The Armory Show
Piers 92 & 94, NYC
closes Sunday March 6

Told / Untold / Retold
Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art
Doha, Qatar

Martin Kersels’ Tumble Room

Sigmar Polke

Vivian Maier,
the Emily Dickinson of street photography

Help KickStart Finding Vivian Maier

Best viewed full-screen

Carsten Höller: Soma in Berlin

Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds

Rebecca Solnit on Jay DeFeo

Jay DeFeo

The Rose

50 years at The Pace Gallery

Anniversary Exhibitions

This may be an ad, but it’s a great one!

Miles Mendenhall won Week 1,
imitating a 19^th century “death portrait” of Nina Bustamante

Once Bravo lost Project Runway to Lifetime, the cable network that came closest to being a PBS for the 21^st century had something of a crisis. In the Actor’s Studio & Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the two series that distinguished the network back in the days when it mostly ran the best movies on basic cable, were already fading memories. Top Chef suffered mightily from the fact that you could see, but not taste, the participant’s creations. And the series of Real Wives knock-offs seemed aimed at an entirely different audience altogether, one that could have just as easily gotten that sort of show from E! Now, two seasons after the last original Runway series on the network, Bravo has re-entered the arena for high-concept reality TV with Work of Art, a blatant Project Runway imitation with the notable difference that its contestants are trying to make it in the least equitable of all creative markets, the fine arts.

The premise of the show is identical to that of Runway. 14 contestants – two less than on PR – are given a series of challenges, with one person eliminated each week until the winner gets a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, plus $100,000. The contestants were obviously chosen for their diversity. Exactly half are women & four are “of color” and the levels of experience are just as broad. Vietnamese-born Trong Nguyen has been showing in New York & European settings for the better part of a decade, and is widely known as a curator as well. Nao Bustamante teaches at the Rensselaer Institute and has been on the art scene for over 25 years. Yet one of the other contestants is a fast food cook from Santa Maria, California, with some decent photography/Photoshop skills, but aimed perhaps more at becoming a commercial illustrator. Another fellow has been living in his truck, has never had a lesson and has never shown his art work to anyone. It shows. Still another is an outspoken Christian lady who appears to have walked over from Real Wives of Oklahoma City – yet her MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago suggests that she may be one of the sleepers here.

On the first show, which aired on Wednesday and is already available for streaming on the Bravo web site, Bustamante & the fellow who had never shown his work to anyone ever were two of the three fighting against being instantly eliminated. Bustamante & the African-American woman who was sent hither basically were punished for presenting abstract work in a challenge that was to do a portrait of another artist. The winner was Miles Mendenhall, the youngest artist ever to win a Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship, who also has a pronounced case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Imagine Monk in the body of a teen idol – this guy is going to be a huge hit with the fans whether he wins or not.

If, that is, the show doesn’t sink from the weight of its own misconceptions. The executive producer here is no Heidi Klum. In fact, it’s Sarah Jessica Parker, Carrie from the Sex & the City franchise, who makes a couple of cameos in show number one to gush at the artists, but isn’t visibly part of the judging. The mentor – the Tim Gunn role here – isn’t an older artist, but Simon de Pury, the auctioneer who started in Geneva & who appears to have bought & sold everything, including his own business. His French accent is a pale echo of Gunn’s clipped speech & pointed opinions. More importantly, he has little to really say about the works he sees in progress, since production is not his expertise, just distribution. The host, China Chow, is a collector known to be friends with a number of artists. The permanent judges consist of Chow and three curator/critics: Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who sits on the board at White Columns & the president’s council at DIA while running her Salon 94 in the art ghetto of the Upper East Side; Jerry Saltz, senior art critic at New York Magazine; and Bill Powers, co-owner of Half Gallery & editor at large for Purple Fashion magazine. And while neither Rohatyn nor Powers are troglodytes, nobody calls foul when two of the three works that come up for elimination include the only abstractions in the group.

All of which points to the hulking, Technicolor elephant in the room: THERE ARE NO ARTISTS HELPING THE CONTESTANTS OF THIS SHOW AT ALL. None. Nada. It’s all about the buyers. Just like Sex & the City. Imagine Project Runway if the judges consisted only of Nina Garcia, the Jerry Saltz of that posse, Melissa Rivers & Lindsay Lohan. Work of Art is not a show about making art, but rather of making collectibles, of manufacturing ready-to-sell pieces. What I’d give to see a Joseph Beuys in this crowd of contestants, especially with a hungry coyote and a good supply of rancid animal fat. I have never appreciated PR’s Michael Kors more than when watching the brazenly incompetent judging portion of Work of Art’s first show.

The result is instantly predictable. The winner of this show will be able to sell, but is unlikely to have any perceptible impact on any other artist, unless it’s repulsion, regardless of how well the work is made or how likeable the artist is as a person. This is a bizarre theory of how to find “the next great artist.” Not unlike letting Garrison Keillor or Caroline Kennedy edit your poetry anthologies on the grounds that they may once have read a book. And every bit as doomed to failure.

Once upon a time, the late Gil Ott shared a tree-house in Bolinas with an anthropologist named Kush. Kush, aka Steven Kushner, would go on to teach at the late lamented New College of California & simultaneously begin videotaping many of the poetry readings he attended around San Francisco. As in thousands of them. Some of these events were also taped by others – most often the Poetry Archive at San Francisco State – & there was something of a rivalry over the quality of the work. How accurate this debate might be is impossible to ascertain from nearly 3,000 miles away since both archives – shockingly, to my mind – remain offline. For all I know, Kush’s archives are sitting in boxes in a garage or attic somewhere, or worse. But even if we presume that the quality borders on the non-existent, the reality persists that for hundreds, maybe thousands, of poetry readings in the Bay Area over the past 40 years, Kush’s archives are the documentation, the only remaining evidence of what happened, what was read & who was there.

I thought of Kush a lot when watching Exit Through the Gift Shop, Bansky’s documentary about street art documentarian Thierry Guetta & his morphing into millionaire street artist Mr. Brainwash. Exit is flat out one of the best films I have ever seen on the visual arts, easily the best since at least Basquiat, a film not-coincidentally directed by Julian Schnabel, a major painter before he turned to film (The Diving Bell, The Diving Bell & the Butterfly). Presuming, that is, that Guetta actually exists & is not himself a Banksy art product rather in the way that Kent Johnson produced Araki Yasusada.

Let’s presume here that Guetta / Brainwash are for real. The story, as such, is this. Guetta, an LA-vintage clothing store owner with a Euro-orphan background not unlike that of Andy Grove or Bill Graham, gets a video camera and becomes obsessive in his recording of everything. But one of the things he records, on a family trip back home to France, is a cousin, Space Invader, one of the first generation of street artists, who unlike the graffiti taggers they so palpably emulate appear all to have gone to art school. Film Space Invader in France, and then back on his own home turf of LA, Guetta meets LA’s resident street art hero, Shepard Fairey, pre-Obama image & Time magazine cover (& pre-Associated Press copyright suit over the use of an AP photo of Obama as one source for his iconic poster). Guetta becomes the sorcerer’s apprentice & soon finds himself everywhere, since he has no fear of heights & gets off on the idea of the danger of getting arrested. Fairey, Invader & the other street artists he soon gets know (virtually all guys save for one street-named Swoon) teach him not only the tricks of their craft, making spray art stencils at the local Kinko’s but to film from a distance & in low-light situations so as not to attract the police.

Guetta tells everyone he is making a documentary, but it appears to be one on the order of Kush’s: lots of tapes, but no real archive that can be credibly accessed by outsiders. The artists all seem to value not only his help, but the idea of creating a lasting archive of work that all too often gets sprayed over pretty quickly (tho, and it’s not noted in passing, we do later in the film see one Bansky Andre the Giant disappear as Mr Brainwash himself pastes his own newer work over it).

But as he gets to know the street art scene, Guetta comes to understand that his compulsive documentation has a major gap. He needs to interview Banksy, the “international man of mystery,” who is the Batman to all these various Robins of Street Art. The catch is that it’s impossible. Everyone professes not to know who he is or where he is. He is said not to own a cellphone. However, coming over to the US to do some work in the LA area, Banksy’s assistant is turned back at customs – the cover story on the rationale for the trip doesn’t get him through. So Banksy calls up Shepard Fairey to see if there is anyone who can and wants to help. Why not, suggests Fairey, this middle-aged boutique owner & camera nut who happens to be Space Invader’s cousin. Unable to find Banksy, Banksy comes to him.

Brent Green

Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then

Andrew Edlin Gallery
134 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY

April 17 – June 5

Watch the video

Someone in Woodinville (just north of Seattle)
is putting the folk into folk art

Lhasa de Sela

1972 – 2010

§



Kenneth Noland

1924 – 2010

Jee Hwang

is the first recipient of
the Emma Bee Bernstein
Emerging Artist Fellowship

& will have a solo exhibition
at A.I.R. Gallery
111 Front Street, Brooklyn
from January 6 thru 31

Conversation Through Kitchen Window, 1992, Museum of Contemporary Photography

Larry Sultan

1946 – 2009

Two & one-half days is not long enough to spend in New York City, particularly since Krishna & I hadn’t done a trip there by ourselves in a long while. Sans kids? Maybe 20 years. Mostly I’m going up for readings or she’s going up with friends or for conferences, the other one at home to care for the nest. But our hulking 17-year-olds don’t feel much need these days. So we borrowed the flat of some friends & headed out to see what we could see, hear what we could hear, eat what we could eat.

Two places where we had better-than-great meals were Back 40, on Avenue B between 11^th & 12^th, and Bombay Talkie on Ninth Ave just up from 21^st Street. At Back 40, we listened to some nice bluegrass over the sound system while the party at one table next to us talked about the scene at the Nuyorican Café & the party at the other table was discussing Gary Snyder. Add to this the best roasted Brussels Sprouts I’ve ever had, perfectly grilled trout (tho they could have been more generous with the chickpea puree that comes with it), and a chocolate bread pudding that we shared, but still took enough home to snack on for the next two days! At Bombay Talkie we shared the Baighan Bharta – I’m an eggplant addict -- & five-spice shrimp. I needed the mango lassi, two in fact, just to keep from bursting into flames. We walked 2.5 miles each way to get to Back 40, but it was well worth the trip. Plus we ran into Lewis Warsh at the market on the way back.

The first part of Saturday was spent looking at galleries in Chelsea. By far, the most wonderful show was Bill Viola’s Bodies of Light at James Cohan Gallery, pictured above. Viola has been around for quite a few years, but his work has an integrity that never gets old, and when accumulated into a gallery-wide installation, it’s just overwhelmingly beautiful, meditative, erotic & sad all at once. We didn’t get to nearly as many galleries as we’d planned on simply because we were transfixed by these pieces. In the installation pictured above – the last (or perhaps deepest) one – a pair of teenagers walk slowly up toward the camera on parallel screens on the wall to the left. They’re blurred at first, virtually without color, until they slowly come through a falling sheet of water you didn’t even realize (unless, of course, you’d seen the rest of the exhibit, where this motif is repeated several times) was there. In the photo above, you can see the young woman reaching her arms out as she penetrates the waterfall, while the guy, with pure teenage male energy, just crosses his arms & wades right in. It’s apparent that the young woman has trained as a dancer – even with her clothes soaking, she’s powerful & fierce. In the screen at the back a naked couple – he’s Asian, she’s European – pierce the waterfall more or less together & react to what they see or imagine. Whatever it is, it’s very different for each. These videos are done in slow motion, tho what really gives them their power is the infinite dignity of the performers.

Time & familiarity with an artist’s work can have mixed results. I liked the Joseph Raffael watercolors of flora at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, a side of his work I’d not seen before, a lot. But Ronnie Landfield’s intense color field paintings at the Stephen Haller Gallery made me want to see the Jules Olitski and Sam Francis originals. Deep sigh. Likewise I found Enrique Chagoya, an old favorite of mine from the Bay Area, predictable & making easy jabs at US culture.

Somebody who makes much more powerful and politically pointed use of cartoon culture in paintings, sculpture &, so help me, wallpaper, is Robert Williams. His show, “Conceptual Realism in the Service of the Hypothetical” at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery shows that this old Zap Comic artist (you can still find 19 of his works available through Last Gasp) has lost none of the fire that drives the best of lowbrow art. Next to Viola, this was the other must-see exhibit I came across Saturday.

Later that afternoon, we took a walk through – or is it on? – Highline Park, New York’s latest great idea (and one of the few that really is a good idea), a converted el route that has been planted with what look like native grasses and some sturdy wooden benchware and just turned over to the wandering masses. On our way there, we ran into Eileen Myles & Michael Friedman & his missus, just starting their own Chelsea tour from the southern rim of the nabe.

We saw one other show while we were in the city, the Georgia O’Keeffe abstractions at the Whitney Sunday morning. If all you know are the calla lilies, tulips & dried cattle bones, this is a must-see, must-do show. It’s big – all of the third floor – and chronological, starting with her student work in 1916 right up to the point where macular degeneration made it impossible for her to see well enough to continue painting. There is also one relatively small room of Alfred Stieglitz photos of her, including some nudes just to remind us (a) of her tenuous social position as the young lover of a successful artist 23 years her elder, and (b) that she wasn’t always the elderly wizard of the Southwest with whom so many of us grew up.

One thing is clear immediately, looking at the very first painting in the exhibit. Whereas abstraction in Europe meant straight lines & hard edges, the arrival of geometry & the rule of the protractor, O’Keeffe’s work is really about registering the movement of the hand: waves, curves, swoops are all possible. To Stieglitz, who probably knew as much at that point about European art developments as any American not actually living across the pond, the distinctness of O’Keeffe’s approach – she had not yet even settled on a career in painting – must have been apparent.

O’Keeffe’s work over the next decade is often brilliant, but it still seems searching & not entirely sure of itself. Then, in 1926, everything clicks. From this point forward, O’Keeffe is a master thoroughly in control. And, with the exception of a couple of late pieces – portraits in theory of her house in New Mexico that appear to be more in dialog with the painting of Josef Albers & maybe Hans Hoffmann – her style is unmistakable. It’s a moment almost as pronounced as Williams’ Spring & All, which wasn’t really the instant his work took off, tho it is the one when the shift into a newer, higher gear became impossible to ignore. So too ’26 & O’Keeffe.

One thing to avoid, tho, is the audio-program headset that comes free with your Whitney admission. It’s egregiously stupid, at one point (#308 on your clunky headset dial) getting the direction of O’Keeffe’s painting completely backwards in order to make some analogy between her abstractions & sexual symbolism. One sympathizes with O’Keeffe, who kept her abstractions to a minimum precisely because they seemed to permit critics to make gushing pronouncements about eroticism in her work. Nearly 40 years after her big retrospective at the Whitney cemented O’Keeffe’s reputation as a painter of the first rank, she still is being mishandled even there.

Jeanne-Claude

1935 – 2009