Seeing more in Richter...

Photo: Carol Diehl © 2012

One of the most interesting things about writing a review (as I am now of the current Gerhard Richter exhibition of new digital works at Marian Goodman), is seeing how other critics handle the same material. Here’s Karen Rosenberg in the Times:

“These works are not just anti-ideological (a Richter hallmark): they’re also antiseptic, more so, even, than the new sculpture, ‘6 standing glass panels’ that accompanies them.”

Rosenberg is entitled to find the works “antiseptic,” if that’s her take, but to make no further mention of the 9’ x 9’ x 9’ sculpture that’s at the core of the exhibition seems remiss.

Installed in the center of rear gallery at Goodman (and, to be accurate, entitled 6 Panes of Glass in a Rack) the work is essential—first in the architectural way it grounds the space, and secondly because of what happens when you look into it and through it, how it interacts with the images on the walls and the other people in the room. To view it as simply a steel rack with glass panels, is like seeing a Robert Irwin scrim piece as a length of fabric stretched from floor to ceiling, or a FredSandback as a geometric configuration made with yarn.

Perhaps people are now so used to art fairs, where the works are—by necessity—installed in a way that’s relatively arbitrary and seen as objects to be assessed rather than engaged with, they don’t consider that the artist may have had an intention for the entire exhibition, or that a sculpture may add up to more than its parts.

Maybe Richter should have provided an artist’s statement.

Continued....

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

I love comments, even the one that said that artist statements are a fact of life, and I should get over it. I will not get over it, any more than Caitlin Moran should get over bikini waxes. (What do artist statements and bikini waxes have in common? Well they hit the culture at about the same time and represent industry influence—art school and porn—in areas that should remain private, are  disagreeable to accomplish and anti-aesthetic.) At least we're getting people to think before they do it.

Joan says: I think it's really important for a student to be able to put into words what they are trying to come to terms with in their work. There's a time and place for it. Doing the work, working without trying to explain every move is important, stream of consciousness, allowing one thing to lead to another, etc. We all know that but then it is useful for a student to talk about what's going on and why, what motivates her, what she is trying to say, where it's coming from. Nonsense to think that a student shouldn't be verbalizing their struggles at different times as they work. As a graduate student I hated the idea of the thesis I had to write, a whole semester course no less. When the words came out of me "my work is my religion, my altar, my way to make an offering, et. etc." it changed me, it helped me understand something I had never thought or said before. Same with artists. Pretentious to think we can just go on and on making art and never talk about it, never say what it is we're trying to do, to get at, to find. Critics do it, why shouldn't artists at times speak about their work. And who wants to write artist statements, nobody does but....When I give a lecture I try to give it all I can. Tell what a piece may (because who knows in the end) be about for me. What I was trying to do or say. If I was GR I probably wouldn't have much to say either. He paints and things happen. Would that I could do just that. Sorry for the long entry. Not in the studio this morning with the muses.

No apologies, I’m grateful for the long entry! I also know that you are particularly adept, poetic even, at writing about your work and life. Whether this stems from nature or from having to do it in art school – or both—we may never know.  However I do know that had I been required to write about it when I was beginning to paint (at nearly 30) it would have killed it—like writing about sex. And like sex, I was in it for the pure pleasure, for the relief from thinking. This is also why I played the piano, and in my 20 years of classical training, I’m grateful no one insisted that I write about why I played, or the experience of playing, because it would have killed that too.

I was also a complete flop as a student, barely making it into college and then dropping out. Maybe this has something to do with it?

Yet I am a writer, as well as an artist, by profession, so I hear you asking, isn’t this a contradiction? Isn’t writing about thinking? Yes, but in a way it’s also about stopping thinking. Stopping the thoughts that would be maddeningly insistent until given expression, containing them, focusing them, which means shooing away all thoughts that don’t contribute. My understanding of other people’s art comes from writing—essentially from observation. Being required to describe and translate the experience is the gateway to insight. I write because it’s a way of making myself stand still, really look in a way I wouldn’t otherwise. My understanding of my own art, however, has come from other people—critics, writers, artist friends—and is the only reason I can write about it now.

Of course I never would have thought about any of this if you hadn’t prompted me…and now you've gotten me to write a writer's statement!

I just now found an online archive of artist’s statements. It’s important to note how the most interesting ones are by older artists reflecting the wisdom gained through a lifetime of art making. I never said artists shouldn’t write or speak about their work, just that it should be voluntary. If your inner being calls upon you to write something, do it! If it enhances the experience of your work, do it! However, the requirement that all artists accompany their work with a statement is not only very recent, it’s as absurd as requiring writers to provide illustrations with their texts. Or maybe that’s next. 

David Sipress in The New Yorker

If Reuters financial writer Felix Salmon can engage in art criticism I feel qualified to comment on a major but under-reported trend contributing to our lackluster economy: NO ONE WANTS TO PAY FOR LABOR. Corporate profits are at their highest, wages are at their lowest. If we can get away with it, we want people to work for next to nothing, or for free. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe if you work, if you're making a contribution to another person’s income, you should be paid commensurately.

I’ve read endless articles about how Walmart doesn’t pay a living wage, forcing employees to apply for food stamps, with universities following suit in their use of adjuncts. A friend in England works in an America designer outlet store that brings in over £400,000 a week (that’s $600,000 to you and me) where the ten or so employees make just over minimum wage. Et cetera, et cetera. What about the art world?

Now that it’s almost fall, my in-box is littered with “opportunities” for people with “excellent writing and editing skills” who are proficient in basic HTML, Excel, Quickbooks and PhotoShop to work as interns without compensation—for artists, bloggers, and galleries who are presumably profiting (or intending to profit) from their enterprises.

Now I’m a really interesting person with lots of life experience; a younger person could learn a lot just by being around me and participating in what I do—perhaps more than they could learn in school.  There’s a ton of work that needs to be done here that someone else could do and I, like many artists, am not exactly rolling in dough. Nevertheless, if someone’s going to put in hours toward my wellbeing, doing what I tell them to do, I feel honor-bound to pay them—especially if it’s QuickBooks, for god’s sake.

Since I doubt that my colleagues advertising for interns are in the Tea Party camp, I'm wondering how being a socially compassionate liberal fits with taking advantage of a climate that presumes people should work for free. Just wondering.

I received this remembrance of Herb Vogel by email from Lucio Pozzi. The Vogels, who I’d known for some time, introduced me to Lucio back in the early 90’s, when I ran into them all having lunch at Jerry’s Restaurant in SoHo. Since then Lucio has been a friend and important figure in my life. In 2008 I posted Lucio's memories of art dealer John Weber, along with this watercolor, one of my favorites:

Lucio Pozzi, Barbardos, 11 January 1972, watercolor on paper, 11.5 x 23.1"

For a few years I lived under a giant skylight in a windowless, basement level, nineteenth century former police truck repair garage on Mulberry Street. There, the city was far away. I slept on a convertible couch or, during my daughter's visiting nights, she on the bed and I on a futon on the floor.

>     Certain summer afternoons Herbie would ring my bell, unannounced. He was wearing checkered shorts, an old pair of sandals and a light non-descript shirt. Despite his having undergone skin cancer surgery a few times on his face, he never wore a hat. With his left hand he would carry a translucent plastic bag full of water in which swam a few rare fishes picked up in the store a block away from me. With his right he held a large paper shopping bag containing a couple of wrapped rectangular works of art. The Uptown subway stop was around the corner.

>     He knew he had to wait for me to run up the ramp to open the door. The familiarity of our greetings were as precious as the years of our friendship and collaboration. No hugs, shouts or laughter, just a glass of water, and the tangible pleasure of sitting around the worktable, plain talk about family and then words about the art of other artists and mine. When theoretical considerations would arise, Herbie was very quick in situating them in simple words in the history of contemporary discourse. Nothing escaped his passionate attention.

>     It was hopeless on my part to ask whom the works in the bag were by or to see them. Only once he showed me a half-dozen drawings by Joseph Beuys he was particularly proud of having secured.

>     On my walls he could see the many ventures I was engaged in - perhaps on the left a large oil painting containing human figures, in the center some plywood geometric polychrome acrylic cutouts, to the right a photograph mounted on tinted canvas. On a nearby table there could have been a landscape watercolor and a dotted gouache texture on paper.

>     His quick eye wandered in the space while chatting, like a fox exploring the night. He would then have me open the flat files of recent works on paper. When a group attracted his attention he took it all. Occasionally he also chose a small piece on canvas or on wood.

>     Sometimes I disagreed about the relevance or quality of what he chose. His respect for the artist had him listen with grace, but we often ended up by his taking what he wanted and me adding what I preferred. Now that the works he had selected are shown to me by the museums that acquired them, I am stunned by how his eye and mind saw beyond my perception of my own work. I would say he was always right. As evening approached he would exit wearing a faint smile, that of a cat who had just savored a good fish meal. And I was left energized.

>     The art would have to fit the shopping bag, or if too large I would deliver it at home. On those occasions he and Dorothy either offered me an Entenmann's cake and tea or, especially after walking had become difficult for Herbie, I would be invited at the diner across the street. He was very particular about food. Never salad, no wine, yes to chopped chicken liver and ice cream.

>     Often Dorothy also came to the studio, but on those occasions the visit would be arranged ahead of time. We would dine in my neighborhood. Dorothy shared with her husband a fastidious concern for the correct handling of the artworks. She also is extremely thorough in cataloguing the collection. While looking at art, her comments would be drier than his, always very pragmatic, to the point, no flattery, few words being better than many. The discussions preceding their final agreement on what was being seen enhanced the conversations.--Lucio Pozzi

Photo via Washington Post

Distracted about abstraction

A few days ago I was cranky and didn’t know why. Then, during an impromptu Skype studio visit with Terry in England, he observed that the structure in my paintings is fading into the background and the gesture is becoming dominant. How scary is that?  Very scary, it turns out. I realize that I always trusted the structure to carry the “meaning” in my intentionally “meaningless” work (are you still with me?) and the gesture was the lively little cheerleading team that gave it edge and life. Thirty years pass this way—happily, I might add—until I wake up to find that the gesture is parading about as the main character and, to make it worse, I’m all too aware that “gesture” is simply a euphemism for “scribbles.”  Now I happen to love my scribbles; I think they’re some of the best scribbles out there.  But they’re scribbles.  Is it possible that anyone else could love them as much as I do?

About the same time I run into Molly Howitt in the parking lot at the Co-op. Molly was a ceramics student when I was teaching painting at Bennington, and I made it a point to collect as much of her output as possible—paying her for some, but not being above poking around in the reject pile outside the studio for others.  I remember once fighting with another faculty member over who was going to buy the bowl we were supposed to be critiquing—I won, and still love it.  Molly has been doing a million other things since, all worthy, but no ceramics. When I bring this up for the 100^th time (I can be annoying), Molly says, “I loved the process, it’s just that I wasn’t doing anything special.”

And true; her work was very simple. However it had an elegance that distinguished it from all other handmade pots, most of which look, to me (apologies, ceramicists out there!) excruciatingly alike.  Molly brightened when I told her this; maybe she’ll actually do it.

Then I went home to my scribbles, appreciating for the first time, how much courage it must have taken to be Cy Twombly. 

Carol Diehl, Althaea, 2012, ink & pencil on panel, 12" x 14" 

The REAL reason Jeffrey Deitch should go....

Swingeing London by Richard Hamilton, 1968-9, showing Rolling Stone Mick Jagger in the back of a police car. © Estate of Richard Hamilton.

Other than making my own, it’s nearly impossible for me to care about art in August. This is when nature is at it’s fullest, and very hard to compete with. Besides, it’s too hot. I mean, who the fuck cares? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these days, the best art comes out of cities like Berlin, New York, and London—as opposed to Paris and Rome—places where you need art to improve on things. Places where, if you didn’t have art, you might go crazy. In the recent documentary, Gerhard Richter calls Cologne, where he lives, an ugly city.  But maybe he needs that. Maybe Cologne is the perfect foil.

It’s never too hot for gossip and controversy, however, and right now L.A.’s MOCA is providing us with a steady stream of both. Today the L.A. Times published an article in defense of Director Jeffrey Deitch, who recently fired—or allowed the Board of Trustees to fire—long-time curator Paul Schimmel resulting in great art world sturm und drang (see post below as well). Unfortunately, the “defenders” quoted in the article are hardly financially disinterested: Aaron Rose, who co-curated “Art in the Streets” at MOCA with Deitch, and Shepard Fairey, who has been hired by Deitch to create a graphic identity for the museum. Under those circumstances, what can they be expected to say? That Deitch is full of shit?

This article and, really, everything that’s been written about the situation, makes it sound as if the issues are (blah blah, I’m so tired of it) celebrity-driven “pop” culture, intended to introduce a “new” audience and bring in crowds, versus “serious” programming, which is, ipso facto, “old culture,” for aficionados only, and crushingly boring. Yet there is a middle ground, as exemplified by the Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou, which somehow manage to attract the world's largest audiences for contemporary art, without sacrificing rigor. And MoMA is packed.

On Deitch-as-curator, my feelings are mixed. By all accounts, “Art in the Streets” was great and I'm sorry it didn't travel to the Brooklyn Museum, as planned. Nor do I have an aversion to the idea of a disco-themed exhibition, done properly. I’m also a big fan of Shepard Fairey, and if I could hire him to create my graphic identity, I would. But to choose to mount not only a Dennis Hopper exhibition, but a James Dean theme show, curated by James Franco, while cancelling mid-stream those of Jack Goldstein and Richard Hamilton—two historic but under-recognized artists whose work would fit perfectly into the MOCA agenda—seems unconscionable. Oh, and did I mention the upcoming Jeff Koons retrospective? Now there’s an artist who needs more attention….

However, none of this means anything. Deitch was hired to be a director, not curator, and the real reason he should go is that he’s proved to be a terrible manager. This whole debacle is a P.R. nightmare of his making. Basically, a director’s job is to create good will and faith in the museum, inside and out, in addition to raising the money to keep it going. It is important that donors feel confident that the museum is being run well, is going to last, and that they‘re not contributing to a vanity project of the principle donor, in this case, Eli Broad. It would seem now that the only direction the museum can take to regain credibility and confidence is to dump Deitch, tell Broad to step back, hire a strong director, and start fresh.

On MOCA, Deitch, disco, dildos and more....

After ranting about the Art Institute of Chicago’s restaurant choices: the reservations-only, pretentiously-named Terzo Piano, which provides “signature cuisine” for the 1%, or the downstairs Museum Café, with pizza, burgers, and plastic dinnerware for the rest of us plebes, I was pleased to read this quote, in The New Yorker’s recent profile of Tate Modern director Nick Serota:  “We did a survey of about forty artists before we began….We thought that if we could make spaces in which artists liked to show their work, then the public would also respond to them—we wanted spaces that the public would feel comfortable in. For example, it was a very deliberate decision to make this [the café] a good restaurant, but not a high-end one.”

Meanwhile all of the artist members—John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger, and Ed Ruscha—of the board of directors at L.A.’s MOCA have quit.

“To live with my conscience, I just had to do it." Baldessari said in an interview Thursday after emailing his decision to MOCA. He said his reasons include the recent ouster of respected chief curator Paul Schimmel and news this week that the pop-cultural slant the museum has taken under director Jeffrey Deitch will continue with an exhibition on disco music's influence on art and culture.

“When I heard about that disco show I had to read it twice. At first I thought 'this is a joke' but I realized, no, this is serious. That just reaffirmed my decision.

“That disco show” refers to an upcoming exhibition—no date yet set—that will examine the supposed cultural impact of disco music on art, fashion and music. It will be co-curated (who is the other curator? Deitch?) by James Murphy of the band, LCD Soundsystem, which broke up last year at the peak of its massive success because, Murphy said, "It was living a life that nobody would live forever."

Although I’ve been a huge LCD Soundsystem fan and will probably regret for the rest of my life not having seen them live, I want to point out that James Murphy was in grammar school during the disco era while, to borrow a phrase from one of LCD’s best songs, I was there.

I was there and disco was not anything artists were interested in. In fact, it was a pejorative word. Disco was AM radio, the boroughs, and secretaries on their nights off, when we were into punk, New Wave, ska, and funk. Studio 54, Warhol and Bianca, was stuff we read about in the Post gossip columns, and besides, Warhol was old by then, in his middle 40s, a veritable éminence grise—while we had CBGB, Danceteria, Area (where the theme changed every month), the Pyramid, 8BC and, in its marvelous decrepitude, the World. No one had any desire to go above 14th Street or wear a polyester suit. My record collection didn’t include Donna Summer, Barry White, the Bee Gees or the Jacksons but James Brown, George Clinton, Parliament-Funkadelic, Blondie, the Velvet Underground, the English Beat, the Sex  Pistols, the Clash, and the Dead Kennedys. I loved “Saturday Night Fever” but it didn’t have anything to do with me. I put on the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” to get myself up and out the door to work.

It was also a time when artists and writers called the shots in the art world—not businessmen.

My concern about the disco show isn’t the pop culture aspect, but that it could end up being a simplification rather than a clarification of history, a glamorized, homogenized, Mad Men-esque perspective of a complex time.  We have only Deitch’s track record so far to go on: by all accounts his 2011 “Art in the Streets” was the show of the year (that I didn’t see it is another big regret, as Street Art is a major interest of mine), while his current James Dean exhibition, curated by James Franco, as well as his first venture, photographs by Dennis Hopper, seem to have been critical flops. And the now infamous Marina Abramovic performance/dinner, was simply appalling.

A bigger issue, however, is the way the firing (framed as a “resignation”) of Paul Schimmel was handled—by the head of the board of directors, yet—and that it may signal the complete takeover of museums, like everything else, by self-interested moneymen (be sure to read more here). It also seems as if the artist members of the board were left in the dark, which alone would be reason to quit.  

Of course if the director curates, the museum doesn’t have to pay a curator—which is a good thing, because Deitch and Broad will have a hard time finding a decent curator who will work for them after this.

At the same time, it’s important to be open to change, and who knows? Maybe the disco show will be great.

It makes me think of other famous art world walkouts like (I wasn’t there) when Sidney Janis introduced Pop Art with his international “New Realists” exhibition (among the 54 artists shown: Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Richard Lindner, Wayne Thiebaud, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Yves Klein, Arman,  and Christo) prompting a dramatic exodus from the gallery by AbExer’s Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston and Robert Motherwell (only de Kooning stayed on).

And when I came from Chicago to work at Artforum in 1976, smoke was still hovering from the Lynda Benglis scandal, over an ad for which she posed nude with a gold-plated dildo, an event that caused Contributing Editors Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson to quit and three others, Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Joseph Masheck, to write a letter to the editor, then John Coplans, protesting this “object of extreme vulgarity”—which just looks funny now.

I refuse to make predictions. Back in the day, an acquaintance from Australia told me about a band called the Bee Gees, who were “really great” and I said, “With a stupid name like that, they won’t get anywhere.” 


Update 7/22/12: Another POV here. 7/23/12 Roberta Smith on the debacle here. Even more here. This is almost as good as Downton Abbey. And now Rob Storr weighs in.

Good art, good people

·           Gerhard Richter, S. with Child, 1995, Oil on canvas, 41 cm x 36 cm, Catalogue Raisonné: 827-2

            I  took a mental health hiatus from my blog, but now I’m back. [Also had to delete a previous post, where the foundation that represents the estate of the artist I rhapsodized about complained about the accuracy of the info I copied and pasted from the museum press release—and were also annoyed that I’d included a Wikipedia link they said contained wrong info. Huh? Seems it might be easier to edit Wikipedia than to ask me to remove the link but hey, as it’s my only complaint in 475 posts, I can handle it!].

Anyway, there’s nothing more likely to get me going than reading stupid stuff about art and artists—like this article, “Good Art, Bad People” by Charles McGrath in the Times, which cites examples to bolster the stereotypical idea that artists are more deranged than the rest of the population. I think articles like these are written so the authors can assuage their egos with the excuse, “I coulda been a contender if I weren’t so fucking nice.” Because we think about stuff so much (artists are, at their core, analytical, always wondering, “how could this be different?”) it’s possible we may be less likely than others to conform to superficial societal norms, but I refuse to make further generalizations (I remember someone once telling me that I couldn’t be a “real” artist because my studio was “too neat”—although there’d be no problem with that at the moment). I’ve known a lot of artists—yes, even great ones—some of whom were totally agreeable (no one is nicer than Ellsworth Kelly) and others who were utterly horrid. Like the rest of the population.

Can good people make good art? Or to make it a little harder: Can good people make great art? The answer here might seem to be equally self-evident. There are countless artists who seemingly lead decent, morally upstanding lives, who don’t beat their wives, slur the Jews, or even cheat on their taxes. There are many more of these, one wants to say, than of the other sort, the Wagners, Rimbauds, Byrons, et al., who are the exception rather than the rule. And yet the creation of truly great art requires a degree of concentration, commitment, dedication, and preoccupation — of selfishness, in a word — that sets that artist apart and makes him not an outlaw, exactly, but a law unto himself.

Great artists tend to live for their art more than for others. This is why the biographies of so many writers in the 20th century who were otherwise reasonably good people, or not monstrous certainly (think of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bellow, Yates, Agee, to take a few almost at random), are strewn with broken marriages and neglected or under-appreciated children.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. McGrath “wants to say” this is the case because an article about kind, generous, thoughtful, sober artists would be totally boring. Also, notice he may be a bit out of touch, as his famous examples are from the last-century or before, when divorce was difficult and alcohol flowed. These days, successful artists are more likely to be super-functional, careerist and businesslike, than dissolute. No one has time to be a drunk.

Meanwhile, if the image presented in the film, “Gerhard Richter Painting” is true, then the world’s most famous living painter is a real sweetie-pie, who has said, “I have painted my family so frequently because they are the ones who touch me the most.”

That’s a quote from the wall text at the recent Beaubourgretrospective, which I saw recently, and this is as good an excuse as any to post a few more. *

On classicism:

The classical is what holds me together.

It is that which gives me form.

It is the order that I do not have to attack.

It is something that tames my chaos or holds it together so that I can continue to exist, that was never a question for me, which is essential for life.

On chance:

Letting a thing come, rather than creating it.

On abstraction:

Horrible, gaudy sketches, sentimental things, functioning through the association of ideas, anachronistic, ambiguous, practically pseudo-psychodramatic and therefore unintelligible, without meaning or logic, if indeed there must be any.

I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no programme, no style, no direction. I like the indefinite, the boundless. I like continual uncertainty.

* Note: I’ve taken some editorial liberties with the rather clumsily translated English text, eliminating some excess “that”s and a “really” (hard to imagine Richter saying “really” in any language) and choosing “touch” (in the French translation, it was touchant) over “affect” as in his family being the ones who touched/affected him the most.

European reflections

I’ve been back from Europe just over a week, but life’s intervening challenges have made it seem like three. Or maybe I was never there. Perhaps I just dreamed it. Regardless, I will share my hazy memories.

Ranting, as I have recently about museum buildings that are more about architectural hubris than art, it was a pleasure to revisit the Beaubourg for the Richter retrospective and see his work installed in an airy, non-linear context that included natural light and breathtaking views of Paris. See? It can be done. Ironically, one of the architects for the museum, which was built in 1977, was Renzo Piano, who's also responsible for the new, architect-centric Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago. But at least, earlier in his career, Piano proved that artwork and architectural statement can happily coexist.

Gerhard Richter at the Centre Pompidou

Also I did go back to the Tate Modern to revisit the Oskar Fischinger installation and, gritting my teeth, walk through the Damien Hirst retrospective. I needn’t have gritted, as the exhibition was so overwhelmingly inconsequential, I couldn’t even get properly annoyed. The ride down in the escalator was terrific, though, as was the cream tea in the café.

The ecstatic ride from Damien Hirst to cream tea.

Loving and hating art in Barcelona

I’m in Barcelona where, for me, the highlight is the best hot chocolate in the world. Known as un suis in Catalan, this is smooth, barely liquid chocolate topped with an equal mound of whipped cream. These perfect opposites—hot and cold, black and white, dense and airy, bitter and sweet—come together in a delectable marriage on your tongue. “Like yin and yang,” says my friend, who won’t allow me to name the café because she doesn’t want it to become more overrun than it already is. Thus far, I’ve been there every day.

And so my love/hate relationship with contemporary art continues. After the previous post about my visit to Chicago, a Facebook friend wrote: “Strong feelings of ambivalence are an indication of deep involvement. Sounds like perhaps you need to choose more judiciously what to see?”

Yes, and no. I want to keep an open mind, and there’s nothing I like better than to have my prejudices overturned, as they were when I realized I liked (some of) Damien Hirst’s spots. I can’t help having opinions, so must constantly guard against turning into one of those loathsome people who spout about things they haven’t seen. However we should keep the question open until after my visit to the Hirst retrospective at the TateModern next week. One thing I know is that, after going to Barcelona’s SWAB fair on Saturday, in the interest of sanity, I should avoid art fairs altogether. At least I got to have a chocolate afterward.

Rather than “young,” the art at SWAB should have been billed as “immature”— adolescent scribbling like you wouldn’t believe. Or maybe you would. Luckily, however, as in Chicago, my inevitable tailspin was mitigated by later seeing spare, graceful, very grown up art, this time Rita McBride at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA). While the MACBA building is another example, like the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing, of harsh white walls and architectural hubris run amok (here that of Richard Meier), every exhibition I’ve seen at MACBA has been beautifully chosen and intelligently executed. Wait, I should say every recent exhibition I’ve seen, thereby excluding a gigantic show in 2005 devoted to Francis Alÿs, whose “diverse body of artwork that explores urbanity, spatial justice, and land-based poetics” (barf!) is a perfect example of what Jerry Saltz has accurately labeled and defined as “curator art.”

Richard Meier, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art: Where's the art?

At least MACBA doesn’t have a café. Chicago’s Art Institute, given its monolithic isolation on Michigan Avenue, needs to offer sustenance to the hoards of attendees, but its food options clearly reflect its values. For the 1%, there’s the posh, reservations-only Terzo Piano upstairs, while downstairs the other 99% of us are relegated to the euphemistic “Museum Café,” really a cafeteria. Here the gastronomic choices (burger station, pizza station, and sandwiches entombed in plastic) are of food court quality and accompanied by endless petroleum products—despite being a location where no one would, or could, take meals away. I was appalled when I was there, but now visiting in Europe, I’m even more disgusted by our throwaway society. Clearly it was foolish of me to assume that a cultural institution would somehow be conscious of plastic being not only wasteful but unaesthetic (my chocolate, if served in a plastic cup, would not be nearly so tantalizing). I suddenly had the horrifying thought that for current generations of Americans, the concept of reusing crockery at all is likely to seem as antiquated as linen hankies.

Addressing my previous post, Ben F. comments, “The large white box and grand entrance are created to give a sense of permanence in the way banks used to be built. A sense that the bank would be here long after you are gone so that you could trust that your donations (of art/money) would be safe. The large space then needs to be fitted with art to scale.”

Again, silly me! I forgot that the main purpose of any institution is self-preservation, which means that the Art Institute’s primary concern is to secure the wherewithal that keeps it going. And there I was, thinking that it was about art!

Art: I love it, I hate it....

I went to Chicago recently, and had a mini art crisis. One dark and stormy Sunday afternoon, blissed out after a morning of kundalini at Yoga in the Loop in the landmark Fine Arts Building, I crossed Michigan Avenue to the Art Institute to see Renzo Piano’s much-touted Modern Wing—and got all cranky.

First of all, while my press cards got me in free, unlike other museums where press are treated like members, I was sent to the regular ticket line, which shrank my allotted hour by more than half. Having only 20 minutes and being pretty familiar with Roy Lichtenstein and photographer Dawoud Bey, the subjects of special exhibitions, I took in the lobby/atrium, and headed upstairs to the galleries displaying the permanent collection—which is where I had my meltdown. OMG I’m SO bored with museums where there is some spectacular entrance, hallway, atrium (or stairway, in the case of Richard Meiers’s Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art) that serves as a showcase for the architect’s creative genius, his use of natural light and ability to spend millions of dollars, while the art is shunted off to be imprisoned in the same-old-same-old square white boxes with track lighting. Really, if I never see another piece of white-painted drywall again (such a lifeless material!) it will be too soon. I don’t know what the alternative is, but there’s gotta be another way. Perhaps if, instead of designing temples to their egos, architects were to think creatively about new ways art could be displayed, they might come up with something.

Renzo Piano, Modern Wing, Chicago Art Institute: Where is the art?

Anyway, featured in this particular white box on the second floor (Contemporary Art from 1960 to the Present) the walls were lined with deadpan portraits by Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, whose fame (soon to have a Guggenheim retrospective) I’ve never understood. Really, I’d rather look at drywall. There was more to the exhibition, but what it was I can no longer remember, because as my eyes darted from object to object, searching for something satisfying to look at, I became more and more upset as I realized that my life was clearly worthless because I’d chosen to devote it to a field in which I had absolutely no interest. Even the next gallery with its exquisite de Koonings and Pollocks failed to console me, as they represented a glorious past now lost.  And if I, a presumed professional, am alienated, what must these dazed-looking tourists feel like, who not only spent time waiting in line but actual money ($18 apiece) to get in? “I just think I don’t know enough,” is what a perfectly intelligent friend said to me. Is this the purpose of museums and art? To make people feel bad about themselves?

My sense is that curators, now that theirs is a career rather than a calling, are so deep inside the justifications embedded in their field that they can no longer view them impartially, and have not learned how to trust their own intuition. This is a field that that took seriously, and obviously still does, Michael Fried’s derisive term, “theatrical,” for art that acknowledges the possibility of a viewer response or experience (we can still hear Fried spitting as he wrote the word),* along with the Marxian theorists who feared that “spectacle” (like the gladiator fights in Rome) would distract the masses from the circumstances of their daily misery.

When I walked outside (or rather ran out screaming), the driving rain had broken. Buying more time by deciding to take a taxi back rather than the bus, I explored Millennium Park with its glorious spring plantings, full of flower scents and bird sounds that felt happily out of place in midst of the city. The Frank Gehry band shell, which Chicago friends tell me functions wonderfully as a site for concerts in the summer, made a dramatic frame for nearby skyscrapers and Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (2004-8) was teeming with people, an example (like Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial,1982) of how a pure, seriously minimal work of art can serve as a catalyst for meaningful engagement, and that it’s possible for good art and public appreciation to go hand in hand. Whew! No need to sign up for the aptitude test just yet.

Gehry Bandshell, Millennium Park, Chicago

Of course our Marxian friends will surely point out that last week, not far away from “The Bean,” as Chicagoans call the Kapoor, military-style police were bashing the heads of NATO protestors, and that both that action and the sculpture are expressions of the same mayoral power structure.** But does that mean they must be uniformly evil? The truth is that inspiring art makes people want to lead inspiring lives. Boredom achieves nothing.

Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2004-8.

Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2004-8, view from underneath.

*Art and Objecthood, 1967.

 **While Mayor Richard Daley’s influence was key in the realization of the park, we have no reason to believe his police would have been more restrained than those of his successor, Rahm Emanuel, or that Emanuel does not see the value of the park.