Who’s the must-have light installation artist in Los Angeles these days? If you answered, “James Turrell,” pack up your Uggs and get out. In Pasadena this week, Olafur Eliasson debuted a modernist hill houseful of installations and interventions, organized by his Italian gallerist, Emi Fontana.
Check out pictures and descriptions at arcspace, or pour yourself a glass of whine at artforum diary, which features largely content-free Olafur soundbites and bitching about the opening’s lack of valet parking. Or go yourself, until May.
Olafur Eliasson: Meant to be lived in [arcspace.com]
LA Residential [artforum diary]
Category: art
ACFWLF
The soft, supple opening to Charlie Finch’s latest column on Artnet:
We first met Laurel Nakadate in 2001, right after she received her MFA from Yale. While in New Haven, Laurel lived in a single-room occupancy apartment house full of lonely, homely, aging single men whom she proceeded to bait and cocktease mercilessly in her video work.
By “we,” I think he means “me and my lonely, homely, single hand.”
Critic, art world svengali, and breast man Charlie Finch sticks his own hand into “perky, dewy” video artist Laurel Nakadate’s career, apparently without realizing that he’s already soaking in it.
If someday she comes out and says her work is about a young artist who graduates from Gregory Crewdson’s Yale and tries to get ahead in the art world, I will die laughing. And give her the Turner Prize.
Nakadate’s show is up at the otherwise redoubtable Danziger Projects through May 14.
Danger is Her Game [charlie finch on artnet]
To Do: White Columns Benefit Auction, 4/16
There’s a lot of goodlooking work that’s been donated to White Columns’ 2005 benefit auction: nice pieces by Verne Dawson, Peter Doig, Rachel Harrison, a pointless-but-nice T-shirt by Payne/Relph, a wheel-thrown ceramic pushpin by Mungo Thompson.
Silent and online bidding is on right now, and some lots will end with a live auction on the night of the 16th.
White Columns 2005 benefit auction
That Che Image And The Guy Who Made It
For an exhibition in Dublin, Dutch artist Aleksandra Mir interviews Jim Fitzpatrick, the Irish artist who created the stencil-like poster of Che Guevara. It’s a fascinating story of copyright, revolution, and appropriation, told by someone who’s been largely invisible, even though he made one of the most widely known–and widely copied–images of the last 50 years.
Some interesting tidbits:
– Fitzpatrick originally made 1,000 two-color posters, with the stars hand-colored yellow.
– Several hand-printed early variations–and one painting–made for an exhibition went missing somewhere in Eastern Europe.
– Che was Irish. Irish Argentinean.
– After cutting off negotiations with Fitzpatrick, A US company, Fashion Victim, bought the rights to the underlying picture from the photographer’s heirs and now enforces a trademark–while producing Che clothing in Honduran sweatshops.
– There was an Amsterdam rebel group called ‘The Provos.’
Not everything is always Black or White. [aleksandramir.info]
Jim Fitzpatrick’s website
Heh. If Dorothea Lange Had Worked For Allure
Weekly World News: “Pope Struck By Meteor Again”
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[headline via the comments on Grammar Police]
FATUOUS WRITING MAKES ART LOVER’S HEAD EXPLODE!!
It’s been a pretty crappy day, already, so don’t make me decide which writing is more annoying, self-reflexive, and wilfully misinformed and misrepresentative about its subject:
- Lee Siegel’s free-associational riffs in Slate about Cy Twombly’s “doodling,” which, after all these years IS apparently just like your kid could do. Bonus quote: “You cannot fully understand Twombly’s art unless you know that he is gay.” [huh?? I DID pick up “fatuous” from here, though.]
updated link: archive.org - Hilton Kramer’s self-contradictory, dishonest, and obtuse reading and critique of Pace Wildenstein’s amazing show, “Logical Conclusions: 40 Years of Rule-Based Art.” Kramer–why am I even mentioning him??–starts in on Minimalism, too. Oy. And the Communist Threat, blah blah blah. Save it for that big Flavin/Judd/Kramer panel discussion in the sky, Hilly. It’s 2005 already.
Rotterdam Swag: New Shopping Bag, by Susan Bijl
I received one of these bags as a thank you gift for one of the panel discussions I did in February at Art Rotterdam. [Inside were a couple of great catalogues and a fine bottle of spirits which I shared away, since I don’t drink. Thanks again to the folks from Het Wilde Weten for the opportunity.]
Anyway, the bag rocks. It’s made out of a super-light, super-strong coated nylon normally used for kites. It’s designed by artist Susan Bijl, and it’s available online and in museum shops and other design-savvy spots. Despite being unable to adequately explain The Preppy Handbook to my hosts, I ended up choosing the pink and green one.
Get your own New Shopping Bag without bloviating in a crowd susanbijl.nl
From The Armory Show Lost & Found Dept.
From my friends Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset comes a show, er, a work that could be titled, Untitled (Hah, made you look!). Right before they left town–and after the opening of their installation at the Bohen Foundation–the artists installed a piece at The Wrong Gallery, Maurizio Cattelan, Mass Gioni, and Ali Subotnick’s foot-deep-gallery-in-a-doorway, next to Andrew Kreps.
They dressed a Mini with all the paraphrenalia of a long trip abandoned–maps, lotion, crumbs and change on the floor–and a sleeping baby in the backseat. The car’s been collecting parking tickets all week; I guess the show will end whenever DOT decides to tow it.
Or else… It just occurred to me that there’s a women’s prison on the corner. Maybe the baby mama is in there doing some firm–if not hard–time.
Elmgreen & Dragset at the Bohen Foundation
[update: Someone apparently called 911 on the baby in the car, because NYPD come to investigate this afternoon.]
While You Were At The Armory
“And with art, there are always boobs, liberated by liquor, out where they shouldn’t be, pointing around at paintings they don’t understand and could never afford.”
–The NY Observer’s Rebecca Dana reporting from the opening of art dealer Jack Tilton’s new East 76th Street gallery.
Bottle Racket [Don’t scroll down so fast you miss:
-Some adman praising his own scripts for Dasani commercials, written “intending Wes Anderson to direct” [Coke spends $2bn/yr on ads, so of course, they got him, duh]–why do I find the idea of Wes directing Anderson-esque commercials written by Coke’s agency laughably sad?
-George Gurley accosting Catherine Deneuve in print and in the, um, flesh.]
Damien Who?
From the Times:
But, at first, the thought of painting in this Photo Realist manner intimidated him. When he began in earnest about three and a half years ago, he realized why.
“I started out airbrushing,” he said. “But the images looked flat, dead. For two years I didn’t think it was going to work.” Finally, he said, he disciplined himself to represent each image faithfully by hand.
Still, he doesn’t consider himself a serious painter. “I would feel uncomfortable putting myself in a category with other painters like Goya or Bacon,” he said. “I’m more interested in the images than the painting.”
From Linda Yablonsky on Artforum.com:
Though many guests made the connection, Hirst may have thought he was avoiding comparisons to Jeff Koons by ordering hired hands to paint each piece in this chilling body of work rather badly. (One assistant was reportedly fired for painting too well.)
But I hope he didn’t think he was avoiding comparisons to another Damien who makes paintings “in photo-realist style from pictures in magazines and print ads”: Damien Loeb.
But my favorite quote from Yablonsky captures a whole swath of the art world’s, “I’m here, so it must be important” sense of audacious self-consciousness, without a hint of self-awareness:
At these prices [up to $2mm] it’s difficult to understand how paintings that are not going to get any better with time can continue to acquire value. Though truth be elusive, let’s just say that that is exactly Hirst’s point: to empty art of meaning. In a market where money is so disposable, how can art transcend mere currency to become more than just a brand? If this is indeed Hirst’s message, then he has issued a galling challenge to every other living artist. It will be interesting to see who takes it up.
Or not. Because it’s not like anyone’s ever paid more than $2 million for a painting before, or even for a Hirst.
As some smart aleck said in the NY Times, “Just because you’ve spent a lot of time and money on something doesn’t mean it’s very good.”
Taste for the Macabre but No Pickled Sharks [nyt]
High and Dry, Linda Yablonsky [artforum.com]
Has Anyone Seen The Flavin Show in Fort Worth?
AND at The National Gallery? I’d love to hear how it’s installed in Ando’s (probably) more sympathetic building.
Huh. They call The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth “The Modern”.
On Demand
The other night Thomas Demand offhandedly described some of the insane details of the production of Clearing, the massive photograph of a forest which is now built into The Modern at MoMA. The photograph was laminated onto two sheets of architectural safety glass that were so large, they had to use satellite-curing ovens at ESA, the European Space Agency–at night–to fabricate it. When the request for the work, Thomas said, “no one quite knew what they were getting.”
[On an irrelevant note, the lifesize set for Clearing happened to be in Demand’s studio during a MoMA Jr Associates visit I set up. It was so stunning, the trustees quickly added the studio to their Berlin itinerary, and curator Kynaston McShine suggested the Modern acquire the work. And I still can’t get a reservation.]
I mention this–obviously I mention the studio story for self-aggrandizement, but remember the tagline of this site, yo–because not quite knowing what you’re getting seems like one of the underlying currents of Demand’s work.
Walking through the show, I tried to recall the portentous actual setting that was obscured behind each photograph’s generic title: Kitchen was Saddam’s, Archive was Riefenstahl’s, etc., but I kept remembering them wrong, which made me load all kinds of historical baggage onto each image; turns out only some of the bags actually matched. Barn was Pollock’s, not Kaczynski’s; the cluttered desk was L. Ron Hubbard’s, not Bill Gates’. The Bauhaus-style stairway was from Demand’s middle school, but it turns out even he remembered it wrong.
Thomas Demand opens today at MoMA [moma.org]
Michael Kimmelman calls it “hypnotic” [nyt]
No one goes to The Modern; it’s too crowded
NFS: Art You Can’t Buy
Tangentially related to both preparations for my upcoming talks on the art market in Rotterdam and to The Gates being rather showily not for sale, I’ve been thinking about art you can’t buy or sell.
The Times of London has Tyson’s full puzzle [timesonline.co.uk]
I’m Speaking In Rotterdam This Week
Shameless plug first: I’m speaking and participating in two panel discussions at Art Rotterdam this week. Thursday at 2000 hours [when is that? someone please tell me.] I’m talking about the effects on art and artists of the art market’s global dynamic. That’s at Het Wilde Weten, an alternative art space in Rotterdam, where the other panelists include: artists Jeanne van Heeswijk and Joep van Lieshout; Mondriaan Foundation director Gitta Luiten; journalist Marc Spiegler; and Amsterdam gallery owner Maurice van Valen.
Then on Friday afternoon at 1500 hours, I’m on a panel about private funding of art and museums. The other folks are Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s special events officer Claudia Rech; Rainald Schumacher, Director Goetz Sammlung; Kees van Twist, Director Groningermuseum; and
Frank Lubbers, deputy-director Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. The moderator is Prof. Dr. Arjo Klamer of Erasmus University.