Food/Face.

Art Free Associating.




They are remarkably similar.

1. "La Grenouille's pike quenelles Lyonnaise." NYT link
2. Magritte, The Rape, 1945

Glass.

Glass.

Gagosian in Athens.

Gagosian in Athens.

Work from "Three notes from Salalah" by Cy Twombly, inaugural exhibition, Gagosian Rome

Via Art in America (http://tinyurl.com/my5p7f) Gagosian is planning on opening up a new gallery in Athens, Greece. An exhibition entitled "Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves" by Cy Twombly will open on September 25.

Does anyone remember this happening in Rome? A space at Via Francesco Crispi 16 opened an exhibition of Cy Twombly's works, entitled "Three Notes from Salalah," on December 15, 2007. The building, a neoclassical structure made up of the ground and mezzanine levels of a former bank, built in 1921, is an imposing mix of grand vertical columns and impressive facade with bare, white cube galleries on the interior. The atmosphere seems fitting for the emperor of contemporary art.

But where's Gogo going with this? Is he not satisfied to be king of New York and London? Does he crave some classical propaganda, long the crutch of despots? After all, endless monarchs and rulers have copied classical architecture to give themselves some street cred with the peasants. "Look at us!" the buildings say, "we reach back to the Roman empire! Check the dome! Don't we look powerful!?"


Charlemagne did it at Aachen:


So what is Larry up to, conquering the ancient world city by city with new outposts of his contemporary art empire? I can't find the source, but I remember reading around the time of the Rome gallery opening an article that proposed Gogo had opened the space simply to secure the legacy of Cy Twombly, to placate the artist and make sure Twombly knew Gogo was committed. I wouldn't be terribly surprised. Twombly is an artist eminently familiar with the classical, with antiquity, and with his own place in the scope of art history. He has taken inspiration and quotes from Greek and Roman poets and the epics of wars and warriors of the time. See Gogo's description of the Athens show for a soundbite:

"The group of four canvases that comprises the Athens exhibition is inspired by a quote from the 7th century B.C. choral lyric poet Alkman."

Twombly certainly deserves to be shown in context with antiquity, and Rome would be the perfect place to do it. The atmosphere seems poetically perfect for Twombly's re-energized visions of legend. On the other hand, the Rome gallery has already played host to a few other important shows and events, including a Lawrence Weiner exhibition and a much-publicized GREED, A New Fragrance by Francesco Vezzoli. Rome's a rising star in the contemporary art world and Italian contemporary artists are long overdue to rise again from their 70s arte povera hangover.

But Athens!? And another Twombly show!?

I dunno, it seems like it might be a fetish, a power play, inaugurating classical spaces with the contemporary master of the ancient world. Maybe Gogo is a kind of performance artist, excorcising the ancient demons, fighting the aura of myth and the contemporary ennui of these places, using Twombly as a charm as Twombly digests the ghosts and puts them into paintings.

Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (III), 2009

So on the jumping off point of Larry Gagosian as performance artist conquering his way through antiquity with his artist-warriors: how does art conquer space? How does the inherent aura of a space with thousands of years of history get confronted by the contemporary art within the Rome/Athens galleries? What happens? In my mind Gagosian is appropriating these spaces into the greater historical narrative of his own contemporary art power. Cy Twombly is appropriating antiquity, ancient emotion, into his own paintings. The combination seems pretty striking.

What I love about art so much is that it presents this continuous narrative, an ongoing rush of ideas and aesthetics and work and life. The meta-works by Gogo and Twombly, the reliquary galleries, containers of ancient space that hold new works referencing antiquity, are perfect. They encounter the past and digest it, they encounter the contemporary art world and conquer it. Most of all, it's just badass. Gagosian as spatial architect, gesamptkunstwerk maker.

I'm looking forward to standing in one of these spaces and seeing if I can feel anything struggling in the air around me.

Wayne Thiebaud's San Francisco.

Wayne Thiebaud's San Francisco.

This is how San Francisco looks to me. Like a vertical cross section that sticks straight up into the air, a slice of a hill. The light, too. When it's sunny out, the buildings cast blue shadows on the streets around 5:30.

Walking down California Street, sometimes I felt like I was going to fall off to one side. I'd walk straight past a cross street and suddenly look to the left to see nothing but empty air stretching all the way to the ocean and the city splaying out before it in a patchwork grid of pastel buildings. There are the stucco facades of apartments painted light blue, the faux-Roman flat rowhouses with shuttered windows.

Everything thing is angled straight up and perched on the hills like a row of birds bobbing on a telephone wire. So when I'm riding in the car like a roller coaster and trying not to fly off the pavement, my eyes are still out there in the empty air, looking down, picturing the city like a Wayne Thiebaud painting: everything mushed against the flat sky, pushed up like a body against a wall, slammed by the sunlight. Everything rolls down San Francisco like the city got tilted on its side. The cars go fastest cause they've got wheels.


All paintings are by Wayne Thiebaud, variously titled: Down 18th Street, Apartment, and Highway Curve by Google Image search. Happy looking.

Daily Audio Blog 3.

Daily Audio Blog 3/Sound Diary.

Daily Audio Blog 2.

Daily Audio Blog 2.

Daily Audio Blog.

Daily Audio Blog.

A new feature!
My posting throughout the life of this blog has been carefully considered and written essays, but that really doesn't get updated often. So! I want to start this new feature, called Daily Audio Blog. (or at least until I come up with a better name for it.) Every day, or as often as I can, I'll post a 30 second audio clip of some place I've passed through during those 24 hours. Outside, inside, kitchen, party, whatever. I'll also post a photo from the place I took the sound. So it's an audio-visual portrait, hopefully one that's vague enough to dredge up some free association without a specific narrative.

The first picture can be seen above, from the porch off of my current apartment in Somerville, MA.

Without further ado, 30 seconds of today:

Street Rothkos.

Street Rothkos.
Via Hrag Vartanian: http://bit.ly/3HhbwB

These photos are accumulations of paint, either from construction or buffing (covering over) graffiti, that have taken on the delicacy and color layering of Rothko paintings. They also bring to mind a handful of other abstract expressionists and action painters, Clifford Still, Cy Twombly at times.

The colors are obviously beautiful on these, the light of the street combined with the flat colors of paint mix to something transcendent. The shapes of the paint strokes too have this kind of vernacular poetry that might not have been intentional, but comes out with a kind of energy and directness that's rare even in the work of talented artists.

Here's my own contribution, from Beijing:


I walked by that almost daily for the three weeks I was there last, and the sheer immediacy of the paint was pretty shocking. There are these six stripes on the wall, obviously covering up some lines of writing, but they're placed in such a way that they control this entire stretch of blank white wall. The drips and splatters are classic action/abstract expressionist and the red top and bottom sections remind me of Barnett Newman. Cool stuff. Compare to Vir Heroicus Sublimis, the great MoMA Newman masterpiece:

via Artnet

It also reminds me of the Japanese action painting movement Gutai. A lot of their work was based on gesture: bursting through a sheet of paper, using hands, feet, heads to move paint around on canvas.

Dana Schutz and Itchy Life.

Contemporary Evidence.
Dana Schutz Missing Pictures at Zach Feuer Gallery


Dana Schutz recently had an exhibition of new paintings at Zach Feuer gallery. It was much buzzed about, notable being the freshness of the work and its instant-classic art history dialogue making. The paintings to me are phenomenal; they bring together a history of figuration in art, a destructive surrealism and a constructive belief in the representative power of real life. Even though her figures fall apart, they get built back together into archetypes and put onto theater stages to totter in our gaze.

Painting a figure is a loaded gesture. It’s a kind of visual snap to the viewer, the lines click together into the shape of a person and it immediately carries a connotation: these lines are a body. What is the body doing? What is performing? What do its actions mean to us? Painting a figure refers compulsively to now. Representing a person is representing the present tense; it carries information about how we think of ourselves within our environment. That’s what makes Dana Schutz’ paintings so interesting: despite depicting events that could take place within some altered universe out of time, they come back relentlessly to now and the evidence and detritus of our lives.


Like the politics of Dada and Surrealism’s origins in the enervation and desperation of World War I, Schutz’ paintings distill the contradictions of life around them. The same visual trauma that is evident in Max Ernst’s melting landscape The Eye of Silence (1943-44) and Yves Tanguy’s Indefinite Divisibility comes through in Schutz’ 2008 Accident. Like a splinter lodged under the skin, the present irritant pushes through to the surface of the painting and makes itself felt in scars and striations. The tar of pavement becomes a series of writhing lines topped by wrinkled material, cloth or metal or an abstract quantity, bordering an eye-obstructing black hole. What’s the irritant here? What makes the ground so twitchy and hypersensitive? Something like the itch of what’s happening and the grating need to make it into art. I think that’s part of the urgency of Dana Schutz’ paintings. The irritation, then the painting, is the physical evidence of how we live.

Max Ernst, The Eye of Silence, 1943-44

So what is it to live in Dana Schutz’ mirror?

People are distorted into half forms, with dangling arms and burnt away sides. A blind masseuse’s eyes gape glowing into the air, neck thrown back and teeth bared. He grasps his subject’s foot with fingers that tangle into each other and turn into lines in front of us. Everything confused and pictorial space mushed up to the front, the painting becomes a wash of beautiful colors that pulse with the hues of rashes and bruises. It’s a fleshy story. Two chess players sit at a table; a normal scene except the players burn into leftover halves, a leg crumbles and a park planter turns into a bed of splotchy germs. The funny thing is that the picture retains its normalcy. What’s wrong with this alternate universe? Throughout it all the chess turn-clock keeps ticking into the middle, untouched. A woman gapes at a newspaper, but the woman’s face suddenly turns into Goya’s Saturn Devours His Son.

Goya, Saturn Devours His Son, 1819

Nothing is settled in these paintings. It all keeps pushing against each other in a constant battle to stay, to draw attention, to live for the audience. There’s a sense that the pictures are using themselves up in a constant mytosis of form, breeding and dying in front of our eyes. Atop all this, certain touchstones stay whole. A pair of glasses. The movie title Spiderman 3 scrawled into the sand. What remains are the things we recognize. The RCA dog listening to a gramophone. The sudden recognition of pop symbols is present and anxious. Schutz’ paintings don’t want to stay abstractly beautiful. They fight to form things, not deconstruct them. The figures fight to stay in focus in the blistering of life rushing past.


It’s an itch to stay alive. It’s a constant itch not to dissolve into a pile of thoughts, a pile of misguided and misdirected instincts and emotions.


Dana Schutz’ figures are victims and witnesses. They watch as they crumble and blow away and topple, only to pile up again, a squirming stack of lines that snap back into people and eyes. Like late Guston’s despairing Klansmen and clutching hands, the pictures seem so intent on being that meaning becomes less important than existing. Life is a struggle not to fall apart. That is what makes Schutz’ paintings so local but universalized in time; they are always fighting to stay in the moment you see them. That’s what makes me itch.

All pictures not noted are by Dana Schutz, a log of Schutz' gallery shows and titles can be found here. Schutz is represented by the Zach Feuer Gallery.

Shepard Fairey and Tufts University

Appropriating appropriation and its consequences.


Shepard Fairey is an artist who has been pretty in the moment recently. From an early mid-career retrospective at the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art to his omnipresent portrait of Barack Obama that became a rallying symbol for the president’s campaign to his scandal-inducing wheatpastes on Boston-area buildings, Fairey has been in the news for months.

This isn’t about Fairey’s mind-numbingly stupid arrest in front of the ICA before the opening of his show though. It’s not about the court cases he has had to endure for doing some illegitimate wheatpasting in Boston on his own time. This is just about one Fairey piece in particular, a mural put up outside of the Tufts campus center on January 25, 2009.

As an adjunct to his show at the ICA, Fairey was commissioned to put up about a dozen murals around Boston. These were large, wheatpasted pieces consisting of the artist’s iconic black, red and white designs, pre-printed, aligned and then stuck on the wall. One can’t blame the ICA and independent curator Pedro Alonzo for trying to take it to the streets a little, that’s one way to give a museum exhibition of street art some life. Despite the museum’s good intentions, however, it’s sometimes hard to avoid provoking someone in artistically-conservative Beantown.


The important thing to remember is that the owners, or managers, of the places these murals were installed in agreed to have them. In a sense, they agreed to play host to Fairey’s art of appropriation and accept the work’s parasitic relationship with its location. Shepard Fairey’s work depends on its environment, and it has a direct influence on it: namely, Fairey’s work politicizes space, and does it well.


This brings us to the case of Tufts University’s Fairey mural. First, the true and whole story of the mural’s short, sharp existence. Sherman Teichman, the head of Tufts’ Institute for Global Leadership, is a personal friend of the director of the Institute for Contemporary Art, Jill Medvedow. This led Teichman to be aware of the ICA’s scouting possible locations for Fairey’s murals. Teichman jumped at the chance, getting the installation of a mural at Tufts approved in a shotgun meeting of university officials. January 25 saw Shepard Fairey brought to campus along with curator Pedro Alonzo and the artist’s crew of assistants.

Hours later, the finished mural was up, a combination of an assertive Asian-looking woman wrapped in a head scarf, a giant black and white peace-sign hand and an assemblage of smaller posters. What the wall also held is a politicized space. Shepard Fairey opened the wall, appropriating the neutral space of Tufts University for his own message, a message that is still a markedly political statement, though it is ostensibly for peace.


Something that has been appropriated once, and so visibly in this case, tends to never quite be pure again after. This is important. It’s an innate aspect of modern and contemporary art. Think of Marilyn Monroe. Is it possible not to see Andy Warhol’s garish screenprints? An imposed meaning tends to overwhelm a neutral base. What was once a blank wall became, after Fairey’s mural, a space for self-expression. And it was used as such.


Milan Kohout is a performance artist from the Czech Republic. He currently teaches a class on performance art through Tufts University’s Experimental College. The class is a mix of discussion and practice, rehearsal and performance. During one class he suggested to his students how interesting it would be if Shepard’s violated space, the wall and the mural, were to be added to. What effect, he asked, would another layer of meaning give to this piece? Another physical layer of posters, combined with another conceptual layer of symbolism? Some of Kohout’s students took that question to heart. They added their own political posters to the politicized space of the wall, politicized space that was directly approved by the highest levels of Tufts University administration.

The new posters caused some controversy. The students’ work confronted some highly charged issues, including Roe v. Wade, the endless optimism of Obama’s followers, and gay marriage rights. Immediately the posters provoked a negative response that Fairey’s work failed to. Tufts Unversity’s anti-bias group BEAT as well as the LGBT center took issue with the posters’ up-front politics and what they deemed as excessive imagery. The posters, along with the remains of Fairey’s mural, were torn down, under the blessing of Tufts’ Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman. The new posters were rejected by the same staff that approved Fairey’s original mural.


My point is that, in terms of art in relation to politics, the two waves of appropriation of this blank wall were equally political and equally valid. And yet Tufts’ administration chooses only to approve of the first. These second posters were nothing if not an expression of free speech, a piece of performed art, where the first mural by Shepard Fairey was a gesture more motivated by personal branding than real communication. Which does Tufts bestow its approval on?
There is an inherent paradox in complaining that a space that has already been appropriated for art is appropriated once again by the students of this university. Tufts’ actions towards the posters betray its fundamentally conservative view towards the visual arts, one that the university has done nothing to correct and everything to reinforce in its treatment of Fairey’s mural and the subsequent posters.


______________________________________
Notes:
All photos courtesy of myself besides the last two of the posters, courtesy of Meredith Klein and the Tufts Daily

Shepard Fairey is the figure wearing the puffy coat and gloves in the photos.

For further information:
See this Daily article on the added posters: here
See this article describing the original mural: here
See this post on the Boston Globe's Exhibitionist blog: here
-in particular, please note this quote: "Apparently, an adjunct faculty member at Tufts University advised his students to ruin the work Fairey had been asked to create" [emphasis added]

If you are interested in more information about Fairey's mural at Tufts, please stay tuned.

Medium Beijing.

Medium Beijing.


I just got my medium format film that I shot in Beijing developed, here are my highlights. Sadly, the camera case got in the way in a few shots... that's why you see the dark area on the bottom edge. I'll know better next time! See Yugong Lama Temple, my dorm room, Wangfujing, the road outside of Xizhimen and a tourist junk shop.