greg.org – Page 190 – the making of, by greg allen

Which Crystalline Minimalism?

I’m fine with somethings in the air, and zeitgeists, and influences, and inspirations, and appropriations. When I finish some of these Dutch Landscape paintings, I’ll go up to Mary Heilmann and Gerhard Richter and a dozen other folks and give them each a big ol’ hug.
But what I don’t like is thinking I’m having my own thoughts and ideas, then getting blindsided by a trend. So until I can delve a little deeper into what painter Steve DiBenedetto means here, I’m going to have to be a little pissed off with myself:

One thing led to another, and it ended up being a reference to Gothic stuff or some of this crystalline Minimalism we’re dealing with now.

Steve DiBenedetto
Breaking the ice–and the surface–with the painter.
By T.J. Carlin [timeout.com via two coats of paint]

Whoa, Have You Ever Heard Of The DESTE Foundation??

Just getting caught up on some blogs I lost track of the last couple of months. Regine at We Make Money Not Art has a great writeup of an amazing-sounding show in Athens at the DESTE Foundation titled, “A Guest + A Host = A Ghost,” which is a witty play on words taken from a 1953 Marcel Duchamp piece. Here’s what the DESTE Foundation is:

Each year, a show at DESTE focuses on the collection of Dakis Joannou, the industrialist who established the foundation in 1983. New acquisitions are standing side by side with older pieces, making emerge new meanings and relationships between the artworks.

What makes the show so interesting is that it was curated by artists whose works are in the collection. DESTE’s curatorial adviser is the artistic director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Massimiliano Gioni, and he put the show together with Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, and Cecilia Alemani.
Up top is an Urs Fischer hole in the floor surrounded by Kara Walkers. Below is a Cattelan hole in the floor with a little Maurizio peering out at Paul Chan’s portraits of the US Supreme Court.

Reg has tons more photos and information. Jouannou’s collection sounds amazing, and to see it through artists’ eyes? Wow, where could you ever have something so cool, but in Greece? Unfortunately, we’ll never get to see a show this cool, because “A Guest + A Host = A Ghost” closed Dec. 31. Oh well, an art lover can dream! Thanks, Reg, for sharing such a rare and innovative artistic treasure!

Neto > Bloc > Klein

While poking around last night looking for more films and videos made by Ernesto Neto, I found this clip, a black & white making-of short for Looking for the end, an installation Neto made in the southern Paris suburb of Meudon in 2007.

For Looking for the end Neto filled Andre Bloc’s 1964 Habitacle with a construction of giant Octon-shaped elements cut out of strandboard
The look of the film–by Benjamin Seroussi, who grew up in Bloc’s house, and whose dealer/collector mother Natalie Seroussi commissioned Neto’s piece–echos very nicely with the Habitacle’s most famous on-screen appearance, in the opening scene of William Klein’s awesome 1966 debut feature, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?
Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? is a Cold War fashion satire, the freakishly beautiful lovechild of a post-protest march hookup between Funny Face and Dr Strangelove. It’s bizarre to think it came out the same year as Blow-Up.
Klein used Bloc’s post-constructivist brick pile as the stage for a ridiculous fashion show, where models inserted or bolted into creations of razor-sharp, polished metal [by Paco Rabanne, of course] paraded in front of magazine editors perched on scaffolding. In the post-show scrum of designer adulation, the Diana Vreeland character proclaims, “Je suis galvanisée!”

The opening’s on YouTube, but it turns out Criterion released Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? in 2008 as part of a 3-title box set, Eclipse Series 9 – The Delirious Fictions of William Klein.

Ernesto Neto’s Coconut Manifesto

What’s the bigger news, that the traditional shell-and-machete-based distribution system of beachfront coconut water is threatened by industrial-scale canned product? Or that Ernesto Neto is releasing catchy video manifestos for the cause on YouTube?
Água de coco Ernesto Neto [youtube via centre for the aesthetic revolution]
There’s also an Ernesto Neto listed as direção–along with Celso Vilalba and Tiago Gil–and as direção de fotografia [along with Vilalba] on this music video for “Ultimos dias,” by Brazilian heavy metal band called Kiara Rocks. What else is Ernesto hiding there on YouTube, hmm?

The Battle of Hürtgen Forest

For the Allied forces, The Battle of Hürtgen Forest was the longest and one of the bloodiest, most pointless battles of World War II. Between October 1944 through February 1945, over 33,000 US soldiers were killed in the dense fir forest filled with minefields and fortifications.
Even when the battle turned immediately hellish, far-off Allied generals kept pressing for “victory,” which at the time basically meant preserving the pride of the US Army by not retreating, even though there was no apparent strategic value to the German territory.
At least that’s Charles Whiting’s point in The Battle of Hürtgen Forest, his harrowing-to-overwrought, GI-friendly history, published in 2000. [I bought my copy on Amazon.]
As Wikipedia points out, though, Germany suffered almost as many casualties defending the forest because it stood between the US and a potentially vital dam, and it was a staging ground for the fast-approaching Ardennes Offensive/Battle of the Bulge.
Still, none of that was known or acted upon at the time by US forces, and it certainly wasn’t communicated down the line to the soldiers pinned down for days in their nearly useless foxholes.
The photos in Whiting’s book are somewhat cursory, and when I imagine the conditions, I inevitably fall back to the episode on the wintertime siege of Bastogne from HBO’s Band of Brothers. So Dmitri Kessel’s 1951 photo for LIFE, depicting the bombed out, burned out ruins of the once-impenetrable forest kind of caught me off guard.
My great uncle Lark was a staff sergeant in Hurtgen Forest. He’d already fought in Africa, Sicily and France when he was killed on October 9th, one of the earliest casualties of the battle. When it published his obituary a month later, The Richfield Reaper (UT) said only he died “somewhere in Germany.” I’m not sure if anyone in my family has ever inquired after or discussed Uncle Lark’s experience during the last months and days of his life. But I suspect it was pretty damn grim.
Hurtgen Forest, Germany, 1951, photographed by Dmitri Kessel for LIFE Magazine [life@google]
The Battle of Hürtgen Forest [wikipedia]

Pebble Beach Pollock Case Gives Year-End Burst Of Crazy

Thanks to Find The Warhols! and the Pebble Beach Pollock, 2009 was the Year Of Sketchy Art Thefts here on greg.org. Definitely didn’t see that coming. But after a couple of intense months, both cases have grown dishearteningly cold of late.
Fortunately, Benjamin Amadio, the collector/dealer/consultant/puppy mill operator/boy toy/possible insurance scammer decided to end the year with a flourish. According to the Contra Costa Times, Amadio filed a “rambling complaint” with the Monterey County district attorney using his lawyer/boss/law school professor’s letterhead, demanding an investigation of the local sheriff for botching the theft investigation–and for persecuting a friend of his with check kiting charges or something.
The lawyer has publicly disavowed the complaint, whose “subjects swing from accusations of sex slavery to a detective’s allergy to cats.” Also, the reported insurance policy on the supposed $20-60-80 million hoard turns out to have been off-the-shelf, $500,000 renter’s insurance.
UPDATE local CBS affiliate KION has published the full text of the complaint. It’s like an un-spellchecked script for a telenovela.
But rambling incoherence and teenage psychodrama aside, Amadio’s memo does put what he calls the “Pebble Beach Art Heist” into the context of several months of wrangling with/persecution by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office. And we get some new characters/suspects: the art driver Todd Griffiths [to whom Dr Kennaugh had given some kind of educational grant, which he canceled?], some other live-in waitresses and hangers-on, and a possible lockbox-stealing guesthouse squatter [their house was a repossessed rental.]
None of this changes the fact, though, that Amadio consistently calls prints “paintings,” or that their still-unseen Pollock is still almost certainly a fiction, fake or fraud. [thanks greg.org reader chris for the heads up.]
Rambling complaint is latest twist in Pebble Beach art heist [contracostatimes.com]

Nazis On A Plane

Here’s my 1st Annual List of The Top Two Films I Never Would’ve Expected To Watch On A Plane From London, Not Just Because They Were Overflowing Of The Kind Of Shock & Awesome Violence And Language That Used To Be Edited Out Of Airline Versions As A Matter Of Course, But Because The Teeny Tiny Subtitles Make Them Kind Of A Strain To Watch On Little Armchair Screens:
2. District 9
1. Inglorious Basterds
Which doesn’t mean they weren’t awesome. Inglorious Basterds is still my favorite sloppy, wet kiss to the movies since Cinema Paradiso.

The AMNH’s Digital Universe Atlas

The American Museum of Natural History maintains a Digital Universe Atlas, which maps all the objects in the universe using the most current data available.
They just released The Known Universe, an animated version of the data, in conjunction with the Rubin Museum of Art [which presumably paid to have the Powers of Ten-style roundtrip through all time and space begin and end in Tibet.]
While it’s encouraging to see so much empty-looking orbital space for me to put my satelloon, this is my favorite shot: “the empty areas we have yet to map.”
Watch The Known Universe by AMNH in HD [youtube via kottke]
Download or visit the Digital Universe Atlas [haydenplanetarium.org/universe]
Previous posts on the charming concept of trying to depict everything in the universe: On The Sky Atlas And The NGS-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

Delirious DC

At the 1931 Beaux Arts Ball, more than a dozen New York architects came dressed as their buildings: [l to r] A. Stewart Walker [Fuller Building], Leonard Schultze [Waldorf-Astoria], Ely Jaques Kahn [Squibb Building], William Van Alen [Chrysler Building, who clearly booked his own stylist], Ralph Walker [Irving Trust Company], and Joseph Freedlander [Museum of the City of New York].
Rem Koolhaas included the Ball in his 1978 history/”retroactive manifesto,” Delirious New York.
Which was hook enough for Lali Chetwynd, whose 2006 performance piece, “Delirious!” reimagined the Beaux Arts Ball as a skyscraper cocktail party. It was ably documented by Showstudio:

“Delirious!” was staged in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, which comprised a giant, inflatable ovoid canopy atop a cylindrical amphitheater/event space.

Which, of course, bears a striking resemblance to the much-discussed, little-funded inflatable balloon space Diller Scofidio + Renfro have designed for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.

So now we have some idea what will go down in the Hirshhorn Balloon if and when it is realized: Liz Diller will appear at a $5,000-a-table benefit, dressed as her creation, and probably looking not a little like this:

but in light blue.
Or perhaps.
Soon after “Delirious!,” Chetwynd changed her first name to Spartacus. Tom Morton discussed the implications of this move in Frieze:

Chetwynd’s adopted moniker seems designed to make us stage a mock-heroic mini-drama in our minds, in which she persuades a band of artists to stop pitting themselves against each other and instead revolt against their masters. Push this fantasy a little further (and Chetwynd’s art is nothing if not about pushing idle thoughts as far they’ll go), and we might imagine the defeated rebels refusing, pace Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus, to identify their chief, instead claiming one after the other ‘I’m Spartacus’, only to be symbolically crucified by a poor auction result or a less than complimentary review.
If this flight of fancy resembles the absurd, unexpectedly telling narratives and motifs that characterize Chetwynd’s work, then this is no mistake. In her practice the epic and the everyday speak through each other in accents of giggled hope.

Giggled hope seems to be an apt operating principle for the Hirshhorn’s Balloon of Cultural Democracy. Is it not now time for us balloon lovers, each of us, to put on our puffy down coats, cinch our hoods around our noses, and raise the defiant cry to all who dare challenge or pooh-pooh us, “I’m Liz Diller!” “I’m Liz Diller!” To the Mall!
[hoodie image via old chum’s flickr, thanks to the purely coincidentally titled blog, an ambitious project collapsing]

Merz-y Christmas!

Paddy recognized a good match for MOCA’s Felix Gonzalez-Torres [Christmas] light string card. If the folks at Luhring Augustine would hop to, we can still get this printed and sent in time for Kwanzaa, at least.
Alternate headlines:
Deck the halls with Fibonacci
Have yourself a Mario little Christmas
Here we come a-Water Buffalo-ing
Untitled, 1998, Mario Merz, taxidermy and Fibonacci numbers, on view through Dec. 19 [luhringaugustine.com]

Time To Make The Doughnut

Sweet. The Hirshhorn Museum is floating the idea to turn its central plaza into a 4-story event space by filling it with a giant temporary balloon pavilion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The $5 million pavilion would be put up to house “performing arts, film series and conferences to foster a wide-ranging public debate on cultural values.”
It’s a grand and awesome-looking architectural gesture that would dance around the bureaucratic hurdles any permanent structures on the Mall would face. The key to its success, obviously, is the programming.
The popularity of the Hirshhorn’s Afterhours DJ parties is proof of concept for courtyard events. But that sounds like barely the tip of the programming iceberg. Think of the Hans Ulrich Obrist-era Serpentine, which fills the temporary pavilion with concerts and and 24-hr lecture marathons–bring your sleeping bag! And of course, you can throw one helluva benefit dinner in that thing.
A lot of work to be done, but it’s nice to see the folks at the Hirshhorn are well-versed in the grand tradition of implausible balloon interventions on the National Mall. And with the even grander tradition of talking to the New York Times, not the local Washington Post, when you want to make cultural attention.
UPDATE: aha. Score another one for the bloggers. Here’s then-new Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek talking to Tyler Green in April [!] about his plans:

We really want to engage the arts in big themes not just in the galleries, but outside the museum, say in a tent-type structure on the National Mall. One of these events would be in the fall and one would be in the spring, in a kind of inflatable building. The structure would house 500-1000 people and we’d have programming that includes everyone, from trustees to directors to curators to artists. [Koshalek showed me drawings of what the tent might look like.] It’s about where the cultural institution needs to go in the future to be relevant.

In Washington, a Different Kind of Bubble [nyt via tropolism chad]

Felix Navidad

Not sure how I feel about this, I’ll tell you when my order arrives. Pretty damn pleased with the headline, though.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres Holiday Cards: Last Light, $14.95 for a box of 10 [mocastore.org]

Bubbly Museums 2.0

Robin Pogrebin reports on all the museums waking up with a financial and strategic hangover after a decade of Bilbao Effect-ed building.
It’s good, obvious-and-not-just-in-hindsight stuff. I seem to recall during the midst of the boom, the American Cinematheque in Paris blew its wad on a Frank Gehry building it couldn’t handle. Now the Cinematheque’s run off of some guy’s dining table or whatever, and the Gehry building’s, uh, something else.
When MoMA picked Yoshio Taniguchi for their expansion, I translated a very similar article on Japan’s 1980s museum bubble from Yukio Futagawa’s GA Document 33: Japan’ 92.
I don’t have it in front of me, but the gist is roughly the same: Japanese cities felt a competitive urge to build trophy museums, which almost immediately began faltering on their collecting, programming, or operations because of incredible strategic, political, and financial short-sightedness. City fathers wrote one check, and they were done.
Taniguchi is just one architect whose reputation was formed in large part on his beautiful contributions to this bubbly museum era. I’ll try and track that article down.

I C U & U & U

The first time I did the Miami collection visit circuit was in 1998, with MoMA’s Junior Associates. A few things stuck out in my mind: Ernesto Neto camped out on Rosa de la Cruz’s floor with a sewing machine; Zhang Huan and his wife hanging out with us at the Rubell’s hotel, making work; Marty Margulies’ dressing room positively overflowing with the entire photographic canon; the Olafur grid installed in his gigantic bathroom; so much rubble shedding from the Bramans’ Kiefers, they had to sweep it up every day; and the oddly standoffish, yet competitive vibe I got from various collectors regarding each other’s collecting. It felt like they didn’t really talk to each other that much, they each did their own intense thing. Except when they didn’t.
By the end of the trip, I’d seen no less than four versions of Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser. It was as if Claes had an eraser-themed trunk show at the Fontainebleau, and everybody came.
I was reminded of that during last week’s installment of Art Basel Miami Beach because of Wade Guyton. I’m not talking about the kind of Art World Tour 09 disorientation you get from seeing Guyton/Walker’s sprawling installation from Venice turn up just a couple of weeks later at the de la Cruz’s new space. “It’s great to be here in [insert biennale/art fair city name]!”
I’m just saying, I know he’s shown at least a dozen at once, but did everyone in Miami think they were the only one buying a Guyton Untitled U sculpture?

The Scholls threw theirs onto the pile of U’s Scott Rothkopf curated into the Lyon Biennale in 2007.
The Rubells had theirs out for their show, “Beg Borrow & Steal,” which was inspired, they said, by conversations with Wade and Kelley in 2005.

And the de la Cruz’s is on view at the Miami Art Museum:

I’m sure there are a few more lurking around Miami I just haven’t seen yet. You?

Slight Of Hand

Considering how important and incredible the work is, it’s funny how ambivalent the Times’ Gabriel Orozco feature sounds.
Ann Temkin did a great show of Orozco’s work in Philadelphia, and yet she comes across as a bit flustered discussing the artist’s mid-career show at MoMA.
The whole Mexico/Mexican Artist thing is odd, too. Mexico is obviously an important site for Orozco’s work, but it’s just one of many. And he’s been resolute–and successful, I’d say–at not being The Mexican the art world might want him to be. [Wow, has it really been seven years since I criticized Peter Schjeldahl’s Mexican stereotyping of Orozco clay pieces at Documenta 11? ]
And the thing about painting? So many of Orozco’s classic works–and I’m thinking of things like the currency, the boarding passes and tickets, the sports photos–involve drawing and painting, this idea that painting’s somehow anathema to him and his project is baffling.
From the beginning, I’ve seen Gabriel’s work–already I realize I have to turn that thought around. The impact comes not so much from seeing Gabriel’s work, as from seeing the rest of the world differently after seeing Gabriel’s work.
The slightness of his gestures and perceptions seem like Duchampian hypotheticals, brought into the real, gritty world: how little can an artist do to make something into art? Can this coaster, this yogurt lid, any circle at all, successfully be art? And if the answer is yes, then nearly every other object or situation we encounter every day has that same potential as well.
It’s why my favorite work of his in MoMA’s collection is a 1992 drawing, or really, work on paper, where he pinched and rubbed a little raised arc at the center.
I’ll figure out some grand ending for this piece a bit later. Right now I don’t have one, which may suit me fine.
Gabriel Orozco’s Whale of a Return to MoMA [nyt]