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Like a dead sun rotting overhead, Oscar Tuazon’s stained orb drips on the floor of his latest exhibit at Maccarone in New York. Although his broken concrete blocks, bare-bulb fluorescent light, steel panels and cracked glass are the essence of industrial, his rubble has an innate elegance, more akin to Cy Twombly‘s than anything produced by process artists of the 1970s, from Eva Hesse to Richard Serra.

(Tuazon images via)

These sculptures come with texts piped into the galleries. Vito Acconci
reads from his proposal for the Halley II Research Station, Antarctica
of the Mind, and Tuazon reads a monologue about another kind of
architecture, one that he could both climb into and carry in his body.
As Alan Ginsberg wrote in San Jose in 1954, yes, yes/ that’s what/ I
wanted,/ I always wanted,/ I always wanted,/ to return/ to the body/
where I was born.”

Meanwhile, in Seattle, his younger brother Eli Hansen is showing at
Lawrimore Project, and elegant is not the first word that comes to mind.
Tuazon has a brooding poetics with real muscle, but Hansen puts his
muscle to more practical use. His work evokes his youth on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where he and his brother and friends envisioned themselves as outlaw makers, using any x or y to get high, build a shelter, make a radio and reinvent their lives through scraps, discards and music.

Here’s a piece they built together – Home Brew Bottle Wall, 2008, glass blown by Eli.

Hansen talks about his work on Saturday at noon at Lawrimore. He’s showing at Maccarone in July.

Month in, month out, galleries try to move product. Even the desperate, hanging by thread, know they have to impersonate serenity to hope for success. Nobody wants to buy from a dealer too eager to sell.

Restraint is good, even when the art apes carnival. Dealer attempts to step into the conga line and shake a retail tail feather almost always falter. Case in point, Traver Gallery’s announcement for its May exhibit, opening Thursday night:

I draw your attention to the imperative at the bottom in capital red letters – PIMP MY GLASS! Difficulties abound. Where to start?

A. The whole “pimp my” is played out. To attach it to an artist’s work is to encase it in cliche.

B. The brothers Einar and Jamex De La Torre are Hispanic. The cultural implications are cringe-inducing.

C. Pimps are creeps. My heart goes out to sex workers, but those who most commonly mistreat them deserve contempt. Who’s the pimp in this construct, the dealer?

On Manhattan’s West Side, from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to 20th Street is the first section of the High Line, a stretch of formerly abandoned raised railroad that opened as a park last year. Its beauty is its truth to materials. The railroad theme inspires the simple benches, and landscaping features clumps of the hobo grass that rode the wind to find a home after the trains pulled out 25 years earlier. Eventually, the High Line will extend to 34th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues.

At night, you’re walking on the city’s lights. During the day, you’re lord of what you survey. Designers, take a bow: Urban design firm James Corner Field Operations with the architecture firm of
Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Below, Richard Lacayo takes a tour with Ricardo Scofidio after the opening:

The Whitney would like to open a downtown branch next to the High Line’s southern terminus. (Great idea, but not all board members are on board.)  In the meantime, the museum plans to open a series of exhibitions in the park.

Pared to 55 artists or artists’ groups, the Whitney’s 75th Biennial has no theme to refute, discuss, praise or satirize. Freed from anyone’s definitions but their own, the artists were chosen for their ability to grip down, waken and start a conversation in each other’s company.

Everybody succeeded, the sole exception being Charles Ray and his gallery full of  inexplicable flower paintings. I love Ray, but if these weren’t his, their monotony would have guaranteed their exclusion. Ray’s work is charts thinking, not noodling. Just because he can draw doesn’t mean he should. Everybody else, however, produced something that hangs on to its moment, blooming either right away or afterward, in the mind.

Here are a few highlights.

Attention, Shoppers: Josephine Meckseper’s 12-minute 2009 video, Mall of America, is set in the afterlife of those who worship consumption. They’re there and not there as colors bleed around bright objects of desire that are ever present but unavailable.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation’s post-Beuys’ We Like America
and
America Likes Us, a white hearse with a video in the windshield, sports cutting commentary on American culture in a comical vein.

Rashaad Newsome, Untitled (New Way), 2009. Single channel
high-definition, color, silent video; 6:48 min. He needs no music, because the music’s in his motions, all culturally coded African American. They are silky supple and tough as nails.

Instead of just building something, Kate Gilmore prefers the pleasure of knocking it down, stomping through it in a party dress and liberating color. Still image from Standing Here, 2010. Mixed-media sculpture with video, color,
sound, dimensions variable.

What if one person were a kind of weather? Kelly Nipper, Weather Center, 2009. Single channel video projection,
black and white, sound; 5:11. Dance performed by Taisha Paggett and
costume by Leah Piehl.

Ty Ziegel nearly burned to death in Iraq after a bomb attack. Instead of dying, he lives in a body whose skin is pudding. Photographer Nina Berman documented his (brief) marriage to his high-school sweetheart. She wanted to come through but in the end, just like us, couldn’t.

Nina Berman, Ty with gun, 2008, from Marine Wedding, 2006/2008.
Pigment print, 10 × 15 in. (25.4 × 38.1 cm)

Heir to James Ensor but painting on the elegant end of that form of grotesque, Storm Tharp gives his monstrous faces the grace of Fred Astaire. (He’s at a big disadvantage in this show, sharing a gallery with video artist Marianne Vitale, whose mode is screaming.)

My favorite sign in a museum hangs next to Aki Sasamoto’s installation, Secrets of My Mother’s Child, 2009:

 Please remain alert when the artist is performing
in this
space.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins‘ work appears to derive almost entirely from a nose: the grandfather’s warty proboscis in Domencio Ghirlandaio’s 1490 portrait. Living things are lovely for a moment. Hutchins’ ceramics sag. On a couch, they’re potatoes.

Three more wonderful painters: Lesley Vance, Jim Lutes and Pae White. Vance punches out from the inside of 17th Century Spanish stilllife. Lutes favors Mark Tobey but with a B-movie heart, and White is shoveling seductive tendrils of smoke.

I’ve just scratched the surface here. Be sure to see current Biennial curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari’s Collecting Biennials on the fifth floor, in honor of the 75th-year marker. If the art world could be said to rest of turtles, there are major turtles here, all the way down.

David Hammons, Untitled, 1992. Copper, wire, hair, stone, fabric, and
thread, height 60 in. (152.4 cm)

Roberta Smith’s review of  the Guggenheim’s Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance was at best tepid.

The actual exhibition is for the most part routine and innocuous.
Organized by Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman, the museum’s curator and
associate curator of photography, it swings rather listlessly between
the arcane and the obvious, the overly familiar and the unknown, the
important and the trifling. (more)

Her real quarrel, which she addressed in her first six paragraphs, is with the catalog. Holland Cotter never does this. If he has a problem with the catalog, he mentions it in an aside and moves on. The question for any exhibit is not the support material but what’s on the walls and in the space.

The exhibit begins in the 1960s and is largely drawn from the museum’s collections. Smith notes that with a few exceptions, it doesn’t come to life until it gets past the 1980s. She singles out work from Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager for having a “been there, done-that predictability.” 

She’s referring to excellent pieces from all of these artists. I’m reminded of music critics who call for a moratorium on Mozart. They’re sick of him, but he’s not the one who has gone stale.

Haunted opens with Andy Warhol’s Orange Disaster #5 from 1963: Fifteen shadow-smeared prints of electric chairs. Not visible in the image below is the Silence sign on the right, which serves as a kind of predictive haunting: Silence does indeed equal death.

The exhibit flows around the Guggenheim spiral, experience to experience.

How I love Anri Sala’s Nocturnes from 1999, an 11-minute video with sound I watched twice through, back to back. Two men scarred by war hobble through their lives afterward. One cares for thousands of fish, the other is addicted to video games. Their identities blur in the flash of a fin and the pinging sound of artificial explosions. The first hides his fish from the public because, he says, they cannot stand to be stared at and flee to corners where they tremble and die. In lesser hands, this could be a mess, but even when Sala’s content is heavy, his touch is light.

Born in Dachau in 1973, Janaina Tschape’s video Lacrimacorps from 2004 features the interior of a castle in Etterburg, Goethe’s summer residence that later overlooked the concentration camp of Buchenwald. Shot from above, a dancer turns in a great hall, a figure come to life from a music box, trapped in a routine beyond her choosing.

Paul Chan’s 7 Lights from 2005-07, projected on the floor, springs from a reverse gravity. The shadow of objects float down, a lyrical residue of a disaster. 

In James Casebere’s Garage from 2003, light is both austere and redemptive.

Formerly an obituary writer for the Daily Telegraph, Adam McEwen writes elegiac obits of the living, such as one here, for Richard Prince from 2007, printed as if it had appeared in the New York Times. I’ve never read anything better on Prince, whose father “did something
in defoliants in Vietnam.”

Sophie Calle’s pair of large photographs from 1990 show graves with sinking headstones, one marked as “Mother,” the other “Father.” 

Sarah Anne Johnson, born in Winnipeg, choreographs a survey of photographs, both straight and manipulated, with real people and puppets, to document a rite of passage from her youth – planting trees in deforested stretches of Manitoba.

There are more than 50 artists in this show. Nowhere to be found is work that earns Smith’s dismissal as trifling. None of it is.

I mind my own business with a restraint that puts me at the outer edge of normal (just barely), but suffer from a compulsion to know what other people are reading. Planes used to be good places to indulge, walking back from the lavatory down the narrow isle with a good view of seats on either side. Pickings are slim, these days. I don’t care what’s on a glowing screen. If pages aren’t being turned, I don’t bother.

What’s left? New York City’s subways. A recent trip suggests a New York Times’ decline. If people are buying it, they’re not packing it. Contrary to years’ past, most of the newspapers I saw weren’t in English. (One of the joys of NY is the range of languages, the daily reminder of living on the earth, not just burrowing through a single life’s construct.)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo continues ubiquitous. Good book, although I skipped a lot of it, not being able to take the sick/slasher-on-girl action. I’m not even sure how it turned out, but my fondness for the main character remains. I keep hearing that nonfiction dominates. Not on the subway. For every person hefting a biography, history, self-help or textbook, there are five plowing through a once-upon-a-time.

After Henry Kingsley Amis expressed contempt for his son Martin’s prose, a reporter asked Martin if he had a rejoinder. He quoted dad, who late in middle age told him, “I’m never going to read another novel that doesn’t begin with the
words, ‘A shot rang out.’ “

Lots of fictional shots ring out on the subway. Sadly, I saw nobody carrying John Godey’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, even though last year’s movie remake must have brought it back. If there’s more perfect subway-reading fare, I don’t know about it.

On the other hand, transcending your surroundings is always an option. A young man in a bowler hat, jeans and vest with a lattice of tattoos running up his right arm got on at Columbus Circle to ride downtown. Out of his satchel he took a hardback copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and proceeded to lose himself in her pages. I mustered every shred of super-ego not to say, Thanks for the sight of you.

A New Museum low was a high for its curator, Jeff Koons: Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection at the New Museum.

Much has been made of the coziness of the arrangement. Joannou is on the New Museum’s board, Koons is an important part of his collection. It’s worth discussing, I suppose, but my heart’s not in it. I’m not a cop or even a hall monitor. I’ve seen plenty of single-collector exhibits that were worth seeing. Plus, artists have always served as curators.

What’s the problem? There isn’t one, save for the show being an overheated, one-note mess. Koons packed the museum’s art-unfriendly galleries with artworks that scream at each other. Flamboyant, dire, crude, assaultive: I’d be tempted to think Koons knows nothing about pacing except, of course, he does. He curated this show to bury everybody else.

Gleaming amid the wreckage is his own single entry: One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank from 1985.

In 1942, Duchamp came in after everyone had hung their paintings and covered a group exhibit with string, making it impossible to see anything but the webbing. (Mile of String) Koons does something similar in reverse. By placing himself as the still point in a carny world, Koons’ liquid-light elusiveness makes all others heavy-handed.

Points to Koons, no points to the New Museum.

An exception to the sorry overkill might be Maurizio Cattelan‘s All, seen here (undoubtedly to better advantage) in its 2007 appearance at the Kunsthaus Bregenz Photo: Markus Tretter (Via)

All my pretty ones? Did
you say all?

Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3

Too bad All isn’t at the Met alongside The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy. Strictly contemporary types need to hop an uptown train to see the past kick the stuffing out of the present. Cattelan’s more than good, but he pales next to mid-15th century French carvers Jean de La Huerta and Antoine Le
Moiturier.

I’d also like to see All in the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence, concentrated in 1492.
Those who were wealthy but not extraordinary so could pay to be buried
in the floor under prone marble statues. Over the centuries as people
walked on those statues and wore them down, they
began to look as if they were floating off the ground: Cattelan in spirit form.

When Michael Darling leaves his job in July as modern and contemporary curator at the Seattle Art Museum to become chief curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, it’s good news for Chicago, bad for Seattle. He’s an extraordinary gifted curator. Objects speak to him, suggesting patterns and relationships that root and waken in his exhibitions.

He is not, however, only the second curator to hold the modern and contemporary slot at the Seattle Art Museum.

New York Times:

Mr. Darling’s appointment reverses his last professional transition, which took him out of a thriving contemporary art environment — the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles — to Seattle, where he became only the second curator of that museum’s modern and contemporary collection. (more)

The second curator in the slot was Bruce Guenther, hired in the 1970s. He too left SAM to become chief curator at Chicago’s MoCA MCA. He’s now back in the region as chief curator at the Portland Art Museum.

Between Guenther and Darling were Patterson Sims, Trevor Fairbrother and Lisa Corrin. (Sims, Fairbrother and Corrin were also deputy directors, signaling the importance the museum places on the field.) How could the NYT have disappeared four people?

Correction, please.

In years past, my visits to the Met tended to be focused. I’d pass wide swaths of world culture in a glance and on a trot. Today everything stops me: the heads and feet, swords and shields; gossamer-thin stone draperies wrapping stone bodies fresh as flower buds; cups and chairs, scrolls and silks; tombs, animal emblems and more than a millennium of painting.

Unlike the Louvre, the Met is not an airport hangar where visitors seek the great amid wide stretches of less than. The stately architecture that can handle crowds without being crowded serves collections whose breath and depth are curated into singular experiences. 

I do wish, however, that the Met would stop pairing Vuillard with Bonnard, or, rather, sticking a few Vuillards in a Bonnard gallery. Bonnard poured his colored light over everything. In his company, Vuillard comes across as timid, when he is actually a deeper and more complex painter, interested in domestic suppression: how his sister fades into the wallpaper in his mother’s presence, and how silence in a sitting room can fester, rattling the tea cups. I’d pair Vuillard with Munch: one scream choked, the other expressed.

Exhibits I might have missed in the old days include the drool Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photo Collage:

Kate Edith Gough (English, 1856-1948) Untitled page from the Gough Album, late 1870s Collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints; 14 5/8 x 11 5/8 in. (37 x 29.5 cm) V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

I might not have seen Five Thousand Years of Japanese Art: Treasures from the Packard Collection. Five thousand is a discouraging time span. I tend to favor exhibits rooted in time and place, with artists who connect like balls ricocheting across pool tables: contact and motion. There’s nothing but connection here, from the Neolithic to the 19th century, economy as a path toward abundance.

Kano Sansetsu (1589-1651) The Old
Plum Edo period (1615-1868) 1645 Four
sliding door panels (fusuma); ink, color, and gold on gilded paper

Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy

From the French High Middle Ages come 37 16-inch monks (and two boys) in a mournful procession, carved in alabaster by Jean de La Huerta and Antoine Le
Moiturier. A lucky accident of a renovation of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in
Dijon pried them out of their oranate architectural settings and set them in high relief on a table in the Met. Too bad they’re going back. On their own, they are killer good: distinct individuals each in his own way awash in emotion, surely the model for Rodin’s Burghers of Calais.

Given everything there is to see, who has time for Highlights from the Modern Design Collection, 1900-2006? Not me, and yet I saw it with pleasure.

Who wouldn’t admire Otto Prustcher’s black/white checkerboard plant stand, zig-zagging across space, from 1903; Harold Van Doren’s ode to motion, his Snow-Place Sled, from 1934; Charles and Ray Eames’ Buffalo Chair, from 1946; Lucas Samaras’ plaster, falling-apart chair, from 1969-70, and Dale Chihuly’s Speckled Gold Venetian with Cobalt Leaves and Stems, from 2001.  

There’s been a lot of talk in Seattle recently about a proposed Chihuly Museum at Seattle Center, much of it implying he’s some kind of lowest common denominator huckster, not a real artist at all. I looked in this show for anybody else from the Northwest who’d made the cut. Who else shared the honor? Nobody. Take it to the bank, nay-sayers. Your account is empty.

On a recent Saturday, a woman behind me in line to get into MoMA said, “I hate the young.” She was assuming they were there en masse to see the museum’s grotesque hagiography of Tim Burton (every scrap preserved). If true, they didn’t limit themselves to the man who made a mockery of Sweeney Todd but poured out into other galleries, their numbers mitigating against anyone’s engagement.

Obviously, the problem is not the young but the museum, which needs to determine what is a sustainable number and what is a stagnating overflow. People were four or five layers deep in the Cartier-Bresson. Who can see his immaculate, small prints in such a physical cacophony? Full of respect for those who forged ahead, I gave up, thinking of Yogi Berra: “That place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.”

In such a mob scene, the courage of Marina Abramovic’s performance retrospective, The Artist is Present, is overwhelming. She’s there every day, all day long, as members from the audience in three minute increments take a seat in front of her and lock into the energy of her presence. Surrounding them is a parted sea of humanity hushed by her intensity.

What a dazzling exhibit. (Hats off to curator Klaus Biesenbach.) Performance retrospectives are a difficult breed of cat. If you missed the originals, you’re limping along afterward with description, analysis and documentation impersonating the real thing. Instead, with fifty works spanning four decades (including sound pieces, excellent videos and photographs), this exhibit recreates a number of her major pieces by restaging them with a frequently nude cast of others. (They deserve bravery badges too.)

Back to the audience, swollen into a problem for itself. It’s an enormous hurtle for Abramovic, who either makes contact or makes nothing. Even with thousands around her, she succeeds, both in the galleries and in the atrium where she presides, inspiring many who signed up to sit down with her to cast off their public shell and give her something back.

Marco Anelli’s photographs of the sitters on flickr are a record of the audience as artists, sharing what they are capable of sharing with the woman in front of them. (Via) I love these faces. Hearts open.

Through May 31. 

Tim Burton’s last day is Monday, which will undoubtedly thin the herd. What will be left is the chill of the architecture. There is no grace in the new space.

Also managing to triumph over crowds in a chilly surround is William Kentridge: Five Themes, organized by Mark Rosenthal for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art.

In prints, charcoal drawings and animated films based on charcoal drawings, he surveys the human predicament. I wish I’d seen this show in San Francisco. Here, the videos dominate, as the drawings are tough to see cheek to jowl to baby carriage with others. He calls his cut-out drawings of shadow puppets stone age. Across a rocky terrain they come, carrying their plows,
their parents, their prisoners, their party props and weapons. It’s
human history in motion: The fleet, the lame, the guilty and innocent,
burdened by their sick and their dead. In the middle of it all, a real
human eyeball pops up, and later a real cat.
Shadows enlarge, dissolve and double into shadows of shadows, stories
lost and found; the dynamic, overlapping chaos of history. 

Through May 17.

Down in the basement, Marilyn Minter’s video, Green Pink Caviar from 2009 drew a cluster of the gorgeous young. Watching them watching, it occurred to me that Abramovic, Kentridge and Minter are all from my generation. The young look great, but they’ll have to work hard to catch us.