Category: art

Four Nudes Too Nude For Texas

As has been reported before, Ms. Sydney McGee, an 28-year veteran art teacher in a Texas elementary school has been suspended after a parent complained that his/her child saw nude art during a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art. The field trip had been approved by the principal; there were other teachers and parents along; and the museum reports it has never had such a complaint from a school group in its history.
The teacher retraced the group’s steps for the NY Times, which noted the following nude works:
Figure of a Young Man from a Funerary Relief, Greek; Attic
c. 330 BC

dallas_museum_funerary_nude

The Shade, Auguste Rodin, 1880 [which is under 1m tall, btw]

dallas_museum_nude_rodin

Flora, Aristide Maillol, 1911 [which is actually draped with a robe of some sort]

dallas_museum_maillol

And Star in a Dream, Jean Arp, 1958, the nudity of which seems to me beyond the reach of most fifth grade imaginations.

dallas_museum_arp_star

There is, however, another Arp that fits the description of “an abstract nude sculpture,” a phrase the principal apparently cited in the suspension:
Sculpture Classique, 1960, which the artist made in a “conscious attempt” to “emulate the basic forms of Greek art.” If this is the offending sculpture, I think there’s a parent who needs a time out.

dallas_museum_arp_nude

Still, my money’s on the Maillol, if for no other reason than that it looks suspiciously like Paul Jennewein’s Spirit of Justice, 1933, a statue whose exposed breast made John Ashcroft want to–well, let’s let him demonstrate. In a way, this whole story now makes perfect sense.

ashcroft_justice_breast.jpg

I Guess Everyone’s Gotta Be Known For Something

Carol Vogel has a story about Damien Hirst’s restoration replacement of the shark [yes, that shark]:

Such is his reputation that when a seven-foot shark washed up on a beach in July, and the Natural History Museum in London needed a place to store it until its staff was ready to preserve it, the first call it made was to Mr. Hirst.
“They asked if I had any room in my freezer,’’ he said with satisfaction. He was happy to oblige.

Swimming With Famous Dead Sharks [nyt]

Lost In Translation

walter_robinson_in_tokyo.jpg

I guess if Kaikai Kiki had wanted the name of its biannual Toyko otaku art fair, Geisai, spelled properly, they should’ve upgraded Walter Robinson’s seat for him. Instead, as he wrote, he had to use his own frequent flier miles to get out of coach [which is the only sensible thing to do, of course, on a 13-hr flight. and the article has since been corrected]:

Murakami sat on the floor and spoke briefly about Geisei [sic] #10. It had been a success, he said, to the extent that it had given young artists a chance to show their work and make contacts.This latest fair had also begun to reach an international audience — we ourselves were the tautological proof of that.

Now, I’m actually a big fan of Japan’s otaku cultures and the DIY sensibility that underpins both the kawaii school of crafty, little artmaking as well as the whole jishu eiga/self-made movie trend. Murakami deserves plenty of credit for trying to bring this kind of creative production to the art world’s [sic] attention, or to formulate a more sophisticated context for it, anyway. [That said, Murakami worship needs some context, too; while he creates the open forum for an all-comers art fair on the one hand, he happily sends his characters to the front to provide cultural cover for complicated-at-least developers like the Moris, whose massive Roppongi Hills megaplex is a Kaikai Kiki-branded project. And it sounds like the “fancy downtown hotel” [sic] where the junketeers stayed. Good to hear Tokyo’s “downtown” is improving.]

But from Robinson’s bemused, deracinated gaijin schtick, it doesn’t sound like he even cracked the spine on Murakami’s intensely argued Little Boy exhibition catalogue before he accepted the artist’s hospitality. Fortunately, the movement, such as it is, is probably as uninterested in Robinson’s clueless opinions as he is with trying to grasp what’s in front of him.

walter_robinson_pointy_melon.jpg image: shibuyabuya

I wonder who else went? And while I’m less interested in whether they disclose the junket, and more interested in hearing what someone has to say whose pointy melon hasn’t been so shaped by the art world’s tiny box.
Murakami, Impresario [artnet]
Previously: Tokyo Snapshots – Takashi Murakami Corp. 08/05
Geisai #10 [geisai.net]
Takashi Murakami interview before Geisai #10 [tokyoartbeat]
update: that didn’t take long. I hear that art magazine folks Judd Tully (Art & Auction), Cathy Bird (Art & Antiques), Dan Fox (Frieze) and a couple of others took the trip. I’d be surprised if someone from the new LTB title Culture & Travel wasn’t tagging along, too.

I’m Venice Super Blog! Thanks For Asking!

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The Venice Biennale of Architecture may have been a critical bust–both the Times’ and the Guardian’s people panned it, complaining that it’s a book in exhibition format, or text and videos but no architecture–but I have to say, it works OK for me as a blog.
MoMA’s A&D Dept. and some other folks–a lot of other folks, actually–have whipped together the Venice Super Blog, with a veritable DVD-ful of audio interviews, video clips, and Giardini gossip. It’s a bit too inside football sometimes, and sometimes the posters are a bit too pleased with themselves for attending [gee, if the “entire Architecture World” really is under the stairs of the British Pavillion with you, who’s supposed to be reading this?], but there’s interesting enough content to make it worth reading/listening/watching.
Some personal picks: Olafur Eliasson talking about his collaboration with architects, including work on the Icelandic Concert and Conference Centre, and David Adjaye’s pavillion for an OE installation. Here’s a wrap-up of a panel discussion about the pavillion project, Your Black Horizon. And here’s a photo of a 1:1 mockup of the IC&CC semi-reflective crystalline facade. [above]
Rem Koolhaas and his thinktank side, AMO, did a presentation on resort developments in Dubai–Olafur calls it “Rem talking about his golf course project in Dubai”–and the modernist building boom throughout the Persian Gulf. Here’s a brief interview, and here’s an even briefer recap.
Besides more useful tags or navigation, it’s the one thing VeniceSuperBlog could’ve done better: raw, liveblogged info. Maybe it’s a problem of too many chief curators and not enough interns.

Branding Man

I know a lot of you have been asking yourselves, “Hey, what’s been going on with Greg and the Belgian Waffle?” No? Too bad. Cuz I’ll tell you.
The Burning Man curator known as LadyBee and I have been going back and forth in email over whether Uchronia’s creators co-opted Burning Man as a backdrop for their own alternabrand-enhancing PR, whether the 1,000+ photos on flickr tagged with Uchronia constitutes a brand now, or whether Arne Quinze and his co-designers are just sending out 50,000 books and DVD’s to “people in important or influential positions who help shape the socio-economic landscape and can make a difference” anonymously and with no expectation of personal benefit.
Now, as you can imagine, an MBA, ex-consultant, ex-banker would have a hard time taking a credible stand against marketing, branding, or PR, but that’s not my point, and it hasn’t been. I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wrong with marketing per se, but I give Burning Man the institution full credit for not launching Black Rock Consulting, but instead sticking to their non-commercially exploitative guns.
But it’s naive of me to have thought as I have all these years, that Burning Man somehow exists apart from the society it sought to leave behind. Just as the environmental and resource impacts of the playa can’t be overlooked–they do still share a planet, an atmosphere, and a Wal-mart distribution infrastructure with the rest of society, after all–the notion that what happens in Black Rock City stays in Black Rock City is a fantasy. And all the bartering in the desert won’t change the fact that Burning Man is a brand and an institution in itself now, and it has associative value that the Uchronians identified and skilfully leveraged–and they did it in a way that has Burning Man veterans defending them.

quinze_core77.jpg
image via core77

While LadyBee has been pretty engaging, if resolute in her defense of the Uchronians, [“of course Arne puts them on his resume – and why shouldn’t he? He designed and built the thing. All our artists do that. If it strengthens his portfolio, fine. What marketing scheme do you think they’re going to unleash? Selling imported radiators to burners?” (Arne Quinze’s co-creator Jan Kriekels has a radiator company)], and she backed off a bit from her first email [“subject: greg – get a clue!”], the Belgian she roped into our exchange started with a really petty, thin-skinned personal attack.
Burning Man’s foundation is the idea that everyone could and should make art or express herself creatively. BRC is built on that creative exchange. Great. But Burning Man also has a curator, and a grant-making and evaluation process, which they use to dole out a portion of gate receipts to art proposals. It’s an institutional system that bears a remarkable ressemblance to the non-playa-based art world.
Uchronia itself was funded completely outside that institution, as LadyBee explained in an email to Burning Man’s staff [who’d apparently had some questions about the project, too.] And its team included between 45 and 60 “volunteers,” who, it turned out, were employees of the creators’ companies, and who worked at full salary, plus expenses, on the project. By that definition, Star Wars was a “volunteer” project, too.
Again, this is all totally cool, but it seems to me that if what happens at Burning Man doesn’t stay at Burning Man after all, and there are curatorial decisions being made and business transactions being done, then these people could respond a little better to criticisms, alternative interpretations, or a response that’s anything less than sheer, uncritical gratitude and ecstasy.
When Christo “gave” the “Gates” to the world, he kept trotting out his figure for how much he spent–$20 million, he said–while the boost the project gave his own art sales and holdings–in a private, pre-“Gates” interview, Jean-Claude claimed they had $400 million–was almost never mentioned.
The “Gates” was what it was, and Uchronia is what it is. But one of the things it is is a page in a portfolio for a “creator of atmosphere” who sells his own brand of edgy counter-cultural buzz to corporate clients like Compaq, Diesel, and Rem Koolhaas.

Called That One

The last mention of Lee Siegel on this blog was also the first. Since about three hours after he published that dumbass comment about Twombly, I’ve basically taken pains not to read his criticism. Life was just too short. And judging from the whorls of justified complaint and outrage in his online wake, I think it’s just as well.
For all the serious crit and insights into Siegel’s folly, the best response, though, has to be Dan‘s comment on Grammar.police, which came during a thread on Twombley’s Whitney show: “I frankly don’t think we can fully appreciate Twombly’s carpeting choice unless we understand that he is gay.”
Jed Perl, on the other hand, has duped me into reading him again and again, even though I usually find him to be a cranky and retrograde wet blanket. I guess I can’t fully appreciate Perl, even though I understand his taste in tapestries.
Advantage: Blogofascists [grammar.police via man]
Previously: Fatuous Writing Makes Art Lovers Head Explode!
How Conceptual Art Is Like A Renaissance Tapestry

Gerhard Richter’s Stained Glass Window For The Cologne Cathedral

gerhard_richter_stained_glass.jpg

It took over 600 years to complete [from 1248 t- 1880], so it should surprise absolutely no one that it takes the Cologne Cathedral [or Kölner Dom] over 60 years to fix a broken window.
Gerhard Richter has been commissioned to recreate a 20m tall window for the Cathedral’s south transverse; the original was blown out during World War II, and the design was lost. The new Richter window will consist of 11,500 handblown glass squares about 10cm each, in 72 different colors; the design was inspired by Richter’s 1974 presciently pixellated painting, 4,096 Colors, which has been overlaid onto window’s original Gothic mullions and tracery.
The top donors to the window’s fabrication costs [estimated at 350-400,000 euros] at the end of the year will receive a signed thank you memento from Richter, as well as invites to the Spring 2007 dedication. [I’d certainly hope so.]
Cologne Cathedral at wikipedia. also, see and read details in German at Koelner-dom.de [via artnet]

AEI’m So Confused

Six years drinking at the open bar of power is enough to get anyone a little woozy, so it should be no surprise that the shots fired at MoMA from the right by two pundits from the American Enterprise Institute were so sloppy and off the mark.
In their Wall Street Journal oped, [“Creative Accounting: MoMA’s Economic Impact Study”] the two think [sic] tankers, Kevin Hassett and Phillip Swagel not only question a recent MoMA-sponsored study that claims the Museum will have a $2 billion economic impact on the NY city/state economy over three years, they attempt, apparently, to discredit the charitable tax deduction system that underpins the entire nonprofit sphere [cultural, charitable, and otherwise], they seek to peel off cultural institutions from any type of economic consideration at all by deriding the very attempt to translate into financial or political spheres the “soft” value of “culture and enlightenment” [which, when “unsentimental,” “hard-boiled economists like [them],” say it, is not a compliment].
Fortunately, for Culture, at least, their case is so wilfully misleading, illogical, and shot through with flawed comparisons and assumptions, that it’s still several minutes away from being called even “soft-boiled.” It’s glaringly wrong enough to make you wonder what the econ-major interns are doing at Journal and the AEI, because they’re definitely not factchecking articles for publication.

Continue reading “AEI’m So Confused”

Modernism: Any Color As Long As It’s White

Olafur Eliasson, Your Engagement has Consequences, 2006

For a couple of months now, I’ve been really pre-occupied by this discussion of the color white and its association with modernism. It’s between Olafur Eliasson, curator Daniel Birnbaum, and Mark Wigley, the dean of Columbia’s architecture school and author of White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, and it’s in the latest exhibition catalogue of Olafur’s work [which was maddeningly unavailable in the US for a long time, except at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. It’s a stunning, eye-opening book, no pun intended.]

DB: How did modern architecture become white?
MW: Well it only became really white after the mid-century.
DB: It was not in Stuttgart? [at the Weissenhof siedlung, an architectural showcase/manifesto featuring work by Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and other pioneering modernist architects]
MW: No. The polemical exhibition of modern buildings in 1927 had a kind of off-white. It takes a long time to become white white, like that of a Richard Meier building today which is completely unlike the white of classic modern architecture. The pioneering buildings had more like an eggshell color, so there is a way in which modern architecture whitens over time. One could argue that it does so as a reaction to the black-and-white photographs. The eggshell color looks white in black-and-white photos and all of the other colors on the buildings, green, brown, and so on, tend to go very dark. So a first result of the photographs is that you don’t realize that there are many colors. One of the main points of the White Walls book was to say that modern architecture was not white but multi-colored. In that system of many colors, white was playing a crucial role as a kind of reference point. So of course I was interested in the ideological construction of the idea of white as a default frame of reference. The famous black-and-white photographs make white famous, and then the buildings try to look more like the photographs and become really white and all the other colors are removed. So that somebody can make a building that is really super white today and people would think that it is modern.
OE: You mean the photograph representing the actual spaces?
MW: Yes. If you look at the photographs of the Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition houses they look absolutely white but Mies van der Rohe’s building was a kind of pink. [emphasis added]

Rem Sleepless, Or Discussion Is The New Performance Art

Much like the 24-hour interview-a-thon itself, Claire Bishop’s report from the Serpentine Pavilion starts out hilariously–my original title for this post was to be “LOLOLOL”–and ends with unexpected substance and insight. Whether her declaration is the first, I don’t care, but Bishop nails it when she tags “the incessant production of talks and symposia” as “the new performance art. Authenticity, presence, consciousness raising—all of the attributes of ’70s performance—now attach themselves to discussion. In this environment, it would seem that Obrist and Koolhaas are the new Ulay and Abramovic.”
This had me laughing out loud:

Like trying to watch all five Cremaster films in one go, there eventually came a breakthrough when the experience was no longer painful. Mine arrived when I realized that our interviewers were suffering, too. Koolhaas’s opening gambit to laidback design legend Ron Arad couldn’t conceal his resignation: “I have always felt sympathy and respect for you, but never the inclination to talk to you. Now I have to ask you questions.”

Speech Bubble [artforum.com]
Previously: On watching Cremaster 1-5. In order.
Serpentine Eats Its Tail
Unrealized Projects, an agency, a book, a NYT article

I Think I’ll Wait For The Book

Here’s the schedule for this Friday’s 24-hour interviewathon at the Serpentine Gallery pavilion. Mega-interviewer Hans Ulrich Obrist and perennial interviewee Rem Koolhaas will be tag-teaming on a whole slate of “culture industry” types.
If you can’t imagine ending your night–or starting your morning–at 4AM with a Damien Hirst interview, then your best bet is probably the opening session–Friday at 6pm: Ken Adam / David Adjaye / Brian Eno / Zaha Hadid / Charles Jenks / Hanif Kureishi / Ken Loach / Tim O’Toole / Yinka Shonibare–and a nice supper.
Serpentine Gallery 24-hour Marathon Interviews [timeout.com via kultureflash]
Previously: HUO interviews, vol. 1