Category: art

While a few “right on”s and “elitist”s trickled in over the weekend, and my favorite–“MoMA is a corporation, the new building is a corporate HQ. You are a foot soldier”–just arrived yesterday morning, the quality of the responses to my little MoMA admissions price challenge did not improve with time.
I should’ve wrapped this up and posted the winners a couple of days ago, but I’ve been too busy hobnobbing with a bunch of MoMA bigwigs (10%) and a kid (99%, Yeah, it doesn’t add up. Tell me about it.)

Continue reading “Y Tu MoMA Tambien”

Was it Documenta where I was taken in by Raghubir Singh’s quietly masterful color photographs of India, which bring an artist’s eye to documentary photos. Gabriel Orozco meets Cartier-Bresson.
There was a great show at the Smithsonian last year, and now his work has come to Sepia International. In his review, The Voice’s Vince Aletti tries to gently correct the art historical record to reflect Singh’s early(-er) and powerful use of color. Scoot over, Egglestone, and let Singh up there on the dais, too.

A Windshield View [Village Voice]
Raghubir Singh: A Retrospective, through Dec. 30 [Sepia International]
Singh Books at Amazon: A Way Into India, River of Colour

Thanks for the response so far. I should say that while I think Kurt Andersen’s idea for the federal government to pay for all the country’s museum entry fees is a good one, I see two problems with it:
1) the problem in the White House, and
2) it’s Kurt Andersen’s idea, so if you’d like me to send him the passes…
Related:
Free Museums for All [Studio 360, 7/28/2001]
My diatribe supporting Billionaires For MoMA which, if you make it to the end, has an offer for free passes.

[Update: I would point out this is my own opinion; I do volunteer work for MoMA, but I don’t speak for the Museum or any of its officers. I wrote this in direct reaction to FreeMoMA.org, which makes a lot of assertions about MoMA that, in my experience, don’t ring true at all.]
And that’s why it’s $20. When the MoMA’s Film curator presented the story of the new building, as told through a series of silent movie title cards and film clips, three scenes got way bigger laughs than the rest:

Glenn Lowry discusses the building with the curatorial staff was the scene from Babe where docile sheep, doing exactly as they’re told, march in formation.
What those curatorial meetings were really like was a shot from Twelve Angry Men where the jurors confront Henry Fonda and tell him why he’s wrong.
But Mike Margitich quickly meets his goal for the capital campaign brought down the house. A 1930’s tuxedo’ed man locks the door, walks over to an elegantly dressed woman, grabs her by the shoulders, and shakes her violently until a wallet drops on the floor. He picks it up, and the two sit down to dinner.

People obviously related. After all, they were at the MoMA Founders dinner Monday night, 200 or so people who had given $1-50+ million each towards the museum’s $858 million capital campaign. Also there: us, Danny Meyer, and the folks from Target who decided to underwrite four years of free Friday evenings at the museum.

Continue reading “Free MoMA?? Try F(*#%-ing Expensive MoMA”

Why else would you exhibit the same work in two different places?
The Museum of Modern Art has this stack, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in two galleries–the Prints Galleries and the Contemporary Gallery. I’m trying to think of any other artist whose work could be shown in two places at once.
Meanwhile, the new building is literally awe-inspiring. My biggest fear was that the gargantuan galleries would dwarf the art. It’s not even close.
I remember during the OK trial, when Margaret Cho ran into Johnny Cochrane at the Mondrian, she gushed, “I love your show!” The only reason I didn’t use that line with Mike Ovitz was because his case wasn’t on TV. Still, we had a good time trading war stories from our days workin’ for the Mouse.
Oh, wait, I think I dropped something.

This is better than pirates. Modernartnotes reports that the Whitney is preparing to realize Robert Smithson’s work, Floating Island, a landscaped barge which will be tugged around New York Harbor.
I’ve been waiting for this since Spring 1997, when Brian Conley and Joe Amrhein talked about doing it after their successful recreation of Smithson’s Dead Tree at Pierogi 2000.
Related:
Whitney gossip at Modern Art Notes
Artforum reviews Dead Tree at Pierogi 2000, May ’97
Dead Tree and Floating Island at RobertSmithson.com
Man claims Governors Island for several minutes with pirate flag

Just a quick and heartfelt thanks to the wide-ranging advertisers on greg.org. Be sure to show them that yes, in fact, money can buy them love, or a reasonable facsimile:

Fleshbot Films’ debut DVD, Necromania, “directed” by “director” Ed Wood [I mean, can you imagine what the makegoods are like over at Fleshbot? Why not stand at attention for them?]

KevinKringle.com, of the North Pole Kringles [A funwhat cryptic site for now, but I’m sure there’s more coming. After all, do you think that Necromania DVD can play itself? Don’t answer that.]

MoMA’s Junior Associates, who are the ‘P’ in VIP, and who may be your best chance for getting your junior butt into the opening festivities for the new building. Besides, their dues are barely more than the new admission fee.

Arcadia University Art Gallery, which is currently showing Olafur Eliasson’s Your colour memory. Eliasson was just named the 29th most powerful person in the art world, which should cinch the deal right there.

Viva La Revolution! The Guardian‘s loyal apparatchik, Amelie Gentleman demands that contemporary art collector, museum-builder, Frenchman, and “rapacious capitalist” Francois Pinault confess his artistic crimes.
Crimes number one, two, and three: pouring hundreds of millions of his own euros into to build a world-class collection–the likes of which doesn’t exist anywhere else in France–and to turn a ruined factory–or, as she calls it, the “temple of France’s workers”–into a Tadao Ando-designed museum.
She tries to scare France senseless by comparing Pinault to the mad king of London’s art world, Charles Saatchi. But she’s got almost all hyperbole, almost no data, and next to no quotes, except for a bitchy whispering “official,” who’s righter than he knows when he says most French contemporary artists aren’t good enough to make the collection (Don’t worry about them, though; their ’68 buddies entrenched at the Pompidou will always buy their work.)
After living all these years in dread of Saatchi, Gentleman’s article sounds like a case of the abused becoming the abuser.

Saatchi of the Seine [Guardian]

You have 9 days and counting to see David Zwirner’s show of 40 years of On Kawara’s date paintings. Kawara began painting these works on January 6, 1966, and he has developed a particular set of rules for their creation: he must complete the painting by the end of that day; the date format is determined by the country where he happens to be (Esperanto where they don’t use Roman characters, and always hand-painted, not stencilled); there are eight color (mixed fresh every day) and five size variations; he eventually stopped including a page from that day’s local newspaper in the box.
While working with a strict, uniform, and imposed subject matter, Kawara’s method offers subtle reminders of the act of making, little shoutouts of “I am still alive.”
Just as Dan Flavin’s work uses the barest means to make us aware of space, Kawara’s makes us aware of time. Why do I suddenly have the urge to see I ♥ Huckabees?
On Kawara at David Zwirner, through Oct. 16
On Kawara at Dia:Beacon, the second-largest grouping around. Also check out Lynne Cooke’s essay.
Other Kawara-related posts, including Kawara’s amazing piece at Documenta XI

And it is good. Just got back from the newly opened Dan Flavin retrospective at the National Gallery this morning, and it’s pretty wonderful. Some of the galleries are oddly cramped–anyone realize how unfriendly I.M. Pei’s actual galleries are to art?–especially if you’re used to seeing Flavins in dedicated spaces like Dia:Beacon, Dia:Bridgehampton, or Judd’s Spring St. loft.
But every time I start to write how there are too many Tatlin pieces in this gallery, or how that gallery would be better with just three pieces, not four, I remember the single-room Tatlin installation at the Menil. Or how I didn’t mind the ground floor of Dia:Chelsea being crammed with his work right after he died. Now that I think about it, it’s really only because the utter perfection of the all-white Flavin show at Paula Cooper’s cathedral-like gallery a couple of years ago still burns like phosphenes on my retinas.
Flavin’s great success, like his kindred artistic spirit Donald Judd, arises from the complex spatial awareness he creates with such industrial, apparently unartistic means. His flourescent sculptures activate the spaces they inhabit; their light seems to hang in the air, outclassing and setting itself off against the “normal” light we otherwise ignore.
Although ads and posters feature the most visually complicated Flavin grid, to me the most wonderful work is the single horizontal flourescent tube spanning a corner. There was a two-toned white one at Paula Cooper, but the example in this show is blue, magically backlit with red, green, and yellow. It positively floats on air. [ModernArtNotes has a reproduction and excerpts of Tylers review for Bloomberg.]
At 10AM the galleries were empty, except for still-unconvinced guards and a pair of bitter old southern queens who repeatedly unloaded their pent-up hostilities on Flavin’s work (“What’re we supposed to see? They’re all untitled!” “Nothing, this was YOUR idea.” “The kids at the day care could do that.” “I’d hope so.”)
Of course, the untitles couldn’t be more loaded with meaning and reference, as even the quickest glance at the works list would show. untitled (to Barnett Newman to commemorate his simple problem, red, yellow and blue) is only one rich example. There’s a Work List in the drawings gallery at the end of the show from the early 60’s, on which serious, momentous-sounding titles are divided into “In Process” and “To Be Completed.” Only two are checked off, but we know now how it turned out. It’s useful to look back through the other end of the telescope and remember that these ephemeral, experiential works of off-the-shelf materials grew from their untitles.
It reminded me of a statement curator Laura Hoptman made about her inspirations for the about-to-open Carnegie International:

I have been thinking about all the artists making work immediately after the Second World War both in Europe and in the United States. Those artists had hubris. Barnett Newman felt that he could sum up the world in a single vertical zip! It might seem ridiculous, but there’s something very potent about the notion that with this kind of abstract gesture you could take on a subject like monotheism.

And no one had more hubris than Flavin and Judd (although Flavin may have grown out of it; the last piece he completed before he died was for the Christmas windows of the newly opened Calvin Klein boutique on Madison Ave.) Perhaps the greatest thing about the exhibition catalogue is the appendix, which features a chipper first-person timeline/biography, written by an obviously younger Flavin, and a 1965 interview, republished from Artforum, where his powerful artistic hubris shines through.
Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, at the National Gallery of Art through Jan. 9, 2005
Buy the exhibition catalogue, or better yet, pre-order Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights, 1961-1996, which includes the catalogue plus all the rest of the artist’s sculptural work.
Related: In Search of The Ultimate [Laura Hoptman with Roberta Fallon on Artnet]

In the last two days, I’ve heard two curators from MoMA talk extensively about what the new building and the reinstallation of the art in it will be like. To use the phrase of the evening, I’ve gotten mixed signals.
Terry Riley discussed Yoshio Taniguchi’s building as the next major datapoint in the generations-long experiment of how architecture should address modern and contemporary art. In contrast to the Guggenheims, which engage art with their own influential, expressive intent, MoMA’s buildings–almost since its founding–has served as a “machine in the service of art,” emphasizing flexibility and utility.
After the powerful statement of Bilbao, Taniguchi’s MoMA, Riley said, “restabilizes” and reinvigorates this debate. And it does it with “logic” and “tradition,” some of the same principles contemporary artists worked against when making their art.
Nevertheless, Riley predicted people “will be shocked” by the vitality and dynamism these allegedly “conservative” principles bring.
On the art front, Ann Temkin, a curator from Painting & Sculpture, revealed that “Art History 101,” MoMA’s longstanding, authoritative chronological approach to displaying its renowned collection would return in November, albeit in expanded form. The thematic experiments of the MoMA2000 shows and the Tate Modern’s idea-driven installations seem to have reinforced the curators’ belief that MoMA’s uniquely deep and broad collection come with the unique responsibility to attempt to show this history. They’re doing it because they’re almost literally the only ones who can.
The “core historical collection” as taken in another generation, and art from the last 30+ years–which is still in process and historical flux–will be shown in consecutive 9-month views. Beyond these accretions and intentional change, the space, the vistas, the juxtapositions and potential paths generated by the new building are probably the greatest difference.
I’ve been in the almost completed building, and it is literally jaw-dropping. The atrium and the contemporary galleries are massive, and even the upper, historical galleries feel huge. MoMA’s got an unparalleled collection, sure, but I have to think that the building’s–the institution’s–new monumentality may end up overwhelming and subsuming many of the works we remember quite intimately. Some may even find it shocking.
Barely related: Not that anyone cares, but there’s some satisfaction in knowing that Charlie Finch got it almost 100% wrong.

Arist Monica Bonvicini will participate in a panel discussion at Art Forum Berlin, the giant art fair, next week. Her co-panelists: gallerist Joe Amrhein, and collectors Harald Falckenberg and Mera & Don Rubell. The moderator is Marc Spiegler, an srt writer who made this sort of trouble at Basel, too.
The Topic: “Bigger! Faster! Out of control! Does today’s Art Market devour Artists?”
From the description: “Since the early 1990s, the art market has been rocked by change. There are many more collectors today, buying more aggressively. The role of the gallery is being radically transformed (and even threatened) by the surging number of fairs, biennials and contemporary auctions. Artists are treated like popstars and their audience often suffers from Neophilia, a constant craving for the new…Is this a permanent transformation or just a ‘Live Fast, Die Young’ phenomenon, dooming us for a crash and destined to yield only ephemeral art?”
Be sure to bring a pen (to jot down the names of hot new artists) and your checkook. Art Forum Berlin, 9/21 @ 1730 (that’s 5:30 to you, pal)