The ARTery

sorta new site

2006-03-03T10:59:00.000-05:00

I'm behind. I've also been meaning to give a shout out to DC area artist Mark Cameron Boyd, who joins the web with his new site www.markcameronboyd.com.

He's also started a blog on art theory : Theory Now. Should be very interesting. Looks like he's got a post up about Sugimoto and conceptualist photography, that I haven't read yet. Check it out.

Sorry it took so long, Mark!

housekeeping

2006-03-03T10:55:00.000-05:00

please note that I've changed my email to arteryartery @ gmail.com

love the gmail.

Sugimoto

2006-03-03T10:40:00.000-05:00

Been meaning to do a write up on the Sugimoto show, which has blown me away. Like I said earlier (I think?) I didn't "get" his work at all until I saw it hanging together in this exhibit. There are so many layers to discover! The sequence of the movie theatres, the buddhas, and the seascapes in particular still gives me shivers to think about.

The last room - the mathematical models, doesn't do as much for me as the earlier work. It's intellectually interesting to see the models and think about the "zen" of math, if you will, but it doesn't grab me at the gut level like the other works do. I feel similar about the dioramas and the wax works, but they tickle me more than the mathematical works.

I just happen to be reading a little book on Buddhism, too (The Wisdom of No Escape), so that might have something to do with why the exhibit has seduced me. A happy convergence.

cooooool

2006-02-28T13:52:00.000-05:00

This is so neat! it's guerilla art, only gentle.

Knitters Ahoy

sugimoto at the Hirshhorn

2006-02-16T18:17:00.000-05:00

This is a brilliant show. I didn't get Sugimoto's work until today. Seeing the photographs together has a huge impact. And the installation, especially of the Buddhas and the Seascapes, is nothing short of exquisite. I won't say more, because the initial view is so powerful, I'd hate to ruin it for anyone.

In about half an hour Sugimoto and curator Kerry Brougher will discuss the show.

yay

2006-02-12T11:58:00.000-05:00

yay, snow! Pretty pretty snow!

We always get dire predictions, and the entire metro area rushes to the stores and cleans them out of milk and bread, and schools cancel ahead of time, and then nothing happens.

This time, there's a payoff! SNOW!

Okay, not art related. But I love snow. Makes me happy. Especially since I don't have to leave the house until tomorrow and can admire it through the windows.

2006-02-09T13:50:00.000-05:00

Sorry, dealing with some health issues and haven't been keeping up with the art.

Been reading about the culture of altar-building, especially among women. Interesting stuff.

Jerry Salz on Andrea Zittel : A Thorn Tree in the Garden

Also, Nam June Paik died recently. His Video Flag at the Hirshhorn never ceases to fascinate me - or maybe hypnotise me. Good thing I'm not epileptic.

At NYT: Computer Analysis Suggests Paintings are not Pollocks. Wherein a physicist uses fractals to analyze works attributed to Jackson Pollock. Edward Winkleman has an essay, which I haven't had time to read.

Congrats to Edward as well for making the October 2005 Young Galleries supplement to Art Press. I just saw this the other day, so it's a bit late...

another weird artist

2006-02-03T16:56:00.000-05:00

I have a soft spot for weird, bad art.

See The Anguish.

Other random stuff

2006-01-31T13:55:00.000-05:00

random group of quotes I liked on Eyeteeth.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.—Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Thought-provoking entry from Edward Winkleman on potentially offensive art and Islam.

Now in the political blogosphere I'm fairly well known for blasting any even remotely biased anti-Muslim rhetoric, and I'll most certainly do so in the future, but I'm personally sick and tired of Western art institutions getting this so spectaculary wrong. If you're going to scrap exhibitions for fear of offending Muslims, you MUST, MUST, MUST also scrap exhibitions for fear of offending Christians (e.g, the Offili piece in the "Sensation" exhibition), or Jews, or Buddhists, or whomever. Full stop. It doesn't matter if they're less likely to resort to violence in their protests, the only honorable rationale for censoring work that critiques Islam is that you, as an institution, consider all religion off bounds.

Now, I would disagree that there is something inherently more violent about Islam than other religions, but otherwise I think this is a great point. It just smacks a little of "I'm not racist, but...". The discussion in the comments is good too.

Edit: See comments. I didn't mean to imply that Edward was racist! Just that I was uncomfortable with the way his statement was formed.

Related article at Common Dreams : West Cowers From Defense of Dane's Liberty to Draw . I think this article makes a clearer arguement.

New (to me) artist : Lari Pittman. Wow, are these paintings full of ... stuff. I'm fascinated. It's like a post-modern hallucination. Pop art on acid. Graffiti gone baroque.

Lorna Simpson / Claudia DeMont

2006-01-31T13:35:00.000-05:00

If you missed the Lorna Simpson lecture at the Hirshhorn, there's a podcast of the lecture up at the Hirshhorn site, along with podcasts featuring Glenn Lowry, Janet Cardiff, curator Valerie Fletcher... go check it out. Hirshhorn Podcasts.

In addition there will be a lunchtime talk with associate curator Anne Ellegood on Simpson's work next Friday, February 10th at 12:30.

ALSO:

An exhibition on Claudia DeMont opens February 8th at the Art Gallery at the University of MD. A related lecture by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Associate Curator, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston on February 8, 2006 at 5:00 PM in UMD's Room 2309 Art-Sociology Building. Oliver's talk, titled Radical Presence: Blacks in the Conceptual and Fluxus Art Movements, covers "the participation of Black artists in the Fluxus Art and the Conceptual Art movements of the 1960s, and their influences on current contemporary practice."

busy busy busy

2006-01-28T12:33:00.000-05:00

It's been a jam-packed week. As my lack of posting reflects.

Sunday had a long meeting. I'm on the board for my non-profit studio complex and we're trying to hack out some major issues. It's exausting and sometimes frustrating work, but it has to be done. Democracy can be tough.

Talked to a PhD student from UMD about the art history program. I'm thinking of grad school... probably not a doctorate, don't know if I have the stamina for that.

Went to the Hirshhorn's Meet the Artist lecture. Lorna Simpson was a great speaker, articulate and funny and gave a coherent slide lecture. Believe me, not all artists, even major, successful ones, can do that much.

Friday went to a brown-bag lecture of a visiting scholar at the American Art museum. Not sure if these are open to the public?? Anyway, she spoke about Joseph Cornell's interest in astronomy, the cosmos, and spirituality. Great, dynamic lecture. I'll have to find her name, she's writing a book about the subject I think should be very good. If you're interested in the lectures let me know and I'll try to find out if they are open to the public. The next one is on Walter de Maria.

Hope to see more art this weekend.

Probably won't go to the Cezanne show yet, will be mega crowded on Sunday I'm sure.

Art for Earth's Sake

2006-01-24T13:19:00.000-05:00

snagged from Eyeteeth.

Art for earth’s sake: Move over Tracey
The new wave of artists are subversive shamans, subtly challenging us to live less destructive lives, says Hannah Bullock. But when sustainability becomes the message, does creativity get smothered?
By blurring boundaries between science, art and politics, says curator Anne Eggebert, such pieces can be useful “testing spaces” for ideas. It’s what Malcolm Miles, cultural theorist at Plymouth University, calls “demonstrating the possible... helping people imagine what doesn’t yet exist”. By offering a vision of where we might want to be in the future, artists can help us work out how to get there – as long as we’re prepared to think outside the box.

I'm baack

2006-01-20T13:26:00.000-05:00

Sorry, I had a rough week and didn't really feel arty. Playing catch-up now.

Interesting stuff:

Eyeteeth on Mel Chin, eco-art.

NEWSgrist on Koons and copyright.

NEWSgrist again, on the continuing case of the artist arrested for bio-art.

New DC gallery : nowuno, 403 Constitution Ave NE, grand opening tomorrow at 7pm

If any of you out there have experience with non-profit arts organizations and their boards (or really any non-profit board), would you email me or post a comment?

Danto on Schiele

2006-01-09T13:45:00.000-05:00

At The Nation - Live Flesh - Arthur Danto on Egon Schiele.

Eroticism and pictorial representation have coexisted since the beginning of art, and many great artists have a few erotic images in their "X Portfolios" (to use Robert Mapplethorpe's term). But Schiele was unique in making eroticism the defining motif of his impressive if circumscribed oeuvre. He was also unique in that drawing was his chief medium. Willem de Kooning said that flesh was the reason oil painting was invented, but Schiele demonstrated how remarkably fleshly thin transparent washes of pale color can be.

Random weirdness

2006-01-08T11:38:00.000-05:00

A Manifesto...

We are Unitarian Jihad. We will appear in public places and require people to shake hands with each other. (Sister Hand Grenade of Love suggested that we institute a terror regime of mandatory hugging, but her motion was not formally introduced because of lack of a quorum.) We will require all lobbyists, spokesmen and campaign managers to dress like trout in public. Televangelists will be forced to take jobs as Xerox repair specialists. Demagogues of all stripes will be required to read Proust out loud in prisons.

DC favorites of 2005

2006-01-07T14:59:00.000-05:00

Favorite gallery show: Renee Stout at Hemphill. I wasn't familiar with Stout's work until I saw this show, and though some of the pieces seemed awkward, I was seduced. Especially loved her drawings. The mark of a good show to me is if I'm still thinking about it months after it closed, and so many shows I see (and even like at the time) quickly fade. Stout's work stays with me.

Favorite museum collection: well, not too hard to guess. The recent installation of the permanent collection at the Hirshhorn is thoughtful and gorgeous. Posted here about it back in October.

Favorite guerilla art: Yes, Borf. I love Borf, so sue me.

Favorite soon-to-be-ex DC gallery: Fusebox. I just saw it was closing on DC Art News. I loved the Kendall Buster installation. No matter who moves into the space, DC will be less for the loss of this gallery.

Favorite alternative art space: The Warehouse. I hope they continue their local focus in 2006.

Favorite image:Spirit by Joseph Barbaccia. Seen to the left. Thanks for sharing your work with me, Joseph.

not art

2006-01-06T12:01:00.000-05:00

but important. They Shoot Helicopters, Don't They? Snagged from Crooked Timber.

more favorites of 2005

2006-01-06T11:16:00.000-05:00

Favorite piece of my own writing: my review of Sacred Wild at apexart. It's one of the first things I wrote for this blog and I still like the ideas it generated for me.

Favorite museum show: Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum. Here's my blog entry, No Mundane Options. Runner-up: Visual Music at the Hirshhorn.

Favorite art writing (published): The American Sublime by Arthur Danto.

Favorite art writing (online): Tyler Green on Shirin Neshat. Technically I don't think it was written in 2005 by it was posted on line in the past year.

Favorite art satire (online): George W. Bush as Performance Artist.

Favorite art satire (television): The Gates on the The Daily Show. Go here to view the video, and a transcript is here. Somebody on the Daily Show's staff sure has read some pretentious art writing to get this skit so right.

Stewart: So, you believe that shrouding these walkways in these orange curtains will somehow change our lives in New York?
Stephen: Oh, it's happening already Jon. Just today I saw an installation artist take a sandwich and ... and wrap it in a paper like substance, almost waxy in texture, and he kept wrapping it, and I'm not doing it justice here, he kept wrapping until he visually achieved 'not-sandwich', then, this is the genius part Jon, at the last minute he cut it in two, in a final act of 're-sandwichment'.

Favorite non-museum art: This art wasn't created in 2005, but that's when I saw it. Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, by Alex Grey.

Favorite Top-Ten list: James Bailey, on DC Art News. Good God, but that man can spill out the words.

Favorite Blog: Eyeteeth. I like the eclectic mix of politics, culture and art.

I could go on forever. I will probably have one or two more, but that's it for now.

On Kuspit's introduction

2006-01-05T12:24:00.000-05:00

As after reading this post from Edward Winkleman, I took a quick look at Donald Kuspit's IntroductionTwentieth Century Art: An Overview of Critical Opinion. Happily, it's easier to read and digest than some of the other Kuspit works I've read in the past, and raises some interesting ideas.

Quick notes, since I haven't had time to really think about it yet:

If I had written this, my undergraduate professors would have got on my back for numerous run-on sentances of doom such as:
How can a "movement formed in part or in whole to agitate against something or someone,"(27) suggesting its "spirit of hostility and opposition" -- the "antagonism" that becomes a "permanent tendency. . . of the avant-garde movement," and eventually a "transcendental antagonism," which "finds joynot merely in the inebriation of movement, but even more in the act of beatingdown barriers, razing obstacles, destroying whatever stands in its way," finally driving itself "beyond the point of control by any convention or reservation, scruple or limit," and thus becoming a kind of totalitarian or tyrannical nihilism -- be anything but self-defeating and spiritually and socially bankrupt, however much it may rationalize itself by a pseudo-pious attitude of agonism?
Also, as obvious from the previous quote, much of the first half of this essay relies on stringing quotes together. To a ridiculous extent. The information Kuspit cites is illluminating, but it gave me the feeling that I was reading someone's note-cards. Yes, it's a literature review of sorts ("overview") but geez.

Oddly, the critical opinions Kuspit reviews are without exception fifteen years or older - comeon, hasn't there been any decent criticism on this subject in a decade? Moreover, the majority of the works he cites are from the 1950s and 60s. I wouldn't quibble (everyone has their favorite sources) but he claims in the title that this is a overview of the subject. One might think from his essay that critical thought on Modernism ended in the Seventies.

Once he gets over his initial quote-dropping rampage, the essay gets more interesting. One point I admired was

...on the one hand modern art is healing and enlightening, for it teaches us to recognize and accept the contradictions that abound in society and human beings, and to resolve them artistically.... But on the other hand modern art enslaves us to our most infantile, destructive, anti-social attitudes... encouraging us to remain emotionally immature.... It is simultaneously facilitating and debilitating.

Another insight is

In their different ways, Barzun and Bell are saying the same thing: that avant-garde art -- art at its supposedly most "advanced" -- does not speak to the problem of being human.

He doesn't really come back to that point in the introduction, and I think it's a vital one.

I kept thinking again and again of Suzi Gablik, who at first glance seems diametrically opposed to Kuspit's high academia theorizing. However, deep down, aren't Gablik and Kuspit asking some of the same questions? Twenty years ago Gablik published Has Modernism Failed, where she addressed many of the issues in Kuspit's essay, albeit in a less rigorous fashion.

I'll have to read Kuspit's essay again. It can be hard to follow his point among all of the quotations.

a few of my favorite things...

2006-01-04T22:26:00.000-05:00

Not organized enough to do a Top Ten list for 2005. So instead, briefly, some of my random favorite things from the year.

Favorite album of 2005: Lullabies to Paralyze - Queens of the Stone Age
I'm not usually a hard rock fan, but these guys are not your typical hard rock band. The album is downright chthonic, scary - but not in an evil way.

Favorite movie of 2005: well, anyone who knows me outside the blogosphere can guess this one - Serenity. If you didn't see it in the theatre (and most of you didn't) you must rent it. Don't judge the DVD by the cover (who designs these things??). The best sci-fi/dystopian/wild west/noir/zombie movie ever. What impressed me most was that the story unfolded in a way that neither the audience nor the characters knew the full deal until the final scenes. So refreshing after so many inanely predictable plots this year. Fun and heart-wrenching and thought-provoking and witty... I can't say enough. So I should probably shut up.

Favorite tv of 2005: My Name Is Earl. Just when you thought television had lost all sense of whimsy. Somehow this manages to be both absurd and sweet all at once.

I promise, I'll get to art (in the more traditional sense) tomorrow.

Interviews and talks online

2006-01-04T22:24:00.001-05:00

Podcasts from the Hirshhorn Museum... check them out.

more art and spirituality

2006-01-03T19:55:00.000-05:00

Wow, second post related to this topic in two days.

Edward Winkleman weighs in with a very honest post : God or Me: One of Us Might Have to Go

Yes, given my position and passion, it seems natural that I should just turn to art for spirituality, but let's face it, looking for the spiritual in contemporary art is often like looking for a trenchcoat you like in your size at Century 21. Even if you find one, there's bound to be some imperfection in it that makes you shake your head and move on.

He refers several times to the introduction to A Critical History of 20th-Century Art by Donald Kuspit, published on artnet.com, which is quite long. I'm going to have to set aside some time to read it. I usually don't like Kuspit's writing style (I've often found him needlessly obtuse) but the pieces Edward excerpted were interesting.

Anyhow, as with many of Edward's posts there is a great discussion that follows. James Leonard writes

And this somehow cycles back (at least momentarily) to why this is a fitting topic for a contemporary art blog. There is a sensual aspect to all spiritual practices. Successful works of art often tap into a similar sensuality. For the past year, with this blog, Ed has displayed a keen ability to evoke insight on what is lacking in most contemporary art.

So Ed, connect the dots for me, where does this all lead? What's missing in today's art (/art world) for you? Gospel? Church? Soul? Something else?

These are the very questions I've found myself asking this past year.

More interesting art bits

2006-01-03T19:40:00.000-05:00

Over at the Brooklyn Rail:

Interview with art writer Dore Ashton.

Rail: But wouldn’t you agree that his book, The Dehumanization of Art, is a somewhat hostile view of modern art?

Ashton: I don’t think that he was against modern art per se. He said something very important, which was that modern artists don’t believe in art any more. I think he was absolutely right. It was a great turning point in modern history, in 1948. And there was a lot of evidence that many modern artists didn’t think there was much to be said. And that was their problem and their dilemma. So he was misread. He wasn’t attacking abstract art. He was simply saying that in this terrible century, artists have lost their faith.

and also

Rail: What do you think about the Post-Modernist theory that was imported from the French in the late sixties, which became so popular in the States in the eighties, especially in academia?
Ashton: First of all, I want to remind you that the Greek word “theoria” for theory really means “to view, to look at,” not about all of that a priori theory. So I was and I still am hostile to theorizing. Secondly, I believe that they took a certain formula like a grid and they put that grid on everything. ... But the appeal in general is quite simple: giving the interpretation a greater prominence than the actual work of art itself thereby removing all the sensual aspect from the seeing experience.

Article on one of my favorite artists, Nancy Spero.

What persistently evades both the fictional and factual portrayal of artists is the intricacy, rigor, attentiveness to detail and facture—the work of the work of art—that characterizes individual practice and the relationship between artist and assistant.
This is a complex event that inevitably touches upon questions of authorship. The long history of gesture and trace as the genesis and primary signifier of artistic intention and identity is, as it were, placed in parenthesis by working practices that favor concept and process over action and expressiveness, a connection that carries the memory of the Duchampian Readymade as the paradigmatic performative act of modernist aesthetics. In this respect, Nancy Spero’s installations are performative events. However, watching her attentive engagement and directorship of the realisation of each printed image, there can be no doubt over her authority in determining both the overall structure and the detailed relationships of part-to-part and part-to-whole. She wants it just so, precisely and definitively, and whose hand leaves the final impress is secondary to the effectiveness of the dialogue between instructor and maker. It is a matter of interpretation and translation, and an exercise in a very particular form of communication which, perhaps, alludes more to film and the character of the mise-en-scène as the mark of directorial sensibility.

Another bit on criticism

2006-01-02T17:40:00.000-05:00

This blog has become something of a collection of semi-related ideas rather than original writing lately, sorry about that. Hope to get more in-depth in the new year. Thanks to everyone out there who has been encouraging me about my writing!

Anyhow, Jeffrey Cudlin of the City Paper has this to write about his view of art criticism, and I found it a solid, straight-forward statement...

Let me explain myself: For me, part of art criticism should be an investigation into the difference between what a work claims to be and what it actually is, to the best of my approximation. So many artists make a career out of positioning and public relations, making their art as much an attempt to shape perceptions of their connections to the art world as an attempt to shape our perceptions of the world at large. Untangling the misdirection and hubris that’s often attached to that pursuit can be a messy business. Add that to the usual critical duties of judging skill, evaluating ideas, and teasing out meaning, and a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down becomes pretty difficult to bestow.

From here. Thanks to DC Art News for bringing it to my attention.

I completely agree with Cudlin. My own reviews (scattered as they are) always incorporate the good with the bad, even in shows that I loved. I don't see the point of merely being a cheerleader or a narrator when it comes to art. It's not what I'm interested in. When I look at a show I can't help but look at the whole (the installation, the curatorial intent, and for lack of a better word the ambiance) as well as the parts (the success/meaning of individual works).

I'm perfectly aware that this art game is very subjective, and I hope that readers realize that this is opinion - I don't believe I have the "correct" take on anything I write about. I think this is the hardest thing to convey. Writers are too afraid of being wrong sometimes, and also I don't think enough credit is given to writers who aren't afraid to change their minds - there was a discussion on this regarding Jerry Salz recently and I can't recall where right now.

Enough rambling. Bon annee.

Kiki Smith

2006-01-02T15:50:00.000-05:00

Over at Eyeteeth (fast becoming one of my favorite blogs) is a few links to interviews with artist Kiki Smith, where Smith discusses the relationship between Catholicism and her art.

But it’s true, you have to live to know what is happening in your neighborhood and in your realm of consciousness. What you’re thinking isn’t particularly unique to what other people are thinking. That’s why you can recognize things from two thousand years ago because it’s not radically different. How you’re thinking about them might have slight variations, but basically everybody has a body and they experience in them very differently, but physiologically there are certain things happening and so it’s no wonder that people think about lots of the same things.

And from another interview linked on Eyeteeth:

Skin is the surface, or boundary line, of the body's limit. The skin is actually this very porous membrane, so on a microscopic level you get into the question of what's inside and what's outside. Things are going through you all the time. You're really very penetrable on the surface, you just have the illusion of a wall between your insides and the outside.

Best. Painting. Ever.

2005-12-31T15:34:00.000-05:00

I'm serious. I love this painting. It was in the film The Royal Tenenbaums. This is titled Bad Route. See the website here. I'm not sure who the artist is, it may be Miguel Calderon.

Fates

2005-12-30T19:01:00.000-05:00

Somehow apropos for the ending of this year.

looking back

2005-12-30T18:42:00.000-05:00

Scanning the blogs, it seems like the thing to do right now is come up with some sort of top ten list for the year. I've only been here (as a blogger) since June, and my memory isn't very good, so not sure I'll be able to be that organized. I may come up with a randomized list of things I liked, lame as that would be.

Anyway, snagged from Eyeteeth, Paul Schmelzer wrote in February on Divinity for the Reality-Based Community. Since this subject most likely won't go away any time soon, it's still relevant.

Art, it seems, allows us to ponder the sacred in non-dogmatic terms --i.e. divinity for the reality-based community. Of course now is not the heyday for that bunch. But perhaps there's hope in what theologian Finley Eversole called a "spiritual underground." For him the term referred to a complex notion that artists who confront the emptiness of a godless world-- writing in 1963, he was thinking of Rothko, Pollock, and de Kooning--connect us to the holy by presenting its inverse: "If our artists have been incapable of religious faith, they have at least shown us that modern man is incapable of unfaith." But I suggest that artists make up a spiritual underground in a different sense. While many mainstream religions are being hijacked by rigid fundamentalists, contemporary artists make up a loose-knit band of the covertly spiritual. If artists of the "secular mystery" can create work that resists co-optation by religious and political ideologues, perhaps we can call on them in more enlightened times to reacquaint us with the joys of asking questions we don't yet have the answers for.

Spirituality and art has been something of an ongoing theme in this blog so far, oddly enough, so I appreciated Paul's entry. I haven't put enough thought into the subject to be very coherent about it. Maybe next year!

update

2005-12-27T10:56:00.000-05:00

Last day in Michigan. Luckily I brought the warmer weather with me and it's been in the 30's. Yeah, I lived here most of my life but the past five years in Washington have eroded my immunity to cold (i.e. below 10 degrees) temperatures.

Lots of cookies were eaten, gifts were given. Got to play with my two-year-old nephew, who is into very repetitive games. I got a book on Chuck Close and a trip to the Rodin/Claudel exhibit for Christmas, and a replica of a Rodin hand. The exhibit was great, I'll write about it when I get back to the East Coast.

Tomorrow will bring the joy of air travel. I'm not exactly tall and I feel squished, I can't imagine what it's like for anyone 6 feet or more.

Back to work on Thursday.

!!!

2005-12-20T14:06:00.000-05:00

One more thing, over at NEWSgrist... as a radical militant library technician I found this hilarious. Not to mention disturbing.

One internal F.B.I. message, sent in October 2003, criticized the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review at the Justice Department, which reviews and approves terrorist warrants, as regularly blocking requests from the F.B.I. to use a section of the antiterrorism law that gave the bureau broader authority to demand records from institutions like banks, Internet providers and libraries.
"While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists benefit from OIPR's failure to let us use the tools given to us," read the e-mail message, which was sent by an unidentified F.B.I. official. "This should be an OIPR priority!!!"

Yeah Yeah, so this is just barely art related, but hey.

Here's another take on the subject from the Rogue Scholar. And I got this one in an email at work yesterday from a colleague... just know your interlibrary loans may get you into more trouble than you'd think.

And one more: Radical Militant Librarians and Other Dire Threats

Salz on Art Criticism

2005-12-20T13:44:00.000-05:00

Picked up from several places, yeah, everybody's talking about it. But, it's worth a read.

From Jerry Salz - Seeing Out Loud

The best critics look for the same things in contemporary criticism that they look for in contemporary art. But they also have an eye. Having an eye in criticism is as important as having an ear in music. It means discerning the original from the derivative, the inspired from the smart, the remarkable from the common, and not looking at art in narrow, academic, or "objective" ways. It means engaging uncertainty and contingency, suspending disbelief, and trying to create a place for doubt, unpredictability, curiosity, and openness.

Dishearteningly, many critics have ideas but no eye. They rarely work outside their comfort zone, are always trying to reign art in, turn it into a seminar or a clique, or write cerebral, unreadable texts on mediocre work. There's nothing wrong with writing about weak art as long as you acknowledge the work's shortcomings. Seeing as much art as you can is how you learn to see. Listening very carefully to how you see, gauging the levels of perception, perplexity, conjecture, emotional and intellectual response, and psychic effect, is how you learn to see better.

Edward Winkleman has a response. There's a pretty good discussion in the comment section.

With art, in New York City, there's no such guarantee you'll ever know [whether a critic liked a show], even when you know they saw it, even for the largest artists or most powerful galleries. If The New York Times, for example, on average, publishes 7 major reviews and two articles in each Friday edition, that totals about 470 reviews each year. The problem is there are more about 470 exhibitions per month*, meaning that more than 11/12ths of all exhibitions will not be reviewed in the Times. For the Village Voice, the number of reviews is fewer than half that. So if you are the lucky artist who gets a review, you've already beaten incredible odds. At that point, for the review to be unfavorable seems almost cruel.

Semi-hiatus

2005-12-20T13:33:00.000-05:00

Will be out of town for the next week visiting my family. Wish me luck, it was 9 degrees in Detroit this morning!!

I may sporadically post over the next week but don't take that as a promise...

art and influence

2005-12-17T15:54:00.000-05:00

Mery Lynn McCorkle writes in her December entry:

Art is a commodity. In art school, in art history classes, it's promoted as a search for meaning but it's a commodity, even when designed to be temporary and outside of the commodity market. Then documentation becomes the commodity. Art reviews exist mostly to tell readers what to buy, other artists what to emulate. One Charlie Finch review at artnet.com was about what art he would like to buy as he strolled through NY galleries. Consumerism is so much easier than trying to develop a coherent observation.

This is such a hard topic to grapple with - it really gets down to what art means to our (capitalist) society, if art can have any meaning and value at all in such a society that transcends commodity. It's not a new struggle - the artists of the sixties and seventies tried to escape the trap of commodification of their art through locating them in remote locations (earthworks) or making them ephemeral (performance, conceptual art) and yet, as McCorkle points out, even these attempts were sucked back into the system through their documentation once the artist became known.

Sometimes, perhaps naively, I think that museums (especially public institutions) can partially transcend this by showing art in a location that isn't directly linked to buying and selling. Only, the system is so interdependent (museums depend on the gallery system for the most part in order to sift out the wheat from the chaff, as it were, and even public museums depend increasingly on the contributions of corporations and wealthy patrons to remain open) that to view museums as "pure" is ridiculous.

Art with a capital A has never been "pure", outside of the influence of one institution or another - from the Renaissance patron system, to the Church, and before that art either served religion (organized or not) or culture (as functional objects reflecting the beliefs of a society). But at the same time, the most interesting art in my view has always pushed at that influence, either with the wish to undermine it, critique it, or just expand its horizons.

Anyway, many many writers have dealt with this more coherently and eloquently than I could, but it's a question that remains on my mind.

What's in a name?

2005-12-17T15:43:00.000-05:00

Reading Off the Wall : a portrait of Robert Rauschenberg by Calvin Tomkins.

Did you know Rauschenberg's given name is Milton?? Milton Rauschenberg really doesn't have the same ring to it.

I've just started the book, but so far I'm enjoying Tomkins' easy-going, engaging style.

theory theory theory

2005-12-15T20:30:00.000-05:00

I only have a vague grasp of high level art theory. Some of the ideas I find interesting, others baffling (such how has anything remotely Freudian lingers in the humanities when it's pretty much out of use everywhere else??) and the rest inpenetrable.

Interesting article with some relevence to contemporary art, since so much of the theory of the last 30-40 years has been drawn from literary theory. Mostly about how the teaching of theory is changing in universities and that even pro-theory scholars are rethinking how it's used.

The Fragmentation of Literary Theory

In the 40 years since Derrida paid that visit to Johns Hopkins, succeeding generations of scholars have had time to fall in love with theory, fall out of love with it, and learn how to live with it. As in any long-term relationship, there's a continuing re-evaluation and reimagining of what works and what does not. Rei Terada, chairwoman of comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine, says: "As the 60s becomes a historical period... we can make finer distinctions and groupings among things that seemed all of a piece closer to the time. ... People are starting to sort out such legacies." No one still believes, for instance, "that all French theory is politically progressive," she says.
...

...theory is the impenetrable postmodernist stuff that has given many a canon-loving student the heebie-jeebies since the French critic Roland Barthes declared authorship dead amid the intellectual and political tumult of 1968. And since that moment, wave upon critical wave has swept through literature departments: structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, New Historicism, feminism, postcolonialism, cultural studies.

Durig and Rodin

2005-12-14T17:44:00.000-05:00

The following is an excerpt from a larger paper on the problem of forgeries of Rodin drawings. I previously posted a very rough version here. For the sake of clarity I have cut out my footnotes, if you are interested in my sources email me. Please don't reproduce this essay without my permission.

Though his exploits gained him a certain level of fame in the 1930s, Ernst Durig was never to reach the artistic heights of his idol, Auguste Rodin. Born in Switzerland in 1894 to devout Catholic parents, Ernst Durig’s driving ambition was to become a great sculptor. At age eighteen Durig hitchhiked to Paris with hopes of meeting the great Rodin. He claimed throughout his life to have been Rodin's last student. Among Rodin’s published correspondence is a letter from 1905 supposedly from the master instructing “Monsieur Durig” about treatment of a portrait bust of Marcelin Berthelot. While Rodin did indeed sculpt a bust of Berthelot in 1905, it seems unlikely that Durig was the original recipient of this letter, as he would have been nine years old at the time. In a 1948 pamphlet of his sculpture, Durig published another letter written by his idol praising Durig’s talent. To prove his relationship to the artist Durig apparently inserted his name in the body of an authentic letter written by Rodin. While it remains uncertain just how Durig acquired Rodin’s correspondence, his alleged relationship with the artist was at the least exaggerated. However false his claims, Durig did meet Rodin. He owned a photograph of himself as a young man posing next to the sculptor, allegedly taken in Rome in 1915.

It wasn’t enough for Durig to be known as the last student of Auguste Rodin. He seemed to feel the need to surpass the legend. Durig spread the story that he was asked to take over the sculpting of a bust of Pope Benedictus XV from Rodin in 1915, after Rodin’s use of calipers to take measurements angered the pope. Durig claimed that his finished marble was placed in the museum of the Vatican. Rodin, who Durig would continue to use as something of a calling card for the rest of his life, died in 1917. Durig was twenty-three.

According to Dorothy Seiberling in Life Magazine, Durig spent several years with the Papal Guard before settling in Florence, where he was arrested and spent several months in an asylum for harassing an American woman. After his family secured his release, Durig made the acquaintance of the poet Rainier Maria Rilke, who had served as Rodin’s secretary. Rilke introduced him to a wealthy widow whom Durig married. Durig sculpted Pope Pius XI in 1924 and his sculpture The Marathon Runner was “acclaimed by Mussolini as Rome’s most outstanding sculpture of 1926.” Sometime in the late 1920s Durig and his family left Europe for the United States.

Active in Washington, D.C. from about 1930, Durig attained tabloid notoriety in the city. In 1933 his wife reported him missing. There was no sign of him for a month, and the day after his equally mysterious return he and his family were evicted from their home for non-payment of rent. The major D.C. newspapers published a number of sensational articles surrounding the events, with photographs of Durig's possessions and sculptures set out on the curb. The articles at the time claimed that Durig attempted to destroy many of his works in anger. Both Durig and his wife made paranoid comments to reporters regarding a "powerful political enemy" who was hindering Durig's artistic career.

Though he claimed to be Rodin's pupil Ernst Durig failed to absorb any lessons from the artist. While his busts do capture a likeness they are often lifeless. Closer in style to social realism than to Rodin, Durig’s figurative sculpture is mediocre and derivative. The Peace Monument, for example, features a woman gripping a sagging soldier. The composition is awkward, the soldier’s bent legs stiff. There is little sense of the strong emotion Rodin conveyed through his modeling of the figure.

Throughout his career Durig continued to pursue notables, sculpting Mussolini, Harry S. Truman and the poet Tagore, though he was paid for few of these. Offering to sculpt a famous figure for his personal collection, Durig would grow angry when the subject then declined to purchase the bust. In 1937 Durig and his family were present at the dedication of his Peace Memorial in Greenwood WI, for which the city paid him the cost of materials. Durig's wife and adopted daughter were killed in a car accident sometime after this, possibly around 1950. Durig's life went downhill after their death. In 1958 he was admitted to the hospital suffering from malnutrition and the next year he was taken to St. Elizabeth's hospital in Washington, where he died on November 4, 1962.

After Durig’s death a chest of papers was discovered in a storage room at St. Elizabeth’s. The find included many letters written by Rodin and over a hundred "Rodin" drawings. Sotheby's initially authenticated the drawings in 1965 and agreed to auction them to repay the city for Durig's care. By March of 1965, however, Sotheby's declined to auction the drawings due to questions about the attribution. Several months later Life Magazine published their expose of Durig's forgery.

Exhibitions of Rodin’s works on paper were common throughout the period Durig was active. Claiming they were a gift, Durig staged exhibitions of his personal collection of Rodin drawings in Washington, D.C. in 1934 and at Leonard Clayton Gallery in New York in 1937. Of the latter show a reviewer writes “[t]hat Rodin was a master is...evident in these dashing sketches...” which must have pleased Durig immensely, if these were indeed his own work.

Kirk Varnedoe dates the start of Durig’s career as a forger in the United States to 1928. In his discussion of the major forgers of Rodin's drawings Varnedoe describes the characteristics of Durig’s work. He wrote that Durig had no preference for a particular size, media or format and imitated different periods of Rodin’s career. Durig did not shy away from difficult poses, often recreating authentic, published drawings. Though Durig grasped the importance of Rodin’s achievement, stating that “[t]hese later drawings of Rodin’s are better than the early ones because they are more simple and direct, and therefore, more powerful...” he was unable to convey this in his forgeries. While Rodin’s work on paper showed a reduction to essentials and undying curiosity about the human form, Durig focused on details over the whole and displayed no sense of the effect of gravity on the body. His figures typically appear to float unmoored on the page. Unlike Rodin, in Durig’s drawings male-female embraces and combinations of three women are common. As with the other forgers Durig had a favorite body type: large, muscular women with broad shoulders and thick joints, the structure of their bodies ambiguous. The nipples of his women in profile are drawn as separate small circles, an as a loose loop in frontal views. Though not as formulaic as other Rodin forgers, Durig displayed a varied ability with anatomy and tended toward quick, broken marks that lack Rodin’s close observation. His washes are more dense and even than Rodin’s, the flesh often too pink or yellow.

Ernst Durig failed to gain success on the strength of Rodin’s name. Unable to support himself with his legitimate work or his career as a forger, Durig died penniless. Several writers have commented that Durig’s forgery seems to have been motivated more from an overwhelming hero-worship than greed. Despite his failures, he achieved some measure of immortality by the very fact that his forgeries continue to be traded on the market. For decades, Durig’s fame as Rodin’s student was unquestioned proof of authenticity of his forgeries, since they supposedly came directly to Durig from the artist. According to Varnedoe, Durig’s “Rodins” are often found in large groups and have been frequently published, sold in galleries and at auction, and placed in museum collections.

text copyright 2005 Amy Watson

Gallery Talk at the Hirshhorn

2005-12-14T17:42:00.000-05:00

The Work of Leonardo Drew
Friday, December 16, 12:30 pm
Meet at the Information Desk
Discover the artist's work and his use of ordinary materials with program specialist Teresia Bush.

Borf Pleads Guilty

2005-12-13T17:23:00.000-05:00

With Guilty Plea, Borf to Try the Art of Graffiti Cleanup

edit: I probably should have included some background for the non-DC reader, but don't have time right this minute.

Via DC Art News, here's Borf - And The Crimes And Punishments Of Graffiti Artists Who Are Allowed To Get Away With Murder, wherein James Bailey compares the damages of one teenage graffiti artist with... larger destructive forces.

Hopefully, Judge Leibovitz will next order that all the banned art supplies in D.C. be channeled down South to New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. There's a desperate need for graffiti art supplies down there. And while we're on the subject of punishing graffiti artists, there aren’t enough prisons in the country to lock-up the hundreds of thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims turned angry graffiti artists who are feverishly spray painting graffiti that expresses their true feelings about being abandoned by their government all over the debris they continue to drag out of their lost homes and broken lives.

George W. Bush as Performance Artist

2005-12-11T21:19:00.000-05:00

It's... oddly convincing. See here. Not sure what this says about art. It works both as a parody of current art and art writing and politics as well...

In November of 1994, he became simulated Governor of Texas by actually being elected Governor of Texas. Thereafter, his artistic career has flourished. By simulating a deep understanding of evangelical Christians, he gained in popularity unlike any other artists in history. The shockwave caused by his seminal work “Presidential Election 2000” was felt throughout the world. By becoming simulated President of the United States, he has achieved the ultimate goal of many artists: To change the world through art.

And... on the Iraq war...

In terms of originality, this piece is significant for several reasons. 1) It was the most expensive art ever made in history, realized entirely with public funding. 2) It was designed with no ending in mind. 3) It was viewed by the entire world in real time.

Snagged from Black Cat Bone.

Alice Neel @ NMWA

2005-12-11T20:31:00.000-05:00

It's such a weird building, the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Very... pink. The lobby, anyway. The collection seems very eclectic.

The Alice Neel exhibition is worth seeing. Very intense portraits of women, never idealized, but never showing flaws just for the sake of flaws, either. Some of the paintings almost border on caricature. I love that Neel painted such a variety of sitters, from intellects to maids. And I love how you can see some of the women's discomfort at the scrutiny of portraiture. From the website:

Selecting her subjects based on outward attributes that revealed inner selves, these images remain unfailingly, and often disconcertingly, honest.

Many of the bodies are twisted and awkward, even (maybe especially) the pregnant women. Her pregnant women are probably the most interesting to me. In one of the captions Neel is quoted saying she thinks that artists have shied away from painting pregnant women because they're "sissies." (The artists, of course, not the women!) I think Alice Neel must have been quite a character to know.

Winter

2005-12-09T15:22:00.000-05:00

This is a park in my hometown, Kalamazoo, MI. Photo by trekguy on the Kalamazoo Flickr. It's actually Milham Park, even though I titled the photo Bronson Park. Bronson Park is below, again by trekguy.

Chapel of Sacred Mirrors

2005-12-09T13:09:00.000-05:00

Last time I was in New York I stumbled across the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. I had been wandering through the galleries in Chelsea for hours and was kinda burnt out on the "white box" experience. At another time I might have found the Chapel either ridiculous or creepy, but at that particular day it was fascinating. According to the website,

The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM) is a sanctuary in New York City for contemplation and a center for events encouraging the creative spirit. The Sacred Mirrors, on display in the Chapel, are a series of paintings that allow us to see ourselves and each other as reflections of the divine.

The Chapel is the work of artist Alex Grey. At first I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be some kind of installation art piece, or the work of a cult. Turns out it's a bit like the combination of the two. Not that there is a Chapel Cult, per se, just that you get an odd vibe from the rooms, like you're entering the sacred space of an alien religion, from an alternative universe just this side of the everyday one you live in.

There are two major rooms, separated by a small entryway/shop. The right hand room contains the Sacred Mirrors, 21 paintings installed in a very specifically designed space, full of red and gold and circular mirrors. The paintings themselves are close to human-sized, each in a cathedral-door shaped frame. They are hung in a specific sequence around the room, much like the Stations of the Cross in a Catholic church. Starting with The Material World, the silouette of a man on a field made up of the Periodic Table of Elements, they range through several anatomical works (Skeletal System, Nervous System, etc.), then male and female examples of three major races of the world. After these (the weakest, due to a somewhat generic rendering of each race) comes four paintings of spiritual systems - my favorite being the Psychic Energy System with it's simultaneous portrayal of nerves, bones and chakras, and emitting a kind of crackling lightening (for SciFi fans out there it doesn't look unlike a quickening from Highlander, but not in a silly way). Lastly there are three representations of religious figures (Christ, Sophia, Avalokitesvara) and a more abstract work titled Spiritual World.

They're a mixed bag as individual works, but together they form an interesting space. As I said before, the racial paintings bothered me because of their blandness, and blonde Christs always annoy me. I was drawn to Sophia, even though she's covered with weird eyes and seems to have an alien fetus in her chest. The anatomical works are cool. They could have been boring, too much like medical illustrations, but somehow avoid that.

The second room contains another series, Progress of the Soul. This room, painted in yellows, doesn't have the impact of the Mirrors, but some of the paintings are more successful. I especially liked Praying.

From what I've gathered, the artist uses psychotropic substances to reach a mystical state, and his art is a representation of these visions.

In an interview, Grey states

My work scares some people because the Divine Imagination can be a scary place, which anybody who has tripped knows is true. It's not only that you see scary monsters, or experience your own death, or dissolve into a network of infinite light, but that such all enveloping visions severely challenge any conventional "non-mystical, non-visionary" worldview. Anyone who admits the existence of these boundless inner dimensions realizes they have profound implications about what we believe reality is. Blake and other visionaries knew these dimensions first hand and now with LSD and DMT nearly anyone who has the guts and the curiosity can be introduced to some aspect of the terrain. But we have to remember that during his day, Blake was regarded by many as totally mad.

And, regarding locating his work in a "chapel" as opposed to a gallery,

A secular art gallery or museum is not the proper place for spiritual art. In order to work most effectively, spiritual art requires a sacred setting. The sacred art and architecture of previous cultures have always been sites of initiationinto their unique and culturally bound understanding of spiritual reality. The tribal myths and dogmas that keep religions at war are not the mystical truths at the heart of each religion. Today, a more embracing and universal spirituality is possible. The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors would be dedicated to fostering such interfaith and post-denominational spiritual understanding.

Some of the paintings are a little too drug-trippy to me, they don't connect to my unaltered consciousness. I'm not denying that these experiences are real, just that some of the paintings go a bit over the top, like Cosmic Christ. Maybe in these cases the vision is just too individual, even as it strives to be universal.

Whatever his spiritual beliefs, Grey is an amazing painter at times, managing to achieve a level of transparent detail in his x-rayed figures that doesn't fall into flat illustration. He's obviously more than just a trip-obsessed deadhead - not only are the paintings meticulous in detail, he's clearly studied both Christian and Buddhist religious art closely, and while his art shows these influences it is still very much his own. I admire his very unique vision, and the determination to exist outside the gallery system.

Washington Art events

2005-12-07T11:02:00.000-05:00

DC Art News has a great post on upcoming art events in Washington.

Also...

A. Salon Holiday Sale and Show, December 10th, 5-8 pm.

Upcoming Hirshhorn Events

2005-12-05T14:16:00.000-05:00

Film & Meet the Artist: Alfredo Jaar
Wednesday, December 7, 7:30 pm
Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar returns to filmmaking in Muxima, 2005, a meditation on contemporary life in Angola. He will introduce the film, which elegantly relates the disparity of wealth, the rise of HIV/AIDS, and the legacy of years of civil strife. This stunning portrait of an emerging nation is a mostly wordless documentary of impressions organized into cantos. Each has a subtly different version of the popular Kimbundu folk song "Muxima (Heart)." English subtitles.

Lunchtime Gyroscope Talk: Ann Hamilton's Palimpsest Dec 9, 2005 at 12:30pmThe Hirshhorn's Anne Ellegood will explore Ann Hamilton's Palimpsest, 1989. This recently acquired installation-which consists of a room covered with beeswax tablets, thousands of slips of paper containing handwritten texts, and a vitrine filled with snails that gradually eat away at heads of cabbage-evokes the complex layering and gradual decay of memory. Meet at the Information Desk.

Lone Star Report

2005-12-03T23:40:00.000-05:00

Critic Noah Simblist checks in from Dallas with a new Lone Star Report.

Marriage

2005-12-03T22:39:00.000-05:00

New piece from Joseph Barbaccia.

Marriage, 2005, clay and salad tongs.

I'm fascinated by Joseph's utensil sculptures. They are familiar and disturbing. Uncanny. I'm not a huge fan of Freudian interpretation of art, but here's an excerpt from his essay The Uncanny...

...if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche [‘homely’] into its opposite, das Unheimliche...; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.

Those hands grasp each other, flesh and mechanism combined. Salad tongs are such an everyday thing, an extension of our hands, a utensil we use at family gatherings. And yet the addition of the hands makes them into an unknown. The thought of using these hands to serve up salad is... creepy. But it's a simple and appropriate metaphor, too. Neither hand alone can accomplish anything... but working together, in concert, they work like... well, a well-crafted utensil. Like a good marriage should.

New acquisitions at the Hirshhorn

2005-12-02T09:37:00.000-05:00

Hirshhorn Museum Acquires 15 Contemporary Works of Art

The Hirshhorn Museum has acquired a number of important works of art by established and emerging contemporary artists, including Olafur Eliasson, Lynda Benglis, Lorna Simpson, Thomas Demand, Janet Cardiff and more. Working in variedmedia and representing a diverse mix of creative minds from around the world, these artists express provocative ideas and pose questions about contemporary society. The majority of these works were gifts from board members and other supporters.

Some of my favorites, of those I've seen so far are...

...Olafur Eliasson's “Round Rainbow” (2005), which combines a spotlight mounted on a tripod and a circle of acrylic glass. This device transforms a gallery into a dynamic canvas bathed in rainbows of light and shadow. In a work that is scientific in one respect and sensual in another, the installation brings a phenomenon usually experienced in nature into the museum, encouraging people to interact with their environment in new ways.

And also this very fun piece which was installed briefly in the Lerner Room and I hope will return soon...

Janet Cardiff's “Feedback” (2004) is an interactive sound piece that plays a Jimi Hendrix rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” when the visitor steps on a wah-wah pedal.

"Feedback" is *really* loud. Shockingly loud. And while the Lerner room was a temporary location (the piece will probably occupy its own room, as far as I understand) it was ironically appropriate, with a view of the Capital and the National Archives as you blast "The Star Spangled Banner" loud enough to frighten unwary museum-goers.

(Image of installation at Delta Axis)

um...wow... protest art takes a new form

2005-11-30T19:26:00.000-05:00

I have to admit, I'm curious.

Dante's Inferno: A horror movie brings out the zombie vote to protest Bush's war

(via Bat's Brain)

mea culpa

2005-11-30T19:05:00.000-05:00

Wow, November really kicked my ass. Had an evil cold, it felt like I was sick half the month. Also, I finished a major long term paper on Rodin. I'll try to post some of the more interesting parts later.

Probably no one left reading...

But in exciting news, I'm going to the Claudel/Rodin show at the Detroit Institute of Arts when I go home for the holiday. Yea!

The image is Camille Claudel's sculpture Vertumnus and Pomona, 1905

Art After Hours

2005-11-15T19:21:00.000-05:00

I'm Alive. Really. Sorry for the radio silence. Hope there are still people out there reading this...

The Hirshhorn will be open after hours tomorrow night, Wednesday November 16th.

Extended hours 7 to 10 pm Meet the Artist: Jim Hodges
7 pm, Ring Auditorium: Hodges will speak about his work, including "don’t be afraid," currently exhibited on the Museum’s façade.

Mingle with friends
Sip a cocktail in a relaxed setting and enjoy extended Museum hours from 7 to 10 pm. Sodas, wine, beer and specialty drinks will be offered. Prices will range from $2.50 to $7.00

Make it a night
Stroll the galleries and take in "Gyroscope," the Hirshhorn’s signature presentation of its renowned collection. Experience our new Black Box, featuring video works by Hiraki Sawa.

7 pm: Museum re-opens (cash bars/lobby and Lerner room, ID required) All galleries open for visitors.
7 – 8:15 pm: Meet the Artist – Jim Hodges (seating first come basis)
7:30 pm: Gallery Talk with Susan Lake, Ann Hamilton's Palimpsest, 1989
8:30 pm: Gallery Talk with Teresia Bush, Leonardo Drew's Untitled (No. 49)
8:45 pm: Gallery Talk with Kelly Gordon, Miguel Angel-Rios, A Morir and Black Box, Hiraki Sawa
9 pm: Meet the Director with Olga Viso, New Acquisitions

Current Events

2005-11-04T13:59:00.000-05:00

I'm apparently out of original thought this week. Blame it on lack of sleep, too much Halloween candy, and an unhealthy addiction to playing with The Black Lodge.

From the NYT : Performance Art Gets Its Biennial

Also from the NYT : 'Ecstasy' at Museum of Contemporary Art, LA

Tonight at the Warehouse : "Hey, is that a boy or a girl?" : Artists look at gender ; opening reception 6-10 pm

On Eyeteeth : A Brief Conversation with Robert Storr : interesting comment on political/socially critical art from Storr

I'm also of the view that sometimes people who should be socially active take refuge in art and make art as an alternative to being involved in the sort of nuts and bolts and oftentimes boring business of organizing and voting and demonstrating and doing all that. I think we've been through a period where a lot of people have very sophisticated political ideas based on a whole series of postmodern thinkers but actually they do almost nothing, and they have avoided the full implications of having a political understanding of the world by having such a good rap.

Happy Halloween

2005-10-30T11:47:00.000-05:00

Or Merry Samhain, for those pagans among us.

Halloween is my favorite holiday.

In the spirit of the holiday I offer up my favorite Halloween radio program, from Kalamazoo, Michigan. It could be called audio performance art??? but only if you really need a reason. Warning for extreme oddness.

The SwaG! Halloween Special

Also, an old favorite... The Black Lodge. You probably won't fully appreciate this unless you're a David Lynch fan, but it's a super-creative use of the internet. I first came across a much simpler version of this site in the late 90's, and it's expanded into an amazing, eery world of it's own. Warning : occasional disturbing imagery. It doesn't appear to work properly with Firefox. The site is like a choose-your-own adventure of sorts. If you can't figure it out, go to "help" on the home page.

"The Kids Aren't All Right"

2005-10-30T11:07:00.000-05:00

Snagged from Lenny, but it was too good not to comment on.

Read the article here.

Aaron Rose has come to believe that MFA programs and overeducation are destroying the creativity and individualism of young artists. Rose writes

The primary problem with this kind of education is that by diving deeper and deeper into the theoretical and self-referential, artists lose touch with their public. As a result, the public, particularly the young public, often feels alienated from art. Intentionally or not, people have been made to feel inferior to the art intelligentsia. What inevitably follows is that art becomes simply something to be bought, sold and understood by a very small sector of the population and it loses its urgent role as a means of communication or as a catalyst for social or cultural change.

This echoes Suzi Gablik's writings a bit. Having not attended an MFA program, I can't comment specifically on how graduate education impacts a young artist. I do share Rose's puzzlement when he writes

why, when we live in such a socially and politically volatile time, are these students producing stuff with little or no social relevance when they should be delivering edgy, urgent, thought-provoking work?

Now, I don't do particularly political work myself. And I don't think everyone should. But there is definately a lack of "urgency" in the mainstream gallery work of today.

I think the issue is more complex than Rose makes it, and I don't think it's only the result of MFA programs. Fashion, or zeitgeist, or whatevery you want to call it is part of it - there's very little edgy, thought provoking work being done in any sphere of American culture right now. Why? Maybe the (mainstream) culture-creators and the culture-watchers are too comfortable still, despite the social and political strains. The current lack of edginess could also be reaction to the confrontational, personal and political art of the 1990's, just as Pop art was a sort of reaction to Abstract Expressionism. And I don't think this lack can be pinned solely on young artists. Where are the edgy artists of yesteryear?

New painter (to me, anyhow)

2005-10-27T12:18:00.000-05:00

I stumbled across Jose Lerma's paintings in a little exhibition catalogue we just got in at the library. He seems like an artist who is still developing, but I find his work more interesting than most of the abstract/decorative stuff so common lately.

This painting is Pronounced Neato, 2005. Check out his website. He reminds me a bit of Cecily Brown, only spare instead of fleshy. Lerma is based in Brooklyn and Puerto Rico and is represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery.

More Murray

2005-10-27T12:08:00.000-05:00

The Brooklyn Rail has an interview with painter Elizabeth Murray and curator Robert Storr.

Rail: And how do you see Elizabeth’s work in the context of the recent history of shaped canvas? There are those who would fit into that category, for example Frank Stella, Lee Bontecou, and Ron Gorchov?

Storr: The argument that I made back in the eighties when I first heard about Elizabeth’s work, that I’m making again for the catalogue essay, is that basically she’s the first painter to have fully developed the possibilities of a shaped canvas work, which is based if you want to call it on the surrealist side of the equation that Stella and others had done. It goes way back to Russia and Argentina in the 1940s. What they did was figure out how to make a shaped canvas that was faceted in a way that a cubist painting can be faceted. But the idea that the container of the painting, the support, would follow the same elastic surface geometries as the forms within the painting, the biomorphisms, that was touched by no one. And Ron [Gorchov] was the only person who has stuck his foot in the water, but he didn’t take it as far as it might have been taken at that point. And I’m a big champion of his paintings, as you know, so I’m not admitting to reasons of criticism, again, but Elizabeth simply saw an opportunity that’s been sitting there for seventy years. I think it’s indicative of how she’s important, not just why she’s important, that not being deterred by the fact that there’s no argument out there for doing it, and not trying to get in on the arguments that are always in play around Stella, and seeing physically and materially what can be done, has made a dramatic change in the paintings.

Must see collection installation

2005-10-24T13:59:00.000-05:00

At the Hirshhorn. As part of Gyroscope (the Hirshhorn's periodic rotation of the permanent collection) one of the new "exhibits" is Sculptors and their Drawings.

From a press release:

“Sculptors and their Drawings” provides a glimpse into the creative process of artists past and present-including Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, Robert Smithson, Julio González and Anish Kapoor-and demonstrates the many ways in which sculptors use drawings: as studies for their work, as a means of liberation from the physicality of sculpture and as a way of developing and exploring their visual vocabularies.

I'm not sure if the installation is complete (I don't remember seeing any Smithson or Kapoor) but the Giacometti room is spectacular.

Visceral art experiences

2005-10-24T13:06:00.001-05:00

Very few "museum" pieces have moved me to the point of leaving me breathless with unexpected tears - not the all-out kind of emotional release or catharsis, but of a kind of instant recognition of something more to life, beyond asthetic appreciation or intellectual fascination.

Once, I turned a sharp corner at the National Gallery and came face to face with Elizabeth Murray's giant painting Careless Love. I still have no idea what it was about the painting that struck me - usually I can be analytic about why I like a particular piece, but this one is still a mystery to me. Something about its exuberant aliveness, mixed with a sense of deeper emotions. Murray's work is never just about frivolous, cartoony imagery, as it would seem on the surface. So I am overjoyed to see that a retrospective of her work opened yesterday at the Museum of Modern Art.

NYT review here. Murray on PBS's Art21.
Edward Winkelman on Murray.

Nicholas Nixon's The Brown Sisters is another such work. I first saw this piece during one of the super crowded "pay what you will" nights at MoMA. I was there to see one of the Modern Starts shows, and was focused on the figurative painters. Somehow though, what I came away with was an awed experience of standing before nearly thirty black and white snapshots of the same four women, year after year, watching them silently progress from young to middle aged. I'd never been interested in photography, never been moved by anything like this before. I could see those women's lives in their faces, could see where one of them had gone through a bad year, when later she seemed lighter again... Every year since 1975, photographer Nicholas Nixon has taken a photograph of his wife and her three sisters. The women stand in the same order, so even without knowing their names or anything about them you start to get to know them. It's eerily intimate, and at the same time something about their gazes keeps them opaque, unknowable.

Nixon's The Brown Sisters will be on display at the National Gallery of Art starting on November 13. Modern Art Notes post on the piece, which I think reminded me of this experience.

AntiOptions

2005-10-20T12:54:00.000-05:00

As always DC Art News beat me to it, but I just have to highlight one paragraph in James Bailey's response to Options 05...

Ms. Lumpkin – coming as no surprise to me – has dramatically failed in her mission to bring us the cutting-edge of D.C. art with Options 05 – instead, she has given us retrograde phantom paper cuts with the blunt edge of her condescending view of D.C. art and artists, and has compounded that error by virtually ignoring the radical voices and visions of marginalized and minority artists in this city who are not fortunate enough to be able pay the outrageous tuition to attend art school. Ms. Lumpkin, like most New York City art insiders, seems obsessed with finding the next great white hope artist somewhere out there in MFA land.

I haven't seen the show yet, so I'm withholding my own judgement, but so far I haven't read any reviews that were positive toward the show as a whole.

I myself am not very familiar with the margins of the DC art world. James, could you point us towards some artists to make up a virtual Anti-Options show??

See also this related site.

Rodin forgeries and the DC connection...

2005-10-19T12:16:00.000-05:00

A work in progress (a very rough draft)...

As part of a larger project on Rodin's drawings I've been researching Ernst Durig, who is the only identified forger of Rodin's drawings. Durig was born in Switzerland in 1894. He claimed to have been Rodin's last student, and owned a photograph of himself as a young man posing next to Rodin. His supposed relationship with Rodin has been called mostly untrue. Durig was a sculptor, mostly of portrait busts. He managed to sculpt quite a few notables, including Pope Pius XI, Mussolini, President Truman, and the poet Tagore, though he was paid for few of these. His M.O. seems to have been to offer to sculpt a famous figure for his "personal collection" and then grow angry when the subject declined to purchase the bust.

Durig married a widow and the family arrived in the U.S. in 1927-28. Sometime after this he apparently began exhibiting and selling signed Rodin drawings, as well as forgeries of sculpture by artists such as Houdon.

He was active in Washington DC from about 1930 to the end of his life. The DC Public Library's Washingtoniana department has a file of clippings from DC papers on Durig. The librarian called Durig "tv movie material" - Durig had somewhat of a tabloid notoriety here. In 1933 he was reported missing by his wife. He was missing for about a month, and the day after his equally mysterious return he and his family were evicted from their home for non-payment of rent. There are several sensational articles in the major DC papers surrounding the events, with photographs of Durig's possessions and sculptures set out on the curb. Durig apparently attempted to destroy many of the works in anger. Both Durig and his wife made paranoid comments to reporters regarding a "powerful political enemy" who hindered Durig's artistic career. There are several more clippings detailing further evictions from the same period.

In 1937 Durig and his family were present at the dedication of his Peace Memorial in Greenwood WI, for which the city paid him the cost of materials. Durig's wife and adopted daughter were killed in a car accident sometime after this. Durig's life went downhill after their deaths. In 1958 he was admitted to the hospital suffering from malnutrition, and the next year he was taken to St. Elizabeth's hospital, where he died penniless on November 4, 1962. In an obituary a friend calls him one of the "10 best" sculptors of all time. Sadly, though he claimed to be Rodin's pupil he didn't seem to have absorbed any lessons from the artist. His sculpture was mediocre at best.

After his death a chest of papers was found at St. Elizabeths which included letters written by Rodin and "Rodin" drawings. Sotheby's initially authenticated the drawings and agreed to sell them to repay the District for Durig's care. Soon afterwards Sotheby's declined to auction the drawings due to questions about the attribution. In June of 1965 Life magazine published an expose of Durig's forgery, and by a 1971 exhibition at the National Gallery a young Kirk Varnedoe had extensively studied Rodin's drawings and outlined features of the major forgers of Rodin's drawings, including Durig.

Durig's is a fascinating and sad story. He doesn't seem to have profited much from his forgery or his legitimate work as a sculptor.

Green on Shirin Neshat

2005-10-19T12:08:00.000-05:00

I'm sure everyone has already seen it, but I'm behind. Tyler Green is reposting his essay on Shirin Neshat's Tooba. I've only seen Neshat's work in stills, but the solemn beauty of the imagery is inescapable.

Part One
Part Two Green writes:

Neshat's utopia is the simplest of Sufi gardens. It is in virtually every shot of the film. The garden sits at the top of a hill, a single tree, about fifty feet high, surrounded by a brick wall. There are no flowering plants, just the tree in the garden’s center. Surrounding the garden is parched earth, ground that grips clumps of thirsty scrub, neither nourishing it nor letting it blow away. The sky is blue and the few clouds are white and puffy. The land will remain athirst. Only the squared garden provides shade, sanctuary, promise.

The beautiful simplicity of the tableau is Neshat at her best, both in terms of the image she creates and the way she explores a concept. By making the garden the centerpiece of Tooba, Neshat refers to both Judeo-Christian and Sufi utopias.

Part Three to come...

Tamarind Flick'r

2005-10-16T12:05:00.000-05:00

Check out the Tamarind Flick'r, a blog which announces mostly one-night local art shows. I keep checking the site the day after their various activities, so haven't attended one yet.
From the August exhibition. Amilcar Cruz, guitarist.

The Tamarind Flick'r is based at El Tamarindo Restaurant on Georgia Ave, an "art gallery/restaurant/lounge/acoustic venue featuring local area artists, musicians, photographers, and poets."

oookayyy...

2005-10-16T11:52:00.000-05:00

This made my day. Sorry, not art-related, but I couldn't resist.

Opening Tonight at the Warehouse

2005-10-13T12:32:00.000-05:00

If you're feeling brave enough to venture out in the drizzle...

Solo3

A solo show - in three parts. Pat Dunning, Alexandra Silverthorne, and Joseph Barbaccia

Opening reception October 13 (tonight) from 6-8 pm. The show runs Wednesday October 5th to Saturday, October 22nd.

At the Warehouse Theater. Image is Joseph Barbaccia's piece "Spirit". Also here, bigger and with details.

On a side note, I like the Warehouse's new web design, but really they need more information - the opening isn't listed and there is no indication as to the gallery's hours.

Call for Entries - Photography exhibition

2005-10-13T12:28:00.000-05:00

Entry Deadline: November 18, 2005
Opening Reception: January 10, 2006
Exhibit Dates: January 2 - February 3, 2006

The Capitol Hill Arts Workshop is currently accepting entries for a juried photography exhibition running January 2 - February 4 2006. All photographic works are welcome, conventional and unconventional processes, techniques,aesthetics, approaches, subjects, material or digital works, video, and photo installations. The judge for the show is Bruce McKaig, artist, photography instructor and Chair of the Arts Workshop's Photography Department. Interested artists may submit up to five images via slides or a CD (jpegformat) to the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop by mail or in person at 545 7thStreet, SE Washington, DC 20003. Images must be labeled with artist's name, date, title, size, and process. Please include a slide or jpeg inventory list (with optional artist statement) and a self addressed stamped envelope for the return of materials. Submissions must be received by November 18, 2005 and selected artists will be notified by November 30, 2005. There is a$20 entry fee per artist to CHAW and prizes will be awarded in variouscategories.The Photo Exhibition kicks-off a series of photography lectures from localexperts celebrating CHAW's renovated darkroom and new digital computer lab. For more information, please visit www.chaw.org or call (202) 547-6839.

Solar Decathalon

2005-10-11T20:34:00.000-05:00

On the architecture/design side of things, check out the Solar Decathalon, now on the Mall until October 16th.

The Solar Decathlon brings together 18 teams of college and university students from around the globe to participate in this unparalleled solar competition to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered home.

So far Virginia Tech is in the lead. The winner will be announced on October 14th. I briefly walked past the houses this afternoon and it looks like a fascinating competition. Getting to view displays like this at lunch is one of the nicer perks of working on the mall. The exterior designs vary from the contemporary starkness of the Rhode Island School of Design's entry to the suburban Americana of Crowder College's design. If I get a change to actually go inside a few houses I'll report back.

While I was away...

2005-10-10T10:11:00.000-05:00

There was apparently alot of rain here in DC, a mudslide in Guatemala and a huge earthquake in Pakistan... the only news source I had access to was oddly enough Fox News, which didn't bother to report on much of anything besides the potential terrorist threat to the NYC subway...

Anyway, catching up. Here's what I've found of interest so far.

Edward Winkleman on art and commerce at the World Trade Center site.

Eyeteeth on some confusion over a commissioned sculpture by Louise Bourgeois.

James Bailey on... Blake Gopnik...well, you have to read it.

Josse Ford on Robert Smithson at the Whitney.

Fire destroys Wallace and Gromit's Aardman Animations sets. Another article here.

Joy Garnett of NEWSgrist sent me a link to the new VisualAIDS blog.

Visual AIDS blog posts will range from exhibition announcements, press releases for events including the Visual AIDS monthly web gallery, the Postcards annual benefit, and relevant articles from online news and blogosphere sources. Posts are generated by staff, board members, friends and colleagues in the arts and health professions, activists, artists and guest bloggers.

Samantha Worlov has redesigned her site. Check it out.

vacation

2005-09-30T23:38:00.000-05:00

going on vacation, be back next week.

In the meantime, go see Serenity.

2005-09-25T16:15:00.000-05:00

Yes, there really is a Kalamazoo

2005-09-25T16:00:00.000-05:00

Feeling a bit nostalgic today, so here's a great photo taken in my hometown Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was posted on the Kalamazoo Flickr, and is the work of Puja. The mirrored facade is from a downtown building I loved as a kid.

Another photo by Puja, taken at South Haven, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Not only is it a beautiful beach, but before they tightened security you used to be able to swim in the warm outflow from the nearby nuclear power plant. I'm sure it was harmless...

Sculpture in the landscape

2005-09-23T10:44:00.000-05:00

Reading New Milestones : sculpture, community and the land published by Common Ground, an environmental charity in the UK. Common Ground's website describes itself as:

...internationally recognised for playing a unique role in the arts and environmental fields, distinguished by the linking of nature with culture, focussing upon the positive investment people can make in their own localities, championing popular democratic involvement, and by inspiring celebration as a starting point for action to improve the quality of our everyday places.

While the website is a bit difficult to handle (the designer is in love with flashing objects), I recommend the book. It's a straightforward documentation of the New Milestones project. For New Milestones, Common Ground matched several sculptors with areas of publicly used land in Dorset in the late 1980s. The sculptors, including Peter Randall-Page and Andy Goldsworthy, created pieces in tune with the landscape, making an effort to include interactions with the community and the history of the land. According to the publication, the underlying goals of New Milestones were (from pg. 75)

to enable ordinary people/groups to commission works of art for themselves
to create cultural touchstones
to release sculpture from the confines of gallery and sculpture park into places where people live, work and play...
to create new collaborations between countryside, environmental, art and community organizations

The Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail, near Wales, is another example of sculpture in the landscape. It's a bit more on the side of the traditional sculpture garden - though situated in a protected forest. I haven't visited but it sounds beautiful.

From "Forests" on the trail's website:

The question has been how to open visitors' eyes to the hints of history, the sense of awe and magic; above all to the sense of beauty of a living and productive environment. Foresters and natural scientists are perhaps too prosaic, too close to the text books which trained them. Could it be that artists who come with no specialist knowledge would be able to inspire visitors with works of art which are both a direct response to the forest and to the very spot where the work is placed?

Lastly, from a more academic article on public art by Wendy Ross (read it here):

Throughout the Forest of Dean visitors are constantly required to reassess their understanding of art and its role in society. Tradition is literally thrown to the winds. Conventional expectations of site, material, form and function are all challenged. Where in galleries the visitor is aware of prominent `Do not touch' signs, here full participation by the visitor is encouraged, indeed is unavoidable as the artworks assert their presence and that of the forest. Many of the sculptures in the Forest tease the visitor into physical participation. These works simply and quite directly intervene in the environment. They are not intrusive, but present themselves in such a manner as to be inclusive as opposed to exclusive.

I haven't come across an equivalent near the Washington Metro area, though we have our share of sculpture gardens. If anyone knows of a forest site close by, let me know.

To Do list : 14th Street Galleries

2005-09-22T12:46:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to write up my notes from my visit to the 14th street galleries two weeks ago. Got distracted by Rodin. I am a baaad blogger.

Anyhow, check back later, maybe tomorrow. Highlights : I enjoyed the surprise of Kendall Buster's blue installation; and Jiha Moon's works on paper drew me in, even as I felt they were more uneven than the reviews I've seen so far suggest.

Danto talk

2005-09-21T12:56:00.000-05:00

If, for some reason, you're reading this and you're in the NY area (or just have nothing better to do than take a four hour drive tonight), critic Arthur Danto is giving a curator's talk for his show The Art of 9/11 at apexart, at 6:30 pm. The talk is free and open to the public. So, you'll have to leave soon if you're going to make it from DC!

Apartment

2005-09-21T12:27:00.000-05:00

Eric Deis, an artist based in Vancouver, emailed me with a link to his video work Apartment. It's a short, absorbing piece that reminds me a little of the way David Lynch turns familiar places unrecognizable by a subtle shift in reality.

From the artists statement:

Operating on the borders between fact and fiction, a residential apartment is transformed through a routine dousing of water from sources suggested, known and unknown. Through poetic visual rhythms, and soundscapes, the barriers between the natural and unnatural, and the transcribed and fact, are dissolved.

I would have liked the cuts to be slower, to linger on the surfaces as the water drips and cascades. The piece has gained an added eeriness in the aftermath of Katrina - all of those everyday, mundane household things that make up our lives made strange and threatening by the addition of water.

First Pulse Projects

2005-09-17T14:24:00.000-05:00

Check out First Pulse Projects, the website for the collaboration between a biochemist and two artists. Joy Garnett is currently in the show Blasts at G Fine Art.

Reading Rodin

2005-09-17T14:01:00.000-05:00

Auguste Rodin has been one of my artistic heroes since I visited the Musee Rodin in 2001. Every few months I make the pilgrimage to the National Gallery's sculpture halls to worship The Age of Bronze. Rodin's emotional expression and belief in the "truth" of nature are a bit out of fashion these days; but for me nothing can beat the intensity of his sculpture or the delicate, erotic strength of his later drawings.

From Auguste Rodin : readings on his life and work, edited by Albert Elsen.

Rodin on drawing:

The greatest difficulty that one encounters in art, that which must be surmounted before everything else and which dominates all others, comes from the necessity of drawing well; only the knowledge of drawing permits one to compare, judge, express simplicity in fixing the essential. By means of drawing, the work takes on the power of natural things, without drawing, no truth.

Rodin on the artistic struggle:

He who, opposed, unrecognized, gives up and doesn't fight on for his personal comprehension of the beautiful doesn't deserve the name of artist. If he persists in his effort, affirming it even more strongly, he will overcome and will impose himself. In a work of art, however misunderstood at first sight, truth always asserts its rights.

Fear Art

2005-09-16T10:20:00.000-05:00

NEWSgrist has posted a collection of articles around the controversial exhibition A Knock at the Door exhibit in New York.

From the show's website:

Anchored with works and artists already targeted by the Secret Service, the show expands to show how, with no accountability required of the federal government, any cultural activity could come under investigation. A Knock at the Door challenges the assumption that there is a clear line defining so-called "threatening" or "Un-American" art and activity, and that all art is an expression of the most basic foundation of a democratic society - the free expression and exchange of ideas.

Caryn James writes in the NYT :

As it turns out, the show is a thoughtful, legitimate exploration of one way in which American artists' lives have changed because of 9/11; it raises questions about artistic freedom that ought to be asked near ground zero. And the anger directed against the show reveals some chilling cultural trends: the devaluing of art as a proper response to 9/11, and the persistent, wrongheaded idea that to question the government is to dishonor the memory of those who died.

Hers is not necessarily the dominant opinion. From the New York Daily News:

The bottom line is that a show like this, staged as it will be in lower Manhattan during the heartwrenching memorials surrounding 9/11, is simply inappropriate, as should be clear to anyone from lower Manhattan with cultural aspirations. It is also insulting to victims and survivors and the country that was attacked.

And finally, 9/11 and "Inappropriate Art" from the Gotham Gazette (via NEWSgrist) which not only comments on this exhibit but on the politics surrounding the creation of the memorial.

I haven't seen the show, and I'm not sure I'll get up to NY before it closes, but questions that spring to my mind from reading these articles are : When is art inappropriate? Can art be inappropriate? If so, what makes a piece inappropriate? When, then, is art appropriate to a situation?

An attempt to answer the last question is made by Arthur Danto's show at apexart, The Art of 9/11. Danto writes:

[After 9/11] I thought the last thing on anyone’s mind was art. But by day’s end the city was transformed into a ritual precinct, dense with improvised sites of mourning. I thought at the time that artists, had they tried to do something in response to 9/11, could not have done better than the anonymous shrine-makers who found ways of expressing the common mood and feeling of those days, in ways that everyone instantly understood.

A Knock at the Door runs through October 1st and The Art of 9/11 until October 15.

Art (Finally!)

2005-09-11T18:55:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm cutting myself off from ranting about Katrina here, unless it's art related. Enough.

While it may not seem like it from my recent posts, I have left the computer and tv screen and seen a bit of art in the last week. It's always difficult to get a good look at art at the opening, so I hope I have a chance to revisit some of these shows. Here's an impressionistic rundown.

Last weekend the Dupont Circle openings were thin, due to the holiday.

I posted on Mary Coble's performance previously here.

Go Figure! at JET Artworks is an eclectic group show of figurative artists. The works I enjoyed most had a certain sense of fragmentation in common. Michael Tarbi's small, detailed drawings and Hunter Stamps' visceral sculptures use isolated pieces of anatomy in a psychological rather than clinical manner. The barely-there images in Lia Cook's exquisite black and white weavings recall pixellated photos, blurred newsprint, or faces emerging from smoke. In his DVD collage Screamtastic Justin Marshall assembles footage from slasher films of the 1970s and 80s to create a seamless, nearly wordless study of human gesture that shifts from creepy to downright funny and back in the blink of an eye. The characters in Amy Cutler's disjointed narratives wander through a world filled with jumbles of household goods, never as bewildered as they should be by their odd situation or the presence of the occasional crocodile.

Introductions at Irvine Contemporary Art was a group show of recent art school graduates. While diverse in media and focus this show was a let-down after the more engaging Go Figure!. Diana Al-Hadid's large gravity-defying sculpture was the only piece from the eight artists that caught my attention. None of the work from the recent graduates were as compelling as the Judy Pfaff print tucked in a remote corner of the gallery's back room. The show is now closed. I'm looking forward to the current show The Apollo Prophecies, which looks grandly strange.

I'll get to the shows I visited this weekend later.

Bringing the War Home

2005-09-11T10:37:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, we're not supposed to be playing the Blame Game (is that a Milton Bradley product??) but these (and this) remind me of Martha Rosler's series Bringing the War Home.

Here's a gallery of Rosler's work. I didn't realize she'd done a new series (2004) of Bringing the War Home works until today. How fitting. I'm not sure the computer animation has the impact of the earlier photocollage, but it's hard to judge on the small screen.

The image is Balloons from Bringing the War Home (1967-72) and is from Rosler's website.

As a complement to the linked images above, read How Bush Blew It, from Newsweek. (nicked from Bat Guano's Brain). Regardless of the failings of local and state government and FEMA, Bush had an obligation as the leader of this country to be aware of what was happening, and to take action when it clearly became necessary. In my opinion this was his worst failing - not only was he completely oblivious to the catastrophe but he failed to be the strong leader he has always claimed to be.

Katrina stories

2005-09-09T19:58:00.000-05:00

As a college student I was involved with Alternative Spring Break. I organized a volunteer trip to New Orleans for a week in the late 1990's. One of the things we were taught by the people we came to help was that they were not just a project to be fixed (especially in a week by college students!) but that they were people, with lives and stories of their own, who would be struggling on long after we were gone. That we got more from them, learned more from them, than we could possibly give back.

This is probably the cheezy bleeding heart liberal coming out in me, but after witnessing the endless reports of how badly people in need were treated (stories of water being lobbed at them off of trucks as if they were animals - when it finally came) I feel like maybe one way to heal some of the pain and humilation the victims must be feeling would be to collect these stories, to listen. To give back some dignity to people who lost everything they had then were punished and demonized.

This isn't art related but as a writer I'm interested in narratives, in the telling of stories. And this is the clearest personal story I've read from the people caught in New Orleans after the flood.

From a narrative by two members of the Paramedic Chapter of SEIU Local 790, in the city for a conference. Via NEWSgrist. These two mention being turned away from walking out of the city, as reported on FoxNews. Unlike the cable news, in this story the reason seems clear:

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

14th Street Galleries

2005-09-09T12:58:00.000-05:00

Oddly, the Washington Flyer (I think it's that free mag you can pick up at the airport) features a good article on the 14th Street corridor galleries and their openings this weekend. Check it out.

I don't know whether I'll make it to the Bethesda Art Walk tonight (it's been a long week) but I should be circulating around 14th street tomorrow night. I'm the one who kinda looks like I spend too much time in a library, staring at a computer screen.

Last Chance - Visual Music

2005-09-07T12:41:00.000-05:00

Visual Music at the Hirshhorn Museum closes this Sunday. Give yourself a present this week and check out the show. If you've only seen it once go again, this exhibition is worth multiple viewings.

More on DC artists for Hurricane relief

2005-09-06T20:32:00.000-05:00

This might be repetitious, but it's for a good cause. I was outbid for JT Kirkland's great piece, but it's for the best - more money for the relief effort.

Updated list of pieces for sale or auction to benefit various charities at Alexandra Silverthorne's site.

The list at Washington DC Art News.

Two prayers that struck me from James Bailey's 58 Prayers for the Victims of Eastern Airlines Flight 304:

11- I don't have a word to describe what happened. I don't think there is such a word. And if somebody coins such a word I don't think it should be put into the dictionary. I think it would be better to leave that word alone

51- What's wrong with the world is that the world is not wrong. People are, but not the world. The world is always alright, no matter how wrong its people are

Part of a larger post titled The Crash of Eastern Flight 304 Into Lake Pontchartrain.

Mary Coble at Connor Contemporary Arts

2005-09-03T11:25:00.000-05:00

I visited Mary Coble's performance last night near the beginning of the evening.
From the press release:

In hate crimes against the GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans-gendered] community words carved into the victim's body was somewhat of a common occurrence in comparison with hate crimes committed against other groups of people. Words like "faggot" and "dyke" were left in the individual's skin as a nauseating marker of why these individuals were killed. I have made the choice to amass the names of these victims and have them etched into my skin as a parallel to this gruesome tactic.

The concept and execution (the names were etched into her back with a tattoo needle) brought to my mind the story "In the penal colony" by Franz Kafka, where prisoners are punished by having their crimes etched across their bodies.

“Our sentence does not sound severe. The law which a condemned man has violated is inscribed on his body with the harrow. This Condemned Man, for example,” and the Officer pointed to the man, “will have inscribed on his body, ‘Honour your superiors.’”

The endurance aspect of the performance was hard to see at the time I viewed it, since less than ten names had been inscribed on Coble's back (out of potentially 100+ over 8 hours). As each name was finished, a small piece of paper was pressed over it, creating a reverse image of the name printed in Coble's blood. These blood prints are quite delicate and lovely.

Overall, I think it may not have been necessary to see the performance itself to appreciate the work (see this discussion at Thinking About Art). In some respects it might make a difference to the audience to be there - the knowledge that the event did happen is different in person than just viewing photographs of the event would be.

Read the Washington Post interview with the artist here.

If anyone can remember the name of the artist who also did a performance (in the early 90's I believe) where someone carved on her(?) back and took prints of the blood - I think the performance was related to AIDS - let me know. I wanted to compare Coble's work to that earlier piece.

Check out the documentation of the performance at Connor Contemporary Art starting September 9-October 22, and the reception on Friday, September 9th from 6-8pm.

Yet another way to help

2005-09-02T20:50:00.000-05:00

My uncle lives in Baton Rouge and is a security screener at the airport there. Here's his call for help:

As of 12:30 pm today [Thursday] @ the Baton Rouge Airport we are doing twice the number of people we normally would and have no help in site from TSA / DHS [Department of Homeland Securtiy]. No manpower or anything has showed up.

You can help me and US, TSA here. We are going to basically be asked to take up the slack from New Orleans airport. Airlines like Jet Blue and United and South west are going to start operations here. The airlines we have are bringing in bigger planes and adding flights. WE NEED MORE SECURITY SCREENERS IN BATON ROUGE NOW!!!

Please put pressure on TSA and DHS to address this problem head-on before we sub-merge in the human tragedy of people trying to get out of here to somewhere safe where family is. Write or email TSA or your Senators and Congressmen for me and the pitiful 35 people here we have to process 2-3000 passengers per day so far we are asked to handle. We have people sleeping all over our airport. Baton Rouge's population is going to double by next week.

If you want to do something to help in this disaster, please do this for me. Do it for the victims so they can get the hell outta here. Think about 2 hours waiting to get through security with only the clothes on your back left to you. Lucky to even manage to get a booking on a flight. I'm serious. You will make a hell of a difference if you can put pressure on the FEDS to get us some help getting the survivors outta here.

As you've probably seen from the news, the New Orleans airport has been taken over by the rescue efforts and made into a makeshift hospitol. This is one (free) thing you can do. While you're at it, ask your representative why after all the hype of reorganization and funding the Department of Homeland Security, among other federal and local organizations, wasn't better prepared to deal with such a crisis, and why it has taken 4 days to start the relief effort when the news media managed to make it in to the area from the beginning.

Write your Representative.

How to write your congressperson.

Contact TSA.

Contact Department of Homeland Security.

Simplify!

2005-09-02T11:27:00.000-05:00

At the end of a great, concise essay on the Dan Flavin retrospective currently in Chicago (formerly at the National Gallery) Todd Gibson writes:

These two paths toward simplicity should serve as case studies for young artists today. Often it’s finding the essential kernel of the work and paring back everything but that—painfully difficult as it is to do—that leads to the development of a clear, unique, mature style.

I feel like I need to do that in my own work, but I'm not really sure where to start. I've talked a bit with JT Kirkland about how he moved from paintings to his wood pieces... anyone else out there want to share your story of how you "simplified" your work - how you got from point A to point X?

Local artists auction work for hurricane relief

2005-09-01T21:36:00.000-05:00

Alexandra Silverthorne has compiled a list. Add to that JT Kirkland, who is offering a beautiful piece.

Another way to help

2005-09-01T21:15:00.000-05:00

My uncle lives in Baton Rouge and is a security screener at the airport there. Here's his call for help:

As of 12:30 pm today [Thursday] @ the Baton Rouge Airport we are doing twice the number of people we normally would and have no help in site from TSA / DHS [Department of Homeland Securtiy]. No manpower or anything has showed up.

You can help me and US, TSA here. We are going to basically be asked to take up the slack from New Orleans airport. Airlines like Jet Blue and United and South west are going to start operations here. The airlines we have are bringing in bigger planes and adding flights. WE NEED MORE SECURITY SCREENERS IN BATON ROUGE NOW!!!

Please put pressure on TSA and DHS to address this problem head-on before we sub-merge in the human tragedy of people trying to get out of here to somewhere safe where family is. Write or email TSA or your Senators and Congressmen for me and the pitiful 35 people here we have to process 2-3000 passengers per day so far we are asked to handle. We have people sleeping all over our airport. Baton Rouge's population is going to double by next week.

If you want to do something to help in this disaster, please do this for me. Do it for the victims so they can get the hell outta here. Think about 2 hours waiting to get through security with only the clothes on your back left to you. Lucky to even manage to get a booking on a flight. I'm serious. You will make a hell of a difference if you can put pressure on the FEDS to get us some help getting the survivors outta here.

Oddly morbid coincidence...

2005-09-01T20:31:00.000-05:00

This image seems strangely appropriate. It's a painting of mine titled Bathers (Bluebeard's Wives), oil and charcoal on canvas, 2004. It's not just the water that disturbs me, but the way the postures of the figures echoes the images on the news of the distraught refugees in New Orleans and Mississippi.

Times Picayune - reporting from New Orleans

Modern Art Notes - Katrina and the arts - Tyler Green has compiled a list of links regarding the effect of the hurricane and flood on arts organizations

KatrinaHelp Wiki Portal

Danto on Smithson

2005-09-01T20:27:00.000-05:00

Read The American Sublime by Arthur Danto.

One of the most famous works of art in America, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty transcends the "earth art" genre to which critics have consigned it, and has become an emblem of the American sublime. It is made of black basalt boulders, bulldozed into a straight line that stretches, jetty-like, 1,500 feet from the eastern shore in the upper reaches of the Great Salt Lake, terminating in a spiral with three whorls. From the air it has the look of a bishop's crosier with an unusually ornamental crook. It has a way of disappearing and reappearing, which somehow gives it a touch of magic. Soon after it was made, it was submerged beneath the saline water that gives the lake its name, and on re-emerging at a later time, when the water-level fell, it was covered with a dense patina of salt crystals. It is reached with difficulty, requiring a trek over rutted roads, and there is no guarantee that it will be visible when one gets there; I failed to see it on the two occasions I made the attempt. So the work is as elusive as it is compelling, and though it belongs to its moment in history, it also has the timeless air of some ancient monument left behind by a vanished civilization.

Geek Love

2005-08-30T12:51:00.000-05:00

Okay, I just discovered the Site Meter last night, and it makes me happy. I don't know how, but someone in Manchester UK visited The ARTery! It's gone international...

Geek Love is also the title of a truely dark and twisted novel about circus folk.

Just so this post has some art related content : a couple of paintings I enjoy...

Gorky's The Artist and His Mother at the National Gallery. Quote from here.

This painting is a fit companion for Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida; both painting and essay explore a son's rediscovery of his dead mother through a photograph. Gorky found the photograph of him and his mother on which the painting was based after her death. In reworking and reinterpreting the photograph of his childhood self with his then-living mother he invokes her memory.

Gauguin's Paysannes bretonnes (Breton peasant women) at the WebMuseum, Paris. This one is in honor of my aunt, who is flying home to Paris today and who has roots in Brittany.

Wolov's Dirty Toys

2005-08-29T11:48:00.000-05:00

Samantha Wolov has shifted her focus from erotic photographs of actual people to... these.

It's like really twisted advertising for Mattel. Only better. Check them out. Welcome back to DC, Samantha!

Neo Rauch

2005-08-25T12:17:00.000-05:00

I've been away from the blog - had houseguests all last week, and work's been busy. Non-art pursuits have been taking up time too - finally finished the last Harry Potter book (and those of you out there who have read it can share my annoyance at the ending) and saw Chris Isaak at Wolf Trap last night.

So... here are some art thoughts for today.

On my last trip to New York I dropped in on the Neo Rauch show at David Zwirner. Rauch is an artist that intrigues me, because I can’t decide if I like him or not. This is odd for me – I may waffle about many things in my life but art is usually not one of them. I think he’s in my mental category of ??? along with John Currin. I’m pretty sure both artists are either doing something interesting, or are all surface and no depth. At least Rauch doesn’t have the icky vibe much of Currin’s work gives me.

Anyhow, today I saw the catalogue to the Zwirner show Neo Rauch: Renegaten) and I’m reminded that I’m still on the fence. Reading the scattershot catalogue essay didn’t help me any, though the press release is better.

[Aside : several of the reviews of this show I’ve read do little more than regurgitate this press release. Reviewers should be banned from reading press releases until after they’ve written their review, the temptation must be too great]

The mysterious randomness of the figures and environments in Rauch’s paintings simultaneously provoke and annoy me. I want to appreciate them, but I have a lingering suspicion that random is all they are. Rauch has been compared to Eric Fischl, and I can see that – like Fischl, Rauch’s paintings are somewhat awkwardly painted, and situate people in psychologically laden landscapes that are both interior and exterior (mentally and literally). However, Rauch seems to be missing the emotional impact that Fischl’s best work has for me (probably purposefully – he seems willfully dry). Unlike Fischl’s paintings of dysfunctional relationships, Rauch’s scenes are decidedly absurd. The characters seem to refuse to relate to or even acknowledge one another. You can’t see his people thinking, they have no inner lives.

Maybe it’s that Rauch’s people and landscapes seem so mismatched, that the people come across as cardboard cut-outs plopped into more lovingly rendered dioramas. In fact, the catalogue essay indicates that Rauch himself calls his figures “Pappkameraden – cardboard companions”. So, all of this must be intentional. But to what end?

Is there a point where open-ended turns into emptiness? From the essay by Christine Mehring :

“With his workers laboring against any message, Rauch frees figurative painting from its totalitarian legacies and implications of easily accessible, partisan messages.… he restores historical specificity and authentic urgency to a play of meaning that had gotten stuck in the dead end street of irony.”

Like with Currin, I’m stuck with the question – if these paintings aren’t ironic, what are they?

Rauch reviews : here and here.

Escape from Potterland

2005-08-16T12:28:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the silence. After holding out for years I finally caved and started reading the Harry Potter series. What can I say, the curiousity got the best of me. So I'm on book 6 now, and realized I've been neglecting my blog.

For your reading pleasure : Brits consider radical plan to measure personal emissions (erm, sounds much dirtier than it is. Trust me). Not art, but interesting.

A related article that is about art (in a general way): What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art

Here's the paradox: if the scientists are right, we're living through the biggest thing that's happened since human civilization emerged. One species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of an entire planet, to knock its most basic systems out of kilter. But oddly, though we know about it, we don't know about it. It hasn't registered in our gut; it isn't part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas? Compare it to, say, the horror of AIDS in the last two decades, which has produced a staggering outpouring of art that, in turn, has had real political effect. I mean, when people someday look back on our moment, the single most significant item will doubtless be the sudden spiking temperature. But they'll have a hell of a time figuring out what it meant to us.

A rose by any other name...

2005-08-04T12:31:00.000-05:00

Check out the discussion over at Thinking About Art about the difficulty of placing J.T. Kirkland's work into easy categories, stemming from my statement in the Seven review that Expanse was the best painting in the show. The comments have been really thoughtful and while not everyone agrees it's a great conversation.

Cardiff at the Hirshhorn

2005-08-04T12:27:00.000-05:00

Blake Gopnik's review of Directions - Janet Cardiff is in today's Washington Post.

Edward Winkleman comments on the developing field of sound art.

I haven't taken the tour yet (too hot) but the interns here who have done it say it's great. At least one of them agrees with Gopnik's assessment that Cardiff is at her best when she's most straightforward.

Anyone out there go on the walk yet?

Seven at the Warehouse Theatre and Galleries

2005-08-03T20:43:00.000-05:00

This review was first posted at Thinking About Art.

Like the Wizard of Oz, the curator disappears behind the art in a good group exhibition and the dynamics of the show appear to spring naturally from the work itself. Group shows have the potential to create a dialogue between works of art that may never have otherwise met. Similarities form surprising connections and differences in points of view are more striking when the work of diverse artists is seen in one place.

Behind this particular curtain is Lenny Campello - gallerist, blogger, artist, and vocal advocate for the DC art scene. Campello took on no easy task - select a coherent and representative group show out of the thousands of slides in the Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran artist registry - and threw in the complication of the Warehouse's labyrinth of exhibition spaces. He could have taken the easy way out and hung the show as a straight showcase of local talent. Instead he created seven separate but interrelated multimedia exhibits. This was the genesis of Seven, an exhibition of art by WPAC members at the Warehouse Galleries.

The narrow passages and unfinished rooms of the Warehouse reminded me of a very compact Art-o-Matic. The comparison is probably unfair, but stayed with me for better or for worse. Seven gains from a distillation of the best local offerings but potentially could have lacked the certain X factor I love about Art-o-Matic - the oddball experience you don't see coming, the sense of freedom and nothing to lose. Happily, Campello retains some of this quirky promise.

The ground floor gallery is split between psychologically tinged figurative work on one side of the room and abstraction on the other. The juxtaposition would be intriguing if not for the blandness of the abstract work, which is redeemed only by Rebecca Cross's whimsical Platters from the Guitar Series, 2004-05. Instead of interacting the two halves of the room feel like separate and unequal exhibitions, making this the weakest of the seven galleries. The most questionable choice was Kristen Helgadottir's Frosty Midnight, 1997 - a terrible pseudo-Jackson Pollock with a jarring blue background.

Two pieces in particular help prop the room up. Melissa Ichiuji's I am beautiful and Everybody loves me, 2004, crouches in one corner waiting for a second glance. The battered wooden armchair features a gently naughty alteration - the wheel of feathers embedded in the seat begs the viewer to give it a try. Also worth a close inspection is Ben Tolman's drawing The Garden of Earthly Delights, 2002-04. Tolman's intricately rendered tangle of abstractions and Bosch-like demons surround a central cathedral structure. The building is flanked by two figures - the artist and his muse - given equal pictorial weight, and therefore in the language of iconography equal importance. With its blood red border and black mat, this is the most handsomely framed work in the show - and the attention to detail helps the drawing escape what could have easily felt like a run-of-the-mill Goth-kid doodle.

Four rooms make up the building's second floor. The art hung in the hall connecting the rooms is uniformly uninteresting (mostly run-of-the-mill still life paintings), but the galleries hold the show's most challenging work. The gallery closest to the street is full of odd forms and an unsettling edginess. Mark Jenkins' now familiar ghostly tape sculptures hover at the edges, oblivious to Linda Hesh's weak political installation (her themes of identity and racism have been better and more subtly addressed by artists such as Lorna Simpson). The red, horn-like protuberances of Graham Caldwell's exquisite glass and steel sculpture burst from the wall with a joyous blare that bounces off of Joseph Barbaccia's sexualized tools. Sustenance, 2005 is a pair of ladles holding perfectly carved wooden breasts. Naked Aggression, 2004, brings to mind a phrase from a novel by Dorothy Dunnett - "Music, the knife without a hilt" but this knife cannot be wielded without taking a lifelike dick in hand. The piece resonates with complex associations: between masculinity and aggression, violence and masturbation, but refuses the viewer a definite meaning.

The two center galleries have the easiest themes to discern : the body, and text as form. "Text" is probably an inaccurate label for this group of work, which more often than not manipulates and distorts words until they become something more than letters on a page. Denise Wolff takes crumpled pages from the writings of theorists who have influenced contemporary art and photographs them like craggy rocks. Art students the world over can appreciate the metaphor - grasping some of these works can be akin to scaling Mount Everest. The sliced texts of Mark C. Boyd's blackboard paintings frustrate the viewer's desire to read the words traced there. The pieces reflect on the impossibility of communication and the imprecision of written language. The blackboard background implies that the roots of our difficulties may lie in the manner we acquire these skills. This abstracting of text leads to J.T. Kirkland's superb wood pieces. Kirkland's pieces gain an added resonance next to the other more blatantly textual works in the room. In Expanse, 2005, drilled holes meander across the wood surface like a reverse Braille, creating a kind of language of negative space. Beyond the more obvious relationship of the work to minimalism, land art and drawing, the methodical precision and deep love of natural beauty recall the art of ancient Egypt. It may sound like a counterintuitive statement to make about such a sculptural work, but Expanse is the best painting in the show.

The next gallery's installation is primarily about the body as a physical presence. Body, not nude - none of these works resemble the classic nude, and are all the better for it. Photography makes the strongest showing, from Samantha Wolov's radiant slide projection of bodies in heightened states of ecstatic carnality, such as Orgasm #2 (at right) to Fierce Sonia's quirky and tactile Choking on her eggs and Fire Starter, 2005. The heavy-handed Allegory of a Gay Bashing, 2000, is the room's Achilles heel. A Christ-like figure of a castrated man is strung up against a graffitied wall. The ham-handedness (especially the disconcerting presence of a cute puppy and kitten) of Scott Brook's painting undermines the potential power of the subject. A more mysterious icon is White Sugar Lily, 2005. In Susan Jamison's tempera painting a naked woman tattooed with twining flowers wears a collar of lilies, her head orbited by bees. The stillness and quiet strength of this work holds its own against the eroticism of Wolov and Sonia. The funniest work in the show is Ancestral Portraits: Dick(s), 2005 by Manon Cleary. Ancenstral Portraits is a collection of little snapshots of male genitalia altered by the addition of stuck-on googly eyes, making them resemble of all things the Muppets. One note they may be, but Cleary has managed to find humor in something our society still tends to take overly seriously.

The last gallery on the second floor is filled with an ethereal installation by Alessandra Torres. Photographs from Torres' Portable Winter Series hang on two walls of the small room. Entering the gentle hush is like stepping into a strange myth, where a spirit in white wanders the wintry landscape, dusting the world with snow. Her clothes hang in the room's closet. The edges and corners of the room itself are sprinkled with drifts of white powder. A vitrine occupies the center of the room, containing a miniature of the landscape in the photographs. Torres' melding of installation, photography and performance brings to mind Ana Mendieta's works in nature, though Torres work is far more surreal than Mendieta's earth-bound rituals.

Kathryn Cornelius has the sole video work in the show. Resolve was projected in a darkened gallery on the third floor on the opening night of the exhibit and has since been moved to a flatscreen in the streetside second floor gallery. The video records a women in a black evening gown desperately vacuuming the sand from a section of beach. This tragically comical action goes beyond a feminist comment on "women's work" to encompass any of the repetitive and sometimes ridiculously futile aspects of our everyday lives.

The show's last gallery shares space with the Warehouse cafe. The heavy hitters - Chan Chao and Sam Gilliam - both have pieces in this room. The curatorial vision here is the most difficult to determine, a result of both the work selected and the function of the space. The pieces are strong, especially Chao's simple but lovely nude photographs, but seem to have little in common beyond their potential salability. Perhaps that is the point.

Washington is a far more conservative town than New York or Los Angeles, and it shows in the region's art production. With cutting edge, international exhibitions a regular part of the Hirshhorn Museum's schedule and New York only a four-hour drive away it's surprising that there isn't more challenging, thought-provoking art created and shown here. True to his curator's statement, the work that Campello has selected seldom pushes the boundaries of contemporary art. Instead Seven is a representation of some of the best Washington-area art. With the exception of the mostly tepid painting, the work is strong and the thoughtful installations more engrossing than a mere group hang. The success of the show, at least among the DC art crowd, should encourage more exhibits of local artists and add to the development of an audience here for the art-making that exists between touristy paintings of landmarks and the sometimes hermetic world of the professional galler/museum scene.

Seven runs at the Warehouse Galleries through September 4th.

Images taken from the websites of the artists and used with permission.

New look

2005-08-01T17:09:00.000-05:00

Got bored of the old look and picked a new template. Feels more summery.

However, not surprisingly I did something wrong, so now when you click on the archives you get weirdness. I'm working on it. Stupid html.

No Mundane Options

2005-08-01T16:45:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to write a review of Basquiat, which I saw at the Brooklyn Museum. First, it's not there any longer, second, it's been a couple months, and lastly there are lots of other great reviews out there. (Go here or here). So instead here are some scattered thoughts from my notebook.

"No Mundane Options" is text taken from one of Basquiat's drawings. I think the phrase sums up his work better than the entire exhibition catalogue. Refusing the mundane option is harder than it sounds, and if Basquiat had been able to accept the mundane he may have lived to see his thirtieth birthday. When you see a show like this it's always hard to imagine the artist going through the day-to-day banality of life, even though you know he did. Part of that whole tired mystique of the artistic life that has yet to die.

Verbal plays and teases. What he leaves out or crosses off often more telling than what he leaves legible. In Irony of the Negro Policeman Basquiat labels the cop's foot "PAW (left)" but there is a stroke after the "W" like he started to add an "N" to turn the word into "PAWN". But he chose not to. Or I'm reading too much into the marks. Given the title, I don't think I am.

In Italian, 1983, from Brooklyn Museum website

Repeated symbols and words remind me of the ritualistic graffiti I saw in New Orleans on the tomb of the voudoun priestess Madame Marie Laveau.

Hollywood Africans, 1983, was the first Basquiat I ever saw, at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts years ago. It's probably still one of my favorites, with its electric yellow field of paint and the self assured drawings of Basquiat and his friends.

Much of his work seems to embody the city (New York) itself, in its cacophony of words and images and advertising, in its barely controlled chaos that somehow makes sense. Like landscapes - or more accurately cityscapes, though they rarely make overt references to buildings. A symbolic record of the lived city life, both personal and universal. The repetition of pasted and collaged photocopies of his drawings recall the repeated fields of posters advertising concerts and events that line the streets of the city.

Basquiat's images of advertising are hot and experienced where Warhol's are cold and without personal input. Warhol is minimalist and Basquiat (of course) expressionist, even performative. There is more affinity between Basquiat's drawings and Warhol's earlier black and white, diagrammatic paintings.

Medieval altar shapes. In Grave, painted after his friend Warhol's death, the three panels radiate grief, it nearly moved me to tears (which really doesn't happen often in front of art).

The sheer amount of work in the show is overwhelming. Words like thought-maps, recording his interests, what he was reading at the time, stream of consciousness connections. Political thinking, what music he loved... it's endless. Sometimes the words take over and flood from the painting or drawing, inundating you. "mapping the urban consciousness" (catalogue, pg. 94)

Fell in love with his drawings of anatomy. You get a sense of his humour there.

The catalogue essays are unsatisfying. Too much time spent on trying to prove he's some Art God. His work is good, don't dwell on mystifying him. Needed an in-depth analysis of his religious iconography and influence of religion - latin american catholicism, haitian religion, etc. It's all there, but I don't know enough about it to comment. Maybe they purposely avoided that aspect.

Consciously employed primitivism and ritual repetition combined with references to contemporary life, throw in some of the logic of "high" Greek, Roman, and Egyptian civilizations. Interesting interplays that have an affinity to Picasso's use of the primitive, though Basquiat is far more aware and critical of this use. Picasso borrowed, Basquiat comments. See this article for a better discussion of this. It seems like any time I have a thought, somebody else has been there first and done it with more eloquence!

Fear and comfort in art

2005-07-31T13:40:00.000-05:00

Thoughtful post at Zero Degrees Art. In Travelogue 34 Mery Lynn McCorkle writes

The concept of the avant garde is based on the superior/prophetic perception of the artist. In times of complacency, shaking up the bourgeoisie through confrontation is a good growth mechanism. In times of fear, though, at least for centuries in the past, art was about offering comfort and perspective, trying to discover and share the harmony and order of the universe. And order, even in mathematics, is indelibly connected to the idea of god. Einstein overtly equated the order of the universe with god. So don't pooh-pooh comfort. It isn't about providing an opiate to the masses. It's about ameliorating fear through changing the viewer's perspective of life events. Fear, as politicians and religious leaders know too well, can be an effective motivator. When it crosses a threshhold, though, fear physically impedes hearing. Literally, physiologically. Offering a way of de-escalating fear and stress is not a shabby job to have.

And, I would add, not an easy one. De-escalating fear cannot be done merely by distraction from the fear - the fear has to be acknowledged somehow. I should be using "fine" art examples here, but as I'm brain dead (and have been ensconced on the couch all weekend) I'm going with the pop culture. Compare how recent television shows deal with the terror of becoming an adult: Buffy the Vampire Slayer vs. regular teen-angst shows like Beverly Hills 90210 or The OC. Buffy at first glance is more unreal, a genre show, and easily dismissed (though really the same could be said for the other shows mentioned - not exactly Big Drama). However, it manages through metaphor to get at deeper fears than 90210 every could - fears that adults don't always have the answers (and are often part of the problem), and that the monsters in the closet might really eat you. But it also shows that young people have power to live through and overcome these fears, and the comfort of knowing that others are going through the same things you are. These are kind of lame examples to use after Mery Lynn's lovely writing, but hey, that's where I'm at today. Plus, I'm a nerd. For more nerdy goodness (or ridiculousness, depending on your perspective) listen to the NPR report or go to Slayage.