9 July - Ai Weiwei's Zodiac

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.

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

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).

10 April - In Memory of John McCracken

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.”

7 Feb - The Google Art Project

LAUNCHPROJECTS - Roberta Smith wrote a piece in today's New York Times about Google's Art Project. I had peripherally heard of this undertaking but had not yet explored the site. Intrigued by Smith's rave review - "from where I sit Google's Art Project looks like a bandwagon everyone should jump on. It makes visual knowledge more accessible, which benefits us all" - I logged on.

Within a few minutes I visited the Tate Britian, the National Gallery, The Frick Collection, the Museo Reina Sofia, MoMA, the Uffizi Gallery - to name a but a few. I experienced the rooms, the walls, the frames, and the paintings to such minutia that William Hogarth's Satan, Sin, and Death (pictured above, right) became almost unbearably tangible - Milton's Paradise Lost in real time in my living room.

This level of access fosters an incredibly intimate art experience. Anyone can enter any of the participating museums at any time, for any length of time. There is no jet lag, fatigue, crush of crowds, plane ticket to buy, or lunch appointment to keep. It is an opportunity to practice seeing, in Smith's words "you can look from a seated position in the comfort of your own home or office cubicle, for as long as you want, without being jostled or blocked by other art lovers. At the same time the chance to look closely at paintings, especially as made things, really to study the way artists construct an image on a flat surface, is amazing, and great practice for looking at actual works."

Google's Art Project is a unique opportunity to explore major works of art throughout the world in an instant. This virtual experience is a part of a continuum of image reproduction that reaches larger audiences. Traditionally in the form of "art books, as postcards, posters, and art-history-lecture-slides," Google's Art Project is the next step in this access to information. Seen exactly for what it is, Art Project is an exciting innovation and incredibly powerful tool accessible to anyone free of charge. Maybe modern technology won't be the death of painting after all.

15 Sept- Obits and (mini) Masterpieces

LAUNCHPROJECTS - Tomorrow is the opening of Patrick McFarlin's exhibition Obituaries and (mini) Masterpieces. The show is hung and looks stunning - Patrick added a bit of site-specific art to the space with a quotation from Faulkner written above the fireplace. The artist "knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall." This came from Faulkner's bio that Patrick was reading while putting this show together - had he read it a bit sooner Scratch on the Wall would certainly have been the show title... so fitting to this body of work and the concept of the series. The following is the catalog essay - the photos above are an installation shot, and McFarlin "scratching the wall" yesterday at LAUNCHPROJECTS.

Each year, Art in America publishes an “Annual Guide” that includes an obituary section memorializing the notable artists, critics, and curators who passed away within the year. In just two sentences (and sometimes less), whole lives and careers are abridged and packaged into laconic, reusable synopses. Stars of the art world, otherwise the subjects of voluminous biographies, retrospectives, and documentaries become distinguishable solely by an adjective here, an “ism” there. Robert Motherwell is an abstract expressionist while Willem Kooning (pictured left) is a seminal abstract expressionist. Joan Mitchell’s paintings are boiled down to “calligraphic” abstractions; Richard Pousette-Dart’s are “pointillist” abstractions. Lives that teemed with struggle and accomplishments are reduced to their most easily described art genre, a noteworthy exhibition.

Fascinated with the hollow languor of these obituaries, Patrick McFarlin began to meticulously translate such obituary descriptions with their accompanying portraits in a series of graphite drawings. His drawings retrace, with careful attention to detail, the ambiguity of the obituary, the detached, printed summations in pages of a glossy magazine. In this way McFarlin places the artist back within his or her original context—the world of art. McFarlin’s interest in his subjects deepened as the number of obituaries he rendered increased in number.

Haunted by the artists and the stories of their lives, he began painting flawless miniature representations of their paintings. McFarlin’s art expresses an homage in paint that the obituaries alone could not exact. The artist’s paintings are a virtuoso display of technical skill, re-interpreting the exact brush strokes of painters as diverse and challenging as Joan Mitchell (pictured right), Francis Bacon, Robert Motherwell, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Diebenkorn, and Willem de Kooning.

The formal rigor and intimate scale of McFarlin’s paintings are reminiscent of the miniatures made by Richard Pettibone (pictured left) a pioneer in appropriation art in the United States. Originating as they do from divergent concepts, the impact and poignancy of Pettibone’s perfect miniatures strongly resonate with McFarlin’s recent body of work.

In a 1995 New York Times article covering a Pettibone retrospective, art critic Roberta Smith asked, “What happens to visual experience when previously large, famous paintings are reduced to the size of the viewer's face, while, at their best, looking mind-bogglingly like the real thing?” She mused that the method is “a new, transformative, maybe original sense of intimacy and ownership that is unusually empowering. It is rather amazing to see art cut down to size with its integrity intact.”[i]

Empowerment is what McFarlin grants his viewers along with the artists he covers, while paying a tribute to all of art history’s painters of note. McFarlin’s unquestionable love for painting is balanced by his humility as he meditates on death’s inevitability. By imbuing these miniature masterpieces with precise brush strokes and conceptual integrity, McFarlin re-contextualizes many highly celebrated and iconic paintings in an intimate setting that allows for very personal contemplation and a space for transformation.

- Cyndi Conn, LAUNCHPROJECTS
September 1, 2010

---

[i] Smith, Roberta. Imitations that Transcend Flattery. The New York Times. July 15, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/arts/design/15smit.html web. 25 Aug, 2010

23 June - MoMA and Chelsea

LAUNCHPROJECTS - A morning cappuccino at Via Quadronno to catch the US vs. Algeria match in the World Cup (Landon Donovan and goal keeper Tim Howard pictured above). We then headed to MoMA to see the newly installed Bruce Nauman exhibition Days, created for the 2009 Venice Biennale. A "sound sculpture" of voices reciting the days of week in random order, it is brutal and fascinating, we couldn't help but wonder at the sanity of the guards after hours on end of the relentless words. It is described on MoMA's website as a "sonic cocoon." More like day of the week clown torture. I love the way Roberta Smith described his work in her 2009 NYT review when it was in Philadelphia.

They don’t “present” as art, yet they lodge in the mind and won’t let go, disorienting, irritating, inundating and exhilarating the senses. And with time, the best Naumans make clear their art-ness, laying bare life’s basic experiences, distilled and compressed. They do this profoundly yet, it seems, inadvertently, as if Mr. Nauman were simply providing raw material that we absorb and fashion into art in our heads.

Exactly, Roberta.