the making of, by greg allen
When we went to DIA Beacon last fall, we gave the Gerhard Richter gallery a cursory glance on the way in, and then were transfixed by it on the way out. It’s the kind of thing you have to be in the mood for, attuned to, and that seems to take some time.
Felix Salmon feels similarly, but he writes about the experience much more clarity.
Richter at Dia [felixsalmon.com]
I heard there was art at MoMA. Here are some highlights:
Needless to say, he’s in a bad mood.
Related, I’m guessing, from Christopher Knight in the LAT: “It will also drive some people nuts, which is another reason to applaud. At a preview, one notoriously fusty critic was heard to shriek, in reference to what he imagined was being done to Barr’s legacy, ‘This is patricide! Patricide!'”
Oedipus on 53rd St [Observer]
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.)
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
The artist Olafur Eliasson will be speaking at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC about his work, including last year’s The Weather Project at the Tate in London.
Olafur Eliasson, The Demetrion Lecture: Wednesday, Nov. 17 at 7pm. [Hirshhorn.si.edu]
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.
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
After the stunning success of Team America World Police [Hey, turns out they got the US political climate right after all…], puppet projects are breaking out all over.
At Harvard’s Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, the artist Pierre Huyghe is staging a puppet meta-opera that tells the stories of Le Corbusier’s design for building and Huyghe’s production of the opera. [That’s the “meta-” part. And yes, the puppets have puppets.]
The performance is November 18th at 6pm; a filmed version will screen in a blobular theater attachment until April 17.
Huyghe & Corbusier: Harvard Project [VES, Harvard]
NYT story with rehearsal stills
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:
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