Lutz Bacher Sub 2001-2007 video [installation view]
Lutz Bacher Men at War 1975 two unique sets of nine black & white fiber prints, 15″ x 12″ each [detail of installation]
[I’m going to be posting a number of entries on shows I like which will include images but, because of the distractions of this week’s art fairs, no significant text]
Lutz Bacher at Taxter & Spengermann
Author: jameswagner
melting architectural lines
untitled (cowl vent) 2008
war is not over
five years and, unfortunately, still counting.
The caption to this Reuters photograph reads: A protestor takes part in a demonstration marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq, in Washington, March 19, 2008.
[image by Jim Young from Reuters]
Shannon Plumb at Sara Meltzer
Shannon Plumb Together 2008 single-channel video [large details of two stills, the first from the segment “Tuesday”, the second from “Saturday”]
Barry and I were both laughing out loud in the upstairs gallery at Sara Meltzer. It may even have been what brought Sara out of her office. It was only when I was home, hours later that I thought about how rare that kind of reaction to a gallery show really is. So, does that make the work suspect as art? Not as far as I’m concerned, and particularly in the case of Shannon Plumb‘s aggressively lo-fi videos, which have charmed – and provoked – me for years.
“Together“, a 24-minute video shot on Super 8, is composed of seven films each describing the ordinary activities which make up a day in the week of a cohabitating male-female couple, He and She, who were inspired by her grandparents. Both are played in inspiring performances by the artist.
The gallery setting was an old Zenith console TV in front of two comfortable but undistinguished upholstered armchairs (one displaying a series of notches almost certainly carved by He), and almost totally-unremarkable carpet. We could have stayed for hours, or at least long enough to meet the two stars, but it seems they have retired from show business. The costumes, hair and mustache glue with which had initialed their colorfully-disparate performances were now inside two sealed glass jars resting on plinths arranged over to the side.
[images from Sara Meltzer Gallery]
Rashid Johnson at Nicole Klagsbrun
Rashid Johnson Run 2008 mirror with spray paint 53″ x 65″ (including frame) [installation view]
Almost the first piece the visitor sees is a large, five foot mirror covered with the paint-sprayed word, “RUN”. Perhaps a tough auspice for an artist’s first New York solo appearance, but it definitely shouldn’t be taken as an exhortation. Rashid Johnson’s installation at Nicole Klagsbrun, “The Dead Lecturer“, is one very fine show, its photographs and sculptures culled from, as the press release tells us:”a mythic secret society of African-American intelligentsia within a metaphysical landscape removed from time and history.”
There are some very good images on the gallery’s site, but a visit and the naked eye would do much better.
capitalists asking for trouble, or “the visible hand”
passing GO
We’re telling them, “we’re not going to regulate you, and we’re going to bail you out when you fuck up.”
I didn’t say it. It was Barry. It was just a few minutes ago. He was replying to my reading outline the Reuters headline, “Bear near announcing sale to JPMorgan: source”. Like many others who happened to be noticing what’s been going on, I had already been shocked to hear that my government had decided to throw a “financial rescue package”* at Bear Stearns, a quintessential capitalist firm which had failed at capitalism (slapped by “the invisible hand”?). This afternoon we learn that one of its rivals had decided that now Bear Sterns was an attractive investment.
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) is close to rescuing the fifth-largest U.S. investment bank, Bear Stearns Cos Inc (BSC.N), a person familiar with the matter said on Sunday, in a deal that could be announced in the next few hours.
Of course none of these people went to jail, but none of them even lost their jobs and none of them lost their ginormous bonuses.
But it’s looking like the country’s about to lose its shirt. I know these lines are a gross simplification of the economics drama being played in the headlines (and conducted behind our backs), but Gretchen Morgenson’s piece in the NYTimes today both explains it in super-lay-person terms and suggests the horror of its potential (likely?) consequences. Here’s just a peek:
HERE is the bind the Fed is in: Like the boy who puts his finger in the dike to keep sea water from pouring in, the Fed finds that new leaks keep emerging.
Regulators must do whatever they can to keep the markets open and operating, and much of that relies upon the confidence of investors. But by offering to backstop firms like Bear, who were the very architects of their own and the markets current problems, overseers like the Fed undermine a little bit more of that confidence.
Another worry? How many well-capitalized institutions remain at the ready to take over those firms that may encounter turbulence in the future? Banks just do not have the capital that is needed to rescue troubled firms.
That will leave the taxpayer, alas. As usual.
And this excerpt doesn’t even address the consequences of foreign investors losing confidence in our capital markets and our government’s ability to keep things together.
Hold on; we’re in for a very rough ride.
*
“The size and terms of the credit line were not disclosed. JPMorgan will borrow the money from the Fed and lend it to Bear Stearns, and the Fed will ultimately bear the risk of the loan.” [quoted from an earlier NYTimes article, “Run on Big Wall St. Bank Spurs Rescue Backed by U.S.”]
[image from Hasbro]
hooker just a cover; Bush and bankers crushed Spitzer
farm foreclosure sale during the Great Depression
My obsession* with this story welcomes further ratiocination: Greg Palast makes some connections which Wall Street, the White House and their joint instrument, a discretionary Justice Department, would prefer to to keep hidden from the rest of us. See the argument in his piece titled “Eliots Mess: The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked”
*
broadcast in two earlier posts, beginning about one week ago, here and here
[uncredited {Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange?} image from annette on picasaweb]
a beautiful woman
Stanley Ann Dunhams 1960 high school graduation picture
Don’t miss this beautiful article about a very beautiful woman. I cried from beginning to end.
She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoros life.
The NYTimes writer is Janny Scott.
[image from KansasPrairie]
Spitzer resigns; everyone else stays
“New York Gov. Spitzer resigns but more woes likely” reads the Reuters headline this morning.
I’m so glad we were able to run him out of office (and within the space of only a few days!) because we heard he had paid for s_x. Apparently nothing else would have worked in these chaste United States of America.
There’s also that interesting subtext that his administration was a danger to so many very-big-money interests, but maybe I should stick with the observation that he wasn’t eliminated because he was guilty of the kind of crimes of which Bush and Cheney are guilty. I’m thinking of, say, the torture of prisoners we hold in concentration camps here and around the world; the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the Middle East and elsewhere; the bankrupting of the economy of the world’s richest nation; the discarding of an ancient Constitution he had sworn to uphold; the defiling, most likely permanently, of this Republic’s reputation (the fundamental and most powerful instrument of a people’s influence for good); and cynically pulling the people of the most powerful and secure state on earth into an endless war for which there is no explanation other than the stupidity of the man we call “Mr. President”, the personal gain of his gruesome Vice President, but above all the obscene enrichment of their handlers, the corporations which are the only objects of their allegiance.
But the list of government officers guilty of real crimes continues beyond the names of these two rogue CEO’s; it includes every member of Congress, the entire Supreme Court and anyone else who has remained complicit or just plain silent in their crimes. But in the end, although we are being poorly-served by a badly-compromised, not-so-free press, and we may argue that it’s really a matter of degree, none of us ordinary mortals (remember “with the consent of the governed”?) can escape responsibility so long as our “leaders” and their paymasters remain free to continue their dirty work.
[image from LeggNet]
Norbert Witzgall at Venetia Kapernekas
Norbert Witzgall Sophie Matt 2007 oil on canvas 57.5″ x 63″
Norbert Witzgall Icy 2008 oil on board, paillettes 9.5″ x 11.75″
Norbert Witzgall Isi Baisia 2008 oil on board, dirt 12.5″ x 15″
Venetia Kapernekas is looking more and more interesting these days. The current show, “wir“, is devoted to some hauntingly-beautiful paintings by Norbert Witzgall.
There doesn’t seem to be any easy way to describe their inspiration, but we get some clues in the large canvas (all of the other, smaller works are on board). In “Sophie Matt” the odd planes of a room which is (almost) dominated by a portrait of the artist Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton are hung with Picabia-inspired paintings. The inclusion of a dwarfish smaller figure, the instinctively-whimsical and seriously-inventive young artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, suggests either a renaissance devotional painting or the hermetic environment of the seventeenth-century Spanish court. Most of these odd and somewhat faded portraits of family members, friends, the famous and the forgotten, include a medium in addition to paint. Sequins, dirt, stars or pressed flowers, remove them even further from the convention which developed the genre over the centuries.
The gallery furnishes a useful list which documents the artist’s image sources. “Icy” is a headshot of River Phoenix, “Isi Baisia” is a fashion photograph by George Platt Lynes of someone named Whitney.