What is with this new trend of hanging stuff a foot from the ceiling? Should I be wearing my stilts to Chelsea? As far as I'm concerned "the art world" is about ART, not galleries, and if galleries are such attention whores now, as to hang the art in places where you can't even see it, in order to draw attention to the gallery itself, then I think we need to re-evaluate where artwork belongs.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Richard Tuttle : Tuttle-Scapes
We love Richard Tuttle. We love Rit dye and grommets. We just wish he would come in from the sun for a bit. Really, it's for his own good.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Hey there, Frida Fans!!! (Or: Betty Crocker sucked!)
OK, these are my last rebutals on my beloved Friduchi.
Dearest Natalie,
Julia Childs was without a doubt an innovator of the American culinary experience.
She pioneered the concept of a televised cooking show,
and with it introduced America to French cuisine, demystifying it for the masses, and in effect changing the cultural pallete forever, challenging and broadening the aesthetics of the average housewife in Idaho.
She achieved this though her passion for the art she loved: food.
But she was a mess in that kitchen.
I saw one show when she tried to cook a whole chicken in some recipe and she grabbed that bird and did things to it that looked illegal, immoral, and just plain ole wrong. Dan Akroid did a great skit as her in the first season of SNL, where (s)he gets a cut and bleeds all over the place and just keeps cooking.
She was clumbsy in that kitchen, to say the least, and that was the charm. It made her whole endeavor relatable. People saw themselves in that kitchen, thinking if she can do it...
She made the difference, not some array of skill or pastiche. She put her heart into the show and its message.
But her apples usually fell off her plate.
Dearest Natalie,
Julia Childs was without a doubt an innovator of the American culinary experience.
She pioneered the concept of a televised cooking show,
and with it introduced America to French cuisine, demystifying it for the masses, and in effect changing the cultural pallete forever, challenging and broadening the aesthetics of the average housewife in Idaho.
She achieved this though her passion for the art she loved: food.
But she was a mess in that kitchen.
I saw one show when she tried to cook a whole chicken in some recipe and she grabbed that bird and did things to it that looked illegal, immoral, and just plain ole wrong. Dan Akroid did a great skit as her in the first season of SNL, where (s)he gets a cut and bleeds all over the place and just keeps cooking.
She was clumbsy in that kitchen, to say the least, and that was the charm. It made her whole endeavor relatable. People saw themselves in that kitchen, thinking if she can do it...
She made the difference, not some array of skill or pastiche. She put her heart into the show and its message.
But her apples usually fell off her plate.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Saltz and Peppa
(Photo: Ellen Page Wilson. Image Copyright Rudolf Stingel and Courtesy of the Artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.)Sometimes I don't know what the hell Jerry Saltz is thinking.
In a recent New York Magazine article (here), he discusses Rudolf Stingel's recently closed showing of three small canvases in the cavernous Paula Cooper Gallery, one per wall.
He says:
"I wouldn’t want any of these paintings individually, but together they charge the gallery with thoughts about what it takes to create shows in the wake of orgiastic abundance. Stingel’s installation is a requiem for the white cube and a fond farewell to the last fifteen years."
What the fuck did any of that have to do with anything relevant to Stingel's work?
I saw it, walked out rather fast, and needed to catch my breathe outside. Fond farewell my ass.
It was a blatant spit in the face of state of the artworld, or the artdream as the world slips away from it. I don't even know how brave it was.
I forgot to check if they sold individually or as a group, or if they sold at all. It could've been Paula Cooper cutting a lot of overhead.
There's gonna be a lot of pages to fill when to next big wave of gallery closures happens during the summer art-lull. Critics will find all manner of bullshit to fill up what should be show reviews.
They'll be scrambling to keep their jobs too.
Get to work, Jerry.
She did. We did.
Frida Kahlo, Tunas (Still Life with Prickly Pear Fruit). 1938. Oil on Masonite.
I'm sorry, you can't seperate someone's ability to paint from the fact that they're an artist. You can't say "Well, Warhol was a good artist, but he was a horrible print maker." Just like you cant say "Betty Crocker wrote some good recipes, but she was a terrible cook" (betty crocker is fictional, but you can substitute her for your chef of choice)
"If she painted apples on a table, no one would've looked twice."
Apples painted by Frida's hand, informed by her experiences, are not apples painted by Cezanne. I challenge you to think about the fact that someone who can look at an apple as an extension of herself, as her own bleeding heart on the table has the ability to make MORE interesting apples then say someone like Cezanne, who saw apples for shapes and forms and color and light, and appley-goodness. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in my opinion, Frida is a better painter then Cezanne, and a lot of other painters-of-apples out there.
She did paint apples on tables. We did look, and we still are looking.
Still got hope, Obama
Da Prez, as he shall hence forth be referred as, is about to create a White House position responsible for the nation's Art and Culture, as per this article in the NY Times.
Definitely a step in some direction.
Not sure which.
I'm actually a little desensitized toward how the gov't feels about art.
Giuliani, Mapplethorpe, Serrano and Saatchi already fucked up my chance of getting anything directly from the NEA.
They (the gov) still haven't fully replaced the NEA funding they cut almost 15 years ago.
I'm just not plugged into that system enough.
I still think Art and Culture should be lumped in with Education. This way everyone would learn to be more comfortable with asking questions, instead of scared of someone taking gov't money and making porn.
Right back atcha "Painter!"
I'm going right out on a limb here and separating the ability to be a good painter and a good artist.
Frida was a good artist. Not a good painter. Period.
Thomas Kincaid is a good painter.
Georgia was an amazing painter (new york cityscapes? What are ya lookin at?)
DaVinci? Come on.
Dali? DALI?! Did u take shrooms before that video? Go the National Gallery at the Smithsonian and stand in front of the Sacrament of the Last Supper, and then repeatedly smack yourself in the head for even thinking that about my boy Sal.
Picasso was a prick. And a womanizer. And an amazing painter as well as the exemplary artist everyone blindly touts him to be.
And he loved Frida.
Frida was a good artist. Not a good painter. Period.
Thomas Kincaid is a good painter.
Georgia was an amazing painter (new york cityscapes? What are ya lookin at?)
DaVinci? Come on.
Dali? DALI?! Did u take shrooms before that video? Go the National Gallery at the Smithsonian and stand in front of the Sacrament of the Last Supper, and then repeatedly smack yourself in the head for even thinking that about my boy Sal.
Picasso was a prick. And a womanizer. And an amazing painter as well as the exemplary artist everyone blindly touts him to be.
And he loved Frida.
Frida, at best was an adequate painter of extraordinary visions.
But I guarantee if she painted apples on a table, no one would've looked twice at her.
That's my definition of a good painter
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Louise Nevelson @ Pace 25th St
Louise Nevelson, Untitled (1968)
Photo by: Bill Jacobson / Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York
Louise Nevelson
Like her. Love her obsessive tendencies. Love her impulse to unify the scraps of debris that surrounded her, and that she chose black as the color to create one from many, creating at the same time a jam-packed and clustered void.
Liked the showing of the work. Didn't like the sections of black walls behind some pieces (dramitic, overdramatic, mellodramatic?). Don't know how I feel about the placement of some pieces hung WAY high on the wall near the ceiling. Hurt my neck a little, and I don't know what it did to the space, other than stick out like a sore thumb.
And space, with its every subtle nuance, is Nevelson's medium of choice.
Frida can't paint.
Talking with Natalie last week, I said something really fast that I've been feeling for a while, and it felt good getting out. I said Frida Kahlo was a horrible painter.
It was at the most recent retrospective of her work at the Philadelphia Museum that I really started questioning things. I caught it on its last day and the show was packed, everyone with there audio tour headset clamoring for position near the next work the show's curators deemed important enough to talk about. And it was a bit of a pilgrimage for me. I've known Frida's work for so long and have yet to get tired of the blunt force trauma you can get from fully immersing yourself in her painful all-life-is-sorrow world. I've seen the majority of her paintings before in past exhibitions, back to the huge Latin American survey MOMA had in the early 90's, and the idea of seeing the "real" paintings was still important to me.
Until I saw them.
I was the overcome by the feeling that the actual paintings on the museum wall were not showing me any more than what I could see in the multitude of reproductions, artspeak for pictures of paintings, that have fed me for the majority of my life. In investing so much in the symbolic language that Frida called her own, and in the circumstances from where it came to be, I paradoxicly found myself distanced from the actual paintings themselves. And at that distance they began to seem crude and dry, as if the juice had been sqeezed and all that remained was the disgarded husk.
Now for my credentials: it's arguable that the work of Frida Kahlo was the prominent influence in myself becoming an artist, a.k.a. crazy and broke. Her work showed me the power of self-directed crazy at work; the exorcism of personal monsters that become inseparable from their host, exposing, owning, accepting, and ultimately using your monsters like a pimp whoring out his bitches.
Now, maturity has brought me the understanding that there was no redemption in her actions; as opposed to what that slop-filled melodramatic faux-biopic a few years back would lead you to believe. Those who knew her usually describe her as full of life, as a feisty spitfire, defiant in the face of all that befell her (and trust me, it was a lot).
But it all just adds up to the sad-clown syndrome for me. A brave face, elaborate costuming, a put-on bravada, all to conceal a lot of pain and fear that stayed with her all the way to her death; her last painting, a still-life where a watermelon half has the words "Viva la Vida" scrawled in its juicy pink flesh, has as much death as it does the life it so brazenly celebrates; the melon's pulp a clear reference to Frida's own vulnerable insides which was so often violated, both by accident and the frequent medical procedure. Being her last painting, its message has been taken as her epitaph, her motto that supported her through all her miseries. But I never felt comfortable with its inherent optimism. To Frida, life will go on a long time without her, and it will be filled with the same pain, and blood, and dead things that she knew intimately in her own. And it is this level of honesty that I have designated as the pinnacle of modern artistic achievement, for me anyway.
So, what the hell does all this have to do with Frida's painting ability? Well, nothing, and that's the point here. Frida Kahlo and the images she produced were so much more than the physicality of the work. It ultimately doesn't matter that the majority of her painting are flat and as visually predictable as a paint-by-numbers. Her greatest painting influences were Mexican retablo painters and her twice-married husband Diego Rivera, and her style combined the flat design-based visual architecture of Rivera's mural work with the awkward naiveté of the religious folk paintings. In both practices, paint is secondary. Frida used it to fill the spaces between what was going on in her psyche.
And that's ok with me.
In fact, it's possably the greatest testament to her work, to the world she created, where she cast herself as the tragic heroine whose sole purpose was to be subjected to all the sorrows that life can bring, and to endure. Nothing more.
It only took me almost 20 years to realize that the paintings themselve were only a supporting character in her play.
It was at the most recent retrospective of her work at the Philadelphia Museum that I really started questioning things. I caught it on its last day and the show was packed, everyone with there audio tour headset clamoring for position near the next work the show's curators deemed important enough to talk about. And it was a bit of a pilgrimage for me. I've known Frida's work for so long and have yet to get tired of the blunt force trauma you can get from fully immersing yourself in her painful all-life-is-sorrow world. I've seen the majority of her paintings before in past exhibitions, back to the huge Latin American survey MOMA had in the early 90's, and the idea of seeing the "real" paintings was still important to me.
Until I saw them.
I was the overcome by the feeling that the actual paintings on the museum wall were not showing me any more than what I could see in the multitude of reproductions, artspeak for pictures of paintings, that have fed me for the majority of my life. In investing so much in the symbolic language that Frida called her own, and in the circumstances from where it came to be, I paradoxicly found myself distanced from the actual paintings themselves. And at that distance they began to seem crude and dry, as if the juice had been sqeezed and all that remained was the disgarded husk.
Now for my credentials: it's arguable that the work of Frida Kahlo was the prominent influence in myself becoming an artist, a.k.a. crazy and broke. Her work showed me the power of self-directed crazy at work; the exorcism of personal monsters that become inseparable from their host, exposing, owning, accepting, and ultimately using your monsters like a pimp whoring out his bitches.
Now, maturity has brought me the understanding that there was no redemption in her actions; as opposed to what that slop-filled melodramatic faux-biopic a few years back would lead you to believe. Those who knew her usually describe her as full of life, as a feisty spitfire, defiant in the face of all that befell her (and trust me, it was a lot).
But it all just adds up to the sad-clown syndrome for me. A brave face, elaborate costuming, a put-on bravada, all to conceal a lot of pain and fear that stayed with her all the way to her death; her last painting, a still-life where a watermelon half has the words "Viva la Vida" scrawled in its juicy pink flesh, has as much death as it does the life it so brazenly celebrates; the melon's pulp a clear reference to Frida's own vulnerable insides which was so often violated, both by accident and the frequent medical procedure. Being her last painting, its message has been taken as her epitaph, her motto that supported her through all her miseries. But I never felt comfortable with its inherent optimism. To Frida, life will go on a long time without her, and it will be filled with the same pain, and blood, and dead things that she knew intimately in her own. And it is this level of honesty that I have designated as the pinnacle of modern artistic achievement, for me anyway.
So, what the hell does all this have to do with Frida's painting ability? Well, nothing, and that's the point here. Frida Kahlo and the images she produced were so much more than the physicality of the work. It ultimately doesn't matter that the majority of her painting are flat and as visually predictable as a paint-by-numbers. Her greatest painting influences were Mexican retablo painters and her twice-married husband Diego Rivera, and her style combined the flat design-based visual architecture of Rivera's mural work with the awkward naiveté of the religious folk paintings. In both practices, paint is secondary. Frida used it to fill the spaces between what was going on in her psyche.
And that's ok with me.
In fact, it's possably the greatest testament to her work, to the world she created, where she cast herself as the tragic heroine whose sole purpose was to be subjected to all the sorrows that life can bring, and to endure. Nothing more.
It only took me almost 20 years to realize that the paintings themselve were only a supporting character in her play.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Re+Arts Takes on Ellsworth Kelly
I'm Sorry Ellsworth! I know your name has two L's. In my defense though, I am a re+art.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Taner Ceylan and the 5 Reasons Why I Leave Chelsea Wanting to Commit Suicide
I also urge you to bring a gun to kill yourself shortly after viewing, because I promise you that you will literally feel your face hemorrhage, and probably never be able to have sex again.
Yes it's really that bad, and if you don't believe me, the picture above is of the disclaimer the gallery had on their door.
So, I bet your wondering "How can it be that bad?" Well, here's how (in no particular order):
5. Photorealism doesn't thrill me, not because I have anything against painting from photographs, but because it started 30 years ago and I'm convinced that SOMETHING has had to have happened since 1970.
4. The paintings aren't really that good. In photographs, they look just like photographs. In real life the perspective is off, the colors are muddled, they're lacking any emotion, and they're just kind of wonky in general. They're not lazily painted, but they're not painted with particular care either. They don't transform the photograph into a painting. Chuck Close, for example, a. works from photographs, b. makes photorealistic paintings, c. makes paintings that still look like paintings and d. makes me actually care because they're done with skill and passion.
3. I'm bored. I like bodily fluids as much as the next person, but I can get great REAL images of them off of google whenever I want. There's nothing about Ceylans paintings that really make them valuable to me as paintings.
2. I'm never a fan of the subjugation of women, and I'm not actually sure that Mr.Ceylan actually ever told THIS woman *points to below* that she was going to be a painting.
1. The Internet may be for porn, but ART GALLERIES AREN'T.
A Glimmer of Hope in the Sea of Suck?
Micheal isn't completely off base with his observation that Chelsea has become a vast sea of suck, but to be the optimist of the blog here I think it's gotta get better. Can it really get worse?
Sure, I'm hard pressed to find a show in Chelsea that I actually enjoy. I mean, is it just me or is all of the contemporary art in the so-called contemporary art galleries from like 1970? Hasn't anything happened in the past 30 years, aside from the complete evaporation of any real meaning, or depth in art? I hardly even see new forms rearing their heads. Light projections, videos.. sure these are new, but have they really made their journey into anything but being "paintings with video projections on them"? Tony Oursler's collection at the Metro Pictures Gallery is one of the only shows up in Chelsea (open until April 11th for those of you who wanna be in-the-know) that came even remotely close to feeling fresh.
Here's a man who's actually using the things that are going on in society in his artwork. Sure enough, hanging a 6 foot long 5 dollar bill with a talking lincoln will always warrant a response by an American, money is the main way we communicate with each other anymore, but its the timing in this 5 dollar bill in the Recession *oh snap I said it* that makes it so contemporary.
And yes, we are in a Recession, not that you'd realize it by walking through the Chelsea.
Recession denial can be seen all over the city, lets begin with Exhibit A: Taner Ceylan. (see above)
(for emphasis)
RETARTS!!!!!!!
Chelsea's not dead yet, but it's getting tired and cold, it's blood
drained from it's already pasty white face.
I wanna thank Wall Street for being so incredibly selfish and fucking
up the whole system just when I'm about to graduate.
Oh, and painting isn't dead, it's just in a far-reaching state of
suck that I'm desperately trying to crawl my way out from under.
TTFN
(Tough titty, fuck nuts.)
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Testing the water....
Many reactions to come...
most of them kind of crappy.
most of them kind of crappy.
Welcome to the new Artworld! Retarts!
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