I cannot believe this has under 1,000 views. I’m only about 8:00 into this YouTube video, and already, Viktor Pinchuk is my hero. While anyone with a yacht or a palazzo could assemble a tranche of the art world powerful on the Grand Canal, only Pinchuk’s inspiring artistic vision can bring them all to Kiev. Well, I’m pretty sure it’s his vision they’re coming for.
Come for the vision, stay for the historic chance to have Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Andreas Gursky, and Takashi Murakami together on stage, answering incisive questions from Ryan Seacrest’s Ukrainian doppelganger. And the pitch for free Prada.
Ah, yes, I just got to the end: “Thank you to the thousands, the hundreds of thousands watching online!” It Gets Better!
Cinthia Marcelle receives Main Prize on FGAP Award Ceremony [ThePinchukArtCentre’s YouTube channel, via Gavin Brown’s GBlogÉ, pronounced like the French, Blo-ZHAY]
Category: interviews
Richter’s Balls, Regrets
So I’m reading along in my new copy of Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007–which is pretty awesome, and which does appear to supersede the artist’s previous collected writings, The Daily Practice of Painting, which is good to know, but really, what to do with all this information?–and I come across this discussion of glass and mirrors and readymades in a 1993 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, and I’m like, holy crap!
When did you first use mirrors?
In 1981, I think, for the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf. Before that I designed a mirror room for Kasper Koenig’s Westkunst show, but it was never built. All that exists is the design–four mirrors for one room.
The Steel Balls were also declared to be mirrors
It’s strange about those Steel Balls, because I once said that a ball was the most ridiculous sculpture that I could imagine.
If one makes it oneself.
Perhaps even as an object, because a sphere has this idiotic perfection. I don’t know why I now like it.
Richter’s mirror Steel Balls? Whew, never mind, they turn out–I think–to be Kugelobjekt, 1970, these odd, little postcard-sized objects, three steel ball bearings suspended in plexiglass in a shadowboxed photo of a staircase.
Kugelobjekt I, 1970, image: gerhard-richter.com
And anyway, on the next page, Richter explains how all the work on the dimensions and framing and installation of 4 Panes of Glass meant it’s “not a readymade, any more than Duchamp’s Large Glass is,” when he goes,
At one point I nearly bought a readymade. It was a motor-driven clown doll, about 1.5 metres tall, which stood up and then collapsed into itself. It cost over 600 DM at that time, and I couldn’t afford it. Sometimes I regret not having bought that clown.
You would have exhibited it just like that, as an uncorrected readymade?
Just like that. There are just a few rare cases when one regrets not having done a thing, and that’s one of them. Otherwise, I would have forgotten it long ago.
And I’m like, the clown! the clown! I swear, I’d written about it before, but I can’t find it anywhere. And then I realize I’d written about it for the NY Times in 2005.
Previous most ridiculous sculptures I could imagine: The International Prototype Kilogram or Le Grand K, and the Avogadro Project
UPDATE:, uh, no. Richter has more balls than I thought.
Goodbye Janette Laverrière
I’d say, “Adieu” or “Au revoir,” but Janette Laverrière was as fierce an atheist as she was a communist, designer, and artist. So I’ll just say I’m slow and sad to learn that Laverrière died last month at the age of, what, 101?
I first learned of Laverrière’s work way too late, too; I saw some wrought iron furniture she’d designed in the 1930s at auction about six years ago. She was a remarkable, politically committed designer in an antagonistic, elitist French decorating world, where men and the richest clients set the agenda.
La commune (hommage à Louise Michel), 2001
The 2001 work, La commune (hommage à Louise Michel), includes a cherry-shaped mirror fragment in a rosewood box, with an iron lid peppered with what appear to be bullet holes.
As Laverriere plumbs history for her references, history is catching up, slowly, with her legacy. In 2008, the Iranian artist Nairy Baghramian collaborated with Laverrière on a very subtle exhibition at the 5th Berlin Biennial, where Laverrière’s sculptures were installed in Baghramian’s carefully calibrated architectural space. Baghramanian also included Laverriere’s mirrored sculptural works in a 2008 exhibition at the Kunstverein in Aachen.
Laverrière discussed the switch from design to sculpture in a 2009 interview with Vivian Rehberg in Frieze:
VR Is there a link between utility and uselessness?
JL Of course. It’s useful to have useless things.
VR Precisely – I agree.
JL So, I started anew by thinking about the oldest thing I could remember being inspired by. When I was 17, I really loved Jean Cocteau; I read a lot of his works. In 1989, I wanted to pay homage to him on the centenary of his birthday. So there I was in bed, thinking: I am not going to do anything useful anymore, I do not want to, I cannot, so I will do useless things. All of sudden, a new world opened up for me
And the Pompidou has acquired an interesting piece from 1952, a suspended secretary, made from steel and Formica, which is currently on view in Elles, an exhibition of work in the collection by female artists.
Secretaire suspendue, 1952, image via batir au feminin’s flickr
Bhagramian’s obituary for Laverriere [frieze.com]
Rooms No One Lives In, Katarina Burin’s review of the Biennial show [thehighlights.org]
Use Value | Laverriere talks to Frieze [frieze.com]
short video: Portraits de Femmes Artistes – Janette Laverriere [ina.fr]
Which Flag Story? Which One Do You Know?
Flag, 1954-55, via moma
The creation myth for Jasper Johns’ Flag is well-known, and well-told. Like Leo Castelli’s story of discovering Johns’ groundbreaking oeuvre, fully formed, while he and Rauschenberg were raiding the icebox, and how Johns’ first show in 1958 got on magazine covers, sold out to MoMA, destroyed Abstract Expressionism and ushered in Pop Art. MoMA’s wall text for Flag [which Alfred H. Barr had Philip Johnson purchase from that show] begins:
“One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag,” Johns said, “and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.”
It came in a dream. It’s a protean story, quintessentially American, slightly romantic, and beyond the reach of anyone but [Freudians, Jungians, and] the artist himself. And that’s the key: because unfalsifiable is not the same thing as definitive, or even true.
In the opening of her 1975 dissertation, published in 1985 as Jasper Johns’ Paintings and Sculptures, 1954-1974, Roberta Bernstein takes a researcher’s step back:
When asked about the sources of Flag, 1954-55, Johns answers that he dreamt one night of painting a large American flag and then proceeded to do so. He has said this several times and will offer no other explanation for the appearance of this remarkable painting.
In the footnotes, Bernstein cites Alan R. Solomon’s catalogue for Johns’ 1964 Jewish Museum show, as well as several personal retellings.
But check out this transcript of Solomon interviewing Johns in 1966 for National Educational Television’s USA Artists Series. Then tell me if it doesn’t sound like there could be another story–or several–for the origin of the flags?
Yves Klein, Ex-Voto Ex-Monastero
Sister Andreina holding Yves Klein’s ex-voto for Santa Rita di Cascia in 1999, photo: David Bordes
I get the sense that in the contemporary art world, an artist’s religiosity or spirituality is often perceived as an obstacle, an eccentricity to be indulged when they’re around, but to be politely ignored in serious discussion. That goes for John McCracken, Anne Truitt, Marina Abramovic, a bunch of others, I’m sure, and the one who made me think of it just now: Yves Klein. When the artist’s widow Rotraut Klein-Moquay spoke at the Hirshhorn Museum’s retrospective last spring, it was clear that she was operating on a different, more spiritually attuned plane than the show’s clearly uncomfortable curator, Kerry Brougher. [Though watching Brougher, his co-curator Philippe Vergne, and the Klein Archive’s David Moquay at the Walker a few months later, exasperated interruption may be the only way to get a word in edgewise with the rambling Moquays.]
Anyway, Vergne takes it all in stride. In an interview with the Walker’s Julie Caniglia, he tells about securing the loan of one of the most interesting and unusual pieces in the retrospective, a 1961 ex-voto which Klein left at the monastery of Santa Rita di Cascia. It’s like a little retrospective in a box, a boite en valise.
Julie Caniglia
Speaking of striving, you literally went out of your way so that Ex-Voto would be a part of the exhibition. Can you talk about how this loan was carried out?
Vergne
Klein made an extraordinary gesture with this artwork and that’s reflected in how it’s treated by the monastery. I don’t think the Mother Superior would have allowed it to leave the convent without a meeting with one of the exhibition organizers. She was basically saying to us curators, “If you really want this work of art, you’re going to have to come and tell me why. It cannot be treated as one more object. You’re not going to just send a loan form, you’re going to have to come and sweat a little bit because this object is extremely important.”
On the other hand, she was kind enough to meet me at a cloistered convent in Rome so I wouldn’t have to make the long drive to her convent at Cascia. We were in a little room accessible to visitors, but divided wall-to-wall by a table: one side for guests and the other for nuns. They brought me coffee and cookies. Through a translator, we entered this conversation talking about Klein’s work and how important it was to have the Ex-Voto in the exhibition. Then we read the entire loan document word for word, all of the details about insurance and transport, everything. It was really like a ritual. Then we had a conversation about immaterial sensibility.
I also got to tell her a story about the well-known Leap into the Void photo–how the house that Klein leapt from outside Paris later became a church dedicated to Saint Rita, through absolutely no relationship with Klein. I thought this was extraordinary, but she said, “No, it’s normal.” I thought she meant for Klein, but she said, “No, for him,” pointing her finger to the sky.
Before I met with the Mother Superior I got to see a part of the convent closed off to the public where some absolutely gorgeous 13th-century frescoes were being restored. That, too, became part of the Yves Klein exhibition for me. I see it as an example of Klein’s immaterial sensibility: I am made of all these little layers of experience, which came together in the making of the exhibition.
Saint Rita is known as the patron saint of lost causes, and was a favorite object of Klein’s devotion and ritualistic interest. He apparently made the ex-voto while experiencing something like painter’s block, and he left it during one of several pilgrimages to Cascia. It was only discovered in 1980, during a renovation at the monastery following an earthquake. It was included in the Centre Pompidou’s 2006 retrospective, but it will return to Cascia after the Klein exhibition closes at the Walker this weekend. Pilgrims, your time is running out.
Yves Klein and the patron saint of lost causes [walkerart.org, thanks to Matt at RO/LU]
‘The Excess of Unimportant Information’
Though to a guy making something called Atlas in his spare time it still probably feels pretty empty and limited, Gerhard Richter’s website is pretty expansive. Via Twitter, we learn that his web elves have just added a quotes section, most of which is taken from Gerhard Richter: Text. Writing, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007 (2009), the UK edition of the artist’s second collection of writings, both of which were edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
I was about to bit the bullet and buy the expensive, out-of-print The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993 when the new edition came out, and I’ve hesitated, waiting to see how or if the two volumes overlap. So far, I’ve seen nothing; I guess I’ll have to pigeonhole Hans-Ulrich at the next global 24-hr art lecture marathon.
Meanwhile, I went ahead and bought Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961 – 2007, the US edition, so I’m just a couple of days away from seeing whether this awesome quote about blurring from 1964-5 [!] is, in fact, on page 33:
I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.
Les Ballons de Léon Gimpel
Last week in my interview with Mike Maizels for Pinkline Project, I’d mentioned how the Grand Palais in Paris would be an acceptable art venue for exhibiting my satelloon project. Not only was the grand nave one of the few spaces in the art world that could accommodate a 100-foot diameter inflated aluminum sphere; but historically, it was the site of major, early air shows, and it has held giant balloons before.
As new greg.org reader Erik points out in this awesome color [!] photograph, which was taken in 1909 by Léon Gimpel.
I didn’t know Gimpel, but the Musee d’Orsay says I should be as familiar with his work as with his Belle Epoque confreres Lartigue and Atget. They staged a retrospective of Gimpel’s pioneering photography in 2008. Apparently, he experimented with distorting mirrors, perspectival compositions, and color photography. He published the first color news photo, using the Lumieres’ autochrome technology [the same as above] just days after they introduced it. And though I can’t find examples of it yet, his aerial photography sounds pretty sweet:
From 1909 onwards L’Illustration commissioned photo reports directly from Gimpel. He stood out from other photojournalists by producing unusual images. At the first major air show, held at Béthény in August 1909, he went up in an airship and so was able to photograph the progress of the aircraft, not from the ground like the other photographers, but from the sky. So, thanks to Gimpel, readers of the magazine had a stunning view of the pioneers of aviation.
From this date, the photographer started to exploit this bird’s eye view in order to set himself apart from other reporters and to seduce the press.
[update: found some via fantomatik]
Fortunately, there’s a catalogue. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look to be readily available in the US. Judging from the cover, though, I could probably ask Ricci Albenda to lend me his copy.
Léon Gimpel (1873-1948), Les audaces d’un photographe [musee-dorsay.fr via ck/ck, the equally awesome tumblr of Swedish designer Claes Källarsson, thanks Erik]
More Gimpel images: La guerre des Ballons de Leon Gimpel [fantomatik]
Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA)
Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991
RB Before I knew you I saw something… You know what I’m going to say?
FGT I dedicated a piece to Ross.
RB Exactly. I thought, this is so sweet, I want to meet him. He dedicated this thing to me and I don’t even know him. (laughter) It put me in the best mood. And then someone said to me, “You idiot, why would he dedicate something to you? It’s his boyfriend.”
-Ross Bleckner interviewing Felix Gonzalez-Torres in the Spring 1995 issue of Bomb Magazine. This is about as funny as Ross gets. He really is as foolish as Felix is thoughtful. Well worth a read.
Bonus: did you know that by Fall 1994, after five solo shows and with his retrospective set to open at the Guggenheim, Felix had never had a review in the New York Times? [I just checked, and the closest was a paragraph in a cranky 1990 survey of Minimalist revival by Roberta Smith. She called his stacks “almost laughable.”]
Johns, Merce, Duchamp: Walkaround Time
image: walkerart.org
Welcome to one of the oldest tabs in my browser: the inflatable balloon set for Merce Cunningham’s 1968 piece, Walkaround Time, which is based on Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, which was made by the company’s artistic director at the time, Jasper Johns.
I’d backed into the pieces–seven cubes of silkscreen-and-paint on clear vinyl, reinforced with aluminum frames–a few months ago, and realized I’d seen them–and not thought much about them–at the opening of the newly expanded Walker Art Center in 2005.
Which I now regret, but which makes Merce’s title resonate a little more. Cunningham dancer and longtime collaborator Carolyn Brown explains that Walkaround Time was a reference to a particular kind of purposeless movement taken from ancient computer history, when “programmers walked about while waiting for their giant room-sized computers to complete their work.” It’s just taken me this long to appreciate–or even to see–the work. And for some great additional links to appear.
I can already tell this is going to go long.
03/2012 UPDATE: Unfortunately, none other than former MCDC stage manager Lew Lloyd informs me that the term “balloon” is not really accurate; they were transparent vinyl boxes fit onto armatures, which could be broken down for travel. Given my noted satelloon bias, I will still think of them as balloons in my heart. For the rest of you, though, remember: not balloons. [end update]
This Flag Is My Flag. This Flag Is Your Flag.
Something Holland Cotter wrote today made me really think: “Short Circuit is a sweet reminder of Rauschenberg’s collegial generosity; he believed in art making as a communal endeavor, and acted on that belief.”
Collegial generosity is certainly one way to look at it. Because Rauschenberg had exhibited in the Stable Gallery’s Second and Third Annuals, he was supposed to be able to select artists to show in the Fourth Annual. For whatever reason, though, in 1955 Eleanor Ward decided only Stable alumni would be allowed in that year, and so Rauschenberg’s picks–Short CircuitJasper Johns, Ray Johnson, Stan VanDerBeek, and Susan Weil–were rejected.
And so the story goes that Rauschenberg smuggled them into the show anyway, as elements in his own combine painting. [It’s not clear why VanDerBeek’s work wasn’t included; Cotter says he didn’t get a piece finished in time, but I’ve also read that VanDerBeek declined the combine invite.]
Rauschenberg invited the artists to, as Walter Hopps put it, “collaborate in his piece.” A generous gesture, to be sure, but also a complicated one.
Short Circuit triggers a whole host of questions that I find the quite interesting: What is the status and relationship of the artworks Rauschenberg incorporated into his combine-painting? Do they still function as autonomous works? If so, why? Are they substantively different from the other cultural detritus he used–newspapers, postcards, fabric, objects? If not, why not?
In the bluntest sense, these questions are answered by the invitation for the show, which mentions none of Rauschenberg’s three collaborators:
Rauschenberg’s generous inclusion of his ex-wife’s painting, his friend’s collage, and his partner’s iconic flag painting–oh, wait, that’s right, this was the first flag painting of Johns ever to be exhibited, and it was as an element of another artist’s work–and behind a door to boot. Did anyone in 1955 even know that Jasper Johns’ Flag wasn’t Robert Rauschenberg’s flag?
The story of Johns’ promethean debut at Castelli Gallery in 1958 is well known. In this 1969 telling of it to Paul Cumming, Castelli visits Rauschenberg’s studio in 1957, and then they pop down to Johns’ studio, which is full of targets and flags, and Castelli offers him a show on the spot. Which makes the cover of Art News and changes the New York art world overnight. But check this out:
Jasper Johns was a real discovery in a certain sense because, although he existed, not many people knew about him. I saw him for the first time in a show at the Jewish Museum. That was in March of 1957, and that was the Green Target that the Modern has now. I saw that green painting. It didn’t, of course, appear as a target to me at all. It was a green painting. I didn’t know that he was doing targets. Well, going around and seeing the familiar painters of that time…. It was a show that had been organized by Meyer Schapiro and other people. There was Rauschenberg and Joan Mitchell, and, oh, all that younger generation. Well, I came across that green painting, and it made a tremendous impression on me right away. I looked at the name. The name didn’t mean anything to me. It seemed almost like an invented name–Jasper Johns.
[Emphasis added on the parts where, holy crap, two years after exhibiting Short Circuit, there’s still a question whether “Jasper Johns” exists.]
Johns had shown flags at Bonwit Teller [including White Flag, which he eventually gave to the Met], where he and Rauschenberg dressed windows under the commercial pseudonym Matson Jones. Except for a drawing in a group show, Johns only exhibited a flag painting under his own name in 1957, in a group show at Castelli a few weeks after their fateful studio visit.
Rauschenberg’s Short Circuit–and Johns’ first and most immediately important paintings of flags and targets–were created when the two artists were closest, and when Johns was essentially unknown. When the flag was stolen from Short Circuit, both artists were famous, and their split was so acrimonious, they were not speaking to each other.
These relationships and collaborations, these formative histories of the New York art world, and these contestations of autonomy, authorship, sourcing and appropriation all seem to converge on Short Circuit. And it makes me wonder, again in the bluntest terms, whose flag was it, and who was it stolen from?
Fun In Paint
I don’t know why I do it either, but here is Washington Post arts blogger Blake Gopnik ruminating on just what it is that makes Arshile Gorky’s paintings so upbeat, so appealing:
The most striking thing about this AbEx show is how cheery and bright many of its paintings seem – as cheery as Gorky’s “Garden [in Sochi]” – given that the movement is so often associated with gloomy existentialism, post-war angst and the dark Freudian unconscious. Could it be that its true roots are in the post-war boom and a country, and a city, coming into their own as cultural and economic hot spots? (But if so, why is Gorky having fun in paint in 1941 already? Or could it be that painting is an inherently affirmative, cheery act, and that painters can only ever mimic gloom, with the risk that silver linings may show through at any moment, in any work.)
Fun in paint? I’d have gone with, “tortured nostalgia for the garden his family had to flee during the Armenian genocide, during an attempt to blot out the horrors of the forced refugee march where his mother died of starvation, but not before instilling in her young son a desperate ambition which became the altar upon which a perennially destitute, lying, insecure Gorky sacrificed his own family and which, after abandonment, cancer and a debilitating car wreck, led him to hang himself from a tree.” But if you see “fun in paint,” I guess that’s…
Anyway, the Garden in Sochi paintings are more properly considered surrealist, transitional, or proto-AbEx, similar to early the figurative/narrative/symbolic work by the other two members of the Fun In Paint School, Pollock and Rothko.
An interview with Gorky’s wife Agnes Magruder, conducted on the occasion of Tate Modern’s Gorky retrospective. She seems far more interesting than the subject matter lets on. [tate.org.uk]
Related: Gorky was an expert camofleur
Sea Force One
Christoph Brech is the master of the meaningful tight shot. In Sea Force One, he focuses in on a pair of workers in a small boat who are scrubbing the hull of Francois Pinault’s black yacht in front of Punta della Dogana during the 2009 Venice Biennale.
The work is included in “Portraits and Power: People, Politics & Structures,” at Strozzina in Firenze. It is interesting to compare their writeup of the piece–
We do not know who was on board the yacht – possibly François Pinault himself, the famous French luxury goods entrepreneur and primary investor in the new Venetian exhibition area. Brech has turned his camera on a moment that would otherwise have gone unnoticed, deliberately choosing not to record the sumptuous affirmation of wealth of the yacht. It is the contrast between the size of the latter and that of the small boat, or between the black hull of the yacht and the evanescent white of the soap and of the reflections upon the water, that brings out the greatness of the vessel, the actual size of which we do not grasp. The artist succeeds in moving beyond the façade of power and wealth by stopping at its surface. He seems to be suggesting that the strategy for the construction of an image of power may lie in its antirepresentation: i.e., the “myth” of power is created by veiling or concealing the identity of those who hold it.
–with the artist’s own:
The yacht Sea Force One is anchored in front of a museum at the Punta della Dogna in Venice. The waves of the lagoon are reflected in the black varnish on the ship´s hull.
From a small boat nearby, workers are cleaning the yacht.
A painting emerges from the broad, white trails of foam on the ship´s dark surface, visible only for a short while until erased by cleansing streams of water.
Once again the reflected waves dapple the yacht.
At first read, I thought Brech’s focus on the formalist, painterly abstraction was notably less political than the Florentine curators’ interpretation. And damned if it doesn’t, in fact, look like a negative inversion of a making of film shot in Franz Kline’s studio.
Which immediately reminded me of the interview Felix Gonzalez-Torres did with Rob Storr, which I’ve reprinted and referenced here several times over the years.
I’m glad that this question came up. I realize again how successful ideology is and how easy it was for me to fall into that trap, calling this socio-political art. All art and all cultural production is political.
I’ll just give you an example. When you raise the question of political or art, people immediately jump and say, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, those are political artists. Then who are the non-political artists, as if that was possible at this point in history? Let’s look at abstraction, and let’s consider the most successful of those political artists, Helen Frankenthaler.
Why are they the most successful political artists, even more than Kosuth, much more than Hans Haacke, much more than Nancy and Leon or Barbara Kruger? Because they don’t look political! And as we know it’s all about looking natural, it’s all about being the normative aspect of whatever segment of culture we’re dealing with, of life. That’s where someone like Frankenthaler is the most politically successful artist when it comes to the political agenda that those works entail, because she serves a very clear agenda of the Right.
For example, here is something the State Department sent to me in 1989, asking me to submit work to the Art and Embassy 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. It’s a very interesting letter, because it’s so transparent.
I guess it’s the curator’s job to overexplain things [?] but Brech’s title and his discussion of the work in terms of abstraction is plenty political in itself.
Related: Photomurals In Stardust Memories By Woody Allen [Not Related]
My recent photomural binge has flushed out some interesting comments and suggestions, including one from Craig about the use of a photomural as a key interior design element in Woody Allen’s 1980 film, Stardust Memories.
Allen’s character, filmmaker Sandy Bates, has wrapped the dining room of his Manhattan apartment with a photomural of Eddie Adams’s iconic 1968 AP photo from the Tet Offensive of the shooting of captured VC Nguyen Van Lem by South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. [above] It was commonly understood to be a universal symbol of man’s cruelty, suffering, and inevitable mortality.
The shocking juxtaposition hadn’t worn off for Richard Woodward, who used the fleeting scene a full nine years later as the opening anecdote for a critique of art’s changing relationship with documentary photography. Titled, with the cloying question mark, “Serving up the Poor as Exotic Fare for Voyeurs?” Woodward seems to complain that the art world, which “favors big pictures and high prices” was messing it up for real [aka “documentary”] photography and serious subject matter:
Perhaps nothing in the film better conveys the twisted soul of the protagonist who, in his misguided need to project, magnify and expiate his guilt over the world’s pain, has turned a moment of unforgettable horror into a decorative mural. It’s a macabre joke about the heartless vanity that can underlie high-minded gestures; and it’s a warning about photography, which can lose any claim as a moral force after countless reproductions on the wrong kind of wall.
But then he ended with this:
Many contemporary artists, like Alfredo Jaar, Sarah Charlesworth and Louise Lawler, are making work in which the use of an image – its presentation by the news media or a museum – becomes the grounds for critical scrutiny in a context of the artist’s own devising. A persistent theme of art in the late 80’s has been the struggle to patrol and examine the use of images. At the very least, many artists seem to be saying, it is time to stop averting our eyes.
Only this turns out to be exactly what Woody Allen was doing a full decade earlier.
Whether it’s Supergraphics or Stephen Shore’s Architectural Paintings or a Bloomingdale’s furniture showroom, there has to be some context or precedent I’m missing here, otherwise Woody Allen should be figuring directly into the history of the emergence of the Pictures Generation.
Because the heavily stylized, black & white Stardust Memories turns out to use photomurals and their relatives as crucial thematic and visual elements.
First off, Allen has said that most of the film actually takes place in his character’s head. Even his apartment, which is nominally in the film’s reality, “is really a state of mind for him. And so depending on what phase of life he’s in, you can see it reflected in the mural.”
Though Adams’s photo is often mentioned, and the stills above are common, I couldn’t find images of any of the other murals. So I just rewatched Stardust Memories [at high speed] and pulled out all the ones I could find. I’d hoped that I could find some discussion of the murals and the film’s design from production designer Mel Bourne, but so far, nothing. Bourne did several films with Allen, including Annie Hall and Manhattan, But he also did the production design for Fatal Attraction and, awesomely, the pilot for Miami Vice. Anyway, they’re all after the jump, because, maybe some people might want to skip them? Not me.
Continue reading “Related: Photomurals In Stardust Memories By Woody Allen [Not Related]”
Les Immiserables
It’s hard to do bad interview with Errol Morris. But this exchange with Amanda Katz for the Boston Globe is particularly awesome:
We have this idea that reading leads to self-betterment. But reading can, properly considered, lead to self-immiserization!
Did you say immiserization?
I did indeed!
Like self-immolation, but into misery instead of fire.
Yeah, self-immolation is slightly different. That’s for Brunhilde. Anyway, I picked up the Dreiser story…
related: a Morris-length rumination on immiseration by geopolicratus.
Imagine There’s No Made In Heaven
Christian Viveros-Faune’s ruthless smackdown of the Luxembourg & Dayan show of Jeff Koons’ porny 1990 Made In Heaven series is an acid, but necessary reminder of how economically and critically disastrous the early 1990s were for the artist. [Though I’m sure there’s a schadenfreude set who hug those Dinkins-era memories close.]
It also reminds me of a 1999 panel discussion Koons did with Rob Storr at MoMA. The occasion was the 25th anniversary of Artists Space. When asked why he had not mentioned Made in Heaven during his otherwise comprehensive conversation, Koons had said that he had repudiated the work, and that he would henceforth no longer associate himself with it. That’s always stuck with me.
He also mentioned being in a difficult and highly distressing custody battle at the time with his Italian ex-wife. So maybe the repudiation had a strategic element to it, and now that his son has moved and grown up, it’s time for takebacks.
If anyone goes to MoMA and tracks down that recording [which is not currently online], I hope they’ll tell me if I’m remembering it wrong.
UPDATE: And I may be. greg.org reader Dan emails to say that he listened to the tape yesterday at MoMA’s archive, and unless it was in part of the audience Q&A he missed, then this exchange wasn’t in it. I’ve had a distinct memory of hearing it, though, so I’ll have to figure out where that might have been. I’ve spoken with Koons several times–we used to live across the street from each other–but this series of work was not a topic I brought up with him.