Category: art

So funny, last night at the Brooklyn Museum, Andrew Russeth was saying as how some late Warhol paintings look remarkably like David Salle.

Villaca Caja, 1929, at Galerie Hopkins-Custot
And I was flipping through The Art Newspaper’s Basel daily edition, and saying this Francis Picabia painting at Hopkins-Custot looks remarkably like David Salle.
Day 3: Christoph Grunenberg, director of Tate Liverpool, on his pick of Art Basel [tan, pdf]

Ian Wilson’s conversation-based art practice reminded Ben of the introduction to Asif Agha’s 2006 book, Language and Social Relations. An excerpt:

…It is therefore all the more important to see that utterances and discourses are themselves material objects made through human activity — made, in a physical sense, out of vibrating columns of air, ink on paper, pixels in electronic media — which exercise real effects upon our senses, minds, and modes of social organization, and to learn to understand and analyze these effects. It is true that that utterances and discourses are artifacts of a more or less evanescent kind (speech more than writing). But these are questions of duration, not materiality, and certainly not of degree or kind of cultural consequence….

Definitely worth reading the whole piece at Ben’s site, and noting the 60s art context in which Wilson was operating, where artists were actively seeking to supplant the commodified physical object of art with its unbuyable, unsellable concept. In interviews I’ve seen [quoted in Anne Rorimer’s 1995 MoCA catalogue, Reconsidering the Art Object], Wilson talked about his Oral Communication series as art as “speech itself,” and “art spoken,” a construct which evolved from his earliest pieces, Time [begun in 1968], which seemed to be about the process of conversation itself.
But that was also 40 years ago. A lot of non-material art has been made, bought, and sold since then, and I wonder how Wilson’s contemporary continuation or revisiting of these Oral Communication works differs from the originals. And how it differs from any sort of conversational situation which involves one party paying another for the…the what? the time? the privilege? the experience? Is it like a shrink? Or could the payment come from outside the conversation, and in advance? UBS is proud to present Ian Wilson in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist?
Speech Objects [emvergeoning.com]

I’ve long admired Ian Wilson’s conversation-based art works, though for years I’ve wondered if selling conversations as art doesn’t complicate one’s daily interactions with people, sort of a conceptual version of how doctors always get hit up for medical advice at parties.
As Sarah Douglas reports from Art Basel, though, it seems Mr. Wilson has solved the problem, by having all the conversations he wants, and only selling the documentation. His invoice/certificates are like the commemorative photos on Splash Mountain, available after the fact for your purchasing convenience:

[Wilson’s work] consists of a small room in which the artist conducts half-hour conversations on the heady subject of “the absolute” with anyone who makes an appointment for the privilege. “Oh, that’s very Tino Sehgal,” remarked one fairgoer. “No, no, it’s very Marina Abramovic!” countered another.

Holy crap, people. Could they even find enough people in Basel capable of sustaining a 30-minute conversation on one topic? The guy’s been doing this stuff since before Tino Sehgal was born.
Circles, Nudity, and the Carnivalesque Rule at Basel’s Art Unlimited and Statements Sections [artinfo via @andrewrusseth]

I find Gerhard Richter’s squeegee paintings to be both endlessly fascinating and seemingly endless. I don’t sweat too much when I think about the one I didn’t buy when I could have; it’s just so hard to decide that this, this one right here, in front of me, is THE one, not the next one I might see and like even better, oh, let’s just wait and see what the next batch is like. Maybe that’s the key to understanding them, the way they thwart or mock such attempts at aesthetic hierarchies.

That said, this one, (Abstraktes Bild (666-5)), from 1988, coming up at Sotheby’s evening sale in London, is particularly beautiful, and has a great exhibition history:

…It is the last of a small cycle of five works in this format executed in 1988, one of which is on permanent loan to the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Abstraktes Bild (666-1))
while another is in the Kunsthalle in Emden (Abstraktes Bild (666-2)). The present work is the resolved conclusion of a lengthy process of creation, as described by Dietmar Elger: “the actual making of an abstract painting, which can stretch out over weeks, involves incessant activity, back and forth between opposite poles, with no single element or value permitted to dominate. Richter once described his process for the abstract works as “a multitude of Yes/ No decision, with a Yes to end it all” (Ibid). It also marks one of the earliest instances where Richter started to rescind the use of wide brushstrokes in his abstract work in favour of a rubber squeegee to smear and smudge the paint material across the canvas. This autograph method has since become synonymous with his remarkable output.
[rhapsodic waxing about the harmonies of ultramarine and “the wall power” of Abstract Expressionism removed, but you can read it in the catalogue]
Richter’s working practice has been described as remarkably efficient: he begins by placing a number of white primed canvases around the walls of his studio, eventually working on several of them simultaneously and reworking them until they are completely harmonized, which has been compared by Peter Sager as being “like a chess player simultaneously playing on several boards” (Peter Sager, ‘Mit der Farbe denken’, Zeitmagazin 49, 28th November 1986, p. 34).
Tracts of colour are dragged across the canvas using a rubber squeegee, so that the various strains of malleable, semi-liquid pigment suspended in oil are fused together and smudged first into the canvas, and then layered on top of each other as the paint strata accumulate.
Richter has said “In this process I don’t actually reveal what was beneath. If I wanted to do that, I would have to think what to reveal…that is, pictures that might as well be produced direct…The process of applying, destroying and layering serves only to achieve a more varied technical repertoire in picture-making” (Dietmar Elger, Op. Cit., p. 267).
The painting undergoes multiple variations in which each new accretion brings colour and textural juxtapositions until they are completed, as Richter himself declares, “there is no more that I can do to them, when they exceed me, or they have something that I can no longer keep up with” (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988, p. 108).

June 28, Lot 47: Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (666-5), 1988, est. 1.5-2.5m GBP [sothebys.com]

I’m as excited as the next guy that there’s an app for the Yves Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn. I bought it the first day to try it out. I did not expect it to be as cool as the Yves Klein app in my head, which is a Brushes-like painting program where the choice of brushes consists of a flamethrower or a tiny, naked 20-year-old Frenchwoman. I would pay $5 for that right now, and send $5 App Store gift codes to a hundred friends.

As it turns out, the app is so mediocre, I started planning my sobering review almost immediately. Alas, I wasn’t quick enough to get ahead of the wave of hype which has crashed on top of the app, including, most prominently, a fluff piece in the Washington Post. The most eyerolling nontroversy so far is from @museumnerd, who tweetwhined about an Android version: “isn’t @hirshhorn promoting Apple products?” [Yes, just like they promote Weyerhauser products when they print their brochures on paper.]
Now it’s important to get some real, constructive feedback out there early, try and nip the horrible practices in the bud before the museum app world is flooded with poorly designed brochureware.
To be fair to the HIrshhorn and the Smithsonian–and even a little bit to @museumnerd–the cross-platform app development imperative lies at the heart of the Klein app’s problem. But I’ll get to that in a minute, after taking a quick look at what the Klein app is, and where its greatest failings lie:
The app contains early iPod-like nested directory/menus of the exhibition and Klein’s various bodies of work; a timeline, and basic map/visitor info for the Museum. At the end of each branch is an image of a work. There are a couple of film clips, but I could not get them to play. Throughout, most of the text consists of quotes from Klein himself.

[Thanks to a single image of Klein and a bodypainted model at the Monotone Symphony performance [above], the app carries a warning that nudity makes it suitable for 12yo+. And just like that, the Hirshhorn app corners the 13-yo boy iPhone user demographic.]
The text is incredibly small; the size cannot be changed. The volume of text, combined with the number of menu items and–most of all–the amount of screen space given over to a static header and a navigation footer, require scrolling to do or find anything. Images are zoomable, but they turn out to be merely web-resolution, so they immediately dissolve into pixels rather than allow any meaningful exploration. For Klein’s large paintings and close-up surfaces, this is a dealbreaker. Ditto for maps of the Museum, which don’t fit the screen.

I understand that most of the content is taken from a documentary playing in the gallery. This content, which would barely fill a three-fold gallery handout, turns out to be way too much. But the real problem isn’t the Hirshhorn’s 10 pounds of content; it’s with the 5 lb bag.
The Museum built their app using Toura, a multi-platform mobile tour guide content management system from a New York-based startup. Museums just insert their content into Toura’s cloud-based template system, hit publish, and voila! Apps for Everybody! Toura’s model is to give away their easy-to-use development tools for free, and then split the app revenue with the museums and other tourist and travel site operators later.
To museums with no budgets and thinly staffed IT and design departments, a free, insta-app is as compelling as a 10-week, 5-figure app dev project is unworkable. I can’t see that changing soon, and until someone proves otherwise by making a fortune with my nude-avatar-paintbrush Anthropometries app idea, I suspect $0.99 repackaged brochures will be the only game in town for a while.
Which is too bad. Because Toura’s standardized design is so suboptimal and user-unfriendly, that it’s almost better to do without. Especially if it’s as poorly executed on an Android as it is on an iPhone. I checked out the only other Toura-based app available, too, for Pace Gallery’s Conrad Shawcross installation in the IBM Atrium on 57th Street. It’s marginally better, with less text, more iPhone-style slideshows, and working video, but it’s still poorly designed, with tons of wasted screenspace, and no content that can’t be found or done online.
For the biggest multiplatform bang for the buck, then, is seems like museums should focus on making their websites more accommodating to mobile browsing. And for the app-happy museum directors trying to get some PR, put out a free app that is basically a portal to your mobile-optimized site. You can then program it right alongside your web content management.
But this seems like the hurdle, both from a development and a user standpoint: if an app can effectively be replaced by an exhibition webpage or a gallery handout, then it probably should not exist. And it certainly should not exist as a paid product.
Of course, this calculation might be different for the Hirshhorn, a museum whose small bookstore maintains a large section devoted to the selling of its own mail–including old catalogues and exhibition brochures from other institutions.

The day I watched the video of Jeff Koons’ crew wrapping the vinyl decals on his BMW Art Car was also the day I surfed across Little Lamb, Richmond artist/musician Sara Gossett’s awesome blogspot compendium of psychedelia [which has lately been supplanted by a tumblr.]
Home for Christmas, Sara was presented with her dad’s collection of Eye Magazines, from which she culled just a few of the most incredible countercultural images. Eye was Hearst magazine’s demographic play for the youth market of 1968-9, the MTV Generation’s parents. It was the Domino and Vitals of its day, with all that entailed. Which means it lasted for just 15 issues.
Among Sara’s finds: this incredible car-decorating photoshoot. Look familiar? No, seriously. Look familiar? Let me help read you read the caption: “Finished! Time: four hours and seven minutes (the seven minutes to blow up the balloons).” [emphasis added on the most Koonstastic part]

Alas, as a visually inspired type, Sara had no text, or info about the shoot, or even what issue it was in. With some digging, though, I think I found it: Eye, Vol. 1, Issue #1 from, wow, March 1968, the September 10th of the Sixties:
“The Almost-Instant-Flamboyant-Fluorescent-Decal-Decorated Car”
Like I said, sound familiar? I asked a friend who is well-versed in such things, and he identified the car as, not a BMW, but a Lancia Fulvia. If any was involved, the artist’s name is currently unknown. But I bought the cheaper of the two copies of the magazine from the web, so we should know in 5-8 business days.
UPDATE: Uh-oh, could this be true? From a completed ebay.ch auction: “Why is this Man Smiling? Peter Max – 3 pages of Peter’s artwork on cars“!

Eye Magazine, 1968 [hello little lamb, thanks sara]

It’s a testament to the PR-fed, context-free media machine, I guess, that Olafur Eliasson, the last artist to make a BMW Art Car, goes entirely unmentioned in the promotions of Jeff Koons’ iteration. [One exception: Richard Chang at the Times.] Or maybe it’s a testament to Olafur’s machine: he gets to have his over-the-top, ice matrix experiment, but he never has to be trotted out and lined up on the lawn at a car show as another corporate trophy.

True, Koons’ hyper-graphic BMW is also more in the tradition of earlier, painted Art Cars by the likes of Calder and Warhol. His design, while dazzling and generally awesome, also feels deeply insignificant. It makes clear the difference between art made of cars and cars decorated by artists.

Which I don’t mean in a bad way, understand. Far from it. Significance is not always a virtue.

The breakthrough of the Koons BMW [which I have to laugh at when I say it, because it’s a car dealer in Virginia. There’s Koons Ford and Koons Nissan, too, and all these cars around DC have the Koons signature on the back, which makes me smile in traffic sometimes, imagining they’re all a big, banal, found object edition.] Anyway, the breakthrough of the Koons BMW is technological. It’s the opposite of Olafur’s impossibility; you can almost literally replicate it anywhere.
As this making of video shows, the design is a vinyl wrap, designed and printed in Koons’ studio, and with a double layer of clearcoat. Everyone should have a giant vinyl wrap printer in his house.

The design templates for standard vinyl wraps are widely available. Judging by the mom&poppiness of the businesses wrapping their ads on Scions these days, it can’t be that expensive. All that’s lacking, obviously, is an artist’s touch.
There are now no barriers to an artist making his own vinyl wrap design, and selling it in edition. Be sure the design is flexible enough to look good on whatever car models collectors might have. [Or you could make them work a little bit by limiting it to, say, Range Rovers.] You’d probably let it be reprinted as needed, but also limit the certificate to one car at a time. And consider offering some zipcode exclusivity for sales; you wouldn’t want any awkward moments in the parking lot at the Atlantic Golf Club in Bridgehampton. Or maybe it’d be interesting, who knows?
If Editions Schellmann can do a series of editions of artists’ doors, and if Art Production Fund can do shower curtains, why can’t some enterprising foundry publish a whole set of artists’ vinyl car wraps? It would not be significant, but it could be awesome.