art – Page 204 – greg.org

On Politics and Art

Rob Storr interviewed Felix Gonzalez-Torres in 1995. Felix identified Helen Frankenthaler as the most successful political artist alive, and then told about the invitation he received in 1989 to participate in the State Department’s Art for Embassies Program:

It has this wonderful quote from George Bernard Shaw, which says, “Besides torture, art is the most persuasive weapon.” And I said I didn’t know that the State Department had given up on torture – they’re probably not giving up on torture – but they’re using both. Anyway, look at this letter, because in case you missed the point they reproduce a Franz Kline which explains very well what they want in this program.

4/06 update: Creative Time has since removed this interview, and only one other place, the Queer Cultural Center, is hosting it. To make sure it stays out there, I’m reproducing it in whole on greg.org, just because. [note: I formatted it for easier reading.]

WTC Site Cultural Anchor: The Drawing Center??

Wow. There’s opaque and then there’s opaque. The Drawing Center was selected to join The Freedom Center in one of two cultural buildings planned for the WTC Site. Their building will adjoin the WTC Memorial, while the other two cultural organizations–The Joyce and Signature Theaters–will share a performance center across the street.
I’m a huge fan of The Drawing Center, as much as the aggressively unassuming, rather esoteric, old-school SoHo gallery can engender huge fandom. But how in the world did the LMDC come to the decision to put them next to the sure-to-be-corporate-slick American Freedom Experience? Is there some backchannel connection?
If only the artist Mark Lombardi were still alive, he could explain it to us. Lombardi’s intricate drawings traced the webs of corruption, power, and influence that spun out of major scandals like the BCCI bank collapse, Iran-Contra, and, ahem, “George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and jackson Stephens ca 1979-90.” That’s the title of the 1999 work above, which was included in the first major retrospective of the late artist’s career–held at The Drawing Center last fall.

On an Unrealized Art Project

In 1999, I conceived and contrived to make a piece of art. It began as an idea for a commission for the artist Olafur Eliasson, but my idea was so embarassingly specific and complete, there’s no way I could bring myself to ask him to do it. Even though I cannot imagine myself as an artist, or a maker of art, I had to admit that this was not an Eliasson, it was Eliasson-esque, at best.
The piece is a sort of reverse sundial.*
Our apartment in NYC faces north, and so receives no direct sunlight. At various times in the day, the sun would reflect off of windows across the street, creating sharply angled patches of bright light, which would move across the wall or floor, marking a specific moment in the day.
I devised to place a mirror on the roof of the recluse’s townhouse across the street, which would reflect sunlight directly into our apartment. It would have a motor which would track the movement of the sun, thereby maintaining the reflecting angle throughout the day. [Constructing this motorized mirror was a great obstacle. Last year, when I finally told Olafur about this piece, he said a German company made such a mirror, called a heliostat, which was exhibited at the Hanover 2000 Expo.]
Rather than the naturally changing light of a normal day, the apartment would receive constant, consistent, direct light. The light wouldn’t shift, the shadows wouldn’t lengthen, then contract. At first, the brt lt praised by realtors and sought after by apartment hunters would be welcome, but I expected that, after a while, it would become unnerving, even maddening.
[2007 update: soon after posting this, I told this story to a couple of Olafur’s dealers, who, instead of laughing with/at me, said I really should have proposed it to Olafur, because he would have loved doing it. Which is a huge bummer, because then I could have paid 1999 Olafur prices for the piece. Oh well, it’s mine now.]
* Olafur actually made a sundial-like piece in 1997 by cutting a round hole in the roof of the Marc Foxx gallery in Los Angeles. The circle of light tracked beautifully across the empty gallery space. The piece was titled, Your Sun Machine. I never dreamed to call my piece My Sun Machine, though.

Revisiting–and repeating–the past

I just found and reread this post from a couple of years ago, and I still like it very much, unfortunately.
How Conceptual Art is Like a Renaissance Tapestry

Upcoming Sonic Youth CD now on WPS1

WPS1.org, the online audio program of PS1, has been up for a few weeks now, and it’s getting better. Some listening tips:

An exclusive preview of “Nurse,” the latest CD from Sonic Youth, broadcast on The Larry Rivers Memorial Music Hour #1. [Surf their unlinkable site: previous broadcasts > Week of May 24th]

A raucous 1962 debate over Pop Art, where “Henry Geldzhaler and Hilton Kramer match wits with Dore Ashton, Stanley Kunitz and Leo Steinberg. William Lieberman referees, er moderates.” [Week of May 17th. Parts I & II were rebroadcast together this week, but I can’t find links to the combined show.]

So much for real-time

Olafur Eliasson, Lighthouse series, image: menil.org

I went to Houston last week for the opening of an amazing show at the Menil Collection, photographs by Olafur Eliasson. Of course, my post about it is now like a 10,000-word essay, which I don’t know if even I’ll ever read.
So in the mean time, check out the show, and the Times article on the de Menil’s Philip Johnson-designed house, which was a sharp International Style stick in the eye of Tara-style 1950’s Houston.

Imagine there is no Hell

Jake and Dinos Chapman's Hell, detail, image: guardian.co.uk Ouch. a 10,000sf warehouse of Momart, the leading art handler/storage company in the UK, burned to the ground yesterday, taking an as-yet unknown number of major Brit Art works with it. The Guardian has some speculative details on what burned, including Jake and Dinos Chapman’s massive installation, Hell, but there’s still a lot that’s not known.
~~If Charles Saatchi believed in karma, this would be devastating to him right now. But unless he’s actively trying to come back as a worm, he doesn’t so, never mind.~~ [via MAN]
Update: I’ve rewritten the title for this post half a dozen times. My initial impulse of shock still stands, but the close second–schadenfreude over Saatchi’s misfortune–is untenable. It really is–sorry, Charlie–not about you. Jonathan Jones visits the site an reflects on the ashes of Hell.

Imagine there is no Hell

WPS1: Let’s put on a [radio] show!

Umm… I was excited for the launch of WPS1: Art Radio, the new online audio programming wing of PS1. Launched three weeks ago, WPS1 is daily mp3 streamed programming in three broad categories: awesome, edge music from all over; rare and archival artist recordings from parent/affiliate MoMA’s library; and self-produced art-related talk/interview shows. Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.
After listening to a dozen or so art talk shows on WPS1, I find them almost unlistenable. Excruciatingly amateurish, painfully ad hoc. Can I say it? I have to. They BLOOOOOWW.
Which really blows, because I’m a fan of PS1. A lot of cool people; in-tune, even daring curators; great artists, great opportunities for new artists; great music, especially in the summer; a very refreshing and energetic institution. I even know a few of the people involved in WPS1 and have been anticipating the launch for months.

Continue reading “WPS1: Let’s put on a [radio] show!”

?: $

$?
$$$$,$$$
!!!!!!

Law & Artists: SVU

Jon Routson, Bootleg (Nashville) still, image: teamgallery.com

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)

WTF Decorator Manque Auction Report

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.

Things to do and when to do them

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.)

From The Spring Auctions

Inspired by Tyler@Modern Art Notes’s to-bid-on list for the upcoming contemporary art auctions. I don’t think I’ll be bidding against him on anything, especially now that he’s lining his pockets with all that ArtsJournal loot. Too rich for my blood.
But a flip through the catalogues turned up at least one must-get work. If Sotheby’s estimates are right for this storyboard Robert Smithson made for his Spiral Jetty movie, I may need to talk discreetly to someone about the street value of a small, cute, baby girl. She’s very advanced for her age and sleeps through the night.

“Smithson equated film stips to historical artifacts trapped in frames, with the movie editor acting as a paleontologist in reconstructing the whole. Smithson wrote ‘The movieola becomes a “time machine” that transforms trucks into dinosaurs.’ In its storyboard format, this detailed drawing by Smithson embodies his notion of historical evolution, fragmented over time, like pages torn from a book and scattered – a scene he enacted in the realized film of Spiral Jetty.”
Related: Smithson on the Jetty and geocaching

NY, NY, A Minimal Town

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.