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Friday, December 26, 2003

Serious business with the INS

 

My inbox yesterday contained this bit of bad news. Bat Purveegiin, my Mongolian artist friend whose American story includes more than three years in INS jails for visa violations, is back in jail. Deb Miller, curator at Da Vinci Art Alliance (and former curator for the recently-closed Gallery 911 which represented Purveegin) says Bat's

"been held in York for about 3 months now, in the immigration detention center. His attorney, Joe Hohenstein, has been able to stay his deportation in the circuit court, but still hasn't been able to arrange for his release. I'm sure Bat's going completely stir crazy in there, so if you have a chance, please try to drop him a line." (For more on Purveegiin, see my post of 7/04/03 or my Weekly sketch of July 9)

Anyone feeling in the snail mail spirit, here's Bat's address. I'm sure he'd love to hear words of encouragement and support.

Batsaihan Purveegiin, BICE, YCP#45925, IC1-26, 3400 Concord Road, York, PA 17402-9007.

By the way, Miller also says several pieces of Bat's work are on exhibit at the main branch of the Free Library (2nd floor, outside the Arts Department). (image is Bat and Dennis, owner of Gallery 911)




permanent link  roberta 11:48 AM
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The business of Currin

 

As if there weren't enough controversy in his brushstrokes and subject matter, now he's up and switched galleries, causing New York cocktail party chatter to rock with seismic waves of .. indignation? fear and loathing? jealousy? Read Roberta Smith on John Currin's decamping to Gagosian Gallery from his previous dealer Andrea Rosen. Also on this page, I recommend the Deborah Solomon audio slide tour based on Currin's Whitney retrospective. The tour takes three minutes and 20 seconds. Solomon is sympathetic but misses nothing. I especially like when she deals with some of the more misogynistic images like the big-bosomed babe paintings and says "he acts as if he's some kind of reactionary truck driver half the time."
permanent link  roberta 9:27 AM
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Thursday, December 25, 2003

Gift from on high

 


There it was this morning sitting on the naked branch of the dogwood tree outside my kitchen window. Stella spotted it first. It sat there, quiet, staring at my window for what seemed like the longest time. Long enough to get the camera, long enough to stalk it slowly, flashing away, long enough to look it up in my Audubon book -- "sharp-shinned hawk -- a fast, small hawk with a slender body rounded wings and a long sqared-off tail. habitat: woods"...and my backyard. I turned my back and it was gone.
permanent link  roberta 11:18 AM
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A form emerges, flat mountain atop a chest, I see forever

 

My favorite moments at the
Philadelphia Art Museum are the suprises, the happening upon work I wasn't seeking. So it was Thursday, when, in looking for the faceless photographs show, I happened upon Yoon Kwang-Cho's pottery.

I had read that this work was wonderful, but the pictures, just like the one here, seemed so flat and uninteresting. Which brings up once again the failure of photos, the failure of web images.

The work by Yoon, a contemporary Korean potter whose work harks back to his country's traditional buncheong pottery, is so tactile, the clay remains a hand-impressed presence under the slips and glazes. The scale of these pieces, vis a vis normal-sized vessels, is monumental. "Message" (shown) is 33 1/2 inches high!

And the hand-built pieces are meditative at the same time that they retain a roughness and primitive quality. The miracle of these pieces was that for all their real world and earthly qualities, they were spiritual--vessels of thoughts and prayers and souls.

Yoon's approach to the clay was filled with experiment, and I was taken with how Yoon rubbed off the finish on raised areas of clay to reveal what's underneath--plain clay--to such different effect from Ken Price using a similar technique (shown, Price's "Inca Message," see Oct. 10, 2003 post). The Price work, which I had admired very much, looks like a bauble symbolizing Western decadence next to Yoon's forthright. plain pieces.

Either way, Yoon was worth the look and then some, and called for the kinds of hands-on viewing the museum cannot tolerate.

In contrast, "The Faceless Figure: Photographs from the Collection" hung limp on the wall, even though many of the images were wonderful and unfamiliar to me.

It was a high concept show, in which the concept didn't enliven the images nor the images the concept.

Too bad, although I still enjoyed having a look (shown, Burk Uzzle's "Industrial Accident Victim, Daytona Beach, Florida," not my personal fave, but what the museum chose to promote the show).
permanent link  libby 8:07 AM
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Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Bragging rights at the ICA

 
John McInerney, head of publicity at the ICA wrote to tell me that the museum's very fine Polly Apfelbaum retrospective was on the cover of January's Art in America. Cool.

So today when I got the magazine in the mail I saw that not only was there coverage of one Philadelphia show in the last art magazine in the universe without a real website but that there was coverage of two big Philadelphia museum shows. In addition to the Apfelbaum article by Stephen Westphall, there's a feature by Miriam Seidel on the Warren Rohrer retrospective at the PMA. Score two points! (image, top is Rohrer's "Settlement Magenta," 1980)

In other insidery news from McInerney, the Apfelbaum show received an award from the International Association of Art Critics. According to artnet, the show shared the award for second place in the category "best monographic museum show organized nationally." The other second place winner was the "Thomas Struth" show from the Dallas Museum of Art.


Also from artnet, I learned that ICA curator Ingrid Schaffner, who also does freelance curating, won an IAAC award for her exhibit "Gloria," a show she co-curated with Catherine Morris. "Gloria," the great revisiting of feminist art from the 1970s, won the "best show in an alternative or public space" award. Schaffner and Morris organized the show for White Columns. Someone at Moore College of Art and Design had the good grace (and money) to bring it to Philadelphia. (If you missed it, check out the White Columns link for images) Score two more! (image left is Eleanor Antin's contribution to "Gloria," "The Wonder of it all, from the King of Solana Beach, 1974-75)

permanent link  roberta 11:55 AM
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Tired of the Barnes saga? Read about the Terra

 
Victor Cassidy's feature at artnet about the closing (in 2004) of Chicago's Terra Museum of American Art gave me momentary pause. Substitute the word "Barnes" for "Terra" and you get a scary read.


Of course in most respects, Terra is not at all like Barnes. The Terra is a Museum. The Barnes is not -- it's first and foremost a teaching collection. Terra doesn't have a blockbuster collection. Barnes does. Its collection is valued above $25 million.

So here's what's similar. Terra's founder, Daniel J. Terra, was a cantankerous millionaire who battled with Chicago's art establishment. And over time the institution became mired in litigation; forgotten as an art destination; and now, due to lack of money, it's closing. And there's the echo. (image, top is Albert Barnes, image left is Daniel Terra)
permanent link  roberta 10:43 AM
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Tuesday, December 23, 2003

Love's seasons

 

I followed in Roberta's footsteps, practically, today at the Art Museum (see her Dec. 2 blog), and saw pretty much what she saw, with a variation or two, for pretty much the same reasons.

I thought I'd weigh in on the Burt Barr "Autumn" video, which, without context seemed pretty lightweight--two turtles apparently doing the nasty slowly and without apparent passion, with a twist in perspective to make the content more mysterious. So turtles move slowly. And don't go anywhere. Or even hardly move when in flagrante, in contrast to the grass which quivers in the wind, or the rain that falls.

But just like the turtles' context and the camera's angle is everything in understanding what's cooking on a literal level, the context of some of Barr's other work is everything in getting meaning out of this piece.

His "August" (image shown is from August) was a video remake of the rolling-in-the-waves unfulfilled embrace scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in "From Here to Eternity." The program notes stated (yes, there were program notes today), "In an endlessly repeating loop, the couple's actions were projected below an image of the crashing surf... ."

Putting the turtles and their small, slow world, as nature shuts down for the winter, in the context of "August," with its crashing passion and grandeur of nature during a season still bursting with nature's productivity, somehow makes the turtles' exercise seem rich with existential meaning.

The piece itself is quite beautiful, the grasses so green, the turtles so yellow and brown. I was interested to learn (again from those helpful program notes), "Barr instills a cinematic quality in the video image by shooting every other frame in soft focus."

I didn't know that video has frames. I have to think about this. I can understand how this might make a difference only if video doesn't have frames, the rushing by of a film's frames giving a different edge to what you see.

Anyway, while the program notes were helpful, seeing Barr's earlier seasons would have been even more helpful. Context is everything.



permanent link  libby 7:56 PM
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Monday, December 22, 2003

Weighing the motives behind Currin's success

 

Currin's commercial success is not an issue, since the market can and does reward practically anything, regardless of quality.

The issue is the promotion of his work as the genuine article by those who are supposed to know.

If the parties pushing his slick and excruciatingly-calculated caricatures truly believe in the work, that's lamentable. However, if they're just cynical opportunists, that's a form of prostitution. (image is floor plan, 2nd floor, Metropolitan Museum of Art--nice and abstract, no?)

--Jack Regalado is an artblog reader
permanent link  libby and roberta 7:18 AM
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Sunday, December 21, 2003

The joke's on who? or religious tyranny in a PC world

 
Imagine my surprise when master ironists and art-world iconoclasts Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid get taken seriously.

My surprise grew out of an article in today's paper reporting that the two bad boys had a show in honor of Chanukka at a local synagogue. The show, based on their series called Symbols of the Big Bang, is being billed as a mixture of science and mysticism, as K&M find all the world's religions and at once and create earnest little images that draw on mandalas, yin and yang, stars of david, and every other religious symbol.

Uh, I don't think so (I'm sorry if I got this one wrong, but I don't think leopards change their spots). Am I the only one who thinks this is funny?

I think the work is really a satire of abstract painting with spiritual aspirations. Unh. Take that, Rothko. Unh. Unh. Feel that punch, Agnes Martin.

What may in fact be the case is that these two very funny Russian emigres created parodies that no one laughed at. Their subject cut too close to religion and wasn't pointed enough in its parody of art. But parody of religion is downright Anti-American. So K&M quick found themselves in the non-ironic spiritual paintings market. And being Capitalists, they adjusted.

So how come no one laughed this time? My bet is, it's not PC to parody spirituality. At the moment, this culture is too bought in to Zen, Catholicism, Scientology, Kaballa, and too ashamed to mock it. That's how George Bush gets away with his born-again stuff. In fact, as a culture, we just lap it up.

I just wonder if K&M are sitting at home laughing or sitting at home crying.
permanent link  libby 4:26 PM
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Theater of perfection

 

I guess I'm also not done with my thoughts about Gabriel Martinez's Confidence and Faith.

I agree with Roberta, that Martinez and Kwan are one identity. Like her perfect performance, his champagne bubbles and then goes flat.

Part of what I got out of the piece was perform well or die, or listen to your error played over and over again into eternity.

I'm also going back to that first room that Martinez offered, with the white dove--the Holy Ghost? a symbol of death? Kwan on the ice?--clinging on with one claw to a scratched surface. Is this perform well or die? Oh, my. Maybe I've got it wrong.

(Photograph by J.J. Tiziou.)

permanent link  libby 4:05 PM
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Sublime abstraction: A Donald Judd experience

 


Post from Douglas T. Witmer, Part II


[Editor's note: This is the second part of Witmer's abstraction post that ran Dec. 18.]

I recently had the chance to visit Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX.  …My wife and baby and I were in with a group of about a dozen other folks, most of whom were more tourists than gallery-goers.  I was unprepared for what happened. 

The guide took us to the hangers where Judd's 100 aluminum boxes are installed and said only, "Donald Judd renovated these buildings so he could install his boxes here.  The boxes are made of aluminum and the exterior dimensions are the same, but they are all different in their interiors."  No theory, no dates, no context. 

And then he unlocked the doors and we went inside and for the next 20 minutes we were suddenly all together, walking around in a quiet visual wonderworld. 

I eavesdropped a bit on the others' conversations, and to a person they were simply dealing with the elements of the experience at hand, looking at the properties of the boxes, looking at their relationship to the vast landscape just outside the floor-to-ceiling windows--clearly engaged and enjoying the process. 

The experience flew in the face what I know of the conventional artworld buzz on Judd--chilly, reasoned, minimal.
 
An idea that has been trying to come up for air in this little essay is that of a search for a kind of purity.  It does not necessarily mean an exclusive or restrictive state, but rather simply a focused experience.  This is what much abstraction does.  It does not seek to mirror or narrate our "cyber-warrior culture and civilization-clash world."  It can still have contemporay relevance by being, as the artist Helmut Federle has said, "a clear alternative to the zeitgeist and velocity of modern life (shown, a painting from Federle's Black Series)." 
 


permanent link  libby and roberta 11:15 AM
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Walking the boardwalk at PAFA

 


Michelle Oosterbaan's installation at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art's Morris Gallery slaps three painted plywood runways onto the floor. And while there's also beaucoup d'paint on the walls and ceiling, it's the floor that holds the power here. The artist's plywood tiles speak to the floor tiles of the Furness building's lobby and while the conversation's not much more than a hello and a handshake, it's a nice touch.

This is a sunny, formalist piece that I enjoyed at noon on a bright day when the room was alit from the overhead skylights. I could have had a picnic right then and there if they would have let me.

By the way, after many years and much experience of walking on art, I still found stepping on Oosterbaan's piece a transgressive act.

permanent link  roberta 8:49 AM
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Who am we?

 
I'll just add a few things more about Gabe Martinez's "Confidence and Faith," a piece I found confusing and altogether wonderful. (for more, see Libby's post of Dec. 17).



Martinez's work is about identity and it's not always about his identity. The artist likes to place the viewer in front of excessively orchestrated bunches of stuff and ask for a psychic reading. Is what's presented you? Is it him? Who is represented here and why?




In his one-night-stand at the Art Alliance, Martinez presents Michelle Kwan as the object of adoration. He loves her. He lights candles for her, throws teddy bears and stays with her when she falls.

But maybe Kwan is a stand-in for the artist, someone who performs without a safety net and sometimes fails.

(Photographs by J.J. Tiziou. Image at the bottom is a close-up of that concretized teddy bear mountain.)





permanent link  roberta 8:22 AM
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