Shag Time

I’m just coming back from a brief tour of the Lower East Side’s growing art scene. I know I’m about two years late saying this, but, being away from Chelsea is refreshing. First, art doesn’t tower over you in size and price tag. Second, gallery personnel are actually approachable. This said, I’m pleased to announce that I introduced myself to one curator who I’ve been trying to corner for a few months now. And, lo and behold, she was pretty friendly. For a brief moment, I remembered that curators need artists just like artists need curators. So, even though I spoke in a head voice, holding in my words like Kermit the frog, I think my name may stick in her head when I call her in a few weeks time. So this is a boost. Makes me feel like dancing.

The variety of spaces was also enjoyable. I recommend visiting, for example:
Smith-Stewart on Stanton, Salon 94 in Freeman’s Alley, Jen Bekman on Spring, and also Participant’s new gargantuan space on East Houston.

Riding the waves

I have always been ambivalent about the medium of video. Primarily, what bothers me is that it’s time based; absorbing a piece happens over time. This is true of course for every medium. For example, a cubist painting takes shape when you stare at it. But, in video, the scope of a piece is not just right there, which may be a problem only for the impatient.

Here are other contradictory feelings in my head about video.

1. Videos are not tangible, you keep them on the shelf. But, this immaterial-ness skirts a product-oriented market. But an artist needs to sell to live. But, that’s why we have other jobs.
2. Video is a young, fast medium. But, it doesn’t have to be. Youth and pace are just trends.
3. There are no video masters, it’s not a skilled art. But, some video artists take on film-like projects. But, I hate that. Video is a medium unto itself. It shouldn’t be film-like. Anyway, think of what it takes to make a good video and of all the great video artists. Like who?

(image from Lawrence Goldhuber's Asylum)

Auchtung!

On Monday, I was advised by a very prominent person in the art world to move to Berlin. He insisted that if he were starting a career as an artist, that’s where he would go. The scene is fresh, burgeoning, and still accessible to artists who haven’t broken “in.” Furthermore, life is inexpensive. He went on to comment that the time was ripe for me make such a move: I don’t have children, my paid work is portable. The general idea being, what’s there to lose, and think how much there is to gain.

I immediately went into panic mode, thinking that if I don’t move now, I’ll never get anywhere. If I don’t move now, I’ll miss the boat.

But, I have a hard time picturing me going to openings in Berlin, when I can’t even get myself to go here. And the idea of walking into a gallery and actually being able to talk to someone sounds like fantasy. But, that might be because New York galleries are so impenetrable.

So, I will consider it. But, I’ll start with a visit first. Maybe in a few months.

He also suggested LA.

Basically anything but New York.

Check in Wednesday

I usually post on Monday, but not today.

On View

(Still from Reynold Reynold's Six Apartments, now at Roebling Hall)

Did a crawl through Chelsea today. Here’s some of what I saw:

1. Adrian Paci at Peter Blum on 29th. I very much enjoyed Paci’s videos at PS1 a few years back dealing with families separated by country. In the video on view here, the artist has a weeper and chanter mourn over his body, although he is still alive.

2. If you’re in to “experiences” you can walk into Antony Gormley’s room of dense steam at Sean Kelly also on 29th. I personally was too scared. The signs posted around the gallery warning claustrophobics and panic-types didn’t help.

3. Over at Roebling Hall on 26th and 11th, I was absorbed by Reynold Reynolds two-channel film installation that glimpses at lonely lives lived in separate apartments as well as well as bacteria and maggots. The camera work was a pleasure and the devastation tickles me pink.

4. Also on 26th, at James Cohan, I recommend Folkert de Jong’s decomposing harlequin figures stacked up on one another.

5. Isaac Julian’s multi-channel installation is too slick for me. It was hard to feel past the esthetic perfection. But, there’s a lot of talk about it, so you might want to check it out at Metro Pictures on 24th.

6. I liked the scale and sparseness of Charles Ray’s installation of three sculptures at Matthew Marks on 22nd. The gallery attendants sitting there in the practically empty space, almost sculptures themselves, are a scream. And the young boy playing with a toy car is appealingly forlorn.

7. I’ve heard so many complaints about Kara Walker’s cutouts being repetitive. But, I don’t buy into the critique, especially when seeing her diverse explorations into the medium at Sikkema Jenkins on 22nd. Here’s an artist whose appetite for form and content are equally large.

L'Age d'Or

I recently worked on the translation of a large book about the French interior designer Jean-Michel Frank, whose streamlined furniture and empty decors belonged to an avant-garde art scene in Europe in the 1920s and 30s. He rubbed shoulders with a mix of outré artists (Man Ray, Buñuel, René Crevel among them) and art patrons (Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, Nancy Cunard, the Pecci-Blunts), who hosted costume balls, lavish soirées and intellectual powwows. There was opium, rehab, suicide and name-dropping, but also artistic innovation and invention. While it was all a theater of extravagance and superficiality, I’ve got to say, it sounds dynamic and invigorating artistically.

Reading Calvin Tomkins’s portrait of Jeffrey Deitch in last week’s New Yorker, on the other hand, had me lying on my back depressed.

His portrait of today’s dominant art scene is entirely unappealing. Can’t say I didn’t already know, but, come on.

"… Sotheby’s Tobias Meyer said [,] 'The physical presence of the work is not the primary stimulant – they will want to see it already make a lot of impact on the printed page.' That sounds like the see-at-a-glance accessibility of advertising art, which happens to be a prime source for the work of Koons, Prince, Murakami, and a score of other top-selling contemporary masters. It also suggests a kind of art that can just be bought on the Internet, and Deitch confirms that this is the case. ‘We do it all the time,’ he told me. ‘People will ask me to send them a digital image of the next available thing by an artist whose work they know and like, and they will buy from that. It’s completely normal in our business.[...]'The art world used to be a community, but now it's an industry. [...] I try to act responsibly toward the art, but if people offer tremendous anounts of money for it you really can't control that.'"

Any exciting alternatives, I wonder, for the thousand millionth time?

Echoes

I probably sound like a broken record, but, being an artist is a privilege and a responsibility, a privilege because we get to express ourselves (a function of our social privilege), and a responsibility because we are in the public eye. It is therefore our job to present vision. I adhere to the Modernist perspective that artists should strive for larger meaning, even for the transcendental. It is our role to address the contradictions and sufferings of our time. I also ascribe to the Romantic idea that artists should brood.

How to do both without being didactic is our challenge.

For these reasons, it was a pleasure to read Christian Viveros-Fauné’s scathing review of “The Incomplete” at The Chelsea Art Museum.

He describes the show as presenting:

"an alarming paucity of deep, nettlesome intelligence - a deficit that would raise red flags in any other art market except ours. Fodder for a steady queue of patrons who prefer their expectations tickled rather than trounced, [the works of these artists] have a strong vein of cork running through them: No matter how hard their creators try to push deeper, their art invariably bobs right back up to the surface."

He goes on to say:

“…the cumulative effect of ‘The Incomplete’ is – to take a page from Neil Postman – of a generation amusing itself, if not to death, then into a kind of art-as-medium-of-entertainment obsolescence.”

Well that just about sums up my frustration, Monsieur. I’m assuming your mother-tongue, but, merci beaucoup!

Success's Formula

I received my first antagonistic comment, from anonymous, about my Alex McQuilkin post. Other comments appreciated.

On another note:

At a family roundtable the other night, I was involved in a heated, psychologically charged conversation about success’s formula. The ingredients proposed were: showing up, dint (which I learned means effort), and random (bias, connections, luck). How much of each does it take to make it?

My breakdown of success, as I consider it today, is as follows: 40% showing up, 40% random, and 20% dint.

Sound about right?

Or are we really going to give more credit to trying?

Everlasting Neil

I look to Neil Young as a model, an artist whose music clearly permeates the way he lives, feels and thinks. And the way he lives, feels and thinks becomes his music. His practice is him. No matter when or where, he’s always being Neil Young.

But, this quality can’t really be described as continuity. As Young says in Sunday’s New York Times profile:

“How did I get to where I am? I mean, what happened? Where’s the guy who wrote the other songs? Where’s the guy who wrote a lot of the early songs? There are some songs I can’t even sing. I don’t even know who wrote them. But I know I did. When I listen to myself, I go, ’O.K., but I can’t do that now.’“

This is every artist’s truth. We change, art changes. But at the same time, there is continuity. I think it somehow lies in adaptation, in allowing a work to change to fit a moment. Young explains:

“I want every song to be coming from me, not coming from who I was or who I’m trying to be or who people think I am or who they want me to be […] All those things are out. It’s just got to be: ‘Is this going to flow like water through me? Can I swim in this sound?’”

Although conclusions are boring, you could say an artist does write the same song over and over again, just in different ways.

Calgon, Take Me Away

I suppose art that makes you want to puke is better than art that stirs up no feeling at all. [Insert here your favorite truism about indifference].

That said, Alex McQuilkin’s video installation entitled “Joan of Arc” at Marvelli Gallery had me literally throwing my arms up in despair. The two-channel piece juxtaposes scenes from Carl Dreyer’s seminal 1928 film rendition of the martyr’s story with images of the artist pouting unconvincingly into the camera and shaving her blown-dry locks.

Watching a white, privileged woman – with the power of art success to bolster her – comparing herself to one of history’s most legendary persecuted figures is a reflection of American arrogance, unawareness and downright stupidity.

The press release suggests that McQuilkin (at age 27) yearns to validate adolescent angst, especially in the face of condescending adults (like myself). Her goal, it seems, is to represent her suffering – through imitation, through theater. What she achieves, however, is the opposite. She comes of as a shallow fake.

Paul Celan

I imagine that the way I am before poetry is the way many are before contemporary art. Most of the time, I just don’t get it. I want something to hold on to – a narrative, an opinion – but, usually when I think I’ve got something, I get befuddled in the next line. I have a hard time going with the flow, letting the image rise up in my head, letting go of analysis.

I’ve got a huge challenge in front of me, then, with Paul Celan, whose 1960s poems experimented with poetics (I think I know what that means). He lay his faith in the word, not the lyricism of the word, and consequently many of his words are invented. I’m fascinated when I read about his poetry, but when I have an example in front of me, I need to draw on patience and a loose mind. You can’t rush through them.

Here’s an example, from his book Breathturn, translated from the German:

NO SANDART ANYMORE, no sandbook,
no masters

Nothing in the dice. How
Many mutes?
Seventeen.

Your question – your answer.
Your chant, what does it know?

Deepinsnow,
Eepinno,
I-i-o.

The H Word

(Marcel Broodthaers, Femur d'une Femme Francaise)

One artist stereotype is that we’re moody and dark. These remarks in Roberta Smith’s recent review of two Chelsea shows focusing on death flavors the myth. She says:

“Their message is that all art, basically, is an attempt to explain, fend off or accept death; to commemorate, or communicate with, the dead or deities; or to defy death by making something that lives on. Not surprisingly, both shows are rampant with skeletons and skulls — as universally essential for physical life as they are symbolic of its inevitable end.”

And:

“Mr. Tricot’s essay in the Cheim & Read catalog provides a coda for both shows. In a startlingly Beckett-esque quotation, extracted from the work of the noted 17th-century Spanish writer Francisco de Quevedo, Death admonishes a reluctant victim: ‘What you call to die is to finish dying and what you call birth is the beginning of death and what you call to live is dying as you go on living.’”

Rolling your eyes or loving it? I personally love it. Although I do wonder if talking about living and happiness could ever sound as juicy. Could the ‘h’ word ever be the stuff of art, but eschew the sentimental, the quaint and saccharine?

La Chinoise

Call me naïve, La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film about revolution-minded students is far from outdated, despite the reviews I’ve read.

Visually, the film feels entirely fresh, with each frame dappled deliberately with red. Text, still photographs, interviews, theater, musical interruptions all combine to form a true inquiry into change, political action, and role of art. What makes the film complex, also, is that doubt about revolution plays a role in the film as well. Violence is questioned, and also ridiculed. So, you’re not left feeling like you’ve just been told the one and only way.

All this reminded me how there’s very little room to talk about radical change without being labeled irrelevant, or worse, outmoded. While revolution may not happen over night, it’s the spirit that is so energizing; such a relief from the drone that a better world is idealism.

Image Potential

I’ve become so used to the idea that art is a luxury item, I almost forgot that in many contexts, it not only is integrated into everyday life, but has a role.

As Ken Johnson says in his review of “Bon: The Magic Word” at the Rubin Museum, on view through January:

“What is art for? What should it be for? What can it be for? Ask today’s art world these questions, and you’ll get a discordant babel of answers. So it is useful to check in on times and places that were not so conflicted. Consider, for example, the art of Bon, the centuries-old indigenous religion of Tibet, presented in a beautiful exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art. The purpose of Bon art was, unequivocally, to help achieve spiritual enlightenment.”

I think it would be arrogant for many artists to make work with the intention of it being useful to others. Meaningfulness and usefulness can only be a rare bonus in a context where images have become ordinary, replaceable, and above all, acquire-able.

Nevertheless it’s just nice to think that there continue to be practices where images help shape mental outlooks. Through visualization, there is internalization.

The painting here was made in 2000, anonymously. It's used in Hindu practice as a meditation tool. Once the image is in your mind, you can draw on it, recall it, both as symbol and image. A collection of these Lingas, as they are called, are on view at Feature through October 27.