Art: SCOPE, The Armory Show, and Jeff Wall at MoMA

Last weekend was big for art. Lots of art fairs. Too many. I went to two. And a lecture. Big weekend.

The big big big thing is The Armory Show. I will not tell you about it's history or why it's a big thing, partially because I don't know, and partially because I don't care to do the research to find out. Suffice to say, it's a big thing. A gazillion people show up, stand on line for an hour, and pay $20 just to walk around a very very overcrowded, overheated, overhyped tented pier out past 12th Avenue where any gallerist who's anyone (internationally) has a little cubicle of sorts in which he or she shows represented artists' work. Prices are upon request.

My understanding is that SCOPE is sort of the Ugly Step-sister. It's smaller, located (also overcrowded, overheated, and in a giant tent) behind the Lincoln Center Plaza. Same deal - gallerists, booths, etc., but some of the wall labels divulged prices. I think this is a good thing. I actually almost bought something, knowing it was in the range of affordability. My friends who are in the know say that SCOPE is "awful," "tedious," "dreadful," etc., so I am being very uncool when I say that I think it was way better.

Let me say this, though. The ratios of schlock to decent, somewhat interesting art were too imbalanced at both fairs. SCOPE probably came in at 10-20:1, The Armory 50-100:1. These are not good ratios. There are too many galleries, and there is too little quality art. There is too much posturing amongst gallerists (and artists). This is, of course, why I am an executive assistant at a leading international executive search firm rather than a gallerist, art critic, etc., despite my snazzy graduate degree from Columbia's Modern Art and Critical Studies program (more on that some other time).

That said, there were a few things that caught my eye. I wrote them down, and here they are:

Neasden Control Center
http://www.neasdencontrolcentre.com/ncc.html
The piece I mentioned considering buying came from this artist. The work is multi-media and based in a sort of post Stanly Donwood (of Radiohead art fame), skater/street art aesthetic, with a lot of collaging and good appropriation. Amusing exchange heard at the booth, where the artist's various works were arranged into a wall installation of sorts, but were marked with individual prices:
Lady (to gallerist): Is this a collective?
Gallerist #1 (with heavy accent): Yes, it is, but you can buy them separately, or there is another price for it all together.
Lady (to her friend): This is a collective.
Friend: What does that mean?
Lady: It's a group of artists working together, collaborating, as a group, so no individual artists have their names on the pieces.
Gallerist #2 (overhearing): Oh, this isn't a collective. It's just one artist.
Lady: Oh it is?
Gallerist #2: Yes, it used to be a collective, but everyone else quit, so now it's just this one guy.

Here are other artists I noted as being of interest:

Cat Clifford
http://www.howardhouse.net/artists/clifford/HH03088det2.html
I saw some pretty little drawings on torn bits of paper. Apparently he works in video, too, but I didn't see any of that.

Yigal Ozeri
http://www.mikeweissgallery.com/html/artistresults.asp?artist=1
These were shockingly precise photorealist paintings of women and plants in thick, glossy oil on huge canvases. I didn't love the portrait aspects of the paintings (a bit romantic for my taste) but the plants were lusciously executed and really just amazing.

Tessa Farmer
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/tessa_farmer.htm
Exquisitely crafted hanging sculptures of. . . insect carcasses. Really quite stunning and delicate and lovely.

Bert Teunissen
http://www.bertteunissen.com/category.php?catId=6
Strong, punchy color photographs of old European people in their oft-crumbling kitchens.

Mike Bayne
http://www.katharinemulherin.com/dynamic/artist.asp?ArtistID=18&Count=0
Smaller than postcard oil on panel paintings of wood frame houses. Tender.

Izima Kaoru
http://www.galerieandreasbinder.de/galerien_muenchen/izimakaorugal.htm
Melodramatic fashion-mag style color photographs self-portraiting the styled artist as dead in a myriad of dramatic, fashioned ways. N.B. Probably the least respectable work in this list. My friends are shaking their heads sadly at my lack of taste and saying "tsk, tsk, tsk." Sure, it's Cindy Sherman and Nikki S. Lee retread, but I like Cindy Sherman (at least, up to a certain point prior to the clowns) and Nikki Lee.

Hans Op de Beeck
http://www.hansopdebeeck.com/
Very weird, very wistful, very white color photographs of old people dressed all in white and holding white balloons.

Paul Graham
http://www.anthonyreynolds.com/home.htm
More very white photos - well, not quite. Large color photos of streetscapes with the brightness turned way up - they have the same quality of color that a Polaroid has when you cut it open and just look at the very back sheet.


Matthew Brannon
http://www.johnconnellypresents.com/brannon.htm
Print maker layering text and various images. I don't find his use of text (the content) very interesting, but I like his aesthetic.

Juliao Sarmento
http://www.juliaosarmento.com/
Paintings, again with text. These are line drawing figure type paintings, very simple, black on canvas painted white, with a color block at the top (often yellow or brown or burgundy) with text in the color block and on the white area. The text here is a bit more interesting, and the pictures are a bit spacey and sad, again, recalling Radiohead album and web art from the OK Computer era. I am a sucker for it.

Leslie Hewitt
http://www.core.mfah.org/persondetail.asp?par1=0&par2=0&par3=319
Well collected and arranged scraps - old photographs, scribbles, notebooks, etc. - placed in frames. Minimal but emotionally rich.

Barbara Probst
http://www.gfineartdc.com/probst.htm
Photography. Again, a bit fashion maggy. Deal.

Kota Ezawa
http://www.hainesgallery.com/Main_Pages/Artist_Pages/KEZA.work.html
Elaborate cut and paste with construction-type paper. Panned by my friends. I love it.

Jen Ray
http://www.janwentrup.com/artists/jen_ray/works/
Illustrations in ink and watercolor. A little girlish and a little goth. Delicate.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor
http://www.jamescohan.com/index2.php?id=8&artist=119
Figurative wall-hangings made of wood inlay. I don't know exactly how I feel about this, aside from the fact that her craft is amazing.

Kent Henricksen
http://www.johnconnellypresents.com/henricksen.htm
Framed tapestries featuring the traditional imagery of racism in the American South. Again, amazing craft, and a sauciness in the content that appeals to me. I generally despise political art, so it means a lot for me to like this.

The other art-related thing I did this weekend was listen to Jeff Wall talk about himself at MoMA. In theory, I want very much to like Jeff Wall's work. I really do. He brings a relationship with traditional painting and with cinema to his photography practice, and he makes big, color, staged pictures. I like that. And yet. There is first the issue of the lightbox, arguably the aspect of his work for which he is most famous (rather than prints, his photos are printed on giant transparencies and shown in lightboxes, not unlike bus station advertisements in his native Canada). I'm not crazy about it. It over-conceptualizes an uninteresting aspect of photography/cinema/advertising, and it washes out color. Then, there is the general structure and aesthetic of his pictures. They feel stilted and stagy in an uncomfortable way. Not in a postmodern, ironic, campy way. Not in a Victorian, preening, ur-postmodern way. Just in the way that (oh, forgive me) Canadians are sort of stilted and uncomfortable.*

My graduate thesis was on the appropriation of visual and thematic structures of Western canonical painting by contemporary color photographers. That might sound fancier than it is. I was writing about photographers who "re-build" (using models, make-up, costumes, sets) Art History 101-type paintings as photographs - including Yasumasa Morimura, Cindy Sherman, Tom Hunter, and, yes, Jeff Wall. There are others. . . the more photography I see, the more I see it happening, if a bit more loosely. There was a giant photograph at SCOPE of twelve African women arranged around a long rectangular table (yes: The Last Supper. Ever so loose a reference, but a reference). The thesis pulled in Benjamin's concept of Aura and tried to determine whether these photographers wanted to use the aura of these canonical paintings in order to ratify the Art-ness of their pictures in some way. I elaborated on the history of documentary v. art photography.

So I calendared Jeff Wall's talk months ago. MoMA has launched an apparently huge retrospective of sorts, and his talk sold out a 450 seat theater. I had to wait an hour on line for standby tickets (purchasing tickets ahead of time somehow never occurred to me. I forget, sometimes, that New York is filled with weirdos like myself who would want to listen to Jeff Wall talk). He was one part boring (people began walking out ten minutes into his hour and a half talk), one part stodgy, and one part just plain wrong - or lying. I wasn't too surprised - after all, his work is one part boring, one part stodgy, and one part. . . well, art can't be wrong per se, but then it sort of can be, and his sort of is.

During the talk, I really wanted a transcript on which to make my favorite kinds of notes: "No! You are wrong!" but alas, I didn't have one, so I will have to work from memory. Here is a list of wrong things that Jeff Wall said:

1. He made the point that the size of his pictures was less about making big pictures than about making pictures that were the scale of paintings. (This is already flawed, because paintings, as we all know, can be giant, Salon-sized monsters, or delicate Gothic miniatures.)

2. He began to discuss paintings, and said dreadfully old-fashioned things about how paintings make us feel [random synonym for "nice" or "good"].

3. He said that aside from painting, the other major influence in his work was film. He stated that a cinematographer is basically the same as a photographer and that photography is basically the same as film, except film is shown in a different way (many frames per second instead of just one). He considers himself a cinematographer. (He does not take into consideration the fact that a cinematographer must consider the movement of shapes and the movement (zooming in and out, panning) of the frame. He is just so wrong it shocks me.) During question and answer period, someone asked whether he ever considered making films, and he answered, plainly, "No." He then elaborated: "Sorry, the medium just doesn't interest me." And yet, he calls himself a cinematographer?

4. He said that his photographs are near-documentary, because in them, he recreates something that he actually saw. He doesn't ever carry a camera with him. He thinks these pictures are very interesting, therefore, "because they're real, but they're not real, but they're real." That is just silly. Even a staged photograph of something that never happened is "real," because photography requires the tableau to exist in order for its image to be recorded - one cannot photograph from the imagination the way one can draw or paint.

5. During question and answer, someone asked what his work's relationship is with early staged photography (e.g. Henry Peach Robinson and Julia Margaret Cameron). He said that their work was "just awful," because they were working within a sort of bum aesthetic (Victorian and Salon culture - the cloying works of the 19th century). I studied this photography carefully, and devoted a chapter of my thesis to it. I think it's positively brilliant. If any artist were making that work today, it would be all over the biggest galleries and magazines. It's so ur-postmodern and campy and ironic. Some Academic painting is, too, although critics are slow to accept that (e.g. Bougereau, though I will lose credibility in many people's eyes by saying that. So it wasn't his intention to be campy. I honestly don't care. The work is campy, and it's brilliant. Intention is irrelevant in art.) Wall stated that these early photographers would have done better to emulate the so-called good art of the time (e.g. Degas). This never would have worked, though, because Degas was emulating snap-shot photography (with asymmetrical compositions cutting figures off the frame's side). Wall denied having any relationship with this early work, which is an untruth. Like it or not, he has simply remade what he would consider their "mistakes" - stilted, stodgy, oddly frozen photographs, eerily like and unlike the paintings to which they refer, only without the abundance of camp, irony, etc. that could rescue them from that tedium.

*It never occurred to me that the staginess was due to a particularly national experience until I spent a week in Canada with one of my friends, who also knows art. After a few days of looking around, I mentioned that I finally understood why Jeff Wall's pictures were so weird, and he laughed and laughed and laughed.