Big Five Oh, part 1: Cutlog

Robert Boyd

So I just turned 50 last week. My nephew, Ford, has the same birthday as me, and he just turned 21. Given this coincidence, I thought I'd treat him to his first trip to New York. I was there to see art and he had my permission to do whatever the hell he wanted to. But for the first couple of days, at least, he stuck close to uncle Robert, perhaps because he didn't feel comfortable wandering around New York alone.

Our first stop was Cutlog, a French art fair that was having its first U.S. version this year. I got in on the preview Thursday because they gave me a press pass. (I'm grateful for that, especially since Frieze denied me one!) Of all the art fairs I went to that weekend, this one had the funkiest location, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center Inc. The space was fairly ramshackle and galleries had no idea if they'd be in a room with a piano or next to people practicing capoeira. As for the art, it was very hit or miss, but I saw art here that was unlike any that I saw in the other fairs this weekend. Here's some of what I saw and liked.


Marion Tampon-Lajarriette at Galerie Dix9

I think my favorite gallery was Galerie Dix9, which had several works by Marion Tampon-Lajarriete. A couple were paintings based on night-vision photos she took that have that spooky, security camera look.


Marion Tampon-Lajarriette at Galerie Dix9

But my favorite was a video, Antichthones 1, where she took a first person tracking shot from an old movie and inserted herself in. What I liked was how she contrasted the color her image with the old black and white movie.


Marion Tampon-Lajarriette, still from Antichthones 1 at Galerie Dix9

Gallery director Hélène Lacharmoise was working on getting a piece by Sophia Pompéry up and working when I was there. Apparently part of the video sculpture had arrived late, and she and her assistant were scrambling. 


Sophia Pompéry, Lighting Up, Burning Down, 2009, video installation on television, colour, sound, 0'20'', loop

But Lighting Up, Burning Down by Pompéry was on view, and I liked it quite a lot. It's the perfect video art gift for your workaholic friend.

Another space I liked wasn't really a gallery space, but a space devoted to Ray Smith and friends.



Ray Smith Studio had three large drawings in it, each a "jam" drawing between Smith and various visitors to the studio. They had a real alternative/underground comics vibe--this is what happens when you get a bunch of cartoonists together in a bar or coffee shop. The only difference was the scale.


Ray Smith & friends jam drawing


Left: Ray Smith's daughter. Right: my nephew Ford

Ford really liked these pieces a lot. I did, too, and I also was charmed by the fact that the booth was manned by Smith's daughter. She told us how Smith's studio was flooded by Sandy last year, and that they were still recovering from that. I found it very interesting and commendable that Cutlog gave him a booth--art fairs usually don't allow artists to buy their own booths, presumably out of fear of angering galleries (who are, after all, the real clients of an art fair). And the fact that his booth was being worked by his daughter gave it a humble feeling; Cutlog was in general very unpretentious compared to the other art fairs I saw this weekend. (Smith showed work in Houston at Peveto last year, but it was quite different from the Cutlog pieces.)



And part of that lack of pretense was forced on the fair by the physical location.  Maybe Galerie Céline Moine would have preferred a clean white booth, but they got this instead and it really looked great. The big ink wash Thomas Henriot drawings wouldn't have looked nearly as good in an uncluttered white box.

Thomas Henriot at Galerie Céline Moine

But here they felt like they were literally spilling out of a closet, which made you feel almost like you were in the artist's studio.

Right across from Ray Smith Studio was Galerie d'Aléatoire, which was showing work from an abecedaria by Ivan Yazykov.


Ivan Yazykov, The Book of Letters "Я"

Of course, since Ivan Yazykov is Russian, The Book of Letters is a Cyrillic alphabet.


Ivan Yazykov, The Book of Letters "Щ"

I loved the beauty and cleverness of these drawings, and I also loved how atypical they were for an art fair. Charming illustrational works displaying high levels of craft and skill are not the norm in contemporary art. But they should be included in the mix, which was why I was glad to see these here.


Ivan Yazykov, Rebus



Another space that wasn't an art gallery was be poles. They publish lovely little pamphlets of photographs by a given photographer of a given city in a series called Portraits de Villes. What drew my eye to them was their beautiful display cases.



They also doubled as shipping cases (I assume) and were thus probably quite economical. The pamphlets themselves were beautifully produced--excellent paper and printing, saddle-stitched with thread, embossed covers--and the photos were lovely, too. I picked up Buenos Aires featuring photos by Jacques Borgetto. (be poles was one of the few booths in any art fair that was selling relatively inexpensive items.)

Some other pieces I liked:


Chris Burden, Untitled, 1974, lithograph with hand coloring, 20 x 16"

Chris Burden at Cirrus Gallery.


 Diane Carr, Mountain (top) and Branches (below), 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 18"

Diane Carr (I can't remember what gallery she was showing with).


The Hole with Holton Rower paintings

Holton Rower's "Pour Paintings" at the Hole.


Holton Rower's Pour Paintings


Jean-luc Cornet, Tribut Telephone Sheep, 1989, installation, 60 cm high

Jean-luc Cornet's sheep made of old telephone parts at Gama Gallery.


Makiko Nakamura, Before a Sweet Rain--Autumn, oil on canvas, 35.5 x 35.5 inches

Makiko Nakamura at Edward Cutler Gallery (I think).

I can't say I actually liked Piers Secunda's Taliban Relief paintings (paintings made of the impressions of Taliban bullet holes on walls) at Per Partes Projects. I found them a worrying aestheticization of war. But considering the paltry responses of artists to our wars lately (wan "protest" art, for the most part; photography is the big exception here), Secunda's pieces were an interesting if unsuccessful attempt to capture the power and brutality of war.


Piers Secunda, Taliban Relief Painting


Piers Secunda, Taliban Relief Painting

Cutlog showed many artist projects and had performances running through the whole weekend. I missed the performances, but here are some of the projects interested me.


Marni Kotak, before photo


Marni Kotak, after plaque


Marni Kotak, Calorie Countdown

Marni Kotak achieved infamy a couple of years ago by giving birth to her son in a gallery. Frankly it felt a little old hat--the fictional artist J.J. from the Doonesbury strip gave birth to Alex Doonesbury as a performance on cable TV in 1988.


Garry Trudeau, Doonesbury, November 29, 1988

For Cutlog, her performance was Calorie Countdown, where she would ride a stationary bike at certain times to try to lose some weight. If she really wanted to lose weight, she should have done what I did--spend hours walking around every art fair in New York, as well as all through Harlem, the Lower East Side and Bushwick. I am not exaggerating when I say that I had to literally tighten my belt after this trip.


Timofey Radya, Figure #1: Stability


Timofey Radya, Figure #1: Stability


Timofey Radya, Figure #1: Stability

Nice use of the riot policeman shield medium by Timofey Radya.

 
Mark L. Power, Plate War, 2012, plastic

I can't tell if this piece by Mark L. Power is just a stack of plastic plates or a sculpture of a stack of plastic plates. And I like that I can't tell.

After all this, Ford said he had really liked it a lot, but he didn't understand one thing--why was all the art so expensive? 

Next stop on the big five oh tour--the monster: Frieze.

Seven Days in the Art World

Robert Boyd



Seven Days in the Art World is a useful companion to the The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. It generally reinforces some of Don Thompson's conclusions about the art world and art markets, while providing a human face to many of the participants. It was published in 2008 and reported pretty much at the height of the art world's money craziness. This paperback edition has many new footnotes and an afterward that update events past the financial panic--which obviously affected the art world. Additionally, Sarah Thornton has contributed articles to a special report on the art market in the November 26 edition of The Economist.

The conceit of the book is that each chapter is a description--indeed, an ethnographic investigation--of some event in the art world for one day. The events are a Christie's auction of contemporary art in 2004, a day-long "crit" at CalArts in 2004, opening day at ArtBasel in 2006, the day the Turner Prize was announced in 2006, a February day spent at Artforum in 2007, a day spent with Takashi Murakami at his studios, and opening day at the Venice Biennale in 2007. When you are reading the book, however, all these days seem compressed, as if she is jetting from New York for the auction to L.A. for the crit to Switzerland for the art fair.

The chapter on the auction duplicates much of what Don Thompson wrote about the economics, but she adds details of who is present, where they sit (and the desirability of certain seats over others, not unlike elementary school). What she writes about the press gallery is interesting. It is not always known who is buying (often art advisers and other straw buyers are buying on behalf of a rich collector), but many of the actual buyers are present. Apparently it is hard for the press to see them all, and they are desperate to figure out who bought what. Anyone bidding has lots of money to spend; the lowest estimate that night was $90,000.

Thorton only found one artist present, Keith Tyson. He, more than anyone else, sees the auction as a naked capitalist exercise.

[...]You feel the thrill of capitalism and you get into sort of an alpha-male mentality. [...] I don't have any problem with the market for art. It is an elegant Darwinian system. Some collectors are effectively buying futures options [sic] on a work's cultural significance."

Perhaps because the auction was nearly devoid of artists, Thornton places her next chapter at a critique at CalArts--a place devoid of collectors and dealers. It's a day-long critique with teacher Michael Asher, a conceptual artist. I think part of the reason Thornton looked here was that for a variety of reasons, contemporary art has become very valuable, with huge prices commanded for certain lucky living artists, some relatively young. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. Even very successful contemporary artists weren't getting rich more-or-less until the 80s. But as the supply of old-master artworks, Impressionist paintings and early modernist works dried up (bought by or given to museums, and removed from the international market by national patrimony laws), contemporary art--of which there is an ever-renewing supply--stepped into the breach. (With museums falling on hard times and deaccessioning like crazy, the market for older works of art may come roaring back. After all, if the choice is between owning a Rembrandt and say, paying the salaries and benefits of 50 police officers for five years, municipalities may have no choice.)  CalArts is one of the places where these future art stars are coming from.

When I was an art student, I hated group crits. I was happy to read Dave Hickey agreeing with me. He hates them for pretty much the same reason my 20-something self hated them.

[...] "I do not do group crits. They are social occasions that reinforce the norm. They impose a standardized discourse."

Chris Burden (who had nothing to do with this particular crit, but who was apparently interviewed by the author while she was out in L.A.) had similar views, expressing them more broadly about art schools in general.

"To be a good artist in the long term, you need to trust your own intuition and instincts," he said. "Whereas academia is based on rational group-think. There is magic and alchemy to art, but academics are always suspicious of the guy who stirs the big black pot."

On the other hand, students can form long attachments during crits. The friendships can combine with critique and form a context within which one can develop one's artistic practice. I think this is obviously true--it's just that it doesn't need the crit to make it happen.

Between the poles of the Auction and the Crit fall the Fair, the Prize, the Studio Visit and the Biennale. There are great observations about the slithery relationship of art and commerce, of collecting and creating, all throughout. The idea, for example, of collecting for the "right reason" (right: love of art, desire to support artists; wrong: speculation, social climbing). The notion of the collector who opens his or her own collection to the public in a purpose-made exhibition space is examined--here we see an intersection again with Thompson. The stated purpose in philanthropic, but as Thornton puts it, "the work of lving artists needs to be pomoted if it is to generate consensus." Hence, the artist benefits from being displayed in Saatchi's gallery, but Saatchi benefits if he helps the artist maintain his reputation.

The odd-chapter out, in my mind, is the chapter on Artforum. Thompson states that art critics are the least influential people in the art world, and lays out a good argument to support this. It is acknowledged in Thornton's book that few people in the art world read art magazines. They look at the pictures. I am guilty of this. I like the reviews in Artforum, but the long articles are almost always tedious. (I always find myself wishing that there more photos!)  Artforum can't survive without dealers, and in a way, the ads the dealers buy are as interesting as the articles. I write this with regret because I'd like the critic to be more important in the greater scheme of things. And I have been really blown away by some of the ideas in Artforum and other art magazines over the years. But the editors must bristle to know that their magazines are primarily illustrated catalogs, a way for dealers to communicate with collectors.

Furthermore, you almost never have writing like Thornton's (or Thompson's) in Artforum. You occasionally have writers who, riffing on Walter Benjamin, discuss in very theoretical terms art and its relationship with capitalism (or "capital," as they like to say). But discussing how an actual work of art actually gets sold is more-or-less verboten, much less the human stories behind these transactions. Thornton's book really foregrounded these human stories, and was really worth reading because of it.