My boys Elmgreen & Dragset are opening their show, The Welfare State, at the Serpentine tomorrow, and there’s a conference related to the show at the Goethe Institute on Friday, and there’s a fat catalogue on every day, whenever you like. [oops, actually, it’s not out in the US until March.]
Kultureflash has images from the show’s first incarnation at Kunsthall Bergen, Norway.
Meanwhile, here’s a photo they sent me from just before their Prada Marfa project opened last fall. That there’s Boyd on the left.
Category: art
First You Get The Money, Then You Get The Power
As the year winds to an end, I think I can officially say it: the art world is whack. It’s all about the Benjamins, and I don’t mean Walter.
I was going to post a diatribe, but instead, I’ll just point out what I’ve already said in print: the small comparison I made between the ravenous fixation on Richard Prince’s appropriations and the parodic, poll-driven works of Komar & Melamid; my calling into question the credibility of a system [i.e., price] that persists in systematically discounting the influence, importance, and value of half the culture; a pair of artists’ self-serving embrace of that same system to overinflate the importance of their work; and the apparently unstoppable influence of the market on the conceptual underpinnings of an artist’s work after he’s gone.
Jerry Saltz hits on a lot of it in his great, biting end-of-year essay in the Voice this week. [I’m glad someone else will call BS on that hilariously embarassing Wizard of Oz photospread in Vogue last month. The idea that someone with a straight [sic] face asked the famously closeted Jasper Johns to be the Cowardly Lion? If I didn’t know how deadly serious the Vogue people took it, I’d say it was the awesomest slam ever of the whole artist-as-vapid-celebrity schtick since Francesco Vezzoli.]
Here’s hoping that in 2006, somehow the bubble will pop, the winds will change, and not too many of my friends’ livelihoods will suffer too much as a result; because I’m looking forward to seeing the art that comes out of it.
Free MoMA
I have 20 16 14 10 8 4 free passes to MoMA that expire on 12/31/05. If you’d like a couple, please drop me a line, and I’ll mail them out to you today.
[update: I ended up with 4 passes left, but now I’m out of town and won’t be back before they expire. Sorry. The Target Corporation invites you to Free Friday Nights at MoMA, though… Merry Christmas, &c.]
Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable Cities
Beijing-based artist Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable Cities series are models of cities inside suitcases, made using the old clothes that city’s residents. In her practice, she explores issues of globalization and homogenization, but also memory and transience.
In a way, her work reminds me of the nomadic Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata, who constructs temporary structures, favelas, and whirlwind-like vortices out of scrap wood and junk he collects around the city. While they exist, they put into play issues of development and destruction and (im)permanence.
Anyway, Yin’s sewn suitcase version of New York City from 2003 includes a shimmering, ephemeral version of the World Trade Center made out of what looks like mesh or organza or something. It’s really quite nice.
via Regine, who has some links to Yin’s work at the Sydney Biennial last year. Yin was also in “How Latitudes Become Art” in 2003 at the Walker Art Center. Her NYC gallery is Ethan Cohen Fine Arts.
Zaha’s Cojones, Neto’s Ovaries
I’ve been waiting for anyone else to say it, but Zaha Hadid must have some serious cojones to show up in Miami–his own home [away from home] town!–sporting a gigantic Ernesto Neto fallopian tube sculpture. I mean, Neto’s Venice installation is like two blocks away in the Margulies Warehouse. Don’t even get me started on Anish Kapoor’s Turbine Hall. Seriously, woman, WTF?
From The Mixed Up Files Of Ms. Nikke Finke
Mike Ovitz can fight his own battles–although he’s been nothing but genial to me, I don’t doubt he can be a pretty scrappy guy. But Nikki Finke’s LA Weekly article on Hollywood-style dealmaking supposedly poisoning the art world is such a raw-yet-feeble Ovitz takedown attempt, I can’t see why it even exists.
And that’s even before you notice that the story’s so old, a veritable reportorial time capsule. The most recent anecdotes are from the early 1990’s. Julian Schnabel–get this!–has a movie about Basquiat. Up-and-coming dealer Mary Boone has revitalized SoHo’s gallery scene. One interviewee, Leo Castelli, actually died in 1999. Rather than even update the story or provide any la plus ca change context, it reads like Finke handed in an old floppy disk she found while cleaning out a storage unit in the Valley, and her editors published whatever killed story or chapter of an abandoned book happened to be on it. What’s next? Finke’s incisive report whether Waterworld‘s production turmoil will threaten Kevin Costner’s status as Hollywood’s sexiest leading man?
Lest you think the cluelessness is confined to alt-freebies on the West Coast, Artforum linked to Finke’s story with a headline and a blurb so inaccurate [“For Hollywood Moguls, Collecting Is Increasingly De Rigueur”] it’s obvious they didn’t even read the piece.
Blame Ovitz: When Art Started Imitating Hollywood [laweekly via artforum]
So A Gate And A Floating Island Walk Into A Bar
There are some posters, and some beer, and the gas for the motorboat had to cost a pretty penny, but that’s about it. Compared to the expensive (and purportedly expensive) public art it skewered, The Gate that chased Robert Smithson’s Floating Island up the East River a couple of months ago cost nothing. Now the Gate and the boat, and a documentary about the project will go on exhibit 11/18 at Redhead, the gallery of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
The artists–who still remain unnamed–intended their project to ask and answer the questions, “Is public art still possible? Can a cheap stunt pack a punch? Does art make enough room to laugh at itself? Yes. When money steps aside and lets the work do the talking.”
A Cheap Publicity Stunt, 11/18-12/22, at Redhead [lmcc.net via greg.org reader chandra]
Previously: Water, Gate. The Gates Bill
The Sound Of One Hand Bidding
What with the hazmat crew required to neutralize the thousands of gallons of formaldehyde and the efforts to stabilize the rotting, soaked corpse, moving Damien Hirst’s shark costs an estimated $100,000.
Meanwhile, Mark Fletcher and Tobias Meyer ended up donating a John Bock sculpture to the Carnegie rather than keep replacing the fresh melons in it.
[Maybe they should have become Buddhists. When I was a missionary in Japan, old ladies were always offering us the fruit offerings–pyramids of oranges and melons, usually–from their butsudans, the black lacquer, gilt-edged, in-home shrines where they prayed to their departed family members.]
“These works become like devotional objects. It’s like caring for your altarpiece,” said Amy Cappellazzo, Tobias Meyer’s Christie’s counterpart.
Ephemeral Art, Eternal Vigilance [nyt]
Previously: how contemporary art is like a renaissance tapestry
Digging Dugway
Whoa. The Dugway Proving Ground is in Skull Valley, an hour and a half west of Salt Lake City. It’s where the US Army tests chemical and biological weapons and defense systems. It’s the site of an incineration program for the US’s stockpiles of bio/chem weapons. And it’s probably the greatest piece of Earth Art since the Nazca Lines.
The DoD’s alterations of the landscape–seen here in Terraserver photographs–rival the Spiral Jetty, Double Negative, Roden Crater, even, in both aesthetic power and content. Flash forward a few hundred years and ask yourself, which desert markmaking will have the most to say about the mid-20th century?
Dugway’s been dealt out of the Earth Art discussion because it’s a) functional, and b) institutional, not individual, but those seem like quaint technicalities. What if the only reason they’re not considered art–or considered alongside art, at least–is that no one’s really had access to them?
Dugway Proving Ground [pruned, via tropolism]
previously: earth art via satellite
John Powers-a-Day at Virgil de Voldere Gallery
When I first met John Powers five+ years ago, he was like a Tibetan monk with a pile of sand. Only instead of sand, he had thousands of 1-inch woodblocks, which he transformed into a huge, impossibly intricate, mandala-like sculpture that sprawled across the floor of Exit Art’s gallery. Every day throughout the exhibit, he scooted around on a little skateboard chair, replicating and altering dense patterns of blocks as he went. The work wasn’t “finished” when the show ended, and he swept the whole thing away, but that, I think was part of the point.
Now, in his latest show at Virgil de Voldere Gallery in the Chelsea Arts Building, Powers is reconfiguring hundreds? thousands? of white, Sol Lewitt-like grid modules into a new sculpture every day. The gallery’s website has pictures of the ones you’ve missed, but you can also stop by until Oct. 9th to watch new pieces come together.
John Powers at Virgil de Voldere through Sun., Oct. 9 [virgilgallery.com]
John Powers-a-Day at Virgil de Voldere Gallery
When I first met John Powers five+ years ago, he was like a Tibetan monk with a pile of sand. Only instead of sand, he had thousands of 1-inch woodblocks, which he transformed into a huge, impossibly intricate, mandala-like sculpture that sprawled across the floor of Exit Art’s gallery. Every day throughout the exhibit, he scooted around on a little skateboard chair, replicating and altering dense patterns of blocks as he went. The work wasn’t “finished” when the show ended, and he swept the whole thing away, but that, I think was part of the point.
Now, in his latest show at Virgil de Voldere Gallery in the Chelsea Arts Building, Powers is reconfiguring hundreds? thousands? of white, Sol Lewitt-like grid modules into a new sculpture every day. The gallery’s website has pictures of the ones you’ve missed, but you can also stop by until Oct. 9th to watch new pieces come together.
John Powers at Virgil de Voldere through Sun., Oct. 9 [virgilgallery.com]
Guggenheim? Good Luck With That
Tyler goes all Observer on Thomas Krens’ butt, while giving new Guggenheim director Lisa Dennison a chance to share her vision for the credibility-starved museum: “I would like the person on the street at Pastis to be able to name our top five curators.”
Personally, after seeing Dennison threaten to deaccession the work of an artist who criticised the the way she installed it, [“Well, if he doesn’t want to be in the museum’s collection, then…”] I’m sure we’ll be brunching over the Guggenheim for years to come.
Krens Relinquishes The Ramps!
Ms. Dennison To Feed Starved Gugg [observer.com]
Guggenheim? Good Luck With That
Tyler goes all Observer on Thomas Krens’ butt, while giving new Guggenheim director Lisa Dennison a chance to share her vision for the credibility-starved museum: “I would like the person on the street at Pastis to be able to name our top five curators.”
Personally, after seeing Dennison threaten to deaccession the work of an artist who criticised the the way she installed it, [“Well, if he doesn’t want to be in the museum’s collection, then…”] I’m sure we’ll be brunching over the Guggenheim for years to come.
Krens Relinquishes The Ramps!
Ms. Dennison To Feed Starved Gugg [observer.com]
Water, Gate
“So when Bob Henry, captain of the Rachel Marie, who is in charge of towing Smithson’s island, looked out across the East River Thursday afternoon and saw another piece of conceptual art gaining on him, he did not view the development kindly.”
A Miniature Gate in Hot Pursuit of a Miniature Central Park [nyt]
Water, Gate
“So when Bob Henry, captain of the Rachel Marie, who is in charge of towing Smithson’s island, looked out across the East River Thursday afternoon and saw another piece of conceptual art gaining on him, he did not view the development kindly.”
A Miniature Gate in Hot Pursuit of a Miniature Central Park [nyt]