When Attitude Becomes Immaterial

When Attitude Becomes Immaterial
Urs Fischer at the New Museum
From 10/21/09 until 2/7/10

Tom McGlynn

The Urs Fischer show at The New Museum displays what a psyched -out Michael Fried might call present -less grace. Fried’s more recent ideas about images created “to be looked at” (or what I would call “looking-ness”) point to a certain post modern histrionic preening before an ironic mirror that reflexively inoculates us from cynically eyeballing art and saves us from reaching a creative dead end.

The work in this show and its presentation are evidence of a dearness towards objects in a physical world quickly becoming distilled evaporate. The residue of experience lies in the souvenir of art. The insistent reference to the substance of objects in Fischer’s work is a paradoxical study in the phenomenology of that which is disappeared.

The large “Untitled” aluminum castings on the fourth floor of the Museum float anachronistically like the hippo ballerinas in Disney’s Fantasia. The tour -de -force fabrication of these pieces is fore grounded but is (perhaps too) knowingly undercut by the formlessness and offhand origins of their making. They were scaled up from hand squeezed clay sculptures but the form they take when transmogrified into pneumatic lumpy figures sometimes resemble gigantic twisting Venus de Willendorfs or even giant animal scat. They are curiously lacking in phenomenal presence though, and this is where I think the artist’s work becomes interesting. How does a dialogue between the monumental object become a phenomenal black hole? I think all of the artist’s poetics resides inside this lack of weight and present-ness. His sculptures make Koon’s feel like Rodins in comparison.

This show is wildly uneven though. A few precious pieces ruin the vibe established by the aluminum blobs and the spectacular mirrored photo-archive of pathetic objects on the 2nd floor. The corny illusionism in The Lock 2007 or “subway seat, bag birthday cake piece” is just dumb, but in a bad way. Or Cumpadre 2007, A hanging croissant with a precious butterfly alighting upon it that is saccharine beyond belief. The same goes for his floppy purple piano. These are the kind of things collectors just eat up, but this artist is definitely in need of an assistant who can tell him when his stuff actually stinks.This kind of cheeky poetics is for the birds.

The aforementioned cubistic/ minimalist photo silk- screened archive, entitled Service a la Francaise, is of very specific objects that the artist has chosen to assemble into a striking ensemble work. It recasts the emptiness of the aluminum blobs. Initially I read the work as an update on the shiny pop logic of Koons’ mirrored bunny married with a left- handed Swiss kozy kitsch. There are elements of this blend, but a more extended experience with the room yielded a more sad and truly witty specificity that touched a real longing in me. Perhaps the artist’s choice of objects related to my own inclination to project pathos onto pop detritus such as a CD Cleaner Kits or obsolete computers. These objects are recent garbage of once cutting edge technology, therefore chillingly dead- present in their insistent obsolescence. The entire installation of differently scaled souvenirs, hardware supplies, bic lighters, rotten pears, arcane Italian Novels, broken, fake -Meissen obelisks, emanates a collective sigh of melancholy at the passing of the reality of these things.

The canny idea of printing of top and side views of these things on mirrored steel cubes underlines the immateriality of their objecthood. I was reminded of Cady Noland’s similarly blank sculptural aesthetic in her aluminum cut outs of American myth. There is something real here, a longing for present-ness together with an awareness of its futile pursuit in our present moment. The pathetic impulse toward stuff overwhelms our capacity to feel it. The re-photographed and wallpapered image of one of the museums galleries in -situ recalls the work of conceptual/ minimalist artist William Anastasi, a progenitor of Fischer’s who probably had a very different take on the immateriality of experience.

Fischer is an interesting artist in that he seems to be very aware of the nature of the art object as contingent in a world where our post modern self is so thoroughly parsed out of being, where the sculptor is a lonely hunter because his prey no longer exists.

LES Gallery Update

Basically good news -- more galleries opened than closed last year, but things are still a bit shaky:

OPENED

Anastasia Photo

166 Orchard Street (and Stanton)

anastasia-photo.com

They’ve been around for a year or so, but I’ve been conflicted about including them since they’re a documentary and photo-journalism gallery, not an art photography gallery. But, what the hay.

Blackston Gallery

29C Ludlow Street (between Canal and Hester)

blackstongallery.com

They weren’t opened Wednesday when I went by, but they had a sculpture show that closed January 10^th so maybe they were installing. On the other hand, their very rudimentary website doesn’t mention anything about an upcoming show, so there is some cause for concern there.

ChinaSquare

102 Allen Street (just above Delancy on the east side of Allen)

ChinaSquareNY.com

This is a small space and according to their website: ChinaSquare is committed solely to the promotion of Chinese contemporary work, and only Chinese artists.

Forever and Today

141 Division Street (where it intersects Canal)

NOTE: open Thur-Sun 12-6pm

foreverandtoday.org

They are a non-profit with a very small space and small staff. I must confess that I never saw any of their shows. When I finally located them it was a Wednesday, and they were closed. According to several dealers that told me about them, their shows have been really good; unfortunately no shows are posted on their website for 2010.

Lesley Heller Workspace

54 Orchard Street (below Grand)

lesleyheller.com

This is a very professional gallery. Their first show, Catherine Howe, is a bit slick for my taste, good, but too facile. The really exciting thing though is in their back room. They will be having curated shows -- and very professional ones indeed. Their first, curated by Jason Andrew, is Wells Street Gallery Revisited: Then and Now. The Wells Street Gallery was a cutting-edge gallery in Chicago in the 1950’s. They showed such artists as: John Chamberlain, Robert Natkin and Aaron Siskind. This exhibition demonstrates Chicago was doing a lot before the Hairy Who.

Robert Natkin, Earth Quake, 1957

Ludlow 38

38 Ludlow Street (near Hester)

ludlow38.org

NOTE: open Fri-Sun 1-6pm

Ludlow 38 is the downtown satellite for contemporary art of the Goethe-Institut New York. They’ve been around for a couple of years but I didn’t include them because of the limited hours, but again -- what the hay.

MOVED

Feature Inc.

131 Allen Street (below Rivington, on the west side of Allen)

featureinc.com

Anne Doran does the invaluable Lower East Side Galley Guide that’s published by Feature Gallery and distributed free in most of the galleries. She’s been a great resource on new galleries.

Feature’s new space is smaller than other ones they had, but the proportions are very comfortable and the work looks great there. They have an encyclopedic, 21-artist, sculpture show up now (skulture, until January 23^rd). The work relates to Orozco (see my post) but I feel it’s simpler, more playful and inventive. I was particularly impressed with B. Wurtz (see photo below).

B. Wurtz, Untitled, 2007 (courtesy of Feature Inc.)

Luxe Gallery not only moved but changed its name to:

Stephan Stoyanov Gallery

29 Orchard Street (between Hester and Canal)

Participant Inc.

253 E. Houston (between Norfolk and Suffolk

participantinc.org/

Nicelle Beauchene

21 Orchard Street (Between Canal and Hester)

http://www.nicellebeauchene.com/almost.html

CLOSED

Michali Fine Art, 45 Orchard Street, closed as I predicted last Spring. (http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/spring-gallery-wrap-up.html)

Smith-Stewart Gallery, smith-stewart.com

Amy Smith-Stewart unfortunately closed her space (I heard because of crime on the block), and has been curating shows at various spaces. This was a really good gallery; I hope she finds another space soon.

OTHER

Sunday LES

237 Eldridge ((just below Houston)

hortongallery.com

The website address isn’t a mistake; they changed their name to Horton Gallery.

Janos Gat Gallery

195 Bowery, 3^rd floor (at Spring)

www.janosgatgallery.com

It's now by appointment only.

MoMA: Bauhaus, Orozco and Burton

I went back and, as predicted by the MoMA guards and information desk staff, it was indeed less crowded. It’s now more like a sale at Bloomingdales rather than rush hour on the Lex. In other words, like it’s been since the Taniguchi renovation. Aside from a comprehensive and enlightening Bauhaus exhibition (through January 25^th), I don’t think it’s worth fighting even these thinner crowds.

Joseph Albers, Set of Stacking Tables, c.1927

It’s surprising that MoMA hasn’t had a survey of the Bauhaus since 1938 because MoMA’s aesthetic has been so Bauhaus. But it may have been worth the wait. One of the best things about this show is that Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, the curators, included many lesser known artists, and, as a result, you can see how communal the aesthetic was, but also how diverse. In fact there’s very little of the severe, minimal, mechanical sensibility that I associated with the school. Maybe we have so adopted the Bauhaus sensibility that now some of the work looks downright cozy.

Btw, the Modern has organized an all day Bauhaus symposium on January 22^nd. Participants include the curators and a half a dozen major scholars. Tickets are only $5 to $12 and you can reserve them on line here.

Mexican, more accurately, International, art star Gabriel Orozco’s retrospective (until March 1^st) is insightful for other reasons. Some artists (e.g.Wallace Berman) are helped by retrospectives, and others look thin and lame. Orozco (no relation to José Clemente Orozco) unfortunately is the latter. The hit or miss quality of his art works better in galleries than a museum -- maybe because less is expected of it. He does hit sometimes though. His La DS, 1993, a Citroen with its middle third removed and re-assembled, is one strange and beautiful sculpture -- a piece Orozco’s reputation has been coasting on for some time now.

Gabriel Orozco, La DS, 1993 (modified Citroen)

Finally, there’s the wildly popular Tim Burton show (through April 26^th).

Tim Burton, Untitled (Boy series), 1980-90

The average person sees hundreds, maybe thousands, of movies and TV shows a year. They care about them, discuss them, and have built up a sophisticated knowledge that far exceeds anything in the other arts. Likewise, movie-making attracts some of the brightest, most ambitious and creative people. So it’s not surprising that movies are the reigning medium of our time. And Tim Burton is one of the most creative and best movie-makers around. He is wildly inventive and incredibly prolific.

So why did I not like the show? I don’t think it’s because of the popularity itself -- I love Picasso, Matisse and Van Gogh shows -- or that it is accessible to the masses -- I liked the Guggenheim motorcycle show. I’ll admit to being a snob, but I really don’t think that’s it, or at least all of it. I think I’m put off by the simple-minded, often cute, illustrational quality of the work. There’s a lot of work like that around now, and I’m put off by that too, but it’s usually tougher and more personal than Burton’s work. There’s something manipulative and contrived about Burton’s work This might work in movies, but it’s very suspect when it comes to the visual arts.

Wallace Berman at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery

Wallace Berman, Untitled, 1971, glass photo collage on wood,

7.625 x 7.75 inches (Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery)

For someone like me, who came of age as an artist and art critic in Los Angeles in the 1970’s, Wally Berman (1926 - 1976) was an enigmatic legend. There wasn’t much of his work around to see because Berman was notoriously shy about exhibiting; but what I did see stayed with me. They were haunting, dark, creepy and fragile objects, redolent of mold. His work was somewhat in the vein of the much better known Edward Kienholz, but more mysterious, gentle and poetic.

Sadly Berman’s work pretty much disappeared over the years, but happily it was re-discovered a couple of years ago because of the exhibition Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle at the NYU Grey Art Galley. Since then Berman’s work appeared in group shows here and there, and now we have a show of his work at the very hip Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, 526 W. 26^th Street, #213, (unfortunately this Saturday is the last day) -- so I guess Wally Berman’s work will endure.

Two things about this exhibition struck me. The first was Berman’s rapid-fire collage film, Aleph, 1956-66. Seeing it projected full scale was powerful stuff. It looked surprisingly cutting edge, reminiscent of the videos of Klaus vom Bruch . After seeing the original silent version, I didn’t think any sound track could possibly work, but John Zorn’s new jazz score for the film actually improved it.

The other revelation should have been obvious, but I never really realized it until now: Berman’s work is patently hand-made. I recently blogged about Mondrian’s work in that respect, and how touchingly human it is. What Mondrian did with impersonal geometry, Berman did with photography and other mechanical mediums. Berman tears, scratches, paints and stains the photos, film or prints -- he does everything he can to make it plain that a human being made them. The result is these fragile, poetic human things -- things perhaps too vulnerable to exhibit in public.

More Kandinski

At the exhibition I overheard several intelligent, animated conversations about the work by YTJ types. That, and the kind of play the exhibition has been getting in the blogosphere, makes me think that Kandinski will be influential in the next year or so. How, I don't know.

The Guggenheim Kandinski Retrospective

Dominant Curve, April 1936

I’ve never been a great fan of Kandinski -- and I’m still not, despite the terrific Guggenheim retrospective (ending January 13^th). I admire him and his work in an intellectual way, but it never gets to me the way Picasso, Matisse and Mondrian do. Strange because I’ve always been interested in art that’s experienced over time, the way we experience music (and Chinese landscape painting). In fact, if you try to take in a Kandinski all at once, it’s a jumbled mess -- you have to scan it from one pictorial riff to another to make any sense of the work.

I think Kandinski never breaks away from traditional easel painting (the idea of the canvas as a window into a separate world) mainly because he centers his pictorial incident, avoiding the edge of the canvas -- the area of a painting closest to the viewer’s real space. Kandinski paintings are a spacey (outer-spacey) staging area for a lexicon of psychedelic, cutesy abstract (or semi-abstract) images flying all over the place, where figure and ground shift, and objects become fields of color. But it is a world that’s separate from ours -- one we observe through the frame. (See my post on Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon for a comparison)

Lyrical, January 1911

It’s too bad Kandinski chose not to go in the direction of his early, Matisse-influenced, Blaue Reiter paintings. That work had the physical presence and immediacy we have come to expect of painting for the last 100 years.

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.