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.