Author: greg

From The Armory Show Lost & Found Dept.

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From my friends Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset comes a show, er, a work that could be titled, Untitled (Hah, made you look!). Right before they left town–and after the opening of their installation at the Bohen Foundation–the artists installed a piece at The Wrong Gallery, Maurizio Cattelan, Mass Gioni, and Ali Subotnick’s foot-deep-gallery-in-a-doorway, next to Andrew Kreps.
They dressed a Mini with all the paraphrenalia of a long trip abandoned–maps, lotion, crumbs and change on the floor–and a sleeping baby in the backseat. The car’s been collecting parking tickets all week; I guess the show will end whenever DOT decides to tow it.
Or else… It just occurred to me that there’s a women’s prison on the corner. Maybe the baby mama is in there doing some firm–if not hard–time.

Elmgreen & Dragset at the Bohen Foundation
[update: Someone apparently called 911 on the baby in the car, because NYPD come to investigate this afternoon.]

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On Finding The Level Of The Room

“Customers who bought this DVD also bought:

  • DVDs from The 21 Jump Street Series.
  • Full House – The Complete First Season DVD (Rate it)
  • DVDs from The Home Improvement Series.
  • Who’s the Boss? – The Complete First Season DVD ~ Tony Danza (Rate it)”
    Meanwhile Kottke‘s not impressed: “Doogie Howser, M.D. Season One, quite possibly the most worthless DVD release ever” [For some reason, though, I can’t picture Steven Bochco and David E. Kelly as Long Tail.]

    • While You Were At The Armory

    “And with art, there are always boobs, liberated by liquor, out where they shouldn’t be, pointing around at paintings they don’t understand and could never afford.”
    –The NY Observer’s Rebecca Dana reporting from the opening of art dealer Jack Tilton’s new East 76th Street gallery.
    Bottle Racket [Don’t scroll down so fast you miss:
    -Some adman praising his own scripts for Dasani commercials, written “intending Wes Anderson to direct” [Coke spends $2bn/yr on ads, so of course, they got him, duh]–why do I find the idea of Wes directing Anderson-esque commercials written by Coke’s agency laughably sad?
    -George Gurley accosting Catherine Deneuve in print and in the, um, flesh.]

    How To Draw My Attention

    I finally saw John Walter’s entertaining and transfixing 2002 documentary, How To Draw A Bunny tonight on Sundance Channel. Walter–an editor-turned-director–collages together the incredible story of the artist’s artist Ray Johnson, whose life, art, and elaborately contrived 1995 suicide in Sag Harbor were inextricably connected. It’s that rarest of things–a good documentary about an artist.
    [Since then, Walter’s done another doc, Some Assembly Required, which also aired on Sundance, about protestors at the Republican Convention. Unfortunately, when it aired around the holidays, its target audience was in a tense stupor about visiting their Republican families.]
    Almost as impressive and a definite surprise: Sundance Channel’s awesome on-air identity system. For their program intros and bumpers, they anchor each show on an animated photo timeline that scrolls left across the screen. It’s like a stylized Final Cut Pro sequence, or a storyboard; it rocks on both brand and context-setting fronts. Screencap and credits, anyone?
    Watch How Draw A Bunny four more times this month [3/19, 3/30] on Sundance, then either buy it on DVD, or rent it at GreenCine.
    FilmForum’s HTDAB page, with good reviews and links

    There Oughta Be A Reality Series

    “{Dimension Films exec Andrew] Rona is only too delighted to play the heavy and play it to the Mephistophelean hilt. In fact, when the studio doesn’t get its way in the selection of a director, he signals that he will make that director’s life a living hell.”
    Sounds like a nice plot for a reality series.
    Since Project Greenlight started burning $1 million/film on the corner-cutting ghetto end of the Hollywood production system, fifty, a hundred, actually good films were made for even less money. One of these days, Greenlight should show someone spending the money smartly. Even though it’d mean less air time for Chris Moore.
    Making It, and Taking It on the Chin from a Studio Bigwig [nyt]
    Project Greelight site [liveplanet.com]
    [update: the timing and content of this post and the appearance of an ad for Reality Green Light’s contest to find a winning reality series idea is pure coincidence. Obviously, if I’d known about the contest this morning, I wouldn’ta gone and blabbed my kick-ass idea, yo. Damn.]

    Damien Who?

    From the Times:

    But, at first, the thought of painting in this Photo Realist manner intimidated him. When he began in earnest about three and a half years ago, he realized why.
    “I started out airbrushing,” he said. “But the images looked flat, dead. For two years I didn’t think it was going to work.” Finally, he said, he disciplined himself to represent each image faithfully by hand.
    Still, he doesn’t consider himself a serious painter. “I would feel uncomfortable putting myself in a category with other painters like Goya or Bacon,” he said. “I’m more interested in the images than the painting.”

    From Linda Yablonsky on Artforum.com:

    Though many guests made the connection, Hirst may have thought he was avoiding comparisons to Jeff Koons by ordering hired hands to paint each piece in this chilling body of work rather badly. (One assistant was reportedly fired for painting too well.)

    But I hope he didn’t think he was avoiding comparisons to another Damien who makes paintings “in photo-realist style from pictures in magazines and print ads”: Damien Loeb.
    But my favorite quote from Yablonsky captures a whole swath of the art world’s, “I’m here, so it must be important” sense of audacious self-consciousness, without a hint of self-awareness:

    At these prices [up to $2mm] it’s difficult to understand how paintings that are not going to get any better with time can continue to acquire value. Though truth be elusive, let’s just say that that is exactly Hirst’s point: to empty art of meaning. In a market where money is so disposable, how can art transcend mere currency to become more than just a brand? If this is indeed Hirst’s message, then he has issued a galling challenge to every other living artist. It will be interesting to see who takes it up.

    Or not. Because it’s not like anyone’s ever paid more than $2 million for a painting before, or even for a Hirst.
    As some smart aleck said in the NY Times, “Just because you’ve spent a lot of time and money on something doesn’t mean it’s very good.”
    Taste for the Macabre but No Pickled Sharks [nyt]
    High and Dry, Linda Yablonsky [artforum.com]

    Let The Name…’Moses’…Be Stricken From Every Public Obelisk…

    So let it be written, so let it be done.
    Many of the thousands of Ten Commandments statues gracing public parks, courthouses and city halls around the country–including the one whose constitutionality is being considered by the Supreme Court–were placed by Cecil B. DeMille and the Fraternal Order of Eagles as a promotion for the film. Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, and Martha Scott attended many of the monument unveilings.
    Many Commandments monuments started out as movie promotion [dallas morning news, via mefi]

    “shaped by their directors’ experiences with grief”

    The lingering after-effects of tragic loss are figuring into American feature films now. Some films are specifically–if obliquely–related to the September 11th attacks, but others can be attributed to a post-9/11 heightened sensitivity to the nuances of experiencing a loved one’s death.
    Makes sense to me; I set my first short, Souvenir November 2001 in this aftermath, after the active, self-conscious mourning is past. People say that the hardest time is actually several months after the funeral of someone close, because people have usually stopped actively checking on you, and the reality of that person’s absence really starts to sink in.
    9/11 Is Sneaking Onto a Screen Near You [nyt]

    Movie Theatre Rwanda

    The awesome Haitian director Raoul Peck’s new HBO film about the Rwandan genocide, Sometimes in April, was the first film shot in Rwanda, and so he promised to debut it there as well.
    Writer Melanie Thernstrom writes about attending the packed, tense screening, which was held in a giant stadium in Kigali.

    A View To A Killing Field     [nytimes.com]
    Sometime in April premiers on HBO Mar. 19 [hbo.com]
    Related: Thernstrom’s book, Halfway Heaven, about the violent deaths of two immigrant students at Harvard, and an article about Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s 2003 epic novel-like reporting in Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx [nymag]

    10 lbs of HBS in a 5 lb bag

    So you mean this whole “HBS rejects applicants who ‘hacked’ into admissions site” hubbub is about people seeing what happens if they truncate the URL for their account?
    I guess they’ve got a brand image to protect as the home of the utterly and irrationally technology-ignorant executive of tomorrow. IT people–hell, people who know how to change their default browser settings–everywhere are shaking their heads.
    Business schools redefine hacking to “stuff that a 7-year-old could do” [phil greenspun]

    Nice, Minnesota

    Several years ago, at the opening dinner of a sculptor friend’s debut 2-person show, I found myself playing the oh-so-sophisticated New York collector at a giant round table in a Chinese restaurant for a mix of folks, including the other artist’s parents.
    I offhandedly pronounced Minneapolis to be the most Canadian of American cities: not just because of the freakin’ weather, but because of public radio. First, there’s Garrison Keillor, and besides, everyone–including every immigrant taxi driver I met–listened to public radio.
    Well, the other artist’s mother said, we’re from Minneapolis. Apparently, calling a Minnesotan Canadian is almost as bad as calling a Quebecker Canadian, except the Minnesotans are too nice to say anything; they just keep it all inside. And of course, they’re so hardy, they didn’t need a jacket for the chill that blew over the table. My recovery attempt–“I meant Canadian in a good way. As It Happens is one of my favorite CBC shows!”–was unwelcome, and the table split into two conversational crescents for the rest of the night.
    Anyway, I was reminded of this this morning when Rex pointed out that “Live in Canada” is one of Minneapolissers Minneapolitans’ most popular goals. [of course, since in the two days since he posted it, it’s dropped from #11 to #18, so they must still be very self-conscious about it.]
    [update: and they’re quick to correct. I didn’t really think it was Minneapolisser, but I figured–rightly–that someone’d clue me in real fast. Thanks, Jason.]

    Clear Your Calendars [Except For Your Therapist]

    The BFI’s National Film Theatre is running a complete Tarkovsky retrospective through March 30. It includes new prints of both Solaris and Stalker. And who can pass up seeing Andrei Rublev on the big screen? [I know everyone in NYC passed up seeing it on video; I bought an utterly unused copy, fresh from the newly dead Kozmo.com, on ebay a few years back.]
    NFT: Andrei Tarkovsky [bfi.org.uk, via kultureflash]