Very busy learning about flirtation and gazing at abs at the Romance Writers of America conference in Times Square. Find a comprehensive report over at WNYC. I promise that the audio bits are worth it.
Monthly Archive for June, 2011
Untitled, date unknown, a photograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, from the solo exhibit Dolls and Masks, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Opens Saturday. This looks like it’s gonna be pretty boss. (Image courtesy of the Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.)
- L.A.: Faile, LA Works on Paper: A Decade of Prints and Originals, at Post No Bills. Through July 2, in Venice.
- Santa Fe: Southern California Painting: 1970s Painting Per Se, at David Richard Contemporary. Opens Friday; artists reception on Friday, July 8 at 8pm.
- Houston: George Gittoes, Witness to War, at the Station Museum. Through September 18. This sounds super interesting. Hat tip to …might be good.
- NYC: Re-Collection, a group show, at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, at the Parson School of Design. Through September 7th.
- Plus, get my latest NYC picks over at Gallerina!!!
One of the best visual tricks in Ryan Trecartin’s solo show at PS1: A mirror on the floor reflected the video on the screen on the wall — allowing the viewer to take in the already-hallucinatory spectacle upside down. (Photo by C-M.)
Ryan Trecartin at PS1
I’ve been pondering the Ryan Trecartin show over at PS1 and felt like I needed to come back to it in a more meaningful way, since I think that my initial assessment was quite glib. I’m gonna be honest: the work still grates on my nerves. The relentless Alvin and the Chipmunks talk inspires a prejudice I don’t know that I can overcome. (I also find Elmo exasperating, so it may just be me.)
An image of one of Trecartin's works at the New Museum, in 2009. (Photo by C-M.)
But, the show at PS1 did make me appreciate Trecartin’s work more than I had in the past. I’d seen his videos at the Hammer Museum in L.A. a few years back and they’d pretty much driven me nuts. I appreciated what he was doing visually: the gender-bending, the banal, suburban-style backdrops peopled by surreal scenarios and the self-centered internet-ish habit of having characters speak over each other rather than engage in dialogue. But the cumulative effect of spending a couple of hours watching his videos left me feeling as if I’d been subjected to an eternity of Nyah Nyah Cat. It was an orgy of excess — with characters who were excessive, scenarios that were excessive, dialogue that was excessive, overstimulation delivered in industrial doses, the raging American id as channeled by the YouTube generation.
Bradbury's classic sci-fi work, set in a dystopic future where you can't turn the walls off
His work is still about excess — the show at PS1 eats up a whole lot of real estate and no doubt has a fairly spectacular carbon footprint. But I have to admit that the surreal sculptural sets from which you view the work made this exhibit, more than any other I’ve seen of his, far more intriguing. The squishy chairs and giant headsets left me feeling as if I was truly part of the work. In addition, the wall-sized video projections gave the whole thing a kind of sci-fi vibe. In fact, as my partner-in-crime reminded me, it was right out of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 — a world in which the walls talk and the citizenry has no ability to turn them off. Montag, the main character bemoans this condition: “Nobody listens anymore. I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls.”
Viewed in that light, I came away respecting the gesture, even if the tweaky nature of the characters still left me irritated. And even though it left me wondering at what point an artist’s commentary becomes the act that he’s critiquing. But maybe that’s the point…
On Generation Blank
Generation Blank, per Jerry Saltz. (Illustration by Jacob Thomas, nabbed from NY Mag.)
It seems like the week’s talked-about essay is Jerry Saltz’s piece about the cerebral, content-free creation of so many art school types: “These artists draw their histories and images only from a super-attenuated gene pool. It’s all-parsing, all the time.” (Which kinda reminds me of this little bit from Tom Wolfe.) But the sentiments echo what Holland Cotter had said earlier in his review of El Museo’s (S) Files Bienal:
In short, the ‘The (S) Files’ confirms what should be obvious but rarely is in the art world: there are scads of artists out there with careers and lives that don’t, whether by chance or by choice, revolve around a few square blocks of mid-Manhattan art real estate. At the same time another truth is demonstrated: In a highly competitive market that turns art schools into art mills, a lot of art, no matter where it comes from, looks like a lot of other art everywhere.
Kyle Chayka at Hyperallergic thinks some critics just aren’t looking hard enough for good work. I think I land somewhere in the middle: you’ll always find something fresh if you search for it, just like you might find orchids in a swamp, but it might mean a whole lotta slogging through navel-gazey art school mumbo jumbo to turn it up.
Random Linkage
- Stories that make me realize I should never bellyache about anything ever: Photojournalists talk about the pictures that almost got them killed.
- Ai Weiwei is out, but the drama ain’t over. Eyeteeth has a round-up of good reads related to his release — and covers the fact that Ai’s release is likely a token gesture prior to Wen Jiabao’s trip to Europe. Hyperallergic has reports on Ai’s associates. And, Art City quotes a poignant excerpt from the artist’s now defunct blog.
- Speaking of which, the Tate is honoring Ai with a special display of his porcelain sunflower seeds.
- Douglas Rushkoff on the ways the internet changes the way we think.
- I’ve enjoyed the Rebus-like arrangement of images that Joseph Maida and Katie Murray have gathered for their exhibit, Picture Consequences — in which one artist responds to another’s image and vice versa. You can see the sequential stream of photos here, or at the Home Front Gallery in Long Island City through August 27.
- Jennifer Dalton’s reality show application for artists. Priceless.
- A 19th century paint set. Like, whoa.
- Frida Kahlo beer.
- Lastly, a veeeeeery long and loopy tag by Alexone. (Ekosystem.)
Surely the best exhibit caption I've ever read: "Minimalism remains the preferred mode of conspicuous consumption. What existential 'pain' needs so many cushions?"
Utter the words “historic district” and chances are it is will describe some hyper-quaint downtown chock full of gift shops, antique stores and candy emporiums that dispense fudge — photogenic spots where all evidence of daily life (supermarkets, drug stores, gas stations) is abolished in favor of providing camera-strapped hordes with postcard views. I’ve long been intrigued by these hyperreal destinations, which are sold as historic, but seem anything but. It is for this reason that I found the Cronocaos show at the New Museum so thought provoking. (And yes, I know it closed almost a month ago, but these days, I’m a little slow on the uptake.)
Organized by starchitect Rem Koolhaas, of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, the exhibit provided a highly critical examination of the way in which cities undertake historic preservation efforts. The show, as has been reported — in ArtInfo, the Times and the New Yorker — is kind of a hot mess. Koolhaas throws around some alarming (not entirely substantiated) figures about the percentage of the earth’s surface that is allegedly guarded by some form of preservationist protection. He posits that historic preservation efforts are generally haphazard, that preservation can result in a saccharine sameness (new houses are built to look like old houses) and that it can hinder progress (it’s hard to build innovative new shit, if the old shit can’t be torn down).
Koolhaas doesn’t get anywhere near answering some of the questions he raises. As in: who gets to determine what stays and what factors make a place worth preserving. And, more significantly, how do we, as a society, prevent these places from turning into Disney-esque Main Streets for the moneyed few. Certainly, I’m marginally suspicious of Koolhaas’s motives — he’s the sort of architect who has aspirations of being a city builder, the sort of practice that requires a whole lot of square footage (territory that may come encumbered by landmarks and whatnot). But Cronocaos raises a slew of highly pertinent issues about the ways in which cities whitewash history in an attempt to “preserve” it.
A sort-of-related postscript.
There’s no good reason that this exhibit shouldn’t reside online. It’s essentially a PowerPoint presentation printed out on very large paper. If Koolhaas really believes what he says, then he’d let the world see it — and let the ideas evolve and move forward. Rather than trying to, um, preserve them...
UPDATE: Art (and Architecture!) Nurse San Suzie has a response to Koolhaas’s concepts in Cronocaos. And since she works in conservation and has studied issues of preservation, I really wanted to highlight her opinion on this:
I have so much to say as a comment to both the posting and the show that I am not quite sure where to begin. But a few things: first, it is very anachronistic to say that historic preservation is about quaint downtowns. Preservation is not just about the museification of our history. It is also about sustainability: it is much “greener” to preserve a structure than to tear it down, filling our landfills with concrete and steel. Preservation is about keeping structures standing that deserve to stand, about using good practices for maintaining what we already have, and most importantly for creating a sense of place for people in their neighborhoods. The landmarks that surround us — in addition to the corner stores and gas stations — provide a sense of locale to the places we reside. It is important to distinguish between good preservation (keeping buildings in use, keeping them safe, expanding their sustainability) and the Disney-style museification of structures, sites and cities. As a student of urban landscapes, Koolhaas should be in the position to know the difference.
Continue reading ‘On Preservation: Cronocaos, Rem Koolhaas at the New Museum (Updated).’
Untitled, circa 2000, by Margaret Kilgallen. On view at Ratio 3 in San Francisco as part of a memorial show dedicated to the artist, Margaret Kilgallen: Summer/Selections. Opens today. (Image courtesy of Ratio 3. More pix at The Citrus Report.)
- L.A.: Assorted Flavor, with Saber, Push, Kofie and many others, at Known Gallery. Through July 9.
- Washington, D.C.: Fragments in Time and Space, at the Hirshhorn Museum. Opens today.
- NYC: An exhibition of the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project, at Saltspace. Opens Friday at 6pm.
- Amsterdam: BLADE, The King’s New Line, at ArTicks Gallery. Opens Sunday at 2pm.
- Berlin: Sergej Vutuc, Something in Between, at Galerie Michael Janssen. Opens Friday at 6pm.
- Plus: You can find many more NYC picks over at Gallerina.
I went to a professional heavyweight bout once at Madison Square Garden. It was as riveting as it was grotesque. Essentially, you’re sitting around watching a guy take a beating. George Bellows really captured the raw power of this savage spectacle in Stag at Sharkey’s, a painting from 1909. His later boxing paintings are more stylized. But in this one, it’s all about the violence, with fighters in contorted poses, their faces a blur of expressionistic red paint. I could practically taste the sweat.
Want: A feathered hat from the Bamileke people of Cameroon, circa 1900. Stunning.
The museum has a trippy-interesting show devoted to Cleveland Op Art (up through February 2012). Shown here is a detail of Julian Stanczak’s piece Provocative Current, from 1965. I would have taken more pix, but there was no photography allowed in the modern or contemporary galleries. Living artists are such a buzzkill.
The Friends With You installation at the High Line in NYC bears an uncanny resemblance to…
…the Nickelodeon Hotel in Orlando. Where I once spent the night in the Danny Phantom suite. (Photos, from top, by C-M and Kim+5.)
Debt Begins at Twenty, 1980, by Stephanie Beroes. Part of the Pittsburgh Biennial, at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Opens Friday. (Image courtesy of CMOA.)
- L.A.: Unfinished Paintings, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Opens today at 8pm.
- Long Beach: Ray Turner, Population, at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Opens today.
- Asheville, N.C.: Jack Tworkov, the Accident of Choice, at Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center. Opens Friday at 5:30pm.
- NYC: Grasping for Relics, a group show, at ZieherSmith in Chelsea. Opens today at 6pm.
- NYC: Revolutionary Film Posters, Aesthetic Experiments of Constructivist Russia, at Tony Shafrazi. Through July 30.
- Toronto: William Hundley, Panic Fear Hallucination, at Show & Tell Gallery. Opens Friday at 7pm.
- PLUS: a get a full list of my NYC picks over at Gallerina.
A detail of a New York Times cover reproduced by Fernando Bryce, in his staggeringly detailed World War II-themed show at Alexander and Bonin. (All photos by C-M.)
This is one of those exhibits that made me exclaim “holy shit” the minute I walked in: for his piece El Mundo en Llamas (The World in Flames), Fernando Bryce has lined the walls of Alexander and Bonin’s ample space in Chelsea with faithful ink recreations of World War II-era newspaper front pages from England, France, the U.S., Germany and Peru. (All are depicted above the fold.) Screaming headlines related to war cover the walls, from floor to ceiling — a stirring chronicle of long-ago news reports on battle advances, defeats, carnage and victory. In between, Bryce has incorporated his renderings of era film posters that he culled from the pages of El Comercio, Peru’s leading daily. (Bryce was born in Peru; he produced El Mundo en Llamas in 2010-11.)
The result is a chronicle of the war that is intensely personal, providing the rare opportunity to view this much-studied global conflagration through a uniquely Latin American lens. Not only are there some interesting historical finds, such as an ad for a 1940s Disney film geared at and incorporating South Americans (see below), the film posters featured — for flicks such as La Sombra del Terror (The Shadow of Terror) and Los Crimenes del Doctor Satán (The Crimes of Doctor Satan) — seem to echo, in exaggerated, graphic form, everything happening in the news. In addition, Bryce’s illustrations are exquisite, turning scenes of war into works of ethereal beauty (such as the image of the Australian soldier, above, from the New York Times). Taken together, the exhibit provides a riveting take on the nature of war, news, propaganda and graphic art. Consider it a must-see.
The show is up through Saturday, at Alexander and Bonin.
Continue reading ‘Photo Diary: Fernando Bryce at Alexander and Bonin in Chelsea.’
