February 26, 2004
Cardiff and Miller at Luhring Augustine
Here is an Artforum.com review of the Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller exhibition at Luhring Augustine. The link will die in two months, so here's the full text:
In their second collaborative show at this gallery, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller present new works that depart from The Paradise Institute, 2001, their prizewinning, semi-immersive miniature movie theater. With The Berlin Files, 2003, they return to a more conventional cinematic scale. Projected in a darkened room, the work is a thirteen-minute single-channel video that displays many of Cardiff's motifs: overlapping, forebodingly ambiguous narratives (in this case involving a Nico-esque young woman who weeps in a karaoke bar's washroom and lies in bed with an unseen lover); incredibly precise multichannel sound delivered via a dozen speakers; and a female voice whose whispers are an urgent, direct address. Cabin Fever, 2004, on the other hand, is scaled down. It presents a nighttime forest scene as tabletop diorama; viewers don headphones to eavesdrop on an unseen couple's domestic disturbance. In the back room, Feedback, 2004—a Marshall amp that plays Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock national anthem when the viewer presses a foot pedal—seems anomalous to a practice marked by nimble, carefully predetermined surround-sound audio tracks. The iconic solo has a direct, forceful presence, filling the room and conjuring historical and contemporary political associations.
The brevity of the Critics' Pick format didn't allow for an elaboration of the last point. Essentially, I felt that The Berlin Files acted as a summation of the main branch of her work to date. It employs many of the stylistic and narrative tricks central to her previous videos and 'audio walks.' It is enjoyable but does not really have a potency beyond earlier, similar works. Feedback, much like Forty-Part Motet, 2001, is stronger because of its idiosyncracy, showing an avenue away from the works Cardiff has made since the late 1990s. The tactile force of Feedback's sound is key, and serves as a wonderful counterpoint to the potentially intimate encounter between sound and listener, with its one-singing-voice-per-speaker setup, in the earlier installation. (Forty-Party Motet has traveled the world: click here, here, and here for other views.)
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
February 20, 2004
Dale Peck makes a good point
Dale Peck, who has garnered too much attention for his "hatchet job" reviewing style, is apparently ready to publish his last negative review. It will appear in the April/May issue of maisonneuve, though of course its introduction is posted online now to drum up publicity. His popularity (or infamy) has allowed him the column space to consider the role of the critic at length in each of recently published reviews, and this one is no exception. But he makes a good point when discussing overly close analysis:
Exegesis at this level is less interpretation than parallel narrative, and sometimes it can be hard to tell if it expands a text’s impact or diffuses it through too many tangential, anachronistic, esoteric associations. Or, to put it another way, whenever I see a critic taking such liberties I’m not sure if I’m in the presence of genius or insanity, but I sure do laugh a lot. Which is, I’m pretty sure, the intention: among other things, the humor of a Paglia or Wayne Koestenbaum or Dave Hickey makes conspicuous the subtle, easily ignored dramatic irony that informs all criticism. The idea that art—an enterprise whose primary function is to reveal the members of a culture to themselves—cannot be understood by that culture without Virgilian assistance would seem, on the face of it, absurd, and this particular brand of exegesis, while often way off the mark (if not simply off the wall), nonetheless acknowledges its supplemental relationship to the text in question; its humor is inviting, yet also invites its own dismissal.
I'm not familiar with Paglia's writing, and would put Hickey in a different category. To Koestenbaum I would add Bruce Hainley, Dennis Cooper, and David Rimanelli. My response to their art criticism exactly mirrors Peck's: I often laugh, I roll my eyes at unnecessarily obscure references, and then manage to forget content while remembering form. Hainley's January 2004 Artforum article on Sue de Beer is a case in point: I do not remember his main argument(s), but do remember that a parenthetical aside mentions something about how an art world that gives birth to her type of video art might parallel the shift from Dungeons and Dragons-style role-playing games to interactive computer games. When that's all you remember about a three thousand word article, it becomes pretty easy to dismiss. So I often chalk it up to some kind of gay ecstatic scribble that my straight mind isn't privy to, wherein the critic takes a very camp approach to crafting sentences. Is this an unfair judgement? I can't tell, but I can't shake it either...
(Link to maisonneuve article first seen at MaudNewton.com.)
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
February 19, 2004
Why this is not a (good) weblog
I had a good run of one-post-a-day activity, but that's going to drop off considerably for the foreseeable future as I take care of work. More soon.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
February 16, 2004
Franz Gertsch at Gagosian Gallery
An Artforum.com review of the Franz Gertsch exhibition now on view at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. The link will die two months from now, so here's the full text:
Few painters continually work on the supersize scale of Franz Gertsch; fewer still have a privately financed museum to support and exhibit their work. This show of seven paintings and six equally large-scale prints, now settled in the only Chelsea space in which it would comfortably fit, originated at the Museum Franz Gertsch in Switzerland. Five billboard-size portraits of Patti Smith, painted after photographs Gertsch took at a 1977 performance in Cologne, dominate the show. They depict Smith interacting with unseen fans, reading from a book, and playing guitar, but their ostensible photorealism is belied by Gertsch's sly editing. In Patti Smith I, 1978, Gertsch excised an audience member from the image, leaving us with Smith, her back turned, crouching in communion with her guitar and amps on a stage littered with cables and papers. She is the epitome of the 1970s rock star: sexually ambiguous; long, messy hair; clothes artfully arranged over a too-skinny frame. The work's placement and its size fuse two audiences—the one looking at the painting and the one watching Smith's performance—and the viewer bathes in the aura of her stardom. This is contemporary history painting.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
February 14, 2004
Rudi Fuchs on (mis)understanding contemporary art
"Here the misunderstanding is complete. Imagine a gallery acquiring a Frans Hals portrait, and another gallery protesting that it already has such a portrait, actually the same thing, only the position of the hands is somewhat different--for the rest it is always mainly black. This would be unthinkable; but regrettably with contemporary art, such superficial judgements are all too common. It shows that we still find it generally very difficult to accept that a work by a contemporary artist might be of the same excellence as any great Old Master painting. That is a weakness in our society; and it allows the casual and facile perception of new work to continue as it does, to our detriment."
"Here the misunderstanding is complete. Imagine a gallery acquiring a Frans Hals portrait, and another gallery protesting that it already has such a portrait, actually the same thing, only the position of the hands is somewhat different--for the rest it is always mainly black. This would be unthinkable; but regrettably with contemporary art, such superficial judgements are all too common. It shows that we still find it generally very difficult to accept that a work by a contemporary artist might be of the same excellence as any great Old Master painting. That is a weakness in our society; and it allows the casual and facile perception of new work to continue as it does, to our detriment."
- Rudi Fuchs, in "Donald Judd (Artist at Work)," Donald Judd
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
February 12, 2004
Susan Sontag: in case you missed it...
On October 12 last year, during the Frankfurt Book Fair, Susan Sontag was awarded the annual Friedenspreis (peace prize) from the German Booksellers Association. The event was little reported in American media, so you may have missed her acceptance speech. Here is a copy.
An excerpt:
Continue reading "Susan Sontag: in case you missed it..."Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
A good appreciation of Anne Carson
As culture editor of Slate, Meghan O'Rourke occasionally uses current stories and trends to wander around in the library: last year's journalistic forgery scandals were put to use in an appreciation of Joseph Mitchell; Courtney Love's trials and tribulations led to a piece on Edna St. Vincent Millay and Emily Dickinson; and, more obviously, she used The Hours to get back to a discussion of Virginia Woolf. Often I don't like following her to the archives, so to speak, because the original pretense is weak. (Or, worse yet, the lessons learned are not terribly applicable to the situation she's looking at.) This week she posted an appreciation of Canadian poet and author Anne Carson that I feel really hits its mark. A reference to Carson in "The L Word" sends O'Rourke off into a quick overview of Carson's career and a taut analysis of her main themes. She stays focused: "The L Word" to Carson and back in 1500 words. It is recommend reading.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
February 11, 2004
Provisional and informal comments on Saltz, Johnson, and Elkins
Last week two reviews were published in our weekly New York criticism outlets that to my mind failed in ways that may be instructive for other critics (i.e., myself). The first is "Modern Gothic,"Jerry Saltz's review of "Scream," a ten-artist group exhibition at Anton Kern. (Which, you may know, was accompanied by a small brochure to which I contributed an essay.) The other is Ken Johnson's Friday New York Times review of "Mute!," a group exhibition at Guild & Greyshkul. (Scroll down: it's the second review at that link.)
From the first sentence (or maybe even the title) of Jerry's piece, we can see that the exhibition is little more than a shell for his ideas about the current trend toward the gothic in work by young artists. Granted, his ideas are interesting and worth thinking over, as usual. But by the end, he has only dedicated a little more than ten percent of his column to discussing the artists and the work on view, noticably shortchanging a few of them in the process. He spends the majority of the column elaborating the Why of the Gothic revival and in the process neglects the What. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Johson's review, which seems little more than rote description of the five artworks on view. He begins: "'Mute,' an exhibition of five artists associated with Lisson Gallery in London, provides little visual excitement but offers some more or less droll approaches to words and sounds," then describes each work in the show. He neglects to investigate any of the questions brought up by the exhibition. What are the implications of a visual art exhibition with little visual excitement? How does sound fit in to the larger ouevre of these Conceptual artists? How does this exhibition compare with the curator's summer 2003 Lisson Gallery "themed" Conceptual art exhibition? (Poorly, to my mind.) I could go on, but suffice it to say that I cannot grasp Johnson's take no matter how closely I read between his lines.
Continue reading "Provisional and informal comments on Saltz, Johnson, and Elkins"Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
February 10, 2004
Arthur Krystal on literary criticism
From "Club Work," the introduction to A Company of readers: Uncollected writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Readers' Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs:
"Awkward, even clichéd prose is forgivable, but to come to literature with the theorist's pride in complexity and obscurantism is like encountering a slightly demented lover who lavishes all his time and effort on a letter rather than on the person the letter is intended for."
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
February 9, 2004
Tate webcast archives
Apropos of Terry Teachout's recent post announcing that the BBC has begun to make available on the web selected material from its sound archives, I would like to point out a similar venture by the Tate. Look at Tate Audio & Video for a schedule of upcoming live webcasts and an archive of artist talks, guest lectures by critics and writers, panel discussions, and symposia that relate to Tate programming or took place at the museums. Of particular interest to me: artist talks by Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Hirschhorn, Francis Alys, and Michael Snow; Stephen Melville's lecture (and discussion with Christian Bonnefoi and Laura Lisbon) titled "Painting Present"; the 2001 conference titled "Thinking the City"; and "Capital Seminar 1: Gift".
Does anyone know of other institutions that make available their archives in this manner? If so, please forward them to me and I will amend this post to create an index of archives.
Related: This article discusses BBC plans to begin extensive arts coverage on television. (Link via Artforum.com)
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
What James Elkins wants from art criticism
In the spirit of sharing and freedom of information that pervades James Elkins's website, here is the conclusion to his pamphlet What Happened to Art Criticism?, number thirteen in a series published by Prickly Paradigm Press in Chicago. I just purchased and read it last night, and more commentary will hopefully soon follow.
Continue reading "What James Elkins wants from art criticism"So here, to close, are three qualities that most engage me in contemporary criticism. They are open to the same objections I raised about other people's proposals: they have their histories, and they can be interpreted as evidence I want to return to some unnamed past--but so be it! That's the nature of criticism.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
February 8, 2004
Frances Stark on idleness
Sometimes I wish I had a job that wasn't all about me. Sometimes I hate myself and so I hate this life of thinking constantly of the style of my thinking and always wishing I had better captured my thinking so that my thinking could then capture someone else besides myself. In the letter of Musil I quoted above, he talks a great deal of idleness; he writes down a quote and paces the room until the sun sets, or reads a line from a book and lies around smoking cigarettes, quietly forgetting his ideas because he doesn't write them down. "Thus I often lay on my divan and slave away at this kind of self-annihilation."
Sometimes I wish I had a job that wasn't all about me. Sometimes I hate myself and so I hate this life of thinking constantly of the style of my thinking and always wishing I had better captured my thinking so that my thinking could then capture someone else besides myself. In the letter of Musil I quoted above, he talks a great deal of idleness; he writes down a quote and paces the room until the sun sets, or reads a line from a book and lies around smoking cigarettes, quietly forgetting his ideas because he doesn't write them down. "Thus I often lay on my divan and slave away at this kind of self-annihilation."
Frances Stark, in "A Craft Too Small," included in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Bas Jan Ader: Filme, Fotografien, Projektionen, Videos und Zeichnungen aus den Jahren 1967-1975
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
February 7, 2004
Hal Foster on relational aesthetics
In a recent review of three books--Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction by Nicolas Bourriaud and Hans-Ulrich Obrist's Interviews: Volume I--Hal Foster proves he's on top of the game with some astute points about the artists these books (and their curator-authors) champion. (The review may be accessible to LRB subscribers only; I'm not sure.)
In this time of mega-exhibitions the artist often doubles as curator. 'I am the head of a team, a coach, a producer, an organiser, a representative, a cheerleader, a host of the party, a captain of the boat,' Orozco says, 'in short, an activist, an activator, an incubator.' The rise of the artist-as-curator has been complemented by that of the curator-as-artist; maestros of large shows have become very prominent over the last decade. Often the two groups share models of working as well as terms of description.
And the meat of the review:
These possibilities of 'relational aesthetics' seem clear enough, but there are problems, too. Sometimes politics are ascribed to such art on the basis of a shaky analogy between an open work and an inclusive society, as if a desultory form might evoke a democratic community, or a non-hierarchical installation predict an egalitarian world. Hirschhorn sees his projects as 'never-ending construction sites', while Tiravanija rejects 'the need to fix a moment where everything is complete'. But surely one thing art can still do is to take a stand, and to do this in a concrete register that brings together the aesthetic, the cognitive and the critical. And formlessness in society might be a condition to contest rather than to celebrate in art - a condition to make over into form for the purposes of reflection and resistance (as some Modernist painters attempted to do). The artists in question frequently cite the Situationists, but, as T.J. Clark has stressed, the Situationists valued precise intervention and rigorous organisation above all things.
I'm right there with him on that point, though I wish he had cited counter-examples. (Felix Gonzalez-Torres is the first to come to mind: his art pre-dates Relational Aesthetics by a year or two yet there's something in his 'gift economy' that fits snugly with Bourriad's artists while maintaining a needle-sharp political side.) Here's Foster the cranky older critic razzing the younger curators:
Furthermore, when has art, at least since the Renaissance, not involved discursivity and sociability? It's a matter of degree, of course, but might this emphasis be redundant? It also seems to risk a weird formalism of discursivity and sociability pursued for their own sakes. Collaboration, too, is often regarded as a good in itself: 'Collaboration is the answer,' Obrist remarks at one point, 'but what is the question?' Art collectives in the recent past, such as those formed around Aids activism, were political projects; today simply getting together sometimes seems to be enough. Here we might not be too far from an artworld version of 'flash mobs' - of 'people meeting people', in Tiravanija's words, as an end in itself. This is where I side with Sartre on a bad day: at least in galleries and museums, hell is other people.
When I read Postproduction early last year, I marked it up extensively with the hope of one day commenting on it. But I need to revisit that text, as well as ingest Relational Aesthetics for the first time, before I do. To play fair, here's an Artforum interview with and a lecture by Nicolas Bourriaud (who is, by the way, curator of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris) where he gets space to elaborate some of his ideas.
Also, Postproduction was published by Lukas and Sternberg, a small press based in Berlin and New York whose thin, chapbook-style publications are worth checking out.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
February 6, 2004
Further notes on Conceptual art(ists) and bibliophilia
Ken Johnson reviews an exhibition of Conceptual Art from Eastern Europe in today's Times. He mentions Julius Koller, subject of this review in the January issue of Artforum (the link may die soon), and Valie Export among others. The show is on view through March at the Austrian Cultural Forum.
I've also hit upon the next level of art-book bibliophilia: online searches of the stock carried by private book dealers. ANARTIST appears to be someone who lives up near Columbia University and deals art books out of his apartment. Tompkins Square Books is actually not at all near Tompkins Square Park, but rather on east 16th St. They have a wider range, but a few very nice art books. Art Books Now, based in Portland, is pretty self-explanatory, as is Art Books Only.
Another method for getting at hard-to-find exhibition catalogues and monographs is to try looking via the publisher. For example, I know that in the late 1960s and early 1970s the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design held many important exhibition of Minimalist and Conceptual artists. Searching for the college's name as publisher yielded some really interestnig books, including catalogues featuring Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, Steve Reich, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Carl Andre, and more. Click here to go to the AbeBooks 'Advanced Search' page.
I could spend days doing this, but I will say that it certainly does not compare to the pleasure of coming across an unexpected surprise in the dusty back corner of a used bookstore that you ducked into to avoid the rain.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
February 5, 2004
Gilberto Zorio at Sonnabend
Here is an Artforum.com review of Gilberto Zorio's exhibition at Sonnabend. The link dies two months from now, so I have included the full text:
This small show of late 1960s sculpture by Arte Povera's youngest practitioner shows just what New Yorkers missed when "Zero to Infinity" didn't come to town. Form is content in sculptures like Odio (Hate), 1969, whose title is rendered in rope encased in a dangling brick-size block of lead. Visitors may then absolve themselves via two works titled To Purify Words, both from 1969. Each presents a mouthpiece into which you can speak; your words will be cleansed as they pass through a chamber filled with alcohol. Look up to glimpse Spot IV, 1968, a small, thin rubber disc suspended near the ceiling by eight ropes extending to the edges of the room, whose presence is disproportionate to its ephemerality. Column, 1967—an inner tube trapped under a slender concrete pillar—delineates its materials' attributes and stands as an example of arte povera at its finest: with a concept so clear as to be transparent, and materials gracefully arranged.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
February 3, 2004
Barenboim and Ozick on political responsibility for artists
Daniel Barenboim, head of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin since 1992 and co-author of a book with the late Edward Said, is profiled in this article. (Link via ArtsJournal.) Barenboim is a model for the politically engaged artist, speaking out repeatedly against the Israeli government whlie also engaging in activities that work to bridge the gap between Israelis and Palestinians (such as teaching classical music classes in the West Bank and conducting a youth orchestra comprised of children from both sides of the divide.)
It is difficult, especially in times of conflict, to recede fully into the comfortable lair of "art for art's sake," and often equally difficult to find a noble expression of political views within one's art practice. Whatever you think of Barenboim's politics, his activity is to be commended because it engages his twin practices--classical music performance and political activism--as separate but equal strands of his life. Holding the two in balance strikes me as the appropriate course for myself as well.
The article also occasions an opportunity to quote from Cynthia Ozick's essay "Public Intellectuals," which I re-read last night in her collection Quarrel & Quandary:
"History isn't only what we inherit, safe and sound and after the fact; it is also what we are ourselves obliged to endure."
"The responsibility of intellectuals includes also the recognition that we cannot live above or apart from our own time and what it imposes on us; that willy-nilly we breathe inside the cage of our generation, and must perform within it. Thinkers--whether they count as public intellectuals or the more reticent and less visible sort--are obliged above all to make distinctions, particularly in an age of mindlessly spreading moral equivalence."
I suspect that most thinkers, and artists and writers, fall into the "more reticent and less visible" category when it comes to pressing political matters, but I think Barenboim would appreciate the way Ozick imparts a culpability for thoughts and actions to us all.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
February 2, 2004
Benjamin Schwarz on book reviewing
An excerpt from "Why we review the books we do" published in the January/February issue of The Atlantic by Benjamin Schwarz, that magazine's literary editor. He is also a candidate to replace Charles McGrath at the New York Times Book Review.
Readers sometimes note that we tend to run pieces that are either unusually short or unusually long compared with those in other review sections. As for the short ones, we're convinced that important and praiseworthy titles can be reviewed analytically, with verve, and even definitively in much less space than other book sections usually allot. We strive to make these short pieces read like mini-essays, tightly argued and with a strong point of view, rather than like capsule summaries. In our fiction reviews we eschew plot summary; we think novels should be elegantly characterized, not recapitulated. This approach gives the reviewer, even in a short piece, room to place the book in a larger context, be it of the author's body of work or of trends in fiction. As for the long pieces, we're trying to nurture and revive the stylish, critical, often saucy and disputatious review-essay, because we believe that from Macaulay through Virginia Woolf to Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, and Gore Vidal it's proved to be a form perfectly suited to discussing complex ideas with grace and flair, and to taking the pulse of the contemporary intellectual and cultural scene.
[Emphasis mine.]
Replace the words "titles" with "exhibitions" and "book" with "art" and you have a pretty fair representation of what I look for in reviews of contemporary art exhibitions. Lately I'm attempting to limit the space devoted to description in reviews, to more success in the reviews I'm writing for myself than those I publish.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
February 1, 2004
Artforum and Isaiah Berlin
Reading the very long "Global Tendencies: Globalism and the large-scale exhibition" roundtable discussion in the November 2003 Artforum led me back to Isaiah Berlin's "The Pursuit of the Ideal", collected in The Proper Study of Mankind. (The link will hopefully take you to the first page of the essay via Amazon.com's "Look Inside the Book" feature.)
"Members of one culture can, by the force of imaginative insight, understand (what [Giambattista] Vico called entrare) the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space."
"It is what I should describe as pluralism--that is, the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathising and deriving light from each other...."
"Claims can be balanced, compromises can be reached: in concrete sitautions not every claim is of equal force....The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices--that is the first requirement for a decent society."