Drummer Boys

by Ron Rege, Jr., , New York Times

Lady Art at McClain

by Robert Boyd

There is something really weird about McClain Gallery's show "A Room of Her Own." OK, the title. We get it. Virginia Woolf. So a show of women artists. But as far as I can tell, the only curatorial idea present in this show is that all these artists are women. I will willingly acknowledge that the art world still has sexism, but it has obviously improved a lot over the past few decades--especially contemporary art. Look at the artists I've written about this year. Look at the composition of the artists going into the Whitney Biennial. And frankly, look at the artists in this show--Kiki Smith, Louise Nevelson, Jenny Holzer, Cecily Brown, Tracey Emin, etc. They are all hugely successful artists, artists scarcely in need of affirmative action. I could see the grouping if there were some feminist idea animating the work, but there really isn't--at least, not that I can see. (Indeed, Inez van Lamsweerde's enormous photographic print, "Kate in Veil", is notable for two reasons: "Kate" is a total hottie, and she is wearing a veil and nothing else. That's one piece designed to appeal to the fellas! Perfect for hanging in your "man cave.")

So maybe a better way to think of the show is that it is a chance for McClain to put on a group show of blue-chip art. That's how I related to the show. And that's perfectly fine. My favorite piece in the show is this one:


Tara Donovan, Bluff, buttons and glue, 2007


Tara Donovan, Bluff detail, buttons and glue, 2007

Tara Donovan's sculpture is really cool, and this one was amazing.The buttons are semi-transparent, so the effect (which you can't really see in the photos) is weirdly hazy and out of focus. Because on the edges of the sculpture, it is transparent, but the deeper you go in, the more the layered buttons block light. The effect is remarkable--it's as if these stalagmite-like stuctures are out of focus. It is literally hard to see the edges unless you get really close. It's disconcerting. Making a huge sculpture out of buttons or plastic straws or paper plates seems like kind of a stunt when you hear about it, but the proof is in the pudding. "Bluff" has a truly remarkable presence.

I was astonished and really pleased to see a piece by one of my teachers from Rice, Karin Broker. When she was teaching us, her main thing was doing huge drawings and etchings of flowers. But that was in the mid 80s and this is apparently what she is doing now.


Karin Broker, Self-Portrait 1, metal, 2009

In the back of the gallery is a separate show of small pieces with another Broker piece. (Sorry for the crappy focus.)


Karin Broker, In the Country, farm box, construction and found objects, 2009

Here's a detail of the Farm Box.


Karin Broker, In the Country, farm box detail, construction and found objects, 2009

It's hard for me to square these pieces with the Karin Broker art I used to see, but I like them a lot. It is as if she decided to take all her strengths (incredible draftsmanship, beautiful sense of light and dark, hard-won skills as a printmaker) and chuck them all out. And that can be a useful strategy if you want to goose yourself to a new or different place, artistically. I think it works here.

One last piece I want to mention, also in the show of small pices in the back. It's by Rachel Whiteread, whose work I have always loved. But she's famous for taking rooms and indeed whole buildings and making full-size sculptures of the negative space within them, right? So what kind of "small" work can we expect from her?


Rachel Whiteread, Secondhand, Stereolithograph of laser sintered white nylon (edition of 400), 2004

It's basically a miniature version of a fairly typical sculpture (positive instead of negative, though). And the means of producing it sounds really high-tech--I'd love to see one being made. I know these techniques are used by industrial engineers and designers when they are producing models of new machines. (I had a summer job at Cameron and was shown some of these 3-D "printed" objects of reciprocating gas compressors that were on the drawing boards.) What is cool about this tiny sculpture is how much it looks like her enormous concrete versions. (And it's fairly inexpensive, given Whiteread's stature. Almost in my price range...)

"A Room of Her Own" is up through December 31, and the "Small Works and Artists Books" show in the back is up through January 2.

New Acquisitions--Milton Caniff and Gene Ahern

I love Terry & the Pirates, Milton Caniff's comic strip that ran from the mid-30s to the mid-40s. (See here and here.) So I am please to have been able to buy two minor examples of Caniff's masterpiece.

This one is from a point relatively early in the run.



Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates 11-11-1936, ink and blue pencil on board

This is a high-contrast black and white reproduction of the piece. Compare it to the color reproduction.



Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates 11-11-1936, ink and blue pencil on board

Hmmmm, there is a lot of blue here. What is it for? It's purpose will be obvious when you see the printed version of the strip (reproduced here from The Complete Terry and the Pirates volume 1).



Caniff used blue to indicate to someone in the newspaper production department where he wanted half-tones. Caniff was very much influenced by studio-mate Noel Sickles. Sickles used a high-contrast chiaroscuro drawing style, and Caniff did the same--using half-tones to add some grey to the mix.

But by 1945 (and all through his subsequent strip, Steve Canyon), Caniff abandoned that. He just used pen and ink with no mechanical halftones.



Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates 10-3-1945, ink on board

Notice the line across the bottom of the panels and across the top of the first panel. I have no idea what those are all about. They don't appear in the printed version, of course.

The third piece I got is a Sunday strip from what was a one-panel comic, Room and Board by Gene Ahern. On Sunday's he got to try a little sequential storytelling (although he did tell stories in the daily strips--he just told them one panel at a time).



Gene Ahern, Our Boarding House 6-19-1938, ink on board

Here is a slightly more readable, high-contrast black and white version.



Gene Ahern, Our Boarding House 6-19-1938, ink on board

Ahern was a wonderful artist for depicting the lives of sometimes pompous but usually fun-loving working-class America. This strip is almost a carbon copy of his earlier (and more successful) strip Our Boarding House. The reason that Room and Board exists is that Ahern was offered a better deal from a new syndicate in 1936, but the old syndicate owned Our Boarding House. So he just cloned it and renamed it, no doubt thumbing his nose at the old syndicate as he did.

Cash for your Warhol

(Signs by Geoff Hargadon. Exhibit here. Hat tip to C-Monster.)

Pim & Francie

 Robert Boyd


Pim & Francie, by Al Columbia.

I just want to write a brief note about this book. (As an aside, I confess that it is hard for me to write "brief notes"--which are a totally appropriate form for a blog--especially when writing about books. My instinct, which is almost wholly guilt-driven, is to write full-length reviews.) Al Columbia is outrageously talented, but has seemed uncomfortable with the idea of doing comics for a long time. This discomfort has manifested itself in many ways, mostly in the fact that he is not a terribly prolific cartoonist.

This discomfort continues in Pim & Francie, where the art is presented as a collection of objects. Like an art book or a historical museum displaying paper ephemera in vitrines, Columbia shows us art not cleaned up for reproduction, but with visible pencil lines, yellowing, stains, tears, etc. All of this adds up to creating a collection of paper objects rather than a comic. But there is a comic here, too. Columbia is really exploring the tension between paper objects and art for reproduction.

The damaged nature of the pages reflects the content--the continuous terror inflicted on the child protagonists, Pim and Francie, as they face murderers, zombies, monsters, and each other. There is a certain cheap irony here--the characters resemble 1920s cartoon characters, but do terrible things in terrible ways to one another. Where cartoon characters would often inflict horrific violence on one another, they don't die, nor do they really have the blood and guts of a "real" person--in Pim and Francie's world, there are blood and guts aplenty. Columbia's genuinely creepy drawings push past the irony, but what really makes it work is the damaged "real" quality of the pages being reproduced here. There is a terrible ambiguity there--are these pages documents? And if so, are they documents of horrific events, or of one cartoonist's depravity? Or is it a carefully constructed illusion of documentary evidence?

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.

Quote of the Day

"I'm again reminded how low the standards are for storytelling in nonliterary media such as comics and popular songs. Ware's story is fine, but as a story, it's the sort of thing that John O'Hara was spinning off by the dozens and publishing in the New Yorker a half century ago. It's got all the subtlety of a refrigerator on the side of the head. That's fine--comics, like movies, are a visual medium and have other things going for them. Still, it's striking to me how different the expectations are for stories in different media." (Andrew Gelman, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science)