February 23, 2003
From e-mail correspondence
These are some initial thoughts after one read-through, admittedly on the train from 116th & Broadway to Astoria. I promise deeper thoughts once I've looked at it again.
Oh, mentioning where I started my reading reminds me of where I was after the meeting: a lecture on 'Density and its Architectures' by Saskia Sassen at Columbia. It seemed really short and haphazardly presented, but it really started expanding in my head after I left. Perhaps this is the 'viral' criticism that Joselit is looking for? Her talk asked a lot of questions that she left (intentionally) unanswered: What happens when you dislodge density from its general perception as physical agglomeration and building height? How does the digital age change notions of density? What is the range of forms--from the territorial to the electronic--of density? She 'dislodged' it by changing the word 'density' to the phrase 'spaces of centrality' and historicizing the current understanding. Our understanding of density is a product of 20th century urbanism, and that as we move into the digital 21st century, we need to see more than just a downtown. Her spaces of centrality are (1) the downtown/city center; (2) the social network, which can extend beyond the physical borders of the city; (3) the global network of interlinked cities (centers of finance, etc.); and (4) electronic space. I get the feeling from her talk that she's most interested in the latter, which is probably the one I'm least interested in.
Actually, before I go and narrate the whole boring thing to you, I'll cut myself short and just get to the two points I found most interesting. First, she seemed to say that in our age density alone is not enough. She coined the phrase mixity ('mixcity'?), emphasizing that a given place--geographic or electronic--must not only have a lot of things going on in it, but that those things must be interacting in complex ways. I think that's an interesting way to think about urban spaces that 'work' versus those that don't: it's not just a matter of building tall and having lots of tenants in your office space. The other idea she brought up was the idea that density can create political subjectivity. It was something she threw in at the end of the lecture, and didn't really flesh out. In the Q&A session afterward, she related it to the WTC disaster: the destruction of that site uncovered a density of heretofore hidden laborers, users, etc. Many of these groups were silent or their social/economic activity was intentionally repressed, the disturbing absence of the surface-level activity at the site brought to light the whole underside that supported that activity. Not only was it bond traders at Cantor Fitzgerald that needed support from the government, but also (possibly undocumented) nighttime workers that suddenly were out of work; they were unified by this absence and were both accorded a certain political subjectivity--a certain right to the funds given and the rebuilding process--after the disaster. Sassen mentioned it in relation to Lefebvre's understanding that it is the organized working class, not the bourgeoisie, that makes creates 'urban space' in a city. In 1950s and 1960s France, the working class was a lot more visible, but nonetheless they are still here today.
Anyway, I'm rambling again...
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
February 20, 2003
Janet Flanner and Roni Horn
I have returned to Janet Flanner's Paris Journals. A New Yorker columnist for fifty years, these slim paperback volumes collect her dispatches in chronological order. She seems the quintessential New Yorker contributor: equally interested in politics and the arts, widely read, and with a casual writing manner that nonetheless conveys a lot of information. I first read the volume dedicated to the years 1965-70 as a way to understand a little bit more about the events that led to the May 1968 student riots. Her writing didn't offer the insights I looked for but did a fantastic job of narrating the end of de Gaulle's regime.
Now I'm back to the book narrating the years 1944-1955. It reads surprisingly fast, and after less than twenty-four hours, I find myself seventy-odd pages in. To continue my newly-minted tradition of offering an excerpted paragraph, here is Flanner's take on the first post-liberation election, in 1945:
Never before in living memory has a bitterly contested French election made a trio of rivals so happy as the Communists, the Socialists, and the new Popular Republicans are right now. One way or another, all of them have just won in France's first election since before the war. The world waited over the weekend, with unusually flattering attention, to see how France would choose. France chose three things, all different. Madame La Quatriéme République is starting out like a woman with three hands, two Left and one Right, the Communists and Socialists being on the side closer to her newly reawakened revolutionary heart and the Popular Republicans on her other, purse-carrying side.
Much like my admiration for Martin Amis, noted below, I am deeply impressed by Flanner's ability to fashion with words a vivid, clear image of an enormously complex situation. I look forward to the moment when I read the last page of the volume that covers 1956-1964 and the two jaunts through postwar Parisian history join together in my mind. Then, perhaps, it might be a good idea to return to Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
February 18, 2003
Georges Perec
The Center for Book Culture's journal, Context, features a well-written primer by Warren Motte on Georges Perec in their newest issue. I came to Perec via Species of Spaces and Other Pieces; I later read Life A User's Manual and read about A Void and Les Revenentes. This article reminds me to dig in the boxes under my bed and find his books so that I might enjoy them yet again.
A brief passage from the article:
Georges Perec is perhaps best described as a literary experimentalist, one who was intrigued by the question of form. He produced a score of major works, each one quite different from the others. Although he is best known for his novels, he also wrote plays, poetry, essays, filmscripts, opera librettos, and many other texts which confound traditional generic categories. "My ambition as a writer," he explained to an interviewer in 1978, "would be to traverse all of contemporary literature, without ever feeling that I am retracing my own steps or returning to beaten ground, and to write everything that someone today can possibly write." He once suggested that his work was animated by four major concerns: a passion for the apparently trivial details of everyday life, an impulse toward confession and autobiography, a will toward formal innovation, and a desire to tell engaging, absorbing stories.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
February 17, 2003
Yesterday
Yesterday brought a trip to the Guggenheim. They are installing the Matthew Barney 'Cremaster' exhibition, so the only show on view is Pierre Huyghe's Huge Boss Prize affair. Two works, one a 'light sculpture' and the other a large-scale video projection of a piece that premiered at the 2001 Venice Biennial. I'd been looking forward to the video since its premiere, and am glad to have seen it in person. For lack of a better description, it contains a model of two 1970s era French public housing towers whose windows, amid fog and snow, light up in a call-and-response manner. The whole thing is set to a soundtrack by Finnish electronic duo Pan Sonic, which is described as being set to a 'random program.' However, after five run-throughs, I didn't notice any variation. As a whole, the piece was a letdown. The other work, L'Expédition Scintillante, Act II: Untitled (light show)--and really, what an unnecessarily over-the-top title--works much better. The light show, set to Debussy's arrangement of Satie's Gymnopodies, is a dramatic backdrop for unseen performers. It is set out in the middle of the gallery, and by virtue of its placement, the viewers opposite you become the actors as you watch them watching the piece. I will say, however, that I'm glad I get free museum admission, because I would have been pretty disappointed had I paid full-price admission and that was all I could see.
The Matthew Barney preparations were interesting as well. The lower third of the rotunda is filled with photographs, the floor is carpeted royal blue, and the upper two-thirds are devoted to the sculptures. I didn't see where the films will be screened. A number of the props used in the Guggenheim scenes of Cremaster 3 are reintroduced to the physical space of the museum: hanging off the ramp's railings were the wall-climbing pegs the artist scaled at the end of the film, and pastel-colored maypole-style ribbons were hanging from the middle of the rotunda's glass ceiling. It should prove a fun affair.
After all that, I went to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and saw the uninspiring 'New Hotels for Global Nomads' exhibition. Twenty-eight minutes and I was back in the lobby, thankfully and surprisingly running into a handful of college friends. We went around the corner to Salon 94, a new gallery run out of the first floor of a recently renovated multimillion dollar townhouse. I buzzed the doorbell twice, and the six of us were let in.
It was quiet, and empty, and sort of dark inside. A woman--who I assume to be the housekeeper--came from the second floor down a few steps and called down that the owner of the house/gallery would be back in a few minutes. So we cooled our heels, feeling awkward and kind of laughing at the fact that we were standing on marble floors and looking out into a beautiful backyard and seeing thousands of dollars worth of art hanging on the walls with no supervision. When the owner came back, I was standing at the other end of the front entrance facing her. Her surprise was noticeable, and the increasing shock as each of my friends came into view, one by one by one by one by one, also registered on her face. Well, it turns out that the gallery isn't open on Sundays and she was surprised to see strangers standing in the middle of her house after returning home from errands. We were surprised also--to have been let in at all--and the ensuing one-minute conversation was quite awkward. I want to go back today, during open hours, to apologize and actually see the video. However, there is over a foot of snow on the ground. It was nice to see, however briefly, how 'the other half lives,' so to speak. As much as all of the expensive art and interior decorations were impressive, I was more impressed by the quiet. One can get a lot of thinking done in an Upper East Side townhouse.
But today I'm going to take a swan dive off my second-floor balcony into an eight foot pile of snow, get up, dust myself off, and climb onto the railing next to that pile and dive into the six foot pile on the sidewalk. Then I'm going to come back inside, change clothes, and try to warm up. I hope my landlord doesn't see me.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
February 15, 2003
War
I do not usually offer directly political opinions in this space, which is normally reserved for musings on art, literature, and the events of my own life. However, I am against both the idea of a US-led war with Iraq and even more the urgency with which it is being pursued by our government. I am at work today, unable to attend today's anti-war rally in New York City, and therefore wish to express solidarity with the protesters in every forum possible.
To that end, allow me to mention On the Natural History of Destruction, a newly-published book by the late W.G. Sebald. It collects several lectures originally presented in Switzerland in 1997, with additional essays on Alfred Andersch, Jean Amery (link to his books), and Peter Weiss. Its central essay, which provoked controversy when published in German during 1999, is titled "Air War and Literature." Excerpts from this essay were recently published in The New Yorker and, thanks to The Guardian, can be found online at this site.
The essay attempts to understand the cultural elision in postwar German literature surrounding the Allied bombing of German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden. Sebald sees this is a willed endeavor, and extols the virtues of writers like Heinrich Boll and Hans Erich Nossack, who managed to report on the terrible events and their horrible, extended aftermath. When one reads passages like this--
In a raid early in the morning of July 28, beginning at 1am, thousands of tonnes of high-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on the densely populated residential area north of the Elbe. A now familiar sequence of events occurred: first, all the doors and windows were torn from their frames and smashed by high-explosive bombs weighing 4,000lbs, then the attic floors of the buildings were ignited by lightweight incendiary mixtures, and, at the same time, fire bombs weighing as much as 30lbs fell into the lower stories. Within a few minutes, huge fires were burning across the bombed area, which covered about eight square miles, and they merged so rapidly that, only a quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped, the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see. Five minutes later, at 1.20am, a firestorm arose of an intensity that no one would ever before have thought possible. Reaching more than a mile into the sky, it snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all the stops pulled out at once.The fire burned like this for three hours. At its height, the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising kiosks through the air, tore trees from the ground, and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind collapsing facades, the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of more than 90 miles an hour, spun across open squares in strange rhythms, like spinning cylinders of fire. The water in some of the canals was ablaze. The glass in the tramcar windows melted; stocks of sugar boiled in the bakery cellars. Those who had fled from their air-raid shelters sank, in grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by melting asphalt. No one knows for certain how many lost their lives that night, or how many went mad before they died. When day broke, the summer dawn could not penetrate the leaden gloom above the city. The smoke had risen to a height of five miles, where it spread like a vast, anvil-shaped cumulonimbus cloud. A wavering heat, which the bomber pilots said they had felt through the sides of their planes, continued to rise from the smoking, glowing mounds of stone. Residential districts whose street lengths totalled 120 miles were utterly destroyed.
--one cannot help but urge caution to our leaders who are currently planning similar attacks. It is even more disconcerting when one considers that the destruction outlined above was created by neither biological, chemical, nor nuclear weapons--all potentially more destructive than the type used over Germany--and presents only one side of the multi-faceted World War. All of this happened only sixty years ago: many of our grandparents fought in and were directly affected by these events. It is my sincere hope that, two generations later, we do not forget what happened and blunder into similarly tragic scenarios.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
February 12, 2003
Martin Amis, etc.
In late 2000, Martin Amis' essay collection The War Against Cliché was published to wide acclaim. I had never read his writing and didn't understand the excitement. Nor could I afford the hardcover price to find out. Instead, about two months ago, I picked up The Moronic Inferno, a collection of author profiles, review essays, and culture think-pieces featuring American subjects. I hoped the book would encourage me toward the more recent collection.
It did. I read The Moronic Inferno in three days, which, when limited to subway and bedtime reading, is quite fast. Every sentence hums, each paragraph is an atlas of ideas. The compression involved in conveying complex ideas with short turns of phrase is especially impressive to me as I struggle against 300 and 350 word counts in my art reviews. I don't always agree with him, but I respect his ability to discern what he feels is important in a given situation and to illuminate it with grace (and a little bit of humor.) The War Against Cliché is a bigger helping of the same: here he focuses on twentieth century British and American authors, with larger sections devoted to his favorites and a few side-trips into diversions like chess and football (the non-U.S. kind). The breadth of this collection makes missteps unavoidable--as when he takes on some literary classics in longer pieces for The Atlantic Monthly--but on the whole, I highly recommend both collections.
It is always instructive for me to examine various strains of criticism: from the highly academic to the populist, on written and visual topics, from the (post-)modern to the classics. My library slowly grows. Next on tap are some collections of John Ruskin's writing to be followed by the pairing of Octavio Paz and José Ortega y Gasset. Any suggestions? I am especially interested in early- to mid-20th century literary criticism or any contemporary visual criticism from non-Western locales. It's all appreciated!
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
February 11, 2003
More thoughts on McGinley's photographs
I amended my previous thoughts on the McGinley exhibition at the Whitney in an attempt to flesh out why I didn't like it. I'd be very happy to hear comments from anyone who has seen the show. These are relatively unedited--I didn't look at them beyond hitting the period key on the last sentence--so I don't really consider this a review, per se. Like you care. Onward.
It's difficult to critique the work of someone who is twenty-four, because at this moment the arc of his career starts with birth and ends at baby's first steps. Juvenile is the word that comes to mind when confronted with an unaesthetic dead-on portrait of a naked boy masturbating, a close-up of semen stains on light blue pants, or a holiday picture of friends out surfing. Some of these are 'early' McGinley, circa 1999, so let me say that redeeming qualities are to be found in a few of the more recent pictures. Lizzie is balanced mid-stride, nude. The contrasting innocence of her young face and bashful pose with a mature body is neatly paralleled: behind her, the frame is vertically bisected by a graffiti-covered wall that sports the outerspace wallpaper of a child's bedroom. One kid, idling on a train track and sporting a scruffy beard, has exceptionally clear eyes that pierce the lens and grab the viewer. However, much like his oft-mentioned artistic forebears--Nan Goldin (who will soon have an exhibition on view at Matthew Marks gallery) and Wolfgang Tillmans--McGinley needs an editor to separate these diamonds of effortless beauty from a rather large patch of rough.
The work of Goldin--and to a lesser extent, Tillmans--depends largely on a deep trust between subject and photographer, a trust that I imagine McGinley is still attempting to build. However, there might be a hitch in that process. The exhibition brochure tells us that his subjects 'perform for the camera and expose themselves with a frank self-awareness that is distinctly contemporary. The camera is ... an accomplice in the construction of the world they wish to create for themselves.' McGinley's subjects are too invested in McGinley the photographer, and the artifice is apparent in the final product. A viewer removed from the scene of these 'constructions' will read them as style, not art.
Have we now crossed a threshold? Does Goldin's fame preclude McGinley's ability to capture the tender, fleeting moments she photographs? Her subjects look away from the camera because they are engaged with life. His look away because they hope to be pictured as so engaged. The difference is slim, but one that separates the memories that last from those that
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
February 6, 2003
Ori Gersht review
This is a review that will appear in the upcoming issue of Flash Art. I don't feel it does the work justice, as I was hampered by a word count that I nonetheless exceeded by about twenty-five percent. I'll post the longer version after revising.
Memory is the matter of much art by expatriates. It is a complex subject that mixes not only past with present, but also fact with fiction and experience with imagination. Memory sits at the heart of Black Soil, Israeli-born photographer Ori Gersht's New York debut. The artist, now a dozen years removed from his homeland and a London resident, recently returned to Israel to explore, through new photographs and two videos, places of personal and historical consequence.The titles of two medium-sized photographs, Red Light / White City No. 2 and White Light / Red City 1 (all photographs 2002), look down on the Arab village of Iksal from the hills of the Jewish quarter in Nazareth. Long exposure times magnify the ambient light on the village streets, giving the peacetime scenery the sinister appearance of being looked at by night-vision goggles. Similar imagery became part of Western collective memory when, a dozen years ago, nighttime bombing lit up the sky over Baghdad. In our imagination, the violence of those images fastens itself to these, amplifying the political tension permeating the landscape. Yet the scrub brush in the foreground of each picture reminds us that these are not military flyovers and that these places have meaning for individuals. Two large photographs depicting blackened and trampled earth show that Nature, here scarred by the military exercises in the Golan Heights, records our actions perhaps more fastidiously than the camera.
The videos exploit the mechanical nature of cameras for dramatic emotional effect. Dew (2001) begins by focusing on drops of water collected on the lens. Over the course of several hours, here condensed to a few minutes, the water evaporates until the auto-focus mechanism brings the background, a Bedouin camp in the Negev desert, into relief. Lyrical desert beauty becomes harsh reality. In Neither Black nor White (2001) the long exposure view of Iksal is dissected, with half-second clips spliced together to create an eight-minute reconstruction of sunrise. At first, the twinkling streetlamps set against the darkness evoke stars until, as sunlight overtakes the lens, the imagery is washed out in ambient white light. John Berger wrote, “The camera relieves us of the burden of memory”: with this exhibition, Gersht reminds us that cameras, memory, and imagination are inextricably linked, and that even images fixed by a lens can float away like memories of a past long ago.
The word limit does not allow me to talk about the balance between formal beauty and political implications, and how the photographs tilt toward the latter while the videos the former. It does not allow me to go on an extended riff about implied violence, which I would very much like to do. Maybe I'll extend it to the realm of review-essay for later use.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
February 5, 2003
Notes
All apologies for the delay. Life is filled to the brim and I appear to have forgotten my intention to record things here. I've seen many interesting things lately, though I won't write about them here with as much detail as I'd like.
Rivers and Tides, a documentary film about Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy, is by turns breathtaking and repellent. These shifts hinge completely on the artist himself, poetic when sculpting and hard to stomach when talking about 'being one with the stone'. What he has is an eye for line and color--two things that translate well to film--and the uncredited assistance of Mother Nature, who provides backdrops that are the stuff of Manhattanites' wet dreams.
Ryan McGinley's exhibition at the Whitney, part of their 'First Exposure' series, is bland and unnecessary. I maintain that any artist who has participated in a group exhibition at Andrea Rosen gallery, published a book with Peter Halley/Index Magazine, and presented a solo exhibition in Paris with Agnes B (who came to New York to throw him a congratulatory after-party at the outsized Ace Gallery) does not need 'First Exposure.' Furthermore, the production value of his photographs was upped once again: at the museum we are presented with flat-mounted chromagenic prints that are slightly larger than his most recent presentation in Chelsea, which were already slicker than earlier efforts. What is unfortunate is the lack of a parallel development in the quality of his images, which still come across as hollow imitations of the intimate daily-life snapshots perfected first by Nan Goldin and later by Wolfgang Tillmans. What bothers me further is that I cannot tell if my reaction is purely formal and aesthetic or somehow intertwined with a subconscious jealousy of the attention and accolades he is receiving at an age not far from my own. I'd like to think I'm above that, and that my inability to 'fully' appreciate Goldin and Tillmans--I see them both as needing an editor to separate diamonds of effortless beauty from a rather large patch of rough--indicates a consistent eye when faced with this type of photograph. I need to go back and look again, to make sure that my dismissal of McGinley's work is truly because I do not see it transcending the 'style' it represents and not simply my impatience with the affects of style themselves. Of greater interest to me is a small exhibition of Dennis Oppenheim's 'Aspen Projects,' a series of process-oriented videos made in 1970 and 'Listening Post,' one of the first pieces of 'digital art' that seems as equally resolved on formal levels as it is technical ones.
A few thumbs up for Russian Ark, the Thomas Struth exhibition at the Metropolitan museum (especially the second-floor gallery dedicated to his cityscape photographs), the Ori Gersht exhibition that just came down at CRG Gallery (tomorrow I'll post a review to be printed in the next issue of Flash Art), and the Martin Amis non-fiction collections I have been reading over the past few days. I hope to get back on the journal bandwagon soon!