Author: greg

Praise for Artforum.com and blurbs re Richard Serra

Let me offer unqualified praise for the editorial acuity of Artforum’s links recommendations.
Two quotes from Calvin Tomkins’ good Richard Serra article in the New Yorker:

According to Richard Serra:
Abstraction gives you something different (from figuration). It puts the spectator in a different relationship to his emotions. I think abstraction has been able to deliver an aspect of human experience that figuration has not–and it’s still in its infancy. Abstract art has been going on for a century, which is nothing.
About Richard Serra’s usually high degree of professionalism and realistic approach to commission negotiations (from his longtime European dealer, Alexander von Berswordt): When he calls someone a motherf***er, that doesn’t help, of course. But he rarely does that without a reason.

From Adrian Searle on Documenta

From Adrian Searle’s article on Documenta 11 in the Guardian:

Iranian photo-journalist and cameraman Seifollah Samadian pointed his video camera out of his Tehran window and filmed a woman in a black chador struggling with an umbrella in a vicious snowstorm while waiting for a bus. There is only the blizzard, and waiting, her silhouette and the cawing of crows, bare trees and a menacing, barbed-wire-topped wall beyond. Nothing happens, except more of the same, more waiting. It is one of the current Documenta’s unforgettable moments, of which there are many… [Not coincidentally, Samadian was the cinematographer on Abbas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa.]
There are those who find the present Documenta patronising, or complain that it is like some horror National Geographic tour of a collapsing world. It is nothing of the sort. It is news from elsewhere, and news from home. We are all in it together, however impossible it is to deal with everything. Uneven, at times annoying, upsetting and even uplifting, Documenta 11 isn’t a perfect show. It isn’t a perfect world.

AIRPORT GIFT SHOP – MORNING

AIRPORT GIFT SHOP – MORNING
A CASHIER at the counter. She does not appear wildly over-qualified for her job. A YOUNG ITALIAN TOURIST COUPLE approach quietly with some postcards. The ITALIAN WOMAN wore her backpack on her stomach, as wary Italians are wont to do.
CASHIER (exclaiming loudly and with glee, but not to anyone in particular): That’s just like Mini-Me!! HAH!!
ITALIAN WOMAN (fright in her eyes, she looks at her husband): ……
CASHIER: You got Mini-Me in there?? HAH!!
The Italians drop the postcards on the counter and rush out of the store without saying a word.

No, it’s not just reciprocal

No, it’s not just reciprocal link whoring, I swear: Just came back from the hotel pool, where I became transfixed by the beautiful patterns of reflections and whorls of light on the bottom of the pool, thinking to myself, “This is cool. Where are the artists examining this natural-yet-manmade phenomenon?” Well, they’re on Travelers Diagram for starters, and they’re named Kathleen Johnson, and they’re having their first solo shows this very minute (until Aug. 9, anyway) in New York. And she turns out to have shown last year at Marc Foxx in LA. Hey, Marc!

Mesa , AZ- Just when

Mesa , AZ– Just when you think it’s too stupid to go back in the air, Delta.com offers the pleasant surprise of online check-in and home-printed boarding passes. A billboard on the way to the hotel says, “Sweating for free?! Get paid to test deodorants!” A photocopied sign at the check-in desk congratulates Gregory Allen for being selected guest of the day. And rather than redo my network settings in our upgraded room, I surf happily on a wide open wireless network that’ s bleeding in through the window. This is the way to start the week.

The route is so circuitous

The route is so circuitous it bores even me, but I just came across The Essential Vermeer Lover, a scholarly yet very engaging site about, well, Vermeer.
While it’ll embarass him, I have to add a quick story from shooting in France about the cinematographer for Souvenir (November 2001), Jonah Freeman. Each night, we’d review the dailies on a giant monitor in the hotel lobby. On one such evening, a French woman (presumably another hotel guest) stood hovering behind us, watching quietly. When an extended shot of the Somme landscape (fields, with some trees at a distant ridge, with shadows of clouds racing across the fields and a really complicate sky) came on, she suddenly called out, “It’s just like Vermer [sic]!” She startled us, and then it took a while to figure who she was talking about. We figured the Vermer/Vermeer pronounciation thing was like Van Go/Van Gochh, something that, even if it was correct, Americans could never pull off. In any case, after that, any shots with sublime-looking light became known as Vermers. Here is Vermeer’s View of Delft, which then came to mind after the woman’s exclamation.
While Vermeer’s remaining work is known for subtlety and serenity, he painted during a prolonged war and religiously fueled conflict which devastated his home city of Delft. Early in his painting career, in 1654, a munitions depot in the town, which held 90,000 pounds of gunpowder, exploded to devastating effect. The Delft Thunderclap, as the accident came to be known, leveled buildings for hundreds of yards, damaged nearly every building in town, and killed and wounded unknown hundreds of people. [Read Anthony Bailey’s chapter about the Thunderclap, or buy his book, View of Delft.] One artist, Egbert van der Poel, painted over twenty versions of View of Delft After the Explosion in his career. Vermeer’s View of Delft, then, turns out to be a portrait of a partially/newly rebuilt city, one in the midst of and recovering from disaster.
(I’m working on an extended post about Jonah’s art, both his photography and installation work. Stay tuned.)

Souvenir (November 2001), Bruegel, Houstonization, The WTC

Rewatching Souvenir (November 2001) a dozen+ times in the last 24 hours, I’d begun to wonder what it can actually contribute to the increasing volume of the WTC memorial/rebuilding debate. There was 4,000-participant offsite Saturday (with a 200-participant makeup session Monday for observant Jews and Hamptonites, I guess). Everyone and their dog is weighing in on the lameness of the Port Authority-driven devil’s choice: Memorial Office Park or Memorial Mall, but is this looming Houstonization of Ground Zero possibly the end-game of Manhattan’s last decade of suburbanization?
(“When they came for my greek-lookin’ coffee cups, I said nothing.
When they came for my independent bookstore, I said nothing.
When they came for my jewelbox-size retailer, I said nothing…”)
bruegel_icarus.jpg
Then I found this Auden poem about Bruegel’s painting of the fall of Icarus. The opening lines:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
Visiting the site of past horrors; seeing how people live among the memories and memorials of destruction; glimpsing the differences between total restoration, preserving ruins, and monumental memorializing. There are people who certainly understand how suffering takes place; there’s much we can learn from them. That’s a point that Souvenir makes, and one that’s still worth making.

Whew!: After a few weeks

Whew!: After a few weeks of fits and starts, a full day of editing followed by a full week of output-to-video frustration, I finally got the “finished” version of Souvenir (November 2001) on tape tonight. It’s not drastically different; in fact, it may be hard to spot the differences at all from the preview screening version. But it feels very different to me. Except that I’m kind of burned out on it tonight, I feel really good about it.
One change I’m still mulling over: a new song under the first scene. It’s called “I’m Coming Home on the Morning Train,” an acapella gospel song performed in 1942 by the Rev. E. M. Martin and Pearline Jones. While I’ve had it on CD for several years, it only occurred to me recently to try it in the movie. It turns out to have been recorded–like so many other incredible artifacts–in the field by Alan Lomax, the godson of American folk music (assuming his father John is the godfather, you see). Lomax just passed away over the weekend. Here is his obituary in the NY Times.

The Look of DV: Tadpole vs. Full Frontal

“The advantage of [shooting on digital video] is that nobody knows, or at least cares, that you’re making a movie; the disadvantage…is that the end product appears to have been filmed through a triple layer of bubble wrap.”
– from Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of Tadpole, the latest from IFC Productions’ InDigEnt.
Compare this to the complicated process Steven Soderbergh used to get “enhanced graininess” on his new DV movie, Full Frontal (from an apple.com article):

Finish
FotoKem received the final cut of the original movie in PAL video, de-interlaced it and converted it to files using a disk array. The files were shipped across the network to their film recorder, which had been calibrated to shoot on 5298 film to enhance graininess. A two-stop push during negative processing further enhanced grain and contrast. A double chrome-reversal process was used to create the final negative and print. The 4:3 images were matted and converted to a1:66:1 (European) widescreen aspect ratio for theatrical projection. Fine-grade bubble wrap was then placed over the projector lens at the press preview.

An artist friend loaned me

An artist friend loaned me his copy of the 1968 underground classic film, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. I’d seen clips of the film before, and it played at Sundance one year when I was partying there. But this William Greaves landmark is pretty amazing to watch. The film is a combination of “screen tests” or early scenes of a feature film and the “behind the camera” documentary of the making of the feature. As those familiar with Souvenir (November 2001) can appreciate, the contrast between scripted&unscripted, the use of documentary tools to tell a story, etc. are ideas the film explores. Well, in Symbio, Greaves doesn’t just explore these ideas, he riffs on them with amazing fluency (Miles Davis soundtrack >> obligatory jazz metaphor).
Earlier, Olafur (another artist friend) and I grabbed some milkshakes during his whirlwind US tour. He’s reaching an amazing level in his work, with a sustained fluency and engagement over a daunting number of complex projects, almost all at once. Even as I focus intently on Souvenir and almost everything about it (finetuning, critical reception, marketing and promotion, the potential impact on the WTC Memorial debate), he made a really good point that it’s the process, the continuous production that’s actually more important. A first project is a trial/test; the second is a reaction/correction; the third is the first real coherent/comprehensive attempt; it’s really the fourth project that has the greatest potential/expectation. A very useful perspective to be reminded of. And one that hits home these days when I’m regularly statuschecking myself and my longer term prospects/plans.

Music: Spent most of the

Music: Spent most of the morning following up on clearing music for Souvenir (November 2001). The process is moving along well. One thing I realized, though: I pointed a couple of the record company folks to this site to find further information about the film. (“Please visit greg.org for updates of me inviting you to visit greg.org.”) Is there some kind of Weblog Heisenberg Principle, where, by weblogging something, you alter it? If Wu Tang disses the movie, I guess we’ll know.
New Project: (Should I have a codename?) Seein’ as how I’m working on an animated film, I know I’m going to see Richard Linklater‘s A Waking Life, a seemingly inspired (or at least inspiring) combo of DV filmmaking and paradigm-shifting, computer-aided animation. I want to like it, although I’m not sure I will; I like Linklater, to be sure. Even so, this review on DVD Journal is so damn funny to read, it almost doesn’t matter how the movie is.

Today the LMDC released its

Today the LMDC released its six concepts for rebuilding the World Trade Center. Visit the LMDC concepts website for details. One thing that strikes me immediately is how they’re all titled “Memorial _____” (fill in the blank with Square, Promenade, Plaza, Garden Triangle, or Park). You could say this forefronts the memorial as a priority of the rebuilding efforts, but it also seems like a way to avert criticism of the process and its preliminary results. By innoculating every concept with the name “Memorial,” it takes the memorial off the table, regardless of how the memorial actually plays out in a concept. (There’s no Memorial Mall concept, even though I’m sure those Australians would happily build it in a second if they could. Maybe one of the concepts should be renamed Memorial Station or something? We’ll see.)
I am inclined to read this cynically because of my general disapproval of the process to date: the highly politicized nature of the LMDC itself (and its ultimate status as a Port Authority organ), the fundamental mediocrity of the (urban and architectural) talents brought to bear so far, and the artificial-seeming public participation in early decision-making. Ultimately, I have little confidence that the LMDC (as evidenced in its stated mission and in its aborted RFP process) can create/facilitate the type of resilient, rallying vision I think is critical to actually rebuilding our city, both physically and psychically. (One of the most extensively described requirements of the RFP is for a bus-idling station. Not exactly the stuff of soaring spirits, unless you’re the Port Authority.)
It’s a few minutes later. Don’t expect a phoenix; that’s a pigeon set to rise from the ashes. The near interchangeability of the six “concepts” is staggering. I am sure that the Port Authority’s fixation on recreating the WTC site’s previous program is the single biggest mistake they can make. Not an entirely blank slate, not a dealbreaker. But for the PA’s own political/fiefdom/leasing income priorities to so overpower all the rest of the concerns, THAT MUST CHANGE.
In any case, the concepts are on display at the Federal Hall National Memorial, on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets (across from my gym, oddly enough).

Yesterday on Studio 360, host

Yesterday on Studio 360, host Kurt Andersen lamented on the lack of risk-taking and originality in “art and entertainment,” and he tarred the television networks, Hollywood, and the artists at Documenta with the same brush. [Listen to his commentary here; it’s the 7/13/02 show.] While I’m a fan of both Studio 360 and Andersen, I can’t help but think he’s wrong, at least about Documenta. (He gets full credit on the other two fish in the barrel, though.)
On questions of “staggeringly similar” of art in the exhibit (“serious, photo-journalistic, documentary”) the curators should be identified (either credited or blamed, depending on your POV) as a moving force. Even if Alan Sekula’s photographs grow tiresome after the tenth gallery or so (which it does), the show cannot be dismissed as “grim, unchallenging images full of conventional horrors and the standard villains,” as Andersen tries to do. He despairs, I despaired. As I’ve posted before, Documenta certainly wasn’t the feelgood show of the year. There was a lot to be depressed about. Or to be moved by. Documenta had plenty, including work and ideas that were both challenging and beautiful.
Andersen yearns for the reemergence of the “contrarian genius, dreamers of odball beauty”-style artists, who he imagines are the true “risktakers” of our culture. But having been heavily involved (and invested) in the contemporary art world all through the last economic boom, I’d have to say Andersen may be the dreamer; the “art establishment” has been plenty safe, corporate- and collector-friendly for a loong time.