|
|
MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Armory Show date change
Much-rumored, now official: The Armory Show will be held the same weekend as the ADAA fair next year: Feb. 23-26. That's less than 11 weeks after Art Basel Miami Beach.
|
Blogroll adds, MSM-style
Newspapers -- well, some of them -- are beginning to get hip to art blogging. I still haven't found a MSM blog that's as good as the best two or three dozen sites on my blogroll, but the MSM is trying. All of which is a long way toward saying that the Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers has started Exhibitionist. (Today Edgers tells us that the MFA Boston's fundraising campaign should be complete in about four years.) So far Edgers gets the blogging thing: Smart, short-if-possible, regularly updated: Good start. Growing pain: The link on the page to the Globe's A&E coverage actually goes to the food section. (This actually isn't so bad -- you should see my daily drama of attempting to navigate the LAT's arts section.) Other blogroll adds:
|
Gazillionaire artists
 The Guardian's Jonathan Jones muses about whether being wealthy ruins artists. (Thanks AJ.) Jones' became interested in the question when he learned that Damien Hirst, whose last show was Whitney Biennial-bad, is worth $180 millon. He goes on to cite examples of wealthy artists who churned out self-obsessed garbage (Dali) and artists who continued to make good work.
This all reminded me of Agnes Martin, who died in Taos last year. (She was 92.) Martin lived in a Taos 'retirement home' called Plaza de Retiro. (Yes, really.) In a previous life Plaza de Retiro had been a '50s-style drive-in motel, a 'motor court' in the parlance of the day. To outward appearances it had not been substantially upgraded for its conversion into a retirement home. The day I drove by the dirt courtyard was muddy with puddles and there was no sign that the courtyard had ever been landscaped. It was not Rummy's Ranch. And to the end, Martin's paintings were fantastic.
Related: My story of trying to visit Martin just before her death. Greg Allen looooves (hah!) commercial Picasso.
|
Rooftop sculpture gardens
The hip museum idea of the last year or two is rooftop sculpture gardens.
In Tuesday's SF Chronicle, John King told us about SFMOMA's competition to design one on its parking garage. (SFMOMA has an exhib of the six finalists, too.) MAMFW has a rooftop space, but last time I was there (December) only this Henry Moore was installed. And Renzo Piano has included a rooftop sculpture space in his Whitney expansion design.
|
Visiting A-Z West (in Black Book)
I'm in the current Black Book magazine, writing about a trip I took to visit Andrea Zittel at A-Z West just after Christmas. Zittel lives in the middle of nowhere, and I tried to convey that in my lede:
 Out of Los Angeles on Interstate 10, through two hours of inner-city, suburbs, exurbs, and past an Indian casino, beyond the turn-off for Palm Springs, past wind-power-generating turbines twirling in the wind, past a curiously punctuated sign that says "Buds Tires," past the convenience store where you can buy a poker-chip money clip for $5.95 and a "Support Our Troops" yellow ribbon magnet for a dollar less. Then up Highway 62 — a four-lane highway on which SUVs go 70 mph in the left lane and ATVs go 15 mph in the right; past a mobile home that has blown across the desert and come to a stop up against the raised road; through Morogno Valley, where a radio ad explains how to use a pawn shop; past the "Dig Your Own Cactus 39 Cents" store; and finally to a steep, rocky hillside across the highway from a strip mall which features the county heath department, a cardiologist, and a bail bondsman.
I'm here.
Here is about three hours east of L.A., and four hours west of Phoenix—in the middle of the Mojave Desert, in Joshua Tree, California.
I'll have some more posts on Zittel, her work, the survey show that's now at the New Museum and A-Z West for the next week or so. But first: Zittel is a blogosphere star. Here are a few posts I've read about her recently:
Related: The Zittel exhibition cataloge is 40% off.
|
Dada: New York
Dada part one: Art about war. Then Dada in Zurich, Berlin, and Hannover & Cologne.
 "From a psychological standpoint I find the spectacle of war very impressive," Marcel Duchamp said in 1915 shortly after his arrival in New York. "The instinct which sends men marching out to cut down other men is an instinct worthy of careful scrutiny. What an absurd thing such a conception of patriotism is!... Personally I must say I admire the attitude of combating invasion with folded arms."
Thanks to the diaspora of artists caused by the Great War, Dada arrived in New York. The American version wasn't as polemical as European dada, but it was plenty informed by the carnage it had fled. Jean Crotti's Clown (1916) is a plainly transitional piece: It's whimsically cute, but it hints at the rearrangement of bodies that was going on in Europe.
Back in Berlin, dadaists eviscerated the ruling classes that had led the continent into war. In New York dadaists eviscerated America's insularity and its obliviousness to millions of deaths. In Berlin, artists who had witnessed the awesome killing power of new machines questioned the benefits (and the motives) of militaristic industrialization. In New York, dadaists poked fun at where industry was leading consumers. Or they poked fun at consumers. Or at consumables. Or all of the above.
 All of these themes are present in Man Ray's wonderful repeating coat hanger sculpture Obstruction, which hangs over the center of the New York dada gallery. Seen in the context of the rest of curator Leah Dickerman's show, Obstruction reads as a commentary on the war. an Ray specified that an infinite number of coat hangers could be used in the piece, to the point where coat hangers completely filled a room. With a simple consumer object -- Americans loved those! -- Man Ray mimicked the endless piling up of bodies in Europe.
In Cologne dadaists focused on the psychological effects of war injuries and how the war had transformed men into stumps. (Berliners were plenty fascinated with this too.) In New York, a dada dude transformed himself -- into a woman.
It is Marcel Duchamp's transformation into Rrose Selavy that best captures the spirit of New York dada. Duchamp had just left a continent on which dual monarchies, the Entente powers, Serbs, and Magyars (Magyars?!), decided what role the individual filled: infantry lieutenant, ambulance driver, whatever. People were chosen for those jobs in large part because of who they'd been before the war: Serb or Croat, a resident of this duchy or that district.
By contrast in New York, Duchamp's assertion of the individual's power to make his own choices was striking. He transformed himself into who he wanted to be. (And, apparently, he wanted to be a punny French dame with a come-hither look.)
In defense of the pink pajama-lovers, it is in New York where dada begins to take on its anything-as-art mantra. Duchamp, in a letter back to Paris, declared objects in his studio to be 'readymades' and asked his sister to send them to New York. (Too late: She'd already cleaned out his studio.) It is also where Dada found its sense of humor -- distance from the war created space for a few yuks. ('We escaped!' the artists seemed to know.)
It is here where the NGA's installers join in the puns. Throughout the show, each gallery is labeled by it's city name. So just as I left "NEW YORK" for "PARIS" I realized that I was really entering "ARIS." The "P" had been covered up by Duchamp's urinal.
Related: The exhibition catalogue is 40% off.
|
Great moments in GawkerForum
Admin note: I think MAN had some interesting newsy-ish items yesterday, so scroll on down. And at least three US art museums offer free wifi. See here.
Welcome to the first in what will be a monthly offering: Great moments in GawkerForum. As you must know by now, GawkerForum is Artforum's attempt at publishing something blog-like. It is the worst imaginable mix of society reportage, self-infatuated writing, and tangentially-art-related party coverage. In fact, the operating credo of GawkerForum apparently is that art doesn't matter -- the parties that happen between art installations are everything. So without further ado, the April version.
"Some have criticized [Francesco] Vezzoli as an opportunist whose only talent is for drawing attention. Then why did so many of us show up? Herd instinct? Glamour quotient? Need for love? I'll leave that to art history..." -- Linda Yablonsky. Art history is interested in determining why people showed up to a Larry Gagosian party? I should be nice: At least Yablonsky didn't compare attending a Vezzoli-Gogo party to covering a war.
"I headed inside, picked up a program, seating card, and sugary-sweet lychee martini, and took the lay of the already bustling land." -- Michael Wilson. Bustle: To move or cause to move energetically and busily. If the land really was bustling, either this story is from 1906 or Wilson has a much bigger story than he thought.
"I learned that you haven't really lived until you've been stuck in a small elevator with large personalities like Jack Pierson, PaceWildenstein's Douglas Baxter, and retired JPMorganChase art advisor Manuel Gonzalez; and, second, that you really haven't lived until you've lived." -- Linda Yablonsky. Is being in an elevator with an artist, a dealer and a retired consultant that critical a life experience? Also: Apparently you haven't lived until you've name-dropped -- which, come to think of it, should be GawkerForum's subtitle.
"After the reception, the sluggish elevator to the dinner in Klagsbrun's West Village penthouse gave us time to reflect on Sullivan's success." -- Linda Yablonsky. (What is it with GawkerForum's elevator fascination?) And while an elevator ride isn't much time to 'reflect' on an artist, it's pretty much the closest GawkerForum came to 'reflecting' on art all month.
"The afterparty took place a block away at The Cock, the recently-relocated gay bar on the site of another known as The Hole, where the gallery crowd were squashed against bemused regulars while enjoying the open bar and a chance to flout the city's smoking ban." -- William Pym. If you're going to bars with names like 'The Cock' and 'The Hole' and all the mischief going on is the flouting of the smoking ban: The party is lame.
"I spoke with pinstriped photographer Hollister Lowe, who had braved the second phase of the evening, to find out what he was making of it all. 'Rivington Arms openings are always great because of the people they attract,' he told me, 'I come for the inspiration of the crowd.' " -- William Pym. Another possible GawkerForum subtitle: Who needs art to inspire you when you have the crowd?
|
Roberta Smith on the Judd show
 Today's NYT featured America's (the world's?) foremost critical authority on Donald Judd, Roberta Smith, writing about the Donald Judd sale/exhibit/sale in NYC.
Smith and I agree on the merits of the 36 pieces, the installation, the need to secure Judd's legacy, the lack of scholarly access to Judd's materials, etc. (I've done four posts on the Judd auction: One and two on the Judd Foundation, and one and two on the Christie's pre-auction installation.)
The difference between Smith's take and mine comes when she writes this: "Questions will always remain about whether the foundation exhausted all fund-raising possibilities before setting this course."
I resemble that remark. I don't know of anyone else who has written on that topic. I think I answered those questions pretty thoroughly. The real difference between my take and Smith's take is critical approach: I'm more inclined to hold institutions accountable for their failures than the NYT's art critics are. (See Kimmelman, Michael.)
I think that's especially important with this sale because it's such a shrug-of-the-shoulders. (In short: Art is being sold off because a non-profit foundation is apparently uninterested in strategic, thoughtful, short and medium-term fundraising.) And given that we're talking about what Smith calls the legacy of "a national treasure," I think those are questions that are important to raise -- and to address.
|
Varnedoe's last book: Fall 2006
Princeton University Press has finally announced a publication date for the book version of Kirk Varnedoe's 2003 Mellon Lectures: this fall. Varnedoe died three months after delivering the lectures at the National Gallery of Art, and his literary executor Adam Gopnik has edited/handled the book. The subject of Varnedoe's lectures were how abstract art is mostly derived from Pollock. Here's a slightly edited version of what I said about Varnedoe's last lecture in 2003:
I'll never, ever forget the end of the last lecture: Varnedoe used a slide-show stroll through a Richard Serra sculpture to tell us about his passion for art. I've never been in a quieter room -- all 500 people there knew that a dying man was telling us... to appreciate great art because, before long, he wouldn't be able to.
|
More museums offer free wifi
 New to me: Visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art may connect to the museum's wifi network free of charge. The museum's website lists three places in the museum from which visitors may connect: the two entrance lobbies, the museum's coffee-stop-cafe just off of its main hall, and the staircase in the main hall.
The PMA is trying to make its staircase (at right -- though I don't think I've ever seen it that light-soaked) into one of Philadelphia's best public spaces. On Fridays the museum stays open late, hosts a jazz band, and the stairs fill with people enjoying a drink and the music before wandering into the galleries. It's one of my favorite museum evening programs.
I don't know of another American art museum that offers hot spot access free to its visitors. (Readers?)
UPDATE: The Brooklyn Museum offers free wifi. So does SFMOMA and Exit Art in NYC.
Unrelated note: If you've sent me an email in the last 24 hours or so and I haven't responded, please re-send it. I've been hit with an unusually massive buncha spam recently.
|
Dada: Hannover & Cologne
Dada part one: Art about war. Part two: Zurich. Part three: Berlin.
 Max Ernst spent the Great War in a German artillery brigade. Art history being art history, curators have focused more on the watercolors Ernst sketched at war than his military duties during the four years he spent on two fronts.
But dada is, substantially, art about World War I. Now, as we enter the Hannover and Cologne galleries in the NGA's Dada show, it more specifically becomes art after war, art about the experience of the most horrific battles in history.
So forget Ernst's watercolors: What was Ernst's job as a German artillery officer? During World War I, artillery was used to break up rows of entrenched soldiers. The expectation was that artillery shells would not only kill and wound the enemy, but that they would break up lines of razor wire and other trench defenses. After the artillery had softened up the enemy lines, then an army's infantry could advance.
It is unclear if Ernst knew what military historians learned pretty quickly after WWI: This strategy was a failure. More likely is that Ernst understood the impact of his weapons. Most of the shells fired by artillery guns, such as the powerful German Krupps models, were high explosives that burst into shards of shrapnel. In half of the galleries of "Dada" there are paintings and collages that show the impact of that shrapnel: an unprecedented number of wounds that resulted in amputations. Ernst wasn't just a dadaist, he was part of the war machine to which dada responded.
 And he knew it. In Farewell My Beautiful Land of Marie Laurencin Ernst builds an object whose shape recalls German Krupps guns. (JPEGs of WWI weapons are much harder to find online than are images of WW2 weapons. Here and here are the best I could do. Note that the tank-like-tread in the second photo is similar to the tread in Farewell.) The 'flinging arm' at the top of Ernst's machine recalls the unusual arm of the Krupps 'Paris Gun' (at right) that flung shells into Paris from 100km away. "Help! Help!" Ernst has written at the bottom of the page. (In a catalogue essay Sabine T. Kriebel casts the obect in this work as a tank and then writes that "Hal Foster has convincingly argued [that] Ernst's diagrammatic collages mimic the distressed male ego, using parody to critique the formation of the military-industrial subject." Question: Does Foster ever cease his psychobabble long enough to pay attention to history?)
Other Ernsts also seem to refer to his war experience. Two Ambiguous Figures features two figures with gas-mask-like shapes for heads. The untitled photomontage at the top of this post plainly refers to the use of planes in war, a WWI first. The Flamingos... also includes menacing aerial perspective, juxtaposed against photos of the most harmless of birds. Ernst was plenty familiar with the pioneering use of planes in the Great War. Early in the conflict planes were merely used for reconnaisance. By the end of the conflict planes were used for bombing runs.
Elsewhere in the Cologne gallery, Heinrich Hoerle's The Cripple Portfolio explores what happened to soldiers Hoerle saw injured at the front. (Hoerle was an ambulance operator.) Over the course of 12 prints, Hoerle presents anguish: a begging amputee, men who appear to have been left castrated and limbless by war in a variety of helpless poses. The prints show more than just destroyed bodies, they show the humiliating effects of war. During the British occupation of Cologne, Germans were required to doff their caps at the British officers who had conquered their country.
The Hannover gallery, essentially a Kurt Schwitters mini-survey, is the weakest of the NGA's six city groupings.
Related: Werner Spies' new biography of Ernst has just been published and Amazon says it's available in the US. (The official publication date is May 15.) Leah Dickerman's exhibition catalogue.
|
Judd Foundation to sell non-Judds
 First on MAN, and not previously announced: The Judd Foundation is selling non-Judd works from Donald Judd's personal collection at Christie's May 9 afternoon sale, including:
The combined high estimates for the works is $1.1 million. The Judd Foundation is believed to have already received a $20 million-ish guarantee from Christie's for the Judds in the sale.
|
End-of-week notes
I'm off for the weekend... Check out the new top five list at the right: It's books about the period of history covered in Dada at the National Gallery. A couple other odds-'n'-ends...
- Christies has finally put the rest of the Judd Foundation sale online. It's here, in the minimalism-laden afternoon sale. Also in the sale: This 1973 Chris Burden.
- Speaking of which: If you're a photographer or artist who has had problems with TSA/Homeland Security, check out TSAin't (which is collecting stories from artists). And, in related news, how about this story on Boing Boing.
- Why Google took down the Joan Miro-styled Google logo yesterday.
We'll resume Dada on Monday with Hannover & Cologne. Here are this week's Dada posts:
|
Two notes on honesty
Regular readers have noticed that I don't link to anonymous blogs, no matter how interesting they may be. There is an emerging consensus about the lack of value of bloggers/commenters who hide behind silly CB-style handles. The latest: This morning the LAT announced the suspension of a staff blogger after he posted anonymously on another blog's comment boards. The happy end of the story: NYCer Jason Laning used to write the blog Art Soldier anonymously. No more. I'm happy to add him to the blogroll.
Next: We are again wondering about the Whitney's honesty. The museum is still running a ridiculously misleading advertisement that makes it sound like its 2006 biennial -- "one of the worst shows I've ever seen" (Dear Whitney, you may use that) -- was critically praised. As we all know by now, critics pretty much uniformly panned the show, and not in the usual the-WhiBi-stinks-again kind of way. "Seeing the 2006 Whitney Biennial was a colossal waste of time." (Dear Whitney, you may use that too.)
If the Whitney has so little respect for its audience that it is willing to deceive people in an effort to make $15, is it any wonder that the museum has given us such a gawdawful show? The Whitney should be ashamed.
|
Dada: Berlin
Part one: Dada: Art about war. Part two: Zurich.
 At the beginning, the war was tremendously popular. The people believed it was necessary to protect their way of life, that if the government didn't address the threats that their very existence was in jeopardy.
The ruling party believed that militarism was the key to its popularity. Indeed, the leader of the nation used strong, decisive language in an effort to make clear the need for war. His arguments in favor of the war tended to describe, in graphic detail, what might happen to the country if the war was not waged. Everyone seemed to believe that the war would be short and easily won.
I am, of course, talking about Kaiser Wilhelm and the mood in Germany in 1914. It wasn't until May of 1916, when the first public anti-war demonstrations were held, that the German public began to turn against the war. Most of the art in Dada's two Berlin galleries was made after those protests. Some of that, naturally enough, is because artists were busy serving in the German military. Otto Dix, George Grosz, and John Heartfield all enlisted.
The artists' anti-war sentiment is in virtually every work in the Berlin galleries -- as are paintings, not usually considered a primary dadaist medium. The inclusion of paintings in a dadaist survey drives home the point that Dada is first a response to war -- an anti-war movement, often -- instead of a movement about wearing pink pajamas to museums.
Dix is one artist who was too busy fighting to make art at the outset. He served as a German gunner from 1916 forward, both in the Somme, then on the eastern front, and finally back in France. (He was even awarded the Iron Cross.) But by 1920, Dix had turned.
In his Memory of the Mirrored Halls of Brussels (above) a general cavorts. Not in the painting, but memorable to everyone who saw it when it was painted in 1920, is direct evidence of the recently-concluded Great War. Stories of decadent generals ignoring front-line conditions, high casualty rates, and trauma at the front were commonplace. Dix paints his general surrounded by mirrors, oblivious to what is going on outside.
 Berlin dada is best-known for photomontage. Most of the photomontage on view at the NGA features some variation on the theme people made into machines by the war. Artists in Berlin would have seen plenty of evidence of this around them. Not only did 1.6 million Germans die in World War I, another four million were injured. Today injured American soldiers are effectively hidden away on military bases or in military hospitals. But in WWI Germany soldiers were returned home after their injuries. It was common to see ex-soldiers with amputated limbs wandering around their hometowns. Men who suffered shell shock -- then little understood -- walked dazed through the streets. So too soldiers blinded by gas.
In photomontages artists treated the human figure as their government treated soldiers: They cut them up and sent their limbs willy-nilly. Men, machines and body parts were interchangeable. Artificial limbs were prominently featured. Men in gas masks (that's an American unit at right) looked alien and vaguely machine-like.
 The Berlin gallery is infused with a decidedly populist spirit. Graphic artist John Heartfield directly called the populace to action through art. (More on Heartfield after I see this show at the Getty Research Institute, from which the image at left is taken.) And nearly all of the artists here work on some variation of this theme: The prominent people, politicians, industrialists, and generals were comfortable at home while awful things were happening to the common man on the battlefield. "Things go on around them, they are unaware," wrote George Grosz on a lithograph of the wealthy luxuriating as a continent burned. (Grosz's print portfolio, "God With Us," contains many variations on the theme of people in a position of power being ignorant of what is going on around them.)
The parallels between what we see in the Berlin galleries and America's present wartime situation are unavoidable. I remember President Bush's post-9/11 call for the American people to "go shopping," and his party's subsequent tax cut for the wealthy at a time when America is spending billions on two foreign wars. It all makes Grosz's portfolio eerily contemporary.
Related: Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who is not the paper's art critic, saw the show the way I did. And have I mentioned that you really should own the exhibition catalogue, especially when it's almost 40% off?
|
Dada: Berlin
Part one: Dada: Art about war. Part two: Zurich.
At the beginning, the war was tremendously popular. The people believed it was necessary to protect their way of life, that if the government didn't address the threats that their very existence was in jeopardy.
The ruling party believed that militarism was the key to its popularity. Indeed, the leader of the nation used strong, decisive language in an effort to make clear the need for war. His arguments in favor of the war tended to describe, in graphic detail, what might happen to the country if the war was not waged. Everyone seemed to believe that the war would be short and easily won.
I am, of course, talking about Kaiser Wilhelm and the mood in Germany in 1914. It wasn't until May of 1916, when the first public anti-war demonstrations were held, that the German public began to turn against the war. Most of the art in Dada's two Berlin galleries was made after those protests. Some of that, naturally enough, is because artists were busy serving in the German military. Otto Dix, George Grosz, and John Heartfield all enlisted.
The artists' anti-war sentiment is in virtually every work in the Berlin galleries -- as are paintings, not usually considered a primary dadaist medium. The inclusion of paintings in a dadaist survey drives home the point that Dada is first a response to war -- an anti-war movement, often -- instead of a movement about wearing pink pajamas to museums.
Dix is one artist who was too busy fighting to make art at the outset. He served as a German gunner from 1916 forward, both in the Somme, then on the eastern front, and finally back in France. (He was even awarded the Iron Cross.) But by 1920, Dix had turned.
In his Memory of the Mirrored Halls of Brussels (above) a general cavorts. Not in the painting, but memorable to everyone who saw it when it was painted in 1920, is direct evidence of the recently-concluded Great War. Stories of decadent generals ignoring front-line conditions, high casualty rates, and trauma at the front were commonplace. Dix paints his general surrounded by mirrors, oblivious to what is going on outside.
Berlin dada was best-known for photomontage. Most of the photomontage on view features some variation on the theme people made into machines by the war. Artists in Berlin would have seen plenty of evidence of this around them. Not only did 1.6 million Germans die in World War I, another four million were injured. Today injured American soldiers are effectively hidden away on military bases or in military hospitals. But in WWI Germany soldiers were returned home after their injuries. It was common to see ex-soldiers with amputated limbs wandering around their hometowns. Men who suffered shell shock -- then little understood -- walked dazed through the streets. So too soldiers blinded by gas.
In photomontages artists treated the human figure as their government treated soldiers: They cut them up and sent their limbs willy-nilly. Men, machines and body parts were interchangeable. Artificial limbs were prominently featured. Men in gas masks (that's an American unit at right) looked alien and vaguely machine-like.
The Berlin gallery is infused with a decidedly populist spirit. Graphic artist John Heartfield directly called the populace to action through art. (More on Heartfield after I see this show at the Getty Research Institute, from which the image at left is taken.) And nearly all of the artists here work on some variation of this theme: The prominent people, politicians, industrialists, and generals were comfortable at home while awful things were happening to the common man on the battlefield. "Things go on around them, they are unaware," wrote George Grosz on a lithograph of the wealthy luxuriating as a continent burned. (Grosz's print portfolio, "God With Us," contains many variations on the theme of people in a position of power being ignorant of what is going on around them.)
The parallels between what we see in the Berlin galleries and America's present wartime situation are unavoidable. I remember President Bush's post-9/11 call for the American people to "go shopping," and his party's subsequent tax cut for the wealthy at a time when America is spending billions on two foreign wars. It all makes Grosz's portfolio eerily contemporary.
Related: Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who is not the paper's art critic, saw the show the way I did. And have I mentioned that you really should own the exhibition catalogue, especially when it's almost 40% off?
|
Andrea Zittel in the desert
 Later this morning: Dada in Berlin.
I saw in the NYT this AM that tomorrow's paper will include a feature on the artist hotbed of Joshua Tree, Calif. Well, you can't write about Joshua Tree without writing about Andrea Zittel, whoseA-Z West operation is HQ'd there.
If you don't want to wait for tomorrow's Times you can read about Zittel right now, in the new issue of Black Book magazine. I trekked out to see Zittel in Joshua Tree and write about our visit. It's on newsstands now. Next week I'll feature a post or two on Zittel and the exhibition now on view at the New Museum.
|
Acquisitions: MAMFW
Yes, I'm late on MAN's monthly acquisitions post. I'm blaming travel.
 Last December, when I stopped in to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth to see Michael Auping's Anselm Kiefer show, I thought I saw a weird Francis Bacon in the museum's permanent collection hang. In my defense, I was at least 75 feet away from the painting I thought was a Bacon. And it was hanging right next to, well, this Bacon. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the painting in question was not a Bacon. It was a, well, a...
Was it some strange Carroll Dunham? Those cartoon figures... no, Dunham wouldn't have painted that background. So who the heck is it?
It's a David Hockney from 1960, when Hockney was just 23 years old. (It wasn't until 1961 that Hockney reached any particular level of prominence. That year he was featured in a show at London's Royal College of Art and earned some praise as a pop painter.) As the goofy figures in the foreground show, Hockney was, like a lot of painters in 1960, working through pop. But the abstracted background indicates that Hockney was already working through art history, through Bacon, and Matisse too.
The Hockney is one of 10 works that MAMFW acquired in 2005. The museum's most fashionable purchase was a complete set of Nicholas Nixon's The Brown Sisters, which has been discussed here ad asburdem in the last six months.
Other pick-ups included:
- Donald Moffett's Untitled (Lot 122704);
- Two works by Texans: David Bates' Thanksgiving Dinner (1982) and Pennzoil No. 2, a large painting by Dallas neo-precisionist Tommy Fitzpatrick;
- MAMFW owns several Ed Ruschas, including the fantastic Jar of Olives Falling. Last year the museum added Gimme Air, a work on paper;
- Lawrence Wiener's One Lump Two Lumps Three Lumps. I can picture it, I think; and
- Works by Uta Barth, Hamish Fulton, and Tabaimo.
Related: 2005 acquisitions by the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
|
Hyperbole alert
From a Kelly Crow write-up in the WSJ: "From art hubs like New York to spots like Fort Wayne, Ind., dealers, collectors and museum curators are scouting artists still in their teens and early 20s."
Teens? Teens? Come on. Who is the museum curator talking to teens? (Aside: Please let this art-market-is-hot story be over. I'm tired of reading it.)
|
Dada: Zurich
This is part two of MAN's look at "Dada," at the National Gallery of Art. Monday's first part, Dada: Art about war, is here.
 "Dada," Leah Dickerman's masterful survey of the movement at the National Gallery of Art, is six mini-exhibits in one. Dickerman breaks down Dada into six cities: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York and Paris.
In Zurich, Dickerman introduces us to artistic techniques that Dadaists would utilize in the ensuing five cities (and around the world): painting, collage, typography, performance, and abstraction in a range of media.
In Berlin, Hannover and Cologne, dada's roots as an anti-war movement are inescapable. In New York we see the effects of a war-generated diaspora of artists from Europe. And in Paris we see post-war Dada beginning to fly apart, toward Surrealism and more.
While the Zurich gallery is plenty attractive, the real story of how Dada started in Zurich doesn't fit neatly into a museum gallery. In short: A German expat named Hugo Ball and his girlfriend fled Munich for Zurich, and in 1916 opened a cabaret. Ball was running from the war: He had visited the front and was so stunned that he flirted with suicide. The cause-and-effect wasn't quite so simple: Ball may have already been depressed after one of his friends committed suicide after being wounded in the war.
The model for their cabaret project was a series of anti-war performances in which they had participated in Munich. The genesis of the Cabaret Voltaire was as unlikely as the art movement that started there. Ball was probably anti-Semitic -- he had been familiar with anti-Semitic thought as a student, and he'd had his nose surgically straightened so that people wouldn't think he was Jewish. But when four men -- all war-driven exiles, two of them Jewish -- visited Ball on the cabaret's first night, Ball welcomed them. The mix of artistic creation, performance, and anti-war fervor that took place in that cabaret is what started Dada. (Dickerman covers this ground in her catalogue essay, but doesn't mention the question of Ball's possible anti-Semitism and whether it played a role in his opposition to the war.)
Particularly striking in the Zurich galleries is Dickerman's introduction of abstraction as a dadaist technique. Hans Arp's 1916-17 collage, Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), isn't a mere formal exercise. At the front, soldiers' bodies were being dramatically blown apart. In Arp's collage, a rectangle appears to have been blown to bits.
 Arp was, essentially, born into a centuries-long armed conflict. He grew up in Alsace, the son of a German father and a French mother. Alsace had been militarily disputed territory for centuries. At the outset of World War I Alsace was in German hands, a result of German victory in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. When World War I started, the French were particularly interested in the return of Alsace and Lorraine, and the Battle of the Mulhouse (at right), was France's entre into the Great War.
Between the stories he must have heard as a child and the beginning of World War I itself, Arp was plenty familiar with violence. He likely had a rough idea that half of those who went to war came back wounded or dead. In Alsace-Lorraine, many French-speaking young men who considered themselves French were forced to fight for the Kaiser and Germany. Battle was the ultimate arranger "according to the laws of chance."
Tomorrow, part three: Dada: Berlin. Related: The exhibition catalogue.
|
1906 revisited
 Today is the 100th anniversary of San Francisco's 1906 earthquake. By today's measurements it would have been a 7.8 on the Richter scale, considerably stronger than the Bay Area's 1989 Loma Prieta quake (6.9).
Both the FAMSF's Legion of Honor and SFMOMA have special quake-related photo exhibits, and both are excellent. At the Legion, After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire juxtaposes 1906 pictures with recent Mark Klett photos taken from the same vantage point. Anyone familiar with San Francisco has been creating these photographs in their mind's eye their whole lives.
At SFMOMA, 1906 Earthquake: A Disaster in Pictures will elicit more than a few hushed oh-my-gods from anyone who sees it. (Many of the photos in the show are from the collection of Ess Eff gallerist Stephen Wirtz, who has a 1906-related show up in his gallery too.)
Related: LA Observed with good links. Wells Fargo has a 1906-2006 blog that's a lot of fun. SFMOMA's store has a fantastic list of books on the quake. And you can score a quick $5 Amazon gift certificate from the museum here.
|
In Chelsea (and Soho)
This was supposed to be Dada, part two. (Part one is here.) But last night as I was coming home from a talk in Baltimore, my train hit something on the tracks, the train stop, a delay began, and I got home late. So Dada continues tomorrow. For now, some quick hits from NYC galleries:
 Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins: Amy Sillman is making the best paintings of her career, the kind of paintings that don't demand attention, but earn it. Her palette is vaguely Diebenkornian, full of sunny blues, unlikely oranges and a purple that seems somehow Morrocan. She uses a strange green that I last saw in Max Ernst, particularly in Celebes. (The painting at left, The Elephant in the Room, seems to share a palette -- and a trunk -- with Ernst's painting.) Sillman is not afraid of color, or, more specifically, Sillman is not afraid of many colors and how they may work together.
Her compositions are precise. They reveal neither landscape nor anything beyond the most grotesquely figurative. The use empty canvas the way a film uses James Cromwell, a character actor who can hold his own -- or simply fill space.
But mostly Sillman has made abstract paintings that attract your eye and keep it on her canvas. You follow her lines to color, her color to lines, is that a splash of red over there? Why? And what on earth is gray doing here? Put another way: Sillman's paintings are mature understandings of how color and form work together to hold interest.
This is no accident. Amy Sillman graduated from college 33 years ago. She earned her BFA six years later, and her MFA 22 years later. She did not have her first solo show in a New York gallery until 1991. Pay attention to this biography MFA star-kids, pay attention.
Ernesto Caviano at Guild and Greyshkul. In the fall of 2004 I was doing the Santa Monica portion of the LA gallery crawl. I popped around Bergamot Station, zipping into galleries here and there. Well, I popped into all of them except one: Richard Heller Gallery, which was closed. I had heard great things about Ernesto Caviano's show there, I was bummed to miss it, and I said something to that effect here. Someone from the gallery emailed me, promised that they would be open during posted hours for the rest of my visit, and I went back and enjoyed the show.
Caviano has made big steps since. His medium is mostly unchanged: ink on paper, often something resembling a Magic Marker. In his new work he has expanded his use of color, though he uses it sparingly.
Caviano is still figuring out how to put his drawings together -- his composition is stilted and often mechanical. Still, this is his most mature exhibition yet, full of smart technique, witty bursts of color, and a stylishly incoherent press release narrative.
 Tara Donovan at Pace: (Why doesn't Pace put Donovan in their Bellagio gallery instead of whatever's there now?)
Donovan is an contemporary alchemist, the Queen of the Wal-Martists. She takes simple consumables -- here it's the kind of plastic cups that you last saw at a frat party -- multiplies by a few million, arranges them around a large space and, voila, a beautiful landscape.
The best artists challenge the way we see things. Donovan changes the way we see two things: cups and landscape. Related: Oriane Stender talks with Donovan.
Special props to: Artist Ryan McNamara, who mandated that a bench be installed in front of his video installation at Feigen. (I missed it because Feigen opens an hour later than everyone else in Chelsea.) Hey gallerists: And an artist shall lead you...
|
The art is great. Don't go see it.
One of the strangest reviews I've read: In Sunday's Washington Post, Blake Gopnik says that the rehanging of the Phillips Collection's permanent collection after a four-year tour is wonderful -- and that readers shouldn't go see it. (Really.)
Finally, at the end of the review, Gopnik capitulates: "Of course if you absolutely cannot plan a Phillips visit at some later date, you ought to go now."
|
Dada: Art about war
"Dada," at the National Gallery, is an exhibit about war, about how artists respond to seeing death, dismemberment, gassing, debilitating mental illness, and more death.
From the show's first gallery, which includes documentary photographs of armaments and film footage of World War I, the show rejects cliched, faux-art history. Dadaists were not primarily devoted to showing that anything could be art, or that the anyone could 'act-out' artistically by, say, wearing pink pajamas to a museum. Dada was about finding a sane response to trauma.
In the course of two floors that take a visitor through six cities, and 450 objects, curator Leah Dickerman never strays far form her central tenet: Dada was an artistic response to World War I; that the art we know as dadaist would not have been possible if artists had not experienced the horrors of what happened when modern war collided with centuries-old war-fighting techniques.
Saying it that way doesn't do justice to the grotesqueness to which Dada responded -- most of which is documented in dadaist art. So: Dada is about a man's lower leg being blown off by a mortar shell and it is about the wooden stump placed on a leg as a replacement. The casualty rate in World War I was 57 percent. Over eight million men were killed, and another 23 million suffered casualties. Sixty-seven percent of Germans who fought in the war were killed or wounded, including Max Ernst. His collage of a semi-human machine flying above a battlefield as two orderlies carry away a wounded soldier is not a mere formalist exercise.
Dada is about the the guy who drives an ambulance so close to the front that he sees hundreds of bodies turned into pieces. It is about the widespread use of poisonous gases on the battlefield (or, as the British called them, "accessories") that turned the surface of the skin into a moonscape of blisters, or blinded you. An estimated 85,000 troops were killed with gas, another 1.2 million wounded. The gas mask and amputations in Rudolf Schlichter's Dada Rooftop Studio are not solely feats of imagination.
 It is about a European capitalist system where business was in bed with the military was in bed with the politicians -- a system that created a triangulation by which the less connected were sent into trenches to die for, uh, well, what was World War I about again? Otto Dix meditated on this in Memory of the Mirrored Halls in Brussels.
"Dada" is a terrific exhibition about a terrible time. Just as important: It is a celebration of the power artists have to portray horrors, as well as a celebration of the voice they have in condemning the circumstances that produced those horrors. On view in Washington at a time when our nation is questioning the Bush administration's conduct before and during war in Iraq, it is a rare -- very rare -- instance of an exhibition at our National Gallery of Art bumping up against the news of the day.
Each day this week MAN will feature a post about Dada. If other blogs pick up the show, I'll share some links on Friday.
Related: The exhibit website. Leah Dickerman's exhibition catalogue (35% off). If you're interested in 20th century art, you have to own this one. Above, right: A soldier being gassed.
|
Without Boundary: A failure of scale?
 On From the Floor this morning, Todd Gibson writes an extremely smart piece about what MoMA's Without Boundary (at right: Kutlug Ataman) show should have been. His conclusion: It should have been a blowout show about contemporary art from the Islamic world. Hundreds of works from dozens of artists. His post is whip-smart, probably the best thing written on the show so far. It touches on not just the exhibit, but a trend in contemporary group show curating. Don't miss it.
In a related story, my piece in the Observer on WB and my writing here on the show has generated a lot of email. (I know Shirin Neshat and Emiliy Jacir received a good bit as well.) A lot of it revolved around this point: Without Boundary's problems, as I tried to make clear in the NYO piece, aren't just MoMA's problems. I haven't seen another American museum do a show anywhere near this presently necessary, this important, in a long time. This is a massive failure of nerve, a massive failure of curatorial curiosity, a massive failure of institutional responsibility, and, well, probably a massive failure of curatorial travel budgets too. The Walker, SFMOMA, the Hirshhorn, MOCA, the Gugg, MCA Chicago, and on and on... nothing.
And encyclopedic museums haven't done much better. When was the last time an American museum launched a major exhibit of Islamic art? The NGA took a collection show from the V&A, and the Sackler/Freer has done three outstanding small shows on Persian manuscript painting in the last four years or so. That's about it. (I hope I'm forgetting something -- readers? This show arrives next year.) Meanwhile, it's sad to see what passes for institutional priorities in some places.
At a time when it's important for Americans to engage more with the Islamic world, its history and its traditions -- and at a time when it's especially important for American institutions to show and share the humanizing power of art, pretty much every American museum has done nothing.
So did MoMA get its show wrong? Yeah. But as I wrote before, WB "is the most important exhibit MoMA has launched in at least a decade." Sadly, MoMA's simply doing a show of contemporary art from the Islamic world (plus, inexplicably, two Americans) is a big step.
|
Judd the Colorist
 NOTE: I'll update links as Christie's brings more work online.
The Christie's exhibit -- I mean sale -- is heavy on Judd's later works, the period in his career when he was most-actively exploring color and the relationships between colors. As I walked around the two-story show, Judd's works constantly reminded Josef Albers paintings that Judd bought and hung in the Marfa National Bank.
I've heard a lot of people, curators included talking about the later Judds as lesser Judds. My favorites are the works that aren't just about minimal forms, but the pieces in which color joines forms to create harmony between lines and color. That's mostly what's here, such as this fantasteriffic wooden stack from 1993. (How great would that look at Renzo Piano's new LACMA contemporary building?)
Judd didn't just get his sense of interplay between colors from Albers. This 1991 aluminum piece is straight outta Barnett Newman. (Judd and Newman's widow Annalee were great pals. She gave Judd the scaffolding-like platform device on which Barney painted. It's still in Judd's Marfa studio.) And in this 1991 work, an infusion of natural light fills the silvery aluminum frame with a milky fog of periwinkle. Other works play catsup red off of milky yellow, forest green off of exposed Douglas fir plywood, and a single-stack piece (below) plays a morning-sky blue against iron.
There are two top-notch stacks in the show: One made of wood with transparent Plexi facing the viewer, and a buttery bronze anodized aluminum stack, with ever-so-faintly gray Plexi.
 Not all the works are stars. A 1993 plywood wall-piece with a hole in the middle reads like a Juddian joke. The painted yellow in the back of this four-piece cor-ten steel wall sculpture is bubbling.
Even if you bristle at the idea of a significant display of work coming at an auction house and not in a museum, the show is a must-see simply because its been a while since there was a big US Judd show. Christie's has thoughtfully installed the works on two floors. As anyone who has been to Marfa knows, Judds are best with natural light, and Christie's provides sunlight from three sides. There isn't a light-bulb to be found on either floor.
|
The Judd Exhibition
 The first major exhibition of Donald Judd sculptures in New York in nearly 20 years is on view until May 9 at Rockefeller Center. The show includes many fine examples of Judd's late work, but is thin in several of Judd's key areas, including Judd's early paintings, his entire early sculpture period and his entire middle sculpture period. Only two of Judd's iconic stacks are on view, his Marfa work is not referenced, his progression pieces are barely represented, and his furniture is completely absent. This is a boondoggle of a retrospective.
Hold on, wait -- I'm being passed a note. This is what? Oh my God! I'm sooo sorry.
It turns out that the Judd show at Rockefeller Center (click for video fun) isn't a retrospective or a survey at all. (I'm so embarrassed!) I quite naturally assumed that the first major NYC Judd show since 1988 would be a survey -- you know, a museum show of some sort. Turns out this is an auction of works owned by the art-rich, cash-poor Judd Foundation. Because the foundation has a sudden and wide impatient streak, it is auctioning off 36 panic buttons, often in anondized aluminum. (For more on the sale, click here and then here.)
As I've posted here before, The sale will create an endowment for the Judd Foundation. I've also written that it's good and important for the Judd Foundation to have an endowment, that it's good and very important for them to do the work that, well, the Judd Foundation hasn't done yet, such as cataloguing Judd's archives and making them available to scholars and otherwise building Judd's legacy. (Have I mentioned that the last big American Judd show was in 1988? Compare that to how the Warhol Foundation keeps Warhol in circulation. Clarified here, 4/19.)
I'm a Juddophile, I love Marfa, I love Spring Street, and I look forward to spending many years writing about Judd, but there were other ways.
Christie's has split the 36 Judds on view at Rock Center between their afternoon and evening sales of contemporary art. For some reason so far only the evening sale catalogue is online. More on the show and on specific works later today -- hopefully the day sale catalogue will be up by then.
Related: Felix Salmon.
|
Doonan responds to Pierson
Three weeks ago we posted part of Chem & Read's angry email about what the gallery considered some faux-Piersons on view at Barneys. In this week's Observer, Barneys designer Simon Doonan strikes back. He says some smart things, some not-smart things, and gets off a couple of fantastic lines, including:
I like my art to be clear, communicative and to have people in it. I own a Cindy Sherman, but only because she reminds me of my lobotomized grandmother.
|
A place to sit in Chelsea
Last weekend I visited Chelsea. Below is a list of all the galleries in which I saw shows I liked from the comfort of a bench:
|
Visiting Arthur Dove
ADMIN: Sorry for the late posting. More server issues today, obviously.
 I dig the first generation of American moderns. So when I was at the Met on Saturday I spent some extra time in the Met's galleries of American modern art.
The galleries looked fantastic. I don't know if that's because it was raining and I was happy to be inside, or because the sorta-hidden track-lighting system in the galleries is new. (Is it? Not even I'm enough of a geek to call up a press office just to ask if some lights are new.)
Of that generation, Arthur Dove is probably the artist whose profile is most out of whack with his accomplishments. Robert Hughes wrote that Dove was America's first abstract painter and maybe the first abstract painter anywhere. I've never quite bought that argument: I see things, objects, landscapes in allegedly abstract Doves, representational elements on which his paintings were obviously based. I think Dove's claim to being a pioneer is better based on other works, including several on view at the Met.
In the mid-1920s Dove made about two dozen assemblages out of materials like bamboo, fabric, wood, aluminum, and oil paint. The most famous of them is in DC at the Phillips: Goin' Fishin'. The Met has two of its own on view: Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry (that's it here) and Hand Sewing Machine.
In the mid-1920s Charles Demuth and Dove were both interested in non-traditional portraiture. Demuth painted his portraits (and included coded gay references in many of them -- perhaps the need to code is why he explored this kind of portraiture), Dove built them. In Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry, Dove portrays a Long Island neighbor, an architect who smoked a pipe. Dusenberry is represented by implements that refer to him, loosely composed into a face: planks of wood from which things -- a painting, a house, whatever -- might be built, an eye, a pipe, and rulers that remind the viewer that paintings and architects both build.
Hand Sewing Machine (I couldn't find an image, sorry) is even more clever. Dove has pasted linen onto aluminium, some of it painted to make it look as if the linen is going through a sewing machine. Pencil marks on unpainted aluminum provide the illusion of motion.
Other Dove collages toyed with the rampant consumerism of the roaring '20s, including Miss Woolworth, a wickedly satirical piece that combined artificial flowers, stockings, a mask, earrings, insoles, a purse, garden gloves, a watch, a ring, a brooch and a bead necklace to make a woman, whom Dove tagged Miss Woolworth. Presumably Dove bought the items at his local five-and-dime. (The piece is believed to be lost, but photographs exist.)
Each of these Doves are, essentially, pre-Rauschenberg combines. And in her fantastic book The Great American Thing, Wanda Corn comes oh-so-close to calling them the original pop art: "Dove responded to the vulgarity of America's new products by making them aesthetically alive," she wrote.
Related: The Critic, from the Whitney's collection. The Hirshhorn's Huntington Harbor. MoMA's The Intellectual. On view through Saturday at Oliver Kamm 5BE: Andrew Sexton works in the Demuth/Dove portraiture tradition.
|
Benches, in art galleries
Below is a list of all the Chelsea shows I saw last weekend that I enjoyed and that had benches from which I could enjoy the art:
|
Previously on Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Venice 2005: Felix Gonzalez-Torres will represent me in Venice, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the politics of selection.
It's one thing for a dead artist to represent the United States in the next Venice Biennale. For a variety of reasons -- including those discussed here over the next couple of days -- FG-T makes a lot of sense. But it's another thing entirely for an artist to be represented by art he didn't make.
The bombshell in Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector's proposal for the U.S. pavilion in Venice was this paragraph:
It will feature a never-before-realized work in the entrance courtyard of the Pavilion: two adjoining reflecting pools that form a figure eight, the sign of infinity, as both a silent mirror on our collective culture and a beacon of hope.
As the Los Angeles Times pointed out (and as Spector confirmed to me), the piece was originally a proposal by FG-T to Western Washington University for an outdoor installation. (WWU has a reasonably well-known outdoor sculpture collection, including an unusual outdoor Donald Judd.) "As someone who is familiar with his sensibility, I like to think I would able to approximate what he wanted to do," Spector told the LAT.
Even if you like the selection of Felix Gonzalez-Torres as the artist to represent the United States in the next Venice Biennale (and I do),
|
Photo from around NYC
Some quick-hit, quick-link photo notes from around NYC:
- MoMA has reinstalled its permanent collection photo galleries. I particularly enjoyed seeing a slightly jarring Toshio Shibata landscape, a New Topos-style Gene Kennedy, and three panoramas of Antarctica by Stuart Klipper, who has visited the continent on five National Science Foundation grants. (That link is to a nice Washington Post/Frank Van Riper CameraWorks profile of Klipper.)
- ICP is hosting Okwui Enwezor's Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography. The show is, to be nice about it, thin. Out of 35 artists, only five were remotely interesting, and one of those is a long-time favorite (Zwelethu Mthethwa, represented by three images from South African gold mines.). Also worth a look are urbanscapes by three artists: Randa Shaath and Hala Elkoussy who photograph Cairo, and Guy Tillim, who shows us Johannesburg. Mikhael Subotzky's panoramic photographs of a South African prison were almost too striking to be troubling. I know curators like to include, include, include, but this could have been an excellent eight-artist show instead of a rambling, often dull 35-artist, 200+ works show.
- Max Protetch is offering a contemporary Chinese photography show. It was pretty flat too, but I enjoyed Zhang Huan's work.
|
Blogroll adds
The visual arts blogosphere is growing faster than I can spend time with new-to-me sites and then add them my blogroll. Here are some new adds, with more coming tomorrow:
- The Art of Law, by Columbus, OH-based Steve Roach: At the top, a Christie's and Sotheby's modern/impressionism auction preview;
- 3quarksdaily, edited from NYC by S. Abbas Raza. A terrific mix of science, art, history and the like;
- iMomus, by NYC-based Nick Currie. Contemporary art and culture with a streak of rudeness -- and not just because the site is on livejournal;
- Museum Madness, S.J. Redman's Denver-based blog. From visible storage to the baseball Hall of Fame's website; and
- Medium, a group blog run by NYC's Irene Polnyi. Even NYCers are interested in the Getty Research Institute's John Heartfield show. (NOTE: As of 11am ET, Medium was down. As of 1pm ET, it's back.)
|
FG-T and the politics of selection
 The politics of FG-T's selection are fascinating -- not the art world politics but the national politics. In 2004 the art world was alive with rumor that the U.S. pavilion for Venice 2005 went unfilled until the last minute, and the that Sao Paulo went completely empty was because of domestic American politics -- that the Bush Administration didn't want to give an international platform to an artist who would, in all likelihood, be as hostile to the Bushies as was/is Richard Serra.
"I heard those rumors too," Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector told me on Friday. "I was unclear why [the process was slow] in 2004. Maybe this time it was politics-aside. Maybe this was just a stronger round of applications."
(We'll never know: The Venice Biennale selection process is intensely private. Even though the selection process for Venice and several other biennials has changed in recent years, the selectors -- that's the list -- are still banned from discussing deliberations. There is, of course, no good reason for why the selectors can't talk after the process, except that the feds say so. It's a dumb rule.)
Undaunted by what happened last time, Spector didn't shy away from politics in her proposal: "[M]ost importantly in the context of the Biennale is the fact that the content of [Gonzalez-Torres'] work has become increasingly relevant in our current social and political climate, to the point that his art seems prescient at this historical juncture," she wrote in the first paragraph.
"It's always hard to tell [if politics matter] because I've never been part of the process," Spector told me on Friday. "I don't know how much say the State Department has and how much the curatorial panel has. [FG-T] doesn't read politically unless you choose to see it that way."
Related: As Greg Allen points out, FG-T's work requires about 30 seconds of thought before the full content of his work becomes clear. Of course, that's true of all the best socio-political art: Aesthetics lead you toward meaning, they needn't bludgeon you over the head with it.
|
Felix Gonzalez-Torres will represent me in Venice
NOTE: This is today's post on FG-T/Venice. There's at least one more coming, tomorrow.
 It is a good thing for America when an artist who calls into question the humanity of our nation and its government represents us at a major international art exhibition.
That the artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, is dead, tinges his selection to represent the United States at the 2007 Venice Biennale with a bit of sadness. But that's OK. Gonzalez-Torres in Venice is a wonderful opportunity for both Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, who proposed Gonzalez-Torres, and for America.
In recent years the Bush administration has worked to crush dissent. Joseph Wilson dared question the Bushies' now-obvious rush to war. They attacked Wilson and destroyed his wife's CIA career. Preserving national security was less important than crushing a questioner. The president's public appearances are so stage-managed that when someone who disagrees with the president's policies gets into a presidential event, it's news. When a U.S. senator questions American policies, he is accused of putting our troops in danger. Republicans routinely consider anyone who disagrees with their policies to be "traitors."
A mature democracy can be judged by how it treats those who question its government. Lately, we're not doing so well. But in 2007, in the U.S. pavilion in Venice, the United States will present art made by a questioner, by a gay man who was marginalized for being gay, for having AIDS, for having found a partner with whom to share his life, but who found a way to have his voice heard. The U.S. should remind the world that this could not happen in a Syrian museum, in the Chinese pavilion, or in a Saudi Arabian exhibit.
In a perfect world, the U.S. government would embrace Gonzalez-Torres' presence in Venice and would go out of its way to praise the heroism of speaking truth to power. Unfortunately it will probably just look the other way and hope that no one notices that the United States is represented by a queer who died of the gay plague.
|
This will be neither the first time a late artist represents the U.S. in Venice, nor is it the first time that Gonzalez-Torres was nominated. In 1982 Robert Smithson was our representative, and in 1994 a team of curators (including MOCA's Ann Goldstein) proposed FG-T.
So what will be on view in Venice? Directly from Nancy Spector's proposal (with some edits for the sake of length):
- [A] never-before-realized work in the entrance courtyard of the Pavilion: two adjoining reflecting pools that form a figure eight, the sign of infinity, as both a silent mirror on our collective culture and a beacon of hope.
-
Untitled (America), 1994/95, the artist’s largest light string (comprising 12 illuminated strands) will grace the round entrance hall of the Pavilion. (It may also be partially installed outside.)
-
In the two rooms flanking the rotunda, there will be, on the left, the large paper stack Untitled (Republican Years), 1992, and, on the right, Untitled (Natural History), 1990, a suite of twelve black and white, framed photographs that documents the inventory of idealized (male) citizens inscribed on the memorial to Theodore Roosevelt at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. -
These images will surround two paper stacks from 1989 that bear the inscriptions "Memorial Day Weekend" and "Veterans Day Sale," respectively. They are both early examples of the artist’s attempt to create a new kind of public monument, one that would remain mutable and open to interpretation.
-
-
An indoor billboard of a lone bird soaring through an open sky (the last work Gonzalez-Torres completed); It will be illuminated by the single light string, Untitled (Leaves of Grass), 1993.
If ever we needed further proof that biennials are over (beyond the abundant evidence on view at 945 Madison, of course), the selection of Felix Gonzalez-Torres to represent the United States in Venice in 2007 should pretty much cinch it. Why bother with living artists
|
LACMA & the Klimts: Can the museum do it?
 Admin: As is often the case after I miss a couple days of blogging due to travel, I'm bursting with stuff I wanna post. If I haven't replied to an email you sent late last week, possibly best to re-send it. For reasons unclear to me I've received 1,100 emails in the last four days. Later this morning: More on the selection of Nancy Spector's Felix Gonzalez-Torres proposal for Venice 2007.
Last week I wrote that LATer Christopher Knight seemed to be preparing a public plea to LACMA's trustees to purchase the five Klimts currently on view at the museum. On Friday, on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, Knight wrote exactly that:
This is a powerful test for LACMA. The museum has embarked on a $145-million expansion plan and hired a new director — Michael Govan, who began work just this week — expressly to become the only encyclopedic museum in the nation with a major program in Modern and contemporary art. Almost preternaturally, the Klimts arrived as if made to order for achieving the goal. We are about to discover the depth of LACMA's sincerity and ambition.
Knight also positions one of the Klimts as an equivalent to Picasso's Les Dems in terms of both art history and as a "destination work" that people will visit the museum just to see. LACMA seems to already know this: Its keeping its website for the mini-show chock full of content. (That said, someone needs to explain to LACMA the difference between a 'review' and a 'news story' and a 'feature story.' Two of the three clips presented as 'reviews' aren't.)
The Klimts-LACMA affair has the potential to become a dramatic public saga. Art exhibitions are what museums do in public, acquisitions generally happen in private. Will LA keep the Klimts, or will Ronald Lauder, MoMA or even the Met somehow win them away? (And what about the National Gallery? Nah. When was their last big, splashy Duccio-level acquisition? The NGA no longer acquires with verve. Its last splashy get was this, in 1998.) Will the Govan era at LACMA begin with a triumph or with a fizzle? Will the Getty be involved? This is going to be fun to watch...
|
Around the blogosphere
UPDATE: Posting/tech problems on Thursday, sorry. So (finally) here we go....
First, from late yesterday: Don't miss the news in the post below this one. Or the links in the post below that.
Somehow it's been a month since I posted an 'around the blogosphere.' (Bad blogger.) There is a 60 percent chance that this will be today's only post (I'm on travel), so visit twice so you can click on extra links...
|
US rep in 2007 Venice Biennale announced
UPDATE: MAN is having posting problems. Working on it.
The U.S. State Department has announced that Felix Gonzalez-Torres will be the U.S. representative to the 2007 Venice Biennale. The Gugg's Nancy Spector will organize the exhibition. She will also continue the trend toward realizing works of deceased artists by including a work "made from" a Gonzalez-Torres drawing.
Also announced by the State Dept.: U.S. representation at the Dakar, Sao Paulo, and Cairo biennials. The Cairo artist, Daniel Joseph Martinez, is featured now at Lauri Firstenberg's new non-profit, LAXART.
Related: Greg Allen.
|
Is Still worth it?
I thought I linked to this about two weeks ago but somehow I messed up: Kyle MacMillan of the Denver Post asks: Is Clyfford Still worth it? Does he deserve his own museum? And how can a one-artist museum stay fresh?
Also: As we told you in February, Dr. Lakra was recently added (in bulk) to the Walker Art Center's collection. Artkrush's Sarah Kessler tells us more about the artist (with lotsa images).
|
LACMA and the Klimts
 The display of five Gustav Klimt paintings at LACMA is the art world story of the week. In case you missed it: The Klimts, stolen by the Nazis and only just now (!!!) returned to the family of Maria Altmann by the Austrian government (well, that explains it) went on view yesterday at LACMA. For the back story, read William Booth's WP story on the saga.
The next part of the story story is this: Can new LACMA director Michael Govan acquire the paintings for the museum, and for Los Angeles? If Govan can pull that off -- and recent appraisals have valued the quintet at $300 million -- it will be the biggest American museum acquisition coup since, uh, well, since... gosh, who knows? (To put this in perspective, media accounts had Rauschenberg's Rebus going to MoMA for $30 million.)
As anyone who's read this blog regularly knows, LACMA hasn't exactly been acting like one of America's leading museums of late. It has destroyed art. It pimped itself out to Philip Anschutz and his King Tut show. It is playing some strange secrecy game with what will be public information. It can't manage to make sure paintings in its galleries are properly illuminated. It thinks Morris Louis is a member of the New York School. From the big stuff to the details, LACMA has bungled it all.
But Michael Govan was the right hire and here's his chance to prove it -- and his board's chance to prove that they are committed to making sure LACMA is one of America's great museums. This is their first big opportunity to say that we, the board, ask atonement for the myriad sins of the Andrea Rich era.
To be sure, the Altmann family isn't offering the Klimts around. As Altmann said yesterday, we just got the paintings back, let us catch our breath. But LAT critic Christopher Knight is already thinking acquisition, and his critic's notebook yesterday sure reads like a critic laying the groundwork for a public plea to LACMA's trustees. (Art world insiders will especially enjoy the nuance and hints in the piece.)
The Klimts are, literally, in LACMA's court. Whether it can keep it there is the first test of LACMA's leadership in the Govan era.
|
The Phillips Collection's new WWW
The Phillips Collection has just launched a new website, and it's fantastic. The site, American Art at The Phillips Collection, features a timeline of American art history, and images (and often text) of hundreds of American works in the collection. Here are six favorites:
- Tomato Field, Edward Weston, 1937;
- Skyscrapers, Charles Sheeler, 1922;
- Maine Islands, John Marin, 1952;
- Blue Column, Morris Louis, 1960;
- Native's Return, Philip Guston, 1957; and
- Red Chimneys, Charles Demuth, 1918.
|
The MoMA consensus
In my NYO piece on Without Boundary last week, I posited that MoMA is "corporate, more like General Motors or McKinsey than the New Museum." I've used similar language before: In my Bloomberg review of MoMA's re-opening, I wrote that:
"The new Museum of Modern Art, open to the public tomorrow, is the art world's new corporate headquarters...
"The $425 million MoMA is an awesome achievement of fundraising, design, and collecting. With 125,000 square feet of gallery space, a $20 admission charge, and multiple shops and restaurants, MoMA is far from where it started in 1929. Back then, MoMA's first exhibit filled just six rooms (three of which were quite small) and its director was a 27-year old named Alfred Barr. He was selected for the job by one of his college instructors.
"Then again, maybe now isn't so different from 1929. The Harvard art professor who picked Barr was Paul J. Sachs, who started his professional life as a Wall Street financier. The new MoMA completes the circle."
Then, in this week's New York magazine, Mark Stevens notes that Jed Perl, Jerry Saltz and others have all called MoMA "corporate." In 1997, in a proposal for building a new MoMA, Rem Koolhaas proposed MoMA Inc. I could keep citing but you get the idea.
So the MoMA-is-corporate thing is pretty well established. Consider for tomorrow: Is a 'corporate' MoMA necessarily a bad thing? Is 'corporate' necessarily a put-down?
|
Five favorites
While we sit around waiting for the Walker Channel Iles & Vergne presentation to pop up online...
I haven't done a just-for-fun list here since January. While on a phone call last week, I found myself thinking about some of my favorite subspaces in American museums. These are usually standard, typical galleries that museums have set aside for a specific department or a specific program. If that sounds vague, I think it'll make more sense by the end of the list
1.) Getty Research Institute gallery. This little space is just off the lobby of the Getty Research Institute building in Brentwood. I've written here before that the GRI space is the smartest exhibition space I've ever been to, a space that programs to the smartest Getty visitors. Where else would you see The Business of Art -- and enjoy it? Julius Shulman was here late last year too.
2.) Whitney's Ames Family Gallery. On the fifth floor, this is more or less the prints/works-on-paper gallery. Recent standout shows have included David Kiehl's Memorials of War exhibit, a Thomas Hart Benton works on paper show, and a mini-show on the grid in minimalism and conceptual art.
3.) SFMOMA's third floor flex gallery. This gallery changes up more than any of SFMOMA's other third floor modern art permanent collection galleries. Recently a Doris Salcedo installation (a recent SFMOMA acquisition) filled the space; right now SFMOMA has installed a works on paper mini-show that includes two Pollocks and a knockout abstract Guston.
4.) Hirshhorn black box. Just a couple of months ago the Hirshhorn took a former educational space in its basement, painted it black, and called it 'black box.' The space will house mini-surveys of video art, such as the recently-closed Hiraki Sawa show. Francis Alys is next.
5.) The Met's first-floor closet spaces, aka the Gioconda and Joseph King Gallery in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing (boy, that helps, doesn't it?). I don't know what else to call these spaces, both at the bases of staircases, on either side of the Met's perpetually lax contemporary art installation. Last year they hosted a two-part Tony Oursler installation, now Kara Walker is there. Recently the Met has been using this as a space where contemporary artists can create an installation and engage with the Met's collection a bit.
Honorable mention: Architecture-enabled flex spaces. At PS1 it's their courtyard. At the Hammer -- at least for a Jean Prouve installation -- it's their, uh, courtyard.
|
Somehwere to sit
For as long as I've been doing MAN I've been complaining about seating-free exhibit spaces, both in museums and in commercial galleries. (The latest offender is the Phillips Collection's awful Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec show, which I might not dislike quite so much if it had a bench in front of the three brilliant Bonnards on view.)
Over on the Walker's visual arts blog, Lynn Dierks tells us about an upcoming Walker show and how the artist requested seating. Specifically a "sack-back Windsor settee in black." (Yes, there's a picture.)
|
LACMA's big secret
It is, of course, unfair to the five most highly paid people at any non-profit that their salaries may be revealed to the world. Only seven or so percent of Americans experience this -- the overwhelming majority of them government workers. But because the Internal Revenue Service requires that non-profit institutions list the salaries of their officers, directors, and the five most-highly paid employees on their tax returns, the salaries of nearly all of your favorite museum directors, Red Cross presidents, and soup kitchen CFOs are public information.
On the flip side, what is unfair to the director of MOCA is good for the non-profit industry. The American people give enormous tax benefits to non-profit institutions and to their donors. The government requires intense financial transparency from those institutions. That's a fair trade-off.
So I have mixed feelings about non-profit salary surveys such as the one that the Los Angeles Times ran over the weekend. I understand why the LAT did the story: Barry Munitz's profligate spending led to the downfall of the leader of America's third-largest foundation. The Getty is in the LAT's backyard. The story is a natural.
But it's also financial voyeurism, the kind of story that serves rubberneckers more than anyone else. For the head of a family foundation, trying to decide what non-profits are worthy of support; or the trustees of non-profits, trying to determine what their peer institutions are paying in salary so they can set their own salary scale, this is useful information. (Though it's more useful on Guidestar than in the LAT.)
There is, however, one real news item in the story: LACMA refuses to tell the LAT what new director Michael Govan is being paid. This is different, and I can't explain why any better than LAT scribe Christopher Reynolds:
[I]f you wonder exactly what LACMA's new director makes, you'll have to wait. Even though the museum in the next year will have to tell the IRS in a public filing — and even though the museum stands on county land and gets millions in county funding — its leaders won't disclose what they're paying Michael Govan.
The decision is all the more curious given that LACMA has to know that the art world is alive with rumors about Govan's compensation package. Refusing to tell the LAT will only intensify the rumor-mongering. After all: Why would LACMA refuse to tell anyone what Govan is being paid unless it's so high that it would embarass the institution? And then what would that figure be?
Just for the sake of argument, let's establish the wince-point this way: LACMA paying its director anything close to double the salary of the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or $1.1 million per year.
Here's why it would be embarrassing for LACMA: Everyone in the art museum bidness knows that LACMA had a heckuva time finding people interested in their job. When what they pay their director comes out, it will be obvious what they had to pay to get a top-notch candidate to take the job.
Important (to me) and relevant aside: Non-profit professionals should make good salaries, especially top people. I think curators are probably the most underpaid non-profit professionals around. Here's hoping AAMD uses some of its clout (ha ha ha ha ha) and mandates that no curator, associate curator, or assistant curator at member institutions should be paid less than, say 20 percent of the director's salary. (In fact if any AAMD member suggests this at the next AAMD meeting, let me know and I'll buy you a drink.)
| |
|
 |
 |
|
MODERN ART NOTES
|
| |
MODERN ART NOTES home
MODERN ART NOTES archives
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Write
Me:
tylergreendc@yahoo.com
| | | |
FIVE TO SEE |
| | [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
LONGER PIECES |
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
More |
| | |
SITE SEEING
|
|
[an error occurred while processing this directive] |
| | | |
OTHER AJ BLOGS |
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| |
| | |
| | | |
| | |
| | | |
