Staring at the cellophane

The (ongoing) story of the recording artist Jandek is one of the most baffling in popular music. I use the word popular here loosely. A month ago I spent about three to four hours reading the website linked above, which goes into incredible detail about each of his forty-seven albums and CDs released since 1978. The close analysis of the album covers is incredibly thorough. Every time I visit the website I get hooked.

From a chapter on Jandek from the book Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music (2000):

Jandek, alone with a guitar and a microphone, sounds like a muttering sleepwalker aimlessly plucking amplified bicycle spokes. His music is dark and gloomy; but it won't make you sad—it will make you tense and uncomfortable.... Jandek accompanies himself on acoustic or electric guitar, but for the incoherence of his zombie-like strumming, his hands might as well be accidentally brushing against the strings. His occasional wheezing harmonica approximates early Dylan having an asthma attack. Sometimes Jandek is backed by a drummer who seems unfamiliar with the kit, and who pounds away relentlessly with no ground beat.

Another writer describes the serial, conceptual art–like presentation of the records:

There has been, on average, one full-length Jandek (pronounced Jan-deck) release every year since 1981. Each album or CD cover is illustrated with a grainy photo depicting either a house with the curtains drawn, furniture, or the same tidy, expressionless, fair-featured young man. The back covers are white with black type listing nothing but the title, the song list, and an address: P.O. Box 15375, Houston, TX, 77220. If you line up all the records side by side, the uniformity of their design is enough to give you a headache.

Never before has there be such a mystique surrounding the artist, and one that not many people outside the record-collector set or experimental music scenes know about. Jandek was first seen in 1999 by a journalist. He also gave an unannounced performance in Scotland five years later and has performed—with incredible restrictions for the performers and no contact with the press or public—several times in the US and Europe. After reading all the stuff on the website, I kick myself for missing his New York shows last year.

Artists we support

Molly Springfield’s solo exhibition, Gentle Reader at Transformer in Washington, DC, has been reviewed by the DCist.

The artist Nicholas Knight has begun publishing a blog, Eponanonymous, which contains images of and commentary on his work.

The Pursuit of Happiness

From the press release on the exhibition I am curating for Sarah Bowen Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

The Pursuit of Happiness
Sarah Bowen Gallery
Group show curated by Christopher Howard
December 1, 2006–January 14, 2007
Reception: Friday, December 1, 2006, 7–9 P.M.

Sarah Bowen Gallery is delighted to present The Pursuit of Happiness, featuring ten New York–based artists: John Bowman, Diane Carr, Rebecca E. Chamberlain, Jonny Detiger, Vandana Jain, Tracy Nakayama, Alexander Reyna, Kent Rogowksi, Carol Shadford, and Jennifer Sullivan. The Pursuit of Happiness explores representations of happiness in contemporary art as a question or proposition more than a definitive statement. Some works openly welcome this fleeting emotion into their iconography, while others harbor skepticism toward it by examining false notions of happiness in a consumer-driven society. (These conflicting views are often seen within the same work.) Other artists use tropes of happiness as a formal launching point into other areas. Whether happiness is bright colors, pretty pictures, love, sex, food, or a state of being is debatable; it is clear that happiness is an imperative motivating factor in human behavior, and therefore it is also a motivating factor in art.

How best to achieve happiness in life is as intensely debated today as it was in the Enlightenment or ancient Greece. Considering current scientific, economic, and social theories, and in a culture of instant gratification and psychopharmacology, it is questionable as to whether we are closer to finding the key to happiness. By examining the pursuit through art, perhaps we will find a deeper understanding of this ephemeral emotion.

Working in a variety of mediums, each artist expresses a different aspect of happiness. Kent Rogowski’s exuberant puzzle montages and photographs of reconstructed teddy bears play on how memory is embedded tangibly in childhood toys and events, and Jonny Detiger’s swirling paintings and drawings draw on psychedelic imagery to represent desire in myriad forms. Jennifer Sullivan’s folksy mixed-media work and Diane Carr’s felt and foam landscapes focus on the imagination of hopes and dreams surrounding happiness through popular culture and nature. The uninhibited, sexually engaged characters in Tracy Nakayma’s intimate drawings create a dialogue about openness and pleasure, as well as the sense of nostalgia and loss. For Rebecca E. Chamberlain, happiness can transcend the personal, as her drawings of reproductions of International Style homes and offices make promises of efficient, refined living. Alexander Reyna and John Bowman present happiness as excess with video images of preadolescent male joys and paintings of an abundance of food and luxury objects. Carol Shadford and Vandana Jain examine the strain of feigned happiness and troubled desire. In Shadford’s video, characters are asked to hold a smile for as long as possible, illustrating how the initial genuine pleasure turns into discomfort over time. Similarly, in Jain’s work, advertising catchphrases emphasize how immediate gratification has few long-term effects.

Tacita Dean wins Hugo Boss Prize

The English artist Tacita Dean has won the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize. Global Warming Your Cold Heart was, of course, rooting for Tino Sehgal.

From Bloomberg News: Tacita Dean, an English artist best known for her contemplative films, won this year’s Hugo Boss Prize, a $50,000 award from the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the museum said. Dean’s recent motion pictures include this year’s Kodak, which shows an Eastman Kodak Co. factory in Germany producing its final run of 16-millimeter film, said Joan Young, associate curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim.

“It’s a witness to, and an example of, an increasingly obsolete medium,” Young said. Earlier works included drawings on chalkboards and alabaster and a film portraying a sunset as seen through the windows of a revolving restaurant, Young said.

The Hugo Boss Prize, sponsored by Hugo Boss AG, the Metzingen, Germany-based clothing maker, is among the large single-artist prizes that have sprung up as government arts funding has declined, Young said in a telephone interview today. It is one of the few without restrictions on the artist’s age, gender, race, nationality, or medium, she said. Prior winners of the biennial award included American Matthew Barney, Scot Douglas Gordon, Slovenian Marjetica Potrc, French Pierre Huyghe, and Thai Rirkrit Tiravanija, the Guggenheim said in a statement.

Dennis Oppenheim review

My review of the recent temporary public-art exhibition of new work by Dennis Oppenheim has been published by the Brooklyn Rail. The work was deinstalled yesterday. I hope you were able to see it. Ace Gallery staged a miniretrospective in 2000 in its massive Hudson Street Street space, which was a real eye opener for someone like me who, until then, was only familiar with the artists late 1960s work. A lot of the work he does really makes me scratch my head, but his commitment to not creating an instantly recognizable body of work, unlike many of his peers, truly impresses me.

Couleur Café

It was a surprise to flip through the pages of the November Artforum and see a Top Ten list by the artist Fia Backström. I recognized her because she used to live across the street from me. I never see her anymore, so I guess she moved. I sometimes said hello because I saw her so often while hanging out on my stoop, but she didn’t have much to say back. Once I got a postcard addressed to her in my mailbox. It was written in what I thought was Danish, but since she’s from Sweden I guess the language was Swedish. I took the card with me that same day when I walked to the subway, thinking I would run into her. A few blocks later I did. I gave her the card. Small world? Not really. Looking on her website I see that there were one-night and weekend art events at her apartment that I didn't know were going on. Sometimes my own backyard can be a foreign land.