I guess there’s some…irony? justice? synchronicity? between Robert Smithson’s non-site works–pieces of far-off locations displaced into a gallery–and twiddling your thumbs at a boring* Smithson symposium in a college auditorium while the last 36 hours of the artist’s Floating Island tick by in gorgeous, sunny, autumnal splendor.
Net net: forget the next three sessions of the symposium (maybe they’ll be podcast), and get your butt to the river to watch the barges go by.
[*although one potential bombshell was dropped, it went seemingly unnoticed. In answer to the moderator’s question about ever rebuilding the Spiral Jetty by allowing new rocks to be piled onto it, the artist’s widow and executor Nancy Holt didn’t reject the idea.
There’s precedent, she said, because Smithson sometimes instructed Holt or other friends go get rocks for his pieces. He didn’t privilege the hand of the artist, she said. True, perhaps, but only partly relevant; more to the point is Smithson’s own intentions for the effects of entropy on the Jetty, not whether he had to be present to dump the rocks. The other factor is how to deal with increasing touristification of the site, which now gets tour buses and up to 100 visitors/day.]
Category: art
All Things Considered, I’d Rather Be In Passaic
I guess there’s some…irony? justice? synchronicity? between Robert Smithson’s non-site works–pieces of far-off locations displaced into a gallery–and twiddling your thumbs at a boring* Smithson symposium in a college auditorium while the last 36 hours of the artist’s Floating Island tick by in gorgeous, sunny, autumnal splendor.
Net net: forget the next three sessions of the symposium (maybe they’ll be podcast), and get your butt to the river to watch the barges go by.
[*although one potential bombshell was dropped, it went seemingly unnoticed. In answer to the moderator’s question about ever rebuilding the Spiral Jetty by allowing new rocks to be piled onto it, the artist’s widow and executor Nancy Holt didn’t reject the idea.
There’s precedent, she said, because Smithson sometimes instructed Holt or other friends go get rocks for his pieces. He didn’t privilege the hand of the artist, she said. True, perhaps, but only partly relevant; more to the point is Smithson’s own intentions for the effects of entropy on the Jetty, not whether he had to be present to dump the rocks. The other factor is how to deal with increasing touristification of the site, which now gets tour buses and up to 100 visitors/day.]
Re-Visiting MoMA’s Re-installed Contemporary Galleries
greg.moma reporting: The Modern has reinstalled the contemporary galleries on the second floor, and it’s an invigorating pleasure and a huge improvement. Seeing it again yesterday with my mother, I found myself paying less attention to the show’s conceptual and art historical underpinnings [Kelley’s and Ray’s juxtaposition with the Viennese Actionist photos of a doused bride, for example] and more to its sensory pleasures [or, in the case of Nauman’s cacophanous drum/rat maze piece, its assaults].
You don’t need to write for October to appreciate the nods to respective senses: the visual saturation of Yinka Shonibare’s batik costumes in front of Dana Schutz’s giant painting; the aural power of Janet Cardiff’s 40-Part Motet*; the threatening touch of a dense carpet of pins (which echoes nicely the greyscaled image on Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ billboard); or the leaching of sensory inputs as you move through a gallery of black/white works (including Yayoi Kusama’s photocollage of dot paintings, a Richter-scale masterpiece, if you ask me) into James Turrell’s inky darkness [where you’re immersed in red light, of course.]
While it’s nice to see MoMA has important works like Marina Abramovic’s early video and Charles Ray’s prop pieces, it’s even better to see them exhibited in coherent, engaging way that signals the museum isn’t tone deaf when it comes to contemporary art.
* Cardiff’s choral piece was last shown in NYC at PS1 in October 2001. It was an overwhelming, mournful piece then when the city was still in shock; yesterday, I found myself choking up repeatedly and involuntarily as I walked around it. Cardiff didn’t set out to create a memorial to September 11th, but for some of us, her work seems destined to remain inextricably linked to the immediate aftermath of September 11th. [here’s what I wrote about that first installation.]
Smithson Symposium Saturday 9/24
New York Is Smithson Country this week, what with the Floating Island and the Whitney retrospective and the Smithson Symposium all day Saturday. What symposium, you say? Actually, that’s what I said. I had no idea.
Anyway, over four sessions, artists, curators and historians will discuss the Spiral Jetty, Smithson’s writings, films, travels, and influence [HUGE, in case you can’t make it]. Me, I’m going to hear Nancy Holt and folks talk about the construction and evolution of the Jetty; and Chrissie Iles and Joan Jonas talk about road trips and film.
Schedule and reservation info is in the sidebar at Whitney.org [whitney.org]
Smithson on greg.org [or greg.org on Smithson, actually]
Bonus Smithson: Tyler Green reports from the launch of Floating Island for the LAT
Speaking At A.I.R. in Chelsea Tuesday 9/20 at 630pm
I’ve been invited to speak Tuesday evening (tonight) at A.I.R. on the subject of women’s art and the marketplace. A.I.R. is the oldest artist-run gallery for female artists in the city, and it was established for the purpose of fostering an audience and environment for showing and making art without the overriding commercial motivations that usually accompany gallery-based work.
It’s an interesting venue to discuss these subjects, which I wrote about last spring in the NYT, especially in light of the current, superheated art world/market where quality is often equated with marketability and desirability. Jerry Saltz just wrote (again) about the need for an antidote, when most people don’t even acknowledge that there’s a disease right now, at least in public. I may end up just reading Jerry’s piece and opening it for questions [kidding].
If you’re around 511 W 25th st, suite 301 this evening at 6:30-8:00, stop by, listen, and throw in your two bits.
Night A.I.R. Series, organized by A.I.R. Fellow Sarah Blackwelder [airnyc.org]
Tote That Barge
Randy Kennedy has an article on the making of Robert Smithson’s Floating Island, a tree-filled barge which will chug around lower Manhattan for a week or so:
Smithson’s project is just as intimately connected to Central Park, which he regarded, in all its artificial pastorality, as a conceptual artwork of its own. (He revered Frederick Law Olmsted and said that he found him more interesting than Duchamp.) While not nearly as monumental as Smithson’s most famous work, “Spiral Jetty,” a 1,500-foot-long curlicue of basalt jutting into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the island – which resembles a rectangular chunk of Central Park, neatly cookie-cuttered out – is a further twist on Smithson’s career-long fascination with displacement. This generally meant taking art outdoors and bringing pieces of the land back indoors, into galleries. In the case of “Floating Island,” the displacement is all outdoors, an exploration of land and water, urban and rural, real and recreated, center and periphery. As a paean to Central Park, it can be seen as a kind of artificial model of an artificial model of nature.
It’s Not Easy Making Art That Floats [nyt]
Even cooler, though, at nytimes.com/robertsmithson, Times makes a raft of its Smithson coverage, dating back to 1982, available (for who knows how long). [greg.org coverage of Smithson, alas, only goes back a couple of years.]
MoMA-Hatin’ On My Mind, Nerves
Well, things could certainly be worse, but I’m pretty fed up with the achingly nostalgic, self-appointed populist heroic, knee-jerk MoMA-hating that passes for an enlightened, progressive cultural standpoint in certain quarters of New York these days.
James Wagner takes it personally and politically when PS1 won’t let him shoot images of the Greater NY show. The MoMA Man holding him down. Sure, it puts a cramp in your photodiarykeeping to not be allowed to take pictures, but please.
PS1 generally, historically–and GNY particularly, famously–is a seat-of-their-pants, chaotic circus. Photo release language in the lending documents–assuming there even ARE lending documents–is exactly the kind of thing I’d expect to slip through the cracks there. Little harm, little foul.
And as for those works being lost forever because you couldn’t snap’em? I thought the conventional wisdom about GNY was that everyone in it was already discovered, represented, and getting famous already. I thought up half a dozen artist names in the show and found images of their GNY work and more on their galleries’ websites. It’s more time-consuming than uploading from a digital, but that’s about it.
The one that really bugged, though, was critic/polymath Terry Teachout’s sob story of his visit to MoMA last Friday, how it’s a crowded mall now, not as good as Cleveland or as conducive to artviewing as the Met. Well, I happened to be at MoMA last Friday, too–I had a meeting there earlier in the day–and not only didn’t it suck, experience-wise, it was actually nice, and there were some revelatory art moments the likes of which Terry apparently couldn’t be bothered with, because he was bitching about the escalators too much.
1) The “mall” escalators are not a core element of the Taniguchi design, but they can be a core element of a visitor’s experience there if you choose them to be. First, they’re 1% the mall that Cesar Pelli’s escalators were. Remember those? Second, the stairs are not only less crowded, they’re highlights of the spatial experience. If you want a contemplative visit, leave the escalators to the tourists and take the stairs.
1a) In fact, the staircase Terry complains Diebenkorn has been shunted to is one of the most sublime elements of the whole Taniguchi building.
2) Terry’s right about the Monets; they’re finally in a gallery where they belong. But he has not a word for what replaced them: giant Cy Twomblys that have never looked better than they do right now, alongside the Museum’s latest purchase, Rauschenberg’s giant Rebus. As an awestruck friend pointed out to me, Twombly and Rauschenberg were hooking up at the time Rebus was painted, so putting the two artists side by side again–and making you think about where that scribbling on Bob’s canvas came from, or as I rephrased it, “You’re wondering where Cy’s hands were?”–is at once hilarious and important. That painting, as my friend said, is “the best $30 million spent on art this year.”
to PS1: but they’re called the visual arts, aren’t they? [jameswagner.com]
One Big Blockbuster [about last night]
Art: We’re Here To Please
Regine just posted about some artists in the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale who made portable chairs available to visitors, [correction: turns out the chairs were sponsor-driven, not artist-driven.] and it got me thinking about the customer service side of artviewing, especially in a setting like Venice.
So much art is about the White Cube, the experience of seeing it, a “critique” of the institution/process, but yet so little of that actual process is actually addressed. A curator friend once told me of escorting her trustees around Venice (the last one, when it was August-hot at the June opening), and they actually had to debate going to see some art based on whether or not the venue was air-conditioned.
An artist like Francesco Vezzolli makes his art movie-trailer-short, sex-filled, and full of fashion and celebrity in order to stand out from the blur of Venice’s gossip-saturated, art-overloaded opening festivities. But that’s just a shrewd reading and anticipation of the setting.
I just came back from Tokyo with a hoard of Takashi Murakami fans, which they were handing out to people as they got off the Roppongi subway stop. It’s not art, I know, but it’s an artist’s move, based on a retailer/developer’s understanding of the viewer experience.
Then there’s Rirkrit Tiravanija’s meals, or last Venice’s Utopia Station, to an extent. Or 2001’s Venice cafe collaboration between Olafur Eliasson and Tobias Rehburger and ___ [I forget, but it doesn’t matter, because apparently it was altered so badly the artists removed their name from it. Somewhere in there, it lost the sanctity that non-artists grant to artwork.]
So what I’d love to see, I guess, is some kind of art-as-customer-service, someone who toys with or explores or highlights the fact that viewing and encountering and contemplating art is often –not exclusively, or even mostly, but often, and especially in the event-centered cases of fairs, biennials, and openings where much of the “art world” places itself– a cultural experience, an activity that its viewers choose over shopping, movies, other forms of travel or tourism, reading, what have you.
Anyway, just rambling when I should be heading out. It’s so hot, I think I’ll take one of these fans.
Tokyo Snapshots 3.1: The Plight Of The Bourgeois
Art is used to lend Roppongi Hills, the massive land grab mall/office complex I’m loving hating these days, cultural credibility. Minoru Mori, the developer, clearly fancies his development is Tokyo’s Rockefeller Center–and, by extension, he’s Japan’s Rockefeller.
At least two pieces of large-scale sculpture that were previously shown at Rock Ctr are currently installed at Roppongi Hills: Takashi Murakami’s Mr. Pointy & co., and Louise Bourgeois’ Maman [above].
Maman was first shown at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. But for some reason, organizers at neither previous venue thought to turn the work into a cafe.
Tokyo Snapshots, 1.5: Takashi Murakami Corp.
I still have a place in my heart–and fortunately, a spot in the old collection–for Takashi Murakami. The Louis Vuitton thing was rather masterful, and the sheer superfluity of luxury and fashion maps rather well onto some of the more expendable aspects of contemporary art, too.
Likewise, I’m not unappreciative of Murakami’s own creation myth, in which he and his characters subverted and exploited the banal world of Japanese idol-centric television, even as they were, in turn, exploited by the media for their own ends.
And when the set of Tongari-kun characters, including Mr. Pointy and his crew, was installed at Rockefeller Center, I was happy to go celebrate. [Here’s Gothamist’s report.]
But for some reason, it gives me a creeped out, sinister feeling seeing the identity characters he licensed to the massive, city-soul-sucking Roppongi Hills development, and then seeing the whole place decked out with banners celebrating Murakami Month, aka the same Tongari-kun/ Mr. Pointy sculptures from two years ago, installed in a lotus pond at the complex’s center.
The Mori Art Museum and its adjacent mall are full of Murakami goods, of course, dolls, t-shirts, towels, stickers, but nothing sums up the uncritical celebration of megalomania and the unholy confluence of conscience-free art, urban planning, and commerce better than this: Roppongi Hills Monopoly, featuring Takashi Murakami’s characters. It’s about 5,000 yen. Of course, I bought it.
Another Unrealized Project: Gregor Schneider’s Venice Cube
A couple of months ago, I wrote a NYT piece about artists’ unrealized projects. The piece quoted several interviews conducted by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who sees these unrealized projects as under-publicized and under-appreciated aspects of an artist’s work, especially compared to the high level of attention regularly paid to architects’ unbuilt proposals.
Well, Gregor Schneider’s Venice Cube 2005 is one piece that’s getting plenty of publicity. Schneider proposed building a large black cube out of scaffolding and fabric in the Piazza San Marco for the Biennale. It was reminiscent of the Kaba’a, which is at the center of Mecca. The proposal was rejected several times by Italian officials for what they now acknowledge were “political reasons,” to use the artist’s description. Schneider wanted to publish his documentation of the piece and the controversy–including emails between government officials and Biennale organizers, but he was forbidden to do so. His entry consists of six all-black pages in protest.
It would be interesting to see those emails. And to see this story get attention beyond The Art Newspaper, a worthy publication though it is.
Art in the age of global terrorism [theartnewspaper.com]
Previously: Unrealized Unrealized Projects
Buy Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews: Vol. 1 at Amazon
Video Artist Guy Ben-Ner on WPS1
Guy Ben-Ner’s in the zone these days; his ingenious video, “Elia – a story of an ostrich chick,” made like one of those anthropomorphizing Disney nature documentaries from the 50’s, is included in PS1’s Greater NY show. Now, he’s representing Israel in the Venice Biennale.
At Venice, Ben-Ner talks with PS1 curator Bob Nickas about his work and how he uses adaptive techniques for shooting under directorial duress. He references silent film, in which the camera couldn’t move, and nature documentaries, where you can’t direct animals. Ben-Ner uses his kids in his videos, which requires a certain creativity to get anything down on tape.
Ben-Ner’s segment lasts about 15 minutes, and then Nickas and his too-smart sidekicks spiral out of control, gushing over Vezzoli’s Caligula trailer–in exactly the critically unaware way that bugs so bad. While Ben-Ner sits silently by for the next 30-40 minutes, the curator/writer conversation encapsulates exactly the kind of hermetic, bitchy Venetian oneupsmanship that shouldn’t be recorded, much less broadcast. Don’t miss it.
WPS1 Venice Conversation – The Bob Nickas Roundtable [wps1.org, updated link to clocktower.org, July 2018]
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Janet.
Sarah Boxer is disappointed in–can I say it? too late–Janet Cardiff’s online piece, Eyes of Laura. Cardiff created a journal (don’t tell the bloggers, but she actually calls it a blog) for a bored security guard in the Vancouver art gallery which commissioned the piece.
Boxer seems to feel the work depends on a suspension of disbelief that is actually IS a work of art, particularly one by Cardiff: “Maybe the illusion of the Web site collapses because it is, paradoxically, too complete, too fleshed out.” I can’t imagine this is the case.
While the site doesn’t have opening credits or anything, Cardiff’s association with it is not as secret as Boxer seems to think. First there’s the site’s distribution. I’m sure it’s promoted/shown at the gallery itself, as any artwork would be. And as Zeke pointed out, the project launch was advertised on e-flux, the giant art world mailing list. Articles like Boxer’s mention it in the context of Cardiff. Googling either Cardiff or “Eyes of Laura” completes the circuit, too. The number of site visitors without a Cardiff clue must be miniscule/irrelevant.
As for the site experience itself, Boxer’s right, it’s too slick. What security guard’s blog asks you to check your media player preferences and tells you to get Flash before entering? From the get-go, it’s an intentional construct, an Online Experience. It’s true the red-on-red text (hidden in my browser) on the splash page gives only the fictional author’s explanation of her site, but Cardiff is mentioned multiple times in the source code. And of course, the domain name itself belongs to her.
On those terms, then, Eyes of Laura is The Idea (a fictional journal) plus the ideas and observations within it, which are thoughtfully, earnestly cryptic and fragmented, but self-consciously so (no “I’m scratching my butt, I’m so bored.” entries, but then maybe Laura just would never write that. Oh wait, I’m wrong: “June 28…Have you ever seen a ‘Spock Five’?”)
Compared to her audio walks, the online piece may feel over-produced, but it’s within Cardiff’s range: she’s done video tours, too, after all, and her Venice pavilion/theater was like a ride at an art world Epcot Center. As one who’s lost the trail on a Cardiff walk before (St Louis), and had her stage-whispered narrative play out over visuals I selected myself, the website’s degree of user control is welcome. I’d argue for even more–an actual blog format–even at the expense of some slickness.
Ultimately, though, Boxer and I agree on one point, if for different reasons. The character of Laura doesn’t quite work. Cardiff’s pieces are always mannered, and I’ve always taken them as extensions or iterations of the artist herself. A lot of art works that way; even when the artist doesn’t intend it to, it gets read that way. So when I read “Laura” explaining “her” site, like this:
“But remember this is all illicit and voyeuristic and illegal. Remember, I am putting my job on the line so you can see this stuff.”
I don’t hear a 25-year-old guard; I hear an artist in her late 30’s trying real hard to sound transgressive, to sound cool, to sound 25.
Eyes of Laura, an online project by Janet Cardiff [d’oh!]
When Seeing Is Not Always Believing [nyt]
Philip-Lorca diCourtroom
Philip-Lorca diCorcia is being sued by this guy for taking his photograph on the street in Times Square in 2001. More precisely, he’s being sued for exhibiting it, selling it, and publishing it in books, and his gallery, his publishers, and unnamed others who distribute the photo are included in the complaint.
I got this image from the Guardian, which wrongly describes the image as taken in the subway. It was taken on the street, under a construction scaffolding. I ran into P-L several times while he was shooting this series. So sue me.
Photographer sued for taking portrait [gothamist]
Buy Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Heads for only $22 at Amazon. While you still can. [amazon]
On Francesco Vezzoli’s Mirror To The Art World
It’s a relief to know that some folks in Venice did know they were being targetted by Francesco Vezzoli’s Biennale-stopping Caligula trailer–and are fans of his work because of it. Our Other Man In Venice was like, “but that’s the whole point–it’s an institutional critique from within the system. Vezzoli is a hustler, and he sees how the system works and is exposing it. And still, he’s best friends with Miuccia.”
And after reading about Donatella’s costumes for the Caligula in W, and how Vezzoli describes the work as “mirroring the superficiality of the film industry,” in Vanity Fair, I’m confident that Vezzoli knows what he’s up to. He’d have to be on top of things to be able to shoot the trailer in March, and still able to plant these fashion magazine stories in time for the piece’s Venice debut. To paraphrase Choire Sicha, Francesco’s a master in the medium of publicity machinery.
I’m totally cool with a smart artist exploring–and even taking advantage of and critiquing–systematic vapidity. But it still bugs when the art world looks into the mirror that artist holds up and doesn’t recognize itself.
Related: Marc Spiegler’s look at the Biennale-hype Industrial Complex in Slate; actor Glenn Shadix’s report from the set of Caligula [‘deliciously over-the-top and outrageous and the food was excellent,’], plus photos and VF scans; ‘the best part of the film is the trailer’? on Jen Shiman’s 30-second Bunny Theater.
