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by Titus O'Brien
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March 2009 |
A lot of people are talking about Holland Cotter’s recent article in the Times, about a return to real art values indicated by the current economic collapse. Most seem to be saying “hear hear!”
At least they are out here in the hinterlands, which is funny, because no one here makes any real money off their art anyway.
A few others think he just means a return to stuffy, grey, dull
“socially active” videos and process performances – and there are
indications they might be right. He says “why not make studio
training an interdisciplinary experience, crossing over into sociology,
anthropology, psychology, philosophy, poetry and theology? Why not
build into your graduate program a work-study semester that takes
students out of the art world entirely and places them in hospitals,
schools and prisons, sometimes in-extremis environments, i.e. real
life? My guess is that if you did, American art would look very
different than it does today.”
I don’t know – this sounds an awful lot like exactly the way a
certain brand of art has continually looked for, say, the last 30
years? The perpetual impulse to find a meaningful shtick necessitates
it (no one’s cooked immigrant food yet as art? Hello, Rikrit!) Grad
programs are too short in duration already to be taking away a year to
go do social work; and when students get out of art school, 99% of them
go get jobs in unexpected places to pay off those loans anyway. I don’t
know if you need to build that into programs. That’s life, man. People
with guts generally know it, and make real life a priority over fame.
Cotter’s rundown on art history is colored by what he characterizes
in the last few years as a lot of parties, a lot of hucksterism, and a
scene awash in moolah. It’s an incredibly recent take, even going as he
does back to Pop; totally New York-centric, and facile. Downtown v.
Uptown, Soho, Chelsea, collapse. Modern, postmodern, cash fashion,
collapse. Younger and younger art stars, the MFA factories, the
spectacle of the fairs, blah blah blah.
All that has simply never interested me all that much. I was, and
am, perpetually drawn to art for what seem to me in the end deeply
mysterious and incalculable reasons. The context and its products (at
their best) simply seem able to do things that others cannot.
What strikes me is how shortsighted, in the end, the speculative
views of prognosticators like Cotter’s are - the other end of the
spectrum being Donald Kuspit’s call for a “New Old Masterism” (gag.)
The last couple years I have had the privilege and sometime burden of
attempting to “teach” this multi-headed boneless hydra called art to
late-adolescent aspiring creatives. What I remind them again and again
is that “Art” is at best 500 years old - in other words, a relatively
brief historical moment that has little to characterize as consistent,
or anything close to fixed to “return” to.
What we generally understand as art today is even more recent, maybe
100 years old, maybe less, and the only real continuity is found in its
rapid mutation and a ravenous co-opting of anything defined as outside
of itself. This was actually as true for Caravaggio as Picasso, or
certainly Cage, Beuys, Smithson, Guston, Levine, Hockney, or Hirst.
Make your own list – in some way, they all act as dustbin divers and
Duchampian recontextualizers. In the midst of inescapable, increasing,
mind-bending novelty, artists also find more time resistant human life
expressions. Important functions - part bottom feeding, part frontier
busting, part standard bearing.
Who knows what will happen? Money, I suppose, just sort of became
another sort of energy/matter to manipulate, as Damien so effortlessly
seemed to show. It did perhaps reinforce a certain distasteful
re-emphasis on the object, and I know I haven’t always found that
particularly interesting. I do have a certain nostalgia for reading the
stories of hungry impassioned beauty and truth seekers who rose to the
top in previous eras with brains, intensity, good works, and empty
pockets.
The things I think that make for good art/artists, and maybe define the enterprise:
1) Authentic Inquiry: a real question, which in the end (no
matter the necessary twist) is always really “What am I? What is this?”
2) Respectful dialogue: every good artist has a strong sense of
lineage; of direct and meaningful conversation with historic forbears,
and to an important if lesser extent, peers.
3) Honesty. As Daniel Richter said, “People lie. Art should not.” Or Picasso’s art is the lie that tells the truth.
I can’t think of any other criteria that can’t be included in the
above three, or that aren’t so narrow they exclude something important,
though I’m not saying this is some kind of final word. Art, science,
and ethics (“the beautiful, the true, and the good”) are the three main
trunks of the same human meaning tree – and meaning is one word for the
thing in the end we psychically and socially can’t live without. We
mustn’t lose sight of that, whether the coffers are full or empty.
PS A friend turned me on to this interview from youtube, with Agnes Martin. She sums it all up. There it is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-JfYjmo5OA
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Last Updated ( March 2009 )
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by Titus O'Brien
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January 2009 |
Denver was a great town to grow up in (or near), but I intuited early on (by, like, age 5) that the place was long on open space and natural beauty, and short on cultural refinement. But heck, less than a hundred years before I was born (right downtown in actual fact), Denver City was little more than a stopover for miners to get supplied, and laid, on their way into the hills.
Since I left it 20 years ago, the Broncos finally turned into winners and the metroplex grew 5-fold. The skyline is impressive, the downtown vital, the public transport is a joy to use, and they have one of the most sane, progressive mayors in the US. All in all, I really like the place, and am not averse to the idea of moving back sometime.
But what’s with the art scene? The galleries are perpetually lame, reflecting a certain backward regional bent for cut steel spirals, bright-colored dated abstraction (think 1980’s), glossy soulless photorealism, lumpen cast iron and bronze – you know what I’m talking about. I know there are exceptions, but on the whole, its no mecca for aspiring art heroes. And that brings me back to the Denver Art Museum. I won’t rehash my complaints from a year ago, but suffice it to say its not gotten any better, and it may indeed (if possible) be worse.
It’s an absolute headache-inducing travesty of a nightmare of a horror show of a crime of a post-modern architectural/artistic apocalypse. It saddens me to say that it might be the museum that Denver deserves – in so far that it embodies the latent rinky-dink cowtown aesthetic that seems to percolate up through the arid mile-high earth. Maybe it’s just too nice there, the mountainous backdrop too ennobling, the lean, active residents too bent on mountain biking or rock climbing or skiing as their existential communion.
Good art always seems to be tinged with at least a modicum of self-conscious morbidity – maybe partly why it seems to thrive in harsher, more difficult environs. When that morbidity is less conscious, you have advertising, amusement parks, pornography, cruises, ski resorts, interior design, and buildings like the Denver Art Museum, which looks increasingly like it aspires to be some conflation of the former.
(more good installation decisions. Yes, that wall is angling sharply away...)
Enough abuse. They at least recently put on the best museum show of a mid-career painter I’ve seen in years. That it was of a German comes as no surprise. I’ve seen a few Daniel Richters in person over the years, and bunches in reproduction. Nothing prepared me, though, for the giddy joy I experienced confronted by a few dozen of his enormous intensely-hued canvases, exuberantly, fearlessly executed; in turns hilarious and not a little terrifying, if for nothing else than their ambition.
Of course it was all the more surprising when you consider the signage as you enter the space. I don’t know whose idea it was, but I’ll blame the curators, because it was completely out of keeping with the work inside, and completely in keeping with the rest of the museum. It's tempting to make drug accusations, but their twisted notion of how art should be presented is maybe a errant vision of the “wacky ideas” they think people on drugs might be having.
 The weird signage, which sadly carries over onto the show catalog cover, colors the work in absolutely the wrong light, creating associations with some kind of psychedelic nostalgia. If that’s operating in the work (which I grant is quite possible inasmuch as the work seems to be about nearly everything), it’s the absolutely least interesting or insightful subtext.
I bought the catalog. Sadly, the experience simply doesn’t translate. The plates just act as slight reminders of how stunning the impact was in person. The scale is certainly a factor. Most of the paintings are Renaissance/Ab Ex huge, many towering above you or necessitating walking back and forth, toward and away to fully grasp. The nature of Richter’s paint handling regularly inspires use of the word “virtuosic”; he does seem capable of almost any effect, and determined to get every last one somewhere into every painting, along with every color combination, and every last image wrung out of his fevered conscious and subconscious (personal and collective.) But it feels less showy, heroic, or theatrical than driven by sheer exuberant love of paint and its history.
As with Peter Doig (a painter with whom comparisons are inevitable and potentially instructive; I'd say Richter is deeper, and a lot more fun), there is a surprising fondness for those formerly outré symbolist maestros Ensor, Redon, and above all Munch, who Richter seems to channel with such deftness and tenacity that it elicits accusations of possible reincarnation. My boredom with my sophomoric attempts at aping these same artists led me to stop painting altogether and make objects. It’s a measure of Richter’s courage and (dare I say) genius that he abandoned the safety of his earlier “pure” abstraction to resurrect this kind of “dated,” even adolescent figuration, and while it often still verges on the cringe-inducing, his success is made all the more triumphant for a high-wire act carried out veritably dancing on a razor-thin cable of intellectual unfashionability. And make no mistake - his paintings are each and every one near disasters: in technique as much as content, which in most cases is, ironically, depicting some kind of disaster.
I almost can’t believe I’m championing this stuff. Another artist referencing CD Friedrich? F*** off! Another painter carelessly raiding the historical icebox in the midnight of our discontent? Gack. More “difficult” Leipzig noodly anti-painting post-abstraction? Noooooo! But that’s the thing – Richter’s paintings just say yes. Yes to sentimentality, yes to story, yes to humor, yes to trends, yes to virtuosity, yes to stupidity, yes to Romanticism, yes to ambition, yes to sarcasm, yes to nature, yes to comic books & heavy metal, yes to terror, yes to allegory, yes to shit, yes to transcendence, yes to the apocalypse, yes to joy, yes to life, yes to death.
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Last Updated ( January 2009 )
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by Titus O'Brien
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January 2009 |
I recently made passing comment on the pitfalls of art/mental jadedness. But jade is actually gorgeous. They used to wrap Chinese emperor corpses in it to insure immortality. A pinch of well honed skepticism can be the antidote to many forms of muddledness.
But in the interest of keeping the heart humidity from becoming too arid in the winter dry, some mystic Sufi poetry is sometimes called for, by god - I mean, Allah. Just ran across this...
All The Hemispheres
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
~ Hafiz ~
(The Subject Tonight is Love - versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)
Also - RIP Nanao Sakaki, Japanese poet and champion Earth walker, who died last month in Japan, age 86 or 87. He lived for years in the mountains around Taos, and travelled widely across the North American continent, mainly on foot. Despite having been accused of being one by Foucault-worshippers in college (who must not have known any), I'm prone to taking hippies to task, but mainly those branded suburban misguided-nostalgia junkies who are so ripe for satire.
Though credited with being the godfather of the Japanese hippie movement (which I can only imagine was small), Sakaki was really some other kind of throwback to, like, the pleistocene, or Tang dynasty Chinese Taoist hermit poets.
His most well-known poem, and a personal fave:
If you have time to chatter
Read books
If you have time to read
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean
If you have time to walk
Sing Songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly
you Happy Lucky Idiot
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Last Updated ( January 2009 )
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by Titus O'Brien
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January 2009 |
A week in Dallas was just enough to leave with the bloom still on the rose of my affection. We headed in one long day’s drive to Abiquiu, New Mexico. We spent a few days in a stone house down the road from Richard Tuttle, whose house I heard cost a fortune, and now shines glittering silver and post-mod cool in the sun beneath surrounding mesas. I also was told it acts like an oven in the summer and a deep freeze in winter. These claims are unsubstantiated however, as the accuser is not 100% sure if the exact house in question is actually Tuttle’s. If we’d had an extra day, I might have gone knocking to find out. My students last semester joked by the end that “Tuttle-esque” had become my favorite adjective. He seems really helpful, for a number of reasons, for introducing a lot of basic contemporary visual themes and approaches to art students.
Abiquiu is most renowned as the longtime home of Georgia O’Keefe. Her house (not open to the public without reservations booked well in advance) is especially striking not just because its the only structure that seems really well maintained, but because Abiquiu is an ancient pueblo town, that hasn’t been overrun like some others in the region. I remember reading years ago that Indian kids thought she was a witch. It’s easy enough to see why when one, you consider her later appearance, and two, you see the “town”, which is really just an old adobe church (famous from her work) and like many Indian towns across the US, a scattering of impoverished-seeming small houses and trailers. What a strange interloper she must have appeared in their midst.
More upscale homes, Earthships, and other myriad off-the-griders are to be found throughout the surrounding valley (like the Abiquiu House, where we stayed.) A move would be tempting, but for lack of any way at this point to pay for a life there.
We spent a day in Santa Fe (40 minutes south), and one in Taos (an hour east/northeast). Northern New Mexican cuisine is one of my favorites – something about that distinctive bitter tang of the chilies. So we had some of the best at Orlando’s in Taos, which I even prefer to the famous Maria’s down in Santa Fe (which is also nonetheless fab.) It’s unpretentious, cheap, and always packed. We bought some obligatory silver at the Taos Pueblo, which is a bit upgraded from my last visit a decade ago, I assume due to a tiny new casino they’ve opened down the street. Then, I finally made it to the Harwood Museum, expressly to see the Agnes Martin room.
(Harwood Museum in winter)
The Harwood is a little museum devoted to art of the Taos scene, founded in 1923. It’s a beautiful building, much of it quite quaint, as is much of its collection. There is much to “appreciate,” but little to feel much enthusiasm for. On the whole, I found the experience a little depressing, seeing the vivid landscapes of the region processed and packaged over a century into the cliché language of “art” that fills dozens of cheesy galleries around town, and many in Santa Fe. A selection of work by the late “Bill Gersh – Taos Original” underscored the feeling, only with bright pop-y colors and standard Southwest imagery (crude dogs and cowboys and guitars – ugh), in Red Groomsian, pseudo-neo-expressionist cartoon constructs.
(Gersh self-portrait)
A longtime Taos resident, Agnes Martin donated seven paintings (the number revealing her Theosophical bent) in the mid-‘90s, which were worth a fortune even then, and the museum rightfully spent a million bucks building a gallery to house them. In an interview, I remember Martin saying that you could walk out of her gallery there and see that everything else in the museum was in someway a depiction of “nature”, something in the world, and she wasn’t interested in that at all. I know how she felt. The aesthetic/critical step down exiting her gallery is steep. The selection of her work, pivoting around 4 Judd benches in an octagon shaped room, is “simply transplendent” (to borrow Houstonian Shelley Duvall’s best line from Annie Hall. I think she was describing a Bob Dylan concert.)
I admit that her titles maybe don’t always thrill me (“Love”, “Love in Spring”, “Love Flower”, “Love in the Afternoon” and suchlike – I’m making some of these up). This wasn’t helped by their emphasis on big, crooked, amateurish foam-core cards with titles in 72 point font on the walls next to the paintings. Everything is right, down to the benches, and then they have to go and ruin it with bad signage. Sigh. Her work nearly always benefits from being seen in small groupings like this (is that one still at the Met?); be sure to take advantage of this one sometime. It’s on par now with some of the great single dead-artist pilgrimage sites – Marfa, the Rothko Chapel, Spiral Jetty, etc.
She is the preeminent artist of cool restraint, even more so I’d argue than someone like Ryman, who feels downright Dionysian by comparison. Martin’s seven paintings here are constrained just to the use of grey, blue, and white, not including even any of those pale orange/pinks prevalent in the 90’s, when these paintings were made. This lends them a particularly winter-y air. There is a tendency to pick out favorites among them, but they very much act as a singular environment. Gazing from one picture to another, one’s senses quickly become attuned to her operation, and the surprisingly different sensations created from relatively subtle alterations in the placement of a few horizontal lines, and arrangements of hue, raw canvas, and touch. Martin was able, through dedicated activity and a religious devotion to the power of pure abstraction, to generate subtle but powerful effects in the psyche. I would be skeptical of such claims if I hadn’t experienced it, again and again, encountering her work.
Looking online at some websites for galleries in Santa Fe, I came across Charlotte Jackson Gallery. I mention it because Martin is much beloved by a couple generations now of lyrically-oriented, post-minimal painters. I suspect a good percentage of them show with Jackson. Clicking through her artist page, I started to laugh, incredulous that page after page after page simply showed selections of monochrome slabs. Can a gallery really specialize in just that? I mean, how many small squares of single colors can a person own, or one gallery show, or an artist even make?
It reinforces how Martin is impressive for what her pictures do, not the style in which she did it. She struggled for decades to find her unique expression. How can thirty artists painting small single-color canvases claim to do the same? What do group shows there look like? Makes me want to curate a conceptual show, where everyone submits nothing.
You can’t just traffic in the intensity of your “refined phenomenology.” We have Martin; we have Klein; we have Fontana, and Irwin, and Turrell, and the lot. I’m all about sensorial sublimation and dogged inquiry, but don’t artists like Jackson's just bore themselves to tears? The aura of such unmistakable “seriousness” accorded to artists like them is, ironically, washed out in the spotlight of a single dealer's attention.
(next: back to that Denver Art Museum travesty, which (is it possible?) is worse than a year ago, save a great survey of yet another great German painter.)
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Last Updated ( January 2009 )
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by Titus O'Brien
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January 2009 |
I recently got back to Chicago from three weeks on the road. The semi-annual Christmas trip home to Denver, by way of Dallas for other family and friends, with a sanitizing few days in Northern New Mexico.
I casually tossed in a couple museum visits. Seeing art can sometimes seem more like work, which is maybe why I seem to write about it so infrequently anymore. I’m somewhat adverse to the idea of work, I guess, though I like to be busy. And I like art that doesn’t feel like work to unravel, though I like a bit of a challenge.
I caught Olafur Eliasson’s “Take Your Time” in Dallas, before it makes its way up here to Chicago this Spring. I talked to Rainey on my way there, who listed it among the litany of stinkers she’s seen the last few years at the Dallas Museum – predictably, I liked not only many of those previous shows (including Richard Tuttle and Robert Smithson retrospectives) but Eliasson’s especially. I’ve not talked to any other "art people" who actually liked it (including a number who saw it in New York), further confirming a long-held supposition that art people are generally jaded, overstimulated, and often too clever for their own good (myself included - it's an internal struggle). Maybe when it’s your business, you’re inescapably wrecked. Rainey even recently dissed Giorgio Morandi. Of course, I love Giorgio Morandi. The climate just ain't right for us contemplative types.
I missed the King Tut show. Though told by a museum staffer friend there was little-to-no chance, I went ahead asked for a press pass. Denied. You see, the whole thing is run independent of the museum. They’ve more or less taken it over. Staff even lost their parking privileges. And even they don’t get in to see Tut for free, after a one-time walk through. It’s $32.50 to get in Friday to Sunday. That’s on top of your museum general admission.
(I think Tut still looks pretty blase about it all...)
They open the museum an hour early just for Tut, while the rest of the museum remains closed. I got there early and was pleased to be among a large crowd waiting to get into “Take Your Time” while the ½ mile labyrinth of theater queues for Tut stood glaringly empty. I hear the museum and Tut organizers are taking a real bath, with attendance way below expectations. Ha.
The DMA is undergoing some radical changes, as many will be aware even from following the newsfeed on this site. Many of the staff who had real connections on the ground in the Dallas art scene are now gone. The education department has won the war with the curators. I don’t know, but I’d expect to see fewer daring signature shows (like Tuttle, or 2008’s On Kawara) in the future, and more like Tut. Which feels about right for Dallas.
Eliasson’s show was just a big pleasure. I found myself wondering what his collaborative staff of thirty genius architects, engineers, and big thinkers do. The work seems (probably deceptively) pretty simple. But at one point I had this distinct sensation, making me smile not for the first or last time, that “this art is going on in my head.” Dude. His stated goal is to get the audience to perceive themselves perceiving. And even if that consciously remains an elusive sensation to many, I saw a lot of people having a very good time, while having their conception of art, if not obliterated, at least radically contorted.
I noticed a lot of kids asking “Hey Ma, what’s this supposed to do?” as they stood in empty rooms of light, pictures of glaciers, and water mist. Ma usually didn’t have a response, except for “I don’t know. Don’t touch that”. But nearly everyone had smiles on their faces. I know I did. I even said “wow, cool” a couple times – probably just in my head.
Next, I wax rhapsodic about the Daniel Richter show at the Denver Art Museum, and finally seeing the Agnes Martins in Taos.
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Last Updated ( January 2009 )
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