Category: art

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In the Times, Roberta Smith combines a righteous review of Jon Routson’s “Bootleg” series–video recordings of films Routson attends–with righteous indignation against increasingly draconian copyright legislation (like making possession of a camcorder in a theater a felony).

It does not matter whether you think that Mr. Routson’s work is good or bad art; it is quite good enough, in my view. It does matter that the no-camcorder laws may not do much to stem pirating while making it increasingly difficult for artists to do one of the things they do best: comment on the world around them.
Our surroundings are so thoroughly saturated with images and logos, both still and moving, that forbidding artists to use them in their work is like barring 19th-century landscape painters from depicting trees on their canvases. Pop culture is our landscape…
At once stolen and given away, Mr. Routson’s works operate somewhere between the manipulated magazine advertising images of the 1980’s artist Richard Prince and the keep-the-gift-in-motion aesthetic of 90’s artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose sculptures included large piles of wrapped candy, free for the taking, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose first exhibitions consisted of cooking curry and serving it to gallery visitors. [Nice company you keep, Jon. -greg]

Routson’s show runs through Saturday at Team Gallery.
Related, Law:
Theaters used nightvision goggles to bust the only man to record (or see) The Alamo (04.15.04)
“If camcorders are illegal, only criminals will have camcorders.” (11.21.03)
& Artist:
Jon Routson profile in Baltimore City Paper (with important-sounding quotes from me) (01.21.04)
Jon Routson’s edited-for-TV Cremaster 4 and video art bootlegging (08.18.03)

Not to get all Elvis Mitchell on yer ass or anything, but if auction reports were white cotton handkerchiefs, dry, practical, and folded neatly, dutifully, and boringly into the breast pocket of some print media outlet or another, Stuart Waltzer’s account of last night’s Whitney Picasso sale at Sotheby’s is a stunning, showy-but-inutile giant Hermes carre, silkscreened with a riot of intricate patterns, cascading like a technicolor waterfall out of the blazer of some too-tanned-for-January decorator at La Goulue.

In helpful, 2×2 grid format:

Go to the Jim Lambie show at Anton Kern, which ends Saturday. Nice pants. (Roberta Smith agrees.)

Go to Momenta Art benefit auction at White Columns Saturday night.

Go to the deKooning show at Gagosian. (Roberta Smith agrees. Again. Stop following me!) The man was either a painting genius, or he had Alzheimer’s his whole life.

Read John Rockwell’s amused, largely successful attempt to conserve and convey an admittedly ephemeral artistic experience–in this case, NYU’s brainy panel discussion, “Not for Sale: Curating, Conserving and Collecting Ephemeral Art”– before the Times locks it up in its archives.

Try to see, literally, Benjamin Cottam’s one-man show of beautiful-to-look-at, aggressively hard-to-see portraits and drawings at Gasser Grunert on 19th St. We snapped up four of the fingernail-sized dead artist portraits as soon as we saw them, which, fortunately, was several months ago in the studio. (Roberta, where are you when we need you?)

Print out your treatment, and head down to the Tribeca Film Festival.

Go to Naoshima in Japan, either with a blogger or with a tourful of “journalling” middle aged artists (how do you tell them apart, you might ask? just look for the elastic-waisted batik pants.)

It’s a fine hook to hang a puff piece for the Guggenheim’s minimalism exhibit on: Tour the city with the curators and uncover the minimalism all around us. Should be ideal; so why would I rather take my chances on the Baghdad-Najaf local?

Is it the idea of riding around in a van all day? The constant competition for most nerve-fraying whine between Nancy Spector’s 3-month-old baby and chief curator/clotheshorse Lisa Dennison? (“There is a very real danger that I will start to shop, so we’d better be brief.”)

No, it’s the depressing realization that these supposedly high-octane New York artminds, augmented by artist and prolific writer Liam Gillick, couldn’t have come up with a more unimaginative, uninformative itinerary. With the exception of Donald Judd’s own studio/house in SoHo, their minimalist sites barely warrant looking up as your cab goes by.
Jil Sander (by Spector’s husband) instead of Calvin Klein (by maxi-minimalist and Judd cut-and-paster John Pawson)? The window at the Time Warner Mall instead of the Rose Center Planetarium (which did clear-glass curtainwall first, infinitely better, and happens to be by an actual architect)? Richard Meier’s silly Asia de Cuba or whatever the hell it’s called? (My guess: Lisa’s idea.)

And the piece de resistance: the Seagram building instead of something actually minimalist, like _____(I’m thinking.) This minimalist braintrust actually drinks the Miesian Koolaid, that it’s all about “structure as the expression of the buildng.” Mies was as much about decoration as the next classicist, it turns out, as the renovation of his IIT in Chicago proved. His structure was a veneer on top of the actual structure: aestheticized, artificial, techno-classicist.

[Update: I am not all right on this Mies nonsense, but it turns out I’m even lazier than a vanful of curators. And I’m too bored with their conceit to care. If you’re really interested in minimalism and the grid and its influence on the city, go read the chapter on how laying out the grid led to the development of the skyscraper in Koolhaas’s Delirious New York.

Police arrest 2 under new ‘anti-camcording’ law
15 Apr 2004 10:07am EDT – By Jesse Hiestand
The MPAA announced Wednesdaythe first arrests under a new California law targetting movie pirates who use camcorders in theaters. Min Jae Joun was arrested on suspicion of violating the anti-camcording law after theater personnel saw a red light from his camcorder during an April 10 screening of The Passion of the Christ at the Pacific Theatre at the Grove in Los Angeles. Joun’s next hearing date is May 5 in Los Angeles’ central arraignment court. Also arrested on suspicion of the misdemeanor charge was Ruben Centeno Moreno, who allegedly recorded The Alamo on April 12 at the Pacific Winnetka Theatre in the Chatsworth area of Los Angeles. A projectionist observed a light from the video camera and confirmed it using night-vision goggles, according to the MPAA. No hearing date has been set yet for Moreno. [via IMDb]

If you can actually tell me which of the three highlighted parts of this story is the craziest, I’ll paypal you a dollar.
Related: Jon Routson got a good, if cautionary, review for his current show of bootlegged films-as-art.

Ever the arts enthusiast in search of a common man constituency, Tyler Green wrote an op-ed for the WSJ that gamely proposes to take the Whitney Biennial on the road, to the people–in the “hinterlands.”
And what could be wrong with that? Besides going to bat for the perennially controversial-at-best biennial? Besides coming off as populist and condescending toward your biennial’s flyover audience?
Well, there’s playing right into the middle of the WSJ‘s own FoxNews-like editorial slant, for one. Tyler shouldn’t be surprised when the comments he received were at odds with the crusty, Moral Majority-form letters the Journal itself published. Tyler lobbed one over the net, and the Journal‘s know-nothing niche shot it down like the pigeon his editors knew it would be.

Tyler has compiled a convenient checkist for making a complete and utter ass of yourself at The Armory Show this weekend. For [my] entertainment’s sake, please follow every piece of advice.

Editor Tim Griffin introduces In Conversation, a new feature in this month’s Artforum, artists talking to artists. To start: Jeremy Blake and John Baldessari, two artists with deep interest in the intersections between painting and ______(cinema, photography, technology, text, conceptual art). Both artists also have deep, abiding interest in film as well, which explains why this turned up on daily.greencine.com.
One great thread: Baldessari’s contested label as a Conceptual Artist.

JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, in the late ’60s, I was introduced to some painter at Max’s Kansas City and he said, “Oh you’re one of those �write-abouts’?” I said, “What do you mean �write-abouts’?” ‘You know, critics write about your work.’ To him, that’s what made a Conceptual artist.

Related posts from Feb. 2003: Jeremy previewing his Winchester piece last Feb and his haiku-like shorts for the Punch-Drunk Love DVD.

One of the most rewarding shows last year in New York was The Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Whitney. For generations, the descendants of former slaves in an isolated Alabama town developed quilt designs that stand alongside–and frequently prefigure by decades–some of the best modern art of the 20th century. The reminded me of Stuart Davis, 80’s Sol Lewitt, and most of all, Ellsworth Kelly.
Anyway, as of yesterday, that show is at the Corcoran in DC. I understand if you’re still boycotting because of that embarassing Seward Johnson exhibit, but you’ll only be hurting yourself if you miss this. But if you insist, you can approximate the Gee’s Bend experience by buying the catalog and the more expansive Gee’s Bend: The Women and their Quilts, or with a handtufted, quilt-patterned carpet, made under exclusive license by the Classic Rug Collection.
Over 600 quilts are now owned by the non-profit Tinwood Alliance, which was established by Peter Arnett, an Atlanta collector who began amassing them in the 1980’s.