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Public Art Fund: Robert Melee.

Through April 2009, Public Art Fund will present an exhibition of four large-scale figurative sculptures by New York-based artist Robert Melee at City Hall Park in New York City.

Apparently Invisible: Selections Spring 2009: Susan Collis, Michaela Frühwirth, Elana Herzog, Marietta Hoferer, Sarah Kabot, Anne Lindberg, Janine Magelssen, Chris Nau, and Janet Passehl AND Sun Xun: Shock of Time (two recent hand-drawn animations by the Hangzhou-based artist)….Both at The Drawing Center from February 20 thru March 28, 2009.

EXYZT presents Situation Room at the Storefront for Art and Architecture Feb 20 2009 – Mar 31 2009    “We will act to defend architecture that is plural, used, complex, diverse, real and alive; architecture that is about action and interaction, formation and deformation, transormation and appropriation.”     

“Situation Room as playground for [re] creation, collective action, active occupation, open demonstration, and social games will be intuitive, interactive and collective performance, showing an everyday life tools and knowledge Directory. For architecture of process, of fabrication, reaction and interaction, members of Exyzt will inhabit the gallery space, making use of the furnishings as though it were a domestic space.”

Martin Kippenberger at MoMA

From New York Magazine  ”Midway through “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective,” a show I expected to be good but uneven, I found myself stunned. I had just been through several galleries filled with his early work—a painting of a fragmenting Guggenheim Museum, a photo of Kippenberger holding a bomb with the World Trade Center behind him, a brown Ford sprinkled with oat flakes, a mannequin of the artist standing in a corner, and what looks like a self-portrait bearing the title The Mother of Joseph Beuys. Then, in a room packed with The Peter Sculptures, a tremendous installation that looked like a storeroom or a swap meet, I understood. The curators, Ann Goldstein and Ann Temkin, were shutting down the awful academic echo chamber that has tried to turn Kippenberger into one cutout caricature or another: cagey gamesman, aesthetic tinkerer, fun drunk, anti-hero. They let his insurrectionary freedom and radicalism come out.

 Kippenberger, who died in 1997 at the age of 44 from cirrhosis brought on by his prodigious drinking, was a live wire. He spoke in pungent aphorisms. He called exhibitions “a running gag.” Art schools were “the most stupid of all educational institutions.” The art market was like “screwing your dick to the wall.” (A nude photo of the artist suggests this would have been an extensive task.) He referred to himself variously as “a woman,” “an alky,” “a sales representative,” and “the holy Saint Martin.” He led a peripatetic life. Early in his career he settled in Florence, trying to become a film actor. Then he moved to Berlin, where he co-founded the gallery/crash pad “Kippenbergers Buro,” ran a nightclub, and started a punk band. In one memorable incident, he went into a bar and acted like a Nazi until patrons beat him up. Then he painted a picture of himself, battered and bandaged. (Another aphorism: “You may behave like an asshole, but you must never be one.”)

 Skepticism was his weapon of aesthetic destruction.” Read the rest here.

Murals

From the New York Times Street Art Comes In From the Cold “Kerry James Marshall stands before a canvas the size of a movie screen. The milky greens, blues and pinks, rendered in paint-by-number patterns and connect-the-dots figures, seem as if they might swallow him and his id whole. But Mr. Marshall and, he hopes, visitors to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art can hold the Crayola madness in check by studying silhouettes embedded in the landscape.

The two three-story murals depict Mount Vernon and Monticello, the estates of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Planted in Where’s Waldo fashion among the bushes and trees in this childlike maze are outlines of the slaves who maintained the estates of a new nation’s champions of liberty.

“The coloring book stuff seduces people to become engaged and has them acknowledge the subtext of these places at the same time,” said Mr. Marshall, who painted the work over a two-week period last month with a crew of local muralists.

Mr. Marshall, a Chicago artist known for exploring racial identity and black history, said he wants people to acknowledge the contradictions that underlie the veneration of the founding fathers. “I think a more realistic representation is appropriate,” he said, rather “than the kind of mythologizing that goes with Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence and Washington as the father of the country.”

Although he developed the sketches long before Barack Obama was sworn in as president, he said, the election of the country’s first African-American president makes the mural as relevant as ever. The mythic sense of power and leadership, the ability to save the nation with which the people endowed Washington and Jefferson applies to President Obama as well, he said. Yet because Mr. Obama’s success is exceptional, he added, it will remain problematic until it becomes common. “I think one always has to understand how complicated America is and start to be more specific about the kinds of changes they think can take place and will take place,” he said.

In many ways the political goals of this work by Mr. Marshall resonate with the mural tradition here. More than 1,000 murals are on view across San Francisco, addressing subjects like the plight of immigrants and farm workers, the impact of the political wars in Central America in the 1980s, AIDS in Africa, gentrification in San Francisco and the joys of bicycling and buying locally grown produce. ” Read the rest here.

A Year in a Cage

From the New York Times “Art takes total commitment, but few artists maintain it around the clock. An exception is the Taiwanese-born performance artist Tehching Hsieh (pronounced dur-ching shay), specifically, the five, grueling one-year pieces he executed, mostly in New York, from 1978 to 1986. Their subject and material was time itself.

Thching Hsieh on Day 1, left, and Day 365, locked up for art.

The Museum of Modern Art is devoting a small, gripping exhibition to the documentation of “Cage Piece” (1978-79), the first of Mr. Hsieh’s One Year Performances. It entailed spending a year in near-solitary confinement in a cell-like cage doing absolutely nothing. The show makes an altogether apt debut for the Modern’s new series of project exhibitions devoted to performance art. Few pieces communicate the medium’s potential and its demands in such a basic, resonant way.” Read the rest here and more here.

El Anatsui

From the Oriel Mostyn Gallery “Throughout his career Ghanaian artist El Anatsui has experimented with a variety of media, including wood, ceramics and paint. Most recently, he has focused on discarded metal objects, hundreds or even thousands of which are joined together to create truly remarkable works of art. Anatsui indicates that the word gawu (derived from Ewe, his native language) has several potential meanings, including “metal” and “a fashioned cloak.” The term, therefore, manages to encapsulate the medium, process and format of the works on view, reflecting the artist’s transformation of discarded materials into objects of striking beauty and originality.

The metal fragments that constitute the raw material of Anatsui’s work have had a profound impact on the West African societies that use, reuse and finally discard them. Several of his metal “cloths” are constructed with aluminum wrappings from the tops of bottles that once contained spirits from local distilleries. The three-dimensional sculptures are made of the discarded tops of evaporated milk tins, rusty metal graters and old printing plates, all gathered in and around Nsukka, Nigeria, where the artist has lived and worked for the last 28 years.”

See the New York Times Magazine article here.

Boom

From the New York Times “The Boom is Over. Long Live The Art!”  by Holland Cotter.

“LAST year Artforum magazine, one of the country’s leading contemporary art monthlies, felt as fat as a phone book, with issues running to 500 pages, most of them gallery advertisements. The current issue has just over 200 pages. Many ads have disappeared.

 

The contemporary art market, with its abiding reputation for foggy deals and puffy values, is a vulnerable organism, traditionally hit early and hard by economic malaise. That’s what’s happening now. Sales are vaporizing. Careers are leaking air. Chelsea rents are due. The boom that was is no more.

Anyone with memories of recessions in the early 1970s and late ’80s knows that we’ve been here before, though not exactly here. There are reasons to think that the present crisis is of a different magnitude: broader and deeper, a global black hole. Yet the same memories will lend a hopeful spin to that thought: as has been true before, a financial scouring can only be good for American art, which during the present decade has become a diminished thing.

The diminishment has not, God knows, been quantitative. Never has there been so much product. Never has the American art world functioned so efficiently as a full-service marketing industry on the corporate model.

Every year art schools across the country spit out thousands of groomed-for-success graduates, whose job it is to supply galleries and auction houses with desirable retail. They are backed up by cadres of public relations specialists — otherwise known as critics, curators, editors, publishers and career theorists — who provide timely updates on what desirable means.

Many of those specialists are, directly or indirectly, on the industry payroll, which is controlled by another set of personnel: the dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and — crucial in the era of art fairs — event planners who represent the industry’s marketing and sales division. They are the people who scan school rosters, pick off fresh talent, direct careers and, by some inscrutable calculus, determine what will sell for what.

Not that these departments are in any way separated; ethical firewalls are not this industry’s style. Despite the professionalization of the past decade, the art world still likes to think of itself as one big Love Boat. Night after night critics and collectors scarf down meals paid for by dealers promoting artists, or museums promoting shows, with everyone together at the table, schmoozing, stroking, prodding, weighing the vibes.

And where is art in all of this? Proliferating but languishing. “Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s statement, and a look or style geared to be as catchy as the hook in a rock song.

The ideas don’t vary much. For a while we heard a lot about the radicalism of Beauty; lately about the subversive politics of aestheticized Ambiguity. Whatever, it is all market fodder. The trend reached some kind of nadir on the eve of the presidential election, when the New Museum trotted out, with triumphalist fanfare, an Elizabeth Peyton painting of Michelle Obama and added it to the artist’s retrospective. The promotional plug for the show was obvious. And the big political statement? That the art establishment voted Democratic.

Art in New York has not, of course, always been so anodyne an affair, and will not continue to be if a recession sweeps away such collectibles and clears space for other things. This has happened more than once in the recent past. Art has changed as a result. And in every case it has been artists who have reshaped the game.” Read the rest here.

Emily Jacir

From the New York Times “IN 2006 Emily Jacir fired a .22-caliber gun successively at 1,000 white books ranged on shelves for the installation piece “Material for a Film,” which commemorates the 1972 assassination of the Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter by Israeli intelligence agents.

In “Material for a Film,” she commemorated the assassination of a Palestinian poet by firing at books.

On Friday two versions of the bullet-scarred piece will go on view at the Guggenheim Museum in an exhibition devoted to Ms. Jacir, 38, the winner of the 2008 Hugo Boss Prize, bestowed every other year by a jury overseen by the Guggenheim Foundation in recognition of “significant achievement” by a contemporary artist.

Ms. Jacir is known for works that blur the boundary between art and life, with a frequent emphasis on global mobility and political exile. An artist of Palestinian descent who mainly divides her time between New York and the West Bank town of Ramallah, she has often explored the impact of Israeli actions on Palestinians.

The killing in Rome of Mr. Zuaiter, a spokesman for the Palestinian cause, was carried out by Mossad agents in retaliation for the slayings that year of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Israeli agents said he played a role in planning the attack; Palestinian factions vigorously denied it, and subsequent accounts by investigative journalists have also raised doubts that he was involved in those killings.

In “Where We Come From,” perhaps her most acclaimed piece, Ms. Jacir addressed the theme of a lost Palestinian homeland. To create the work, she used her American passport to realize desires — lighting a candle in Haifa, for example — of Palestinians who lacked the freedom of movement needed to cross borders freely between Israel and the West Bank.

Her politically provocative art has drawn some sharp criticism from those who feel it maligns Israel, and the Guggenheim show is opening against a backdrop of fervid controversy over Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza.” Read the rest here.

Ryan Trecartin

From the New York Times  ”THE shoot the night before had lasted into the next day, ending around 9 a.m. after a scene in which the perimeter of the kidney-shaped swimming pool had been set ablaze with rubbing alcohol. So when the artist Ryan Trecartin greeted a visitor that afternoon, sleepless for more than 24 hours, he ran his hands through his hair and said, “This really isn’t me.”

He meant that he wouldn’t be much good for an interview. But he could just as well have been speaking in the voice of one of the maniacally mutable characters he plays in the videos he has been writing and directing for the last several years, characters whose hold on identity and existence itself seems so tenuous that they must keep talking to keep from disappearing. (“If I didn’t take the liberties to glue these prop knobs onto my safe space, who would you think that I’d be?” demands one, in what has become Mr. Trecartin’s signature unhinged vernacular: phrases that sound like something you might have heard before, on television or the Web, but haven’t.)

Mr. Trecartin (pronounced tra-KAR-tun) was creating these characters more or less for himself and a band of friends and collaborators from the Rhode Island School of Design when one of his works, posted on his Friendster page, was seen in 2005 by the artist Sue de Beer, who brought it to the attention of a curator at the New Museum in Manhattan. In stunningly short order, even for an art world then still moving at breakneck speed, his work was everywhere: the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Saatchi Gallery in London, the collection of the Guggenheim Museum. And his most ambitious work to date, the movie-length “I-Be Area,” which made its debut in 2007 at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery in Chelsea, was greeted with a kind of joyous critical consensus rarely seen in the art world.” Read the rest here. See his youtube channel here.

NYT 1/30/09

Three articles from the January 30th New York Times.

1. Bonnard Late in Life, Searching for the Light by Roberta Smith  ”By the last quarter-century of his long, productive career, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was deep into what might be called his Red-Yellow-Orange Period. These colors dominate “Pierre Bonnard: the Late Interiors,” a sumptuous exhibition that lends some unseasonable warmth to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, specifically to the tepid lower level of its Robert Lehman Collection.

The fiery hues may be offset with touches of green, blue and darker tones; they may be intermittently superseded by expanses of pulsing white — a snowy door or mantelpiece or, most often, a blazing tablecloth. But generally they reign supreme among the show’s 80 or so paintings, drawings and watercolors. All are interiors or still lifes or, best, a hybrid; all were made from 1923, when Bonnard was 56, to the end of 1946, a month or so before his death.   Read the rest here.

2. At the Height of Power for the Netherlands, the City in Glorious Detail by Ken Johnson “There is nothing like a beautiful city, and there are several, lovingly painted, in “Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age,” a quiet, gorgeous exhibition opening on Sunday at the National Gallery of Art.

This display of 48 paintings, 22 maps and assorted atlases and printed books shines a light on a time of extraordinary prosperity for the Dutch Republic. In a limited area of marshy land that fostered concentrated populations, an unusual number of rich urban centers grew up in the 17th century — places with still resonant names like The Hague, Amsterdam, Haarlem and Delft.

As they enjoyed a booming economy, these cities vied with one another for aesthetic as well as political and economic pre-eminence. Jan van Goyen, Gerrit Berckheyde, Jan van der Heyden, Jacob van Ruisdael and other preternaturally skillful painters created vividly realistic yet idyllic images that made their cities seem like parcels of heaven on earth.

Images of towns and cities had figured for centuries in European art but almost always as background scenery in pictures devoted to religious, historical or mythological subjects. The painters of the golden age in Holland brought the city onto center stage and made the cityscape a genre unto itself.

This urban motif evolved out of highly developed Dutch cartographic traditions. Large, intensively detailed maps included in the show suggest an almost obsessive preoccupation with geographical facts.” Read the rest here. 

3. Children’s Television, Tenderly Subverted by Karen Rosenberg  “Alex Bag’s videos take aim at television in all its forms: the infomercial, the reality show, the nature documentary. So it’s funny to learn, as we do in Ms. Bag’s first solo museum presentation, that her mother was the star of two popular children’s programs in the 1960s and ’70s. “The Carol Corbett Show” and “The Patchwork Family” both featured Ms. Corbett as a peppy host who interacted with puppets and animal guests. Ms. Bag appeared on “The Patchwork Family” at the age of 4, pushing a monkey in a baby stroller.

In her latest video, commissioned by the Whitney Museum and on view in its lobby gallery, Ms. Bag reimagines her mother’s programs from her own jaded, 21st-century perspective. Modeled on “The Patchwork Family,” the mock show is hosted by an “off my meds” depressive (Ms. Bag) with narcoleptic tendencies. Its supporting cast includes a wisecracking puppet, a strung-out folksinger in a wheelchair, a creepy animal handler and a witchy doppelgänger who resembles a character from Ms. Bag’s 2004 video, “Coven Services.”  Read the rest here.

Public Art, Eyesore to Eye Candy

From Roberta Smith and The New York Times

“ART adores a vacuum. That’s why styles, genres and mediums left for dead by one generation are often revived by subsequent ones. In the 1960s and ’70s public sculpture was contemporary art’s foremost fatality — deader than painting actually. The corpse generally took the form of corporate, pseudo-Minimalist plop art. It was ignored by the general public and despised by the art world.

At the time many of the most talented emerging sculptors were making anything but sculpture. Ephemeral installations, earthworks and permanent site-specific works were in vogue, and soon the very phrase “public sculpture” had been replaced by public art, an amorphous new category in which art could be almost anything: LED signs, billboards, slide or video projections, guerrilla actions, suites of waterfalls.

But over the past 15 years public sculpture — that is, static, often figurative objects of varying sizes in outdoor public spaces — has become one of contemporary art’s more exciting areas of endeavor and certainly its most dramatically improved one.” Read the rest here.