MARATHON MAN: Guido van der Werve Runs 'Home'

Guido van der Werve, Nummer veertien, home
Sep 7-Oct 20, 2012, Luhring Augustine Gallery, 531 W 24th St, NYC

The explorer George Mallory was once asked "Why do you want to climb Mt. Everest?", to which he famously (reputedly) responded: "Because it's there." This economical quip expresses something meaningful about the willingness of spirit that takes triumph and failure under consideration in equal measure as potential outcomes of any endeavor. It is this same spirit that artists, generally speaking, understand all too well: the aspiration of overcoming self-imposed obstacles; the uselessness of doing things just for the sake of doing them; the poignant pointlessness of it all.

Guido van der Werve, the Netherlander artist and oft-described 'Romantic' (and triathlete, marathon runner, filmmaker, classically trained composer and pianist), also tried to climb Everest; or rather, the equivalent of it (he failed). He documents a more successful labor in his latest film, Nummer veertien, home, the centerpiece of an exhibition on view at Luhring Augustine gallery. The film follows van der Werve's elliptical journey from Poland to Paris as he swims, bikes, and runs a circuit that traces the birth, death, and unusual burial arrangements of composer Frederic Chopin. Chopin's dying request was to have his heart removed and smuggled back to his birthplace in Warsaw; his body, however, remains entombed at a pubic gravesite in Paris. These dual points of interment mark the start and end points for van der Werve's circulatory, oddball triathalon-as-pilgrimage, which concludes with the exhausted artist placing a small container of soil from Chopin's birthplace upon his grave.

The twelve-act film (structured after the classical musical form of the Requiem) is certainly replete with enough melancholic, wide-framed landscapes to earn the artist his "Romantic" credential, but also contributes to the canon of 'Endurance Art', which enacts extreme physical stress as a process and a kind of performance (see: Matthew Barney, Marina Abramovic, Ragnar Kjartansson, or--why not-- David Blaine). However, van der Werve's exertions are not an end unto themselves; they are actions which position and isolate the character within the broader visual narrative of his films and projects. We are rarely subjected to close-ups of the artist's bodily or emotional trials; rather, the film's dispassionate formality captures the wide, precisely-split horizon lines and flat, constructed 'Nature' of modern European suburbs. The inescapable grid of civilization, even in these semi- bucolic environments, undermines whatever sublimity the 'lone figure in the landscape' trope might evoke. Endurance requires a sense of rigorous interiority and discipline; it is no surprise that the lonely duress and directed purposelessness of the marathon runner is a state that appeals to van der Werve's sensibility.

Perhaps alienation is our contemporary Sublime, but, despite the beautiful, elegiac score (written by van der Werve), the artist undercuts any pathos or heroism with small episodes of abrupt, whimsical absurdity. In the opening scene, we see the artist playing a grand piano while outfitted in a swimmer's wetsuit; in another, the artist--who has inscrutably set himself on fire--calmly extinguishes the blaze by jumping into a small canal. Periodically, a full orchestra and chorus appear, nonchalantly performing the film's score while seated in fields, driveways, bedrooms, and other incongruous pop-up locations, in moments that seem more Monty Python than Greek chorus. The meaning of these moments is left open to interpretation, thankfully, adding a bit of mystery and shock to contrast to the film's otherwise top-heavy explication--and to help the audience forget about the ponderous, mostly unnecessary side-narrative about Alexander the Great. 

Unlike traditional narratives, which rely on external conflict and heroic resolution, van der Werve sets up a course of self-determined problems to solve, working from what he knows and pushing towards the outermost edges, seeking meaning, as most artists--or athletes, or explorers, or maybe anybody-- would do. Nummer veertien, home is not quite an indie film, a performance document, or an art installation. If anything, it's an extended-cut music video, by way of an act of self-flagellating devotion. It's a total work that threads together the physical and aesthetic enthusiasms of van der Werve, a (self-described) non-artist who nevertheless employs the the art world to provide a context of meaning to his variegated activities, skills, and obsessions. Why climb Mt. Everest? "Because it's there?" Nah. "Because I can. Because I must."

SONG 1: Doug Aitken at the Hirshhorn

Over the years, Doug Aitken has developed a singular and enviable practice: as a purveyor of large-scale, well-funded, ephemeral projects supported by a handful of devoted, established institutions, he is that rare artist who has figured out how to straddle the parallel tracks of commercial and fine art, an ambition achieved by few--and perhaps shared by none, considering the more conceptual, as opposed to pop, leanings of his oeuvre. He seems to have scarce need for the routine approval of the gallery circuit (actually, I don't know if that's true, but his New York gallery's website shows that his last exhibition was in 2008), instead carving out a niche with site-specific, spectacular projection works: after-dark-only, semi-public temporary pieces that are showy but manage to skirt the usual groan-inducing compromises of most public art.

In SONG 1, a 360-degree video projection mapped to the cylindrical architecture of Washington DC's Hirshhorn Museum, Aitken deploys his A-game bag of tricks, perhaps best described as lyrical film noir. It's narratively abstract but formally precise, all montage and motifs, multi-screen and nonlinear, and populated by affectless, oddball characters inhabiting the dusk-til-dawn boulevards of 'Lost' Angeles: an artificially lit, cinematic inner-edge megapolis suffused with the same listless melancholy and magical realism that admirers of David Lynch and Edward Hopper might be familiar with. Viewed as a kind of zoetrope-in-reverse, SONG 1 is a structural and phenomenal loop-- inverting its association with other panoramic/panoptic presentations that enclose viewers around a perceptual center, instead projecting the imagery along the outer circumference of the museum's facade. 

The audience is encouraged, thus, to perambulate around the building's horizon-line, with no fixed or privileged field of view; although the museum's landscaping makes a completely unhindered line of sight impossible, Aitken courageously sacrifices clarity by projecting straight through the trees onto the building, inadvertently evoking a liminal, haunted-forest effect that echoes with the polyphonous strains of the film's soundtrack. Aitken has a keen eye for the seductive artificiality of filmic space and time, flipping instinctually between the floating frames of traditionally composed narrative sequences--the projection as cinema--and kaleidoscopic, patterned abstractions of urban chiaroscuro--visual effects as architectural ornament.

The main character of SONG 1 is actually, as the title suggests, a song: the iconic standard 'I Only Have Eyes For You'--specifically the popular version recorded by 1950s doo-wop group The Flamingos as a touchstone, reworked by various musical artists and actors. This cast is directed to enact various lyrical and choreographed tableaus, in solo and counterpoint: singing over a car radio during a pensive late-night drive; a staccato duet (or duel?) in front of a shifting neon collage; and, in the film's most amusing segment, a Stomp-like percussive routine beat out by the beleaguered-looking inhabitants of an all-night diner. Mostly, though, 'Eyes..' serves as an increasingly fragmented fugue-like soundtrack guiding this eclectic ensemble of characters who, one imagines, mentally casts the small dramas of their somnambulist urban lives as something cinematic, cooly romantic, and sublime. Of course, we all have these 'soundtracks to our lives' running in the back of our minds, and our own reveries can, at times, seem like a lens-flared, soft-focus TV-movie montage. Having said that, SONG 1 periodically borders on twee, with the slick calculated affect of a car commercial or too-quirky indie film; but in this case, it might be all right to qualify Aitken's commercialized image/sound vocabulary as a type of appropriated material, rather than a lexicon of received ideas. Or frankly, maybe it's both; if the goal of commercial entertainment is to deliver closed, cathartic story arcs which dispel ambiguity, then SONG 1's lack of dramatic structure and traditional denouement--edited percussively rather than expositionally-- overrides some of the skepticism generated by the work's unarguable 'entertainment value'.  

In short, SONG 1 was a crowd-pleaser--including, perhaps especially for the crowd that is unfamiliar with the term "expanded cinema"--and one which, like the semi-lucid audiovisual drift of Marclay's 'The Clock', evokes nostalgia while eliding its attendant mawkishness.

For photos, production stills, and some interesting essays that accompanied the show, check out the museum's artist page here.

Moving Image Art Fair review

Video art takes time. It can take a lot of time, in fact, so I made sure to show up early for the debut of 'Moving Image - An Art Fair of Contemporary Video Art' (a somewhat redundant title--isn't all video art contemporary?), in its sleek and spacious home at the Waterfront Tunnel, a block-long cavernous corridor in the northern strip of Chelsea, home to a former nightclub and the occasional art fair venue. I stayed all day and saw everything, which consisted of a total of 36 individual works (30 single-channel videos and 6 installation/sculptural pieces) from an international roster of galleries from such locations as Zurich, Romania, Paris, and Ghent. New York is suitably represented by well-known venues like PPOW, Julie Saul, Pace, Bryce Wolkowitz, and of course from the fair's organizer and host, Edward Winkleman.

Moving Image Fair opening, March 3

I look at a lot of video; even I can get sleepy. Truthfully, after 5 hours, I was still on my feet and watching pieces a second, third, and fourth time. Part of the love it/hate it relationship with video art is often with the presentation and the demands made upon one's attention; here, multiply that by 36. The minimal exhibition design is a cunning compromise, and for the most part, works--except when it doesn't. Upon entering, the first half of the show is airily spaced out with six installations that incorporate sculpture or projection to varying degrees; the remaining show of 30 single-channel videos are shown individually along two rows of alternate-side facing monitors, suspended from a hanging gantry. The monitors are unimposing in size, and are belittled somewhat by the scale of the room. However, this makes for an intimate viewing experience, and one can quickly glance down the line of TVs to get a quick preview of all the works at once. Each monitor only has one awkward counter stool assigned to it, so you have to do a lot of standing, but chic couches are placed evenly throughout the space, and--Thank God!!--a 'Wichcraft cafe is housed about halfway through, relief for when your legs and eyes start getting cranky.

Before I discuss the work, a few general notes are in order. First, this fair was invite only, not open submission, and thus reflects the taste (and network) of the hosting gallery and the advisory committee (including Elizabeth Dee, John Connelly, and Kevin McGarry--the full list is on the fair's website). If you were worried about seeing a kunsthalle stuffed with Bill Viola-, Pipilotti Rist-, and Ryan Trecartin-esque antics, you may be pleased at the low-octane, more considered energy of this fair.

Second, the selection of works is slanted toward the short-form and the narrative/performance-based, an observation of which was confirmed by Mr. Winkleman in an effort to, in a nutshell, not try the viewer's patience with an overload of difficult work (the favored maxim of my wise professor/mentor on durational art was: "If it's bad, it's also LONG and bad!"). Combined with the uniformity of presentation, this could be said to create a consistent, themed exhibition, more of a survey show than an art fair; a critical view might also see it as flattening and homogeneous.

Finally, it's hard to tell if this decision reflects the state of the art so much as the state of the market. Difficult and conceptual work is hard to sell, and this IS an art fair. However, barely 7 or 8 of the 36 video works on display are NOT in some way performance based or based on some mode of bodily figuration or characterization. This reflects a bias towards only one formal strain of video art, with many strategic positions, of course, but can hardly be said to be a survey of the full range of moving image and screen-based art in current circulation. There is very little abstract or experimental work; almost no animation at all; no internet-based or interactive/digital pieces whatsoever; and very little technological-sculptural work, with a couple clear exceptions in the installation portion of the show. All this is fine-- video-about-video and techno-gimmicks get old fast, and there is a good range of ideas and production values present.

But unfortunately, of all these bodies on display across these screens, they are, without exception, ALL, it must be said, of the ivory skin coloration. Not to play the quota game, but with such an international spectrum on display, and in view of the pronounced visibility of video artists of color on the biennial & fair circuit, this seems a strange and tangible void.
(CORRECTION: The sole exception to this criticism is the installation 'Trans Siberian Amazons', which I forgot about in my notes.)

On to the work. Like I said, the pieces mostly tend towards the short-form and the conceptual one-off, so feel free to streamline your viewing experience depending on what grabs you. The roundup:

I found myself returning to works which I found quirky, strange, and affecting. Of these: Shana Moulton's Galactic Pot Healer (2010), named after but not apparently based on the Philip K. Dick novel, portrays an elfish woman and the mysterious, titular entity which repairs broken pots by kneading the clay-like flesh of its clients. It's funny, perhaps even a bit twee, but is disarmingly clever in its low-fi, fantastical take on the oft-explored notions of the female body as a literal site of production through craft-work. (UPDATE: a later afternoon visit to the fair proved this video to be a real crowd favorite, not to my surprise!)

Shana Moulton, Galactic Pot Healer

  

Janet Biggs' Airs Above The Ground (2007) portrays an underwater ballet performance by a fit young female swimmer. The simple decision to flip the camera upside down, thus orienting the youthful athlete 'upwards' as she rises and descends, is haunting and supernatural.

Janet Biggs, Airs Above The Ground

Corban Wallker's TV Man (2010). You can't miss this droll and somewhat confrontational act of self-portraiture, in which the artist presents himself 'life-size' within a wide-screen TV frame.

Corban Walker, TV Man

Andres Laracuente's Timepiece (2008) is an eye-catching, increasingly grotesque head-shot of an "aged voice actress" who attempts to maintain her close-up composure while getting hosed in the face by an aerosolized fog spray. It is at turns weirdly hilarious and touching; I think I could watch it all day.

Andres Laracuente, Timepiece

Alex Mirutziu's Runway Spill #2 (2011) depicts the artist attempting to stand in an awkward pose, arrested in mid-fall. You get it right away, it's a visual one-liner, but it works; oddly, the high-falutin' wall text fails to note the piece's obvious witty 'moving image' reference to Robert Longo's famous 'Men In The Cities' series.

Alex Mirutziu, Runway Spill #2

Video's been around for a while, so certain modes of production reassert themselves continuously, often to the point of cliche or banality. If you'll forgive me a moment of absurd reductionism, the fair is not without its 'Woman-as-Talking-Head-Speaking-To-The-Camera' genre (Cecilia Stenborn's Alive and Sophia Lisa Beresford's First and Second Creation, both by UK-based Workplace Gallery) and its male-go-to counterpoint, the 'Dude-In-A-Room-Doing-Weird-Fetish-Shit' archetype (Martin Soto Climent's The Chessboard Hall and RKDB's 'The Healing of Xrist). We've seen this type of work before, and I'm not sure these have much to add to these practices, but in an act of redemption is the always fascinating, sometimes goofy Melanie Bonajo and her Diversion (2009), which combines the performance of direct address, shamanistic ritual and consumer-junk props lashed to naked, forlorn bodies like so much sexualized, post-capitalist flotsam.

As I mentioned, abstract and electronic work is scant, so it's good that what IS on view is engaging. Jim Campbell's edge-of-perception, volumetric LED grid is a rare fusion of concept and technical wizardry (a larger outdoor version of this work is also on view in Madison Square Park). Hiraki Sawa's Dwelling (2010), depicting tiny airplanes flying around an apartment, is a dry, witty favorite, but unfortunately looks a lot better online than it does here. Miranda Lichtenstein's Danse Serpentine (2010) is a psychedelic, whirling arabesque which pays homage to the twin births of modern dance and cinema. Martin Kohout is definitely the odd-man-out in this show with the atmospheric Moonwalk (2008), a kind of electronic-tonal 'Stairway To Heaven' composed solely of stepped stacks of a YouTube player scroll-bar displaying the progression of the audible score.

Miranda Lichtenstein, Danse Serpentine

Of course the show had its harder-to-parse moments. I won't go into the hyperbolic and hilariously overblown wall-text statements, but they are worth an embarrassed chuckle or three. In my notes I charitably upgraded the category from 'Mindless' to 'Willfully Obscure' as seen in such works as Adrien Missika's Flat Beat, Paul Mpagi Sepuya's A Separate Piece, and Johanna Unzuta's Natural Movements, pieces that show how too often certain half-baked ideas are communicated, yet unserviced, by this medium. Leslie Thornton's Binocular (2010), on view at Ed Winkleman's a short time ago, is formally elegant but falls somewhat short of the mark in its comment on the aesthetics of our technologized 'seeing' of nature. I wanted to like Glen Fogel's With Me...You installation more than I could, which because of its insistent scale as a five-channel walk-through projection is likely to be remembered as the fair's most pronounced statement. Consisting of family heirloom jewelry shot on a turntable against monochrome backgrounds, then projected monumentally, any personal or melancholic reading of the work is outstripped by its resemblance to a tacky store display or Zale's commercial. Still, there is something there--maybe--but it didn't slow me down much. The same could be said of Carolee Schneeman's War Mop (1983), a kitschy kinetic sculpture, which was a particularly odd piece to choose from this pioneering feminist artist, given the fair's disposition toward female-performance and body-oriented work.

Glen Fogel, With Me...You

In that regard, some historical grounding is provided with Hannah Wilke's Intercourse With... (1975), a well-edited performance documentation that includes images of the artist's nude body covered with various texts. At almost half and hour, it is the longest piece in the fair, but worth spending time with. PPOW also presents David Wojnarowicz' Heroin (1978), a silent black and white film transfer that recalls his well-known 'Rimbaud in New York' photo series, which is wonderful to see if you are as passionate about this artist as I am, but it does remind one that Wojnarowicz' voice was more fully realized in his writings and paintings.

Despite my insistence on the 'theme' of this show, Mr. Winkleman assures me that no such theme was consciously intended or directed. Adopting an active rather than reactive stance, the fair was assembled quickly and elegantly with the notion in mind that (to paraphrase) "..asking 'how can we sell video work' is the wrong question. The point is that if you are serious about [collecting and looking at] contemporary art, you can't ignore this." As the market for video continues to vie for authenticity by emulating the artificial scarcity-editioning method of photography, in actuality, it is the very malleability of video that is ripe with potential. More than one of the single-channel works here are distillations of more complicated multi-screen installation setups, which points to the fact that video art is conceptual art, at least in half, at its very core. (UPDATE: At the panel discussion held at the fair on Saturday, there were some interesting complaints from the curators about video artists' tendencies to continue fiddling with the presentation of the work long past its original context and intent, because of new technology being made available, or "just because they can"). I have a lot of respect for the overall sophistication of execution at this inaugural fair, and for reducing what could have been an unwieldy concept to its first and basic principles. I'm looking forward to witnessing Moving Image's future evolution.

--

Moving Image: An Art Fair Of Contemporary Video Art is open from Thurs-Sat, March 2-5 from 11am-8pm, and Sunday March 6 from 11am-3pm, at the Waterfront New York Tunnel, 269 11th Avenue between 27th & 28th st. Visit www.moving-image.info for more details.

Speed Dating At The Strip Club: Tino Sehgal

The famous riddle goes something like: "What crawls in the morning, walks on two legs during the day, and three legs in the evening?" The answer has something to do with Tino Sehgal's latest installation-slash- performance-slash- social sculpture now at the Guggenheim Museum. There is no physical artwork in the main rotunda; on my visit, the museum was amok with children, groups of teenagers, and bemused folk of all ages. The atmosphere was lively. The experience of the piece goes something like this: at the base of the ramp, a small child confronts you with the question "What is Progress?" As you walk and talk and formulate a response to this precocious charge, you are unceremoniously fobbed off on a person of more advanced years--late teens, early 20s. More walking, more talking, another handoff, another age bracket. Before you know it you are at the top of the museum, shaking hands goodbye with the senior-aged 'guide', and then you go into a side gallery and look at some Picassos and stuff. So the question about progress really becomes a question about process, about the inevitability of aging and decay, and any grand notions turn inward and become soberingly personal.

Back up a minute. The first thing you see upon entering is a couple embracing,making out, and rolling around on the ground floor of the rotunda. Their movements are dancer-ly and mannered, like a tango in slow motion. The awkwardness of witnessing public eroticism dissolves over time, partly because the stamina of the performers and extended duration of the performance, but also because they are constantly visible no matter where you are--it's an erotic ballet which anchors the center of the Guggenheim's helix runway. They are the first and the last thing you see: as I left (after an hour & a half or so) a changeover took place, presumably to give the first couple relief. It's worth mentioning that the couples were male-female, young, hip-looking, inter-racial, fit, and basically attractive.

Some thoughts:

Ok. The kids are totally adorable. Their earnestness and obvious thrill at being in charge is disarming and a cunning point of entry to the piece. I found myself talking to them as I would speak to an adult. Good one.

As you 'progress', the transitions from conversation to conversation can be abrupt. The guides are prone to leaping out from behind columns at you, or darting away when you are in the middle of a sentence. This is meant to keep you off balance, to remind you that you are on the clock. The first time I went through the cycle, it was kind of exhilarating. I stood at the top of the rotunda and looked down at the kissy dancers. I thought about all the cool things I just said in a short space of time. Then you see the guides walking up the ramp chatting with someone else, and you feel a little cheated. These people are there because it's their job to pay attention to you. They do not particularly find you interesting. It comes off feeling like speed dating at a strip club.

Not that there's anything wrong with strip clubs. We seek out fake experiences all the time, as a reminder of our notions of the so-called 'Real.' You watch strippers to get a certain experience about sexual voyeurism. Speed dating gives you a pared-down, goal-oriented meta-experience of flirtation. But there's no essential chemistry, and the conviviality is self-aware. Sehgal's 'Progress' is not about social chemistry. The final conversations, prompted by the older guides, were a little morbid. I rambled on about capitalism, war, and death. The particular architecture of the Guggenheim is perfectly suited to house this stagy cradle-to-grave metaphor.

The second time I walked through, I felt a rebellious urge to break the rules a little bit. This piece DOES have rules. A child reprimanded me for turning the question back on him (the performers are not allowed to give their own opinions). I stalked a couple of other people's 'conversations', and the vibe was about the same as when one does this to strangers at a bar. I got one of the older guides to break the wall and admit that she didn't know if this was art, and that "no social science will result from all this--the artist will never know what happened". An enthusiastic young German guy told me that "art is supposed to confront you with thoughts." I flirted with a couple people (unsuccessfully). I tried to get a guide to walk me DOWN the ramp (nope). I deliberately answered questions obstinately and got what felt like an honest argument out of the performer, but I never got a sense of any REAL tension, or that the guide was allowed to judge my opinions as one would in a real conversation.

And, just in case you think this is all a bunch of phony baloney, or if you need a break, there IS art to look at. The side galleries are stuffed with the procession of Modernism: Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, and Brancusi, all that pre-war jazz. It's good. It makes you think about art's relation to the 'progress' of the 20th century. There is an amazing NEW work by Anish Kapoor that looks like a rusted beached submarine forcibly wedged in a narrow gallery. It's volume and heft is breathtaking; in fact the piece is so large you have to view it from three separate corridors, and for once you get to peer into the void of the sculpture's interior. It's a great experiential magic trick, and it was all I could do NOT to shout just to hear the sublime echo. I prefer the volume of the void to his mirror surfaces any day.

As I left, passing the dancers engaged in their amorous torpor, I witnessed a a changing of shifts. Another couple (also male-female, young, and interracial) merged onto the floor. After a minute of synchronized dance-hugging, the first couple exited, to some scattered applause. I think they deserve a lot of credit for their strenuous, compelling performance. But if it were my piece, I would have taken a lot of couples, really going at it, and hidden them behind stairwells, around columns, in the reading room, and other secret places. There is no sex without a little mystery, a little surprise--even in a sex club. And there's no come-hither, no real allure, in a conversation that one doesn't really want to be stuck in. Are you really talking to someone, or just waiting for your turn to speak?

'Progress' is part relational aesthetics, part social work, and part Tony & Tina's Wedding. In other words, it limns the boundaries of the comfortable territories of ART and is part of a genus of activity that perhaps needs a new name to describe itself. For all the valid criticism that gets lobbed at the Gugg, this is one show, love it or hate it, that WORKS in it, and BECAUSE of it. The open spiral ramp shows you simultaneously where you came from and where you're going, the people that you're traveling with, and the painful human yearning for connection and love which slowly spins at the axis. This sounds like as good a definition of progress as I've ever heard.

Intangible Gets Tangible Over New Museum Controversy

An interesting but tepid panel discussion held at the Fashion Institute of Technology took a surprising (yet somehow predictable) left turn during the Q&A session. The ostensible subject of the symposium, titled 'Intangible', was to explore the diverse marketplace realities of so-called ephemeral art, mainly related to performance and media art since the 1960s. Seated on the panel was dealer/impressario Jeffrey Deitch; prickly artist/educator Clifford Owens; the assistant curator to media & performance art at MoMA Cara Starke; and the passionate, ever-classy advisor/curator Thea Westreich. The discussion was moderated, sort of, by educator and writer Martha Schwendener, who also teaches at the FIT; the event was organized by MA candidates in the school's Art Market: Principles and Practices program.

So, the conversation went hither and yon, with several anecdotes about (and impersonations of) Vito Acconci and frank accounts and case studies from Mr. Deitch and Ms. Starke. Actual $ numbers were revealed and some peeks behind the curtain were offered (though nothing revelatory to those in the know, I'm certain). Mr. Owens established a cautious and enticingly antagonistic tone at the outset ("I'm surprised I was asked to be here. I'm going to see how this conversation develops"). Ms. Schwendener held the reins rather slackly, at one point allowing an impatient irruption from an audience member to fully derail the conversation (whom Mr. Owens derailed in turn by amusingly banging his head into his microphone). This individual blathered on about how the internet makes everyone an artist because every 10-year old with a cellphone can upload a funny video to YouTube, which is a sadly linear and startingly low standard of qualifications for this particular career choice, unless you're Ryan Trecartin, but maybe he had a point. Everyone is an artist now, whereby the "hell of images" has merged with "the hell of other people." Beuys=0; America's Funniest Home Videos=1.

Aside from this, the discourse was quite reasonable and entertaining, even though no aspirant performance artist was going to walk out of that room with a new business plan in mind.

Then the shit hit the fan. During the Q&A, someone inevitably brought up the case of the New Museum, despite it being a case of conspicuously NONephemeral market-object propagation. A crackle of energy, a whiff of ozone, and the tone of the room changed instantly. (I've only had the occasion to witness this particular debate online; this was my first face-to-face encounter with the polarizing rancor ensuing in its wake, affected by those close to the controversy). I only had a dinky skee-ball pencil to write with; I'll summarize.

Jeffrey Deitch (portrait not by Phong Bui)

Mr. Deitch became immediately testy--as an adviser & curator for the Joannou collection I imagine he has been at the defensive center of the controversy for some time. I've never seen him lose his cool--his whole demeanor is one of measured, mannered impishness. Mr. Owens wasn't very cool about it either, declaring more than once "I don't make art for collectors" and like comments, and loudly shuffling his luggage and jacket as though preparing to storm out of the auditorium while Deitch was speaking (he also made several salient points during the ON-TOPIC part of the symposium, so my apologies for short shrifting him here). Ms. Westreich exuberantly broke down the whole situation for everyone. The following excerpts are liberally paraphrased; there was a lot of heat coming off the stage here.

Deitch: "I don't see what's wrong with exhibiting a pre-eminent collection of modern art by one of the world's greatest collectors, and least self-serving individuals, works selected by Jeff Koons, the most radical artist of the past 25 years...(turning to an agitated Owens) You disagree with me."

Westreich: "The answer is in the history of art. No museum can exist without committed artists and collectors. The New Museum is an exhibiting, not collecting, museum... (she carries on about the realities of patronage and museum boards, exceptional only in the coinage of the wonderful word "Vomiticious!")... It's HISTORY, folks, if we don't like it, then we have to change it, as a consensus."

..and,

"The underground happens out here (gestures with hands) and the good ideas will eventually be recognized and co-opted...the edges move to the center and meanwhile there's more edges and more young people emerge with ideas that will change the way we look at and think about art. This is the history of the museum. This is the history of culture!"

Deitch: (to an audience member) "That's where it comes down to taste, and choice. The New Museum is not the same institution. You could go and support White Columns, if that's more your choice in programming."

Westreich: "It's not about the market, it's about patronage. Patronage is crucial to the support of living artists. I hope Dakkis feels the same way about collecting your work as he does about the other works in his collection.. ..the NEA's budget is next to nothing, financial support for the arts in this country is nothing. The REAL tragedy here is the paucity of support for public art institutions."

Owens: "I don't make art for collectors."

Westreich: "No, you don't make art to be sold, you make art to answer certain questions...but you show in your gallery, [that gallery nurtures and sells your work]. Your richness does not become MY richness without a system of support and exhibition. Patronage preserves that history."

Owens: (something to the effect of) "Let's preserve the history of the New Museum as a non-institutional institution, one that was critical in supporting under-represented artists like myself." (lots of head-nodding in the audience here).

Deitch: "Everything that you're talking about, Dakkis started the same way. I started the same way, making art and writing, I decided the best way to serve the arts was as a dealer. Dakkis did lots of things, and decided his best way to serve was as a patron. There's a lot of people speaking here without being informed. Dakkis wanted to be involved in the same way (to be a part of the art dialogue). He buys work from emerging artists and unheard of artists and supports their careers. He's not doing it as speculation."

Schwendener: "Do we have time for one more question?"

Owens: "No, because it's late! I'm DONE!" (stalks out briskly, with Deitch not far behind).

----

No, not much was added to the debate in this exchange, but I hope the FIT team makes the full video recording of the session available soon, if only to correct my gross paraphrasing and to witness the passion and vigor of this impromptu argument, which the participants were clearly unprepared to speak about--but which clearly had been weighing on their minds. Maybe it's just me, but everyone seemed like they were dying to bring this up. Perhaps the NuMu should hold a symposium (or town hall meeting, the way folks are carrying on you'd think the future of health care reform was at stake) to allow for a good ritual public airing of views. It might reduce the levels of hostility between those in the inner circle, and educate the shoulder-shrugging bemusement of most of us who are on the outside and choose to let history decide the rightness, wrongness, or quality of the show. The only interesting, and true, and contrived, act of resistance would be on the part of one of Joannau's selected artists, who might refuse to participate in the show on ethical grounds. Wouldn't that be a kick in the pants? And an almost certain solo show for said 'outsider' artist, alas..

Spend A Little Time With Me: Video Art Roundup

What is the State of Video Art? The field known as video art covers such a range of activites and formal strategies that it's impossible to make a totalizing statement about what video art is or isn't. The same goes with painting, sculpture, and every other art medium, but folks seem to have a harder time getting a handle on video, which can be difficult. For one thing, it's durational. Most galleries are lifeless vacuums and not places you want to spend a lot of time in, no matter how good the show. What was the last time you spent looking at a painting for more than five minutes? Five actual uninterrupted minutes--try it. Sure, a good painting will warrant scrutiny after a cursory viewing, but there is a subtle resentment at having to spend time with a work to fully appreciate it.

Another problem is that you will never forget viewing a bad video piece, and there are a lot of these. Video art, unlike painting or photography, seems to carry with it the burden of responsibility for all of its less successful or tolerable endeavors. I think this is also tied in to the time problem. People really hate having their time wasted, and a lot of artists have trouble knowing when to wrap it up. Like my video professor Jim Pomeroy was fond of saying, if it's bad, it's also long and bad.

Yet another problem is that people don't go to art exhibitions to watch TV. Every moment of our lives tends to be in confrontation with some type of screen or another. There's nothing more dispiriting than a little monitor on a pedestal in the corner with a pair of sanitarily questionable headphones dangling in front of it like a listening station at Virgin Megastore. Interactive video pieces are the worst. I'm here to look at art, not be put to work.

But the main issue is the confusion about what the field of video art actually constitutes. Video tends to absorb a lot of concerns. Sometimes it's a performance piece; sometimes it's a staticky media critique. Some artists make 'moving image paintings', some are basically making movies. It can be animation (hand drawn or digital), or live action, or swiped off the web. The production values vary wildly. It can be scripted or improvisatory; sensational or abject. Not all of it is for everybody--including, I might add, for some of the artists that make it. But that's the point...its diversity is its strength, although it could also be argued that dilution only weakens, and frankly, some foundational ideas about video art are better off left to, er...historical appreciation.

With all these considerations in mind, I offer these reactions to several video shows that I encountered in my latest gallery go-rounds; I think I got dosed with a fairly representative sampling of these differing practices that also happened to span the divides of generation, race, and gender in their particular ways.

--

My first stop was at Andrea Rosen to check out Matthew Ritchie's new exhibition, "Line Shot", because, simply put, I adore Matthew Ritchie. His big bang theory of artmaking could almost be dismissed as daffy solipsism were he not constantly expanding the parameters of his practice (much like the artwork itself, which seems to seethe with desire to burst out of its frame) to include collaborations with scientists, game designers, musicians, and architects. Like Matthew Barney, he presents an idiosyncratic, mythologized 'total work' on a big scale; he's Frank Stella as science-fiction graffiti artist. I like being drawn into his quasi-mystical creationism, and I've longed to see what he was up to with his video work.

Well, I got my wish. A centerpiece of the exhibition is an hour long, dual-channel video, projected large and framed within an amorphous wall drawing of Ritchie's signature silly-string-theory arabesques.There's no point in trying to describe the detailed symbolism and intricate cosmologies at work in this piece -- as anyone who's tried to decode one of his paintings can attest -- but suffice to say that it was like standing in front of a baroque Stargate portal watching the queasy, turbulent birth cycle of a nascent cosmos. Really, it's not unlike the famous time-tunnel sequence at the end of 2001, but not as acid-damaged. Ritchie is attempting to invent his own reality, based on math and myth, and then model it, the artistic equivalent of those worrisome particle physicists who are making miniature black holes in order to study the creation of the universe. It's seductive and lunatic, and thoroughly mesmerizing. The video appears to be a combination of 3D animation and heavy visual-f/x processing which gives the work an uncanny formal semblance to his drawing, painting, and sculptural work; in fact, one would imagine that these investigations began in the form of digital simulation from which his paintings and prints were derived, rather than the other way around. To allow yourself to really get lost in his universe is to understand what right-wing creationists (or anyone who hasn't visited a planetarium) will never get: that science is but one way to embrace and be consumed by the sublime, which is to say the spiritual.

Also of note, this work is available in various scales: an as-is installation in an edition of one; as a custom-designed installation piece to suit the interests of a collector; or simply as a play-as-you-will series of three 22-minute chapters on DVD (edition of 5 or so). Ritchie is, according to the gallerist, "very flexible."

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Next up was Rashaad Newsome's exhibition "Standards" at Ramis Barquet (incidentally, also the site of last summer's smart, tight and fun video group show 'East Coast Video', cheekily named after the Getty's sprawling but cogent 'West Coast Video' exhibition). Newsome purports to deconstruct signs of power and luxury in hip-hop culture, mainly with a series of bling-and-teeth-grill photo collages shaped to resemble traditional heraldry. Also on view was a decorative mirror-chromed palace gate and an ornately bejewelled wall piece, also heraldic in composition. Upon entering the space, one immediately hears the overwrought strains of Carl Orff's O Fortuna from that composer's masterpiece Carmina Burana. This impossibly cliched musical work, the score of countless commercials and operatic thrillers, is actually the soundtrack to Newsome's two-part video The Conductor. Dozens of snippets from hip-hop music videos are expertly edited to the movements in the Burana, presenting a frenetic dervish of blinged-out, champagne-in-hand gesticulations that appear to 'conduct' the cantata.

Newsome is making an obvious, but fun to look at, statement with this work; I'm not convinced that the "ghetto coat-of-arms" visuals are presenting much more than we already know about the largely uninterrogated appropriation of Western symbols of wealth and privilege in black hiphop culture. The cantata is eventually underscored with a nice downtempo beat, the ultimate result resembling a rap-star remix track set to a YouTube fan video mashup. So visually, there it is: an entertaining, silly taxonomy of bling.

A couple of things, though, about the cunning choice of music. As Alex Ross notes in The Rest Is Noise, Orff (along with fellow German Richard Strauss) was compliant with the Nazis, and his best work, the Carmina Burana, was a favorite among the Reich's leaders, who played it across the country in open-air arenas to rouse the emotions of the populace. Orff's role as a flat-out Nazi sympathizer has been largely repudiated, and his music "commits no sin by being and remaining popular." This is the real story of Newsome's video, with its narrative of Western oppression and its connection to racism (and racism's connection to poverty), to say nothing of hiphop culture's compliance with symbols of opulent, conspicuous power. Throw into the mix the art world's obsession with status, luxury good acquisition, and 'racial issue' art memes, and this initially silly video starts to percolate. Are Newsome's rap stars (and Newsome himself), like Orff, making the best of a bad situation, born into an oppressive cultural context, or are they just in league with the devil to get a better seat at the table in Hell?

One more quick note about the music. Newsome inadvertantly completes Orff's project of Theatrum Mundi, now largely unrealized, which required the symbiosis of music, speech, stage visuals, and kinesthetic action. Here's a quote from Wikipedia: "Orff's artistic formula limited the music in that every musical moment was to be connected with an action on stage..Carmina Burana was intended [to involve] dance, choreography, and visual design." Could there be a better description of a hiphop video?

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So, gesticulating my way over to Robert Miller Gallery, I was eager to see guest curator Tim Goossen's show of contemporary Belgian art, "Avec Le Temps". Tim is well known as the young and dandyish junior curator at PS1 and is the co-organizer of 'Between Spaces', a tight little exhibition of object-based conceptual sculpture on view now.

What I was expecting was mostly what I got: a mix of visual and sculptural work that was at turns smart, visually witty, and occasionally impenetrable. Some of the works were lucid, others were aided and abetted by the press release description. What I was not expecting to find was two of the most compelling, guileless and cunningly sophisticated documentation-style video works that I've seen all year.

The first, by Edith Dekyndt (born, according to the press release, in 1960) is an intimately scaled point-and-shoot documentation of a performance. Or, should I say, of a sculpture-in-process. Or, even more accurately, of a sculptor's prerequisite obsession and fascination with the material properties of an object. In the video, the camera frames two hands which repeatedly knead, roll, caress, and tear some type of chalky magnetic playdough. The tearings reveal spiky tendrils and flaky folds of matter which are repeatedly tortured into various organic configurations. Part of the marvel of the video is in the mystery of this erotic, reactive ball of material, but the real art here is in the process. Documented as a time-based material investigation, this video is much more interesting than choosing to predictably display the resulting objects, frozen in their torments, divorcing us from the experience of tactile pleasure and curiosity. However, it must be said that this piece, projected small and low on a wall, was part of an installation with other visual and audio components that seemed less legible.

The next piece, a wall-size video projection of a 16mm film by Els Opsomer (b. 1968), I walked in on, walked out on, then returned to. Boy, I'm glad I did. The video is simply a quotidian shot of a busy street: traffic, bustling pedestrians, construction vehicles, a scrolling advertisment marquis overlooking an open-air plaza. OK. The theme of this show, after all, open-endedly interprets the notion of 'Time', so here is a locked-down moment of time and space, a little bit of light-weight neo-structuralism. However, this particular moment of time and space is taking place in Instanbul during an annual two-minute commemorative silence, during which the entire country ceases all activity. A couple minutes in, crescendoing waves of blaring air-raid sirens freeze every person solemnly in place. It doesn't happen all at once, and some citizens are slow on the uptake, but this flash-mob performative ritual was like something out of an episode of the Twilight Zone. It chilled me to my core.

Lens flares of sunlight flitted from behind a tree. The marquis ominously continued to scroll. Eventually, the sirens wound down, the population unstuck themselves, and carried on. So moved was I by the weird poetry of this piece, it is only now that I think of the implications. Nostalgia is a terrible weapon often wielded as an instrument of nationalistic mass control.

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My final stop was a large solo exhibition by the big daddy himself, Bill Viola, whose exhibition "Bodies of Light" fill the temporary chambers of James Cohan's cavernous space. It's hard to argue with the primacy of Viola as high exalted grand poobah of the Video Arts (even though I've generally preferred Gary Hill's more literate and structural work over his). Give it up for the fact that he's one of the few artists who has chosen to work exclusively in the medium, instead of as a facet for a broader installation practice. His work deals with basic premises, simplistic symbolism, and devotional formalism. His work is the connective tissue between the Classical and the Modern; he references Greek and Romantic sculptural mise-en-scene, Eastern/Western spiritualism, and uses slow-motion as a dramatic technique the way Benny Hill used fast-motion for comedy. He makes work for operas and churches. He doesn't care if you think it's pedantic, overwrought, or mawkish. I think that takes some balls, and I like his work.

Several pieces from the last decade are on display here, but the centerpieces deal with Viola's familiar stagings of human figures interacting with water. In this body of work, Transfigurations, an invisible curtain wall of water obscures and reveals the passage of an trans-generational array of men and woman--some nude, others clothed-- through its veil. The scenes are lit such that the spray of water appears to emit from the contours of the evanescing figures, accentuating Viola's obsession with the body's deliquescence. There are several of these videos, presented in different sizes and numbered configurations: they are what they are. The actors act, and the performances can be a little histrionic. Birth, consciousness, passing on, etc. It's Plato's Cave for the spiritual-motivational poster art crowd.

However, the introduction of a subtle technical effect, which took me a while to catch on to, charged the drama of these works considerably and finally completed the project, formally speaking. Simply put, the models were shot with two cameras: one a grainy, grimy, black and white night vision camera, the other a high-definition color camera, the look of which is now familiar in his later, mannered work. The figures emerge from the darkness, monochromatic, blurry video frames skipping. As they push through the waterfall, they transition seamlessly to the high-def color imagery, like Dorothy stepping out to behold her technicolor Oz. As the characters back away into the void, the process is reversed. That's it. It's a jarring gag, and a sublime one, especially in the piece installed at the front of the gallery.

If I sound snarky, or divided, as I describe this work, it's a defense mechanism. Viola makes it safe for us to like the Romantic stuff that's just on the iffy side of cliche. What I really long for is a re-staging of his magnificent The Crossing diptych that served as the opening to his retrospective over a decade ago. There are other works in this show, mostly good, mostly small and quiet, especially Bodies Of Light, which looks like it sounds and is kind of tantric and charmingly low-tech in a late-60s video performance kind of way. The other centerpiece installation is Pneuma (1994), a full-room multi-projector environment of deliberately obfuscated, digitally granulated home movies, essentially. This work is pursuant to Viola's interest in liminal vision and totalizing sensations, like being underwater, but it feels out of place alongside the crispness of his later work. Also, I generally like the exhibition design of shows at this gallery, and Cohan is a true believer in video art, which is why it was so frustrating that the cramped quarters of these ersatz viewing catacombs left so little breathing room for the work (as well as the audience). Some curatorial editing would have gone a long way to a show that is otherwise worth spending some time with.

Bitter People Hate Art, Life

On this ex-treme-ly rainy, blustery spring day in New York--really, just the kind of weather I enjoy, especially for gallery hopping in Chelsea--I find my sensibilities regarding the life-affirming power of Art under assault.


First at the Yoko Ono installation at Lelong, in which viewers are invited to take a Polaroid of themselves limb-f*cking a perforated canvas. In a way, also, mourning the death of the Polaroid, what a bummer!


In need of refreshment with a snack and magazine, New York Magazine informs me that 1 in 10 people who kill themselves in New York come from out of town specifically for that purpose, in this article on Suicidal Tourism. Yo, Gypsy wasn't that bad! At least now I have 'The SuicideTourist' as a name for my autobiography. Ta for the title.



Finally, a scary xerox clown-head warns aspirational pedestrians against art school...(click to view larger).

New York is trying to tell me something, but the message arrives too late!

All Those Beautiful Boys

Speaking of boring gays and expensive art (see previous post), here are some musings about shows that all opened in the same time-frame last month in New York, representing a spectrum of high-end/low-end art production models and art world fagiolis in general..

Ryan McGinley @ Team!

The best part of Ryan McGinley will always be his openings---eww, no, that's not what I mean! I mean all the fabulous skinny giraffe boys and artfag mafia that attend his openings (and star in his photographs). This current body of work was miles ahead of the puzzling and unenjoyable Morissey concert photos of his premiere Team offering. Ryan toured the country with a group of beautiful nude ectomorphs of both sexes (embodying such an otherworldy level of litheness and lethargy, perhaps more like a hipster third sex of some kind..). Such an envious proposition resulted in less joy than you might think: his romantic posings, alternately leaping, running, or in repose, are rendered with a kind of affectless flatness which I find characteristic of his photos; slightly distanced, the figures dissolving into the landscape like a Natural History Museum diorama, these post-sexual gazelle-like children always fleeing, flying, the exact opposite of the cum-shot confrontations of, say, Terry Richardson (who was there, of course). The NY Times critic's review of the show discouraged his use of fireworks (a recurrent motif) in which nude figures are suspended in a nimbus of pyrotechnic energy, but I disagree, they lend a supernatural exuberance which counterbalance the few shots that threaten to disappear into their own indolence...

Scott Treleaven @ John Connelly Presents!

This show was so charming and sexy I wanted to buy half-a-dozen pieces on the spot, but settled for a catalog. Scott makes very mannered, adorational photo-collage altarpieces in the spirit of xeroxed gay-punk zines, Derek Jarman, or a more occultish, back-alley Pierre & Gilles...the naked punk youths in his stark pictures usher the viewer into a baroque reliquary in which the sophomoric symbology (skulls, floral japonisme, wolves, the occult, human sacrifice) does seem to somehow work in summoning up my inner goth-punk buried deep down inside forgotten queer teenage feelings...

Murakami @ Brooklyn Museum

It just wouldn't be complete if I didn't include this surreptitiously snapped shot of the infamous My Lonesome Cowboy, Murakami's sole nod to the explicit gay manga subgenre (a medium not short on other deviant sexual behaviors like misogyny, rape, child porn, psycho-sexual torture and other family-friendly fare). In fact I really can't believe the number of strollers and kids I had to dodge around at this opening, granted it was the first-friday free-family day-care center at the museum, and the work is awfully bright and full of festive cartoon figures, but a little research ahead of time might have saved parents a lot of embarrassment and awkward explanations about Murakami's scatalogical, putrescent and somewhat alarming artwork.
I loved Peter Schjeldahl's frank statements about the show in the New Yorker:
"I don't like Murakami's work, but my dislike, being moody, feels out of scale with the artist's terrific energy and ambition...His aim is to control and standardize aesthetic experience, forcing viewers into an infantile mold of rote response. Warhol, with his..color and catchy evidence of manual touch, is Rubens by comparison. But Warhol as marketer, not as artist, is Murakami's lodestar."
Also: "Murakami seems averse to a cardinal obligation that Warhol, Koons, and Hirst accept: the duty to seduce. But to actively woo the eye and tantalize the mind implies the possible existence of resistant viewers." If an underwhelmed Scheldahl found solace in the naked avarice of the built-in Vuitton boutique, I admit to being sucked in, seduced, and twirled around like a lariat of semen around that maniacally grinning boy's head.
REBLOG update (posted by Ed Winkleman, May 15):
My Lonesome Cowboy... "inspired by a Japanese video game hero with a swirling semen lasso, fetched more than five times its $3 million low estimate. At $15.2 million, it may be the most expensive ejaculation ever auctioned. (A Sotheby's spokeswoman said that's one category they don't track.)"

Expensive Art, Boring Gays: Credit in the Straight World

Last week I had an interesting conversation with a certain favorite gallerist of mine in which he bemoaned the loss of an interesting, radical queer culture in favor of the current assimilationist, overly-capitalized attitudes of the gay scene. Always one to carry on two conversations in my head, the other one concerning the 'Art and its Markets' issue of Artforum, I chirped at the parallel developments within the gay movement and the art world since the 70s or so. In both scenes, early optimistic attempts to create team-oriented utopian social alternatives fizzled fairly quickly and gave way to a highly market-driven, consumption-oriented practice. Or did it? After a tumultuous decade in which art and queers (and usually, queer art) had to continually defend itself against public and governmental exhortations to 'prove its validity in the real world', it turned around and did exactly that. The Market (or rather, success in the Market) is the sole autonomous zone of invulnerability in this country. So now, the art market has become an inflated parallel universe of hyper-capital, and there are more gays boringly getting married and going to church than ever before. The positive side of this being: a rising tide has the potential to lift all boats. As if!!

As Gregory Sholette notes in his article 'State of the Union' from the afore-mentioned issue of Artforum, this process of radicalization and then normalization seems to be cyclical. There was a period of collectivity, organizing and attempted unionization of artists following the Depression and the WPA projects, followed inevitably by a postwar clampdown in which 'radicals were purged from unions and artists began to abandon picket lines for their studios.' It wasn't until the 60s and 70s that artists "again took up militant self-organizing", obviously in parallel with the other social movements of the time, including the post-Stonewall politicization of the Gay Lib movement.
Sholette: "But as we well know, the conservative 'revolution' of Reagan and Thatcher soon followed. After experimenting with ideas, politics, unions, and other not-so-marketable practices, artists began to paint again." (And freaky expressions of sexuality in popular culture went back in the closet to a certain degree, or at least hid beneath a veneer of a coded normative heterosexuality, as in certain music videos of the period...) "East Village artists of the 80s surrendered themselves to the means-end rationality of the marketplace" while mimicking the subaltern culture they were helping to displace. Nevertheless, some artists continued to self-organize for greater equity at a time of rapid defunding of the public sphere through targeted cuts in nonmilitary state expenditures."

Conceptually speaking: "further complicating the status of artistic production is the 180-degree shift in the profile of the artist, from marginal outcast to a fetish figure for the creative networked economy...the new spirit of capitalism calls on all of us to think like an artist: outside the box." The image of the Gay, likewise, is of the ultra-efficient, socially networked glamazon, ready to decisively improvise a fabulous makeover, deliver sharp advice and generally help straights get their life together. When you have to work twice as hard for half the reward, after all, you get good at it. The new spirit of reality-tv pop culture calls on all of us to think like a homo: outside the closet!

Of course that works great for those art stars & fagiolis who are at the top of the food chain; the social reality for the proletarian majority continues to be precarious. We all love the idea of being poor, underground, radical and sexy. Lots of great art and great sex has happened in that zone, but then we, like a society in general, has to grow up. The presence of an expanded market thanks to Hirst or Koons or Gagosian or Broad doesn't prevent new collectivities and radical schools from forming. Twenty-year old republican gays getting married doesn't stop freaky punk-tranny-rock star hustlers from coming into being and converting your kids. Like I told my gallerist compadre at the end of our conversation: You sound like every other old guy who complains about things becoming too mainstream...the rad art, music and sex is still going on, but it's happening in the underground where it belongs, and its not for you (or me either for that matter) anymore. Sorry.

Volta Video from my phone!

One of the neat things about Volta is that galleries are allowed only one artist per installation. This makes it feel more like an exhibition and less like a trade show. From the viewer's perspective it certainly eases the fatigue of art-fair visual overload, and hopefully it presents the taste level of the gallery in a more accurate light which ultimately attracts longterm collector interest---right? This may have been the reasoning behind the galleries that chose to display, er, shall we say non-commodity oriented work.

There was a cool 'contraption' aesthetic to a lot of the work--and a lot of really great video installation pieces. Here is a look at some of them. I shot the video with my cell-phone which accounts for the appalling production values.



Ian Burns @ Spencer Brownstone

Ian Burns creates inventive, self-contained cinematic scene-generators made from kitchen-sink contraptions comprised of ironing boards, folding chairs, dirty plastic cups, electric fans, spy cameras and other off-the-shelf consumer junk. The sculptures are hilariously unwieldly mechanical assemblies that are notable in their use of plastic bags as a visual stand-in for arctic landscapes. Can you see the model plane 'flying' through the clouds?



Peter Sarkisian @ I-20

'Extruded Video Engine' is a rear-projection piece ingeniously mounted and seamlessly presented; it consists of hundreds of clips composited together to intelligently conform to the contours of a 3D vacuum-formed sculpture. It had a retro, slightly carnival-esque Dada feeling, like peering into the workings of a 50s sci-fi mechanism or behind the curtain of the Mighty Oz; the pistons, gears, and whirlygigs are obsolete gadgets that were allegedly filmed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Another crowd-pleaser here.





Pietro Sanguineti @ Nusser&Baumgart

These videos really caught my eye. Sanguineti incorporates the style of broadcast graphics to create time-based explorations of single word imperatives (which he also creates as text-based sculptures, see side); in the central, newest piece, he cuts snippets of computer-generated footage from video-games, commercials, and other sources to comment on the complex representations of 'nature' in our heavily mediated visual culture.





One more...



David Ellis @ Roebling Hall

Brooklyn action-graffiti painter David Ellis does a 180 from the Barnstormers work we know and love and presents these fascinating junkyard honky-tonk percussion sculptures. Tom Waits should be howling over them, I think. I didn't get a good shot of the clanging mound that the large bird is flapping in front of, but it's actually a giant craft-fair owl formed from beer bottles and metal mesh. The video loop is a teaser of an upcoming film of slow-motion paint spilling, I thought it was a long form computer rendering of fluid dynamics. Speaking of which, David is doing a week-long live painting performance at the Theory flagship store in the Meatpacking District, check it out til April 3rd.

Art Fair Roundup 2: Volta!

Here are some highlights from the Volta fair, which everyone--quite justifiably--told me to attend after the somewhat dull viewings at Scope (don't get me wrong, there was a lot of really nice work on view, it just didn't feel like--well, like art was happening).

Above, Jacin Giordano's fabulous toilet seat cover column and glitter painting at Baumet Sultana.

Above, these sculptures from Kevin Francis Gray (at Goff & Rosenthal) were real crowd pleasers. A combination of cast resin, bronze and automotive paint that filtered a smart classicism through a contemporary filter, or is that the other way around..? Sex, death, glamor, drapery, and the artist himself, a big, bearded, beaming Irishman...
It made me think. No one in New York is making work like this, except Koons, but he's on his own trip--but it may have more to do with access to the resources necessary to make this kind of work. This kind of work is expensive, time-consuming, and craft-conscious, not exactly three things in the toolbelts of most NY artists, but is that an aesthetic choice or are the means of production limited by the difficult realities of living here? The junk/assemblage aesthetic certainly seems to rule the scene here. I'd be interested in your opinion on this.

Art Fair Roundup!

Assume Vivid Astro Focus at the Armory! Yay!!
This is about all I paused to enjoy at the Armory show, after sneaking in--kind of--thanks to the good grace of my friend from VideoArtWorld who was in town to host a series of really interesting panels and screenings at Whitebox for DiVA (the Digital Video Art Fair, now revamped as a series of individual installations in several shipping containers scattered around Chelsea--MUCH preferable to a cramped hotel presentation, though probably not for the poor gallery attendants who had to sit in the containers all day in the cold & rain!).

Beauty, Brocades, Truth & TinFoil: Rudolf Stingel @ the Whitney

(Disclosure statement: I haven't yet seen the show, but I am an admirer of his past works, and I'm looking forward to it. This post is more general thoughts about the review the artist's work in general.)

In looking at the A/V tour provided by Roberta Smith at the NY Times online, I'm struck again by the artist's intentional workings on idea of ornament, environment & surface adornment, notably in view of contemporary wallpaper and carpet designers who are positioning these craftworks more firmly in the nether region between art, design and architecture. Or should I say, between good taste and bad taste, high art and tacky luxury, process and product. Ms. Smith writes: "Opulence is countered by austerity, spectacle is undercut by banality. All processes are as transparent and simple as possible...The show swings between painting as portable object and as immersive environment."

Stingel's past work, such as the huge floral carpet for the Walker Art Center, or his particle-board sacristy to Paula Cooper (excellently reviewed here by Jerry Saltz), places him in the recent tradition of artists who work in a decadent, allover consumptive decorative way (AVAF, Jorge Pardo, Jim Iserman, Barry McGee, Tsang Kin-Wah, et al), who manage to somehow insert a pleasure principle into a political and immersive (but human scale) practice.How can you not love this installation titled 'Home Depot' for the MMK Frankfurt, in which the wallpaper housed the same pattern of the 'artwork':



Stingel's use of 'cheap' materials such as styrofoam, mirrors, shag carpet and the DIY aspect of the silver mylar graffito piece tweaks my stingy reluctance towards 'participatory' art and the lazy notion of 'everything the artist does is art', but as Ms. Smith puts it in her review of the current show:

These paintings set a brooding, romantic, even phlegmatic tone at odds with his usual brisk no-nonsense attitude, but they emphasize several important points: The artist is always at the center of the art, no matter how impersonal it may sometimes appear; art takes a lot of thought and deliberation, no matter how simple it may seem; and indolence has its rewards.The implication is that artists in particular should do as little as possible. The sign of a successful artwork is its ability to derive the greatest effect from the least means.

Another lesson to be extracted from this elegant show is the oxymoronic nature of the notion of “empty beauty” that has been bruited about extensively in the last decade. This show suggests that if art is empty, it is not beautiful and vice versa. If something is beautiful in any sustained way, it contains, at the least, an idea about beauty and usually much more.

It's got to be said his self-portrait paintings are pretty amazing...which is a laconic compliment-with-a-sneer about photo-realism, right? And even the 'do-nothing' works have an air of shabby sophistication that is genuinely inviting and funny, through the simple inversion of putting floor-works on the wall (carpet, footprints) and vice versa. The aspect of his work which involve self-referential art world gags or the navel-gazing 'demystification' of the art-making process can seem kind of precious, leaving the question open: is this an appropriation of spectacle or is it a container of unapologetic, pleasurable spectacle as an end to itself? Whatever. I love it.

See the full review & voiceover tour by Ms. Smith right here.

Risky Business: What They Don't Teach You In Art School Part I

I recommend this writing which is found on the always entertaining and frank artblog run by gallerist Ed Winkleman. This post reveals the mysteries of the artist/dealer 50/50 sales split and tries to answer the question, What Is It That Galleries Do Anyway?, which is just a super question to ask when you consider that a gallery really is a business and not a public service or retail space and that most dealers really aren't interested in the non-buying, off-the-street hoodlum hoi polloi (such as myself) that drifts in and out of their $25,000/month tony exhibition halls, pestering the young staff with so-called in-depth questions (my 'interest' is a shallow cover for often unsuccessful flirting BTW). These annoyances surely account for the fact that galleries are only open 5 days a week (not including Sunday) typically with the awkward, non-working-class friendly hours of 10-6 pm and are closed for holiday for upwards of a month...

Anyway, here are some snippets:

Many folks outside the gallery system will look at that split and be amazed, I'm sure. The artist is the creative genius, the artist spent years in art school, the artist is the one putting it all on the line for the public to take pot shots at their vision. In other professions, like acting, managers only get 15% and agents only get 10%. Why on earth does the gallery take 50% of the money? The short answer is because it costs that much to promote the artist's work. The longer answer is, well...

All in all, I feel the artists who get it the best are also the artists who take the time to understand the business realities of the relationship. Many artists will complain about the split wholly unaware that at the point they're doing so, the gallery has spent more money promoting the artist than they've taken in through sales. In other words, the gallery has yet to recoup its investment.

Also:

I took a small survey of young(ish) galleries with bare bone staffs and predominantly emerging artists in their stable in New York. They reported that it costs between $6,000 to $12,000 per exhibition for the overhead/rent alone (these are all galleries with relatively modest spaces). This is before the gallerist takes a salary, let alone sees any profit for the business. That means, that with the 50/50 split, those galleries must sell between $12,000 and $24,000 of artwork per exhibition before they even break even. Before they can pay themselves anything. Before they can expand the business and reinvest in more resources to promote their artists. For many (if not most) emerging artists out there, I suspect, that means the gallery took a loss on your first exhibition. Sometimes a hefty one.

Furthermore:

...it happens all the time that after 5 years, after an investment of $50,000 or more, an artist will leave a gallery, or stop making art, or a whole range of things that make that investment disappear. It's risk like this that, to my mind, justifies the 50/50 split. At least initially.

We artistical-types are flakey that way.

But, I'm not really being snarky here, you should absolutely go to the blog and read the full writing as well as the insightful discussions on the comment board. Go!