6 March 2009
At The Armory Show
At first you wonder: is it as crowded? Is the audience as plentiful as in previous years? Then you consider – based upon the hour and flow of people in and out – yes, it is more or less. (Perhaps less, but not significantly so. Now whether the crowd holds as many willing buyers or collectors is another matter entirely.) What is immediately apparent is a certain deliberative air; not exactly focus – there’s far too much to distract or divert even the most focused eye for that. It’s a ruminative, thoughtful crowd. Collectors or not, people seem a bit more directly engaged with the art. The frenzy is gone – and that is all good. People are here to look, think, process the work, occasionally lubricated by a glass of champagne. The crowd could almost be said to be – and this is almost inconceivable in New York -- moving slowly.
Some of the galleries seem to underscore this newly judicious, deliberative attitude – e.g., a somewhat ironically placed white fluorescent piece by Joseph Kosuth from 1966 on the exterior wall of the Sean Kelly space, telegraphing this subdued mood: “Subject Described, Object Defined.” Others address the panic looming just outside (or presumably in reluctant collectors’ pocketbooks) more directly. The first thing you saw in the Galleria Massimo de Carlo (Milan) space was what looked like a broken marble cornerstone chiseled with the following dedication: “EVERYONE IS BROKE.” It’s by Elmgreen & Dragset, a pair of Irish and Swedish artists working out of London and Berlin, respectively. At Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris), the message was delivered by turns humorously, ironically, and perhaps a little desperately, too. Daniel Arsham showed a painting, predominantly in steel and charcoal grays – a bird’s-eye view of what resembled the shells of unfinished high-rise buildings or apartment blocks, protruding roofs of which spelled out the word, “W-A-N-T.” As you were thinking, ‘does it get any more desperate?’ you’d catch an eyeful of a neon piece by Paola Pivi – an Italian artist working in (get this) Anchorage, Alaska. (That would induce a certain irony and desperation. ) “Stop the complaint, we just bought it.” An artist by the name of Kolkoz had a slightly drier take on the theme with pieces that consisted of nothing but giltwood frames and mouldings – a more or less traditional giltwood frame (or frames) closing in on – more frames and finally simply filled with the frame mouldings. Michael Sailstorfer’s piece was almost a nullification of the spirit of Joseph Kosuth’s 1966 piece – a black polyurethane piece that looked like nothing so much as a set of black fluorescent tubes. I suddenly feel back in Berlin – that is to say, Lou Reed’s Berlin. “It’s so cold in Alaska.”
(MORE)
Saturday, March 7, 2009
The Pornography of Desperation
5 March 2009
My first toe in the snow turned out to be not the Armory Show, but a run through Scope – it was nearly impossible to get to the Piers this particular evening – and frankly I was tempted to stop right at the newly renovated Alice Tully Hall, whose glass-faced façade disclosed a very warm and inviting looking bar and café. I consoled myself that I could always stop in afterwards. Inside (as opposed to outside) the pavilions, Scope has a slightly more manicured look this year – though the twilight may have enhanced the effect. ada (Richmond, Virginia) Gallery’s booth this year is close enough to the entrances that you could practically fall into it (no – I did not stop for a drink at Alice Tully Hall), and it’s always fun running into John Pollard who does such an amazing job with this gallery. This year, the gallery is celebrating the influence of the convulsive, hysterical films of George Kuchar, who is actually scheduled to present a few of his films at special events the gallery will present this Saturday evening (6-8 p.m.) and Sunday afternoon (12-2 p.m.). Kuchar really invented a kind of pornography of desperation; and, to judge from the business and economic news alone, you’d have to say these films have really found their moment. (Me – I’d just love to see some of these Wall Street money mis-managers cast and forced to act through a George Kuchar film.) John always shows something amazing, something surprising that takes you completely off guard; and I’m sure there’s more here that I should be mentioning; but I was most immediately fascinated by paintings and stop-action animations (from the paintings) he showed by Bruce Wilhelm – whose uncanny, abstracted, naïve style I found completely captivating -- e.g., horses and figures cantering into and out of a conventional landscape obscured by, morphing, or dissolving (more apparent in the animations) into other fragmentary elements, bits of landscape or other figures or color fields. Amazing (and not expensive!) There was much more; but, needless to say, I’ll be going back.
I’m not terribly familiar with dFaulken, a local gallery, but I was intrigued by their mix of artists – from expressive (if not tortured) and figurative, to rigorously cool abstraction, and they were friendly enough to invite me in when everyone was getting kicked out. I’m not sure what to make of an artist like Karim Hamid, whose work suggested a number of impressions or images superimposed upon each other and sunk into abstracted fields that might themselves be fragmentary images or merely background elements. A few were recognizably portraits. One of the portraits featured was of Chuck Close, a compelling one, recognizable though face and figure were all but blacked out. I was not so compelled by Sara Carter’s retro-De Stijl channeled abstraction – blocks and bars of color of varying density and transparency against dark fields – but perhaps it’s in synch with a certain mood of deliberation and determination that seems to be in the air. She’s certainly determined. I have more to say about Mark Gagnon, who showed some very interesting work – but I’ll have to come back to him. (He’s terrifically talented.)
Hey look – I know Costa Rica is incredibly beautiful (I’d love a place there myself) – but you can’t just plunk something down there on the beach or against one of those incredible landscapes and call it art. Can you?? (Or can you?) The Jacob/Karpio Galleria of San Jose, Costa Rica was showing some digital photography by Nefertiti Ingalls (love the name) – not without interest; and certainly an almost classical beauty and poise; and those gorgeous backdrops – but so what? This is not tai chi at the beach, honey. (Ya have to wonder – I came back from L.A. for this?)
There was a good deal of Chinese contemporary art and I have to talk about some stuff at Kuckei & Kuckei (Berlin) – but for now I’m putting it on HOLD. Gee, New York looks great under snow (although it’s already melting).
My first toe in the snow turned out to be not the Armory Show, but a run through Scope – it was nearly impossible to get to the Piers this particular evening – and frankly I was tempted to stop right at the newly renovated Alice Tully Hall, whose glass-faced façade disclosed a very warm and inviting looking bar and café. I consoled myself that I could always stop in afterwards. Inside (as opposed to outside) the pavilions, Scope has a slightly more manicured look this year – though the twilight may have enhanced the effect. ada (Richmond, Virginia) Gallery’s booth this year is close enough to the entrances that you could practically fall into it (no – I did not stop for a drink at Alice Tully Hall), and it’s always fun running into John Pollard who does such an amazing job with this gallery. This year, the gallery is celebrating the influence of the convulsive, hysterical films of George Kuchar, who is actually scheduled to present a few of his films at special events the gallery will present this Saturday evening (6-8 p.m.) and Sunday afternoon (12-2 p.m.). Kuchar really invented a kind of pornography of desperation; and, to judge from the business and economic news alone, you’d have to say these films have really found their moment. (Me – I’d just love to see some of these Wall Street money mis-managers cast and forced to act through a George Kuchar film.) John always shows something amazing, something surprising that takes you completely off guard; and I’m sure there’s more here that I should be mentioning; but I was most immediately fascinated by paintings and stop-action animations (from the paintings) he showed by Bruce Wilhelm – whose uncanny, abstracted, naïve style I found completely captivating -- e.g., horses and figures cantering into and out of a conventional landscape obscured by, morphing, or dissolving (more apparent in the animations) into other fragmentary elements, bits of landscape or other figures or color fields. Amazing (and not expensive!) There was much more; but, needless to say, I’ll be going back.
I’m not terribly familiar with dFaulken, a local gallery, but I was intrigued by their mix of artists – from expressive (if not tortured) and figurative, to rigorously cool abstraction, and they were friendly enough to invite me in when everyone was getting kicked out. I’m not sure what to make of an artist like Karim Hamid, whose work suggested a number of impressions or images superimposed upon each other and sunk into abstracted fields that might themselves be fragmentary images or merely background elements. A few were recognizably portraits. One of the portraits featured was of Chuck Close, a compelling one, recognizable though face and figure were all but blacked out. I was not so compelled by Sara Carter’s retro-De Stijl channeled abstraction – blocks and bars of color of varying density and transparency against dark fields – but perhaps it’s in synch with a certain mood of deliberation and determination that seems to be in the air. She’s certainly determined. I have more to say about Mark Gagnon, who showed some very interesting work – but I’ll have to come back to him. (He’s terrifically talented.)
Hey look – I know Costa Rica is incredibly beautiful (I’d love a place there myself) – but you can’t just plunk something down there on the beach or against one of those incredible landscapes and call it art. Can you?? (Or can you?) The Jacob/Karpio Galleria of San Jose, Costa Rica was showing some digital photography by Nefertiti Ingalls (love the name) – not without interest; and certainly an almost classical beauty and poise; and those gorgeous backdrops – but so what? This is not tai chi at the beach, honey. (Ya have to wonder – I came back from L.A. for this?)
There was a good deal of Chinese contemporary art and I have to talk about some stuff at Kuckei & Kuckei (Berlin) – but for now I’m putting it on HOLD. Gee, New York looks great under snow (although it’s already melting).
Friday, March 6, 2009
Baby, It's Cold Outside
4 March 2009
Delays, delays, delays – ‘so what else is new?’, readers of this blog (jeeeeeezus – are you still with me?? I must send you all something fabulous.) are likely to ask. But you all know how much I hate to miss a phree-view or an opening night; and in this instance (i.e., The Armory Show), I have missed both. Look – I’m not crazy about it either. You brave the traffic, the winter cold (and it is freezing); and miss the opening? The injustice of it.
The worst part of it is leaving my apartment an unmitigated disaster zone (yet apparently still ineligible for federal disaster relief!) when people have to come in to take care of my feline daughters (oh you have no idea how many hours – DAYS – I spent trying to clean up. I’ve barely scratched the surface; though I can say that my couch and coffee table can once again be used as they were originally intended. A virtual Everest of books, catalogues, magazines, legal pads and notebooks had to be relocated to the more traditionally book-friendly loci of my apartment – like, uh, the bookshelves, and bookstands in my bedroom. I probably should have called upon earth movers; but instead I tried to do it myself with predictably mixed results. At least now there is the semblance of a flat (as opposed to craggy and mountainous) surface – the surface of the table. There are still a couple of rather imposing stacks of art books at either end of the table; but now there is actually enough room on it for, say, a couple of drinks, a tray of hors d’oeuvres (or, well, my laptop), an ashtray or two or a lighter, and a pack of cigarettes. Two people could actually have a civilized conversation here … as long as they didn’t try to move to another part of the apartment. That includes the kitchen, which belongs to the cats, my coffee cups, and whatever seems to periodically migrate there from my car, more or less in that order.
What am I talking about? No – the worst part is leaving my feline children – or, more accurately, their complete emotional melt-down prior to my departure. No mater how well you plan, how gradually you time the pre-departure organization (which in my case means cramming most of it into the final hours before the taxicab arrives), no matter how well you disguise the packing, there comes a moment when they just go completely haywire and then shut down altogether. (The critical moment sems to be when one of the larger bags either begins to fill up or gets moved closer to the front door.) There are no magic words to say to make them come around (although calling them to a final breakfast or dinner can have a momentary distracting effect) – except perhaps, “Alright, I’ll stay.” But then what? Even if the party of the first (or second) part secretly wants to stay – against her better interests, forsaking duty or obligations, or worse, opportunity for discovery, for pleasure – it’s always awkward. It devolves into a kind of mental shut-down. It’s cozy – a little too cozy – for a few minutes; and then it’s scary. Okay, kids – we’re back in Kansas – we never bothered going to Oz – land of the bleak and home of the gray.
The Kansas, of course, is simply in your mind – but you don’t escape it just by pulling the comforter over your (and your cats’) head(s). Though sometimes it seems as if you have to tear yourself apart to purge it from your system. You rip yourself to shreds, take incalculable losses – throw so much out – to find one fresh, new thing; one kernel of genius, one point of light in the churning sea of darkness.
It’s that delicate balance between hope and desperation.
The losses: well, you can start totting them up the instant you leave home. Half-way to the airport (running LATE!) and you’re already missing something – forget about its readiness for the caregivers. Then the curbside jostling; the rush to the airline counter, baggage check; the careering to the security screening.
Oh yes – the security screening. Well go ahead – screen and screen again. I have no idea why, but no matter how heavy or light I travel, the screening process is not a two tray, not three tray, but a virtual train of trays down that mysterious conveyer belt, in which something (occasionally something important) gets left behind or lost. I am invariably ‘wanded’ (with some electronic scanning device – believe me, it’s no fairy’s touch), prodded, patted down, occasionally probed, and all but asked to disrobe. What is it? The personal jewelry? The scarves? Okay – I wear a lot; but as for the scarves, it’s winter time, I need a couple of woolies around my neck. As for the jewelry, I admit to a certain amount of jewelry build-up – but I’m sure there’s a little something in my arteries by now, too. This time, the ‘agent’ insisted I ‘fold over’ my pants (what – to check for suspicious lingerie? – I knew I should have worn La Perla!). I started to unzip – I mean, I don’t care at this point; I’m in a frantic hurry and trying to monitor seven trays of stuff, including my shoes and a laptop – and she says, “You don’t have to unzip completely, just let me have a look underneath.” (Gee, have I ever used a line like that?) “Honey, these pants are skin-tight. You can’t get more than a finger down there unless I unzip – though you’re welcome to try.” She had her look and sent me running back to my trays.
It’s now been well over seven years since the Twin Towers fell. Guantanamo is scheduled to close within a year; the State Department seems to be reassuming its traditional imperatives after eight years of deferring to the Defense Department-spear-chuckers; and we have a new acutely intelligent, rational and determined President, with an equally focused and determined administration behind him. Hillary Clinton, George Mitchell and a host of other diplomats are flying over the world trying to administer acute first aid to our damaged foreign relations. You’d think traveling would get just a LITTLE easier – wouldn’t you? Or you might think, given our newly rational leadership, they might work out some new, rational form of passenger profiling – having nothing to do with the net for potential terrorists – but making it somewhat easier for the rest of us to pass through the security gauntlet that makes even domestic travel such a nightmare. By now I’m sure the people at LAX and Burbank know my personal jewelry and repertoire of scarves as well as their own stuff. Sometimes I think the only way to do it now is to prepack some plastic trays with all the personal stuff, and head to the airport in nothing but a trench coat (maybe with a bodystocking underneath) and just get dressed there. Chances are, they’re going to see it all anyway. I hope someone can address this at the federal level. It’s getting ridiculous. And I’m about to miss my goddamned flight.
Oh yeah – and I’m missing my earrings – the only ones I brought.
Well here I go.
[ps – I’ll bring you up to date on some of my L.A. notes from the last month, soon – promise.]
Delays, delays, delays – ‘so what else is new?’, readers of this blog (jeeeeeezus – are you still with me?? I must send you all something fabulous.) are likely to ask. But you all know how much I hate to miss a phree-view or an opening night; and in this instance (i.e., The Armory Show), I have missed both. Look – I’m not crazy about it either. You brave the traffic, the winter cold (and it is freezing); and miss the opening? The injustice of it.
The worst part of it is leaving my apartment an unmitigated disaster zone (yet apparently still ineligible for federal disaster relief!) when people have to come in to take care of my feline daughters (oh you have no idea how many hours – DAYS – I spent trying to clean up. I’ve barely scratched the surface; though I can say that my couch and coffee table can once again be used as they were originally intended. A virtual Everest of books, catalogues, magazines, legal pads and notebooks had to be relocated to the more traditionally book-friendly loci of my apartment – like, uh, the bookshelves, and bookstands in my bedroom. I probably should have called upon earth movers; but instead I tried to do it myself with predictably mixed results. At least now there is the semblance of a flat (as opposed to craggy and mountainous) surface – the surface of the table. There are still a couple of rather imposing stacks of art books at either end of the table; but now there is actually enough room on it for, say, a couple of drinks, a tray of hors d’oeuvres (or, well, my laptop), an ashtray or two or a lighter, and a pack of cigarettes. Two people could actually have a civilized conversation here … as long as they didn’t try to move to another part of the apartment. That includes the kitchen, which belongs to the cats, my coffee cups, and whatever seems to periodically migrate there from my car, more or less in that order.
What am I talking about? No – the worst part is leaving my feline children – or, more accurately, their complete emotional melt-down prior to my departure. No mater how well you plan, how gradually you time the pre-departure organization (which in my case means cramming most of it into the final hours before the taxicab arrives), no matter how well you disguise the packing, there comes a moment when they just go completely haywire and then shut down altogether. (The critical moment sems to be when one of the larger bags either begins to fill up or gets moved closer to the front door.) There are no magic words to say to make them come around (although calling them to a final breakfast or dinner can have a momentary distracting effect) – except perhaps, “Alright, I’ll stay.” But then what? Even if the party of the first (or second) part secretly wants to stay – against her better interests, forsaking duty or obligations, or worse, opportunity for discovery, for pleasure – it’s always awkward. It devolves into a kind of mental shut-down. It’s cozy – a little too cozy – for a few minutes; and then it’s scary. Okay, kids – we’re back in Kansas – we never bothered going to Oz – land of the bleak and home of the gray.
The Kansas, of course, is simply in your mind – but you don’t escape it just by pulling the comforter over your (and your cats’) head(s). Though sometimes it seems as if you have to tear yourself apart to purge it from your system. You rip yourself to shreds, take incalculable losses – throw so much out – to find one fresh, new thing; one kernel of genius, one point of light in the churning sea of darkness.
It’s that delicate balance between hope and desperation.
The losses: well, you can start totting them up the instant you leave home. Half-way to the airport (running LATE!) and you’re already missing something – forget about its readiness for the caregivers. Then the curbside jostling; the rush to the airline counter, baggage check; the careering to the security screening.
Oh yes – the security screening. Well go ahead – screen and screen again. I have no idea why, but no matter how heavy or light I travel, the screening process is not a two tray, not three tray, but a virtual train of trays down that mysterious conveyer belt, in which something (occasionally something important) gets left behind or lost. I am invariably ‘wanded’ (with some electronic scanning device – believe me, it’s no fairy’s touch), prodded, patted down, occasionally probed, and all but asked to disrobe. What is it? The personal jewelry? The scarves? Okay – I wear a lot; but as for the scarves, it’s winter time, I need a couple of woolies around my neck. As for the jewelry, I admit to a certain amount of jewelry build-up – but I’m sure there’s a little something in my arteries by now, too. This time, the ‘agent’ insisted I ‘fold over’ my pants (what – to check for suspicious lingerie? – I knew I should have worn La Perla!). I started to unzip – I mean, I don’t care at this point; I’m in a frantic hurry and trying to monitor seven trays of stuff, including my shoes and a laptop – and she says, “You don’t have to unzip completely, just let me have a look underneath.” (Gee, have I ever used a line like that?) “Honey, these pants are skin-tight. You can’t get more than a finger down there unless I unzip – though you’re welcome to try.” She had her look and sent me running back to my trays.
It’s now been well over seven years since the Twin Towers fell. Guantanamo is scheduled to close within a year; the State Department seems to be reassuming its traditional imperatives after eight years of deferring to the Defense Department-spear-chuckers; and we have a new acutely intelligent, rational and determined President, with an equally focused and determined administration behind him. Hillary Clinton, George Mitchell and a host of other diplomats are flying over the world trying to administer acute first aid to our damaged foreign relations. You’d think traveling would get just a LITTLE easier – wouldn’t you? Or you might think, given our newly rational leadership, they might work out some new, rational form of passenger profiling – having nothing to do with the net for potential terrorists – but making it somewhat easier for the rest of us to pass through the security gauntlet that makes even domestic travel such a nightmare. By now I’m sure the people at LAX and Burbank know my personal jewelry and repertoire of scarves as well as their own stuff. Sometimes I think the only way to do it now is to prepack some plastic trays with all the personal stuff, and head to the airport in nothing but a trench coat (maybe with a bodystocking underneath) and just get dressed there. Chances are, they’re going to see it all anyway. I hope someone can address this at the federal level. It’s getting ridiculous. And I’m about to miss my goddamned flight.
Oh yeah – and I’m missing my earrings – the only ones I brought.
Well here I go.
[ps – I’ll bring you up to date on some of my L.A. notes from the last month, soon – promise.]
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Fresh Holes in the Universe and a Baroque Resurgence (I)
11 January – 31 January 2009
As I was saying …. Well, gee, is anyone really surprised Slumdog Millionaire swept the Globes? The only people who might have been surprised are those Hollywood-political types whose idea of a bankable movie is either something that might have played well as a made-for-television movie circa the 1970s or something likely to play well as a video game for the next couple of years, and/or the people who haven’t seen the movie. What passes for a Hollywood ‘establishment’ or its tattered remains – which seems to be mostly agency or agency packaging people – wouldn’t know a bankable script from a licensing agreement – or maybe an oil change. As long as the machine runs – might as well be their pathetic motto. It was also gratifying to see Mickey Rourke honored for his performance in The Wrestler. The Globe writers, editors and critics got it: ‘attention must be paid.’ I think it was also acknowledged in the daily press that both of these films were studio independent division projects that were nearly shunted off to television or video before finally getting distribution deals. Not to dismiss games – but this is the future of film (or digital or whatever) theatrical entertainment; and for the studios to take a cavalier or dismissive attitude towards the independents is sheer lunacy.
So where were we – oh yes, painting. Surprisingly painterly painting – in the midst of what might be Little House on the Prairie-Land (à la that Nara YNG Conestoga at Blum & Poe) or might be closer to the Kierkegaardian fear-and-trembling-and-sickness-unto-death terrain evoked in Valérie Favre’s brilliant show at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Come to think of it, the two might have a bit in common on that level. The work Favre showed evinced two distinct strains – one a kind of cartoon-ish emblematic yet fluid scrawl – think Ludwig Bemelmans (you do remember Madeline, don’t you? – in a similar blowsy sort of yellow, at that) in a kind of Sarah Kane-ish 4.48 Psychose setting (is this what we can expect the contemporary Madeline to grow up to?); the other a more expansive, quasi-narrative – almost lyrical -- and dazzlingly chromatic. There is an element of Doig here (but of course, also the Leipzig school, though no painter in that group shows a singular influence – Favre is entirely her own artist) – but more immersed, submerged – a sunken (not saturated) world caught on the surface. The palette is Bonnard-like – in the full Bonnard mature-to-late intensity of luminous purples and oranges relieved by verdigris and paler blues – notwithstanding the use of yellows and the mossy greens that fill out some of her quasi-narrative panels. I see I’ve used the ‘quasi-narrative’ descriptive twice, so let me explain. First of all, there is no explanation, nor for that matter a narrative; but there is certainly the suggestion of conflict, possibly mortal combat (e.g., ‘pugilists’ penned in a ‘boxing ring’), a ‘grim reaper’s’ scythe; a sense of simultaneous ascent and descent; a sense of overreach (that may parallel Favre’s own transparent ambition here), implosion, explosion (more little bunnies flaming out) – in other words, the mythological. There is a baroque quality to some of these paintings that is far from accidental. Mythological subjects are taken up in a great deal of late Renaissance and Baroque painting – with many other subjects treated as if they were mythic. (Who can say whether they lived up to it in actuality? In the paintings, they are mythic.) Oh – one more thing. At the opening, I overheard more than one viewer remarking on Gerhard Richter being an “influence.” Well, maybe and what of it? I’m as big a fan as anyone; but can we just get over Richter for a minute? Let’s face it: Richter is an influence on almost all contemporary European painting (and probably American, too). Favre’s work can stand on its own two(?) flaming bunny feet. It may be the best painting in town right now.
George Stoll’s show is by now long closed – and in any case, it was more than adequately noticed by the local press (well, ‘adequate’ may be stretching it – though my scan of Hunter Drohowska-Philp’s gave me some background on Stoll that I never really knew. I knew he’d had a Prix de Rome fellowship or something at the American Academy, but had no idea he’d spent so much time there). In any case, I thought the notices I saw (Christopher Knight in the L.A. Times and Hunter Drohowska-Philp’s (somewhere on-line – maybe the gallery sent it to me) were both fairly thoughtful. It’s no secret among my pals that I rather like Stoll’s work – he has a wry, ironic, almost wistful touch with, you might say, the paradox of life and art – not just its intimate, yet frequently paradoxical relationship, but the paradox of its continuity; its stream of ephemera – that sometimes make for something more than ephemeral – and its endurance, its persistence. Stoll intrigues – with his sensitivity to the gravity of what in outward appearance seems light, the sense of how one thing might stand for something quite different than what it superficially ‘says’ or ‘announces’; the sense of what is hidden or held or contained in forms both fanciful and more or less straightforward or generic. (I always have the feeling that Duchamp’s ball of twine, “With Hidden Noise” must have spoken to him in the most direct and personal way.) Stoll has worked with ‘Halloween’ themes before; but I thought it was interesting for Drohowska-Philp to point out an implicit reference in the Lightbox show to the Roman catacombs. Also Knight’s reference (or am I confusing it with something else?) to Baroque ‘vanitas’ – those gesso ice-cream breasts melting away into soupy oblivion (like my own ‘pre-molten’ pair??).
I’m not sure if it’s the impending inauguration of one of the most authentic individuals ever to assume the Presidency (and not a split second too soon), or the skyrocketing unemployment or imploding world economy, but – to judge from the arts and culture calendar alone – melt-down of one sort or another seems to be on almost everyone’s mind lately. You see the extreme rationalism cheek-to-jowl with a kind of (refreshingly) ideology- and religion-free spiritualism. What to call it? ‘Baroque Obama’? I’m only half-kidding. Without trying to comment directly on recent art market activity, it’s very hard to predict what is moving (in all senses), where the focus or emphasis is now or where it should be – I’m not sure that verb ever really applies; but on the other hand it’s a reflection of the real state of emergency we’re left in after almost eight full years of the Bush/Cheney state of emergency.
I’m not trying to make a case for the relevance of the L.A. art world, to say nothing of my odd peregrinations through it; but let’s just say I can find myself struck by that sort of dual resonance in the oddest places – art galleries included. The other night [January 10], I previewed Lester Monzon’s show at Kinkead Contemporary, an abstractionist whose work seems to be evolving with some sensitivity to this febrile climate around us. At one point a year or more ago, I would have simply viewed him as an abstractionist of a certain, uh, stripe – or grid or – you get the idea – not uninteresting, but nowhere close to the level of complexity he’s dealing with now. It would be radically over-simplifying to see this kind of painting as emerging from the pixelations of digital media, though certainly that is alluded to. But even within the underlying grids, stripes, checkerboard squares, roundels or, well, pixels, if you will – the color scheme is rigorously controlled – its own fabric (I mean that almost literally – it gives the impression of a textile weave) or manicured fields (dare I say landscape?) of brilliant yet subtle color gradients. Out of what might already be an interesting painting on its vivid yet restrained surface, a more painterly chaos erupts – though I’ve already exaggerated by using the word ‘chaos.’ Yet it’s almost impossible to resist the notion, given the control and restraint beneath. Is it simply the same tug-of-war of order and entropy? Order bleeding, if not exactly breeding chaos. Easier to look at it as a kind of painterly event that erupts or oozes from the not-so-randomly section of canvas (or linen). There is of course nothing random about it at all. The events, the brush-strokes, however sweeping or halting, seem, if not composed, then certainly choreographed. And so we’re back to a gestural style of abstraction – except that the old terminology – at least in this new context – doesn’t seem to apply. The gesture – signifying? towards? and how do we receive it? Or perceive it? And it’s not as if entirely floats free of this weave, this ground beneath it. Or does it – and where does it move the viewer?
Lester’s made something a bit more open-ended here – yet tethered to these brilliant swatches of an idiosyncratically manicured world – or maybe just the rods and cones of our eyes. It will be interesting to see where he moves these pieces of the seen and felt world – just as it’s already interesting turning and pivoting these pieces about in one’s mind.
It’s not a bad place to start from – the warp and woof (or whatever you call it) of an increasingly inter-woven – and pillaged – world we seem to have inherited. Lisa Adams similarly starts somewhere at the intersection of natural and constructed worlds – both in the most plural sense possible: the pillaged and polluted world; the natural world – or at least its invocation – of humanity, the biosphere; and the world reconstructed, transfigured, in imagination, in art. Adams titles her current exhibition at the Lawrence Asher Gallery (which I checked out the evening following the Monzon preview), after one of her paintings, The Future of Paradise Past, conveying its acute consciousness of that pillaged and polluted world which is our plundered legacy. The eponymous panel gives a literal sense of this hole in the universe – a ‘bird’s head’ opening to sheer sky around which quail-like birds repose or simply float. It is a deliberately floating, isolated, not so much mis-shapen as hybrid, universe – the physical world as re-built, re-written, re-embroidered as if the artist were projecting her own private Lhasa – the kind of Lost Horizon you might just as easily find outside your kitchen window as at the top of the Himalayas. (Mere coincidence that a pagoda (or a birdhouse??) looms out of Adams’ painterly blocks of acid yellows, whites, moss greens? – here surmounted by a red cardinal who seems to weave a mask out of a string in its beak. (The title: “After the Deluge.” Coincidence?? My guess is, no.) Elsewhere, filigree vines are fashioned variously into weaving parabolae, arches, necklaces or simply sentinels in twilight tones of storm-gray, flaming coral, lapis blues, and sullied cloud-whites – variously broken down into the suggestion of an incipient grid or simply swept across the panel. Funny, too, how, notwithstanding felicitously rendered birds and blossoms, the filigree vine can segue from seeming embellishment to something akin to barbed wire. You thought irony was dead? Tell that to Lisa Adams. This is a show replete with irony – but I mean that as a compliment. How else to get through something like what we’re clearly on the brink of?
Any more inaugural notes?? This seems something of a departure for Adams. It’s a mordant and, as I said, heavily ironic, show. I would have to guess this rather elegiac tone comes as much from where she’s standing right now in her life. But, how different is it for any of us here in L.A., to say nothing of the more benighted corners of the world? I’m looking forward to the celebrations in a week or so. But I have a feeling we can expect a few similarly sobering, cautionary notes from the 44th. This is a pretty terrific show.
[MORE TO COME]
As I was saying …. Well, gee, is anyone really surprised Slumdog Millionaire swept the Globes? The only people who might have been surprised are those Hollywood-political types whose idea of a bankable movie is either something that might have played well as a made-for-television movie circa the 1970s or something likely to play well as a video game for the next couple of years, and/or the people who haven’t seen the movie. What passes for a Hollywood ‘establishment’ or its tattered remains – which seems to be mostly agency or agency packaging people – wouldn’t know a bankable script from a licensing agreement – or maybe an oil change. As long as the machine runs – might as well be their pathetic motto. It was also gratifying to see Mickey Rourke honored for his performance in The Wrestler. The Globe writers, editors and critics got it: ‘attention must be paid.’ I think it was also acknowledged in the daily press that both of these films were studio independent division projects that were nearly shunted off to television or video before finally getting distribution deals. Not to dismiss games – but this is the future of film (or digital or whatever) theatrical entertainment; and for the studios to take a cavalier or dismissive attitude towards the independents is sheer lunacy.
So where were we – oh yes, painting. Surprisingly painterly painting – in the midst of what might be Little House on the Prairie-Land (à la that Nara YNG Conestoga at Blum & Poe) or might be closer to the Kierkegaardian fear-and-trembling-and-sickness-unto-death terrain evoked in Valérie Favre’s brilliant show at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Come to think of it, the two might have a bit in common on that level. The work Favre showed evinced two distinct strains – one a kind of cartoon-ish emblematic yet fluid scrawl – think Ludwig Bemelmans (you do remember Madeline, don’t you? – in a similar blowsy sort of yellow, at that) in a kind of Sarah Kane-ish 4.48 Psychose setting (is this what we can expect the contemporary Madeline to grow up to?); the other a more expansive, quasi-narrative – almost lyrical -- and dazzlingly chromatic. There is an element of Doig here (but of course, also the Leipzig school, though no painter in that group shows a singular influence – Favre is entirely her own artist) – but more immersed, submerged – a sunken (not saturated) world caught on the surface. The palette is Bonnard-like – in the full Bonnard mature-to-late intensity of luminous purples and oranges relieved by verdigris and paler blues – notwithstanding the use of yellows and the mossy greens that fill out some of her quasi-narrative panels. I see I’ve used the ‘quasi-narrative’ descriptive twice, so let me explain. First of all, there is no explanation, nor for that matter a narrative; but there is certainly the suggestion of conflict, possibly mortal combat (e.g., ‘pugilists’ penned in a ‘boxing ring’), a ‘grim reaper’s’ scythe; a sense of simultaneous ascent and descent; a sense of overreach (that may parallel Favre’s own transparent ambition here), implosion, explosion (more little bunnies flaming out) – in other words, the mythological. There is a baroque quality to some of these paintings that is far from accidental. Mythological subjects are taken up in a great deal of late Renaissance and Baroque painting – with many other subjects treated as if they were mythic. (Who can say whether they lived up to it in actuality? In the paintings, they are mythic.) Oh – one more thing. At the opening, I overheard more than one viewer remarking on Gerhard Richter being an “influence.” Well, maybe and what of it? I’m as big a fan as anyone; but can we just get over Richter for a minute? Let’s face it: Richter is an influence on almost all contemporary European painting (and probably American, too). Favre’s work can stand on its own two(?) flaming bunny feet. It may be the best painting in town right now.
George Stoll’s show is by now long closed – and in any case, it was more than adequately noticed by the local press (well, ‘adequate’ may be stretching it – though my scan of Hunter Drohowska-Philp’s gave me some background on Stoll that I never really knew. I knew he’d had a Prix de Rome fellowship or something at the American Academy, but had no idea he’d spent so much time there). In any case, I thought the notices I saw (Christopher Knight in the L.A. Times and Hunter Drohowska-Philp’s (somewhere on-line – maybe the gallery sent it to me) were both fairly thoughtful. It’s no secret among my pals that I rather like Stoll’s work – he has a wry, ironic, almost wistful touch with, you might say, the paradox of life and art – not just its intimate, yet frequently paradoxical relationship, but the paradox of its continuity; its stream of ephemera – that sometimes make for something more than ephemeral – and its endurance, its persistence. Stoll intrigues – with his sensitivity to the gravity of what in outward appearance seems light, the sense of how one thing might stand for something quite different than what it superficially ‘says’ or ‘announces’; the sense of what is hidden or held or contained in forms both fanciful and more or less straightforward or generic. (I always have the feeling that Duchamp’s ball of twine, “With Hidden Noise” must have spoken to him in the most direct and personal way.) Stoll has worked with ‘Halloween’ themes before; but I thought it was interesting for Drohowska-Philp to point out an implicit reference in the Lightbox show to the Roman catacombs. Also Knight’s reference (or am I confusing it with something else?) to Baroque ‘vanitas’ – those gesso ice-cream breasts melting away into soupy oblivion (like my own ‘pre-molten’ pair??).
I’m not sure if it’s the impending inauguration of one of the most authentic individuals ever to assume the Presidency (and not a split second too soon), or the skyrocketing unemployment or imploding world economy, but – to judge from the arts and culture calendar alone – melt-down of one sort or another seems to be on almost everyone’s mind lately. You see the extreme rationalism cheek-to-jowl with a kind of (refreshingly) ideology- and religion-free spiritualism. What to call it? ‘Baroque Obama’? I’m only half-kidding. Without trying to comment directly on recent art market activity, it’s very hard to predict what is moving (in all senses), where the focus or emphasis is now or where it should be – I’m not sure that verb ever really applies; but on the other hand it’s a reflection of the real state of emergency we’re left in after almost eight full years of the Bush/Cheney state of emergency.
I’m not trying to make a case for the relevance of the L.A. art world, to say nothing of my odd peregrinations through it; but let’s just say I can find myself struck by that sort of dual resonance in the oddest places – art galleries included. The other night [January 10], I previewed Lester Monzon’s show at Kinkead Contemporary, an abstractionist whose work seems to be evolving with some sensitivity to this febrile climate around us. At one point a year or more ago, I would have simply viewed him as an abstractionist of a certain, uh, stripe – or grid or – you get the idea – not uninteresting, but nowhere close to the level of complexity he’s dealing with now. It would be radically over-simplifying to see this kind of painting as emerging from the pixelations of digital media, though certainly that is alluded to. But even within the underlying grids, stripes, checkerboard squares, roundels or, well, pixels, if you will – the color scheme is rigorously controlled – its own fabric (I mean that almost literally – it gives the impression of a textile weave) or manicured fields (dare I say landscape?) of brilliant yet subtle color gradients. Out of what might already be an interesting painting on its vivid yet restrained surface, a more painterly chaos erupts – though I’ve already exaggerated by using the word ‘chaos.’ Yet it’s almost impossible to resist the notion, given the control and restraint beneath. Is it simply the same tug-of-war of order and entropy? Order bleeding, if not exactly breeding chaos. Easier to look at it as a kind of painterly event that erupts or oozes from the not-so-randomly section of canvas (or linen). There is of course nothing random about it at all. The events, the brush-strokes, however sweeping or halting, seem, if not composed, then certainly choreographed. And so we’re back to a gestural style of abstraction – except that the old terminology – at least in this new context – doesn’t seem to apply. The gesture – signifying? towards? and how do we receive it? Or perceive it? And it’s not as if entirely floats free of this weave, this ground beneath it. Or does it – and where does it move the viewer?
Lester’s made something a bit more open-ended here – yet tethered to these brilliant swatches of an idiosyncratically manicured world – or maybe just the rods and cones of our eyes. It will be interesting to see where he moves these pieces of the seen and felt world – just as it’s already interesting turning and pivoting these pieces about in one’s mind.
It’s not a bad place to start from – the warp and woof (or whatever you call it) of an increasingly inter-woven – and pillaged – world we seem to have inherited. Lisa Adams similarly starts somewhere at the intersection of natural and constructed worlds – both in the most plural sense possible: the pillaged and polluted world; the natural world – or at least its invocation – of humanity, the biosphere; and the world reconstructed, transfigured, in imagination, in art. Adams titles her current exhibition at the Lawrence Asher Gallery (which I checked out the evening following the Monzon preview), after one of her paintings, The Future of Paradise Past, conveying its acute consciousness of that pillaged and polluted world which is our plundered legacy. The eponymous panel gives a literal sense of this hole in the universe – a ‘bird’s head’ opening to sheer sky around which quail-like birds repose or simply float. It is a deliberately floating, isolated, not so much mis-shapen as hybrid, universe – the physical world as re-built, re-written, re-embroidered as if the artist were projecting her own private Lhasa – the kind of Lost Horizon you might just as easily find outside your kitchen window as at the top of the Himalayas. (Mere coincidence that a pagoda (or a birdhouse??) looms out of Adams’ painterly blocks of acid yellows, whites, moss greens? – here surmounted by a red cardinal who seems to weave a mask out of a string in its beak. (The title: “After the Deluge.” Coincidence?? My guess is, no.) Elsewhere, filigree vines are fashioned variously into weaving parabolae, arches, necklaces or simply sentinels in twilight tones of storm-gray, flaming coral, lapis blues, and sullied cloud-whites – variously broken down into the suggestion of an incipient grid or simply swept across the panel. Funny, too, how, notwithstanding felicitously rendered birds and blossoms, the filigree vine can segue from seeming embellishment to something akin to barbed wire. You thought irony was dead? Tell that to Lisa Adams. This is a show replete with irony – but I mean that as a compliment. How else to get through something like what we’re clearly on the brink of?
Any more inaugural notes?? This seems something of a departure for Adams. It’s a mordant and, as I said, heavily ironic, show. I would have to guess this rather elegiac tone comes as much from where she’s standing right now in her life. But, how different is it for any of us here in L.A., to say nothing of the more benighted corners of the world? I’m looking forward to the celebrations in a week or so. But I have a feeling we can expect a few similarly sobering, cautionary notes from the 44th. This is a pretty terrific show.
[MORE TO COME]
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Happy New World Order
28 December 2008 – 11 January 2009
Happy New Year. I want to say ‘Happy New York’ – even though I’m here in L.A. There’s no snow on the ground here – but the weather has been uncharacteristically chilly (as low as freezing); and a glance to the east or northeast shows plenty of snow in the mountains. The ski resorts are busy.
No – I haven’t died – though obviously many have – in addition to my late pal, Gregory. It could justly be said that I was in mourning for a while – but not quite this long, notwithstanding the recent deaths of Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt – whom I truly mourn – Pinter’s death only a few months after his near-peer, Simon Gray (Butley, Otherwise Engaged) whom I truly loved. Kitt’s death took me by surprise – she was so alive, so indefatigable, even battling cancer. Only a year ago, she was shaking the rafters of the Café Carlyle with her performance.
As I said, I may have been a bit sad, a bit down (and more than a little overworked until the last month or so), but it’s not like I haven’t been out and about. I have – most recently at the movies. (What – you were thinking, uh, a gallery? The opera? A recital (almost – I’ve missed a couple recently)?) Yeah yeah yeah – saw the Dumas (Measuring Your Own Grave – since closed), Kippenberger, Index (a truly excellent show of conceptual work – almost all of it culled from MOCA’s fine permanent collection), Louise Bourgeois – and I might as well add the museum-quality Raymond Pettibon show of recent work that was up at Regen Projects II. Yes, of course they’re all worth seeing. But so what? Allow me to first recommend, almost without qualification, The Wrestler, the new Darren Aronofsky film (from a script by former Onion editor Robert D. Siegel), with a searing, absolutely fearless, peerless, balls-out, no-holds-barred performance by Mickey (where has he been???) Rourke, that in and of itself takes the film to that ‘next’ (do we call it masterpiece?) level, a performance that all but screams bloody for an Academy Award nomination, if not the Oscar itself. The supporting performances are equally strong, even, to some extent by non-professionals that (as I understand it) Aronofsky used to fill in this very realistic human landscape. The sensibility – even the way it’s shot – very cinéma-verité – a lot of tracking shots and close-in work with what looks like a good deal of hand-held work – in a very grainy-color that looks almost as if it were deliberately shot in hi-def video and transferred to film (though I’m sure there are other ways the effect might have been obtained) is almost Burroughs-ian – though, dare I say it, with lots of heart. It’s all of us there scrutinized under that deli counter glass, as Randy the Ram serves us up a heaping platter of our own flesh and blood. The direction and performances wring pathos from every scene, every shot. It is at a pitch that, given different material or context, might risk being called pandering, but nothing panders in this film. It is the stuff of life pushed right up into the lens: the negotiation between life and individual identity; the construction (and deconstruction) of an individual identity and its integration or disintegration – or even cannibalization – into the fabric of life as it’s collectively, continuously negotiated, constructed, and reconstructed. Every moment counts, everything is at risk.
The supporting performances are equally strong. Marisa Tomei is simply over-the-top magnificent – a multi-layered performance no less down-to-the-ground, down-to-the-bone than Rourke’s. (And why not? They both play performers and parents. And Tomei’s body, I might add, is as perfect as ever.) Evan Rachel Wood is perfect as Randy’s estranged daughter. She wears the face of tragedy that all but stands in for what goes to black-out at the film’s end. Okay – you get the point – I liked the movie. (What I think I’m really a bit awestruck by is the script: how do you go from the Onion to this? Where did someone like Siegel get this stuff?)
Speaking of the everything at risk, every moment counting (and everything turning to shit) style of film-making, you could say that style merges with subject in the pyrotechnic hands of Danny Boyle, with his coruscating, scarifying, and yes, shit-drenched, roller-coaster of a movie, Slumdog Millionaire – the picaresque fairy-tale of a chai-wallah’s unlikely ascendance to fortune and fame in that super-rich, ultra high-tech island that is affluent India floating over the sea of mostly human shit that is also India and that threatens to inundate its dazzling centers (one potent political aspect of which was driven home vividly with the terrorist pillaging of the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Intercontinental Hotels at Mumbai’s center). I was complaining at some point last year about the relative poverty, the paltriness of certain ‘theme-ride’ mechanical movies (and even the latest Bond movie disappointed). Boyle has somehow managed to breathe life into this genre. How? By going back to the simplest kind of theme and story, the simplest kind of structure – and using every tool in the director’s and cinematographer’s toolbox to wring suspense, drama and comic irony from every cliff-hanging moment. Apart from its particular kaleidoscopic dazzle, what is most original about the movie is the way Boyle exploits that tension of the palace or temple of gold and alabaster floating on an ocean of shit. Salvation here is predicated on the immolation that rages all around the haloed hero and heroine – the ‘princess’ rescued twice, as it happens, from the ‘mud’ (the redeemed idealism; also evoked by Jamal’s rejection of the craven host’s attempted trick (or trap) multiple choice answer). Immolation (or inundation) is the common destiny – rendering the notion of salvation absurd or at best transitory. I have no idea if the screenwriters (Simon Beaufoy is credited with the script – which is based on a novel by Vikas Swarup) were consciously exploiting the particularly vile art direction of the Indian version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? – which is astonishingly faithful to the American original – but the filmmakers make the most of this crucible – that fascist architecture of light and steel, the focused lanterns and super-trouper beams constantly raised and lowered and all but pinning the contestant like the hapless insect he is. The fairy tale payoff of faith and love triumphant is simply the shimmering curtain Boyle brings down on his own magician’s bag of tricks – an infectious homage to Bollywood song-and-dance that made me resolve to ditch European designers in favor of the frothiest Indian sari style for the new year. (Okay, maybe not.)
Okay – so much for movies (Jeeeeeezus – whatever you do don’t see Good; it’s soooooooo BAD!). Back to ‘stills’ (but are they ever really?). Believe it or not, I found the Yoshitomo Nara show at Blum and Poe very intriguing. Seductive – and I don’t mean the slightly Keane-esque aspect he’s given some of his urchins’ eyes. If the uncanny subversion of these nascent-apache Zazies is what draws us in (and I confess I’m still a sucker for it), it’s the painting that holds our gaze – that moves our eyes up and down the figure – the end result of painstaking glazing, scraping, re-glazing and re-scraping that produces that particular mottled yet immaculate ‘skin’-surface of the painting. There’s something uncannily pure and meditative about it – which puts another spin altogether on these smug (or simply quizzical) little mugs. An ‘environment’ (like a mini-studio or office in a wagon) lets the viewer in on the very impure genesis of this not-quite-alien species of art (and street – or at least school) life.
[MORE (much) TO COME]
Happy New Year. I want to say ‘Happy New York’ – even though I’m here in L.A. There’s no snow on the ground here – but the weather has been uncharacteristically chilly (as low as freezing); and a glance to the east or northeast shows plenty of snow in the mountains. The ski resorts are busy.
No – I haven’t died – though obviously many have – in addition to my late pal, Gregory. It could justly be said that I was in mourning for a while – but not quite this long, notwithstanding the recent deaths of Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt – whom I truly mourn – Pinter’s death only a few months after his near-peer, Simon Gray (Butley, Otherwise Engaged) whom I truly loved. Kitt’s death took me by surprise – she was so alive, so indefatigable, even battling cancer. Only a year ago, she was shaking the rafters of the Café Carlyle with her performance.
As I said, I may have been a bit sad, a bit down (and more than a little overworked until the last month or so), but it’s not like I haven’t been out and about. I have – most recently at the movies. (What – you were thinking, uh, a gallery? The opera? A recital (almost – I’ve missed a couple recently)?) Yeah yeah yeah – saw the Dumas (Measuring Your Own Grave – since closed), Kippenberger, Index (a truly excellent show of conceptual work – almost all of it culled from MOCA’s fine permanent collection), Louise Bourgeois – and I might as well add the museum-quality Raymond Pettibon show of recent work that was up at Regen Projects II. Yes, of course they’re all worth seeing. But so what? Allow me to first recommend, almost without qualification, The Wrestler, the new Darren Aronofsky film (from a script by former Onion editor Robert D. Siegel), with a searing, absolutely fearless, peerless, balls-out, no-holds-barred performance by Mickey (where has he been???) Rourke, that in and of itself takes the film to that ‘next’ (do we call it masterpiece?) level, a performance that all but screams bloody for an Academy Award nomination, if not the Oscar itself. The supporting performances are equally strong, even, to some extent by non-professionals that (as I understand it) Aronofsky used to fill in this very realistic human landscape. The sensibility – even the way it’s shot – very cinéma-verité – a lot of tracking shots and close-in work with what looks like a good deal of hand-held work – in a very grainy-color that looks almost as if it were deliberately shot in hi-def video and transferred to film (though I’m sure there are other ways the effect might have been obtained) is almost Burroughs-ian – though, dare I say it, with lots of heart. It’s all of us there scrutinized under that deli counter glass, as Randy the Ram serves us up a heaping platter of our own flesh and blood. The direction and performances wring pathos from every scene, every shot. It is at a pitch that, given different material or context, might risk being called pandering, but nothing panders in this film. It is the stuff of life pushed right up into the lens: the negotiation between life and individual identity; the construction (and deconstruction) of an individual identity and its integration or disintegration – or even cannibalization – into the fabric of life as it’s collectively, continuously negotiated, constructed, and reconstructed. Every moment counts, everything is at risk.
The supporting performances are equally strong. Marisa Tomei is simply over-the-top magnificent – a multi-layered performance no less down-to-the-ground, down-to-the-bone than Rourke’s. (And why not? They both play performers and parents. And Tomei’s body, I might add, is as perfect as ever.) Evan Rachel Wood is perfect as Randy’s estranged daughter. She wears the face of tragedy that all but stands in for what goes to black-out at the film’s end. Okay – you get the point – I liked the movie. (What I think I’m really a bit awestruck by is the script: how do you go from the Onion to this? Where did someone like Siegel get this stuff?)
Speaking of the everything at risk, every moment counting (and everything turning to shit) style of film-making, you could say that style merges with subject in the pyrotechnic hands of Danny Boyle, with his coruscating, scarifying, and yes, shit-drenched, roller-coaster of a movie, Slumdog Millionaire – the picaresque fairy-tale of a chai-wallah’s unlikely ascendance to fortune and fame in that super-rich, ultra high-tech island that is affluent India floating over the sea of mostly human shit that is also India and that threatens to inundate its dazzling centers (one potent political aspect of which was driven home vividly with the terrorist pillaging of the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Intercontinental Hotels at Mumbai’s center). I was complaining at some point last year about the relative poverty, the paltriness of certain ‘theme-ride’ mechanical movies (and even the latest Bond movie disappointed). Boyle has somehow managed to breathe life into this genre. How? By going back to the simplest kind of theme and story, the simplest kind of structure – and using every tool in the director’s and cinematographer’s toolbox to wring suspense, drama and comic irony from every cliff-hanging moment. Apart from its particular kaleidoscopic dazzle, what is most original about the movie is the way Boyle exploits that tension of the palace or temple of gold and alabaster floating on an ocean of shit. Salvation here is predicated on the immolation that rages all around the haloed hero and heroine – the ‘princess’ rescued twice, as it happens, from the ‘mud’ (the redeemed idealism; also evoked by Jamal’s rejection of the craven host’s attempted trick (or trap) multiple choice answer). Immolation (or inundation) is the common destiny – rendering the notion of salvation absurd or at best transitory. I have no idea if the screenwriters (Simon Beaufoy is credited with the script – which is based on a novel by Vikas Swarup) were consciously exploiting the particularly vile art direction of the Indian version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? – which is astonishingly faithful to the American original – but the filmmakers make the most of this crucible – that fascist architecture of light and steel, the focused lanterns and super-trouper beams constantly raised and lowered and all but pinning the contestant like the hapless insect he is. The fairy tale payoff of faith and love triumphant is simply the shimmering curtain Boyle brings down on his own magician’s bag of tricks – an infectious homage to Bollywood song-and-dance that made me resolve to ditch European designers in favor of the frothiest Indian sari style for the new year. (Okay, maybe not.)
Okay – so much for movies (Jeeeeeezus – whatever you do don’t see Good; it’s soooooooo BAD!). Back to ‘stills’ (but are they ever really?). Believe it or not, I found the Yoshitomo Nara show at Blum and Poe very intriguing. Seductive – and I don’t mean the slightly Keane-esque aspect he’s given some of his urchins’ eyes. If the uncanny subversion of these nascent-apache Zazies is what draws us in (and I confess I’m still a sucker for it), it’s the painting that holds our gaze – that moves our eyes up and down the figure – the end result of painstaking glazing, scraping, re-glazing and re-scraping that produces that particular mottled yet immaculate ‘skin’-surface of the painting. There’s something uncannily pure and meditative about it – which puts another spin altogether on these smug (or simply quizzical) little mugs. An ‘environment’ (like a mini-studio or office in a wagon) lets the viewer in on the very impure genesis of this not-quite-alien species of art (and street – or at least school) life.
[MORE (much) TO COME]
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
The Last Wave Good-Bye
8 September 2008
Seven nights or so ago, Gregory Poe left our company. My beloved Gregory Poe – I’m not sure if he ever made an appearance in this blog, under his own name or under some made-up monicker (something I occasionally do here). He was not ‘officially’ of the ‘art world’, though he certainly had an abiding interest, indeed a passion for it. And a great eye for it – or just about anything that touched the aesthetic realm. Or out of that ‘realm’ – meaning life. Gregory was one of those people, who for all their immersion in the world of art and the aesthetic (including design and style, generally), understood the difference between the two and was wise enough to choose life every time. Yes, wise – in spite of his own flaws and some foolish decisions, which he usually managed to see clearly amid many, many problems, difficulties, adversities enough to challenge anyone’s faith in life or art. Wise almost in spite of himself – he seemed to vanquish cynicism with his own cynical sensibility. Even in the fog of physical pain, depression, and (yes) drug dependency, he had a certain clarity that could cut through it all. He had no patience for anything less – from himself as much as anyone else.
Our ‘company’ – you were always on your best with Gregory – or you certainly tried to be. I make it sound a bit as if he were leaving a small party; and maybe that applies. You knew a party had already peaked when Gregory was about to leave. It was more or less, “Okay – yeah.” (Done this, seen that, made my point – the ‘point’, however subtle, however nuanced, always trenchant, even emphatic.) For someone who understood the social context as well and as deeply as Jane Austen and Joan Didion – especially L.A.’s – it’s hardly surprising that he knew how to navigate it. Gregory was famous for his own parties – some of them pretty big. (Gregory’s natural working environment might be the couture studio or the fashion runway, but I always thought the most natural habitat for him, at least here in L.A., was the rooftop of the Chateau Marmont.) And with Gregory you always felt as if you were at the hip center of the best, hippest party in town.
I should add that being on your best was less about how you looked (though, given Greg’s acute and encompassing gaze, it could hardly be overlooked) than what you presented – an idea, a story, an original voice, a line (in any sense), even a riff. It was all about the improvisation, the dance, the conversation. Greg loved jazz and jazz singers; and I think that was far from coincidental. Start anywhere (a blues line – or just a blue line – would be just fine) and see where it took you; see where and with what (or in what) you might end up. At the same time, the sensualist in Greg could not help but be aware of ‘key’, ‘choreography’, shape, texture and tactility, composition, architecture. He consumed it all voraciously and returned it back in full as story, performance (yes – even over the phone – a kind of performance; no one who knew him, especially in L.A., will forget some of those telephone conversations), his work. You could almost say that Greg’s working method involved a similar aesthetic immersion. His genius was an uncanny blend of the cerebral and the tactile or sensual.
Genius. It’s not a word I use lightly; and I would be hard pressed to give an example of one of his creations that represented a crystallization or culmination of that genius. (I have no doubt, though – especially if I went back through archives of his years designing in Japan – that I would find something worthy of this description. There was so much that was amazing on its own terms.) Nevertheless, there was an audacity to Greg’s creativity, his vision that at its strongest, at its best, was akin to genius.
Some years ago I began to notice a type of street fashion that I described to one editor as a kind of bricolage – something that might have evolved out of grunge or similar tendencies, but far more individual, refined and with a far broader range of affect; and it occurs to me that Greg was a kind of bricoleur of couture and style long before the term even had much currency in the art world, much less the world of fashion and style-making. I wouldn’t exactly call what Greg did couture povera (though as I write this, I’m thinking Greg would find this worth a giggle); but, just as there was nothing in the aesthetic realm that escaped his notice, there was nothing in the world at large, however humble or luxurious, that he might not seize upon as material. Greg was the perpetual ‘daft – and deft – punk.’ It was no accident that his star emerged as punk began to crest. The aesthetic he created – at first in accessories that were seen at that hip mecca of the time, Fiorucci – was both one version of it and a retort to it that could have only originated in L.A. or southern California. (It was a viewpoint or aesthetic that began to be consolidated for a time in the magazine Wet. I remember going to the Opening Ceremony store here in L.A. for the first time, and, seeing the old Wet magazines scattered about the décor, having a sense of homecoming. I knew I had to bring Greg there. Once upon a time, Gregory would have sold his fashion lines there.) Our friend, Carla Weber, put her finger on Gregory’s working method brilliantly, I thought, at his wake just yesterday afternoon, drawing a bead on days spent working, watching movies hanging out, and all but losing (or finding) oneself in the hilarity of his conversation. “His output was massive, and fun and silly and naïve and glorious and absolutely sophisticated.”
It would be impossible to put one’s finger on Gregory’s particular creative spark, but somehow, out of this cocktail of conceptual guile and naiveté, he managed to synthesize something entirely original, provocative and on the pulse. It had to do with being open to inspiration from anything and anywhere – movies, music, the endless conversation, the moment. Carla says it far better than I can: “He kept you laughing, entertaining you with his beautiful, ludicrous vision and yet creating an intimacy that was highly intoxicating.” Yes. (I’m thinking of Gregory as the close friend he was now – that moment when, having disarmed you utterly with some amazing story – a ‘fractured flicker’ of the real and surreal in one sublimely told anecdote – he would touch down to earth and quietly elicit our own dark secrets and intimacies.) Carla again: “[H]e was excellent at not just dissecting people, but human nature in all its glorious vulnerability.”
Gregory’s talent as a raconteur partook, yet almost stood apart from his design gifts. I’m not sure I would go as far as Carla, who said the other day, “His capacity to create a new language from the English language was hilarious.” But I know what she means. It was that volatile synthesis of verbal and visual. Greg had the story-telling talent of a film-maker, and by that I mean a great film-maker. (The comparison that comes to mind most readily is Billy Wilder – especially in his Paramount collaborations with Charles Brackett. Greg could have written Foreign Affair – or maybe his own updated version. Another is Preston Sturges. I think of conversations I had with Greg – at bars, openings, after-parties, even on the phone – that could have been entire scenes out of Sturges movies.) No coincidence either that his knowledge of film was exhaustive. And, though he designed costumes for several films, it was a pity he didn't do more. He had an almost innate sense of story arc; and his comic timing was sui generis. (Move over – WAAAAYYY over – Andy Kaufman – and a million others. Greg as a newly minted angel: “Hey, YOU – all hundred of you – get off of MY cloud.”) He knew how to build the story, the moment, then throw it away. At his best it was almost breath-taking. (Maybe you’re right, Carla.)
And of course there’s the musical side to that gifted timing – and I think a bit of Oscar Levant. We were both fans; and I think somewhere at the surly, cynical edge of Greg’s wit was something that descends from the Levantine line. I remember my first encounter with Gregory (at the old Studio Grill on Santa Monica Boulevard across from Trader Joe’s), followed not long thereafter by a telephone conversation – a rundown (in every sense) of local design talent, each thumbnail sketch more scathing and hilarious than the last. (I was co-editing a special issue of L.A. Weekly at the time.) Greg’s telephone narrative could almost have been published verbatim (and probably should have, now that I think of the problems we had putting that issue together). By the time we put the issue to bed, Greg was on his way back to Japan; but I made a mental note to stay in touch, and somehow we did.
Gregory was formidable then. I can’t imagine what kind of impression I could have made at the time. My VERY brief jag of dressing in boutique or designer threads had long since passed and I felt lucky to have a nice pair of shoes on my feet. (Maybe it was the shoes.) But then, as Carla has noted many times, there was beneath that edge, that temperament (and boy did Greg have a temper) and genius, a fundamental humanity in touch with an entire spectrum of human nature. I was always amazed at how well Gregory – haut-bourgeois, Beverly Hills boy that he was to his core – could relate to everyone and anyone. Over the years, that surf samurai stance began to give way to something not quite so hard-edged and perhaps a bit vulnerable. Gregory was vulnerable. He stood up to the corporate Establishment as it was then arrayed in his industry and was tsunamied right back down. He picked himself up, of course, and took his surfboard back to L.A. But L.A., a city he loved and knew better than anyone I know, could also be the fabled City of Nets to its native son – something that Greg in his infinite cynicism could undoubtedly see through; yet he was repeatedly stymied by its upsets and betrayals. To look at the profusion of surf- and skate-wear lines here, to say nothing of elements seen in contemporary design everywhere from New York to Milan, is to see the remnants of a hundred design careers Greg might have had.
Greg and I never really discussed that local brand of shmatte – the kind of surf- and skate-wear that’s a drug on the market these days – at any length, though it’s impossible to ignore his enormous influence. Regardless of its ‘artistic’ embellishments, it would seem so passé, almost irrelevant in the context of Gregory’s own work and overall perspective. I can just imagine his withering assessment: e.g., ‘How THIRTY years ago – which was, fortunately, NOT the Sixties.’
He could still look fierce (he was fierce). Every once in a while, especially when it rained, he would wear a leatherette hood that looked like the sort of headgear a Roman Catholic prelate of the Late Renaissance or the Baroque might wear – on the battlefield or in the torture chambers of the Inquisition. He made one think of a Medici or Barberini cardinal or pope (in or out of the Bacon-esque blur). About a year ago, after undergoing a long (and long overdue) rehabilitation for his long-standing chemical dependencies, he emerged healthier than he’d been for more than a decade, but nevertheless delicate, still clearly in recovery. It would be a long road back to full health. Now his look took on something gentler, almost saintly (especially in those quiet moments that, to those of us who knew him well, signaled something more alarming, perhaps deadly, than it looked – the absolute exhaustion of his patience: ‘I’m going to suffer your idiocy for another 15 seconds and then I’m going to have to blow your head off, darling.’). How would Bacon have rendered Saint Jerome? I wonder.
It is almost too ironic that Greg’s latest design line was to be a line of urns and funerary objects (the designs I saw before his death were fantastic) – an irony Greg would of course have been the first to appreciate. But the cruelty of Greg being cut down on the eve of his third act is almost too much to bear at the moment. One season ends and another begins and it almost feels unseemly that Greg’s passing should be lost in this tumult (to say nothing of the distractions of politics). Or perhaps we’re just trying to find his voice, hear it again clearly in that confusion of sights and sounds. Only a few evenings ago, I was chatting with Mary Woronov, another close mutual friend, and we were trying to locate, recapture something of that voice, wit, that way of telling a story – something that between the two of us (or maybe three or four) we might, in theory, be able to do. We couldn’t come close.
Another mutual friend rang up to say, "Wow -- this is really going to blow a hole in your life." He wasn't kidding; but I'm in -- well, good company: Mary, Carla, Pat Loud, Robbie Cavolina, among others; and, it goes without saying, his brother, Jeff -- the Poe of Blum and Poe -- as formidable as a sibling as he is in that global province we call the art world. No one loved his brother as well as Jeff.
There was laughter as well as tears at Greg’s wake; but – you couldn’t help but think – not as much as there would have been if Greg had been there. It’s a cliché to mourn the passing of youth and laughter in the wake of an untimely passing; but there was a kind of joie and verve, spontaneity and effervescence that seemed to pass before us and into the shadows, despite the afternoon’s lambent sunlight. I thought of the end of a book I had recently finished in a jag of research for a pitch – Nancy Mitford’s biography of the Marquise de Pompadour. Mitford’s description of Pompadour’s final recessional goes as follows:
“[The King] watched the Marquise as she went back up the long Avenue de Paris; in the bitter wind he stood there without coat or hat until she was out of sight. Then he turned away, tears pouring down his cheeks. ‘That is the only tribute I can pay her.’
“After this a great dullness fell upon the Château of Versailles.”
After Gregory’s passing, a great dullness seemed to fall upon the aquamarine skies of Los Angeles.
Seven nights or so ago, Gregory Poe left our company. My beloved Gregory Poe – I’m not sure if he ever made an appearance in this blog, under his own name or under some made-up monicker (something I occasionally do here). He was not ‘officially’ of the ‘art world’, though he certainly had an abiding interest, indeed a passion for it. And a great eye for it – or just about anything that touched the aesthetic realm. Or out of that ‘realm’ – meaning life. Gregory was one of those people, who for all their immersion in the world of art and the aesthetic (including design and style, generally), understood the difference between the two and was wise enough to choose life every time. Yes, wise – in spite of his own flaws and some foolish decisions, which he usually managed to see clearly amid many, many problems, difficulties, adversities enough to challenge anyone’s faith in life or art. Wise almost in spite of himself – he seemed to vanquish cynicism with his own cynical sensibility. Even in the fog of physical pain, depression, and (yes) drug dependency, he had a certain clarity that could cut through it all. He had no patience for anything less – from himself as much as anyone else.
Our ‘company’ – you were always on your best with Gregory – or you certainly tried to be. I make it sound a bit as if he were leaving a small party; and maybe that applies. You knew a party had already peaked when Gregory was about to leave. It was more or less, “Okay – yeah.” (Done this, seen that, made my point – the ‘point’, however subtle, however nuanced, always trenchant, even emphatic.) For someone who understood the social context as well and as deeply as Jane Austen and Joan Didion – especially L.A.’s – it’s hardly surprising that he knew how to navigate it. Gregory was famous for his own parties – some of them pretty big. (Gregory’s natural working environment might be the couture studio or the fashion runway, but I always thought the most natural habitat for him, at least here in L.A., was the rooftop of the Chateau Marmont.) And with Gregory you always felt as if you were at the hip center of the best, hippest party in town.
I should add that being on your best was less about how you looked (though, given Greg’s acute and encompassing gaze, it could hardly be overlooked) than what you presented – an idea, a story, an original voice, a line (in any sense), even a riff. It was all about the improvisation, the dance, the conversation. Greg loved jazz and jazz singers; and I think that was far from coincidental. Start anywhere (a blues line – or just a blue line – would be just fine) and see where it took you; see where and with what (or in what) you might end up. At the same time, the sensualist in Greg could not help but be aware of ‘key’, ‘choreography’, shape, texture and tactility, composition, architecture. He consumed it all voraciously and returned it back in full as story, performance (yes – even over the phone – a kind of performance; no one who knew him, especially in L.A., will forget some of those telephone conversations), his work. You could almost say that Greg’s working method involved a similar aesthetic immersion. His genius was an uncanny blend of the cerebral and the tactile or sensual.
Genius. It’s not a word I use lightly; and I would be hard pressed to give an example of one of his creations that represented a crystallization or culmination of that genius. (I have no doubt, though – especially if I went back through archives of his years designing in Japan – that I would find something worthy of this description. There was so much that was amazing on its own terms.) Nevertheless, there was an audacity to Greg’s creativity, his vision that at its strongest, at its best, was akin to genius.
Some years ago I began to notice a type of street fashion that I described to one editor as a kind of bricolage – something that might have evolved out of grunge or similar tendencies, but far more individual, refined and with a far broader range of affect; and it occurs to me that Greg was a kind of bricoleur of couture and style long before the term even had much currency in the art world, much less the world of fashion and style-making. I wouldn’t exactly call what Greg did couture povera (though as I write this, I’m thinking Greg would find this worth a giggle); but, just as there was nothing in the aesthetic realm that escaped his notice, there was nothing in the world at large, however humble or luxurious, that he might not seize upon as material. Greg was the perpetual ‘daft – and deft – punk.’ It was no accident that his star emerged as punk began to crest. The aesthetic he created – at first in accessories that were seen at that hip mecca of the time, Fiorucci – was both one version of it and a retort to it that could have only originated in L.A. or southern California. (It was a viewpoint or aesthetic that began to be consolidated for a time in the magazine Wet. I remember going to the Opening Ceremony store here in L.A. for the first time, and, seeing the old Wet magazines scattered about the décor, having a sense of homecoming. I knew I had to bring Greg there. Once upon a time, Gregory would have sold his fashion lines there.) Our friend, Carla Weber, put her finger on Gregory’s working method brilliantly, I thought, at his wake just yesterday afternoon, drawing a bead on days spent working, watching movies hanging out, and all but losing (or finding) oneself in the hilarity of his conversation. “His output was massive, and fun and silly and naïve and glorious and absolutely sophisticated.”
It would be impossible to put one’s finger on Gregory’s particular creative spark, but somehow, out of this cocktail of conceptual guile and naiveté, he managed to synthesize something entirely original, provocative and on the pulse. It had to do with being open to inspiration from anything and anywhere – movies, music, the endless conversation, the moment. Carla says it far better than I can: “He kept you laughing, entertaining you with his beautiful, ludicrous vision and yet creating an intimacy that was highly intoxicating.” Yes. (I’m thinking of Gregory as the close friend he was now – that moment when, having disarmed you utterly with some amazing story – a ‘fractured flicker’ of the real and surreal in one sublimely told anecdote – he would touch down to earth and quietly elicit our own dark secrets and intimacies.) Carla again: “[H]e was excellent at not just dissecting people, but human nature in all its glorious vulnerability.”
Gregory’s talent as a raconteur partook, yet almost stood apart from his design gifts. I’m not sure I would go as far as Carla, who said the other day, “His capacity to create a new language from the English language was hilarious.” But I know what she means. It was that volatile synthesis of verbal and visual. Greg had the story-telling talent of a film-maker, and by that I mean a great film-maker. (The comparison that comes to mind most readily is Billy Wilder – especially in his Paramount collaborations with Charles Brackett. Greg could have written Foreign Affair – or maybe his own updated version. Another is Preston Sturges. I think of conversations I had with Greg – at bars, openings, after-parties, even on the phone – that could have been entire scenes out of Sturges movies.) No coincidence either that his knowledge of film was exhaustive. And, though he designed costumes for several films, it was a pity he didn't do more. He had an almost innate sense of story arc; and his comic timing was sui generis. (Move over – WAAAAYYY over – Andy Kaufman – and a million others. Greg as a newly minted angel: “Hey, YOU – all hundred of you – get off of MY cloud.”) He knew how to build the story, the moment, then throw it away. At his best it was almost breath-taking. (Maybe you’re right, Carla.)
And of course there’s the musical side to that gifted timing – and I think a bit of Oscar Levant. We were both fans; and I think somewhere at the surly, cynical edge of Greg’s wit was something that descends from the Levantine line. I remember my first encounter with Gregory (at the old Studio Grill on Santa Monica Boulevard across from Trader Joe’s), followed not long thereafter by a telephone conversation – a rundown (in every sense) of local design talent, each thumbnail sketch more scathing and hilarious than the last. (I was co-editing a special issue of L.A. Weekly at the time.) Greg’s telephone narrative could almost have been published verbatim (and probably should have, now that I think of the problems we had putting that issue together). By the time we put the issue to bed, Greg was on his way back to Japan; but I made a mental note to stay in touch, and somehow we did.
Gregory was formidable then. I can’t imagine what kind of impression I could have made at the time. My VERY brief jag of dressing in boutique or designer threads had long since passed and I felt lucky to have a nice pair of shoes on my feet. (Maybe it was the shoes.) But then, as Carla has noted many times, there was beneath that edge, that temperament (and boy did Greg have a temper) and genius, a fundamental humanity in touch with an entire spectrum of human nature. I was always amazed at how well Gregory – haut-bourgeois, Beverly Hills boy that he was to his core – could relate to everyone and anyone. Over the years, that surf samurai stance began to give way to something not quite so hard-edged and perhaps a bit vulnerable. Gregory was vulnerable. He stood up to the corporate Establishment as it was then arrayed in his industry and was tsunamied right back down. He picked himself up, of course, and took his surfboard back to L.A. But L.A., a city he loved and knew better than anyone I know, could also be the fabled City of Nets to its native son – something that Greg in his infinite cynicism could undoubtedly see through; yet he was repeatedly stymied by its upsets and betrayals. To look at the profusion of surf- and skate-wear lines here, to say nothing of elements seen in contemporary design everywhere from New York to Milan, is to see the remnants of a hundred design careers Greg might have had.
Greg and I never really discussed that local brand of shmatte – the kind of surf- and skate-wear that’s a drug on the market these days – at any length, though it’s impossible to ignore his enormous influence. Regardless of its ‘artistic’ embellishments, it would seem so passé, almost irrelevant in the context of Gregory’s own work and overall perspective. I can just imagine his withering assessment: e.g., ‘How THIRTY years ago – which was, fortunately, NOT the Sixties.’
He could still look fierce (he was fierce). Every once in a while, especially when it rained, he would wear a leatherette hood that looked like the sort of headgear a Roman Catholic prelate of the Late Renaissance or the Baroque might wear – on the battlefield or in the torture chambers of the Inquisition. He made one think of a Medici or Barberini cardinal or pope (in or out of the Bacon-esque blur). About a year ago, after undergoing a long (and long overdue) rehabilitation for his long-standing chemical dependencies, he emerged healthier than he’d been for more than a decade, but nevertheless delicate, still clearly in recovery. It would be a long road back to full health. Now his look took on something gentler, almost saintly (especially in those quiet moments that, to those of us who knew him well, signaled something more alarming, perhaps deadly, than it looked – the absolute exhaustion of his patience: ‘I’m going to suffer your idiocy for another 15 seconds and then I’m going to have to blow your head off, darling.’). How would Bacon have rendered Saint Jerome? I wonder.
It is almost too ironic that Greg’s latest design line was to be a line of urns and funerary objects (the designs I saw before his death were fantastic) – an irony Greg would of course have been the first to appreciate. But the cruelty of Greg being cut down on the eve of his third act is almost too much to bear at the moment. One season ends and another begins and it almost feels unseemly that Greg’s passing should be lost in this tumult (to say nothing of the distractions of politics). Or perhaps we’re just trying to find his voice, hear it again clearly in that confusion of sights and sounds. Only a few evenings ago, I was chatting with Mary Woronov, another close mutual friend, and we were trying to locate, recapture something of that voice, wit, that way of telling a story – something that between the two of us (or maybe three or four) we might, in theory, be able to do. We couldn’t come close.
Another mutual friend rang up to say, "Wow -- this is really going to blow a hole in your life." He wasn't kidding; but I'm in -- well, good company: Mary, Carla, Pat Loud, Robbie Cavolina, among others; and, it goes without saying, his brother, Jeff -- the Poe of Blum and Poe -- as formidable as a sibling as he is in that global province we call the art world. No one loved his brother as well as Jeff.
There was laughter as well as tears at Greg’s wake; but – you couldn’t help but think – not as much as there would have been if Greg had been there. It’s a cliché to mourn the passing of youth and laughter in the wake of an untimely passing; but there was a kind of joie and verve, spontaneity and effervescence that seemed to pass before us and into the shadows, despite the afternoon’s lambent sunlight. I thought of the end of a book I had recently finished in a jag of research for a pitch – Nancy Mitford’s biography of the Marquise de Pompadour. Mitford’s description of Pompadour’s final recessional goes as follows:
“[The King] watched the Marquise as she went back up the long Avenue de Paris; in the bitter wind he stood there without coat or hat until she was out of sight. Then he turned away, tears pouring down his cheeks. ‘That is the only tribute I can pay her.’
“After this a great dullness fell upon the Château of Versailles.”
After Gregory’s passing, a great dullness seemed to fall upon the aquamarine skies of Los Angeles.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Sweet flipping bird
1 September 2008
Where does a wild woman go?* Well look – I don’t call it awol for nothing. You want a story? Let’s see: I was doing corporate espionage in Prague and Budapest. Or was it just Prague? Or Buda? Or Pest? (Not an unlikely scenario when you think about it – assuming one of the people involved was divorce litigant, no? Kidding. Seriously – kidding.) I was pirating (legal) substances between Spain and Morrocco. But that took all the fun out of it, right? Like you need to have MORE FUN in Spain?? But then Fez – not necessarily about FUN, right? But I really don’t know anything beyond Barcelona and Casablanca. Seriously. (Oh jesus if you only knew who I sounded like right now.) I was held hostage by Robert Wilson’s minions at the Water Mill in Southampton. Or was it just a toxic reaction to that Botox blitz after a multi-magnum Champagne OD in some designer’s digs in Montauk? Or Malibu? Return to the Chateau. Marmont.
No – the closest I got to Barcelona this summer was via Woody Allen and Vicky Cristina. Disappointing but delicious anyway. My immobility puts a new spin on the stay-cation concept altogether. Oh I’m getting around a bit – but it’s exhausting – I’m not sure which is more – the fuel prices or just the endless driving (it would be so nice to have a driver in this town ). I’ve been out a bit – films (well it’s summer; you know you’re going to go to some movies even if they’re bad), performances, new music, the usual action in the museums and galleries. There’ve been a few interesting group shows around town (e.g., Circus, Fette; a nice sculpture show at Western Project). I haven’t been to the Conceptualism show at MOCA yet; but seems as if it would be a great follow-up to the Lawrence Weiner show that closed a month or so ago. But the last few nights have been mostly about politics. Thursday was officially Barack’s night – in L.A. as well as Denver; but so was Sunday afternoon. My genius producer pals Jane Cantillon and Richard Ross, who have lately reincarnated themselves as a nightclub act (so much more entertaining than your garden-variety superhero/heroine), threw a benefit together in their beautiful garden and raised a small truckload of money for Obama. I suppose that means for the U.S.A. – since the Bush administration have put a whole new perverse spin on the “Ask not what your country can do for you;” concept. They’ve made it pretty clear that that a Republican government is not going to be doing anything for anyone or any part of this country outside the wealthiest .25 percent or the oil/energy or military industrial sectors. Am I hopeful? It’s too early to ask. But at least it makes me feel less exhausted.
Oh who am I kidding? If I were any more exhausted, I’d be something like Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth – “Oxygen. Oxygen!” – trying to connect with my inhaler. (“Who are you? I don’t know you.”) Gee, isn’t that an appropriate metaphor for life in Los Angeles? Trying to stay connected to that creative spark without blowing up the hotel room. Trying to connect to the inhaler or oxygen mask. Just trying to breathe. It gets a little overwhelming.
Or maybe just exasperating. I’m not the most patient person around. Certainly not at 9:00 in the morning. (My father says it’s just our DNA – of which mine is a particularly defective specimen.) Which is around the time I was flipping through the latest W Magazine this past Saturday morning. What can I say? It’s that time of the year, kids (I almost typed ‘ids’ – I guess that would apply, too). No, no, no – I’m so past the shmatte – no patience for that, either (and goddess knows, no money for it). But…. well, there’s always something in les modes, no? Whether it’s some jacket in pink-satin that looks like a cross between a bed-jacket and a life-preserver, or some bauble that looks like a prosthetic or silicone implant. (Okay, I’m looking for something, uh, new, okay??) Or – I don’t know – I’ve gotta figure out some way to look, no? And then there’s the terrific photography. Fabulous editorial spread by Juergen Teller, featuring that terrific actress and human work of art, Tilda Swinton. (You thought I was going to say, Björk, huh?) A couple of others -- two Kates -- by the team of Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot -- Hudson (new and improved); Moss -- same-old and fabulous). Of course, this being that time of year, as I said, they're also going to throw some art and culture at us, and of course they do. Tara Donovan -- show coming up, great studio, great new house in Brooklyn; Philippe de Montebello -- getting ready to retire, not exactly someone making the rounds in Chelsea every week, but a class act nonetheless; Liza Lou -- show coming up (at L&M), colonizing the bead craft work force of Durban, South Africa to build her over-sized lunatic baubles. (Come to think of it, it would almost make sense as jewellery.)
Yeah -- did anyone else read that? It was too early in the morning for the adrenaline to start flowing. In the hour or two before cocktails, believe me I would have been seeing stars -- no need for Ms. Lou's sparklers, thank you. As if there hasn't been enough ink spilled over her sorry ass -- we have to have a full color spread documenting her exploitation for the sake of kitsch on a grand scale? On a fascist scale. Make no mistake about it -- this kitsch Guantanamo in fiberglass, crystal and bugle beads -- in no way transfigures its grim subject. It's just a Disney-fied monument to fetish. As if her being awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant wasn't enough to make you throw up. And the writer's (Christopher Bagley) studied neutrality gets to be a bit much.
Lou tries to answer her critics and just digs herself a deeper hole. "It's summing up someone's lifework as a mental oddity.... What's far more frightening for people is to consider the possibility that I'm completely aware of what I'm doing." Yes -- it is a lifework as "mental oddity"; and yes, her awareness of what she's doing makes it far more frightening." Her studio/workshop set-up sounds like a Jim Jones/People's Temple cult camp. Everything but the cyanide Kool-Aid, which I'm sure you'd be begging for at the end of a workday. If you didn't figure in the desert/heat and the overseers with the whips, you'd think the Egyptian slaves building the pyramids got a better deal. At least they were building an architectual monument, a wonder of the world. Lou's wage-slaves (and you can imagine what those wages probably are) are only building a monument to their master's fatuousness. (Robert Pincus-Whitten is quoted and it's hilarious -- and embarrassing, and damning -- in its absurdity: "There's that ambiguity between the extremely luxurious and the politically terrifying." Move over Damien Hirst -- let Liza Lou and Walt Disney show you how it's REALLY done. Did he get paid to write that? Or is he suffering from dementia?) And please don't even think about throwing that comparison with Late Antique or Renaissance mosaic work at me. Those artists and artisans may have worked like slaves, but they were artisans, not slaves, not piece-workers; cognizant of their important creative role in the great studios and workshops.
Setting aside the colonialism, the exploitation, even the not-so-latent fascism of the work -- it's just BAD. Lou is quoted as saying that in art school, "I was really hated for what I was doing." Are you sure YOU were hated, Liza? Maybe what was hated was just the work -- what you were doing. The rest of the pull-quote is "I was this strange little person, making things." Yeah -- you could say the same thing about the Unabomber. I could go on. There's sheer insanity in every paragraph -- presented entirely without comment, challenge, cross-examination or any qualification or analysis whatsoever by the apparently anesthetized reporter.
Enough. To think -- all those thousands of man- (or woman-)hours of drudgery and all those thousands of beaded and sequinned dresses all over the world that need repair -- including one or two in my closet. Can we talk about some real sparklers now? The healing kind -- brought to you by Shirley MacLaine. She calls it "Chakra Sky Jewelry." "Align your Spirit, Body, and Mind with sacred geometrical forms and healing colors of the rainbow that are imprinted with Chi energy." A priestess in the Rat Pack -- who knew? Oh, if they could see you now, honey. (What would Dino say???) You can't make this stuff up. Does Warren know about this? Why couldn't she just stick to acting and dancing? Or even writing. Honey, this time you've gone WAY too far out on that limb.
* The line (by Susan Tyrrell and Gregory Poe) is from Susan Tyrrell's one-woman show, My Rotten Life.
Where does a wild woman go?* Well look – I don’t call it awol for nothing. You want a story? Let’s see: I was doing corporate espionage in Prague and Budapest. Or was it just Prague? Or Buda? Or Pest? (Not an unlikely scenario when you think about it – assuming one of the people involved was divorce litigant, no? Kidding. Seriously – kidding.) I was pirating (legal) substances between Spain and Morrocco. But that took all the fun out of it, right? Like you need to have MORE FUN in Spain?? But then Fez – not necessarily about FUN, right? But I really don’t know anything beyond Barcelona and Casablanca. Seriously. (Oh jesus if you only knew who I sounded like right now.) I was held hostage by Robert Wilson’s minions at the Water Mill in Southampton. Or was it just a toxic reaction to that Botox blitz after a multi-magnum Champagne OD in some designer’s digs in Montauk? Or Malibu? Return to the Chateau. Marmont.
No – the closest I got to Barcelona this summer was via Woody Allen and Vicky Cristina. Disappointing but delicious anyway. My immobility puts a new spin on the stay-cation concept altogether. Oh I’m getting around a bit – but it’s exhausting – I’m not sure which is more – the fuel prices or just the endless driving (it would be so nice to have a driver in this town ). I’ve been out a bit – films (well it’s summer; you know you’re going to go to some movies even if they’re bad), performances, new music, the usual action in the museums and galleries. There’ve been a few interesting group shows around town (e.g., Circus, Fette; a nice sculpture show at Western Project). I haven’t been to the Conceptualism show at MOCA yet; but seems as if it would be a great follow-up to the Lawrence Weiner show that closed a month or so ago. But the last few nights have been mostly about politics. Thursday was officially Barack’s night – in L.A. as well as Denver; but so was Sunday afternoon. My genius producer pals Jane Cantillon and Richard Ross, who have lately reincarnated themselves as a nightclub act (so much more entertaining than your garden-variety superhero/heroine), threw a benefit together in their beautiful garden and raised a small truckload of money for Obama. I suppose that means for the U.S.A. – since the Bush administration have put a whole new perverse spin on the “Ask not what your country can do for you;” concept. They’ve made it pretty clear that that a Republican government is not going to be doing anything for anyone or any part of this country outside the wealthiest .25 percent or the oil/energy or military industrial sectors. Am I hopeful? It’s too early to ask. But at least it makes me feel less exhausted.
Oh who am I kidding? If I were any more exhausted, I’d be something like Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth – “Oxygen. Oxygen!” – trying to connect with my inhaler. (“Who are you? I don’t know you.”) Gee, isn’t that an appropriate metaphor for life in Los Angeles? Trying to stay connected to that creative spark without blowing up the hotel room. Trying to connect to the inhaler or oxygen mask. Just trying to breathe. It gets a little overwhelming.
Or maybe just exasperating. I’m not the most patient person around. Certainly not at 9:00 in the morning. (My father says it’s just our DNA – of which mine is a particularly defective specimen.) Which is around the time I was flipping through the latest W Magazine this past Saturday morning. What can I say? It’s that time of the year, kids (I almost typed ‘ids’ – I guess that would apply, too). No, no, no – I’m so past the shmatte – no patience for that, either (and goddess knows, no money for it). But…. well, there’s always something in les modes, no? Whether it’s some jacket in pink-satin that looks like a cross between a bed-jacket and a life-preserver, or some bauble that looks like a prosthetic or silicone implant. (Okay, I’m looking for something, uh, new, okay??) Or – I don’t know – I’ve gotta figure out some way to look, no? And then there’s the terrific photography. Fabulous editorial spread by Juergen Teller, featuring that terrific actress and human work of art, Tilda Swinton. (You thought I was going to say, Björk, huh?) A couple of others -- two Kates -- by the team of Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot -- Hudson (new and improved); Moss -- same-old and fabulous). Of course, this being that time of year, as I said, they're also going to throw some art and culture at us, and of course they do. Tara Donovan -- show coming up, great studio, great new house in Brooklyn; Philippe de Montebello -- getting ready to retire, not exactly someone making the rounds in Chelsea every week, but a class act nonetheless; Liza Lou -- show coming up (at L&M), colonizing the bead craft work force of Durban, South Africa to build her over-sized lunatic baubles. (Come to think of it, it would almost make sense as jewellery.)
Yeah -- did anyone else read that? It was too early in the morning for the adrenaline to start flowing. In the hour or two before cocktails, believe me I would have been seeing stars -- no need for Ms. Lou's sparklers, thank you. As if there hasn't been enough ink spilled over her sorry ass -- we have to have a full color spread documenting her exploitation for the sake of kitsch on a grand scale? On a fascist scale. Make no mistake about it -- this kitsch Guantanamo in fiberglass, crystal and bugle beads -- in no way transfigures its grim subject. It's just a Disney-fied monument to fetish. As if her being awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant wasn't enough to make you throw up. And the writer's (Christopher Bagley) studied neutrality gets to be a bit much.
Lou tries to answer her critics and just digs herself a deeper hole. "It's summing up someone's lifework as a mental oddity.... What's far more frightening for people is to consider the possibility that I'm completely aware of what I'm doing." Yes -- it is a lifework as "mental oddity"; and yes, her awareness of what she's doing makes it far more frightening." Her studio/workshop set-up sounds like a Jim Jones/People's Temple cult camp. Everything but the cyanide Kool-Aid, which I'm sure you'd be begging for at the end of a workday. If you didn't figure in the desert/heat and the overseers with the whips, you'd think the Egyptian slaves building the pyramids got a better deal. At least they were building an architectual monument, a wonder of the world. Lou's wage-slaves (and you can imagine what those wages probably are) are only building a monument to their master's fatuousness. (Robert Pincus-Whitten is quoted and it's hilarious -- and embarrassing, and damning -- in its absurdity: "There's that ambiguity between the extremely luxurious and the politically terrifying." Move over Damien Hirst -- let Liza Lou and Walt Disney show you how it's REALLY done. Did he get paid to write that? Or is he suffering from dementia?) And please don't even think about throwing that comparison with Late Antique or Renaissance mosaic work at me. Those artists and artisans may have worked like slaves, but they were artisans, not slaves, not piece-workers; cognizant of their important creative role in the great studios and workshops.
Setting aside the colonialism, the exploitation, even the not-so-latent fascism of the work -- it's just BAD. Lou is quoted as saying that in art school, "I was really hated for what I was doing." Are you sure YOU were hated, Liza? Maybe what was hated was just the work -- what you were doing. The rest of the pull-quote is "I was this strange little person, making things." Yeah -- you could say the same thing about the Unabomber. I could go on. There's sheer insanity in every paragraph -- presented entirely without comment, challenge, cross-examination or any qualification or analysis whatsoever by the apparently anesthetized reporter.
Enough. To think -- all those thousands of man- (or woman-)hours of drudgery and all those thousands of beaded and sequinned dresses all over the world that need repair -- including one or two in my closet. Can we talk about some real sparklers now? The healing kind -- brought to you by Shirley MacLaine. She calls it "Chakra Sky Jewelry." "Align your Spirit, Body, and Mind with sacred geometrical forms and healing colors of the rainbow that are imprinted with Chi energy." A priestess in the Rat Pack -- who knew? Oh, if they could see you now, honey. (What would Dino say???) You can't make this stuff up. Does Warren know about this? Why couldn't she just stick to acting and dancing? Or even writing. Honey, this time you've gone WAY too far out on that limb.
* The line (by Susan Tyrrell and Gregory Poe) is from Susan Tyrrell's one-woman show, My Rotten Life.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)