ART IN LIFE

26 Jan - Phenomenal in Southern California

2012-01-26T08:23:00.012-07:00

Last week I was in Southern California for the final week of Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and La Jolla. The three-venue exhibition was part of Pacific Standard Time (PST), the six-month visual art extravaganza that is now the largest cultural collaboration in the history of the region.

The project’s mission is to commemorate the dynamic history of art in Los Angeles from the 1940’s through the 1970s. In the words of Deborah Marrow, Director of the Getty Foundation and one of the mastermind’s behind the project, “through Pacific Standard Time, the region’s enormously creative history has been preserved and re-examined, narrative by narrative. Now, for the first time, the full story of the genesis of the Los Angeles art scene is finally available to the public at exhibitions throughout Southern California.”

I repeatedly heard that of the 185 exhibitions (and counting) in the region, Phenomenal was the one not to miss. The exhibition explored the preoccupation among a handful of Los Angeles artists the 1960’s – 70’s of light and sensory phenomena as artistic medium. These artists, sometimes described as the Light and Space movement, created paintings, installations, sculptures, and atmospheres to shift and exceed the viewer’s capacity to experience and perceive art through basic manipulations of light and space. As described by Christopher Knight for the Los Angeles Times “whether by directing the flow of natural light, embedding artificial light within objects or architecture, or by playing with light through the use of transparent, translucent or reflective materials, these artists each made the visitor’s experience of light and other sensory phenomena under specific conditions the focus of their work.”

Phenomenal featured 56 works by 13 artists: Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Bruce Nauman, Eric Orr, Helen Pashgian, James Turrell, De Wain Valentine and Douglas Wheeler. The impact of the exhibition outstripped all of my expectations and reinforced my conviction that art can profoundly inform and expand the way we see and process the world.

One of the most important aspects of Phenomenal is the time it requires to literally see and then experience the impact of the works in the show. Upon first blush, many of these works appear to be an empty canvas, a room with nothing inside. In Irwin’s biography Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Lawrence Wescheler describes witnessing a couple literally "not see" one of Irwin's 7-foot dot paintings hanging in a museum. Standing with the work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Weschler describes that "a couple walked into the room. The young woman, gesturing with a sweep of her arm, sighed in mock exasperation 'See, this is what I mean.' Her friend smiled knowingly... and the two moved quickly on. They had literally not seen a thing - one does not, one cannot in that amount of time. She was just sick and tired of having museum walls cluttered with empty white canvases."

Experiencing these works requires the patience of time and attention, the leap-of-faith conviction that experiencing an “empty white canvas” might actually be worthwhile. And the works do unfold. With time and patience entire rooms, materials, light, and color that were literally invisible upon first glimpse are revealed - visual assumptions are shattered. In the words of Christopher Knight for the Los Angeles Times, “the eye opens, the buzzing mind lets go. A spectator arrives at a perceptual base point. As your body begins to feel the space it occupies, the rational brain shuts off. The effect is sensuous and exciting.” Or perhaps more aptly, in Irwin’s words, "at the very best, a few people will walk in and it will change their lives.”

Dramatic though that statement may sound, Weschler describes that this level of visual engagement turns our perception inward and facilitates a heightened awareness or our own ability to perceive. "Engaging the picture, we in turn engage the wonder of our own perceptual facilities. As in so much of Irwin's later work, for a few moments, we perceive ourselves perceiving." It is within that fresh perceptual space that we are able to see nuances, ask new questions, and make room for new opportunities.

The impact of Pacific Standard Time upon Southern California has also created an opportunity for profound shifts in assumptions and perspectives. PST created a new paradigm in large-scale collaboration. The project successfully fostered a sense of place and time through community consensus and the shared direction of powerful non-profit leaders in the region. In a time when so many non-profits dread collaboration and are loathe to share resources, Pacific Standard Time serves as a wake up call that a broader impact can result from a unified long-term community vision and a thoughtful and strategic combination of forces. Janet Lamkin, California State President of Bank of America, described the long-term impact of this project is that it “will bring together people of every neighborhood and background, and involve virtually all of this region’s arts institutions….(and) contributes to a climate where innovation flourishes, economies grow, and people, business and communities thrive.”

5 Dec - Art Basel Miami Beach

2011-12-05T20:38:00.001-07:00

Last week was the 10^th anniversary of Art Basel Miami Beach. In what amounts to a week-long art viewing, hobnobbing, party-hopping bender, the international art glitterati descend upon Miami Beach to see, be seen, schmooze, acquire, revel, gossip, and generally carouse. In addition to Art Basel Miami Beach there are 16 satellite fairs scattered throughout the city, museum exhibitions, gallery openings, private collection tours, concerts, performances, brunches, and VIP events in a timeline better suited to a month-long endeavor than a five-day art event.

Art Basel originated in Basel, Switzerland and came to Miami in 2002. Over the years, the fair has profoundly transformed the city while it is there. Hotel rooms, flights, restaurants, stores, galleries, museums are teeming, and Miami garners the focus of international publicity on a previously unprecedented scale.

The week is a testament to the unassailable and unnerving fact that money and art are inextricably bound. This week lays bare and unabashedly celebrates the fact of their interdependence. The art world is an amalgamation of pretense and brilliance – breathtaking imagination alongside gilded Gucci-clad lemmings. Miami invites that dichotomy in its most extreme – amazing works by little known and experimental artists at the fringes of art making presented simultaneously with the insecurity, boredom, and keeping up with the Joneses that is the “dark side” of the art world.

While in Miami I received an editorial by the infamous (and notorious) art collector Charles Saatchi. No stranger to controversy and criticism, Saatchi seemed to have had a massive art epiphany. Or – more likely - his wealth paled in comparison to the “artigarchs” of Brazil, Russia, India, and China who are out buying all of the traditional “major players.” Saatchi seethed that “being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar…do any of these people actually enjoy looking at art? Or do they simply enjoy having easily recognised, big-brand name pictures…In the fervour of peacock excess, it's not even considered necessary to waste one's time looking at the works on display. At the world's mega-art blowouts, it's only the pictures that end up as wallflowers.”

Beyond the madness and excess, the vulgarity of VIP swagger and “peacock excess,” Miami has gained an increasingly prominent position as a destination for art, culture, and design. The fair and all of its adjacent events have bolstered the Miami economy in profound and quantifiable ways. The fair’s continued success has encouraged the development of formerly dilapidated neighborhoods such as the Design and the Wynwood Art District that are now comprised of major private collections, boutiques, restaurants, bars, and a major influx of galleries - 4 to 45 over the past 8 years.

Another benefit, as described by Lizette Alvarez of The New York Times is that “as Miami’s cultural profile has grown, so too has the government’s willingness to invest. Local museums, including the well-respected Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, are expanding, partly with government money. The Miami Art Museum is in the midst of constructing a new building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architects who reimagined the Tate Modern in London.”

The fact that “trendy” and “chic” is often not (ever?) a sustainable model is an issue that major players in the Miami art world must address in order to maintain Miami’s current cultural growth trajectory. Every “cool” event has its expiration date, and for Miami to bank on the past decade of cultural success it will have to make real-time infrastructural and practical investments. As Rosa de la Cruz, patron of the arts and Miami-based collector explains, “Miami universities need to create graduate programs that will act as springboards for talented young artists.” Other ideas include Miami museums building major permanent collections…Art Basel has been wonderful to Miami, but for the rest of the year we need to start building an infrastructure,” Mrs. de la Cruz said. “We have to be very conscious of that, and we have to work very hard.”

2 November - Caravaggio and Francis Bacon

2011-11-02T17:00:00.006-06:00

I just completed Francine Prose’s lucid biography Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles. I have always been drawn to Caravaggio’s stunning paintings and the defiance and innovation with which he approached traditional religious subject matter. I was curious to know more about his work and infamously troubled life after seeing the Caravaggio / Francis Bacon exhibition at the Galeria Borghese in Rome, and this biography provided great insight into his work and life.

Esthetically, the pairing of Francis Bacon and Caravaggio was a brilliant choice by British curator Michael Pippiat. Both Caravaggio and Bacon unflinchingly plumbed the depths of the human condition. Each in his own unique and extraordinary way painted the sordid and debased, exposed the flesh and decay of the human body. Both artists simultaneously eroticized and laid bare the vulnerability of the human condition in forms that challenged the sensibilities and conventions of the contemporaries and patrons of their respective eras. Beyond this esthetic connection both artists’ lives were notoriously difficult, conflicted, and enormously self-destructive. Each perpetuated the myth of the tortured genius to the furthest reaches of their capacities. Bacon and Caravaggio were iconoclasts, virtuosos, addicts, and criminals – their very myths defined by the raging intensity of their personal turmoil and the extravagant beauty of their work.

Caravaggio seethed against the constraints of 17^h century Italy. He embodied the sacred and profane and with each professional success his life spiraled deeper into brutal street fights, vendettas, exile, and multiple murder charges. His life, like his work, treaded a fine line between the sublime and the beautiful, the sacred and the profane. In Prose’s words “Caravaggio insisted on his freedom to defy categorization, his right to make art according to his convictions and out of whatever engaged his intellect and his soul, as well as his creative, religious, and erotic impulses.” Bacon, too, lived a contradictory and despairing existence. As described in his biography by Pippiat, Bacon was “generous but cruel, forthright yet manipulative, ebullient but in despair: He was the sum of his contradictions. This life, lived at extremes, was filled with achievement and triumph, misfortune and personal tragedy."

It is fascinating that both artists have transcended their times to remain among the most important painters in the history of art. In Prose’s words, describing Caravaggio but also apt for Bacon, “all of these centuries later, the sense of connection, of communication—of communion—that we feel with the long-dead painter seems almost vertiginously direct and profound. Having spent his brief, tragic, and turbulent life painting miracles, he managed, in the process, to create one—the miracle of art, the miracle of the way in which some paint, a few brushes, a square of canvas, together with that most essential ingredient, genius, can produce something stronger than time and age, more powerful than death.”

12 Oct - Bono and Hiroshi Sugimoto

2011-10-12T09:38:00.042-06:00

This weekend I attended The Chinati Foundation’s 25th anniversary celebration in Marfa, Texas. It’s founder, artist Donald Judd, conceived of creating a place that would present art (originally his alongside that of Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain) in a permanent space to carefully address the context of place, architecture, and constancy. In Judd’s words, “It takes a great deal of time and thought to install work carefully. This should not always be thrown away. Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved again. Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place."

The Chinati Foundation opened to the public in 1986 as an independent, non-profit, publicly funded institution (supported largely by the DIA Foundation). The collection now includes 15 outdoor concrete works and 100 aluminum works by Judd, 25 sculptures by John Chamberlain, an installation by Dan Flavin occupying six former army barracks, and permanent installations by artists including Carl Andre, Ingólfur Arnarsson, Roni Horn, Richard Long, and Claes Oldenburg.

In addition to the permanent collection, Chinati also presents temporary exhibitions and this weekend featured an installation by internationally celebrated photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. I have long admired and exhibited Sugimoto’s photography and was surprised to find that this show consisted of 24 glass pagodas, each six inches high, presented on Japanese wood pedestals. At the center of each pagoda, however, I discovered a thread from his earlier works - miniature unique images of his iconic seascape photographs (pictured above, left).

I met Sugimoto on the opening night and attended his lecture in downtown Marfa the next day, curious to learn more about this new body of work. The lecture addressed Sugimoto’s creative influences, exhibition history, and current and future projects. It touched upon his recent architectural work and how his ongoing fascination with Japanese antiquities brought him to this new body of sculptural pagodas and linked him back to Donald Judd who apparently had a similar affinity. The talk, however, took a wildly unexpected turn and got me thinking about the intersection of fame, celebrity, and cross-disciplinary inspiration.

About twenty minutes into the lecture, Sugimoto's slideshow of images went from his own work to his collection of Japanese antiquities to U2's "Claw," a massive four-legged supporting rig build for their most recent world tour. Um, what?

Sugimoto laughed, and said, and now we will talk about something very different. Sugimoto proceeded to launch into a story of being taken by private jet to Bono’s beautiful villa in Nice a few years ago. He had never met Bono and was not totally sure who he was, but he was enthralled with the extravagance of transport and magnificence of locale. Bono greeted Sugimoto at the villa and told him that he was a great admirer of his Seascapes. Bono then asked if Sugimoto might consider shooting a seascape from this villa for the cover of U2's next album. At this point in the talk, Sugimoto chuckles, and tells the audience that he is not a commercial photographer. Had Bono NOT asked him for the shot he may well have made a picture, but since Bono asked him to do it he had to decline. He clearly was entertained with this aspect of the story.

Bono and Sugimoto continued the conversation, and ultimately one of Sugimoto’s existing photographs, Boden Sea, was used for the No Line on the Horizon album cover and title. The photograph was also used in a repeated image that spanned the massive video screens atop "The Claw" during the world tour. Taken with his work being featured amidst the magnitude and scope of U2's fame (it turned out to be the highest-grossing and highest-attended concert tour in history), Sugimoto remains star struck. At one point during the lecture Sugimoto showed a concert clip where Bono interrupts one of his signature songs in a stadium full of screaming fans to give a shout out to "Sugimoto-san." Sugimoto beamed, momentarily speechless, basking in the memory.

This lecture was an example of artists at the pinnacle of their respective careers being awed by the achievements of peers in other fields. For the same reason that I love Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, Adam Bly’s Seed Salon series, and the Sundance Channel’s Iconoclasts, it is fascinating to explore the ways that creative visionaries interact with, inspire, and admire one another’s lives and accomplishments. The examples of this interaction is endless and fascinating, the transcendence of "good work" clearly stretches far beyond its intended or understood audience into other realms of thought and interaction. In Sugimoto’s words "the works are really connected to the very deep roots of the human mind, even to the minds of musicians who have reached the pinnacle of success."

Beyond the glitz of private jets, French villas, solo exhibitions, auction records, and massive world tours, this type of intersection is a fertile place for growth and innovation and offers a singular opportunity to explore new ways to illuminate and understand our world.

6 Sept - Packing for Mars

2011-09-06T08:05:00.016-06:00

I just finished Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach. Admittedly, this book does not discuss, tangentially or otherwise, anything related to art. But it is so entertaining, so fascinating, that I can't resist mentioning it in the blog. And I hear Bruce Nauman also loved it. So there you go.

In Packing for Mars, Roach explores and details the types of stories that NASA would most likely prefer to remain under wraps. This book is about the embarrassing, awkward, mundane, and utterly human aspect of space research and travel. The Publishers Weekly review describes that “despite all the high-tech science that has resulted in space shuttles and moonwalks, the most crippling hurdles of cosmic travel are our most primordial human qualities: eating, going to the bathroom, having sex and bathing, and not dying in reentry. Readers learn that throwing up in a space helmet could be life-threatening, that Japanese astronaut candidates must fold a thousand origami paper cranes to test perseverance and attention to detail, and that cadavers are gaining popularity over crash dummies when studying landings.”

One of the best aspects of Roach's research is that she throws herself into the project - she experiences parabolic flights in the "vomit comet", practices on zero gravity toilets, and drinks her own treated urine in the NASA cafeteria. She is unquestionably the type of adventurous friend who would lead you to delicious, scandalous, memory-making trouble. She can even make Jon Stewart blush.

This book is a work of art. It is the dark and dirty and juicy details of rocket science. Roach is brilliant, unfailingly inquisitive, and laugh out loud funny. If my college physics professor had been this interesting I could be working at NASA by now. Well, maybe not.

30 Aug - Science is Culture

2011-08-30T08:51:00.041-06:00

30-year old Adam Bly created Seed Magazine at the intersection of science and non-science to explore “a new way of looking at the world…like the renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the renaissance before us will be characterized by a revolution in how knowledge is gathered, synthesized, and applied to society.” Bly formerly studied cell adhesion and cancer at the National Research Council of Canada, was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007 and is recipient of the Golden Jubilee Medal from Elizabeth II. He has lectured at the World Economic Forum, MoMA, Harvard, the Royal Society, the National Academy of Science, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, and the State Department on the future of science and its role in society. His book Science is Culture is a compilation of five years of conversations Seed Magazine instigated between scientists and non-scientists as part of its Seed Salon series.

One of the most fascinating dialogs is the conversation between scientist and author Alan Lightman and choreographer Richard Colton. Lightman wrote Einstein’s Dreams, to date one of my favorite novels. The book follows young Einstein, living in Berne, Switzerland in 1905 as a patent clerk privately working on his bizarre, unheard-of theory of relativity. The book strays into fiction as Einstein goes home to take a nap, and subsequently has 30 dreams in which he works out his theory of relativity. Each dream is a parable of a world altered profoundly due to minute shifts in relativity. As described in its book review “in their tone and quiet logic, Lightman's fables come off like Bach variations played on an exquisite harpsichord. People live for one day or eternity, and they respond intelligibly to each unique set of circumstances. Raindrops hang in the air in a place of frozen time; in another place everyone knows one year in advance exactly when the world will end, and acts accordingly.”

Prior to their Seed Salon conversation, Richard Colton collaborated with Lightman to bring Einstein’s Dreams to the stage as a dance performance. The Seed Salon discussion is the continuation of a longer dialog between the two on the intersection and interdependence of art and science. A few highlights of the conversation: On artists’ fascination with science Lightman says “I think artists like to have their world thrown upside down. That’s part of what art is about, in my opinion. Artists like to look at things from totally new perspectives. That’s why artists have always enjoyed staying in touch with science. There’s a long history of salons and groups of both artists and scientists… Artists very much like to get new ideas from science, because they shake up their worldview, which is what they’re trying to do with their art.”

On why scientists are intrigued with the arts: “I think that one of the things that art helps provide scientists with is the language—and the metaphors and the images—to describe what scientists are so desperately trying to understand. Our instruments tell us that these totally unimaginable phenomena are happening, and yet we have no intuitive understanding of them. So we grope for language and pictures, and I think art provides some of these for us.” I must say, this resonates so closely with Jonah Lehrer’s perspective in Proust was a Neuroscientist – I would love to see the two of them in conversation…

Lightman and Colton discuss poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who in writing a letter to an aspiring poet advises, “learn to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, or like books written in a very foreign tongue.” Lightman’s interpretation is that “a lot of art is about the questions themselves. The question is more important than the answer. So I think that artists are much better at living with uncertainty. Ambiguity is an essential part of art.”

Asking new questions, existing with ambiguity, a new way of looking at the world. Like the world created in Einstein’s Dreams, I believe that we can create an exquisite new iteration of our world by exploring the edges of uncertainty, dreaming up new questions, ultimately reaching solutions that have until this point have been inconceivable and unimaginable. In the book’s introduction Bly describes that “science is a lens through which we can visualize and solve complex problems, establish international relations, and embolden (even reignite) democracy. More than anything, what this lens offers us is a limitless capacity to handle all that comes our way, not matter how complex or unanticipated.”

15 Aug - Art Crush William Powhida

2011-08-15T10:47:00.026-06:00

I recently watched the Powhida Trailer to get a better sense of of William Powhida's recent opening at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea. The trailer is an Untitled-meets-Julian-Schnabel masterpiece, described as "the story of the greatest living artist." Powhida endlessly drains champagne from the bottle, womanizes (they're not hookers, they're my friends), stumbles, staggers, and waxes incoherently about his position of power and authority in an art world he recognizes as utter bullshit. I was instantly charmed.

The press release for his current Marlborough show rhapsodizes that it is the artist’s “most ambitious installation to date.” New York Observer critic Michael H. Miller ranted that “performances like this only work if there is some follow through. No one was being provoked. Mr. Powhida was simply pretending—half-heartedly—to be an asshole.” The critic didn't know that this was a Hollywood actor and that the real William Powhida was at a residency in Wisconsin. Polemical, subversive, button-pushing, deeply offensive to critics. I am willing to go so far as to say that William Powhida is the real deal.

The Marlborough installation consisted of an empty gallery with one bad oil painting hanging on a far wall of a man in a black suit and a purple dress shirt with sunglasses releasing a white dove from his hands. The painting was called POWHIDA, Portrait of a Genius. In a roped off area of the gallery was a table and chairs, a mini-fridge of beer and champagne, Marlborough Reds and ashtrays. Pernod-Absinthe flowed freely for all gallery attendees. People stood around in the gallery, drinking Absinthe and looking confused. And annoyed. Powhida arrived through one of the front gallery garage doors in a dark green Mercedes convertible, arms around two beautiful blondes, drinking straight from a bottle of champagne. He got out of the car, posed, and declared “Well I’m bored as fuck.” He proceeded to sit on the couch the majority of the event with his ladies, hurl expletives, and pound champagne.

William Powhida’s work has become an art world sensation for its scathing criticism of everything ranging from the New Museum, George W. Bush, Jerry Saltz, Zach Feuer, Dale Chihuly, to the Northern spotted owl. Poor Northern spotted owl. In 2004 Powhida began a list of “enemies,” rendering portraits of each “enemy” in graphite and gauche with insults written beneath each face. In 2009 he produced a drawing called "How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality" for the November cover of the Brooklyn Rail. Holland Cotter of the New York Times has called Powhida an "art world vigilante, virtuoso draftsman, compulsive calligrapher and fantasist autobiographer."

As Powhida’s popularity grows, his own fame and celebrity presents an interesting challenge for an artist whose entire oeuvre has been critiquing the art market as elitist and celebrity obsessed. Which is what makes his alter-ego so bewitching and subversive. LA MoCA Director Jeffrey Deitch described that "the irony is that by exposing art celebrity culture, he's becoming a celebrity himself... So hats off to him." Jeffery just wishes he had thought of creating an art world doppelgänger... other than James Franco.

So how does William Powhida address his own fame and place within the art world? As he described to Stephen Squibb for Idiom, “for me, this was the beginning of a dialogue that might help address some of the uneasiness about participating in a star-system and provoke an authentic reflection on the ways in which we, all of us, generate value around art objects. I’m left with the feeling that the market mechanism is bent, but not broken and that we have some collective authority to re-shape it in a more equitable manner. Really, we want to find ways to elevate the importance of culture in our shared social life. That art is a privilege for the wealthy, and not a right for everyone to understand and appreciate about our shared humanity is a concept that we really did challenge.” Half-hearted? Asshole? I think not.

photo credit: nose picker by Micah Schmidt

2 August - The BMW Guggenheim Lab

2011-08-02T16:10:00.000-06:00

A visionary new venue opened its doors today in Manhattan. The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a six-year collaboration between the Guggenheim Museum and the car company BMW. This project will invite a new generation of leaders in architecture, art, science, design, technology, and education to come together to address the challenges that face the cities of tomorrow by examining those that exist in urban life today.

The lab will travel to nine major cities worldwide with three distinct mobile structures and thematic cycles. Each structure will be designed by a different architect and each will travel to three cities around the globe. As described by Carol Vogel of the New York Times, “In each city curators will invite leaders in fields including architecture, art, design, technology, education and science to participate in programs: lectures, workshops, games, performances and film screenings.”

The first Lab, located in the East Village in a formerly abandoned parking lot, was designed by the Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow (pictured above, right). This modular carbon-fiber-mesh structure is designed to literally fold up and move to its next stop (first to Berlin, then to Mumbai) at the end of its ten-week run in New York. The interdisciplinary nature of this project provides an innovative and unconventional venue to engage in critical dialog and explore new ideas, in the words of curator Maria Nicanor it is “only by bringing everyone into the conversation can we achieve more innovative and meaningful answers to the urban challenges of the future.”

Theoretical Physicist and Santa Fe Institute professor Geoffrey West described that "cities have emerged as the source of the biggest challenges the planet has met since humans became social, yet as reservoirs of creativity and ideas, they are also the source of the solution." The BMW Guggenheim Lab is an opportunity to explore solutions within a captivating, intellectual, community-oriented, peripatetic, and mutable new platform. In the words of Reena Jana of Smartplanet.com “what will the public, the Guggenheim, and BMW learn from what promises to be an intriguing adventure in curating and international urban design? Even if the lessons are open-ended, the BMW Guggenheim Lab is likely to be a worthwhile architectural, marketing, and social experiment, one that will no doubt spark ongoing public debates and discussions both inside and outside the movable building itself.”

25 July - Midnight in Paris

2011-07-25T18:14:00.000-06:00

I just saw the new Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris. It is absolutely enchanting.

New York Times film critic Joseph Berger describes that “many a writer or artist has longed to travel back in time to the sizzling Paris of the 1920s, to sip absinthe with Hemingway at Les Deux Magots or dine on choucroute garnie with Picasso at La Rotonde.” The main character in the movie, Gil (brilliantly played by Owen Wilson), does just that. Gil parties with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, has his unpublished novel critiqued by Gertude Stein, confesses the absurdity of his situation with Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, (who are utterly unfazed by a troubled time traveling novelist), and gets love advice from Ernest Hemingway (love, sex, death, and manliness).

Without a thorough knowledge of the cultural explosion and characters of 1920's Paris some of the incredible dialog and intimate jokes may go unnoticed, but for anyone who loves the literature, art, and legacy of that era this film truly cannot be missed. In the words of Filmtwitch critic Jim Tudor, the “abrupt humanization of these icons of the art and literature is as amusing to Gil as it is to us. The electricity of the time is felt as he makes not just priceless connections and contacts, but friendships. The magic and charm of 1920s Paris is right out in front of everything...”

The film failed for me on one critical level. The moral of the story is that the present is as vital and splendid as the past. Allen attempts to teach us that the lens of nostalgia paints a far more enchanting image of an era than it truly is in its own time. The film is so sumptuous, superbly filmed, and the icons of the past are so vibrant and seductive that I am convinced without a doubt that I would rather be in Paris in 1920 than in Santa Fe in 2011. Sorry, Woody - I'm just not buying it.

images: Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody), a moment in the film, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (Alison Pill and Tom Hiddleston)

22 July - Lucian Freud dies at 88

2011-07-22T08:13:00.000-06:00

Lucian Freud passed away on Wednesday at 88. Freud was a figurative painter known for holding steadfastly to his own voice and figurative style through decades that critics, collectors, and curators cast their interest and praise solely upon abstraction. Freud's work ultimately rose beyond art trends and contemporary fancies to be placed firmly within the trajectory of art history as one of the most important artists of our time. In the words of Tate director Nicholas Serota, "The vitality of his nudes, the intensity of the still life paintings and the presence of his portraits of family and friends guarantee Lucian Freud a unique place in the pantheon of late 20th century art."

Freud’s painting delves into the exquisite grotesqueness of the human flesh – it is impermanence and imperfection manifest - his paintings are excruciating masterpieces of lumpy and flawed sensuality. Only Freud could render Kate Moss' nude body both ravishing and ravished in thick and loose strokes of his brush. In his words, “ I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."

Working most of his life in a dingy studio in London, Freud's subjects were predominantly friends, family, fellow artists, and lovers. He described that his "subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really”. In the words of New York Times critic William Grimes, Freud's studio was “his artistic universe, a grim theater in which his contorted subjects, stripped bare and therefore unidentifiable by class, submitted to the artist’s unblinking, merciless inspection.”

Freud touched on the most intimate details of his subjects' carnality and in doing so gave his viewers a glimpse into the delicacy and raw sensuality of the human form. British art critic William Feaver described that Freud “always pressed to extremes, carrying on further than one would think necessary and rarely letting anything go before it became disconcerting.” Through the lens of Freud's sumptuous distortions we are given a glimpse of our own humanity, acutely revealed and inexorably electrifying.

18 July - Eva Hesse Spectres

2011-07-18T08:06:00.000-06:00

I finally made it to the UNM Art Gallery to see the Eva Hesse Spectres, 1960 exhibition. Seeing this show was a reminder of how visceral and searing Hesse’s work truly is live, her work suffers so dramatically in printed and digital reproduction. I was surprised to find that Hesse's early paintings are as haunting and fragile as her later works in more experimental and ephemeral medium that included string, rubber, cheesecloth, wax, and resin. The Spectres paintings achieve the hollow and fragile need, the teetering vertiginous quality of the installation and sculptural works that propelled her short career into international renown. Walking from painting to painting, I was reminded of a quote from Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman’s 2010 Hammer Museum lecture on the same series, “It is always beyond me how good Eva Hesse is at all times.”

Eva Hesse was born in Hamburg in 1936. She and her family fled to the United States when she was 2 to escape the Holocaust. This body of work was created when Hesse was just 24, soon after graduating from the Yale School of Art. The show consists of 19 oil paintings on canvas and masonite. An early departure from the abstraction and minimalism she would later be known for, the Spectre paintings are semi-representational, haunting, and acutely personal.

The paintings are comprised of two distinct groups. The first are smaller paintings that are of cadaverous, loosely rendered figures standing in small groups of two or three. As described by the Yale Press blog, “These paintings seem to emerge from an intersection of the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti and the paintings of Willem de Kooning. They straddle the divide of flesh and paint, figure and ground, abstraction and line, proximity and distance.”

The second group are larger in scale and are elegiac and isolated self-portraits. As UNM Art Gallery curator E. Luanne McKinnon describes in her catalog essay, these figures embody “a sense of loss or displacement and pain. More directly stated, in these paintings Hesse’s real beauty was transmogrified into the ghastly.” As described by the Yale Press blog “claustrophobia and aberrant colors abound; skin is thick and dripping with paint; eyes are sightless and reflect nothing but violence. These self-portraits, as with the paintings that comprise the first half of the collection, are embodiments of emotional turmoil and existential frustration.”

Hesse’s work, regardless of medium, cuts to the core of human experience. Almost unbearably desolate, her work also holds a tenderness that I experience as a visceral sense of optimism, breathless expectation. Hesse fearlessly explored pain, loss, and isolation in her work, but also the unchartered territories of life's mysteries - the tender spaces between its excruciating moments. In her words, “I am interested in solving an unknown factor of art and an unknown factor of life.”

IMAGES: No title, 1960. Oil on canvas. 36 x 36 in. (91.44 x 91.44 cm). Collection of Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul, Chicago; Eva Hesse, 1969; Contingent (detail), November 1969 Fiberglass, polyester resin, latex, cheesecloth, 138 x 248 x 43.

9 July - Ai Weiwei's Zodiac

2011-07-09T17:48:00.000-06:00

While in New York last week, I was able to see Ai Weiwei's “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” installation at the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. As most know by now, Mr. Ai is a political activist who openly criticized the Chinese Government’s stance on democracy and human rights. He was arrested in Beijing this past April and held for over two months without official charges. He was recently released, but as Bill Lasarow of Visual Art Source describes, Mr. Ai is “effectively under house arrest, under indictment not for a political “crime” but for tax evasion, he is reduced to the statement: ‘I can’t talk to media but I am well’… Perhaps at some later date the artist will once more be who he so recently was, a fearless creative force shaping his art around a brilliant fusion of spot on aesthetic intuition and political passion. If his life hasIf his life has been salvaged, his teeth have been capped and his claws have been clipped.”

In light of the newly released but eerily silent artist, it felt right to see his installation of gnashing, grimacing, and ferocious creatures taking up significant space in New York City. The installation is a series of 12 heads of the Chinese Zodiac: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, boar. The cast bronze heads are enlarged versions of sculptures originally designed by European Jesuits in the 18th century for the Manchu emperor Qianlong. Part of a famous fountain clock in the Summer Palace, they were looted by French and British in 1860. As Roberta Smith describes in the New York Times, the installation that “my colleague Holland Cotter rightly predicted would look “winsome” if you didn’t know the back story, but that becomes more subversive if you do… It is a seemingly benign work plundered by the West, now being shown to the West, triumphantly enlarged and reconstituted.”

The installation is a stunning and subversive reminder of Mr. Ai’s message in a moment that he is unable to freely use his voice. Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum, read a quote by Ai at the opening ceremony of the installation, at a time he was incarcerated and his charges unknown, “without freedom of speech there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.” The installation is up 6 more days in New York. It is then scheduled to travel to Los Angeles, Houston, Pittsburgh and Washington. Another edition is currently in front of the Somerset House, London.

6 July - Just Kids

2011-07-06T19:04:00.000-06:00

Over the weekend I read Just Kids, a biography by punk poet Patti Smith about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe. I was astonished by her linguistic radiance, her capacity to make even the most banal of moments enchanted and acute. I did not know much about Smith – I remember looking at stunning and fearsome photos of her in Interview Magazine in the 1990’s and assumed she was a reckless, iconic, somewhat talented drug addict rocker.

Smith and Mapplethorpe met on the streets of New York in the late 1960s and immediately found in one another a confidante, an ally, a lover, and a source of unwavering inspiration. They made a pact to stick together and this book is the narration of that enduring promise. Smith winds her words through New York street life and encounters ranging from fleeting moments to lifelong friendships with such luminaries as William Burroughs, Salvador Dali, Janice Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepherd, Jimi Hendrix, and Brice Marden. The book is the story of finding authenticity in fleabag hotels, clarity of vision in the darkest moments of rejection and fear, and each ultimately finding a distinct voice - through poetry, collage, photography, or punk rock – that transcended the cacophony and messiness of life.

In describing her belief in Mapplethorpe’s profound genius, Smith describes that “it is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or a tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys. Robert infused objects, whether for art or life, with his creative impulse, his sacred sexual power.”

Just Kids begins with an account of one of Smith’s earliest recollections of walking along a river with her mother. “The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle. A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage. Swan, my mother said, sensing my excitement. It pattered the bright water, flapping its great wings, and lifted into the sky. The word alone hardly attested to its magnificence nor conveyed the emotion it produced. The sight of it generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan, to say something of its whiteness, the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings.”

Smith, as she describes Mapplethorpe's "creative impulse, his sacred sexual power" infusing objects with magical life-breath reflexively and intuitively describes herself. Her husband once said that every photograph Mapplethorpe took of Smith ended up looking just like Mapplethorpe. They were bonded to the end, two lives navigating the thin line between chaos and creativity, theirs an integrated existence of life as art and art as life.

23 June - Guest of Cindy Sherman

2011-06-23T18:50:00.001-06:00

I finally watched Guest of Cindy Sherman, the documentary co-directed by Paul Hasegawa-Overacker, aka Paul H-O. Paul begins with the fabulous and ghetto public access program "Gallery Beat," in which he and co-producer of the film Tom Donahue bust into galleries throughout New York and force their way into the faces of some of the art elite of the early 90's including Julian Schnabel (who hates them and comes off as an odious narcissist in the film), Spencer Tunic (then an unknown artist, Paul records the show in the buff), Tracy Emin (she is so unknown at the time he forgets her name), Ross Bleckner (who mocks public access TV). The list goes on and on and on.

Eventually, Paul finds his way to the already iconic photographer Cindy Sherman. The chemistry is immediate and Paul is permitted rare and intimate access to record Cindy's world. What ensues is an insider glimpse of the glamor, treachery, and mercurial nature of the art world from the late '80's through five excruciating years of Paul's unraveling from being Cindy Sherman's boyfriend, downgraded to "Guest of Cindy Sherman," then ultimately to becoming "Ex of Cindy Sherman."

The documentary is as painful as it is intoxicating, reality TV at its best. As Joy Press of Salon.com describes "We get a sidelong view of the art world and its symbiotic relationship with commerce and celebrity, as well as an exploration of the awkward life of a famous person's "plus one." We also get an incredibly rare look at Cindy Sherman the person, the fledgling surfer, the "Florence Nightingale" of girlfriends. Risë Keller of Movie Habit wrote an insightful review of the film, describing that "because the graceless Paul H-O features so prominently in it, I kept fearing the film would lapse into something clumsy, something that would make me want to stop watching the film before it was over. But the narrative surprised me at those moments by pulling back from his particular brink of clutziness, and the story about this odd couple kept me on edge. Other tensions kept pulling me in, too: the tension between the sunny, pert faces of the “real” Cindy Sherman and the desperation in her portraits, and the class tensions that course through most scenes. "

One of the most compelling, and optimistic, aspects of the documentary in my opinion was the message (delivered as Paul's lament) that authenticity can transcend the bullshit of the art world. Paul was having a blast as a subversive ex-artist documenting (and snidely judging) the art world through the lens of Art Beat. It worked for him. As Cindy Sherman's boyfriend, he begins to resent how hard he has to work in contrast to the ease with which Cindy breezes through the art world. Why? I venture authenticity. What shines through in this film is Sherman's conviction and a drive. Her singular voice in a cacophony of art world sycophants that transcends its superficiality and fickle whims. Sherman makes art her way - has even attempted (unsuccessfully due to her success) to make unsalable art. For that very conviction, she is exactly who she is. And as the movie poster illustrates, Paul finds himself lost in the shadow of Sherman's spotlight.

19 June - A Bentonville Bilbao?

2011-06-19T14:33:00.000-06:00

Is Bentonville the new Bilbao? On 11-11-11, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will open its doors in the unlikely city of Bentonville, Arkansas. The museum will be 201,000 square feet, over twice the size of the Whitney Museum of American Art and will chronicle the entire story of American art from the Colonial era of the late 1600s to contemporary works including Chuck Close, Kara Walker, Mark di Suvero, Walton Ford, James Turrell, and Roxy Paine. This project is the brainchild of Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton, heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune.

In addition to Ms. Walton’s lavish spending to build the collection (over 400 works will be displayed upon the opening of the museum) and initiate the project, her family has pledged to give $800 million to the new art museum, the largest cash donation ever made to a U.S. art museum. Kelly Crow of the Wall Street Journal explains that “the gift from the Walton Family Foundation trumps the $660 million in oil stocks that J. Paul Getty bequeathed to his namesake Los Angeles museum more than three decades ago.” According to Don Bacigalupi, the museum's executive director, "$325 million from the family's gift this week was earmarked to buy additional artworks. Another $350 million will go to cover the museum's operating expenses (around $16 million a year), and the rest, around $125 million, will be set aside for future upkeep of the complex."

The museum's “encyclopedic sweep (is) reminiscent of the ambitions of the robber-baron museum builders in the Gilded Age, but rarely attempted by new museums today. Billionaire Eli Broad, for example, has pledged nearly $340 million to build and endow a new museum for his collection in Los Angeles, but his vast holdings only cover the past few decades of U.S. and international art.” (Crow)

This is a massive undertaking in any city, but this is located in Bentonville, Arkansas. Why? Because Ms. Walton seeks to bring high art to this middle-American town of 35,000, best known as the headquarters of Wal-Mart. The Crystal Bridges website describes their mission, in addition to expanding access to art, cultural and learning resources, "will also spur the continued economic development of Northwest Arkansas.”

This brings to mind the Guggenheim Bilbao, now the landmark of the city. Built by starchitect Frank Gehry, Bilbao was transformed virtually overnight from a backwater to be avoided to a must see destination. As the city’s website describes “Bilbao was changed forever. Then came the obvious knock on effects of hotels opening, the airport expanding, upgrading of all facilities, extra employment etc etc. Today the advances continue as Bilbao continues to strive to make itself a tourist friendly destination.”

Ms. Walton described that “for years I’ve been thinking about what we could do as a family that could really make a difference in this part of the world. I thought this is something we desperately need, and what a difference it would have made were it here when I was growing up.” Carol Vogel of the New York Times reported that the museum is “planning for about 250,000 visitors in their first year and expect an annual operating budget of $16 million to $20 million. In addition to the 120 full-time jobs the institution is creating, they said, it will pump millions of tourist dollars into northwest Arkansas.”

An interesting story to follow – certainly a worthwhile collection to visit. Let's hope the Field of Dreams concept works for Bentonville as it did Bilbao, "if you build it, they will come."

images: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Bilbao

10 June - Spiral Jetty in Danger

2011-06-10T07:19:00.000-06:00

BY GLEN WARCHOL

The Salt Lake Tribune

First published Jun 08 2011 05:14PM
Updated Jun 9, 2011 11:03AM
On Tuesday, the state of Utah had become the owner of one of the world’s iconic earthwork masterpieces, the Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson.

But by late Wednesday, the status of the massive art work created in 1970 and previously managed by a New York art foundation, was "in flux," according to a Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands spokesman.

According to division officials, the New York-based Dia Foundation that was given control of the Spiral Jetty by the Smithson estate had been tardy in making its annual $250 payment on the 10 acres of land that’s periodically submerged by the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Worse, Dia had also failed to respond to the state’s automatically generated notice in February that its 20-year lease on the lake bed had run out, said division spokesman Jason Curry.

On Tuesday morning, Curry said, "the notification went out that the lease will not be continued and the land will be managed like any other sovereign land." Other of the state’s sovereign lands include the beds of navigable lakes and rivers.

It would be up to the discretion of the director of division whether the land would be available for lease in the future, he said. And even if the parcel were made available, Dia would have no advantage over other bidders. "If somebody wants to apply for the land, it would be looked at just as any other piece would be," Curry said.

Dia deputy director Laura Raicovich was shocked Wednesday when The Tribune informed her that continuation of the lease had been denied. She said she wasn’t aware of any lease termination notices. Raicovich declined to comment on the issue until Dia had a chance to communicate with the division.

Under Utah’s standard lease agreement, Dia would have 90 days to remove "any improvements" on the land. According to that wording, "improvements" presumably would include the 1,500-foot-long basalt-rock jetty that draws visitors from around the globe.

The Spiral Jetty would continue to be protected as state land and the public access would remain the same, Curry said. "Dia’s not holding the lease is not going to change anything regarding the Spiral Jetty."

The Utah Department of Natural Resources received thousands of emails in 2008 protesting an oil company proposal to conduct exploratory drilling near the Spiral Jetty. Curry said he couldn’t speculate whether Dia’s loss of the lease would affect its standing in such protests in the future.

The DNR’s abrupt action seems unusual, said Joro Walker, a Salt Lake-based senior attorney for the Western Resources Advocates. "Typically when somebody is occupying sovereign land, they get their leases renewed," she said, noting that the state is charged with managing the land in the public trust. "I think the people of Utah consider the Spiral Jetty to be an icon."

Refusing to renew any lease on the lake usually doesn’t occur without good reasons and possibly a public process, Walker said, and such a refusal would be unheard of if the land were leased by a mineral-extraction company.

"Why change it when Dia takes good care of the land and the jetty? [Dia] is spending their resources to protect it, and they are paying [lease payments] into the state coffers. It seems like a completely appropriate arrangement that benefits the people of Utah."

Wednesday afternoon, Curry acknowledged that the division had heard from Dia officials who argued that Dia had been negotiating an agreement with former Sovereign Lands Coordinator Dave Grierson, who died in April 2010. The division, he said, is trying to uncover any correspondence between Grierson and Dia.

"I don’t have any idea which way it will go at this point," Curry said. "But we will do our best to work with Dia."

Department of Natural Resources spokeswoman Tammy Kikuchi said she was surprised at the interest in the Spiral Jetty’s status "because few people in Utah have visited it."

Curry added: "It’s a matter of perception. To the Dia and the landform art world, the Spiral Jetty is a big deal. But in the larger scheme of sovereign lands management, it’s only one component."

Upon Cursory research for further information, I found this blog by Rosalie Miller from 2009:
Back in early 2008, Dia Art Foundation discovered an application filed by the Canadian oil and gas company, Pearl Montana Exploration and Production, which WOULD of allowed exploratory drilling in the Great Salt Lake. This "development" would have disrupted the physical sculpture of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (located 3-5 miles from the development site)... not to mention the possible degradation of the natural ecosystem(s) within the Lake itself. However, the sate of Utah denied Pearl Montana's application... and for now, immediate drilling has ceased.

However, as of July, 2009, Dia has discovered yet another application, which was filed by the Great Salt Lake Minerals. This proposal relates to expansion re: solar evaporation ponds (i.e. extraction of potassium sulfate). Dia immediately issued public comments to Utah's Dept. of Water Quality and the US Army Corps of Engineers expressing their numerous concerns. Moreover, the Army Corps of Engineers is working on an Environmental Impact Study for the project and is slated for completion in early 2010.

We'll see... I am hopeful that conservation and preservation will prevail, but my skepticism seems to creep in from time-to-time. For more information on this topic visit the Dia Art Foundation site or click on the following link:http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/59/1245

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Photo: George Steinmetz.

5 June - John Waters in Venice

2011-06-05T08:53:00.000-06:00

From Artforum International:

"In anticipation of the Venice Biennale's opening, Monopol has published an interview with the celebrated director John Waters, a member of this year's biennale jury. When asked if he was surprised to be selected, Waters said, "Others are probably more surprised than me . . . I'm a great fan of this year's curator Bice Curiger. So I feel very honored. There must be some people in the art world who are irritated to see that the master of bad taste is on the jury of the most important art show. But contemporary art and bad taste have more in common than many might like to admit." Surprisingly, Waters has never been to Venice. "I've been almost everywhere, even to Bologna, the Italian capital of the blow job as I was told," he said, adding, "but a jury is lots of work, so I don't think I'll have a lot of time for wild nights, but who knows?"

And as interviewed in ARTINFO.com

What aspect of the Biennale are you most looking forward to?Jury folie a famille

How many times have you been to the Biennale before? Zero

What's your plan of attack for this Biennale? Ruthless exploration

What's your position on gondolas? If they tip over I can swim.

What's the last show that you saw? Louise Lawler at Metro Pictures Gallery, New York

What's the last show that surprised you? Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Why? How NEW all the work seemed.

Do you collect anything? Buildings of Disaster by Boym Partners

What's the most indispensable artwork you own? Oversized Fischli & Weiss "Airport" photograph

What's the last artwork you purchased? Karin Sander mold painting, "Gebrauchsbild"

What's the weirdest thing you ever saw happen in a museum, gallery, art fair, or biennial? Glory holes in bathrooms

What's your art-world pet peeve? Outrageous escalation of auction house surcharges

What's the last great book you read? "Humiliation" by Wayne Koestenbaum

What work of art do you wish you owned? "Carpet #9" by Mike Kelley

What would you do to get it? If I was younger, burglary. Now that I'm older I guess that I'd sell my soul.

What under-appreciated artist, gallery, or work do you think people should know about? George Stoll

Who's your favorite living artist? Cy Twombly

What are your hobbies? How dare you presume I'm a dabbler!

images: John Waters in Venice, Water's artwork, the famous Divine

3 Jun - A Tank, A Treadmill, A Singing ATM

2011-06-03T13:06:00.000-06:00

The Venice Biennale is a spectacle beyond spectacles. It is the Lady Gaga of art events, and details of the extravaganza are filtering back to the US as the press and VIP's wind their way through the National Pavilions, the Arsenale, the galas, dinners, and cocktail parties. I am stung with an urgency to be in Venice. Yesterday.

The news is of the ATM machine in the Giardini, the Tank at the American Pavilion, and the "it" Tote bag. The tote bag to have this year (they are annually distributed as free takeaways) is a gold lamé creation from artist Hany Armanious from the Australian Pavilion. Carol Vogel reports that "officials there said within three hours on Wednesday they had dispensed with more than 2,000 of them and as they’re getting scarcer this season’s “it” bag is becoming a collector’s item."

Vogel also reported back of the sensation caused by the sole ATM in the Giardini (the gardens that host the national pavilions). An interactive installation piece by artist duo Allora & Calzadilla, it "is a pipe organ with an A.T.M. embedded in its belly that is computer-programmed to play a tune when a person puts in their pin number... Theories have even been circulating that the bigger someone’s balance, the more elaborate and longer the composition, something officials at the pavilion hotly deny. During the first three days of the Biennale’s V.I.P. preview earlier this week, more than 100,000 euros were withdrawn from the machine. That amount, Lisa Freiman, commissioner of the pavilion said, is three or four times the normal activity of an A.T.M. in Italy, according to BNL, the bank that operates it."

Other high and low-lights come from Roberta Smith of the New York Times and Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine. Smith described the Italian Pavilion as "a new and historic Biennale low is reached in the vast Italian Pavilion where Vittorio Sgarbi, an Italian art historian, television personality and former under-secretary of culture, has overseen a ludicrously dense installation of work by some 260 Italian artists, almost all of it unredeemable still-born schlock. Bristling with an unbelievably venomous hatred of art, the exhibition would be a national scandal, if Italy weren’t already plagued by so many." It sounds so bad I just want to see it to believe it.

Saltz speaks to a moment in the Giardini in which a "megacurator of an extremely well-known U.S. art museum" groaned that he was embarrassed to be an American as he stood before Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's installation in front of the American Pavilion. A 60-ton Army tank "shipped from England at who knows what expense, turned upside-fucking-down, turret and gun barrel on the ground, steel treads to the sky. Atop this warlord wedding cake, they’ve installed a treadmill where a world-class runner works out for fifteen minutes of every hour. It’s the health club from Hell, Afghanistan in Venice, and it makes a humongous racket that can be heard all around the Giardini. I looked back at the curator and said, “I think being embarrassed to be an American is partly what this is about.”"

Money that sings (possibly to the tune of your bank account digits), gold lamé tote bags, train wrecks of installations, and upside down ruckus-making tanks with treadmills and track stars. Mix with a crush of patrons, curators, critics, and artists; maze-like Venetian alleyways; Bellinis at Harry's Bar; copious amounts of pigeon poop. Is there anywhere in the world I'd rather be?

Photos: Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images, Ruth Fremson/The New York Times (second two images).

23 May - Prada & Risk

2011-05-23T12:40:00.000-06:00

If I were to attempt to follow my thread of musings in the art world and how they manifest in the form of this blog, the common denominator may be my belief in the manifest value of taking risks. Through the works and minds of such disparate characters as Olaffur Eliasson, Marcia Tucker, Alanna Heiss, Bruce Nauman, Dave Hickey, Robert Irwin, Lady Gaga, and Banksy (to name but a few), I have explored the ways that taking risks -- and being uncertain of their outcome -- incites dialog, innovation, fury, passion, transformation.

In the June issue of Vanity Fair, Ingrid Sischy (former Editor and Chief of Interview Magazine) reports on Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli's approach to fashion, life, and the creation of the remarkable art collection that will be presented publicly for the first time in conjunction with the Venice Biennale next month. The Prada Foundation's new home is a 65,000 square foot 18th-century plaza on the Grand Canale in Venice. Sischy describes Prada and Bertelli as collectors dedicated to risk and outside-the-box ideas in the arts, supporting extraordinarily ambitious projects, massive in scale and frequently volatile in nature. "When it comes to materials and logistics, says Prada, 'we are attracted to the nightmares.'"

Prada and Bertelli are remarkable for their approach to collecting. They are unique voices amidst the predictable and often clichéd accumulations of high profile art collectors. Not interested in the checklist of heavy auction hitters and the art stars of the moment, "Prada and Berletti have become legendary in the fashion and art world for making their own rules. But they are also believers in careful study; thus, when they decided in the early 1990's to focus on modern and contemporary art as collectors, and to create a foundation that would support outside-the-box ideas, theirs was a commitment."

Contemporary art can create space for independent thought beyond conventional structures and tacit social boundaries. It can electrify minds and create new conduits to experience life, with its issues and conflicts. Prada and Berletti are clearly active and engaged participants in an important international art dialog that involves innovation, originality, and risk. Describing the inaugural exhibition to be presented next month, Sischy asserts that "new ideas don't come along that often, but the exhibition provides a kind of petri-dish environment in which they can cook. Or think of it as a jam session, with artworks riffing on one another thanks to evocative or provocative juxtapositions - Prada likes surprising couplings and unexpected combinations in her fashion as well as her art."

Promoting the possibilities of art, what Tate Director Nicholas Serrota describes as "the nerve endings of contemporary art," requires an openness and excitement in the face of uncertainty rather than the assurance of subscribing to the costly and commercial status quo. Art critic and curator Dave Hickey stated that “if you don’t take risks, if you confirm the prescience of previous investors, you acquire no power, create no constituencies, and have no effect. So you must take risks."

In the Vanity Fair interview Prada states it is "better to make mistakes than be totally correct. We want to do something alive… The whole idea was to try and do something that could help produce new ideas in the future. However much we criticize art for being commercial, it is still a place for freedom and thinking and creativity."

Images: Photographs of the Prada Foundation by Sam Taylor-Wood for Vanity Fair, portrait of Prada by Guido Harari

17 May - Nancy Holt: Sightlines

2011-05-17T09:17:00.000-06:00

On Sunday I attended a lecture and book signing by internationally celebrated artist Nancy Holt. The event was held at the Santa Fe Art Institute for the release of her newly published book Sightlines, a comprehensive survey of photography, installation, video, film, sculpture, and land art ranging from the 1960 through today.

I first met Nancy Holt several years go when she lectured at the Center for Contemporary Arts in conjunction with a Land Art exhibition I co-curated with Bill Gilbert, the Lannan Chair of Land Arts of the American West. The exhibition was a 5-year survey of the Land Arts of the American West program – a unique land art program shared by the University of New Mexico and the University of Texas, Austin (featured this month in The New York Times).

I recall being drawn to Holt’s incredible history (she spent her early years as an artist in New York with colleagues and collaborators including Michael Heizer, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson – to name but a few), her unassuming manner with the audience, her endless curiosity for the world around her. I had not seen Nancy in many years when I recently was invited to join her for dinner. The dinner conversation was as intriguing as her initial lecture, we meandered through topics including monumental works of land art, the process of digitalizing her image archive, the trajectory of art history, buddhist practices, Italian art hotels, her ongoing interest in reliquaries. Her lecture on Sunday followed a more focused but equally engaging and complex process of contemplation.

At the lecture we learned that Sun Tunnels, arguably her most renowned work of art, was created as an installation of orientation within the awesomely vast and impersonal landscape as the Utah desert just beyond the Bonneville Salt Flats. Holt's work often brings a personal and human scale to the immensity of the landscape within which she works - a vastly different approach than, and nearly opposite to, her male Land Art counterparts. Her work represents a moment of respite and orientation to otherwise vertiginously open and enormous spaces.

Holt is an alchemist of sorts, and much of her talk was about transformation – transformation of light into sculpture, sculpture into photography, photography into print, print into digital scans, digital scans into a power point presentation. She described a piece she created for an exhibition in Denver in the early 1990's. Her father had photographed a garden, and then created a painting from that a photograph. Holt photographed her father's painting, and then it was reproduced in a catalog. She then photographed the image from the catalog, and photocopied the photograph. She then faxed it to friends as an object of art that stated (something like): This is a facsimile of a photocopy of a photograph of a photograph of a painting of a photograph of a garden. She noted at the lecture that as each fax printed the image slightly differently, with varying proportions, ink output, and data markings, each person owned a slightly different iteration of that work of art. She then, chuckling to herself, looking at the image on her slideshow presentation, said she would have to add "digital scan of a slideshow presentation of a projection."

Her focused fascination with the alchemy of light, time, and technology recalls the Henry Miller quote, “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself." One perfect example - the holes that are spaced throughout the Sun Tunnels are made in the form of constellations so when the sun – a great star itself – shines through the tunnels it creates unique constellations inside the sculptures so each visitor can walk on stars.

So much of what we might take for granted on a daily basis – light, time, medium, perspective, reflection, optics – is explored in Holt's art with astounding dedication and focus. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery of Columbus University described that "Holt developed a unique aesthetics of perception, which enabled visitors to her sites to engage with the landscape in new and challenging ways.” Holt turns each moment into Miller’s indescribably magnificent world in itself and in doing so reveals complex and spellbinding new worlds for her audiences - at once meticulously intricate and limitless in scope.

1 May - Eli Broad & The Giving Pledge

2011-05-01T06:19:00.000-06:00

Eli Broad is a controversial figure in the art world. An icon of "aggressive philanthropy," Broad is a Los Angeles brand, reputedly a control freak, and in the words of Frank Gehry, “a real pain in the ass.” In his 60 Minutes interview last Sunday with Morley Safer, however, one thing became abundantly clear. Eli Broad is one of a handful of philanthropists who are showing the world how to give.

At 77, Broad has given away over $2 billion to charity and intends to continue giving. In the words of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, "Eli Broad sets the standard. I think it's really being a role model for others. And they look at Eli and because of him, they get the ideas, 'I'm going to be innovative and be philanthropic and do some other things.' The leverage of Eli Broad is really quite amazing."

Broad is one of the Giving Pledge members, a campaign initiated by Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates in which they ask those with the largest fortunes in the world to commit to giving away at least half their fortune during their lifetime or after their death. This dynamic philanthropic leadership has, in the words of Fortune Magazine's Doris Burke, “the potential to dramatically change the philanthropic behavior of Americans, inducing them to step up the amounts they give. With that dinner meeting, Gates and Buffett started what can be called the biggest fundraising drive in history. They'd welcome donors of any kind. But their direct target is billionaires, whom the two men wish to see greatly raise the amounts they give to charities, of any and all kinds.”

Broad frequently quotes Andrew Carnegie's statement "he who dies with wealth dies in shame.” Broad then adds that “he who gives while he lives also knows where it goes.” A window into both the intention and the potential of philanthropy, Broad, Gates, Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, Ted Turner, and a handful of other leaders are leading by powerful example.

These dynamic philanthropists recognize that giving at any level is a learned behavior. To pitch the concept of The Giving Pledge, David Rockefeller Sr. hosted a dinner that included 12 of the wealthiest guests in the world. At that dinner, each was asked to tell a story of how they learned to give. In Burke's words, “David Rockefeller Sr. described learning philanthropy at the knees of his father and grandfather. Ted Turner repeated the oft-told tale of how he had made a spur-of-the-moment decision to give $1 billion to the United Nations. Some people talked about the emotional difficulty of making the leap from small giving to large. Others worried that their robust philanthropy might alienate their children. (Later, recalling the meeting, Buffett laughed that it had made him feel like a psychiatrist.)"

In the 60 Minutes interview, Eli Broad emphasized that his sense of being wealthy was heightened when be began to give his money away. He realized that his money and his life mission was not to simply maintin the status quo, but to make things different and better. Culture cannot exist without altruism and in Broad’s words "civilizations are not remembered by their business people, their bankers or lawyers. They're remembered by the arts.” The reach of philanthropy extends far beyond the arts. The charitable causes that The Giving Pledge dinner guests discussed ranged from education, culture, healthcare and hospitals, public policy, and poverty. Bill Gates stated after that dinner that the event was amazing, the causes admirable, and "the diversity of American giving is part of its beauty."

Support for progress that occurs at the community level has the capacity to influence policy and engender change on a national and global scale. Regardless of the size or type of contribution, it is critical to give. In Burke’s words, “society cannot help but be a beneficiary…nor will it be just the very rich who will perhaps bend their minds to what a pledge of this kind means. It could also be others with less to give but suddenly more reason to think about the rightness of what they do.”

pictured: Eli Broad (L), Warren Buffet, Bill and Melinda Gates (R)

17 April - Modigliani: A Life

2011-04-17T08:44:00.000-06:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - I just finished the new Meryle Secrest biography Modigliani: A Life. Known for his Francis Bacon-esque life of hard drinking, drugging, and womanizing; this biography sheds new light on Modigliani's life-long battle with Tuberculosis. Secrest's biography is in many ways an argument that Modigliani's drinking and drug use was predominantly “a cover (or a compensation) for the debilitating tuberculosis that he kept secret –- a spasmodic condition managed with the opium, laudanum and alcohol that contributed mightily to his tragic death at 35.”

The epidemic of Tuberculosis in Europe from 1800 - mid 1900's was a terrifying and deadly situation - one that could be likened to the AIDS epidemic of contemporary society. A contagious disease without a cure at the time, "consumptives" were frequently shunned and ostracized from society. Secrest's hypothesis is that Modigliani would have gone to any extreme to hide his condition. Immoderation, however, was also a part of the artistic lifestyle - fuel to the creative force - and the majority of artists, writers, dancers, and actors living in Paris in the early to mid 1900's lived in the extreme.

Among Modigliani's great and influential peers at the time included Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Constantin Brancusi and Chaim Soutine. Each felt destined for a special fate in life, one that released them from the conventional mores and standards of their time. As Secrest describes, “like Frank Lloyd Wright a few years later, Modigliani was clearly influenced by Nietzsche’s theories about the emergence of the Übermensch.The artist, as Superman, was divinely endowed, therefore divinely inspired, for as Nietzsche also wrote, the artist had his own truth, or a special kind of truth. ‘He fights for the higher dignity and significance of man; in truth, he does not want to give the most effective presumptions of his art: the fantastic, uncertain, extreme, the sense for the symbolic… the faith in some miraculous element in the genius.’” In a letter to a friend Modigliani wrote that “People like us… have different rights, different values than do the normal, ordinary people because we have different needs which puts us – it has to be said and you must believe it – above their moral standards.”

Modigliani and peers believed they were different, chosen, fated. “In his mind, fatalism and idealism, creativity and death, seemed intertwined.” The conviction that the true artist is one destined to live a tortured and extreme life beyond the bounds and rules of conventional society remains to this day. One of Bruce Nauman’s iconic works of art is a neon installation that reads “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.” Nauman, in describing this piece that proclaims the artist as outlier and oracle, stated that “the most difficult thing about the whole piece for me was the statement. It  was a kind of test—like when you say something out loud to see if you believe it. Once written down, I could see that the statement [...] was on  the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the other hand, I believed it.  It's true and not true at the same time. It depends on how you interpret it  and how seriously you take yourself. For me it's still a very strong thought.” Just add tragedy and stir.

10 April - In Memory of John McCracken

2011-04-10T20:49:00.000-06:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - John McCracken, a West Coast artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico known for bright, lustrous, minimal sculptures died on Friday in New York. He was 76.

I do not remember the first time I experienced John McCracken’s sculptures. It was most likely at James Kelly Contemporary in Santa Fe. I can not recall the specific colors of the works or how they were placed within the space. I do know that they haunted me for days following the show. In that rare and remarkable way that precious few works of art function, his sculpture shifted the way that I experienced anything that was even peripherally visually related. Whether it was a sumptuously painted lowrider in Northern New Mexico or a Donald Judd sculpture at Pace Gallery in New York, McCracken's sculptures changed the way I observed the world.

McCracken once stated that his “tendency is to reduce or develop everything to 'single things' — things which refer to nothing outside [themselves] but which at the same time possibly refer, or relate, to everything." His work was a whisper in a cacophony of voices, and the simplicity and elegance of that intention leaves an enduring and singular impact.

Artdaily.org described his sketchbooks which shed significant light on “both personal and speculative observations about the function of art. Ranging from one-word statements to several pages of commentary, his notes were frequently inspired by ancient history and paranormal meditations. These facilitate a parallel understanding of his works, as evidenced in a passage from 1966 on the reflective, even surfaces of his sculptures: “if the viewer is in motion, the sculptures become in a sense kinetic, changing more radically than one might expect. At times, certain sculptures seem to almost disappear and become illusions, so rather than describing these things as objects, it might be better to describe them as complexes of energies.”

McCracken's work gave the art world elegant, minimal, infinite objects of art. In the words of a mutual Santa Fe friend, “Not only was he a great and unique artist, but he was a thoughtful, kind and subtle soul.”

6 April - International call for Ai Weiwei's release

2011-04-06T01:23:00.000-06:00

Arts community unites to call for release of dissident Ai Weiwei

By Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent

Tuesday, 5 April 2011

Ai Weiwei, pictured here last year, is under house arrest at his Beijing home

A global campaign was gathering pace last night for the release of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who was detained by authorities on Sunday while attempting to board a flight from Beijing to Hong Kong.

Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, and the sculptors, Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, joined representatives from London's Somerset House – where Mr Ai was due to unveil a public installation next month – and Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, a close friend of Mr Ai's, in calling for the artist's immediate release. France and Germany also demanded the release of the artist, who revealed last week that he was planning to build a studio in Berlin.

"I appeal to the Chinese government to urgently provide clarification and I expect Ai Weiwei to be released immediately," the German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, said in a statement.

Mr Ai, 53, was taken from Beijing airport by security personnel. Police later raided his studio.

At the time of going to press the artist was "still missing", according to his lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang.

The artist's Sunflower Seeds Unilever Series installation is on display in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall until 2 May.

"The artist remains un-contactable and his whereabouts are unknown," said Sir Nicholas Serota. "We are dismayed by developments that again threaten Weiwei's right to speak freely as an artist and hope that he will be released immediately."

Mr Ai has documented the arrest of prominent fellow artists and activists on his Twitter account, where he has 73,000 followers.

"I would call on all cultural institutions globally to voice their protest against all kinds of behaviour which we haven't seen since the days of Stalin," said Gormley.

"I think he is one of the bravest voices to come out of China and as an artist I think he has fought tirelessly to make artistic freedoms available to others. In 21st-century China he is a lone voice." Kapoor said: "Mr Ai Weiwei is first and foremost an artist and he uses this position to speak out for freedom inside and outside of China.

"We all need to fight for freedom and I deplore the Chinese government's short-sighted need to withhold such freedom of expression." Eliasson said: "I am upset and I condemn the fact that the Chinese government is restraining his freedom in this way.

"I am saddened that they have to use policies from the Middle Ages to suppress freedom of speech."

The artist's first public installation in London, entitled "Circle of Animals", is scheduled to open on 12 May at the capital's Somerset House.

The Independent.com

2 April - Olafur Eliasson and not knowing

2011-04-02T08:42:00.000-06:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - I have been spending much time and consideration over the past few months on how the arts impact culture - considering the factors of the art world that both frustrate and inspire me - that bring me to the brink of insanity and bring me back, again ignited. I recently heard of Olafur Eliasson's new art school in Berlin, The Institut für Raumexperimente. This school, and Eliasson's vision, encapsulates in so many ways the way the art world could function - by not having all the answers, living a life of inquiry and uncertainty. Doubt as a fundamental principal of learning and innovation.

Marcia Tucker, the founder of the New Museum, was fired from the Whitney for a Richard Tuttle exhibition she curated far before he gained international notoriety. The art, Tucker's unusual approach to its presentation, and a post-exhibition catalog proved to be too much for audiences to bear. When the exhibition opened, “people went berserk. People tried to pull the delicate wire pieces off the wall. They scrawled pencil comments of their own next to some of the works when the guards weren’t looking. They complained bitterly that it wasn’t art.”

Audiences were offended by the inquisitive nature of the exhibition and by the fact that Tucker did not present answers, only more questions. Tucker had organized this exhibition to see what might come of the project, to learn something new, to explore new frontiers in the arts. “‘I don’t know’ is the honest answer when you’re working investigatively, but it can get you in trouble. You’re supposed to know, and if you don’t you’re going to be seen as unprofessional rather than adventurous.” Eliasson addresses this directly in the form of an art school, "to acknowledge one’s insecurity rather than progressing according to rationalised and standardised modes of understanding. By accommodating uncertainty, I think we strengthen our ability to re-negotiate our surroundings. Let me therefore suggest a principle: the success of a model lies in its ability to re-evaluate itself. It thus emerges that no artistic formula is waiting at the end of our inquiries."

It is Tucker's spirit - and the mission of Eliasson's art school - that sustains my confidence in the art world. Eliasson's mission statement follows. Nothing is ever the same.

Nothing is ever the same

The Institut für Raumexperimente is in itself an experiment. To me, the experiment as a mode of inquiry is necessary if we are to insist on a constant, probing and generous interaction with reality. Or to put it differently: by engaging in experimentation, we can challenge the norms by which we live and thus produce reality. Due to its obsession with primarily formal questions, art education has, I believe, seriously failed to acknowledge the fact that creativity is a producer of reality. The hierarchical transmission of knowledge practised in many art schools is clearly unproductive: the inflexible categories of ‘teacher’ and ‘student’, working in a sealed-off environment, and the fundamentally unequal relation between the two, have taken responsibility away from the students, distancing them from real work in real life. But to study and to produce knowledge shouldn’t imply a withdrawal from society. There have, of course, been exceptions. Within the history of spatial research, educational experimentation has occurred at, for instance, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, founded by Gyorgy Kepes and based on his engagement with the New Bauhaus School in Chicago; in the work of Joseph Albers and his teaching at Black Mountain College; in O.M. Ungers’ 1960s classes at the Technical University in Berlin; at the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris, founded by Pontus Hultén with Daniel Buren, Serge Fauchereau, and Sarkis; and in the work of other pioneers for whom life, individual engagement, and studies could not simply be separated. I aim to recast their radical notions of learning in contemporary society. The educational alternative I hope to offer should provide tools for the creation of artistic propositions that have consequences for the world. We must embrace re-evaluation, criticism and friction. As we leave behind the representational distance cultivated by traditional art academies, a necessary and immediate relation to the world is forged. Experimentation as a method not only informs my school, but also forms the core of my artworks and my Berlin-based studio. In my understanding, an artwork is fundamentally tied to its surroundings, to the present, to society, to cultural and geographic determinants. It activates this dense texture, thereby examining the world in which we live – and by doing so, it can ultimately change the world. It also seems relevant to examine the pragmatics involved in the organisation of my studio, its randomness and roundabout ways. This reveals a structure that continuously invents the model according to which it proceeds. The practice I have developed makes me believe in my works and studio as agents in the world. And just as my works and studio participate in a continual exchange with their environment, with the times in which they exist, so too does the school. The Institut für Raumexperimente is not a discrete space; it is inseparable from its surroundings, from Berlin, from society and life in general. One might therefore call the Institute a logical consequence of my artistic practice. At Institut für Raumexperimente, time and space are considered inseparable even at a methodological level. Space cannot be externalised; it isn’t representational and nor are the experiments with which we work. To work spatially does not necessarily entail the creation of representational distance, and we can precisely avoid this distance, essentially static and unproductive, by insisting that time is a constituent of space. Or as a friend has said: space is ‘a constantly mutating simultaneity of stories-so-far’. To institute means to begin, and the school – cultivating consciousness of time – is about beginnings in space. I hope to establish a school of questions rather than of answers; of uncertainty and doubt. It is my firm belief that we can cultivate a relationship with these unstable modes of being, letting questions spawn new questions. Currently, it seems productive to acknowledge one’s insecurity rather than progressing according to rationalised and standardised modes of understanding. By accommodating uncertainty, I think we strengthen our ability to re-negotiate our surroundings. Let me therefore suggest a principle: the success of a model lies in its ability to re-evaluate itself. It thus emerges that no artistic formula is waiting at the end of our inquiries. Just as time is inseparable from space, so too is form from content. Art isn’t a formal exercise. To me, duration, space, form, intention, and individual engagement constitute a complex whole whose performative qualities we should articulate and amplify. For this reason, our experimentation with experimentation as a format for producing art and knowledge will never focus solely on either form or content. I hope the participants at Institut für Raumexperimente will see the potential in our formation of multiple, simultaneous trajectories. To some, these trajectories will appear to be slow, to others fast, and it is precisely my aim to cultivate a high level of individual reflection. Ultimately the idea is to explore the notion of the school as a process. By doing so, we can hopefully circumvent the negative mechanisms of the current-day market economy: by commodifying our thought processes, this economy insists on a linear way of engaging with our surroundings, on linearity in our understanding of process and history. Marketability, consumption, and success are everything. The seductive virtue of a stable form lies in its conclusive nature, which in turn is a criterion for success. This I find counterproductive to the friction that may allow art to exert influence in society today. To me, nothing is ever the same. Only in this way, by virtue of the experiment, can we co-produce society, making the voice of art heard. And, if it would only realise this, art has an incredible potential to evaluate the values ingrained in society. It can consolidate a non-normative platform and evoke a sense of community based on the fact that we are all different from one another. To define community in this way is the real challenge today. The type of programme that we are trying to create at Institut für Raumexperimente is an unfolding macroscopic model of an aesthetic and social encounter. The life of the school will be dialogical, a multiplicity of voices. I hope the school participants – ‘teachers’ and ‘students’ alike – will enter the cacophony of voices that constitute its core. Giving and taking is equally distributed. Inspiration is for all. What we will produce in this encounter is reality. It will be a laboratory for experience, but probably nobody will see this experiment as being essentially a model until tomorrow. Institut für Raumexperimente is an entirely public school, realised in collaboration with the Universität der Künste in Berlin. It is not an avant-garde school model in the classical sense, seeking a blind rupture with all previous systems, nor is it a private career-oriented educational scheme. Rather, we are supporters of slow revolutions. If crucial changes happen at a microscopic level, an entire society or worldview may in time be changed. And if our school experimentation succeeds, we will be able to sustain a non-dogmatic self-criticality as part of our everyday lives.

- Olafur Eliasson

*Marcia Tucker quotes from her autobiography, "A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World".

1 April - Street Art vs. Museums

2011-04-01T17:38:00.000-06:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - I was asked by the fabulous Kindle Project to be a participant in a dialog on Street Art versus Museums. here is the blog in its entirety:

The Kindle blog closes this season’s Art theme with a conversation between some great minds and artists. For us, dialogue is at the heart of how we explore what it is we do. Most of us working at Kindle Project are artists in some form or another outside of our work. Over wine, caffeine, sleepless nights, and under porches, we have spent years building art theories and breaking them down. We’ve stenciled sidewalks and shown in galleries. We’ve been inspired by JR, Princess Hijab, and dreamed of walking the streets of Valparaiso, Chile. We’ve been impressed at MOMA and wowed by Launchprojects.

Recently, we’ve been asking questions about accessibility to art, the tension/cohesion between institutionalized art and street art. To help further this dialogue, we’ve solicited insight from four very diverse individuals in the art world to give us their candid reflections on a series of questions based on the broad debate of Street Art versus Institutionalized Art. We are pleased to present to you the perspectives of Cyndi Conn – Founder of Launchprojects, Pablo Acona – artist, Yozo Suzuki – artist, and Liza Mauer – founding member of Partners in Art. A special thanks to all of you.

Help keep the conversation moving and share your perspective with us.

Do you think that street art has a place in the context of modern art?

Yozo – I am certain that street art has its place in art. From cave painting to the digital displays of the Sony building on Ginza street in Tokyo artists have been showing art on the street and in public arenas since the earliest evidence of art itself. Of course such familiar names like Basquiat, Haring, Banksy and Fairey have had very successful careers indoors as well as out.

Liza – Street Art absolutely belongs in the world of contemporary art. It is an honest reflection of what is happening at a most basic grassroots level. If anything Street art holds an important entry level place for youth and a younger generation of artists. Have you seen the Banksy film, Exit through the Gift Shop? Every person I know under the age of 25 was transfixed by the film and related to its energy. I know young artists who are making street art today after learning about Banksy. Artists operate in many mediums and arenas. Street art is just one place to show and make art. Also, there isn’t much of a difference between the mass market production of Bansky, Shephard Ferry and Andy Warhol. They are all responding to mass culture. LA MOCCA is currently showing the first NA large scale show of graffiti art.

Pablo – For many years I did not think street/graffiti art had a place in the modern art world because of the fact that is inherently a rebel culture that defied structure within that scene. It’s hard to argue these days that it doesn’t. Even back in the early NYC downtown art scene it had a place. The only difference is now it has become recognized as a tried and true profitable form of art so its blown up and everybody is doing it and can get a share of the market. Back in the day you had to prove yourself in the streets first, today you don’t. I think graffiti/street art always could be considered an art form it just didn’t always fit into the art world because it was made for the streets. That is where it was meant to be seen and that is where it made the biggest impression on the viewer. Now graffiti/street art is so watered down that it really doesn’t matter and most people that create it are thinking about galleries, museums and books anyway.

Cyndi – Absolutely. Street art is and always has been a critical voice reflecting the reality of our times, not simply pandering to the demands and whims of an increasingly rarified art market. Street art also incorporates disparate facets of society that are not always addressed in traditional art making – music, film, politics, design, fashion, language – that creates an incredible synergy. It can be the impetus for and foreshadow movements to come in the larger art and cultural market.

What is the role of street art in molding public perceptions?

Yozo – On the most basic level street art exposes people of all social strata to personal and political expressions. The strong tradition of social commentary in street art coupled with the freedom of showing outside of commercial venues allows for an unvarnished view point to come forward in a mainstream way.

Liza – Street art generates a dialogue. It introduces a whole different constituent base to art. Art can be everywhere. It’s our era’s equivalent of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960′s in Italy.

Pablo – In its purest form it is still catered to shocking and amazing the public and challenging peoples pre-conceptions of what art can or can’t be. Sparking debate, emotions and perceptions. However the form I see it in most often nowadays is in the role of commercial art. It has molded people’s perceptions as to what can be profitable and commercial.

Cyndi – As i mentioned in the last question, street art can reflect the social pulse as it is transforming and becoming a larger movement or issue. Street art has both the benefit and detriment of anonymity, which gives the artist the capacity for absolute candor. I think the anonymity can be an important factor in reflecting the truth of our times. The flip side, the side that most who oppose street art would point to, is that anonymity also gives lesser minds with a spray can and time an opportunity to vandalize and debase public venues. As Nick Douglas of MOCA-latte describes the recent incident at LA MOCA, “The incident piqued my interest, not due to the issue of censorship, or the removal of Blu’s work, but the existence of a newly engaged public talking about art in Los Angeles. Deitch and his actions served as a lightening rod for debate regarding the role of the museum and art. It was exciting to see this level of discussion about art in Los Angeles – a pretty rare occurrence in this city.” Street art begins conversations. That is always a critical function of the arts.

What is the role of institutionalized art in molding public perceptions?

Yozo – Art institutions tend to function as a type of sieve. Whether its in a museum whose goal is to present art historical content in the context of timelines and traditions or contemporary museums and galleries who distill contemporary art through the eyes of a curator, institutions of art tend to present a selective version of the art world.

Liza – Most people see art only in traditional art institutions-galleries, museums, public spaces. Institutions are critical to maintaining a cultural life in a city. Even a great street artist would be feel honoured to have an art show in a museum space. I dare them to argue the opposite.

Pablo – I don’t really have an opinion on this.I almost feel institutionalized art is more authentic then most graffiti/street art these days. You go to school and you learn and develop a skill within a system. It can be limiting but that is what graffiti/street art was there for. It was an outlet from that side of art. Graffiti also was a system that artists used to work, learn, paid dues and developed in. It had rules and values that have been lost in newer generations. I think institutionalized art molds peoples perceptions as to what is viable as modern art in a classic sense.

Cyndi – I like the expression of institutionalized art. I am picturing little paintings in straight jackets in white padded cells. Art housed in institutions such as museums functions to demonstrate important works of art and fundamentally why art matters. Ideally, art opens minds, reminds of past mistakes and accomplishments, encourages us to continue pushing boundaries and taking daring risks for the sake of betting our community, country, world.

Does street art have a responsibility in education or informing the public? If so, what is that responsibility?

Yozo – I don’t believe that artists have a responsibility to educate the public. One of the great things about art is that it can function as inspiration for thought; however, placing a burden on artists to serve any societal role negates its greatest strength.

Liza – No, it has no responsibility at all. It is art!! Art for Arts sake!

Pablo – Within education I think it can play an important role in teaching younger generations alternative ideas and techniques to approaching creativity and art. It also has a responsibility to teach the history of this form of art which will keep it in a context that separates it from other art. Right now the lines are blurry and there is not much difference between modern commercial art and graffiti/street art. The history is what really separates it and makes it special. Yet on the other hand street/graffiti art really has no responsibility to the public. In its purest form it is a creative backlash at the system and society that it was born and escaped from. Its anti-responsibility, anti-establishment and if its done correctly it can’t be labeled. Maybe vandalism fits.

Cyndi – I think by its very nature the genre of street art should not have a responsibility in educating or informing the public. “Street Art” is a genre of radically diverse individuals with a wide-ranging intentions. I think that if street artists should be held accountable to anyone or anything that accountability should be dictated within their own system.

Does institutionalized art have a responsibility in educating or informing the public? If so, what is this responsibility?

Yozo – I wouldn’t call it a responsibility. Having said that, I do appreciate seeing the greatest works of art through history even as determined by a consensus of so-called art experts. I guess if one is going to stand up and say “this is great art,” then that person creates their own obligation to champion and preserve that art.

Liza – Yes, it does because institutions receive funding from the government and other arts organizations so are responsible for exposing, educating and supporting the arts. If we don’t support the cultural life of our city through funding the arts, Toronto (and every other city for that matter) will be a wasteland. Art institutions primary responsibility is to expose and educate. Art shows, panel discussions, lectures, films all enrich our lives. We’d be no where without our cultural institutions.

Pablo – I think institutionalized art has a similar responsibility. To educate about history, techniques and movements. Unfortunately support for art is diminishing within the educational system. This leads to the lack of unique and creative thinking and inspiration that exists today.

Cyndi – It does because it is so defined. I feel the greater question is if institutions are currently doing their duty and fulfilling their responsibility in educating and / or informing the public, and how that might or could be changed to a changing public with changing needs in relation to arts and culture.

Bio’s of our conversationalists:

Yozo Suzuki’s work challenges notions of identity and power. Suzuki is represented by Linda Durham Contemporary Art in Santa Fe New Mexico.

Pablo Ancona is a DJ and multimedia artist from New York. He specializes in photography, collage, graphic design, audio /video editing and graffiti. He has lived and worked in Santa Fe, Chicago, Boston, New York and Sao Paulo. He graduated in 2008 with Bachelor of art in Documentary studies and a minor in art from The College of Santa Fe. For his senior project, Pablo produced a documentary on a Samba music band in rural Brazil that he filmed, photographed and recorded during a semester there. Since that time, Pablo has worked with local community artist, Chrissie Orr on the “El Otra Lado” project recording and editing the stories of immigrant and native communities in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Pablo has illustrated the covers for three children’s books, Murals ,Barrio and Olé, Flamenco, which were written and photographed by his father George Ancona. He is frequently involved in exhibitions and art projects such as a benefit for Haiti and a piece for American Friends Service Commitee’s Reflections on the war in Afghanistan project. As a DJ he specializes in Rare groove jazz,funk,soul,Disco,Latin and Hip Hop music. He plays a wide variety of events as well as producing mixed CD’s music and parties. Pablo is currently living and working in Sao Paulo,Brasil.

Cyndi Conn is currently the co-founding Director and Curator of LAUNCHPROJECTS. Conn has fourteen years of expertise in the field of contemporary art. An independent curator and consultant, Cyndi held the position of Visual Arts Director and Curator of the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe until founding Launchprojects in 2008. Based in Santa Fe, Cyndi curates, lectures, and advises clients throughout the United States, Latin America, and Europe. She has lead art tours to Venice, Basel, Cali, Miami, Los Angeles, and New York. Conn holds a Masters Degree in Curatorial Studies and Arts Administration from Skidmore College in conjunction with the Tang Museum, a BA in Latin American studies from Tulane University and studied at the Universidad Ibero Americana in Mexico City. She has lived in Paris, Mexico City, Austin, and New Orleans.

Liza Mauer is a founding member and past president of Partners in Art (PIA), a not-for profit organization that fundraises and educates its members in the arts. Over the past 7 years of its existence, PIA has raised over $750,000 and supported institutions such as the AGO, MOCCA, the ROM, Imageworks, OCAD, the Powerplant, the Gardner museum to just name a few. Several months ago, Liza resigned from being a Sr Development Officer at Sick Kids Hospital Foundation and is currently Vice President of the Powerplant Art gallery. Liza’s busiest job however, is raising her four children.

28 March - Tim Rollins and K.O.S

2011-03-28T20:06:00.001-06:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - I returned last night from New York. I had mapped out everything I wanted to see - Lynda Benglis & George Condo at the New Museum, Tara Donovan and Donald Judd at Pace, Yayoi Kusama at Robert Miller Gallery, Kate Shepherd at Galerie LeLong, Anish Kapoor at Barbara Gladstone, and on and on. I will go on to my thoughts and impressions on some of these shows in a later blog, but I stumbled without itinerary into Lehmann Maupin and was captivated by an exhibition of works by Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival).

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. began working together in the early 1980's when Rollins created a strategy for his students from Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx that combined lessons in reading and writing with making art. Rollins told his students on that first day, "Today we are going to make art, but we are also going to make history."

As described on the ICA Philadelphia website:

"In a process they call "jammin," Rollins or one of the students reads aloud from the selected text while the other members draw and relate the stories to their own experiences. These drawings are then cut and pasted or enlarged and recreated on the grid.

The collaboration between Rollins and his students soon outgrew the classroom. Frustrated with the strictures of the public school system, Rollins opened the Art and Knowledge Workshop, an after-school program in an abandoned school building five blocks from IS52. After teaching all day at IS52, Rollins would meet K.O.S. members at the workshop; homework would be done and art would be made. In 1987, Rollins and K.O.S. began using a traveling workshop format to spread the ideas and inspiration behind their project beyond the South Bronx. In 1994, Rollins and K.O.S. moved their operation to a studio in Chelsea. There Rollins and some long-term K.O.S. members rebuilt and expanded the project nationally and internationally, significantly increasing the number of workshops conducted with other schools and arts institutions.

Today there are active K.O.S. members in Philadelphia, Memphis, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. Rollins and K.O.S.'s decision to exhibit the art that they had created in their classroom in professional galleries marked an important turning point in their history; it signaled the moment they began to distinguish themselves from other teacher-student collaborations and demanded that their work be engaged first as fine art."

The images at Lehmann Maupin are wholly compelling, even without the back story. The majority of the exhibition consisted of elegant large-scale figurative paintings in indigos, blacks, and reds rendered in a Raymon-Pettibon-meets-Kara-Walker stroke atop white-washed pages from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby. On a far wall hung quieter paintings made from sheets from the original operatic score of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny wrapped nets of butcher's twine and gold paint.

In an interview for Deutsche Bank Artmag, K.O.S. is described as "filling the gap between performance art, installation, graffiti, and Neo-Expressionism," and Rollins as "attracted to the idea of an intellectual revolution and learning. After twenty-six years, Tim Rollins is still riding that line between art, education, and a rescue operation." The exhibition continues the artists’ endeavor to challenge standard notions of art through education, collaboration, and deep engagement with literary and historical texts. The show stands alone in Chelsea in my mind for its content and intention. Again, in the words of Tim Rollins, "today we are going to make art, but we are also going to make history."

23 March - Richard Prince + Appropriation

2011-03-23T10:36:00.000-06:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - On Friday, March 18 2011, U.S. District Court judge Deborah A. Batts ruled that Richard Prince infringed upon the copyright of photographer Patrick Cariou when he appropriated 41 photographs from Cariou's book of photographs of Rastafarians in Jamaica titled Yes Rasta (PowerHouse Books, 2000). Prince altered these images for the exhibition Canal Zone at Gagosian Gallery in New York City.

Judge Batts rejected Prince’s argument that the images were appropriated for “higher artistic use,” noted that allowing copyright to be infringed solely on this claim would in practical terms eliminate copyright protection altogether. The court further found that Prince's motive in copying Cariou's photographs was primarily commercial, citing the fulsome proceeds from the exhibition, described in court documents: Prince made 29 "Canal Zone" artworks, with all but one including imagery from Yes Rasta. Gagosian sold eight of the works for a total of $10,480,000, with the gallery taking 40 percent of the proceeds. Seven more "Canal Zone" paintings were exchanged for unspecified artworks, valued between $6,000,000 and $8,000,000. Almost $7,000 worth of catalogues were sold.

Batts further ruled that Prince showed "bad faith" when he appropriated the images without attempting to license them properly and also found Gagosian Gallery liable for Prince's infringements, on the grounds that the gallery should have ensured that Prince had the rights to the material he used before the gallery offered the items for sale. Prince and Gagosian were ordered to cease exhibiting and promoting the series, and in an intriguing addition ordered that collectors of any "Canal Zone" paintings are not lawfully allowed to display the pieces they purchased. What a bizarre position for a collector to be in – surely there will be backlash for that judgment.

Charlie Finch of Artnet wrote a fantastic and ironic piece addressing Cariou's search for justice, Prince's effortless (lazy?) successes, and how Finch imagines this ruling to play out (in Prince's favor, of course):

“Having a judge as an interpreter of the meaning of art remains Kafkaesque: we can trot out the entire oeuvre of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and a thousand other artists as violators of Judge Batts' standard. But what of photographer Cariou? Is he not an artist, as well? There is undeniable schadenfreude in seeing Prince suffer, notably when his "Canal Zone" show was one of his laziest (but wasn't that the point?) and a best seller at high retail price points. Indeed, Judge Batts decreed that, absent a stay for an appeal from the defendants, Prince's work from the series and the tools used to make it should be obliterated in some way in the next 10 days, with those paintings already sold forbidden from being (literally) hung on the walls. Presumably, Cariou will have to go after their owners specifically.

Rough justice might demand that Cariou himself do the destruction and that Prince photograph the process and produce a new, very ironic series that would sell for tens of millions apiece. But this proposal enters a metaphysical plain of justice and recompense apparently beyond the scope of the law.”

15 March - How We Can Help

2011-03-15T20:58:00.001-06:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - I find myself at a loss for words as I watch in horror the unfolding catastrophe in Japan. The following is a list compiled by backpacker.com of known legitimate organizations helping the countries hurt by the earthquake and tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011. CNN has also published an article on how you can help. To all of those who have been affected, you are in our thoughts and hearts.

“In charity there is no excess.” – Sir Francis Bacon

Red Cross: United States Residents – Calling +1-800-RED-CROSS for donation options. Text “Red Cross” to 90999. A $10 donation will be added to your cell phone bill. American Red Cross Online Donations.

Salvation Army: United States Residents - You can call +1-800-SAL-ARMY for donation options. Text “Japan” or “Quake” to 80888 to make a $10 donation. A one-time donation will appear on your cell phone bill. Respond “YES” to the thank you message you receive. Salvation Army Emergency Disaster Services

Save The Children: Online Donation

GlobalGiving.org: This project will disburse funds to organizations providing relief and emergency services to victims of the earthquake and tsunami. GlobalGiving is working with International Medical Corps, Save the Children, and other organizations on the ground. United States Residents – Text JAPAN to 5055. A $10 donation will be added to your cell phone bill. Online Donation

Convoy Of Hope: United States Residents – Text TSUNAMI to 50555. A $10 donation will be added to your cell phone bill. Online Donation

World Relief Corp: World Relief has been in communication with our partners in these countries including our alliance partner in Japan, the Japanese Evangelical Association, who is monitoring the damage there. United States Residents – Text WAVE to 50555. Online Donation

World Vision: Providing support to children and their families. Online Donation

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF): Has two three-person teams attempting to get to the worst-hit areas in Iwate and Miyagi prefectures. Online Donation

ShelterBox: Humanitarian response to the disaster began immediately and a three-person ShelterBox Response Team is already en route to Japan. Online Donation

7 March - B-Girl Bouillabaisse

2011-03-06T21:19:00.001-07:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - Art in its most authentic form can manifest spontaneously. Seemingly out of nowhere and with a galvanizing effect on contemporary culture, the case at hand occurred on a Staten Island Ferry with a formally ballet-dancer-gone-rogue. This story is the perfect kick-off to Thursday's opening at LAUNCHPROJECTS with artist / fashion collaborative Tete de Veau. The night will include performance art, post-war reel-to-reel audio, haute couture, and live models in gowns of reclaimed camping materials and fur...

The New York Times Magazine featured an article yesterday on Anne Marsen, an early 20-something dancer who grew up in a competitive ballet school in New Jersey. As described by Paul Tough of the New York Times, Anne was still recovering from a high-anxiety childhood and "the ever-accelerating pressure to be the best and skinniest and en pointe-iest girl in class. Since dropping out of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia a year earlier, she had gone rogue, dance-wise, taking three or four classes a day from studios all over New York City — jazz, modern, tap, salsa, flamenco, belly-dancing, break- dancing, West African, pole dancing, capoeira — borrowing gestures and movements and boiling them all down into her own unique B-girl bouillabaisse."

Her world collided with that of Jason Krupnick, who was hired to create a promotional video with dancers for footware. He posted an ad for dancers on Craigslist in exchange for slices of pizza. He was enthralled with her unique moves, used her in that video, and and six months later called her to collaborate again for a video for D.J. Girl Talk's latest album All Day, "a stew of samples lifted from 373 songs and recombined into a chaotic, propulsive mix. As Krupnick listened to the album, it struck him that Girl Talk makes music the way Anne Marsen makes dance."

Marsen danced for 71 minutes, completely improvised. She is brilliant and hysterical and "weird and joyous, popping with youth and energy. At first, Marsen looks more like an enthusiastic and slightly dorky amateur than a trained dance pro. She wears regular tennis shoes and worn gray cords and an oversize, multicolored jacket, and at one point she falls off the railing of an escalator. It’s not until a minute or so in, as she twirls and gyrates through the ferry’s upper level, staring down the camera with a sly smile on her face as sleepy commuters pretend not to notice, that you start to suspect that you’re watching something more than a little magical."

Anne and Jason are enjoying mini-celebrity status with their shared talents and their pure joy for what they do. An undeniable work of performance art, Anne is raw and talented and a thrill to watch. Even when she falls off the escalator. I will leave the words to the New York Times and the moves to Anne. Check out the Marsen Magic below - enjoy!

GIRL WALK // ALL DAY

HUMAN AFTER ALL

images: video stills by Jason Krupnick

23 Feb - The Ferus Gallery

2011-02-22T21:05:00.003-07:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - Last week I had the remarkable opportunity to meet Irving Blum. Internationally renown art dealer and the force behind Los Angeles' legendary Ferus Gallery, Blum was a pioneer in the promotion of the post-war artists of the 1960's on both coasts - discovering and championing artists such as Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Bell, Ken Price, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns.

Last night I decided to watch the documentary The Cool School to learn more about the Ferus Gallery and Blum's tremendous impact both in Los Angeles and New York at that time. The Cool School uncovers and interviews virtually all of the artists, friends, collectors, and minds behind Ferus to explore how this short-lived gallery forever transformed the Los Angeles art scene. As the documentary describes, "the gallery managed to do for art in Los Angeles what the museums previously could not. Even though their modalities were as disparate as assemblage art, abstract expressionism and Pop, Ferus artists shared ideas, goals, workspaces and a lasting vision."

The concepts and motivation behind both the success and closure of Ferus is further described by Blum in a 1977 interview with Paul Cummings. Blum describes that even with the excitement and rush of Ferus' exhibitions and openings, "there just wasn’t a heck of a lot of activity. There wasn’t a lot of movement, there really wasn’t. And the awful thing about selling out there, especially at the beginning, was that there was simply no pressure. So if somebody said, well, if you told somebody the price of a painting, they would say to you, “Fine, all right, let me think about it.” You’d say, “All right.” And they would think about it for a month, or two, or three and be relatively sure that when they came back into the gallery, that thing would still be there... And virtually every time out, it was still there. So they could take as much time as they liked to consider buying whatever it was they had in their head to do. Whereas in New York, if you see something and it’s really terrific, and if you say to the dealer, “Well, let me think about it,” the dealer will generally say, “Well, certainly, take 48 hours. I have other interests, I have other people coming in to look.” And you know that that’s true. In California, it simply wasn’t true. I couldn’t say, “Look, I can only give you 24 hours.” They would laugh! They would say, “Who else would buy that, for God’s sake?” And you couldn’t answer. And they’d be right, you know".

When Cummings questioned Blum what he had learned over decades of dealing emerging and established art on both coasts, Blum responded that "if I knew then what I know now, I probably would have had other thoughts about doing the gallery business. I probably would have gone ahead and done it in any case, but at least I would have had a sounder base from which to operate. I would have known that it would have taken me six or seven years just to get even for example. That was something I had no idea of at the very beginning. And I would have understood that showing younger people or unknown people takes forever and is largely a thankless, difficult, expensive matter."

Our conversation followed the thread of both the documentary and the interview. He was extraordinarily generous and forthcoming about his experiences and his insights resonate deeply as we consider LAUNCHPROJECTS' current endeavors and what we ultimately aspire to accomplish. Blum's energy and enthusiasm for the art world continues to be contagious, his charm exhilarating. Transformation, passion, and honest examination of time and place is clearly a foundation to sustained growth and continued relevance in this capricious and mercurial world of art.

Images: Irving Blum, The Ferus Gallery Storefront, The Ferus gang, 1962. L-R, Ed Kienholz, Allen Lynch, Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, John Altoon

18 Feb - Orgy of the Rich

2011-02-18T16:07:00.002-07:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - Tuesday's evening auctions at Sotheby's London experienced an unprecedented moment - five protesters snuck into the room and disrupted the auction process. The protestors threw fake £50 notes in the air and then unfurled a large banner stating "orgy of the rich". The demonstrators belonged to Arts Against Cuts, a group of artists and students protesting a recent plan by the U.K. government to explore budget cuts for arts programs in the wake of the recession.

Their protest began with moaning as Andy Warhol's Nine Multicolored Marilyns (Reversal Series) was presented by Sotheby's star auctioneer Tobias Meyer. The moaning escalated to screaming, shouting, sirens, and alarms while dozens of protesters rallied outside the auction house, shouting and waving banners. One particularly poignant sign read 1 Warhol = 1,222 tuitions.

In the words of New York Times contributor Soren Melikian, "If this was a happening, as I overheard another dealer saying in jest, it was too close to the bone to feel like a joke. It chimed well with the Whatever the reality, this may have long-term repercussions in the market. People deeply involved in art, rich and not so rich, tend to live in their own cocoon. They are not used to having the worries of the rest of the world thrown in their faces."

Rob Parsons and Godfrey Baker of the London Evening Standard quoted a protester explain that "it is obscene that the amount of money being spent at this auction could be the difference between having some form of local services which exists in the community and not." Belgian collector Mark Vanmoerkerke said the auction house took the interruption in its stride. He said: "It's fun to see people stand up for what they believe in. An orgy of the rich? They're not exactly wrong."

My guess is that Vanmoerkerke's flash of insight did not influence his enthusiasm or spending, nor did the protest have any effect on the rest of the evenings sales. The notably small sale raised £44m. When combined with the results of the single-owner sale Looking Closely held the previous week, Sotheby’s total for its post-war art auctions fetched £88m - the second highest February in the auction's history.

WATCH IT LIVE

16 Feb - Contemporary Gaga

2011-02-15T20:33:00.001-07:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - In Monday's LA Times, art critic Christopher Knight discussed the "space Age plastic egg" in which pop-music sensation Lady Gaga arrived and later used in her performance on Sunday's Grammy Awards. Knight addressed the similarities between Gaga's egg and and Japanese artist Mariko Mori's Wave UFO sculpture, featured in the 2008 Venice Biennale. Knight further paralleled the meat dress worn by Gaga at this year's Video Music Awards and Canadian artist Jana Sterbak's 1987 sculpture Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic, made from 50 pounds of raw flank steak, now in the permanent collection of Paris' Centre Pompidou.

The article jogged my memory to my first experience with Lady Gaga's music. I had heard a few of her songs on the radio, knew she was Julliard trained, and wanted to know more about her. In a quick Google search, the video for the song Bad Romance popped up. I was stunned to watch this contemporary pop icon clearly riffing on Matthew Barney's epic video project, The Cremaster Cycle. I was electrified by the connection. Gaga had successfully transformed an utterly esoteric work of art (even among the erudite and experienced of contemporary art aficionados) into a sexy and accessible 4-minute visual sensation targeting mass audiences and teenage fans across the globe.

Gaga's "sampling" of contemporary art could perceived as the debasement the original artists' intention and process for media attention and pop sensationalism. I have yet to find any artistic credits to Mori, Barney, or Sterbak on Gaga's website and if that does not yet exist it needs to happen. I also feel, however, that it is exciting that contemporary art is influencing videos, album covers, and pop fashion. It provides the possibility of a more mainstream access to the type of art that can otherwise be considered too rarefied for mass consumption. Access creates understanding and appreciation. It ideally also fosters future champions of the arts.

When pop stars incorporate contemporary art into their practice it becomes less intimidating and mysterious to those who do consider themselves "art people." Lady Gaga must give credit to the artists that inspire her ideas. Credit, a brief description, and links to more information about the artists that influence her work on her website could whet the appetite of her enormous fan-base. Gaga could also add a curator to her entourage. Imagine the cultural street cred that would create - a much stronger statement of cultural achievement and sophistication than "poppin' bottles of Crystal." This confluence of culture is a potentially phenomenal vehicle to acquaint a substantial and diverse group of pop music fans to the wonder of contemporary art. Keep it up, Gaga - just give credit where credit is due.

11 Feb - Steve Martin + Dave Hickey

2011-02-12T08:20:00.001-07:00

LAUNCHPROJECTS - To follow-up my past blogs discussing Steve Martin, his latest novel Object of Beauty (November 17), a recent implosion at New York's 92nd Street Y (December 2), and Dave Hickey (July 11) - the two men came together Thursday night at LACMA to chat. The topic of the discussion was Martin's book, his collection, and the art world in general. I think they also wanted to make New Yorkers look bad for not wanting to sit through Martin's talk at the Y. LACMA's Andrea Grossman opened the night by stating, "We in Los Angeles want to hear Steve Martin talk about art!"

The evening's moderator Doug Harvey relays the opening sequence of events in his transcription of the conversation:

Me: Dave, can I get a quote on how this is going to prove that Los Angeles audiences are more sophisticated than New York audiences? In your own words of course.

Dave Hickey: I am going to wear my opera glasses to look at the audience.

Me: By wearing opera glasses, are you implying that L.A. audiences are more sophisticated than New York audiences?

Hickey: More buxom.

As Harvey notes "This exchange, had with post-Vegas MacArthur genius Dave Hickey before he squared off with funnyman/collector/novelist Steve Martin onstage at LACMA Thursday night, was a pretty good indication of what was to follow...The audience was fairly star-studded for this kind of affair, with a cluster of comic genius at the back of the reserved section that included Carl Reiner, Eric Idle, Martin Mull, and Ricky Jay. I'm pretty sure I saw Beck kicking around beforehand, and I definitely spotted Martin's "Colbert Report" co-conspirator Shepard Fairey. Not so buxom a crew, but there was plenty of that to go around in the rest of the 600-capacity Bing Theater."

Hickey delivered his typical Hickey-isms including:

"That's the way I do art criticism – I try to raise the price of things that I think are underpriced, and lower the price of things that are overpriced."

"Buying paintings with the prospect of financial gain is like shopping for your wife. It's never going to work."

When he stated that "If I were trying to write a book about the art world... I really couldn't quite tell the truth, because as awful and grotesque as the party is, I want to keep coming to the party" he certainly described one of the challenges Martin faced when writing Object of Beauty. Largely taken as a satire, the book was meant to be true to the art world as Martin experiences it. He tried to write the book without naming actual names, which proved to create a distracted guessing game to those who read it (I can attest to that). When he used real names, however, he was criticized for portraying the characters too harshly, "I have Peter Schjeldahl [the art critic] sitting at a dinner and he delivers a bon mot," Martin told the crowd. "And Peter Plagens [another art critic] reviewed the book saying it wasn't worthy of Schjeldahl -- although it is actually something he said."

One of the things I take away from Martin, Hickey, Object of Beauty, and the LACMA "scene" is that the art world is its own caricature so any storytelling - real or fictional - reads as satire. The reality of our world is that comedians become important collector/novelists, actors become artists who act like artists on TV, and collectors dress as custodians to get to pay millions of dollars for objects of art before anyone else. And that is just scratching the surface. Our fancy and lovely world of art is so outrageous that it is hard not to take as parody, which is why movies such as Untitled (September 28) feel so harsh yet ring so true. Ridiculous. Sublime. Contemporary. And buxom to boot in LA - just ask Dave.

Photo of the event by Doug Harvey