces that will be open to the public, the Getty is building a new cold storage vault for large-scale (mostly color) works. The Museum believes it is the only storage facility of its kind in the world. Somewhere some Big Germans are smiling.
The Getty Museum's photography collection is the only Getty Museum collection to include modern and contemporary art. It is one of the finest photography collections in the world, rich in work by Watkins, Fenton, Stieglitz, and others. The new space will be inaugurated with an exhibition from some of the 500 photogrpahs the Getty has received from the collectin of Bruce and Nancy Berman.
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WhiBi: In which we become popular with curators
Yesterday, On the aesthetics of the Whitney Biennial: Pink is the New Biennial, y'all.
Many of the problems at the 2006 Whitney Biennial are all about curatorial decisions.
Too much art is installed in too little space. It's as if the curators are saying to artists: We know you want to be in this show. So you probably won’t complain if we shoehorn your art in between the work of four other artists. For example: A Mark Grotjahn, owned by the Walker Art Center (Philippe! Come on!), is positioned between some lackluster chunk of installation art and the door to a room-sized installation. While I was there, three people rubbed against or bumped into the Grotjahn.
And the wall-text. At at an average of 150 words per artist, the text panels really wall-essays. Next to a Ben Davis essay about text in the biennial, Artnet ran images of wall-text where it normally runs images of art. Were the curators hoping that we would be so busy reading that we wouldn't notice the art? (Seriously: Read Ben Davis. It's a good piece.)
Finally, the Whitney Biennial is part of a maddening trend: The show's curators apparently believe that they have to be part of the show, that curator equals artist, that the curator should combine the work of multiple artists to create Mondo-Art.
"There seemed a particular urgency to make a bold curatorial statement about the current zeitgeist," Iles and Vergne wrote in a curator's preface to the show. Wrong. Artists make art and artists may make statements. Curators show art. Artists and curators are not and should not be competitors. Curators should not set artists in competition with each other for a viewer's attention.
But that's what happens in the very first gallery in the show. A Rudolf Stingel painting hangs on a wall. A Urs Fischer sculpture rotates in front of it, leaving circles of candlewax on the floor. Fischer also cut holes in two walls and it is through these that the Stingel and another Fischer are visible. This is not fair to Stingel, at whose painting I never got a good look from further than about 18 inches away. (From another angle, Dan Colen's rock-turds were in the way.) At first I thought this might be a cluttered installation, but then I saw some Mark Bradfords nearby and realized that the curators were constructing an installation about deconstruction. It's fine to hang related work together, but that's not what the curators did here. By installing art in making a 'bold curatorial statment,' they subjugated art to their statement-making. (UPDATE: MAN hears these two artists worked on the installation together. Which would render this particular example problematic... but I have a plane departing 15 minutes from this posting so I'll address it later!)
A particularly unfortunate insertion of curatorial voice comes where Richard Serra's infamous 'Stop Bush' drawing is installed amidst Monica Majoli's watercolors of BDSM enthusiasts in various types of restraint and sensory deprivation. By hanging Serra's unamiguous image of United States military torturing a former Iraqi Baath party official next to sexual adventurers, the curators diminish the evil perpetrated by American troops. Either that or they equate kinky sex with the torture and humiliation of a helpless prisoner. Regardless, the work of the artists deserves to be seen individually and not as a tag-team creation of the curators.
Tomorrow: The Whitney Biennial needs major surgery. Related: Did we mention that Ben Davis writes smartly about wall text and the WhiBi.
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Blake loves Peter (apparently)
Two posts below this one (or here) : The Pulitzer Prize criticism finalists... including an art critic.
Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker (web-posted on Feb. 27):
Neither the building nor the sculptures will ever look better or seem more self-evident in their historical importance. This makes sense when you reflect that the year the Guggenheim opened, 1959, was close to the midpoint of Smith’s artistic maturity, and that it coincided with the last high tide of confidence in modernist progress, which is associated with both the sculptor and the architect.
Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post (web-posted on March 11):
Instead of fighting against the circular architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright's building, and the angled floors of its spiraling exhibition ramps, Smith's art seems entirely at home. Maybe that's because the 1959 building, and the mature works Smith was making at the time it was built, so clearly belong to the same moment in our visual history.
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Pink is the New Biennial, y'all
 The 2006 Whitney Biennial is an awesomely bad exhibition, an all-in presentation of a narrow strain of today's art. It is the worst contemporary group show I've seen in a major museum since The American Effect, which was (coincidentally) at the Whitney in 2003.
There are three primary problems here: The show is full of hideous things that consciously reject the viewer's first glance and don't deserve a second. The show is badly installed, crowded and over-stuffed with curatorial gasbagging that turns wall text into wall essays. Finally, curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne apparently felt the need to compete with the artists, to create installation art out of groupings of artists in some kind of effort to say something. (Isn't that what artists are for?) I suppose some of this is bound to happen when curators are compelled to prove the relevance of a tired concept. The Whitney Biennial needs to be gutted, almost destroyed, to be saved. (We won't get to all of this today. That's what Tuesday and Wednesday are for.)
The 2006 Whitney Biennial is fascinated with ugliness and how visual artists use it to attract the viewer. Or, more prosaically: Many Biennial artists are inspired by a million JPEGs of Britney Spears and K-Fed white-trashing it up, and by the spectacle Steve-O, the "Jackass" star who recently pissed his way back onto the B-list by soiling an Oscar-night red carpet. Pink is the New Biennial, y'all.
The exhibit is full of artists who clamor for our attention by making us cringe. Anthony Burdin and Gedi Sibony make works out of accumulated junk, but don't elevate the piles to more than, uh, junk. (Were these artists too young to see the Kienholz retro?) Dan Colen painted papier-mache rock turds. Nari Ward's Glory is lazy agitprop: a coffin made out of oil barrels, a bad political cartoon. The Biennial is riddled with similar works, including Richard Serra's sadly temporal drawing based on an Abu Ghraib photograph. It's a lovely political poster, the kind of thing made to use as a fundraiser (which it was), but its 'Stop Bush' message is two years away from being dated if it isn't already. (That's not to say that art can't show us something specific and still be timeless visually engaging. Goya's Third of May is a horrific scene, but its gripping drama pulls us in and its evil is more torturous because of it.)
What's worse is that this is the bastard child of a show I've seen before: Curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne have presented a step-child of Rob Storr's interesting and strangely attractive 2004 SITE Santa Fe biennial. In that show Storr explored ugliness by finding elegance and wonder in the grotesque. Here the Whitney curators are satisfied with presenting the ugly. And nothing more.
Of course, that the Biennial's soul is borrowed from a more accomplished show is fitting, because so much of the art in this show is a too-small step away from what inspired it. Paul Chan's light projection flirts with James Turrell. Peter Doig takes a pass at Gauguin. I'm not the first to note that Troy Brauntuch apes Gerhard Richter. Billy Sullivan did Elizabeth Peyton. And Kori Newkirk flirts with the shower curtain aisle at Target.
Many of the artists here could learn from Marilyn Minter, whose shiny, photorealistic enamel-on-metal paintings imbue high-fashion cliches with darkness or grittiness. In Stepping Up (2005), two feet in high heels climb a staircase. Paint curls up and peels off the steps. The leg that dominates the right-hand side of the painting is wet with rain -- or sweat. Her heel and ankle are covered with dirt, and mud is caked onto her instep. But her shoes -- Dior! -- are pure rhinestone brightness, all shiny, happy, exultant and fabulous! Minter knows what Goya knew: Revulsion works best when it is paradoxically beautiful.
But alas, there is little other visual engaging work on view. Thank goodness for Mark Grotjahn, Florian Maier-Aichen and Matthew Monahan, all of whom make work that invites us to look twice, at least.
Tomorrow: Part Two.
Related: Maurizio Cattelan on biennial curating. Creative Time's Marilyn Minter billboards. Mark Barry saw the Doig-Gauguin link too.
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Whitney Biennial, Part Three
This exhibit makes clear that contemporary art doesn't need a flagship show like the Whitney Biennial to present it to the public.
The Whitney Biennial, in this form, has long since outlived its purpose. It is impossible to do a biennial exhibit that presents what’s going on in American art. Instead of focusing the show more tightly, the Whitney has broadened the show’s scope to include artists from around the world. Why? There are dozens of biennials that already do this. We don’t need another one.
The 2006 Biennial is proof that the Whitney needs to blow up the Biennial and come up with a different concept. Sure, the contemporary art world that has a lot invested in this show: Galleries want their artists seen in a headlining show because that means sales. Curators and collectors from around the world enjoy the New York junket and enjoy seeing their artist choices validated.
But at this point, in an environment that features lots of smart group shows and several strong art fairs that provide a better opportunity to see a broader – and more democratic -- swath of contemporary art-making, what good is this show anymore? The Whitney maintains the Biennial because it’s an identifiable brand that brings in sponsors, donors, and over 200,000 admissions at $15 a pop. The Biennial is already irrelevant, one of the worst possible ways to see a large amount of new art. The Whitney should view remaking the Biennial as an opportunity. This exhibit should provide the museum with a sense of urgency.
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MANscoop: Jerry Saltz is Pulitzer finalist
MANscoop: MAN hears that Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for criticism. Jerry's been a finalist before -- in 2001 for 2000 -- and we hope he wins this year. The other two finalists are NYT architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff (we like him too) and Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan.
One reason to root for Jerry: He writes about contemporary art in a way that assumes the intelligence of his audience. He doesn't write mini-biographies of long-dead artists who show at big museums. He writes about the art of the present in the context the now. You can buy his most-recent book, Seeing Out Loud, here.
Previously: The LAT's Getty team appears to be a finalist for investigative journalism.
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Key Celmins to SFMOMA
 I won't swear to it, but I think I saw my first Vija Celmins at SFMOMA. It was a 1977 graphite-on-paper piece of the surface of the ocean. Even now, probably 10-15 years after I first saw it I'm still mesmerized by the waves in that drawing, or by the drawing of those waves, or both.
Yesterday SFMOMA announced that it has scored another major Celmins: Suspended Plane from 1966. The painting was acquired directly from the artist. It's on view at SFMOMA now.
Unrelated: I'm in NYC. See you Monday.
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Houses are the new paintings
 Kyle Macmillan tells us (thanks AJ) that the Denver Art Museum has scored the contemporary art collection of Vicki and Kent Logan. Not to mention their house.
(Pretty good year for Denver: Clyfford Still, the Logan collection, a Libeskind addition to the DAM opens in the fall, and the David Adjaye-designed MCA Denver opens this year too, perhaps. I can't tell for sure -- there's so much Flash on that MCA site that who can tell anything?)
Yes, the Logans have given the DAM their house. This is not a first: Last year Howard and Cindy Rachofsky gave the Dallas Museum of Art their Richard Meier-designed house (at left). Generosity aside, I gotta believe the tax benefits of this are huge. And so a trend begins...
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Pipilotti Rist on CD
Pipilotti Rist is out with a CD of soundtracks from her video installations. (via) So far I can't find it available from any US outlets, but it might pop up at Printed Matter.
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Gordon Parks dead at 93
In a nice bit of rhyme, Andy Grundberg has the New York Times obit of Gordon Parks. Grundberg left the NYT years ago -- to go to the the Corcoran where he chairs the school's photography department. In 1997 the Corcoran launched the first Parks retrospective. Titled "Half Past Autumn," it traveled around the country for so many years that many of the prints in the show were changed out more than once. It was an important show and a good example of what the Corcoran once did.
Related: A 1998 PBS interview, a selection of Parks' FSA photos.
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The new Janson's
Randy Kennedy had a nice piece in this morning's NYT about the new Janson's History of Art. Modern Kicks followed with a nice post about his experience with previous versions of the book and what he might think of the new one. MK also offers a suggestion:
I propose that surveys of this kind drop contemporary art altogether - that they stop chronologically at, say, the second world war, or somewhere around there that makes a convienent ending in art historical terms. That would free up some precious pages and get rid of an area that a book of this kind is ill-equipped to serve.
Clyfford Still is the perfect example of why that's a good idea. Still was the first American artist of his generation to reach abstraction (Pollock and others followed, and only Arthur Dove may have preceded Still). Still was the first to choose to paint abstraction on a grand scale (again, Pollock and others followed). But this is narrowly appreciated because so few of Still's works are available to scholars, curators and historians -- let alone the general public.
Because the Still family so tightly controlled Still's papers, we don't really know how or when Still became an abstract artist. It looks to me like Still's breakthrough came somewhere between 1941 and 1943 -- when Still was working in the war industries in and around San Francisco (a city that was worried about being attacked by Japan from the air). But only a few Still canvases from 1937-1943 have ever been seen by anyone outside Still's family. Did WWII play a role in Still's push into abstraction? Are the gaping, terrified voids in Still's paintings some kind of psychological reference to the fear of war raining down from above? We don't know. Yet.
"It is clear that [Still] will occupy an even more important position in twentieth-century art than has been accorded him up to now," Hirshhorn director Jim Demetrion wrote in the catalogue of a Still exhibition he curated in 2001.
I think Jim would agree with MK too.
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The Albright-Knox's wish list
Continued from yesterday's Albright-Knox 2005 acquisitions post.
When I talked with Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos last week, I asked him what artists he most wants to add to the museum's collection.
"We're certainly working toward Fred Sandback, who would be a very, very important addition to our collection," Grachos said. A number of curators with whom I've spoken recently pegged Sandback as a top need. Some of that is probably Sandback's recent death, and some of it is probably due to how great Sandbacks look in two recent installations: at Dia Beacon and at MoMA.
"We're really hoping -- and this is in the works -- to get a major Rachel Whiteread in the collection," Grachos said. "Jim Hodges is also on my shortlist. In historic material the one artist we don't have is a Barnett Newman." Grachos also mentioned Pipilotti Rist as a must-add. (Grachos obviously hasn't seen the Hirshhorn's hideous Hodges installation. Ed: Stop that! The post is about the A-K!)
Grachos' other hope for the A-K's permanent collection is a building addition that allows the A-K to hang its entire Clyfford Still collection and to display some of its Still archival material. (I've read all of the letters that Still exchanged with the A-K and its director Gordon Smith. They're dynamite. Almost literally.) With 33 works, the Albright-Knox and SFMOMA are the two major pre-Denver repositories of Still's work.
Feature we like: From the front page of the A-K's website, you can click-through to pages of some of the museum's recent acquisitions. Here's 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, and 2000.
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