April 29, 2003
The journal, the art, the books...
There is much progress on the journal front: submissions are rolling in, I am being invited to participate in panel discussions about publishing, artists whose work interests me are proactively contacting me to inquire about my writing and Ten Verses, and much progress is being made on the design and information architecture aspects of the website. "Call for submissions" flyers this week, business cards next week, the site's information architecture the week after that: the vision is taking concrete (albeit virtual) form.
To boost my confidence during these preparations, I have been reading Amy Newman's Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974. It is an oral history of the magazine's beginnings, and I am feeling a certain kinship with Philip Leider, its founding editor. A few quotes that endear him to me:
"[Walter] Hopps has claimed that my 'idealism' led me to propose 'the notion that Artforum should be totally free of commercial vested interest: no advertising. Coplans and Irwin of course...dissuaded Leider.' This is amusing and it may be true: I can imagine myself saying that...I could easily imagine myself thinking that way.""It was exactly what I was trained to do: edit a magazine. I thought it was just a matter of getting copy and correcting it. But in this situation I had to do everything. There was no one else to do it. And I had to learn everything really fast and I loved it, I just loved it...I was there from dawn to dusk. And I learned a great deal about the mechanics of getting a magazine out in a really short time...I really paid dues, I made mistakes right on the page...It was really a high, and I loved it."
"We sold subscriptions one way—through the little tear-out thing in the magazine. And I don't think we ever sold more than ten copies in a month on the newsstand. But subscribers told others, artists told other artists about it, word of mouth, and every week we got this load of little cards back."
It is wonderful for me to see that an institution as well-known and respected as Artforum has humble beginnings. I do not wish to follow the same route as that magazine, but nonetheless appreciate finding faces behind the monolith. Here's an excerpt from an e-mail message describing what I hope to get out of Ten Verses:
The public reasons for starting it are in the mission statement: to connect criticism of architecture and the visual arts with intellectual currents in a wide set of disciplines, to allow young authors a chance to be published in a respectable journal (that they can use as 'clips' for further publication), and an opportunity to promote nearly real-time dialogue between author and audience. The private, personal reasons are similar: I am interested in reading longer, more engaged reviews of exhibitions and essays on artists and architects; I hope to build a platform of communication between me and other young critics (as I've mentioned before, they can be hard to find) and artists; and to give me a large group of friends with whom I can discuss all that I experience in my rather omnivorous quest to learn more about the arts.
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I've been treating myself to film and video art lately. I saw Chris Marker's La Jetee last Tuesday. It is a beautiful film and I now understand its cult status. I picture its multiple narratives, moving simultaneously in various directions, as the equalizer lights on a stereo, rising and falling next to each other. The print I saw was a low-quality VHS dub, and I am now going to actively seek out a DVD or clean projection to watch it again. I also saw Chantal Ackerman's Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, a very slow film whose comments on the passage of time were exacerbated by my having skipped dinner to watch it. Sunday saw my introduction to Stan Brakhage via a memorial screening at the Museum of the Moving Image. Again, now I understand his cult status. The museum's program featured eight or nine short films covering six decades of work; most beautiful to me were The Burial Path (1978), Chartres Series (1994), and Max (2002). The first has given rise to an exhibition idea that I'm going to work on in the coming month.
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I also visited Maria Marshall's new exhibition at Salon 94. I think that being childless serves to separate me from Marshall's art. I say this because, over the past few years, she has gained notoriety for videos and photographs that feature her two young sons, often in a variety of "transgressive" adult settings. One video featured her two-year-old smoking a cigarette; another, titled "I did like being born, I put my wings open, then I flied," features her son alternately rising above and falling below a pool's water level. Her concern seems to be as much maternal as artistic, and the placement of her children in potentially dangerous or unsettling scenarios is meant to provoke protective responses in all of us. Her newest work, a single-channel DVD titled Puzzle Fit, features a handful of nine year olds dolled up and let loose inside a stage-set bar with accompanying disco floor. They interact largely by asking each other who they would date if they could: some girls are domineering, others are shy, and almost all the boys are confused. It's not a bad depiction of the scenes they will find at bars fifteen years from now. However, looking to Gillian Wearing's Broad Street (2002), recently on view at the MCA Chicago (and soon traveling to the ICA in Philadelphia), Marshall's child-to-adult direct correlation falls flat. Wearing's five-channel video installation takes a long look at a night hitting the clubs on Broad Street in Birmingham, England, and is marked by the ambiguities, tensions, and complexities one actually encounters in those social situations. We see groups of boys and girls out on the sidewalks, moving into the clubs, dancing to cheesy music, attempting to have at each other on the floor or at the bar, and finally ending up back out on the streets at the end of the night. No one really connects with each other, and the loneliness that pervades the work is palpable. Unease is Marshall's goal, but Wearing evokes it more subtly by letting her subjects generate their own.
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Thanks to the Strand and a complete recklessness with my bank account, I'm now the proud owner of another collection of Thomas Crow essays titled The Rise of the Sixties; Dan Graham edited by Gloria Moure; Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors; Guy Lelong's new book on Daniel Buren; Udo Kultermann's The New Painting; Michael Auping's Philip Guston; Benjamin Buchloch's Gerhard Richter: Eight Gray; Yve-Alain Bois' Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955; and more. God bless the store, God save me and my wallet.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
April 17, 2003
MA programs and new books
From e-mail correspondence:
I made my first visit to the CCS Museum at Bard College on Sunday. A free day trip. I enjoyed being out in the sun and lying on the grass, as well as having an opportunity to talk at length with the museum's curator and a number of Chelsea art world people that I normally only see in passing. I met a number of students who have been accepted or waitlisted for autumn admission to the program, and talking with them has since led me to think about CCS and the like at some length.
I have always felt that the CCS program is more of a 'finishing school' (and, to continue the analogy, its exhibition openings a 'debutante ball') than anything else. Overheard on Sunday: "Kelly, this is Jeremy Deller..."; "Kelly, I'd like you to meet Ally, she works closely with Maurizio Cattelan..."; "Kelly, this is Aida Ruilova, a young video artist." The three student exhibitions were not very strong. The museum is beautiful, the teachers seem excellent, and everyone gets to meet everyone else, but I wonder about the content of the courses themselves. Is there (somewhat) rigorous art historical scholarship? Are other aspects of the humanities discussed?
I always come off a bit dismissive of the program when discussing it, and I think part of it can be tied to a fear that the CCS and Columbia University Modern Art and Curatorial Studies programs are creating an entire generation of curators who might not know what they're doing. (While simultaneously overcrowding the field and pushing others who do not have MA degrees—ie, me—out of the way.) If there are, say, fifteen Assistant Curator-type positions at well-respected contemporary art museums in this country, these graduate programs churn out twice as many bright young things as potential available positions every year. I'm afraid it will soon become mandatory to have one of these degrees. What do you think? How did your MA experience play out in the application process for the job you now have? What do you think about people who go straight from an undergraduate art history program to a graduate curatorial studies program without getting into the muck of the art world between? For me, it can be scary to see a relatively new field solidify before your very eyes when you're too young to yet be on the inside.
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On another note, thanks to the Strand, I finally picked up Avishai Margalit's The Ethics of Memory. I'm looking forward to starting it when I climb into bed tonight. I also received Steve Beard's Aftershocks: The End of Style Culture for review on the FILM-PHILOSOPHY e-mail list. I can tell by looking at the table of contents that I'm not going to like this book. But it's nice to receive stuff for free. It makes me feel legitimate.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
April 16, 2003
The loss of cultural treasures
The looting and destruction of culturally and historically significant sites in Iraq was commented on rarely before or during the recent attacks. Now this piece runs in The Independent and compounds the sense of horror I still feel at all that has transpired of late. Not only have there been contemporary casualties, but now the voices of many earlier generations have been silenced. (Link via CR Saloon.)
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
April 9, 2003
Two short reviews
Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Feb. 4 - May 18, 2003:
New Yorkers have been blessed lately with contemporary German photography: the Gursky retrospective at MOMA, the debut of the Bechers' "Industrial Landscapes" at Sonnabend, and now the magisterial Thomas Struth survey at the Metropolitan. Seventy-odd photographs were arranged more or less by series, and the opportunity to see them together revealed not a narrative of development, but rather an increasing mastery of what I call attentive depth. Beginning with streetscape photographs that most often look toward a distant vanishing point, subjects slowly slide toward the lens; the recent "Paradise" pictures present lush forest scenes that press up against the picture frame without devolving to mere surface. We understand that the camera is still peering through the green canopy to discern what lies beyond. Struth's concentrated act of looking effaces his own presence and allows us to do the same: if Gursky looks down at the world from above, Thomas Struth is our man on the ground pointing out details in museum audiences, families, flowers, and urban environments we might otherwise miss.
Gillian Carnegie at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Feb. 28 - April 5, 2003:
Gillian Carnegie's New York solo debut smelled as strongly of oil paint on its last day as at the opening reception. She acknowledges paint as a physical thing, and the strongest works in this exhibition tied built-up surfaces to the tactile qualities of her subject matter. The flowers in a small still life, angled toward the viewer, literally rise off the surface and make the most of what little light Carnegie gives the scene. A large canvas on the back wall of the gallery uses a similar technique to lesser effect by outlining rays of immaterial sunlight in concentric circles. Most dramatic is Black Square (2002), a forest scene rendered with varying thicknesses of black paint. It seems plausible that the scene was carved out of a paint slab instead of carefully applied to the flat canvas, and I felt the urge to touch the bark on its tree trunks.
Three small paintings on paper were trapped behind glass that disallowed this sensual encounter. Along with a seemingly atypical small nude self-portrait, they mark the only disappointments in a strong New York debut. The pairing of materiality and representation is concept simple enough to yield diverse results. I hope Carnegie continues down the interesting paths laid out in this exhibition.