Summer reflections on Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp, Rotoreliefs (1935), Alan Koppol Gallery, Chicago.

Do leave comments, even if it’s just to say hi, because even though I can see the stats, I often forget that there are real people out there. I’ve been in that state of forgetfulness since coming back from Europe, and then last night went to Brenda Goodman’s opening at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY, where I ran into a bunch of people I hadn’t met before who were totally up-to-date on my peregrinations. It’s a funny feeling, but nice.

Also the heat has taken me over, my big obsession being whether or not I should get air conditioning (which I haven’t needed before) for the studio—a major expense. By the time I make up my mind, we’ll be into another Ice Age.

So since I’m not generating original ideas, I’ll put forth those of another—Marcel Duchamp, with whom I seem to agree about everything. Calvin Tomkins’s biography titled, not surprisingly, Duchamp: A Biography, is without a doubt the best biography of an artist I’ve read (don’t get slowed down by the first chapter but save it for the end, when it’s more meaningful). I got the book out to lend to a friend—perfect summer reading—and then kept it to peruse the phrases I highlighted back in 1996.

Duchamp, who used to say that the artist never really knew what he was doing or why, declined to offer any such explanations for The Large Glass. One of his pet theories was that the artist performed only one part of the creative process and it was up to the viewer to complete that process by interpreting the work and assessing its permanent value. (p.11)

“I do not believe that art should have anything in common with definitive theories that are apart from it. That is too much like propaganda.” (p. 152)

Works of art could not be understood by the intellect, [Duchamp] maintained, nor could their effect be conveyed in words. The only valid approach to them was through an emotion that had “some analogy with religious faith or sexual attraction—an esthetic echo. This echo, however, was heard and appreciated by very few people. It could not be learned—either you had it or you did not—and it had nothing whatsoever to do with taste, which was merely a parroting of established opinion. “Taste gives a sensuous feeling, not an esthetic emotion,” Duchamp said, “Taste presupposed a domineering onlooker who dictates what he likes and dislikes, and translates it into beautiful and ugly, whereas “the ‘victim’ of an esthetic echo is comparable to that of a man in love or a believer…when touched by esthetic revelation, the same man in an almost ecstatic mood, becomes receptive and humble.”

I don’t think you would've caught Marcel writing an artist’s statement.

I Am Love

Tilda Swinton in "I Am Love"

I’m still in the afterglow of Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love,” which I saw the other night. Even though I linked to it, don’t watch the trailer, which is not only a spoiler, but offers a series of staccato bytes from a piece that unfolds its subtle surprises with a tempo of its own. Just be sure see it while it’s still on the big screen, because it’s a film to sink into, be totally immersed, all senses stimulated. Especially in these bombastic times, the level of subtlety and restraint is extraordinary. Enhanced by oblique cinematography and editing, the narrative-free story is told with the slightest of clues, its intensity sustained because we’re shown only the events that directly contribute—such as the engagement party but not the wedding, nor the patriarch’s funeral—after handing over his assets, we know he must surely have died because he’s not in the final scenes. My friend, Petria, who I saw it with, said, “He (Guadagnino) trusts us to fill in the blanks” and later I found an interview with Tilda Swinton who talked about “giving the viewer ownership.”

While critical opinion ranged from “artistic triumph” to “artsy mishmosh”, it’s surprising that many critics would choose to call this “melodrama,” which is characterized by “exaggerated emotions, stereotypical characters, and interpersonal conflicts.” Here the characters are under, rather than over-acted, and hardly stereotypical—the cuckolded husband isn’t even a meanie--and the much of the drama occurs around a serving of soup.

‘I Am Love” was developed by Guadagnino and Swinton over a period of nearly a decade (Swinton interview), and which resulted in an attention to detail that could not have been hurried. The aggressively modern, symmetrically rhythmic score, a composite of existing pieces by contemporary composer John Adams, is nearly another character in the film (I wrote this before finding a video interview with Guadagnino about his process where he says that very thing), and played almost perversely against mood—urgent and insistent during languid scenes, tantalizing lighter during those more emotionally charged. (Guadagnino has said that he doesn’t like being “told by the music what to feel.”)  And the subtle inclusion of Elliot Smith’s “Pretty (Ugly Before),” by an artist who, before his tragic death, never found his place in this world, is more than indie music dropped in for its cool factor, but the perfect allusion to the daughter’s inner turmoil over her secret life, still playing on her iPod (i.e. in her head) as she greets her family.

My only complaint is that the ending is a little too abrupt and inconclusive, reminding me of Fassbinder’s “The Marriage of Maria Braun,” where it seemed the director didn’t know what to do with his protagonist, so he just blew her up.

Two other characters in the film: the house and the food. The house is Villa Necchi Campiglio, and can be found on casemuseo.it, a website of historic house museums. The food in the film was real so that the reactions to it would be real, and prepared by Milan chef Carlo Cracco, who runs the Michelin two-star restaurant Cracco.  Both might justify a trip to Milan.

Cracco's soup in "I Am Love"

 

Interim

I’m back. Sort of. Some moving parts may still be hovering over the Atlantic. Usually blog posts just come bubbling out of me, but in this heat nothing is bubbling; the brain cells are stuck. Every day the forecast calls for precipitation, but does it ever happen? My own forms of the rain dance, so efficacious in the past—refusing to carry an umbrella, going out with all the windows and skylights open, leaving garden tools out overnight—have not yet gotten the attention of the Gods, who are clearly Spanish and still off celebrating the World Cup. My resolution for today is to find the connector cable for my camera and download my photos…but in the meantime I’ll leave you with this exquisite piece of music by the 23-year-old Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds (yes, one third of all male Icelanders are named Olafur, including their President), whose new album ...and they have escaped the weight of darkness got me through yesterday.

Summer hiatus

The Housatonic River from my bike ride this morning.

What a day to be leaving! Tonight I'm off to England and Berlin, which promise to be unseasonably chilly--but bright. Everyone talks about how dark England is, but that's in the winter. Right now, nearing the solstice, the sun in England rises at 3:40 a.m. and goes down after 10:00 p.m. As usual, I may or may not post. Back after the 4th.

Louise Bourgeois

Photo: Christian Coigny for Vitra, circa 1995

Today the New York Times published an article claiming that happiness comes with age. Researchers, apparently, are confounded as to why this might be, but anyone who is older than they were yesterday knows that it’s because with experience we learn to appreciate the present, and that nursing old wounds—or new ones—doesn’t serve us. (What they failed to consider, however, is that those who are content may live longer.)

Interesting that this article should be published on the same day as the obituary of someone for whom this was famously not true: Louise Bourgeois who, in her long lifetime, came to her art through replaying the traumas of her early life, and for whom feelings of helplessness and abandonment were just as vivid in her 80s as in childhood. Maybe more so, for all we know.

I first met Bourgeois in the mid-1990s, when I was producing celebrity ads (some of the first ever), a print campaign that ran only in Europe, for the high-end furniture company, Vitra. The celebs ran to the intellectual, and part of my job was to get the famous people to sit in the famous chairs—Martin Scorsese in an Eames chair, Jean Baudrillard (my biggest coup—Baudrillard in an ad!) in a Citterio chair. When we came to her home to photograph Bourgeois in a chair designed by Philippe Starck, she could not have been more gracious, and while the photographer, Christian Coigny, was setting up, she inquired about my painting and introduced me to the writing of Edward T. Hall, whose books came to have an enormous influence on my thinking.

Emboldened by this warm visit, I called to ask if I could interview her for a story in Art & Antiques, and Bourgeois agreed. However this time, she was totally prickly—trying, while I sat with my tape recorder running, every possible gambit to get rid of me (I was later to learn just how much she hated interviews). Finally she said, “I know how we should do this. There’s a book about me that’s all quotes. Go get that book, make a list of the quotes that interest you, come back and we’ll work from there.”

“Great,” I said, pulling the list from my backpack, because that was precisely how I’d prepared, “Shall we begin?”

I never saw Bourgeois nonplussed again, but from that moment we were friends and she was completely cooperative—in fact I could say we co-wrote the article, one of my favorites ever. She gave me complete freedom to shape it, but made many suggestions, all of which were on target, and enthusiastically participated in honing the smallest details.

After that we spent time together and I helped her with a couple of projects, but had to pull away when my time began to look like more hers than mine. She taught me a lot, however, much of it about how to stand up for myself as a female artist. Around that time I also wrote an article for Art & Antiques about my artist great-grandmother, and when I called to check what they’d written in the blurb about me for the contributor’s page, was horrified to find that it read, “Diehl has recently received a grant to do some painting of her own. Will it be in the style of her great-grandmother?” The twenty-something assistant who’d written it didn’t grasp the problem, but pulled it when I told her they couldn’t run the article if it stood (there was no blurb for me in that issue).

That evening I attended the premiere of a film about Bourgeois (which began with her running away from the filmmaker and hiding) and at dinner told her my story. When I said that she’d taught me to have that kind of courage, Bourgeois started pounding the table with her fist saying, “It’s not about promotion—it’s about defending our art! We must defend our art!”

Thank you, Louise.

I remember George Segal chuckling at his well-meaning relatives' inquiries about when he was going to stop making sculpture and retire. As my son Adam, who was about 10 at the time, noted, "Many people retire so they can make art." Here’s Steve Jobs, when asked if the introduction of the iPad might be a “high, fitting end” to his career:

“I don’t think of my life as a career. I do stuff, I respond to stuff. That’s not a career—it’s a life.”

Complete interview, Time Magazine, April 12, 2010.

Your Little Room

well you’re in your little room
and you’re working on something good
but if it’s really good
you’re gonna need a bigger room
and when you’re in your bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think about how you got started
sitting in your little room

--The White Stripes

Last night I watched “The White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights  (2009), a video of The White Stripes’s tour of Canada in 2007, where this two-person band that can easily fill stadiums, travelled to far-flung towns and villages, playing their punky bluesy, countrified rock in free daytime shows at each location with as short notice as possible. Similar to Sigur Ros’s tour of Iceland, which can be seen in their gorgeous video “Heima,” Jack and Meg White played venues as diverse as a rec center, a pool hall, a small boat, and a flour mill, culminating their tour with their 10th anniversary show in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia—where they interfaced with local musicians, said to be distant relatives, playing regional music. The effect is surprisingly heart-warming, with attitude-free Jack White coming off as a total sweetie-pie.

White is also someone who’s thought a lot about the nature of creativity. His favorite quote about the band describes them as “simultaneously the most fake band in the world and the most real band in the world,” which made me think about how it’s the deft mixture of artifice and reality that makes for great art. Err too much on one side or the other and the magic is lost.

And White’s soliloquy on creativity was just the pep talk I needed before going into the studio:

It used to be, before I ever was on stage, there was the excitement of what it would be like to play onstage, or if I could just record… what would that be like? I don’t have inspirations like that anymore. Ten years later we’re just working in the same box….one part of my brain says I’m tired of trying to come up with things in this box, but I force myself because I know something good can come out of it if I really work inside of it

Inspiration and work ethic, they ride right next to each other. When I was an upholsterer… sometimes you’re not inspired to reupholster an old chair, sometimes its just work, but you do it because you’re supposed to and in the end you look at it and think “it’s pretty good” and you move on. That’s it. Not every day of your life are you going to wake up, the clouds are going to part, the rays from heaven are going come down and you’re going to write a song…sometimes you just have to force yourself to work, and maybe something good will come out of it. Whether we like it or not we write some songs and record them….book only 4 or 5 days in a studio and force yourself to record an album in that time…deadlines and things make you creative. But opportunity and telling yourself, oh, you’ve got all the time in the world, all the money in the world, you’ve got all the colors in the palette you want, anything you want— that just kills creativity. I’m using the same guitars onstage I used 10 years ago, and I like to do things to make it really hard for myself. For example, I don’t have picks all taped to my microphone stand. If I drop a pick, to get another I have to go all the way to the back of the stage. I place the organ just far enough away that I have to leap to get to it to play different parts of the song…. so I have to work harder to get somewhere. And there are hundreds of things like that…like those guitars I use that don’t stay in tune very well; they’re not conducive, not what regular bands go out and play. So I’m constantly fighting all these tiny little things because they build tension. There’s no set list when we play—that’s the biggest one—each show has its own life....when you go out and everything’s pre-planned and the table’s all set, nice and perfect, nothing’s going to happen; you’re going to go out and do this boring arena set….
All those things have always been a big component of The White Stripes: the constrictions…only having red, white and black colors on the art work and presentations, [sticking to] just guitar, drums and vocals, storytelling, melody and rhythm—these force us to create.

Random notes & images

I’m back. Part of the delay was a computer virus that mimicked my security program, even put an icon on my toolbar, and when I didn’t fall for their bogus upgrade, started offering me porn. Other than that I’ve been travelling for the last two months to the point that a week or so ago my friend, Scott, left a message on my voice mail saying he didn’t know where I was anymore. That made two of us. And since I seem to have no thoughts or opinions at the moment (other than about my ex-handyman’s insane bill for priming the back porch) I’ll post some images from my peregrinations and hope my brain returns to normal soon.

This isn’t De Chirico, but Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, another culture where art isn’t a separate intellectual activity for the privileged, but is as pervasive and natural as the sun.


Then revisiting one of my favorite places, the old synagogue that Camille Pissarro’s family belonged to, off the beaten tourist track in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, V.I. Who knew that this famous French Impressionist was Jewish and from the Virgin Islands? I found out when I saw an exhibition of his work in St. Thomas some years ago, and reviewed it when it went to the Jewish Museum in New York. The synagogue is tiny and opulent, a rich interplay of colors and textures—mahogany, brass, blue velvet cushions—and a white sand floor, in memory, I was told, of illicit congregations in medieval Europe who put sand down to muffle the sound of their prayers.

In contrast, the geometry of Philadelphia’s new civic center in construction, across from the ornate Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which my great-grandmother attended, and no doubt looks exactly as it did when she was there.

Then Stanford, which has to be the most beautiful university campus in the world. Yale and Harvard should weep. This is Palm Drive, three blocks of majestic trees leading up to the campus. One of the students told me that a replacement tree arrived like an enormous rocket on a flatbed truck and sat for awhile on its side near the studios. Cost (I was told): $80,000.

The Stanford graduate fine art program has only nine students, who are fully funded, and working in the most well-appointed and vast studios I’ve ever seen. For one brief moment, degree-less as I am, I was tempted to apply. This was lunch:

And palm fronds on the ground around the studios:

Finally, the weekend before last I flew back to JFK late Friday night and early Saturday made it up to Central Park West for an all-day White Tantric Yoga workshop, held once a year in New York, which is not the sort of thing I usually share, but the photo was too beautiful to resist:

This last weekend was the Anne Truitt opening at Matthew Marks, the guests intermingling with the sculptures:

For the next few weeks I intend to hole up in the Berkshires, finish off one essay, write another, and get up to speed in the studio. Oh, and work in the garden and finish the taxes I got an extension for. It never ends.

Eruption

All images: Guðmundur Oddur Magnússon, 2010.

Thanks to reader, Sid Garrison, for linking me with Guðmundur Oddur Magnússon and these incredible photos. Goddur, as he is called, is a professor at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, as is my former SVA grad student, Hulda Stefánsdóttir. Hulda and Sigur Ros were responsible for my original interest in Iceland, and I’m grateful to Olafur Eliasson and Art in America for getting me there for my first visit in 2004.


Also Hulda sent me this link to a live feed from the volcano.

More about juries and statements

The garden at the Writer’s Villa, Los Angeles

I can’t believe I’m sitting here in the SoCal sun, listening to the trickle of water in the fountain, and still thinking about critiques and artists’ statements. But that's the lot of one who checks her email assiduously. So here is a comment from CAP regarding my last post: "Art Jury, but not really":

Like “Concerned,” I'm puzzled why the panel disparages artists' statements, and then picks out one of which they approve.

Why not just address the work/slide?

Fair enough, the artist's intentions, are often not reflected in the work, may be poorly articulated in any case. But if I liked the art, this would not put me off. Their interpretation is simply not mine.

All feedback on work is useful of course, and if it comes from recognized figures in the art world, it at least helps the artist get some idea of the terrain. But my experience has been that occasional opinions tend to vary so widely it's hard to put much credence in any single remark.

Why not just address the work? Because the statements were submitted as part of the package, and we were there to evaluate the presentations. I’m not against artists’ statements per se, but I believe that everything anyone puts out into the world as a professional should be of a certain standard, or it doesn’t serve them. Duh! I shouldn’t even have to say that. Maybe if CAP liked the art, a stupid artists’ statement wouldn’t put him off, but it certainly puts that artist at a disadvantage against someone whose art is just as impressive and has an intelligent presentation. Further, few will be surprised to learn that being a critic is a labor of love. I write because of what I learn from the time I wouldn’t otherwise spend with certain work, and in a way I’m investing in that artist’s career—as I am when I’m on a panel and recommending someone for the honor that will advance it. Furthermore, whatever it is, my name is on it—I can’t afford to take a chance on someone who could turn out to be a dud.

Also it may seem to those who’ve had varying critiques in the studio but who haven't spent time on panels, that opinions in these situations could be widely disparate. The surprise (although not if you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink) is that they're not. Regardless of the number of jurists and entries, the first 70-80% are eliminated with complete consensus. It’s only when you get down to judging the finalists that there’s any discussion whatsoever. In this case I was overruled by my co-panelists and let stand, as one of the three “winners,” one artist whose work I found completely trite. But that’s not usually the case.

Art Jury, but not really

This is an idea that all art schools should adopt: a mock jury, so that students can see what happens when experts are alone with images of their work, find out what they really think in an impersonal, non-confrontational way.

Tuesday I participated in the Second Annual Fourth Wall Panel Review as part of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ (PAFA) graduate program. The idea was to invite an artist (James Hyde), a curator (Robert Cozzolino), and a critic (I was wearing my critic hat) to publicly view and discuss the anonymous digital images and written statements of nearly thirty MFA thesis students in the program (a lily-livered few declined to participate) and narrow it down to the three we found most competitive for the kinds of professional opportunities—grants, residencies, exhibitions, teaching positions, etc.—that are determined in this way. It provided the students, attendees from other area institutions, and the general public, with fly-on-the-wall insight into this otherwise secret process.

For three hours we sat with our backs to the audience facing the screen on which the images were projected. The panel differed from others I’ve been on in that there were fewer artists (30 as opposed to several hundred) with more slides each (10), and instead of simply dismissing those we weren’t interested in, we discussed our reasons for doing so. We also took the artist’s statements into account where normally, at least the panels I’ve been on, if they’re considered at all, it’s only to make distinctions at the very end.

Shall we digress onto the subject of artists’ statements? Oh, why not. So I ask: why is it that every time I’m in a situation like this, my colleagues and I unanimously agree that the concept of artists’ statements is ridiculous, yet this relatively new invention persists in being seen as an essential aspect of the artist’s promotional package? Further, statements often work against the artist. As the director of a not-for-profit gallery once told me, “Often we’ll find an artist we like and then read the statement and say ‘no way.’”

The PAFA statements were no exception, containing the usual damning phrases: “My work is about…” “I want to make…” “I am trying to….” By allowing such statements to pass, art schools give the impression that once students are out in the world, we’re going to be interested in them. No one has told them that we’re not interested in the slightest; we don’t care what they think, feel, or want to do. We see tons of stuff, all day, every day, and it’s their job to stand out from the crowd, to make us take notice whether we want to or not. I try to imagine a similar situation in another, more rigorous field—such as a filmmaker attempting to get backing by writing: “I want to make a film about….. Ever since I was a small child I’ve been fascinated by …...”

Fortunately, so we didn’t come off as total curmudgeons, there was one statement that not only piqued our interest, but shed light on the artist’s obliquely rendered subject matter:

My flight is at 10:00 in the morning, which is good because I can wake up at 6:00, catch the trolley by 6:45, then catch the train to the airport, and hopefully be there by 8:30. If the flight were earlier then I’d have to find a friend to drive me because public transit doesn’t start until 5 and it takes about 2 or 3 hours to get there. I have to remember to bring my phone charger. When I wake up I have to put it in my bag. I have to make sure everything I need can fit into a carry on bag, I can’t afford to check it and they ALWAYS lose my bag. A friend of mine checked his bag and they lost it for months, he had to call them everyday about it until they paid him some money. I have to make sure the machines can see everything that is in my bag and on me. I can’t have too many clothes. One pair of pants only. I don’t have to pack my jacket I can wear it even though its too warm. I can’t have too much change or metal stuff in my pocket because it will take too long to empty my pockets before I go through the metal detectors. I seem to always think I have to take my money out of my pockets. I haven’t shaved in a while I wonder if they’ll search me, I hope I don’t miss my flight. I have to make sure I fill my water bottle up when I get there and not before. This one time they changed me to another flight that was already boarding in a different terminal, but to get there I had to go through security again, but my water bottle was full, so they made me go empty it and wait in line again. I had to run to catch the plane. I’ve never connected where it was landing before. I hope they over booked the flight. I’ll volunteer for a free round trip. (Jordan Graw)

Jordan Graw, 22nd Street Station, 2010, oil on panel, 24"x 24".

The panel was initially proposed by PAFA faculty member and curator of the Arcadia University Art Gallery, Richard Torchia, who told me that the students, to their credit, forwent having a catalog in order to fund this event. There were no prizes involved, just the honor of being chosen. Although we were almost, but not quite, as straightforward as we’d be in a closed panel, the students took it well, and afterward we all went out for drinks.

Marathon Monks

From the Web: Copyright may apply


In the context of Marina Abramović (see posts below), my friend Alexandra sent me this link to a 20-minute documentary about the Marathon Monks of Japan--or you can read about them here.

Why do people take on such disciplines? Why does Abramović? Alexandra notes that regardless of the methods used to achieve a certain level of consciousness, everyone who does it says the same thing—that it’s a state of mind beyond differentiation, beyond the self, where it’s clear that we are all one.

So even though the Marathon Monks are celebrities in their country, hopefully by the time they get there, they’re beyond caring.

I’m off to New York, Philadelphia, and California (LA and Stanford) with the Berkshires interspersed, until the end of the month. I cannot predict blogability, will just have to see.

Note: All this time I've been curious about Abramović's "re-performers," and today this in the Times where, because it's the news media, the emphasis is on the negative (improper touching) and only briefly discusses what the performers are getting out of the experience, much apparently positive.

Giacometti, Kentridge and the Biennial

Alberto Giacometti, Full Figure III (1960), Museum of Modern Art

I have to admit I never really got Giacometti—until last Friday, when I was again at MoMA on what must have been the museum’s busiest day ever. It was a comparative study in human presence: milling crowds, silent nude stand-ins in Marina Abramović’s “re-performances” and, of course, Abramović herself. Her aura, which seems to grow more powerful with each day, filled the Atrium as she sat looking into the eyes of yet another ordinary someone. Then, leaving the Sculpture Garden, my eye caught Giacometti’s female figure, which suddenly seemed almost alive, towering over the lounging sun worshippers with a regal stillness that matched Abramovic’s. For the first time I understood that just as Monet was able to make atmosphere palpable in his paintings, Giacometti’s sculptures are not of humans, but their essence—the interior person made exterior.

I also didn’t get William Kentridge—but only because I hadn’t yet seen the MoMA retrospective, having been put off by the overwhelming hype (he’s definitely the artist of the year) which is not a good excuse. I left awed, especially by the miniature theater representation. I’m still kicking myself for not seeing “The Nose” (I hated the name—have got to revise my attitude), which my smarter friends told me was an amazing theatre experience. Sometimes things are famous for a reason.



Next was the Whitney Biennial, which has to be the blandest yet. After the bustling scene at MoMA, the Whitney seemed tired, wan, past its prime (there was a time when it was the other way around). Yes, there was a desultory queue to get in—it was Good Friday after all—but the galleries themselves were hardly crowded, the visitors wandering around with a “Why am I here?” look on their faces. I am, however, pleased to report that the video has been installed in such a way that it doesn’t distract from the static pieces and, unlike previously, I can’t have fun with the publicity material: this year the descriptions of art and artists are sensible, even readable. There’s no blurb for Charles Ray, however—did he request that there not be one, or have they just not gotten around to it?

I also went to the National Academy Museum’s annual invitational exhibition, and am beginning to feel that the whole survey show concept is so last century (or maybe the one before that—this is the 185th for the NAM). Perhaps the “Biennial problem,” its loss of relevance with each permutation, has not only to do with the Whitney’s choices, but that if one is seeking a true art experience, any exhibition where the work isn’t related through some over-arching theme feels increasingly like a waste of time.

The Biennial is the subject of David Cohen’s usually perky Review Panel on April 23rd, and I’m curious to see if three interesting critics (Roberta Smith, Christian Viveros-Faune, and
Svetlana Alpers) can be interesting enough to make the subject of uninteresting art interesting.

Are we tired of Marina Abramović yet? I’m not. To the post below, Joan contributed a comment questioning (as I interpret it) the value of events that cannot be repeated. However I don’t think that need be a standard. There’s something wonderful about an event that’s fleeting, can never happen again—where you had to be there, as they say. My friend Alexandra’s example of John and Yoko’s “Bed-in” is one of the best. Certainly if Christo and Jeanne Claude’s The Gates were to be installed again, it wouldn’t have the same pizzazz. Olafur Eliasson is very aware of how the temporary nature of a work can contribute to its effectiveness. When it turned out to be such an incredible draw, the Tate Modern wanted to extend the run of The Weather Project, the artist, however, objected and it was removed on schedule. Eliasson explained his decision by saying, "The time after a show is just as interesting to me, because then it becomes an object of memory and its meanings change."

Each of Marina Abramović’s performances is an exercise that brings her to a more realized place, a stepping stone to becoming the person she is, the woman whose great personal presence dominates the Atrium at MoMA even though she’s just sitting there in silence. It is to her credit that this performance (and I believe all of her performances) cannot be successfully replicated; she embodies her work.

Nowhere was this more clear than when an artist sent me a picture of herself, dressed as Abramović and sitting across from her, which she apparently did for an entire day, calling it an “intervention.” Next to Abramović, the copy-cat artist looks like a rag doll [don’t let me go off too much, but that endeavor smacked of the over-indulgence of art school, where “commenting” on art is often allowed to serve as art, no doubt because doing something original is just too hard]. In the same way, actors in bio-pics, no matter how accomplished, are rarely able to convey fully the power of the personalities they are portraying.

I’m curious to know what others’ experience is with the Abramović exhibition. Do you think “re-preformance” works?

Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2004, Tate Modern, London

To re-perform or not to re-perform? More about Marina.

While I was bobbing about in the Caribbean last week, I didn’t think even once about Marina Abramović. But now that I’m back, the show at MoMA is on my mind again, mainly because it’s unforgettable. I feel only admiration and awe for this woman who was sitting in that chair when I left, remained there while I was away doing new things, meeting new people, and is still stationed there in yogic-like silence. Her performance is a profound experience that should not be missed.

Because I believe Abramović is such an important artist and this is such an important moment in art, I’m sorry to say that the rest of the exhibition fell flat and has brought me to the conclusion that “re-performance,” as Abramović calls it, does not work. Nothing upstairs comes near to producing the indescribable jolt you feel when you see Abramović in the Atrium, holding the space with the primal force that emanates from her being.

“Re-performances” are artifacts, and artifacts are bloodless things. A few years ago I was visiting the Chicago History Museum when I unexpectedly came across an exhibit of paraphernalia from the 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention, with several vitrines dedicated to items from the anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy. Well, in 1968 I was very young, very pregnant, and co-chairman of press for the Chicago office of the youth-dominated campaign. The items laid out under glass with their little placards were buttons I’d worn, posters I’d helped produce, handouts I’d had a part in writing. The effect was spooky—looking at it made me feel like Rip Van Winkle. But what was most clear was that these objects, which once carried so much energy and meaning, were dead.

In the same way I found the re-performances and documentation in the rest of the exhibition tedious—because I’m not as interested in history as I am in art. And not just art per se; I go to a place like MoMA to have an experience of art, like the one in the Atrium.

When confronted with “stand-ins” the mind begins to wander…Who are these people? Do they get paid? How much? Are they still glad they signed on?...whereas Marina Abramović occupies her performances with her commitment, personal preparation and endurance; she embodies her own idea, so that everything you think about her is still within context of the piece. It’s not just about two naked people in a doorway, it’s the artist choosing to expose herself in that way and that energy particular to her, the rare charisma that has been developed and infused through her work.

Further, the whole idea of performance art has to do with spontaneity, the interaction not only with a person, but a specific and fleeting moment in time. It has a certain urgency that cannot be recreated, any more than you can successfully replicate a painting by Picasso or Matisse. Art as a primary experience requires the primary players.

This was especially brought home to me when my friend, Alexandra (who saw one re-performer start sobbing and another faint while she was there), asked how meaningful it would be if someone were to try to recreate John and Yoko’s famous bed-in for peace.

Not very.

From the Web. Copyright may apply.

Spring vacation

I rarely enjoy reading interviews; I’ve written them from time to time, when asked, but in general I consider them a low form of journalism, kind of a cop-out, especially when art is the topic at hand. The interviewer is usually intimidated by the subject, and the questions are rarely more probing than, “Where were you born?” I did write one for Mike Glier’s Along a Long Line (see sidebar), a book about his global painting project, which I think is good only because Mike’s words about himself and his work are more interesting than anyone else’s about him could be.

However friend and artist colleague, Roberto Juarez, has published another interview with Mike, this time in Bomb magazine online, which goes even more deeply into what it means to be an artist, and specifically a painter. Rarely is painting discussed with such perception and thoughtfulness on the parts of both the interviewer and the interviewee. I recommend printing it out and enjoying it while I’m away for the next week or so, frolicking near one of the places on Mike’s longitudinal journey, which he so aptly interpreted in paint. Enjoy!

Mike Glier, January 26, 2008, Haulover Bay, (St. John, VI), oil on aluminum, 24" x 30". Gerald Peters Gallery.

Throw away your Janson!

It's all here in this music video for a song called "70 Million"--made by a group called l'Ogre, for the French band, Hold Your Horses:

Looking for art in all the wrong places

A friend recently experienced culture shock, coming back from a month of meditation in India and going to the Armory Show at the piers while still jet-lagged. “There’s such a contrast between the vital, natural, creative impulse that is India, and the intellectual constraint of Western art, “she said. “There the creative, intellectual, and spiritual are all of a piece, where here we tease them apart. Indian art is raw; Western European art is processed, an intellectual product.”

I haven’t been to India, but I have been to Egypt, where the soft pastels of the clothing and painted clay houses, the graceful sails of the feluccas on the Nile, were one with the sandy, palm-treed landscape, each vista more breathtaking than the last, every aspect harmonious. The way the shopkeepers in the Aswan market laid out their wares was as artful as any installation I’d ever seen. Beauty seemed as natural as breathing.

And beauty, I’m convinced, is as necessary to healthy life as clean air, water, and food, yet we in the West pretend that it’s a luxury. The only way we acknowledge beauty’s importance is by punishing criminals by depriving them of it. Prison wouldn’t be prison if cells had brightly colored walls and inmates wore attractive uniforms— “Jil Sander for Attica" would not fly.

Even the environments we create for people to live and work in (and supposedly get well in, just look at our hospitals—we won’t even speak of the food) are equally aesthetically barren. Every time I drive through mall heaven in the towns outside Boston, or on Long Island or…anywhere, I go into shock.

So back at the piers, there’s an inescapable irony in paying $30 to look at art—try to find beauty—in the most inhospitable of situations: crowded, hot, claustrophobic, everything squished in. Another friend says she likes Ikea better—“at least they give you a green line to follow.”

From the Armory Show: Keltie Ferris, He-She, 2010, oil, acrylic, oil pastel & sprayed paint on canvas, 80x60"
Courtesy Horton Gallery, New York. Photo: Mark Woods

Meanwhile, a real armory on Park Avenue, intended for storing military equipment and built at a time (1861) when beauty was still a priority, makes a much better backdrop for art, which is why I prefer the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America) Art Show, this year concurrent with the ones at the piers. Not edgy, you say? Okay with me. At least I can breathe.

…and visit with John Kelly, who’s artist-in-residence in this lavishly decorated monument to war that’s being turned into an alternative art space. Dancer, singer, actor, writer, painter (my review of his recent show at Alexander Gray was in the November Art in America), John is one of the most charismatic performers ever, the proof being that he can make even cabaret (a musical genre I loathe, right up there with musical theater) into a thrilling experience. I’m such a fan! John will be channeling Joni Mitchell in performance in Usdan Gallery at Bennington College at 9:00 this Friday evening.

John Kelly

The Armory Studio

However if the backdrop makes the art, it does not make the music. Forgoing dinner with friends, I had high hopes for Animal Collective and Danny Berger in the rotunda at the Guggenheim last Thursday, but hardly the “kinetic, psychedelic environment” promised by the press release, it turned out to be totally anemic. It’s as if they weren’t even trying. I, like others, expected a concert, but instead it was arty computerized electronic plinking that could barely be heard over the conversations of the milling crowd, who also rarely glanced up at Berger’s vapid projections. Unlike Jenny Holzer’s project last year on the exterior of the building, it was a great opportunity, piddled away. (Vanity Fair agrees.)

My desire for sound and light, however, was more than satisfied the next night, when I bought a single ticket to hear Muse and the Silversun Pickups (who you must know by now are my favorite band) at that most unaesthetic of venues, Madison Square Garden. No doubt the show cost a gazillion dollars and took months to prepare—and Muse is definitely OTT, no subtlety there—but I was primed. It wasn’t Art, so they had to deliver. At the end I was getting hugs from sweaty, 20-year-old guys (“You like Muse? Let me give you a hug!). Totally worth it

Muse at Madison Square Garden 3/5/10

Update

© estate of anne truitt via the Washington Post

I’m about to descend into Armory madness. For reading material I hope you’ll turn to my article on Anne Truitt in the March Art in America.

Thoughts on the gaze, Marina Abramović and Tino Sehgal

Marina Abramović, photo by Reto Guntli

From the press release:

The Museum of Modern Art presents Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, the first U.S. large-scale museum retrospective of the artist’s groundbreaking performance work, from March 14 to May 31, 2010. Internationally recognized as a pioneer and key figure in performance art, Marina Abramović (Yugoslav, b. 1946) uses her own body as subject, object, and medium, exploring the physical and mental limits of her being by creating pieces that require her to withstand pain, exhaustion, and discomfort in the quest for artistic, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual transformation….

Abramović, best known for her durational works, has created a new work for this retrospective—The Artist Is Present (2010)—that she will perform daily throughout the run of the exhibition. For her longest solo piece to date, Abramović will sit in silence at a table in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium during public hours, passively inviting visitors to take the seat across from her for as long as they choose within the timeframe of the Museum’s hours of operation. Although she will not respond verbally, participation by Museum visitors completes the piece and allows them to have a personal experience with the artist and the artwork.

I wasn’t quick enough to get my bid in to write about Abramović for the art magazines; indeed, until I attended the press preview at MoMA last week, I didn’t realize how profoundly I related to her work. I’ve done many things in my life involving ritual, meditation, a certain amount of endurance (the only English phrase my Chinese t’ai chi master seemed to know was “hold for one minute”) and even danger (studying karate at a dojo with a policy of admitting everyone, even those with “problems,’ because that’s who’s out there on the street, in life)—experiences that offer me a glimpse into Abramović’s practice.

But just a glimpse. Because no matter how rigorous my practices have been, they don’t add up to anything like Abramović’s project. The press release doesn’t mention that Abramović is committed to also remaining silent during her “off” hours, but that would seem a necessary component, as she will be taking in a lot.

I think about an exercise I did once as part of a personal growth workshop which required standing just a little too close and silently staring into the eyes of another member of the group of 150, chosen at random, for ten minutes. During the workshop I’d been sitting next to a man in his 50s, whose conversation indicated that he was very much in love with his wife—who I’d only seen from afar, but seemed hardly the type to inspire such ardor. It turned out she was my partner, and after looking into her eyes for ten minutes, I was in love with her too. Following the exercise we went back to our seats, but my first thought upon leaving the room was that I wanted to give her a hug, an impulse that turned out to be mutual.

In the same vein I sat in on a workshop that Betty Edwards (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain) gave, watching as adults went from drawing stick figures to lively, acutely representational portraits within just a few days. One of the exercises involved drawing another person, again chosen at random from the group. In the ladies room later I overheard a conversation where one participant was saying to another, “She’s not the sort of person I ever thought I’d be friends with, but after drawing her for so long, I found I really liked her and we made plans to have lunch.”

I think too of my friend Tim, a singer at the Met who, instructed by a doctor not to speak for three days, said he saw a lot of pain in people’s faces he hadn’t been aware of before.

What will Abramović see? Perhaps just a bunch of people taking pictures (I don’t yet know what MoMA’s policy will be). New Yorkers aren’t great at sitting still—or being quiet. Maybe they’ll come to confess. Whatever happens, Abramović will be changed by the experience, and it will have a profound influence on whatever she does next.

This would appear to be what Roberta Smith was calling for when she wrote (in her much-discussed article “Post Minimal to the Max”) that she wanted to see more “art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand.”--only in the case of Abramović it’s not the hand but the entire body.

This is art that comes from process, from doing, rather than thinking.

By contrast Tino Sehgal’s piece of interactive theater at the Guggenheim (see Holland Cotter’s favorable Times review) seems to spring from the head, an idea illustrated. The people who ask you questions as you ascend the ramp aren’t actors, but neither are they real people acting on their own impulses. Like the commenter on this blog, Kathy Hodge, who said, “I don’t want to be forced to interact with anyone for their own ‘social experiment,’” I don’t want to give thought to answers that will go nowhere—so I avoid as I do the television news people on the street corner who don’t really care about my opinion either. In both cases I feel as if I’m being used.

With Abramović, however, we meet on our own terms.

On process and creativity

Alberto Giacometti, Tete Noire (Diego), 1951, oil on canvas, 31 7/8" x 25 5/8"

Reader Joan, in a comment on my post below, "Elizabeth Gilbert and Creativity" contributed this from James Lord's Giacometti: A Biography, and I felt it was worthy of reprinting as a post on its own:

It becomes always more painful,” Alberto (Giacometti) said, “for me to finish my works. The older I grow, the more I find myself alone. I foresee that at the last I shall be entirely alone. Even if, after all, what I’ve done till now counts for nothing (and it is nothing by comparison with what I would like to create), fully aware of having failed till now, and knowing from experience that everything I undertake slips through my fingers, I enjoy my work more than ever. Is there any understanding in that? Not for me, but that’s how it is. I see my sculptures there before me: each one—even the most finished in appearance—a fragment, each one a failure. Yes, a failure! But there is in each one a little of what I would like to create one day. This in one, that in another, and in the third something that’s missing in the first two. But the sculpture of which I dream incorporates everything that appears isolated and fragmentary in these various works. That gives me a longing, an irresistible longing to pursue my efforts—and perhaps in the end I will attain my goal."

Giacometti and Beckett, each in a deeply individual way, personified the pure commitment of the creative man. Driven beyond the conscious self by a need to express what defies expression, they found the strength to sustain that need in the ironic authority derived from a mortifying acknowledgement of failure. Beckett had learned that words are powerless to convey an idea of a feeling, just as Giacometti had found that neither paint nor clay can possibly embody the experience of vision. But both were infatuated with the expressive possibilities which baffled their passion for self-expression. It was the futility of the pursuit that made it fascinating and saved the effort from becoming monotonous. Its purpose was not to produce works of art but to wrest from the process of perception its utmost resources. A thankless, well-nigh ridiculous task, performed with humility as an act of pride.

Post-Minimal to the Max

As a young artist, I thought for sure when I got older that new, unfamiliar art would come along to challenge my assumptions and beliefs. I even looked forward to it. But now that I’m old enough to be a fogey, I see stuff like Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim and instead I’m thinking, “OMG, this again? I have SO seen this, done that.”
I wonder how many more generations I will have to watch discover conceptual art, each time becoming more sterilized, more schooled.

The funniest is art that tries to shock. Sorry, but now things are reversed; it’s the younger generation that’s been coddled and the older one that has done more, seen more, and put more substances up their collective noses than the young ‘uns can imagine. Ours is the generation that produced Robert Mapplethorpe, for chrissake, who saw Nancy Spungen’s body carried out of the Chelsea Hotel, and needing to pee at Danceteria, found people fucking in the stalls--not to speak of having friends dying left and right from AIDS. So I’m going to quake inside when I see a (clothed) black man laying on top of a (clothed) white woman on the floor of the Guggenheim?

Roberta Smith, however, says it better, in “Post-Minimal to the Max” in Friday’s Times:

The current exhibition of Gabriel Orozco at the Museum of Modern Art along with the recent ones of Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum and of Urs Fischer at the New Museum have generated a lot of comment pro and con. So has the Tino Sehgal performance exhibition now on view in an otherwise emptied-out Guggenheim rotunda. But regardless of what you think about these artists individually, their shows share a visual austerity and coolness of temperature that are dispiritingly one-note. After encountering so many bare walls and open spaces, after examining so many amalgams of photography, altered objects, seductive materials and Conceptual puzzles awaiting deciphering, I started to feel as if it were all part of a big-box chain featuring only one brand. More…

The artists Smith would choose to feature are not necessarily those that populate my curatorial fantasies (for instance I’d start with Terry Winters, whose last New York museum exhibition was in 1992) but not to quibble. Smith sums it up when she says, “What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand.”

Certain readers will take this as meaning that Smith is angling for a return to AbEx or somesuch, but I’ll interpret it my way. Readers of this blog know that I admire the work of Olafur Eliasson, who works with a team of collaborators and rarely executes anything himself, yet the aura of “intense personal necessity” surrounds everything he produces. It is also very highly developed. On the other hand, given how much art one sees that seems only half-realized, it’s important to recognize that process itself—the struggle to execute—can be an important path to new ideas. The stubborn development of technique (and by this I mean not facility, but the ideal vehicle for the concept) can provide the time required to take the art where it needs to go.

Also to say that while I find Tino Sehgal's work mannered and superficial, I'm inspired by that of Marina Abramovic (actually this is a prime example of the watering down process I was speaking of, where one generation adopts the look, but not the substance, of the previous one), and will expound on this in later posts.
Terry Winters, Luminance, 2002, oil on linen, 94 1/2" x 133 3/4" (courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery).

Missed it!

A lecture at SVA Thursday evening by Ann Lauterbach (poet and critic, co-chair of writing at Bard College and visiting critic at Yale) on The Given and the Chosen: A Meditation:

The work of art mediates the given and the chosen. It takes place between the fixities of received orders and possible forms which simultaneously confirm and escape through those fixities. To decide to treat experience as the site of transformation of the given by way of the chosen is to decide to live as an artist. The materiality of the world, its givens, presents itself to the artist as a field of possible relations, or choices.

Elizabeth Gilbert on creativity

No matter what you might think of Eat, Pray, Love (if the Web is any indication, a lot of people have opinions about the book who’ve never even read it) Elizabeth Gilbert’s reflection on the nature of creativity is worth considering. For me, it came in the nick of time, challenged as I’ve been lately with my work (or non-work, as it might more accurately be termed) in the studio. I needed to be reminded that I’m simply the conduit, and that all I need to do is open the door, allow whatever is going to happen to happen, instead of trying so fucking hard.

This may be the reason some people have big successes and then fall off—they begin to believe the hype, to think that they did it, and then struggle to do it again. I think about Philippa Gregory, who wrote one of the best novels I’ve ever read (The Other Boleyn Girl) and some of the worst (all the rest). Or Rauschenberg, who never seemed to be able to get past himself.

Students are often taught—or at least given the impression—that making art is about having an idea and executing it, when actually it’s about doing the work and then getting out of the way.

If I build the tracks, the train will come when it’s ready.