Patronizing the Arts

I went to 3 very different art shows over the weekend, starting Friday with a gallery opening in Harlem.  The exhibit, Abacism, was in an utterly gorgeous space:  a brownstone with original molding, wood floors and fireplaces.  It was part of the Harlem Studio Felloswhip (info here: http://hsfny.wordpress.com/).  It is difficult to describe the exhibit, and it felt like a bit of an intellectual workout understanding it at the show, which is a good thing I think.  In some ways that is the point.  The artist France Languerand uses the entire available range of digital color pixels in each of her photographs, carefully ordered by mathematical systems that she imposes upon them.  The title refers to the abacus, and each of the photos in a way serves as an abacus for Languerand’s own process of counting and sorting the almost infinite possibilities of coding the color combinations.  The resulting photographs (3 of them) are abstract compositions of what appears to the naked eye to be a standard spectrum of color (some of the variances are so minute as to be imperceptible) arranged in patterns that often appear like optical illusions.  I guess in a way they are.  They were accompanied by a sound piece in the room, which I must say got quite redundant and distracting after a short amount of time, and a second sound piece that was supposed to play in a limo, but for a missing ipod cord.  I liked the idea of the art emptied of content in these venues of old wealth also emptied of their glory.  A rented limo, an empty pre-war brownstone, and infinite systems.

The Museum of the City of New York makes a big fuss on their homepage about their collection of photographs including those by Bourke-White and Riis.  However, none of these were on display at the museum while I was there.  Instead, there were several small exhibits with overwhelming amounts of information-text, objects, photos, art, giant wall decals, ephemera of all types.  An exhibit on Paris and New York at the beginning of the 20^th century showed cross influences in fashion, art, and design.  It focused primarily on New York’s role in shaping taste.  A friend commented that if we saw the same exhibit in Paris, all of NY’s ideas would be considered knock-offs of the French.  It was a tidy little exhibit and mostly eye candy.  An exhibit on the history of political campaigns was fairly interesting; I loved seeing the little tin type buttons from 19^th century campaigns, but after a while it was nauseating, particularly the odd tableau of bleachers with life-size cutouts of Obama, Clinton, and McCain.  Was I supposed to take my picture with these? Overall, disappointing.

The real treat was the Neue Galerie’s exhibit of Alfred Kubin drawings. This poor guy led a majorly tortured life:  his mother died while he was young, his father beat him, he was molested by a pregnant woman at 11 years old, tried to commit suicide in a cemetery, married a woman who was ill and addicted to morphine, and moved to the Black Forest.  All during WWI and WWII.  Influenced by Goya and Munch, any comparisons to Edward Gorey should be let at the door.  There is little to no humor in Kubin’s drawings.  But, they are stunning.  His technique alternates between rich lush environments and delicate whisps of forms.  Figures glide like ghosts, and giant beasts hover forlornly or menacingly.  Sometimes the nightmares are too much: a saw cuts into a woman’s vagina, limbs are torn from bodies.  The images are so personal and so intimate that it was easy to forget the fact that in many ways all Europeans of this period were living in a world of nightmares. A few drawings represented war itself, a monolith marching through atmospheric space crushing tiny helpless humanity under foot. The show was well-curated; appropriate lighting and wall colors set the mood along with music by Mahler and other maudlin composers I can’t recall.  I even ate up the plexi case with carefully lit velvet and Kubin’s death mask floating above.  You couldn’t escape the sensation that he had been wearing his death mask his whole life.

Oh my, oh my. I let the summer go by without a single post.  I should be punished-and was.  I was studying for comprehensive exams, memorizing 500 of “the most important works of art of all time.”  I’ve already forgotten 95% of them.  Anyway, instead of trying to do a bunch of “catch up” posts, I thought I would just jot down a few thoughts on the shows I caught over the summer as one long post, a couple of which just ended or are about to, so it is not altogether untimely.

Frick Collection rocks

I realize it is inexcusable that I had never gone to the Frick collection until this summer, and after going I was kicking myself for not doing it sooner.  For someone who loves the Italian Renaissance AND basking in the reflected glory of gilded age wealth, this is even better than the Morgan (sorry, Morgan, I love you and your fries, but you’re lacking in Duccios).  I really love this brand of museum:  a sharply edited collection of exquisite works in a manageable quantity set in a beautiful historic building.  It is so old school, and so comforting.  And so are the artworks.  Vermeer, Rembrandt, Duccio, Piero della Francesca, Bellini, Holbein, Goya, Manet, and Whistler.  The gang’s all here.  This is a collection which definitely inspires connoisseurship and sheer aesthetic enjoyment, which isn’t always a bad thing.  In fact, it is quite soothing.  Though, I have to question whether hanging three paintings together instead of spread out constitutes an exhibition. (I’m talking about the Vermeers.)  The most surprising part of the collection was the miniature bronzes, which were so delicately crafted but filled with energy and movement.  Full disclosure: I don’t love sculpture.  Personal preference.  But, I enjoyed having these small works lying around scattered on various tables and tucked away in corners as little palette cleansers before taking on the weight of art history’s “most important artists of all time.”   

JMW Turner rocks me to sleep 

Boats.  Lots of large canvases of boats.  Not a lot of Turner’s more expressive, abstract compositions filled with color and light and frantic movement, ie. what Modern viewers expect out of a Turner exhibit.  There was one room, however, that captured my interest.  It was filled with watercolor sketches of the burning of the Houses of Parliament.  You could feel the heat and the excitement in the brushstrokes.  One after another, the different compositions and explorations into the atmospheric effects of fire and smoke and water gave a palpable impression of the artist’s techniques and preoccupations.  The Met could benefit from more explorations like this:  a group of images that helps to illuminate through their repetition major thematic elements in an artist’s oeuvre.  It reminded me of the room in the Courbet exhibit of Le Gray photographs of the water and sky.  It’s the kind of exhibition strategy that allows the art to speak louder than the wall text. 

Pietra Dura, again, rocks

Who knew a decorative art exhibit could be so interesting?  Basically, this exhibit is about opulence and how’d they do that? execution.  God bless the Italians for their amazing craft abilities with inlay and precious gems and their apparent feeling that more is more.  The trompe l’oeil effects and incredibly detailed decorative objects were dazzling.  Those rich people really knew how to live.  I particularly appreciated the enormous cabinet outfitted with miniature chandeliers over porphyry putti who danced in tiny niches that evoked mini-ballrooms.  The carved fruits looked good enough to knock your teeth out and wunderkammern were truly wondrous.  The religious subjects on the other hand often seemed ill-suited to the polychrome treatment; a little gaudy and at odds with high spiritual content.  But, they were resurrected by the craftsmanship and the kitsch factor.   

Salvador Dali Films and Paintings

The experience I had viewing this exhibit reminded me why I never go to MoMA. Sacrilegious as it may seem, I never enjoy coming here.  I can’t believe how much they charge; thank God I get in free or I would never go.  The exhibit was packed to capacity so that getting up to a painting even to see the whole work unobstructed was an impossibility.  However, this was a mixed blessing since it forced me to concentrate on the films, something I usually don’t do.  I have an attention-span issue with video and film in a gallery setting, so fleeing the hords to sit down and actually watch each film in its entirety was very unlike me, but a rewarding experience.  I had never seen Un Chien Andalou. I know, but I hadn’t.  It was nice to be able to see it along with several of his other films to get a wider view of the violence and sexual tension explored throughout his work.  While I’m still not sold on Surrealism, I do feel that I have a better appreciation for his evocations of dreams and nightmares, and must say that I felt the films were more effective in conveying that dream-like quality.  One of my students recently commented that Dali was doing the same thing as Bosch. It seems so obvious, but never having the interest I hadn’t really thought of it before.  The difference of course is that Bosch was using a naturalistic painting style to make the fantastic nightmares of God’s punishment real to a religious audience and Dali’s images are in service to the self-absorbed modern man (and I do mean man).  The reality never needing to be entirely believable since the imagination’s creations are the endpoint.  My favorite film was Chaos and Creation, a mocking Mondrian that corralled pigs and a model into a brilliant critique of Modernism.  The room devoted to Dali’s work on Hitchcock’s Spellbound was the most direct and most effective exploration of the relationship between Dali’s painting and film, and thus provided a sort of manifesto for what he was trying to accomplish in terms of representing dreams visually. 

Ernst Kirchner hits the streets

I don’t have a lot to say about this exhibit except that after bustling through midtown to get to MoMA and fighting through the crowds at the Dali show, the small exhibit of Kirchner’s street scenes seemed altogether appropriate.  The glamorously macabre figures masked in fashion glide at disturbing angles through the streets becoming the architecture of the city.  When you are in a crowd, the bustle is often all you see, your eyes stopping every so often on a particular face, often made garish by the tumultuous experience.  These German Expressionists really knew how to convey alienation in a crowd.

Bernd and Hilla Becher Typologies

Finally saw some of the Becher’s work on display. Pretty much what I expected.  Repetition. Same but different. Highly influential. Systematic. I get it. I’m bored. Not trying to sound to cool for the Becher’s; I just mean that it is more of an intellectual exercise than a flashy exhibit and I didn’t feel that seeing the images in person made too much more of a difference than reading about them.  (Also have to say that I recently saw a set of Bechers up close and personal and the printing was so messy. What’s up with that? Shouldn’t they be immaculate? Do they do their own printing?)

Louise Bourgeois works out her daddy issues

I seem to provoke strong reactions from people when I give any personal preference or critique of the Bourgeois exhibit that just closed at the Guggenheim.  My personal opinion is I would have like to see more paintings even though I know she is a sculptor (the paintings are great).  I thought the way the Personages were set up was well-done.  The early sculptural work was well covered.  Her personalization of minimalism and dialogue that she creates between minimalism and surrealism is very interesting and her sculptures are so well-crafted in size and finish as well.  I liked seeing the play of color between the different types of stone that she used.  But, once I got to the installations I became disappointed.  Text does not suit her well, and while I agree that the cells provided really interesting plays between exterior and interior and access and denial that were interactive in a really intriguing way, the content was frankly too obvious.  The way she could evoke all of the same emotions and themes with a minimal carved form was so much neater than the excessive use of props that only served to reiterate the same emotions and themes.  I have a lot of respect for her evolving career and using different techniques to address a consistent range of personal issues, but the cells felt a little like an older artist trying to stay in touch with what the youngsters were doing.  Go knows I love the antique store aesthetic, but it wasn’t exactly revolutionary for all its polish.  By the time I got to the primordial moment or whatever that crocheted mommy-daddy coitus (with boots!) in a glass case was called-I longed for the subtlety of a giant sculpted phallus.

Olafur Eliasson goes chasing waterfalls (couldn’t resist a TLC reference)

I’ve saved the best for last.  I don’t know what people’s opinions of the waterfalls were, but I thought they provided a sensory touchstone for summer in the city.  Summer in NY is hot and kind of gross and the thought of misty water falling from scaffolding/skyscrapers is appealing and entirely fitting to the fabric of the city.  Getting to see the waterfalls at different times from different vantage points throughout the hottest months was a treat.  Always active, always present, they blended into both the hum and the gloss of New York now.  I did one of the boat tours and the difference between seeing them on land and water was a unique viewing experience.  I felt that the Brooklyn Bridge and East Village locations blended best with the panoramas of the city.  The tower in alphabet city fit in with the tall city housing behind, playing on notions of public and architecture and the fall under the bridge had the most solid, heavy spray which was fitting for an emblem of architectural stability.  The other towers were less integrated into places that people actually go, and I feel that they suffered a bit for this.  They were more about looking at than living with.  Altogether, this was my favorite art-viewing experience of the summer and if I’m not mistaken, you can still go see it for another week. 

Eminent Domain:  Contemporary Photography and the City is a smallish exhibit currently at the main branch of the NY Public Library.  I happened upon it by chance and it warrants a plug here since it is free, conveniently located, and in a nice air conditioned space.  A good reason to duck out of the impending summer sun.  Photography around a city is a difficult thing.  No matter what, it tends to feel nostalgic and cheesy (decaying signs that read like one note puns for instance), the spawn of Lee Friedlander finding the same old quirky subjects in windows and car mirrors.  But, if it is done well and perhaps has a conceptual element, it can give a more accurate sense of life in a city.  Eminent Domain runs the gamut between nostalgia, tired Friedlander-esque postering, interesting concept and lackluster execution, but like all city photography, if you live in the city you won’t be able to help yourself from enjoying it.  (Kind of like in that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa attends a poetry reading by Robert Pinsky who mentions the school’s library and everyone cheers and screams “Name another building!”).  I digress.  The main attraction here is Thomas Holton’s The Lams of Ludlow Street, a series that follows a sort of day in the life approach to an immigrant family’s life in a small Chinatown apartment.  It is above all a naked portrayal of the documentary impulse.  The photographer’s intrusion with the camera is a desiring gaze, longing for the tight knit closeness and tradition of the family he photographs.  He has also given the children a camera, so that interspersed between his large, careful compositions are delightful little polaroids of the kids’ perspective.  By allowing the family to be photographers themselves, he avoids the trap documentary often sets of victimizing its subject.  The compassion one is generally meant to feel for the people in documentary photographs is turned on Holton, and the photographs are revealed to be documents of his own longing. 

I went to the opening of Zhang Huan’s current exhibit at PaceWildenstein on May 8th.  The exhibit spans both the Chelsea spaces on 22nd and 25th streets, and at the opening, red logo-clad pedicabs (read: rickshaws) carted artsy types back and forth.  It was a little offensive, a little cheesy, a little too corporate but super convenient for those who wanted to avoid the brutal Chelsea terrain.  Due to an incident with the fire department (smoke alarms went off because of too many people resulting in a massive line), I only saw the 25th street space, but Giant no. 3, the cowhide draped armature sculpture of an enormous fantastical giant with clinging children on her back was impressive.  Chuck Close held court at its feet as Zhang Huan sheepishly stood still for photos, clad in sweats and looking ill at ease compared to Close’s regal art world giant status and demeanor.  Enough obnoxiousness, the art was impressive.  The giant was beautiful and even though enormous and carcass covered, not menacing. You wanted to curl up on it, climb it, touch it.  The impeccably carved (by a laser? I hope not) Memory Doors next door were imprinted with history, social, political and spiritual.  In this context, the giant served as some sad but comforting ghost of Chinas past.  The doors were not a judgment on Chinas history or present, but a relic and portrait.  Like photography, the viewer is left to interpret these signs of history into something relevant to the present and future.  As far as I can tell, the relevance is in Zhang Huan’s expansive vision for art, raising beautiful questions but not necessarily answering them.  

My review of the 22nd st. monumental ash painting is forthcoming.  

How does my meager blog begin to say anything of value about the Whitney Biennial?  How does the Whitney Biennial begin to say anything meaningful about the current state of art?  To avoid these issues, I will instead provide a quick and dirty user guide to the Biennial that is made even more superfluous since the show is only open for two more days.  First, holding true to the group show format, it is important to immediately recognize that there will be only a handful of truly notable artists/works (since sometimes the same artist will include a gem and a stinker–we’ll call it the one-two punch), a handful of truly awful pieces (usually in the form of d.i.y. style installations that could easily be sponsored by Home Depot), and finally a majority of average to mediocre works which one immediately forgets upon exiting the building.   Since time is of the essence, rather than get bogged down by the misses, I’ll stick to the greatest hits.  

My particular interests in photography and creepy Victorian-type things will probably become apparent as I run down my short list of favorites from the show, but having seen it months ago at this point, those works that resonated with me personally will have to be our subject.  

James Welling’s Torso series uses a blue grid of screens overlapping and twisted, formed from the human torso, to evoke landscape, the human body, ice bergs, computer animation, or perhaps the cyanotype photographic process.  They are about photography itself, the process of light creating an image and the viewer’s complicity in creating meaning out of that image.  They are indexicality once removed, the screens standing in for human touch, direct light shining through the screen precludes the need for the camera eye.  Bare bones, they recall the earliest days of photography when William Henry Fox Talbot placed small pieces of lace on the the surface of paper soaked in chemicals to produce photogenic drawings.  As the Biennial website notes, “Tactility is privileged above opticality, as he turns away from perspective and optics to reground the medium in its fundamental bases of touch, pressure, and weight. (As has often been noted, photography literally means “drawing with light” and is not etymologically related to any mechanical means.) To cite Welling in a 2003 Artforum interview: “In retrospect, I see that there’s no escape from the history of photography.”

So, due to my lack of computer skills I lost the last portion of this post.  More to come soon. 

I went to Cai Guo-Qiang “I Want to Believe” back in February and am finally getting around to saying a few words about it, something I should have done much earlier considering that this is one of the most engaging exhibits I have ever seen.  It is also worth noting that it is a show that truly works with the Guggenheim’s troublesome space.  Journeying through the museum, you are invited to meditate on beautiful aftermaths of violent acts:  from a ship’s wreckage of thousands of shards of Chinese export porcelain to a series of neon-lit cars replicating a car bomb to gun powder paintings.  Repurposed goats taxidermied into a pack of wolves hitting a glass wall and leaping tigers pierced by arrows poignantly reference ancient warfare.  Next to the works that deal with modern violence and destruction, these animals invite the question of warfare as a natural state while the arrows simultaneously take on the appearance of armor.  Assistants sculpted Chinese peasants out of clay over wooden and wire armature during the exhibition.  The peasants carry their loads up the slope of the Guggenheim’s corkscrew, forcing the viewer to feel his/her own descent/ascent more bodily and forging a surrogacy between a spectator in other’s work and carrying the burden oneself.  A make-shift river and small boat offered children the chance to float along while their friends or parents guided the little craft through a room with canaries in a cage and references to Chinese medicine.  It was, frankly, magical. 

Check it out, here.

The exhibit will be open until May 28th. Be prepared to fight through the throngs; it has been a popular show.

I spent Sunday at the consumer-driven fantasy land that is the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum.  I say that like it is a bad thing, but consumer fantasy is kind of the point.  A Louis Vuitton store with logo-clad salespeople decked out in all white, a Kanye West video (along with other Murakami shorts) drawing a line around the main room, and all out bedlam in the gift shop.  The hype, it would seem, was actually worth it.  There were multiple rooms wallpapered with Murakami designs, hung with his paintings which then took on a 3-D quality, and peopled with his creations like Kaikai, Kiki, and DOB.  The minimalist cavases began to pale in comparison to these elaborate installations and the highly finished (and often hyper-sexual) sculptures.  I had never encountered Inochi, a small cyborg boy (anatomically correct–sort of) and the short films that highlight his sexual awakening in a Japanese prep school.  The playful and humorous aspects of his work are more fully meaningful when they are accompanied by this sort of uncomfortable sexuality.  

Speaking of uncomfortable sexuality, I finally got around to seeing the Dinner Party while I was there.  If you are unfamiliar with Judy Chicago’s important feminist work, it’s basically a triangle shaped table with place-settings from a representative group of famous women from history, beginning with the primordial goddess.  At this fictional dinner party, everyone eats off of floral-vaginal plates.  Appetizing.  Nuanced.  It seems really important to contextualize this work into 70s feminist movements.  Juxtaposed with the current exhibit in the Sackler Center by Ghada Amer, however, it seems retro and even hokey.  Amer’s work is subtle and beautiful even when she is stitching pornography into oversized cavases.  The violence of the needle and the male gaze subsumed and reclaimed by the softness of a female touch and the delicacy of her paintings.   

In honor of the Armory Show and all its various competing off-shoots and alternatives, Williamsburg’s galleries stayed open until 11:00 on Saturday (March 29). In addition to providing a space for hipsters to mingle in a safe, well-lit environment, there were incredibly cheap drinks. At the best galleries, only tips were required. Obviously by “best” I mean that they gave me free booze and therefore I endorse their artists regardless of talent. At a couple of galleries, there was a $2 charge for a pabst or Trader Joe’s wine. I found that the galleries with the best art charged for the drinks, while the galleries with the worst art gave it out for free and were packed. Draw your associations as you will. As for the art, the highlight of the evening was at Jack the Pelican, where some of the best art could be found, including what the website describes as “Salvadoran artist Irvin Morazan conjures violent Aztec god Xipe Totec, with a sexy procession of Mayan headdresses and “flesh” throwing combat - a postmodern tribute to ancient Pre-Columbian ritual sacrifice.” I missed the sexy procession of Mayan headdresses, but did arrive in time to see two people seated across the white gallery space from each other wearing elaborate Mayan costumes and mixing colored glue and cotton balls into gooey masses. Two microwaves sat in front of the figures and they would slowly, systematically mix their “flesh”, heat it, roll it into a ball and finally hoist it across the room at the opposing figure. I don’t know anything about the rituals on which this performance might have been based, but the ritual aspect certainly remained in tact. The crowd cheered whenever the “flesh” balls stuck to the figures, while the figures themselves remained silent. It was surprisingly haunting to see the masked figures, but the microwave and contemporary materials provided an ironic counterpoint to the spiritual and weightier associations. On the gallery’s website, the artist’s statement and gallery text indicates the commentary on displaced indigenous peoples through colonialism. While this association is valid, it seems a little too obvious and perhaps a little naive. These costumed figures microwaving their modern surrogate flesh in a typical white gallery space belies a complicity, or better, adaptation to post-colonial indigenous life. Projects like this show the potential for art that is both critical and carries positive potential.

What I know about nineteenth-century French art is the quick and dirty Art 101 variety. Turns out quick and dirty about sums it up. Fast livin’, fast brushstrokes, fast women (and men, depending how you roll)…a tale as old as time, at least from what I can tell from the Courbet exhibit at the Met. There are a number of debates about the origin of modernism (or, Modernism?, or the modern era?), but in the Art 101 survey version, Courbet is where it all starts. He isn’t really considered “the first Modern artist” as if such a thing could exist, but he was working with all the ingredients that Manet would use to steal that (dubious) title; he just didn’t quite put them together the same way. The Met’s retrospective was a refreshing reminder of how close Courbet got to sparking a revolution and how beautiful and interesting the conventions of the Academy could be when exploited by a master for whom no subject was too humble or too noble. Let’s get down to the nitty gritty though. The paintings of his family and friends were a nice background to his later work, when he started to play fast and loose with traditional nudes and landscapes. It was interesting to see some early, less eloquent moments: paintings of his buddies in medieval garb hanging out in the French country-side. Some of the hands in the earliest paintings looked a little awkward, like ball gloves or oven mitts. His self-portraits brimming with all the bravado and ambition of a young Rembrandt or Caravaggio sprinkled amidst those early efforts were stunning and writ like promises kept by his later nudes and genre scenes. Nothing like a Turkish businessman with extra cash and a penchant for writhing fleshy women. Leave it to the Met to present these works as though we had just discovered some playboys under our parents’ bed. The Origin of the World was placed behind a partition along with some early erotic photographs. It was actually a welcome surprise to find these photos in the show, but their inclusion also reinforced the nudey-mag feel of the small space. See it in the Musee D’Orsay and it’s right there in yo’ face. It did prove, however, that over 100 years later, it’s still shocking. Turns out Courbet and Britney Spears have something in common: they know the PR value of a strategic crotch shot.