May 16, 2008

LRB: Foster on Serra; Eagleton on anonymity; Kopelson's diary

The new issue of the London Review of Books has a number of goodies. Highlights include Hal Foster's blow-by-blow recount of the decision-making process that led to Richard Serra's sculpture now at the Grand Palais in Paris, Terry Eagleton's review of Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (arriving on US bookstore shelves in August), and the diary of academic literary critic Kevin Kopelson, author of the engaging small book Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk (which I first blogged about on March 15, 2006).

From the Foster text (which is decidedly not a review):

Serra decided on plates 17 metres high and four metres wide; absolutely vertical, they are anchored only shallowly in the ground, and nothing supports them at the surface. This size turned out to be an excellent match of technical necessity – the plates are about the largest that can now be milled – and aesthetic scale: at just under half the height of the nave, they hold their own against the architecture but do not overwhelm the viewer (only about 15 centimetres thick, they appear almost elegant). Yet this resolution of size still left the questions of number and placement, and there could be no trial run. Serra calculated that 100 feet might be the right interval to create a rhythm that would at once articulate the architecture and motivate the viewer; more plates might interfere with the former and/or intimidate the latter, while fewer might make the ground feel a little arid. This formula makes for five plates over the 200 metres of the nave, with one placed directly under the cupola, and this is what Promenade consists in.

The particulars of placement remained, however, and here Serra was cued by the axis of the nave, to which all the plates are strictly perpendicular. To scatter the plates would be to lose the power of this strong line; to overlap them would be to destroy the centre in another way. So Serra decided to set the plates at a very slight angle (1.69 degrees) from the axis: some are positioned on the central line at the bottom and 20 inches away at the top, while others are 20 inches off the central line at the bottom and plumb at the top. These deviations create, with simple means, a great tension; one feels drawn through the piece as through a slalom course. Yet this energy might feel forced if the rhythm were only one of alternation, so here again Serra mixed things up: from the Champs Elysées side to the Seine side, the pattern of lean vis-à-vis the centre is in-in-away-away-in.

Eagleton begins his piece thusly:

All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler. I might pass you a note at a meeting, but a note is only a note if it can function in my absence. Writing, unlike speech, is meaning that has come adrift from its source. Some bits of writing – theatre tickets or notes to the milkman, for example – are more closely tied to their original contexts than Paradise Lost or War and Peace. Fiction (since it is imaginary) has no real-life original context at all, and hermeneutically speaking can therefore circulate a lot more freely than a shopping list or a bus ticket. Literary works are peculiarly portable. They can be lifted from one interpretative situation to another, and may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning.

Kopelson's playful ramble ends up by asking, "Have I become, then, Grover Cleveland?"

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

May 15, 2008

Visual Interlude: On Kawara

On Kawara, Monday, Dec. 17, 1979, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 18 1/4 x 24 3/8". Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2008 On Kawara.

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May 13, 2008

Adrian Searle on Richard Serra in Paris

Guardian art critic Adrian Searle visits the Grand Palais to see Richard Serra's exhibition in that venue's new "Monumenta" series of solo exhibition. An excerpt:

How sudden and decisive these steel plates feel, as if they had been stabbed into the concrete floor the moment we walked in. It takes a while to apprehend how mysteriously they choreograph the space, and our movements through it. As much as Serra deals with gravity, mass, weight, presence, a sense of the commanding and the impending, he also deals with duration, mental space and the unfolding of the physical experience in time and distance. But with the midday sun streaming through the roof, the whole space is a dazzle of light and shadow. It is difficult at first to comprehend what I am looking at: the walls, the floor and Serra's steel planes are zebra-striped in a camouflage of light and shadow. It feels like being trapped inside the gears of a solar clock. The iron art nouveau stairs and balcony writhe on one side. Later in the afternoon, when the sun is off the roof, the tension between the sculptural elements and the building reveal themselves and intensify. The skin of oxide on the milled corten steel softens to a grayish purplish glow. People down the other end of the building seem tiny, like the far-off figures in a Canaletto. Somewhere on the floor, dancers are rehearsing. Couples amble or walk apart pensively. Parents take photos of infants propped against tons of steel. Voices echo from far away.

The piece rambles on, with a quote from Serra about "when Obama becomes president," mentions the New Museum's "Unmonumental exhibition," and discusses how Searle's relationship to Serra's art has changed as he aged. To read the rest, click here.

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

May 8, 2008

Katy Siegel interviews Richard Shiff

The Brooklyn Rail has published an interview with art historian and critic Richard Shiff by his onetime student, Katy Siegel. There are many interesting passages, among them this discussion of the relationship between art history and art criticism:

Rail: What are the issues at stake when a historian becomes a critic? Reading your essay about using art criticism to build a historical narrative, “On Criticism Handling History,” was the thing that made me want to be an art historian, but now the formula seems more pressing when reversed. So many historians have begun to dabble in the contemporary, but oddly don’t seem to bring historical skill or perspectives to the task.

Shiff: If my writing on living artists has a distinctive character, it would be for two reasons (no doubt shared with at least some other writers, but probably not many)—first, I’ve always got the long view of history in mind and probably see better than most of my peers that a great deal of what goes on now isn’t particularly unprecedented or innovative (the nineteenth century had its share of people who took a postmodernist stance toward the fundamentals of modernist practice—for every true believer, there was an ironic deconstructionist, but they didn’t have the word then). At the same time, I would fault many of my contemporaries for romanticizing the present by seeing it through moments of past history. They either understand the past era better, or, more likely, have simply romanticized it by identifying it with a figure they wish were right beside them in the present time. Walter Benjamin is a critical writer I myself admire for his remarkable acumen, but I wouldn’t apply his politics to the politics of our own time—it won’t work.

Rail: I am very interested in what you say about the way your peers think about the past and see the present through romantic versions of certain past moments. This seems particularly true about 1968. Could you talk a bit about that?

Shiff: The ideas of 1960s radical groups will not work now, so we have to be careful about how much we romanticize 1968. Yet, because significant elements of the social structures associated with modernity may not have changed all that much over the past two hundred years, understanding art of a century ago or two centuries ago helps us to discern what’s truly different about now and what isn’t. I don’t need to translate our time now into the Paris of 1914, the Berlin of 1939, or the Paris of 1968 just to function as a historically sensitive critic. Some of my peers seem to be in the habit of transposing historical moments, oversimplifying what they see as the social and political crises of the relatively recent past. They seem to think that history repeats itself. I don’t.

Rail: People are still talking about the “failure of utopia” and the “disappointments of modernism” as if events of the ‘20s and ‘30s are still uppermost in the minds of thirty-year-old artists. How do we connect our history to the past without mistaking it for the present? Do we in fact need to connect to the past?

Shiff: It seems pointless to note the failure to attain some kind of social utopia if the critic does no more than denounce the implied utopian promises of certain forms of art. Those promises tended to be made by critical interpreters more than by artists, so, at the very least, let’s not hold the artists and their art responsible for political fantasies that were the creation of the writers who were promoting the art. And, of course, a technique or an image that had a certain connotative value in the past may have a very different one now. A critic ought to be sufficiently sensitive to history to identify which aspects of traditional practice are being resisted, ignored, or actively discarded. Do techniques, subjects, and aesthetic attitudes change because the needs they once served no longer exist, or do they change because of an overriding ideological principle, such as (obviously) change for the sake of change? This can be a fruitful path of questioning but you can’t proceed down it if you have little understanding of the dynamics of past art within its own society.

Shiff goes on to discuss his new book, Doubt, what distinguishes artists, critics, and historians, the trouble with theory, the "tychic" element in reading and writing, and much else besides. To read the rest, click here.

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

May 1, 2008

Visual Interlude: Stuart Franklin

From a recent issue of Time magazine: Magnum Photographer Stuart Franklin has spent a decade exploring the beauty of trees and the unique place they occupy in man's world. Its website features sixteen images from around the world, including the one above, which was taken in Scotland. More of Franklin's photographs are available at his website (see, in particular, his series "Europe's Changing Forest").

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April 30, 2008

Visual Interlude: Peter Kayafas

Peter Kayafas, San Francisco, 2007, from an exhibition presented earlier this year at Sasha Wolf Gallery, New York

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April 21, 2008

Visual Interlude: Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer, The Rapids, Hudson River, Adirondacks, 1894. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

On Saturday, while on a prize jury for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I marveled at the block-long line snaking out the museum's front door. Chances are that the queue was waiting for tickets to see the museum's Edward Hopper exhibition. But I'm looking forward in particular to the exhibition "Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light," which is also on view at the museum until May 10.

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Poussin: Two writers, two ledes

A week or so ago, The New Republic published Jed Perl's review of the Nicolas Poussin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now T.J. Clark has written a review, for the London Review of Books, of that exhibition and the simultaneous Gustave Courbet retrospective. Both are worth reading, and both have rapturous ledes. Here's Perl:

"Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, takes us deeper into the inexhaustibly complex relationship between nature and culture than any other exhibition I have ever seen. When Nicolas Poussin sets men and women amid vast landscapes, he is reflecting on our experience of the natural world, and nobody has more beautifully woven together sensation and imagination, instinct and intelligence, freedom and design. There is a curiously pungent juxtaposition of naturalistic immediacy and pictorial artifice in Poussin's landscapes, whether he is representing a darkly luxuriant tree, a placid lake, a cloud-strewn sky, an elegantly designed city, or a handsome Ovidian hero. Somehow, the immediacy and the artifice reinforce each other. The paintings are finally about our struggles to understand what we feel, to objectify the subjectivity of our experience. Poussin's admirers will not be surprised to see this seventeenth-century artist who is often pigeonholed as a chilly classicist re-framed as something of a romantic. What most people are going to be unprepared for is the big-heartedness of his vision as it is revealed in this epochal show.

Here's Clark:

Once or twice in a lifetime, if you are lucky, the whole madness of painting seems to pass in front of your eyes. It felt that way to me in New York this spring, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where two great exhibitions – one exploring Nicolas Poussin’s role in the invention of the genre we call ‘landscape’, the other an endless, stupendous retrospective of Gustave Courbet – are happening a few corridors apart. I stumbled to and fro between them day after day, elated and disoriented. They sum up so much – too much – of what painting in Europe was capable of, and they embed that achievement so palpably in a certain history. Behind the glistening meadows and the huntsmen in the snow one catches the smell of autocracy and public burnings, of permanent warfare and bankers with impeccable taste.

Clark, of course, is the author of The Sight of Death, a book-length "experiment in art writing" about two paintings by Poussin. The Poussin exhibition remains on view until May 11, and the Courbet retrospective comes down May 18. For more information, click here.

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

On the artist-gallery relationship

On Friday, the dealer and prolific blogger Ed Winkleman noted recently two published items, one in the New York Times and one on an artist's blog, that discuss the severing of artist-dealer relationship. He added his own commentary:

"Every dealer knows each of his/her artists personally, and the good ones do feel sorry when things don't work out and try to ease the transition as best they can. Every artist understands that leaving their gallery will be difficult for them (it will can cause the gallery to have very unhappy collectors who were on waiting lists and lots of unpleasant questions to answer all the way around), and the considerate artists do leave as gently as they can. Believe me, this is much more humane than the way such partings are handled in other businesses, and that fact that it is such a big deal (as evidenced by the two pieces noted above) reflects well on the way business is done in general in the art industry in my opinion."

The comments thread has now reached 100 posts. Click here to read it.

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

April 17, 2008

"Detectives On the Trail of Photography's Origins"

From today's New York Times:

The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the world’s leading Talbot expert and asked if he could grace the sale’s catalog with any interesting scholarly details about the print — known as a photogenic drawing, a crude precursor to the photograph.

“I got back to them and said, ‘Well, the first thing I would say is that this was not made by Talbot,’ ” the historian, Larry J. Schaaf, recalled in a recent interview.

“That was not what they were expecting to hear, to say the least.”

In the weeks since Dr. Schaaf’s surprising pronouncement was made public, “The Leaf,” originally thought to have been made around 1839 or later, has become the talk of the photo-historical world. The speculation about its origins became so intense that Sotheby’s and the print’s owners decided earlier this month to postpone its auction, so that researchers could begin delving into whether the image may be, in fact, one of the oldest photographic images in existence, dating to the 1790s.

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March 31, 2008

Minor Milestone

This evening I published on Artforum.com a "Critics' Pick" review of Daan van Golden's exhibition at Greene Naftali Gallery. It is my one-hundredth review for the Artforum website, a minor milestone I couldn't have imagined reaching when Elizabeth Schambelan, now my longtime colleague, invited me to begin contributing to the site in late 2003. Here's to one hundred more. The review begins:

Art historian Svetlana Alpers’s observation about golden-age painters, that “it is hard to trace stylistic development, as we are trained to call it, in the work of Dutch artists,” applies to reclusive septuagenarian artist Daan van Golden. This exhibition, his first US solo presentation despite his being greatly esteemed in Europe, surveys canvases made in the last fifteen years but is representative of an extremely focused practice that has lasted over four decades.

Click here to read the rest.

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

January 3, 2008

Preview of the Fifth Berlin Biennial

My preview of the Fifth Berlin Biennial, opening this spring, has been published in the January issue of Artforum. Here is the beginning of the piece:

If there is any consensus regarding the contemporary mega-exhibition, it's that it is in need of reinvention. And, increasingly, a focus on performance and pedagogy seems to offer one way forward. The prime example here is Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle, and Florian Waldvogel's attempt, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, to reimagine Manifesta 6 as an experimental art academy, but one could also mention Documenta 12, with its emphasis on workshops and colloquy, or New York's performance-only biennial, Performa, now heading toward its third edition. Displacing the emphasis from object to experience, performative and pedagogical tactics provide a way around what is now disparaged as the static nature of the Grand Show.

For the Fifth Berlin Biennial, opening on April 5, curators Adam Szymczyk, director of the Kunsthalle Basel, and Elena Filipovic, an independent art critic and curator, have extended this nascent tradition by dividing their exhibition into halves, which they call "Day" and "Night."

To read the rest, click here. (The link takes you to BrianSholis.com.)

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

December 3, 2007

A talisman

Below is an excerpt from an interview between the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the artist David Robbins, published in the Summer 2007 issue of X-TRA. Robbins is discussing the advent of his Ice Cream Social project:

From the beginning of my involvement with art I was a man of pop theater, a TV kid, but I was articulating that theater via objects and images, in a context devoted to objects and images. I got the art context fundamentally wrong, and gradually built that misperception into an alternative to it. The visual art context is really designed for people who want to, or already do, seek to align their emotional and psychological lives with the neutrality of form, while theater more fully recognizes the narrative dimension of human life—tragedy and comedy. The art world is always suppressing the narrative line, looking for ways to take it out or play it down, to zero it out. I wanted a fuller embrace of the fact of narrative—we live, we die, there’s narrative—not in order to critique art but only because that position was more authentic to what I was interested in.

I was never a darling of the New York Times or of the Whitney—far from it, believe me—but there are many ways to have a career in the art world, many ways to have a valid history. Come to think of it, don’t you find it odd that whenever we think of an artist, in any field, who no longer appears active, we always think that it’s because they somehow “failed”? Really, isn’t it just as likely that they found not to their liking whatever system they were required to engage in order to get their work out—the system failed them, on the human level—and, in an act of maturity and self-possession, they moved on? Culture systems such as the art world may be all we have, but that doesn’t mean they’re good systems. From a certain perspective the art world is a deeply unhealthy network that brings out the worst in people. It’s too bad that the pursuit of beauty and knowledge should do that, but it does.

The more time I spent in the art context, the more uncomfortable I became with the faith-based dimension of it. I had to invent a way out, and into another kind of creativity.

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

September 25, 2007

On Gerhard Richter’s new cathedral window in Cologne

The invaluable website Sign and Sight has translated an article about Gerhard Richter’s new south transept window at the Cologne Cathedral. It is by Petra Kipphoff, was published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on September 13, and contains new-to-me information about Richter’s inspiration for the abstract design he eventually settled upon:

The cathedral architect's initial request came with the wish for a figurative motif. Not necessarily Joseph or the Virgin Mary, but maybe a modern martyr like Father Kolbe or Edith Stein. After a brief attempt Richter gave up the holy venture. In fact he would have returned the commission had he not accidentally, playfully, placed a template of the window's frame on a reproduction of one of his earlier colour field paintings. "I got a real shock," says Richter, "because it looked good, it was the only honest possibility."



There was more to it than meaning-resistant abstraction. The interplay of light and colour in the stained glass window also attracted Richter for its possibilities of new experience on old terrain. "The main problem of my painting is the light," he wrote back in 1964/65, by which he meant not the light of Impressionist plein-air painting but the instantaneous light of the photography that so often forms the basis for his paintings. From the early photos of family and friends to the sea and landscapes and the Baader-Meinhof cycle, light-generated photographs - preferably blurred and in the shades between grey and white - have provided the inspiration for Gerhard Richter's paintings. Only in the series of monochrome panels and the abstract works does light play no active role (here it is a matter of illumination rather than exposure). A stained-glass window, where the glass changes its coloration with the quality of the daylight, offers a new facet of this old theme that is the central issue.


Try this Flickr search for images of the window.

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

September 21, 2007

Sharon Hayes in midtown

At half past noon on Monday, the artist Sharon Hayes emerged from the UBS tower on Sixth Avenue (between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Streets), microphone stand and small amplifier in hand. She set them down on the sidewalk and, without preamble, began speaking the text of an anonymous love letter, catching and holding the eyes of passersby willing to meet her gaze. She spoke plainly, addressing a “you” seemingly far away, perhaps in the Middle East. The letter’s tone was melancholic and its details were specific to our moment, addressing not only the war, but also the steam-pipe explosion in Manhattan and other recent events; it began by mentioning the arrival of autumn. Fifteen or so people stood at the curb listening and watching; by the time she had recited the six- or eight-minute letter three times, seamlessly blending the end of one recitation with the beginning of the next, another ten office employees had stopped to take the measure of her action. The insertion of private woe into the impersonal environment resounded in me and—somewhat unexpectedly—brought to mind the Maximilian Colby song “Balance,” which combined an anonymous woman’s recording of Judy Grahn’s epic poem “A Woman Is Talking to Death” (1974) with a long, brooding hardcore song. (The mid-‘90s hardcore band is now so obscure it is difficult to learn about it online, much less hear its music.)

The performance, titled Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time for Love?, is part of Art in General’s twenty-fifth-anniversary exhibition, at the UBS Art Gallery. Hayes repeated it at 12:30 PM each day this week, each time reciting a different letter. Phrases recur, including “I am so much yours I am no longer myself,” and the sign-off, “… I choose my words carefully, and I say to you goodbye.” The dominant sentiment remains longing: “Why can’t you be my country?” the narrator asks at one point, encapsulating Hayes’s fusion of personal anguish and political circumstance. As the week progressed, repeat viewers could begin to stitch together a narrative: The two lovers had once been together in New York; the absent partner’s family demanded that she leave the United States; the left-behind partner offered to leave, too, but was rebuffed; now they communicate primarily by letter, with distress and bewilderment as the communicative motifs.

Who is the author of these letters? Each speculation colors the interpretation of the performance. Is it Hayes herself, and is this public “respeaking” (to use the artist’s term for her earlier performances) as harrowing for her now as it was when it was happening? (And is it an ongoing correspondence?) Is the narrator fictive, making Hayes’s story a mirror held up to the audience of office workers on their lunch break, expressing collective emotions otherwise unacknowledged publicly? Small details continually overturn one’s conclusions without breaking the spell of the performance. On Thursday, in mentioning a political protest in Washington, DC, the letter’s author mentions wanting to “tell the fucking President to call off the National Guard.” The phrase could as easily have been uttered in 1967 as in 2007.

That so profound a resonance can be achieved through such simple means is testament to Hayes’s talent. She has for several years been “respeaking” historical texts and creating other performances that commingle the private and the public; for further reference, see this May 2006 Artforum profile of the artist, written by Julia Bryan-Wilson. Everything Else Has Failed... will stay with me for a long time.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 20, 2007

Doug Aitken returns to familiar territory

Doug Aitken, an artist whom I respect but who I feel peaked approximately five years ago—his video installations since interiors, 2002, have increased in scale and complexity and budget, but not necessarily in quality—has returned to his early stomping grounds: the music video. Pitchfork has posted a new video that Aitken directed for the LCD Soundsystem song "Someone Great." As music blog Stereogum put it in its gloss on the vid,

Award winning/MoMA-commissioned short film maker Doug Aitken shot the "experimental film" for the track, which captures James's use of the mundane (phones ringing, lovely weather, not-bitter coffee) to hit at something interpersonal 'n' bigger ("you're smaller than my wife imagined / surprised you were human") with similarly trivial-yet-somehow-heavy shadows 'n' strolls. James ain't in it, but we're thinking he's comfy with the amount of mug exposure he got in his spaceman getup / Peter Gabriel facepaint.

For more commentary, keep an eye on this Google Blogs search.

Posted in Art, Music. Found always via this permanent link.

Aaron Young's Greeting Card

Above is a view of Aaron Young's performance-cum-action painting Greeting Card, which took place on Monday night at the Park Avenue Armory on the Upper East Side. As art, and especially as a comment on Abstract Expressionist painting, I think the work left something to be desired. As an event, as pure spectacle, it succeeded brilliantly. To see perfectly coiffed Chanel-clad Upper East Side matrons in breathing masks; to gawk at Tom Ford, Sigourney Weaver, and the R&B singer Usher; to experience ten motorcycles running, indoors, in frantic patterns; and to then stand around afterward, looking at the silhouettes of friends and colleagues highlighted by light shining through drifting smoke was—to say the least—unique. Click the picture to see four more views.

UPDATE, 9/21: Roberta Smith makes several valid points in today's review of the event in the New York Times: "If there was any doubt that we live in a reasonable facsimile of the Gilded Age, it disappeared Monday night during “Greeting Card,” Aaron Young’s enormous paint-by-motorcycle spectacle in the vast, emptied-out drill hall of the Seventh Regiment Armory. [ ... ] As spectacle, “Greeting Card” was a bit thin and not as much fun as the anticipation. [ ... ] After “Greeting Card” is dismantled on Sunday night, Mr. Young will divide its 288 panels into individual paintings ranging in size from a single panel to as many as 150. These will then begin a second life as saleable works meant to hang on walls. Perhaps they will buy Mr. Young enough time to figure out a more profound way to make paintings or other kinds of art."

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"A tiny artist"

One can accuse Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones of many things. Not saying what he means is not one of them. His one-star review of Gary Hume's new exhibition at White Cube ends this way:

I almost want to apologise for reviewing an artist who is quite obviously falling apart, but I did go in hope of a decent comeback. After all, what is British art now? Some pretentious public sculpture that connives with popular delusions of omniscience. At least Hume never tried to be loved. But, even at his very best, he was never first-rate. Look closely into his shiny surfaces, and you will see a tiny artist trapped in the empty wastes of his own style.

One gets the feeling Jones argued with his editors over the assignation of that single star.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

October 3, 2006

Two from Texte zur Kunst

The German art magazine Texte zur Kunst has recently increased its English-language content and its web presence. Here are excerpts from two pieces in the September issue.

First, Sam Lewitt reviews "Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne" at the ICA Philadelphia:

[Curator Bennett] Simpson endeavors to locate the spirit of resistance to market forces in Cologne's hey day, but like the ideological ambiguity of Kippenberger's imperative, there is a haziness as to the modality of his search: is the exhibition thematic or about social milieu? If either or some combination of both, then what is the specificity of "Cologne" in relation to the present, and further, what is the specificity of the present to the mythical after-image of Cologne in the 80s and 90s?

This ambiguity is codified rather than resolved by the inclusion of works by several artists and artist groups that had no direct contact with Cologne; The "Out" of the exhibition title extends to a space-time precariously constellated between direct influence and a posited spirit of practice. Simpson's sensitivity to the pitfalls of his endeavor is clear in his catalogue essay where he states that "MYOL" was: "predicated on a belief that historical reception is both ongoing and contradictory, a product of desires that are political and intellectual as well as libidinal and economic." As viewers navigate "MYOL"'s four successive rooms, this complex characterization of historical reception at times loses distinctiveness as a specifically historical phenomenon as it is put to the curatorial test.

Second, Rosalind E. Krauss reviews "Los Angeles 1955–1985" at the Centre Pompidou:

What is also invisible is the rivalry between Los Angeles and New York resulting not only in a group of very ambitious galleries such as Ferus, Ace and Dwan, but also of the rival art magazine Artforum, determined to wrest the grip of the historical account of the avant-garde from the East Coast critical establishment. The brilliant editorship of Philip Leider propelled Artforum to the front of critical discourse and reinforced the prescience of the L.A. dealers such as Irving Blum for their choices, which included the exhibition of Warhol's "Campbell Soup Cans" at Ferus in 1962, or of Yves Klein's blue monochromes at Dwan in 1961. The wealth of Los Angeles could also support ambitious museums of advanced art, whose talented curators supported the art scene as well. These were Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum and Maurice Tuchman at the L.A. County Museum of Contemporary Art (the site of the important "Art and Technology" exhibition).

New York could boast of none of this. Its art magazines, such as Art News, dealt in belle-lettristic gush, rather than close analysis. Its schools were still in thrall to the effects of Abstract Expressionism. Its only advantages came in the form of the artists' housing and studios available in the spacious downtown lofts of SoHo, and the galleries these spawned. The other was the presence of Clement Greenberg, whose precise, spare prose focused the formal features of the works he discussed and produced the historical groupings that gave those features meaning.

Because the Texte zur Kunst website uses frames, both of the review links take you to pages that only contain the text of the review; to access the magazine's homepage, click the link at the top of the entry.

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

Adrian Searle's Turner pick: Tomma Abts

There may well be those who feel their lives have been ruined by their participation in the Turner prize, which itself includes a modicum of television exposure. Will the Turner contenders be queuing, in the full gaze of visitors to the show, to tell the stories of their ruin for [Phil] Collins's project, after the winner is announced? Who should win anyway? Who is making the best art, and what does that mean nowadays? [Tomma] Abts and Collins are the most developed in my view. I think Collins has made more concise and telling works elsewhere. Abts's quiet and disturbing paintings seem utterly right and unexpected. They ought to win.

Read the full story here.

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

October 1, 2006

Momus on John Bock's Medusa im Tam Tam Club

An artist friend who lives in Berlin was in town last week, and over dinner she mentioned her admiration for the fact that German artists like John Bock and Jonathan Meese were expanding their practice and creating pieces for the theater. As she noted, theater is an art form appreciated by a far broader public in Germany than elsewhere (or, for that matter, than contemporary art in galleries and museums). Over the weekend Bock presented the last of five performances of his new work, Medusa im Tam Tam Club, at the Staatsoper in Berlin, and Momus has just posted a report, with pictures, on his site.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Interview with Joseph Leo Koerner

Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBook has published an interview with art historian Joseph Leo Koerner that discusses Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, his book The Reformation of the Image (University of Chicago Press), and modern and contemporary artists and art historians. An excerpt:

Still, I was raised in a household that confessed the heretical creed that nothing of enduring value would ever produced under the banner of Modernism. And I became an art historian partly as a response to (or as Freud might say, as repression of) this primal critical scene; I therefore place little weight on my personal judgements on modern art, though that does not keep me from eclectically loving many contemporary painters—Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, and Francesco Clemente are all figures who have meant a lot to me.

I feel much freer approaching contemporary photographers. I am a huge admirer of Jeff Wall, and hearing him explain his procedures made me even more fascinated by his example. I enjoy the big photos of Andreas Gursky, partly because I find the modern spaces he photographs naturally beautiful to begin with—similarly the coal mines shot by the Bechers. Having spent much of my life in Vienna, I am fascinated by the nostalgic element of early photographs (Atget) and by the magical photograms made by Adam Fuss. I was bowled over by the first installation I visted by Ilya Kabakov. I am especially intrigued by the installations that feature deliberately obsolete oil paintings; they’re painted by Kabakov, but purport to be by some unknown artist working without a public somewhere in Russia. These, together with the particular apartment house interiors Kabakov creates, transport me back to my childhood in Vienna, where my father was took us every year, and where he painted his peculiar canvases often without any public to see them.

[ . . . ]

These days the books currently on my shelf that I reach for most often are ones by Bruno Latour, Michael Taussig, Valentin Groebner, and Miguel Tamen. The authors I return to, again and again over the years, and with changing responses, are Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, and Paul de Man. When I feel I am losing my voice and need to find it again, I read Wallace Stevens, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka—I listen to their cadences and how they reason about completely unreasonable or unspeakable things. When I feel I am losing my intellectual energy, try to write something about my father. Ambivalence is a great energizer, I think.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 27, 2006

Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing

I was going to post this later in the week, but decided to make today an all-Gopnik day.

Next month, Princeton University Press will publish Kirk Varnedoe's 2003 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts as Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock. Earlier in September I skimmed through PDFs of its chapters, each of which hews closely to one of the six lectures delivered three summers ago. The volume is prefaced with a short appreciation by Adam Gopnik, Varnedoe's close friend, sometime collaborator, and an occasional visual-art critic. From that preface:

Working only with notes, though of course drawing on a lifetime's reservoir of looking and thinking, the seemingly crafted and pregnant sentences present on these pages really were improvised by the speaker in the course of an hour's talking.

It was not an irresponsible or offhand improvisation—he knew more or less what he wanted to say and had often rehearsed it, in his own mind and at length with listeners. (And, of course, he worked with an outline and a huge number of slides, which played a mnemonic role.) But the words came ringing out, every Sunday, fresh and unplanned, just as the reader meets them here. Much was premeditated but more was improvised: looking at the images almost always inspired an unexpected thought, instantly blended into the body of the argument, and here preserved. He supposed these lectures to be his last and intended them to be his most important work, his testaments of faith.

The transcribed lectures do indeed maintain fidelity to what I assume was Varnedoe's extemporaneous voice, a quality that, when combined with his unwillingness to stray too far from exegesis of the works themselves, give the book a refreshingly anachronistic feel. Here are a few excerpts from the opening lecture, in which he sets out a game plan:

For many people, who think and write about culture, this moment [the mid-1950s, ed.] marks an even larger watershed between the end of modernism and the inauguration of a postmodern world, a great divide between the world of, say, Henri Matisse and Picasso and that of contemporary art. I am not one of those people, however, and this dichotomy is not what I am here to talk about. [ . . . ] What we want to do is cut through the gas and grab the ideas that flow out of and drive us back toward such confusing, gritty particulars of experience, rather than the ideas that constantly and confidently blend such things into soupy generalities. [ . . . ] I take this topic ultimately because it seems to me one of the most legitimate and poorly addressed questions in modern art. Put another way, I want to ask whether there is any grounding for abstraction, a "logic of the situation," to borrow a term from E.H. Gombrich. [pp. 6-7, 8, 25]

Posted in Art, Books. Found always via this permanent link.

September 26, 2006

Susie Linfield on "why photography critics hate photography"

In the September/October issue of Boston Review, Susie Linfield, a longtime contributor to the magazine and the associate director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at NYU, has published a provocative essay on “why photography critics hate photographs.” If you’re willing to accept her central conceit—that Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and, especially, Bertolt Brecht influenced late-twentieth-century photography critics’ understanding of the medium and its effects—it is an elegantly turned exposure of the limitations of writings on photography by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and John Berger as well as a humane call for a more syncretic approach to picture interpretation, one that allows for warmth and emotion. A few quotes:

[Contemporary photography] critics view emotional responses . . . not as something to be experienced and understood, but, rather, to be vigilantly guarded against: to these writers, criticism is a prophylactic against the virus of sentiment.

[ . . . ]

These critics denied that a scintilla of autonomy—for either photographer or viewer—was possible; denied, that is, that the photographer could ever offer, or the viewer could ever find, even a moment of surprise, originality, or insight through looking at a photograph.

[ . . . ]

A greater problem, for Brecht and his followers, is what photographs succeed in doing, which is to offer an immediate, emotional connection to the world. People don’t look at photographs to understand the inner contradictions of [the world].

[ . . . ]

[Contemporary photography critics] don’t need to spend such ferocious energy distancing us from images. In doing so, they have made it easy for us to deconstruct photographs but difficult to see them.

My only quibble, interestingly, is with the one passage in which she analyzes specific photographs. In discussing images reprinted in Witness Iraq: A War Journal February–April 2003, Linfield, perhaps somewhat bravely, admits to the frustration caused by an image of “helpless” women, in chadors, grieving for a son apparently killed when a bomb was dropped on an outdoor market in Baghdad in late March 2003. Linfield instead praises two Iraq War photographs that, perhaps by coincidence, feature children; one in which a Marine coddles a young girl whose arm is bleeding, and one that depicts a hooded detainee cradling his young son behind barbed wire. She praises the contradictory interpretations that naturally arise from these atypical war images; their irresolvable nature—Who is helping whom? Who is guilty? What forces put these children in these situations?—necessitates an open-ended (and open-minded) search for meaning.

It seems problematic that Linfield should offer commentary on the political situation of the women depicted in the first photograph at the same time that she praises a very different type of picture as being better able to evoke complex responses, both thoughtful and emotional. However admirable it is for Linfield to admit a controversial reaction to the image in question, hazarding commentary on the women’s political situation—“I doubt that such sorrows can even begin to abate until the women in the cemetery take off their veils . . . and enter into the modern world to begin making modern politics”—is compromised by her very own analysis of the flaws that thread through the picture’s aesthetic elegance and stark portrayal of grief.

The reason I bring this up is because there is a small hurdle that I wish Linfield had surpassed in the essay. She goes on to call for more images that “suggest—though do not explain—the strange incongruities of the Iraq war,” but neglects to account for the fact that these pictures are necessarily few and far between, and that to be properly equipped to respond to the floodtide of photographs in the world (or even those coming from this particular conflict) one must engage many of the “compromised” (my word, not hers) images, one of which caused such dubitable reactions even in someone with so keen an intelligence as Linfield obviously possesses. Is coming “to the photograph as full human beings” possible when the photograph in question is, by the standard expressed in her essay, somehow incomplete?

Related: Linfield on photographing cruelty, which I have not read, and on Sebald et al., which I read and enjoyed.

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

September 20, 2006

"Criticism and the Arts" panel (a longish report)

Given past experience with panel discussions, and common assumptions one brings to them, I didn’t have the highest hopes for one titled “Criticism and the Arts,” held last night at Hunter College. It featured Joan Acocella (of the New Yorker, Greil Marcus (author, most recently, of The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, Alex Ross (of the New Yorker and the weblog and forthcoming book The Rest Is Noise), and Mark Stevens (of New York magazine), four eminent critics one must respect no matter one’s opinion of their opinions. Thankfully, the panel was moderated adroitly by Wendy Lesser (of the Threepenny Review), and the brisk pace—two questions from Lesser to all four panelists; two more questions thrown open to them generally; three or four questions from the audience—engaged until the end, when it was “time for wine and fizzy water, so you’ll feel this is more of a conversation than an opportunity for us to talk at you.”

I found it somewhat surprising that I generally agreed with what all four critics said, though whether that surprise is rooted in disappointment that I’m affected by the same factors that influence their work (and no longer am independent firebrand, however self-styled) or pride that I can claim similar methodological concerns remains to be determined. Acocella came off as the seen-it-all chronicler (an aside: I've been particularly taken with her recent writing on books, notably this introduction to Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity; Ross the obsessive stylist and last-ditch proselytizer for an increasingly marginalized art form; Marcus the storyteller who sneaks autobiography into each ruminative, "mystical" association; and Stevens the skeptic—both about the use of an institutional “we” and attendant overidentification with one’s platform and an art market seemingly out of control. There were few insights about criticism in the abstract, but plenty about these writers’ practice.

Continue reading ""Criticism and the Arts" panel (a longish report)"

Posted in Art, Books, Miscellaneous, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 19, 2006

Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror at Rockefeller Center

My attempts to photograph the construction of Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror at Rockefeller Center were thwarted by rain, but the sculpture is now officially on view, so I trekked up to midtown this morning to take a few pictures.

The work was, by 9AM, generating all kinds of tourist-like activity, even among those who were obviously New Yorkers. The spectacle is, of course, a necessary part of any intervention into this site. The sculpture, perhaps thirty feet tall and set into a specially built concrete plinth, achieves different effects on its two sides: Its convex surface, pointing outward toward the sidewalk, is a mirror that will draw the narcissism out of Fifth Ave. passersby; its concave surface, pointed up toward the tower of 30 Rockefeller Center, is noticeably more complex, reflecting—as the above picture and the title indicate—the shifting sky and the tops of nearby buildings. (What's interesting is that the computer renderings at the Public Art Fund website indicate a far more distorted view of the street life, akin to what one encounters when standing close to Cloud Gate, Kapoor's enormously popular sculpture for Millenium Park in Chicago.)

I need to return to the plaza and watch the public's behavior around the sculpture, but in the meantime wanted to share these two pictures with you. Ten more can be found in this Flickr set.

UPDATE, 9/20: Gothamist is on the case with plenty of links to other photographs.

UPDATE, 9/23: Simon Hattenstone files a profile of Kapoor in today's Guardian.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 15, 2006

Congratulations to two friends

Two friends who work as curators at midwestern museums open their first big shows this weekend. "So the Story Goes," featuring Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Larry Sultan and curated by Katherine Bussard, opens tomorrow at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is Assistant Curator of Photography. Yale University Press is co-publishing the exhibition catalogue. Just a few hours down I-55, tonight the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis opens "Janaina Tschape: Melantropics," organized by Andrea Green, curatorial assistant at the museum. The catalogue for Andrea's show will be distributed by D.A.P.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 13, 2006

A few words

I had the pleasure of speaking to a fairly large audience at Parsons today. Here is one paragraph from my talk:

Instead, one should live by the creed of verbs—to review, to write criticism, to make art—rather than nouns. I have taken recently to saying that I “write about art” rather than “I’m an art critic.” Doing so flattens out the implicit hierarchies lodged in the terms, even potentially opening up the opportunity for radical—and instructive—role switching. Doing so likewise creates a situation in which one must apply oneself fully to each task, because there are no laurels to rest on. I have published several hundred pieces of writing about art in the past three and a half years, but having done so neither guarantees that what I write next will be mind-opening, authoritative, or even factually correct—alongside working as an editor, I work with and rely on editors, too—nor does it grant me intrinsic authority over any of you in the field of “art criticism,” much less in the art world at large. Perfect evidence of this lies in the fact that it’s quite possible that some of you, even knowing that I was coming to speak today, have never read anything that I have written.

I also spoke about understanding one's own limits and not presuming to take up more resources (in the art world, that is) than one can properly use and maintaining a sense of community in the face of all kinds of forces that would tear them apart. It seemed to go over well. Here's a quote that I was inspired by as I was planning the talk:

What with the fairs and the steroidal explosion of Chelsea, it’s no wonder that even the New York Times realizes that the current model of success for many artists is monetary. Can the interest in [Lee] Lozano be anything but the flip side of this coin? It’s up to us to heed Lozano’s cautionary quip, “Win first don’t last.” But the oxymoronic “Win last don’t care” is worth taking to heart as well. In the face of an autocratic regime bent on totalizing knowledge and war, many feminists have called for explorations of failure—as the only viable form of practice under today’s political and market conditions. Lozano offers a model not of failure per se but of a very particular form of achievement, in which when you win last and don’t care, you are capable of become a tool that transforms the rules of the game. — Helen Molesworth, from a review of “Lee Lozano,” Artforum, September 2006

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 12, 2006

First impressions

Over the weekend I penned three short "Critics' Picks" for artforum.com, and the first two were published today. (I'm still waiting for an image to run alongside the third, but will update this post when it is published.) Here they are, with teasers:

Alice Könitz at HudsonFranklin: "The unwieldy title of Los Angeles–based artist Alice Könitz’s second New York solo show not only hints at a narrative that might animate these more-or-less abstract sculptures and collages but also indicates that, in a pendular swing between private and public concerns (her last solo, in LA, was titled 'Public Sculpture'), Könitz has returned to the intimate scale of the domestic."

Greg Bogin at Leo Koenig, Inc.: "The paintings in New York–based artist Greg Bogin’s current exhibition, nominally about science-fiction optimism, are so seductively empty that one can’t help but paper over their anonymous beauty with references to other visual phenomena."

Yang Fudong at Marian Goodman Gallery: "No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006, an eleven-minute black-and-white work that premiered last spring at Parasol Unit in London, is Fudong's inaugural foray into multichannel presentation."

Links to the gallery websites can be found in the "Worth Seeing" section of the middle column.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 11, 2006

United Nations Plaza in Berlin

Last week, Anton Vidolke, one of the three curators of Manifesta 6, the ill-fated experimental school that was to open in Nicosia, Cyprus, sent a note out advising friends that the concept was being ported to Berlin. Today, e-flux makes public more details about the yearlong venture. Its initial program is a conference titled "Histories of Productive Failures: From the French Revolution to Manifesta VI." (One could certainly quibble with the equivalence the title implies.) Speakers include Vidolke and others in conversation about Manifesta 6, Liam Gillick, Maria Lind, Diedrich "The Best Name in Cultural Criticism" Diederichsen, Tirdad Zolghadr, and Vasif Kortun.

One can eventually check the website for more information about upcoming programming.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Can art change the world . . . or speak to world-changing events?

If not outright apples-and-oranges, I acknowledge that this comparison is at least Granny Smith–and–Red Delicious, but I couldn’t help but be somewhat struck by the fact that right after I read Jerry Saltz’s “holistic theory” of art’s ability to change the world, I came across this article on Slate, in which nineteen individuals (including two art critics and one photographer) were asked “What work of art or literature has helped you make sense of the attacks and the world after them?” and only one visual artist or artwork was mentioned.

Saltz:

Can art change the world?

Most art world denizens would instinctively say yes. But if by "change" you mean, can art on its own change global warming, stop Iran's president from denying the Holocaust, or halt the spread of AIDS, the answer, I'm afraid, is no.

In concert with other things, however, art can change the world incrementally and by osmosis. This is because art is part of a universal force. It has no less purpose or meaning than science, religion, philosophy, politics, or any other discipline, and is as much a form of intelligence or knowing as a first kiss, a last goodbye, or an algebraic equation. Art is an energy source that helps make change possible; it sees things in clusters and constellations rather than rigid systems.

Art is a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself, a medium or matrix through which one sees the world, and that grants that pleasure is an important form of knowledge. Art is not optional; it is necessary. It is part of the whole ball of wax.

The writer Gish Jen, in the Slate article:

I found myself unexpectedly put in mind of 9/11 by the Brancusi exhibit at the Guggenheim two years ago. It was impossible not to admire the ineffability of certain pieces, and their ambition to capture a human essence beyond history and culture, without feeling how diminished we are today—in our hopes for peace, of course, but also in our hopes for fundamental understanding.

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

September 10, 2006

Weekend picture: Jim Lambie sculpture at Anton Kern

I plan to upload a picture or two each weekend as a relief from the torrent of text that seems to fill up this site each week. It'll be an arwork I've seen (or hope to), a picture I've taken, or something in the news or on the web that caught my eye . . .

By now I've seen somewhere north of fifty gallery exhibitions since Thursday, and this sculpture, an as-yet-untitled work from Jim Lambie's "Byrds" series now installed at Anton Kern Gallery and on view until October 14, is the most joy-inducing single artwork I've come across. I like Lambie's art, but, upon seeing this four-sculpture installation, even detractors would have to admit that he's on overdrive; the space visually hums. The bird (one of six designs) is a Scottish knick-knack that the artist sent to ceramicists in Mexico, who scaled it up; after the paint was dripped on, the piece was set on top of a ring of spray-paint cans that emptied themselves under pressure from the weight and created the rainbow halo on the floor (which is covered in black tape).

The last time this little nook looked this good was a little more than a year ago, when Kern hung an Edward Krasinski blue-tape-and-mirror installation—not long after the legendary Polish conceptual artist died. Back to Lambie: I wrote a brief review of the artist's spring 2005 solo exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in London. He also has one of his signature "Zobop" tape pieces on view until October 2 at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC, and the museum has a great time-lapse Quicktime video of the installation on its website.

UPDATE, 9/12: The sculpture is called Dawn Chorus, and my colleague David Velasco has written a "Critics' Pick" review of the exhibition for artforum.com.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 8, 2006

The Uncertain States of America Reader

(Detail view of cover of mock-up made by designers)

As I publish this entry the Serpentine Gallery is celebrating the opening of "Uncertain States of America," curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar B. Kvaran, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. As I mentioned in a parenthetical aside in this entry in June, I was asked by the three of them as well as Serpentine Gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones to edit an anthology of recent writing about contemporary art, politics, and the current cultural climate in the United States. The first of two editions of that volume, called The Uncertain States of America Reader, is being released tonight to coincide with the exhibition. (A second, expanded version will be published later this autumn by Sternberg Press.) This edition contains seventeen texts, is designed (by my friends Stuart and David of Dexter Sinister) to feel like an academic reader, and can be obtained now at the Serpentine Gallery, soon at the Walther König bookshop, and, a little bit later, in a few other locations around Europe for an intentionally low price—£6, I think. (The Sternberg Press version will be more widely distributed.)

Quickly realizing the scope of the project after I was initially invited to undertake it, I asked Noah Horowitz, who was hired by the Serpentine as an exhibition organizer and is a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, to coedit the anthology with me. Here is a brief excerpt from our coauthored introduction, which is available in full at BrianSholis.com:

In recent years, many have noted the fashionableness of art that addresses its broader social context. The translation of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics into English in 2002 and the ongoing debate about this set of essays is one prominent example of this tendency. Others pertain to the intensification of discussion about the Internet’s (virtual) social power and the agency of extra-gallery/museum practices, the latter of which inspired "The Interventionists," an exhibition curated by Nato Thompson and presented at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, in the summer of 2004. What has perhaps changed since the re-election later that autumn of George W. Bush is the zeroing in of (primarily European) interest in American art and artists. One could cite "Uncertain States of America," "USA Today" at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, "This Is America: Visions of the American Dream" at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands, and even "Day for Night," the 2006 Whitney Biennial (curated by Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, Europeans now ensconced in American institutions), as evidence of this trend.

This is undoubtedly a moment marked by a serious interest in the actions America is taking on the world stage—actions that have been described as cause for "grave concern." We do not attempt to authoritatively engage these concerns here, but we do think that this sampling of discourse by and about a country’s visual artists leads to insights about its politics and society not gained elsewhere. [ . . . ] At the very least, it gives a sense of what it is like to live in the United States now, and it occasions some inspired debate.

(Table of contents of mock-up made by designers)

This edition of the book reprints the following texts:

"From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique" by Andrea Fraser

"Eric Buell, Art Mover" in John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter, eds., Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs

"Boundary Issues: The Art World Under the Sign of Globalism" by Pamela M. Lee

"Itinerant Artists" by Miwon Kwon (excerpt from One Place After Another)

"Tent Community: On Art Fair Art" by Jack Bankowsky

"American Mutt Barks in the Yard" by David Barringer (excerpt)

"Was ist Los?" by Seth Price

"When Procedures Become Market Tools," Johanna Burton and Isabelle Graw in conversation

"New Live Queer Art" by Matt Wolf

"Renigged" by Hamza Walker

"Sublime Humility" by Paul Chan

"When Thought Becomes Crime" by the Critical Art Ensemble

"Startling and Effective: Writing Art and Politics After 9/11" by Alan Gilbert

"The State, Spectacle, and September 11" by Retort (excerpt from Afflicted Powers)

"Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib" by Dora Apel

"Notes from New York" by Molly Nesbit

Trisha Donnelly, 2006

Also from our introduction: "The present volume is not a ‘portrait of the exhibition’s artists in text’ (an early, and mightily optimistic, vision). Nor is it a top-down survey of all that is novel and noteworthy in today’s art world. Cognisant of this exhibition’s ambitious modus operandi, to represent ‘a “new” vision in American contemporary art,’ we realize, of course, that some may view this publication as nothing but such a list, a currency-enhancing invocation of already-prevalent curatorial/critical interests. And we understand that such a publication indelibly sanctifies its content, that it operates as a value filter or, as Isabelle Graw observes in these pages, a ‘“sound bite” in order to underline claims for art historical importance or theoretical erudition’. Yet it is our underlying hope that this Reader belies such a roll-call of erudite endorsements, and that its contents engage audiences in unanticipated and fundamentally informative manners."

So, I hope that if your travels take you to London or wherever else this volume may be sold, you'll consider looking it over and purchasing a copy. I'll be sure to post a notice when the expanded version is available later this autumn.

UPDATE, 9/12: Adrian Searle reviews the exhibition in the Guardian:

The overall tenor is sophisticated, charmless, disaffected and at times deliberately damaged. The collision of artists and works is also often incomprehensible. The pile-up of stuff might be, in part, collaborative, but the effect is merely wearying, a sub-Kippenberger-ish turn-off. [ . . . ] But does any of this tell us very much about America? To coincide with the exhibition, the Serpentine is publishing The Uncertain States of America Reader, a number of recent essays on art theory, the art market, 9/11, Abu Ghraib and the war on terror.

But the book has more heft than most of the art in the show. In the end there's too much here that is silly, opaque and, to be honest, immature. How seriously should we take Uncertain States of America?

Well, at least he says something nice about the book, if you consider "heft" a good quality in a reader. Phew.

Posted in Art, Books. Found always via this permanent link.

September 7, 2006

Kay Rosen answers a question

At the invitation of Matthew Higgs, I submitted a question—one of twenty, each submitted by a different person—to the artist Kay Rosen, whose last New York exhibition I reviewed in the September 2005 Artforum. It was for one of his "20 Questions" projects, and the Indiana-based artist's answers have been printed in a small book published by Yvon Lambert Gallery to accompany her new exhibition, which opens a week from today. It was surprisingly difficult to come up with just one question, and so I ended up choosing one that weighed heavily on my mind at the time:

BRIAN SHOLIS: What do we do when language fails?

KAY ROSEN: My work has always attempted to demonstrate that language doesn't fail, that readers, viewers, and listeners can construct meaning out of the most meager fragments. In a 1990 essay I discussed the issue of how to rescue language from a collapsed system (which I had devised through blocking out huge chunks of letters). "In the absence of a linguistic system, meaning appears to be thwarted and blocked, but the pieces actually attempt to function as re-signifiers of meaning rather than as de-signifiers. Instead of hampering reading, they intend to redirect it, forcing the viewers through another non-linguistic process of 'reading.'" In the new sparsely populated work Exterior, Interior, one might approach the four letters E ER R in both a linguistic and non-linguistic way. Through the title or through their powers of observation and deduction, viewers might conclude that it has something to do with inside and outside and how coincidental and amazing it is that in this word structure corroborates meaning. That in EXTERIOR there is an exterior E-R and an interior E-R, that both are the same except for their location, and that the word is a construction that contains aspects of other physical constructions, like buildings and bodies.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

I'm ready

On Tuesday, Edward Winkleman asked, "R U Ready to Rumble?" He was referring, of course, to this evening's onslaught of opening receptions. Unlike the past few years, this time I'm ready. Last week's trip to San Francisco and the redwood forest was perfectly timed, rejuvenating me before I could begin having minor panic attacks about how much art I will see (and attempt to process) in the coming weeks. I even played hooky from the office for ninety minutes yesterday afternoon to get a head start on shows opening yesterday evening. Let's hope that my sixth season in the New York art world is one to remember.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 6, 2006

Guardian interview with Charles Saatchi

I'll withhold comment on many of the more, shall we say, problematic quotes in this long interview with collector/art-world impresario Charles Saatchi in today's Guardian. There are, however, two things of note: 1) When he reopens his gallery in June of next year, the inaugural exhibition will feature six Chinese artists; 2) Despite an aside about the fire that broke out a week ago at a building owned by the Royal Academy of Arts, which was mentioned on artforum.com here and which led to speculation that "USA Today," Saatchi's exhibition of new American art, would be delayed, the interview posits that the show will still open on October 6. OK, one quote (about "USA Today"):

"America has been in the doldrums for 15 years, and for me is now as exciting as Britain was in the early 90s." Why? "I have no idea. Probably because there's been a lull, and I think after all lulls the reverse happens."

The USA Today show will feature Dana Schutz, Josephine Meckseper and Barnaby Furnas—none of them familiar names in this country. "If you were to scratch your average very hip dealer in New York, they would know half the names, and another dealer would know the other half," Saatchi says. "Over here, they're completely unknown."

(The artist-name links are to texts I wrote about each.)

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

From the Archives: Ray Eames

This is the first in what I hope will be a twice- or thrice-weekly series, in which I pull out excerpts of interviews, reviews, or other material from various archives (hopefully also available online) for your pleasure.

Here are a few quotes from an interview conducted with Ray Kaiser Eames in the summer of 1980.

RAY KAISER EAMES: I didn't take any painting; I didn't want to, but I did other things. You know, it was just interesting to me. Charles at that time was teaching design, as well as working with Eero. Eero had just gotten out of Yale and come back to work with his father. They also . . . he and Charles became friends, because they were both working for Eliel. is this something you know?

RUTH BOWMAN: It's nothing that the Archives has heard from you.

RAY KAISER EAMES: So they would work on these projects, and then also work on things together at night. Eero was especially interested in competitions: he loved competing, and that's when the Museum of Modern Art competition came up and they were working together. I got into the middle of that.

RUTH BOWMAN: So you worked on the original chairs.

RAY KAISER EAMES: Yes, yes. I didn't work—I was like a hand, you know, just . . . . It was quite under way by that time; there was a model; I watched the photographing of the model, and then I worked on the drawings, the presentation drawings. And that ended, and then I left after it was sent in.

[ . . . ]

RAY KAISER EAMES: Yes, Charles had always been terribly interested in photography. I think it's been known that his father was a great amateur photographer and had left equipment. His father died when he was very young. He left his equipment and Charles started to read instructions and taught himself about photography. The great joke he always made was that he was making glass plate negatives before hearing that there was such a thing as film, because of having this old equipment. But he learned a great deal. Then he used it always as a tool, photographing architecture, photographing objects, studying it by photographing models. And I think he made some experiments in film when he was at Cranbook. Some film . . . I must check that, I think they might have it. We kept records of everything, but he never shot just a record, he always shot something and made a good-looking photograph. But then—that was another joke, but it had some truth in it—friends had left us a projector and editing equipment and we had nothing to project, so we decided to make a film—the film—but he was really interested in the whole. In terms of communication, he's always been interested in that subject, and this seemed to be the logical extension of it, the use of film for studying and putting things into form, that could be then handed over. We first made a film to experiment, just with the technique, and observing things, like toys—but I think that very first film also had the underlying quality of communication. We shot many toys, but shot them so that you could understand and see them in a way that you couldn't see them otherwise. It was brought out to be a thing in itself seen differently than you would otherwise see it, I think.

[ . . . ]

RUTH BOWMAN: And this relationship has continued over forty years with Herman Miller?

RAY KAISER EAMES: Yes, absolutely.

RUTH BOWMAN: And the production laboratory has always been here?

RAY KAISER EAMES: "Production laboratory"—that's a different way of saying . . . . I don't think of it that way.

RUTH BOWMAN: How do you think of it?

RAY KAISER EAMES: Studio, office—we call it "shop," the place where we work has been here, and the early production was here. Part of this building . . . it was unbelievable when you think back about it, having the actual production here, as it was during the War, actually making the splints and making the furniture, making all the experiments. Then it becoming Herman Miller and having half of the building be production and the rest of it our own, making films, walking over cables. The people who produced the things, you know, were all local people, many of whom had worked . . . most of them, as a matter of fact, who had worked on the splints during the War. They were made up of housewives and all mixtures of people, various carpenters and really, just sweet people that we'd known for many years.

For more information about Charles & Ray, check out the Eames Office website. The Filmes of Charles and Ray Eames box set is a beautiful object, but if you were to only buy one DVD I would recommned Volume 2.

Posted in Art, From the Archives. Found always via this permanent link.

September 5, 2006

Gilbert & George on their forthcoming retrospective

Despite being a devoted fan of Gilbert & George's early videos (last seen in New York at PS1 in 2003) and "living sculpture" works, some of the artists' quotes in this Guardian article previewing their forthcoming Tate Modern retrospective rub me the wrong way. To wit: "'In the past 20 or 30 years we haven't really seen our pictures at the Tate,' said Gilbert yesterday. 'We lobbied the Tate, and did what it took,' said George, of their securing of the exhibition." And: "The artists had previously rejected the offer of an exhibition at Tate Britain, because 'we think we are modern artists not British artists', according to George; and, as Gilbert points out:'I am not British.' He was born in Bolzano, Italy." I had to roll my eyes at that one, given that they seemed to have no compunction about representing Britain at the 2005 Venice Biennale. I look forward to seeing many of the artists' early works together, but hope I don't have to put up with too much more of this kind of posturing in the art press prior to the show.

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

September 1, 2006

Is the new contemporary-galleries installation at MoMA really that bad?

After Reading Lee Rosenbaum's post at Culturegrrl earlier this week lamenting the new installation of MoMA's contemporary galleries, I wondered if they could be as bad as she suggests. ("The less said about this particular contemporary installation, the better.") In today's Times, Roberta Smith chimes in with an affirmation that yes, they really are:

The rest of the show feels like its own form of incarceration and is, at times, fatally sophomoric. Not much clicks visually, nothing surprises.

[ . . . ]

The point is that the selections and juxtapositions in “Out of Time” are so orthodox, so true to the Minimalist-Conceptualist gene pool, so loyal to a familiar cast of pre-approved artists and so risk-adverse and eccentricity intolerant that the art feels frozen and isolated, like deer in headlights. It is rather late in the day to be trotting out old standards like On Kawara date paintings or Andy Warhol’s film “Empire” for a show about time.

[ . . . ]

One wonders whether the theme of time was at least partly imposed on the curators by some higher-up who felt the public needed an idea to hold onto. That may be nowhere near the truth, but it would explain the show’s half-hearted alternations between the obvious and the arbitrary.

I am, at the very least, glad that Richter's October 18, 1977 cycle of paintings is back on view. The rest, well, I'll just have to see for myself.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September in Artforum

Selected articles from the September issue of Artforum are now online. (Take that, Greg.) One that you'll have to find the magazine to read is "Keeping Distance: On the Art of Marine Hugonnier," by my friend and colleague Martin Herbert. Hugonnier's film Ariana was a highlight of the 2003 Venice Biennale, an oasis of calm amid the chaos of the Arsenale's eleven simultaneous exhibitions. Here's what Herbert, eloquent as ever, has to say about that work:

In 2002 . . . Hugonnier went to Afghanistan to shoot Ariana. An avid researcher, she'd become fascinated by the Panjshir Valley in the north of the country, a lush landscape (described in ancient Persian poetry as a "paradise garden") protectively encircled by a nameless mountain range, and a stronghold of resistance during twenty-three years of war with the Soviets and then the Taliban. Hugonnier wanted to see for herself—and, if possible, record on film—how landscape determines history. As it turned out, that wasn't possible. Deploying a musing epistolary voice-over and documentary images in a manner reminiscent of Chris Marker's 1983 masterpiece Sans soleil, the eighteen-minute film tracks her camera crew's attempts to reach a mountaintop from which to shoot the valley and its rocky sentinels. They are stymied; the authorities say landslides have blocked the way. Since, however, the spot the crew is trying to get to is located at a militarily strategic point, Hugonnier suspects an ulterior motive.

Finally, however, the Ministry of Culture helps them gain access to a location that affords the aerial perspective they need to complete their visual travelogue—a promontory the locals call "Television Hill," overlooking settlements and battlefields. "The spectacle made us euphoric," Hugonnier recalls in voice-over. But now, having arrived at the critical moment of her project, she refuses to set the camera rolling. Panoramas, she realizes, connote power—the controlling gaze. (No accident, surely, that they attained popularity as a form of mass entertainment in the nineteenth century, at the height of European colonial adventure.) By denying her audience this panoptic vision, Hugonnier broaches the issue of the inherent morality of specific vantages. The film suggests that imagemaking may not only reflect attitudes toward otherness but may also perpetuate or even establish them.

My own review in the issue, of Berlin-based artist Thomas Zipp's New York solo debut at Harris Lieberman, is now online at BrianSholis.com.

I also wrote a brief preview of "Wunderground: Providence 1995 to the Present," opening September 15 at the RISD Museum:

Founded in 1995 by artists Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale, Fort Thunder was a decrepit, junk-filled warehouse in Providence that became home to an ever-shifting group of artists and musicians. It was also, for a particular breed of pilgrim, a holy site—mecca for a hyperpsychedelic art of visual and aural excess. Forcefield, the art collective, and Lightning Bolt, the band, were both forged in this creative cauldron; the latter's performances there approached a hallucinatory, sweaty sublime. But the party had to end: Developers razed the building in 2002. This exhibition, conceived by Brinkman, Chippendale, and six other artists who got their start in the Providence underground, aims to capture the scene's manic energy with approximately two thousand screenprinted posters for art and music shows, as well as sound recordings and a new, site-specific, collaborative installation.

I hope to make it up to Providence to attend the opening and visit my friend Lauren, who will begin studying at the school this autumn. And I hope that the rest of you pick up this issue of Artforum—which you can read more about here and is as replete with smart essays as ever.

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

August 20, 2006

Andrea Fraser on institutional critique

Recently, as part of my research for a freelance project, I have spent considerable time with Andrea Fraser's "From a Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique," printed in the September 2005 Artforum. Here is a quote from near the end of that article:

Every time we speak of the “institution” as other than “us,” we disavow our role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions. We avoid responsibility for, or action against, the everyday complicities, compromises, and censorship—above all, self-censorship—which are driven by our own interests in the field and the benefits we derive from it. It’s not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art. It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.”

Fraser's selected writings, edited by Alexander Alberro, were published as Museum Highlights by MIT Press in 2005.

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

August 19, 2006

Iwona Blazwick's plans for the expanded Whitechapel

In the course of a long profile in The Guardian, Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick describes some of the initiatives the gallery will undertake during its yearlong renovation and what kinds of rooms the gallery will have upon its reopening:

She intends for the huge central reading room in the library to be given over to a single artist and a single piece of work for a year at a time. "Among all the hurly-burly of the East End and the hyperactive London art world, I always wanted to create a quiet counterpoint and place you can come back to time after time. This is perfect for it."

[ . . . ]

While the gallery spaces will be closed for the whole of 2007, there will be a series of newly commissioned work displayed around the ongoing development of Spitalfields market. And during the redevelopment, all the community and education programmes will continue, as will late-night poetry in the café and events in the auditorium. "And when we reopen we'll be using a newly discovered 'secret gallery'; we'll be able to show work from private collections and from artists' own collections—there has always been a fascinating exchange economy between artists - as well as having space for an archive gallery, which will draw on the extraordinary history of this place. The East End art boom of the past 20 years has been a remarkable thing to behold. But the spiritual home is not White Cube, it is the Whitechapel, and we will be reasserting ourselves."

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

August 17, 2006

Lawrence Weiner gives good interview

An interview with Lawrence Weiner was included in this week's ArtInfo.com newsletter. He is his usual engaging self:

Interviewer: There’s an implicit political stance in your work. Your work consists of verbal statements, but you scrupulously avoid giving your audience orders.

Weiner: I don’t tell anybody to do anything.

In order to hear what I have to say, or to see what I have to show, why should somebody have to do something? I don’t get it. My presumption is that, as artists, we are integral parts of society. Therefore our questions of the material world are legitimate questions and they have a legitimate reason to be presented.

That’s not to tell somebody else that in order to be able to understand me you have to spin around three times or genuflect or do something else. I don’t believe in the order. I think that it’s a fact that if you tell somebody, “Three lines on the wall,” and they’re really interested, they’ll make the three lines on the wall, but they don’t have to. They can imagine what it looks like, and it’s just as good.

This isn’t being goody-goody. This is saying, “I demand my rights as a human being to present what I see as an objectification of my material circumstances, but I don’t require the right to give other people orders.”

Interviewer: I’m not sure that I understand.

Weiner: It’s like graffiti. All graffiti has a right to exist anyplace as long as it says, “My children are hungry,” or “The sky is blue,” and not just “Me! Jose!” As long as it’s not just an existential plea, it has a right to exist. It’s the same with public art. All public art is made by artists for themselves, because they’re part of the public. They pay taxes, they take the kid to the dentist, just like everybody else. It’s just like wearing Yankee baseball paraphernalia. We have as much right within society as anybody else, not a privilege, but a right.

Last year, Hatje Cantz published Having Been Said: Writings & Interviews of Lawrence Weiner, 1968-2003. It clocks in at almost 500 pages, and is worth the hefty cover price.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Daniel Buren at the Guggenheim, April 2005

I thought this column was getting a little text-heavy, so here's a picture I took in April 2005, at the Guggenheim. It's part of a set of eight. My favorite reviews of the exhibition, oddly enough, were in the New York Times and October (not a full-text link). It's rare that those two publications are linked in my mind, but Michael Kimmelman and Silvia Kolbowski's pieces were great fun for the same reason: Both ran against type. Kimmelman unpredictably compared Buren's work to Christo & Jeanne-Claude and October let one of its contributors publish a (rather informal) "diary" in lieu of a review by some art-history assistant professor. Anyway, the picture is why I posted this, so I won't clog the column up with more text.

Also, today is the five-year anniversary of my move to New York. Time for reflection on what I've achieved (if "achieved" is the right word) and consideration of what I hope to do soon.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

August 16, 2006

A roundtable led by Chris Gilbert, and his resignation from the Berkeley Art Museum

While doing research for a current project, I came across the published transcript of a discussion between Chris Gilbert, TJ Demos, Carlos Basualdo, and Gregory Sholette held in late 2004 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where Gilbert then worked as a curator. After a brief introduction, Gilbert laid out three questions for discussion:

One concerns how fully informal creation and underground practices—their look and their techniques—can be commodified by the market and incorporated into the gallery system. Greg has suggested that dark matter is only superficially appropriable—that the art industry merely trades in simulations of collective informal work and adopts only the look or manner of dark matter. It could be argued, however, that appropriation of an underground is always superficial and that there is something circular about saying that the politics of the work is not appropriable or commodifiable—since, of course, the politics of underground work could be defined as simply that-which-is-not-commodifiable.

A second question concerns the internal structure of dark matter. How are informal production and its creators organized? For example, how are zine-makers connected with each other? A tentative answer, and a seeming given, is that there are many-to-many connections among the producers, who relate to one another through rhizomatic structures rather than arborescent, hierarchical ones. For example, in the way zine creators communicate with each other, a weblike or horizontal structure is immediately suggested. Another seeming given is that there is an inherent collectivity to dark matter's organization; working together, working socially, appears to be integral to labor in its immaterial form.

A third and final question concerns the agency of this exhibition and of art exhibitions more generally. If exhibitions organize work—and exhibition curators are often described as "organizers"—to what degree does their organizational work play into the hands of capital and increase the governability of the work and the producers? This raises the further question of how one can exhibit artworks as singularities (in their singularity) and resist the unifying logic of an exhibition. For some years I've been concerned with the problem of "curatorial panopticism," by which I mean not so much the literal figure of the panopticon as it might be realized in this or that exhibition, but the idea that a panoptic logic underpins the structure of most exhibitions.

If these questions are of interest to you, the rest of the lengthy discussion will reward the time you spend with it. These are topics that I am also considering, albeit from the standpoint of someone who primarily writes about art rather than organizes exhibitions.

As perhaps many of you know, Gilbert caused waves in the art world a few months ago by abruptly resigning from his job at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, where he was responsible for the "MATRIX" series of exhibitions. The source of the hubbub, specifically, was his resignation letter, which has been posted publicly on the internet (click here for a printer-friendly version). At the end of the letter, Gilbert expands upon the specific reason for his resignation (a dispute over the language of a wall text accompanying this exhibition) and delivers this pointed critique:

I think it is important to be clear about the facts that precipitated my resignation: that is, the struggle over the wording of the text panel, which fit into months of struggle over the question of solidarity and alignment with a revolutionary political agenda. That issue is discussed above. However, it is also important to understand the context. Again, it is too weak to say that museums, like universities, are deeply corrupt. They are. (And in my view the key points to discuss regarding this corruption are (1) the museum's claim to represent the public's interests when in fact serving upper-class interests and parading a carefully constructed surrogate image of the public; (2) the presence of intra-institutional press and marketing departments that really operate to hold a political line through various control techniques, only one of which is censorship; finally (3) the presence of development departments that, in mostly hidden ways, favor and flatter rich funders, giving the lie to even the sham notion of public responsibility that the museum parades). However, to describe museums and other cultural institutions as simply if deeply corrupt is, as I said, too weak in that it both holds out the promise of their reform and it ignores the larger imperialist structures that make their corruption an inevitable upshot and reflection of the exploitive political and social system of which they form a part. Such institutions will go on reflecting imperialist capitalist values, will celebrate private property and deny social solidarity, and will maintain a strict silence about the control of populations at home and the destruction of populations abroad in the name of profit, until that imperialist system is dismantled. Importantly, it will not be dismantled by cultural efforts alone: a successful reform of a cultural institution here or there would at best result in "islands" of sanity that would most likely operate in a negative way—as imaginary and misleading "proof" that conditions are not as bad as they are.

In fact, with conditions as they are, a different strategy is required: there should be disobedience at all levels; disruptions and explosions of the kind that I, together with a small group of allies inside the museum, have created are also useful on a symbolic level. However, the primary struggle and the only struggle that will result in a significant change would be one that works directly to transform the economic and political base. This would be a struggle aiming to bring down the US government and its imperialist system through highly organized efforts.

Through an earlier job I came to know Gilbert somewhat, and have corresponded with him (and his wife) in the past. It is premature for me to comment now, but I will simply say that from what I know of him, the decision to quit, especially in such a spectacular manner, was only arrived at after significant thought; he was never one to take anything lightly. (The discussion linked above is certainly evidence of this.) Instead, here is the Berkeley Daily Planet's story on his resignation, as well as a lengthy discussion at Mute magazine. Gilbert seems to have deliberately sunk below the art-world radar, as yet offering no further commentary on his resignation. I, for one, am very curious to see where, how, and if he turns up again.

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

July 10, 2006

James Hopkins

BrianSholis.com was updated over the weekend; I uploaded an essay about the British artist James Hopkins that I wrote for Max Wigram Gallery.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

July 6, 2006

Richard Serra interview in the Brooklyn Rail

This FishBowlNY post, which comments on a New York Sun article lamenting the demise of several Brooklyn-based magazines, led me to peruse the Brooklyn Rail website. Currently featured in the site's art section is an interview with artist Richard Serra, conducted by Phong Bui and published in the paper's June issue. After glancing at it while at work yesterday afternoon, I returned and read it closely last night, when 3 Quarks Daily linked to it. It's a long, fascinating talk, covering Serra's time at Yale, early influences, and paintings; "the problem with today's art"; his criticism of some contemporary architects; the "given" conditions for sculpture; his "Stop Bush" image and its presence in the Whitney Biennial; and his brother, a lawyer who defended Huey Newton, among others. A few excerpts:

[In Albers's class, we] had to find ways to enable form to distinguish itself from matter. Basically, it was an open-ended experiment. What I came to realize is that matter imposes its own form on form. Working your way through a problem with a specific material is not theoretical. For me the choice of material is subjective and accounts for one’s sensibility and intuition.

[ . . . ]

The problem with a lot of work today is its predictability. Its only allusion is to something we already know; it reframes, or re-references the known over and over again. It can’t possibly give us the same kind of inventive diversity and fulfillment and complex evolution of the formal language of art that invention can provide.

[ . . . ]

There are certain conditions that are a given and that you can rely on. In sculpture gravity is undeniable. Sculptural form must necessarily confront gravity. I am interested in process and matter, in construction, in how to open up the field. The problem for me is to address within a work circulation or movement that is outside of all representation; that is to make movement itself the subject which generates or constitutes the work.

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

July 5, 2006

Museum library websites

My job requires that I find out about art-world exhibitions and events happening well into the future, and my interests encourage me to find out about those that I missed. Occasionally I am asked how I stay on top of what's going on. The simple answer is that I have put my name and e-mail address in just about every contemporary-art gallery guestbook I have set foot into, and consequently receive innumerable press releases; I have subscribed to the e-mail lists maintained by e-flux, ArtCal, Art Cards, and other valuable information clearinghouses; and I talk constantly with a wide network of critics, curators, dealers, and artists, all of whom like to discuss their current projects. This is all, perhaps, obvious. It's a bit more difficult to discover information about exhibitions one never hears about or misses. One habit I've found worth adopting is glancing at artist biographies whenever I'm at galleries, even if it's someone whose work I'm not particularly enthusiastic about. A less obvious answer, however, is to take advantage of museum library websites. If an exhibition generated some kind of publication, there is a good chance that the document ends up in the library at MoMA, the Whitney,