Can I just say, I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t know what’s left to accomplish? I mean, how can I top the thrill of getting to write for Cabinet Magazine? I just don’t know.
I’ve had a puppydog crush on Cabinet since Issue 3, where they interviewed John Cliett about the implications of his definitive/exclusive photos of Walter deMaria’s Lightning Field. Then there was the magazine’s plan in 2003 to lease the ten tiny, lost slivers of surveying-mistake-generated land that Gordon Matta-Clark once bought from the New York City government for his unrealized project, Reality Properties: Fake Estates. What began as an offhand bemusement grew into an exhibition at the Queens Museum and a book–and an important contribution to the resurgence of Matta-Clark’s influence on the art world. It can be self-conscious and super-nerdy, but the magazine consistently finds overlooked and convincing perspectives on the culture and art taking shape around us.
Whenever I read it, I was never able to imagine how to write one of those Cabinet essays. What offbeat subject did I have a slightly too obsessive familiarity with that a dozen art history phd’s didn’t already turn into 300-page dissertations? Then guest editor Jonathan Allen and Sina Najafi emailed me out of the blue, asking if I’d like to interview Scott Sforza about stagecraft for the special issue on Magic. Uh, YEAH.
Sforza never came to the phone, though, so instead, I ended up with an attempt to put a bit of political and visual context around the exercise of control of the vantage point. I also threw in some discussion of the impact of the switch from binocular [eyes] to monocular [camera/lens] vision and the construction and interpretation of media images. For good measure, I connected some dots from Sforza to Andrea del Pozzo to the spiritualist photographers of the 19th century to Jan Dibbets to Michelangelo Antonioni. Susan Sontag and Gilles Deleuze provided much of the theoretical seasoning, along with a rather candid Karl Rove, circa early 2001. To top it off, there are the incredible anti-Sforzian photographs of GWB’s visit to Monolia shot by Iwan Baan.
I tell you this now because the article isn’t online, so you should all go re-up your subscriptions pronto so you can read it. I still can’t believe it’s there.
Cabinet 26: Perspective Correction: The beguiling stagecraft of American politics [cabinetmagazine.org]
Category: art
“Viewfinder” Opens July 14th At The Henry In Seattle
There’s only a partial list of artists included, but the premise of this show holds a lot of promise. Though I would hope that assimilation has more to do with exploration and manipulation, not just funny camera angles:
Since photography’s inception, our world has become an ever more visual culture, where deciphering media images is an increasingly important form of literacy. Viewfinder provocatively suggests that we see photographically and that contemporary artists assimilate the camera’s mechanics as they compose technically and conceptually complex work.
Viewfinder runs from July 14 to December 30 at the Henry Art Gallery [henryart.org via archinect]
UbuWeb Sitdown With Archinect
There’s an excellent, loong interview on Archinect with Kenneth Goldsmith, the artist, poet, dj, theory karaokeist [?], professor, and web developer behind the incomparable UbuWeb.
Ubu began with just texts, and as collections and formats and partners came their way, it’s expanded into other media: sound, performance documentation, artist film and experimental video. The focus remains resolutely on the undeservedly inaccessable and out of print/circulation.
Goldsmith: “My only regret though is that there aren’t fifteen or twenty UbuWebs.” They talk about theater, dance, and architecture Ubus, but I confess, I have a hard time seeing how those might come together as well as Ubu’s collection of conceptual/concrete poetry. Could happen, though. Anyone have some unlimited bandwidth and server space? There may be a MacArthur in it for you.
UbuWeb Vu – Kenneth Goldsmith [archinect]
Huge Props
So if you’re going to see the Richard Serra exhibition at MoMA–and you should, it’s really quite spectacular–you should see it when the museum is closed, because then you have the whole place to yourself.
A friend John and I went last Tuesday morning, and we started on the sixth floor. By the second room, it was obvious that the experience of the show was really incredible. Serra’s an artist who, by design, almost prevents you from seeing multiple examples of his work; they’re site-specific–not just permanently installed in or made for, but actually about the site and the experience of being in it. By the second Serra, then, you realize you’re in rarified territory. And the first three room-filling works you encounter at the entrance of the sixth floor space really makes this clear.
The silence was shortlived; there was a crowd of middle school students sitting on the floor in the next gallery, which was crowded with very early works. I wanted to go grab each of these kids by the shoulders and shake him, saying “Do you know where you are? Remember this!” But I figured they’d figure it out by the time they got downstairs.
Was it Peter Schejldahl who mentioned how sad and domesticated the corral of prop pieces looked? I’m afraid he was right. I’m also afraid I couldn’t imagine any other way MoMA, with its constant crowds, could show the precarious work. These delicate, human-scale pieces are not the Serras around which the new building was designed, and it shows. [The hands-down best prop piece I’ve ever seen, by the way, was in the office of a dealer on 24th street. It was a square metal sheet held up by a roll that sat on the floor like a lead umbrella. The fleshy soft surface was in seductively pristine condition, too, a testament to a life in careful storage, I guess.]
The massive second floor galleries, where Serra’s early lead and timber scatter piece seemed so lost in front of the Twombly when the museum reopened, now seemed complete. The torqued ellipses and ribbons of Serra’s late/current period are, as John aptly pointed out, our real Peace Dividend. They’re made possible–and made–by advances in Military Industrial design software and manufacturing. Prowling around NASA in the past, I’ve seen utterly utilitarian instruments, objects, and components whose stunning aesthetics would drive a hundred MFA’s into the web design business.
Serra seems like one of the few artists to make a sustained, legitimate attempt at actually engaging the means of production of the Cold War. And when you consider the price tag of the new MoMA as a purpose-built context machine for these works compared to, say, the Pentagon’s weekly expenditure in Iraq, the ROI is off the charts.
All that said, my favorite piece in the show was not, in fact, one of the sexy, transporting, transformative curved mazes on two, but a much earlier piece on six. [It could be, but it’s not To Lift, the 1967 piece made of sheet rubber, which is easily the most elegant.] Circuit II, [1972-86] is a giant prop piece which has been in MoMA’s collection for a while. Four straight steel plates are wedged into the corners of a room, creating an unsettling, compressed void where they would intersect. Circuit II was installed when I first moved to New York; it was in the Philip Johnson annex gallery known as the basketball court, which, at the time, had been the largest space in the Modern. The simplicity of the execution and the visceral spatial experience left a real impression on my fragile little just-graduated college mind. It was a kind of non-academic awe that my skeptical art history professor’s cursory lessons on contemporary art had not prepared me for.
I’d like to say I felt that sensation again, but to be honest, the new sixth floor galleries are so high, and the beautiful skylight overhead was so open, Serra’s once-overwhelming plates felt a bit quaint and conceptual, the idea of awe instead of awe itself. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s not so much the work, but my own spatial nostalgia, the kinaesthetic memory of it, that I’m loving so much, that thrill of paradigm-shifting discovery when you’re young and stupid–and your paradigms are due for several hefty shifts. Maybe Richard Serra’s works are not just shapers of space; after you’ve encountered them once, they become manipulators of time, too.
Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years [moma.org, thanks alex]
Ferran Adria Exhibiting In Documenta’s ‘G Pavilion’
Holy smokes. Artforum reports that chef Ferran Adrià is participating in this year’s Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, by leaving a table for two open at El Bulli every night for exhibition visitors. El Bulli is in Costa Brava, outside Barcelona. Barcelona, Spain.
D12 director Roger Buergel will select two people at random every day during the 100-day run of the exhibition, who will receive airfare and dinner. El Bulli is officially known in the Documenta program as “the G pavilion.”
[Though judging by David Velasco’s predictably self-important Artforum reportage, a free ticket away from Kassel is just what this Documenta requires.]
Adrià’s G Pavilion [artforum]
Adrià traslada su participación en la Documenta de Kassel a “El Bulli” [lavanguardia.es, google trans]
image of El Bulli’s beet ribbons via chez pim’s stunning photos. [chezpim and flickr]
Untitled (America)
It’s actually happening. Ever since it was first announced that Felix Gonzalez-Torres would be the artist representing the US at the Venice Biennale, I’ve kind of held my breath to see if it would actually come off. And it has.
The New York Times plays to the ambiguity of meaning and open-ended experience in Felix’s work, which I guess is diplomatic. But to anyone who delves into Felix’s work and the politically charged ideas that underpinned it, I can’t see how this exhibition of these particular works, which had to be approved by the State Department, can be read as anything but an unfettered indictment of the present administration, its policies, and the culture of fear, authoritarianism, corruption, and bigotry that it foments and feeds upon.
Part of me is baffled that curator Nancy Spector and the advisory committee who recommended Felix’s inclusion “managed” to “get the work by” the State Department. But the more realpolitik side thinks that it’s just evidence of the total disregard and disinterest the administration has for something as irrelevant and inconsequential as art. In some random gallery somewhere. In Italy. Made by a dead Cuban homo. And fawned over by a passel of rich effete liberals from New York and who else? That’s it.
So really, it’s like two indictments, pushed up against each other, a damning pair.
And speaking of pairs, the posthumous pools look absolutely stunning. I’d wondered and doubted about them when I first heard of the project, but a while back, Andrea Rosen and I were talking about them, and their validity, not just as work, but as Felix’s work, really sunk in. Now to see them–or to see pictures of them, we’re not at the opening this year–they are spectacular. And to remember that the original commission for them was scuttled when a university official learned Gonzalez-Torres was gay, well, they fit all too well with the rest of the show.
Hats off to flickr user SophieGrel, who is the first to post any real photos of the Biennale, including the beautiful detail above of the pools in the rain. Another favorite, which will no doubt be repeated over the next five months, is the abandoned posters around Venice.
I remember realizing I was getting closer to Felix’s show at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris as the concentration of people carrying free, rolled up posters increased. The inverse, seeing how far and how long people will carry the posters before they decide to leave them behind, is an interesting metaphor for something, too, I’m sure. What that is, I’ll leave to your own interpretation.
Previously: 1985 Act Up 1989 FU State Dept. 1996 Died 2007 Venice Biennale
Death and Venice
“On Politics And Art”, transcript of a 1995 interview Rob Storr did with Felix Gonzalez-Torres,
Diamonds Are Forever! TODAY ONLY!
First things first: if someone DOES buy Damien Hirst’s diamond-and-platinum skull, it won’t be for $100 million. Any shlub billionaire walking in off the street would get 10% off, and any actual collector would get 20%. So if someone’s been around the art block already, that’s where he’ll start talking.
Second, by floating a $20 million cost figure, Hirst is taking a page–and a number, even–from Christo’s playbook that likely has more to do with setting a context for potential buyers than with the actual outlay.
Hirst told the Times, “The markup on paint and canvas is a hell of a lot more than on this diamond piece.” but the difference is far less than it first appears.
8,160 diamonds but only 1,100 carats, those are some small stones. A quick glance at the Rapaport Report will tell you what dealers would pay for 1,000 carats of 0.125 carat D-F stones. [0.23 carat D IF stones are $4,900/carat retail on BlueNile.com. Comparable 0.5c stones are double that, so let’s assume comparable 0.125 stones are half, or $2,500/c retail.] Depending on how far back along distribution chain Hirst was able to reach, the actual cost–or if you’re cold about it, the actual “value”–of his diamonds could be a half, a third, a quarter of that.
Diamonds, it turns out, are a lot like art: heavy on perceived, light on actual, value. They’re are no more or less intrinsically valuable than dead flies, another medium Hirst has employed for his art. The only difference is the cultural assumptions of decadence or disgust attributed to them [and given the bloody, terrorist- and tyranny-funding origins of so many African diamonds, decadence and disgust aren’t mutually exclusive.]
Apart from their subjective value, then diamonds and art share an aura of exclusivity. Which turns out to be almost entirely artificial as well. Diamonds have been historically rare because of their geographical concentration and the difficulties in extracting them, but the DeBeers cartel has also manipulated the supply and perceived scarcity of diamonds for over 100 years.
Even as diamond stocks from beyond DeBeers’ direct control have entered the market, it remains in dealers’ and suppliers’ economic interests to maintain the DeBeers-created industrial and distribution system–and margins. But those monopolistic days are numbered.
In 2003, Wired reported on two companies who were developing technologies to manufacture flawless diamonds for use initially in jewelry, but the real goal is to revolutionize the semiconductor industry by making diamonds economical enough to replace silicon. From there who knows how cheap diamonds could become?
Before mass production techniques were developed in the 1890’s, aluminum was a rare and precious substance, too. For example, in 1858, Charles Christofle made an extravagant centerpiece from aluminum for Emperor Napoleon III’s Chateau de Compiègne. By the turn of the century, aluminum was being used for luggage. Now I have an aluminum centerpiece decorating my table: a pyramid of empties made for me by Diet Coke.
If there’s any significance at all to Hirst’s skull, it’s as a symbol of a far-reaching, manipulative cartel of dubious ethics at the center of an elaborately collusive web of mutually beneficial delusion. Whether that’s the diamond market or the art market or both, as subjects go, it’s not bad at all.
On the bright side, Hirst may be onto something in his quest for museological immortality after all, even if our grandchildren are paving their driveways with diamonds a hundred years from now. By employing master craftsmen with royal warrants to create an object of superlative, if fleeting, value, an object that has been the subject of religious, artistic, and cultural interpretation for millennia, and an object that doesn’t take up even a fraction of the vitrine space of, say, a tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde–Hirst may have guaranteed that at least one piece of his art will be shown in a museum a hundred years from now.
Update: Hirst suggested the British Museum would be a good spot for his skull. A reader reminded me that the British Museum is the home of the Crystal Skull, which was a controversial hit in the Age of Aquarius [ie., the Seventies]. That’s when no less an authority than Leonard Nimoy suggested the only way the Mayans–or was it the Atlantisans?–could have carved it 3,600 years ago was with extraterrestrial help. Turns out it was manufactured in Germany in the 19th century. And like all the world’s Crystal Mystery Skulls, it originated with a French art dealer in Mexico named Eugene Boban.
If the British Museum is looking to deepen their holdings of shiny, over-hyped skulls made by charlatans that lie irrelevant and forgotten within thirty years, Hirst may be in luck. Then again, judging by the similarities between the Museum’s photo of the Crystal Skull and Hirst’s own images, it looks like that was his plan all along. And he’s only out a couple million pounds to pull it off? Brilliant.
My So-Called Audience
When I heard that Christopher DeLaurenti used body mics and a mini-disc-equipped vest to make his surreptitious recordings of orchestral intermissions, I was like, “Half the recording is probably the squeaks of his leather vest. What he’s actually capturing isn’t just music; it’s his experience of listening.”
As I read on in the NY Times article about his new CD, I was pleased to learn the “Seattle-based ‘sound artist’ [quotes? please, this isn’t Seattle -ed.] and composer” agreed:
The recording itself became a performance, he said, because every movement of his body would alter the way the sound was captured. “I became entranced in doing it,” he said.
The illicit nature of the project not only informed the recording process, it provides the aural rhythm, a 6bpm directional bassline:
He honed a technique of often shifting his posture and moving around. “Most people are not observant and rarely look at one thing for longer than 10 seconds,” he said.
Any John Cage reference or influence is always welcome around these parts, of course, and the transformation of ambient sound into music is one of my personal favorites.
But Cage also had an interest in the transformed roles of peformer, composer, and audience. In a 1972 interview, he said:
…more and more in my performances, I try to bring about a situation in which there is no difference between the audience and the performers. And I’m not speaking of audience participation in something designed by the composer, but rather am I speaking of the music which arises through the activity of both performers and so-called audience. . .
When a piece like 4’33” is ultimately peformed/composed/experienced in each listener’s ears and head, does it still make sense to keep using an implicitly passive term like “audience”? Does it matter that DeLaurenti declares himself an artist, not just an audience member? Does it matter that he published his work? Or that he released a commercial recording?
DeLaurenti’s project also reminds me of another artist of the experiential whose practice is also technically illegal: the videocam-wielding moviegoer Jon Routson.
Routson used to shoot video while he was in the movies, not to create a bootleg of the feature film–justifiably afraid of getting caught, Routson usually didn’t even look through the viewfinder of his camera, which turned the secreen into a skewampus trapezoid–but to document the experience of watching a movie. Ambient, quotidian life became art; art was what the artist did–including sitting through three screenings of Mel Gibson’s The Passion .
Looking back on how he developed his early studio practice, Bruce Nauman told an interviewer [pdf] that he wondered, “… what an artist does when left alone in the studio. My conclusion was that I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.” And in the cases like DeLaurenti and Routson the studio is expendable.
But artists like Vito Acconci, who made video art from his daily doings, and at-home dad/artist Guy Ben Ner, who transforms primary caregiving into production by enlisting his kids as characters and crew in his video works, have it easy.
The two bootleg guys face a unique challenge because their experience involves consuming–and recording–someone else’s intellectual property. The most remarkable thing about the Times’ intermission article is how laid back almost all the orchestra spokesmen are about DeLaurenti’s recording. Granted, no one’s going to go ballistic to the Times in a culture feature, but it’s like winning the Turner Prize compared to the draconian treatment that Routson faced.
Maryland criminalized videotaping in a movie theater while the Baltimore artist was still making his works. He moved production to New York for a while, but the film industry’s aggressive campaign against ‘piracy’ and the subsequent changes to federal law ultimately forced him to abandon his series.
So all the world’s a stage, and we are merely gloriously players. And playwrights. And composers. And artists. Except that large swaths of our production–our lives–are declared the exclusive property of the expensively counselled copyright and trademark industrial complex. All the world’s a store, and we are merely consumers. Meanwhile the cameravans prowling our city streets are from Google. All the buildings on the Sunset Strip seems really quaint right about now.
The Concerts Found Onstage While Everyone Else Takes a Break [nyt]
Now Fit To Print: Holland Cotter’s Hippie Flashback
Look, wasn’t born in time for this “Human Be-In” of which the Grey-haired Ones speak, but I own shagpad.com, so don’t think I’m not down with the groovy, psychedelic 60’s. But if going to the Whitney triggered a flashback to my drug-addled youth, I don’t think I’d write about it in the New York Times:
Say you were a middle-class American white kid in 1964. What were you listening to? Jan and Dean, the Shangri-Las. Surfers and bikers. Then you and some friends see the Beatles on their first American tour. They’re so new: four skinny, pale, dandyish guys with femme haircuts singing “Love me do.” The girls in the audience scream. The boys cheer. Ringo shakes his mop and the boys scream too. Hysteria. It’s a high.
Four years later the Beatles are in India, and you’re in college, at a concert, smoking grass and this truly unusual woman named Janis is swinging her hair across the stage. She’s commanding you to take a little piece of her heart. She’s white but sounds black, and she’s reckless, eyes closed, right at the edge of the stage. She’ll fall! Does she care? Outside there’s a war, and the world feels weird, but not in here, tonight.
Then you’re tripping, and Jimi Hendrix is up there on some other stage with this tremendous light show cued to the pulse of the cosmos exploding behind him. No flowers now. No mellow. He strangles the national anthem, then ignites his guitar. Someone behind or beside you whispers: Detroit is on fire. A Buddhist monk torched himself in Saigon. People are making draft-card bonfires. Flames are spilling out of the music, spreading off the stage and into life. You don’t know where acid stops and reality starts.
Also, if I were reviewing an exhibition that fills two floors of the museum, I might actually, you know, talk about more than two of the objects on view. So there’s a Rauschenberg and a Peter Saul, and a Haeberle photo? Were the parenthetical mentions of Archigram and Verner Panton included because they’re in the show? Maybe the Times needs to call Lily Tomlin in to talk Cotter down.
Through Rose-Colored Granny Glasses [nyt]
Bombardment Periphery, Rotterdam
As part of Rotterdam 2007 – City of Architecture, the city commemorated the 15-minute-long German bombing on May 14, 1940 that destroyed the city center, precipitated the Dutch surrender in WWII–and ultimately provided the occasion for all that new architecture. The area destroyed by the bombs and the ensuing firestorm is demarcated by the Brandgrens, or Fire Limits:
The Fire Limits
14.05.2007
On Monday 14 May, in the evening, Rotterdam 2007 City of Architecture will illuminate the fire limits of Rotterdam’s city centre with over one hundred light beams.
The fire limits mark the areas of the city that were destroyed by the bombing on 14 May 1940 and the ensuing fires that broke out. From 10.45 pm a blaze of light beams on these boundaries will light up the skies, making the true impact of this devastating event visible throughout the entire city.
The bombing ‘only’ lasted fifteen minutes but managed to destroy practically all of Rotterdam’s city centre. Even before the war ended, it was decided not to replicate pre-war Rotterdam when reconstruction began, but to turn the city into a modern, revitalised city. The fire limits highlight the differences between the old and the new in many places in the city centre, which although visible, have never been experienced as a whole before. On 14 May 2007, the art producer Mothership will illuminate the entire fire limits, stretching almost 12 kilometres, turning this historic event into a sight that everyone can see.
Such a prominent spatial use of spotlights as a memorial these days obviously evokes references to the Towers of Light memorial. Like the World Trade Center version, this project, produced by the art collective Mothership, is intended as a temporary, ephemeral precursor to a permanent memorial demarcating the Brandgrens. But that’s actually not the most interesting part of this project for me.
Though the memorial’s official path through the city was only recognized in February, the idea of the Brandgrens has been as integral to the post-war identity of Rotterdam. The Fire Limits [or as Mothership translates with a bit more thesaurian flair, Bombardment Periphery; Babelfish translates Brandgrens as “Fire Boundaries”] is a commemoration of a Nazi attack that uses the Nazis’ own vocabulary of spectacle, specifically Albert Speer‘s 1934 Lichtdom, the Cathedral of Light, at Nuremburg. The rendering [above] reads almost like a direct quote of Lichtdom, in fact.
As it turned out, Bombardment Periphery looked uncannily like a re-creation of a nighttime bombing, with evocations of anti-aircraft searchlights, groundlevel glow, and illuminated cloud cover. I’d be very interested to hear what the reaction was to this event [the commemorating, that is, not the attack.]
It’s a bit absurd, but the first image that comes up in my search for night-time air raid photos was from Los Angeles.
In the early morning of February 25, 1942, unidentified flying objects were spotted over Los Angeles, triggering a massive anti-aircraft barrage that killed three civilians [three more died of heart attacks] and sparked a flood of bitter criticism and controversy. No definitive explanation has ever been made of the objects. The incident was inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s comedy [sic], 1941.
The caption for this photo, which ran on the front page of the LA Times, is incredible:
Scores of searchlights built a wigwam of light beams over Los Angeles early yesterday morning during the alarm. This picture was taken during blackout; shows nine beams converging on an object in sky in Culver City area. The blobs of light which show at apex of beam angles were made by anti-aircraft shells.
The obvious question, of course: Is next February 25th too soon for someone to recreate a wigwam of light beams over Culver City?
Bombardment Periphery Gallery [enterthemothership.com]
Rotterdam2007: The Fire Limits [rotterdam2007.nl]
West Coast Air Raid [wikipedia]
Sig Heil, Bruder Maciunas
Raimundas Malasauskas: Can we ask him who he was in his past life?
David Magnus: There might be a surprise, but he was an athlete, a preacher. He had something to do with the Mormons. I don’t know what, I am not familiar, but a religious sect. He is showing me Germany… fascism, and I was saying: “That doesn’t look pretty,” and he goes, “They all aren’t all pretty, honey,” … that kind of a thing … don’t think yours are either.
When he talks about being a preacher, you know, he was, or at least he felt connected to dictators. They were fascinating characters, fascinating character studies for him. He saw himself, many times, and he learned a lot. He observed them a lot. He found it so fascinating that he could find a piece of himself in others. And I think it’s very interesting what Mother Teresa said she found Hitler in herslef. Small part, but okay.
In 2002, Raimundas Malasauskas started emailing around asking, “Do you have a question for George Maciunas (1938-1971), artist and the founder of the Fluxus Movement?” Then he sat down with David Magnus, “an experienced psychic,” who relayed the questions to the deceased artist–and channelled back his responses.
Yoko Ono wanted to know if Maciunas was still aware of what was going on in the world, and if so, what did he think about it?
My friend Yasu wanted to know what he really thought of Yoko Ono?
The interview/seance was originally published in 2002, but it was just reproduced in the most recent issue of the design journal Dot Dot Dot [issue 13], put out by Dexter Sinister.
So September 10th
I have no idea what to make of this. Dresden painter Eberhard Havekost’s Kontakt is coming up for auction at Phillips de Pury on May 17th. Its oblique, cropped composition depicts the flat, linear patterns of the facades of the Vista Hotel and the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and a wind-flipped American flag.
Here is Phillips’ catalogue text for the painting, which is expected to sell for between $80-120,000 [1]:
Vertiginous and fiercely cropped, Eberhard Havekost’s Kontakt reads as taut with the freight of its symbolism, the allotted canvas actually failing to contain the plus-sized reality of its subjects. Although executed prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it is unlikely that contemporary viewers will escape a connection—thematically as well as visually—to the journalistic and sentimental imagery that flooded the United States after those events. The buildings are rendered as flat, surface without depth, with the only indication of shadow in the image serving to slightly dim the stars and backward curl of the flag, arguably drawing more attention to them than the flag itself, boldly outlined in black. This decision on Havekost’s part seems particularly prescient, as it is a simplified graphic image of the ‘stars and bars’ at attention before a towering skyscraper—while pruned entirely of context for anyone not familiar with 9/11’s events—that has arrived as a new unassailable image in the national mindset, much like Joseph Rosenthal’s 1947 photograph at Iwo Jima, which would serve as the model for Felix W. de Weldon’s Marine Corps Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Obviously, the destruction of The World Trade Center is going to factor into any encounter with a work of art which features the buildings. As the text notes, Havekost made this painting long before the September 11th attacks, in 1998. Whatever his idea or intent was for making Kontakt, though, the context around the painting has shifted dramatically.
But rather than just make mention of the situation, Phillips is explicitly running with it, pumping up the importance of Havekost’s painting by torquing it into a kind of prophetic artifact. Even more disturbing, they’re marketing, not the painting, but the personal experience of weighty remembrance that comes from seeing it: it isn’t “symbolic”; instead, it “reads as taut with the freight of its symbolism.” It’s unassailable image in the national mindset.”
The Iwo Jima photo-turned-memorial comparison is another extraordinarily explicit claim to historic, iconic status that is belied by the painting’s origins. Rosenthal’s staged photo was immediately seized upon as a homefront propaganda tool to invigorate the war-weary country. If anything, its transformation into three dimensions is a memorial to the lingering echoes of the media’s own rallying cry.
If a comparable image exists from the WTC, it’s surely of New York City firefighters rigging a flag comandeered from a nearby yacht, a cloying attempt by the media to regain their once-galvanizing reach by re-staging–lamely and literally–Rosenthal’s photo. But whatever, the icon is definitely not Havekost’s depiction of a pop-flat, human-free vacuum. Not that that stops Phillips from trying to sell it as an icon.
Kontakt‘s current owner, Charles Saatchi, is not known for his reticence, but compared to the auction house’s ambitious historical reading, Saatchi’s is pretty subdued:
Predating 9/11, Kontakt contains an almost ominous forbearance, emblematic of an unblemished innocence.
This isn’t the first time Kontakt has come up for sale. It failed to reach the $20-30,000 estimate at Christie’s in 2003. Whether Saatchi bought that innocence at a private discount after the auction, or whether he was left holding onto the work for a few more years, I don’t know.
So which is it, unblemished innocence, unassailable sentimentality, or taut surface? Until I tracked down a review by David Ebony of Havekost’s first US show, in 1998 at Anton Kern, I thought I had an idea. Kontakt wasn’t included in the show, but similar architectural paintings were:
The people and places that Havekost depicts are bathed in a harsh, artificial light that adds to the work’s sense of unease and often implies a scenario of intrigue, terror and murder.
While the images are dazzlingly clear, there is a consistent distortion in the cropping and brush work that conveys a feeling of loss — a loss of the lost moment or, perhaps, lost hope…Havekost proffers an expression of modernist existential angst that is perhaps more gut-wrenching that anything found in the films or videos upon which his paintings are based.
The answer then, was ‘none of the above.’ And yet if the 1998 reading is accurate, Havekost’s painting is actually more prescient and symbolic than ever: it showed a superficiality-obsessed culture, vulnerable and oblivious to the target on its back. Which, on a morning where the headlines were of Lizzy Grubman, Chandra Levy, and getting into Marc Jacobs’ afterparty, sounds about right.
[1] It sold for $90,000, $75,000 final bid, which means only one or two bidders.
The Ingredients In The MoMA Artists’ Cookbook
Seriously, where do they find this stuff? In the 25th issue of the inimitable Cabinet Magazine, Jeffrey Kastner has a few tasty excerpts from The Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Cookbook, by Madeleine Conway and Nancy Kirk, published in 1977.
The day I got my magazine, I quickly ordered one of the few copies of the cookbook I found online [Abebooks, the Museum edition is much more expensive, but the spiral bound trade edition seems easier to cook from.]
Definitely read Kastner’s piece for some great quotes about food and meals from various artists, including some who are still household names, and others who are decidedly not. The book is as quaintly provincial as you’d expect, a fascinating time capsule of circa 1970’s culinary sophistication.
Will Barnett enthuses over “a small shop on Spring Street where they make the best bread in the world.” Louise Bourgeouis likes to entertain after the galleries close and before the jazz clubs open, serving foods “that are largely unfamiliar to most Americans but are a delicacy in her native France,” such as endive and fennel. Helen Frankenthaler worries where in the city to get red lettuce from California. Alex and Ada Katz have a thing for fresh chanterelles, “the essence of conspicuous consumption.” So many things that have since been thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream of American food, whether by expansions of taste or distribution.
The other thing that caught my eye is the mix and age of the artists included in the book. It’s unrealistic to judge a museum’s curatorial program by the cookbooks it publishes. If it the list of recipe contributors is indicative of anything, it’s probably the social networks of the authors and who they could get to respond to their solicitation.
Still as I scan the list of recipe contributors, who the subtitle bills as “thirty contemporary painters and sculptors,” I can’t help but think of The Modern’s ongoing relationship with the contemporary art world, which has come under increased criticism the last few years.
There’s a definite New York-centricity to the list. And the youngest artist included, Red Grooms, was 40 years old at the time, born in 1937. [The next youngest is Richard Estes (1936).] Were younger artists in their 30’s–like Nauman, Serra, Marden, Elizabeth Murray, for example–not on MoMA’s speed dial at the time? What about artists not included, Pop artists like Rauschenberg and Johns, or Minimalists Flavin, Judd, or Morris?
Between the middle age and the omissions, I can’t help but wonder if MoMA’s complicated, incomplete, and variably unsatisfactory interactions with the art of the moment isn’t a new phenomenon brought on, supposedly, by corporatization, but something persistent, recurring, endemic? I’ve read interview transcripts of Robert Smithson and Allan Kaprow inveighing against Bill Paley and his CBS friends at the museum.
But isn’t rebelling against authority what the kids in any era do? Just as longing for the good old days is a pasttime for the aging/aged? These kinds of cultural criticisms resist self-awareness. But by comparing snapshots of the past to the present, we can see how and where our cultural constructs have changed. At least 12 of the artists in MoMA’s 1977 cookbook–Indiana, Grooms–have receded from the current art world dialogue; the names of some, like Raphael Soyer, Audrey Flack or Ernest Trova, would draw blank stares from most of the art-engaging world today. Meanwhile, endive and arugula are available at McDonald’s.
This Japanese-American Internment Camp Life
We finally made it to the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco last weekend. I’ll see a Sheeler show any time, any place, but except for a nice population of Diebenkorns and the well-stocked Oceanic galleries–oh, and Gerhard Richter’s disorienting photomural commissioned for the atrium, and a few other little pieces I photographed and may post later–I’m afraid the de Young’s Herzog & de Meuron building left more of an impression on me than their collection.
With two notable exceptions: there was a painting that looked like a charcoal drawing and dated 1944, which appears to have been done in the Japanese American internment camps. I’ve been armchair-fascinated–and since 2002, increasingly outraged–by the camps and how my country managed to incarcerate its own citizens–over half of them children–in the name of defending freedom.
But except for Ansel Adams’ photos of Manzanar and portraits of its internees, I hadn’t seen art that had been created in the camps. And I’ve been stalling for two paragraphs because I can’t remember the artist’s name… Danny…
Anyway, the permanent installation of sculptor Ruth Asawa‘s ethereally minimalist work was great, too, but I wish we’d been able to see the full Asawa retrospective [which left the de Young in January, and is at the Japanese American National Museum in LA until May 27.] I didn’t know but should have that Asawa was interned as a girl; at Santa Anita, the horsetrack-turned-prison camp, Asawa began taking drawing lessons from older artists who had worked at Disney before Pearl Harbor. Black Mountain was a far greater influence on her aesthetic, perhaps, but the experience in the camp is a piece of her puzzle as well. Getting up to speed on her work and career is on my shortlist.
And for another, more surreally quotidian look at life in internment, there’s Densho, the primary source/oral history initiative which has just put online a massive collection of newspapers published within the camps. The LA Times has an article about it today.
“MRS. Arikawa received a wire from Washington saying her son had been killed in action in Italy, but no one in the block knew of it for the whole day. She and Mr. Arikawa ate their meals unobtrusively and as usual at their table in the mess hall, he with his omnipresent cane laid against the bench and she quietly leaning over her plate…. Made homeless and their security jeopardized by the very agency to which they have given their sons, they must wonder what their reward will be.” — Manzanar Free Press, July 29, 1944
A movie about daily life in the camps has been brewing in my head for years now, and I’d always been seduced by the rich tones and contrasts of Ansel Adams’ photos, relying on his outsider’s eye to capture the insidiously banal contradictions of loyal Americans stripped of their rights and property and rounded up into prison camps. But obviously now, that’s because I haven’t read enough of the Manzanar Free Press. Which, despite its title, was one of the more rigorously censored camp papers around.
Previously: I Mean, Just Look At How Happy They Were!
Neutra For Sale: Calling Michael Govin [sic]
Richard Neutra’s office building in Silver Lake is for sale. It’s about 4900sf, plus two apartments in back, with some Neutra built-ins and fixtures. No price is mentioned, but the broker does helpfully provide a ceiling:
RECENT SALES OF IMPORTANT EXAMPLES OF ARTISTS LIKE KLIMPT & POLLACK SOLD IN THE 140M RANGE! WHAT SHOULD THE UNIQUE AND ONLY SURVIVING INTACT EXAMPLE OF NEUTRA COMMERCIAL ARCHITECTURE BE WORTH?
Or is that meant as the opening bid? Either way, maybe they can add it to the LACMA collection.
An architectural landmark on the market [neutra.org via andy at reference library]