September 28, 2004

Hard drive failure

...back next week. Sorry for the delay!

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 27, 2004

Survey of arts blog readers

Todd Gibson of has created a survey designed to help those of us who write about art online find out a little more about those of you who read what we have to say. I filled it out—it takes about five minutes—and would recommend you do the same. Thanks!

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

Joseph Brodsky quote

From Watermark, a collection of reminiscences about Venice:

"For the eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. And to the eye, for purely optical reasons, departure is not the body leaving the city but the city abandoning the pupil."

Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.

September 25, 2004

A brief interruption

You may have noticed that this website was unavailable for some time over the past day or two. Never fear, the technical snafu has been fixed. Now we just have to get past the editorial snafu—birthday celebrations and some pressing work deadlines—and we'll be just fine. Expect posts to resume on Monday.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 23, 2004

Music recommendation: Isis, Panopticon

Isis, the purveyors of methodical, elaborately constructed doom metal fronted by Aaron Turner (of Hydra Head records fame), lies near the opposite end of the musical spectrum from my last recommendation. Panopticon, their third full-length album and second on Ipecac Records, arrives in stores approximately one month from now. It is epic in scope (seven songs stretch to sixty minutes), and paradoxically can be described as disciplined (in its deliberately leaden tempo) and exploratory; it contains waterfalls of guitar pressed together so tightly as to seem impenetrable and delicately melodic interludes that are beautiful without being "pretty." What marks this album as an improvement over Oceanic, an admittedly spectacular record released two years ago, is the presence of those melodic passages hidden underneath the noise. Take "Wills Dissolve," the fourth track, as a key to the record. The first three minutes feature guitars and bass playing a melody that can be considered one step above funereal dirge (not unlike "Swimming in the Lake of Bile," from Canadian metal band Acrid's underappreciated 1997 album Eighty-Sixed); during the final four minutes that same melody is drenched in noise yet appreciably not abandoned. It is plodding, intricate, and mesmeric.

Something Chris Ott wrote in his Pitchfork review of Oceanic is true yet again of Panopticon: "Oceanic is an album that's at once more precise and more exploratory than the predecessor it upstages. Each song is an anthem on par with the three finest on Celestial...but their song remains the same: a huge chorus, and many lengthy breakdowns. Where Oceanic succeeds is in its ability to hold your ear during those lulls." Panopticon is the type of album that forces me to keep one foot in the metal and hardcore scenes while I explore further (and much quieter) realms of music elsewhere.

Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.

Around town, around the world

Not too many gallery exhibitions open in the next few days, as most now have their September shows on view. Museums' schedules, however, are almost never aligned, and so there are plenty of openings worth mentioning. A big one that I failed to mention was last night's opening of a Boris Mikhailov retrospective, featuring 500 photographs, and a new Lucy McKenzie installation at the ICA Boston.

In New York, Iona Rozeal Brown opens her second solo exhibition tonight at Caren Golden Fine Art, which inaugurates its new space on West 23rd St. Also tonight, at 6:00, is a screening of "Alvaro Siza: Transforming Reality," a new documentary about the Portuguese architect. It takes place in the Parsons auditorium at 66 W. 12th St.

Turning elsewhere, tonight the traveling survey "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast in Contemporary Art" opens at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco and the Chapman Brothers talk at Tate Britain, London.

Tomorrow two big exhibitions open: the annual "Printemps du Septembre" in Toulouse, France, curated by Pascal Pique and artist Jean-Marc Bustamente, and "Nancy Spero: Weighing the Heart Against a Feather of Truth," the artist's first retrospective, at the Centro Galego De Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. It is sad that Spero's husband, the artist Leon Golub, will be unable to share in her achievement, as he passed away in August at age 82. Elsewhere tomorrow Rosemarie Troeckel opens an exhibition at Tramway in Glasgow, "Kulturkammer," a solo exhibition of work by John Bock, opens at the ICA in London, and "Nothing Compared to This" opens at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The latter exhibition is marked by its lack of wall labels, its playing of ambient music in the exhibition space by musicians like Brian Eno, and its concept-driven 24x24" fold-out brochure designed by my friend David Reinfurt of the firm O-R-G. Friday also marks the 25th anniversary of my birth.

Saturday brings a couple of big-name openings: the touring Donald Judd retrospective, organized by Nicholas Serota for Tate Modern, lands at the Kunstmuseum Basel; the 26th Sao Paulo Biennial opens; and  Althoff's mid-career survey opens at the MCA Chicago. I wrote about the Althoff's debut at the ICA Boston, where it was organized by new Chief Curator Nicholas Baume. What I didn't say then is that it is one of the two or three best solo exhibitions I have seen since I moved to New York over three years ago and began looking at art in earnest. To that end, I made a second pilgrimmage to Boston in August explicitly to see the exhibition a second time, and will be fortunate enough to see it twice more at its Chicago venue. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Elsewhere Saturday, "Fashination" opens at the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm; "Power & Persuasion. Avant-garde European Graphic Design and Photo-montage" opens at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow, "Real World: The Dissolving Space of Experience" (featuring Katy Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema, and Hiroshi Sugito) opens at Modern Art Oxford; and John Neff and Sally-Ann Rowland (who has a solo show at ZieherSmith in New York right now) open at Western Exhibitions in Chicago. Last but not least, critic and curator Jan Avgikos speaks at 1pm on Hanne Darboven at Dia:Beacon.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 22, 2004

William Gass

I'm in Philadelphia today to see the autumn exhibitions at the ICA and the Fabric Workshop. Therefore all I have to offer is a pair of quotes and a link. Fortunately, both quotes are from William Gass's "The Music of Prose," collected in Finding a Form, and the link is to an essay published in the January 2004 Harper's. First, from the earlier publication:

Yet no prose can pretend to greatness if its music is not also great; if it does not, indeed, construct a surround of sound to house its meaning the way flesh was once felt to embody the soul, at least till the dismal day of the soul's eviction and the flesh's decay.

and later:

...language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of the sentence, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination too; it is the allocation of the things of the world to their place in the world of the word

To enjoy prose that "embodies the soul" of meaning, I highly recommend you read "On Evil: The Ragged Core of a Sweet Apple," a review of Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Were I editor of the Best American Essays 2004 volume to be published sometime next year, this piece would surely make the list. For me, reading Gass—like reading Joseph Brodsky, Mary McCarthy, James Wood, or Italo Calvino, an admittedly diverse and improvised list—is simultaneously deep pleasure and learning experience.

Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.

September 21, 2004

Judith Rothschild Foundation drawings gift

This New York Times article on Harvey Shipley Miller's Judith Rothschild Foundation drawings collection includes an important quote:

"The collection is not being presented to them as an all-or-nothing gift," Mr. Miller said. "If they want to accept some and not all of it, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. But knowing the views of the museum staff, I don't believe it will come to that."

Art world rumor had predicted the gift would be an all-or-nothing affair, which would make it something difficult for MoMA's board to swallow. The article quotes Miller as saying "This gift has a lot of noncanonical figures, is very contemporary, and includes emerging artists whose future is uncertain, so the drawings committee may not want to accept it," all of which is an understatement. Based on the summer group exhibition curated by André Schlechtriem, Miller's assistant, and what other information I have about it, it's a very uneven collection. (Though that may stem more from Miller's and Schlechtreim's biases than their ability to identify strong works by the artists they do collect.) It nonetheless contains beautiful, important works—as the Times image slideshow attests—and it would be a shame if MoMA turned it down.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

"Before the End (The Last Painting Show)" at Swiss Institute

My brief review of "Before the End (The Last Painting Show) at the Swiss Institute is now online. Click here to see it at Artforum.com and here for a permanent link at BrianSholis.com. Since I'm recommending it as "worth seeing" in the right-hand column, I'll include the full text here:

This first-rate collection of paintings from the mid-'60s, an expanded version of a show seen earlier this year in Dijon, is by a group of artists later (and better) known for Conceptual works in a variety of media. Dated 1962 to 1967, the works back up Lucy Lippard's chronology of the art object's dematerialization, and indeed the canvas, when used at all, is treated more as a thing than a surface. Jan Dibbets stacks eight of them, in a gentle gradation of painted color, on the floor; Michael Asher wraps his around a stretcher that extends from the wall at a 45-degree angle; Robert Barry mounts his diminutive work at the exact mid-point of the back wall. In 1963, Douglas Huebler, like Donald Judd, was painting wooden wall reliefs; the example included here furthers our knowledge (already enhanced by this summer's Minimalism survey at MoCA in Los Angeles) of his early development. By 1965, Art & Language was using the latter to generate the former; Painting-Sculpture plays on the open-ended nature of the moment. Most, if not all, of the included artists turned away from painting during the ensuing years, whereas Olivier Mosset, the curator, stuck to his brush—a fact that may account for this subdued, elegantly installed show's slightly nostalgic air.

I really do recommend this exhibition. If you're in Soho, drop by.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Warhol/Noland and then some...

Last month, while visiting the Lee Bontecou retrospective at MoMA, I took a detour through their collection exhibition, "To Be Looked At," to see what was on view. The usual suspects were there, but when I came across Warhol's Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times, a huge diptych from 1963, I was transfixed. After a long look, I did what anyone would do: I started reading. The best analysis of this subject matter in Warhol's work that I have found so far is Hal Foster's "Death in America," first published in October 75 (Winter 1996) and reprinted in the October Files book on the artist.

After a lengthy introduction, including ruminations on Lacan's "The Unconscious and Repetition" and Barthes' Cameria Lucida, Foster comes around to the meat of his argument, which I'll augment for a little bit of context: "...it is this first order of shock [of the subject matter] that the repetition of the image serves to screen, even if in doing so the repetition produces a second order of trauma, here at the level of technique where the punctum [a term pulled from Barthes] breaks through the sceren and allows the real to poke through [spectacle culture]." This seems analogous to something I wrote about Cady Noland, in which her agglomeration of objects serves the same purpose as Warhol's repetition of images:

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Noland’s art could not be misattributed to an artist living outside the United States: her sculptures and installations—accumulations of metal pipe, geriatric walkers, American flags, police paraphernalia, automobile accessories, chain-link fencing, Budweiser cans, and other industrially-fabricated objects—disclose an obsession with and canny understanding of the seamy underside of lower-middle class white American culture. “Pathology” is a term often used in the discussion of her art, and during this period her eye acted as surgeon or scientist, dissecting the body of American social interaction and extracting the toxins within.

Later in the essay, I add: "The violence depicted in this work permeates the air like a fine mist, subtle yet ever-present, mirroring the way contemporary culture is suffused with suffering, destruction, and confusion." This violence is, I think, equivalent to what Foster is calling "the Real." He goes on to say that Barthes was wrong to assume the punctum—that moment of breaking through—is only a private affair, a point which is borne out by the title of an exhibition on view at the exact moment of his essay's publication. "Public Information: Desire, Disaster, Document," at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, included both Warhol and Noland. The show attempted to "confront...how photographic and technologically produced images mediate and define social reality," but one can extract a miniature show-within-a-show—one that looks at Reality puncturing the Spectacle at its seams—by zooming in on the included works by Warhol, Noland, Gerhard Richter (Fighter Jet, Eight Student Nurses, the October 18, 1977 cycle), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Untitled (Death by Gun)), and Jeff Wall (Dead Troops Talk: A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986). 

But to focus on this dual breakdown breakdown (of the spectacular and of private/public), as Foster notes, creates an historical understanding: "The breakdown of the distinction between private and public is traumatic, too; again, understood as a breakdown of inside and outside, it is one way to understand trauma as such. But this understanding is historical, which is to say that this traumatic breakdown is historical." But, to use a Zadie Smith quote fresh on my mind from yesterday's post: "These are hysterical times; any [art] that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped." What happens when the breakdown is of the historical? When real events become so traumatic as to seem unreal, outside-of-history (or seemingly signalling its end)? The historical event to which Smith was referring was September 11, 2001, and she wondered aloud whether or not artists (in her case, writers) are simply always one step behind the Real. Is there any way to "keep up," to accurately represent the unreal Real? Is the answer to be found in Paul Virilio's "Unknown Quantity" and his related writings? Or will this representation be more akin to JG Ballard's fiction? (Foster mentions Ballard throughout the Warhol essay.) I'm not sure exactly, but there's something incredibly potent about artworks that approach and cross this line, and I definitely want to examine the phenomenon more closely. (An obvious example would be to finally read Foster's Return of the Real, which has sat quietly on my bookshelf for years.) Please note these are incredibly provisional thoughts and I know they do not yet go anywhere...I'm just thinking out loud.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 20, 2004

Zadie Smith on...

This weekend's Guardian Review includes the introduction to a centenary edition of Graham Greene's The Quiet American written by Zadie Smith. Though I've read neither of her two novels, I've always enjoyed her appreciations and assessments of other writers that occasionally pop up online. Here is an article based on her 2003 Orange Word Lecture "EM Forster's Ethical Style: Love, Failure and the Good in Fiction"; here she waxes nostalgic for Katharine Hepburn in the days following Hepburn's death last summer; here she responds to James Wood's attack on "hysterical realism"; here is a summer reading list from 2001. All were published in The Guardian. If you limit yourself to one, and you shouldn't, I'd suggest the essay on Forster.

An excerpt from the introduction of The Quiet American:

The hope [Greene] offers us is of the kind that only close observers can give. He defends us with details, and the details fight the good fight against big, featureless, impersonal ideas like Pyle's. Too much time has been spent defending Greene against the taint of journalism; we should think of him instead as the greatest journalist there ever was. If more journalists could report as well as Greene bringing us the explosion in the square, how long could we retain the stomach to fight the wars we do?

The devil is in the details for Greene, but redemption is also there. The accretion of perfectly rendered, everyday detail makes us feel human, beats away the statisticians, tolls us back to ourselves.

On Forster:

Forster's voyeurs are very much more layered, and are offered a great deal more empathy. The most obvious reason is Forster's own personal interest in them. Several critics have pointed to a sublimated homosexuality here; they are, to a man, unmarried and uninterested, and as such they are estranged from the romantic fictions they inhabit. They are also privately incomed in a world where most people work. They share both these traits with Forster himself. These two matters become symbols to Forster of his own ethical failure as a novelist. His homosexuality, because he could not publicly express it, in life or on the page. His independent financial security, because it made him feel that he could not understand the experience of the great majority of his fellow men. His genius lay in making these failures the basis of his ethics, consistently applying his attention to the idea of solitude, moving from this only to communities of no more than two; he famously championed intimacy over sociality, friendship over country. In his novels, he can never completely condemn his conscientious abstainers—he has a soft spot for them.

and then:

Sure, there is a lot in Forster that fails, is both cloying and banal: his Pantheism, his fetish for the exotic, his idealisation of music. The mystic will occasionally look the fool. Forster took a risk, opening the comic novel to let in the things it was not designed for; small patches of purple prose were the result. But Forster's innovation remains: he allowed the English comic novel the possibility of a spiritual and bodily life, not simply to exist as an exquisitely worked game of social ethics but as a messy human concoction. He expanded the comic novel's ethical space (while unbalancing its moral certainties) simply by letting more of life in . Austen asks for toleration from her readers. Forster demands something far stickier, more shameful: love.

Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.

September 19, 2004

Quick take: Annika Larsson at Andrea Rosen

In "New Gravity," her second solo at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Annika Larsson uses her signature filming technique—markedly deliberate close-ups that border on the fetishistic—to examine two subjects that finally elude her: a nightclub concert and an ice hockey scrimmage. Her art, at its best, allows the viewer to see details—especially subtle power relationships signified by dress and demeanor—that otherwise flash by unnoticed, and the videos have, to date, been slow-mo affairs that seem to suspend time by the sheer fascination of their subjects. She speeds things up this time (again accompanied by a club-ready soundtrack by Tobias Bernstrup), but not enough, and the videos are stuck in a middle ground: New Gravity's obvious staging removes whatever emotional tug might come from recognizing yourself in the faces of the enthralled teenage boys in the concert's audience, and the activity in Hockey feels similarly insincere. The latter video only soars when Larsson zooms in on the sweat-drenched face of an older man watching the game or spies the intense concentration in the unblinking eyes of a center waiting for a face-off; in these scenes, she effectively reenters the uncomfortable zone—literally placing the audience too close for comfort—that made her earlier videos such compelling vieweing.

But those moments are few and far between. Jordan Kantor made several observations in a review of Larsson’s last New York show in the May 2002 issue of Artforum that bear repeating. Regarding the video Poliisi: “While this irony drains the violence of its menace, it also keeps the viewer at arm's length. Other than the sheer visual seductiveness, there is no real 'hook' here, and after a while, the video drags. Though this may be part of Larsson's critical strategy—a comment on the banality of power, perhaps—ultimately Poliisi's meanings remain ambiguous.” Regarding Dog: “Larsson's cinematography is incontestably dazzling—Dog's cool light recalls Stanley Kubrick as much as Poliisi's dark palette does Ridley Scott—and again, it's clear that surface and theatricality are her central concerns. Here too, however, the relative weakness of the authorial voice persists.” Kantor concludes: “The mere fact that it's unclear whether Larsson's videos offer a viable counterpoint to the eroticization of fascism or rather revel in it is in itself somewhat discomforting. So though irony is clearly Larsson's vehicle, here it seems to he spinning its wheels.”

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Around the web and around the world

Here is a Sunday post meant to mention a few shows and websites that I missed on Friday and Saturday.

First, today's openings in New York: Beth Brideau is opening this afternoon at Southfirst, who will celebrate by having the first of their autumn Sunday Readings; Rita McBride's "Exhibition" and two group shows open at SculptureCenter. And elsewhere: Lothar Baumgarten's "Carbon" opens at the Dallas Museum of Art (which has a pretty new website); a solo show of new work by Scottish artist Martin Boyce, titled "Dark Reflections," opens at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany; "Performative Architecture" opens at the Gallery for Contemporary Art in Leipzig; Shahzia Sikander's "Nemsis" and "Bottle: Contemporary Art and Vernacular Tradition" both open at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut; and "Some Forgotten Place," the newest Matrix series exhibition, opens at the Berkeley Art Museum.

I know it seems like I am linking to way too many exhibitions, but believe me when I say that this is an edited list. There is far more out there, and I believe that each exhibition I link to is likely to have some merit. My criteria is simply: "Would I be interested in seeing it?"

Also on Sunday: For people in LA: Hans-Ulrich Obrist will be signing his new book of interviews at MOCA beginning at 2pm.

Now, to pick up a few things I missed: Cecily Brown just opened an exhibition of new paintings at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Tacita Dean opened an exhibition of new work at Frith Street Gallery in London; Steve McQueen has just opened a slide-projection-and-audio piece at the South London Gallery; the Yves Klein retrospective has just opened at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt; Finnish artist Mari Sunna's second solo at The Approach in London has just opened; and, last but not least, Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneux has just opened a show at Galerie Kamm in Berlin.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 18, 2004

Around the web in eighty minutes

- "Urban and Urbane: The New Yorker Magazine in the 1930s" (Link via The Morning News.)

- The Center for Land Use Interpretation, which I visited in July, has posted the contents of its Summer 2004 newsletter, "The Lay of the Land," online. For those who haven't heard of the organization, here is an excerpt from its mission statement: "The CLUI is a research organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth's surface. The Center embraces a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling the stated mission, employing conventional research and information processing methodology as well as nontraditional interpretive tools."

- Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBlog shares news of a new W.G. Sebald title, out last month from Hamish Hamilton. It is a collection of poems accompanied by lithographs the late author traded with German artist Jan Peter Tripp. Apparently yet another Sebald title is forthcoming in February 2005. Given his postmortem productivity, I assume he must be in the same section of heaven as Tupac. (Not that I mind.) Thwaite also points me toward Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting, which is now near the top of my "to find soon" list.

Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.

Fall exhibitions at the ICP

In yesterday's New York Times, Michael Kimmelman reviews "Looking at Life," the exhibition that anchors the International Center of Photography's fall season. I attended the media preview on Wednesday morning, and mostly agree with Kimmelman's assessment. Let me jumble up two quotes from the review to give you an idea of my quick take on the show: "The big idea behind the exhibition is how Life and, by implication, all forms of popular journalism package news, but in the end the photographs, looked at one by one, speak for themselves," which appears near the end, should be followed by "Some of what's in the show is great but some isn't. It's just visual information, banal photography — truth be told, like much of what was in Life," which appears near the middle. What Kimmelman neglects to mention is how the weaknesses of "Looking at Life" are ballasted by its companion shows: It is presented alongside Cornell Capa's photographs of JFK, Ant Farm's Media Burn and The Eternal Frame, and "Inconvenient Evidence," which is comprised of sixteen digital prints of the amateur photos taken at Abu Ghraib. The four provide a much better picture of how "all forms of popular journalism package news" than any one would by itself.

Bear this in mind if Kimmelman's review doesn't make an ICP visit sound enticing. The presentation of the two Ant Farm videos—Media Burn is more well known, but The Eternal Frame, on first glance, is the more rewarding work—brings a small slice of the traveling survey which is now on view at the ICA Philadelphia to New York, a stroke of luck for those unable to travel to see it. (The survey was reviewed in the April 2004 Artforum, and both videos are mentioned.) I'm curious to hear opinions on the museum presentation of the Abu Ghraib photos. ICP curator Brian Wallis noted that the sixteen on view were culled from a collection of forty or fifty pulled from press contacts, government sources, and web searches.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 17, 2004

Michael Auping on Alan Saret, 1979

While searching for something else altogether, I came across Michael Auping's introduction to Alan Saret's spring 1979 "Matrix" exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum. Saret is a favorite of mine (see my review of his recent solo show at James Cohan Gallery here), so I thought I'd share. Here is an excerpt:

Saret's use of highly mutable materials to create non-static forms reflects relatively new sculptural methodology, which involves allowing the forming or distributing of materials in space to be a function of the natural properties of the chosen material. This attitude—reflected not only in Saret's wire pieces, but also in Lynda Benglis' poured latex works, Robert Morris' scattered and draped felt and Richard Serra's splashed lead—may be seen as an extension of the chance procedures of the Dadaists and, more recently, the contemporary composer John Cage. The intent of much of this recent sculpture is to discover a meaningful form within a given material rather than trying to fit the material to a preconceived form, as has traditionally been the case. In speaking about his work, Saret states, "The flexure of each material draws a line in space which corresponds identically to its physical properties. Nature, therefore, draws the final line in the art." (Undated notes by the artist).

Click here to read the whole thing.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Steven Henry Madoff in the new Bookforum

Madoff, author of Christopher Wilmarth: Light and Gravity, writes, by way of introduction to a review of Doris von Drathen's Vortex of Silence:

To write about an artist's work is to objective our own deep think, if we have one, about the world that we "discover" in the artist's project. We confess through description and explication; we bring our tics and quirks, our needs to seduce and be praised, our histories and educations, feelings and intellects into the light as ventriloquists, making the mouths of various helpless artworks move. [Giorgio Agamben's] notion of the inaccessible has a certain pathos, as if the act of criticism were about the ultimately unsayable, the unreachable essence, like Wallace Stevens's "palm at the end of the mind," when it's really about the abundantly, profusely, lavishly sayable, talking largely about ourselves.

Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

Around the art world this weekend

A second batch of New York gallery openings takes place this weekend. This evening you can attend receptions for Cannon Hudson at 5BE Gallery and Julianne Swartz at Josée Bienvenu. Tomorrow, the 18th, marks the opening festivities for the temporary New Museum quarters on 22nd St., with festivities from 12 to 6; Christie Fields at CRG, Miroslaw Balka at Gladstone Gallery, a three-artist group show at Greene Naftali, Ugo Rondinone at Matthew Marks, Jane & Louise Wilson at 303, Hernan Bas at Daniel Reich Gallery, Candida Hofer at Sonnabend, and Walead Beshty at Wallspace, all in Chelsea; and, in other neighborhoods, Mark Lecky at GBE (Modern) and Lizzi Bougatsos/Kim Gordon at Reena Spaulings Fine Art.

Also on Saturday: If you're in LA you can enjoy dueling Sean Landers openings at China Art Objects and sister; if you're in Pori, Finland, you can attend the opening of "What Is Important?" at the Pori Art Museum; if you're in western Austria you can attend the opening of a Thomas Demand survey at the Kunsthaus Bregenz; if you're in Liverpool, England, you can attend the opening of the Liverpool Biennial; if you're in Karlsruhe, Germany, I'd recommend "Phonorama: A cultural history of the voice as a medium" at the ZKM; and, last but not least, Berliners should attend the "Publishing Without Limits" panel at Art Forum Berlin, which runs from 5:30 to 6:30. Get there early if you want a seat!

Slight tangent: This weekend London plays host to the annual Open House event. New York has our second annual open house on the weekend of October 8 & 9.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Around the web in eighty minutes

- This article from Wednesday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer describes in detail plans for a new public sculpture garden to be created on that city's waterfront by the Seattle Art Museum. It announces (to me, at least) that Richard Serra's Wave, seen at Gagosian Gallery in 2002, has ended up in the museum's collection, and that Cai Guo-Qiang can make art that doesn't involve gunpowder or fireworks. Plus, now I know where I can visit Tony Smith's Wandering Rocks, 1967. As this is only the first phase of acquisition announcements, with more to come in the spring, this sculpture garden sounds like it will rival the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, across the street from the Walker Art Center, in quality and dedication to modern and recent work. (Link to article found at ArtsJournal.)

- One website not to be missed this autumn is Archinect's ambitious School Blog project. They've signed up over forty current architecture students at schools around the world (though about 85% are US-based) and given each of them the keys to their very own blog. Some will make better use of the space than others, a fact which is apparent less than two weeks in to the project, but overall it's a great way to get a feel for day-to-day life at architecture school. (I stood at a fork in the road, with one sign pointing to MArch programs and the other toward a career path outside of studios, four summers ago. Six weeks of my own ineptitude at the GSD "Career Discovery" program led me to discover that designing buildings is not for me, but talking about them...)

- In the "big news" section: Philippe Vergne, Senior Curator of the above-mentioned Walker Art Center, is departing in April 2005, just two months after the museum opens its Herzog & de Meuron-designed building to the public, to become Director of the François Pinault Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris. Art Museum Network News has an article on the move, which I originally found via Artforum. The article notes that Vergne was responsible for the Walker's purchase of a sculpture by André Cadere for the collection. I've known about Cadere for several years, but have yet to see any of his pieces in person; the closest I've come is a drawing by Dave Muller offering to trade his own art for any of Cadere's.

- The beauty of the web dept.: Doing a quick Google search for information on Cadere netted little English-language information, but I did find the website of ARCHIVES, a French gallery/bookshop that specializes in art from the 1950s to the 1970s. It has just earned a place near the top of my "to visit next time you're in Paris" list.

- From the Floor alerted me to the presence of a website I didn't know existed, but should have: the Robert Smithson Estate. I found this after reading through FtF's posts about visiting Spiral Jetty this summer, which begin here.

- Furthering Wednesday's post about critics' first takes on fall shows, The New York Times crew publishes its first Friday gallery roundup here, including a positive mention from Roberta Smith of my friend Jamie Isenstein's debut solo. Big news part two: Carol Vogel reports that Daniel Libeskind's "Spiral," designed eighteen years ago for the V&A Museum in London, is officially dead in the water.

Random postscript: The new issue of Bookforum arrived at the office today, which means it should be going out in the mail to subscribers very soon. I'm a dozen pages in and loving it, as usual.

Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.

September 16, 2004

Other neighborhoods

To those who found last weekend's openings in Chelsea a bit lacking (one, two), I suggest perserverance. I believe that the handful of shows worth recommending, although only a small proportion of what's now on view, are a blessing. But Chelsea isn't everything: I went south, to Soho and to the Lower East Side, and found even more. Keep an eye on the new "Worth Seeing" list in the right-hand column. Whether or not the shows will be your favorites remains to be seen, but if you follow the art world to any degree, I bet you can find something you like at each. (Find my e-mail address on the "About Me" entry to agree or disagree.)

For example: León Ferrari is new to me, and the selection of drawings from 1962-1965 now on view at The Drawing Center is revelatory; the same can be said for "Before the End (The Last Painting Show)" at the Swiss Institute. (I'm keeping my cards close to my chest on these because writeups of both will soon be posted to Artforum.com). Mathew Cerletty's second solo at Rivington Arms downplays the emphasis on decorative patterning found in last year's show, reducing his backgrounds from swirling floral motifs to Agnes Martin-like creamy horizontal stripes; the patterns are repeated in the figures' (the artist's friend Connor appears in all the canvases) striped shirts, whose palette is also muted. The whole effect—and the doubling and mirroring of the images—places a renewed emphasis on the imperfect features and overall pinkness of the skin, especially in the (seemingly) enlarged hands and the dab of tangerine swiped across the lips. Across the street at Participant Inc., Rafael Sánchez makes ingenious use of turntables and vaudeville accoutrements (canes, a top hat) in his kinetic sculptures. The vaudeville effect is enhanced by a not-very-deep stage at the back of the gallery, which will be the scene of performances on the weekend of October 8-10. If I don't end up in Pittsburgh for the Carnegie, I'll be there. And if you do go, be sure to check out the piece in the downstairs bathroom.

If you're in the neighborhood but don't want to look at art in public, then walk a few blocks down Ludlow St. to the new e-flux video store. I dropped in at noon yesterday—I was the first guy through the door!—only to discover they weren't quite ready for rentals. By four this afternoon, I was the sixteenth member, and came away with video art by Hubert Czerepok and Diego Perrone to watch in private. The two-day rentals are free; you can bet that I'll be there several times a week.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Around the web in eighty minutes

A few miscellaneous non-art links:

- The Young Hegelian is four months old, but new to me. The author appears to be a former philosophy student living across the Atlantic, and the focus is appropriately philosophical. I came across the site via Stephen Mitchelmore at Splinters, and promptly read almost the entire archive of posts. Here is the author's first entry, with a bit of background information, and here are two recent posts worth reading: one on the visibility of the events in Beslan, Russia (be sure to read the comments also), and one dated today that quotes a ten year old Guardian article about terrorism that still rings true in 2004.

- Terry Eagleton has written a brief review of Frank Furedi's Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? for The New Statesman. David Aaronovitch, "Columnist of the Year," also reviewed it this past Sunday for The Guardian. This topic interests me like passing a car-wreck on the highway, as it's a non-art world equivalent to the "death of painting" argument we have every few years. Two years ago, on our side of the Atlantic, we had Richard Posner's Public Intelletuals: Another Study of Decline. (See this link for a detailed examination of the book and responses to it, with many links, from The Complete Review.) A slightly different version reared its head last year when Anne Fadiman resigned as editor of The American Scholar after a budget dispute, taking twenty-odd contributing editors and board members with her. (Last week the magazine hired Robert S. Wilson as her replacement.) Given how these things go back and forth, I tend to prefer books that accept "public intellectuals" as fact—because we'll always have some version, whether they are of the "Renaissance man" type or academic specialists—and explore their relevance to an ever-shifting cultural landscape. One that I enjoyed is simply titled The Public Intellectual, edited by Helen Small.

- Philip Roth's The Plot Against America comes out on October 5, and weblog link consensus proclaims this profile (once again in The Guardian) of the author as the best printed in this publicity cycle. I have to admit I haven't yet read it. There is also an extract from the book online.

- Random observation: The Believer, a monthly, has been ahead of The New Yorker twice in two weeks. The former's August 2004 issue has an entertaining article that describes a home-cooked "Futurist Banquet" and an article, "The Invasion of the Minnesota Normals," about the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a personality test. My first sense of déjà vu came on September 6, when the annual New Yorker food issue contained a profile of a Futurist restaurant now operating in Italy; it appeared a second time as I read Malcolm Gladwell's "Personality Plus" in the September 20 issue. I'm sure The Believer shows up on some New Yorker editors' cultural radar. I wonder how they felt about the overlap? Perhaps I think too much about these things.

- Faber and Faber, the esteemed British publisher, turns seventy-five this year, and is profiled in The Independent. I've been picking up discounted paperback copies of the well-designed Faber poetry books and anthologies at Strand Books for a few months now. I often daydream about publishing an essay collection with Farrar Strauss Giroux in the US and Faber in the UK. Or, better yet, co-published here by FSG and MIT Press. A boy can dream, right? (Link to Independent article found at Sarah Weinman.)

- ReadySteadyBlog links to novelist Paula Fox's brief memoir of postwar Paris in the summer 2004 issue of The Paris Review. My second visit to Paris, in June, solidifed that city's location at the top of my "List of Cities to Live In Before I Die." So, naturally, I've been reading about it. Two favorites were published by New York Review Books: British historian Richard Cobb's Paris and Elsewhere, with an introduction by Julian Barnes, and Mavis Gallant's Paris Stories. Earlier this year I finished Barnes's essay collection titled Something to Declare, a full quarter of which is devoted to the Tour de France and Flaubert. Late last year I came across Edmund White's The Flaneur, which is a quick and entertaining read. My whole obsession with this particular vein of writing started with Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent for The New Yorker from 1925 to 1975, whose Paris Journals guided me straight to the heart of the City of Light at midcentury. The Journals make perfect subway reading, as each is simply a collection of column-length essays; I often find myself picking up a volume and reading a random entry or two while waiting for a friend to call back or food to be delivered.

Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.

September 15, 2004

Critics: start your engines

With the first week of the new art season behind us, critics at dailies and weeklies are beginning to weigh in on the shows to see. From The Guardian: Here is Adrian Searle on Doris Salcedo's show at White Cube in London (I wish he had also commented on Damián Ortega's show at the gallery's "Inside the White Cube" space); here is Alfred Hickling on Paul Ramirez-Jonas's show at Cornerhouse in Manchester; and, last but not least, here is Jonathan Jones on "Young German Artists" at Haunch of Venison. The last review starts with  this line: "It's hard to convey what a dreadful experience this exhibition is," so if you're only going to read one and are looking for entertainment, I'd start there. All of The Guardian's reviews can be easily accessed from the front page of their art section.

In New York, The TimeOut NY reviewers are back in action, though only brief blurbs on "This Week's Picks" are available at their website; the same is the case at The New Yorker (scroll down halfway to see the commercial gallery listings) and on New York magazine's website, where the prolific Karen Rosenberg has a batch of smartly-written previews. (Maybe she'll get back to doing weekly reviews once the magazine's redesign is complete in November.) Jerry Saltz has published his annual back-to-school column in this week's Village Voice. You can tell where Hilton Kramer vacationed this summer by reading his current column in The New York Observer, a review a Rockwell Kent show in Maine. In LA, Christopher Knight has weighed in on the Smithson retrospective at MOCA under the headline "A Pop Naturalist," but his reviews are still behind subscriber-only protection, so I can't provide a link.  And, last but not least, Artforum.com's "Critics' Picks," to which I contribute, is rumbling back to life after an August slowdown.

Happy reading. I recommend keeping tabs on all of these sites (and more) as the season progresses.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

VB 54 at JFK

Last night I attended the performance of Vanessa Beecroft's VB 54 at the Saarinen-designed TWA Terminal at JFK. Or, rather, since the footage for the actual artwork was shot prior to everyone's arrival, I attended a reception for the project at which the roughly thirty-five models—most in bikini bottoms and high heels, all painted a uniform shade of black, most chained together with handcuffs attached to their ankles, and one very pregnant—were also in attendance. Needless to say, it was a slightly surreal experience, as no one interacted with this group of (mostly silent) models, who were undoubtedly tired from their hours-long ordeal and stared up fairly impatiently from the sunken lounge area in which they stood. (Click here for an image of that lounge; the seats you see had been removed.) The guests, mostly people who have worked with Beecroft in the past or are in some way attached to Terminal 5, the exhibition in which VB 54 will be included, spoke in hushed tones. The filmmakers, still on hand and still rolling, swooped back and forth in front of the models and occasionally urged us to stand closer and discuss the scene. And of course everyone had their (whispered) opinion about Beecroft and about the work. Many tried to take surreptitious photographs with their digital cameras, despite an explicit ban on the act. A few openly flouted it, snapping pictures as they paced back and forth like families in front of an animal cage at the zoo. Fewer still, I would venture, actually tried to extract some kind of meaning out of the night's events and the artwork itself.

Arriving early, about twenty minutes before the models took up their positions, I was treated to a full tour of the building by a friend who is coordinating a series of panel discussions for the exhibition. We went down one of the long corridors lined with a check-in counter, through a door, and down the stairs into a dank netherworld of disused and depressing spaces. The building has been out of commission for four years, and I was told that TWA employees were given little to no time—told at mid-day on a Friday not to come back Monday— to prepare the building (and themselves) for their departure. Utensils were still laid out in the cafeteria; personal effects were still in the locker rooms; keys and papers were left everywhere. There were many small, square-ish rooms with cinderblock walls, dropped ceilings, and horrific lighting...the exact opposite of the soaring concrete structure up above. Feral cats had moved in during the building's slow decline, and evidence of their existence greeted the feet of those who weren't careful where they stepped. The whole scene evoked feelings of having woken up to discover I was the last man on Earth: I walked from room to room, up small flights of stairs and down others, waiting for someone to pop out from around the next corner. No one did. It was quite a contrast to the tuxedos, jewels, specially-mixed "signature" drinks, and calm assurance of the scene above.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 14, 2004

Worth noting

Around the web and around town:

- Spurred on by this article in The Boston Globe, Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes posts the first part of an essay about the MFA renting Monets to PaperBall, a subsidiary of PaceWildenstein, for this exhibition at the Bellagio Gallery in Las Vegas. He also brings up the issue of deaccessioning, which is discussed by the Art Institute of Chicago's James Rondeau and the Museum Association's Deputy Director Maurice Davies in the September 2004 "Debate," a new feature in Frieze sadly not yet online.

- Peter Eisenman wins the Golden Lion for career achievement at the just-opened Venice Biennale's 9th International Architecture Exhibition. It's heartening to also note that SANAA, one of my favorite architecture firms and the designers of the under-construction New Museum building on the Bowery, won the Golden Lion for most remarkable work. The remarkable work(s)? Two museums: The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, which they built from the ground up, and their renovation and extension of IVAM, in Valencia, Spain. Click here for a list of all of this year's awards. (Original Eisenman news via Artforum.)

- Speaking of architecture, Nicolai Ouroussoff comments in Today's NYT on the just-unveiled Morphosis design proposed for a new building at Cooper Union. Here is last December's press release from Cooper Union.

- Click here for Adrian Searle's July 13 review of Santiago Sierra's summer solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in London. There's another article about Sierra, not online, focusing largely on the same exhibition, in the September Artforum. Those of you who know me well know that Sierra is a particular interest of me.

- Last night I attended the launch party of Work Magazine at Galapagos. My short article on Christine Hill appears in the debut issue, which you will soon be able to find in New York City's "finest independent bookstores." (By no later than the end of this week, I suspect.)

- Tonight's openings in New York: last week's rescheduled opening at the Drawing Center, "Before the End: The Last Painting Show" at the Swiss Institute, "Based on a True Story" at Artists Space, "Electrifying Painting: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954-1968" at NYU's Grey Art Gallery and, though there is no reception, today is the first day of the Chris Burden exhibition at Zwirner and Wirth, uptown. Also worth noting: Glenn Brown's first mid-career survey opens tonight at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.

Birthday book haul

I found a cache of discounted books online last week and decided to buy myself a large selection of them as a birthday gift. That gift came in the mail last night. It included: the 1995 Venice Biennale catalog, Brice Marden's 1995 Matthew Marks Gallery catalog, Richard Serra's Torqued Spirals, Toruses and Spheres catalog, a Witte de With catalog of a 1994 exhibition curated by Daniel Buren, Destroy All Monsters' Geisha This, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss's Formless: A User's Guide, Glenn Seator's Three catalog, Permanent Food issue 10, the Manifesta 4 catalog, Gabriel Orozco's From Green Glass to Airplane, the Documenta XI catalog, Colin McGinn's The Making of a Philosopher, Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, Octavio Paz's Configurations, Juan Munoz's Dia Center catalog, Andy Grundberg's Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography Since 1974, and, last but not least, the catalog of "Donald Judd: Early Work 1955-1968." Whew! Where do I begin?

Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.

September 13, 2004

Thomas Scheibitz at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

My review of the Thomas Scheibitz exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is now online. Click here to see it at Artforum.com and here for a permanent link at BrianSholis.com. Since I'm recommending it as 'worth seeing' in the right-hand column, I'll include the full text here:

Dresden-based painter Thomas Scheibitz has always worked from pictures randomly selected from a clippings archive, making more-or-less recognizable representations of representations (a house here, a portrait there). In this show, the identifiable images in the paintings—the floor plan of a stadium, a pie chart, a flag, maps—are themselves already abstractions, a conceptual gambit that would place the viewer on incredibly unstable ground were it not for the artist's mastery of form. Updating Hans Hofmann for the new millennium, Scheibitz lets the push and pull of interlocking planes of bright color, thinly applied and painted in a variety of styles, imply perspectival depth. The works are most engaging when he leaves a lot to the imagination. Map I (Old Map) (all works 2004), a roughly nine-by-fifteen-foot canvas based on the earliest cartographic representation of the United States, somehow ends up looking like a mountainscape; Stella resembles a rendering of a Zaha Hadid building half unzipped to reveal an in-progress game of Tetris. Several sculptures are also on view. Like those in his last New York solo, they're simply constructed, most often of painted wood and MDF, yet because of their variously colored surfaces they look quite different from different angles. There are no gestalt moments in this show. Its pleasure lies in mentally putting the pieces together.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Tony Smith interview, 1971

An early draft of my forthcoming Artforum.com review of Thomas Scheibitz's new exhibition contained a description of his sculptures, which are difficult to obtain a complete mental picture of due to oddly folded planes and his diverse color palette, as "rainbow-hued riffs on Tony Smith's wooden maquettes." I decided this was more a comment on his last show, in 2002, and cut it. But the thought led me back to a 1971 Tony Smith catalog published by Knoedler & Co. that contains an interview between Smith and Lucy Lippard. After claiming that he finds "the bombardment of the senses very disturbing...I can't tolerate anything that is too busy," Lippard asks:

LL: But so much information does come at you fragmented—just about everything—and you have to make sense of it.

TS: Yes, you do that when you read the morning paper, whether you want to or not. There is always something going on, even in a suburban area like this where there is supposed to be a certain amount of quiet. There are the sudden noises of chain saws cutting down magnificent trees, grass cutters, those machines that blow leaves, ambulances and police cars, and those cars and motorcycles in the night. And you can never tell when some of these things are going to combine. Anyhow, I think that the quiet and stability of my pieces are desirable in themselves. I don't believe I am trying to make particularly inventive forms as much as to make some that aren't too disturbing.

LL: I don't know. Some of them have an outflung, almost explosive character.

TS: I think they do. But I have tried to contain that. Even in such pieces I find echoes that are much quieter when we are familiar with them than they seem when we first see them.

LL: They change a great deal from one viewing angle to another.

TS: Yes, I am often surprised by them. Not many of them reveal themselves all at once. I think that Hubris does that more than any other piece. Even that has unexpected effects.

Someone asked me the other day if I started with a drawing. I said "No," because I don't have any sense of how a piece is going to turn, or even if it is going to turn out, until the end.

Here are two reviews of Tony Smith's 1998 MOMA retrospective: the first from Artforum and the second from Artnet. I highly recommend the catalog that accompanied that exhibition. Strand Books, where I purchased mine, still appears to have copies at a very fair price.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 12, 2004

Downtown for Democracy's Liberty Fair

This afternoon 22nd St. played host to Downtown for Democracy's Liberty Fair, an art-world street fair featuring caricature portraits, makeovers, a marching band, amateur boxing, performances and DJs, tarot card and palm readings, a kissing booth, and other events and prizes, all in support of John Kerry's campaign in various swing states. It was a beautiful day, the schmoozing was kept to a minimum ("How's it going?" "Good, you?" "Good. See you at Frieze?" "See you at Frieze."), and the activities were laughably appropriate for those who led them: Will Cotton decorated cookies with little kids, Cecily Brown gave makeovers, and, best of all, Brice Marden collaborated with visitors who wanted to "Make a Brice Marden with Brice Marden" by coloring in photocopied reproductions of his looping abstractions. I came away with two caricature portraits, by Amy Sillman and Dana Schutz, and a tarot card reading predicting positive developments in my love life. Not a bad haul.

UPDATE (9/13): Click here for pictures of the event, courtesy of Artnet.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Lines I wish I wrote, #3

Leon Wieseltier, who was widely taken to task for his last outing for the New York Times Book Review (a review of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint), writes an appreciation of Czeslaw Milosz on the back page of today's issue. It includes these two lines, marked in bold, which gracefully summarize much of what has been written about the poet in the month since his death, on August 14:

He was a hero of the history of his time and a hero of the literature of his time. For friends and for strangers, for lovers of liberty and for lovers of beauty, he was, for more than half a century, an indispensible man. Milosz discharged his obligations to his age and his obligations to his soul with the same diligence and the same depth. The stability of his mind, its preternatural composure, was one of the great sanctuaries of the 20th century, a prophecy of the eventual emancapation. He had the rare gift of knowing how to be at once troubled and unperturbed. When light was needed, he was light; when stone was needed, he was stone.

Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.

September 11, 2004

Recent Thomas Hirschhorn project north of Paris

My opinion of Thomas Hirschhorn's art oscillates—I was intrigued by his Bataille Monument at Documenta XI, impressed by Cavemanman at Barbara Gladstone in late 2002, not as interested in Unfinished Walls at Stephen Friedman in London, etc.—but he just finished a project that sounds spectacular. Here's a description by Natasha Edwards taken from the current issue (#65) of Contemporary:

Here on a patch of wasteland, with the help of the predominantly North and West African youths from the neighbouring HLM council flats, he has constructed a temporary museum, comprising gallery, lecture space, library and buvette café, out of his favourite materials of cardboard, hardboard, wood, parcel tape and polytheme sheeting; and, as with the Hommage à Deleuze (2000) in an Avignon housing estate, he has involved the local community in looking after the 'museum' and running the buvette. The name Musée Précaire suggests not only its diy fabrication and temporary nature but also the 'situation précaire', or precarious status of many of the inhabitants of this impoverished suburb.

Produced in association with the Aubervilliers-based Laboratoires art association and the Centre Pompidou, each Tuesday for eight weeks heralds a change of artist, with different works loaned by the Centre Pompidou and another vernissage.

So is it more than simply a socio-political installation by Hirschhorn? 'I am an artist, I am not a social worker. The Musée Précaire Albinet is a work of art and not a sociocultural project,' insists Hirschhorn, who describes his museum as an 'afffirmation...that art can only gain importance and a political meaning by being art'. In creating a work that is so distinctively his, could Hirschhorn simply have used any work of art? Well no. While the whole entity is very clearly an artwork by Hirschhorn, its impact comes from the relationship between his installation and the appropriated artworks it contains. Each artist chosen has in some way revolutionised art practice, andt he works on show, accompanied by photocopied documentation of catalogues, texts, and archive photos, are all the genuine articles. There is something incredible about seeing Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913) (also a neat reference to Duchamp's own Musée Portable), Dalí's Hallucination partielle: Six images de Lénine sur un piano (1931) or Warhol's Electric Chair (1971) transported to a flimsy cardboard shack, as well as the mere idea that the Centre Pompidou would lend out such valuable works into a potentially risky environment to be watched over by one large security guard and a bunch of kids. Hirschhorn has complemented the gallery with a cultural programme for the banlieue that takes in debates, lectures, writing and children's workshops and a masterfully thought-out programme of guided visits related to each artist: for Duchamp, the hardware department of BHV and the covered passages of Paris; for Beuys an organic lunch, a visit to an ad agency and a meeting with a group of radical ecologists.

Click here for images and here for another article on the project, the latter published in Tate Etc.. Questions of its long-term efficacy (Will the neighborhood kids remember it? Did it spark an interest in art where previously there was none?) are of course relevant, but still it sounds successful as a temporary public project.

Here's another profile of Hirschhorn from an earlier issue of the same magazine (#61). Click here for Michael Wilson's February 2003 Artforum article chronicling the installation of Cavemanman, here for a review of the same exhibition by Tom McDonough in Art in America, and here for an earlier, much longer Artforum essay by Benjamin Buchloch.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Oren Ambarchi's Grapes from the Estate

A favorite recent release is Oren Ambarchi's Grapes From the Estate, his third solo record with British label Touch. (The link takes you to the album page at the Touch site.) Here are excerpts from two reviews compiled on a Touch webpage.

The most thoughtful I've read so far is from Bagatellen.com:

Two salient points stand out in Oren Ambarchi’s fine new album. Conceptually, the four pieces utilize a surprisingly song-like structure, albeit one that’s drastically extended and iterated in languid fashion. Formally, many of the guitar sounds share an unusual element. This latter becomes apparent from the very opening of the first track, “Corkscrew”. It’s made up of a series of humming tones, very organ-y in nature, but every tone is introduced with a kind of plosive click, as if each is being turned on independently and the sound of the switch itself is retained. [...] “Corkscrew” turns out to have been something of a prelude for the remaining works which amplify and elaborate on issues it raises. Throughout the disc, the pop-hum element is omnipresent as is the repetitive structure. [...] “The Girl With the Silver Eyes” introduces brushed drums and zither-like guitar, slathered onto the drones like icing on a cake, beguiling the listener with sheer lusciousness. In terms of quasi-pop structural allusions, things ratchet to their peak on “Remedios the Beauty”. The tempo is picked up to a gentle trot, there’s something of a melody in play, and the brushed drums become more insistent. Small morsels are appended: a faint raised pitch here, a small spray of static there, but you have to listen hard to notice them as you tend to be lulled by the sonic bliss. [...] The final track, “Stars Aligned, Webs Spun”, pulls back a bit from the relative delirium, playing off a clear, two-note figure (as always, with the popping intro) against low, sputtering tones, a calm, if bleak coda. “Grapes from the estate” is very much of a piece, four variations on a lovely conceptual theme.

A shorter, slightly less rapturous review comes from Will Montgomery in The Wire, an authoritative source:

Oren Ambarchi's latest, his 3rd for Touch, begins with a sinuous track exploring the soft, warm tunes with which his guitar playing is most associated. The notes loop gracefully, swerving as they go. There's a well gauged decay and an appealing capacity for low-register wobbling: Ambarchi can treat the guitar as essentially a tone generator. Pluck and twang are suppressed and the ear is asked to home in on the repeating notes themselves. But this focus on sound in itself is only half the story. It is brought together with the arch pop leanings that are given full head in Ambarchi's group Sun. The second track, "The Girl With The Silver Eyes", begins with looping tones but the atmosphere changes completely with the entry of a brush caressed snare drum. The loops are slowly overlaid with percussion, Hammond organ and strange, spangling guitar chords (all played by ambarchi himself). The result is a wistful lyricism with allegiances floating somewhere between tune and tone. The next piece, "Remedios The Beauty", at one pleasingly queasy point folds in on itself, dropping away to play deep, low tones against resonant bells. But Ambarchi oversweetens the mix with strings and a descending piano phrase that soon hangs heavy.

More satisfying is the final track, the 20 minute long "Stars Aligned, Web Spun". The wavering of the gong-like main guitar note gives the piece a sustaining ambiguity. Slowly, more tuneful material gathers around it and the piece moves into an easy-on-the-ear post-rock pastoral. Yet it's hardly challenging. There are plenty of strengths to this album: an open, improvisatory feel; a sound that's both dense and unfussy about hiss and loop-point clicks; a skilful layering of elements. But Ambarchi's personal third stream isn't as persuasive as some of his past work - yet.

I recommend the album wholly, but favor "Corkscrew" and "Stars Aligned Webs Spun," the more abstract tracks.

Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.

Penguin UK's "Great Ideas" series

Literary bloggers across the web are offering their comments on Penguin UK's new Great Ideas series. Tracts by Seneca to St. Augustine to Rousseau to Hazlitt to Orwell, all offered at £3.99 apiece. Sounds great to me. What's not as often commented on is the dearth of similar publishing gestures, however flawed, on this side of the Atlantic. As long as the translations of texts not originally published in English are reliable, why should we complain about greater and less expensive access to these works? Of course someone you love will be left off the list, but that's little reason enact revenge fantasies wherein you are the series editor and can remove those undeserving. I wish I could easily find new copies of Ruskin and and Gibbon and Montaigne for five bucks a pop; instead I content myself with yellowing used copies of mid-century paperbacks often with unwanted marks by previous readers.

Plus, the design of the series is something that would never float in America. We seem to need an image on the cover of almost every book.

Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.

We're trying to locate ourselves

It seems I'm not the only one giving thought to the meaning and implications of criticism. Stephen Mitchelmore has just posted to InWriting.org a consideration of the topic through his favorite lens, Maurice Blanchot.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 10, 2004

Collection note: Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman's multi-screen projection Mapping the Studio..., shown in 2002 at the Dia Center, has landed in the permanent collection of the Tate Modern. The New Mexico-based artist is also creating a new site-specific sound installation to be unveiled in the Turbine Hall this October as the latest exhibition in the museum's Unilever series.

UPDATE (Sep. 11): I just came across an interview with the artist by Robert Storr in the autumn issue of Tate Etc. magazine. It's online here.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Around town, around the world

What to do with tirelessly collected information? Share it!

The openings continue tonight: Iran do Espirito Santo at Sean Kelly, Justine Kurland @ Gorney Bravin + Lee (the  forest photographs are really lovely), a group show at Nicole Klagsbrun, Wim Wenders at James Cohan, a group show at Greene Naftali (it opens 9/18, 12-9pm), Zachary Wollard at Massimo Audiello, Marc Handelman at Lombard-Fried, Annika Larsson at Andrea Rosen, Pipolitti Rist at Luhring Augustine, Eugene von Bruenchenhein at Feigen,  Wolfgang Staehle at Postmasters (whose Berlin Pan, 2003, is one of the better works in a show of SVA alumni at their 601 W. 26th St. galleries), Neil Jenney/Ree Morton/Sylvia Plimack Mangold at Alexander and Bonin, An-my Le at Murray Guy, a pinata party at GBE Passerby, Johannes Wohnsafer at Casey Kaplan, Richard Long at Sperone Westwater, a group show and two new White Rooms at White Columns, and Terry Richarson at Deitch. If you live in Brooklyn and are too lazy to cross the river, you can attend openings at Priska Juschka and Pierogi.

The intrepid among you will note that I put this in geographic order, north to south, and can make an anal retentive street-by-street list in your datebook like I do.

Never fear, friends in faraway places: Abraham Cruzivillegas is opening at Roberts + Tilton in LA, as is Irit Batsry at Shoshana Wayne, Anne Collier at Marc Foxx (who I saw on 20th St. last night...he better hurry  home!) and Dario Robleto at ACME. Or, if you're in Chicago, you can attend the opening of Sterling Ruby's new exhibition at 1R Gallery.  Those of you in London can attend Doris Salcedo and Damián Ortega's openings at White Cube, David Shrigley's opening at Stephen Friedman, Tobias Rehrberg and Paul Noble's openings at the Whitechapel, or a rare screening of Anthony McCall's Long Film for Four Projectors at Tate Britain.

Farther afield? How about the opening of the group show 'Slow Rushes' at the Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, Lithuania ("SLOW RUSHES: Takes on the documentary sensibility in moving images from around Asia and the Pacific"), or the festivities for the 2004 Gwangju Biennial, in South Korea.

And there's more! Don't say I'm not looking out for you.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

Michael Auping interview at MAN

Tyler Green, on his way to New York for tonight's batch of openings, has posted to his website a four-part interview with Michael Auping, Chief Curator at the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth. Other curators will be jealous as Auping details the central place he held in the commissioning and design of the museum's new Tadao Ando-designed building. Click here and, after reading, scroll up for the next entry. New Yorkers know Auping most recently as the curator of the traveling Philip Guston retrospective that stopped in at the Met from October 2003 to January 2004.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 9, 2004

Chelsea comes out of hibernation

Desperate for something new to look at—though I must say my recent visits to the Frick and the Met have been entirely rewarding—I visited a handful of Chelsea galleries yesterday to take a sneak peek at a few shows opening today. The early report includes thumbs up for Thomas Scheibitz at Tanya Bonakdar, On Kawara at David Zwirner (including an unexpected three-panel painting that comments, rather drily, on Vietnam), and the Ree Morton/Neil Jenney/Silvia Plimack Mangold "early works" show at Alexander and Bonin.

Last night brought openings (and parties) for shows at Art in General and ApexArt. At the former, the Nomads + Residents magazine/journal table had a few new finds; the large group show upstairs had some strong works. I'm definitely going back. Unfortunately a building near the Drawing Center, which was to open its Fall Selections exhibition, had some sort of structural damage that required the evacuation of the entire block; most of the people who wanted to go to the opening ended up a little further south for the Black Book magazine party in Deitch's 26 Wooster St. space.

I never realized how addicted I was to constantly seeing new art until this week. Tonight everything starts in earnest, with openings at Robert Miller, D'Amelio Terras, Andrew Kreps, Plane Space, Derek Eller, John Connelly Presents, Sara Meltzer, Anton Kern, TEAM, Gasser + Grunert, Tanya Bonakdar, Gallery Lelong, Elizabeth Dee, Metro Pictures, Susan Inglett, Cheim + Read, Thomas Erben, Cohan & Leslie, Rivington Arms, Bellwether, Guild & Greyshkul...you get the idea. Most people would be overwhelmed by this list; like a gourmand faced with more courses than he can eat (or a competitive eater faced with 53.5 hot dogs), I'm excited. See you there!

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Mark Stevens on political art

Here's a link, pilfered from ArtsJournal, to Mark Stevens's review of the art world's response to the RNC. There are a few quotes germane to what I've been thinking and writing about (look down a few posts) lately:

"The Vietnam echo currently reverberating through American culture suggests another important reason artists are having trouble making powerful work attacking the current administration. Kerry is so obviously not JFK; Iraq is so obviously not Vietnam. The present seems only an echo of the past."

"Politics today is too abstract for the old handmade arts. Both the Republican and the Democratic conventions are works of theater, performed for cameras inside guarded forts, where even spontaneity is carefully scripted. To confront this strange situation, an actor and a camera become the weapons of choice."

I'd like to think that Stevens is wrong in his final assessment, but there was frighteningly little contemporary art on display that matches the power of Vietnam-era artworks involving similar themes. Have we already graduated from artists's nostalgia for 1960s social movements to critics' nostalgia for 1960s political artworks?

Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 8, 2004

Northrop Frye: quotes on criticism

Last week a friend asked me why I chose to be a critic. The answer I provided her then was insufficient, and thinking about the question some more—the start of the new season is always a good time for this kind of reflection, just ask Jerry Saltz (see his "Where are we now?"-type essays from 2003, 2002, 2001, and 2000)—I returned to the "Polemical Introduction" to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, one of my favorite discourses on the subject. Here are some select quotes:

"There is no real correlation either way between the merits of art and its public reception. [...] A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. [...] To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, it to assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure of independents from the art it deals with."

"The first thing the literary critic has to do is to read literature, to make an inductive survey of his own field and let his critical principles shape themselves solely out of his knowledge of that field. Critical principles cannot be taken over ready-made from theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any combination of these."

"Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.... Criticism...is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom: a verbal imitation of a human productive power which in itself does not speak."

I think substituting "visual art" for "literature" works fairly well with this essay, which was originally published in 1957. Here are earlier quotes on the subject that I've posted to the site: Arthur Krystal on literary criticism and Helen Molesworth on art criticism.

Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.

Andy Goldsworthy....Hero?

Did anyone else notice that Hero looks like the Andy Goldsworthy documentary Rivers and Tides with gravity-defying martial arts action? Take a look at the amped-up color in the natural background settings of some of these photos from Hero and then think back to your favorite scene from the documentary (mine might be the chained-together rainbow of leaves floating down the river). Maybe if Goldsworthy had included fight scenes wherein he takes on critics who won't approach his work seriously, his movie's box office take would have been much higher....

Posted in Film. Found always via this permanent link.

Another reason Paris is amazing...

This report in The Guardian describes a fully-functioning underground cinema and restaurant housed in an underground cavern. Amazing enough, right? Even better: It was a secret society of sorts, and the authorities didn't know about it. Here's the meat of the story:

Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.

A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 5, 2004

“Austria West” at the Austrian Cultural Forum

Artforum. has just posted my brief review of the “Austria West” exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum on 52nd St. The review is online here and archived online at BrianSholis.com here.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 3, 2004

"Nostalgic" art and politics, circa 2004

Here are the introductory paragraphs to an article written for the October issue of Flash Art titled "(Re)Making History." It's my attempt to understand why we are faced at this moment with a surge of "political" art. See also the entire September issue of Artforum for further opinions on this topic.

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” – Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967

We’re in the midst of another 1960s moment. As the United States heads toward a presidential election in which the Republican candidate is incumbent and conservative policies are everywhere ascendant, the cultural expression of liberal politics seems more focused on the heyday of three decades ago than on current problems. Think of Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s documentary The Weather Underground, the Strokes, White Stripes, and Bruce Mau’s Institute Without Boundaries; Mark Kurlansky’s 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, Bernando Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, and Susan Choi’s novel American Woman. In the visual arts, the trend is equally pronounced. Consider the ever-growing section of your bookshelf dedicated to Robert Smithson; the 2004 Whitney Biennial and “Utopia Station” at last year’s Venice Biennale; Pamela M. Lee’s Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s; the critical reevaluation of older artists like Július Koller; and the current practices of Andrea Bowers, Sam Durant, assume vivid astro focus, Carol Bove, Felix Gmelin, and many others. Whether the historical torch they carry is utopian, psychedelic, countercultural, tied to social protest, or blends all these things together, the number of artists addressing this phase of our history is approaching something like critical mass. What makes the 60s ripe for such intense cultural examination now? Whitney Biennial curator Debra Singer described the current spate of artistic activity as nostalgic, and attributed it to the similarities between then and now, with tumultuous political, social, and cultural events of the previous era (along with its visual lexicon) functioning as sites for the displacement of “contemporary problems, anxieties, and hopes.”

But this time there’s more to it: the artists (and art historians) now coming to prominence belong to the first generation that experienced the events of “The Sixties”—a period that can roughly be defined as the decade stretching for five years in either direction from the watershed events of 1968—second hand. They were too young be directly involved but not so young that they didn’t understand what was happening. Dimly aware of what their parents were doing at the protests, they absorbed events unfolding live on TV, and this once-removed point of view perhaps accounts for the fact that many of the artworks use appropriation as a basic strategy. Their recuperative gestures are an attempt to bring forward fragments of the milieu—the last golden age of protest for social change—in which they were raised. The current turn toward the 1960s can be viewed as an attempt to revitalize a liberal tradition in decades-long decline.

Adam Gopnik, reviewing several new histories of World War I in a recent New Yorker article, observed that it is only now—ninety years later—that a definitive understanding of the war is emerging. It has taken almost a century for history to become History. The events of the past thirty to forty years, then, must still be subject to revision, to expansions and contractions of meaning and relevance. Because few people now living were active participants in the Great War, it has calcified in our cultural consciousness; the smaller wars of the 1960s—social battles over racial, sexual, and gender equality, among other causes—are embodied, literally, in still-living participants. Avant-gardes and countercultural movements are necessarily short-lived, as their complete success also marks their demise, but we never closed the case on the 1960s countercultural project. The writing, music, filmmaking, art historical scholarship, and art practices now exploring that moment can therefore also be seen as test balloons sent out into the cultural atmosphere to be corroborated or shot down: These are the first steps toward a History of the era.

Recent artworks by Carol Bove (born 1971) and Andrea Bowers (born 1965) offer a core sample of this wider practice.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 2, 2004

A reading log

In the absence of much new art to go see—a problem soon rectified by the "Back to School" feeling next week will bring—I guess this site has served as a reading log. Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe, originally published in 1951, brought me through yesterday and today. Like McCarthy's non-fiction, which I was introduced to last year by the NYRB's essay collection, this book is equal parts humorous and searing. Academic life and (Joseph) McCarthyism are twirling on the spit above (Mary) McCarthy's prose flames, and despite my initial resistance to another book anchored by a self-centered academic, I became fairly engrossed and saw it through to the end. Three novels in two weeks? I ought to turn back to non-fiction now, just to save my reputation.

Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.

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Worth Seeing

"Black Is, Black Ain't" at the Renaissance Society, Chicago (through 06/08/08)

"Shaker Design: Out of This World" at the Bard Graduate Center (through 06/15/08)

Elad Lassry at John Connelly Presents (through 06/21/08)

Tomma Abts and Paul Chan at the New Musuem (through 06/29/08)

"Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns?" at Tony Shafrazi Gallery (through 07/12/08)

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