More on the brain

Along with enjoying the English spring and the company of 21-month-old Nya, formerly known as the Upholstery Eater, who says "Good morning, Carol!" when I come down for breakfast, "Bless you" when anyone sneezes, and occasionally "Blimey!" I'm reading another book about the brain, this time, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life by Daniel G. Amen, M.D. So far I've learned that witzelsucht is "a term in the psychiatric literature that characterizes 'an addiction to making bad jokes'" and that my pathological aversion to paperwork could indicate an imbalance in my prefrontal cortex. Amen's prescription? Hire someone else to do it.

The Brain That Changes Itself

Yarek Wazul for The New York Times

I’m off to England again, and may or may not post until I come back the first week in April, so thought I’d leave you with something to read: The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge, MD, about how our thoughts and experiences form the actual physical structure of our brains. There are myriad new ideas to ponder in this book, including how to keep our brains functioning into old age. I always thought I was safe because I use my brain so much, but it turns out it isn’t how much you use your brain, but how much you use it in new ways that keeps it young (good news for polymaths, formerly known as dilettantes). The older we get and the better we get at what we do, the narrower we become. Doidge suggests learning a new language to keep the mind alert, but I’ll just relearn the old one—French—which I learned as an adult and found, the last time I tried to use it, that it had dissipated to the point that only the nouns were left. Inspired by the book I’ve also started playing the piano again, learning a new, difficult piece and memorizing it (my piano teacher used to say that a piece wasn’t “mine” until it was memorized, and I feel that way about poetry, too—just ask me, the next time you see me, to recite Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky).

Memorization, it turns out, exercises the brain in important ways. Doidge writes:

…for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children’s brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and this not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum because they were too rigid, boring, and “not relevant.” But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brain power unfamiliar to us now.

There’s much more in the book to challenge contemporary assumptions about how we use our brains—but for now I’m just happy to remember where I put my passport.

The greatest advantage to a blog is that I can write about a show I haven’t seen and don’t intend to see (I’ll use my broken foot, now mending nicely, thank you, as an excuse, although I’ve probably seen all the Lisa Yuskavage paintings I need to in one lifetime). But I will use it as an opportunity to rail against the idea that an artist’s gender, or his/her intention or surmised intention, political or otherwise, has anything to do with the aesthetic value of a work of art. What if we suddenly found out that all of Yuskavage’s paintings had been done by Russ Meyer? Or the seven dwarfs? What if they weren’t on exhibition at David Zwirner, but some of the “unique images” offered by Arcadia Fine Arts? What if Yuskavage had been trained, not at Yale, but by a Bob Ross certified instructor? What would that change, really?

I found a Washington Post interview from 2007 that delineates thought pro and con about Yuskavage, and then this, from Jerry Saltz’s latest piece in New York:

The same bogus arguments come up every time there’s a Lisa Yuskavage show. Is her work feminist? Is she, oy, “critiquing the male gaze?” At the opening of Yuskavage’s current solo outing, I was standing between two paintings: Figure in Interior, a picture of an anorexic nude on her knees with her legs akimbo, shaved vulva exposed, white cream/semen dripping from her face onto her breasts; and Reclining Nude, a picture of a recumbent girl in a glowing green glen, her breasts pointing in two directions, legs splayed to expose pink genitalia protruding from blonde pubic hair. A well-known museum curator sidled up and swooned, “Lisa’s paintings are as rich as Vermeer’s and Boucher’s. They’re as sumptuous as the background of the Mona Lisa.” I blinked silently until she mentioned Courbet. Then I bitchily snipped, “If you think these paintings have that kind of mojo, you’ve either never looked at those paintings or you know nothing about painting—which I’ve written about you.” We smiled at each other and parted. I love the art world.

While I don’t necessarily draw the same conclusions as Saltz about what is important now, we agree, that with the social and economic changes of the last few months, the era of forced cynicism, as evidenced by Murakami, Hirst, Koons, Prince and others, including Yuskavage (and perhaps Currin), may have come to a close. It’s not enough to make work that comments on art; we want the real thing.

What is a blog for, if not shameless self-promotion? I'll be on David Cohen's monthly Review Panel at the National Academy Museum Friday evening. It's a series I've been attending regularly and find enormously interesting--for the audience's comments as much as those of the panel members--and David does an excellent job of keeping things lively. So I've been preparing for that as well as getting my taxes done and trying to figure out how I'm going to get around New York with a stress-fractured foot (I can't tell you the number of people who've said, "Well it's good you didn't break it")--and smelling spring which, even though it's faithfully followed winter every year of my life, always feels like a miracle.

In our culture, outside of Carl Jung who coined the term, synchronicity hasn’t been given its due. It hardly ever shows up in literature—in fact a friend was once told in a writing workshop that, to be believable, “coincidences” should be strictly limited to one per novel. Go back another century, however, and we have Dickens, Trollope, and Austen peppering their books with unexplainable happenstances. Sometimes I think synchronicity is all over the place if you’re looking for it, but sometimes it shows up even when you’re not. I offer this story as an antidote to the tales of doom and gloom that saturate the media.

Last Tuesday night, a neighbor I’ve known since he was small, Oliver Antunes, was bummed. A 2008 graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, Oliver left his job as poissonier at Wheatleigh, a posh Berkshire resort, and has been living with his mother, studying French, and catering private dinners, saving up to go live in Europe and pursue an apprenticeship with a top restaurant in Lyon. Through his Portuguese father, Oliver has a dual passport that allows him to live and work in the EU. He’d lined up his contacts and even an apartment in Lyon when, on Tuesday, a catering job that would’ve brought him close to his goal was cancelled at the last minute. Commiserating with her son, my friend Crane (a single mom who’s supported three children with her panoply of talents including cooking) asked how much more he needed. “$4,000” Oliver answered, before disappearing to the village market to buy a can of beer. The next morning Crane noticed that Oliver was up and out uncharacteristically early. It turns out that, along with his can of beer, Oliver bought a $1 lottery ticket, and not wanting to say anything until he had the check in hand, had gone off to the Lottery Commission in Springfield to redeem it. The amount? $4,000.

Bon voyage, Oliver!

Cookies

Photo: Scott Cole

Today Bernard Madoff went to jail. Today my friend Scott was upbraiding himself for eating too many chocolate chip cookies. Chocolate chip cookies are, in Scott’s case, an occupational hazard: he serves delightful breakfasts and lunches at his Caffé Pomo D’oro in West Stockbridge (MA), doing all of his own baking, so as part of his job he makes some of the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. Of course he’s going to eat them.

In a conversation about the financial crisis, so much of it having been caused by Wall Street greed, my friend Arthur, art director at TIME, said: “You and I like to make money, it’s a benefit of doing the work we do, but it’s not why we do it. Our occupations have many satisfactions, of which making money is only one. One of the problems in the current situation is that we’ve created a segment of the population whose only purpose in life is to make money.” True, they’re supposed to be making it for other people as well, but what’s to keep them from dipping their hands in the cookie jar?

Press release of the week II

Why think? Adding to my collection of statements about art that say absolutely nothing, my new idea is to gather enough so that readers can string them together and make their own press releases and artist’s statements (students, listen up!), thereby avoiding unnecessary brain strain. Here’s an example from a current press release that could work for almost any kind of art. Just insert your name and medium in the blanks:

_______ is working within a familiar lexicon but the process of _______ pushes the imagery out of the realm of objectivity. _______sees this step toward abstraction as not necessarily in opposition to representation, rather as an abstraction of ideas. The iconography in these _______(s) relates sometimes directly and sometimes quite obliquely to the iconography of the world in which we live. By creating a parallel universe in which the artist investigates these themes, he/she is able to open the work to the viewer for further exploration.

The best and worst of times...

At the Armory: a Leo Villareal light sculpture reflected in a David Levinthal photograph, Gering & Lopez Gallery, March 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870), A Tale of Two Cities

Dickens famously warns us against thinking of our particular times as unique, however there have been few points in my lifetime (the sixties, for sure, except I was too young to have anything to compare it to) where the extremes of best and worst were as clearly drawn as they are now. It’s a time of depression and darkness, but also of awakening and light, and we all know it. Everything this year is different from the way it was last year, and the ten years before that, and the ten years before that. It’s an epoch that will get a name, be called something, however just as people didn’t know that they were living in the Renaissance or the Roaring Twenties, we don’t know how history will remember these extraordinary times.

In the art world, everything is up for reassessment, and whether it’s the worst and best of times depends on who you talk to. If you read the Armory Show wrap-up in the Times today, you’d think it was going down the tubes, yet the people I spoke with at a couple of galleries (Gering & Lopez, Sean Kelly) were more than pleased with their return at the Armory and others even suggested that the economic downturn could turn out to be a boon for art because the prices have been discounted and rich people have nowhere else to put their money.

One thing’s for sure: the era of second-guessing the art market and thinking that it can be controlled with any amount of hype is over. Remember Richard Prince? I didn’t come across a single piece of his in the Armory Show. Damien Hirst? Who?

In last month’s Art in America (February, p.33, not yet on the Web) Dave Hickey described the previous “period”—meaning up until last fall—as one where “ ‘fairness’ (read mediocrity) proliferated. Dealers diversified their offerings to disguise their personal taste, thus eroding their better judgment.” Or, as one dealer once told me blatantly, “I don’t show what I love.” The same was true for artists, who were coached by art schools to ape certain kinds of art.

Now all we have to fall back on is ourselves. How refreshing!

Why I'm going to England again in a month...

Duh!

Now here’s a novel idea that recently cropped up in the Times—paying doctors to keep us healthy! When I was studying t’ai chi with Master Koo, he told us that in ancient China, people paid their doctors only when they were well. I’ve noticed that the biggest difference between holistic and conventional Western medicine is not so much the form of treatment but the fact that holistic practitioners ask questions and credit your knowledge of your own body. Accustomed to the former, I recently consulted a Lyme specialist at the Berkshire Medical Center and when I attempted to describe my symptoms she asked tersely, “Why are you telling me this?” I have a friend right now who’s being treated for sleep apnea, which I think is hilarious because his 30-year-old mattress is—literally—like trying to sleep on a pile of rocks. He’d rather get treatment (covered by insurance) than shell out for a new bed, although might feel obligated to if his doctor had asked him about it. Another friend was on Prozac, and when I inquired about his dietary habits, he told me he drank 12 cups of coffee a day. He thought it was normal. I also know someone who is getting disability, cannot work due to depression, yet his Dunkin’ Donut habit and addiction to diet Dr. Pepper have yet to be revealed to his doctor. Everyone always says that it’s hard to get people to make lifestyle changes. I bet that if doctors’ incomes depended on it, they’d figure out a way.

So, I began to think, in what other profession do we reward practitioners when they fail? Well, okay, maybe in the financial sector. But, unlike medicine, where they study sick people to try to figure out how to be healthy, at least in finance we don’t study the habits of poor people to learn out how to be rich.

Press release of the week

Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Jeremy Everett. The large-scale sculptural installation, Opium Feast, is his largest and most ambitious exhibition to date. Jeremy Everett's populated composition of wax sculptures is as decadent as it is dead. The massive grotesque accumulations underline his interest in archaeological strata, Classical antiquity and the modern landscape of detritus, emotion and memory. Constructed entirely from wax and fragments of architectural ruin, the artist builds layers of vast fields of opium poppies-a substance that has been used for pain relief and ritual since Neolithic man. What is left is a landscape of the subconscious void. The physical body is lost, notions of being no longer pertain. Surrounded by compositions of opulence and portraits of sexual climax, buried in a still life of the Symphony Fantastique, the viewer is left hovering between fantasy and reality, fame and oblivion.
Beverages provided by Grolsch.

Heima

I was in Iceland all last night, in my dreams. Before going to sleep I watched Part II of Heima, the gorgeous Sigur Ros film (more like a long music video/travelogue) from 2007 (thanks to Roberto and NetFlix)—which I can’t believe I’d never seen, given how enamored I am of Sigur Ros and all things Icelandic. In 2004, on my way to an Olafur Eliasson exhibition in Oslo, I stopped for several days in Iceland for the sole purpose of driving alone in that surreal landscape while playing their music—which is so eerie and beautiful I can get weepy just listening to it on my iPod while riding Metro North. The idea may sound hokey, but it totally worked—except for when I was freaked out. My plan was to drive from Reykjavik up to Geyser, around the coast to Grindavik, and end up soaking in the milky, steaming mineral waters of the Blue Lagoon. I had a map that showed a road by the Arctic Sea, with numerous place names, which I assumed to be quaint little fishing villages. Instead the “road” turned out simply to be a driveway-like leveling of the gravel and the place names just that—places, perhaps inlets, someone had once named. I drove for hours in my rented Toyota (with its seemingly unlimited gas tank) without seeing any evidence of humans or habitation, the only road signs being those that said “Blindhead”—which meant that the narrow road I was on was about to go over a rise where I wouldn’t be able to see any vehicles that might be approaching from the other side. The prospect of a head-on collision was scary, but not as scary as it would have been if I’d actually seen another vehicle the whole time I was driving. I would come to the top of one of those hills, hoping to catch sight of a house, a barn, a fence—anything, off in the distance, a restaurant or gas station being too much to hope for—but each time there was only the endless empty ribbon of road, stretching on and on….

Somewhere in Iceland, 2004

Blogger malfunction, not saving text, hopefully to be resolved soon.

Oh no! Not more about wall text...

Arthur Dove, Me and the Moon, 1937, wax and emulsion on canvas, 18 x 26", Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

As usual, the comments on this blog provide food for thought. Regarding my discussion of Cindy Sherman’s work in the post below, Lady Xoc writes, and it’s worth repeating:

…the hallmark of great art is generosity (the artists themselves may be self-involved sonsofbitches), but the work has to give something, make a vital connection with the souls of others….

And from Brian:

I disagree with your assessment of [museum] wall text. I enjoy making art, talking about art, and reading about art. Wall text is like bonus material on a DVD: while I can watch the movie without it, the behind-the-scenes footage adds to my experience! Of course a work should have the ability to stand on its own, but anything that can tell me what the artist is inspired by, thinking about, or interested in can only add to the conversation. Your statement that the "artist's intention holds little interest for me" is disappointing!

When a pianist is about to sit down and play Clair de Lune in concert, someone with a microphone doesn’t first come out on the stage and explain that Debussy was known as an Impressionist, that this work, the translation for which is “Moonlight,” may have been based on a poem of the same name by Paul Verlaine, and that the arpeggios were meant to convey the “impression” of moonbeams illuminating a garden.

Although Debussy’s intention was to suggest moonlight, what if you, the listener, are inclined to think of waves of water, or silk rippling in the wind, or the music evokes an emotion or sensation you feel inside your body, or reminds you of a dream? Are these responses not valid? And would you be more or less likely to think of other ways of interpreting the music, once you’ve been told what it’s supposed to be about?

Also, why do we want to hear this piece again and again? Is it because Debussy was important in providing a link between romanticism and modern music, and the composer happened to be successful in his intention of making music that sounds like moonlight—or because it’s an exceptionally beautiful and expressive piece?

With music, any information about the artist and his/her intention is not an element in the performance but is available—or not—in the program; there’s no assumption that it’s essential to the enjoyment of the music. Why should visual art be any different? When placed on the same plane as the art itself, explanatory text assumes authority, becomes part of the experience, and narrows the lens through which it will be viewed.

Out with the old and....

Christmas lights, Great Barrington, MA, December 2008

"What the cynics fail to understand, is that the ground has shifted beneath them."--President Obama's inaugural address.

I started writing this a month ago, but was so bored I didn't finish, because it's just too boring to write about being bored. But truly, since returning from Berlin in November, I've not been able to get interested in art, which is a problem considering that it's not only my field, but too late in life to take up another profession--such as plumbing or neurobiology, or become a concert pianist after all. However either out of habit or false hope, I've continued to trudge around to museums and galleries looking for inspiration, not just to write about, but for my studio practice, which is in need of a reboot.

What first set me on the road to ennui was Cindy Sherman’s show at Metro Pictures. Part of my feeling of intellectual isolation comes from the fact that I’m the only person in the entire world who doesn’t think her work is the bee’s knees. To me, Sherman’s conceit is just too facile to sustain itself for long. I also remember how, just before Sherman made her film stills in the seventies, Eleanor Antin was transforming herself in photographs in ways that were more haunting, funny, varied and complex—as well as more human. Where Antin was clearly on a quest for self-knowledge, Sherman’s portraits come off as unflattering commentary on the aspirations and ways of life of others, especially in this series, which struck me as ageist, sexist, and just plain mean.
Eleanor Antin, The King, 1972 (image from the Web)

Eleanor Antin, The Angel of Mercy (Florence Nightingale), Myself-1854, 1977 (Image from the Web)

After that it was the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, a museum I want desperately to like, whose new building (and admission fee—$12 per person plus $11 or more for parking) sets off all kinds of expectations that, so far, have not been met by what’s inside. This time the main show was Tara Donovan, who makes installations with mass-produced disposable objects, such as plastic cups and toothpicks. I can see how the idea might be interesting (“Ooh, Honey, did you realize this is made of plastic straws?”) to someone who hasn’t taught a gazillion graduate students. In my experience, at least one third of the graduate population has latched onto similar ideas as a way of getting out of actually making something without having to spend much money or travel farther than the nearest convenience store (I wish I had a dollar for every piece of art I’ve seen made of black plastic garbage bags). Then there’s the text that suggests that because Donovan has figured out a way to make a cube out of metal sewing pins, she’s part of a lineage that includes Donald Judd—with whom she has about as much in common as Santa Claus.

Which brings me to one of my favorite subjects: wall text (some of my readers may already be aware of my promise to abolish it, along with artist statements, when I’m king). I’m clueless as to why such a small museum would give over any space to a permanent collection, but if they do, they’d better make sure it stands up to multiple viewings. This one threatens to become a Saatchi-esque time capsule, with texts that read like exercises one might be required to write in curator school. This, for instance, next to a painting that appears equally academically-driven:

Untitled continues Lucy McKenzie's exploration of latent meanings in design styles, expanding a detail from an advertising image she found on a condom vending machine of two robots amorously engaged. The scene is rendered in a Mondrian-esque style using geometric blocks and is rendered in faux marble to make the "ugly" scene appear more elegant. The work also includes two figures in shadow, as if in conversation while looking at the painting.

And back in New York, at the New Museum, while Elizabeth Peyton's paintings were charming, did they justify this curator's paean?

Where her earliest portraits can be compared to those of Dutch masters or Spanish painters in their quietude and focus on the aspect of a single subject in the center of the picture plane, beginning in the 2000s, Peyton's maturity as a painter is expressed in the increasing complexity of her compositions. In the history of portraiture, these later works can be more closely compared to figure compositions by Henri Matisse or Eduard Vuillard, both of whom integrated their human subjects with their static ones in dense surfaces of pattern and brilliant color.

But what finished me off was the Marlene Dumas painting exhibition at MoMA (through February 16th). As Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker:

She has been favored by a fashion for sensationalized moral seriousness which explains the recent prestige of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud and of younger masters of sardonic melancholy, including Luc Tuymans of Antwerp, and Neo Rauch of Leipzig. Is this taste a self-flagellating compunction of the spendthrift rich? Surely no one would paint pictures as aggressively uningratiating as those of Dumas unless she meant them.
Well, I don't care whether she means it or not, the "artist's intention" holds little interest for me, only the result--which here, despite Schjeldahl's rhapsody over Dumas's brushwork, is heavy-handed and depressing. I’m not opposed to so-called “serious” subject matter, but a little nuance would be nice. Interestingly, in that same New Yorker, David Denby reviews the film “Revolutionary Road,” and while finding it “honorably and brutally unnerving,” suggests that it “may suffer…from the illusion that pain and art are the same thing.” He could have been writing about Dumas.
After that I was sure I never wanted to see any more art ever again.
Later I began to think that my reaction had to do with the sense that the art I was seeing was looking old, because--in case you haven’t noticed--we’re in the midst of a great cultural shift. And unlike generations in the past who experienced the massive change that came with the invention of the printing press or the rise of the Industrial Revolution, we know it, can feel and see it. It’s fast, so fast that when I was working with the art director on TIME’s Person of the Year, he noted that if we had commissioned a portrait of Obama in October, it wouldn’t be the one we’d want to run in December. And the Tom Friedman piece of December 23rd that I wanted to link to when I started writing this, Time to Re-Boot America now feels as if it was penned a year ago rather than just a month or so.
It’s a time of purging, of getting rid of what doesn’t work and replacing it with…well we don’t know. But it’s inevitable that art will change with it, old systems will be replaced with new ones, and that which doesn’t deliver, will fail.
And while I don't have a crystal ball, I'll make some predictions just because this is my blog and I can. I believe that in the future (which, the way things are going, could be next week) we’re going to be less fascinated with human dysfunction (a la Dumas and Sherman) and seek more art that inspires us, has substance, puts us in awe of human capability. I hope that we’ll also figure out another way of experiencing art that doesn’t involve rectangular rooms, white walls, and track lighting. I want art to engage and involve, be more than this static thing that we look at while standing on our feet (although I dislike so-called “interactive art" even more), but has to do with its context and, like music, is woven into the fabric of our lives. I believe the era of the individual genius is waning, and instead collaborative ventures (between individuals as well as disciplines) will come to the forefront. That means chucking the our current system of teaching visual art, which has hardly changed for centuries (okay, so we teach “media arts” now, it’s still a separate department) and move toward one that’s integrated with science, mathematics, agriculture, history, and technology, as well as the other arts.
I also believe people will always be fascinated with painting.
With these thoughts in mind, I went to Chelsea yet again, and this time saw two exhibitions that looked not only far from tired, but fresh and new. The irony is that one was done by an 80-year-old, Robert Irwin, and the other by Fred Sandback who, were he still alive, would be in his mid-sixties. Both installations are serene, sure, engaging and beautiful. Oh, did I mention beauty? Well I believe in beauty, and think it’s a human need, as important as fresh air and water. It's definitely due for a comeback.
Installation view of Robert Irwin's Red Drawing White Drawing Black Painting, on view at PaceWildenstein, 545 West 22nd Street, NYC through February 28, 2009. Photo by G.R. Christmas/Courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York.


Installation view, Fred Sandback at David Zwirner, January-February 14, 2009. Photograph by Cathy Carver, Courtesy Zwirner & Worth.

These images , however, hardly convey the experience of being there, which is why Irwin, in the early days, refused to have his work photographed.
And Shepard Fairey is, for sure, of his/our time. Creator of the now iconic image of Obama that became so important to the campaign—as symbolic of our decade as Robert Indiana's Love was to the 60’s—the attention given him now is well-deserved. I knew about Fairey’s work through my son, Matt, and last year suggested to TIME that they commission him to do a portrait of the 2007 Person of the Year, Vladimir Putin, which ran on the inside of the magazine:

Vladimir Putin by Shepard Fairey for TIME, 2007

This year TIME invited Fairey to do another image of Obama (see video) for the cover, and it's every bit as strong as the first--and updated, more "now" than last year's poster. What I especially like about Fairey’s new fame--in this time of fallout from extreme greed--is that it stems from an image he gave away (which is why I think the current copyright flap won't hold water--as a picture-researcher friend, put it: "Since the poster/image took on a life of it's own, was 'used' by so many people without even Fairey's permission... how could one begin to determine a use fee?").

Barack Obama by Shepard Fairey for TIME, 2008

And now the ICA in Boston (so critized above) is on its way to redeeming itself in my eyes by being smart enough to mount the first museum survey of Fairey's work, which opens tomorrow and runs through August 16th.

Technical difficulties

Well I worked hours and hours on my newest entry, and it simply WILL NOT POST for reasons only Google Blogger knows. Please be patient....

Sno daze

My trainer just called to say that the gym is closed due to weather conditions. Bummer! I was looking forward to my workout. I suppose the reason has something to do with safety, but it would be even safer if we all just stayed home all the time. Here’s what our president (whom Scott, who can be depended upon to brighten a winter day, calls Snowbama, or the Obamnable Snowman), has to say about snow days:



I’m from Chicago too, where there was only one snow day the entire time I was in school—and never having heard of such a thing, my high school car pool and I went anyway. I’m with the Icelanders, whose leading purveyor of technical sportswear has employed the slogan, “There’s no bad weather, only the wrong gear.”

Full disclosure

I thought you'd want to know that I'm one of (so far) 53,219 registered Facebook fans of Aretha Franklin's Inauguration Day hat. Reprise here.

Snow sculpture, Kinderhook, NY

Last night, driving home from dinner, was I especially tired? It seemed like a mirage, these life-size, fanciful animals made of snow lined up on the lawn of a big Victorian house on the main street of this picturesque town. I got out and saw that, at 10:15 p.m., their creator, who told me he's been spending 2-3 hours a day on them, was hard at work repairing his menagerie; the day's warm weather had left them a little worse for wear. On Inauguration Day he had them decorated with flags and holding Obama/Biden signs. More pictures and info here and here. And about Kinderhook here, along with the story that the expression "O.K." may have been derived from "Old Kinderhook."

The day we thought would never come

Happy Inauguration Day!

Daft Punk vs. Adam Freeland "Aer Obama"

Philip Glass

In an attempt to avoid worrying about frozen pipes, I went to two Philip Glass events at Mass MoCA this week and it did the trick. Well the second night did, anyway. The first featured a film by Scott Hicks, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts which, at nearly two hours of sheer tedium, offered more than enough time not only to worry, but do my eye exercises. I left thinking that Philip Glass has to be one of the most boring people on earth, one of those artists—it does happen—whose personality gets so soaked up by their work that there’s nothing left over. I’d seen a number of Glass performances, including a choral piece at MoMA in 1976, not long after I moved to New York, which left me with the feeling that anything was possible in art. There was the positively exultant 1984 revival of Einstein on the Beach, and then a magical New Year’s Eve when I appeared with Butch Morris’s “Chorus of Poets” at the Public Theater, on the same bill as Glass, and found myself at midnight leaning on the grand piano listening to him play. He also once came to my loft for a photo shoot I’d arranged but we hardly interacted as he was distracted, pacing, on the phone almost the whole time. I remembered thinking that he was much too Type A for a Buddhist, while his friend, Allen Ginsberg, who came with him, was just the opposite, completely chill.

[Actually, where Glass seemed to take no notice of his surroundings, Ginsberg’s interest was unnerving as he went around my kitchen and living area examining absolutely everything—I was glad I cleaned up before he came—picking up each object, turning it over, asking “What’s this? Where’d you get it? What do you do with it?” And, after a while, “Are these your paintings?”
“Yes.”
“Weird.”
When I told him I was a Nuyorican poet (meaning I performed regularly at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe) Ginsberg said, sweetly, “Me too.”]

In the film about Glass, amidst a few snippets of music, we see shots of the composer making pizza, playing with his small children, practicing T’ai Chi with his teacher (who was a fellow student in the classes I took for many years with Master Ham King Koo) while various friends, family members, and colleagues weigh in with remembrances. Having just returned from my first experience with film editing, I’m hyper aware of what’s essential and what isn’t—such as the shot of his houseguest taking out the garbage, or the part where his wife reveals her Internet password, a bit that’s kinda cute but tells us nothing.

The second evening featured Glass in person, in an interview with a film critic who’d chosen a number of cuts from films for which Glass had written the score, asking him to comment on each one. And guess what? Glass was totally interesting, probably because he was talking about making music, which Hicks, when he brings it up at all, treats it as a product rather than a process (never touching on the things I wanted to know, such as, what was the first piece Glass composed? Did his early study of mathematics have an effect on the kind of music he makes? When he works, does he noodle around on the piano or does he hear it in his head first? What does he learn from hearing his work performed by others? What did he get from his classical studies, from the work of John Cage, Ravi Shankar?). But here, listening to Glass discuss his concepts for each film we got an idea of how his mind works, his fascination with the art of filmmaking, how he wants the score to be an integral part of the process rather than something tacked on in post-production. For Godfrey Reggio’s Powaqqatsi (1988), Glass went with the director to Brazil to document fortune seekers mining for gold, the cinematographers listened to his music as they shot the footage, and the childlike nature of the of the very young gold-diggers Glass met inspired him to later add a children’s choir to the score…all of which is so much more interesting than pizza (my impression of him as a phonoholic stands, however, because at one point onstage he did actually check his cell and may even have been texting).



To round out the evening Glass played several pieces—his encore was from the early (1970) Music with Changing Parts, one of my favorites—and as we drove home, while I hadn’t completely forgotten about my frozen pipes, I didn't care so much.

For a documentary that successfully delves into the heart and soul of a musician, do your best to catch Steven Sebring’s Patti Smith: Dream of Life (schedule)--also available on NetFlix:

Back from Obamaland

I really will finish my post about how bored I am with art, but right now I'm too bored to even think about it. What I am excited about is that there are only 9 days left of the Bush regime--hooray! It was fun to be in the capitol pre-inauguration, and these storefronts on M Street in Georgetown reflect the enthusiasm with which all of Washington is greeting our new president:

Shopping in D.C....

...where "Whole" Foods just happens to be out of lentils (all lentils, red, green and brown) and where, when I was trying on super high-tech athletic shoes, one of the salesman's selling points was that he'd sold the very same shoes not to some major sports figure, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

I'm here with Erica and Terry, who's come over from England, to work on the editing of our film about Olafur and Einar's collaboration, and there's a part where Olafur talks about the lack of experimentation in our culture and Einar says that the human race needs dynamics, that anything that isn't dynamic is going turn into an institution and kill itself.

Now those are pretty general statements, but then I walk out onto M Street in Georgetown, which used to be lovely and historic but is now like a linear mall of chain shops--Tommy Hilfiger, Banana Republic,The Body Shop, Benetton, Steve Madden, a mini H & M, etc.--that could be anywhere. There are no local styles; all across the country people are wearing various configurations of clothing drawn from the same pool, at least until they get older and simply narrow it down to Donna Karan and Eileen Fisher. Experimentation? Hardly. And then I think that the art world is the same, that the exhibitions at nearly every museum of contemporary art in the world are configurations of art drawn from a pool of the same 50-100 artists. It's so BORING! But more on that when I get back.

Holiday intermission

Roberto's windows, December 2008

I’ve been writing an end-of-the-year manifesto, which I’ll finish and post as soon as I get “Jingle Bell Rock” out of my head, the result of an untimely visit to Radio Shack. It’s worse than Billy Joel. I’ve finally realized that I was born with a condition, shared by untold others, where I absorbed—and remember indelibly—the words and music to all of the songs to which I was exposed, up to and during adolescence. This is a serious deficit for someone born pre-Beatles and positively treacherous around Christmastime (yes, Mike, I really do know what comes after “ten lords a-leaping,” although I’m not proud of it). Some of my most intimate friends aren’t aware that I, who loathe musical theater, could, if pressed or paid enough, sing all of Oklahoma including the more obscure ditties such as The Farmer and the Cowman can be Friends. This should date me, except when I look on YouTube, I discover that, even in this age of Twilight and Kanye West, high school music teachers are STILL making bewildered-looking students perform this thing. C’mon, guys, get over it! You don’t want to be responsible for any part of the population in 2050 (when everyone really will be wearing silver Lycra tights to work as in Logan’s Run) going around with “The Farmer and the Cowman” in their heads. You don’t!

Nixon in Iceland

This morning at breakfast, with my houseguests Einar and Manuela, the conversation turned to elections, Nixon, and then Nixon‘s summit meeting with Pompidou in Reykjavik in 1973. At the time Einar and other young Icelandic architects were concerned that the city’s early timber houses were being destroyed in that era’s international craze for “urban renewal,” the excuse being that the buildings were derelict. To demonstrate that their shabbiness was only superficial, Einar and 60 to 80 friends went to work on a row of houses scheduled for demolition, painting facades and replacing windows. It just so happened that soon after, Nixon came to Reykjavik for the summit, and wanted to take a stroll around the city. As they walked down this street of newly pristine houses Nixon said to his host, “I see that you take good care of your traditional architecture here in Iceland”—and after that, of course, there could be no talk of demolishing them. The buildings stand to this day.

When Buckminster Fuller visited Reykjavik two years later, Einar told him this story. “I’m happy to know this,” Bucky said, “because I like to think that everyone has some good in them and I’ve never heard anything positive about Nixon.”

Einar writes about this, his first visit with Fuller, in his upcoming book about his 40-year quest to find what he has named the “Fang,” which is, in geometric terms “a space-filler for five-fold symmetry space.” Below, Einar’s geometry at work in one of Olafur Eliasson’s installations, Your spiral view (2002), which I photographed at the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg, Germany, in 2004, and is now part of the Beyeler Foundation collection.