Author: greg

The Mellowing of Richard Serra

stop_bush_serra.jpg

[via MAN] What’s shocking about Richard Serra’s poster for pleasevote.com–a thick paintstick silhouette of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner–isn’t his use of text or figurative representation, both completely absent from the rest of his work (with possibly one 1960’s exception).
And it’s not his political activity. He’s always been an active liberal, and his art challenges both easy commodification and conservative notions of authority. And who can forget his legal battle with the GSA and anti-NEA zealots like Jesse Helms which culminated in the destruction in 1989 of his sculpture Tilted Arc (besides pretty much everyone, that is)?
No, what shocked me was his positively statesman-like restraint, which stands in contrast to the horrible image in his drawing and to current levels of Administration discourse. With STOP BUSH, Serra–who’s well known for his angry temper–let’s George off easy.
In 1990, he made an etching as a fundraiser for North Carolina Senate candidate Harvey Gantt, who lost after his opponent ran some race-baiting ads that have become recognized dirty tricks classics. The title of that piece (sorry, mom) was Fuck Helms.

2004-07-12 & 19, This Week in The New Yorker

In the magazine header, image: newyorker.com
Issue of 2004-07-12 and 19
Posted 2004-07-05
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT/ BLOWING BUBBLES/ John Cassidy on the dubious longevity of Alan Greenspan.
DEPT. OF RABBLE-ROUSING/ THE CHICAGO PRECEDENT/ Ben McGrath on Pat Buchanan’s convention memories– and plans.
THE FINANCIAL PAGE/ PAYING TO PLAY/ James Surowiecki on the new payola.
IN THE BELTWAY/ THE VICE-PRESIDENT’S DOCTOR/ Jane Mayer on what happened to Dr. Gary Malakoff.
SHOUTS & MURMURS/ Patricia Marx/ Chain Letter
LETTER FROM CAIRO/ David Remnick/ Going Nowhere/ The problem with democracy in Egypt.
FICTION/ Judy Budnitz/ “Miracle”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS/ David Greenberg/ Fathers and Sons/ George W. Bush and his forebears.
A CRITIC AT LARGE/ John Lahr/ King Cole/ The not so merry soul of Cole Porter.
THE ART WORLD/ Peter Schjeldahl/ All-American/ Childe Hassam at the Met.
THE CURRENT CINEMA/ Anthony “Mmm, what I’d do with four mechanical arms” Lane/ Swing Easy/ “Spider-Man 2” and “The Clearing.”
FROM THE ARCHIVE
PROFILES/ Margaret Case Harriman/ Words and Music/ Cole Porter, soon after he suffered a debilitating horse-riding accident, talks of, among other things tailoring songs for performers like Bert (son of John) Lahr./ Issue of 1940-11-23
PROFILES/ Truman Capote/ The Duke in His Domain/ In Rick Lyman’s NYT obit for Marlon Brando, this piece is called “a patronizing portrait of a somewhat dim prima donna.”/ Issue of 1957 sometime (don’t they know?)

WWPANYNJD?

They’d cover it up for now so it doesn’t distract from the event, then they’d rip it out once everyone’s gone. They’d also make a few arbitrary, unreviewed, undiscussed decisions about other stuff they’d keep.

Most guests arriving at the ceremony were probably unaware that they were crossing the line of the north facade of the north tower, since the column bases had been covered in gravel. Officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, said the gravel was spread to create a smoother grade and to protect the remnants.
During the impending dismantling of the parking garage that was under 6 World Trade Center, some architectural elements will be preserved, including a smoke-scarred column, a column on which the paint was blistered by heat into a marbleized pattern and a section of smoke-stained wall with the words, “Yellow Parking B2.”

– “Rebirth Marked by Cornerstone at Ground Zero,” by David Dunlap, NYT

WTC Groundbreaking QTVR

At panoramas.dk, Hans Nyberg has posted a remarkable QTVR by Jook Leung, taken from the center of the media scrum at yesterday’s Freedom Tower groundbreaking ceremony.
Pataki Schmataki, check out the full extent of the Bathtub wall, with its uneven concrete facing and steel cable tiebacks. Once the centerpiece of Libeskind’s own sunken memorial plan, the raw wall’s going to be refaced, and ultimately, only a small section–if any of it–of it will be visible through a glass curtain wall when all’s said and done.

Blake Gopnik Jumps Art Critical Shark

When the chief art critic for your town’s largest paper publishes a front page review of the cafeteria’s “gelato collection”, do you:
A) Realize now’s a good time to rethink the curatorial program of the museum?
B) Wish he’d reviewed the best publicly accessible “bathroom installations” while he’s at it?
B) Develop a strong desire to pummel said critic about the head and face?
C) Remember that next door is a horrible Stella, and next to that was a concert starring Barry Bostwick, Robin “last BeeGee standing” Gibb backed up by the whitey white whitest choir EVER, and Clay Aiken singing the William Tell Overture, so why are you EVEN surprised?
E) All of the above.
Related, but not mentioned, an actual piece of art: Art Domantay’s 31 Flavors of Hell.
Related: Hirshhorn Museum men’s room features “The Lexus of baby changing tables.”

White House:: Happy Days, State Dept:: Joanie Loves Cha-Chi

This is so beyond jumping the shark. At least the shark was jumped on the main show.
Colin Powell singing YMCA in Jakarta (he was the construction worker.) is the political equivalent of a bitter, aging Erin Moran, who–realizing her series isn’t going to be renewed, and without even a glint of hope for a Charles in Charge of her own–just pushes through the script and tries to get through the week so she can cash her check and suck it up her nose. [via waxy]

So We’re Rebuilding the WTC After All

Christopher Hawthorne nails this weekend’s Pataki Day Celebration, aka the groundbreaking for the Freedom Tower.

This is what it has come to at Ground Zero: A premature, election-year press conference held on Independence Day to celebrate the start of construction on a building called the Freedom Tower, which is designed to be precisely 1,776 feet tall and to rise next door to a vaguely conceived but lavishly outfitted museum called the Freedom Center. Who says patriotism is dead?

Even though it’s not designed, funding is uncertain, there are no tenants, and market demand is less than zero, Pataki’s pushing the tower forward out of some mix of ambition and political narrative desperation. “All this is looking more and more like the process that brought us the original Twin Towers in the late 1960s and early ’70s.”
Related: Hawthorne nails the WTC Memorial competition

More Dependent Shorts: gettyimages

The trend continues. Gettyimages teamed with RES and others to have seven directors make 30-60 second shorts on about The Big Idea (whatever that is). The catch: they were to use Getty’s own bank of 70,000+ images and clips.
By default, collage, compositing, and digital manipulation rule. Making a film from pre-existing images refracts so many layers of intentionality, it makes my head spin. Marc Wilkins’ explanation of his own short, To Long For, could apply to working from the imagebank itself: “The film starts with pictures waiting for something — not doing anything, not moving and not acting; just searching, waiting.”

the big idea, tsujikawa koichiro, image:gettyimages.com

There are no accidents. Or, rather, if any accidents happen, they’re buried deep in the production process and within the prescribed boundaries of the corporate source. The closest anyone comes is Koichiro Tsujikawa, whose initial conceptual approach, to make “a collage of images that come up when I search related keywords,” turned out to be too broad. Eyes is a seductively manipulated kaleidoscope of his search results for just one word.
If it’s going to be collage, then, how about a John Cageian level of randomness? What if you determined which digital bits and clips to use by throwing the I Ching or some other arbitrary randomizing system at the database? Such a film would be about the imagebank itself. You could call it The Better Idea. [via coudal]

Well, that explains ‘Esther’

The Guardian asked a bunch of brainy Brits what the ‘most hated movies of all time’ are. I say, who knows, especially if you don’t see them all? But there are some very funny answers.
Showgirls (a So Bad It’s Good movie, actually) gets multiple mentions, but Battlefield Earth gets none. Neither does Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil, of that pirate movie that sunk Renny Harlan. Castaway Island Cutthroat Island [which, Deborah protests, is “a perfect pirate film.” And since it was only the biggest moneyloser ever, it was probably only “most hated” by studio accountants. Duly noted.] Citizen Kane‘s in there, though, which is entertaining, but too “bad-boy” an answer, even if it were true.
Leave it to Julie Burchill to come up with the right answer, though: of Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away, starring his wife, Burchill says, “If I was responsible for something this bad, I’d change my name, too.” Mazel Tov.

Ono, Jishu Eiga, Kore-eda

still from Danchizake, dir. Ono Satoshi, image: midnighteye.comI met Satoshi Ono in New York, when his excellent DV doc, Danchizake (Homemade Sake), played at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight Dec. 2002. Danchizake is an elliptical, self-effacing, yet powerful story of the filmmaker’s own family and the emotional rifts caused by years of economic hardship. Midnight Eye reviewed it in the Spring of 2001.
In the latest issue, ME does a roundup of jishu eiga, selfmade films, a burgeoning genre in which Ono is cited as a leading practitioner. [His 2003 short, Good Morning Yokohama, just screened in Dallas at the Asian Film Festival.]
ME also includes a technique-heavy interview with Japan’s most successful documentary-style filmmaker, Hirokazu Kore-eda. I’ve admired Kore-eda’s work since seeing the quiet, beautiful small-footprint Maboroshi at New Directors/New Films almost ten years ago. And After Life is one of my favorite films ever.
Now, with the coming release of his fourth feature Nobody Knows (#3, Always, wasn’t distributed in the US), Kore-eda seems ready for a change: he’s making a jidai geki (costume drama) for Shochiku. “To be natural doesn’t automatically mean to be real,” he says. “So far I’ve tried to use naturalism to search for reality, but now I will try total fiction to search for that reality.” [via greencine, of course]

Yeah, good thing you got a transcript

I heard Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff barking on WBUR last night about how the shifty Michael Moore has not released a transcript of Farenheit 9/11, the easier to dispute the points he makes in the film.
[Is irony really, truly dead after all, that so many of the tortillas being flung at F9/11 from the right-field bleachers are because Moore “makes inaccurate insinuations from unrelated facts and dishonestly leads people to jump to conclusions that are otherwise unsupported?” Matthew Continetti, the Weekly Standard water carrier on On Point kept making that argument, and I’m like, what veep-in’ Vice President have you been listening to the last three years?
As I see it, the only possible vindication worse than Michael Moore’s is Graydon Carter’s, my glass-house-livin’ slavishly administration-supportin’ friends.]
Anyway, waxy and daily.greencine.com point out that Drew at Script-o-rama has found and documented self-serving inaccuracies and bias in the transcript used by many Moore critics, including Isikoff. I certainly feel better when I say it: go factcheck yourself.

Pained Observer

Critics who don’t buy this also don’t buy this [via bloggy]
I guess if the Observer isn’t going to have art critics whose recommendations ever make sense, at least they can have critics whose pans are consistent signals of worthwhile shows.