The Greasy LACMA Wheel Gets a Squeek

I headed over to LACMA today to see So Cal: Southern California Art of the 1960's and 70's from LACMA's Collection. Christopher Knight types some words about the show at the LA Times and makes note that Kienholz's The Illegal Operation isn't even in the collection. That's perhaps why the publicly owned collection isn't allowing photography, since some of the works are privately owned. It could also be a policy brought in by Michael Govan, since Dia is big on enforcing their no photo policy.

Back in the 19th century, art students used to go to museums and sketch artworks as a type of visual note-taking. This being the 21st century, the digital camera has become my personal sketch-pad of choice. The 43-year-old work above (now owned by the County of Los Angeles) was censored because of it's sexual content. When it first was shown, you would have to ask a guard to open the car door, to see the tableau inside. Now LACMA is closing the door on snapshots, probably as a way to monetize this publicly owned work.

Speaking on monetizing, Tyler Green has reported on LACMA's gouging of art students in the past. Rather than pay the $9.00 adult price, I forked out the $25.00 for an annual student membership. If you go to their website, it still lists the fee, as do their membership brochures. When I picked up the current (September/October) issue of Connect, LACMA's Member's Magazine, two sentences under News & Highlights mentions that admission is now free for students of Art Center, Otis, UCLA, USC, Irvine, and CalArts, just by showing your ID card. No mention of this secret program on their website or at the ticket window.

Don't think that "Start On Us: Opening Doors for SoCal Art Students" is unsolicited benevolence on the part of LACMA: they got Bank of America to pick up the tab through June of next year.

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Documenta 12, Take 1:

(With apologies to John Godfrey Saxe and the blind men of Indostan)

It was six fine folk of "the art press"
(Whose opinions we do read),
Went to Documenta
(Though none of them can see),
That each by observation
Might write quite pithily

The First approached the exhibit,
And happening to fall
Against a Persian rug that hung,
In Documenta-Halle:
Said, "This hodge-podge show

Is like a furry wall!"

The Second, at Romuald Hazoumé,
Cried, "Ho! what is this craft
So very round and smooth and sharp?
A work that makes me laugh!
His floating presentation,
Is very like a raft!"

The Third approached a collector,
And happening to take
His wrinkled neck within his hands,
Thus boldly up he spake:
"I see," quoth he, "Documenta
Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth saw reading materials
And feeling bored and mean,
Rolled his eyes and lollygagged
(For reading, he wasn't keen),
" 'Tis clear enough this exhibit
Is very like a 'zine!"

The Fifth, who faced the Fridericianum,
Betwixt a Joseph Beuys
Came upon a suitcase-gallery
With art the size of toys
This marvel of a free-for-all
Is like those Banksy ploys!

The Sixth, feeling much despair
Walked in a darkened room,
And tripping on guitars and wires,
He heard their drang und strum
"I hear," he said, "this arty fair,
Is very like a tune!'

And so these folk of the art press
Amid their four-town sprint,
Each baked their own opinion
Based on their Kassel stint,
So need you not think at all,
Just read their views in print!

Prose comments to follow...

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Doubting Teresa, Mother of Agnostics?

The publication of Mother Teresa's letters to her confessor--which she asked to be destroyed--has garnered lots of newsprint in the past few days. This should be a lesson for those with last wishes: don't ask the Holy See to carry them out.

There's an interesting aside to atheists in Time Magazine article:

But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists...will see the book's Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself."

I would argue that the difference is that the woman in the country western song has a husband who's left, and therefore there is a possibility he may return. When you carry a torch for the god meme, the possibility of an appearance is even more remote. In her own words,

“For me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves but does not speak.” “Such deep longing for God—and … repulsed—empty—no faith—no love—no zeal.—[The saving of] Souls holds no attraction—Heaven means nothing.” “What do I labor for? If there be no God—there can be no soul—if there is no Soul then Jesus—You also are not true.”

Like Hitchens I tend to believe that the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence.

"The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'"

It's too bad she didn't have the balls to publicly express her agnosticism. At Richard Dawkins' website, one poster noted a stunning similarity between quotes by Mother Teresa and Sylvia Plath:

"I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak."

"I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of the darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul."

Can you tell which is which? The answer is below.

And in case you had any doubt about Sylvia Plath's atheism, her poem, The Dead:

Couched in cauls of clay as in holy robes,
Dead men render love and war no heed,
Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe.

No spiritual Caesars are these dead;
They want no proud paternal kingdom come;
And when at last they blunder into bed
World-wrecked, they seek only oblivion.
Rolled round with goodly loam and cradled deep,
These bone shanks will not wake immaculate
To trumpet-toppling dawn of doomstruck day :
They loll forever in colossal sleep;
Nor can God's stern, shocked angels cry them up
From their fond, final, infamous decay.

The first quote was MT, the second, SP.

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Art | 38 | Basel Highlights and Thoughts

Art Basel is my second of four stops on my grand tour. All the towns I'm in are relatively small places, completely overrun (and overbooked) by art crowds. In Venice, I stayed in Mestre, the last stop on the mainland before reaching Venice proper. In the evening I would see the street vendors back from a day's work, milling about and smoking cigarettes. Likewise in Basel my housing choice was limited to the town's youth hostel. I shared the room with one of Basel's homeless, who only got out of bed to eat, shit, and smoke. It made me wonder if they put Basel's homeless in cheap rooms to clean up the city for the art crowd.

On my first day I visited Art Unlimited, the hall of mostly installation work by selected artists. It wasn't expecting to see space free of the galleratti and their fetching sales staff. Above is William Hunt, who would climb into this BMW filled with water and sing with a special underwater microphone and breathing apparatus.

I also ran across Pierre Huyghe's Light Show which was at MOCA's Ecstacy. Jeffrey Vallance was also there with his Cultural Ties piece he made way back when he was in art school.

I like Allan McCollum. He was showing a small fraction of his SHAPES Project.

It was also worthwhile to walk through a fully realized Christoph Büchel installation, Simply Botiful. The work seems to fulfill three out of four of Jackson and Messick 's aesthetic responses to creativity:

Surprise
Satisfaction
Stimulation
Savoring

And with stimulation, he hits the ball our of the park.

Michael Stevenson was showing the remainders of one of the fifty tents commissioned by the Shah of Iran that were erected to house VIPs for the 2,500 year anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire. The rag-draped remains became a cautionary monument for hubristic leaders.

On my second day I attended the fair proper with my "professional pass," a chance to see the booths without the crowds. I came across a piece by my CalArts mentor, Sam Durant, from his Pilgrim's Story.

About mid-day I started to get the chills, and barely made it back to my bed at the hostel. Did running around Venice full throttle deplete my immune system? Did the coughing jags of my homeless roomie pass me some virus? I worried that I wouldn't be able to pull myself together for my train ride to Kassel.

At this point I'm completely arted out and want nothing more than to be home in my own bed, sandwiched between my dog and my boyfriend.

I feel like I've been immersed in a really ugly part of the art world. Filthy lucre and privilege are everywhere. Quality is diluted by quantity, and money trumps everything. If we humans place value on objects that are rare, be it precious stones or paintings by dead people, what value do we place on things that are ubiquitous and common, like mints that come with the restaurant bill? Would FGT give away his posters if they weren't in an unlimited edition? Because humans have been so successful at populating the planet, does it make it easier to go to war and kill them?

If the art market is booming and more artists are showing more work through more galleries, does that devalue artwork overall? I keep hearing about the inevitable art market crash, and the scenario goes that the rich--beset by hard(er) times--pick up and take their money elsewhere. But what if the predicted "correction" comes not because of the investors, but from the glut of available art?

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Venice Biennale, Part IV

Russian eye candy from AES+F.

My last pithy comments on pavilions of note:

The First Roma Pavilion was host to artists from the Roman diaspora, better known as Gypsies.

Don't mess with Ecuador.

Territorios, an exhibit put on by the Italian-Latin American Institute contained some great work, including the knife pictured above By Manuela Ribadeneira. Engraved in reverse, the reflection on the wall says (in Spanish) I Make This Territory Mine. There was a great video by Cuban artist René Francisco called Patio di Nin.

Video art from the Albanian Pavilionette.

In the same building was the three-room video pictured above by Sonia Balassanian called Who is the Victim?

Glove for sale.

I also ran across Htein Lin from Burma (pictured above) selling gloves full of water as part of Migration Addicts, one of the collateral exhibitions.

Relational aesthetics, Venezuelan style by Vincent + Feria.

Before I close and move on to Art Basel, Documenta, and Sculpture Project, I wanted to note a few things in the Giardini.

I went to Yale and all I got was a pavilion in the Venice Biennial.

I had trouble understanding Hyungkoo Lee's presence in the Korean Pavilion. I hate to carp on something that was so well received, but his work oozed Yale MFA program. He almost seems to be Matthew Barney's surrogate, since Barney's only presence in the Giardini was at the L'uomo Vogue booth where skinny models tried to pass off free five-pound copies of their magazine with Barney on the cover.

They drink Tang.

Isa Genzken in the German Pavilion made me wonder about Europe's love/hate relationship with America. Trolling through the modern art spaces in the EC, I'm always tripping over these over-romanticized depictions of Americana: American Indians, The Space Program, Jazz Music, "The West," Hollywood, etc. Then our imperialist president does something unforgivable, and America gets blamed for shattering their dreams.

Political art?

Lastly, I want to mention the conversation I had in front of Toril Goskøyr and Camilla Martens piece at the Nordic Pavilion. I talked with the guy hired to wash the windows dressed as an African immigrant. I'm sorry I didn't write down his name, as he wasn't credited on the artists' or the pavilion's web site. We both felt that he was there as a surrogate for the African immigrants seen selling designer handbags around Venice. He was actually working as a Summer student intern while studying architecture in Italy. He was born in the Sudan, but came to Europe with his parents at a baby and had grown up in Brittan. I asked him if any of the other art viewers had gone up and talked to him, and he said I was the only one. He was hired as a docent but was put to work washing windows because he looked the part.

It would be nice to do something important.

When you're dead, you loose control of your work.

I have an idea: let's make art using light bulbs!

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la Biennale di Venezia, Parte Tre

I ran into Charles Gaines on opening day; he looked very happy to be there.

I've mentioned other artists in the Arsenale in previous posts. If you love or hate Sol LeWitt, Fred Sandback, Louise Bourgeois, Nancy Spero, Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer, or Ellsworth Kelly, your opinions would have been reinforced. One artist I'd like to mention is El Anatsui who showed this summer at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. He makes these huge sculptural blankets out of flattened metal bottle tops. They're so radiant and lush, they out eye-candy some Gustav Klimts.

Of the Collateral Events, some worth mentioning were Thomas Demand's paper reconstruction of the Niger Embassy in Rome.

Also Joseph Kosuth's riff on water which was only viewable from a special vaporetto that ran to San Lazzaro Island.

Am I the only one who has trouble seeing past Bill Viola's technical skill and special effects wizardry to swallow all the pseudo-spiritual babble he spews out when talking about his work?




Lastly, I wanted to mention a couple of pavilions, Hong Kong and Lithuania. Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas's project, Villa Lituania was a witty critique of the civic boosterism that saturates both the construction of embassies, and the national pavilions in Venice. The staged a pigeon race from the former Lithuanian embassy in Rome, to an ornate pigeon coop in Venice modelled after the embassy.

At the Hong Kong Pavilion, the artwork was overshadowed by the promotion of economic development through the arts. At the entrance hung a huge banner that flatly stated the motives for the exhibition:

Established in 1995, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (ADC) is a
statutory body set up by the Government to plan, promote and support the broad development of art including dance, drama, literary, music, xiqu, visual arts, film and media arts as well as arts education, arts criticism and arts administration in Hong Kong.

As the bridge between the Government, arts sector and the public, the ADC is committed to the following development strategies:

- Developing Hong Kong into an arts and cultural hub in Asia
- Establishing platforms to assist arts groups in reaching out
- Promoting the development of arts education
- Exploring community resources and rally community-wide support for arts development
- Raising the professional standard of the arts industry
- Providing greater support to the arts community

The ADC has presented works of Hong Kong artists in the Venice Biennale in the name of Hong Kong, China since 2001. The total number of visitors of the past three exhibitions amounts to 100,000.

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The 52nd Venice Biennale, Part II

Fresh Produce for Sale on the Fondamenta Sant'Ana

I thought I'd post a few last tourist snapshots before putting up some pictures of the art. This will also give me a chance to write a few more words on the context of the VB. For the past couple of weeks, my routine has been to wake up late, look at some art, stop by a cafe, and write down my thoughts in my journal. In Venice all that changed to a frantic pace of running running between pavilions, consulting maps, and catching traghettos.

Looking Across the Piazza San Marco

Outside the Dodge's Palace was a carved head with an opening in the mouth. Here one could deposit a slip of paper if you wanted to accuse someone of a crime and turn them in to the authorities. It seems like nothing has changed in the past five hundred years, with post-9-11 admonishments to report all suspicious activity. Today--as always--political systems are about control of the population, a sort of ham-fisted behaviorism. When I was a child, one of the exemplars of the evils of communism was that children were encouraged to turn in their parents as traitors if they spoke out against the state. Today DARE encourages kids to turn in their pot-smoking parents.

Statuary on the Palazzo Ducale

So much of the art encountered seemed to point to political problems, but in the end one felt as powerless as an inmate in the Palazzo delle Prigioni. Most of the better work took into account its context, addressing the civic boosterism of a 19th century exposition in the present tense.

Stonework detail on the Bridge of Sighs

In my next post I'll get to specific artists I liked (or didn't) but I thought I'd mention some general impressions. There wasn't much in the way of interesting new painters. In retrospect, most of the canvas I spent some time looking at were older generation artists: Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Sigmar Polke, and Susan Rothenberg. It made me wonder if it's possible to make interesting and relevant painting when so much new work seems like fodder for art fairs.

I was also surprised by the amount of good video I saw: stuff that I plopped down in front of and watched to the end. Some of it was eye candy, and some was more pointed, but there was a lot that was thoughtful and interesting: Oscar Munoz, Sophie Whettnall, Francis Alÿs, Yang Zhenzhong, Steve McQueen, Sophie Calle, Sonia Balassanian, AES+F, and Paolo Canevari.

Prisoner's View: Looking of the Ponte dei Sospiri

Lastly, I couldn't shake Andrea Bowers comment on the choice of Felix G-T for the American Pavilion, that there are plenty of good living American artists that they could choose from. Somehow, the pointed work by dead people--be it FGT or Jason Rhoades--looses it's edge and moves from an intervention to a collectible.

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Behind the Tarps at MASS MoCA

Since I was close to MASS MoCA, and having walked through his meth lab/Iraqi trading post at Art Basel, I wanted to check out the Christoph Büchel's cancelled Training Ground for Democracy. Call it an impasse, debacle, broo-ha-ha, catastrophe, fiasco, controversy, or whatever, if nothing else the non-show has increased his art world gossip and press.

There was a tinge of guilt, peeking behind tarps that shield the incomplete work that were put up by court order, Büchel's attempt to keep from viewers a work-in-progress. Guilt was easy to cast aside as Büchel was selling reproductions of the legal documents pertaining to his lawsuit at Art Basel. Both parties behaved badly, and I had few qualms about slowing down to inspect the car crash.

The main entrance to the installation was to be through a real movie theater, taken apart and reassembled in the gallery. Next to a the ticket window, one would walk through the theater lobby, past the candy counter and into the theater pictured below.

With 120,000 square feet of exhibition space in a complex that covers 1/3 of downtown North Adams, it seemed disingenuous that MASS MoCA's horn-tooting show, Made at MASS MoCA, was placed placed in a room that forced visitors to walk through the uncompleted work.

Due to the space constraints imposed by the materials assembled for Training Ground for Democracy, the exhibition Made at MASS MoCA is being presented in MASS MoCA’s only remaining available gallery space. To enter Made at MASS MoCA, visitors will pass through the Building 5 gallery housing the materials and unfinished fabrications that were to have comprised elements of Training Ground for Democracy. Reasonable steps have been taken to control and restrict the view of these materials, pending a court ruling which is being sought by MASS MoCA.

They don't mention that you can take a side trip through the theater, projection booth, and view the installation by peeking through a banner that lists all the component parts on view.

Other work on view included a retrospective of Spencer Finch's work, "What Time is it on the Sun?" Below is a snapshot I took at MASS MoCA of their installation, and below that are a couple of images off the web taken at Finch's show at Galerie Nordenhake. Abecedary is owned by a Swiss collector, and Sunlight is from Frankfurt's modern art museum. I think these works capture the mindset at MASS MoCA that let to the Büchel catastrophe.

The cloud piece would have to be made from scratch each time it's shown. The colored gels get creased and pierced in the process of hanging, and making it impossible to reconfigure the cloud in exactly the same way each time it's installed. In fact the wall didactic states that the dimensions are variable, which infers that the work is recreated each time it's installed. I have no illusion that I'm looking at Finch's handiwork.

It's a different experience looking at a pre- or post-mortem installation by Jason Rhoades and a drawing show at the Getty. Different assumptions are made about the artist's hand.

Abecedary is a drawing composed of 36 sheets of paper pinned to the wall. Up close one can see the multi-colored droplets of watercolor that comprise the image, some overlapping and bleeding together. I think most viewers would expect the actual drawing to be on view, rather than a reproduction produced in the MASS MoCA fabrication department. I expect that LACMA's show of Latin American Art would have been much easier to put on if the decorative arts were fabricated in Los Angeles, rather than crated and shipped from points South. I was surprised to read that the drawing being exhibited was not original. I didn't run around to check out the other wall tags, but it did make me question how much of what I saw were reproductions.

Spencer Finch Sunlight in an Empty Room

(Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004) 2004

Spencer Finch Abecedary

(Nabokov's Theory of a Colored Alphabet Applied to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) 2004

Abecedary (Detail)

Also while there I ran into Joseph Beuys' Lightning with Stag in it's Glare (Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein aug Hirsch) which I saw a month or so ago when I was in Frankfurt. The Guggenheim Bilbao has another copy and there's a fourth somewhere else. It was unfortunate that MASS MoCA stuffed Beuys into the corner of a large room and then roped it off. In Frankfurt I was able to wander around and in between its parts, and closely inspect the turd-shaped objects on the floor. For a museum that has the floor space and professional preparators, the installation left me unimpressed.

Beuys at MASS MoCA

Beuys' installation at the Museum for Modern Art in Frankfurt (supervised by Beuys himself)

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Art and Chemisty with Robert in Boston

Looking out of the ICA Boston from their transcendent-looking, but dysfunctional Mediatheque

While Robert was attending the 234th American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition, I checked out some of the art in Boston.

The ICA had a great show of Philip-Lorca diCorcia, spanning work from his male hustler series to the more recent pole dancers. It's like having a window into the potential of Jeff Wall's work, stripped of Wall's OCD and histrionics. Brilliant stuff. I also got a chance to see Paul Chan's 1st Light, mentioned in my last post.

Boston also seemed to master the Japanese art of unitended entendres with transgender ice cream-filled cupcakes and a restaurant named after the slang term for licking someone's ass:

Sweet creamy fillings, MTF

They also sell T-shirts that say,

"I got my salad tossed."


If only sex was that easy to find in Boston;
the place has no frikken bathhouse!

Robert on the way to his presentation.

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