Author: jameswagner

outraged students try to retrieve their art from a truck bed before being stopped by NYC police: Is this how a real school treats its graduate students? Is this the role of a real city?

The show of Brooklyn College students’ MFA thesis work was supposed to have continued for another few weeks, so there was obviously no scheduling urgency for the space inside the Parks Department building in downtown Brooklyn, but in a surprise, cynical and totally dishonorable move early this morning school authorities rushed over some open trucks and ordinary workers (not art handlers) to haul away the original art created by its own students. This was going on at the moment the students were supposed to be meeting with the school Provost, Roberta Matthews. Much of the artwork was damaged, some of it apparently beyond repair.
Plainclothes police officers were on hand for the operation, apparently to ensure that the use of force would remain the monopoly of the college and the city.
Meanwhile our mayor, who likes to consider himself a conoisseur of art but who plays the role of philistine as well as any Wall Street bonus boy, seem to believe that art is only for museums – or for billionaires looking for an expensive hobby. “Nobody’s suggesting that anybody shouldn’t be allowed to exhibit art,” Mr. Bloomberg said, mimicing the nonsense disconnect of words uttered last Friday* by the College’s own Provost. Bloomberg continued, “The issue here is this is not a museum.” Is he being serious, or just cowardly?
The NYTimes has a story today, but the graduate art students themselves have added some pictures and another statement to their dedicated site.

Pictures supplied by the artists:




Statement issued by the artists:

As per the Press Release listed in a post below, yesterday Brooklyn College removed our work from the War Memorial without our consent.
We were set to meet with Provost Roberta Matthews at 9am. As we were about to go to the meeting, we got calls from fellow students who were guarding the space saying that Brooklyn College trucks were there and had begun dismantling and taking out the artwork. We had to turn around and rush down there.
When the professors who are supporting us got to the Provost’s door they were told the meeting was cancelled.
The PR for Brooklyn College has spun this as if we agreed to this and as if it was a benevolent gesture. Unfortunately some of the press has picked up on this and is sending out inaccurate information. We never agreed for them to move this work and were never given a chance to discuss anything with the college. We have agreed to nothing regading [sic] this space they have proposed to us.
No one can describe how it feels to see the fruits of all of your labors taken down and dismantled in the span of hours.

I confess to an honest but naive sense of disbelief that this thing could have gone this far, but my fear now is that even in New York we have become so inured to the idea and practice of unresponsive government that no one [except Norman Siegel] cares enough to resist anything any more. Small-town moralist and Brooklyn parks commissioner Julius Spiegel should have been overruled immediately, Provost Roberta Matthews should have been removed days ago, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg should at least be ridiculed without mercy for the remainder of his days on earth.
Where at least are all the other arts institutions in a city which loves to bask in a golden aura of the illusion of culture? And where are all those bloggers who now are, who think they are, who are said to be, so important? How rich or how famous an artist do you have to be to deserve freedom, or at least the claim to freedom? Okay, at the very least, when can you begin to get some attention if the custodians of the institutions of higher education and of the government of great cities physically trash your art – your own property (to use the only word which some will understand)?

*
“Brooklyn College has a long tradition of educating fine artists. Throughout, the administration of the College has supported our students’ rights to freedom of artistic expression.” [excerpt from her statement announcing the removal of the exhibit]

[first image, Robert Stolarik from the NYTimes; others from PLAN C(ENSORED)]

Paul McCarthy’s mixed-media installation “Bang-Bang Room” (1992) in the former Jewish School for Girls.

Now I wish we were there. Barry and I don’t like travelling in the pursuit of art fairs and I was going to try not to think about the Berlin Biennial too much, but Roberta Smith’s report makes it very hard to do so.

They have come up with something that perhaps shouldn’t work but does: an unusually poetic show that forms a kind of rebus about the arc and tumult of life itself. Its humanistic content makes it almost old-fashioned, evoking some of the Sturm und Drang of postwar figuration. Yet the art on view actually moves back and forth between Conceptual and more Romantic and Expressionist sonorities.

Even under normal circumstances Berlin is a big temptation for both of us, so missing out on the [fourth] Biennial now feels like a big mistake. Besides this fair seems to be as comfortable in its scale as it is lively in its components and inventive in its venues.
Maybe we’ll catch it some other year, when we have to leave New York for our Berlin exile.

[NYTimes caption below image from Paul McCarthy/Hauser & Wirth via NYTimes]

detail


the long view


the day unfolds

The erotic frisson of much of the work in his earlier walls is missing in the installation Joe Ovelman completed early this morning. Ovelman has been spending a lot of time in São Paulo and it seems to agree with him.
The photography is almost painfully beautiful, but his work is always beautiful and very often there’s some pain too. These photographs are also, well, very happy, but they are not dull. There is nothing casual about their composition and they are clearly the work of a master. They are also intensely personal and they reveal a private world which is, while not quite exotic, warmly exceptional and pretty inaccessible even to those who may be privileged to travel a lot.
It’s very interesting to me that many of the images are of walls, but these walls seem to shelter more than they exclude. Ovelman lives in these spaces in more ways than one, and we can wish we did too.
Actually, until these fragile paper bills disappear this world really is a little bit of ours as well.

The following thunbnails are only samples from the rank of images.












UPDATE: the wall remains almost entirely intact (as of last night, May 10)

It was a very small piece of paper on the back of a traffic signal. I couldn’t read the words from down on the sidewalk, so I held the camera high above my head and aimed. I took the image home and enlarge the text area.
“Bozack Nation” is more than a sign.

In the last 24 hours I’ve heard or read comments from several people suggesting that the Brooklyn College MFA thesis show difficulties [see also] might have been avoided had the gallery posted a “warning label”. I’m also dismayed by the recent sighting of these labels outside some Chelsea galleries.
I totally disagree with the idea that we have to warn people – anywhere – when human sexuality is addressed. Only in America would such a suggestion be met with anything but ridicule.
I think “warnings” are particulary inappropriate where art is concerned. Nothing interesting ever happens when people encounter only what they expect.
Is it necessary to point out that if you can find your way into an exhibition you can find your way out?
And I cannot accept the argument that it’s for the sake of the children. Kids will only be traumatized if their parents make a scene.
I would add that this country has already become far too “infantilized” if I didn’t have so much respect for Les Enfants we think we are protecting to use that word. Let’s just agree we do no service to people of any age by dumbing-down an entire culture.

We visited the two floors of the School of Visual Arts MFA open studios event last weekend where Sarah Schich was projecting a small moving image onto one wall of her darkened studio. The walls were all shingled with seriously-blank sheets of white typewriter paper. Across from the “screen” and also just above the floor, lit by one dim bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, was a typed list of names pinned to the wall.

Sylvia Plath
Edgar Allen Poe
Anne Sexton
Michel Foucault
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Yukio Mishima

The little lantern relayed a looped series of six short animated videos illustrating the story of the deaths of six famous writers.
The image above is a still from the story, by the author’s own account, of the social circumstances in which Michel Foucault contracted the disease, HIV, which eventually caused his death.
I know this may sound weird and probably disrespectful, but the animations are graceful, beautiful, and absolutely charming.

maybe our guardians now plan a special exhibition of their own

Don’t they ever learn? NYC Parks authorities have abruptly shut down the MFA thesis exhibit for the art school of Brooklyn College/CUNY.
It will be interesting to see how the art collector successor to Giuliani deals with this one. See Barry for the story up to now. There you will learn that this dedicated blog has been set up to provide continuously-updated information.

Pictured is the cover of the catalog for the Nazi’s 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition. I have a copy here at home, a very precious and tragic relic of a product of what I once thought was an alien mind.

UPDATES: See follow-up posts done as the story developedhere and here and here and here and here and here and here and still again and again and now the suit

[image from Deutsches Historisches Museum]

Joe Ovelman (São Paulo wall)

Joe Ovelman will be doing another of his huge photo installations on a very fortunate Chelsea wall early Saturday morning. This will essentially be the first street project to include work done while he has been living in Brazil. I’m assuming all of the images we will see this weekend were captured in the southern hemisphere.
Joe in Brazil with his camera. This is certain to be a great ride. Other than the possibility that there may be more than one dimension to the idea of wall this time, I know almost nothing else about the new piece.
Papered along the west side of 10th Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets, the work should be whole and complete by about 6 am, but don’t wait too long to check it out. There’s never any way to know how quickly the images may be destroyed or removed; ironically their mortality, and especially the uncertainty of the number of their days (hours?), contributes to the incredible vitality of every one of Ovelman’s wall projects.
I hope to have pictures of the piece here later in the day on Saturday.

[image from Joe Ovelman]