Category: art

Untitled (Republican Years), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1992
currently in “Stacked” at D’Amelio Terras
If you are boycotting the French right now, you’re a loser. They’re putting on some of the best shows in town. Additions to an incomplete list:

“Back Grounds,” at Andrew Kreps [Dude, get a website!] a show of intricately made B&W photographs by Liz Deschenes, James Welling, and Adolphe Humbert de Molard. Curated by Olivier Renaud-Clement.

“Stacked,” a group show of, well, stacked works at D’Amelio Terras.

“Architecture and Furniture by Jean Prouv� at Sonnabend,” with Galerie Patrick Seguin, including remarkable 1950 pieces from the Air France office in Brazzaville, Congo.

“The Extravagant Vein,” at Marianne Boesky. Drawings, video projection and oil painting by Donald Moffett.

Photographs by gallery artists at Andrea Rosen, including Craig Kalpakjian‘s proposal for creating an earthwork on the moon (which would, by definition, not be an earthwork).

Douglas Gordon at Gagosian. What’s the big deal? Or, more precisely, what’s the big deal with “big?”

Last night at a friend’s house, Jeremy Blake showed us some recent work and talked about it.

and by “house,” I mean a sprawling, gorgeous Fifth Avenue apartment filled with pictures of supermodels (not kissing ones, but just hanging out ones)

and by “some,” I mean two of his DVD-based pieces, including Blossoms and Blood, a beautiful, expressive short film he made with Paul Thomas Anderson and Jon Brion for the Punch-Drunk Love cast and friends. It’s a closely interwoven mix of scenes from the movie, Jeremy’s paintings, and Brion’s music.

and by “recent,” I mean the DVD was still warm. 1906 is the just-finished second part of a trilogy about the Winchester Mansion, which combines 8mm film, paintings, and an organ/symphony/film projector-interlaced soundtrack. It’s eerie, moody, historically rich and beautiful.

and by “talked,” I mean blew people away with passion, articulate discussion of his work and his process, and intelligence regarding the context it inhabits. One thing that surprised me: Even after “air-dropping from the farthest margins into the center of the film world,” and working with one of the most famously creatively empowered directors, Jeremy finds that artists actually have it pretty good, in terms of freedom to “pursue subjectivity” with their work.
The New Museum previewed a strong group show, “Living Inside the Grid,” where Dan Cameron exercises his international muscles in advance of the Istanbul Biennial. There are some obvious (and thus, intentional) omissions, but many nice pieces, including a creepy-sleek prison door by Elmgreen & Dragset.
And finally, while I didn’t make the opening, the after-party came to us at dinner: The Whitney opens a show about Diller + Scofidio, architects who have PR-muscled their way to the front of the technology/media stage. Eager to make amends for the dustup caused by his baldly partisan, king-making articles about the WTC redesign, the NYTimes‘ Herbert Muschamp returns to clear-eyed, of-the-people objectivity in his review. Here’s the first paragraph:

The search for intelligent life in architecture is artfully rewarded at the Whitney Museum’s retrospective of the work of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, New York’s brainiest architectural team. But intelligent visitors will have to pick their way through a few unwelcome booby traps: curatorial winks and nods designed to dumb things down for the chimerical unsophisticates to whom far too many museum shows today are needlessly pitched.

This AP story [via the cool Scrubbles.net] from Indianapolis sounds like the tip of the iceberg: museum curators using ebay to add to their collections.
My conversations about eBay with various curator friends all follow a predictable a trajectory: surprise that we’re both eBay whores; polite envy over what the other scored; caginess over what we’re looking for now; relief when we find out we’re looking for different stuff; quick detente and an exchange of usernames when we find out we’re buying the same stuff.
Of course, now eBay’s gonna turn my butt in to the Feds, as the EFF reports they’re all too eager to do.

As I arrived at Gawker’s launch party last week, I ran into some friends from my old consulting days. (I guess it’s Nick’s job to know everybody, and he does.) Anyway, their shoutout just before the elevator door closed, “we have a weblog, Wooster Collective” should be nominated for Undersell Of The Year.

Wooster Collective is a hoppin’ arena of grafitti, stickers, stencil art and other street art, with updates coming more frequently than the 4-5-6 train at rush hour. In a remarkably short time, they’ve tapped into a sprawling network of artists and fans who contribute great stuff from far beyond Wooster.
Some highlights: Posters of sidewalks by Gucci, et al; Peter Coffin’s barcode stickers [Peter, you gotta tell me about this stuff…]; and Dan Witz interview, whose trompe l’oeil graf works are stunning.

Yeah, I want a Cremaster belt buckle, but not if it means
getting executed in a salt arena… image: guggenheim.org
‘cuz it’s gonna be all we talk and hear about for months (at least until Matrix Reloaded comes out). We’re just suckers for an entirely fabricated, all-encompassing, and disturbing worldview. (What, the imagined world of Wolfowitz ain’t scary enough?)
Anyway, in the Times, Michael Kimmelman gets all sticky for the Cremaster show, which opens today at the Guggenheim. Note to all: Fridays through June 6, are hereby set aside for watching the entire 5-film Cycle, in order. You will be graded on this.
Note to MB: If Prada teaches the world anything, it’s to actually have a site up when you go wide with a marquee URL.

Alte Pinakothek, Selftportrait, Munich, 2000, Thomas Struth

The other night, I heard the photographer Thomas Struth talk about his work. A friend (who has a far more serious art habit than even I do) hosted a reception for the artist in his office. Extra Struths, brought out of storage for the evening, rested on stacks of printer paper, an installation technique you don’t see at the artist’s current one-man show at the Met.
Struth spoke very quietly, but determinedly, about his work and the ideas and process behind it. He’s clearly contemplative, and some of his most well-known works are unabashedly about contemplation (his Paradise junglescapes and his photos of museumgoers). He described his decades-long relationship with the 1500 self-portrait of Albrecht Durer (above) and his fascination with its unusual gaze. By putting himself in the photo (that’s Struth’s shoulder), he wanted to capture a moment of a conversation, while readily allowing that the two figures may not be saying anything to each other.
He caught me off guard, though, by referring to the photo’s cinematic character; but sure enough, the framing, blocking and “sightlines” are from one half of a shot/reverse-shot, the continuity editing staple for depicting a two-person conversation. Struth wanted to portray a conversation that crosses 500 years (he shot it in 2000), a long-term perspective Struth finds shamefully absent today.
“No one [in the current political situation] looks forward even 50 years; they only look to their next election.” Struth then ruminated on art worlders and what they could do to pull the real world back from the brink of war. “We’re here, in the office of [one of the wealthiest men in the world], there are so many influential people in the art world. Why don’t people use this powerful social network” to avert this global disaster?
Nervous silence, nervous chatter, and then a spurt of panged/defensive hands, as a few people tried to explain how our “standing here sipping champagne” was actually alright. An older guy with a Palm Beach tan leaned over and murmured to me, “I think we’re going in the wrong direction.” “That’s exactly what he’s talking about,” I deadpanned, “Oh, you mean the conversation.” Soon, we returned, quickly, safely, and completely, to discussions of how, exactly, he was able to get that amazing shot of the Parthenon. (“Because I’ve tried to shoot it every time I go, and it’s just so dark!”)
One implication in Struth’s photo, which cannot be avoided, of course, is our own responsibility. Shot/reverse-shot technique uses two components to establish the shared space; a reverse shot is needed. It would be a shot of Struth (and all of us, in the present day, standing in museums and galleries and private collections) from the perspective of Durer’s painted space, maybe over the 16th-century artist’s shoulder, a shot looking far into the future.

Last night I heard the artist Christian Marclay talk about Video Quartet, his enchanting, mind-boggling music/film work at Paula Cooper Gallery. It’s a 13-minute musical composition of nearly 600 separate film clips, on four simultaneous channels, projected onto a 40′-long screen. It was commissioned by a friend, Benjamin Weil, a curator at SFMOMA, where it was shown last summer to wide acclaim. [Naturally, Jason Kottke wrote about it then; so did Wired.com.] Rather than parrot or try to outdo other reviews, or gush about my own experience (I’ve now seen Quartet ten+ times), I think it’s worthwhile to look at how Marclay actually made the piece.
Video Quartet owes its existence to the recent emergence of real desktop editing software, and the artist’s highly unconventional use of it. Amazingly, Marclay learned and used Final Cut Pro: “I sat in front of a computer for almost a full year,” he said. With the concept and an abstracted narrative structure in mind and starting with the films he knew, Marclay gathered scenes with music, performance, or sounds. He made bins for various categories (e.g., piano playing, singing, gongs, violins, tapdancing), hand-building a database of clips to work from.
Then he started constructing passages or scenes and built “bridges” between them. (One thing he said he’d wished he’d done differently: start at the beginning and build it sequentially. Hey, no complaints from me.) Along the way, Marclay would search out additional films and pull from them “the right combination of music and image.” (Musical strike two for Richard Gere: Marclay wanted to use Gere playing trumpet from The Cotton Club, but the combo just didn’t work.)
But how can you edit four video+audio channels in FCP, which plays multiple audio channels, (but only one video channel) at a time? By ear, apparently. He’d layer the four video+audio channels, set sound levels, and then adjust the timing of edits by outputting tiny animated versions, side by side. The result is exquisitely composed sound throughout, with absorbing images choreographed across four screens, flecked with just a touch of visual chance.
Knowing the basics of Marclay’s method adds a layer of complexity to Quartet, a layer that deepens with even a little hands-on experience in Final Cut. The last time I watched it, I began seeing the clips on a timeline, picturing a. What had seemed impossible or magic before was now revealing itself as a complex creation, the product of arduous, inspired effort.

Installation view, Anne Truitt, Danese Gallery (image:artnet.com)
Two shows of evocative new work by unrepentant minimalists are on 57th street at the moment, a moment when a pair of artists over 80 demonstrate the power and relevance of the minimalist mode, as well as the potential benefits of being in it for the long haul.

Agnes Martin is showing luminous new paintings at PaceWildenstein, (who doesn’t have a freakin’ website, hello, 2003).

Anne Truitt is showing several square column sculptures which give form and physical presence to color at Danese Gallery. [See installation views on artnet.com.]

Also at Slate Joshua Clover writes a clever essay (very or too, depending on if those are exhibition posters or actual paintings on your wall) about Richter 858, a luxuriantly produced ode– in book form, with specially commissioned poems and a CD (of Richtermusik, I guess) — to a suite of Gerhard Richter squeegee paintings. Retailing at $125 and co-published by SFMOMA (who have been promised the paintings from an anonymous donor), Richter 858 is a “classic fetish item, beautiful enough that everyone might want it but priced beyond the reach of the great unfunded.” And that’s not the worst of it.
Clover reveals that 858‘s editor, David Breskin, is an SFMOMA Trustee and “almost certainly” the donor of the paintings, facts which–despite a year of SEC reforms and disclosure scandals–go unmentioned in the book. “Whatever a given Richter painting, or a particular poem, might be about, Richter 858 is about checkbooks and culture–that is, it’s a book perfect for decadent modernism, where the art of consumption has replaced the art of production; it’s a book, finally, about collecting, that individualist art overseen by the twin muses ‘Dollars’ and ‘Indulge.'”
“Dollar”: Last time I checked, what a Richter painting’s about, is $400,000 – 1 million, depending on the size and the date. A suite of eight, then, is about, well, you do the math. By making the paintings a “fractional and promised gift” to the museum, our benefactor (let’s call him “DB”) gives a percentage of the title each year for a fixed term ( ex. 10%/year, 10 years), until they belong 100% to the museum. Why do this, O Muse?. “DB” spreads a large tax deduction out over several years, which is useful if his gifts exceed 30% of his adjusted gross income. “Indulge”: “DB” is able to keep the art for a period of time each year in proportion to his percentage ownership.
But there’s another muse’s fingerprints on this one. 858‘s not a catalog, it’s an experience Compared to the essay- and information-packed Richter exhibition catalog written by “The Brain,” (aka, former MoMA curator Robert Storr), Richter 858‘s multimedia melange is a work of the Heart.
“Heart”: SFMOMA says Breskin was “compelled by these works” to create this book. Talking about the project and his interactions with Richter, Breskin’s giddiness (“As a sequence, these hung together and swung in a musical sense,” “I wanted to create an alternative way of engaging with pictures.”) sounds less like a trustee and more like a groupie.
Trust me, that’s what some of the most passionate collectors are, art groupies. Going to concerts (openings), getting backstage (in the studio), obsessing over some lyric (work) and asking arcane questions that betray how powerfully a it inhabits your mind. Groupie? Check out Breskin’s 2-day interview with the Richter of 1987 rock-n-roll, Bono, for Rolling Stone. Breskin seems like the kind of guy–indulgent, clearly, but in a necessary way–who’s trying to live an art-centered life, not just an “art-owning” one. And by placing the Richters at SFMOMA, “DB” seems like the kind of donor who believes that indulgent art experience should always be available to the public (but who agonizes over letting the paintings go too soon).
And besides, 858‘s 30% off at Amazon. A serious collector looks for a discount.

Bright Glow Tube (all images, powerpointart.com)
Slide 1 – Background:

• Powerpoint invention and evolution (ref. Ian Parker’s May 28, 2001 New Yorker article)
• Powerpoint taking over human thought. 30 million presentations made daily. (ref. Julia Keller’s Chicago Tribune article today) [via Romenesko’s ObscureStore.com]
• Career spent making/giving Powerpoint presentations (ref. “where I worked)
  
  Hay Theme
  Slide 2 – What this will be used for:
• As-Yet Unannounced Animated Musical (AYAUM)
• Wrest Human Creativity From Jaws of Monopolist Technology (TBD)
• Obligatory 3rd bullet point
  background image from powerpointart.com, wtc-memorial-us-flag.jpg
  Slide 3 – Examples:
• RTMark
• Powerpoint Gettysburg Address
• Relationship: An Analysis
• TBD
  
  Slide 4 – Action Items:
• Collect examples of Powerpoint as Medium
• Ask WWSD? (What Would Slate Do?)
• Adapt spychedelic Willie Wonka & The Chocolate Factory Oompa-Loompa text interludes into Powerpoint

Dollhouse, Interior views, Yinka Shonibare
for the Norton Christmas Project 2002
In lieu of Christmas cards, the art collector Peter Norton and his family began sending out specially commissioned works. [Inspired by the Nortons’ example, we began commissioning artist editions–albeit at a much smaller scale–to send to family and friends as a commemmoration of various births and anniversaries.]
In 2002, the British/Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare created a toy Victorian rowhouse, outfitted with his trademark Dutch batik fabrics, a photo of his own, and, for good measure, a Fragonard in the bedroom. Shonibare exhibited a sculptural installation based on Fragonard in 2001 and was in Documenta 11 last year.


Wink, Takashi Murakami, 2000
for the Norton Family Christmas Project 2000, image: Toyboxdx.com
For the 2000 Project, Jap-pop artist Takashi Murakami made a Wink doll, which contains a happy little CD in its base. Read about it on Alan Yen’s ToyboxDX. And in 1996, Norton asked Brian Eno to publish an updated edition of Oblique Strategies, his highly sought after collection of question and idea cards, originally made in collaboration with the late Peter Schmidt. Gregory Taylor’s OS site includes Norton’s description of the Project and soliciting Eno’s participation.
My favorite Strategy (as I attempt to write and edit in public): “Give the game away.”

Superstar, 1987, Todd Haynes
Last night we (finally) saw Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story last night. After years of being snubbed by the clerks at Kim’s Video when I’d ask for it, and half-hearted attempts to get a bootleg copy from someone or other, we just walked over to Anthology and there it was, showing as part of Illegal Art!.
(The first time I went to Kim’s, a Suit workin’ for the Mouse but livin’ in Chinatown and yearning for street cred, I cannily asked if Bladerunner wasn’t in the Ridley Scott section. The scornful reply: “Noo, the Douglas Trumbull section.”)
Anyway, Superstar turned out to be both better and worse than I imagined. Definitely worthy of its reputation, it’s a canny film; it’s a little eerie how well the Barbie doll concept works. The bootleg copy they showed, though, sucked. If only there were a medium you could copy without generational degradation… [If you don’t have connections to the video underground either, you can watch Superstar in even lower-res online.]

Giant Steps, stills, 2001, Michal Levy
Other films screened with Superstar, all using unauthorized/illegal footage or music in some way. For my money, the best ones were not about appropriation per se; Michal Levy’s Giant Steps, for example, is a fun, beautiful CG interpretation of John Coltrane’s canonical (and surely impossible to clear) recording.
A slightly unrelated note: Apparently, my new haircut is something of a proto-mullet, not unlike Todd Haynes’.

Serial Project #1, 1966, Sol Lewitt, from Aspen 5+6
Unbelieveable. The entire collection of Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, is now online. It’s the magazine equivalent of Kieslowski’s Dekalog: almost completely unknown, yet highly respected and influential within its narrow audience.
In a fit of John Cage admiration, I tracked down and bought Aspen 5+6 several years ago. In addition to some floppy little records with Cage and Morton Feldman on it, there’s a reel of 8mm film with works by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Rauschenberg, and others; documents of Sol Lewitt’s seminal 1966 1967 exhibit at the Dwan Gallery in LA, Serial Project #1, and a little Tony Smith sculpture you can make yourself.
Not owning a record player or an 8mm projector, my edition of Aspen has been more a glassined, bubblewrapped holy relic than anything else. Until now. The Moholy-Nagy film is full of glare, shadows and light reflecting off of machinery, as if Jeremy Blake and Paul Thomas Anderson were the same person. Check it out. Thanks, UBU (and thanks, Fimoculous for the link.)

Untitled (Two Windows), 2002, Toba Khedoori
Drawing Now: 8 Propositions at MoMAQNS, for Toba Khedoori, Chris Ofili, Russell Crotty, Paul Noble, Kai Althoff [Roberta Smith’s NYTimes review; Walter Robinson’s artnet review] [There’s a Toba Khedoori show at David Zwirner right now, too.]
Lazlo Moholy Nagy Color Photographs at Andrea Rosen Gallery: They look like they were made yesterday, not in the ’30’s/’40’s. (Actually they were. Moholy Nagy’s estate had them printed for the first time ever. Liz Deschenes did the printing. They’re amazing and exquisite.)
Staged/Unstaged at Riva Gallery: for (Souvenir cinematographer) Jonah Freeman’s entrancing new video work and a funny video piece by Maria Alos. Curated by Lauri Firstenberg. Chris Ofili and his crew climbed 11 flights of stairs for the sweaty opening.
The (S) Files Bienal at El Museo del Barrio: It opens tonight, but I figure if there’s a little portrait of me by Maria Alos in the show, it must me good.
Shmoology at M3 Projects in Dumbo: Curated by Bill Previdi, who’s 3 for 3 on shows he’s done that I’ve seen. Go now. Ends this weekend.
Uta Barth at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery: for the photographs of the spaces between–sometimes between the camera and the background, this time between the branches out the artist’s window.
Karen Kitchel at Cornell deWitt Gallery: for crisp, precise, beautiful paintings of grass.
Martin Creed at Maurizio Cattelan’s Wrong Gallery: for something to talk about, since a lot of people are talking about it. [Same Walter Robinson review as above, just scroll down.]