On A Big Art Thursday

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.

    • Mr Rogers Was A Person In My Neighborhood

    mister_rogers_couch.jpgI was too young to get worked up about moving from New York to Indianapolis, but I remember being very nervous about moving from Indianapolis to Raleigh. One day, my 1st-grade teacher took me to Dairy Queen after school to talk about it.
    “Well, I don’t know anyone,” I complained, “and there aren’t any famous people from North Carolina.” (New York already had its hooks into me, it turns out.)
    “Like who?” Mrs Hershenson asked.
    “Like Cowboy Bob.”
    Although, at the time I didn’t realize the golden era of locally produced kids’ shows was ending, I had a point.
    Deftly skirting a potentially ugly Cowboy Bob-Andy Griffith shootout, Mrs Hershenson asked, “Is that important to you?”
    Proto-New Yorker answer: “um, yeah.”
    “Well, what about Mister Rogers?”
    “But he’s not from Indianapolis.”
    “No, you’re right. He’s from Pittsburgh. But his show is on a network, which means it’ll be on in North Carolina, just like it is here. So when you get to Raleigh, you’ll already know someone. And then you’ll make a lot of other friends, too, in no time.”
    Thus, in addition to explaining the differences between affiliate and network programming, Mister Rogers (and Mrs Hershenson) helped me to see that my neighborhood extended far beyond my street, and they guided me into to a lifetime of seeking out the friendship of famous people.
    Mister Rogers passed away today, after a recent diagnosis of cancer. View a timeline of Fred Rogers’ achievements, including a behind the scenes clip from the first show, and his 1969 Senate testimony where he passionately argued for the creation of PBS, at pbskids.org.

    Architectural Survivor 3: See Who Gets Voted Off The Island

    It’s architectural reality TV, with so many last-minute campaigns, twists and turns, you’d think Fox was running it, not the Port Authority. The final two bachelors, er architect groups in the design “competition” for the WTC site have been workin’ it hard, according to design reporter Julie Iovine’s NYTimes article, even turning up on Oprah. Herbert Muschamp weighs in, too, slightly chastened. Meanwhile, Edward Wyatt’s report of a LMDC committee’s surprise recommendation of THINK over (the Pataki/Bloomberg-favored) Libeskind sounds like a promo for the finale of Joe Millionaire. And just as “surprising,” or “real,” for that matter. Whether angling to arrive at a lecture with a victim family member or throwing shade on each other’s designs, these architects ingenuously perform for the camera.

    Night Of A Thousand Film Geeks

    alexander_payne_moma_comp.jpg
    clockwise from top R: UA’s Bingham Ray and honoree Alexander Payne
    David O. Russell, last year’s honoree, still in a euphoric daze
    “special friend”/screenwriter Jim Taylor, freezing on way to afterparty
    John Waters and sycophantic fan, photo: David Russell
    crowd shot, which captured the supposedly elusive cracked-me-up international man of mystery
    Last night at MoMA, Alexander Payne and Bingham Ray talked about Payne’s career and films (including Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt). The Museum’s Film & Media Department gave Payne its Work In Progress Award, to honor filmmakers as they transition from “promising” to “proven.” Ray, who’s an independent film legend himself, and who heads United Artists (which picked up Pieces of April at Sundance), studio headed the conversation.
    In my secret socialite life, I co-chaired the benefit. I’m working up my notes from Alexander’s discussion (and will try to score some audio clips, too) and will post a page of pictures soon. In the mean time, here is a composite pic, and the highlights of my speech:

  • “Thanks to the creative family at Vanity Fair and W Hotels (the sponsors). They don’t give traditional gift bags; they make them. Graydon Carter was up late writing poems for each of us.”
  • “Smile! It’s for my weblog.”
  • I decided to cut the bit about the after-party being potluck (“Manhattan brings the entree; Brooklyn, a salad; Westchester, the mixers; LA, the herb…” Like last year, LA was the only one who brought what they were assigned.)

    • Movie Idea, v. 1million

    It takes the village paper, the Guardian, to report this story from Urbana, IL:
    “The mother who convinced everyone her child had leukemia”

    Terri [Mom] fed Hannah [seven-year old daughter] sleeping pills, then took her on long, aimless drives among the strip-malls and cornfields of Ohio until she fell asleep. Afterwards, she would tell her they had been to the hospital, and that she had slept through her treatment again…
    Within weeks, [the head of the Mother’s Club at Hannah’s school] had the pupils holding cookie sales and donating the aluminium ring-pulls from fizzy drink cans, which they sold for recycling. “They even had a Hannah Hat Day,” the Urbana Daily Citizen newspaper noted in a report last June, under the headline Community Reaches Out To Little Girl. “Everyone wore a hat, because Milbrandt must wear a hat since she had the chemotherapy and lost her hair.”

    Canadian Flag On Backback — The Cremaster Version

    cremaster2_patch.jpg
    Cremaster 2 Patch, click to order at the Gugg store

    Now there’s a Canadian flag patch for all your globehopping needs. Use the Maple Leaf to show your Can-x street cred, or to avoid taking the heat for shameful US administrations.
    Or kick it old-school with the until-1965 version, the Red Ensign. With this Cremaster patch (1 of 5, each sold separately) on your, um, backpack, the velvet ropes at biennial VIP lounges will part for you; you’ll waltz right in to Matisse Picasso, no waiting; and suddenly-fawning art dealers will give you an extra 10% off. [thanks to the eagle-eyed Fimoculous]
    [Face facts: the backpack’s a dealbreaker, dude, especially in Venice. Put it on a sash, maybe with a pink kilt.]
    [Sadly, the “I Survived Cremaster 3” T-shirts, which were a hit in Basel, aren’t available. Get a cap instead.]
    update: the patches are no longer at the Guggenheim online store, but Well Wisher has images of them on flickr

    On Loving Their Work

    Josh Newman and Colin Spoelman, the budding moguls at Cyan Pictures should be celebrating, if they weren’t working so much. Their short film, Coming Down the Mountain, has just played at a couple of film festivals.
    And, shooting recently wrapped on their first feature, actor Adam Goldberg’s directorial debut, I Love Your Work. Naturally, there is a behind-the-scenes weblog.
    With just six days worth of posts from the twenty-plus day shoot, the weblog’s kind of slight, but it makes for good readin.’ Figuring (rightly) that posting in real-time and producing would suck, Josh brought in Helen Jane, a blogger pro, so to speak. HJ knows refreshingly/annoyingly little about filmmaking, giving the weblog an amusingly wide-eyed, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid for hanging out with Franke Potente!” tone. No news here, but I’d rather see a weblog from the POV of a principal player (producer, director, actor) rather than a friendly groupie. Of course, that’s why I’m here.
    [Update from the “Going out in a blaze of glory” department: writing about the ILYW weblog may be the new way to cease publication, if Shift and Salon are any indication. If I’m not around next week, you’ll know why…]

    More On Punch-Drunk Love and Jeremy Blake


    blake-pdlove.jpg

    Been making arrangements for a private preview of a new work by Jeremy Blake, who I’ve been friendly with for many years, since his first NY show. While putting together an email of links and background for people, I went back to the official site for Paul Anderson’s film, Punch-Drunk Love [DVD, someday]. Under “movies”, there is a collection of 14 haiku-like clips, which use liberal doses of Jeremy’s abstracted work and Jon Brion’s film music, often without any dialogue, or even ambient sound. They’re really great, like a bowl of film candy.
    A search of the web for any discussion of them turned up nothing, but ptanderson.com, the blow-away best “unofficial” filmmaker fansite around, comes to the rescue, sort of. In addition to a section on Jeremy and his work (including a what/where inventory of his work in PDL), there’s a list of deleted scenes which maps pretty closely onto the website movies. PDL is the most overlooked movie of the award season. And not just acting/directing/writing, but the whole gamut of editing, production design, sound, lighting, music, I mean, come on.

    The People In Your Neighborhood v5

    Q: When your cable modem drops its DNS settings, and your wireless network connection goes out while you’re away for a few days, how many voicemails requesting you call your damn ISP can your neighbor leave before committing a breach of wi-fi netiquette? Does this number vary by coast?
    Or is this the karmic price for your own use of the wi-fi connection you find blazing through your window when you’re away?

    First, Let Me Say, Daniel, We Loved Your Idea

    daniel libeskind pointing to the elements of his model that won't be built, image: greg.org And (according to the Guardian), we’d really like to move forward with it. We made just a couple of notes, ‘Kay?

  • The bathtub kept open as a memorial? We love it. What do you think about filling it in with a bus station? No, not all the way, just 2/3 or so.
  • The 1,776-foot tower? With the sky gardens? One word: Inspiring. Not gonna build it, but it’s inspiring.
  • The memorial plaza that’s sunny for one morning a year? Love it. If the developers throwing up a dense forest of towers all around the east, north and south of the site are onboard, I’m sure we can see about getting a day’s worth of sunlight down there. A morning’s worth, anyway.
  • Oh, and we had some of our guys whip up a giant glass atrium train station. Think you can you work that in, Daniel? Just thinking out loud here. Maybe on top of the bus station?

    • On Museums On eBay

    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.

    On Wooster Collective

    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.

    Gucci sidewalk photo, artist unknown, image: woostercollective.com

    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.

    As If greg.org Needed Another Matthew Barney Reference…

    Matthew Barney as Gary Gilmore, but it's about that belt buckle, image:guggenheim.org
    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.