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On Robert Smithson, film, and finding the way

The Spiral Jetty is back. Although it was submerged when we checked in July, my college senior sister said it was visible from the hill above it when she took a first date out to see it a couple of weeks ago (talk about a litmus test; it’s a 3+ hour drive one way, half on rutty dirt paths.) Sure enough, the SL Tribune has an article about it (Thanks, Artforum.) Read Smithson’s own comments on making the Jetty here.
Underwater or not, Geocachers have logged Spiral Jetty; it’s not surprising, given its off-the-mapquest.com obscurity, limited-but-not-prohibitive access, and non-mainstream nature. Geocaching would suit Smithson fine, I think:

After a point, measurable steps…descend from logic to the “surd state.” The rationality of a grid on a map sinks into what it is supposed to define. Logical purity suddenly finds itself in a bog, and welcomes the unexpected event…The flowing mass of rock and earth of the Spiral Jetty could be trapped by a grid of segments, but the segments would exist only in the mind or on paper. Of course, it is also possible to translate the mental spiral into a three-dimensional succession of measured lengths that would involve areas, volumes, masses, moments, pressures, forces, stresses, and strains; but in the Spiral Jetty the surd takes over and leads one into a world that cannot be expressed by number or rationality.

Geocaching examines the gap between the natural and the rational worlds, too, coming at if from the grid side. Spiral Jetty is locatable in grids, of course, including USGS satellite photos and via latitude/longitude coordinates, translated from GPS orbital data. But for geocachers, getting there is more than half the fun; the rush comes from “mapping” the “distance” between the two worlds.
Back in New York, Smithson sat down with friends to make his film about the Jetty.

Film strips hung from the cutter’s rack, bits and pieces of Utah, outtakes overexposed and underexposed, masses of impenetrable material. The sun, the spiral, the salt buried in lengths of footage… And the movie editor bending over such a chaos of “takes” resembles a paleontologist sorting out glimpses of a world not yet together, a land that has yet to come to completion, a span of time unfinished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels…[Editor Bob] Fiore pulled lengths of film out of the movieola with the grace of a Neanderthal pulling intestines from a slaughtered mammoth. Outside his 13th Street loft window one expected to see Pleistocene faunas, glacial uplifts, living fossils, and other prehistoric wonders. Like two cavemen we plotted how to get to the Spiral Jetty from New York City.

Smithson uses the road, going forward and backward (in time as well as place) to tie his film together. “The disjunction operating between reality and film drives one into a sense of cosmic rupture. Nevertheless, all the improbabilities would accommodate themselves to my cinematic universe.”
When I went to Spiral Jetty in 1994 (it’s first reappearance in 24 years), I was overwhelmed by how different experiencing the work in person (glistening salt crystals, cotton candy pink water, and that drive…) was from seeing it in pictures (aerial B&W on the last page of the art history text). Now it seems that that was the point. Mapping the distance between two worlds is what filmmaking’s all about.

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.

Gabriel Orozco at Documenta 11

Contrary to one writer’s opinion, Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican who can make pottery. After seeing Peter Schjeldahl’s misguided critique of Orozco’s work at Documenta 11 cited on ArtKrush to support an even broad(er)side on the state of contemporary art, I have to call bulls*** [Sorry, Mom.] on the whole thing.
Orozco’s Documenta 11 installation, Cazuelas (Beginnings), is comprised of “thrown” clay bowls. While the clay was still wet, Orozco threw smaller balls of clay into the bowls, where they were embedded like embryos in a uterine wall. The artist left deep fingermarks on the rims of some bowls, traces of where he lifted or deformed the “finished” product. Regarding this work, Schjeldahl claims Orozco’s “lively formal ideas are blunted by the artist’s rudimentary skills.” Zooming out, this supposed failure, then, “makes the point that in today’s convulsive world everyone must learn new things. I was obliged to include myself: a New York art critic who left Kassel feeling uncomfortably marginalized.” Well, if you’re marginalized, please don’t blame it on Gabriel Orozco, whose work is, in fact, the exact opposite of “blunted,” “rudimentary,” and a “first effort.” Beginnings extends ideas and techniques Orozco has been working with for over ten years: the transformation of the humblest material by the touch, gesture, or glance of the artist.
At frenchculture.org is an image of My Hands are My Heart, a 1991 work where Orozco cradles a transformed ball of clay in his hands. Here is an image of Made in Belgium, which was shown in Orozco’s seminal 1993 exhibit at Galerie Chantal Crousel (which also included La DS, his famously altered Citroen). Just before these roof tiles entered the kiln, Orozco grabbed and distorted them, leaving his gesture (and even his fingerprints) on the clay. And in 1999, he showed Pinched, seductive aluminum forms cast from heavily kneaded clay. Orozco’s work at Documenta is more a culmination than a first effort, and his skills are anything but rudimentary; they’ve been honed in the public eye for at least eleven years. So if you’re looking to throw something at contemporary art, don’t take aim at Gabriel Orozco; you’ll wind up hitting yourself.

At the Hirshhorn Museum yesterday

At the Hirshhorn Museum yesterday (originally to see the Ernesto Neto installaion before it closed), I kind of fixated on the work of Anne Truitt, which is in the “Minimalism and its Legacy” installation on the lower floor.
I wasn’t familiar with Truitt’s work, but a quick Google search shows an embarrassingly long and distinguished career (embarrassing for me not to know about it, that is). Go ahead, try it. Truitt was a central figure (along with Judd and Andre, but “championed,” for better or worse, by Clement Greenberg) in the emergence of Minimalist art in the 60’s. Yet unlike the canonical Minimalists, her work never sought the complete elimination of content. It seems obvious to me (although no shows seem to have been done to examine it) that the surge of artists using minimalist vocabulary (Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Gober and Ellen Gallagher are among the most obvious) to biographical, emotional and political effect can relate directly to Truitt’s work. (One of Truitt’s earliest sculptures was–and wasn’t, of course–a section of picket fence, which suggests Gober’s various playpen/crib sculptures.)
Surprisingly, Truitt’s still alive and cranking away (although from the tone of this interview in Artforum, “cranking” isn’t the steely-yet-genteel artist’s style) right here in Washington, DC. And looking at the consistency of her more recent work, she continues to pursue her interests, while being somewhat inexplicably underappreciated by the current art world/market. [Here is Daybook: The Journey of an Artist, Truitt’s well-reviewed diaries. Buy it. I did.]
Oh, the Neto piece is great, btw. I’d seen a couple of less successful ones lately and wondered if he’s been in a slump, but the strong sculptural quality of this one was really nice. Since it was rice and styrofoam, it didn’t smell, but it did have so many visual references to genitalia (think mons, orifices, and billygoats moving away from you, not the “wombs” the brochure delicately alluded to) that an arts funding crisis would’ve broken out if conservatives didn’t feel oh-so-comfortable with their grip on this town right now.

Stopped off in Philadelphia for

Stopped off in Philadelphia for a couple of hours to see the big Barnett Newman exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum. One thing I hadn’t known before was Newman’s (and his other artist friends’) battle with the relevance of painting in the wake of WWII. In a 1966 WNET documentary interview, Newman said how there was no sense painting in the early 40’s, since the world was coming to an end. And in the late 40’s, with global-scale destruction and atom bombs, painting didn’t seem particularly relevant, either. The solution? Newman set to painting the most profound subjects he could, Creation, Genesis, the Universe, the Void. These led to his breakthrough works, the “Onement” series that contained fully realized versions of “zips” (although he didn’t call them that until later).
Also interesting: seeing the chronological development of his work and mapping it to public and critical acceptance. His first two (or three?) gallery shows (in 1950-1) were basically failures; he supposedly stopped painting for four years; yet his work entered the MoMA collection by 1959. By the Sixties, though, his harder-edged work–produced during a period of great acclaim–seems a little synthetic and dry. There’s some inverse correlation going on here.
Anyway, the show’s great, and it’s up until July 7th, then goes to the Tate Modern in London in September. [Buy the exhibition catalog from Amazon.]

How Conceptual Art is like a Renaissance Tapestry

In The New Republic, Jed Perl wrote an impressive review of an even more impressive exhibition, “Tapestry in the Renaissance” at the Metropolitan Museum, which I saw last weekend. After a detailed, compelling, history-filled analysis, Perl surprisingly (and effectively) contrasts this “alternative medium” (ie., tapestry) to the current crop of “alternative media” that are generally displacing painting in current art (or curatorial) practice.. For me, though, something else stuck after seeing these unknown–or at least, wildly under-appreciated–masterpieces.

Continue reading “How Conceptual Art is like a Renaissance Tapestry”

Director’s Headshot

One of the reasons I’d delayed submitting to some festivals was (of all things) my lack of a “director’s photo (B/W),” which some festivals require. Last week, Roe Ethridge, a friend and artist whose work I’ve collected for three-plus years, took some photos of me. In the pinch, I scanned in a Polaroid and printed it out for the submission packets, but there are real prints on the way.

Roe works as a photographer for a huge pile of magazines. While the photos he took with Julian Laverdiere to develop the Towers of Light/Tribute in Light may be more widely seen, his extremely smart style shows through much better in the photo he took of Andrew W.K., which is everywhere, including on the cover of I Get Wet, and on T-shirts.

As if that weren’t enough, he’s got a show of his work at Andrew Kreps Gallery which got great reviews in Artforum, The New Yorker [note: time sensitive link], and The Village Voice[inexplicably, there’s no link to their picks].

As if that weren’t enough, the show’s selling like crazy. I even got smoked when I was too slow to commit to a photo; the last one sold to the Mexican billionaire collector (you know the guy). Check it out until June 01.

I was on a panel

I was on a panel today at -scope, an art fair held here in NYC this weekend. Hoping to follow in the tradition of the Gramercy International Art Fair, which began in the mid 90’s by filling the rooms of the seedy-but-cool Gramercy Hotel with young galleries from here and there, -scope put galleries into three floors of the Gershwin Hotel and scheduled a bunch of ancillary events: a benefit, a concert or something, and “Collector’s Day,” (aka Mothers’ Day). Here are some of my views on collecting art, from a wall text of an exhibition I curated 18 months ago.

It was fine. A panel discussion is one of those tricky events where something a self-absorbed person deludes himself into believing (that, of course people want to hear him hold forth on whatever enters his head) veers dangerously close to reality (people do come to hear him say something; it’s not a panel of mimes or monks, after all.). But too much self-deprecation aside, it went pretty well, I think. people only began to flee after an 1.3 hours or so, a respectable amount of attention to pay. So kudos to Bill, who organized and moderated, who probably collects more than I do, and who was easily dissuaded from holding an “art collector’s game show” (his first idea). [Click here to become a contestant on Jeopardy!]

Janet Cardiff at P.S. 1

Janet Cardiff at P.S. 1 MoMA: It’s rare when a work of art has the power to transform, transport so completely. Forty-part motet is such a work. 40 speakers are arranged in an ellipse in the gallery, each playing an individually recorded member of a choir. The unaccompanied choir sings a work in Latin by Thomas Tallis, a 16th century English composer. [see this National Gallery of Canada link for a more detailed description.]

You move among the speakers, pausing in front of one, trying to hear two or three at once, then move into the center to hear them all. The wall text describes the artist’s interest in the role of the individual, the impression of the collective, and the individual’s ability to succeed as part of a whole.

Does this adequately explain why every person who entered the gallery became transfixed, practically held captive once they figured out how the piece worked? Or why nearly every single person there looked like their thoughts were a million miles away? Or why almost everyone was caught wiping tears away? I don’t think so.

Cardiff’s work creates a simultaneous, visceral feeling of both presence and absence. The members of the choir are right in front of us; we hear them, sense them, move among them. But they’re not. They’re gone. And the work, by its nature, lets us know that they’re not there. In this city, at this time (the show opened on October 14), a work that aspired to one level of impact has achieved something almost unimaginably transcendent.

It’s obvious to see how

It’s obvious to see how entertainment product has been superseded by reality since September 11; movies the country may have once flocked to are now recognized as fatuous and (potentially) consigned to oblivion (or straight-to-video, whichever’s worse). Today, I was made to wonder if the same thing should or would happen to so called “fine art.” Work of artists I both like and prefer to ignore has been pushed to the fore by recent events, and it’s a challenge to see how it holds up in the order-of-magnitude harsher glare. So many things aren’t abstracts or concepts any more; what happens to art that “addresses issues” and “explores limits” once these limits have been surpassed?
This afternoon I walked to Christie’s to preview the upcoming contemporary art auction. En route, I found Fifth Avenue to be completely closed for several blocks. I figured it’s UN week, Vicente Fox is at Trump Tower, that kind of thing. It turned out to be the funeral service of Donald Burns, the Assistant Chief of the NY Fire Department, held at St Patrick’s Cathedral. Nearly a thousand men and women in dress uniforms were standing at attention in the middle of the street, forming a line two blocks long and three to ten officers deep. [note: here is an image from a service one day earlier.] No one made a sound, including the spectators. Stores silenced their music. Burns’ casket and procession had just passed into the cathedral. After several minutes, the officers snapped to attention and began to file into the church. Two months did not diminish the overwhelming sadness and sense of grief the scene evoked.

Vanessa Beecroft, The Silent Service, 2001, image via publicartfund.org
It also made me think of the work of Vanessa Beecroft, including a performance she staged in April 2001 on the Intrepid. Here is a photograph derived from the event. Especially when considered in concert with her earlier work, this seems almost as empty and wrong as a Schwarzenegger film. The emperor has no clothes, indeed.
At Christie’s I saw several monumental photographs by Andreas Gursky, whose work “presents a stunning and inventive image of our contemporary world,” according to MoMA’s curator, Peter Galassi. From the first week after the bombings, when I was in full CNN burnout, I wanted writers’ and artists’ perspectives, not Paula Zahn’s. The scale of the debris, the nature of the target, even in wire service photographs, it called for Gursky’s perspective to make some sense of it, perhaps. As it turns out, he was grounded in Los Angeles, where he’d been traveling with (and shooting) Madonna’s concert tour. The other end of the spectrum, it seems, now.
Irony and knowingness doesn’t work; sheer aesthetic, devoid of context or emotion doesn’t work; stunning monumentalism rings a little hollow. On the other hand, sentimentality, baring-all emotionality, sympathetic manipulation is even worse. What does it take to make meaningful art now? If it weren’t nearly 2 AM (and if I had any answers), I’d keep writing…

[added 18 Feb 02: Here is Gursky’s photo from the 13 Sept. LA Madonna concert, which was unveiled at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris on 13 Feb. This has become one of the top five searches for my site.]

While on vacation, we took

While on vacation, we took a weekend trip to Venice to see the Biennale, a sprawling exhibition of contemporary art. With some exceptions, the art was a tremendous disappointment. Chicken & egg, I don’t know, but most of the work either strained to stand out and provide some immediate, breakout, experience right then and there; or else it required time, consideration, and contemplation which the festival format inexorably discourages. In this oppressively large exhibition, the apparent subtlety and understatement of two installations appealed to us greatly: Robert Gober’s installation in the American Pavilion and a cafe project/installation credited to the artists Olafur Eliasson, Tobias Rehberger and Rikrit Tiravanija. Understatement is problematic, though, and in ways that concern me as I try to make a documentary that is, itself, unpretentious yet affecting and lasting. Also, these works made me even more aware of how important/complicating are the expectations/experience a viewer brings with him. Let me explain a bit:

In each room of the Jefferson-esque pavilion, Gober carefully places a few objects or assemblages that appear to be found or flotsam, but which turn out to be meticulously hand-crafted re-creations: styrofoam blocks, plywood, an empty liquor bottle. In the corner of each room, there was a white, plastic-looking chair. Were they part of the piece? Gober’s certainly done chairs before. [see an image] [read an essay] We debated, looked for evidence of the chairs’ handmade-ness (which we found), but decided they weren’t. (Clue: they weren’t lit like the other objects. Sure enough, they were for the guards.)

After walking ALL over the two main exhibition venues in Venice’s August heat, we took refuge in the “Refreshing Cafe,” which was credited to the three artists above. The cafe was a series of tables, some white lacquer columns/stools, and a counter/bar under an overturned swimming pool-like form propped up by pistons. It was a rare and welcome retreat from the heat and from the overwrought video art of the show. It wasn’t really clear what the contribution of the artists was, but an improvised cafe with a few mod-looking furniture pieces certainly seemed in keeping with the other works of these artists. Just last night, though, I ran into one of the three and complimented him on having made one of the few pieces we liked in the whole show. Turns out that not only did the three of them not really do anything with the piece, what they did do had been completely altered by the exhibition authorities, calling the existence of the “work” into question.

This is kind of unnerving; when understatement is the goal or medium of a work, how do you differentiate it from (or not mistake it for) the “non-art” around it? Do you?

What does this mean for the artist and the creation process?

When looking at/for art, do we readily give artists we like/know more latitude, more time, the benefit of the doubt? Does this blind us to other experiences or discoveries? Is it a sign of dulling of critical approach or increasing orthodoxy?