Drill Hall floor of the Armory
Drill Hall vault of the Armory
We were at the press preview for the Whitney Biennial this afternoon. This year the venue has been expanded to include the Seventh Regiment Armory, in whose extravagant nineteenth-century precincts many of the exhibition’s performance art elements (including some interactive experiences scheduled throughout the next month) have been assigned high-ceilinged rooms and closets.
But I as I wrote last week I always have a lot of trouble resisting the aesthetic and historical seductions of architecture like this even when there’s exciting contemporary art to be seen. So here I am writing a post preceding my observations of this year’s Biennial with a couple images of the Armory which shelters some of the installations, and to show that I’m not indifferent to the charms of Marcel Breuer’s own hall, I’m including a view of his lobby ceiling, one of my favorite details in the Whitney itself.
lobby ceiling of the Whitney
Category: Culture
do we owe it all to Bush?
“Certainly the prestige of the office of president must be seriously compromised if a woman has a serious shot at it.”
I would add “or a black man” to that conditional clause, but the subject of the article from which this quote was pulled is specifically that of the place of women in American society. The sentence is inserted as a parenthetical reality check inside the penultimate paragraph of Leslie Camhi’s Village Voice review of “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at PS 1. She alludes to the current state of our national political life with this reminder of both how far we have come and how close we still remain to the more benighted environment of the 60’s and 70’s which inspired the feminist revolution:
Just how far we’ve traveled since those times might be measured by the fact that the female contender for the Democratic presidential nomination is perceived as the establishment candidate. (Certainly the prestige of the office of president must be seriously compromised if a woman has a serious shot at it.) But some things almost never change: It’s nearly impossible, for example, to imagine this show being staged across the river, at P.S. 1’s Manhattan affiliate, the Museum of Modern Art.
Instead, the artists of “Wack!” remain in the schoolhouse. But their contemporaries might well take a lesson from them.
[Presidential chart image by Automatic Preference whitosphere blog via Francis L. Holland]
“The Cult of Personality” at Carriage Trade
portrait of Kurt Cobain, by an anonymous artist, from a collection of paintings on velvet
Yasser Aggour‘s photographs of portraits commissioned of Cairo sign painters
detail of a section of Jennifer Dalton‘s “What Does an Artist Look Like?” captured from three years of The New Yorker
Paul McCarthy‘s drawing referencing Michael Jackson and Bubbles through Jeff Koons
Portraiture isn’t what it used to be; or is it? Maybe it’s just the times; the times, they just aren’t what they used to be either.
SoHo’s Carriage Trade gallery opened its exhibition, “The Cult of Personality, Portraits and Mass Culture”, this past Thursday. An auspicious inaugural show, it uses portraiture as a means to examine the way in which our myths are assembled and deconstructed, specifically marking the similarity between the the myths which create, sustain and dim celebrities (and the products they sell) and those which generate, underpin and erode governments (and the policies they pursue).
An excerpt from the press release elaborates:
The process of crafting present-day myths to be served up for the purpose of turning the news into entertainment requires some belief in charismatic personalities. While the concept of a cult of personality is most often associated with autocratic leaders who use mass media to develop and sustain their popularity in an undemocratic state, the sphere of influence enjoyed by the media within a democratic system, and recent cases of its manipulation by government, suggest that this concept is ready for an expanded definition.
In adopting the genre of portraiture, a form associated with traditional identity construction which focuses on the relative psychological interest of the subject, The Cult of Personality, Portraits and Mass Culture attempts to locate the manner in which the development of an identity for mass consumption adopts the traditional viewer/subject relationship, often with the expectation that viewer will lose themselves in the protectiveness or superiority of the subject while finding momentary fulfillment in a distraction from what they are meant to feel that they lack.
. . . .
In the run up to an election which is mercifully overshadowing our current leaders long, slow decline in popularity, the mechanisms through which personality can trump reason in the public sphere might be worth revisiting, if only as a reminder of the very real consequences of allowing fictions to displace facts.
I was totally smitten with the one piece I couldn’t find on the gallery list. It’s the black and white painting on velvet to the left just before you reach the desk. I had no idea who had created it (and as it turns out, nobody knows, including artist and gallery director Peter Scott), but maybe I was one of the few people in the room who had no idea whose portrait it was. Okay, Scott told me it represents Kurt Cobain, but how was I to know Cobain was beautiful even as a child? The work itself may or may not really be a part of the show. Although it’s signed “Felix”, it’s by an artist whose name is apparently unknown even to its owner, WFMU’s Station Manager Ken Freedman. It was purchased in Tijuana, from the painter.
Popular commercial art, whether produced on commissioned or speculation, is a concept and a subject worthy of a serious book itself, and my apologies to the responsible parties if I’m overlooking the effort(s) of anybody who’s already gone there.
Scott has put on a wonderful show. There are a relatively modest number of works involved, but this provocative and compelling curatorial project enjoys the additional interest which their broad diversity of medium, sophistication and approach provides.
The artists in the show whose work is not shown in the images above are Ligarno/Reese, Karen Yama, Vitaly Komar, Sherrie Levine, Muntadas and Reese, Julia Wachtel and Bill Owens.
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen at Renwick Gallery
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen’s re-enactment of “Licked Room” 2000 by Ene-Liis Semper
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen’s re-enactment of “The Artist’s Kiss [Le Baiser De L’artiste]” (1977) by Orlan
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen’s re-enactment of “Blood Signs & Body Tracks” (1974) by Ana Mendieta
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen’s re-enactment of “Vaginal Painting” (1965) by Shigeko Kubota
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen’s re-enactment of “Anthropometries of the Blue Period” (1960) by Yves Klein
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen’s re-enactment of “Loving Care” (1992-1996) by Janine Antoni
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen performed fourteen historical “re-enactments” (actually, thirteen plus the artist’s own contemporary “The Artists’s Song”) at Renwick Gallery Thursday night, but for those of us fortunate enough to crowd into this west SoHo space for “A Void“, almost all of whom must have missed the legendary originals, the performances may have felt pretty much like the enactments, created over the half century beginning in 1958, felt to earlier audiences – or not. In any case, now they have become acts for our own age, if only because this time we were watching fourteen of them follow immediately upon each other within the space of a single evening.
I loved it, enough to hardly notice that I was standing mostly in one place at an opening for almost three hours (with a quick break early on for another gallery’s reception, a big treat itself, but one which did not offer this kind of live, one-off theater).
Much of what I’ve seen of Rasmussen’s creative output references art, artists and the art world, but the combination of seriousness and wit in her provocative performances is distinctly her own.
Everyone’s experience of the evening must have been pretty personal, but the outline of the artist’s concept for this, her first solo show in the U.S., is covered very well in this excerpt from the press release:
“A Void” investigates the identity of an artist and questions the authenticity of the art work and the history of art. Performance art has been very radical in its transgressions and has expanded the categories of art. The authenticity of performance art is related to the here-and-now experience. When the performance is over, it can only be experienced through documentation far from the original experience. Even if it is performed again, it will be very different from the original experience, dependent on the artist, the audience, time and context.
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen re-enacts other artists’ performances in her own way. The point of departure is identical, but the experience will be completely different. The historical re-enactments will follow each other without precedent announcement as one long performance. They will be documented and shown on video after the opening. Traces of the performances will also be present as drawings and photographs.
The remaining sections not represented in the images I include here were inspired by Piero Manzoni, Rirkrit Tiravinija, Claude Wampler, William Wegman, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik. Did I say the performances were terrific? Also, I can’t wait to go back to see what the gallery, which started out at 6pm as an empty white box, “a void”, will look like during the remainder of the exhibition, once the water and other debris have been cleared away. There will be the performance documentation, of course, but I’m guessing that at least some of the canvases created Thursday night might play a role as well.
For more, including a video capture of one of the re-enactments, see Bloggy.
The Seventh Regiment Armory’s “American Aesthetic”
Louis C. Tiffany window in the Library of the Armory
I’ve been walking through the front doors of the Administration Building of the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue for decades, but until this past Monday I had never had a glimpse of that late-nineteenth-century monument’s most elaborate rooms, in the wing north of the monumental entrance hall. They are just about as vigorous an expression of the American Aesthetic Movement to be found anywhere, but they have been pretty much hidden from the public, their beauties increasingly neglected for the lack of funds to maintain them. Today they are being restored to their original glory by the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy.
I was taken by surprise that we were permitted access that during The Art Show of the ADAA, and Barry and I were also in something of a hurry that afternoon, so I didn’t have a chance to get more than a few images before having to rush out. Fortunately it was a beautiful sunny day, so the Tiffany windows and much of the rooms’ other, largely-undisturbed, ornament probably looked their best – at least for now.
When the restoration is completed these rooms will look even richer, as much of the original color and detail had been watered down or replaced by alterations over the years. For instance, the panels to the left of the window in the picture below are now covered with a dull velvet fabric, but were originally painted with a blue field behind a stenciled silver and copper chain mail [it was an armory, after all] pattern.
detail of the musicians’ gallery in the Veterans Room
Guggenheim finds Incredible Shrinking Museum (ISM)
Filip Noterdaeme ISM (The Incredible Shrinking Museum) 2004-2006 model (glycerin soap) [view of installation at HoMu]
When I wrote about Filip Noterdaeme’s Homeless Museum (HoMu) just about a year ago, I included the picture above and copied the artist’s own description of a project, The Incredible Shrinking Museum (ISE), which he had begun some time earlier. It was one of my best memories of the HoMu tour:
“ISM (The Incredible Shrinking Museum)” is a project for an interactive museum consisting of a sixteen-foot cube of glycerin soap. The cube is subject to constant change through exposure to the elements. In addition, visitors will be invited to exploit the structure like a mine until is it is used up, the goal being to reach out to a new audience and challenge visitors to think about their role as active participants in the shaping and destruction of culture through direct participation in the realization and, ultimately, the deconstruction of a museum.
Yesterday I heard that a model of the ISE had been installed inside the Guggenheim Museum as part of an exhibition by Cai Guo-Qiang, “Everything is Museum“. In spite of my huge delight in Noterdaeme’s museum-critique concept, I thought his announcement was merely another of his excellent projects; the email seemed especially suspect because the setting was the Guggenheim, a museum criticized by many in the art world for its franchising history and its unsubtle relationships with corporations and commodities. But as his subject line, read, “You Can’t Make This Up”: When I replied asking him for clarification, I found out the news was both good and true.
Oh, by the way, yesterday the Guggenheim announced the resignation of its director, Thomas Krens. This news is also good and true.
Art Fag City has more, including an image of a different model, one representing the ISE already under deconstruction.
selling off the High Line to developers – no, really!
fourteen floors, most of them condos, to be built on top of our park
I admit that I’ve known about this building for some time. I’ve been quietly fuming about it (something I don’t do often – the quietly part, that is) for perhaps a year; it’s just that getting an email from the developers boasting essentially about how clever they are to have arranged this public scam put me over the top.
This isn’t the first instance in which the city has sold a part of the High Line to developers, and it may not be the worst, but it’s just about the most egregious.
Has New York been able to reverse nature’s own law, that plants need sun, even in parks? And, more importantly, are we going to have parks in this city or are we just going to have developers’ opportunities?
This text is copied directly from the press release I received today:
Denari’s HL23 will rise fourteen stories from a singularly challenging site: a 40-foot wide footprint located at 515-517 West 33rd Street, just steps from Tenth Avenue and half covered by the High Line, the historic elevated railway bed slated for transformation into one of the nation’s most lyrical urban parks. Overcoming this through-block site’s inherited restrictions while exploiting them with boldness [and the power of money and influence], Denari has conceived a building that will dramatically increase in size as it rises from its slender footing to cantilever gracefully over the rails. Made possible by a Special Authorization, comprising of seven waivers granted by the New York City Department of City Planning [my emphasis] in support of the building’s unique contribution to the cityscape, HL23’s reverse-tapering form [absolutely the reverse of New York’s historical and progressive setback zoning] will make it a local landmark while creating cinematic views and unrivaled intimacy with the High Line for residents inside.
Why not call it the Highline Tunnel? Construction is supposed to begin in a few days.
CORRECTION: I originally described it as a thirteen-story building in this post, but apparently a penthouse will comprise a fourteenth floor.
[image from triplemint]
Marsden Hartley at Babcock in ADAA show
Marsden Hartley Finnish-Yankee Wrestler ca. 1938-1939 oil on board 24″ x 18″
This small painting by Marsden Hartley was one of the reasons I headed up to the Park Avenue Armory on the last day of the ADAA show this past Monday, having been alerted to it by Karen Rosenberg’s article in the NYTimes on Friday.
It was in the Babcock Galleries booth, imprisoned inside an embarassingly-humdrum, molded gold frame. It did absolutely nothing for Hartley’s subject, or his gentle love for the robust New England to which he had returned toward the end of his life.
Joy Garnett at Winkleman
Joy Garnett Night oil on canvas 60″ x 78″
Joy Garnett has four large canvases installed at Winkleman until March 15. You probably already know how I feel about the artist’s work, so I’m just posting an image this time. It’s probably the least representational of the works in the current show, but that doesn’t say anything about my preferences, since I’m crazy about “Molotov” and I think Garnett is terrific at everything she does.
Rodney Graham at MoMA
Rodney Graham Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 2003 installation: 35mm film (color, silent), Cinemeccanica Victoria 8 film projector [large detail of still from film image projected within installation]
[large detail of installation]
Maybe it’s partly my aspirations as both writer and photographer, since this extremely elegant work intersects both of those arts, but I was fascinated by this Rodney Graham piece when I wandered right into it the other day. It’s part of the current contemporary galleries show at the Museum of Modern Art, “Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now“.
There was also the impact of the profound, endless “silence” produced by that huge projector’s rapid click, clack, click, clack inside a darkened room.
The gallery label included this text:
This film depicts a 1930s German typewriter made by Rheinmetall that Graham found in a junk shop. “It was just this incredibly beautifully made, solidly designed typewriter. Not one key had ever been pressed on it,” he has said. His filmed homage is projected with a 1961 Victoria 8 projector issued by the Italian company Cinemeccanica, a mechanical wonder that Graham has described as “very beautiful, kind of overly powerful.” “It’s these two objects confronting one another,” the artist has said of the installation. “Two obsolete technologies facing off.”