Global Warming Your Cold Heart

What happened to global warming?

2009-10-19T18:44:00.002-04:00

Excerpt from a review of 557,087

2009-05-12T00:00:00.006-04:00

“In Kosuth’s piece [‘a series of cards, part of a larger work entitled Art as Idea as Idea’], the slender physicality of the cards is reluctant, but the philosophy is honest; Kosuth risks the embarrassment of trying to find answers in his typed outline, rather than merely, hiply, ‘posing questions.’ ”

From Peter Plagens, “557,087,” Artforum 8, no. 3 (November 1969): 64–67.

Younger Than Jesus, part two

2009-04-11T17:12:00.006-04:00

Interview with Jarvis Cocker, published in August 1998 in Juice Magazine.

On the new album you sing the line, “I am not Jesus though I have the same initials.” What else do you have in common with him?

I’m a man. That’s about it really. I can’t perform miracles and I’m older than him. That’s what brought on that particular song that you’re talking about, because some guy really put a downer on my evening at a party once ‘cause he asked me how old I was. I said “I’m gonna be 33 next Thursday,” and he goes, “Oh, you’re gonna have problems.” I said, “Why is that?” and he said, “You know it’s the Christ age—Jesus was crucified at 33, a lot of men at 33 measure their life up against that of our saviour and find it wanting in some way.” I thought, I don’t believe this crap, but as it turned out, for whatever reason, he was right.

It’s been said that you don’t want to grow up. Is that true?

No, no, no. On the back of the record it says it’s okay to grow up, just as long as you don’t grow old. I mean human beings have to change. If you’re still trying to do the stuff that you would do at 22, when you’re older you look stupid and also your body just can’t take it as well. So, you know, it’s good to mature in some ways, but for me what growing old means is becoming less open to things, and becoming too bogged down in your views. You have to fight against that as much as you possibly can.

Younger Than Jesus, ca. 1968

2009-04-10T00:05:00.004-04:00

The names of artists and art-world players—with their ages—as featured in a Howard Junker article, “The New Art: It’s Way, Way Out,” in the July 29, 1968 issue of Newsweek:

David Paul, artist, 22
Fred Sandback, artist, 24
Nicholas Wilder, art dealer, 30
Charles Cowles, Artforum publisher, 27
William Pettet, artist, 25
Dennis Oppenheim, artist, 29
Walter de Maria, artist, 33
Michael Heizer, artist, 23
Neil Jenny, artist, 22
Alan Saret, artist, 23
Richard Serra, artist, 28
Bill Bollinger, artist, 28
Bruce Nauman, artist, 26
Stephen Kaltenbach, artist, 28
Richard Tuttle, artist, 27
Dan Christiansen, artist, 25
Peter Young, artist, 28
Ronnie Landfield, artist, 21
Robert Gordon, artist, 23
James Turrell, artist, 24
Joseph Kosuth, artist, 24

Sexy Sexism

2009-02-04T12:32:00.011-05:00

But in a world in which art, fashion, celebrity and money commingle, gallerinas know that their looks—or, at least, their look—can make a difference. Yancey Richardson, the owner of an eponymous Chelsea art gallery, notes that she employs front desk assistants who can answer questions from the public and clients, and also attack a rigorous list of tasks. “You can’t just hire people who are decorative,” she said, “but you can find someone with all those necessary skills and who is beautiful.”
—New York Times, March 30, 2008

“It’s not a surprise that the director of a prominent, important gallery is black or is young or is a woman,” said Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, which has showed two of Ms. Vassell’s artists. “But when you run the three together, it sends a very important signal.”
—New York Times, February 2, 2009

Material Girls

2008-12-30T00:00:00.022-05:00

Giorgio Morandi and Han Solo

2008-12-15T16:53:00.007-05:00

Skulls

2008-11-17T08:56:00.003-05:00

Piotr Uklanski
Untitled (Skull)
2000

Philippe Halsman
Dali Skull
1951

I was 10 years old in 1978. And I loved Wonder Woman.

2008-10-21T20:22:00.004-04:00

Dara Birnbaum,
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman
1978

Ramsay Stirling, Enduring Freedom (∞ Flags), 2008

2008-10-19T19:13:00.006-04:00

Ramsay Stirling

Andrew Lahde, hedge-fund manager

2008-10-18T11:59:00.001-04:00

Wire: BLOOMBERG News (BN) Date: 2008-10-17 19:47:59
Andrew Lahde Quits Hedge Funds, Thanks `Idiots' for His Success

By Katherine Burton
Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Andrew Lahde, the hedge-fund manager
who quit after posting an 870 percent gain last year, said
farewell to clients in a letter that thanks stupid traders for
making him rich and ends with a plea to legalize marijuana.
Lahde, head of Santa Monica, California-based Lahde Capital
Management LLC, told investors last month he was returning their
cash because the risk of using credit derivatives -- his means
of betting on the falling value of bonds and loans, including
subprime mortgages -- was too risky given the weakness of the
banks he was trading with.
``I was in this game for money,'' Lahde, 37, wrote in a
two-page letter today in which he said he had come to hate the
hedge-fund business. ``The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose
parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was
there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not
worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received)
rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and
Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government.
``All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only
ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to
take the other sides of my trades. God Bless America.''
Lahde told clients he'll be content to manage his own
money, rather than taking cash from wealthy individuals and
institutions and trying to amass a fortune worth hundreds of
millions or even billions of dollars.
``I do not understand the legacy thing,'' he wrote.
``Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your
mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.''

Request for Soros

He said he'd spend his time repairing his health ``as well
as my entire life -- where I had to compete for spaces at
universities, and graduate schools, jobs and assets under
management -- with those who had all the advantages (rich
parents) that I did not.''
He also suggested that billionaire George Soros sponsor a
forum in which ``great minds'' would come together to create a
new system of government, as the current system ``is clearly
broken.''
Lahde ended his letter with a plea for the increased use of
hemp as an alternative source of food and energy that segued
into a call for the legalization of marijuana.
``Hemp has been used for at least 5,000 years for cloth and
food, as well as just about everything that is produced from
petroleum products,'' he wrote. ``Hemp is not marijuana and vice
versa. Hemp is the male plant and it grows like a weed, hence
the slang term.''

`Innocuous Plant'

He added, ``The evil female plant -- marijuana. It gets you
high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike
alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So,
why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No,
that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this
country.''
Lahde said the only reason marijuana remains illegal is
because ``Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather
sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other addictive drugs, than
allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the
profits going into their coffers.''
Lahde wasn't available for comment. A woman at his firm,
who asked not to be identified, confirmed the authenticity of
the letter.

For Related News:
Top hedge-fund stories: (TNI WWTOP HEDGE }
Californian Hedge funds TNI CA HEDGE

--Editors: Larry Edelman

Public Service Announcement

2008-10-08T22:36:00.002-04:00

Google Analytics

2008-10-07T10:16:00.000-04:00

Naomi Fisher and Country Life

2008-10-05T15:06:00.007-04:00

Roxy Music, Country Life, 1974

Naomi Fisher, Untitled (Hole In Ground), 2000

Naomi Fisher, Untitled (White dress — You can't fight Mother Nature...), 1998

Naomi Fisher, Untitled (White Lilies), 2000

The Post-Male and His Icons

2008-09-26T05:11:00.019-04:00

An email to a colleague about a conversation between Kevin Phillips and Bill Moyers

2008-09-22T10:26:00.014-04:00

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09192008/watch2.html

He is right about many things that he says. In particular in saying both parties are corrupt. Partisans always annoy me. It's all so symbolic. If a Democrat is president people like [an artist we know] and [another artist we know] feel better about the world. It doesn't matter what they do. If a Republican is president people like [an upper middle-class person we know], who cares about taxes more than anything else (because they are not even remotely religious (that's a huge partisan smear BTW)), feel better about the world. It's stupid. Nothing seems any different to me. Nothing seemed different when Clinton was president. Same as it ever was.

We live in an age when opinions matter far more than observations. People hanker after religion. Politics is religion for a lot of people. The problem is that it is a feeble, incomplete and crippled substitute for a real religion. And this is because, as I read someone else say, it does not address the central and primal metaphysical question of death.

But, I also think Kevin Phillips is full of shit. He leaves out a gigantic part of the picture. He is a crypto-nationalist. He hates Wall Street (the men in the pin-stripe suits as he calls them), the financiers. But what he does not acknowledge is that the stunning economic growth in the U.S. and around the world of the past 25 years was engineered by Wall Street (and the other financial centers around the world). Was some of it hot air? Of course! And some people (many ordinary people) do not want the party to come to an end. He is right about all that. But not anywhere near all of this growth was hot air. And he is wrong to insinuate this. Would computers and telecommunications technology be anywhere near as cheap and ubiquitous? Probably not. And it is our global, post-modern and post-industrial financial system that facilitated this transformation. Could the government have done this? Hell no! What a joke. I can not even believe anyone thinks this. Actually I think people who say this want to go back in time to some idealized moment in the past. People like Kevin Phillips want to turn the clock back to 1950. That's what he's getting at with his malarkey. He was a part of the Nixon administration. He's probably pals with Pat Buchanan. Those people have an idiotic nostalgia for the 1950s. It's completely pathetic that the Left in the U.S. is now also talking about how great things were in the 1950s (just look at Thomas Frank). Keep in mind: all this talk is crypto-nationalism. I HATE NATIONALISM in any form. I don't care whether the person is a Leftists or a Rightist. If you ask me allegiance to a state, any state, anywhere in the world is stupid. And nostalgia for a place is just that: nostalgia.

I am willing to bet Kevin Philips also objects to globalization (like Pat Buchanan). But did he mention that? People who object to globalization are ALWAYS nationalistic in their thinking (again, whether they are Left or Right). Fuck that. I'm post-nationalist. I don't care what happens to the U.S. But, that said, I can see with my own eyes that it's the best place in the world. And I'm very lucky to have been born here. And things will have to change way way way more than they have so far for it to stop being the best place to live in the world. The U.S. economy could contract 50% and it would still most likely be the richest country in the world. And if Spenglerian decline takes place (a preoccupation for Europeans for a century now), well, I hope my grandchildren have the sense to move where the opportunity and action is (that is if I have any grandchildren). I can not repeat it too many times but the idea of nation is stupid. If nations continue to exist in the future they should have to compete for people. And in this regard, the U.S. is still the front runner. This is in part because it is more post-nationalist than any other country in the world. People who would be fighting someplace else can live side by side in the U.S. A lot of people seem to have these ridiculous blood/soil thoughts in their head and they will object to what I am saying. The whole world would be a better place if more people moved somewhere else and nipped this empty idea. Would the conflict between Israel and Palestine still be happening? It's entirely about the whole blood/soil thing. And many of the attitudes — on both sides — are Nazi-like. In fact, I tend to think making everyone in that part of the world move somewhere else is just about the only thing that will bring that conflict to an end. Ethnicity (and that blood/soil garbage) is the most bullshit form of identity. It's as meaningful as astrology. Sure, it is fun to play with but is ultimately empty. And it is the true cause of every Nazi or Nazi-like movement in the world — not capitalism like too many fools like to argue. Capitalism does not give a shit about ethnicity or nationality — AT ALL. And this is a good thing. (And by the way, if it sounds like I'm saying the U.S. is a problem-free utopia, well, this is definitely not so. The whole reason I'm voting for Obama is because of the ongoing legacy of one particular thorny U.S. problem.)

As far as the economy is concerned, yes, be prepared for a bad recession. But it will not be the end of the world. And, most likely, the whole world will go into recession. There is some slim hope it will not affect China and India. But I am skeptical of this. I'm personally bracing myself for the shock but I'm not overly worried about it. More than anything I'm curious to see what happens. And besides, there's still opportunities in economic contractions. My grandfather did not believe in the depression of the 30s and he lived through it in New York! He was a working class guy, a plumber. (His wife, my grandmother, was a maid and a housewife.) My grandfather believed that there were always jobs someplace and that you should go where they are. He was not born in the U.S. You just have to keep your wits about you. We may have to work more, save more and be more cautious for a while. Fine. Whatever. All these things happen in cycles. It's not like we haven't been through this before.

The day turns to night. And then the night turns to day. We need both night and day.

I love Erik Satie.

Kicking Off Fall

2008-09-05T17:19:00.000-04:00

Burning Occult Books in the Sight of All Men

2008-09-03T16:25:00.001-04:00

2008-06-17T19:26:00.000-04:00

A Curatorial Sketch

2008-06-16T19:11:00.002-04:00

Lakshmi Tatma
born 2005
Bihar, India

Jan Dunning
Arachne
2003

Lakshmi Tatma
skeletal structure

James Juron
Figure in a Room
2008

Judy Fox
Lakshmi
1999

Bronze statues of Vishnu with his consorts Bhu and Shri (also known as Lakshmi)
From central Tamil Nadu, southern India
Chola dynasty, around AD 1000
Bronze images of Hindu deities used in temple festivals

Lakshmi
goddess of wealth and prosperity

back

front

Sun City Girls
Live From Planet Boomerang
1992

The first move here is connecting the image of Lakshmi Tatma, a girl born in India with multiple limbs (a partially formed parasitic twin) to Jan Dunning's photograph Arachne.

Lakshmi Stuti

2008-06-15T09:23:00.002-04:00

Prayers to Lakshmi, the Goddess of Fortune

These are Prayers to all of the qualities of the Goddess and the blessings that She gives.

The Lakshmi-Stuti, from Vishnu Purana, 7.9.116-138,

This Stuti eulogy of Lakshmi, which was spoken by Lord Indra, is the source of all opulence. In this world, poverty never dwells among those who recite this stuti daily.

Indra [the demigod king of heaven] said, "I offer my obeisances unto the lotus-born mother of all beings, unto Sri [the Goddess of fortune], having full-blown lotus-like eyes, and reposing in the bosom of Vishnu."

"I offer my obeisances unto the Goddess who is the abode of lotuses, who holds the lotus, whose eyes resemble the petals of a lotus, whose face is a lotus, and who is dear to the Lord who has a lotus navel."

"You are siddhi, nectar, Svaha and Svadha, O purifier of the worlds. You are twilight, night, effulgence, opulence, intelligence, faith and Sarasvati."

"You are the knowledge of sacrifice, the worship of the universal form, and occult learning, O beauteous one. You are the knowledge of Brahman, O goddess, and the bestower of the fruit of liberation."

"You are the science of dialectics, the three Vedas, Varta, the knowledge of chastisement. O goddess, this universe is filled with your gentle and terrifying forms."

"O goddess, who except you can dwell in the person of that God of gods, who consists of all forbearance, the bearer of the mace, who is contemplated by the yogis?"

"O goddess, the three worlds, having been abandoned by you, were on the verge of destruction--because of you, they have again recovered their position."

"O exalted one, men are endowed with wives, sons, houses, friends, grain and wealth due to your constant glance."

"O goddess, freedom from bodily ailments, riches, destruction of enemies, and happiness are not difficult to attain for persons who view your glances."

"You are the mother of all creatures, as that God of gods, Hari, is their father. And this universe, consisting of moving and nonmoving entities, is presently permeated by you, as well as Vishnu."

"O purifier of all, if you forsake us, neither our treasures, nor our cows, nor our houses, nor our possessions, nor our bodies, nor our wives, are secure."

"O you whose abode is the chest of Vishnu, if you forsake me, neither sons, nor friends, nor animals, nor ornaments can be mine."

"O spotless one, men who are forsaken by you are also forsaken by goodness, truth, purity, good character and other virtues."

"And those who are glanced upon by you, although devoid of any good qualities, are infatuated by all good qualities, such as good character, lineage, wealth, etc."

"O goddess, he who is glanced upon by you, is praiseworthy, accomplished, fortunate, intelligent, high-born, heroic and possessed of power."

"O nurse of the universe, O beloved of Vishnu, all virtues, character, etc., immediately abandon him from whom you turn away."

"Even the tongue of Brahma is incapable of describing your qualities. O lotus-eyed one, be auspicious unto me. Please do not abandon me."

Welcome to the party

2008-06-01T22:40:00.007-04:00

Cover of Meringue, Grandma’s Supermarket House (Cherry Smash, 1995).

Cover of Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks, 2007).

Index to Robert Nickas’ Live Free or Die, Les presses du réel, 2000

2008-05-27T09:45:00.006-04:00

Acconci, Vito, 75, 143
Ahearn, John, 81
Aldrich, R. 97
Armleder, John, 85
Avgikos, Jan, 88
Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 81
Beck, Lisa, 86
Beery, Gene, 104
Belcher, Alan, 44, 81
Bickerton, Ashley, 49, 75, 83
Bleckner, Ross, 85, 146, 147
Broodthaers, Marcel, 59-66
Brown, Alex, 118-119
Burden, Chris, 98, 149
Cadmus, Paul, 115
Cain, Peter, 115
Cattelan, Maurizio, 115, 126-139
Celmins, Vija, 115
Clark, Larry, 115
Clegg & Guttman, 83
Close, Chuck, 115
Condo, George, 85
Conner, Bruce, 115
Courbet, Gustave, 59
Dali, Salvador, 144
David, Jacques-Louis, 59
Deustch, David, 85
DiBenedetto, Steve, 83
Diamond, Jessica, 85
Dokupil, Georg, 86
Duchamp, Marcel, 51
Dwyer, Nancy, 48
Eliasson, Olafur, 144
Ess, Barbara, 80, 83
Flavin, Dan, 146
Gober, Robert, 44, 48, 51
Gonzales, Wayne, 119 – 120
Graham, Dan, 80, 83, 99
Green, Renée, 86
Greenbaum, Joanne, 120
Guston, Philip, 123
Halley, Peter, 29. 84, 85
Haring, Keith, 84
Hesse, Eva, 120
Hopkins, Peter, 48
Hopper, Edward, 121
Huebler, Douglas, 43, 44, 84
Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 59
Jaar, Alfredo, 48, 82
Jenkins, Michael, 49
Johns, Jasper, 29, 144
Jones, Ron, 88
Judd, Donald, 46, 85
Kelley, Mike, 145
Kessler, Jon, 48
Kilminik, Koren, 77
Koether, Jutta, 87, 91-93
Koons, Jeff, 46
Kounnellis, Jannis
Krueger, Barbara, 80
Kusama, Yayoi, 120
Holm, Peter, 99
Lawler, Louise, 27, 44, 82
LeVa, Barry, 43, 75
Lemieux, Annette, 51
Levine, Sherrie, 31, 84
LeWitt, Sol, 85, 104
Lichtenstein, Roy, 119
Marsden, Brice, 83
Martin, Agnes, 123
McCaslin, Mathew
McCollum, Alan, 44, 75
McDermott & McGough, 76
Merz, Gerhard, 31
Miller, John, 140-150
Morris, Robert, 46, 73, 143
Mosset, Olivier, 12, 13, 15, 29, 82, 85
Nagy, Peter, 81
Nanney, Chuck
Nauman, Bruce, 75
Newman, Barnett, 18 – 23
Noland, Cady, Cover, 44, 47, 49, 75, 97 – 105
O’Keefe, Georgia, 138
Ottman, Klaus, 141
Otterson, Joel, 148
Palermo, Blinky, 29
Parrino, Steven, 29, 47, 85
Parsons, Laurie, 44, 45, 48, 75
Picasso, Pablo, 127, 138
Prince, Richard, 84
Quentel, Holt, 47
Ray, Charles, 149
Rainer, Yvonne, 76
Reinhardt, Ad, 18
Richter, Gerhard, 29
Robbins, David, 49
Rockenschaub, Gerwald, 29
Ruscha, Ed, 46, 144
Ruyter, Lisa, 86, 87, 121-122
Ryman, Robert, 75
Salle, David, 80
Samore, Sam, 55-57
Schnabel, Julian, 80
Schuyffl, Peter, 81, 85
Schwartz, Bill, 51
Serra, Richard, 43
Shaver, Nancy, 44
Silverstein, E., 98
Smithson, Robert, 18, 46, 47, 48, 64, 76, 84, 85
Staehle, Wolfang, 44
Stahl, Mark, 44
Steinbach, Haim, 33 – 42, 44, 83
Stella, Frank, 123, 183
Stingel, Rudy, 76, 86
Stockholder, Jessica, 44, 48, 75, 144
Stone, William, 48
Swenson, Gene, 19
Taaffee, Philip, 29, 82
Torres, Felix-Gonzales, 67-74, 95, 146, 147
Tremblay, John, 122-123
Vaisman, Meyer, 81
Wallace & Donahue, 44, 48
Walsh, Dan, 86, 123-124, 125
Warhol, Andy, 25-31, 49, 103, 145
Weiner, Lawrence, 85
Whistler, James McNeill, 96
Wool, Christopher, 83

3 groups of 4

2008-05-27T01:36:00.005-04:00

llcooljo
2008

Kevin Regan
2004

The Residents
1974

Daniel Joseph Martinez, Monte Cazazza and Les Krims

2008-05-23T12:31:00.005-04:00

Daniel Joseph Martinez, 2000

Monte Cazazza, late 70s.

Les Krims, Self-Operation Fiction, 1970

Daniel Joseph Martinez is famous for being in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Monte Cazazza is famous for being an industrial music pioneer (see RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook (1983)). And Les Krims: "In 1971, a young boy was kidnapped in Memphis, Tennessee. The ransom requested for his return was the removal of Les Krims's photographs then on exhibition in Memphis. Krims' pictures were removed and the boy was released unharmed."

Two cover designs

2008-05-22T13:12:00.002-04:00

Are volcanoes still active

2008-03-21T23:59:00.001-04:00

2008-03-10T22:16:00.001-04:00

1 CPW 45C - the 10th annual installation, 2007-2008

2008-02-27T13:30:00.005-05:00

The 10th Annual Installation, 2007-2008, of the Peter Norton Collection in Peter Norton's private home, New York City. This is a small selection of the entire Peter Norton Collection. The 10th Annual Installation was curated by Amy Smith-Stewart.

2008-02-10T18:59:00.000-05:00

Today is the start of a new game...

2008-02-05T09:07:00.000-05:00

Did anyone notice these two things?

2008-01-30T21:47:00.001-05:00

In the early 2000s, Christian Viveros-Faune wrote art criticism for the New York Press while he codirected the gallery Roebling Hall in Williamsburg. He was the only reason for me to ever pick up that newspaper. Except for the I Saw You classifieds, which have morphed into the better-known Missed Connections on Craigslist. And I lost interest in reading those a long time ago. Back to CVF: I do not recall reading a blog post that mentioned his tenure at the New York Press and the much more obvious appearance of a conflict of interest there.

Spiritual America: just about every photograph in that show was labeled “Exhibition Copy” or something like that. There wasn't a single “original” Richard Prince photograph in that museum—they were all copies that were probably destroyed after the exhibition. (Prince has always produced his photographic work in editions of two.) So here was a major retrospective in a major world museum that, for a large part of the show, displayed facsimiles of the artist’s work. I cannot recall a single review that mentioned this. Is the joke on us now?

Here’s a related story from two years ago, perhaps posted two years too late:

On November 8, 2005, the first photograph to sell for more than a million dollars at auction was sold at Christie’s in New York. Richard Prince’s large Ektacolor print, Untitled (Cowboy), an edition of two from 1989, sold for the princely sum of $1,248,000 to Stellan Holm, a New York art dealer. The previous auction record for an individual photograph was set two years before, at Christie’s in London. On May 20, 2003, a daguerreotype taken in 1842 by the French traveler, artist, and historian, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, of the Athenian Temple on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, sold for $922,488. The aforementioned image is valuable for its age; the image was taken three years after the invention of photography.

Such a high price for a photograph may be attributed to market whims. Prince’s stock in the art world has risen in recent years, enough to position the artist as number five on the top artists list of ArtReview magazine’s annual Power 100, released in November 2005, where he was previously unranked. Recent high-profile exhibitions at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, work displayed in international art fairs, paintings appearing on a record cover, and interviews with or conducted by Prince in Artforum magazine have made him and his work on the tips of tongues. And Untitled (Cowboy), a large 50 x 70 inches, benefits from have the second edition in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the artist’s current market trendiness is not at issue here. In a larger sense, such a feat—the one million dollar mark—should have been cause for celebration for those who have tirelessly championed photography as art, but when considering the photograph in question—a tossed-off snapshot of a magazine page—an uneasiness sinks in.

$25 million in diamonds but don't breathe the diamond smoke

2008-01-11T07:19:00.000-05:00

Welcome to this situation

2008-01-10T20:40:00.000-05:00

An email to an esteemed person about the Tino Sehgal exhibit at Marian Goodman

2007-12-23T17:52:00.000-05:00

I went to see "This Situation", the Tino Sehgal exhibit at Marian Goodman, twice this past week. I intend on spending more time with it when I get back into town. I went over there on my lunch break so I could only stay for about 30 minutes each time. This was long enough to get a sense of the formal structure of the piece but I would like to stay longer. They did turn to me once and ask "and what do you think" so I very briefly got involved in the talk. It's quite a shock when you first see them confront somone in this way. They are not mean but most people do not like being put on the spot. Twice I saw people weakly say "I don't know" (which initiated their "reset"). My heart went out to these gallery visitors. I know how they felt: performance anxiety is the term. Perhaps they needed some intellectual Viagra before entering the gallery? But it also highlights the way serious public discussions tend to be BOTH about the perfomance of speakers AND the ideas conveyed by their speaking (form and content). But I would still be interested in getting more involved in the conversation. This is in part because of the quotes. Sehgal's position on economics and politics totally fascinates me. I find his perspective, though somewhat unclear, refreshing. But, that said, if I am totally honest, one of the other reasons I wish to participate in this conversation (Sehgal's piece) is because I harbor a desire to perform in public. Am I turning into an exhibitionist?

The group, the form of it, makes me think of the chorus in a Greek tragedy. But the way they talk in unison, those Brechtian moments when the artifice of it all is foregrounded, also makes me think of Devo. It also makes me think of Superman's home planet Krypton for some strange reason... I'm not sure I can explain why (since I've never been all that much into that sort of stuff). Sehgal could have easily gussied up the whole thing visually by putting the performers in costumes. But I think he made the right move by not doing this. It would have flattened out the meaning of the piece a great deal. It has far more depth the way that it is, with the performers in their own clothes (which we might also describe as costumes). It obscures the audience when you first enter the gallery. I wonder if audience members ever join this strange chorus and become one of the performers? But it also folds back on what I was saying in the above paragraph: it calls attention to the fact that we are all often performing when we are in public -- and especially when we are involved in a public discussion. Think of a classroom for example... Are we ever not performing? Perhaps when we are either asleep or completely smashed on alcohol or drugs... And if this is the chorus then where is the protagonist of this drama? This chorus sometimes spoke of an absent "speaker"...

Didn't Art & Language (or one of the artists involved with them) do some work that revolved around discussions (in the early 70s)? This work which I do not recall very well may have been also entirely dematerialized. I can't help but think part of why I do not know of it better is because it was not well documented. But as I have heard Sehgal say: art as a discipline is about the relationship between people and objects. The fact that this earlier work is not well remembered may having something to do with this too.

The premise behind Sehgal's entire artistic project (so far), not adding any more things (material objects) to the world, also totally fascinates me. I saw Sehgal speak at the Guggenheim a couple of years back (as a part of his Hugo Boss Prize nomination). It was definitely not a New York art scene event. There was hardly anyone there! And there seemed to be none of the usual VIPs. This surprised me. But anyway, I will tell you one thing about that talk and then end this long email. Sehgal was a very mild mannered fellow. He seemed very learned, a person who does his homework. The only time he began to lose his cool was when he started talking about the standard anti-capitalist position of avant-garde artists in the 20th century. He said they were deeply misguided.

LOL

2007-12-18T15:55:00.001-05:00

Aaron Young

2007-12-10T11:47:00.000-05:00

High Performance

Good Boy

Eusa Kills

2007-12-05T23:42:00.001-05:00

This is the lake of our feeling

2007-11-29T09:08:00.000-05:00

Molly Springfield at Mireille Mosler

2007-11-28T09:47:00.001-05:00

Marcia Tucker at the Whitney (1969 - 1977): a curatorial sketch (2)

2007-11-21T21:50:00.000-05:00

Robert Morris
Untitled
1965

Robert Morris
Untitled
1965

Jack Tworkov
End Place
1970

Jack Tworkov
Untitled OC (Sky Series)
1950

Rafael Ferrer
Maquette for Flotilla of Kayaks in a Tropical
1979

Rafael Ferrer
Merengue in Boca Chica
1983

Susan Hall
Business Woman
[before 1972]

Jay Van Everen
Abstraction
[1920s?]

Jay Van Everen
Untiteld (Abstraction)
1920-25

James Rosenquist
Empty Pail of Water
1974

James Rosenquist
Ceci n'est pas un pistolet
1996

Joseph E. Yoakum
Mount Siple in Ellsworth Highland District of Antarctica Island of South Pole Location
1970

Joseph E. Yoakum
Mt. Barney of Greater Dividing Range Near Brisbane, Australia
1966

Joseph E. Yoakum
Flying Saucer in 1958
1971

Italo Scanga
Untitled
1962

Bruce Nauman
Self-Portrait As A Fountain
1965

Gladys Nilsson
Disemboweled Suit Out Walking
1966

Gladys Nilsson
The Little Naturalist Field Trip
1993

Gladys Nilsson
Arytystic Pairanoiya
1978

Lee Krasner
Gothic Landscape
1961

Lee Krasner
Palingenesis
1971

William George Allan
Armond Teases the Fish
1987

William George Allan
Unlike the Magician
1969

Ree Morton
Poses (Signs of Love)
1976

Ree Morton
Terminal Clusters
1974

Ree Morton
Cell Darwing With Pink
1974

Joan Mitchell
Untitled (Abstract Dockside)
ca 1947

Joan Mitchell
#5
1955

Al Held
Mao
1967

Al Held
Phoenecia IV
1969

Joan Moment
Archipelago
2005

Betye Saar
Wizard
1972

Betye Saar
Liberation of Aunt Jemima
1972

Betye Saar
Biddy Mason's Home of the Open Hand
1989

Dennis Ashbaugh
Bio-Gel (aka The Jolly Green Giant)
1990-1

Richard Tuttle
3rd Rope Piece
1974

Charles Garabedian & Brian Murphy
Untitled
1975

Just Kick It Till It Biennials

2007-11-16T11:12:00.000-05:00

Hott off the press: Fia Backström, Carol Bove, Bozidar Brazda, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Roe Ethridge, Corey McCorkle, and Seth Price.

Brody Condon: 3 Modifications

2007-11-10T11:36:00.000-05:00

Brody Condon
Virgil de Voldère

Still Kicking It Till It Breaks

2007-11-09T09:29:00.000-05:00

Karen Rosenberg, Art in Review, New York Times, November 9, 2007
“[Bozidar] Brazda’s work has looked sharp in group shows, including one at this gallery last summer and another at the Kitchen last spring, but he seems to have trouble sustaining focus on his own.”

Roberta Smith, Art in Review, New York Times, October 5, 2007
“Gardar Eide Einarsson’s work continues to be a little too thin on the outside and a little too hollow on the inside; it is more impressive in group shows than on its own.”

Two months later: close, no cigar distributed

2007-11-01T09:29:00.000-04:00

What would the maximum complexity of a thought be?

2007-10-24T11:26:00.000-04:00

If you get in a fight with a dominant dog, you had better be able to win. If you don't win the dog learns that aggression works.

2007-10-21T19:00:00.000-04:00

Raymond Pettibon at David Zwirner

2007-10-20T17:10:00.000-04:00

Earthworks Gone Wrong

2007-09-26T15:36:00.000-04:00

Dennis Oppenheim must be pissed. Robert Smithson must be rolling in his grave.

Honest responses

2007-09-18T21:46:00.000-04:00

I love to read Artforum, and I love to read Frieze. They’re two of the best, most professional and thoughtful magazines on art around. The September issue of the latter has some particularly interesting reviews of recent exhibitions by Banks Violette and Dash Snow, perhaps some of the most insightful and bitingly funny commentary on these artists’ work. Both reviewers manage to criticize both the art and the art-world hype, shedding light on the vacuousness of the latter while taking a good look at the former, the actual stuff. You know, art. And what it’s all about.

For the Love of God

2007-09-01T00:01:00.000-04:00

Datura

2007-08-28T21:18:00.000-04:00

A brief, partial history of New York Rock in the early 2000s

2007-08-22T20:56:00.000-04:00

Ghost Exits, interview and photograph, January 2004

2007-08-16T17:05:00.000-04:00

Stephen Shore, Alec Soth and web 2,o

2007-08-09T14:06:00.000-04:00

So, I never look at Alec Soth's blog. I feel like I should but I don’t don’t. The only reason I can come up with is that I don’t like photography. Now this is an absurd thing to say and certainly not true of Alec Soth’s photography, which I like. What I like about Soth’s work is the that twinge of Southern Gothic in his work. He taps into the same thing that William Eggelston does. It’s that version of Southern Gothic in which Big Star comes somewhere after Flannery O’Conner and not, say, Harry Crews (or certainly not Nick Cave). But, anyway, all that aside, today I did look Alec Soth’s blog and the post, about Flickr, "Where are the great pictures on Flickr?", was what was on there. The starting premise here is a comment by Stephen Shore regarding Flickr: “I went on to Flickr and it was just thousands of pieces of shit, and I just couldn’t believe it. And it’s just all conventional, it’s all cliches, it’s just one visual convention after another.” This comment initially got me riled up so I started reading through the comments and ruminating on a response when I got to this (which I just noticed Mr. Soth posted again, in it’s own post, today, because the post I am talking about above, that I looked at this morning, is actually from yesterday, but anyway):

And I forget about my response to Shore’s remarks about Flickr because now I was entranced by the idea of this project he alluded to that involves the collection of photos from eBay. The cell phone photographs of things like the London bombing, aesthetically, interest me less but Shore is spot on in calling attention to them. The proliferation of cameras, cell phones more than anything else but the cameras in computers and security cameras after that, is really pretty amazing. Vietnam War coverage probably marks the first blush of this ubiquity, "the Global Village" or whatever you want to call it. The contemporary ubiquity of cameras begins with Rodney King. But the apotheosis of cell phone photography is probably best emblematized by the Abu Ghraib photographs. Everyone who carries a cell phone with a camera built-in to it is now a roving security camera. We are all the fabled panopticon, big brother, etc., so on and so forth. We are all now collectors of evidence. But then it occurred to me that this project of collecting eBay photos was some sort of web 2,o version of the photographic project by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan documented in their book Evidence (1977). Evidence is an excellent book and a collection of genuine instances of vernacular photography, photography used for some sort of functional documentary purpose. It is an aesthetic that was, arguably, ushered in by Ed Ruscha, years earlier, in books such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) and Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966).

Part 2: Links are the new content.

2007-08-09T14:03:00.000-04:00

Blog

Flickr

Jimmy Joe Roche

2007-08-06T23:04:00.000-04:00

2007-08-04T19:13:00.000-04:00

Facsimile reproduction of a Coum Transmissions text

2007-08-03T00:29:00.000-04:00

Performance By Artists, source of Coum Transmissions Text

2007-08-03T00:24:00.000-04:00

Two Instructional Videos

2007-07-31T19:16:00.000-04:00

For some reason I find it interesting that both these videos use the instructional video format. The Art of Bleeding is based on those films it seemed like your science teacher was showing in class to kill time but, unbeknownst to you, had to be shown to meet a school policy requirement. Boy Scouts. I just felt like writing that. And Nagi Noda used your mom's exercise video as its model (yeah, the one you caught your brother masturbating to). You remember how mom was gonna exercise every morning after you left for school? Nagi Noda is a commercial director of music videos and television commercials. In the world of commercial art she makes me think of Michel Gondry (I'm talking specifically of the Palm DVD). But in an art world context she makes me think of Luis Gispert. They seem like they might be examples of what Peter Plagens was talking about in that article when he wrote "The School of Mathew Barney (it's out there, folks, breeding like tree frogs)"? [Plagens, Peter "Contemporary Art, Uncovered", Art In America, February 2007]. The Art of Bleeding, however, is the product of the Los Angeles underground (the wing for which the Amok catalog is no mere catalog but a canon). Actually I think they're the offspring of Wallace Berman -- but filtered through Richard Elfman's Forbidden Zone (1980). The Art of Bleeding is a string of related projects. I suggest you direct your attention to the THE GOREY DETAILS HOTLINE 1-888-467-8535 (Toll Free) , their effort to collect "medical emergency narratives". Might we say that Art of Bleeding, aesthetically speaking, is like Throbbing Gristle but with the frown turned upside down? Well, regardless, I'm an admirer of Al Ridenour, one of our finest guerilla ontologists.

I Saw Genesis P-Orridge Walking Down the Street Last Night

2007-07-29T13:27:00.000-04:00

[Genesis was here.]

It was dusk, about 7:45 PM. We were on our way to McCarren Park to listen to Sonic Youth play Daydream Nation to a gigantic empty pool full of cool people. We had waited until earlier this week to try to get tickets so we missed it. It was sold out. We were on our way to the park where we were gonna sit on the grass outside the pool and listen to the show with Chris and a bunch of his friends. (By the way, it sounded good.) But anyway, my wife and I were stopped on Knickerbocker, at the light on Johnson (where Knickerbocker merges with Morgan) and Genesis P-Orridge walked in front of my wife's black car. He looked at us. He looked into my eyes. Should I say he or she? S/he looked sort of like he did on that recent Wire cover, but less like a hooker, and more like that cool old lady that lives down the street who sells you pot and has all these amazing obscure, scary books and stories of living in Morocco and what not. But all the normal kids say she's an evil witch and she likes it like that. It still kind of bothers you though because you are a neophyte and you want everyone to like everyone (even though you are a total freak). Where s/he was walking is technically the East Williamsburg Industrial Park not Bushwick. It's where the loft scene growing up around the Morgan stop is but it spills across Flushing into Bushwick (where we live, a few blocks up Knickerbocker). I wonder where s/he was going? This was my second P-Orridge sighting in the part of Brooklyn that those kids told me is "the wrong part of town, dude" (they barked it at me after spraying me from the fire hydrant as I biked by 'em). The other sighting was while we were switching to the M train from the J train around midnight. P-Orridge and his small entourage sat across from Ivan and I on an empty M train car. They took it two stops to the Myrtle Ave stop and got off. The L train intersects with the M train at Myrtle. I wondered then where they lived. I figured they must live somewhere out here, Bushwick or East Williamsburg, if they were riding the train that far out, to the limits of hipster-land. I doubt I would have recognized him that time but earlier that evening we had attended the COUM Transmissions presentation that was part of that Performa Biennial. They showed some footage of COUM Transmissions performances from the early 70s. It was a casual event. Genesis sat in a chair and talked off the top of his head over what seemed like raw footage someone found in their closet 25 years after the fact.

peeair and the pill poppers vs Barbara Streisand

2007-07-27T19:04:00.000-04:00

Read A Book vs. your mommy

2007-07-17T08:04:00.000-04:00

The Amazing Mr. Slug vs. Laurie Anderson

2007-07-10T22:29:00.000-04:00

Madonna vs. Magik Markers

2007-07-09T22:29:00.000-04:00

"For their money, the fans got to see Madonna simulating sex with a guitar..."

The thought, no matter how remote, that Madonna is stealing ideas from Magik Markers thrills me to death (for some reason). It's Elisa Ambrogio's concept of female guitar wanking. That's what I'm talking about. Yes.

Frog did something similar

2007-07-08T22:29:00.000-04:00

Viral Marketing

2007-07-06T09:13:00.000-04:00

I don't know whether Ecstatic Peace is running a scam on Macy's or scam on me? This showed up via the MySpace bulletin and made me scratch my head. I wondered, for a moment, whether Ecsatic Peace had partnered with Macy's to do a viral marketing campaign...? Or if someone at Escatic Peace found some way to scam Macy's and they are propagating it on MySpace? Both of those ideas sound too far out to me. This bulletin reached 8685 people. That's how many friends Ecstatic Peace has right now. Of course, the most likely explanation is that the Ecsatic Peace account has been hacked (and they just need to change their password or whatever it is one does). I'm certainly not clicking on that link or pasting it in my browser. Ecsatic Peace and Macy's, what an odd pairing. Maybe not... Did you see the Jack Spade mailer from the end of June? The style aped the cover of Sonic Youth's A Thousand Leaves.

The thing with Lonelygirl15 is that it's an experimental work of fiction, exploiting new media, that for some reason looks like a viral marketing campaign. Is this what happens in Marshall McLuhan's World? Everything, in a sense, becomes marketing and advertising? We will no longer be able to tell the difference between what is marketing and what is not marketing? Can you tell? Is the concept of authenticity outmoded? That the autographic mark of the artist is a kind of branding is old news. We've all heard this before. And television commercials are often formally more radical than the programs they buttress (the big budget stuff at least). Timothy Leary, apparently, even said that the future will look back on television commercials as the pinnacle of 20th Century Art (or something along those lines and, yes, with a capital "A"). This, by the way, is an actual anecdote from a friend of mine. I find it to be rather hilarious. Perhaps Pop and everything after is some wild attempt to catch up with the times by those who are trailing behind them... Style, form, branding... What is left if we reject those things? I'm not sure the content, at a core level at least, has changed all that much (for all of recorded history). I mean, after all, is it the archaisms that make Shakespeare interesting to us or what? Is it possible to be radical on this level? Is this not what the Surrealists attempted with all their games? Is this not what all those 20th Century "bachelor machines" were about? And in the end all those games seem to rest on form (style and branding...) -- not content. The form, in those cases, is the content (and vice versa). In terms of content Lonelygirl15 is not at all radical but in terms of form it is (for the moment).

evidence AND/OR free advertising?

2007-07-05T09:13:00.000-04:00

When I saw the above Jack Spade mailer the first thing that popped into my mind was Sonic Youth. What specifically came to mind was the cover of A Thousand Leaves. And I guess I could even be persuaded into saying it looks kind of of like a nice version of Thurston Moore's punk rock flyers and what not from the 80s (the Jack Spade more than the SY cover (color xeroxing was expensive back then)). But notice that the Jack Spade piece says that the collage is by Alex, age 8. And the cover of the Sonic Youth disc depicts a girl, perhaps age 8, with bunny ears (actually hamster ears). On the cover of the mailer is a gorilla with bunny ears. But what I wondered was whether this was the idea of the person who was hired to design this artifact and whether it was their idea to riff on the idea of the Sonic Youth cover? And what is interesting about this is the possibility that Jack Spade (or the organization that goes by that name) may have had little to do with the idea -- except saying "okay" and "we like that one" and putting their signature (I mean brand mark) on the thing. There is something medieval about it. Do you belong to the guild? I find this far more interesting than the thought that Alex is the Spade progeny and this was Jack Spade's idea. I don't know why. But I do wonder if they ever get together to do a Sonic BBQ in rural Mass.?

Send and receive

2007-06-30T22:22:00.000-04:00

A Book Review in the Form of a Fragment of an Email Correspondence

2007-06-27T08:57:00.000-04:00

I don't know if I am going to openings. I suppose I ought to start going to those things. Are you going? The only one I know of is Banks Violette.

Yeah, I'm not sure what I think of Miranda July either. Like everything these days, it seems like something I saw before but I can't quite recall. Too much of culture operates that way now. You may be right about the Cassavetes reference regarding her film. Her book, which I flipped through at Spoonbill (it was “on the table"), reminded me of Raymond Carver but I'd definitely have to read more to confirm this hunch. I'm not sure whether I want to give it the time. I think her target audience is really the 40 to 50 year old demographic. Anyway, Cassavetes is a hero to that Olypmia rah rah we're gay scene, is he not? For me he is in that category of stuff I feel like I should have seen and be able to talk about by now. But I can't. I have not seen a single Cassavetes movie. One day, perhaps... Actually I'm not sure what Miranda July's involvement in The Need was. I could be wrong about that. I saw it on her website. She's been around forever -- over ten years of doing stuff... Maybe I knew this before and forgot about it but I think it’s kind of cool she was doing performances opening for punk bands (I think that was primarily on the West Coast). It does not seem as original now but in the late 90s it probably seemed like a very original throw back to stuff you read about happening now and then in the late 70s or early 80s, in New York, the last original time (it's when hip-hop came along too, man). So, I guess that's why her super star sounding name is so familiar to me. I tell you, she's haunting me! She keeps fluttering around my head -- and even passing through it! I can't decide if I should just read her damned book or not. I mean I just can't consume it in five minutes and move on like something I might find online. Maybe one is supposed to simply display the book on the bookshelf (with the DVD)? Anyway, the Need are ok. I never want to listen to them. They are spazzy retro punk made by fags (I do not at all mean that negatively). Off the top of my head, not going back to listen to it, I want to say it sounds indebted to Essential Logic. I would strongly recommend that group to you. The early Essential Logic is freaking amazing.

Fuckin Rad Dude!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2007-06-18T17:07:00.000-04:00

For me it's a monument to coincidence.

These are bands...

2007-06-17T02:55:00.000-04:00

These Are Powers rocked. I thought they sounded more like the Liars or The Ex on MySpace (but I guess with a former member of the Liars that makes sense because I always thought the Liars sounded deeply indebted to The Ex). But live These Are Powers made me think more of Confusion Is Sex era Sonic Youth but heavier. It was all swells of dissonance and chiming overtones. When I mentioned the SY connection to S. after the finished their set she told me to shut up.

SIDS (aka Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) can be very loud. They sound raunchier live, like the sound is coming apart, the way tender morsels of meat fall from a bone, as a rocket rushes forward into the sky. This, in my view, served them well. I also saw them play a few nights before in Don Pedro's basement. It hurt my ear.

In the basement at Silent Barn I thought Pterodactyl sounded a lot like These Are Powers but jazzier. This is all wrong. On MySpace they sound sort of like Akron Family or a sloppier version of the Beta Band. Lately everyone sounds like Akron Family or Beta Band to me. Meringue were so ahead of it. You see, we live in an age of harmonizing, man. Anyway, Pterodactyl seem more at home in their skin than These Are Powers who are preoccupied with the news and those old R. Kern and Nick Zedd films. I will see Pterodactyl (and These Are Powers) again but not if I have to go to Manhattan. What do I care if the PAs are better and they have A/C units?

June 16, 2007
Silent Barn

Flag Day 1985

2007-06-14T13:04:00.000-04:00

Margaret Griffis took this important photograph.

I was in the audience.

Black Flag on Flag Day.

Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

The Amazing Mr. Slug

2007-05-17T19:48:00.000-04:00

The Amazing Mr. Slug is amazing.

Other reviews

2007-04-23T21:54:00.000-04:00

New York Times

Artforum

Shelve it

2007-04-16T23:46:00.000-04:00

It wasn’t until after I wrote about Dave McKenzie’s (B)lack that I realized how much work in Just Kick It Till It Breaks presents shelves or tables as a primary element. (B)lack is not a literal shelf, of course, but Carol Bove and Josephine Meckseper use real shelves in their work in the exhibition. Bozidar Brazda and Fia Backström use tables as a key part of their installations. (Tables are to sculpture as shelves are to reliefs.) Uses of flags and banners have been common in contemporary art—witness Michael Phelan’s and Garder Eide Einarsson’s work in the exhibition—but I haven’t yet noticed shelves. Haim Steinbach (above) is an obvious precedent, but I am sure there are others.

Back in (B)LACK

2007-04-11T22:51:00.000-04:00

I am interested in Dave McKenzie’s (B)LACK (2006), a work of colored pencil on paper in the collection of Anthony Elms and Jacqueline Terrassa of Chicago. McKenzie draws on an instruction manual for an Ikea shelf, coloring in a warm, medium-brown skin tone onto the man sizing up the shelf on the wall. There are also coffee-cup stains, folds, and other signs of distress on the paper. I think some holes have been cut out too.

In a handout/checklist now available for the exhibition, the author writes, “This collage transforms generic directions … into a document more specific to [the artist’s] needs and identity, underscoring how one’s concept of self in contemporary society is often produced by consumer culture and the media rather than the other way around.” Sure. But I wonder if an artist would need to alter such instructions in order to make such a critique. Or even if such a critique is necessary.

One only has to look at advertising circulars from stores such as Macy’s or Kmart, the kind you find in the Sunday newspaper. Since the 1990s, or maybe even the 1980s, department stores and discount retail chains have increasing included nonwhites as models. Seeing a black man modeling an expensive suit in mainstream advertising might have been rare twenty, thirty, forty years ago. Now it’s commonplace—though of course, like in prime-time television, parity may not yet be reached.

Back to McKenzie’s work. Is the creative, artistic act of drawing or defacing the Ikea shelf instructions an act of rebellion? If, as I posit, representations of nonwhite people have become common in this type of consumer publication, what is the meaning of McKenzie’s gesture? The “lack” that McKenzie points to isn’t as big an issue as the artwork (and the accompanying text from the Kitchen) indicates. The interpretation offered by the exhibition handout doesn’t go far enough—it’s too obvious. And boring. A careful analysis—visual or textual—of this kind of imagery or these type of publications might uncover something else, something more crucial, about representation. Including more blacks and Latinos, for example, in the JC Penney catalogue is a calculated move on that company’s part: it wants to depict a more culturally diverse society while at the same time bring in more African American and Latino consumers by portraying these groups wearing JC Penney clothes and sleeping on JC Penney bedspreads. Progressive politics becomes a capitalist tool. Companies make previously undersought consumers welcome, make them feel good, in order to sell them stuff. Let’s talk about political candidates pandering to the “black vote.” This larger, more important idea relates to the theme of Just Kick It Till It Breaks, but I don’t quite see it addressed in McKenzie’s work.

While on the subject of advertising circulars, I remember that in the mid-1990s, Wal-Mart began using store managers and employees and their children as models in their product photography. It was certainly a populist move, a novelty pleasing both workers and shoppers, but I assume it also saved the company a lot of money. I imagine Wal-Mart didn’t pay these people the same rate as they would for professional models—if they were paid at all. It reminds me of what some art magazines and related publications do for art critics: give them the pleasure of seeing their names in print while not having to actually pay for the writing. Few art critics make money writing about art, and few Wal-Mart employees earn a living wage working for that company.

Back to (B)lack. Or rather those Ikea shelves. Full disclosure: I bought two of them maybe six years ago and installed them in my living room. I’ve stacked several hundred CDs on them, and the sturdy shelves have held up just fine.

"The MFA Is the New MBA"

2007-04-10T14:42:00.000-04:00

Josephine Meckseper

2007-04-05T15:20:00.000-04:00

On her Saatchi Gallery page (a lingering element of her participation in the show USA Today) it states that Josephine Meckseper’s work “[often uses] department store display cases and sales ephemera.” Commentary on her work of this kind, and, perhaps, her show % at Elizabeth Dee, has clearly established that Meckseper’s formal vocabulary is on some level taken from the visual vocabulary of the way stores display their products. But, the thing is, questions still remain. I say this because I find it difficult to imagine myself mistaking one of Meckseper’s pieces with an authentic instance store display. So, I then wonder, what exactly is Meckseper’s relationship to this? Meckseper’s relationship to it is very different than Haim Steinach’s and Fia Backström’s because with them, I could, in fact, imagine myself mistaking their work with the thing they are imitating. Their work is a very literal imitation of the way products are displayed in stores at present. Steinbach and Backström mime different versions of it but they overlap in terms of the literalness of their attack. Meckseper’s approach is, rather, a more metaphorical one. It merely suggests the idea of store display without literally imitating it. But, a sound argument could nonetheless be made that all three artists reference store display for a similar reason: in order to call attention to the fact that galleries are stores, the kind that sell art (yawn). However, that aside, what distinguishes Meckseper’s work from Steinbach’s or Backstrom’s is a quality that she has in common with David Altmejd’s: the poetry filter. In other words, Meckseper like Altmejd takes the idea of product display from the store and filters it through something else. For example, with Altmejd’s work we get what looks like store display systems, the sort found in upscale clothing stores, boutiques and department stores, but filtered through a fantasy of zombie apocalypse, Dawn of the Dead (or maybe, rather, Dungeons and Dragons). He takes the product plinth and converts it into a stage for some romantic fantasy of disaster and decay. Meckseper does something similar but with different filters. She takes the shelves and vitrines of boutiques and departments stores and filters them through the covers of a couple of early Brian Eno albums: No Pussyfooting (Eno’s 1973 collaboration with Robert Fripp) and Here Comes The Warm Jets (1974). No Pussyfooting is there in larger proportions than Here Come the Warm Jets but there are elements of both. The effect this kind of filter creates is a kind of temporal confusion, an anachronistic collision of styles, a look that might be described as dystopian glam. Another way of saying the same thing, and, by the way, it is mostly only in evidence in Just Kick It Till It Breaks in Meckseper’s only shelf piece in the show, Untitled (Only A Monster Can Allow Himself the Luxury of Seeing Things As They Are), 2005, is that she is doing a rendition of the shop windows of old Paris photographed by Eugene Atget—but in the manner of someone obsessed with the A Clockwork Orange and/or, possibly, Brazil. (I suppose I ought to acknowledge that in all of this are some submerged allusions to Minimalism.)

Setting the pop culture register aside, and focusing on what we might call the professional register, that is art history, Meckseper’s shelves, vitrines, and plinths make me think of two projects and one artist. The first project is the ‘Exhibition of Surrealist Objects’ at the Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, May 1936. It's documented in a recent book, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros: 1938–1968 by Alice Mahon, a book which, by the way, relates in an interesting way to Just Kick It Till It Breaks (a relationship that one ought to elaborate on at some point). And the other project is Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise, 1935–41. Meckseper formally and conceptually borrows heavily from both projects. However, what probably intrigues me most about her work is what I am reading as a couple of weird coded references to La Boîte-en-valise. The more prominent one (at least for me) is to Air de Paris, one of the works in La Boîte-en-valise. What I am talking about, my hunch, is that this is what those clear glass objects are alluding to. You know, they look like little flower vases and Meckseper typically presents them upside down. In Untitled (Only A Monster Can Allow Himself the Luxury of Seeing Things As They Are) there are two arrangements of this sort and one of them also looks like a clear glass dildo. Der Umkerhrbare Lauf der Dinge, 2005 (one of the three works Meckseper exhibits in Just Kick It Till It Breaks), a work which is, by the way, not a shelf, vitrine, or a plinth and, arguably, makes no references to all that store display stuff, also features these clear glass objects. Arguing that it too alludes to Air de Paris may be a bit of a stretch but I think it still makes sense. The object probably looks more like, on the one hand, some sort of weird fountain, those weird fountain-like thingies in Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and, on the other, glass bongs and hookahs. An intriguing thought is generated if you parse this, the hookah part in particular, with the idea that it is alluding to Air de Paris (but perhaps I digress). And, the other weird coded reference to La Boîte-en-valise, one that Meckseper also regularly seems to make, is to Duchamp’s miniature reproduction of Fountain (which in the context of La Boîte-en-valise is, perhaps significantly, right side up). Meckseper’s coded allusion, in this case, occurs in terms of her rolls of toilet paper and her toilet brushes. However, it must be said that, despite all my talk of Duchamp, he is not the artist to whom Meckseper owes her greatest debt. It is, rather, the American Joseph Cornell (who was sort of a Surrealist (this “sort of…” part is important)). And I would argue this despite her sly protestations to the contrary in Modern Painters (March 2006). Perhaps we might put it this way: Cornell is Meckseper’s artistic father (and thus a proxy for her real father?)...

Teen Age Riot

2007-04-01T12:44:00.000-04:00

Sonic Youth in the “mid-eighties” is a very different band than Sonic Youth in the late eighties.

Bad Cover Version

2007-03-29T23:34:00.000-04:00

Bob Nickas’s Collection Diary

2007-03-25T11:42:00.000-04:00

This is not the first time I've thought something along these these lines but I was re-reading Bob Nickas’ Collection Diary (2004? I can't find the damn date on this book which was published by JRP/Ringier (how does one type this damn name?)) and it occurred to me that Bob Nickas is an art world version of Byron Coley. Yes, in order to understand what I mean by this comment you really have to know who Byron Coley is.

Only a monster can allow himself the luxury of seeing things as they are.

2007-03-24T20:19:00.000-04:00

E.M. Cioran, History and Utopia, translated by Richard Howard (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998)

Chronophobia

2007-03-23T15:48:00.000-04:00

Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time In the Art of 1960s
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), xi-xii

"Kill This Hippie Shit"

2007-03-21T00:12:00.000-04:00

The “target” of Michael Phelan’s tie-dye painting in Just Kick It Till It Breaks is twofold—hippies and high modernism. It’s a hilarious picture of everything political revolutionaries and avant-garde artists mock: pacifist, stoner lifestyles and Greenbergian formalism. I don’t think the Beatles ever wore tie-dye. Or Lou Reed. Or the Red Army Faction and the Angry Brigade.

Sparks’s and Richter’s source image.

2007-03-20T23:18:00.000-04:00

To the left is the primary image that Meredyth Sparks and Gerhard Richter uses for their work. This is a fairly well-known image to people familiar with the Red Army Faction. According to Richard Huffman, the author of the forthcoming book This is Baader-Meinhof (publisher unknown), “The images come from full-body images taken when Ensslin was in police custody. I believe that they are from photos taken of Ensslin as she is entering the courthouse built on the the grounds of Stammheim prison, especially for the Baader-Meinhof trial.” What’s not known is if this image is an official West German police photograph or a newspaper photograph. I am curious to know how the image was circulated in the late 1970s. (Robert Storr’s monograph on Richter probably has the answer, but I do not own a copy of it.)

Meredyth Sparks and the Red Army Faction

2007-03-20T21:55:00.000-04:00

The single contribution to Just Kick It Till It Breaks by Meredith Sparks is a pair of digital prints, defaced with black glitter and pieces of aluminum foil and presented adjacently to form one work. Called Untitled (Gudrun with record player) (2007), it depicts Gudrun Ensslin, a member of the revolutionary/terrorist group the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, who died with several comrades under mysterious circumstances on October 18, 1977, in a West German prison. The smaller work depicts a turntable owned by Andreas Baader. Baader was a leader of the Red Army Faction and Ensslin’s boyfriend. Glitter and foil covers portions of the images; this takes on some geometric forms and straight lines but are mostly irregular shapes, acting as both a decorative element and an intervention. The word FOUND in all caps crosses the scan of the record player. The end result looks like a mix of Bauhaus design and Russian Constructivist photography collaged by a teenager.

Importantly, the linking of a portrait (Ensslin) and an object (turntable), that is, media personality and musical device/consumer product, dovetails with the choice of subject matter in Sparks’s other recent work. She performs similar arts-and-craftsy interventions with scanned photos of bands, musicians, and performers such as the Ramones, Ian Curtis, the Velvet Underground, Talking Heads, Kraftwerk, Elvis Presley, Abba, Roxy Music, Blondie, and so on. Like the Red Army Faction, these bands were active during the 1970s and beyond. The well-known and formerly underground bands are ones that, presumably, the artist admires or has some affinity toward; they also have a built-in audience of fans, which easily works in Sparks’s favor regarding the publicity of her work. Her subject matter reminds me of work by Elizabeth Peyton, who chooses more mainstream subjects (Prince William, Kurt Cobain, Eminem) for her paintings. While Peyton lovingly admires her subjects, Sparks graphically cuts and scratches her images—an aggressive attack—but she also decorates them like a devoted fan with a weird sense of reverence. This kind of respect reminds me of punk shows where the audience constantly tries to upstage the band onstage, transcending their role of passive observer but not quite reaching the level of the performers.

Taking the curatorial theme into consideration, Untitled (Gudrun with record player) obviously romanticizes a member of the West German terrorist group in the same way she does with her images of musicians and rock stars. She also, I think, recognizes that images themselves have the power to do this. Sparks is aware of this seduction, but such an awareness falls short of “questioning” or making a critical commentary. While thinking about Sparks’s work I am reminded of those t-shirts with Alberto Korda’s photograph of Che Guevara sold at shopping malls across the country and in “punk” shops on Saint Mark’s Place here in New York. In both cases, the image is severed from its revolutionary potential and meaning to simply presents superficial, truncated knowledge and empty gesture. This is a pose, and is not a critique, of revolutionary chic. Sparks writes that the manipulations to her source image “establishes a stuttering or skipping effect; this effect disrupts the image’s cultural circulation, a circulation in which images continually replay events and circumstances, where meaning is prescribed, shaped and enacted repeatedly for the viewer.” I am still trying to see how this works.

One last note: the German artist Gerhard Richter painted both the record player and a cropped version of the Ensslin photograph, showing her from the waist up, in his renowned painting series October 18, 1977 (1988), now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I believe that most people in the art world are familiar with the Red Army Faction through these paintings more than any other source (news, books, being there, etc.) Scholars have persuasively argued for the importance of memory and history in Richter’s work; I don’t think revolutionary chic ever figured into their interpretations.

2007-03-18T01:49:00.000-04:00

Buying In or Selling Out

2007-03-15T00:07:00.000-04:00

We know the title of Just Kick It Till It Breaks comes from the Angry Brigade’s 8th Communique or, if not that, the back of Tom Vague’s book about the Angry Brigade (or some other book like it). (The back of Vague’s book, by the way, is also reproduced with the 8th Communique at the above link.) We get all that. But what I am wondering now is whether the title was suggested by Josephine Meckseper? Or, if not suggested by Meckseper herself then by one of her pieces: Selling Out? Notice the copy of a book about the Angry Brigade in Meckseper’s piece? You can read the “wall label” about this Meckseper piece on her Saatchi Gallery page. It sure is interesting that this particular piece is also used to “illustrate” Meckseper’s page. Of course, the connection between Selling Out and (the title of) Just Kick It Till It Breaks is by no means obvious. It is completely indirect. And I think it’s something that, to use the title of Bozidar Brazda’s work (also in the show), only “Insiders” would get. It is something of a nod or a wink. I say this because how many people in the world have the Angry Brigade’s 8th Communique in the forefront of their minds? The Angry Brigade in and of itself is a difficult reference to get (unless, maybe, you are from the U.K.) or a punk who read Vague (back in the day). I would even contend the reference may even be a bit oblique for your average American Situationist-head too (because they tend to dwell on Debord’s writing). So, after putting all this out on the table, what I am beginning to wonder is whether Selling Out is a footnote pointing to Just Kick It Till It Breaks? Or is Just Kick It Till It Breaks a footnote pointing to Selling Out?

What I am talking about here is like the concept of the index explored by Rosalind Krauss in her famous essay “Notes on the Index” (in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths) but it’s different. It functions in a more peculiar and particular way, and I think the concept of a footnote actually captures it better. Footnotes have an indexical function, but they also have a parenthetical one. I would argue that it is this parenthetical function that is relevant here. The footnote used in this way formally exemplifies Jacques Derrida’s concept of the supplement, the engine (or rather monkey wrench) behind a deconstructive reading. But, I would add that what formally distinguishes Just Kick It Till It Breaks (the show and the work in it) from Derrida is in the way these deconstructive elements are built-in. Perhaps a better way of saying this is that the deconstruction is written into the work. At first it seems as though this is an anti-Derridean effect because it privileges the one who is doing the writing. Derrida’s ideas, I would argue, privilege the reader—not the writer. But, the truth is Just Kick It Till It Breaks is merely anti-Derridean in the same way that Derrida (the cryptic and impossible to understand writer) is also anti-Derridean.

Who wants Yesterday’s Newspaper?

2007-03-14T00:03:00.000-04:00

One of Dave McKenzie’s two contributions to Just Kick It Till It Breaks is called Yesterday’s Newspaper. The set-up is simple: a gallery assistant places a folded copy of the New York Times—straight from the newsstand—on a low wooden base every day the gallery is open. As the work’s title indicates, the issue is not that particular day’s edition but the one before.

The press release for McKenzie’s last solo exhibition, held January 5–February 10, 2007, at Small A Projects in Portland, Oregon, says that Yesterday’s Newspaper “is an object that is at once useless and historical, disposable and archived. It is also a sculpture that amplifies the disappointments of the present while anticipating the brighter possibilities of the future. Yesterday’s Newspaper relies on a caretaker (in this case, the gallery) for its maintenance.” The press release’s author compares this activity to the replenishing of ephemeral work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres; Robert Gober also worked with newspapers in the early 1990s with a different purpose. But I digress.

As the major theme of the Kitchen exhibition is reappropriation using a wide nexus of quotes and source material—more on that later—Yesterday’s Newspaper references an earlier moment and another artist, Dan Graham. McKenzie’s work is a literal manifestation of Graham’s idea of the “just-past,” which in turn was borrowed from Walter Benjamin (who cribs from Marx and the Surrealists). Graham articulated this theory in a short talk that was published in the first Discussions in Contemporary Culture (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1987). He writes:

I believe now that the task of the artist is in part to resuscitate the just-past—that period in time made amnesiac by commodity culture—and apply it as “anti-aphrodisiac” (Walter Benjamin’s phrase). The Rolling Stones’s song “Yesterday’s Papers”—“Who wants yesterday’s papers? Who wants yesterday’s girl? No one in the world”—make this anti-aphrodisiac aspect of the just-past clear.

According to Benjamin, “progress,” the 19th-century scientific and ultimately capitalistic myth, is expressed in commodities, fashion goods which “produce a sense of eternal newness.” This makes progress a mythical goal, never to be reached, for there is always the new and it is always superceded by the next new. For Benjamin, then, progress is actually a state of stasis. And yet it is this very stasis that makes the recovery of the just-past potentially subversive.

It’s amusing to see an artist make a work of art based directly on Graham’s theory, whether intentional or not. The Graham essay is scanned and posted below—it’s only three pages long, four with the footnotes and well worth the read. Everything in the text illuminates a lot of what’s going on in Just Kick It Till It Breaks. The essay could also potentially work against the exhibition, much of which focuses on the revolutionary sixties, and make McKenzie’s Yesterday’s Newspaper surprisingly stronger than the other works because it focuses on the importance of what’s happening now without a whiff of nostalgia. Consider Graham again, this time in conversation with the video artist Michael Smith in the May 2004 Artforum:

DG: I thought Outstanding Young Men was hilarious. You were reviving ‘80s disco culture, but it was a ridiculous revival. I think it’s very important to look at how ridiculous the “just past” is.

MS: The what?

DG: The just past: Walter Benjamin said the just past is very important—it’s a little like “Yesterday’s Papers” by the Rolling Stones. They ask, “Who wants yesterday’s papers?” Nobody. Nobody wants to look at the just past. People almost always look to a few decades before instead. And every time you have a neo-’60s or a neo-’70s, like we’re seeing now among artists, you’re canceling out the just past. I was trying to get at the just past in the Dia Art Foundation roof piece, for example, combining the corporate atrium of the ‘80s and the alternative space of the ‘70s.

MS: I’m thinking that the “just past” is always Mike’s present. It’s fresh for him, since he’s always behind the times. Everything has been absorbed and digested before Mike even considers a taste.

The Anti-Aphrodisiac

2007-03-14T00:01:00.001-04:00

Cultural Mapping: An Incomplete List

2007-03-13T01:09:00.000-04:00

Below is a catalogue of the artists in Just Kick It Till It Breaks, a group exhibition on view at the Kitchen in New York, March 8–April 28, 2007, and their recent involvement in other group exhibitions in New York (and London) during the past two years. As indicated toward the bottom, all fourteen artists with work or performance in Just Kick It Till It Breaks have been written about in the world’s leading art magazine. The participating artists are: Fia Backström, Carol Bove, Bozidar Brazda, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Roe Etheridge, Adam Helms, Scott Hug, Corey McCorkle, Dave McKenzie, Josephine Meckseper, Michael Phelan, Seth Price, Meredyth Sparks, and Kelley Walker.

In Practice Projects, Winter 07, SculptureCenter, 2007
Fia Backström
Gardar Eide Einarsson

The Gold Standard, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2006–7
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Seth Price
Kelley Walker

Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006
Josephine Meckseper
Kelley Walker

Bringing the War Home, Elizabeth Dee, 2006
Fia Backström
Carol Bove
Scott Hug
Michael Phelan

Grey Flags, SculptureCenter, 2006
Seth Price
Kelley Walker

USA Today: Works from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, 2006
Josephine Meckseper
Kelley Walker

Greater New York 2005, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2005
Carol Bove
Bozidar Brazda
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Adam Helms
Corey McCorkle
Michael Phelan (?)
Seth Price
Kelley Walker

Lesser New York, Fia Backström’s house in Brooklyn, 2005
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Seth Price

Artforum (cover)
Carol Bove
Kelley Walker

Artforum (articles, reviews, writings, gossip column)
Fia Backström
Carol Bove
Bozidar Brazda
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Roe Etheridge
Adam Helms
Scott Hug
Corey McCorkle
Dave McKenzie
Josephine Meckseper
Michael Phelan
Seth Price
Meredyth Sparks
Kelley Walker

Affiliations
Elizabeth Dee
Reena Spaulings
Maccarone
John Connelly Presents
Marianne Boesky
Team
Continuous Project
North Drive Press

Just Kick It Till It Breaks

2007-03-12T21:15:00.000-04:00

The title of the Kitchen show Just Kick It Till It Breaks is taken from the Angry Brigade's 8th communique. It's reproduced above as it appears in Tom Vague's book Anarchy In the UK: The Angry Brigade. The Hanger-On, by the way, is the one who deserves credit for initially catching this reference.

Fia Backström and Kelley Walker

2007-03-11T23:24:00.000-04:00

Double Images

2007-03-04T06:50:00.000-05:00

I apologize for the fact that I initially read this editorial cartoon as being about our discussion of the Paul Chan studio visit incident. This at first might seem like an allegorical reading but it's not. Neither story is being read through or in terms of the other. The cartoon appeared in the February 24th-March 2nd issue of The Economist (unsigned in keeping with their usual editorial policy of the magazine). We posted our discussion on February 15th. I find instances of synchronicity of this sort intriguing when they happen to me personally. Supernatural explanations are tempting but I'm more inclined to think it has something to do with the selective nature of our attention at any given moment. Anyway, I initially read "an American chap on eBay" as a reference to Chan not George Bush. I of course immediately realized that I was misreading the cartoon which was, nonetheless, producing two distinct gestalts for me. And each gestalt has nothing to do with the other. If I focus my attention on one it obscures the other. This intrigues me. Is it a non-retinal analogue of one of those "classic double images" both Salvador Dali and Jasper Johns seem so fond of?

Dash Snow's Coke

2007-02-24T09:51:00.000-05:00

The first eBay pranks were about the idea or possibility of an eBay prank (or something like it). These works both celebrated and mocked their target, eBay. And what we remember best about them is the form, an eBay prank. However, the moment when this form (an eBay prank) could still be viewed as an interesting primary content for a work of art has passed. To be an interesting work of art an eBay prank must, while exploiting the form, be about something else. This is the case with Brian Electro's eBay prank, which earlier in the week was posted on eBay and then a day later pulled by eBay. Brian's work is about Dash Snow and eBay is simply the vehicle to deliver the goods. The real subject is not some person, the one who goes by the memorable name, but the name itself and the (media) persona indexed by it. The work calls attention to the fact that Dash Snow is really "Dash Snow."

Tuesday talks: Jerry Saltz and Paul Chan

2007-02-15T21:39:00.000-05:00

De Selby: Did you get into the Paul Chan lecture? Someone at SVA said they called Columbia and were told only Columbia grad students can attend those lectures.

I forgot that Jerry Saltz was also giving a talk last night. I arrived at the studios just as some fellow students were headed over there. So I went with them. It was good in Jerry’s “I’m-not-gonna-beat-around-the-bush-with-you” way. His thing is this down-to-earth, no bullshit thing. There was nothing revelatory in his talk. He said many of the same things one finds in his writing and that he regularly seems to mention. For example, he said that everyone has a relationship to the art market, and if you are anti-market then that’s your relationship to the market. You can’t escape it. Interestingly Saltz and Tino Sehgal seem to have similar takes on this topic. However, I would be willing to bet Saltz has nothing to say about Sehgal—unless he has actually seen his work (not just read or heard about it). So, Saltz, it seems to me, is all about common sense and trying to maintain a bit of integrity. I think his position is that it’s the dialogue that matters most. He spent much of the lecture just telling us, the artists, what we can expect from him, the critic. He doesn’t write about his friends. He doesn’t collect art. He doesn’t have sex with artists. And, he doesn’t do drugs with them either. Saltz did say he knows critics who do all of these things but he does not judge them for it. His tone was very conversational and, from the outset of his talk, he demanded audience responses. More than once Saltz said he was going to stop talking if he did not soon get a response to whatever question he had thrown at the audience. I took this to be symptomatic of his interest in dialogue. I apologize for forgetting to mention this to you. I am not sure whether the lecture was open to the public or not. The security guards asked to see my student ID when I entered. It was in the same lecture hall as the Donald Kuspit talk.

The Hanger-On: I really got into the Chan talk. It was interesting, and I liked the Q&A at the end, which is always the best part of these kinds of talks. One Columbia grad student called Chan on this lawsuit—I’m not sure if that’s the right word—against him for stealing a Northwestern University grad student’s work and making it his own (and exhibiting it at least twice, including the Serpentine Gallery in London). Of course MFA students with impending studio visits should be worried. I can explain this in detail later.

The Jerry Saltz Experience sometimes runs on autopilot. His reviews are great to read—I try not to miss them. But he tends to repeat himself about the market, about criticism, etc. It’s good to stick to your guns, but if you read or hear him talk more than once, you’ll end up hearing the same thing. At the same time, though, it’s important for him to keep saying what needs to be said, for example, about women artists being vastly underrepresented. The fact is—as has been the case for decades—the work of women artists is just as good as that of men. Isn’t this a no-brainer? The power structures of the art world are still holding onto (implicit) sexist views.

In the recent CAA News interview, Saltz talks about artists and friends differently. He’s not as harsh. In the interview, he says that it’s difficult to maintain a friendship after he writes (sometimes negatively) about that artist, but it’s usually the artist who gets upset. Which is understandable. If someone trashes you in print, do you want to still be friends with that person? Can you? It’s awkward. But it’s not personal. About not getting responses: yes, it’s hard to get the Q&A session started, but it always happens. Remember João Ribas’s talk in the fall, the one that lasted three-and-a-half hours? By not doing drugs at the after party with artists, Saltz establishes himself as an independent, interesting character who is cool because he isn’t trying to be cool—it’s an act in the same way everyone poses. But at the same time it’s not an act: his passion for art is totally genuine.

De Selby: Yeah, I mentioned Saltz’s market comments as an example of one of his usual routines. Not having seen him talk before, I find it refreshing. But, you are right, he does have a consistent position on certain issues. This is different than what we are talking about, but I noticed recently that Saltz used the same Charline von Heyl quote he had used in one of his November 2006 columns. It caught my attention not because of the repetition but because the first column I saw it in was of special interest to me. My sense about Saltz as a person is that he simply likes people, finds all sorts of people interesting, and really enjoys conversation and dialogue. Many of the things he said at the talk (and says regularly) seem to have to do with the perils of being a critic. I like his openness about this sort of stuff. One of Saltz’s big messages, which is probably common sense, but nonetheless seems to require regularly repeating, is that we can rise above. We can certainly imagine a situation in which a person, say, a critic, might very much like another person, say an artist, enjoy their intelligence and conversation and yet dislike their art. And let us not forget the corollary fact that one body of work or a single show is not normally what constitutes an entire career. I think it bothers Saltz that people, and not just the artists, often take his criticisms so personally (see pieces such as “Looking Back” and “Learning on the Job” which are both in Seeing Out Loud). I think he would like it to be a part of the larger dialogue.

I do not know about the Chan lawsuit. I want to hear more about it.

The Hanger-On: I am not knocking Saltz: I hope I don’t sound negative. I am in agreement with him in many ways. His point of view is refreshing and needs to be said, which is perhaps why he says and writes the same things time and again. I particularly like his idea that people in the art world need to be willing to embarrass themselves in public. Though it isn’t necessary to go see him everytime he speaks in town, I’m glad he does, because he gets a new audience each time. I know his point of view, and I feel the same. And I’ll keep reading his columns—they’re refreshing, insightful, challenging, and usually spot-on, even if I disagree.

The theme of the artist’s-talk portion of the night was about change. For Chan, artistic breakthroughs aren’t eureka moments that come charging through the door. Instead, shifts in his work come in small moments. Also, he uses drawing (often charcoal on paper) to free his mind from his more detail-oriented work, and also when he’s stuck. He talked about how a series of drawings of flesh-eating birds, drawn from Leviticus, turned into My Birds ... Trash ... The Future, which was shown in LA as well as in Greater New York 2005. And drawings and collages of shadows turned into his recent Light series. His hellish experience installing My Birds in LA got him interested in low-tech projection. People, especially in Germany, are building video projectors with three basic elements: a light source, an LED screen, and a lens. An overhead projector with a transparency has the same basic components as a video projector. Chan said his construction, which looked very sculptural, didn’t really work too well. The images were fuzzy. I think he said that that’s what led him to the shadow drawings and the new work.

Some of what Chan said at Columbia—his experience in Iraq before the war, religion and politics, his art and activist work—has been previously discussed in a 2005 interview in Bomb. The highlight of the night, however, was the legal struggle brought up by the Columbia student, who seemed to know the Northwestern student artist or know someone who does. Chan handled the charge gracefully, saying that his lawyers are working with lawyers at Northwestern. That’s taking care of the legal issues on copyright, intellectual property, appropriation, etc. The ethical matter, however, was being worked out between the student and him. He was mum about that.

I guess I need to tell the story now: as a visiting artist at Northwestern in spring 2006, Chan saw a work by one student in her studio that he really liked: a banner with the words “mission accomplished” on them. He told her that she should really do something with the work, which she was unsure about. The matter dropped, at least until the summer, when a Hong Kong arts center asked him to contribute a work to a benefit. He also had a solo show there. For the benefit, he re-created that same banner. But it didn’t sell. A couple months later, in the fall, Chan was asked to participate in a group show at Serpentine Gallery in London. He made an edition of twenty, again, none of which sold. (Perhaps it was the edition in China—my memory is fuzzy.) When the work was in London, he e-mailed the student artist in order to share credit (and income, if there would be any). Responding a couple weeks later, she totally freaked out. A few weeks after that, Chan was contacted by lawyers at Northwestern.

Like I said, Chan separated the legal aspect of the situation from the ethical part. But he was unwilling to say—at least to this audience—that he was in the wrong, and that it was a mistake to directly take (steal) this other artist’s work and present it as his own. He did say that the first thing he should have thought of when first making the banner (contacting or involving the student) became the last thing he thought of. This professional blunder has come back to bite him in the ass.

Overall, Chan was amicable and articulate and seemed well read, quoting Adorno and talking about Freud and Christianity; he has really looked into and seems to understands this writing. This made me think of a concern that I’ve overheard art-history professors talk about: that today’s students lack a basic knowledge of religion, namely Christianity and Catholicism. Identifying people and themes in Western European art is a true stretch for these students, because we now live in a pluralized and secular world, much more than ten and twenty years ago or more. Parents don’t take their kids to Sunday School anymore; no one knows their Bible stories. Art history is, some say, directly suffering as a result. When Chan mentioned that he was taking a class at the Columbia Seminary School on the Apostle Paul, he got blank stares from most of the audience. It makes me want to revisit that New Testament figure.

I reskimmed the review of the London show. Chan’s banner is mentioned right in the first paragraph! The exhibition was The Uncertain States of America. That was a major show, covered by all the art magazines.

De Selby: Chan’s move is puzzling to me. But I am willing to bet that much of it had to do with being under the gun to come up with a project and get it completed in time. It was probably too much trouble to contact the student artist and simply collaborate with her. But, now that I think about it, why would the student artist want to collaborate with Chan? I would think she would rather simply want to show the piece on her own (especially if someone expressed interest in exhibiting the piece). Ah, but there is the rub: the curators in Hong Kong care more about Chan’s name than whatever piece he submits for their show. And genuine collaboration with the student would mean that Chan would have to involve himself with someone he did not really know. The fact the Hong Kong show is a benefit makes Chan’s move seem even more lame. He didn’t want to give away one of his own works?

This instance of corruption may be more interesting to watch because Paul Chan seems to make a point of putting his idealism on display. If a Kelley Walker or a Seth Price did something similar, because there is so much cynicism in their work, it would probably be less interesting to observe (and seem like less of a surprise).

The Hanger-On: Chan did say he was under the gun about making a work for the Hong Kong benefit. I think he said he was asked to contribute the same banner to Serpentine. He should have declined inclusion in that last show—knowing eventually he would be found out, facing a compromising situation. Despite the blurry lines between stealing and appropriation (Koons won a court case recently, and I know about a handful of others involving Barbara Kruger, Robert Rauschenberg, and other lesser-known artists), he still made a really bad call.

Aside from that, Chan did say some interesting things, namely that he has a conservative view of art, that is to say, that art is a realm of absolute freedom—whatever form that takes and whatever it means—where artists represent not necessarily what is but what can be. He recognizes that his “activist” work is a part of the larger struggle for power, be that antiglobalism or war protesters, established political parties, etc. Activist work is about power (e.g., for disenfranchised groups) in the same way that people in power try to maintain their power. Art—his art—hopefully operates outside this, establishing that space for dialogue that Saltz and Ribas long for. I think his view is old fashioned, not necessarily conservative, but still relevant.

De Selby: I am inclined to agree with the notion that art ought to be a realm of absolute freedom. However, problems perhaps arise when people start signing their names to things. Benefits often accrue to the signatures.

Chan might separate his art making from his political activism and view them as different activities but I don't think this holds up for me. I read about them both in Artforum. I view it all as one big ball of stuff that Chan does.

The Hanger-On: The freedom in the act of creating something, of making the art, of making the unseeable seeable, or the unknown known, can be separated, however precariously, from the other part: display, sale, collecting, etc. That’s where issues of power come in, that is, the art world. Henry Darger was able to make amazing art apart from that entire world. He had his own freedom, perhaps only in his own head. I mention Darger because Chan has used his stuff in earlier works.

Chan separates his art from his activism. He makes this clear in the Bomb interview, the Artforum profile last summer, and last night at Columbia. While some overlap is inevitable, it seems he divides his creative energies well.

De Selby: I think this separation in the end is an artificial ideal. Why do we know so much about his political activism? Is it necessary that he share this information with his art audience? I think this is a calculated move on his part. It is his way of letting his audience know what type of person he his. It frames, in some small way, my reading of his art. I think the claim that they are separate is, perhaps, clever PR. It’s the kind of PR we can all feel good about.

Darger is an interesting example. All his work ended up being owned by his landlord. Darger spent his last days living in a hospital for the aged and infirm. He took nothing with him. He left all his belongings behind which, of course, includes all of his art. He told his landlord to throw it all away.

The more I discuss Paul Chan’s intellectual-property theft (or whatever it is) with you, the more his behavior pisses me off. If Chan felt so strongly about the piece, he should have helped connect the artist with an opportunity of her own. Isn’t that supposed to be the way it works? Isn’t this a part of what studio visits are about? And it is really the only truly defensible thing Chan could have done. If I were this artist, I would be pissed. I find Chan’s behavior very disillusioning. It is a pathetic or passive abuse of power. And to even consider that collaboration with the student artist would have been the most appropriate thing to do is also suspect. Why should the student artist be required to make this sort of compromise? Why should Chan get to put his name on the project? For discovering her? The scenario sounds like something from the world of advertising. Senior art directors and creative directors can always claim, at least in part, authorship of ideas generated by those beneath them (in the same firm, of course). They may try to smudge their thumbprint onto an idea in order to justify or rationalize their claim to it, but that, if they do it, is a mere courtesy.

The Hanger-On: I think he’s completely irresponsible for doing it. He made it clear that the lawyers are figuring out the legal stuff, which is fine. Can he make a copy or parody of the famous George Bush flight-suit banner aboard that aircraft carrier, whether or not the student artist did? Appropriation is iffy territory, but it’s obvious—and I remember Chan saying as much—that he got the idea specifically from the student. The ethical issue remains, and Chan totally fucked up. Being held in such high esteem in the art world, he’s desperately trying to save face. But—perhaps like Clinton with Lewinsky—he just can’t come out and say, “I was wrong,” at least not at the outset. He’ll should lose his credibility, at least for now. But I can imagine the art world rallying behind him and supporting him. Insiders have no concern for the outsiders, the little guys. It’s also a shame because his video in the 2006 Whitney Biennial was my favorite work in that show.

De Selby: Jerry Saltz’s comment on Chan’s work (in his review of the biennial) takes on a slightly different meaning in the shadow of our discussion. Saltz: “Paul Chan’s floor piece is evocative but unoriginal.”

Für and against

2007-02-06T22:40:00.000-05:00

Global Warming in Frieze

2007-02-01T22:06:00.000-05:00

The title of this post is no pun. A comment that appeared in this blog in September has found its way to the pages of a favorite British art magazine. Katie Stone Sonnenborn quotes from Daniel Lefcourt’s response to a post about his exhibition in her review of that same show. It’s in the second to last paragraph.