Bruno blahs

In between Iceland posts, I want to weigh in with a quick review of “Bruno,” which I went to see last night with four gay guys. As one said, and we all agreed, it was “flat.” Yes, flat, as in boring. I wasn’t even offended. In fact Scott and I left midway and went out for a quite delightful dinner. Could I say I loved “Borat”? Well the actual experience was a kind of torture, but that was the point. “Borat” was brilliant, a case of inspired political activism and a cultural milestone. It worked because Sacha Baron Cohen’s transformation was seamless—he was Borat. Robert Irwin and Olafur Eliasson talk about art that makes you aware of yourself, “seeing yourself seeing” as it were—well “Borat” is the ultimate example. Because no matter what Borat does, no matter how outrageous or disgusting he is, the person you’re most surprised by is yourself when you find yourself rooting for him. Bruno, on the other hand, is wooden, a schtick. And to what end? I’m still not sure what the point is, or what audience Baron Cohen was trying to reach. And there's no pacing; it just thrashes on. It’s sad because having been a fan ever since I encountered “Da Ali G. Show” many years ago on British TV where Bruno was my favorite character, I think Baron Cohen is a genius. Oh well.

Notes from Iceland--1

Flying into Keflavik at 11:00 p.m.

Our cabin at the Motel Alex near the airport, around 1:00 a.m., with campers sleeping in tents all around. It's hard to remember to be quiet when it's so light out.

Okay, I admit to being an Icelandophile. I love that it's so incredibly rugged and isolated yet inhabited by some of the most sophisticated and creative people in the world. And I love the way of life: daily swimming in geothermally heated outdoor public pools could easily get me through any long, dark winter. Open into the evening, the pools are community gathering places for everyone from moms with toddlers to high school kids, to old guys soaking and yakking in the hottest (44 degrees Celsius, 111.2 degrees to us, yikes!) of several “hot pots.” Because of the Gulf Stream, the temperature in winter is roughly that of New York City (if you don’t take into consideration the harsh Arctic wind), and in summer hovers around 60F. People always associate the extreme northern countries with high rates of suicide and alcohol consumption, but doing research I found that (except for Greenland with the highest suicide rate, which spikes in summer) statistics don’t bear these assumptions out. In fact one site lists Icelanders as being the happiest (this before the economic crisis). They at least enjoy some of the best health, and have a 100% literacy rate. Although most in Reykjavik speak flawless English, they prefer to communicate in Icelandic, and the number of books one finds in the stores translated into or written in a language spoken by only around 300,000 people, boggles the mind.

Erica noted that everyone walks slowly to the point where, if we concentrated on it, the people on Reykjavik’s main shopping street appeared to be moving in slow motion. They are also quiet spoken, but at the same focused and deliberate. Is this because their sense of time is so unlike ours? In Iceland, rather than moving through time, you are suspended in it, and indeed we were told that the Vikings didn’t divide the year into months but gave each day its own name. I loved that it was light all the time, although the landscape seems less dramatic (if that’s possible) in summer because the light is more diffused. When I was in Iceland in the fall, the sun hovered just above the horizon, always in your eyes and casting long shadows from even the smallest rocks. Last week there was an hour or so of twilight around midnight and then, with a change that was more sensation than visually perceptible (something a photograph, for instance, could not capture), it would shift to dawn. In the space of a few minutes I’d go from anticipating more of the evening ahead to feeling as if I’d been up all night and wanting to go to sleep. There was also a different pattern of activity—more people out on Reykjavik’s streets at midnight on Saturday than at any time during the day.

Hotel Fron, Reykjavik, midnight

Not only is there no familiar reference for time in Iceland, there’s none for space. With no in-between, nothing in the middle range, you have only near and far—no way of telling whether it’s a walk to the mountains you see in the distance, or an hour’s drive. This makes the landscape nearly impossible to capture in photographs, so most photographers try to include something for scale—a building, an animal, a person in a boat—which makes for images that make it look like a National Geographic Anywhere. Certainly not Iceland, because what distinguishes Iceland is that there’s NOTHING there. Outside the city, you have to plan where you’re going to get gas, eat and, yes, pee. The tourist board publishes a map of the entire country with red dots--and not a lot of them--indicating rest stops “with W.C.” As for dashing for cover by the side of the road, forget it. There is no cover. You haven’t seen a car for at least 20 minutes, but if one of those giant SUVs (you need them in Iceland) with the high wheel beds were to suddenly come barreling across the gravel, you’d be completely exposed.

Random landscape shot

...with Terry and Erica shooting landscape for our video project, for scale.

On our drive, my companions and I had a misunderstanding. Too late I realized we were setting off on the route to a certain waterfall, which meant forgoing the restaurant Einar recommended. I was wondering, did they really intend to go without lunch and dinner? Now I realize that they must have been planning to pick up something on the way, while I was thinking this is Iceland, where there is no “on the way,” and if we know of a food source, we should go there. We did, happily, find our way to another restaurant where Erica pronounced the lamb chops “worth the entire trip.”

Landscape at Þingvellir, with flowers for scale

Gullfoss: if you look carefully, you can see people standing on the top of the ridge

Catching up

Just back from Iceland, I segued into being so absorbed with painting that I don’t want to stop even to eat or go to the bathroom. But I know that soon enough I’ll be back to my normal self, wanting to share the images and thoughts from the trip that have been percolating in my head since returning. For an Icelandic art experience in New York, I recommend spending contemplative time with Finnbogi Petursson's beautiful installations involving sound, light and water at Sean Kelly. I became interested in Finnbogi's work on my first trip to Iceland in 2004, and was lucky enough to see the other half of the show last Saturday at i8 Gallery in Reykjavik.

Just to give you an idea, here's an earlier piece: Finnbogi Petursson, Elements, Water, Earth (2005), courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery.

And for something to read, this is Jerry Saltz writing about the state of the art world through the lens of the Venice Biennale (“Entropy in Venice”—could not be better named). These are issues I’ve been grumbling about for years, so it’s gratifying to find those opinions shared, and so succinctly summed up. You can read the whole thing on Artnet:

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall. There are now more than 100 biennales around the world (most of them put together by the same 25 celebrity curators, drawing from the same pool of 100 or so artists); Venice is often called "the most important" of them. The main show of the 53rd Venice Biennale, June 7-Nov. 22, 2009, is the work of Daniel Birnbaum, a well-respected 46-year-old Swedish critic and curator. His "Making Worlds," held in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni delle Biennale and in the magnificent Arsenale, attains an enervating inertia of exhibitions and brings us to a terminal state of what we’ll call "the curator problem."

Birnbaum’s show, containing the work of 90-plus artists, doesn’t offend or go off the rails. Rather, it looks pretty much the way these sorts of big international group shows and cattle calls now look; it includes the artists that these sorts of shows now include. It’s full of the reflexive conceptualism that artists everywhere now produce because other artists everywhere produce it (and because curators curate it). Almost all of this art comments on art, institutions or modernism. Basically, curators seem to love video, text, explanations, things that are "about" something, art that references Warhol or Prince, or that makes sense; they seem to hate painting, things that don’t make sense or that involve overt materiality, physicality, color or strangeness.

Any critic who says this, of course, is accused of conservatism, of wishing for a return to painting. I’m not for or against video -- or any medium or style, for that matter. Nor am I wishing for a return to painting, which can never come back because it never went away. (That said, it’s hard to imagine anything more conservative today than an institutional critique. That sort of work is the establishment.) My beef is with the experience that "Making Worlds" produces. It’s just another esthetically familiar feedback cycle: impersonal, administratively adept, highly professionalized, formally generic, mildly gregarious, esthetically familiar, totally knowing, cookie-cutter. It is time we broke out of that enervated loop.

On my way...

To get in the mood for my trip, I watched the video Screaming Masterpiece, a survey of Icelandic music in which Barði Jóhannsson, of the band Bang Gang, answers the question: “Why is Icelandic music so special?” For a country whose largest city is about the size of Akron, OH, and where they speak a language shared by no other, it produces an amazing amount of great music. Barði says it’s because “all the bands that are any good know that their music won’t be played on the radio and that they won’t sell more than 200 albums in Iceland, so they make music just as they please.”

More Iceland

The Blue Lagoon, January 2004

I'm off to Iceland on Friday for a whirlwind trip with Erica and Terry to shoot background landscape for our film about Olafur Eliasson and Einar Thorsteinn's collaboration, returning after July 1st. But before that, tomorrow, I'm going to Finnbogi Petursson's opening (friend of Olafur and Einar, whose work I've seen in Iceland) at Sean Kelly Gallery, and then to see John Kelly's Paved Paradise Redux: the Art of Joni Mitchell at the Abron Arts Center at the Henry Street Settlement, which runs through Saturday. John is an extraordinary singer/actor/dancer (and artist whose exhibition of self-portraits is up until the 27th at Alexander Gray), and this particular performance, which he's done for many years, has almost a cult following.

This will be my fourth trip to Iceland since 2004, and my first in summer with its almost 24-hour light (and hopefully sun--it's been raining there as much as it has here). We plan to end up at/in the Blue Lagoon (above) where the water is so hot it doesn't make any difference what the weather is doing.

Sunday morning

Division Street, Great Barrington, MA

It’s Sunday, so a sermon is in order. This was sent to me by Father Ralph Peterson, who I met at Olafur Eliasson’s event at Bard, and whose interest in art includes having brought the Louise Nevelson-designed chapel at St. Peter’s in NYC’s CitiCorp Building into being. These are excerpts from a sermon given by Canon John Simons at the installation of the Rt. Reverend Dennis Drainville as the Twelfth Bishop of Anglican Diocese of Quebec. Although it’s been unfashionable of late to think that art should be anything more than information or even to make value judgments (I’ve been accused of wanting art to be “good for its audience,” as if that were silly, when the alternative is to waste time on the stupid or mediocre) I like the expectation put forth here, that it “enlarge the boundaries of the self.” BTW I believe in any and all religions, and none.

Human beings are by nature spiritual beings, created by God to receive the Holy Spirit. The evidence of this receptivity is that we cannot be human unless we live ecstatically. In other words, each of us lives by participating in a larger reality than our particular location and perspective, than our particular consciousness, and, conversely, each of us, enriched by that larger world, adds his and her unique sensibility to it.....

Our spiritual potential is given a particular inflection in everyday life through music and literature. We all know what it is like to be moved by a poem or a novel, or any other work of art, for that matter. An aesthetic work enables its audience to enter and explore a different way of seeing something, a different way of feeling about the world, or, a way of feeling that is already ours, but which we may have repressed. To appreciate a literary work, for example, is not simply to be informed about the author’s point of view. It is to feel the sense of things expressed in the work.

You enter into the characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their clothing. Hence literature, music and art do not isolate us in egocentric desire or self-pity; rather, they invite us to actualize our capacity to love, that is, to abandon our self-preoccupation, to stand outside ourselves and within the world as experienced by others. This is what love does, and what art fosters. It enlarges the boundaries of the self.

Scott's house reprise

Regarding the post below, Robby Baier's comment to Scott on Facebook:

I love your place. Such artistic order. Carol's Blog reminded me of a story about my friend Peter in Stuttgart. I was staying with him about 4 years ago and was struck by how impeccably the place was organized. He doesn't have your artistic sense so it was just super neat and very clean. When we left in the morning, after the beds were made, the dishes cleaned and put away, the sink wiped down with a fresh, dry rag (who wants those unsightly stains on the stainless steel?), he stopped in the doorway and turned around one last time to make sure everything was in place. Sharing with me that he "doesn't like it when things are too perfect", he went back inside and took a coat off of one of the hooks by the door, walked over to the couch and tossed the coat on the armrest. Not happy with the way the coat had fallen, he picked it up again and threw it a second time. Ahhhh. Now, for him, the place was imbued with just an air of the casual.

Note to manically tidy self: go downstairs and throw some magazines around.

Scott's House

Art Vent House Report #6:

Scott Cole is often mentioned in my posts, sometimes as Scott Who Knows Everything, as he’s frustratingly multi-accomplished. Musician, painter, and chef (Scott owns Caffe Pomo d’Oro in West Stockbridge, MA) his home is an ever-changing work of art.

While the furnishings could not be more opulent, comfortable, and New England in orientation—as well as festive—Scott’s emphatic use of black adds a slightly sinister edge to his style, which I have dubbed “Goth Colonial.” Every room is permeated with a sense of mystery, the objects in whispered conversation with each other, telling cryptic stories, alluding to histories and secrets we’ll never know:

When I’m there I’m always taking pictures and the only challenge is editing—basically you can point the camera anywhere and get a beautiful vignette. For instance you can guess what vantage point I took this from. But really, isn’t this just the world’s sexiest toothbrush?

You get the feeling that it's all intentional, but not too intentional, and that there's a sense of humor behind everything:

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s Scott, preparing the dinner he made last night for a few friends, in his kitchen which, except for the black cat lurking nearby, is white and innocent:

As is the upstairs bathroom:

The dining room:

Master bedroom:

A corner of an upstairs guest room:

Because it fit him perfectly, I gave Scott this kimono, which was made for my uncle when he served in China during World War II. He wore it once for Halloween, then hung it on the wall:

And outside, the hand-carved pickets on the fence that came with the house. Even they tell a story:

Jaws

This photo, which I took in Pittsfield, MA and posted last year, pretty much sums up how I feel about public art. Not that public art can’t be good, but that it rarely is, because too much rote thinking is involved on the part of the artists, as well as those who commission it. Artists make art that looks like what they think public art—especially sculpture—should look like, and selection committees select it, without a lot of thought to site or placement. It’s hard to compete with nature—usually the environment would look a whole lot better without it (although I’m a big fan of her paintings, the pile of rust by Rebecca Horn that despoils Barcelona’s beautiful beach is a perfect example, and the Frank Gehry fish that lurks nearby, isn't much better).

I was back in Pittsfield today, at the Berkshire Medical Center (for an MRI on my foot which, of course, was completely cured by the fact that I was going for an MRI—just the way a snuffly, crying baby turns into a smiling picture of health the minute you enter the pediatrician’s office) where this sculpture caught my attention. Although I’d go for something a little more comforting and calming for a medical center—incorporating a water feature perhaps, or vegetation (it would be a great place for some surprise topiary)—the sculpture itself is not so bad, and its sleek lines and mirrored surface contrast nicely with the traditional architecture of the building behind it. But what’s with the sign at the bottom? What’s the point of installing something if you’re going to overwhelm any redeeming qualities it might have with a tacky sign? Who’s thinking here?

So I’m driving home, ranting to myself about how I’ll gladly add public sculpture to the list of things (museum wall text, artists statements, children’s music) that I plan to outlaw when king, when I see this—unmarked, unattributed, and perfectly at home in its environment—and am reminded, as with the Kinderhook snow sculpture I came across last winter, that the human artistic impulse has a place outside after all, just best, perhaps, when it’s not institutionalized.

But let's be positive. Send me examples of public art you think works. Or even better, we could compile a best and worst list.

Painting

Oil paint is great because you can fudge it and it will still look like something...except when it doesn't and looks like crap. The problem is, you don't get to decide.

My friend Erica’s 3-year-old dog, Bella, never chewed a book before now. Interesting that she should choose Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior for her first literary meal.

Photo by Erica Spizz

Brushes goes legit

I have a love/hate relationship with my iPhone. On the one hand it’s like the limb I never knew I'd been missing, but when it breaks down…well, it’s only broken down once in the eight months or so I’ve had it, but having gone through three or four iPods on one warranty, I’m not optimistic. So last Thursday I was in Grand Central Station withdrawing money from the brand-new Chase ATMs (they’re supposed to be touch-sensitive but you have to stab at each choice at least ten times—designed to sense frustration levels rather than fingertip heat, they only work when you’re ready to smash the screen) and it dispensed $100 when I’d clearly pressed the $200 indicator (never, never will I withdraw money again without getting—and keeping—the receipt). I tried immediately to call the number on the wall, but my iPhone said “No Service.” I walked outside, and still “No Service.” I tried a pay phone on the street (they still have them) but the Chase rep couldn’t hear me. When, an hour later, I finally got through on my land line, I found out that Chase had—whew!—only deducted $100. But then I had to go to the Apple Store for two hours, go get my computer and bring it back for another two hours, after which I had a brand new iPhone with all my data intact...except the apps. Once you’ve purchased an app you can download it again for free, but any un-backed-up app data will be lost.

Lost! It was a crushing moment because then and only then did I realize that my true métier isn’t actual but virtual painting with the iPhone app called Brushes, and the masterpieces I’d made with it were gone forever. I love my Brushes “paintings”—really paintings over photos, just like Gerhard Richter—but have had to reluctantly acknowledge that yet again, the thing I do best has no material application. I thought they’d make great Iris prints, so emailed them off to a friend who has a gallery and does such things, but she was not impressed. That may change, however, and Brushes may yet become respectable, because it turns out that this week’s New Yorker cover by Jorge Columbo was done on an iPhone with Brushes. You can see it here, with a step-by-step video of how he drew it (makes it look easier, though, because it doesn’t include the “undos”)

Here are two of mine, which I was smart enough to save:

Younger than Jesus at the New Museum

It’s touchy when a member of one generation attempts to criticize the work of a younger one, and easy to assume that the oldsters don't get it because they’ve become out-of-touch fuddy-duddies—like those hoary old Abstract Expressionists who, with the exception of de Kooning, quit the Sidney Janis Gallery en masse after the first showing of Pop Art. However the difference is that historical youthful insurgencies represented a striking break from the past, where here the under-thirty-three-year-olds, at least as selected for the New Museum's "Younger than Jesus" survey, are making watered-down facsimiles of the work of their elders such as Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Jason Rhoades, and Jessica Stockholder (along with a living, breathing woman sleeping in a bed on the gallery floor, an idea that seems more than 50 years too late)—the result of overactive graduate programs worldwide that have caused so-called rebellion to become codified and unchanging for the last decade and more. The parlance is almost incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been indoctrinated, and those who are familiar with the buzzwords may not be willing to play the guessing game (or read the wall text) to find out what the experience is supposed to be about.

With few exceptions (the one for me being Cyprien Gaillard’s 30-minute video Desniansky Raion—fueled by the electro-pop music of Koudlam, it’s a hypnotic ballet of images of social devastation wreaked by public housing) much of "Younger than Jesus" looks like an extreme version of Show and Tell (if anyone does actually make something, it's with tongue implanted in cheek) which might not be surprising for an age-group raised on praise. As one of my graduate students at SVA put it, “Everything we did was put up on the refrigerator.” MFA programs have continued the praise game—or at least the encouragement game—because to discourage a student would be to cut off a significant source of revenue.


Clip from Cyprien Gaillard's Desniansky Raion

Through its music we know that this generation has verve, energy, and innovation to burn, coming up in the world at a time when technology has not only extended music-making capability, but liberated music distribution from the corporate stranglehold—while visual art remains filtered and controlled by institutions driven by agendas that have little to do with quality. The lowered bar and limited lens has to be discouraging to those twenty-something visual artists who have something new and valid to contribute (some of whom—like Kehinde Wiley—may, gasp, still take painting seriously). Historically art has tended to thrive when real estate prices are low (New York’s Downtown scene in the eighties, the more recent migration of artists to low-rent Berlin), so if we’re lucky, the economic downturn will result in increased opportunities for artists to take things into their own hands.

I’m not sure what—other than a sensationalist marketing tool—the reference to Jesus is all about, but another comparison might be “older than Artemisia Gentileschi” –who made this painting at 16:
Susanna and Her Elders (1610) Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653)

On Facebook today I updated my status, saying that I "will never learn not to paint in my good clothes," to which Dennis Kardon commented: "didn't hurt Basquiat, though don't start shooting up as well."

It reminded me of being a guest at a dinner following the opening of the 1984 “New Expressionists” show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, when Basquiat was refused entrance to the Russian Tea Room because of his paint-spattered clothing. He slipped away and returned a little while later wearing clean pants and the world’s most expensive Armani jacket, after which he was politely admitted. A class act.

Jean-Michel Basquiat in his studio, 1985, photograph by Lizzie Himmel.

Even more Olafur

Saturday I drove to Bard College for the opening of Olafur Eliasson’s first permanent outdoor installation in this country. Entitled The parliament of reality, the piece consists of a circular cement island in the center of a moat-like pond, accessed by a bridge enclosed by arches of steel latticework. The pond is ringed with plantings of wild grasses that will take 2-3 years to fill in, and 24 trees, whose branches, when they grow out in 5 years or so, will ultimately form a unified circle. The trees also produce blossoms which, hopefully, will coat the pond with yellow petals each May. With seating in the form of massive local rocks, the idea is that it will become a place for meeting, discussion, and performance. At the moment the constructed elements dominate, and it takes some imagination to picture what it will be like when the trees, for instance, are higher than the latticed roof of the walkway. Without the vegetation it seems like the bare bones of something yet to be realized, as did Robert Irwin’s Getty Garden when I saw it in its earliest stages.

Middle photo: Photo: Olafur Eliasson Studio

The latticework pattern mimics that of the ripples in the pond. Did he know it would do that?

The Eliasson installation is adjacent to the Frank Gehry designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, a building I love for its quality of lightness and insubstantiality, heightened on this overcast day so that the roof of the building seemed to merge with the sky.

Sadly, this lyrical dance of wing-like curves and light ends abruptly with the rear of the building, which is as square and clunky as the back of any urban theater. Although I've been to the Fisher Center several times, I'm never prepared for the nasty slap of reality that awaits me as I walk around it to my parked car. I want to believe in the fairy tale.

Music Scrooge

I don’t believe in children’s music—which doesn’t mean I don’t believe in children engaging with music, just that I don’t know why children should be subjected to music that not only talks down to them, is irritating to the adults around them. “They like it,” you’ll hear parents say by way of justifying this annoying genre (they like TV and junk food, too, if you give them enough of it) but trust me, children like any and ALL music, even—and especially—your music, if you give them the chance. I wouldn’t read them books I didn’t enjoy with illustrations I didn’t like either.

I can also tell you that their father and I brought two sons into functioning adulthood without any of that crap—and it’s something they’ve continually thanked us for.

Although Matt's the music professional, my most vivid early memories of my children and music have to do with his younger brother, Adam, probably because of the dark winter when Adam was two and had pneumonia, which meant long weeks inside with just mom and the stereo. He spent hours dancing to the Beatles in front of the speakers, identifying which side of the album he wanted to hear by pointing to the cut or whole apple illustrated on the label. Among his other favorites were Bob Marley's “I shot the sheriff but I didn’t shoot the dead tree” and Paul McCartney’s “Man on the Rug." I remember trying to tear him away from Elton John’s "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" when we were late for a doctor appointment, by promising that we’d listen to the radio in the car. He was screaming “Yellow Brick Road! Yellow Brick Road!” as I carried him out and once in the car, insisted on hearing it there. I tried to explain that the radio played what it wanted, not what we wanted, but lost all credibility when I turned it on to find it playing—of course—“Yellow Brick Road.”

This all comes to mind as I’ve recently been spending much delightful time with various friends’ toddlers, loving the way 1-4 year olds are so trustingly imitative while remaining true to their emerging personalities—a combination that’s often hilarious. Then this morning Cary Smith sent me the link to this video of Thom Yorke singing the Radiohead classic “Weird Fishes” with orchestra (wait for the sound to start)…



…after which I found this, and it cracks me up:



Don't skip over the song links to the music videos above, each one better than the next, ending with Elton John accompanied by Muppets, the Sesame Street album being a big exception to my rule—because I enjoyed it. Happy parents, I always think, make for happy children. And why not give them something that enriches not only their present, but future life?

Style

I’m about to quote something from a magazine I never thought I’d quote from— Psychology Today—one of a number of liberal-ish, pseudo-intellectual (I haven’t used that term since high school) magazines that promise much and ultimately leave you feeling empty, of which The Utne Reader is a prime example. Among PT’s many annoying qualities is that it employs those byte-sized fillers with cutesy graphics that magazine people (including those at TIME and New York) seem to think are all our Internet-addled heads can handle. (Here one is “What do you do to prevent nodding off at the wheel? 54% Park and walk around, 52% turn on music, 5% Drive faster, etc.) When will magazines stop trying to compete with the Web and get that if we’re going to sit down and read, we want something to read. In-depth articles, analysis, criticism, investigative reporting, photojournalism—these are all things magazines do well that the Internet can’t. The New Yorker has had that formula down for years, and because of it is increasingly relevant. But I rant, when my intention was to point out something I liked. This from the October 2008 issue of PT (disclaimer: I found it in the acupuncturist’s office) by Hara Estroff Marano in an article about style in an issue about style (the Editor’s Note is entitled Clothes Encounters—pul-lease!—whoops, there I go again):

…style is optimism made visible. Style presumes you are a person of interest, that the world is a place of interest, that life is worth making the effort for….

As the speed of all our transactions increases, we need fast ways of transmitting information about ourselves without losing authenticity; we have less and less time to make our mark in other, more leisurely ways of knowing. Style, like a perfectly-fitting book jacket, evokes the substance within by way of the surface. It makes an authentic visual impression in a world that otherwise strips people of identity. There was a time when style was a luxury. Today it is a necessity.

Yes, because finally, in the 21st century, it appears that “style” is becoming the new “fashion.” And hooray for that! Starting with the vogue for unusual children’s names (which make it easier to be found on the Internet), individuality is key—when everyone used to think that in the “future” (which we happen to be living in) we’d all be running around like so many Spocks in identical silver tights.

Anyway, just thinking about style being “optimism made visible” cheers me up, as do the new, soft, white organic cotton pajamas (with wooden buttons!) I’m wearing while stuck at home with the nasty cold I’ve had since Chicago. The interesting thing is that while I know I have style (although am less concerned about making an impression than pleasing myself—no one can see me in my pajamas), I want a different style. I want to be funky, like my friend, Jude, but over the years have had to come to terms with the fact that I’m simply not funky. Just the way I want to be an expressionist painter and must reconcile myself to being…me. Oh well.

More Olafur

Random shots below by artist Summer Zandrew, who accompanied me when I went to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art to take pictures of the Olafur Eliasson survey. Again I stress the importance of being allowed to take photographs of art—Olafur’s especially because it’s created with interaction in mind, and in an age where every single person who enters a museum is carrying a camera, photography is one of the vital ways we interact with our environment.

Me, refracted

Summer, self-portrait

Report from Chicago

I’m loving Chicago! Having a home town guy in the White House seems to have caused it to shed its Second City inferiority complex (which always drove me crazy) and stand proud. The only negative is the hysteria over the swine flu “epidemic,” which has schools closing and gatherings being cancelled. I’ve always washed my hands before meals—as my mom taught me to—and carried a little bottle of Purell with me to make it easier, silently marveling at my New York friends who’d get out of a taxi or the subway and sit down to dinner (and sometimes prepare food—yuck!) without doing so. Maybe the good side of this is that it will make everyone more conscious of something they should have been doing all along. Meanwhile I use my Purell more surreptitiously, because I don’t want to add to the fear-mongering, and am frequenting Mexican restaurants (so good in Chicago!), because they probably can use the business.

I thought Art Chicago was pretty boring—only a handful of really good galleries represented—but, to my surprise, loved the Antiques Fair a few floors below. Meanwhile the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the MCA (through September 13th) has caused a lot of excitement—as I mentioned, so much better than at MoMA and PS 1—and the the pairing with the Buckminster Fuller show (through August 9th) is genius, because you can see the lineage. As I’ve no doubt mentioned before, Einar Thorsteinn, who works with Olafur (“helps me with models and helps me to think,” as Olafur said in his artist’s talk), was a protégé of Fuller, and so here you can look at Fuller’s models and then go downstairs and see how Olafur and Einar have taken off on them in their own models, made them more fanciful, and then elaborated on them in large works. There are also interpretations of Fuller’s work by sculptor Kenneth Snelson, which are gorgeous. I wish I had images to illustrate all of this, but I was only able to photograph Eliasson’s exhibition while accompanied by a representative of the MCA, and had not made an appointment to shoot the Fuller show.

Let me go off a little bit on this policy of no photography, which is shared by the Whitney (but not by MoMA), and the reason I didn’t write about Jenny Holzer’s show here, which I loved. Yes, I could have gotten images from the museum, but if they didn’t reflect my vision, I’d just be doing P.R. I could understand it in the old days, the concern that a lousy shot taken on someone’s Brownie could end up in a magazine as representative of the artist’s work, or that people would produce coffee mugs and T-shirts with a pirated image. But today, when the influence of print is lessening and word-of-mouth rules, why would you want to insist on stopping someone from taking a picture with her iPhone and emailing her excitement to all of her friends? As for artists, photography is a way of recording what is important to them—not some commercial photographer—ideas that they may want to incorporate into their own work. As we all know, major museum exhibitions have an influence on the art that comes after, and to limit that in any way seems counter-productive.

Museums seem to be catering more and more to the casual visitor while distancing themselves from artists. First there’s the entrance fee, which limits when you can see the work (in crowds on free night). I tried to get a friend who’s a professor of art in Iowa into MoMA on my press card with me, and was told she could come in for free if she had a group of students with her. But even if she were teaching in New York, doesn’t she have to see the show first, to decide if it’s something she wants to bring her students to? I know so many artists who choose to pass on major exhibitions because of the fee, and often if you find a good show, you want to see it more than once. In Chicago, no doubt, many artists can afford to join both the MCA and the Art Institute (or “INSTITVTE” as it reads on their Web site—yikes!), but in New York, with a plethora of major museums, cost becomes prohibitive. I propose that the New York museums get together on an “artist’s card” that would allow entrance to all the museums for a yearly fee of $125 or so. Verifying that someone is an artist is easier now than it was back in the day when I had to prove my professional status to the city in order to live in SoHo—it can be anyone who has a Web site featuring their work, or is featured on a gallery Web site. Such a policy would increase not only traffic but word-of-mouth.

That said, here are some random shots from the Eliasson exhibition:

Your eye activity field, 2009, oil on canvas (detail). Created for the MCA's lobby and atrium, this series of 300 canvases (approximately 6" x 14") represents the 300 nanometers of the color spectrum that can be seen by the human eye

Reimagine, 2002: spotlights cast shiftin, overlapping rectalinear patters across the gallery wall, creating an illusion of distance and depth.

Beauty, 1993: a spotlight shining obliquely through a curtain of fine mist.

From the model room

One-way colour tunnel, 2007 (detail)

One-way colour tunnel (detail) with view of Inverted Berlin sphere, 2005

Inverted Berlin sphere, 2005, with a detail of Multiple Grotto, 2004 (left), which incorporates elements of the model seen above.

Colour sphere embracer, 2005, colored glass rings suspended from the ceiling nestle inside one another while a motor simultaneously rotates each in a different direction.

Update

I’m in Chicago, watching the sun rise over Lake Michigan, from the guest room in my friend Barbara’s apartment. It’s been a great trip, except yesterday my ex-husband had a nasty fall that landed him in the Evanston Hospital emergency room, and his wife told me that treatment was delayed (total time in hospital: 12 hours, with 45 minute to one hour waits between procedures) because the place was overrun with people worried that they had swine flu. I know the tendency to hysteria over possible disaster isn’t new to the human race, but we seem to have a collective memory that doesn’t go back even as far as three years ago, when the avian flu was going to kill us all. I remember that well because I have a friend in Paris whose girl friend is an epidemiologist, and in every other email he was urging me to stock up on quantities of Tamiflu. I preferred to keep my immune system up with a steady consumption of chocolate bars and red wine, which worked just fine. I also read Dr. Mercola, whose assessment turned out to be correct. Here’s what he has to say about swine flu.

Wednesday evening I went to the opening of the newest version of Olafur Eliasson’s survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. At one point a museum video crew, collecting short interviews to use in fund-raising, approached and asked me to talk about my connection to the museum. At first I didn’t think I had anything to say, but then realized that my intense interest in Eliasson’s work began with the MCA and the Robert Irwin exhibition in 1976 that changed forever how I think about art. Irwin was Eliasson’s biggest influence as well, although I think it’s unlikely that he ever saw an actual work until fairly recently. This version of the traveling Eliasson survey show (next stop: Dallas) is the best exhibition of the many I’ve seen (I didn’t see the survey in San Francisco, however, and the curator there, Madeleine Grynstein, is now the director at the MCA). At the MCA the work has room to breathe, and I think Eliasson is at his best in vast enclosed spaces—the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern (below) being an example. I’m going back today to take pictures, which I’ll share.

Olafur Eliasson, weather project, Tate Modern, 2004.

The high cost of speeding

I had to pay a speeding ticket yesterday—the first in my life—$335 to the town of Hoosick, New York. It required a money order, which I bought at the post office. I love small town life in that I could count on commiseration from the clerk and P.O. regulars as I reluctantly counted out my twenties. Mary, the head clerk, a gray-haired dumpling who you’d never take for a speed demon, topped me, though, saying that she’d gotten a $1000 ticket in Cambridge, NY. for 75 in a 55. It was her third ticket in New York State. My friend Robby, knowing that I’d taken that same route back and forth to Bennington at 80 mph for years, suggested I simply look upon it as a retroactive toll, or the price I must pay to join the rest of the human race.

Kurt's house

Art Vent House Report #5: Easter, for the second year in a row, was celebrated at Kurt Andernach’s home, which he calls Somersault House, on the Athens/Catskill, NY border, so deep in the woods that it takes a high clearance vehicle, preferably with all-wheel drive, and a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to negotiate the seemingly endless narrow dirt roads that lead to it. Each time I go there (once, scarily, by myself, near midnight on a dark, snowy New Year’s Eve), I wonder if I’m really going to find it, and if not, how I’m going to get out.

Even if you didn’t know Kurt was German, the siting of his cottage in the forest would make you think of Hansel and Gretel, but then you go inside and the fairy tale feeling is complete. Both rustic and elegant, it could be Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s house—provided Grandma had exquisite taste and a penchant for Biedermeier furniture.

But finding such a house in the middle of the Catskill woods isn’t the only incongruity. The other is that Kurt is an architect, a designer of chic store interiors (such as those for Diane von Furstenberg and my favorite department store, Bon Marche in Paris) and blindingly white loft-like spaces. Obviously he has range. How many modernist architects do you know who proudly display a cuckoo clock?


One of the many distinctive aspects of Kurt’s house is that there are no screens—“How European,” a friend said. Yeah, except northern Europe doesn’t have insects (a Swiss friend once told me it was because they wouldn’t allow them) and this is New York State, where mosquitoes rule. Kurt, however, is uniquely oblivious—or impervious—to mosquitoes, and one summer evening I ate in his dining room largely untouched—even though the room was buzzing with them—because his dog, sitting next to me on the bench, was incredibly efficient in snapping the insects out of the air with his mouth.

The massive, elaborate antique furniture is from his family, and when I asked Kurt how he got it into the house he said, “Oh, it was easy. It came from Europe in a container, which was left on the main road, and I rented a U-Haul…” Clearly what’s easy for Kurt would be challenging for a normal person—he's also moved hundreds of rocks from the woods to form patios and walkways around his house. I hope to do a summer update on the extensively gardened exterior which, when everything is in bloom, is as magical as the interior.

Living room:

Upstairs office:

A corner of the kitchen, set for Easter brunch:

A corner of the dining room:

And bunnies!

Kurt now splits his time between his architectural practice and a storefront in on Main Street in Catskill, where he makes indoor/outdoor furniture to be marketed under the name Somersaultwoods. Solidly handcrafted in rustic Bavarian style without glue or screws—all joints are made by hand—his focus is on green technology for the materials and finishes.

Happy spring!

How we all feel. This from artist Catherine Hamilton's Birdspot.

You are what you think

‘tis in ourselves that we are thus
or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which
our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant
nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up
thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs, or
distract it with many, either to have it sterile
with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the
power and corrigible authority of this lies in ourwills.

(Shakespeare, Othello, Act 1, Scene 3)

Mind is the wielder of muscles. The force of a hammer blow depends on the energy applied; the power expressed by a man’s bodily instrument depends on his aggressive will and courage. The body is literally manufactured and sustained by the mind. Through pressure of instincts from past lives, strengths or weaknesses percolate gradually into human consciousness. They express as habits, which in turn manifest as a desirable or an undesirable body. Outward frailty has a mental origin; in a vicious cycle, the habit-bound body thwarts the mind. If the master allows himself to be commanded by a servant, the latter becomes autocratic; the mind is similarly enslaved by submitting to bodily dictation.

Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, 1946.

So reading about the brain and how thoughts and experience can change its physical configuration (neuroplasticity), I wonder why stop with the brain? If the brain can change, why not the rest of the body?

I have not forgotten a long article I read in The New York Times more than ten years ago (now finally available through the miracle of online archiving), which describes how a person diagnosed with multiple personality disorder may have actual physical characteristics that come and go, depending on which personality is dominant:

Excerpts:

For more than a century clinicians have occasionally reported isolated cases of dramatic biological changes in people with multiple personalities as they switched from one to another. These include the abrupt appearance and disappearance of rashes, welts, scars and other tissue wounds; switches in handwriting and handedness; epilepsy, allergies and color blindness that strike only when a given personality is in control of the body.

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Today, using refined research techniques, scientists are bringing greater rigor to the study of multiple personalities and focusing on a search for the mechanisms that produce the varying physiological differences in each personality.

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One of the problems for psychiatrists trying to treat patients with multiple personalities is that, depending which personality is in control, a patient can have drastically different reactions to a given psychiatric medication. For instance, it is almost always the case that one or several of the personalities of a given patient will be that of a child. And the differences in responses to drugs among the sub-personalities often parallel those ordinarily found when the same drug at the same dose is given to a child, rather than an adult.

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[Also] …observation of vision differences…made by those treating multiple-personality cases. ''Many patients have told me they have a drawer full of eyeglasses at home, and they never are quite sure which to bring when they go out''….

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Now what I need is to develop a personality that doesn't have spring allergies.

Reggie's house

Art Vent House Report #4--Last week I dropped in on Reggie Madison, a longtime friend and painter I admire, who has eked out a home and studios (plural) in a crumbling industrial complex smack on the edge of the Hudson River in the village of Athens, NY. This is one of several industrial spaces he's "Reggified" since I've known him, and patrons of Club Helsinki in Great Barrington, MA, where he designed the interior, will recognize the the style--humorous conglomerations of objects only Reggie would choose, more of which can be found in his shop on Warren Street in Hudson. The building is so close to the water that inside it feels like an ocean liner, especially the living room with its narrow windows:

Reggie can make even knotty pine look exotic:

The entry way:

The music room:

A corner of the bathroom:

The upstairs studio:

The downstairs studio:

And outside, the Hudson, still bleak in early April: