Welcome to the party! This week, another weblog launched documenting the conception, birth and life of an independent film. Cyan Pictures is the brainchild of two guys, Joshua Newman (aka “a veritable Doogie Howser”) and Colin Spoelman (aka, a veritable Vinnie Delpino, I guess). As Newman notes on his personal site, self-aggrandizement.com, their’s is the “the web’s first moviemaking weblog.” [of the week, I guess. I added them to the short list.]
They, too, are starting with a short and a film festival target (Sundance for them, Cannes for Souvenir November 2001). and have just posted the first public version of their script. I wish them all the best. Stay tuned. (via Kottke.org)
Watching CNBC like it was
Watching CNBC like it was 1999: Actually, it was nothing like 1999, which is why I’m mentioning it. CNBC had been the VIP room at the analyst’s club for the entire boom of the 1990’s. But in an utterly transfixing burst of reporting, reporter Mike Huckman caught Jack Grubman, a top Salomon analyst of Worldcom, on tape [scroll down for the video] by waiting outside his townhouse yesterday morning. Nothing new about that, right? Except that the video they got was so completely different from anything else I’d seen on CNBC (or from any other reporting on this type of story, for that matter).
Mr Grubman (who, apparently, is a neighbor) was definitely caught off guard by the reporter and his polite persistence. His answers were unremarkably shocking (“What can I say? I’m not part of the company?” “I’m no different than anyone else on Wall Street.”), especially given his nearly god-like stature in the telecom industry. [Anecdote: When he was earning only $3.5 million in 1997, it was so much that younger analysts at Salomon began pricing things in $3.5m “Grubman units.” He made as much as $25 million/year since then, though, presumably requiring all sorts of G.U. recalculations.]
But what was most gripping was the man’s palpable sense of loss of control, of a seemingly unprecedented sense of unpreparedness as the world he knew (and so dominated) was collapsing around him personally (and on live TV). In between pleas of privacy, ignorance, and harassment, he still answers questions, cagily and painfully; he clearly wants to be left alone, but also wants to make sense of things. At the end of the clip, Grubman attempts to flee the wrong way up Fifth Avenue, when he abruptly turns and gives one final answer (“So this caught you completely by surprise?” “Yes. Yes.”) He then walks into an empty Fifth Avenue to get away. No waiting car.
Earlier, I was writing on
Earlier, I was writing on a new project, which reminded me of the Bohr story, which I posted. Then I found Wall Street on Bravo and kind of got into it for a bit. Then it got on my nerves, because they kept saying, “sure thing” and “easy money.” Even in what may be Oliver Stone‘s only truly good movie, he can’t resist beating the viewer over the head. Went swimming instead. Then came back to an incredible scene in a truly, truly good movie: the hookup scene in Out of Sight.
I hadn’t really noticed it before, but Steven Soderbergh and Anne Coates wove two intensely related scenes with Jennifer Lopez & George Clooney together: A) their slightly awkward small talk in the hotel bar, and B) their subsequent playful foreplay in Lopez’s room. The sound and dialogue throughout is from the bar, and the overlay of their mutual flirting with its payoff makes their lines doubly charged. Coates uses very brief freeze frames, too, and the combined scene closes on a still of the two actors just about to kiss. The whole scene plays with expectation, anticipation, fulfillment. We know these two stars are gonna hook up, so there’d be little suspense in their flirting. This way, both scenes–and the pacing of the movie–benefit. It’s been almost a month since I’ve had a paean to Soderbergh, and it’s overdue. Coates should get major props, too, though; after all, she won an Oscar for editing Lawrence of Arabia. Here’s an article on Coates from the Editor’s Guild.
Also found these helpful quotes from a this Guardian interview with Soderbergh:
“As soon as an actor takes their clothes off in a movie, you’re watching a documentary, not a feature film. I feel like it breaks the spell that you’ve created for the characters, that it’s not Karen taking her clothes off, it’s Jennifer Lopez. In a movie, I sort of check out when people start to slather on each other.” And on Coates: “I had to shut her up. If I had to hear one more David Lean story, I’d belt her.”
[Buy Wall Street, Out of Sight, or Lawrence of Arabia on DVD.]
I usually find The Art
I usually find The Art Newspaper a little too smart for its own good, no doubt an attempt to appease/appeal to its too-smart target readers, who don’t need something as mundane as a newspaper to tell them anything about art, thank you very much. But this article about Documenta 11 (the current sub-theme of this site, apparently) is pretty good, despite its annoying “A is for Africa…Z is for Zero, Ground” conceit.
There’s something refreshing about a
There’s something refreshing about a sudden downpour, especially when you’re not trapped in it. Thunderclaps that set off car alarms on your street, Flickers that–save for a surge protector–would fry your laptop. Suddenly bright sunlight (“the devil is kissing his wife”). This is, like, the third or fourth in the last few weeks, though (“The Storm of the Century of the Week”). Can it be a sign of global warming? Yes. Unless you’re a right-wing environmentalist group.
At first, I thought this
At first, I thought this guy was a weblog stalker, considering we’d been to several of the same exhibits and openings, but it turns out that the “reading over your shoulder,” “they’re right behind you!”character of Modern Art Notes is a benign sign of how small the DC art world is.
My favorite astrophysicist and I
My favorite astrophysicist and I loved this great story from Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I found on kottke.org over the weekend:
Exporting gold from Denmark was “nearly a capital offense” under the Nazi occupation of 1940 on. Entrusted with the gold Nobel prize medals of Max von Laue and James Franck (two German Jewish physicists who had fled first to Copenhagen), George de Hevesy and Niels Bohr dissolved the medals in acid to avoid their confiscation (and any complications that would arise from sheltering Jewish refugees). The resulting solution, known as aqua regia, remained undetected in the Niels Bohr Institute and was delivered to the Swedish Academy in 1950 so that they could be recast. [A search for primary source material turned up this page on the Nobel site, which (unromantically and unfortunately) says the Academy decided to recreate the medals with new gold, not the carefully saved original metal. Still, it’s a great story.]
Peter Schjeldahl reviews Documenta 11
Peter Schjeldahl reviews Documenta 11 in this week’s New Yorker. He snidely and wearily compliments the show for its “robust, mature…festivalism,” which I take to mean they figured out how to show video-based works. But he at least notices two of my Documenta favorites. On Amar Kanwar’s documentary: “a stunning exploration of the Pakistani-Indian military frontier in Kashmir…[and] skillful, alluring, and notably uncomplaining.” (Gee, sorry to disappoint you, Peter.) On Gabriel Orozco’s terra cotta bowls: the “always witty” artist’s “work’s bristling joke…also invokes the anti-stereotype of a Mexican who is lousy at pottery…” (Huh?? And the one about the pollack who graduated from college?)
Ultimately, though, the real reason I’m linking to Schjeldahl’s review is because he was staying at my hotel in Kassel. Yes, I slept with Peter Schjeldahl.
At the Hirshhorn Museum yesterday
At the Hirshhorn Museum yesterday (originally to see the Ernesto Neto installaion before it closed), I kind of fixated on the work of Anne Truitt, which is in the “Minimalism and its Legacy” installation on the lower floor.
I wasn’t familiar with Truitt’s work, but a quick Google search shows an embarrassingly long and distinguished career (embarrassing for me not to know about it, that is). Go ahead, try it. Truitt was a central figure (along with Judd and Andre, but “championed,” for better or worse, by Clement Greenberg) in the emergence of Minimalist art in the 60’s. Yet unlike the canonical Minimalists, her work never sought the complete elimination of content. It seems obvious to me (although no shows seem to have been done to examine it) that the surge of artists using minimalist vocabulary (Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Gober and Ellen Gallagher are among the most obvious) to biographical, emotional and political effect can relate directly to Truitt’s work. (One of Truitt’s earliest sculptures was–and wasn’t, of course–a section of picket fence, which suggests Gober’s various playpen/crib sculptures.)
Surprisingly, Truitt’s still alive and cranking away (although from the tone of this interview in Artforum, “cranking” isn’t the steely-yet-genteel artist’s style) right here in Washington, DC. And looking at the consistency of her more recent work, she continues to pursue her interests, while being somewhat inexplicably underappreciated by the current art world/market. [Here is Daybook: The Journey of an Artist, Truitt’s well-reviewed diaries. Buy it. I did.]
Oh, the Neto piece is great, btw. I’d seen a couple of less successful ones lately and wondered if he’s been in a slump, but the strong sculptural quality of this one was really nice. Since it was rice and styrofoam, it didn’t smell, but it did have so many visual references to genitalia (think mons, orifices, and billygoats moving away from you, not the “wombs” the brochure delicately alluded to) that an arts funding crisis would’ve broken out if conservatives didn’t feel oh-so-comfortable with their grip on this town right now.
Stopped off in Philadelphia for
Stopped off in Philadelphia for a couple of hours to see the big Barnett Newman exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum. One thing I hadn’t known before was Newman’s (and his other artist friends’) battle with the relevance of painting in the wake of WWII. In a 1966 WNET documentary interview, Newman said how there was no sense painting in the early 40’s, since the world was coming to an end. And in the late 40’s, with global-scale destruction and atom bombs, painting didn’t seem particularly relevant, either. The solution? Newman set to painting the most profound subjects he could, Creation, Genesis, the Universe, the Void. These led to his breakthrough works, the “Onement” series that contained fully realized versions of “zips” (although he didn’t call them that until later).
Also interesting: seeing the chronological development of his work and mapping it to public and critical acceptance. His first two (or three?) gallery shows (in 1950-1) were basically failures; he supposedly stopped painting for four years; yet his work entered the MoMA collection by 1959. By the Sixties, though, his harder-edged work–produced during a period of great acclaim–seems a little synthetic and dry. There’s some inverse correlation going on here.
Anyway, the show’s great, and it’s up until July 7th, then goes to the Tate Modern in London in September. [Buy the exhibition catalog from Amazon.]
In the cab this morning:
In the cab this morning: A veritable weblog full of unsolicited narration from the older, female driver.
“I been driving a cab 34 years.”
“I used to race cars. I was 14.”
“The tourists come to see the matinee, but they can’t drive.”
“I washed my car this morning, but I didn’t need to. It’s clean.”
“My friend died. Cancer. Yesterday.”
“He’s a cabdriver 30 years. three sons and a grandson. He’s so young.”
“And he just bought a new cab last year.”
Still in Kassel, at
Still in Kassel, at least mentally. The bad news first: Michael Kimmelman’s embarassing writeup of Documenta 11 in todays NYTimes is not only self-contradictory, but almost every complaint or criticism he makes of the show can be refuted by the contents of the show itself.
Maybe it’s telling that we approached the show from different angles, literally. He arrived via Cologne, where the Matthew Barney show just opened, and so he supposes that Barney’s work is “just what Documenta 11 is reacting against but could do with a little more of.” I, in the mean time, came via Basel, the world’s biggest contemporary art fair, where the hottest souvenir turned out to be the “I Survived Cremaster 3” T-shirts, which were handed out surreptiously (at first) among the hubris-weary dealers and consumers.
While I do agree with one of Kimmelman’s statements– “It leaves me edified and a little sad” –I doubt we’re sad about the same thing. He lamented “didactic” overly serious, homogeneity and an indifference to “art.” But there were beautiful, moving works that spoke (both directly and obliquely) to injustice, hatred, violence, decay, abuse of power, and any number of important problems facing the world (go ahead, zoom in, and say they face the west, the east, the country, the city). As Documenta 11 makes a very persuasive argument that art can and does matter to the world outside a museum or a gallery, Kimmelman, inexplicably, seems to be pining for irrelevance and overwhelming self-referentiality. There’s a time for that: it’s called 1999.
Now the good news: One of those works is Amar Kanwar’s 1998 documentary, A Season Outside. It begins with scenes of the bizarrely ritualized gate-closing ceremony that takes place at the Kashmiri border of India and Pakistan. Citizens of each country cheer on their own soldiers, who high-step and prance agressively like armed peacocks. Literally, each step a guard makes is matched by the his counterpart, a ridiculous, bravado-blind tit-for-tat that prefigures the blustery statements politicians are making today. It’s breakdancing, but with nuclear missiles. The filmmaker’s voiceover describes a feeling of inevitability and impending disaster, and the crowd of men onscren turn out to be wagering on a pair of rams repeatedly set loose to butt heads.
Refusing either pessimism or cynicism, Kanwar poetically explores the philosophy of nonviolence, even as covert video shows gangs of Chinese soldiers clubbing Tibetan monks. When Kanwar asks a monk if all the injustice they face doesn’t demand a forceful response, the monk replies, “whatever be the way, I must not return pain for pain, evil for evil.” Here’s a work made five years ago that directly speaks to the greatest threat to the world at this very moment and that presciently implicates the exact word George Bush wields as his religio-political sword. The more I remember it, the more impressed I become with A Season Outside, the sadder I become for the current total absence of nonviolence as an element of the debate in the US, and the more I feel that art could play a powerful role in shifting that debate.
[Here is an early review from FAZ.net (in German). Run the URL through Babelfish for a rough translation. Excerpt: “Amar Kanwar’s contribution lives on hinreissenden [ravishing, I think] pictures, detailed observations and a melancholy, which seek to mediate between past and future.” ]
Setting: Fredericianum, Documenta 11, Kassel,
Setting: Fredericianum, Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany
The voice of a woman reading from within a freestanding glass booth echos through the gallery: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and twelve. B.C.
You watch, slightly amused. A set of black binders in a vitrine bear the title, One Million Years (Past and Future). One binder is open, showing columns of numbers, years. A couple enters the gallery and stops right in front of the booth. If it were the window to someone’s home, they’d be standing invasively close. They stare into
The voice of a man reading from within the booth: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and eleven. B.C.
the booth. The woman acknowledges them, but doesn’t speak. They keep staring for a moment, then move on. The gallery is basically square, typically classical, on the central axis of the building, with an extremely high, domed ceiling. The doorways are placed enfilade, creating a path for traffic right in front of the booth. That booth is kind of nice, though. Seamless, slightly grey glass. At least ten feet high, including the suspended ceiling and diffused lighting. Grey carpet, a black table with two places. One chrome mike stand, one binder,
Woman: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and ten. B.C.
and one glass of water for each place. A pile of CD jewel cases on the floor? Ah, they’re recording this, too. (Wouldn’t you? I mean, how much would it be to get interns to record this for you?) How long will it be before the guy reads his next year? If they cough, does that get edited out of the CD, or do they leave it in? More people walk in, pause, smirk at each
Man: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and nine. B.C.
other, look at the label, and move on. OK, now time the interval. Well, maybe later. I mean, they’ll be there a while, right? You move on to the next gallery. Hmm. Not very interesting. The next one is dark, though. A row of thirty or so film projectors lined up on a shelf that spans the entire gallery, but they’re not on. Ein Tagebuch (A Diary) by Deiter Roth. It starts at 11:00, in just about
Woman’s voice, still audible: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and eight. B.C.
five minutes. Push ahead and come back. You know, there are all those little photos culled from Der Spiegel. That should take about five minutes.You head back through the central gallery, past the booth again. Do those people in there think you’re lost? or at least aimless? En route, you try to look purposeful, make eye contact, acknowledge their humanity, their contribution to art and culture. You get it, after all. You know On Kawara’s paintings, too, so,
Man: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and four. B.C.
thanks.
The photos are small, pinned under glass, and extend all the way around the gallery. There’s a crowd. a riot, a group of soldiers. Another crowd. Demonstraters in handcuffs. Billy clubs. Another crowd, another riot, another, another. Isa Genzken has found an unsettling aesthetic similarity between these photos spanning decades of unrest and violence on every continent. Now the game is to identify the country and the
Man: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand three hundred and seventy nine. B.C.
era from the clothing the subjects wear and the cars and advertisements in the backgrounds. You check your watch. Almost five minutes. You hustle back through the galleries just as two attendants are signalling each other. They start the projectors from the outside moving in. Little home movie-like images slowly populate a grid on the wall, which the attendants focus and fine tune. Roth’s explanation is in the catalog: “I wanted to show my daily life in the films here…so I didn’t have to do anything courageous…For instance, it would be courageous to make a point
Woman: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand three hundred and seventy four. B.C.
of showing badly made films individually; but because I’m afraid of this kind of exposure, I will show 30 films of this kind at once–a flickering, which dazles and distracts from the poverty of each individual film.” Hmm. Sound like weblogging to me. Looks like it, too. You head back to watch the rest of that documentary on the India-Pakistan border which revitalizes the philosophy of non-violence, considered “quaint” (when it’s considered at all), passing once again through the
Man: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand three hundred and sixty one. B.C.
gallery with the booth. But this time something hits you and you stop. The cycles of life, violence, death, the attempts of people to make sense of it, to be remembered, to gain dignity and avoid embarassment, the lessons unlearned over centuries of conflict, the conceptual memento mori offering no illusions of progress or respite, the same inexorable flow of time giving unexpected comfort that things will pass. You choke back tears as you take up place against the door jamb, yielding to the years that pass over you. The woman looks up briefly, acknowledging my humanity, my contribution to art and culture, and then turns her eyes back to her page.
Woman: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand three hundred and sixty. B.C.
Report from Kassel: Got back
Report from Kassel: Got back Saturday, after an ultimately successful and fulfilling trip, but with entirely too much driving. Friday afternoon, the Documenta technical office installed a new monitor in the Ashkin piece, calibrated the timing of the three monitors, and started it up again–all under the watchful eyes of Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, and myself. (It turns out the Ashkin was the only piece in the entire show not visible on Thursday, so it would’ve been a priority for them even if I hadn’t turned up.) Okwui was effusive and smooth in his apologies, and they were both stoked about the piece, which they’d first seen at Andrea Rosen Gallery in Jan. 2000. [click on “artists” and “michael ashkin” to see stills and installation photos.] People seemed to respond well to the piece, at least during the 90 minutes or so that I watched it. The video consists of shots (with fixed camera & ambient sound) of an overgrown, abandoned proving ground at Sandy Hook, NJ, which progress on three large monitors. These multiple views create a very spatial experience, an understanding of this otherwise unreadable (or at least unusual) landscape. Basically, it rocked.
While waiting for the afternoon installation of the monitor, I was able to watch most of most of the Igloolik documentaries (that’s not a typo). It was both a revelation and a relief; these shows were clearly prelude to Atanarjuat, both in story and technical terms. It takes at least a little pressure off to know that it didn’t just spring fully formed from Zacharias Kunuk’s head and win Best First Feature Award at Cannes.
KASSEL – A mammoth contemporary
KASSEL – A mammoth contemporary art exhibition. First things first: Documenta 11 is at least an order of magnitude better than last year’s Venice Bienale, and not just because it’s not so freakin’ hot. While pursuing some gratuitous VIP ego-stroking (I’d just come from Basel, what do you expect?), I wandered into the Documenta Lounge, where I met Okwui Enwezor, curator-for-life and the suavest guy in town. [As of today, the catalog’s not on Amazon, but these “Documenta” books are.]
Even though there is at least as great a percentage of video-based art, it is far more engaging, engrossing, and better presented than the depressing gauntlet of the Arsenale. Presentation seems to vary and complement the work, with some stadium-style seating platforms (for Isaac Julien, Steve McQueen, and one more I don’t remember); futon-like benches for Craigie Horsfield’s 4-wall meditation, and more standard black box theater/rooms for others. Who suffered? Shirin Neshat’s film–shown on two opposing walls like her breakthrough piece at Venice in 1997– is beautiful and back on track, but the room is cramped and clogged with lost-looking people. Igloolik, Zacharias Kunuk’s production company (as well as the name of the Inuit town where he is based), is showing 13 documentaries on 13 wall-mounted monitors in the loong central hallway of the main venue; there’s a bench all along the wall, but it seems shortchanged. (Although I’m hard-pressed to think of a better way to show 13 Inuit documentaries in an art gallery… Compared to Atanarjuat, they’re like a full season of The Real World: Igloolik.
There are installations with video, too, but for some reason I found them almost universally lacking. They included Chantal Akerman’s multi-channel “real-time” piece on immigration, the INS and the Arizona border, which was like wandering around a darkened Circuit City and seemed full of an outmoded French smugness. (If she’s critiquing France’s own immigration problems through a self-righteous ‘exploration’ of US/Mexico, doesn’t seem too guilt-ridden to me.) Joan Jonas…I forget, but I just couldn’t watch any of it. And a net-based piece by tsunamii.net, which included a synthetic voice intended to read the webpages on the monitor was, instead, reading the error page from Internet Explorer.
So why am I really dwelling on the challenges and vagaries of video-based art? Because I hauled my sorry butt to Kassel to see one work, a three-channel video installation by an artist whose work has been very important to me (and who has been a friend) for a long time, Michael Ashkin. I happen to have bought this work, Michael’s first video piece, more than two years ago. I was extremely excited when he told me he was included in Documenta, and both honored and excited when he said he would include this video piece as well. Since the piece requires a large room, three flatscreen monitors on large pedestals, and a central bench, we’ve never installed it (although we play the DVD’s from it one at a time on our TV). Earlier in the week at Basel, many people (most of whom didn’t know I had the work) spoke very highly of Michael’s pieces here, and the installation itself is wonderful. EXCEPT FOR THAT ONE MISSING MONITOR AND THE “OUT OF ORDER” SIGN ON THE WALL.
Fortunately, I’d just sat through an amazing work (A Season Outside by Amar Kanwar, an Indian documentary filmmaker) which dwelt beautifully on Gandhi’s and the Dalai Lama’s teachings of non-violence. [I have to write about Kanwar later. His work made a real impression on me.] I found the head of technical services and calmly talked to him about the missing (broken, actually) monitor. Of course, fixing it was already a concern for him, and by the afternoon, he said the replacement would be installed tomorrow morning. The piece would be back in action Friday morning, noon at the latest. So, I am staying an extra day to see it. Thus, the vagaries of video-based art are transformed from institutional inconvenience to personal crisis.