Art: William Kentridge: Five themes, at MoMA

An opening is rarely the best time to see a show; generally the crowds make the work physically inaccessible, and your sensorium is dulled by the free wine anyway. A short film retrospective, though, functions differently. The chattering revelers, who have come to see and be seen, would be forlorn in the dark rooms, filled with sound and flickering light, so they keep to the echoing loggia, crowding around the bar.

And so the benches are mostly free in room after room where all of William Kentridge's old films are playing. I've seen most of them before, and the ones I remember being my favorites (Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old and Felix in Exile ) still move me the most.

There are so many reasons why I love Kentridge's work, the primary perhaps being that I love it despite itself. It's not particularly seductive; I'm partial to clean lines, high production values, and pretty people. Kentridge works with charcoal drawings, occasionally adding a bit of blue to his black and white palette, and he creates moving images by photographing the literal palimpsest as he makes slight erasures and augmentations to lines, transforming each sheet hundreds of times, so that an eight minute film uses between 20-40 sheets of paper. This means that his films are swirling, murky things, where shadows trail each image and dim ghosts are left vibrating in the white spaces. Kentridge's cast of characters, too, are mottled and murky, aging, overweight, balding, naked. The blue chalk is usually used for water, cried as tears from his sorrowing characters' eyes, pouring from the faucet, filling rooms.

Why then, do these "ugly" animations move me? Certainly not because of their political intention; I generally loathe political art. Kentridge is South African, and the violent horrors of apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are omnipresent—pigs that explode, bodies that die and disappear behind blowing sheets of newspaper, long lines of refugees carrying their belongings on their backs. While I acknowledge the importance of international awareness, I generally request that my art edify, rather than notify, or, worse, horrify.

But there is something so incredibly human in Kentridge's work—he communicates our pain so tenderly, and discloses his own with such unabashed honesty. The diligent investment in his craft (he seems to be one of the few contemporary artists who actually, physically, makes his own work) is part of that honesty.

Without knowing how big the exhibition was, I over-invested my time in revisiting Kentridge's older films, leaving myself only a few minutes to watch the newer works installed in the further galleries, a number of which were installed together in one room (three pieces consisting of ten projections all together). These, which MoMA groups under the rubric of "Artist in the Studio" perhaps aren't strong enough to show on their own, but still detract from each other, and in them, Kentridge, the flesh-and-blood man, steps into the frame (he is present in the older films, but under the guise of charcoaled characters Felix Teitelbaum and Soho Eckstein). Whimsical and reminiscent of Dada films, these are more sullied by our contemporary moment, in which art is made about art and the artistic process, rather than about humans and the human condition. And so, perhaps it's for the best that I spent all of my time firmly lodged in the early 1990s, when Felix cried blue tears, filling the room with his sorrow.

Art: The Armory Show

For me, the Armory show is a necessary evil. Everyone will be talking about it, so I have no choice but to go, and to see everything, and to do so quite attentively, so that I will be able to engage in the city-wide conversation the week afterward. And yet, for me at least, the Armory Show feels like a combination of the most gruesome things: a shopping mall the day after Thanksgiving, the velvet rope in front of the nightclub of the moment, and the ramp that cattle walk before they are unknowingly slaughtered. There are crowds, it is hot, and there is a sense of blind urgency. Flashy things—neon lights, broken mirrors, drawings of genitalia (male and female)—are hung on every wall to delight or distract (depending on whether you are more in the mood for shopping, swinging, or dying an unpleasant but quick death).

This year, I'm not sure whether the show changed, or I did, for there was a want of urgency. As always, there was an overabundance of neon (as if Bruce Nauman had alighted upon a new medium, rather than just creating a one-off amusement), myriad broken looking glasses (self-loving solipsists that we are, we tend to gravitate toward art in which we can see ourselves, and if we see ourselves fractured and distorted, we feel all the more "honest" for it), and wall after wall of unaffecting photographs.

I had my usual chuckle at the well-styled gallerists munching their festival vendor panini, selling art by artists who outsource their production (Customer: "Does the artist actually know how to draw at all?" Gallerist*: "Hmm. . . I am not sure. . . But of course, it does not matter, right?")

*French accent

But, I managed to see two things of interest. One was Grayson Perry's Walthamstow Tapestry, ironically one such outsourced work. Perry designed and drew the scene, but the fabric itself was woven by a computerized loom in Belgium (another of his tapestries, Vote Alan Measles for God, was sewn by workers in a Chinese factory, via a high-end rug company in London. Given the tapestry's overtly anti-consumerist thrust, I cannot help but find this lack of consistency rather disappointing).

The other, more ideologically integrated work that I managed to latch onto was a 22 minute video by Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck. Called Staging Silence, this black and white video with its magical laboratory soundtrack offers a number of blank stages into which hands insert tiny objects, one by one, creating a scaled spaces (a waiting room, an office interior, a country estate complete with working fountain, a forest, a theatre with proscenium arch), and then taking them apart. It was rather serendipitous that I decided to stick my nose around the dark corner where this film was playing, because it was easily missed, but also easily the best work of art on view.

Ultimately, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling, walking through the show, that I was unable to discern art from non-art. Having recently seen Tino Sehgal’s show at the Guggenheim, I had this insistent itch to walk up to people and say, “Excuse me, but are you a piece by Tino Sehgal?” Oddly, whether or not they were, this would be my own performance art, although I don’t consider myself an artist (being too inhibited to actually speak to anyone).

Sehgal-struckness aside, the work versus non-work question presented real challenges for me. The broken neon leaning on the floor against the wall, shattered glass all around it: a statement that Bruce Nauman is dead, or a mere accident that hasn’t been cleaned up yet? The Acura SUV on display, complete with attractive saleswoman in short, tight dress: a opportunistic attempt to entrance a captive, wealthy audience already primed to spend thousands of dollars, or brute commentary implying that art fairs these days are as blatantly middle-brow consumerist as Japanese luxury car lots? The black man with dreadlocks to his waist pushing a trashcan around on wheels: sanitation worker, or statement about the minority man’s role in the art world? I followed him around for quite some time, trying to decide, and trying to snag a photograph, but like the meaning of art these days, he was surprisingly elusive.

Art: Tino Sehgal's "This Progress" at the Guggenheim

I've had more conversations about "What is Art?" than I care to recount. In fact, sitting here writing my previous entry, I was just engaged in a conversation on precisely that topic by the person sitting next to me, who turned out to be a filmmaker. He asked about my blog, and said that he, too, had one. He had started it as a way to talk about his movie, and was surprised that, ultimately, people used his movie, and his writing about his movie, to connect with other people and talk, not about the movie, but about themselves. He was a bit surprised that his art was more a vehicle for human connection than a direct communication from himself to an audience.

This didn't surprise me much at all. I asked him, really, what was the purpose of art if not to enable people to connect with each other? There were certainly periods of high culture in which art was something very rarefied, very elite, very top-down, but that unilateral communication isn't fashionable these days, probably because it isn't very potent. The intensity of an experience is dependent on the degree of the participant's investment. It's hard to feel anything when you're standing in front of a Jackson Pollock painting, you here and it there, wondering what the big deal is. But, if you engage with the artist's intoxicated dance, lock in on a line with your eye and follow it, walking back and forth, your eyes zooming up and down, swinging with the paint and letting it lead your tempo, not only do you instantly "get it," you are elated.

But even Pollock is a pretty elitist artist. If no one tells you to engage with the work this way (and trust me—no one will) the painting will continue to hang on its wall, totally separate from you and your life. This is why Tino Sehgal may be my new favorite contemporary artist.

I walked into the Guggenheim knowing nothing about the artist, the piece, or what to expect, which is the ideal way to experience it. (And so, if you are reading this while the show is still up, and you are here in New York, stop reading, go see the piece, and then resume reading. I would hate to ruin it for you.) As I turned the corner at the bottom of the ramp, still rather excited about the smaller piece he had staged on the museum's circular central floor, a red-haired boy wearing taped-up glasses came up to me. "Hi! I'm James!" he said, and shook my hand. I said hi back, shook his hand, told him my name. "This," he said, "is a piece by Tino Sehgal." "What is?" I asked him. "This," he said, making a sweeping gesture with his hands. "This?" I asked pointing to him. "Yes, this," he said, pointing to himself with his thumbs. "This?" I asked, pointing to the tape on his glasses. "Well, not really that," he said. "Anyway," he said, "Would you like to come with me?" "Sure," I said, and he began to walk me up the museum's spiral ramp.

He asked me how I would define "progress," and I said "Hmm. . . Movement. Forward. Or upward." He engaged me in a conversation about this. I said that we were progressing along the ramp. He asked whether progress was inherently good. I said yes, definitively, because of the meaning of the prefix "pro-."

We were shortly joined by a 20-something man. Our child-guide introduced us, quickly recapped our conversation to him, and passed us off. We continued to climb up the ramp, talking with this new guide about progress. He was trying to help us problematize the concept, inviting me to comment that, certainly, if I have something, that's something he doesn't have, so that my personal progress might come at the expense of someone else's progress.

We began to be shadowed by another man, bearded, who joined our conversation for awhile before the 20-something man left us (they all introduced themselves, but I cannot remember their names). This man continued to nudge the conversation; we spoke about the importance of individual responsibility, and what an education system would look like where this kind of mindfulness and compassionate responsibility was taught (for I argued that our current educational system teaches people to be obedient, to accept the status quo, because compassion can be "dangerous," insofar as radical love upsets the status quo. I worried about how I would explain to my children (when I have them) why there are homeless people on the subway, who smell. I asked him what I'm supposed to do when I get on the train with a homeless person who smells. I confessed that sometimes, when I'm feeling very human, I see them and want to hug them, long and hard, even though I know I can't really do that. I asked him what I am supposed to do.

He suggested that the thing to do is to stay on the train, and tolerate them for awhile. I said, "NO—tolerating is exactly the problem. Tolerating doesn't change anything. Tolerating is the status quo. What is needed is radical, violent loving." We had to walk past a pole, and he let me go first. I was just saying something about Jesus Christ when I turned around and saw that he was gone. "Where did he go?" I asked.

And then an old man approached me, and introduced himself. He said that he had been reading an article about the growing middle class in China. He asked me whether I thought it was a good thing that the middle class was growing. I told him that it depended. I told him that, generally speaking, the middle class consumes too much. There's nothing definitively wrong with middle-class-ism, but the Chinese middle class is modeling itself after the American middle-class, and there is something definitively wrong with that. Now, every middle-class person in China feels entitled to a car, as every American middle-class person has one. I told him that the American middle-class out instead follow the Chinese middle-class, and ride bicycles. I told him that the American middle-class eats too much, shops too much, hoards too much stuff. He asked whether I could think of anything positive about the middle class. I told him that I was grateful that, as an American middle-class woman, I had been entitled to an education, and free to make my own living, so that I could marry a man I loved, rather than be given by my family to a man for financial reasons.

The old man asked whether I thought there was any universal thing that all people needed to be happy (aside from food, shelter, etc.) I thought about it awhile but wasn't sure. Love, I suppose now, but at the moment, I was stymied by the concept of universality. My friend suggested "self-confidence," or the feeling of being accepted, and I joked, "the envy of others," which had been suggested in a novel I was reading at the time. Our guide, though, liked these ideas, and said that, in his long life, he had thought quite a bit about it, and had decided that the only thing we did universally need was positive human relationships; connectivity with others. He asked us whether we thought it important to human happiness to satisfy goals. We both vehemently argued against the strategy of goal setting; arguing that, if one sets a goal and achieves it, one often feels disappointed by the results, and the lack of drive after that achievement, and further, if one doesn't achieve the goal, one feels dissatisfied with one's abilities. Our tweedy old man seemed a bit taken aback by our answer, but rather liked it. As we were by that point at the very top of the museum's spiral, he bid us good bye and good luck, and sent us on our way.

All this time, we hadn't much noticed that there were no art-objects hung on the walls. Looking down the museum's spiral, we saw clusters of people, in groups of two and three and four, deep in conversation, looking ahead, or thoughtfully down at the floor, or into each other's eyes, gesturing with their hands. The museum was empty and white, a treadmill for the mind.

My friend, who had "seen" the piece a few times already, and who knows my taste fairly well, had thought that I would hate it. Indeed, conceptual art usually leaves me cold, because I'm hungry for a visceral, physical, aesthetic experience, not just a puzzle for my mind. But, though Sehgal had created no beautiful objects on which to focus, he had invited us to focus on the beauty of the interaction of human minds and hearts. This sounds a little gooey, and I apologize for that, but it was truly elating to go the the museum and connect in meaningful conversation with other human beings, both my friend I'd arrived with, and the strangers who had served as our guides. This is why we go to museums—to think and feel and share—but we so often forget that, either going alone and allowing ourselves to feel isolated in our emotions, or going with our friends and gossiping about the minutiae of our lives, occasionally remarking that we do or don't like something, and rarely talking about why.

The filmmaker next to me suggested that, possibly in the future, films would be pure aesthetic experiences, because the audience would evolve beyond needing characters or plot to talk about, being more engaged in applying film's sensation to their own lives. But I disagree. I think that films are more appealing to the general public than museums because of the human connectivity—the plot's invitation to us to connect with the characters. If museums continue to progress in this direction, art will again mean something. And that is deliciously "dangerous"—an invitation for radical loving.

Art: Dan Graham at the Whitney

Dan Graham is the ideal candidate for a retrospective at the Whitney; the artist and the institution share all the same character flaws: both are hyper-cerebral, tedious, self-important figures suffering from an identity crisis. Graham is not so much an artist as a scienceless sociologist who flits from medium to medium dabbling in linguistics, anthropology, and other social sciences. One of the retrospective's featured pieces is a video that, according to the wall text, juxtaposes the heady dancing of middle American Shakers with the same of teenagers at Woodstock. This piece is actually a poorly-edited "documentary" filled with pseudo-scientific, politically-motivated, "radical" "insights" (e.g., rock-and-roll is a something created by corporate adults to entertain and thereby control/defang young people. This statement holds some truth, if one removes the term "rock-and-roll" and replaces it with "pop," but Graham overinflates the bogeyman and centralizes it in a big, bad, single-minded and intentional consciousness that just doesn't exist. Most of his work lacks the subtle nuance that would make it potent.

Other work includes a large selection of printed work Graham placed in magazines (the original mock-up of Homes For America, sheets of semiotic "poetry," and ads inviting investors to send money in exchange for shares in Dan Graham (something that Duchamp had done less seriously and with more aplomb artistic eons ago)), a number of mirrored-glass installations (a small-scale fun house version of a Richard Serra, a room behind clear glass through which you see people in the other room, and yourself reflected in the mirror behind them, and a revolving door a guard ushers you through that only has two compartments, as opposed to the usual four), and a number of embarrassingly dated "post-modern" video projections (a filmed performance in which a nude man looked at a nude woman only through a camera, and she looked at her nude self on a television screen playing the camera's recording in real-time, a dual-projection of two nude people (Graham and a woman) holding movie cameras pointed at each other, and a room in which a camera records your image and projects it onto the opposite wall, while a camera on that opposite side of the room records the images of people there and projects it onto the wall on your side).

The issues of space and media and personality and control that Graham keyed into as long as fifty years ago are still very much relevant, if not moreso, in today's society. Unfortunately, Graham's work is too stilted and cerebral, too detached and obtuse, too moralizing and judgemental, to act as potent social criticism. It is too easy to write him off as a disgruntled, nerdy crank who, despite being very much stuck in the aesthetic of the early 1970s, nevertheless has aged without grace and continues to try to be relevant to alternative kids today, including a model skate park graffitied with names of punk bands in his oeuvre.
It's a little embarrassing, but mostly tedious and easy to forget. Poor Dan Graham. Poor Whitney. Both want so hard to be hip and relevant and radical and edgy, but ultimately they are just sort of ugly and boring. Posers, trying too far too hard, look like this.

Art: Younger Than Jesus at The New Museum

I have a hard time paying attention to the art at the New Museum. This is because the building is so beautiful, and the art is so atrocious. When I go there, I usually find myself enjoying the gap between the floor and the wall.

I came away from this show with distinct memories of only two pieces. One was a banana peel on the floor. I remember it because my mom saw it, and said, sarcastically, "Is that an installation?" She thought it was trash, but wouldn't put it past the New Museum to include it as art. I was certain that the gestapo-like museum guards would have noticed and discarded it if were not art, so I said, "I don't know. Let's see if there's a wall label." Indeed, there was. It was art. The artist had instructed that each morning, a museum guard peel and eat a banana, and discard the peel at a random location in the gallery. Luckily, the guard had randomly chosen a location near the wall label that day.

The other piece that I remember was a bed, minimally austere in that it was a white cube of sorts (a platform bed on a low plinth), with that post-minimalism humanist twist—it was topped by a meringue of white sheets and down comforter, and, according to the wall text, had a woman sleeping in it. I found this rather intriguing (as my first impulse had been to climb into the bed myself), but did not see anyone under the covers. Perhaps she was very small and had curled into a ball and covered her entire body, including her head. Or, perhaps she was in the bathroom.

So I remembered one thing because it looked like it wasn't supposed to be there, and another thing because it wasn't there, even though it was supposed to be. A bit like the lovely gap between the wall and the floor. Somehow, the building managed to be a metaphor for its contents before there were any contents. That is great architecture.

Art: The Third Mind at the Guggenheim

The tag line of this show (American Artists Contemplate Asia 1860-1989) is a loaded gun, and I don't like it. Perhaps my stint at Berkeley taught me too well how to be offended on behalf of others, but I fear that a show of this kind, which binds an aesthetic kitchen sink together with the thread of so-called Asian influence, not only invites viewers to make gross generalizations, but, as an educational cultural institution, reinforces, in fact validates cultural stereotypes.

Just because a cultural stereotype is "positive" (one that I overheard in the gallery today is that "Asians have more reverence for the passage of time than Americans") doesn't mean that it is acceptable (or true). And, by including such disparate influences as Japanese printmaking, Chinese calligraphy, and Indian philosophy under one slogan, the Guggenheim's curatorial staff not only engages in a kind of cultural (in)discrimination inherent to the ignorant, but it irresponsibly disseminates that misinformation to a trusting audience.

Recklessness aside, the show additionally fails as a cohesive collection of objects. Certain items, like Nam June Paik's Zen For Film (a loop of blank 16 mm film, which produces a rectangle of white light with black splotches and dots dancing to the warm, mechanical whirring of the projector) and Paul Kos' Sound of Ice Melting (a circle of microphones surrounding two melting blocks of ice) are effective both as aesthetic objects and think-pieces (with the added bonus of thematic relevance; they are material objects in the tradition of zen koans). However, most of the show's contents don't manage to muster any reaction, emotional or intellectual.

The included pieces by Richard Tuttle, Adrian Piper, and Morris Graves in particular, amongst plenty of other immemorable detritus, not only waste prime exhibition space, but contribute to the numbing of the audience's mind, so that the spectacle of Ann Hamilton's Human Carriage (an installation in the museum's rotunda, in which small groups of shredded books fall from the top of the gallery at regular intervals, after a cart decorated by Tibetan prayer bells and veiled in white silk has sailed along a metal tube mounted to the museum's spiraling interior wall), an obtuse yet shallow metaphor dressed in unfortunate preciousness, becomes enthralling, drawing the visitors like lemmings to the ramp's edge. I hope (as I often do when visiting this institution) someone will jump.

Art: The Armory Show

I almost didn’t make it to the Armory show this year, citing general artistic exhaustion along with extreme disapproval of the $30 admission fee (when was the last time you paid admission for the right to shop at the mall, which is basically what the Armory is—a poorly-curated international mall of art up for purchase). Because I was pressed for time, annoyed, and exhausted, I didn’t make it to SCOPE, the Armory’s low-brow ugly stepsister that I’m not ashamed to admit I usually prefer to the bigger, better, more-renowned thing. Too bad, because it was probably better than the Armory.

At first, I did think that this year’s Armory was an improvement over last, but it was so extensive that after the first two hours (I was there for three, and technically “saw” [often meaning glanced at dismissively] everything) I really couldn’t be attentive to anything. I did have a notebook, though, and jotted down the following trends:

Art that is interesting but not moving.

Art that is pleasant but not good.

Art that appeared again and again in different booths (and unwarrantedly so).

More specifically, I noticed a greater incidence of pen and ink virtuosity (something that I saw seeds of at SCOPE last year, but which has fully exploded since then) and highly textured collages—huge creations of layered paint, photographs, cut-outs, woodchips, threads, and sequins. Craft, it seems, is making a come-back, even if it’s not in a traditionally aesthetically-pleasing way. Artists are back to laboring hard and taking their time.

Less pleasingly, a lot of artists are relying on tacky technology—LCD screens and flashing lights, Jenny Holzer 2.0s, “look at me!” art that is generally less interesting than the floor (which concrete landscape of trapped shipping flotsam is actually pretty captivating in places.) Other gluts were of a more traditional kind—much too much photography from Diane Arbus and Robert Maplethorpe (though I did make a great photographic discovery—one gallery had a few huge prints from Paul Himmel, a mid-century American photographer whose name I’d never heard and whose work I instantly loved).

The other great find was a group of ink drawings by Hope Gangloff, a series of Egon Schiele-meets-Zak Smith (with a taste of the Wallace Smith woodcuts in Fantazius Mallare) portraits of women in bed and men in bands—hipsterish content that would have no staying power if not for her technical virtuosity, and distinct ability to use line to imply rather that demonstrate—the quality that makes Schiele’s drawings so emotive and powerful.


Her biggest drawing (which wasn’t big at all, maybe 18”x24”) was selling for $8,000, and if I were a collector of any means, that’s the thing I would have bought that day. Hers is a name to follow.

Art/Performance: FLUXCONCERT 20090220-21

After Mr. Garvin’s last FLUXCONCERT—epic on a Fluxus scale—this evening of Brecht event scores, pulled at random from a surprisingly ornate vase, and enacted by an unrehearsed group of performers (the usual crowd), felt a little small, incidental, mild. As most of the chosen scores give little—if any—specific instruction, responsibility for the audience’s engagement rested with each performer. Because this is a creative group of fellows, those scores with the least-specific instructions generated the most interesting events (although the audience was in surprising good spirits and applauded avidly after each event (perhaps too avidly)).

One score, Suitcase, which instructs “from a suitcase” and nothing else, somehow inspired Anthony Clune to roll onstage in a wheelchair and pop the longest wheelchair wheelie I’ve ever seen (have I ever seen a wheelchair wheelie?) while telling a story about a night spent at a bus station. The literal suitcase never appeared. Another score, called Smoke, instructing “(where it seems to come from)/(where it seems to go)” brought Ethan Wagner on stage with an elaborate candelabra plugged with unlit burgundy tapers. But rather than light the candles, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and stuck one in his mouth. But rather than light the cigarette, he struck an elegant wooden match with a flourish, watched it burn a bit, and blew it out. He held the smoking match to the bottom of the cig, and then left the stage.

These open scores made me wonder what could have been for those scores listed on the program that were not performed (the program adhered to a time limit, rather than a certain set of scores, and the surprisingly long Winter Event, expressed simply as “antifreeze,” for which Wagner melted an ice cube in his right hand (refusing to transfer it to his left hand, or his mouth, as the audience occasionally demanded) burnt up a good amount of performance time). What, for example, might a person do to enact “-yellow/-yellow/-yellow” as part one of Three Yellow Events?

Alternately, Mr. Garvin chose to include a few of Brecht’s very specific scores, including Comb Music, Recipe, and Concert for Clarinet, Fluxversion 1. These fail to interest, despite the performer’s flourishes (in Recipe) and determination (in Clarinet), because the scores explain almost precisely what the performer will do. They leave little room for the visual punning, the surprise physicality, and the threat of the unknown which make Fluxus events worth watching, rather than just reading (because they do have a particular lean elegance on the page*).

Two events staged by Ryan Anthony Donaldson, which all engaged the audience, came off particularly well: Event Score (“Arrange or discover an event. Score and then realize it.”), for which he staged an impromptu three-minute birthday party, complete with invitations, silly hats, and a cake, and Position (“an insect nearby”). Position, in particular, got a delicious rise out of the crowd; Donaldson released a small spider from a Tupperware container onto an upper riser in the audience. Responses ranging from detached interest to embarrassed fear rifled the audience like an unseen breeze for the rest of the show; the older woman sitting next to me, who had often checked the time and jangled her jewelry with boredom, bent down and picked her handbag up off the ground. Fluxus can teach us to fear the ground! Later, when the creature reappeared near the stage during Winter Event, I shouted “Kill it!” and the vegans sitting in front cried “No!” in various tones of ecological self-righteousness. Too bad I was too far away to stomp on it; the ensuing brouhaha would have been another version of Event Score.


*Less so, again, the longer, more specific ones, which begin to read like technical manuals, whose jargon shoots your interest on a trajectory away from the text.

More about FLUXCONCERT at http://www.fluxconcert.org/

Art: Drawing Babar at the Morgan Library

Because my parents initially met, and then later partially raised me, in San Francisco's now-defunct Cafe Babar, where the back room's store-front window was painted with a giant elephant in a green suit escorted by an elegant gray-haired woman in a black floor-length gown, I was always meant to like the Babar books. But I never did. I didn't like elephants, I didn't like old ladies, and I didn't like France.

But the show at the Morgan Library, which displays the original drawings and mock-ups for each page of Jean de Brunhoff's Histoire de Babar, all done on creamy paper in muted pencil colors and fat, fanciful French script, with pieces cut and pasted atop each other as the story evolved in the creator's mind, presents something very different than the garishly-colored, inelegant books presented to me as a child. Perhaps American booksellers don't think that children's eyes can distinguish between non-primary reds and greens. Or perhaps I was indeed too young to appreciate the jaunty curve of Babar's ears and trunk, or the sad single tear he cries when he loses his mother, or the exuberant absurdity of an elephant riding the elevators up and down at Galleries Lafayette.

Of course, all the new-found delight is sucked right out when the adult mind realizes that Babar is a thinly-veiled piece of colonialist propaganda (the orphaned African elephant comes to Paris, where he feels lost and awkward, until a kind old lady (France, of course) helps him, first by bathing him (oh, the insulting assumption that natives are dirty), then by clothing him in a suit (Babar wants to terribly to look like everyone else around him), then by letting him drive a car (it's not just the American Dream, but the dream of the civilized world—you have, perhaps, noticed that everyone in China and India now wants one), and finally, by going back home to bring more of his friends and family to France, where he gets married (in a government- and church-sanctioned ceremony complete with white gown and veil) and can therefore become a productive French citizen. I've heard told that Winnie the Pooh is England's own colonialist children's story; what a disappointment.

But still, the original drawings are gorgeous, and French is always better in storybooks than academic post-structuralist tomes. If we can forget about what it means for Babar to have his portrait taken in his new clothes, if we can stop ourselves from uttering the word "bourgeoisie," we can still enjoy a beautifully-drawn story about an elephant in Paris.

Art: Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim

The breadth of Catherine Opie's oeuvre is so extreme, and so disparate, that without knowing this exhibition is her mid-career retrospective, one might mistake it for a poorly-curated amalgamation of six different photographers' work. But to anyone with a bit of art historical background, what quickly emerges as the binding principle of Opie's work is an insistence on grounding deep conceptualism in deep aestheticism. This may be why she is my new artistic hero.

Though I'm not, nor have I ever been, part of the queer and/or body-modification subculture (a subculture with which Opie is a part of and with which she engages intently in more than half the pictures in this show), I am from California, and I do think this helps me identify with her pictures (Opie is based in LA, and California's own particular aesthetic is a strong presence in much of her work as well)—in addition to inuring me to the "shock" of her more sensational portraits of friends who play with gender and body modification (tattoos, piercings, carvings, etc.) There's no doubt that the early Portraits (the most stilted, and, on the whole, least interesting pictures in the show), shots of nearly-nude or suited up men and women who aren't readily identifiable as either, posed against bright backdrops reminiscent of the colors of the gay flag, could be construed as threatening, weird, or even degenerate by an insulated viewer. For me, they simply remind me of home.

And "home" is a, perhaps now the, key concept for Opie. These early Portraits are of her friends, who comprise a community. They inspire an unexpected contrast with Opie's Houses, portraits themselves in a way, of the fronts of Southern California homes built in the 1950s in wealthy areas; there is something equally as campy about their now almost quaint architecture and hedges (think The Flintstones) as the piercings and tattoos and carefully crafted 'dos of Opie's friends: an intensely constructed identity, a surface that masks the inside, to protect it, to defend it, to fake out potential aggressors. Opie might make a different argument, one of opposition: in the Portraits, her friends reveal their innermost secrets, wear their proverbial hearts on their sleeves; the houses, in contrast, seem pristine from the outside, but mask whatever darkness may lurk inside.

Despite the closed gates of the Houses, Opie's relationship with the home and domesticity is actually very healthy—in fact, all of her work pulsates with a vigorous good-health, a comfort, a vitality that one might not expect to see in work that documents a subculture often associated with suffering, darkness, torture, physical and emotional pain. These are not Nan Golden's punk-rock smears of disaffected youth. These are painstakingly made (most often large format) photographs that engage with something seemingly different to show that it is actually the same. This is most apparent in the Domesticity series, in which Opie photographs lesbian couples, sometimes with their children, in their homes, including a few of her own son in hers. She describes a relationship with the snapshot in these photographs, but it is clear that in some of them, particularly one of her son sitting on the floor, bathed in light, shot over the remains of breakfast food on the table, she is also deeply engaged with the Dutch still life painting of domesticity.

The relationship with art history, with painting in particular, is of key importance in what I think are her strongest pictures: the Large Format Polaroids of performance artist Ron Athey and Darryl Carlton/Divinity Fudge. These are perhaps the most affronting photographs; in one, Athey lies in a bed, his head at the bottom of the larger-than-life photograph, his arm raised and his hand delicately curled, twenty hypodermic needles knitted through his tattooed flesh. But the sheets are golden, and the focus fades in the background (the top of the picture, and the bottom of the bed), where his ankles are strapped with leather thongs to the bedpost. Like the others in the series, this is a highly baroque image. In another, we see Athey from the rear, his venous, muscular legs planted in black stiletto heels, one leg up on a platform; he pulls up the voluminous skirts of a tightly-bodiced gown to reveal his tattooed ass, a luxuriantly long string of white pearls issuing forth from his anus (anus not shown). The backdrop is of patterned silk; again, the focus is muted, the colors warm, dark, opulent. At last, an interesting photographic engagement with the history of portraiture that peaked with Ingres' sumptuousness, an aesthetic wealth that draws us in and comforts us, while our stomachs struggle with the needled flesh, the BDSM implications, our desires, our fears, our titillation, without ever being cheap or vulgar or even offensive; this is not Vito Acconci—there is no affront.

Opie is extremely aware of what she is doing here. She shows three self-portraits together; two of which I saw for the first time in an art history class, at which time I formed a strongly unfavorable opinion of Opie, which opinion has clearly reversed now that I have seen the rest of her work. The earliest of these portraits is of her bare back, into which a childish drawing of a house and two female stick figures holding hands have been carved into her skin, which is beaded with blood. The second is from the front; the word "pervert" has been carved, in an elaborate, filigreed typeface, across her chest—it bleeds; her bare, sagging breasts have nipples pierced through with fat bullets; her white stomach is doughy and hangs unabashedly over the waist of her pants (we see just the top of them; she's seated, and the picture is from the waist up). Her entire head is enclosed in a black leather mask/hood, fastened tightly around her neck. Her arms are laced with hypodermic needles, more than twenty on each side. Together, these two pictures were disturbing and revolting when I saw them in my art history book at the age of nineteen. This was sickness; this was an affront. But the third self-portrait of the series changes the first two—narrativizes them in a way. The third self-portrait is, in art historical terms, a Madonna and Child. It is Catherine Opie, again photographed from the waist up, again topless, but this time neither pierced nor bleeding (though tattooed, and still wearing the white raised scar of the word "pervert" marked indelibly across her chest, which is somehow, now that it ceases to bleed, beautiful), holding in her big, brown, capable hands, the perfectly marble, nearly translucent body of her blond baby bay, just over a year old, whose hand and mouth sucks on her breast (perhaps the first anatomically-correct suckling Madonna and Child). The tone is silent, holy, rapturous even. It is whole. In spite of Opie's fluid understanding of gender (she states that some days she feels like a boy, and some days like a girl, then clarifying that she feels more like a girl since she's had a baby), there seems to be a melting away of anger, of rage, and a shift inward, that happens here, which frames the previous two portraits differently, as part of a story, of something that Opie wanted, which she wondered whether she was entitled to have, and which she finally took, thereby finding peace. This is somewhat reductive, because there are serious implications to this narrative (can a woman only find peace in motherhood? Must one be a mother to be a real woman? Can a woman out of touch with her femininity be "cured" by bearing children?). These are all dangerous potential interpretations of Opie's personal narrative, which she is brave enough (some may say reckless enough) to imply, and against which she does not protect, but I'll leave that to be your discussion question when you go to the show.

Meanwhile, I will make the dramatic shift that Opie makes, and that the layout of the museum affirms, and discuss Opie's. . . dare I say less personal work. Perhaps it's safer to call it her more minimalist work, or her more structuralist work, or her work focused outside of, rather than on the site of, the body. This is work that consists of two paired photographic sequences of Ice Houses and Surfers, black and white panoramic shots of Wall Street, Chicago, and Mini-Malls shot in LA, and tiny platinum prints of Freeways. The Houses and Surfers, shown together in a corridor-shaped room, where they face each other, are reminiscent of the German work that comes from the Bechers' students: large-format color pictures made with a cool, detached eye, tracing a receding line of, in one series, ice houses in a field of snow and, in the other, wetsuited surfers, waiting in a flat, gray ocean for the next wave. The pictures are about waiting (the surfer waits for waves, the photographer waits for the shot), and about the uniconographic. They are steeped in the minimalist aesthetic (if you squint, they could be the white canvases of Robert Ryman). The Freeways, conversely, are steeped in the history of photography. They are tiny, stunning platinum prints, a kind of marriage between the tilted architecture of Rodchenko and the yellowed salt and albumin prints of Middle Eastern ruins taken by Francis Frith and Maxime Du Camp in the 1850s. If content-related anxiety distracted us at all from Opie's technical mastery in looking at her other photographs, we see it here in its pure form: silent slabs of concrete curving across a jewelbox panoramic frame. The highways are California's sphinxes, and so for all their unadulterated aestheticism, these pictures are as richly conceptual documents as any of Opie's others, perhaps just less viscerally so. But they are, like most all of her work, stunningly beautiful.

Art/Performance: FLUXCONCERT 20080925-27

Read about previous FLUXCONCERTS here and here.

In his first own original FLUXCONCERT, writer/director/creator of the FLUXCONCERT series Perry Garvin continues on a preëstablished trajectory to use the structural modes and practices of Fluxus to create performance art with richer, emotional meaning than the genre typically implies. From the outset, Garvin discloses that this piece is "an oblique exploration of love, loss, and the ambiguities of human bonding." That seems dangerous territory, but it is in fact the rigors of Fluxus that restrain this piece from tumbling into the nether regions of sentimentality that words like "love," "loss," and "bonding" intimate. And while we expect from Fluxus something cool, detached, and cerebral, it is in fact the mode's embrace of randomness that allows it to make those ambiguous, emotional concepts so tangible. For isn't coupling arbitrary? (And don't dare think that arbitrary equates with meaningless until you've seen the show.)

The work is highly structured, with a 48 minute clock divided into different increments for five roles (two of which roles are played by two place-trading players each). Person A (played by two performers who switch each minute) performs a different action each minute. His actions are the most physically rigorous of each player; early instructions include "force blood to head," "scratch bare chest vigorously," and "whip head back and forth repeatedly." Person B (also played by two performers who switch for each three minutes) performs a different action each three minutes. His actions are also quite physical, but rather than damaging his own self (and damaging is indeed the correct word; on the second night of the show, Person A had raised red wounds from the previous night's scratching, and while he whipped his head back and forth, I couldn't watch; his veins stood out through his skin, and I thought I would be sick for his pain), he damages external items, tearing sheets of paper (of increasing size) in half, breaking sticks (of increasing size) in half, blithely blowing bubbles (of increasing size).

Person C, seemingly isolated from the action on stage, facing away from it, and starting at minute 12 plays a random kind of score to the drama: three pieces of music in 12-minute intervals from "the very beginning of the piano's history," "the very middle of the piano's history," and "the very end of the piano's history." Person E, equally isolated from Persons A and B, from the very beginning until the last minute of the show, is tasked to "build a structure," which he does in the corner opposite the piano (is this structure, which ironically toppled at the show's end, the promise of a future? Of work completed? Of something accomplished, done, made, built? One can't avoid the intimations of home, of family). Half-way through the show, Person D enters, his only instruction "electric guitar" (he stands with deer-in-the-headlights eyes, making no sound to break the dull electric buzz of the amp, creativity stymied, paralyzed by the overwhelming potentiality of everything that could be done). The minutes are chimed by Garvin, seated in the last row of the audience. At the final chime, minute 48, each person ceases his other activities and lowers a drape over the entire stage, and the show is over.

So where, in all this, is the exploration of love, loss, and bonding? That is what happens between Persons A and B, who after a bit of lonely, destructive behaviors, begin a courtship (Person A is instructed to look at Person B, first through binoculars, then to reach out to Person B, from a ladder, once with a string, once with a tape measure, once with his own body, but never touching Person B. He is then instructed to throw things at Person B, then to "communicate" to Person B, using numbers, clay, flags (n.b. the impotence of all these actions)). In minutes 24 through 35 persons A and B come together, trading sounds and actions, but beginning at minute 36, physical brutality begins again. Person B is instructed to grasp onto Person A, while Person A is instructed to generate shapes, make vigorous movements, and finally remove Person B's grip. At one point, Person B's arms are wrapped closely around Person A's waist, and Person A picks up a blunted half broomstick from Person B's earlier stick-breaking activity and repeatedly jams that stick into Person B's ribs and stomach. Person B finally cannot take it and releases his grip; Person A runs off stage, away form Person B, who has suffered.

I should not need to explain this metaphor to you explicitly, having already disclosed the words "love," "loss," and "bonding," and yet the audience, to my great surprise, met much of this scuffling with laughter. But I felt no mirth. I've been both Person A and Person B enough times to recognize the loneliness, the desire, the shared reaching toward meaning, the devolving of shared experience into abuse, the mindless, fearful clinging, the desire, the loneliness. Garvin's world in this piece is the world of Beckett, of Pim and Bom in How It Is (which I'm certain he hasn't read, but I see he must have lived, as we all eventually do). If anyone is to end up anything other than completely miserable, we shall have to hope that he is wrong about the ambiguities of human bonding. But I don't think he is.

Art: Dalí: Painting and Film at MoMA

I've never been a fan of Dalí's stark and lacquered surfaces, carefully colored in tans and bright blues, corralled by stoic architecture, darkened by distended shadows, and blemished with bloated creatures, Tanguey-like squiggles, those signature melted clocks. There's no lack of technical virtuosity, nor can one argue that the pictures are boring, per se (though they are, certainly, cool, with the suppressed, airless quality of De Chirico and Magritte, Surrealists all). But all Surrealist painting leaves me cold.

Not so Surrealist film, and so while this show at MoMA seemed to confuse the pulsing throngs who pushed from one tiny study to the next, then stopped to gape at the giant screens showing some very curious black and white movies, I found it rather better than expected. The fault is mine for showing up only on the show's very last day, and not attending any of the film screenings except the tangentially-related Pan's Labyrinth. . . Dalí's early collaborations with Buñuel, as evinced in two shorter films being screened in the galleries, are fantastically weird thanks mostly to the naive time-lapse jump cut. (And these are much more interesting than his more well-known collaboration with Hitchcock on Spellbound, a movie that, with its stuffy psychoanalytic pretensions, never did a thing for me).

Unquestionably, the strangest inclusion in the exhibit is another collaboration: one with Walt Disney. In the mid-1940s, the animation scion commissioned the artist to work on an animated feature, but the project, called Destino, was soon shelved (supposedly for financial reasons, but likely also because of incongruous artistic visions: Dalí is hardly suitable for children). More than 50 years later, Disney completed the film, based on the artist's original storyboards and the less-than 20 seconds of film that had been shot. The result is a strange hybrid: the traditional Disney princess—slender, winsome, doe-eyed—is tinted (just as Jasmine, Mulan, and Pochahontas were all tinted), slightly (but safely) Dalíesque: her bones a bit stronger, her curves a bit deeper, her hair a bit more stringy, her shadows much, much longer. She frolicks in a surreal desert landscape, flatter even than one of Dalí's paintings (Disney animation is the ultimate in flat), trying to rejoin her lost love, who is trapped in stone. There is an accompanying score rather than any dialogue (Disney's original intent was to include the film in another sort of Fantasia). I can't say that I think Dalí would be satisfied with the final product (it is, ultimately, much too pretty; there is a stark contrast between the included original reel and the post-humous creation)—it feels very much a Disney product—but I would rather watch it (and show it to any children in my care) than any contemporary atrocity from Pixar.

There is only one painting in the exhibition that warrants real discussion: Metamorphosis of Narcissus, a medium-sized picture in which the disparate parts formally coalesce (unlike the scattershot compositions of most of his other work). Here, echoing forms tease the eye; perhaps first we see a crouching body repeated, first in sun-drenched mud, then in cold, dried clay, until we notice a ridge in the clay figure's kneecap: it is a thumb's nail, the body actually a hand, holding an egg (simultaneously bodily/base and geometrically ideal), cracked and sprouting a fervent lily. Tiny figures in the wayback strike nude poses, stand contraposto. Behind, the sky is tumultuous, below the pond is reflective (each also contrasting with the usual flat, arid skies and grounds the artist favors). There is still more Surrealistic whimsy than I would prefer (I would, for example, if painters had editors, excise the checkerboard on the right, paint out the burning ponytail of the figure on the left; there is a difference between stark and clean, and this picture, for all its fascinations, is too busy).

Art: Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum

It is awfully tempting for me to do a Duncan Hines version of this post (and it wouldn't be all that inappropriate, given the out-of-the-box quality of his dare-I-say "so-called" art); it is tempting to be reactionary, and simply dismiss it as a consumerist cheap thrill, recoil at its profligate sexuality, and lament the youth of today for making him into an art house fashionista rock star. And yet, there is something very unsettling about Murakami's runaway popularity, given the (what ought to be) controversial content of his work.

Walking amidst the pram-crowded galleries and listening to a cooing mommy say, "Look at the Lady!" pointing her child's eyes up at a life-size Sailor Moon-like figurine, I thought, Yes, look at the lady indeed. I then began to fret over what she might say upon walking into the next room and seeing the cowboy, a rather well-endowed male character with his hand planted firmly on his erect cock, which spews a curling lasso of ejaculate, and his partner, another Sailor Moon, only nude (shaven, of course; all Murakami femmes have disturbing child-like pundenda), with hyperbolic breasts shooting out a hula-hoop of milk. Children have a tendency to ask innocent questions like "What is that?" which, in this context, turn out to be rather awkward.

So why are these prams here? Perhaps for the room papered in bright flower-power wallpaper (plasticky as Con-Tact), or for the cheerful, bright, and squat mushroom sculptures, which wouldn't be out of place in McDonaldland. Perhaps for the $95 plush flower pillow with embroidered happy face available at the gift shop? How do these quasi-liberal Brooklyn parents reconcile these cheery, Sanrio-like faces with the face of Inochi, the pubescent plasticine android whose sexual awakening is featured in a series of commercials for, well, himself, in which he stares at a room of half undressed ten year old girls with the same Sailor Moon pigtails and innocent button noses of the first statuette Mommy pointed at? (The same pigtails and innocent button nose, might I add, of the female statuette with not just a shaven but also crimson and folded. . . cleft. . . which collapses, Transformer-like, into the shape of a fighter jet.) And why, in the surprisingly contentious Louis Vuitton boutique (contentiously located smack in the middle of the art), are there only bags with cheerful plump cherries, rather than, say, Chris-Ofili-like flying pussies? (For what else, for a mind like Murakami's, could the cherry be?)

I don't find Murakami to be the source of this oddity; I don't feel comfortable crediting him with much (he is the latest in the series that reads Duchamp, Warhol, Koons, except that his three predecessors innovate and define in a way that Murakami does not (and I must concede that these men produced progressively more schlock to bog down their otherwise fascinating oeuvres)). What fascinates me here is more the public's embrace of this work, in spite of its rejection of other equally or less sensationalist artists like Ofili (one might argue that Ofili's sexuality, as a black man, is much more threatening to a white audience than Murakami's sexuality, as an Asian, but that would just be plain old school, i.e. wrong-headed). Likely it was the combination of sex with religion (and religion with elephant dung) that so broadsided Giuliani and his anti-Sensation brigade ('twas also the Brooklyn Museum, if I remember correctly), but still, does the sexualization of children not offend anyone anymore?! (I am not speaking as a reactionary here, only calling the reactionaries to arms!)

There are a few paintings that, believe it or not, have some merit (I counted two, and they were similar); they feature the D.O.B. mascot (if you're not familiar with it, you soon will be upon seeing the show) floating on a Hokusai-like wave of sea foam across a Jasper Johns-meets-Gerhard Richter background, spread across three conjoined canvasses that, ever-so-slightly, recall the Japanese screen. D.O.B.'s mouth is open and toothy, not unlike the teddies designed by Stanley Donwood and Tchock for Radiohead's mid-career albums (of which I was always extraordinarily fond). But referencing aside, what here is Murakami's very own? What is iconic? Aside from the concept of grandiose kitsch (and Koons has been there, done that), there is nothing to cling to. I'm in and out in under 40 minutes, and spend more time out on the lawn, blinking under the summer sky and playing with my toes, than I did with the art. For shame.

Rebuttal: On Jed Perl's "Postcards From Nowhere"

Let it first be said that Jed Perl is here so reactionary that a) He ought to write for The New Criterion rather than The New Republic, and b) He has inspired me--Madonna and Child-loving me!--to write defensively on behalf of contemporary art. Read Perl's article here, and then read my rebuttal.

Let us begin with Perl's thesis, that contemporary artists "replace the there that constitutes a work of art with a nowhere." He is right in proposing that Duchamp is the primary instigator of this "displacement of the work of art," and that, from here, "you can't go home again." He is right in identifying Warhol and Rauchenberg as modern disseminators of the Duchamp gospel, and Koons and Hirst as its contemporary preachers. I don't think that David Salle is remotely important enough to be included in this list, nor is his work appropriately applicable, but that is a small complaint. The larger complaint is that Perl's thesis (more an excuse for a laundry list of complaints than a binding idea) is plainly false. A work on canvas, such as Matisse's Dance, which Perl so fetishizes, is no more a "somewhere" than Olafur Eliasson's Room For One Color—in fact, it is much less so, since it cannot be literally embodied, lacks the intense, immediate, sensory alteration of the audience/participants that the Eliasson piece instigates. Perl mentions the Eliasson piece in passing: "there are lights that turn the space a deep yellow," but that is not what the piece does at all. Because of Eliasson's light installation, the corridor bleaches color from everything you see—in particular, the other people standing around, gaping at the world around them, which has suddenly become the interior of an old photograph, a punk-rock concert handout, or the movie Pleasantville. Everyone and everything is black and white. And when you have finished gawking, and you come out of the corridor, it is indeed like Pleasantville, or, to choose a reference perhaps more of Perl's time, The Wizard of Oz; people look tinted, their color false. It is an incredible mindgame, more than an optical illusion, that Eliasson has instigated. And it's not "nowhere"—it's everywhere, in the corridor, on our skin, in our heads, and lodged in the history of image-making.

Perl next moves to recriminate museum spaces built to house contemporary art. He lambastes the not-spectacular, but neither deserving, New Museum, likening it to an unfinished big-box retailer. I've not seen the BCAM, so I will refrain from addressing it, but he throws, at the end, the SFMoMA into the mix, at which I take personal offense. I have always found the SFMoMA to be the epitome of perfection in museum architecture (not just contemporary spaces, but all spaces). The rooms are of manageable size, as are the floors; the twin spirals that meet at the central staircase limit the rat-in-a-maze anxiety I feel at other museums, where rooms open to two or three other rooms rather than one, and I am uncertain whether I've seen everything, and torn in different directions at once. The New Museum eliminates this problem as well, by only having one gallery per floor. While this type of space served the Unmonumental show poorly, the pieces lacking any grounding or stability on the larger floors, that can be blamed rather on the work shown, not the space, whose warm details, like corner nooks and the inch-wide gap between the floor and the walls, imbue the galleries with much more humanity/craftsmanship than, say, the icy Whitney. That museum, with it's cattle-sized elevator, much more closely approximates a big box retailer; since, however, it has been standing since his younger years, Perl deferentially approves of it.

I haven't been to the Brooklyn Museum for the Murakami show yet (I'm going on Sunday), but I am generally predisposed to loath the man, and I won't speak in his defense here. Koons, however, I will defend, but only because Perl's argument against him is so weak. He states, "Koons and his kind have never been interested in the old avant-garde idea of outraging the bourgeoisie, of shaking up expectations. The possibility that a work of art can disturb us, whether through its style or its content, is at heart a rather traditional possibility, a new twist on the complex emotional exchanges that have gone on between artists and audiences from time immemorial." Unfortunately, Perl has his history of art all wrong (and he should know this, as he compares Koons' monumental post-readymades to Tang Dynasty horses). Art was always made to "massage the egos" of the money- and power-wielding gate keepers—the king, the church, the business tycoons. It was not until the rise of characters precisely like Duchamp that art began to "shake up expectations." And yet, Koons does manage, regularly, to "outrage the bourgeoisie" (Perl seems awfully outraged, and if he thinks he's better than bourgeois, he might need to reread his Marx). What could be more outrageous than Murakami's lasso of cum, or Hirst's diamond-studded skull (which riffs on a very classic artistic and literary motif, in a rather timely way)? A twelve-by-six inch Roman landscape by Corot? Surely, he jests.

Perl, too, is uncomfortable with the commodification of the art object—the making of something initially particular into a kind of "logo"—he here refers to Serra's curling swaths of rusted steel. I wrote recently about Louise Bourgeois' participation in the creation of "logo" art as well—the Spider, of course—and so I am sensitive to Perls' discomfort here. However, dare he say that Matisse's Dance has not become a logo? What about Picasso's Guernica, or Cezanne's apples and pears? What Perl here objects to is the fact that he sees new logos being minted before his very eyes, while he naively accepts the always-alreadyness of logos that were pre-established before his art historical education began.

Perl "wish[es] more museum directors and trustees understood how hungry—and how disgruntled—museumgoers in America really are." Again, I don't think that he could be farther from the truth. Art in America, which has always belonged to the elite, is at long last approaching something that the layperson can engage with and be moved by. One doesn't need to know the trajectory of minimalism to understand Eliasson's 1 m3 Light, although a working knowledge of Tony Smith and friends does deepen its relevance, in the very same way that one doesn't need to know anything about a diaspora to appreciate the bleeding colors and persistent lines of a Kitaj (dare I argue that knowing less here may be more). And yet, because the first is ephemeral rather than concrete, Perl dismisses it as being "from nowhere," and without merit.

At MoMA this past weekend, the Eliasson show was absolutely filled with museumgoers, and they were far from disgruntled. They were, in fact, literally elated, completely engaged and positively vibrant with the endorphine release of pure visual delight. Dizzy with pleasure, they were. Even the grandparents were able to drop their curmudgeonly attitude and wheel about the colored spaces, seeing the world with fresh eyes. I am shocked that Perl was able to shut down his senses and deny himself this pleasure.

Art: Olafur Eliasson at MoMA/PS1

I'm glad that I saw the fun, but less spectacular, PS1 portion of this show before going to see the installations at MoMA, or else I may have been disappointed. From the PS1 installations, one might identify Eliasson as a hit-or-miss artist, someone who has the occasional great idea, but who also gets rather mired down in obsessive, uninteresting nonsense. The occasional great idea would be the "title track," Take Your Time, where, to truly appreciate this piece, one must do exactly that. Walking into the large gallery (I love the proportions of PS1's huge, high-ceilinged, airy rooms), you see people lying on the floor, looking up into an immense, slowly rotating circular mirror, which is mounted at an angle not parallel to the ground. It is difficult to describe the trippy results without leaning on psychedelic language, but the euphoria this piece induces is a kind of mind-bending, total-body displacement, a woozy, uncanny, unplugging of from spatial reality that might seem like a gimmick, if it weren't for a number of Eliasson's other similarly brilliant pieces. Rather than dwell on the assorted bits and pieces of dreck also housed at PS1 (I'm thinking of the Model Room, which is, to be honest, a collection of studies, rather than an actual work of art, and perhaps therefore undeserving of my derision), I will move directly to MoMA, where the real jewels of the exhibition are housed.

The hands-down most stunning piece at MoMA right now happens to be part of Eliasson's show, and it is called Your strange certainty still kept, consisting of a magical curtain made by flickering points of light. The mechanical description of the piece is that a ceiling-mounted bar dribbles water into a trough on the ground, and the drops of water are illuminated by strobe lights, but that doesn't quite evoke the power of the installation, which manages to simultaneously tap into the primordial and the mechanical, the innocence of a childhood magic show and the sordid fascinations of a strip club. It describes, far more than the so-called installation at PS1*, beauty.

The on-its-heels runner-up to this piece is the visceral head-trip (an oxymoron, I know) of Room for one colour, for which Eliasson installs a lengthy corridor directly off the escalator with a kind of yellow tubular light bulb. These lamps at first simply seem egregiously bright, but after a bit, you shake your head in confusion as you realize that they somehow bleach everyone of color, so that you're walking in an old photograph or movie, or amongst the ultra-punk-rock. This is another of the visually-uncanny kinds of work that is delightfully so. The emotion induced is similar to the emotion felt (if a fan could feel) by the freewheeling fan in Ventilator, which, hung on a sturdy cable, propels itself as if a small child on a swing, in random, gleeful circles, heedlessly threatening to threaten the heads and raised hands of the audience (but being too good-natured to do any actual harm). When exiting the black & white hallway into the next room, color emerges as in the film Pleasantville; people look tinted, falsely painted, in strange and muted colors, until one's eyes adjust.

The smaller pieces at MoMA, including a number of spot lights pointed at mirrors and the ground to create "No way!" moments of geometrical perfection, delight on a more puritanical level. A circular colored projector in another room brings to mind the shadowbox at the Exploratorium, for all you San Franciscans out there. A slowly-changing, ceiling-sized light box in one of the PS1 installations, which shifts from dim to need-sunglasses bright, and from golden to rosy, recalls the same museum's Meeting by James Turrell. Turrell is the artist who might first come to mind when walking into most of Eliasson's installations.

There are, it must be said, large pieces that don't quite make the jump from ephemeral to mystical, and these include the Moss wall at MoMA and the Reversed waterfall at PS1; the first is a bit too dead, the latter a bit too sloppy. But ultimately, Eliasson's work is the first ultra-contemporary, ultra-conceptual art that has moved me in a long time; I don't think I've felt this kind of ebullient thrill since illegally climbing inside the sculptures at SFMoMA's Sol LeWitt retrospective. And at the Eliasson show, I wasn't doing anything that I wasn't supposed to be doing.

*Beauty consists of a wall of water as well, only a much finer, continuous mist, against which is trained a steady light, producing a rainbow. The piece is almost as ephemeral, though nowhere near as magical, as Your strange certainty still kept.

Art: Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim

If I came to the Guggenheim expecting to hate this retrospective, and actually saw five or six pieces that I didn't completely loathe—that, in fact, I found partially maybe somewhat appealing (from the back), or even, *gasp,* interesting—does that make the show a success? I'm afraid I will have to say yes, since it introduced me to work with which I was unfamiliar, and which I couldn't easily dismiss.

I could, and did, easily dismiss Bourgeois' earlier work, which winds around the lower floors of the famed Guggie spiral. The small drawings and paintings recollect Miró and Klee, the totemic sculptures the African influences on Picasso and Brancusi, the general imagery the Dada and Surrealists. But all of it seems smaller, coarser, weaker. . . dare I say more womanish? Somewhere out there is a cute lesbian ready to beat me up for that (there were more than one at the opening), but I will stand by it anyway. Gender is professed to play a huge role in Bourgeois' work, so I get a free pass.

Onto gender, then. One of the few recurring images/tropes in Bourgeois' work is the nodule. Here is a good example of nodules in a piece that I found partially maybe somewhat appealing:


The appealing part, for me, comes from the juxtaposition of the raw wooden plinth with the soft sheen of the polished marble. Under well-placed lights, the crown of each nodule reflected with a kind of wet awareness (like an eyeball, or a clitoris, or a penis emerging from its foreskin. . . sorry! I warned you that we were going to talk about gender!) Aside from seemingly obvious sexual intimations, the piece (called Cumul I) offers room for more politically-inclined interpretation. One might see "groupthink" in a cluster of fretting heads, some hiding inside their ghostly garments (perhaps French Catholic nuns, perhaps Arabic women in hijab).

Even more appealing (and more surprising, since I did expect these semi-organic, disturbing growth-like sculptures, but didn't expect this) were, toward the top of the spiral, what I would call life-size Cornell boxes, intimate rooms structured with doors for walls, with frosted glass windows and keyholes for peeking inside to see rusty wire bed frames, clear glass jars, yellowed cotton undergarments waxy casts of held hands, and colored lamps. These nostalgically evoke the concept of "interior" (as in, the private space of women) in a more tender and subtle way than her other domestic work, like the caged and guillotined sculpture of her childhood home, or the installation called The Destruction of the Father, in which a room of life-size nodules gather round a pyre-like construction of skeleton-evoking bits and appear simultaneously to be approaching the memorial as dining table, all under hot red lights. I cannot find a good image of these intimate rooms, and so wish I had brought my camera.

As far as Bourgeois' ultra-famous spider is concerned, I am ambivalent. It neither disgusts me, nor frightens me, nor inspires me, nor challenges me. I might like it better if I were allowed to climb between its legs and look up at it from inside. The omnipresent arachnid is a symbol of the artist's mother, she says, who was a weaver of tapestries, and a force Bourgeois considers less than positive (as was, as evinced in her work, her father). And yet, I cannot see these spiders as evil as many viewers, no doubt, do. It is something just there. In its proportions, its machined construction, and repeated manifestations (there is one at the Tate, one on San Francisco's Embarcadero, one at the Louvre, one in Tokyo, one at the Smithsonian, one at one at the National Gallery of Canada, etc. etc. ad inf.) it threatens only on an Oldenberg scale—that is, as a joke, as "plop art," as a way to make a buck (or, in fact, a cool $3.2 million). She may be more bourgeois than most aficionados are willing to admit.

Art: Subway Poster Slasher Strikes!

Art/Performance: Fluxconcert 20080613

This is a review of the second formal FLUXCONCERT . Unlike the first FLUXCONCERT, the second showcases a completely fresh composition, in 13 movements, prelude, and postlude, courtesy of rising local star Ethan Wagner. Wagner reveals a surprisingly deep understanding of the Fluxus mentality, while managing to regularly subvert the genre with actual pieces of music that sound appealing. In Movement 8 (Nonsense Sounds), for example, Wagner writes: "Compose for the following sounds: Paper clip in a styrofoam cup; straightened paper clip against an upside-down wine glass; tearing paper (one sheet only)." It is a challenge to imagine, simply by reading the instructions, the beauty of these three subtle sounds together, and it is by each performer's own skill that the patterns of noise intermingle in a pleasing, rather than cacophonous, way. That the paper used is a yellowed page of sheet music is a sly wink to Wagner's classical training, which he has not, it must be said, at all eschewed, even in this production. For example, Movement 11 (Music Lesson) demands that one "Try to teach an audience member how to play something incredibly difficult on an instrument that requires a bit of skill." Rather than opting for something populist, like Stairway to Heaven on the acoustic guitar, Wagner places a novice pianist at the keyboard and demands that she play Rachmaninoff, to rather whimsical effects. A musical teacher himself, he parodies his trade with panache.

An underlying insistence on violence pervades the show (at the end of the aforementioned Movement 8, the wine glass is crushed inside a "sturdy bag," in Movement 13, Crunching Things, a person simultaneously breaks "a sack of thirteen light bulbs, a clock, a box of Premium saltine crackers, [and a stack of] cassette tapes," using a Bible, a mallet, his bottom, and his feet, respectively), as well as a coyness about technology (in the fascinating Movement 4, Sequenced Ticking, a performer uses a microphone and a laptop to manipulate the ticking of four individual alarm clocks over a specified time period to make a kind of digital sound scape; in a number of other pieces (Prelude; Movement 10, In Memoriam Tony Clune; and Postlude) the audience is asked to participate by either actively or passively inciting their mobile phones to sing and squawk). While it is impossible not to read these two tendencies as hat-tips to the current state of affairs in the modern world, the show's best pieces maintain music's traditional role: the creation of sonic beauty. It is a piece such as Movement 3, Caricature no. 3 (Fragments on a theme.), or Movement 6, No. 6 ("Melody for trumpet and guitar.) (both original, straight-forward compositions that your grandmother would be comfortable calling "music") that actually warms and softens the audience so that it can bear the detached, wry humor of the more Fluxus-oriented movements.

A special nod goes to organizer Perry Garvin, who not only alerted me to the existence of FLUXCONCERT, but also performed, with great gusto, "a patriotic song with deep conviction" for Movement 9, Devotion. Because the composer and organizer received mixed feedback with regard to their handing out, at the show's beginning, the score (the complete instructions for each piece), I will take this moment to cast my vote as heartily in favor. The instructions are written in a beautifully succinct language, constantly on the verge of wit, but bone dry and bone bare (consistent with Fluxus instructions of yore), and serve as not only a reference, but an elucidation, of the performance. A show without the structure they provide would devolve into mere entertainment, rather than art.

Art: Detroit Institute of Art

My dad grew up in Detroit, and moved to San Francisco in the 70s; he was the first of six children, and the only one to ever leave Michigan. I remember going to visit grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins as a child, marveling at the expanses of lawns, tire swings, and houses that were only one floor, but had "lakes" (ponds) on their extensive lots. My cousins played in little league, knew how to roller skate, and regularly ate food cooked outdoors on Weber grills (on which I burned my hand at the age of five, when my cousin, with pigtails encircled with bows of red yarn, tried to teach me to roller skate, and I tentatively pushed forward while keeping a constant hand on whatever object was available to support me, in this case, a smoldering meat cooker that covered my right palm in blisters that kept me up crying all night.) Of course, all these families lived in the 'burbs, and I never saw Detroit itself, only heard the horror stories: the family friends who went into town for the Opera and were car-jacked, the wife being locked in the trunk during the thugs' two hour joyride, and then abandoned under a highway.

I hadn't been back to Michigan in almost fifteen years when I found out that my cousin—the one with the red yarn bows—was getting married. It was with much trepidation that I conceded to my father and bought plane tickets (fear of seeing the long-lost family again, not fear of Detroit). I wanted desperately to see the old Michigan theater, a glory-days movie palace that, in the 1970s, was gutted and turned, believe it or not, into a parking lot (the walls and ceilings still boast the original arches, stonework, and peeling paintings of the 1920s), and I woke up early the day of the wedding to drive downtown with my dad and see it on the way to visit his ailing sister, who wouldn't be at the wedding. The theater/garage was closed, and the two attendants wouldn't let me in, although I begged, pleaded, and offered cash incentives. The most I got was a tiny peep through the gate. We did, though, drive by the old railroad station, and stopped to snap some pictures.



The morning after the wedding, when everyone was sleeping of their hangovers, my mom and I were with my uncle and his girlfriend, who still live in Detroit proper (they bought a gorgeous old Victorian with stunning original details for a song about ten years ago. . . I am talking a five-figure sum, here, with a first digit of two. Unbelievable, given that my parents bought their house just outside of San Francisco almost ten years before that, also with a first digit of two, but a six-figure sum). They drove us, in their cigarette smoke-infused, cranberry-colored jalopy (we were happy for the ride) to the Detroit Institute of Art, which, I had heard, to my surprise, was an amazing museum. More to my surprise, the museum had been completely gut renovated within the last year, and its cool, silent rooms were fresh and lovely, with evenly painted mauve walls and shining wood floors and sparkling white rafters. It being early Sunday morning, and most of Detroit being rather cemetery-like anyway (silent, peaceful, mournful, grassy, now that half of the abandoned buildings have burned down and their ruins become de facto micro-prairies), the museum was mostly empty.

We only had one and a half hours to spend, so I wasn't able to take careful notes or spend too much time with any one thing, and still only managed to see about half of the museum, which has a surprisingly extensive collection. I didn't take pictures of any of the contemporary work, like the beautiful William Kentridge video that was projected onto a spinning table and then reflected up onto a metal can, where the movie played right-side-up, or the Yinka Shonibare batik-dressed mannequins on stilts that I recognized from his show at the Cooper Hewitt in New York. Instead, I wandered around snapping photos of paintings that caught my fancy.

I like different paintings for different reasons, of course. Sometimes, a painting is just plain weird, and I love it for that reason. Like this Jaws episode:


Sometimes, I see a painting by an artist I know well, but in a style that seems incongruent with his other work, like this Paul Gauguin self-portrait.


I generally cannot stand landscapes, but I found myself rather taken by this one:


And ultimately, I am always a sucker for good naked lady paintings, both the more romantic, like this one:


And the more stylized, like this one:


This last one is kind of like an Egon Schiele if Egon Schiele were a Pre-Raphealite. The artist is a Swiss guy named Ferdinand Hodler; I had never heard of him before, and this is apparently just a study for his painting called Day. Look at the way he bends her body to conform to the frame, as compared to the more straightforward portrait above. This is typical of Hodler's work, where bony bodies hunker down to "fit" inside the bounds of his wide but short canvasses. I think he is my new favorite painter.

Art: SCOPE and The Armory Show

Why would an artist who can do this:
do it, but also do this:
These are two pieces by Karl Haendel that I saw at the Armory Show this year, which highlight the kind of confusion endemic to the art scene these days (you'll find it at the Whitney Biennial, gallery-hopping in Chelsea, and so on). The first picture is a pop/photo-realist pencil drawing, about three feet wide; the reflections are the fault of my shoddy photography on the glass. The second picture is of a work about the same size, but portrait instead of landscape: a list of ways in which Hitler and Karl Haendel are different. It's funny, but I would personally hesitate to call it good art. I would be less hesitant to call the giant baby good art, but I wouldn't buy it for my house, either. It feels a little dated. Both pieces do, actually, although they represent opposing ends of a dated spectrum (pop and conceptualism; all image versus no image).

The positive thing that I can say about Haendel's work is that it caught my attention and made me want to take a picture and write down his name. I didn't take pictures of any of the exploded-craft-store variety (the kind of work we see a lot today, in which labor intensity is highlighted, while "craftsmanship" is ignored, using a good amount of sequins, tape, fabric, wax, blinking lights, vinyl banners, colored plexiglass chips, markers, sparkles, rhinestones, day-glo paints, and all other ephemera of bling-meets-kitsch). I didn't take pictures of any of the so-tedious-I-walked-right-by-without-noticing stuff, either. I didn't take pictures of anything at the Eleanor Antin booth, because I couldn't decide whether I liked it or didn't (I know I don't like the Eleanora Antinova film, but I do maybe possibly like the photographs, and the concept of Eleanora Antinova, and I do probably like the new photos, the full color ones that play with the photography/sculpture/painting and post-modernity/antiquity (they would have fit in nicely with my graduate thesis), but I do remember it, which is more than I can say for much of the rest of it.
I also didn't take pictures of my favorite thing at the show, because I instead bought the book: The Hyena & Other Men by Pieter Hugo. I really wanted to buy one of his gorgeous, serene, dingy pictures, but at $9,500 a piece, that wasn't really a possibility. While I didn't see anything else at the show that I would have actually wanted for my own collection, I wrote down a few names of artists whose work was sort of maybe remotely interesting: Anthony Goicolea (it must have been photography, because looking at his website now, his drawings are awful), Dan Perjovschi (who did a fairly amusing installation at MoMA recently, although I've already forgotten what he had at the Armory that made me note his name), Juliao Sarmento (whose paintings I remember seeing last year and liking then, too), Youssef Nabil (whose small, hand-tinted pictures grabbed my attention at first, but quickly grew tiresome and gimmicky, and don't work as well in large format), and Justine Kurland (whose name I wrote down, but whose work I can't remember at all).

I feel like I actually had better luck the day before, at SCOPE. Perhaps the smaller festival is just less overwhelming, or perhaps I was a bit more fresh. Or, perhaps SCOPE features art that's way less hip (I think it does), and my tastes are sort of dated (I get that feeling more and more; when it comes to art, I can defend my generation against an older naysayer, but I'm not genuinely of it, and amongst a group of peers, I'll play dinosaur). At SCOPE I fell in love, really in love, with a painting by Gavin Nolan. It was already sold, so I didn't bother asking the price (I think that was a mistake), but here it is; I love it, and I can't even tell you why. It's just brilliant.
The gallerist showed me some photocopied images of some other Nolan paintings they still have "in stock," but I didn't like them at all; they were very Bacon-inspired. . . sort of Bacon-meets-Interview magazine. They didn't combine the hyper-real flesh tones with the blocks of print and color; this is apparently a new departure for him. I hope he sticks with it, because it's great. It's the best painting I've seen in a long while.

The other thing at SCOPE that really caught my eye was a group of little icon-like paintings, on small scraps of wood and tin, in brilliant orange and greens that were clearly heavily influenced by graphic arts, but maintained that extra je ne sais qua that makes art art. They were hung on a wall with no label, and were minded by no gallerist. I had to circle back a few times, hoping to find out what they were; at long last, I was able to interrupt an obnoxious L.A. slag wearing a clingy leopard-print wrap dress with spike heels while she chattered away with a (male) client, refusing to give me the time of day. I stood next to them for a few minutes, looking at her pointedly, and being pointedly ingored, and then they started to walk away. I had to interrupt and ask her cooly "excuse me, but does this artist have a name?" "The Date Farmers," she snapped, and walked away. And so, to the internet, where I found some more pictures, and decided that these guys are totally awesome, wherein painting is concerned (I'm hesitant on installation in general, and their installations looked a little. . . crafty/cloying/tedious). But their paintings? Brilliant.