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Thursday, February 26, 2004

Big Easy viewing

 

Stella and I went to New Orleans last week to visit our friends Chuck, Iris and Lianna, and while I can’t really call Mardi Gras art, the whole thing is one long, giddy performance that comes pretty darn close.



So here are a few pictures -- a little lagniappe (see definition below) -- of the pre-Lenten bacchanal that, regardless of what you call it, employs a lot of artists in the making of floats and decorations. (My friend Chuck took the great, night-time float shot...I'm responsible for the rest.)


It’s the pattern and decoration holiday.

And while colors are dictated (purple, green and gold are the Mardi Gras colors), there’s plenty of variation.


Excess is the watchword.

In the Catholic scheme of things, it’s the big binge before the purge of Lent.

People decorate their homes. They decorate their bikes.


Street performers dress up as statues on Royal St. Call them photo opportunists. Take a picture and they want a tip.


I wondered about this little Jerry Garcia. He must have been zoned out on something because he sat there for hours working for his dogbones.

On Mardi Gras day itself, everyone dresses up and parades in the streets just for the sheer exhibitionistic fun of it.


For weeks, there are parades. Towards the end, two and three or more a day, with floats and riders and movie stars and marching bands.

And then there’s the loot. Millions of pounds of plastic beads thown from the floats.



I never realized what a job gathering beads was. Going to a parade was like going to work. Gotta go out there and get some more beads.

If you're a pack rat with a touch of the obsessive, you might want to avoid this whole thing.



Speaking of work, my friend Chuck, who works at the Historic New Orleans Collection, took us on a quick tour of the place. Behind the scenes, in the preparator's room, we ran into Scott Ratteree who was unwrapping some of the old Mardi Gras memorabilia in preparation for display at the restaurant Antoine's, official watering hole of the Krewe of Rex (King of Carnival).


Anyway, I thought you might like a little color this morning. And even though these pictures don't tell half the story, you can tell that as holidays go, Mardi Gras has got more beauty and sensuous moments than you can shake a stick...er, scepter at.



lagniappe - (lan-YAP) - Used primarily in southern Louisiana and southeast Texas, the word lagniappe refers to an "unexpected something extra." It could be an additional doughnut (as in "baker's dozen"), a free "one for the road" drink, and an unanticipated tip for someone who provides a special service or possibly a complimentary dessert for a regular customer. Creole term for something extra.
permanent link  roberta 9:23 AM
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Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Art politics across the pond

 
I want to recommend Peter Schjeldahl's New Yorker piece this week on how the Tate Modern and the Saatchi Gallery represent two different and competing art cultures that represent the split in the society between the upper class status quo-ites and the nouveaus.

Donald Judd (untitled shown above) would represent the former, or artists as priests in the church of culture, and Damien Hirst (his "Away from the Flock," left)would represent the latter, or artists as shock jocks.
permanent link  libby 10:18 AM
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Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Just politics as usual

 

I wouldn't say I regret the trip Roberta and I took to Lehigh University in Allentown to see the five Larry Fink "Forbidden Pictures" (see post, Feb. 3). Nor would I say it was worth that much effort.

The pictures are hanging not in the gallery but in the lobby of a building that includes poli sci as well as a bunch of other departments--in other words in a public space, not an art space. Some students were incensed by the political content of the images, which included a George Bush look-alike casually fondling the breast of a dame (image above).

The irate students raised enough of a fuss to engender a disclaimer on the Lehigh U. gallery website. They also engendered an air-clearing discussion; we learned this from a sign posted on the door leading to the photos. Students standing in front of the photos (shown) were debating the work when we arrived. So as political agit-prop, the photos can be declared a success.

As art, though, I'd have to rank them as somewhat less successful. Roberta observed that the reinterpretation of Weimar art via photos suffered from the loss of painterliness. Without the texture, exaggeration and mark-making, the images didn't stand up.

Nor did the work have the usual charms that carry Fink's work along. His acute eye for social nuance is wasted on the staged, fashion-y, made-up shots. His outsider's eye was an insider's eye here engaged in hermetic navel-gazing.

Even the flesh that his eye often lingers on is wasted here, drenched in makeup, stiffened in poses. And the endless space that some of his candid photos provide is not here. Instead, a tilted, false perspective blocks any entry into deep space.

These photos would have felt right at home amongst the fashion photos in the pages of the New York Times Magazine section, where they were originally supposed to appear (lines in image from scan of folded poster version).
permanent link  libby 5:00 PM
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Monday, February 23, 2004

Where it's hot--or not

 


The Adam Cvijanovic "Ideal City" installation at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art's Morris Gallery is one of those shows that should attract an enormous crowd of young people.

The artist is young and hot, hot, hot. He's a New York artist (that's Brooklyn) with a long list of big shows under his belt, and he's not unknown in Philadelphia, having recently shown one of his painted wallpapers (the bosky backyard scene, no repeats) in the Fabric Workshop and Museum's wallpaper show.

Furthermore, his subject matter, which includes the Osage Avenue MOVE bombing (some of the paintings of the MOVE fire shown right), ought to fire up some local interest.

So if this work were showing at the ICA, I'd bet the crowd at the opening would have quintupled the anemic turnout Friday at PAFA.

What's the story?

People show up for Fabric Workshop and Museum shows and Vox Populi shows just a block away, so I'd have to eliminate location.

Is the Morris Gallery, which has been showing some pretty thought-provoking and hip shows of work by an array of artists from around the country, suffering from association with its parent institution's stuffy reputation. Why isn't PAFA's stuffy reputation getting a polish from the Morris Gallery shows (shown left, detail from the installation plus someone's sleeve)?

Is it because the Cvijanovic show fits closely to the Academy tradition of realist painting, thereby misleading people into thinking this is just ho-hum realism?

Anyway, to make a long story short, the Osage Avenue piece alone is worth the visit, with its disorienting space, it's dreamy light and its nearly uniform row houses standing as metaphors for residents living in harmony--except for that one house--the MOVE house--with boarded-up windows and the loopy yellow structure on the roof (see detail, right, and wider view at top).

I found the rest of the installation more interesting for its content than its execution, but still worth the visit.
permanent link  libby 12:58 PM
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Sunday, February 22, 2004

Faces of the living and the dead

 
Some images visible through the window at Union 237 pulled me right off the street the other day and impelled me through the front door. They were a couple of prints by Puerto Rican political artist Carlos Irizarry from the Vietnam War era, which seem incredibly relevant and moving at this time when young men, ours and theirs, are dying regularly on the other side of the globe.

The prints were griddy images of youth and death. "My Son the Soldier" (top) and "My Son the Soldier (part II)" (shown right) were made in 1970, but they sent a shiver through me. Part I included a poem by Eugene J. McCarthy and images of military death--war photos, soldiers raising a flower instead of a flag at Iwo Jima, flag-covered coffins, a no more war poster, a skeleton with a ton of military bars, etc.

The head count in the bottom photo, by the way, added up to 197 plus one blow-up (I don't know if it's a repeat of a face in the small-image count, or if it makes 198). They all are young and beautiful, with their name, service branch, rank and hometown. The words on the print read, "The Faces of the Dead in Vietnam, One Week's Toll." I found myself mourning those long-gone young men all over again. And when I saw this morning's sad story in the paper of the 18-year-old killed while selling flowers, I had to put up this post.

Besides the Irizarry prints, the gallery was filled with a huge selection Adrian Wecer's war photos, starting with Vietnam, followed by wars and civil strife in places from the Western Sahara to Zaire and the Congo to the Iran-Iraq war, to Chile. The pictures, many of them quite beautiful and revealing, are chilling reminders of people's lives and deaths all over the world.
permanent link  libby 2:07 PM
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