10 February 2008 (for Amy Winehouse)
Before I post what I was going to post a week ago, let me first say that NO, I did NOT GO to the BCAM opening. Fearless Leader and Fabulous Publisher went to the press preview Thursday and – though she submitted no direct comment to me of her own (her neutrality is somewhat understandable: the works shown from the collection are, almost without exception, superb; I believe a list is available from the website – both LACMA and Broad’s own)*, I found a comment she relayed to me from someone else who was there – a very knowledgeable perceptive and articulate (and widely published) L.A. critic – revealing. After asking FL for her thoughts, he responded with one of his own: “It’s all about money.” To that I might append a couple of corollaries, both more or less directly applicable to Mr. Broad’s apparently unslakeable competitive drive and his unshakeable need for control: it’s all about ego; and it’s all about real estate. Presumably we won’t be hearing too many complaints about the real estate for at least a few years, and maybe more. Between refurbished galleries on the rest of the campus, BCAM and the May Co. space, Mr. Govan, et al. should have enough lebensraum for, well, at least a tausendwochenreich. As far as Mr. Broad’s ego is concerned, I have an architectural proposal that, although probably not suited to the talents of Renzo Piano or Zaha Hadid, is sure to intrigue someone – maybe a Yale MFA or Architecture graduate. They would surely recall the design of the Beinecke Rare Book Library: a glass structure itself fully contained within an opaque but translucent ‘sarcophagus’ of Carrara marble. With all the talk (albeit understandably reticent at this stage) about yet another free-standing Broad facility for art, yet ambivalence about simply abandoning the elegant structure that now houses the Foundation, perhaps a structure, similar to the Beinecke marble box (but much larger) could be built around the building, holding the Foundation, art and library (and all those Beuys), and Mr. Broad’s ego, all at once. Presumably ego radiation danger should abate within, say, a tausendjahrensreich.
*By the by – has anyone else noticed that BCAM is listed on the Broad Art Foundation website as if it were simply one more proprietary component – or certainly an ancillary – of the Broad Art Foundation? Once you click on this BAF sub-head/’sub-entity’ for an ‘overview’, the unscrolled narrative presents BCAM as if it were a joint venture with LACMA -- which of course it is -- rather than an actual no-strings-attached gift to LACMA. (I’d love to see the deal memo on all of this.) As always, the language is carefully parsed – would that the press picked up on these things: “$60 million donation to create the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at LACMA” ; in the next graf – “the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at LACMA is open.” “BCAM at LACMA” – my emphasis. Not LACMA’s BCAM; not L.A. County’s BCAM – it just happens to be there on Wilshire Blvd. (I guess Armand Hammer beat Eli to the Wilshire frontage in Westwood that would have been more convenient to his office – though Hammer had an entire corporation behind him already hunkered down on Wilshire.) And it’s not as if that prime Wilshire Boulevard frontage has a negligible market value exactly – even in today’s depressed real estate market. As far as providing some architectural cohesion or coherence to the Museum complex (or at least that Wilshire frontage again), that remains to be seen. For the time being, I think they should just make the most of a rather syncopated beat.(to put the best spin on it), taking the length of that stretch of Wilshire between Curson and Fairfax, from the Pits and sculpture garden to that misbegotten ziggurat-pastiche by the Hardy Holzman firm (I’m not sure I even remember who designed this fortress – probably a team of architects, all working at odds with one another), to – I have no idea what’s going on with the ‘entrance pavilion’ – to say nothing of that Chris Burden installation (is that permanent? Reminds me a bit of a question occasionally (obnoxiously) posed to me: is it fashion or is it costume?) – to BCAM – and finally to the Streamline Moderne classic by Martin & Marx that was once the May Co. department store. (It surprises me a little that more hasn’t been done with those amazing spaces.) With all the attention splashed on BCAM, I sort of wonder if there’s a New Yorker-type cartoon in the making: the two buildings jostling with one another on the page: LACMA West to BCAM: “Hey, what am I – chopped liver?”
The Broad approach to collecting – I wouldn’t even call it high market/’blue chip’ (crass to use this kind of jargon in the context of art, however commodified), though of course, it is high market, if not top of the market, because, with rare exception, Broad’s penchant for control doesn’t seem to really allow him the latitude for the kind of risk top-market, high-stakes bidding entails – tells us something about what is lacking in this approach – and what may be missing in the collection as a whole: adventure, passion, discovery, a sense of the moment, the truly contemporary, a confidence of taste – however that may be characterized over the short or long term.
In other words, with certain exceptions (and there are always exceptions), I don’t think you ever really get collecting at the high end, without understanding something about collecting at the low, the new end. That doesn’t mean every new art starlet, every new graduating class from the major art schools. It does mean a willingness, an eagerness to seek out and seriously consider the new (or simply unseen, unanticipated; ‘emerging’ should also encompass the newly ‘emergent’ from well off the beaten (cyber- or other) track), a voracious appetite for new visual ideas, and to consider them in a continuously refreshed cultural context; ancillary to that is of course a vigorous engagement with the culture. It’s really not for the faint of heart, and – even in the saturated hyper-connected digitally extended world from which most of us operate – it’s not something that can be entirely accomplished from a Wilshire Boulevard office, a suite at the Four Seasons or a Gulfstream jet.
I was reminded of this as I made my round of openings this week-end (minus BCAM). I wasn’t sure what to expect from Eve Wood (whom I know a bit and have frequently enjoyed chatting and sharing discoveries with; her enthusiasm is irresistible) – and I have to say I was prepared to be less than thrilled. There’s a whimsical and anecdotal quality about these paintings that risks being labeled a bit ‘twee’. (Okay, is that what I’m doing here?) When I saw the image on the invite (“Between Sea and Land”), the thought-association that immediately came to mind was The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Sunflowers’ (as in Paul Zindel‘s play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.). A whimsical (or so it seemed) portrait set against a fantastic arabesque-like backdrop of sunflowers set into a densely floral hedge sinking into the painting’s foreground/lower edge. The portrait has a slightly cartoon-schematic cast – a fairy tale figure (and configuration). What redeems it is the clarity of the painting within that arabesque. I’m not sure it matters that the portrait doesn’t really look like its subject (a well-known local artist); the real subject (I think) is the arabesque itself. (Aren’t we all, though?) This is the problem Wood sets up for herself: conjoining the ‘iconic’ with the anecdotal, while fully exploring/exploiting her capacities for painterly clarity, transparency and expressiveness. The unusual composition – a deliberately ‘painterly’ backdrop that both supports and undermines the ‘pictorial’ aspect, a slightly skewed or oblique orientation (congruent with the impulse towards arabesque) just off the vertical axis – certainly supports the latter of these objectives. The first is somewhat harder to achieve. Far easier, I think, to let that clarity work, in a sense, as a kind of reveal, to let the subject emerge within the painterly whole – which is what happens in the best of these canvases. E.g., notably “No Way Home,” a portrait of the artist’s mother looking up (stageward) amid a sea of red plush theater seats – beautiful character study, gorgeous painting; also “Every Good Story Has A Cherry In It” (which features Wood’s adorable dog) – already a ‘picture on a wall’ in rich amber tones relieved by chartreuse. In “Lone Wolf on the Prairie, the figure (here, unambiguously twee) floats amid a gossamer mille-fiori backdrop that needs no justification for its exuberant beauty, its sheer joie de peintre.
It was an evening of such small, contemplative pleasures – which continued at the Carl Berg Gallery – right across the street from the splashy luau my editor and I were missing at LACMA. Jessica Minckley, who was featured in the L.A. Louver Rogue Wave of 2005, showed a small gallery of enigmatic objects and panels/pages(?), that (with the exception of a series of watercolors made with pages actually torn from books) initially seemed quite disparate, yet with an eerie sense of correspondence. Taken in succession, though, that sense of correspondence built into an assemblage of dark, quiet power. From the “Epigraph/Epitaph” series of watercolors – simultaneously dark and bitterly ironic yet almost elegiac – to the nascent Narcissus about to lose his shadow (a framed watercolor panel that actually has its full blown/full-grown cut-out counterpart in a fabric silhouette attached to the frame and dangling to the floor. Between these book-ends, among other things, a life/death mask, a stack of pink bakery boxes stacked almost to the ceiling, with only the top box opened, a pair or salt-lick cubes suspended from a set of plastic fingers (used for grazing cattle), a ‘salt drawing’ laid over a magazine ad for Morton Salt. I had the benefit of a rather cogent chat with the artist; but ultimately, the book pages with their ironic texts and ineffable watercolors (scatters, tangles and hatchings of variously brights and pastels) are by themselves enough to nail down Minckley’s thesis. Consider just one or two out of the 10 or so watercolors. “Without Reason” is a dark cloud of hatchings (this one actually in pencil); the epigram on the flyleaf is by Hannah Arendt (that alone promising a mordant note), “ … the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, I want you to be, without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.” The book: Amy Bloom’s Love Invents Us. Or, more simply/obviously(?), “Unanswered Prayers,” a spray of bright confetti on the flyleaf of – what else? – Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers. “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” Is there anyone who doesn’t know that one by heart? (And is there anyone – atheists included – who doesn’t routinely set aside its wisdom?) Amid such resonance, the revelers across the street could only seem like bright shadows, the Chris Burden installation a long row of candles to light their way to the Tomb.
The evening only grew darker – yet cooler, too – as I headed to Chinatown for Rommelo Yu’s show at Chung King Project – Nitwittliwitt, continuing his fascination with Sol LeWitt – yet both morphed into a kind of permutation of the classic LeWitt stereometric grid and projection, and with an implication of something queasy or unsettled. (Something I should have taken away from the Wood show earlier? – what happens when the axis tilts? The center doesn’t hold? And when it tries to right itself – or take another turn altogether?) Behind a curtain of orange and purple ping-pong balls (that’s what they looked like anyway) arrayed in a runic configuration (or perhaps a scroll of Greek characters – they looked like interlocked lambdas – stood Yu’s wobbly-looking (but surprisingly sturdy and well-constructed) wood ‘LeWitt’ openwork 27-(3x3x3) chambered “Shaky Cube.” The geometry of combinations and permutations took on a darker cast with the suite of fragmented pentagram studies Yu took from the pictorial structure of some of the first released photographs of the Abu Ghraib horrors. Any student of iconography has some familiarity with the vocabulary of political gesture, the semiotics of power, control, abasement, humiliation (and exaltation) – the examples, both royal and religious, fill the pages of art history texts. A cautionary exercise -- this dissection of humanity’s heart of darkness; sentence diagrams, if you will, in humanity’s grammar of self-degradation. Dark pleasures indeed at that wobbly core.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
Art fairs and art films; Bassman and butterflies
1-2 February 2008
Before I go over a few notes about Victor Man, the art fairs, Chloe Piene’s drawings, which always amaze me, Rosson Crow, and – speaking of the fairs – a late, very late discovery that is really a re-discovery, but either way, so bizarrely lagging behind the rest of the world, you would think I’d just crawled from beneath a rock where I’d been trapped for the last five years. That apparently is when the Farmani Gallery (on South Robertson) had a show of the work of Lillian Bassman, photographer of fashion, fantasy, and the ephemeral glamour, mystery and sheer joy of their intersection in the gritty grisailles of urban life. But more of that in a moment.
I mentioned that I might have a few words about Schnabel’s Le Scaphandre et le Papillon – and I do; except they’re mostly en français. Le Scaphandre is one of those movies that, as essential as language is to the film, to the story as Jean-Dominique Bauby writes it, seems to sweep away conventional grammar and syntax, indeed all the linguistic structures that comfortably occupy the mesh of neuro-synaptic networks that are the springboard for our verbal communications. And maybe that applies to visual language, too. Before even two minutes of the film have elapsed, you’re aware of a radical shift in the narrative and purely visual priorities of the film. That the film is intended to be told from the point of view of the “locked-in” Jean-Do Bauby is a given. But the film doesn’t lock itself into that framework but floats freely through and around it and, when necessary, entirely away from it – much as Jean-Do would have liked to himself. It is as if, having one destroyed one set of experiential filters, Bauby – from the conrfinement of his diving bell, his scaphandre (which nevertheless might be considered an implement of discovery) – and Schnabel behind his own two eyes, that of his camera and his seemingly limitless imagination, are continuously engaged in discovering (and rediscovering), reassembling, imagining another. Writing these words, I suddenly have an image (from Robert Polidori?) in my mind of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans – a scattering of old family photographs and mementos and pages of handwritten letters and journals floating on the dirty waters amid broken furniture and other flotsam flowing in and out of a ruined house. What of the past, the markers of identity, of residence, can be recovered from such disaster? Bauby’s actuality has nosedived into a dark murky full fathom five and reemerged bobbing on the surface, grasping for anything familiar, unfamiliar – trying to find a compass, a paddle (visual, emotional, physical, intellectual) to navigate a course back to himself, to his life. Irony fails here, at least initially. Outrage, indignation are what we viewers and Bauby grasp at; obliteration – even of self, to make peace amid this ‘sea of troubles’ (to the initial despair of his earnest ‘speech’ therapist, Henriette (played by Marie-Josée Croze); to sweep it all before us as we swim towards an ‘undiscovered’ surface. Light itself, in endless variations, unlocks the reserves of irony, however cruel, perverse. Sensually appreciative, even sexual within his scaphandre/sarcophage, Bauby laughs and bemoans simultaneously the cruelty of his fate. Schnabel’s task is to navigate a perceptual channel to and through this imprisoned Bauby, and to reconstruct his imaginative – liberation is too strong, too large a word – reengagement with a world that can never be the same. Light fades by degrees (or ’blinks’ closed) to darkness, returns fitfully to close on an image – the actuality, a memory, a schematic view of something that might or might not be happening – we are aware even within the first few frames that this is an image-maker of astonishing power. As self-pity gives way to acceptance, a process of transformation – out of light and darkness, memory and imagination, a projection or superimposition of one reality over another (or its subtraction, but more often not – Bauby’s realism, his poly-pragmatism is re-made into something more malleable, something that will admit the participation of its sidelined, paralyzed narrator/composer) – begins. Bauby ‘surfaces’ and the composition of his book (and recomposition of self) begins.
Without going into detail about the beauty, originality and power of the film (which I may develop at more length for artillery), let if suffice to say that, regardless of what Academy members are voting for in the Best Picture category (I’m not sure if Schnabel’s film is eligible; at the very least, it should have been nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category), this is the best film of 2007. I know it sounds absurd to make such a sweeping and categorical judgment. But – like the best films of Welles, John Ford, Bergman, Antonioni, Godard, etc. – it has changed (or should change) the way we look at and the way we make movies. (The film itself is a liberated and reengaged kind of film-making, if you will.) Can I be allowed to change my mind? (Well, my artillery copy will or won’t bear out my thinking about it.) I’ll admit I wasn’t as detached a viewer as I would have liked – I wept profusely through sections of the film (too many end-of-life issues, etc.). Let me see it again. Though I think it can be recommended without qualification to anyone who likes movies. I feel as if, just as Richard Strauss was able to say upon his deathbed that death was “just as I wrote it” (in Death and Transfiguration), Schnabel may one day be able to say much the same thing. Speaking of music, the film (not surprisingly) has a fantastic soundtrack. That I will state firmly and categorically. With respect to my own emotional response, almost ordeal, I would say to Schnabel – quoting from the film (and Bauby’s book) – in English this time: “I don’t mind you dragging me to the bottom of the ocean because you’re also my butterfly.”
MORE
Before I go over a few notes about Victor Man, the art fairs, Chloe Piene’s drawings, which always amaze me, Rosson Crow, and – speaking of the fairs – a late, very late discovery that is really a re-discovery, but either way, so bizarrely lagging behind the rest of the world, you would think I’d just crawled from beneath a rock where I’d been trapped for the last five years. That apparently is when the Farmani Gallery (on South Robertson) had a show of the work of Lillian Bassman, photographer of fashion, fantasy, and the ephemeral glamour, mystery and sheer joy of their intersection in the gritty grisailles of urban life. But more of that in a moment.
I mentioned that I might have a few words about Schnabel’s Le Scaphandre et le Papillon – and I do; except they’re mostly en français. Le Scaphandre is one of those movies that, as essential as language is to the film, to the story as Jean-Dominique Bauby writes it, seems to sweep away conventional grammar and syntax, indeed all the linguistic structures that comfortably occupy the mesh of neuro-synaptic networks that are the springboard for our verbal communications. And maybe that applies to visual language, too. Before even two minutes of the film have elapsed, you’re aware of a radical shift in the narrative and purely visual priorities of the film. That the film is intended to be told from the point of view of the “locked-in” Jean-Do Bauby is a given. But the film doesn’t lock itself into that framework but floats freely through and around it and, when necessary, entirely away from it – much as Jean-Do would have liked to himself. It is as if, having one destroyed one set of experiential filters, Bauby – from the conrfinement of his diving bell, his scaphandre (which nevertheless might be considered an implement of discovery) – and Schnabel behind his own two eyes, that of his camera and his seemingly limitless imagination, are continuously engaged in discovering (and rediscovering), reassembling, imagining another. Writing these words, I suddenly have an image (from Robert Polidori?) in my mind of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans – a scattering of old family photographs and mementos and pages of handwritten letters and journals floating on the dirty waters amid broken furniture and other flotsam flowing in and out of a ruined house. What of the past, the markers of identity, of residence, can be recovered from such disaster? Bauby’s actuality has nosedived into a dark murky full fathom five and reemerged bobbing on the surface, grasping for anything familiar, unfamiliar – trying to find a compass, a paddle (visual, emotional, physical, intellectual) to navigate a course back to himself, to his life. Irony fails here, at least initially. Outrage, indignation are what we viewers and Bauby grasp at; obliteration – even of self, to make peace amid this ‘sea of troubles’ (to the initial despair of his earnest ‘speech’ therapist, Henriette (played by Marie-Josée Croze); to sweep it all before us as we swim towards an ‘undiscovered’ surface. Light itself, in endless variations, unlocks the reserves of irony, however cruel, perverse. Sensually appreciative, even sexual within his scaphandre/sarcophage, Bauby laughs and bemoans simultaneously the cruelty of his fate. Schnabel’s task is to navigate a perceptual channel to and through this imprisoned Bauby, and to reconstruct his imaginative – liberation is too strong, too large a word – reengagement with a world that can never be the same. Light fades by degrees (or ’blinks’ closed) to darkness, returns fitfully to close on an image – the actuality, a memory, a schematic view of something that might or might not be happening – we are aware even within the first few frames that this is an image-maker of astonishing power. As self-pity gives way to acceptance, a process of transformation – out of light and darkness, memory and imagination, a projection or superimposition of one reality over another (or its subtraction, but more often not – Bauby’s realism, his poly-pragmatism is re-made into something more malleable, something that will admit the participation of its sidelined, paralyzed narrator/composer) – begins. Bauby ‘surfaces’ and the composition of his book (and recomposition of self) begins.
Without going into detail about the beauty, originality and power of the film (which I may develop at more length for artillery), let if suffice to say that, regardless of what Academy members are voting for in the Best Picture category (I’m not sure if Schnabel’s film is eligible; at the very least, it should have been nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category), this is the best film of 2007. I know it sounds absurd to make such a sweeping and categorical judgment. But – like the best films of Welles, John Ford, Bergman, Antonioni, Godard, etc. – it has changed (or should change) the way we look at and the way we make movies. (The film itself is a liberated and reengaged kind of film-making, if you will.) Can I be allowed to change my mind? (Well, my artillery copy will or won’t bear out my thinking about it.) I’ll admit I wasn’t as detached a viewer as I would have liked – I wept profusely through sections of the film (too many end-of-life issues, etc.). Let me see it again. Though I think it can be recommended without qualification to anyone who likes movies. I feel as if, just as Richard Strauss was able to say upon his deathbed that death was “just as I wrote it” (in Death and Transfiguration), Schnabel may one day be able to say much the same thing. Speaking of music, the film (not surprisingly) has a fantastic soundtrack. That I will state firmly and categorically. With respect to my own emotional response, almost ordeal, I would say to Schnabel – quoting from the film (and Bauby’s book) – in English this time: “I don’t mind you dragging me to the bottom of the ocean because you’re also my butterfly.”
MORE
Monday, January 28, 2008
Speaking Truth to Power -- Schnabel, Mason, etc.
27 January 2008
This has been the week of the art fairs in Los Angeles and of course I was there and of course I took notes – high and low. There were the usual suspects and the unusually suspect; the surprises (rare) and the real discoveries (rarer still) – in the expected and unexpected places. There was the buzz and there was the occasional stunned silence (lost in the din of course). Julian Schnabel was in town – not for the fairs or the fine art biz, but the fine movie biz – his presentation at the Directors Guild, along with his fellow best director nominees. I’m told he stole the show, which doesn’t surprise me at all. I only wish I could have witnessed it first-hand. From what I gleaned (from a writer-director who was there), it was a real ‘telling truth to power’ moment: an innovator showing up, in the most matter-of-fact, quietly down-to-earth and non-threatening manner possible, the flaws in an industry drunk on the latest technology, but mired in the hoary conventions of conventional Hollywood movie-making. It quite flummoxed a couple of his not-quite-peers on the stage. (More about Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, plus tard, say, a post or two from now.) (The other movie I took in this week – aside from Welles’ F for Fake (see previous post) was There Will Be Blood, about which for the moment I will only say: There was John Huston; and Daniel Day-Lewis, as great an actor as he is, will never bring him back to life; nor will Paul Thomas Anderson ever replace him or reproduce his achievement.
A lot of my New York pals were in town for the madness – including Super-Kathleen and a new colleague I’ll just call the Designated Italian Countess for now. Rivers of champagne flowed (and flash floods, too – hey can somebody do something about the storm drains in this town? My Louboutins are looking a little too low and beaten). I’m a bit smithereened – and soaked – by it all. It was also a seriously political week – and the week-end of the South Carolina primary, the results of which surprised me more than a little and gave me just a bit of hope. The Left Side of my family (we can forget about what I’ll just call the von Karajan-Right side of my DNA line) has more or less endorsed Obama; and although I’m an entrenched skeptic and distrustful of almost everyone in the power class, I can’t help hoping the Obama candidacy might just be the spur to turn this country around. In the meantime, the mainstream media continues to behave in this sphere much as the Hollywood studio potentates behave in theirs. Was I the only one who wondered why Bill Clinton was being spotlighted ad nauseam in a moment that belonged to Barack Obama? (That was no concession speech; though I have to give Clinton credit for his rhetorical flair and sheer chutzpah. But will no one tell him to GET OFF THE FUCKING STAGE?) And then there was the outrageously cynical dual New York Times primary endorsement. What the fuck is THAT about?? For once I was plotzing about something other than an art or music event – or my financial quagmire.
So if you don’t mind, I’m going to track back a bit again. (No, I’m not re-naming the blog “The Time Machine” – it would be more like The Science of Sleep (I loved the Gondry film – such wonderfully touching performances by Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg) – it’s all I want to do after a week like the last.
I’m not going to talk about the L.A. Weekly “Annual Biennial” – although the opening at Track 16 at Bergamot Station was obviously the event of that particular evening (the 12th): it looked as if the entire L.A. art world had jammed into the Bergamot parking lot, to say nothing of the gallery itself which might as well have been a mosh pit – until I’ve read Doug Harvey’s essay in the Weekly. But – setting aside the fact that the emphasis was on painting, setting aside the caliber of the work on view (high for the most part), and that a good many of these artists are among the country’s best, even personal faves – let’s just say I have a few issues about it. (Is that okay, Tom Christie?)
No – I have to skip for a moment over to the show I might have missed that evening, but was sooooo glad not to. It’s a show I may write about at greater length somewhere down the line, but, on this political week-end (and ohmygod – the State of the Onion upon us!), let me just share a few things about this marvelously entertaining show by Rachel Mason, a recent Yale MFA and apparently a Daumier-in-the-making. It’s called The Candidate – and as the Presidential field is gradually being winnowed down, it may be useful to have a look – or two or three or more at this show of the winners, losers, poseurs and posturers, also-rans and even ‘never-rans’ – in short, the political animal in motion, as exemplified by the contenders in the Presidential horserace, fresh (or not so) out of the starting gate as of about fall of last year. The field has already lost a few since the show opened – e.g., Fred Thompson (not a minute too soon) and Joe Biden (there’s a particularly excellent rendering of Biden here; ditto Bill Richardson of New Mexico – which is almost a completed portrait); and will likely lose more (I’m thinking Giuliani’s number is up next – speaking of which, Mason has fingered him in her crosshairs as no political cartoonist has – at least that I’ve ever seen). But these are more than political caricatures. This is above all about physiognomy, the cast of facial expression – the political mask as prop to the will to power; and gesture – the physical expression of the extension towards, the reach and grasp for power, public acknowledgment (and endorsement). The artist has made the gallery space into a silent, but cacophonous echo chamber of gesture using podiums, microphones and cast plaster hands (the artist’s own) sculpted into various finger-pointing – directing, commanding, jabbing, hectoring, pleading; spread palm – exhorting, embracing, collecting, and pleading again; grasping the mic and the edge of the podium.
Beyond that, there’s a jagged movement and energy to the figures. They push towards us, to fill, crowd the viewer’s visual field. Mason’s line has a fluid, nervous, almost angst-laden energy perfectly suited to her subject. You sense her own reach, her extension towards the politician under her scope. Her project took first began to take shape after her boyfriend’s Playboy assignment covering the Edwards campaign was aborted. She took her sketches and kept right on going. Her own written observations amplify what is evident in the drawings: she doesn’t miss a thing. It’s interesting to see where the emphasis falls in these drawings – probing eyes, mouths and proboscis in unrelenting motion; and falling away from the face – hands, shoulders. The studies of Barack Obama had a Munch-like expressiveness. “He looks so white,” I said to the artist – which reminds us of something the media tends to overlook, that he is in fact half-white; and apparently I wasn’t the only one who had made such a comment. Perhaps as his campaign gathers momentum, the media will learn to look as carefully (if not as acutely, shrewdly or entertainingly) as Mason has.
This has been the week of the art fairs in Los Angeles and of course I was there and of course I took notes – high and low. There were the usual suspects and the unusually suspect; the surprises (rare) and the real discoveries (rarer still) – in the expected and unexpected places. There was the buzz and there was the occasional stunned silence (lost in the din of course). Julian Schnabel was in town – not for the fairs or the fine art biz, but the fine movie biz – his presentation at the Directors Guild, along with his fellow best director nominees. I’m told he stole the show, which doesn’t surprise me at all. I only wish I could have witnessed it first-hand. From what I gleaned (from a writer-director who was there), it was a real ‘telling truth to power’ moment: an innovator showing up, in the most matter-of-fact, quietly down-to-earth and non-threatening manner possible, the flaws in an industry drunk on the latest technology, but mired in the hoary conventions of conventional Hollywood movie-making. It quite flummoxed a couple of his not-quite-peers on the stage. (More about Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, plus tard, say, a post or two from now.) (The other movie I took in this week – aside from Welles’ F for Fake (see previous post) was There Will Be Blood, about which for the moment I will only say: There was John Huston; and Daniel Day-Lewis, as great an actor as he is, will never bring him back to life; nor will Paul Thomas Anderson ever replace him or reproduce his achievement.
A lot of my New York pals were in town for the madness – including Super-Kathleen and a new colleague I’ll just call the Designated Italian Countess for now. Rivers of champagne flowed (and flash floods, too – hey can somebody do something about the storm drains in this town? My Louboutins are looking a little too low and beaten). I’m a bit smithereened – and soaked – by it all. It was also a seriously political week – and the week-end of the South Carolina primary, the results of which surprised me more than a little and gave me just a bit of hope. The Left Side of my family (we can forget about what I’ll just call the von Karajan-Right side of my DNA line) has more or less endorsed Obama; and although I’m an entrenched skeptic and distrustful of almost everyone in the power class, I can’t help hoping the Obama candidacy might just be the spur to turn this country around. In the meantime, the mainstream media continues to behave in this sphere much as the Hollywood studio potentates behave in theirs. Was I the only one who wondered why Bill Clinton was being spotlighted ad nauseam in a moment that belonged to Barack Obama? (That was no concession speech; though I have to give Clinton credit for his rhetorical flair and sheer chutzpah. But will no one tell him to GET OFF THE FUCKING STAGE?) And then there was the outrageously cynical dual New York Times primary endorsement. What the fuck is THAT about?? For once I was plotzing about something other than an art or music event – or my financial quagmire.
So if you don’t mind, I’m going to track back a bit again. (No, I’m not re-naming the blog “The Time Machine” – it would be more like The Science of Sleep (I loved the Gondry film – such wonderfully touching performances by Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg) – it’s all I want to do after a week like the last.
I’m not going to talk about the L.A. Weekly “Annual Biennial” – although the opening at Track 16 at Bergamot Station was obviously the event of that particular evening (the 12th): it looked as if the entire L.A. art world had jammed into the Bergamot parking lot, to say nothing of the gallery itself which might as well have been a mosh pit – until I’ve read Doug Harvey’s essay in the Weekly. But – setting aside the fact that the emphasis was on painting, setting aside the caliber of the work on view (high for the most part), and that a good many of these artists are among the country’s best, even personal faves – let’s just say I have a few issues about it. (Is that okay, Tom Christie?)
No – I have to skip for a moment over to the show I might have missed that evening, but was sooooo glad not to. It’s a show I may write about at greater length somewhere down the line, but, on this political week-end (and ohmygod – the State of the Onion upon us!), let me just share a few things about this marvelously entertaining show by Rachel Mason, a recent Yale MFA and apparently a Daumier-in-the-making. It’s called The Candidate – and as the Presidential field is gradually being winnowed down, it may be useful to have a look – or two or three or more at this show of the winners, losers, poseurs and posturers, also-rans and even ‘never-rans’ – in short, the political animal in motion, as exemplified by the contenders in the Presidential horserace, fresh (or not so) out of the starting gate as of about fall of last year. The field has already lost a few since the show opened – e.g., Fred Thompson (not a minute too soon) and Joe Biden (there’s a particularly excellent rendering of Biden here; ditto Bill Richardson of New Mexico – which is almost a completed portrait); and will likely lose more (I’m thinking Giuliani’s number is up next – speaking of which, Mason has fingered him in her crosshairs as no political cartoonist has – at least that I’ve ever seen). But these are more than political caricatures. This is above all about physiognomy, the cast of facial expression – the political mask as prop to the will to power; and gesture – the physical expression of the extension towards, the reach and grasp for power, public acknowledgment (and endorsement). The artist has made the gallery space into a silent, but cacophonous echo chamber of gesture using podiums, microphones and cast plaster hands (the artist’s own) sculpted into various finger-pointing – directing, commanding, jabbing, hectoring, pleading; spread palm – exhorting, embracing, collecting, and pleading again; grasping the mic and the edge of the podium.
Beyond that, there’s a jagged movement and energy to the figures. They push towards us, to fill, crowd the viewer’s visual field. Mason’s line has a fluid, nervous, almost angst-laden energy perfectly suited to her subject. You sense her own reach, her extension towards the politician under her scope. Her project took first began to take shape after her boyfriend’s Playboy assignment covering the Edwards campaign was aborted. She took her sketches and kept right on going. Her own written observations amplify what is evident in the drawings: she doesn’t miss a thing. It’s interesting to see where the emphasis falls in these drawings – probing eyes, mouths and proboscis in unrelenting motion; and falling away from the face – hands, shoulders. The studies of Barack Obama had a Munch-like expressiveness. “He looks so white,” I said to the artist – which reminds us of something the media tends to overlook, that he is in fact half-white; and apparently I wasn’t the only one who had made such a comment. Perhaps as his campaign gathers momentum, the media will learn to look as carefully (if not as acutely, shrewdly or entertainingly) as Mason has.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
I, etc. -- (Self-)Portrait as Fugue
25 January 2008
I’m mixing things up a bit, I know. It’s simply the way my too-complicated life intersects with the L.A. art world. Again I start by posting a note to a late-dated note. But that’s the L.A. art world, too – the endless confluences, coincidences and correspondences that enmesh us like a rich and densely woven tapestry. I attended a screening of Welles’ F for Fake Tuesday evening (22 January) at the Hammer – one of a series of films presented in conjunction with the Francis Alÿs Politics of Rehearsal show. That the process and technique of this film would appeal to Alÿs and relate well to the substance of the Hammer exhibition is obvious – Welles narrates – emcees, if you will – a great deal of the film from his editing table; the seams, patches, ellipses, elisions are all (or mostly) exposed in plain view. The film is also, however occasionally self-involved or self-conscious, a masterpiece – a revisiting of Mr. Arkadin, and a number of other Wellesian themes and subjects in an entirely fresh context, tantalizing and electric in its feints and conundrums. It was also a fresh reminder of what the show at fette’s Gallery tried to express “mathemetaphysically” – i.e., the “inconstancy of FACTS as well as the multiplicity of YOU.” The film is itself a double, even triple (and more) portrait – a veritable fugue on the subject of identity, signature (in every sense) counterfeiture (in every sense), self-possession and projection. The ephemeral purchase each of us has on self-actualization, projection, identity (here reduced to a tragicomic joke). The contentious, dubious claim we stake on observation and expression – our own and others’. There are indelible scenes and portraits within this portrait: an amazing face-off between Clifford Irving, would be-biographer of Howard Hughes and Hoax perpetrator, and Elmyr de Hory, famed art forger (who made a specialty counterfeiting the Fauves, late Post-Impressionists and various School of Paris artists) and himself the subject of an earlier Irving biography; the fascinating (and drop-dead gorgeous) Oja Kodar; and finally Welles himself – at his editing table and on various locations, including Chartres, where he delivers an elegiac monologue. “Our songs will all be silenced; but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.” I have to remind myself of that once in a while.
12-13 January 2008
The natural follow-up to photoLA was a themed group show of photographic work curated by fette (with the further amplifications of one “Dr. L. Hernandez Gomez,” a “mathemetaphysician” with the “League of Imaginary Scientists”) for her Culver City gallery. Although it would be absurd to refer to the exhibition as simply photography, its insights into the medium and process were directly applicable to much of what was on view at the photoLA fair (the work Andrew Garn, Bruce Gilden, Trent Parke, Zachary Drucker and Brian Finke provide just a few examples). But the show goes to the heart of a much deeper problem of the both the medium and art itself; and beyond that to the problem of perception and (self-)definition. Although Fette had determined beforehand that photography would be the participants’ common medium for the show, her core idea was to ask each of the 25 artists (there are two collaborations by paired artists) selected to photograph themselves “representing someone else.” This is both specific enough and general enough to wreak a certain havoc in what would otherwise be a more conventional show of portraiture. Of course it also has a multiplier effect – which is what may have inspired Fette to bring in the collaboration of a “mathemetaphysician.” I think a pure mathematician would have sufficed; but I sometimes wonder if Fette takes a certain, almost perverse, pleasure, standing back and gleefully watching her prank unfold in ways she might not have foreseen herself. (The last lines of the Mark Antony funeral oration from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar suddenly come to mind. “Now let it work. Mischief thou art afoot, / Take thou what course thou wilt … Fortune is merry, / And in this mood will give us anything.”)
It does. If self-portraiture is above all portraiture, inherently a kind of doubling, (Unititled) u = ___ approaches this particular kind of auto-portrait en masque as a (quasi-)mathematical function. (In fact, the ‘operation’ as it is described sounds something like a quadratic equation applied in a social context and – well, let’s just say in infinite series. The infinite extends to the infinitesimal: we are, all of us, defining, refining, re-defining our notions of self, persona, other, and others (society, or the group) on a more or less continuous basis. In short, reality is slippery, and we need no further proof of this than a glimpse in our mirrors. Projection (self into the external; as well as the projection of others’ onto the self), extension, abstraction, displacement – any number of strategies are available here.
Some of the (not exactly self-)portraits are relatively straightforward. William Lamson shows a digital C-print image of his(?) face encased in a transparent (plastic?) mask in a kind of early medieval configuration, the mask bristling with pins (acupuncture needles?) which appear to almost pierce Lamson’s skin. It’s the social warrior in a moment of repose (or not – can we ever rest?), the self-scaffolding exposed beneath the (transparent) armor, the myriad projections – slings and arrows indeed – of a million friends, enemies and anyone looking for a momentary prop on their own reality and self-definition. Some are all pose and context (e.g., Kristian Haggblom, Ned Meets Kuzo; Kate Gilmore, Hungry Hillary – a bulemic’s poster-girl, Anouk Kruithof, musicnature • solvation)
Some are about the transition – the moment(s) of transformation/transaction – the exchange of attitude, persona; the blur (of posture, identity, gender). Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Amy Elkins and Arnaud Delrue provide examples of this. Performance, pose (costume) and manipulation are key elements here – e.g., Elkins and Delrue, who both wear dresses; Delrue’s an interesting contrast to Sepuya’s attitude blur. The performative aspect is more explicit in Deanna Templeton’s (a kind of vacant ‘advertisement for herself’ – Space Available) and Tobias Faldt’s. In others, the role play is multilayered – less blur than an accumulation of layers of identity, each interacting, commenting on the others (Suellen Parker, Roya Falahi, Raphael Neal and Eva Lauterlein providing excellent examples of this. Falahi’s and Neal’s are particularly brilliant).
Carlee Fernandez has explored this terrain fairly extensively and by now is an old hand at it; and I wasn’t surprised that her “Self-Portrait as my Mom’s Ex with 29 Palms Rainbow Stockings” had sold straightaway. (Victor Boullet explored another (digital) kind of displacement.) There are more examples than I have time to inventory – including the almost pure abstractions (e.g., Melanie Bonajo) – but there I go again. I’ll sum up only by saying Fette’s in a bit of a rut lately: she only does interesting shows.
She may be in a rut where openings are concerned, too. This one (Friday evening, the 11th) was particularly fabulous. Leora Lutz (of Gallery Revisited) was there, among many, and in fine form; and, as I was leaving, a spectactular looking film-maker I can only identify as Nana from Ghana walked in; among many, many others. I haven’t laughed so much in months.
I’m mixing things up a bit, I know. It’s simply the way my too-complicated life intersects with the L.A. art world. Again I start by posting a note to a late-dated note. But that’s the L.A. art world, too – the endless confluences, coincidences and correspondences that enmesh us like a rich and densely woven tapestry. I attended a screening of Welles’ F for Fake Tuesday evening (22 January) at the Hammer – one of a series of films presented in conjunction with the Francis Alÿs Politics of Rehearsal show. That the process and technique of this film would appeal to Alÿs and relate well to the substance of the Hammer exhibition is obvious – Welles narrates – emcees, if you will – a great deal of the film from his editing table; the seams, patches, ellipses, elisions are all (or mostly) exposed in plain view. The film is also, however occasionally self-involved or self-conscious, a masterpiece – a revisiting of Mr. Arkadin, and a number of other Wellesian themes and subjects in an entirely fresh context, tantalizing and electric in its feints and conundrums. It was also a fresh reminder of what the show at fette’s Gallery tried to express “mathemetaphysically” – i.e., the “inconstancy of FACTS as well as the multiplicity of YOU.” The film is itself a double, even triple (and more) portrait – a veritable fugue on the subject of identity, signature (in every sense) counterfeiture (in every sense), self-possession and projection. The ephemeral purchase each of us has on self-actualization, projection, identity (here reduced to a tragicomic joke). The contentious, dubious claim we stake on observation and expression – our own and others’. There are indelible scenes and portraits within this portrait: an amazing face-off between Clifford Irving, would be-biographer of Howard Hughes and Hoax perpetrator, and Elmyr de Hory, famed art forger (who made a specialty counterfeiting the Fauves, late Post-Impressionists and various School of Paris artists) and himself the subject of an earlier Irving biography; the fascinating (and drop-dead gorgeous) Oja Kodar; and finally Welles himself – at his editing table and on various locations, including Chartres, where he delivers an elegiac monologue. “Our songs will all be silenced; but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.” I have to remind myself of that once in a while.
12-13 January 2008
The natural follow-up to photoLA was a themed group show of photographic work curated by fette (with the further amplifications of one “Dr. L. Hernandez Gomez,” a “mathemetaphysician” with the “League of Imaginary Scientists”) for her Culver City gallery. Although it would be absurd to refer to the exhibition as simply photography, its insights into the medium and process were directly applicable to much of what was on view at the photoLA fair (the work Andrew Garn, Bruce Gilden, Trent Parke, Zachary Drucker and Brian Finke provide just a few examples). But the show goes to the heart of a much deeper problem of the both the medium and art itself; and beyond that to the problem of perception and (self-)definition. Although Fette had determined beforehand that photography would be the participants’ common medium for the show, her core idea was to ask each of the 25 artists (there are two collaborations by paired artists) selected to photograph themselves “representing someone else.” This is both specific enough and general enough to wreak a certain havoc in what would otherwise be a more conventional show of portraiture. Of course it also has a multiplier effect – which is what may have inspired Fette to bring in the collaboration of a “mathemetaphysician.” I think a pure mathematician would have sufficed; but I sometimes wonder if Fette takes a certain, almost perverse, pleasure, standing back and gleefully watching her prank unfold in ways she might not have foreseen herself. (The last lines of the Mark Antony funeral oration from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar suddenly come to mind. “Now let it work. Mischief thou art afoot, / Take thou what course thou wilt … Fortune is merry, / And in this mood will give us anything.”)
It does. If self-portraiture is above all portraiture, inherently a kind of doubling, (Unititled) u = ___ approaches this particular kind of auto-portrait en masque as a (quasi-)mathematical function. (In fact, the ‘operation’ as it is described sounds something like a quadratic equation applied in a social context and – well, let’s just say in infinite series. The infinite extends to the infinitesimal: we are, all of us, defining, refining, re-defining our notions of self, persona, other, and others (society, or the group) on a more or less continuous basis. In short, reality is slippery, and we need no further proof of this than a glimpse in our mirrors. Projection (self into the external; as well as the projection of others’ onto the self), extension, abstraction, displacement – any number of strategies are available here.
Some of the (not exactly self-)portraits are relatively straightforward. William Lamson shows a digital C-print image of his(?) face encased in a transparent (plastic?) mask in a kind of early medieval configuration, the mask bristling with pins (acupuncture needles?) which appear to almost pierce Lamson’s skin. It’s the social warrior in a moment of repose (or not – can we ever rest?), the self-scaffolding exposed beneath the (transparent) armor, the myriad projections – slings and arrows indeed – of a million friends, enemies and anyone looking for a momentary prop on their own reality and self-definition. Some are all pose and context (e.g., Kristian Haggblom, Ned Meets Kuzo; Kate Gilmore, Hungry Hillary – a bulemic’s poster-girl, Anouk Kruithof, musicnature • solvation)
Some are about the transition – the moment(s) of transformation/transaction – the exchange of attitude, persona; the blur (of posture, identity, gender). Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Amy Elkins and Arnaud Delrue provide examples of this. Performance, pose (costume) and manipulation are key elements here – e.g., Elkins and Delrue, who both wear dresses; Delrue’s an interesting contrast to Sepuya’s attitude blur. The performative aspect is more explicit in Deanna Templeton’s (a kind of vacant ‘advertisement for herself’ – Space Available) and Tobias Faldt’s. In others, the role play is multilayered – less blur than an accumulation of layers of identity, each interacting, commenting on the others (Suellen Parker, Roya Falahi, Raphael Neal and Eva Lauterlein providing excellent examples of this. Falahi’s and Neal’s are particularly brilliant).
Carlee Fernandez has explored this terrain fairly extensively and by now is an old hand at it; and I wasn’t surprised that her “Self-Portrait as my Mom’s Ex with 29 Palms Rainbow Stockings” had sold straightaway. (Victor Boullet explored another (digital) kind of displacement.) There are more examples than I have time to inventory – including the almost pure abstractions (e.g., Melanie Bonajo) – but there I go again. I’ll sum up only by saying Fette’s in a bit of a rut lately: she only does interesting shows.
She may be in a rut where openings are concerned, too. This one (Friday evening, the 11th) was particularly fabulous. Leora Lutz (of Gallery Revisited) was there, among many, and in fine form; and, as I was leaving, a spectactular looking film-maker I can only identify as Nana from Ghana walked in; among many, many others. I haven’t laughed so much in months.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
photoLA -- The Big Look
11 January 2008
Before I’m driven back (kicking and screaming) to the LACMA/BCAM/BAF fiasco, allow me to start off on a slightly happier note. (Hey it happens – even in my life.) Although photography has been inescapable in the fine arts practically from the advent of the daguerrotype, and an indispensable tool and medium in contemporary art, it’s never exerted quite the same pull on my curiosity and aesthetic palate as painting and three-dimensional media, or even motion pictures. But, as Lao-Tsu might have said, the longest narrative (or non-narrative for that matter) movie begins with a single frame. And – well you can ask Carole Caroompas (as I have blogged not too long ago) – or Gerhard Richter – or Andy Warhol (well maybe not Andy), or another million or so artists: some of those frames are as indelibly printed on our consciousness as anything in the natural or human-made world. So you want to know what’s new in photography? I’m not sure I can tell you anything you don’t already know, but there was something to draw in the eye almost everywhere you turned Thursday evening at the photoLA opening.
The advance publicity out of the photoLA was already promising – sixty-some galleries on board, in addition to various art/photo publishing outlets; Jeff Burton, John Divola and Connie Samaras featured in programmed “conversations”; the opening night kick-off with Julius Shulman; and galleries everywhere from Brooklyn to Prague I had no acquaintance with. What was interesting was that it was some of the ‘tried, true’ places that engaged and delighted at least as much as the edgy and new. (Although I have to wonder if such distinctions mean anything at all. The ‘tried and true’ stay that way by showing the freshest and strongest of the ‘new’. And as for the ‘new’….well, so little really is; the ‘edge’ dropping into the void but taking us nowhere we’ve haven’t been before. For (outstanding) example – setting aside the over-the-top Schoeller body-builders, the ACE Gallery booth was almost a beacon for the show. Stepping inside, you felt immersed in the luminosity pouring, strobing off the walls. One wall held lightboxes, against which hung a 3-layer ‘Dura-transparency’ of what looked like a clip of a grainy black-and-white film or animation – a sequence of (the same) 18th century soldier(s) running, jumping and brandishing his weapon. A chorus line of cadets, circa 1789. Except it was closer to 1776: I thought they were French; they were in fact American revolutionary soldiers. The effect of implied movement was paradoxically bolstered by the seemingly rhythmic insertion of the identical soldier image that began the sequence – A-B-A-C-A-D. To its left, another revolutionary soldier, emerging from the shadows, adjusting his tricorne, this one in luminous color and backlit by a burst of light washing over the soldier’s inclined figure. Turning to a table of printed matter, I flipped through a book of photographs by Melanie Pullen – apparently a follow-up to her original High Fashion Crime Victim series which made quite a splash when she showed them here in Los Angeles only a few years ago – not without a bit of disappointment, even exasperation. The first series were suffused with a particular aura both haunted and opulent – incongruous luxury set off vibrantly against settings variously gritty, pristine (except for the evidence of crime or violence), or simply magical – settings not merely fortuitously treacherous, but ripe for a karmic double-cross. Most of this more recently published series seemed bereft of that peculiar electricity. Only then, as I turned away to face another wall, was I informed that the transparencies were also the work of Melanie Pullen – her latest series on soldiers, which continues to be augmented – perhaps as soon as next week, as Pullen was later to inform me herself. A studio shoot is in the works – assuming a set for a bombed-out Berlin, circa 1945, can be successfully constructed on a studio soundstage. It was great to see her moving in a fresh, and trenchant, new direction (and great to see her, too).
On another wall, Jay Mark Johnson, showed equally luminous work, made with a special (and apparently costly) scanning camera, that answered Pullen’s kinescopic soldiers with sunlit slices of landscapes (and aquascapes) against which figures and incident moved laterally in choreographic precision across the elongated horizontal bands of the scanned landscape. Here, too, the element of the repeated figure (person, horse, gesture or movement), or the figure’s movement – as with the poolscape where the swimmer’s legs flutter sinuously in intersecting sine waves – imbued these minimalist, almost conceptual mappings with a kind of lyricism.
More lyrical still were Dennis Hopper’s large color C-prints of collected litter, debris and random cast-offs culled from various urban “walks” – New York, Venice, etc. – ‘inventory’ photographs, if you will; also, perhaps, non-linear storyboard Rich with color, incident and densely textured, they drew me in repeatedly, almost against my will, searching for the clue, the tell-tale artifact, the story.
But ACE was hardly the only gallery with something arresting, powerful, luminous, dark. A.M. Richard showed amazing work by Stephen Mallon, Andrew Garn and Jillian McDonald, among others. Andrew Garn in particular has an amazing range: street vignettes from Times Square from the 1970s and early 1980s (one stark, black-and-white – the absurd juxtapositions of 42nd Street of a certain vintage, emphasized by the ironic juxtapositions in texture and scale; a seemingly ‘painted’ study of a drag queen-prostitute, simultaneously forlorn and self-possessed – a monument in motion; finally imagery of industrial sites, alternately cool, distanced, then almost overwhelming in their intensity. (E.g., the coolness of a Bethlehem Steel site in disuse; and finally the dark, dust-choked late industrial inferno of Magnitogorsk, a complex of steel factories in Siberia – amazing images all that demand to be seen.)
The Magnum photo agency was also here – hardly at a loss for compelling images. Among the most interesting was Trent Parke, whose brilliant color photography has something of the street/social context, texture, and contrast of Garry Winogrand, but with an entirely different energy – displaced by a few degrees, dislocated. He plays with the light sources, setting off individual figures and elements just so, creating a kind of tension and suspense. [I failed to mention the photography of Bruce Gilden when I posted this -- a bizarre omission given the power of these images. Since I seem to be using quasi-iconic photographers as a very rough index or reference point here (see above), let me just say that these portraits and pairings and street scenes -- taken mostly from contemporary Japan -- have something of the brazen energy and off-hand intimacy of William Klein, but with something jostling and fresh, syncopated and disjunctive in the visual rhythm and balance, and -- dare I say it? -- Japanese (or maybe not). But let me come back to Gilden in my next post. (Yeeeesssss -- it's coming.)]
You can’t go wrong showing Stephen Divola and Stephen Cohen had Divola in both color and black-and-white. I also loved Zachary Drucker’s and Brian Finke’s color photography (Drucker, who was there for the opening, is himself completely charming). Also Nick Brandt’s haunting, monumental images out of Africa. And Lori Nix’s surreal, richly evocative slice of urban decay (e.g., her chromogenic print of a disused proscenium stage theatre interior, “Majestic” (2006).
I’m simply breezing over this work, I’m well aware; but – well, there was a LOT to see (and I’ll be back). The Czech Center for Photography (Prague) was bursting with brilliant black-and-white photography from as far back as the 1920s to the present (much of it astonishingly affordable – e.g., a vintage print dance study by Julius Andres was only US$500). Circus scenes, landscape grotesqueries, bucolic landscapes – the range and the quality of almost everything on view were extraordinary. (In stunning contrast to at least one local dealer, who will go unnamed, asking the most outrageous prices for his ‘found’ and ‘vintage’ generic recyclings.)
Before I’m driven back (kicking and screaming) to the LACMA/BCAM/BAF fiasco, allow me to start off on a slightly happier note. (Hey it happens – even in my life.) Although photography has been inescapable in the fine arts practically from the advent of the daguerrotype, and an indispensable tool and medium in contemporary art, it’s never exerted quite the same pull on my curiosity and aesthetic palate as painting and three-dimensional media, or even motion pictures. But, as Lao-Tsu might have said, the longest narrative (or non-narrative for that matter) movie begins with a single frame. And – well you can ask Carole Caroompas (as I have blogged not too long ago) – or Gerhard Richter – or Andy Warhol (well maybe not Andy), or another million or so artists: some of those frames are as indelibly printed on our consciousness as anything in the natural or human-made world. So you want to know what’s new in photography? I’m not sure I can tell you anything you don’t already know, but there was something to draw in the eye almost everywhere you turned Thursday evening at the photoLA opening.
The advance publicity out of the photoLA was already promising – sixty-some galleries on board, in addition to various art/photo publishing outlets; Jeff Burton, John Divola and Connie Samaras featured in programmed “conversations”; the opening night kick-off with Julius Shulman; and galleries everywhere from Brooklyn to Prague I had no acquaintance with. What was interesting was that it was some of the ‘tried, true’ places that engaged and delighted at least as much as the edgy and new. (Although I have to wonder if such distinctions mean anything at all. The ‘tried and true’ stay that way by showing the freshest and strongest of the ‘new’. And as for the ‘new’….well, so little really is; the ‘edge’ dropping into the void but taking us nowhere we’ve haven’t been before. For (outstanding) example – setting aside the over-the-top Schoeller body-builders, the ACE Gallery booth was almost a beacon for the show. Stepping inside, you felt immersed in the luminosity pouring, strobing off the walls. One wall held lightboxes, against which hung a 3-layer ‘Dura-transparency’ of what looked like a clip of a grainy black-and-white film or animation – a sequence of (the same) 18th century soldier(s) running, jumping and brandishing his weapon. A chorus line of cadets, circa 1789. Except it was closer to 1776: I thought they were French; they were in fact American revolutionary soldiers. The effect of implied movement was paradoxically bolstered by the seemingly rhythmic insertion of the identical soldier image that began the sequence – A-B-A-C-A-D. To its left, another revolutionary soldier, emerging from the shadows, adjusting his tricorne, this one in luminous color and backlit by a burst of light washing over the soldier’s inclined figure. Turning to a table of printed matter, I flipped through a book of photographs by Melanie Pullen – apparently a follow-up to her original High Fashion Crime Victim series which made quite a splash when she showed them here in Los Angeles only a few years ago – not without a bit of disappointment, even exasperation. The first series were suffused with a particular aura both haunted and opulent – incongruous luxury set off vibrantly against settings variously gritty, pristine (except for the evidence of crime or violence), or simply magical – settings not merely fortuitously treacherous, but ripe for a karmic double-cross. Most of this more recently published series seemed bereft of that peculiar electricity. Only then, as I turned away to face another wall, was I informed that the transparencies were also the work of Melanie Pullen – her latest series on soldiers, which continues to be augmented – perhaps as soon as next week, as Pullen was later to inform me herself. A studio shoot is in the works – assuming a set for a bombed-out Berlin, circa 1945, can be successfully constructed on a studio soundstage. It was great to see her moving in a fresh, and trenchant, new direction (and great to see her, too).
On another wall, Jay Mark Johnson, showed equally luminous work, made with a special (and apparently costly) scanning camera, that answered Pullen’s kinescopic soldiers with sunlit slices of landscapes (and aquascapes) against which figures and incident moved laterally in choreographic precision across the elongated horizontal bands of the scanned landscape. Here, too, the element of the repeated figure (person, horse, gesture or movement), or the figure’s movement – as with the poolscape where the swimmer’s legs flutter sinuously in intersecting sine waves – imbued these minimalist, almost conceptual mappings with a kind of lyricism.
More lyrical still were Dennis Hopper’s large color C-prints of collected litter, debris and random cast-offs culled from various urban “walks” – New York, Venice, etc. – ‘inventory’ photographs, if you will; also, perhaps, non-linear storyboard Rich with color, incident and densely textured, they drew me in repeatedly, almost against my will, searching for the clue, the tell-tale artifact, the story.
But ACE was hardly the only gallery with something arresting, powerful, luminous, dark. A.M. Richard showed amazing work by Stephen Mallon, Andrew Garn and Jillian McDonald, among others. Andrew Garn in particular has an amazing range: street vignettes from Times Square from the 1970s and early 1980s (one stark, black-and-white – the absurd juxtapositions of 42nd Street of a certain vintage, emphasized by the ironic juxtapositions in texture and scale; a seemingly ‘painted’ study of a drag queen-prostitute, simultaneously forlorn and self-possessed – a monument in motion; finally imagery of industrial sites, alternately cool, distanced, then almost overwhelming in their intensity. (E.g., the coolness of a Bethlehem Steel site in disuse; and finally the dark, dust-choked late industrial inferno of Magnitogorsk, a complex of steel factories in Siberia – amazing images all that demand to be seen.)
The Magnum photo agency was also here – hardly at a loss for compelling images. Among the most interesting was Trent Parke, whose brilliant color photography has something of the street/social context, texture, and contrast of Garry Winogrand, but with an entirely different energy – displaced by a few degrees, dislocated. He plays with the light sources, setting off individual figures and elements just so, creating a kind of tension and suspense. [I failed to mention the photography of Bruce Gilden when I posted this -- a bizarre omission given the power of these images. Since I seem to be using quasi-iconic photographers as a very rough index or reference point here (see above), let me just say that these portraits and pairings and street scenes -- taken mostly from contemporary Japan -- have something of the brazen energy and off-hand intimacy of William Klein, but with something jostling and fresh, syncopated and disjunctive in the visual rhythm and balance, and -- dare I say it? -- Japanese (or maybe not). But let me come back to Gilden in my next post. (Yeeeesssss -- it's coming.)]
You can’t go wrong showing Stephen Divola and Stephen Cohen had Divola in both color and black-and-white. I also loved Zachary Drucker’s and Brian Finke’s color photography (Drucker, who was there for the opening, is himself completely charming). Also Nick Brandt’s haunting, monumental images out of Africa. And Lori Nix’s surreal, richly evocative slice of urban decay (e.g., her chromogenic print of a disused proscenium stage theatre interior, “Majestic” (2006).
I’m simply breezing over this work, I’m well aware; but – well, there was a LOT to see (and I’ll be back). The Czech Center for Photography (Prague) was bursting with brilliant black-and-white photography from as far back as the 1920s to the present (much of it astonishingly affordable – e.g., a vintage print dance study by Julius Andres was only US$500). Circus scenes, landscape grotesqueries, bucolic landscapes – the range and the quality of almost everything on view were extraordinary. (In stunning contrast to at least one local dealer, who will go unnamed, asking the most outrageous prices for his ‘found’ and ‘vintage’ generic recyclings.)
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Up Against the Wall (or Back to Broad)
Darlings -- I'm back -- but not exactly all there yet. There's so much to say -- and so much better left unsaid. I've been in an L.A. Breakdown mode lately and I'm grateful just to be let back into MY LIFE -- forget about the City itself or for that matter the L.A. art world. There are notes -- oh yes, there are notes -- and I mean to post them. But rather than throw them all out in an omnibus posting, I'm just going to start in media res, so to speak, posting just a bit (a couple days' worth, say) at a time. Bear with me -- and thanks for checking in.
8-9 January 2008
Jesus I hate to break my month-long silence just for a news item. As readers of this blog are only too aware, awol isn’t exactly about news, per se. More like (I would like to think, anyway), the back-story or up-front (and hopefully way ahead) story – or maybe a lateral cross-reference to some sidebar or ancillary story or just a bit removed from the ‘front’ page – which, as we all know, always requires some reading between-the-lines – and perhaps a bit more in recent years as they’ve been co-opted into PR mouthpieces for establishment agendas. (My brother used to be a virtuoso at this kind of cross-reading of The New York Times front-page political stories, and it sometimes surprises me he never ended up there editing it (he’s at one of the other major metro dailies); but I wonder now how he would have dealt with this subterfuge.) As many of my friends and colleagues here in Los Angeles are aware, I haven’t exactly been in seclusion over the last month. More like, submersion – as in, almost drowning, as in fighting for my life. But it’s not as if I couldn’t manage to bob to the surface now and then. I surfaced at Regen for Matthew Barney, for example – though arguably, that might easily have blended in with the overall drowning sensation I was trying to overcome. E.g., the (photographic) work on the walls appeared to be mostly a retread of Cremaster 3 – art direction shots and production stills – and the film shown appeared to be of a live ritual-cum-performance involving animals (always nervous-making) and elegantly shod but otherwise nude models performing a kind of static limbo and controlled excretions of foreign (to their bodies anyway) fluids (honey? Oil? Chocolate? Who knew?) – too mechanical to be dream-like but seeming to unfold in dead air. Not exactly Barney’s take on the ‘money-shot’ – but what? From cremaster to sphincter – is this Barney’s reply to the Courbet ‘origin-of-the-world’-view? I know life’s end is frequently accompanied by incontinence; but I’m not sure how this applies to the world’s end. But you’d think he might be ready to pull his focus out of the crotch. (I know that sounds funny coming from me, as I write this from my perch at the Flynt Building.) Barney was there – personable, still handsome, and very down-to-earth. Björk loves him; why can’t I?
But see – I’m already getting away from what pulled me out from under my security blanket, if you will. Yeah, yeah – I was out last Saturday, too. But can we save it for a minute? (Yes, I forgive your skepticism – since I assume you forgive my jaundice.) The first shock – and I didn’t even see it first thing – is that The New York (and not the Los Angeles) Times broke the story. What’s with that? Sam Zell transition issues? Okay, I’m sure everyone knows by now that Eli Broad announced today (yesterday?) that his Art Foundation would retain full control of his collections, rather than donating any significant segment of them to major art institutions. And I’m sure we all know which local art institution had the most riding on this decision. Why am I not surprised? Was it LACMA’s dubious track record with this sort of business? Goddess only knows how many L.A. collections have passed on LACMA in favor of other institutions, or simply the auction block. Then there are the notorious instances of those not-quite-ready-for-the auction-house curated exhibitions of private collections which, stamped with LACMA’s (no less dubious) imprimatur, headed straight to New York, leaving only a souvenir or two behind (e.g., the Maslon collection, which ultimately went to Sotheby’s). Then there was LACMA’s own foolish deaccessioning of a few years ago, which included unique, irreplaceable works by Ernst, Beckmann, Masson and Modigliani. Just how foolish we can finally judge today in concrete terms. (Do I mean that literally?) Hmmm…. In theory, the funds (and the auction results were less than spectacular) were to be used to acquire new works. I suppose we have to trust LACMA on that one. Except that I don’t trust anyone – I don’t have either the experiential or genetic architecture to support it (hell my life has been one long Charley Brown kick for a non-existent field goal). But without getting all forensic on their asses, and speaking of concrete, there’s been a whole lot of it poured into the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (already acronymized by the LACMA crew as “BCAM”) on the west side of the LACMA campus.
When some years ago Broad exhibited a generous 40 odd year swath of his art collection at LACMA – this was some time before his commitment to a building on the LACMA campus – I again wondered what the Museum itself might stand to keep from what was placed on view. (If nothing else, it seemed Broad seemed to be giving the nod to LACMA, as opposed to MOCA, on whose board he also sits.) There were of course the teasers: the token gifts – “Promised Gift of Eli and Edythe Broad” – though I noted that these were few and far between. None of the best Rauschenbergs or Johns bore such a caption. It was also interesting that one of the “promised gifts” was a room-sized Marcel Broodthaers installation – implicitly raising the issue of space.
What was also noteworthy was a certain lack of zing to the collection. Notwithstanding the masterpiece caliber, with a few exceptions (the Broodthaers, for example), it all seemed so safe, and – it sounds so cynical – “blue-chip.” (And of course the flip-side of this is that what is blue-chip today may not look so tomorrow.) A collection usually says something about its collector(s) and about his/their passions and ambitions. This was an impenetrable wall of currency in every sense.
Or maybe it’s about the wall. Just the wall. Broad is a builder – and he’s not too particular about what he’s building or how the real estate is squandered and the planet plundered with it. He started out ruining vast tracts of southern California with thousands of acres of mediocre housing – more suburban blight; and now he’s embarked on an almost megalomanical building program for Bunker Hill downtown. It’s Eli’s No-Trump bid. But of course there had to be some Wilshire Boulevard presence – another Name up there along with those of Ahmanson, Simon, Bing and Anderson. Was it mere coincidence that Michael Govan – who made his reputation as a builder – got Broad's endorsement for the Museum Directorship?
And so another culture palazzo is born. I was on the horn with Fearless Leader before you could say Sean Scully; but she’d only read the apparently blacked-out L.A. papers and was still going through her e-mail or something. I read her a few grafs and she joined me in my shocked-not-shocked space. Speaking of palazzos – believe me, unless they’ve somehow cauterized half their neural snynapses (you know – the ones that scream, ‘hey I need a 10-mg Valium stat’ when your prized shit isn’t hitting the fan so much as just blowing away), they’re plotzing over at LACMA. We’re talking about a mausoleum (somehow I always think of the Skull & Bones tomb whenever I pass it, which is a minimum of six times a week) with twice the square footage of the Whitney for chrissakes. Needless to say there’s plenty of room for that Broodthaers – to say nothing of the Chris Burden apparently to be shared with MOCA. (By the way, is that necessarily such a good thing? It’s fairly sizeable – which means it’s going to be a hassle shlepping it between Fairfax and downtown.) And how many Beuys pieces did they just acquire? Something over FIVE HUNDRED? You’d think they might WANT to spare a few. It’s not like they’re going to always be on view at The Broad Art Foundation. (The Broad Art Foundation is open to the public only on a very selective and by-appointment basis.) Which leads me to the obvious question. What the fuck was he talking about? – “We don’t want it to end up in storage, …” Honey, it already is in storage in your Art Fortress.
I see Michael Govan has made a further comment here (this morning’s (Jan. 9) New York Times. Talk about spinning – he might as well be a Whirling Dervish.“[H]e believed Eli Broad’s decision to keep his art collection in a private foundation that makes loans to museums is a positive development because it means none of the artworks will be sold…” Of course it means nothing of the kind – and more on that later. “Since Day 1 he’s privately and publicly given me a lot of support.” Uh, yeah. You built him a super-sized Skull & Bones. And for that you should have asked him for a helluva lot MORE.
8-9 January 2008
Jesus I hate to break my month-long silence just for a news item. As readers of this blog are only too aware, awol isn’t exactly about news, per se. More like (I would like to think, anyway), the back-story or up-front (and hopefully way ahead) story – or maybe a lateral cross-reference to some sidebar or ancillary story or just a bit removed from the ‘front’ page – which, as we all know, always requires some reading between-the-lines – and perhaps a bit more in recent years as they’ve been co-opted into PR mouthpieces for establishment agendas. (My brother used to be a virtuoso at this kind of cross-reading of The New York Times front-page political stories, and it sometimes surprises me he never ended up there editing it (he’s at one of the other major metro dailies); but I wonder now how he would have dealt with this subterfuge.) As many of my friends and colleagues here in Los Angeles are aware, I haven’t exactly been in seclusion over the last month. More like, submersion – as in, almost drowning, as in fighting for my life. But it’s not as if I couldn’t manage to bob to the surface now and then. I surfaced at Regen for Matthew Barney, for example – though arguably, that might easily have blended in with the overall drowning sensation I was trying to overcome. E.g., the (photographic) work on the walls appeared to be mostly a retread of Cremaster 3 – art direction shots and production stills – and the film shown appeared to be of a live ritual-cum-performance involving animals (always nervous-making) and elegantly shod but otherwise nude models performing a kind of static limbo and controlled excretions of foreign (to their bodies anyway) fluids (honey? Oil? Chocolate? Who knew?) – too mechanical to be dream-like but seeming to unfold in dead air. Not exactly Barney’s take on the ‘money-shot’ – but what? From cremaster to sphincter – is this Barney’s reply to the Courbet ‘origin-of-the-world’-view? I know life’s end is frequently accompanied by incontinence; but I’m not sure how this applies to the world’s end. But you’d think he might be ready to pull his focus out of the crotch. (I know that sounds funny coming from me, as I write this from my perch at the Flynt Building.) Barney was there – personable, still handsome, and very down-to-earth. Björk loves him; why can’t I?
But see – I’m already getting away from what pulled me out from under my security blanket, if you will. Yeah, yeah – I was out last Saturday, too. But can we save it for a minute? (Yes, I forgive your skepticism – since I assume you forgive my jaundice.) The first shock – and I didn’t even see it first thing – is that The New York (and not the Los Angeles) Times broke the story. What’s with that? Sam Zell transition issues? Okay, I’m sure everyone knows by now that Eli Broad announced today (yesterday?) that his Art Foundation would retain full control of his collections, rather than donating any significant segment of them to major art institutions. And I’m sure we all know which local art institution had the most riding on this decision. Why am I not surprised? Was it LACMA’s dubious track record with this sort of business? Goddess only knows how many L.A. collections have passed on LACMA in favor of other institutions, or simply the auction block. Then there are the notorious instances of those not-quite-ready-for-the auction-house curated exhibitions of private collections which, stamped with LACMA’s (no less dubious) imprimatur, headed straight to New York, leaving only a souvenir or two behind (e.g., the Maslon collection, which ultimately went to Sotheby’s). Then there was LACMA’s own foolish deaccessioning of a few years ago, which included unique, irreplaceable works by Ernst, Beckmann, Masson and Modigliani. Just how foolish we can finally judge today in concrete terms. (Do I mean that literally?) Hmmm…. In theory, the funds (and the auction results were less than spectacular) were to be used to acquire new works. I suppose we have to trust LACMA on that one. Except that I don’t trust anyone – I don’t have either the experiential or genetic architecture to support it (hell my life has been one long Charley Brown kick for a non-existent field goal). But without getting all forensic on their asses, and speaking of concrete, there’s been a whole lot of it poured into the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (already acronymized by the LACMA crew as “BCAM”) on the west side of the LACMA campus.
When some years ago Broad exhibited a generous 40 odd year swath of his art collection at LACMA – this was some time before his commitment to a building on the LACMA campus – I again wondered what the Museum itself might stand to keep from what was placed on view. (If nothing else, it seemed Broad seemed to be giving the nod to LACMA, as opposed to MOCA, on whose board he also sits.) There were of course the teasers: the token gifts – “Promised Gift of Eli and Edythe Broad” – though I noted that these were few and far between. None of the best Rauschenbergs or Johns bore such a caption. It was also interesting that one of the “promised gifts” was a room-sized Marcel Broodthaers installation – implicitly raising the issue of space.
What was also noteworthy was a certain lack of zing to the collection. Notwithstanding the masterpiece caliber, with a few exceptions (the Broodthaers, for example), it all seemed so safe, and – it sounds so cynical – “blue-chip.” (And of course the flip-side of this is that what is blue-chip today may not look so tomorrow.) A collection usually says something about its collector(s) and about his/their passions and ambitions. This was an impenetrable wall of currency in every sense.
Or maybe it’s about the wall. Just the wall. Broad is a builder – and he’s not too particular about what he’s building or how the real estate is squandered and the planet plundered with it. He started out ruining vast tracts of southern California with thousands of acres of mediocre housing – more suburban blight; and now he’s embarked on an almost megalomanical building program for Bunker Hill downtown. It’s Eli’s No-Trump bid. But of course there had to be some Wilshire Boulevard presence – another Name up there along with those of Ahmanson, Simon, Bing and Anderson. Was it mere coincidence that Michael Govan – who made his reputation as a builder – got Broad's endorsement for the Museum Directorship?
And so another culture palazzo is born. I was on the horn with Fearless Leader before you could say Sean Scully; but she’d only read the apparently blacked-out L.A. papers and was still going through her e-mail or something. I read her a few grafs and she joined me in my shocked-not-shocked space. Speaking of palazzos – believe me, unless they’ve somehow cauterized half their neural snynapses (you know – the ones that scream, ‘hey I need a 10-mg Valium stat’ when your prized shit isn’t hitting the fan so much as just blowing away), they’re plotzing over at LACMA. We’re talking about a mausoleum (somehow I always think of the Skull & Bones tomb whenever I pass it, which is a minimum of six times a week) with twice the square footage of the Whitney for chrissakes. Needless to say there’s plenty of room for that Broodthaers – to say nothing of the Chris Burden apparently to be shared with MOCA. (By the way, is that necessarily such a good thing? It’s fairly sizeable – which means it’s going to be a hassle shlepping it between Fairfax and downtown.) And how many Beuys pieces did they just acquire? Something over FIVE HUNDRED? You’d think they might WANT to spare a few. It’s not like they’re going to always be on view at The Broad Art Foundation. (The Broad Art Foundation is open to the public only on a very selective and by-appointment basis.) Which leads me to the obvious question. What the fuck was he talking about? – “We don’t want it to end up in storage, …” Honey, it already is in storage in your Art Fortress.
I see Michael Govan has made a further comment here (this morning’s (Jan. 9) New York Times. Talk about spinning – he might as well be a Whirling Dervish.“[H]e believed Eli Broad’s decision to keep his art collection in a private foundation that makes loans to museums is a positive development because it means none of the artworks will be sold…” Of course it means nothing of the kind – and more on that later. “Since Day 1 he’s privately and publicly given me a lot of support.” Uh, yeah. You built him a super-sized Skull & Bones. And for that you should have asked him for a helluva lot MORE.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Dazzle and Desolation: the Coen Brothers and Carole Caroompas
Well, reader, I'm at that odd place again -- looming deadlines, catastrophes (alright -- calamities; the catastrophes are all cultural), the hols (I want to say the Huns -- it feels like an invasion). I've hesitated posting these notes -- and why? A film already discussed to death? Paintings I've already written about in print? Obsessions (surrealism, political/conceptual work) already worried to death? I didn't go to Miami; and today, for the first time, I feel alright about it. For once I am happy to let someone else blog the fairs (The New York Times alone must have a half-dozen staffers on it -- but as far as I can tell not one of them is Roberta Smith.) while I attend to hard print copy obligations. Besides Jonathan Biss is in town to do the Beethoven 4th with the L.A. Phil. and I'm slated to hit New York for the next big contemporary sales. (I almost said 'market corrections'.) Speaking of 'corrections' -- did anyone else do a double-take at that Business Page Sunset Boulevard-gone-Miami (or Palm Beach) story Monday? It had everything but the art collection; and the story is far from over.
Perhaps double-take is not quite it; it's a story far too familiar to me -- and not just because I live in close proximity to Sunset Boulevard.
24-25 November 2007
Before I talk about Carole Caroompas (and how can I not talk about Carole Caroompas?), I have to say a word or two about the film I saw last night, the Coen Brothers film of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. I almost want to call it The Texas Terminator; it has a similar exterminating angel – though as a performance, these roles are in no way comparable – no more than an actor of Javier Bardem’s gifts can be compared to that robo-homo-sapiens who somehow got elected governor of California. (We’ll set aside the fact that he’s only marginally more robotic than Gray Davis was, and with a slightly better temper.) The film is more about the pitilessness of the land itself, and the incongruous, insupportable piteousness of its inhabitants, than the almost absurd plot that pits its characters, directly and indirectly, and almost at random, at one another. It’s almost ridiculous to even address the element of conflict that ensnares (or not) the few characters who have managed to put themselves in the path of Bardem’s implacable, indefatigable reaper. They scarcely signify more than the helpless by-standers, trapped in their unexamined assumptions, their unspoken, inexplicable expectations, at the mercy of this demonic killer’s blackjack-binary moral code. As played by Bardem, whom I first had the privilege of seeing on screen in his revelatory performance as Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s movie of Before Night Falls, the character of Anton Chigurh is a shade or shadow hanging over the film, like a dark drift of storm clouds sweeping gray over an already desolate, sun-scorched landscape. The opening scenes with their brilliant establishment shots perfectly set the tone for this upended Hamlet. This is the ‘undiscovered country’ itself – with (unlike Hamlet) nary a soul left alive. (The final scene seems to allude to this disconsolate dream-like domain.) Mere clarity or comprehension offers no defense against this fate, this self-contained keyhole into the apocalypse – the principal example of this being the cool annihilation of Chigurh’s smart stalker, Carson Wells (a witty, perfectly judged performance by Woody Harrelson). I’m at some disadvantage, not having read the book; but there is something inadequately played out here; or maybe it’s disappointment at not having enough of an appealing character. Pity is the screw in the coffin, individually and collectively. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin, also excellent) seals his fate almost from his first such gesture – again, something presumably borne out of a dream. Tommy Lee Jones’s role as the sheriff’s detective Ed Tom Bell is both foil to Chigurh and fulcrum in this fatal triangle, his moral compass ‘tempered’ both by a native pragmatism and a wistful, respectful nod to the power of the unconscious, as well as the severity of the landscape. There can be “no certainties” in this landscape – or any other – an essential cognizance of which demarcates the intersection between Bell’s and Chigurh’s moral “codes.” The Coens wisely avoid forcing any play-out or pay-off in the drama (I’m tempted to call it a dram-edy); but the near-perfection of the film’s close couldn’t entirely compensate for the penultimate ‘keyhole’ face-off between Bell and Chigurh (a brilliant moment in itself) that seemed to effectively blow a hole through the scenario as deadly to the film’s momentum as Chigurh’s air pressure gun is to anything moving on two (or four) legs.
Whatever the film’s flaws, though, it’s almost impossible to deny its power – as a kind of cinematic touchstone, witness to a very dark (and desolate) historic and cultural moment. It has to be one of the Coen brothers’ best films to date. What to take on next? After Bush Country – the Bush dynasty itself? Part of the genius of this (or any) film, of course, is simply casting; and regardless of his own genius versatility, somehow I just don’t see Bardem as Cheney. (Do you?)
Carole Caroompas’s current show of paintings at Western Project evoke a similar sense of the land’s desolation and desecration; but also a sense of dazzle (which I guess she recognized fairly quickly in the process of creating them, since she calls them the “Eye Dazzler” series): there is, literally, a certain shimmer to these paintings owing absolutely nothing to glitter or other non-pigment media (unlike, say, many of Mari Eastman’s paintings). The shimmer is itself ambiguous, mediated between the vibratile zig-zagging color of the Navajo motifs that are more structural armature than mere backdrop to the inter-woven pictorial narratives created by Caroompas’s complex, multiverse iconography, and grisaille sections that float like a mirage on the surface of the paintings. In other words, it’s not simply the shimmer of ‘heat’ – there is in fact a coolness to some of these passages – but a kind of oscillation, an issue (literally and figuratively) of resolution and reflection. It’s as if the surface were dissolved into a continuously shifting and reconfigured array of signal-to-signal (as opposed to signal-to-noise) ratios. Caroompas draws many of these ‘signals,’ (i.e., not necessarily the frame image, per se; there are figures that are simply cut from these still images) from John Huston’s film, The Misfits. But virtually all of these figures – all of the imagery – are ‘misfit(s)’; their connections to each other fraught, tentative, incomplete, tangential or oblique. The figures and imagistic elements reach across a universe of time, space and imagination. A frontierswoman swims or reaches out towards a mounted cowboy who attempts to lasso a roller derby skater. Roslyn (Monroe) snaps her paddle ball like a laser towards a tumbled Barbarella (hard to believe Fonda’s “psychedelic” space emissary appeared on the screen only six or seven years after Monroe’s last commercial film release). Kinescopic cowboys, kitsch children’s fairy and nursery imagery figure as semaphores and footnotes to a text written and re-written only by the viewer. Caroompas literally embroiders some of these onto the canvas; but only as if to contradict the notion that it might fit neatly into a conventional Pattern and Decoration scheme. There is no real connective tissue here; only the yearning for connection – or re-connection. In a sense, the “Carrie” (in her familiar Sissy Spacek incarnation) is as central as Misfit-Roslyn/Monroe – invoking the gods’ wrath just as a circle of tribal Native Americans invoke the gods’ bounty.
What emerges from this shimmer, this ‘dazzle’ and ‘dance’ is above all an evocation of loss (and invocation of some cosmic re-connection), and finally a certain poignancy. Encountered initially, the paintings have a certain formal, almost heraldic, aspect at odds with the feelings they evoke after only a few moments. (Is it the vibratile contrast between reds and oranges of almost psychedelic intensity and super-cooled grays?) You feel those passages, those ricochets of time and space, and certainly their evanescence. Where the Huston-Night of the Iguana imagery of Psychedelic Jungle underscored a certain submerged (and fluid) aspect of the paintings, the ‘Misfits Dance’ imagery here reasserts the surface, a sense of lateral movement across the picture plane, and also – I don’t think it goes too far to say – the sense of light, energy just above the surface – a further irony lost on no one who spends any time with these paintings.
In my first cursory conversations with Carole Caroompas before my visit to her studio, I mentioned how taken I had been with some of her work leading up to and including the Psychedelic Jungle series she had shown at Western Project in 2004; also how distinct each series of works seemed alongside its predecessors (whether they were conceived as series or individual works; yet also (at least in retrospect), how seamless the transitions seemed. That impression held through my studio visit and interview, and to some extent still does. But I now have a clearer idea of this duality. With Caroompas, there is an element of reaching back – to her own past/work, as well as the iconography, cultural references, design elements and cues drawn from both visual and literary (and, arguably, musical) culture that makes her works like palimpsests of a certain moment of the civilization. Here, too, in addition to the rich iconography culled from any number of sources, both pop and canonical (and sometimes a fusion of the two), or a specific cultural tradition (e.g., folkloric or, as in this show, Native American), there is a reach back to work as long as a decade past (i.e., work that would have been seen at the Mark Moore Gallery) or longer – thinking here of the grisaille insets which reference alternately a half-lit landscape or the celluloid universe of American cinema (or even television – something I had a further reminder of this [Sunday, 25 November] afternoon, during Mike Kelley’s and Jim Shaw’s presentation of Dalí- and surrealist-influenced films – which included a kinescope of a surreal and unusually serious segment of the Ernie Kovacs show). It’s a bit as if Caroompas were re-discovering – and re-configuring, recontextualizing – bits of herself as well as the culture; re-positioning them for a fresh orientation, a fresh vantage point.
I couldn’t help thinking of this just a bit at the opening reception at Western Project – which was, of course, packed with everyone from peers and collectors, to fans and students – “Lari’s Night” redux (Lari Pittman was there of course; Roy Dowell, too – he contributed a brief essay to the catalog for the show) – except this was Carole’s Night. It was as if Carole herself had effected that unfinished cosmic connection between Marilyn Monroe as Roslyn and Jane Fonda as Barbarella. (More than one contributor to the catalog couldn’t refrain from mentioning Caroompas’s signature style.) Carole’s personal style (not unlike her painterly style?) continues to evolve; and she looked smashing that Saturday night (the 3rd). Once upon a time, I would have called her look a punk-goth Ava Gardner. Now (after a bit of MM? Fonda? damage), her hair still Monroe-Misfits blonde, she looked like an angel-fish touching the shores of another planet – in a black-and-white bateau/A-line dress and shiny silver ankle boots that looked like the classic ones by Courrèges – updated, say, for Bowie, circa Space Oddity – or Carole Caroompas, circa anytime she goddamned likes. It’s clear from the paintings she understands the Earth; who’s to say she can’t move on? It was fine with us – we were all in orbit that night.
Perhaps double-take is not quite it; it's a story far too familiar to me -- and not just because I live in close proximity to Sunset Boulevard.
24-25 November 2007
Before I talk about Carole Caroompas (and how can I not talk about Carole Caroompas?), I have to say a word or two about the film I saw last night, the Coen Brothers film of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. I almost want to call it The Texas Terminator; it has a similar exterminating angel – though as a performance, these roles are in no way comparable – no more than an actor of Javier Bardem’s gifts can be compared to that robo-homo-sapiens who somehow got elected governor of California. (We’ll set aside the fact that he’s only marginally more robotic than Gray Davis was, and with a slightly better temper.) The film is more about the pitilessness of the land itself, and the incongruous, insupportable piteousness of its inhabitants, than the almost absurd plot that pits its characters, directly and indirectly, and almost at random, at one another. It’s almost ridiculous to even address the element of conflict that ensnares (or not) the few characters who have managed to put themselves in the path of Bardem’s implacable, indefatigable reaper. They scarcely signify more than the helpless by-standers, trapped in their unexamined assumptions, their unspoken, inexplicable expectations, at the mercy of this demonic killer’s blackjack-binary moral code. As played by Bardem, whom I first had the privilege of seeing on screen in his revelatory performance as Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s movie of Before Night Falls, the character of Anton Chigurh is a shade or shadow hanging over the film, like a dark drift of storm clouds sweeping gray over an already desolate, sun-scorched landscape. The opening scenes with their brilliant establishment shots perfectly set the tone for this upended Hamlet. This is the ‘undiscovered country’ itself – with (unlike Hamlet) nary a soul left alive. (The final scene seems to allude to this disconsolate dream-like domain.) Mere clarity or comprehension offers no defense against this fate, this self-contained keyhole into the apocalypse – the principal example of this being the cool annihilation of Chigurh’s smart stalker, Carson Wells (a witty, perfectly judged performance by Woody Harrelson). I’m at some disadvantage, not having read the book; but there is something inadequately played out here; or maybe it’s disappointment at not having enough of an appealing character. Pity is the screw in the coffin, individually and collectively. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin, also excellent) seals his fate almost from his first such gesture – again, something presumably borne out of a dream. Tommy Lee Jones’s role as the sheriff’s detective Ed Tom Bell is both foil to Chigurh and fulcrum in this fatal triangle, his moral compass ‘tempered’ both by a native pragmatism and a wistful, respectful nod to the power of the unconscious, as well as the severity of the landscape. There can be “no certainties” in this landscape – or any other – an essential cognizance of which demarcates the intersection between Bell’s and Chigurh’s moral “codes.” The Coens wisely avoid forcing any play-out or pay-off in the drama (I’m tempted to call it a dram-edy); but the near-perfection of the film’s close couldn’t entirely compensate for the penultimate ‘keyhole’ face-off between Bell and Chigurh (a brilliant moment in itself) that seemed to effectively blow a hole through the scenario as deadly to the film’s momentum as Chigurh’s air pressure gun is to anything moving on two (or four) legs.
Whatever the film’s flaws, though, it’s almost impossible to deny its power – as a kind of cinematic touchstone, witness to a very dark (and desolate) historic and cultural moment. It has to be one of the Coen brothers’ best films to date. What to take on next? After Bush Country – the Bush dynasty itself? Part of the genius of this (or any) film, of course, is simply casting; and regardless of his own genius versatility, somehow I just don’t see Bardem as Cheney. (Do you?)
Carole Caroompas’s current show of paintings at Western Project evoke a similar sense of the land’s desolation and desecration; but also a sense of dazzle (which I guess she recognized fairly quickly in the process of creating them, since she calls them the “Eye Dazzler” series): there is, literally, a certain shimmer to these paintings owing absolutely nothing to glitter or other non-pigment media (unlike, say, many of Mari Eastman’s paintings). The shimmer is itself ambiguous, mediated between the vibratile zig-zagging color of the Navajo motifs that are more structural armature than mere backdrop to the inter-woven pictorial narratives created by Caroompas’s complex, multiverse iconography, and grisaille sections that float like a mirage on the surface of the paintings. In other words, it’s not simply the shimmer of ‘heat’ – there is in fact a coolness to some of these passages – but a kind of oscillation, an issue (literally and figuratively) of resolution and reflection. It’s as if the surface were dissolved into a continuously shifting and reconfigured array of signal-to-signal (as opposed to signal-to-noise) ratios. Caroompas draws many of these ‘signals,’ (i.e., not necessarily the frame image, per se; there are figures that are simply cut from these still images) from John Huston’s film, The Misfits. But virtually all of these figures – all of the imagery – are ‘misfit(s)’; their connections to each other fraught, tentative, incomplete, tangential or oblique. The figures and imagistic elements reach across a universe of time, space and imagination. A frontierswoman swims or reaches out towards a mounted cowboy who attempts to lasso a roller derby skater. Roslyn (Monroe) snaps her paddle ball like a laser towards a tumbled Barbarella (hard to believe Fonda’s “psychedelic” space emissary appeared on the screen only six or seven years after Monroe’s last commercial film release). Kinescopic cowboys, kitsch children’s fairy and nursery imagery figure as semaphores and footnotes to a text written and re-written only by the viewer. Caroompas literally embroiders some of these onto the canvas; but only as if to contradict the notion that it might fit neatly into a conventional Pattern and Decoration scheme. There is no real connective tissue here; only the yearning for connection – or re-connection. In a sense, the “Carrie” (in her familiar Sissy Spacek incarnation) is as central as Misfit-Roslyn/Monroe – invoking the gods’ wrath just as a circle of tribal Native Americans invoke the gods’ bounty.
What emerges from this shimmer, this ‘dazzle’ and ‘dance’ is above all an evocation of loss (and invocation of some cosmic re-connection), and finally a certain poignancy. Encountered initially, the paintings have a certain formal, almost heraldic, aspect at odds with the feelings they evoke after only a few moments. (Is it the vibratile contrast between reds and oranges of almost psychedelic intensity and super-cooled grays?) You feel those passages, those ricochets of time and space, and certainly their evanescence. Where the Huston-Night of the Iguana imagery of Psychedelic Jungle underscored a certain submerged (and fluid) aspect of the paintings, the ‘Misfits Dance’ imagery here reasserts the surface, a sense of lateral movement across the picture plane, and also – I don’t think it goes too far to say – the sense of light, energy just above the surface – a further irony lost on no one who spends any time with these paintings.
In my first cursory conversations with Carole Caroompas before my visit to her studio, I mentioned how taken I had been with some of her work leading up to and including the Psychedelic Jungle series she had shown at Western Project in 2004; also how distinct each series of works seemed alongside its predecessors (whether they were conceived as series or individual works; yet also (at least in retrospect), how seamless the transitions seemed. That impression held through my studio visit and interview, and to some extent still does. But I now have a clearer idea of this duality. With Caroompas, there is an element of reaching back – to her own past/work, as well as the iconography, cultural references, design elements and cues drawn from both visual and literary (and, arguably, musical) culture that makes her works like palimpsests of a certain moment of the civilization. Here, too, in addition to the rich iconography culled from any number of sources, both pop and canonical (and sometimes a fusion of the two), or a specific cultural tradition (e.g., folkloric or, as in this show, Native American), there is a reach back to work as long as a decade past (i.e., work that would have been seen at the Mark Moore Gallery) or longer – thinking here of the grisaille insets which reference alternately a half-lit landscape or the celluloid universe of American cinema (or even television – something I had a further reminder of this [Sunday, 25 November] afternoon, during Mike Kelley’s and Jim Shaw’s presentation of Dalí- and surrealist-influenced films – which included a kinescope of a surreal and unusually serious segment of the Ernie Kovacs show). It’s a bit as if Caroompas were re-discovering – and re-configuring, recontextualizing – bits of herself as well as the culture; re-positioning them for a fresh orientation, a fresh vantage point.
I couldn’t help thinking of this just a bit at the opening reception at Western Project – which was, of course, packed with everyone from peers and collectors, to fans and students – “Lari’s Night” redux (Lari Pittman was there of course; Roy Dowell, too – he contributed a brief essay to the catalog for the show) – except this was Carole’s Night. It was as if Carole herself had effected that unfinished cosmic connection between Marilyn Monroe as Roslyn and Jane Fonda as Barbarella. (More than one contributor to the catalog couldn’t refrain from mentioning Caroompas’s signature style.) Carole’s personal style (not unlike her painterly style?) continues to evolve; and she looked smashing that Saturday night (the 3rd). Once upon a time, I would have called her look a punk-goth Ava Gardner. Now (after a bit of MM? Fonda? damage), her hair still Monroe-Misfits blonde, she looked like an angel-fish touching the shores of another planet – in a black-and-white bateau/A-line dress and shiny silver ankle boots that looked like the classic ones by Courrèges – updated, say, for Bowie, circa Space Oddity – or Carole Caroompas, circa anytime she goddamned likes. It’s clear from the paintings she understands the Earth; who’s to say she can’t move on? It was fine with us – we were all in orbit that night.
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