Tuesday, November 30, 2010

In the 50s, Abstract Art Was a Commie Plot. Today, They Go After the Gays

You thought going after gay artists or artistic themes was a relic of Jesse Helms. The resurgent right wants to rekindle the culture wars, though.
Reps. John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Eric Cantor (R-Va.) have threatened the Smithsonian over the National Portrait Gallery’s much-praised “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” exhibition. Boehner, the presumptive House Speaker-to-be initially threatened increased oversight and then demanded that the exhibition be “canceled.” Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican, demanded that the Smithsonian take down the exhibition, reports The Hill newspaper. It is not clear whether either legislator has seen the show. (Tyler Green, Modern Art Notes, November 30)
This is just the first shot over the bow. The NEA will be their target next, as well as any museum that gets any funds from the government. Get ready to fight, Pan fans.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

I Saw Boogie Woogie So You Don't Have To

This is not a review of Boogie Woogie. I don't have anything to say about it as a film beyond what has been said in the reviews in the New York Times and DVD Talk. I pretty much agree with what they wrote. It's not a dreadful movie--it's definitely watchable, but only just.

Briefly, the film is set in the London art world. There is a blue-chip gallery owned by Art Spindle (Danny Huston), a pair of collectors, the Maclestones (Gillian Anderson and Stellan SkarsgÄrd), a pair of artists (Jack Huston and Jaimie Winstone), a pair of gallerinas at different stages of their careers (Heather Graham, whose character is about to quit and start her own gallery, and Amanda Seyfried, who has just been hired), and an older couple who own a Modrian that everybody wants (Christopher Lee and Joanna Lumley). Alan Cumming plays the enabling friend of Elaine, the lesbian video artist; he helps her career and gets nothing in return.

One thing really interesting about the movie was that it featured a lot of blue chip art. It didn't try to fake it, as many movies do. The art on screen was curated by Damien Hirst, and it is not surprising that the film features a lot of Hirst work.



He even seems to have fabricated a piece for the film. Paige Prideaux, the Amanda Seyfried character, has a medical emergency which results in a teratoma being removed. Bob Maclestone then commissions Hirst to make a really gross artwork out of it.



The Maclestone's apartment is loaded with art.



I can't identify all the pieces here, but the flower cart is by Michael Landy, the $ by Sue Webster and Tim Noble, and of course the Brancusi.



Not to mention a Warhol.




And Jake and Dinos Chapman. This movie has a lot of sex in it (all of it kind of horrible and compromised--which this image really speaks to).

Boob lovers will enjoy this movie. Heather Graham's character gets a boob job so she can have "power breasts" (I remember in the 80s when a yellow tie was, for some reason, called a "power tie" on Wall Street--thanks to Spy for telling me this. But this was the first time I had ever heard the term "power breasts.") She is breaking away from Art Spindle to start her own gallery, and has snagged Elaine, the lesbian Casanova who videotapes her conquests, for her opening. This is the scene where Graham is showing Elaine her new "power breasts".


Elaine then decides to show hers. 


Then she seduces Graham's character--while surreptitiously  videotaping it.


Elaine comes off as a combination of Nan Goldin (in her obsessive documenting) and Laurel Nakadate (in her exploitation of her subjects). Secretly filmed sex is hardly the worst thing that shows up in Elaine's video art.

That's the thing about this film. Literally everyone (except Dewey, the Alan Cumming character) is awful. And Dewey is a pathetic victim. I have no idea what the world of blue chip art is really like, but I have a hard time believing that everyone is this bad.

For some reason, gallery owners are almost never portrayed positively in movies. In Beverly Hills Cop and Legal Eagles, the gallery owners are actually murderers. Art Spindle is not quite that evil, but he does come off as a scheming scumbag. (The gallery owner in Age of Consent, however, was portrayed in a positive light. That seems to be the exception.) This is completely different from pretty much every gallery owner I personally know.

I would like to see a movie set in the art world at a lower level than this--not the blue chip world but the world that I encounter weekly, which is far larger than the tiny blue chip world. It might be hard, though, to find all that much drama there...

Saturday, November 27, 2010

It's Better to Regret Something You Have Done... at Art Palace

Of all the commercial galleries in town, Art Palace is perhaps the most adventurous. They regularly display works that are intellectually challenging, as well as works that would be difficult for a collector to possess--installations and video art in particular. This show carries on that direction, and it's really exciting but it makes you wonder how long Art Palace can survive as a going concern. (Or maybe--hopefully--I am underestimating the adventurousness of Houston collectors.)

The thing is, since Duchamp--and really since the Renaissance--context has been a really important aspect in understanding an artwork. Art made for a 17th century Dutch burger's home is inherently different from art made to decorate a 17th century Italian church--even if the subject matter is identical. This comes into play when discussing at least some of the artwork Art Palace's current group show, "It is Better to Regret Something You Have Done..." For example, Linda Post's Cozy Group has a slightly different existence in a commercial gallery than in, say, a non-profit art space like Diverse Works or Lawndale.


Linda Post, Cozy Group, televisions, sewn canvas cozies, DVDs (photo courtesy of Art Palace)

Four small televisions are on the floor in the darkened front room of Art Palace. Each is playing something. Each is covered by a custom fitted cozy, like a tea cozy, made of canvas. Obviously a TV cozy is a very different thing than a tea cozy--a TV cozy has no practical use. There is no need to insulate a TV to keep it from losing heat. The cozies, in fact, prevent the TVs from operating optimally by covering the screen and muffling the sound. Entering the room makes one think of scenes from movies where people enter a dusty old house where the furniture has been covered with sheets. The ghostly shapes of the furniture in such scenes are so suggestive and ominous that this scenario has become a cliche for haunted house movies. Likewise, the Cozy Group has a haunted feel--one that is amplified by the fact that the TVs are playing. The cozies make the screens glow softly and spookily in the darkened room.

So why does it matter that this is being displayed at Art Palace rather than a museum or nonprofit art space? Because by being in Art Palace, one is implicitly asked to imagine this in the possession of a collector. One must imagine this in someone's home--that someone would devote a room in their home to house this spooky, severe piece. (I realize, of course, that you could walk into a gallery and forget its commercial purpose and see the art within as art qua art--and if you can do that, you are a much purer person than me.) The interesting thing is that this piece (or earlier versions) has been shown in non-profit spaces in 2004-05 and 2009. Now as hard as it is to imagine someone owning this group, the thought is tremendously appealing. Imagining this scenario for me makes experiencing Cozy Group in Art Palace a richer experience than it would be at, say, the Incident Report Viewing Station in Hudson New York.

(The reverse would be true about an oil painting in a commercial art gallery. Oil paintings have a long history as objects of commerce, whose location in a gallery is to facilitate a cash transaction. However, an oil painting in a non-profit art space implies a theory or thought process is at work to make sense of it being there. An oil painting in such a space is the end result of a curatorial process, and thinking about that process adds something to the painting itself.)

 After the 2009 Lawndale Big Show, there were two nights of slide presentations by the artists.I'm pretty sure Jim Nolan was one of the presenters, and his talk, though brief, was memorable. (If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.) He described his work as being influenced by Joel Shapiro, which I didn't get. I associated Shapiro with those cutesy cast railroad tie men, like the one in the Cullen Sculpture Garden. But Shapiro has done a lot of other work that you can see as possibly influencing Nolan. This piece distinctly recalls some of Shapiro's wooden floor pieces:


Jim Nolan, It's Better to Regret Something You Have Done/First House, painted wood (photo courtesy of Art Palace)

Some of Nolan's pieces--including Not in focus yet / Grey, which is in this show--feature a string with the two ends attached to the wall (among other elements). This element has a casual feeling--it is literally hanging around--and the artist doesn't determine the form. Gravity and mathematics do. I think this is what appeals to me. A completely flexible string, hanging freely from two ends, will form one shape and one shape only--a parabola. The focus and directrix of the parabola will depend on the length of the string and the distance between the two endpoints. So Nolan has a great deal of control over what the parabola will look like, but still he is surrendering his decision about the shape of the string to the laws of gravity. It's a kind of humility.


Jim Nolan, Not In Focus Yet / Grey, carpet, wood, string and pushpins

And this leads to a second thing Nolan said at Lawndale. It was so memorable to me that I remember almost word for word. "If you keep working on a thing, does it get any better?" On one hand, this could be read as a rejection of craft. But on the other hand, I think it relates to the string, or to the unpainted wood in Double Rose. Or the flattened cardboard boxes that Robert Rauschenberg did (and which can be seen at the Menil). If it works, why fuss with it? If gravity makes a perfect parabola--an elegant shape--why not let it?

Jillian Conrad's art is similar in the sense that she allows her modest, unlovely construction site materials look like what they look like, without any attempts to beautify them. This was apparent in the work she showed at the Art League earlier this year, which looked like detritus recovered from a construction site (with glitter added). This effect is also apparent in her work here, such as the piece Sweet and Lowdown.


Jillian Conrad, Sweet and Lowdown, concrete blocks, plaster, clay, wood and pigment


Jillian Conrad, Sweet and Lowdown, concrete blocks, plaster, clay, wood and pigment

What makes this piece for me is the line on the floor--all the rest of it could be a sculpture in a tradition sense (broadly speaking), but the line on the floor really fuzzes things. If Rosalind Krauss is right and sculpture prior to the '60s could be described as not-landscape and not-architecture, then that little line makes you wonder if this is architecture--a corner of an unfinished structure. Of course, she suggested that minimalist and post-minimalist artists had expanded the field of sculpture--"sculpture"could now be simultaneously architecture and sculpture. But with Conrad's work, I am reluctant to use the term "architecture"--I want to say "building." (I would say "construction," but that is a term already loaded with specific artistic meaning.)

This again is work that is strange in an art gallery. Removing it to a collector's back patio, say, would make a viewer wonder if she was looking at a piece of art or an unfinished building project. And because it is in a gallery and has a price attached to it, I personally can't help but imagining that very scenario. In fact, imagining it is highly amusing for me! A piece like this is ambiguous--depending on context, it may announce itself as non-art or art. And ambiguity can be really funny. And that makes me love the work even more.

I wonder why Nathan Green was included in the exhibit. Maybe they thought the exhibit needed a splash of color, which Green provides in spades.


Nathan Green, Tumblr Totem, mixed media, 2010

Green's paintings (to go by his website) are deliberately crude mostly square canvases. So here it looks like he has literally stacked paintings on top of one another. Instead of a painting being a "thing," here it is an "element". A very distinct element--each painted part is very different in color and value from the ones below and above it. The use of the word "Tumblr" in the title in interesting. I can't find any obvious relation between this work and the popular blogging site (as far as I could determine, Green doesn't have a blog). So let that remain a mystery. All I can think of is that these canvases stacked on top of one another look like they could really easily tumble off the wall at any second.


Nathan Green, untitled arrangement, mixed media, 2010

Here Green takes has paintings and creates a kind of taxonomy of how paintings could exist relative to a wall., They could hang on a wall ( the black and white canvas on the upper left); they could be painted right onto the wall (the yellow and green stripey rhombus); they could lean against the wall. In a way, Green reproduces in a minimal form a painter's studio, where one is likely to encounter paintings with all of these relations to the wall.

Neither Barry Stone's Ikea collages nor Kara Hearn's line drawings of weeping comedians did much for me. But four out of six ain't bad.