Culture – Page 102 – James Wagner

Rob Fischer at Cohan and Leslie

Rob Fisher installation view of Summery (Goodyear Ecology) in foreground, Unity Road No. 1-5 on the wall, both works in detail

Cohan and Leslie has another winner with Rob Fischer’s current show [site not updated] of sculptures, painted photographs and paintings. Once engaged, it’s hard to walk away from this space, the images and the entire environment are that compelling.
The very healthy-looking grasses shown in both images included here are a part of a stunning piece which, in the words of the press release, “makes ‘the outside’ suddenly containable.” It includes

. . . a tire track cut across Fischer’s yard accidently which has been excavated whole and installed in a metal tray.
. . .
Fisher’s project [that is, the entire show] addresses and explores the tension between transience and memory and the specifics of site.
. . .
The photographs on view, painted C-prints shot by the artist from his car while driving through his native Minnesota, are images of abandoned trailers on fire from various viewpoints. This creates a cinematic yet disorienting effect when viewed from one to the other. The trailer, an American icon of a culture that is historically characterized by the desire to migrate and discover is seen in an indefinable state – partly present, partly destroyed.

Rob Fischer Summery (Goodyear Ecology) 2004-05 tire track excavated from cultivated swamp, mixed media 32″ x 71″ x 30″

As I child I delighted in constructing new or re-imagining found miniature environments, so Summery totally charmed me on more than one level. I wanted to bring this one home. Barry suggested we could commission Eric Doeringer to do a “bootleg” work in a more convenient, apartment size. Hmmmm.
I kept expecting to see a tiny frog or guppy show up in the track, and the sight and gentle sound of water trickling from the pipe, if normally unnecessary to represent an ordinary puddle, was a delightful recognition of the requirements of the unnatural venue.
There is still much more, including a small warren of rooms constructed so that their interiors are less than two feet wide, each one separate from the other yet connected by a maze of water pipes. These spaces suggest domesticity, but with a built-in architecture of unease. New Yorkers will get it right away.

art and politics at The Gates

the “politicization” of the gates!

Many thanks to Noah Lyon for giving me the opportunity of pulling together my last two posts about art and politics (and maybe a good many more of these blogs, going back almost three years) with an email to which these photos were attached. The elegant sticker in the pictures is Noah’s art, and my caption is taken straight from his message. Of course none of us knows much about the specifics of this particular “politicization” operation.
Incidently, for those who might be disturbed by the negativity of some of their critics, remember that we’re still all part of their art, according to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, even when we quibble about or shout at The Gates.* It’s such a burden.

“The work is not only the fabric, the steel poles, and the fence. The art project is right now, here. Everybody here is part of the work. If they want it, if they dont want it, either way they are a part of the work� I believe very strongly that twentieth century art is not a single, individualistic experience.” – Christo

[the images from Michael Carreira via Noah Lyon]

whose gates?

paradise, an imaginary park where “Fair Use” really is doctrine

Hide those cameras and sketchpads if you’re planning on using them in Central Park this month, and even if you’re not going, think of an alternative phrase to describe those 7500 orange-ish shower curtains. Do Christo and Jeanne-Claude own Central Park? Their publisher at least seems to think so, according to a post in Infoshop News by street artist and dedicated artists’ rights gadfly Robert Laderman.

Christo’s publisher [Kunst-Verlag Schumacher/Edition Fils] claims a vast new degree of copyright and trademark protection. They claim they will prosecute anyone who sells their own original photos of The Gates; who makes and sells a drawing of The Gates or who even uses the words, The Gates, without their permission. They claim to have copyrighted the words, The Gates. They also claim to have an agreement with the media that media sources may only use news photos of the gates for the period the installation is up. That after that the media will only be allowed to use “official” photos of The Gates.
They also claim that all of Central Park is now “private property.” Talk about privatization! Be sure to thank Christo, Bloomscrooge and the CPC [Central Park Conservancy, the private group which now controls New York’s parks, or at least the areas enjoyed by communities of money – ed.].

Don’t forget the Maybach.

[image of Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise” from Artchive; story tip from Robert Boyd]

Jack Shainman

Leon Golub Two Heads (II) 1986 oil on canvas 21″ x 68″

It’s a terrific show, and don’t let thoughts like that expressed in the remark of the guy we passed on our way across 20th Street deter you. We heard him tell his companion, “If there’s one thing I don’t like it’s the politicization of art.”
Full disclosure: If you’ve been reading these pages for even a little while you already know that I have no problem with the “politicization” of art – any more than I have a problem with art which addresses any other subject. Man is both the creator and the subject of all art, and the root of the word, “politics” is the Greek word for “people.”
The Jack Shainman show was organized by Claude Simard and it will be up until March 12. The title is a mouthful to be sure: “The Whole World is Rotten: Free Radicals and the Gold Coast Slave Castles of Paa Joe,” and the content may be a headful, but there’s beauty and power in the images of the mid-twentieth-century activist reponse to centuries of racism, and the continuing engagement of contemporary artists, which are included in this exhibition.
And exhibition it is, at least so it is in the larger room, where the works are displayed almost as they might be in a museum of natural history. We were at the opening with our friend Karen who liked the work but complained that the show just wasn’t messy enough. Then she immediately added that her complaint “might just be the Group Material in me.” But I thought immediately when she said it that she was right about the room. The works were generally excellent, even at first sight (they will further reward a return), and the crowd was dynamic, but the walls were holding back.
Then we found the small gallery to the side, which was hung just right. There were posters, photographs and newspaper clippings hung imaginatively in something vaguely like salon style, and in the center one of Paa Joe’s large coffin replicas (there are two in this show) of slave castles from the Ghanian coast. Dynamite.
I’ve finally accepted the fact that I really do enjoy going to (some) openings, and the major lure, aside from the ties of friendship, must the be the kind of energy created by the crowd at the reception for this show.

Cave Nick.jpg
Nick Cave The Day after Yesterday 2005 human hair on found beaded and sequined garment fabric 43″ x 111″ x 1″ detail

Chris Tanner

Chris Tanner Marcella 2005 mixed media on canvas 48″ x 110″ detail

Although perhaps not quite so excited as he himself should be with his latest success, we’re still really delighted with Chris Tanner’s spectacular show, “Ravaged by Romance,” at Pavel Zoubok, an uptown gallery which recently moved to West 23rd Street.
Barry and I have been enthusiastic about Tanner’s work (the paintings, the performances and Chris himself) for some time, but we’ve never seen so much of it at once, outside the walls of his dazzling apartment (yup, you already knew it’s in the middle of the East Village).
It may be hard to believe, but what you see in this show are actually some of his more low-key creations. We have one brilliant, large-ish piece ourselves (always wishing we could have more) and, given a chance, it would probably upstage this show on its own. It should also upstage our entire apartment, but we haven’t yet given it a chance. It still hasn’t been framed, partly because it really needs something more like a box with a plexi cover: The problem isn’t the paillettes; it’s those fabulous feathers.
Okay, now I’ve talked myself into uncovering it again and just letting the magic breathe.
For more images, see the artist’s page on the Pavel Zoubok site.

Tannerflowersmother .jpg
Chris Tanner Flowers for my Mother 2004 mixed media on wallpaper 17.75″ x 17.75″

[second image from Pavel Zoubek]

“on the subject of WAR”

Nina Berman Cpl. Tyson Johnson III, 22, a mechanic with Military Intelligence

The caption next to the photograph of Corporal Tyson reads:

Cpl. Tyson Johnson

22 years old, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, was
wounded September 20, 2003 in a mortar attack on
Abu Graib Prison. He suffered masssive internal
injuries and is 100 percent disabled.
Photographed May 6, 2004 at his home in Pritchard, Alabama.

“Most of my friends they were losing it out there.
They would do anything to get out of there, do anything.
I had one of my guys, he used to tell me, ‘My wife just
had my son. I can’t wait to get home and see him.” And
you know, he died out there. He sure did, and I have to
think about that everyday.
“I got a bonus in the National Guards for joining the
Army. Now I’ve got to pay the bonus back and its
$2999. The Guard wants it back. It’s on my credit
that I owe them that. I’m burning on the inside.
I’m burning.”

We went to the opening last night mostly because a friend was part of Smack Mellon‘s latest group show (the site’s not updated as I’m writing this, so check ArtCal for details), so it was supposed to be largely a social thing. Sure we knew the title of the show, “on the subject of WAR,” ahead of time, but I can speak for both of us when I say that we were still caught a bit off guard by the power of the imagery. We didn’t leave with any springs in our steps.
Susan Sontag, in whose memory the show is dedicated, would have been pretty pleased: The curator, Smack Mellon-ite and visual artist Kathleen Gilrain, wants to show how other artists continue to deal with the dilemma of representing in images the atrocities and absurdities of war.

Eve Sussman Solace 2001 video still

Twelve of the horrible, and infuriating, photographs and texts from Nina Berman’s project, Purple Hearts, Back from Iraq, shared a room with Eve Sussman‘s very beautiful and melancholy video, Solace, from which the strains of Purcell’s “Music for a While” were heard repeated over and over again, threatening to destroy any composure remaining to the viewer. The video is worked from homey Brooklyn footage assembled by Sussman on September 11 and the days following.

Mike Asente Aerial and Ground Explosions 2004-2005 mechanical embroidery, dimensions variable (detail of installation which included five pieces)

Mike Asente‘s delicate white needlepoint “canvases” explode near the entrance of the huge DUMBO space, which itself looks much like a survivor of urban war.
Barry and I have two of Asente’s pieces, and we like them both a lot. One is a large soft sculpture, Baby Disney Asshole, and the other is a tiny framed embroidery suggesting a distant galaxy, which somehow, and quite oddly, links the earlier asshole with the current work with explosions.
There’s much, much more in the exhibiton on Water Street, including a room of early 40’s photographs from the “good” war by anonymous photographers (from the collection of Edward C. Graves), but crowds and the lateness of the hour made it difficult for us to see all of the work properly last night.
The other participating artists are Bobby Neel Adams, Barnstormers, Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson, Ron Haviv, Susan Meiselas, Patricia Thornley, Sarah Trigg. While photography and video dominate, a number of other media are represented in this powerful show.
We should really go back ourselves, but it won’t be easy. No one walks out whistling.

[image at the very top from Purple Hearts; Sussman video still from artnet]

The Gates

actually, this was the only gate we found whose curtain was wrapped about its architrave

I just didn’t get it. Barry and I went to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s project for Central Park, The Gates, this afternoon, well, first because it was there and also because we expected there would be a great deal of excitement on the first day of its display. We also thought we’d run into a lot of friends.
It was there, and apparently it was opened this morning in the minutes around 8:30 as scheduled. But I think I was surprised that I didn’t find it at least a little exciting, rather only very mildly diverting. Nor did it seem to inspire the kind of holiday cheer I had expected within the huge crowds which had turned out to see it, crowds found walking through and about [thousands?] of saffron-colored “gates” which lined almost every pedestrian path in the park (the Rambles and other “wild” areas were left alone). And there were no friends in sight, as if they all knew better.
The Reichstag thing I liked a lot, even if I didn’t get to see it.
Anyway, I guess $20 million just doesn’t buy what it used to.
Perhaps striking the right note for the day, we overheard one young woman, as we passed her and her friend on our way up to Belvedere castle, talking about the miles of saffron nylon on display: “Yeah, I’d make a skirt out of the stuff.”

at the “Command Center,” while our small crowd gathered on the other side of the vehicle, and as their intense conversation with a bunch of male authority figures in suits wound down, the pair kept pointing to the car; did they want to get rid of it or keep it?

Halfway through our trek today we were passing the Loeb Boat House and the parking lot across the path from its door when I spotted a very large limousine being escorted into the lot. I’m a car fanatic, so identifying a $350,000 long-wheelbase Maybach 62 in a blessedly-car-free (temporarily) Central Park was no problem. We stood around until we could spot the back-seat occupants and, not surprisingly, they turned out to be Christo and Jeanne-Claude. I have to assume that their use of the car was a condition of a patron’s generosity to the project.
Oh yes, a final touch of another local color: Barry spotted a Duane Reade bag inside on the floor in the rear.

Claudia Weber and Jennifer Karady

Claudia Weber The Return 2005 mixed media, dimensions variable, installation view

Claudia Weber Untitled 2005 mixed media, dimensions variable, large detail of installation view

Claudia Weber is represented by one photograph and two sculptural installations at Momenta Art this month. I like them all a lot. The installations both excite and scare me for their fugaciousness [I worked on that noun a bit]. For more, see bloggy and go to the gallery in Williamsburg before March 7.

Jennifer Karady Pageant Talent: Katrina Johnson, Miss Nimrod 2003, Nimrod, MN 2004 Chromogenic color print on Fujiflex, mounted on Plexiglas 30″ x 30″ installation view

In the second gallery space Jennifer Karady shows photographs which engage, and disturb, with their sensitive examinations of some very special [dependent but apparently quite fulfilling] relationships between people and the animals closest to them.
While looking around unsuccessfully for larger images from the show, on a day on which the people at Momenta are not around to help with a jpeg, I discovered that Karady has herself collaborated with a friend from a neigboring species, Tillamook Cheddar, a diminutive and very charming abstract expressionist with a solid c.v. of her own.

on this museum and its stash

Howard Hodgkin In Bed in Venice oil on wood in artist’s frame 38.5″ x 49″
[not promised]

Susan Rothenberg Dogs killing Rabbit oil on canvas 87″ x 141″
[promised]

Anselm Kiefer dem unbekannten Maler (To the Unknown Painter) watercolor & graphite on paper, three sheets 25″ x 52.25″
[promised]

I went to the Museum of Modern Art yesterday for a preview of the temporary exhibition of works from the UBS/PaineWebber/Donald Marron collection. It was only my second visit to the museum’s new quarters; the first was also under the circumstances of a preview, that of the new building itself, but in the end I hadn’t made it to the two floors which housed the core of the prmanent collection before having to leave to make way for a reception being laid for serious patrons.
I think I wasn’t expecting any epiphany this time, and I found none, but I did find at least some of the same excitement which a visit had always promised before, and rewarded, during the years when the artists represented in this collection were first being adopted by the Modern.
It only took a few minutes in the first of the rooms partitioning the enormous spaces of the top floor temporary-exhibition galleries before I had to stop, step back and just wonder at the quality of the art which had just taken my breath away.
There was a Rauschenberg, two Oldenburgs (one a delightful proposal for replacing the Nelson Monument in busy trafalgar Square with an enormous gearshift), one each for Richter, Lichtenstein (a perfectly-simple round bevelled mirror) and Ruscha, two Johns, a Warhol and a large Artschwager which should make almost anyone a worshipper – of Artschwager. Oh, and behind the first partition, the most magnificent Howard Hodgkin I had ever seen. (and then the artist went one step further and titled it “In Bed in Venice” – forever guaranteeing its beauty as far as I’m concerned)
Where had these paintings and drawings been all my life? (well, at least much of my life) Everything was new to me. Where will they be next year? Some of these works are promised corporate gifts to MoMA, but not all.
In my circumstances at least, their individual quality (I leave the discussion of the collection as a whole, how it got to 53rd Street and the fundamental subject of corporate art to Roberta Smith) was the perfect introduction to my descent downstairs to the fifth and fourth floors not yet visited. By this time however the reality of the museum’s scheduled closing time forced me to do something like a run-through. It was still just enough to remind me how much had been missed during the five years the museum had been closed.
I still think the building is a disappointment for anyone who has survived into the 21st century, but I’ll admit I was certainly able to enjoy the stash from the last century hanging on its walls. Some of the views were pretty neat too (see the images below).
Even a museum of modern art is still a museum, a place where we go to see things that have already been done, or things that are already known, but maybe that’s okay. If we’re really interested, we’ll always head for the smaller, sometimes less clean and less well-lighted spaces (see most of this blog’s other posts) to see the things that are happening now, the things that aren’t really known yet.

the less grand staircase

Cisitalia in the garden

layers of art

[the three images at the top from UBS]

the Swiss Cory Arcangel – “live”

Cory’s PowerPoint presentation begins: “this is awesome”

Cory Arcangel hosted a lecture cum performance cum master class at the Swiss Institute this evening. You really had to be there to understand what it looked and sounded like, but while seated on the aisle in the eighth row, in between the laughs and the breaths swept away by his happy genius, I managed to capture a few visual stills and a few excerpts from some deathless remarks.
You’ll soon be able to find the sounds, and much more, on his site (at the moment down for a rebuilding).

the pretty one

The evening was essentially an expansion of and a commentary on the “stuff” (he said he’s been asked to stop calling it “crap”) Cory has currently installed at Team and Deitch. He began with an explanation of how he created his mega jam, “the coolest” iPod CD (soon to be available free everywhere) and then he played the composed piece straight through.
He devoted a good deal of time to a discussion of his special take on the Simon and Garfunkel phenomenon 1967-1984 (see his video, “Sans Simon” at Team), starting with the question, “How hot is Garfunkel?”

Cory’s DVD projection/human performance piece

“Simon sucks,” reads one of his PowerPoints, so Cory thought he should try to block out the offending half of the duo – for visual aesthetic reasons (he allowed that Simon had all the musical talent).

Cory narrating what he called a “post-MoMA” scene from his “Super Mario Movie”

Arcangel, who had graduated from Oberlin not strictly with a degree in the visual arts (no one’s complaining), but one in Technology in Music and the Related Arts, pretended to explain some of the work shown at Team Gallery with the claim that while working on the complexities of his “Super Mario Movie” he had decided he absolutely had to find simpler art forms. I think his words were something like, “I’m trying to figure out the least amount of work required to make a viable work of art. Is that formalism?” Ouch.
The formal part of the evening ended with Cory performing the role of director delivering a live narration over his own creation, that same wonderful wall-projected, altered Nintendo cartridge movie created by himself and the collaborative Paper Rad and now installed at Deitch. Before starting, he told the enthusiastic audience that he felt like the guy who sits in the easy chair to introduce public television’s “Masterpiece Theatre.” Returning to character, Cory quickly added, “No, just kidding.”