MOMA, Tuesday, December 29, 2009

I've never seen MOMA as busy as it is now -- and they don't even have a blockbuster show. I thought since the museum is usually not open on Tuesdays it would be empty, but was I ever wrong! I asked a few guards and people at the information booth what's up and they said it was tourists and kids. They advised I wait a week or two -- so I'm passing their advice on.

How Holiday Windows Save my Soul

Maybe its the clean blue Wisconsin skies, the absence of security lines, Milwaukee's surprisingly good airport art, or the fact that I'm sprawled out over three seats in the waiting room with a cup of coffee and wireless internet, but I’m feeling warm and fuzzy enough to confess my most superficial, glittery addiction to holiday kitsch. 

I’ll admit to having an almost instantaneous, scornful reaction to things that are “pretty”.  Someone once came up to me during a group show and (in what he must have thought was a compliment) gushed over how wonderful it was that my pieces were “easy to look at”.  I had never been so insulted.  I wanted to rip my diptychs from the wall and stomp them to bits right there, hopefully embedding some glass shrapnel into the man’s meticulously-coordinated jacket and scarf ensemble.  “Pretty”, without irony, makes me want to commit murder.

But, once a year, I let myself out of my uncharitable restraints and run with abandon into the arms of the glitzy and sensual.  I let go of all my fears about art degenerating into emotional mush, of ideas getting lost in precious moments, of letting my eyes and heart slaughter my mind—and I run to the window displays to become a temporary member of the glitterati.  

The windows are intoxicating.  They are a rescue team that airlifts me out of my own mental quagmire only to drown me in a flood of fake pearls and plastic icicles.  They are so secure in their superficiality, so joyously transparent in their purpose that there is absolutely no way I can hate them.  They are icons of consumer lust and highbrow vanity, visceral eyegasms that are meant to steal thoughts and replace them with ohh-want-want-look-if-only’s.  They are demons or fairies or gods or whatever else can bewitch you by showing you what you want—what you need—who you could become, while stoically restricting their world to a tiny glass box you can never enter.  I need them.  Blatant frivolity is my palate-cleanser.

For your viewing pleasure, the blog AnotherNormal has the best photos I’ve seen around of these (and previous) years’ holiday (and non-holiday) displays. 

Not art, but mass-market glam at its most seductive.  Ying, meet your Yang. 

Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés at the Philadelphia Museum

Sorry for the hiatus. I’ve been busy renovating, and moving into, a new apartment. After 26 years in the same place we moved 15 feet up -- to the second floor. I was able to take one day off, however, to see the Duchamp exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art before it ended on November 29^th. The occasion for the exhibition was the 40^th anniversary of the public unveiling of Étant donnés, Duchamp’s strange, creepy even, tableau that he worked on in secret for the last twenty years of his life.

I’ve seen it about a dozen times over the years and it still shocks me. Off to the side of the gallery where the Arensberg Collection is housed, is a small room with a scruffy carpet (more on that later). Against the far wall is a brick arch enclosing an old wooden door with two peep holes, grubby from 40 years of people’s faces pressing against it. What you see through the holes is a larger hole ripped out of black material that exposes a very realistic three dimensional tableau of a beautiful naked woman sprawled on some wild brush, lying spread eagle, and holding a glowing gas lamp up in the air. In the background is a woodsy landscape (reminiscent to me of landscapes in the backgrounds of Renaissance paintings, but not at all lyrical) with a realistically flowing waterfall -- all shown in bright daylight.

Her naked body, especially her vagina, is very much in your face, as it were! Whatever erotic feelings I had (she seems to be offering up her body) is much mitigated by the embarrassment of being a voyeur. How many works of art do that to you? The only one I can think of that came close was Courbet’s L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) exhibited last year in the Met’s Courbet retrospective, and that too was in a separate room off to the side. I suspect Duchamp was making a reference to this painting since the pose is very similar.

Courbet, Origin of the World, 1866

But, unlike the Courbet, Duchamp’s Étant donnés has a disconcerting, violent, undercurrent. The woman’s skin is mottled and bluish in places. Was she beaten? Is she dead? (Her skin looks more decayed than I remember -- has it changed over the years?) And her hairless vagina is deformed into two slits. Did someone do that to her?

So not only was I embarrassed looking at porn through a peep hole, and for being a voyeur, but I was made more uncomfortable because I was intruding on an intimate and disturbing mystery.

Traditional art is separate from, and different than, “real world” experiences; it’s in a frame, on a pedestal, behind the fourth wall, etc., i.e. it’s not real. One way to look at the history of modern art is a continual attempt to obtain for art the visceral power and presence of “real world” experience. Duchamp, more than any artist, explored the space between art and life. hence the significance of the carpet. I think it’s a device, like a frame, that separates Étant donnés from the larger gallery and eases the viewer’s entry into a meta-world mixture of art and life.

The Cloisters: An Allegory of Global Warming

The “Cloisters” (An Allegory of Global Warming)

Tom McGlynn

Rockefeller procured the Fuentiduena Apse, on loan from the dictator Franco’s Spain for 99 years. It was taken apart stone by stone, numbered and shipped Stateside to build a central part of a picturesque folly (The Cloisters) to house the oil baron turned philanthropist’s hoard of medieval art. It now sits on a promontory in one of the highest spots in uppermost Manhattan and the edifice is being rapidly eaten away by acid rain. Mid- Atlantic mugginess combined with car exhaust is doing a number on this church fragment, which came from Segovia, an arid region in Spain. The surface of its exterior roof- supporting corbels of saints and gargoyles is breaking down into calcium carbonate, as the polluted precipitation percolates out of the rough- hewn Spanish limestone. From coral unto stone unto dust shall it return. By the time the lease is up the shipping costs back to Spain should be greatly reduced.
So the oil (once thought medicinal and also sacred by Pennsylvanian Native Americans) that greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution and powered Ford’s combustion engine and auto-assembly lines, pays for an ancient chapel as supporting compensation to a Fascist dictator of a (then) devoutly Catholic country to recreate the Old in the New World. The spoils of European piety become a garden folly housing the Unicorn Tapestries on the Hudson. Ford’s motorcars exhaust emissions ultimately efface this conceit of conspicuous consumption: the mortification of the simulacra.
To partly atone for his sins (and to maintain a pristine fringe view of foliage from the Cloisters tower across the river to the top of the New Jersey Palisades) the philanthropist Rockefeller donated his land holdings there to become the Palisades Interstate Parkway, which brackets, ironically, a picturesque automobile drive up the Hudson towards West Point and Bear Mountain. I’ve often admired the neo- gothic stonework of the parkway’s over passes, build as directed by Craftsman- Style architects employing cadres of Depression Era WPA workers. In Rockefeller’s landscape issues of Commerce and Art, Global Warming and job creation are interlinked. Too bad the king couldn’t resist cornering that Unicorn, though. The allegory of purity despoiled in the tapestries says it all exquisitely.

Mary McDonnell "Touch" at James Graham and Sons (Sept 25- Nov 7,2009)

Mary McDonnell’s recent show of paintings and drawings at James Graham and Sons defies easy description not because it is esoteric or abstract, not because it is automatic writing, and not because it isn’t some version or quotation of an art historical genre, it might be because the work is so credibly “there”. The show is entitled “Touch”. Manipulated gesture is inscribed upon subtly suppressed fields of chromatic paint layers that pulsate almost indiscernibly like veins beneath the skin. The human feel is evident, apotheosized and amplified, by her deployment of hand- made brushes and implements, often constructed large, and awkwardly vulnerable to registering irregular marks. Like the pathos telegraphing, ill -fitting shoes of the silent comedian, these touch go- betweens heighten our awareness of the grace of our own disheveled beings. In two large drawings on paper, one of which the artist painted with a broom dipped in India ink, the ragged horizontal gestures make a quizzically blank statement about vital nerve endings. These marks are also analogous to the windshield wiper trace of dune grass blades as they get whipped back and forth in place on the sand. The wonder at the mechanics of the mark making overtakes the natural phenomena itself, the gesture inscribing both the rooted plant and the capricious wind with uncanny symmetry.
The fineness of the artist’s multiply over- painted fields can be reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s sense of elegant microcosmic surfaces. The gestures inscribed upon them have a more culpable immediacy than those of Cy Twombly, which they sometimes come close to resembling. Some of the larger strokes can also bring to mind Gerhard Richter’s similarly implement- generated abstractions. McDonnell’s work doesn’t share Richter’s deep cynicism but instead exudes a base but not entirely un-romantic humanism. These works don’t suggest a libretto to the existential opera often conjured by abstract expressionist tendencies, nor do they invoke inhuman nature in their inevitable “there ness”. This work eludes these types of descriptions. These stylistic references don’t really get at what she’s doing with this work.
Experiencing McDonnell’s paintings can be unsettling in how they can objectify your own essence. One is reminded of the Ad Reinhardt cartoon in which a painting accusingly addressing a man looking quizzically at its abstract composition saying” And what do you represent?”
In McDonnell’s case, the artwork isn’t aggressively interrogating the viewer like the cartoon, or putting one in one’s place like Olympia’s disinterested gaze, or Pollock’s vastness. It’s neither nurture nor nature nagging you in her work but rather a cool, humane empathy that addresses with a complicit ,palpable emotion. These are gut -wringing machines brilliantly disguised as lyrical abstractions.

Tom McGlynn

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Studio Tour or free-for-all?

The studio tour has packed up and moved out after a loaded weekend that has left a lot of us Jersey City art folk in fallout mode.  This year's installment had no large venue to host multiple group shows (unlike the huge unfinished space rented from Canco Lofts last year) so seeing a good number of artists was a challenge, and since show descriptions weren't included in any of the accompanying press even figuring out which sites looked promising was a feat unto itself.


That's the (relatively) objective part.  But the reason it's taken me so long to get something posted about the event is that besides the standard cliches I just don't know what to say.  The JC Studio Tour is (diction fails me)...weird.


I wrote an article for JCI on the first Art Fair to take place in Jersey City (in conjunction with the Tour), and it got me thinking--what exactly is the point?  Most of the venues in this year's event were not artist studios, rather alternative exhibition spaces in people's houses, garages, or vacant condos.  I didn't see one working studio during my rounds of 20 some stops, but because there weren't any descriptions about the venues I can't really be certain how many there actually were--and that's a huge problem.


Part of the reason why artists didn't open up their work spaces might be because there are few people who have dedicated studios--Jersey City doesn't have much in the way of artist buildings, and it's kind of awkward (though cool) to traipse through someone's house in order to get to the room in which they make art.  It may also be that the Tour has gotten large enough to attract artists who don't live and/or work in Jersey City (I talked to artists from Hoboken and Bayonne) who import their work to vacant spaces.  For whatever reason, there are fewer and fewer actual studios on the Tour and more and more alternative exhibition venues.


This isn't a bad thing, but, on a critical level it has led to growing pains.  Studio Tours are generally community-centered events where artists demonstrate how they work to visitors who might not know that much about art in order to educate the public and replug culture into neighborhoods.  The Gowanus (Brooklyn) Studio Tour is a great example--their mission: "to provide the public a unique opportunity to visit and engage one-on-one with working artists for the purpose of gaining a broader appreciation of the various types of visual art media", and that's what they do.  The main focus of the event is not selling work, but selling the idea and passion of creation.  It's like the "making of" feature on a dvd.  


On the flipside, many artists who participate in the JC Studio Tour are looking to sell or get noticed, not necessarily to teach.  That's why there aren't demonstrations and even people who have accessible studios don't often open them up; they prefer to put their work in shows where they have a better chance of being seen.  The only problem is, the artists aren't selling much, and the non-artists aren't coming out in force.


The JC Studio Tour is in between and something's got to give.  Artists don't know what to expect or how to publicize, and content-wise, just about anything goes--which has some bailing out (I'll expand on this later).  Visitors have to shoot blind picking what to see, leaving people pleasantly surprised (at best) and disappointed (at worst).  What is the Tour?  What does it aspire to be?  That's for ProArts and the City to decide, but I really hope these growing pains will ultimately lead to a more focused, purposeful, and ultimately successful event.


For the record, I think either approach (or even a mix) would be great--as long as the events were well-publicized and documented so people could actually make educated choices about what to see.  And Hudson Reporter: either publish descriptions of show venues, minimize typos and listing errors (yikes), or move over and let someone else do it.  


Thoughts?

Jersey City Studio Tour Art Fair tries for a new market

Update: About an hour ago Nj.com basically published the museum's press release straight.  Way to go journalists who give themselves by-lines for reproducing other people's text.  

I just got an email from the Jersey City Museum inviting me to tonight's preview of the "Jersey City Art Fair at the Beacon", an event apparently aimed at collectors who might be put off by the traditional studio tour slog from venue to venue (understandably- it's supposed to rain).  Since this is the first real art fair in Jersey City (indoors at least) I'm curious how it's going to come off--especially because this is the only concrete PR I've read about it.   

Many artists I've talked to who participate in the annual Tour have said they do it just to get their work out there and show the community what they're up to--not in the hopes that they'd sell a piece.  Part of the reason many have written off sales might be because most Jersey City arts events are billed as local opportunities for community building rather than opportunities for people to view (and buy) works of art.  Just take a look at the democratizing language used on the ProArts website:

"All events are free and open to the public and there is truly something for everyone. The Studio Tour unites Jersey City's artists, art groups, galleries and more to create an outstanding weekend for all to celebrate our talented and vibrant artistic community."

Do not be afraid.  The art won't bite.  We're in this together.  Oh, and it's free.

Jersey City doesn't have its own collectors market and buyers haven't exactly been flocking in to purchase pieces from artists based here, but it looks like the Jersey City Museum, along with Victory Hall and JC Cultural Affairs (event sponsors), are trying to change that.  Or at least, they're changing their language, billing this event as an opportunity to: "mingle with nationally and internationally recognized artists, curators, gallery owners, and the arts community".

It's an important start, and I'm glad to see the studio tour evolving to potentially support what could become a true Jersey City art market...but six hours notice is kind of short.  It will be interesting to see who shows up.  

"The Jersey City Art Fair promises to be a wonderful opportunity for serious collectors, art connoisseurs and the general public. This event allows everyone the chance meet new people and to discover latest developments in contemporary art. It's not to be missed!"

Confessions of an errant blogger

Forgive me LeftBank for I have sinned; it's been two months since my last post. Five hail Saltz's and an entry a week?  Ah.... sweet absolution.

Joanne Greenbaum "Hollywood Squares" D'Amelio Terras Gallery

Joanne Greenbaum : Hollywood Squares

September 10-October 31, 2009

D’Amelio Terras Gallery 525 w 22^nd St

Chelsea, NYC

There could be said to exist a school of eccentric abstraction in New York that would include artists like Carroll Dunham, Tom Noskowski, Amy Sillman, Jane Fine, and the late Elizabeth Murray. Much of the visual instincts of this loose cohort can be seen in Joanne Greenbaum’s work. On the surface it’s friendly, energetic, edgy, hip and savvy. Its colors drift toward the day glow palette of sharpie markers, so it also exudes a pop feel. Like Terry Winters’ work over the past decade there is also an awareness of computer generated repetition, or at least the semblance of the image as endlessly reproduced and lit from behind. There is also the quality that these images were once smaller and were blown up in size to exude an intimate extroversion, similar to Noskowski’s work.

Ms. Greenbaum’s paintings evolve out of an additive scaffold of drawing that often resembles the nervous marginalia of a student’s notebook, an unconscious construction of a tangeraity of lines that assemble into loci of space grid hysterics. Onto and across these structures she finds areas to block and slash paint in repetitive gestures that form either voids that single out the previously laid lines of the under-drawing, or form vaguely figurative ‘personages’ a la David Smith’s drawings or early Pollock. Her paintings in this show almost all share a ragged vortex that splays the compositions like spin art.

When looking at these works I thought for the thousandth time that painting no longer has to make great pictures. The authority of the static image has been so incessantly undermined by the increasing tolerance for sophisticated time- based media to the extent that painting no longer functions as a rock of facture in that slipstream or slip-deluge of visual gloss. Painting is nothing to hang your hat on anymore. So I was impressed at the sense of recognition and comfort I got from this show. Perhaps it is in the playful, offhand way in which the artist assembles her image. Maybe it has to do with the multiple layers of lines and thick paint, which erase and reveal the doodles cast large. I think it is also because there is a rich pathos in these paintings, which might reside in the simple guilty pleasure of witnessing a pathetic human reflexive attempt to manage the void. These paintings are like banana peels on the verge of nothingness. It is an equivocal response to an arcane existential longing for fixedness or certainty. These paintings are philosophically flaky in a serious way. -Tom McGlynn