March 30, 2006
David Nutt, "Melancholera"
Last week, while idly flipping through the current issue of Open City at the end of a long workday, I came across David Nutt's short story, titled "Melancholera." It chronicles, in first-person narration, the pendular swings from sickness to health of a young boy suffering from lupus, Lyme disease, spinal meningitis, and other serious maladies. The boy is precocious, smart enough to offer lucid observations about family, friends, and the ever-shifting terrain of his own body but never so clever as to seem a mere cipher for the author's musings. The story moves along languidly, proceeding from the "Winter of Mysterious Stiffness" through the "Summer of Lethargy and Malaise" to the "Spring of Dizziness and Dementia." Nutt is a very gifted writer, stringing together highly evocative phrases without once calling attention to his literary acrobatics. He even manages for the boy's narration to conceivably impart clear impressions of all that he is missing while sequestered in various hospital beds. (See excerpt below.) "Melancholera" isn't perfect, as the ending speeds unnaturally through the narrator's teenage years to a vignette about his adult life with a loving, breadwinning wife. But it's as close as I've encountered recently, and as good as anything published in the New Yorker, which makes it all the more stunning that, according to his bio on the contributors' page, this is Nutt's first published story. Three cheers to the intern or editor who pulled this one out of the slush pile.
An excerpt, chosen at random:
The doctor shook his head, spelled out the new illness on an index card I quickly tore to pieces and scattered in an assortment of wastebaskets. I couldn't care less what it was called as I spent the beginning weeks of school confined to a hospital bed under close supervision. My body felt feeble and deflated, like a loose-fitting shirt someone else refused to wear. Sitting up became painful. Walking proved an absolute hazard. There were days I thought sneezing would be the end of me. I adopted a fierce regimen of hourly sulking, aware that new friendships were currently being forged beneath soccer field bleachers, freshly cemented pals-for-life peering up the shadowy hollows of coeds' skirts. Meanwhile, I sat listening to my father read the telephone book in Elizabethan voice after he exhausted the children's shelf of the hospital library.
The story alone is worth the cover price , but the issue also contains a pleasant-enough reminiscence of tea at the Plaza by Philip Lopate and a whimsical portfolio of watercolors (reproduced in black-and-white) by Molly Smith, a recent Columbia Graduate who has exhibited with KS Art.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
March 29, 2006
MP3 of the Moment #2: Jan Jelinek, "Moiré (Piano & Organ)"
From the ~scape records website:
With the aid of his sampler Jelinek has developed an exclusive music discovery approach, building on three central themes: jazz, the loop-finding modulation wheel and Moiré. Jazz sequences from the 60s and 70s are cut up into second-long loops, shifted by the wheel of the sampler and combined into spatial arrangements with maximum depth of field, re-creating the notorious Moiré effect, this ground-breaking painting technique of creating three dimensional space in a plane without the classic tools of perspective.
This is the opening track on Loop-finding-jazz-records, released in 2001 and my introduction to Jelinek. Since then he has collaborated with an Australian jazz combo called Triosk and (supposedly) an obscure '70s German TV-music production trio called The Exposures. I say "supposedly" because it remains unclear whether or not The Exposures, who have since released an album titled Lost Recordings, were described as a "fictitious backing band" on the collaborative release. Here is an excerpt of the Pitchfork review of Lost Recordings:
The Exposures are best remembered for being credited as a "fictitious backing band" on microhouse snake charmer Jan Jelinek's 2003 sleeper, La Nouvelle Pauverte. Whether Jelinek saved or robbed them is unclear: Conflicting reports tell us that he shined the light on these 25-plus year veterans by inviting them to perform on that record, while the liner notes on the group's Lost Recordings—which compiles their obscure pieces from the past four years—claim Jelinek sampled their shimmering wah-wah guitar without permission for his "Ifs ands & Buts". Hell, judging by the songs here, The Exposures could really be Jelinek himself in b-boy drag.
Either way, I hope you enjoy the song. Right-click the link at the bottom of the middle column to save the file to your computer. Click here for Jelinek's discography at Discogs.com.
Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.
Uncanny
In discussing the paparazzo cage and photo-op line at last night's screening of Drawing Restraint 9 at MoMA, I mentioned to an office colleague that I occasionally hear that the last time the contemporary art world was covered this extensively by general-interest magazines was right before the early-'90s market crash. Thirty minutes later, I turned to New York magazine's website to look up the address of a restaurant, and at the top of the page I encounter Marc Spiegler's "Will the Art Market Crash?" This post mentioned a number of recent New Yorker articles (though I neglected to include the Leo Koenig profile published a few months ago). There have been profiles of Raymond Pettibon and the Leipzig School painters in the New York Times Magazine, and every month W features multiple articles about contemporary art and artists. I'm not prognosticating, by any means, but my coincidental experience this morning was uncanny. More later.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
March 21, 2006
A quote
The triumphs and even the tyrannies of history endure for only a moment; it is their ruins which are eternal.
Richard Howard, "On Lepanto: An Appreciation of Cy Twombly," in Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
March 19, 2006
New Feature: MP3 of the Moment
Here in New York, you have to pick your battles, so to speak. You can't be an art buff, a film geek, a music nerd, a theatergoer, a balletomane, and an opera fanatic; there just isn't enough time in the day. My life is filled with art, writing, music, and the events attending to those three passions. The rest I experience haphazardly at best. In acknowledging this I have just frozen my Netflix account, which was perhaps a losing venture for me from the start.
My three regular readers will see that I have removed the "From Netflix" listing at the bottom of the middle column on this site. In exchange I have added "MP3 of the Moment," which features a randomly selected song from my hard drive and which will change once or twice a week, as the desire strikes.
The first selection is JK Broadrick's remix of Pelican's "Angel Tears," taken from Australasia, the band's debut full-length. Broadrick, as you may know, was behind Godflesh and Napalm Death, and has recently begun recording music under the moniker Jesu; Pelican is a new-ish instrumental metal band from Chicago. (Coincidentally, I knew two of its members ten years ago, in high school.) The original version of "Angel Tears" is a plodding, eleven-minute behemoth, all chugging guitars and (two-thirds of the way through) double-bass-drum attack. Broadrick works solely with the initial melody, adding an ethereal synthesizer "chorus" that hovers behind the music and some echo/reverb to the guitars—essentially giving "Angel Tears" the metal-meets-Slowdive sheen of his current recordings. To my mind, it's an utterly stunning cocoon of noise. Due to bandwith usage concerns, please right-click and download the file rather than playing it directly from my web server.
A few related links: Pelican's record label, Hydra Head Records; reviews of Australasia; Jesu's homepage; and an informative review of Jesu's self-titled album.
Posted in Miscellaneous, Music. Found always via this permanent link.
Paul Pfeiffer and Mary Gaitskill
On Friday, almost five years after I moved to New York, I received what I've been looking for since I set down my belongings in a second-floor Astoria apartment from which one could see a sliver of the Manhattan skyline: lifestyle validation from the New York Times. Apparently, attendance at talks, readings, panel discussions, and the like is on the rise. (The very first post on this site reported a talk given by Benjamin "Heavy Duty" Buchloch at Dia.) To wit:
The current enthusiasm for lectures and spoken-word events calls to mind the 19th century, when crowds flocked to hear Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain and Henry Ward Beecher lecture, said Donald M. Scott, a historian at Queens College of the City University of New York. At the peak of the country's lecture craze in the 1850's, nearly 400,000 people a week attended lectures in the northern and western parts of the country, he once wrote in an essay on the topic . . . But why the resurgence now? In the 19th century the increase in the number of lectures and debates came at the same time that "there was an explosion in print," Mr. Scott said in an interview. It was "staggering, equal in its scope to the kind of explosion we are seeing in electronic and TV and visual media.""I think it's a symbiotic relationship," Mr. Scott said. "There is something to listening to a figure you may have read or heard about. Even though what they have to say may be something you can get in another form, it's a way to feel you are actually in touch with these ideas and these figures."
Last Monday I was in touch with the artist Paul Pfeiffer, via a Sculpture Center-sponsored talk he delivered at the New School, and on Thursday with the writer Mary Gaitskill, who read from Veronica, her newest novel, at 192 Books in Chelsea.
Pfeiffer, who is cocurating (with Anthony Huberman) Sculpture Center's spring exhibition, "Grey Flags," offered his "subjective history of sculpture," an hour-long talk in which the word sculpture did not figure until the Q & A session after he had finished. He instead opened with a clip from The Exorcist, a film Pfeiffer returned to throughout the talk, and went on to discuss Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man," Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious, Roger Caillois's "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. What united these disparate references, which were accompanied by images of Robert Smithson's "Mirror Displacements" and Dan Graham's pavilions, is still somewhat opaque to me. Perhaps I can best describe the lecture, which Pfeiffer admitted was haphazard, as an attempt to exorcise the "repressed" content within seemingly stable representations of order, from the Vitruvian Man (which, if the circle and square in the famous drawing are de-centered slightly, becomes as unstable as one of Duchamp's Rotoreliefs) to Krauss's infamous "figure-ground-not figure-not ground" grid. Pfeiffer tied this to Fanon's third-person consciousness (living "as an image for others") and, moving through Benjamin, to what he views are shifts in the status of the artist today. (This last idea was mentioned only in passing, and deserves more attention, as does his use of Smithson and Graham, which were given as overly literal representations of this fragmentation of identity.) One can tell by the opacity of this summary that, as Huberman later put it in an e-mail, the talk "asked a lot of his audience." Nonetheless, Pfeiffer's ideas flew like sparks, and he obviously enjoyed presenting them, smiling with the introduction of each unexpected insight. I hope he's offered another opportunity to speak on a similar topic so that he can more clearly thread together these thoughts. I plan to attend one or both of the two remaining lectures in this series: Trisha Donnelly on April 24 and John Armleder on May 1.
Gaitskill, with her cool demeanor and smooth presentation, was Pfeiffer's opposite as a public speaker. She read a long selection from the middle of Veronica set in Paris, where Alison, the narrator, is working as a model. Gaitskill's self-possessed delivery ran counter to the voice I had ascribed to Alison (I'm on page 100), but was nonetheless engaging. The Q & A session, in which Gaitskill answered each question patiently and with both detail and the quiet force that she brought to the reading, led me to believe that she would make a very good teacher. (She's a professor at Syracuse.) Related: an interview with Gaitskill at nerve.com.
Posted in Art, Books. Found always via this permanent link.
March 16, 2006
Around the web #10
- Two smart review-essays about Franz Kafka's life have appeared this month. The first, by Robert Alter, ran in the New Republic and is reprinted online at Powells.com. The second, by Jeff Fort, is in the current issue of The Believer. Their respective first lines: "There is a tantalizing gap between our increasingly detailed knowledge of Kafka's life and our imperfect understanding of his achievement as a writer"; "Franz Kafka’s greatest wish was to disappear."
- Morgan Meis, at 3 Quarks Daily, uses R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet to muse on Homer, Tacitus, and the differences between (and intertwining of) parataxis and hypotaxis. It's more engaging than it sounds, just like Kelly's epic tale.
- The Los Angeles Times runs a story on musical Minimalism on the occasion of the LA Philharmonic's "Minimalist Jukebox" series, running from this Saturday through April 2 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. If I could attend only one event in the program—and I'm very upset that I cannot attend any—it would be "Hallucination City," which features Glenn Branca conducting his Symphony No. 13 for 100 Guitars, on Wednesday, March 29.
- A few art links: An interview with Arthur Danto at KultureFlash; the Art History Newsletter points to Donald Kuspit's "A Critical History of 20th Century Art," which is being serialized at Artnet, and to Doug Harvey's LA Weekly column from last year, called "The End of Donald Kuspit"; in January, Artforum hosted a panel discussion called "Curating the Biennial," and the RealAudio webcast is now online (direct link to RA file); and Adrian Searle, writing for the Guardian, does a better job of reviewing Hilma af Klint's exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre than he did the Tate Triennial.
- Pankaj Mishra published an eminently sensible review of David Foster Wallace's new essay collection in last Sunday's NYTBR.
- The wild card: WFMU's Beware of the Blog posts seven video clips from Kure Kura Takora (Gimme Gimme Octopus), an early '70s Japanese children's television show. The clips must be seen to be believed.
- I have been on the fence about subscribing to the Virginia Quarterly Review, a literary journal, but yesterday's announcement that it was nominated for six National Magazine Awards, more than any other publication except The Atlantic, pushed me over the fence. See the other nominees here.
- Continuing my writing-about-writing theme started with the mention of Kevin Kopelson's book a few posts below this one, here is an ode to an Olympia typewriter by Michael Erard, published at The Morning news.
- Last, but not least: I had coffee the other day with my friend Mirjam Varadinis, who is a curator at the Kunsthaus Zurich and the proprietor of A-Z Public Limited Editions, which publishes "limited edition" artworks as downloadable PDF files. AZPLE's first edition, by the artist Annelise Coste, is only online through the weekend, so download while you can; the next artwork will be posted on March 20.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
March 15, 2006
Gabriel Josipovici interview
ReadySteadyBook has just published an interview with the novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici. Mark Thwaite, the site's proprietor, is an ardent fan of Josipovici's work, and his advocacy led me to pay special attention for Josipovici's name (I especially enjoyed his review-essay on Grimm's fairy tales in the TLS last summer) and to purchase a used copy of The World and the Book, which I've skimmed and also enjoyed. An excerpt:
MT: In [England] we tend to see literary novels as ‘heavy’ and popular fiction as ‘light’. Yet you have referred to the ‘lightness’ of The Iliad. What is this quality exactly? Are there modern novels that are light in this way?GJ: There may be two or three different issues here. I find contemporary works that take themselves terribly seriously a pain, as I’ve said. I’d much rather read a good thriller or a good comic novel than one that is bidding to become a Booker prize-winner (and often succeeding). Unfortunately even thriller writers—especially American ones—these days want to show they are ‘important’ writers, which is a disaster for their work. But there is also a large historical issue. For complex reasons art before the Romantics could be both profound and ‘light’. Homer’s and Shakespeare’s plays are cases in point. After the onset of Romanticism it’s as if depth had to entail solemnity, weightiness. Contrast Mozart and Beethoven, Pope and Wordsworth, Fielding and George Eliot. I love many works written after 1800, but I wish it were lighter. And I can’t stand those great nineteenth century works that take themselves so seriously and try to found a new religion, like Mahler’s symphonies. That’s why I love Stravinsky: for me he has everything: wit, lightness, precision, yet a plangency that is deeply moving. He remains the artist I would most like to emulate (one can have ones dreams). I love some of the novels of Bellow and Nabokov and Muriel Spark and Thomas Bernhard because I think they laugh at themselves and their own pretensions even as they burrow into the depths. I love some of the novels of Aharon Appelfeld because they say what they have to say in the simplest way and then stop, and what they have to say moves me deeply. But I could go on and on, with a list of my favourite modern novels – which would include works by Malamud, Shabtai, Simon, Perec, Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Kundera, Joseph Heller and Peter Handke.
Posted in Around the web, Books. Found always via this permanent link.
Kevin Kopelson, Neatness Counts
Brief review: In this slim, enjoyable book, cultural theorist and literary critic Kevin Kopelson uses the writer's desk as an airstrip from which to lift off into flights of stirring exegesis. The five linked essays, on poet Elizabeth Bishop, novelist Marcel Proust, critic Roland Barthes, playwright Tom Stoppard, and travel writer Bruce Chatwin, use the orderliness (or lack thereof) of the writer's desk as an lens through which to view the writers' literary production. They are marked by an erudition that allows Kopelson to flit effortlessly from primary text to journal to correspondence to contemporary criticism—in one paragraph, he segues from Walter Benjamin (who could easily have been the subject of an additional essay) to Banana Yoshimoto. Although at times Kopelson is too caught up in his own critical reverie—especially in the essays on Barthes and Stoppard—the writing is always felicitous. The book is highly recommended.
Links: Kopelson's page at the University of Iowa, where he teaches; the book's page at the University of Minnesota Press; an excerpt from the introduction and another from chapter four.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
March 14, 2006
Rambling through the fairs (with an emphasis on the "rambling")
I have passed through the feelings that usually arrive on the Monday after an art-fair weekend--slight nausea, horror concerning who saw you do the things you can't remember doing, bewilderment at how such a confluence of events came to be in the first place--and am now back to thinking somewhat clearly about what I saw and experienced over the weekend. (Recovery takes longer after the fair weekend in Miami, which is in every way so wildly unlike my everyday life in New York.) After ten hours on the Armory Show floor on Thursday, the result of which was posted here, I visited the LA Art Fair on Friday, and Scope and Pulse on Saturday.
My personal reactions to the Armory Show differ slightly from those of others I reported at artforum.com. While I too noticed the "missing center," so to speak, the fair remains by far the best in the city. There were plenty of artworks I was glad to see—and that I might not have seen at all were it not for the fair—and, in most cases, the booths were more sensitively installed than those at the other fairs. The Armory Show suffered, as usual, from its location on Piers 90 and 92, which is uniquely inhospitable to trade shows; "lounges" mid-way down the corridors, like the one sponsored by Artforum, do little to temper the feeling that one's journey will never end. The feeling is akin to trying to reach Gate 116 at Newark Airport, only without the moving walkways. The fair managers' decision to decrease the number of galleries is admirable, but the resultant reconfiguration (such as moving some exhibitors upstairs into the former lounge area) definitely requires tweaking.
The Armory Show's organizers were likewise smart to recognize that public (and collector) interest in art fairs is not a zero-sum game, and to support the presence of the other, "satellite" fairs, such as the three I visited and DiVA, which I missed. In conversation with various dealers, artists, critics, and curators over the weekend, I floated a test-balloon theory that stated the Armory Show is past its prime, and is now on the gradual downward slope that Art Chicago recently tumbled down at an alarming rate. I suggested a "shelf life" of approximately ten years for most fairs. Everyone seemed to think that the Armory Show is stronger now than Art Chicago ever was, and that the lure of New York would itself sustain a fair in a way that traveling to Chicago, say, or Cologne, never would.
So everyone seems to be in agreement that the Armory Show is fine, for now . . .
Continue reading "Rambling through the fairs (with an emphasis on the "rambling")"Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
The New Yorker: All art, all the time
Recent issues of the New Yorker have been littered with art-related content, from Calvin Tomkins's "Talk of the Town" pieces on "School Days," an exhibition at Jack Tilton Gallery, and Barnaby Furnas (which sent Jenny Davidson down memory lane) to Peter Schjehldal's recent reviews (David Smith, Edvard Munch), and from Jack Handey's tips for painters back to Tomkins for a short profile of Whitney director Adam Weinberg. And let us not forget this gem, from Jack Turner's article on absinthe (not online):
Absinthe and those who drank it became a favorite subject for painters from Degas to Picasso. Paul Verlaine developed the notion of absinthe as the drink of the artistic temperment, proclaiming, "For me, my only glory is a simple, ephemeral absinthe." (Whether or not absinthe aided his intoxicated versifying, it probably helped dull the pain he suffered from syphilis, gonorrhea, rheumatism, and bronchitis.) Verlaine's fellow-poet and sometime lover Arthur Rimbaud was also a student at what he called the "Academy of Absomphe," fuelling his poetics of sensory disorder with the "sagebush of the glaciers." Toulouse-Lautrec went so far as to teach his pet cormorant to drink it. He carried his own dose in a hollowed-out cane and took it "diluted" with cognac, a combination he dubbed "the Earthquake."
I hope the barrage of art-related content continues, as this site will of course no longer be updated once I have made my fame and fortune as the painter of Handey's Still Life with Beets, Cauliflower, Liver, and Large Glass of Beer.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
March 13, 2006
Lines I wish I wrote, #4
From Jerry Saltz's review of Charlene von Heyl's exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery:
And right now there's Charline von Heyl, 45, who is German, which may not be coincidental considering that innovative painters seem to tumble out of Deutschland like clowns from a Volkswagen. Von Heyl has lived in New York for more than 10 years and is currently having her fifth and best solo exhibition since 1996. Sometimes I think von Heyl is just a late entry in the de Kooning sweepstakes (one of her current paintings is even titled Woman). Even so, much of her art takes me to a wonderful snake pit where styles I thought were outmoded turn dangerous again. [Emphasis added.]
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
March 9, 2006
DIY Art Project #1
In the spirit of Rob Pruitt's 101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself and e-flux's DO iT:
1) Find a company that produces stickers.
2) Re-create the circle-and-arrow "You Are Here" design from New York City subway system maps located on train platforms. Change wording to "Others Are Here."
3) Send to company for printing.
4) Affix one sticker with arrow pointing to a randomly chosen station on each map.
Posted in Art, Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
March 8, 2006
Exhibitions I wish I could see, #3
It's Armory Show time, and once again the international art world has descended upon New York, meaning that this weekend is as good a time as any to see gallery exhibitions in other cities. Focusing on Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Berlin—the cities I visit most frequently for the express purpose of looking at art—here is a selection of a few I wish I could see:
- Nathan Mabry at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles (through 3/25). Mabry's sculptures in "Supersonic" and "Thing" were hilarious blends of "primitive" and high-modernist forms; I'm curious to know what he's making now.
- Evan Holloway, "Despair," at Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (through 3/11). (I wrote a brief review of Holloway's last show at this gallery.)
- "4: Friederike Clever, Tue Greenfort, Felix Schramm, and Stefan Thater" at Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles (through 4/9). I wrote about Schramm's New York solo debut in this month's Artforum and am always eager to follow up on artists on whose work I've spent significant time and thought.
- "An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life" at REDCAT, Los Angeles (through 4/2). This exhibition was cocurated by Anton Vidolke, who I know well and respect.
- Steve Roden at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (through 4/1). Two summers ago, while tagging along with a curator friend then based in Arizona, I visited Roden's Pasadena home and studio and became enamored of much of his work, especially his 2001-02 drawing series titled "Wandering."
- Thomas Schütte, "Rings," at Faggionato Fine Arts, London (through 3/17). Though I now know Schütte primarily as a sculptor, I first came across his work classified as painting, at the Walker Art Center's 2001 "Painting At the Edge of the World" exhibition. The work exhibited there, Ringe (Rings), is the focal point of this show.
- James Hopkins at Max Wigram, London (through 3/18). I enjoyed Hopkins's New York solo debut last autumn (see my artforum.com review here), and have just penned a short essay for a catalogue that Max Wigram is publishing.
- Jaime Gili at Riflemaker, London (through 3/31). Riflemaker presented one of my favorite booths at last autumn's Zoo Art Fair, and Gili is, at least in reproduction, one of the gallery's artists whose work I'm most eager to see in New York.
- Isa Genzken and Hilma af Klint at the Camden Arts Centre, London (through 4/16). Two great tastes that, I imagine, taste great together.
- Andrea Bowers at Praz-Dellavallade, Paris (through 4/22). I've come to know Bowers since writing about her work in Flash Art eighteen months ago, and am always interested to see her newest works.
- Pierre Ardouvin at Galerie Chez Valentin (through 3/11). I base this choice on the "Critics' Pick" review published on artforum.com.
- Steve McQueen at Marian Goodman, Paris (through 3/11). Embarrassingly, I missed his last show in New York . . .
- Helen Mirra at Galerie Nelson, Paris (through 4/7/06). I have written about Mirra twice to date, and I remain as engaged with her work—and its philosophical ruminations—as I was on the day I first encountered it, four years ago at the Whitney Museum.
- Thomas Zipp at Guido W. Baudach, Berlin (through 4/8). I've been thinking about Zipp's work since being led by hand—literally—to see this artist's work in Miami.
- Jan Christensen at c/o Atle Gerhardsen, Berlin (through 3/11). I met this artist, briefly, in Norway last year, and he seemed very smart; now I want to know if his work matches up.
- Sharon Lockhart at Neugerriemschneider, Berlin (through 3/11). Since my friend Michael Ned Holte penned a feature article on Lockhart in a recent issue of Frieze, I've been eager to see anything related to her new film Pine Flat, including this exhibition.
- Mai-Thu Perret at Barbara Weiss, Berlin (through 3/31). I recently met Perret in New York but know embarrassingly little about her art.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
March 7, 2006
Museum, Inc.
I came across a copy of Paul Werner's Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World (Prickly Paradigm Press) just a few days after reading Todd Gibson's blog post about the pamphlet. It's a short book, digestible in one read, but it should be significantly shorter: After removing the unnecessary sexual metaphors and other adolescent locutions; the inappropriate references to Hitler and the Nazis; the bad puns (perhaps Werner's greatest, and most frequent, offense); the factual errors (however small); and the side-swipes at individual artists and, oddly, teachers, one is left with a fairly smart, fairly jaded, 4,000-or-so-word magazine article about Thomas Krens's tenure at the Guggenheim and contemporary museum economics. Werner, a lecturer at the Guggenheim for nine years, states his thesis most concisely at the end of chapter three: "In the traditional art museum today the people are allowed to be spectators; in the Guggenheim Museum they may on occasion be spectators of who they are; in no case, either in art, or politics, or museum-going, are they ever allowed to be participants." Werner advocates "lifting the veil" from museum machinations in the name of creating a richer experience for visitors, a task he gave himself toward the end of his tenure on Fifth Avenue, incorporating "art criticism" into his group tours. I can only hope that his criticism, such as it is, was not delivered with as much smugness and flippancy as this book. A pamphlet should possess a quiet strength, persuading by the coruscating force of its logic. Every flash of insight Museum, Inc. presents is undercut by rhetorical overkill, often in the very same paragraph. It doesn't help matters that Werner neglects to offer any alternative, however vague, to the situation he is denouncing so vociferously. I cannot recommend reading it.
(Allow me to present a sample of lines to be found within this book's seventy-six pages: "I never metanarrative I didn't like"; "While the League of Disgruntled Directors was busy castigating the hookers for its own repressed desires, Krens was standing on the corner in rouge and butt rider"; "Catalogs are what shrinks might call a transitional snobject"; "Remember, dahling, it is better to look free-marketous than to be free-marketous"; "Been there, been done by that.")
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
March 6, 2006
Around the web #9
- Geoff Dyer's "My Life as a Gatecrasher" in the spring '06 Threepenny Review.
- No review of Lewis Dabney's biography of Edmund Wilson that I've yet read has undertaken a critical analysis of Wilson's writing and his place in the pantheon of American criticism, preferring instead to dutifully sketch a thumbnail version of the critic. This one, written by Morris Dickstein and published in the TLS, at least sent me to my own bookshelves, causing me to pick up Clive James's The Metropolitan Critic. I also happened across an $8.50 copy of Dickstein's The Mirror in the Roadway in Park Slope this weekend, which I look forward to reading.
- The last New York Times Travel section mini-feature on Paris that caught my eye was about high-end chocolate shops; yesterday's paper included a paean to that city's libraries. Obviously someone at the paper wants me to return to Paris, and soon.
- An essay by NBCC-nominated writer Dubravka Ugresic appears in the current issue of Context. Here's the key quote: "Today, whether he’s conscious of it or not, the postcommunist intellectual sends what he writes to three different addresses, to three imaginary recipients, three hypothetical 'sponsors.' The first addressee is his own local community; the second is 'Europe,' 'Western Europe' or the 'European Union,' whatever that means; while the third is the global marketplace, the 'world.' Compared to American writers, for example, the postcommunist writer’s situation is incomparably more complex. In his effort to satisfy all three imaginary addressees, he has become the perfect polymorph." If you want to see her tease out these three "addresses," click here.
- This week, Slate's book club features Stephen Metcalf and Simon Reynolds discussing Reynolds's Rip It Up and Start Again, which I also purchased this weekend—ostensibly for my girlfriend, but really because I've been eager to read it since I first heard about the British edition six or eight months ago. Reynolds blogs here.
- Amartya Sen in last week's New Republic on "the uses and abuses of multiculturalism."
- George Hunka offers thoughts on culling his library (link via Terry Teachout).
OFFLINE
- The March 2006 issue of Modern Painters includes the most fascinating and revealing interview yet undertaken with the Wrong Gallery. Francesco Bonami is skeptical of the group's hijinks, and asks pointed questions. Perhaps because the curator is so widely respected, the Wrong Gallery members do their best to answer him thoughtfully. As Bonami notes in the introduction: "My questions aim to find out what's behind this innovative, still extremely annoying, project . . . but note that I regard the fact that the project continues to annoy me as proof of its worth." I recommend reading it.
Posted in Around the web, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
The 2006 Whitney Biennial
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Left: A detail view of the Peace Tower rising from the Whitney's below-grade courtyard. Right: A fourth-floor installation view of Rudolf Stingel's Untitled (After Sam) (2005-06) and Urs Fischer's Untitled (branches) (2005), looking through Fischer's The Intelligence of Flowers (2003-06).
"Day for Night," the 2006 Whitney Biennial, opened last week, and, as usual, it has generated plenty of commentary. Here is a selection: Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times; Jerry Saltz in the Village Voice; Linda Yablonsky on Bloomberg's wires; Lance Esplund in The Sun; Ben Davis on Artnet; Kriston Capps at Eye Level; Mia Fineman at Slate; James Wagner on his eponymous weblog (images here); my own comments—emphatically not a review—here, which were followed up by my colleague Michael Wang here.
None of this covers, of course, the peripheral considerations, which include Joao Ribas's interview with the curators at ArtInfo, Biennial artist Momus describing his first performance in the galleries, and Holland Cotter's article in Sunday's Times about collective art practices. Or Siva Vaidhyanathan's blog post that includes a link to his essay included in the exhibition catalog.
Then, of course, there is the discussion one has on the phone, in elevators, over dinner, at other openings. "The Europeans they chose don't do a good job of showing how Europe is culturally distinct from the US." "The ideas that have most occupied my thinking about art in the last year are not represented in the show." "The show was really powerful; I left depressed." "This is the worst biennial I've seen in a long time." ;Being at the opening was like crossing a list of art-world people I don't want to see with the stars of my iTunes playlist." "The Momus performance made me want to stab myself in the eye." "The fourth floor is boring." "The fourth floor is the best." "The second floor looks like 'Greater New York'— and I don't mean that as a compliment." "They should make the Biennial smaller, only fifteen artists."
A big show like this can't help but be a mirror in which a critic ratifies his or her own personal taste, seeking out familiar names and favored styles. My own initial response conforms: I prefer the fourth-floor installation, with its measured pace, subdued air, and formalist and conceptual concerns. It seemed to me like a proper museum exhibition, one in which the potential for curatorial argument exists; the third and second floors seem too much like an unfiltered smorgasbord. What disappoints me most thus far is ease with which the radical, collective practices touted by the curators (and discussed by Cotter in his Times article) are subsumed into the greater exhibition. The same goes for Toni Burlap, Iles's and Vergne's fictional curator, whose presence is little (if at all) felt in the galleries. (Another disappointment: The catalogue costs $50, so I won't soon be able to tell if these ideas receive greater prominence there.) But I get the feeling that if one has a few hours to spend with the plethora of film and video projects, there are many rewards to be gleaned. As I revisit the exhibition and attempt to discover them, I will post my thoughts here.
Posted in Around the web, Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
One writer's life
While Licy, his Latvian psychoanalyst wife, recovered in bed from the hours which, by her own choosing, she spent working late into the night, Lampedusa would get up early and walk to a café-cum-patisserie where he would take a long breakfast and read. On one occasion, he did not move for four hours, the time it took him to finish a large novel by Balzac, from start to finish. Then he would undertake his long tour of the bookshops, after which he would go to another café where he would sit but not mix with a few acquaintances of his with semi-intellectual pretensions. He would listen (to their "nonsense") and hardly say a word, then, after all these marathon sittings and feeble peregrinations, return home on the bus. He is always described as walking wearily along, looking very distinguished, but with a somewhat careless gait, his eyes alert and holding in his hand a leather bag crammed with the books and cakes and biscuits on which he would have to survive until evening, since lunch was never served at home . . . Apparently the bag always contained more books than were strictly necessary, as if it were luggage of a reader setting off on a long journey, who was afraid he might run out of reading matter while away.
Javier Marías, "Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa in Class," from Written Lives
Posted in Books, Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
March 3, 2006
A critics' favorite: David Smith at the Guggenheim
Four critics, four admiring reviews: The David Smith exhibition now on view at the Guggenheim has received phenomenal critical response. Holland Cotter in the New York Times, Jed Perl on the New Republic's website, Peter Schjeldahl in this week's New Yorker, and Hal Foster in the current London Review of Books. I have yet to see the show, but have added the exhibition, under the "Worth Seeing" heading in the purple column at right, based on these assessments. Here's a key graf from Foster's piece:
A good show disturbs settled views, and this centennial survey by the Spanish curator Carmen Giménez (on until 14 May) does so beautifully. As befits an exhibition that will travel to Tate Modern and the Pompidou, its perspective is European, which freshens the work dramatically. American accounts of Smith tend to race through his long apprenticeship to European masters—in particular Julio González, Picasso and Giacometti—in order to focus on his distinctive series of the 1950s, such as the Tanktotems, non-objective ‘personages’ that ask to be compared with Abstract Expressionism, and of the early 1960s, such as the Cubi, geometric constructions that seem to relate to Minimalism. In short, Americans cut to the American chase. In this exhibition, on the contrary, one ascends the spiral of the Guggenheim slowly, as if accompanying Smith in his arduous struggle with his European predecessors. At first, Smith knew these masters only through such magazines as Cahiers d’art, and the geographic distance did not grant him much in the way of artistic distance.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
March 1, 2006
Welcome / Around the web #8
For those of you coming via today's spring arts preview in the Observer, I offer an immediate caveat to Choire Sicha's characterization of me as a blogger: The majority of my time is happily spent editing the content specific to Artforum magazine's website, www.artforum.com. I also write for it, as evidenced by a diary entry about my recent trip to Stockholm currently on the site's front page. When I post here, it is furtively, often late at night, and often little more than links to other articles, essays, and sites I have been reading. Here's another batch:
- James Wood continues beating the drum for realist fiction in this article for Prospect. It is the shortest and most accessibly written article he's yet penned on the topic. (Wood also has a long review of Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses in the current LRB. Link here.)
- As widely noted, Malcolm Gladwell has started a blog.
- Here is an interview, conducted last summer, with the writer Richard Stern, whose collected short stories I am slowly working through (and enjoying).
- Here is a (somewhat low-quality) video trailer for a documentary about Matthew Barney that is to be released (I believe) later this year.
- A new-to-me Scandanavian design magazine titled Forum features excerpts of many of its articles, including stunning pictures. One of my favorite profiles is of the Danish Minister of Culture's recently revamped offices.
- I seem to choose a freely available article or two from every issue of the NYRB for recommendation; from the March 9 issue, I recommend Alan Hollinghurst's review-essay about Lytton Strachey's letters.