May 31, 2007 10:45
Last Thought on Richard Serra
I think. I've been over to MoMA twice this past week for events connected to the Richard Serra retrospective that opens there on Sunday, first for the Serra dinner that the museum gave on Tuesday, then for the members' preview last night. It happened that last night, as I was walking around in one of Serra's massive new works, I had one of those "here's a show I'd like to see" moments.
Richard Serra and Richard Tuttle. And no, not just as a Bambi-vs-Godzilla thing. But as a way of thinking about the different ways that scale, mass and weight can operate in art. Tuttle's work is all about the minute inflection of delicate materials. Serra's — well, you know what Serra's is about. But as it happens, the MoMA show is a reminder that early in their careers Serra and Tuttle were working with similar ideas. A Serra piece like One Ton Prop (House of Cards), which involved four sheets of lead leaned together to form a makeshift cube, was asking what's the smallest intervention with material that could still be said to create a work of sculpture — very much the same idea at the heart of what Tuttle did and still does.
Who could do this sort of compare and contrast exhibition? Well, it's too late for MoMA to throw up a temporary Tuttle gallery. But maybe Eli Broad could make it happen at the UCLA School of Art that bears his name. It already has a Serra Torqued Ellipse out front of the new Richard Meier-designed building. And just a week or two ago, Broad closed on the purchase of one of the biggest pieces in the MoMA show, Band, also for placement on the UCLA campus. So a couple of Serras, the pachyderms of this show, would already be in place.
As for the Tuttles, those things are a lot easier to ship around.
UPDATE: After I posted this it occurred to me to check the dates of Tuttle's latest show at his New York gallery Sperone Westwater, about 40 blocks south of MoMA. It turns out that it's running through June 30. So if you happen to be in Manhattan before that date, for the price of a subway fare you could make that Serra-Tuttle show happen on your own.
May 30, 2007 2:26
Stephen Shore: It's the Little Things That Count
Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975 — All pictures © Stephen Shore - Courtesy Aperture Foundation
I made it over to the International Center of Photography today to catch the Stephen Shore show that opened there a few weeks ago. Shore has been a favorite of mine since the mid-70s, around the time I also first became aware of the earlier generation of street photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander whose work was one inspiration for him. No one has ever been better at capturing — and exalting — the banalities of American junkspace. If you can't get to the show, I strongly recommend the book that is Shore's great masterpiece, Uncommon Places; The Complete Works, a compendium of one of the great, multi-year undertakings of American art in the 70s.
On first glance, some of Shore's pictures — some of his best — can give the impression of being utterly pointless scenes along the road. But with a longer look you recognize how powerfully they're constructed. Some of his more complicated pictures, like the one above, now look as measured and classically arranged as Poussins.
Fifth Street and Broadway, Eureka, California, September 2, 1974
Sometimes Shore seems to be experimenting with the problem of how loosely an image can be organized and still hold. He dared to shoot ever more banal locations, as in the picture above, forcing you to reorder your own expectations about where and how to find meaning in the picture. There are some where I still haven't found it, but those are the ones that keep me coming back.
West Ninth Avenue, Amarillo, Texas, October 2, 1974
At other times, especially between 1974 and 1976, he worked, as in the picture above, in the resolutely stable and frontal manner that Walker Evans often favored. That resulted in images of Evans-style stately Americana, but I prefer Shore when he's mucking around in the quotidian mess of roadside America.
He's also the master of the tiny detail that gives meaning to a picture, like the ruffled line of displaced shingles at the edge of a roof, or the tiny figure of a woman in a pink dress. Is this what Roland Barthes meant by "the punctum"? Could be, but to be honest I've never been sure what Barthes meant by that.
May 29, 2007 2:52
Christoph Buchel Speaks
Though in this case not to me. But in as much as we've mostly heard MASS MoCA's side of the story with regard to their dispute with Buchel, this statement by the artist is of interest. He sent it last March to The Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers. Over the last few days Edgers has been reproducing it now on his blog, The Exhibitionist. I've linked you here to Edgers' post from today. You can work backwards from there to the beginning of Buchel's statement, which Edgers posted last Wednesday.
May 24, 2007 5:40
More Fast Talk: With Richard Serra
Installation View of Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years at MoMA. Photo: Lorenze Kienzle
A final installment from my conversation two weeks ago with Serra as he was mounting pieces for his upcoming retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. (And a link to my piece about him in the new issue of Time and to a Time.com slide show about Serra and his work through the years.)
LACAYO: You told Kynaston McShine [the MoMA curator who co-organized the museum’s upcoming Serra retrospective] that you had resisted working in steel for a long time because if you used steel you would have to acknowledge the tradition of sculpture. Well now you’ve been working in steel for decades. Just where do you see yourself in relation to the traditions of sculpture?
SERRA: At a certain point, probably after House of Cards, I said to myself, I guess there’s no denying this is sculpture. [House of Cards was a 1969 piece in which Serra and some friends/assistants leaned four heavy square sheets of lead against one another to form a cube.] Then I thought, well if this is sculpture it’s my sculpture, so I’m going to try to redefine what I think my sculpture is in relation to the history of sculpture. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to worry about Michelangelo and Donatello and Giacometti and Brancusi. I’m gonna look at them all and acknowledge them all. I understand that there’s been a line of those people. But I don’t have to do their work. I can do my own work and see how it comes out.
I think picking up steel was a problem because in the begining of the century Gonzalez and Picasso had really opened it up, particularly with [Picasso's] Guitar. What happened from there is that steel sculpture ended up becoming the sculptor’s version of pictorialism in steel. Sculpture was hung in space as some sort of picture-making problem in 3-D. That went right on through to David Smith, and Calder and everybody else. I entered the game being much more interested in space than in pictures and images. I think that’s what distinguished what I do from what people had done up to that point in the tradition.
LACAYO: All these years later, what’s the lesson you’ve taken away from Tilted Arc?
SERRA: I think just to stand up for what you believe in and I’d do it again. It was painful. It was a saga that went on too long and a lot of mean spirited nonsense came my way, but I’d do it again. I believe in artists’ rights. I don’t think the government should commission work and then destroy it.
LACAYO: With the corridors that you’re working with now -- do you ever think back to De Chirico. There’s almost a surreal character to some of your work. That’s probably not a tradition you see yourself as coming from, but your work starts to build associations in people’s minds that you may not have intended. Do you think along those lines sometimes when you’re working along those corridors?
SERRA: There’s one period of DeChirico, the metaphysical period, that struck a chord with me. But I don’t think of DeChirico. I don’t think of Piranesi. I’m not involved with Surrealism. I’m not involved with the language or the poetics of dream imagery. But does the space [in his work] have a sort of disorienting effect, of the kind that you can see in the planar shifts in De Chirico. Possibly. It’s not something that I think about now, but there was a time in Italy when I thought about him alot.
If work is rich enough to affect people in different ways and broad enough then its meaning doesn’t have to be tacked down to a one liner. There’s a potential for people to move into it in a lot of different ways. And if the work has any validity or any strength you’ll go back to it again and again.
LACAYO: If you had asked me in the 1970s to predict some of the biggest names in American art in 2007, I would not have thought first of Richard Serra and Cy Twombly, because his work and yours was so difficult at first for people to grasp. But now it turns out that you're both something like beloved modern artists. You’re one of the most successful public sculptors I can think of. I've seen people all around the U.S. exploring your pieces with pleasure. You would never have described your work 35 ago as viewer friendly.
SERRA: I wouldn’t have predicted it either. If at the end of the last century someone had said to me "You have a shot at the work being able to communicate to a broad base of people," I would have said, "A long shot".
May 23, 2007 8:42
Fast Talk: With Richard Serra
The Matter of Time (partial view), 2005/Richard Serra — Installed at Bilbao Guggenheim — Photo: Ander Gillnea/AP
I got the chance two weeks ago to watch Serra supervise the installation of some of the enormous pieces that will be the culmination of his upcoming retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Afterwards we sat down for a conversation. Here are some excerpts. I'll post a few more on Friday.
LACAYO: How do you start your work? With a lead model? With a maquette of some kind?
SERRA: Usually I start out with a certain sense of context. Where we’re gonna build, what the circulation is going to be like. If it’s outside, what the topography is. The entrances and exits, the light source, whatever. Then we try to find how to scale the work in relation to that context. And then we start building lead models. We usually build models an inch to a foot.
LACAYO: Who fabricates your work?
SERRA: I work with a place in Germany.
LACAYO: What do you send them? Specs? A maquette?
SERRA: [He starts to draw.] Let’s say there’s a major axis on an Ellipse, which is a long line, and a shorter axis, which is a short line. So I send them the major axis, the minor axis, the bottom, the top, whether it’s rotated 65 degrees. So they know where the overlap is; they know where the lean is. After I give them the basic parameters and ask them if they can procede on that, then I go into model making. Then they send me back all their computer drawings of what their model would look like as compared to my model. Often they look the same, but sometimes there’s a variance that has to do with how many plates are necessary. Each plate supports its own load. Each plate is free standing. So it might be that, say, this plate, which leans this way, has to be a little longer [to stand up on its own].
LACAYO: You work seems to grow in sequences, one idea or form grows out of another. Is there a point at which you feel like you’ve done everything there is to do with a certain form? There was a period of about ten years when you were making torqued ellipses. Now it seems that period is over.
SERRA: You work out solutions to ideas and often the solutions to those ideas lead to other ideas that you can’t foresee until you work out the solutions to the ideas you’re working on. So it’s not like I have a program, I’m going to do so many of these and then do something else. You’re working on an idea and then in the process that leads you to another set of ideas, and so the work comes out of the work.
The piece that’s going up here, Band, that took about two and a half years to figure out. [Band is a 72 ft. long undulating ribbon of steel.] The other piece here, Sequence, with the S-shape and the two spirals? To conceive it and then start building models took about two weeks. So some of them coalesce right away. Others you have to belabor the idea. Band is a completely new form for me. Nor have I ever done Torqued Toruses before. [These are distorted bullhorn shapes.]
LACAYO: I know that the Cor-Ten steel you work with is supposed to rust. So you know you’re going to get a certain surface effect over time. But do you ever do anything during the fabrication process with the intention of producing a particular surface effect?
SERRA: With some pieces you might leave the "mill scale" on. When the pieces are first rolled they have a scale on them, so they have a very tight, bluish grey surface. There’s a spiral up at Dia/Beacon [the Dia Foundation museum in Beacon, N.Y.] that’s never been outside, so it still has its mill scale on and it’s more leaden looking, which makes it look heavier. With other pieces, while we were making them the process itself scarred the plates. For instance, if we had to “line heat” them, which means if two plates aren’t coming together you just make a line of heat and you put water on it. When you line heat something it leaves a pattern on the plate, a big gash. So then what we do is, we sand blast the plate. And often when they’re being shipped they get scarred and marked up. To get rid of some of the scars we hose ‘em down.
May 23, 2007 1:23
Dumb and Dumber
Two interesting (and discouraging) recent articles about museum display practices and the fine line between visitor friendly and moronic. One from the UK, about the debate over there, the other from the Detroit Free Press, via, about plans by the Detroit Institute of Arts to protect visitors from wall cards that make them feel "stupid". (That's the term used by the museum's vice president of exhibitions.) And how do the mean wall cards do that? By telling people something they might not know or using dangerously specialized terms like Baroque. Until now it had never occurred to me to worry about the countless injuries that must have been suffered as a consequence of the mere appearance in museum galleries of that word. And let's not even talk about Rococo.
Well, I'm as concerned as the next guy about the emotional frailty of the museum going public. Maybe there could be warning signs on the way to the most potentially traumatizing wall cards. (Danger! Information Ahead!) Actually, here's a better idea. How about a brief wall card that simply explains what Baroque means and how the term arose? Then when people encounter the word outside the museum, they'll know something about it.
On second thought, forget it. Too elitist.
My blogger colleague Tyler Green is quoted on one of the Detroit museum's worst ideas — a gallery of modernist works with phrases projected over them. "A projection over a painting sounds like Dante's 43rd circle of Hell." Actually, considering the caliber of the people Dante assigned to hell, I'm guessing they woudn't do anything that tacky.
In connection with all this, a funny blog post in the Brit paper The Guardian, about Tate Modern's plans for a weekend long consultation with 150 teenagers about how the museum should operate and what it should offer. Coming soon, sliding ponds in the Great Turbine Hall. Oh wait, they already did that.
May 22, 2007 12:13
MASS MoCA vs. Christoph Buchel: Round 99
This time it's getting serious. For months, MASS MoCA has been fighting with the Swiss artist Christoph Buchel over the rising budget for a massive Buchel installation called Training Ground for Democracy that was supposed to open at the museum last December. (There's an umlaut in Buchel, dear reader, but those take too long to apply on my ultra sophisticated blog machine.) But now the museum has cancelled the Buchel project — sort of. The plan is to allow people to see the unifinished, warehouse-sized installation — which includes an entire two story house, a movie theater interior and a voting booth. But all of the elements will be behind plastic covers, unless the museum can get a federal district court in Massachusetts to give it a declaratory ruling that the rump exhibition can be shown without the plastic.
Meanwhile, the museum has also whipped up a show in its own defense, Made at MASS MoCA, that details its happier working relations with other artists on installation projects at MASS MoCA, including Tim Hawkinson, Ann Hamilton and Cai Guo-Qiang. (Translation: Buchel is a sorehead.)
In its press release, the museum also makes a point of noting this:
Due to the space constraints imposed by Training Ground for Democracy, the exhibition Made at MASS MoCA is being presented at MASS MoCA's only remaining gallery space.
(Translation: Buchel is a sorehead who has practically squeezed us out of house and home.)
The MASS MoCA vs. Buchel fight has been heating up for a while. They say he made demands that caused a $160,000 project budget to climb to $300,000. (This for an institution wiith a total annual visual arts budget of about $800,000.) Joseph Thompson, the MASS MoCA director, says he finally called it quits when Buchel went back to Europe last December and left behind a list of new elements he needed for the installation, including the fuselage of a large jet liner, burned, bomb damaged and hung from the ceiling.
Buchel says that MASS MoCA mismanaged the whole project and spent more than necessary on some of the elements, like the house. He also issued a list of demands to the museum last winter with a classic statement: "The artist demands full autonomy with regard to his artwork."
Well, for that to happen, sometimes the artist has to come equipped with is own checkbook. Just ask Diego Rivera.
May 21, 2007 3:36
Fast Talk: With Daniel Libeskind
The Lee-Chin Crystal/Daniel Libeskind — Photos courtesy of Royal Ontario Museum
In the ordinary course of my work I travel around alot to see new buildings and shows and to talk to the people involved, artists, architects, museum directors, curators and so on. Sometimes I just to check in with people and see what they're up to. I thought I would start to share brief bits of Q & A from the those talks, no more than three to five questions.
So here's a few things from a conversation last week with Daniel Libeskind, architect, accordion virtuoso and all purpose advance man for the future, which took place at his office in New York. The Lee-Chin Crystal (named for a donor) is Libeskind's fiercely conceived new addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. It opens next month.
LACAYO: When I was coming through passport control on the way to Toronto recently the guy checking my passport asked me what was my business in Canada. I told him I was here to take a look at your new building. It turned out he was very aware of it but also kind of perplexed by it. His reaction was to say to me: "What's that about?' I told him that would be my first question to you. So, what's that about?
LIBESKIND: I designed that building exactly to evoke that response. This is not just something you already know. It's a reinvention. It's really like opening a new window into the city's dynamic and the culture's dynamic. It's not business as usual. It's not just another black box.
LACAYO: All the same, people are going to ask what they always ask about your work. Why work in these thrusting, diagonal lines? What's wrong with the straight ahead forms we already know?
LIBESKIND: I love orthogonal architecture but it belongs to a certain period in history. In a democratic society architecture has many possibilities. We're not meant to sort of become "rigor mortised" at some point and say "OK, This is it. Now nothing more will happen." Economics is changing, art is changing, science is changing, everything is developing. Why should architecture not also be part of new discoveries? Wonders, new spaces that have not been built before — Why should we only see these things on TV or in virtual reality? Why not go there in real space?
LACAYO: After your addition to the Denver Art Museum opened last fall, some people complained that all those slanting, trapezoidal gallleries were too difficult for the display of art, that they created spaces too dynamic for the quiet contemplation of the works.
LIBESKIND: The display of art is also not set for eternity. It has changed over time. Look how differently things were displayed in the 19th century. I think these buildings are very sympathetic to the art, because they energize. Curators are not boring people. They're not people who are asleep. They also want to create a new experience for the viewer. .... And by the way, not a single one of my clients has ever asked me to make a box. None of them said to me — we want you to design something like somebody else.
May 17, 2007 11:46
Gimme Money (That's What I Want)
As expected, people with disposable income disposed lots more last night at an art auction. This time it was Christie's sale of modern and contemporary. Also as expected, Warhol's Green Car Crash, (Green Burning Car I) was the big sale of the night. I've been entertaining myself this week leafing through Andy's glyphic pronouncements, so I'll let him have the last word today. Take it away, Andy!
"Somebody asked me, 'Well, what do you love most? That's how I started painting money."
May 16, 2007 11:44
Money Changes Everything
"I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall."
— Andy Warhol.
192 One Dollar Bills, 1962 /Andy Warhol
Good old Andy, as endlessly quotable as Oscar Wilde. The papers and websites are full of news today about last night's record breaking sale of modern and contemporary art at Sotheby's, a record likely to be broken by tonight's sale of modern and contemporary art at Christie's. (Insert perfectly-understandable-but-all-in-vain hand wringing here about how it all affects how we look at works of art, distorts the careers of young artists, prices museums out of the market, etc.)
In any event, lots of collectors went home last night with pictures of money for their walls. In light of all this, I was struck by this bit of news from the UK. (Which is not quite news, since word of Damien Hirst's latest project — a platinum skull encrusted with 8601 diamonds, which he hopes to sell for $99 million — has been buzzing around in the Brit press for a while, but it's London debut is coming soon so the coverage is notching up.) As a painter Hirst leaves me cold. (And of course, "his" paintings are mostly the work of his squadrons of studio assistants. And yeah, yeah, I've heard of Rubens.) But as a conceptual artist he can be very funny and shrewd. As vanitas pieces go, there's nothing cornier than the thought of a skull encrusted with diamonds. But to actually go do the thing, and then sell it, is a pretty funny intervention in/commentary on the lunacies of the current market. I've already got the thing pictured, propped over the bidet in some McMansion outside St. Petersburg. No doubt so does Hirst.
Though it may get lost in the shuffle of Warhols and Rothko, one of the most interesting pieces Christie's will auction tonight is the Hirst I saw last week at the Christie's preview viewing. It was one of his various meditations on medication, Lullaby Winter, a steel case fitted with glass shelves that hold hundreds of painted, cast ceramic "pills" organized into a sort of Minimalist grid. It was right across the room from Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), the Warhol disaster picture that will probably be the high point of tonight's sale. Andy, a pill popper from way back, would have loved it.
"The best time for me is when I don't have any problems that I can't buy my way out of." — Andy Warhol.
May 15, 2007 12:12
Everybody's A Critic
The verdict on Matthew Barney, just in from a Flickr site devoted mostly to street art. (A shout out to my art buddy and fellow journalist Carolina Miranda for spotting this.)
Gosh — was it Barney's last movie that sent somebody over the edge? You know, that one where he and Bjork take out whale knives and slice each other into seafood?
My own verdict here, after his big show at the Guggenheim four years ago.
May 11, 2007 12:21
Travel is So Broadening
I've got my bottle of water, my carry on bag and my government-issued photo ID. That can only mean one thing. I'm back on the road again, so won't be blogging again til next Tuesday. Meanwhile, here's a shamelessly self-serving link to my review of the Boston MFA Hopper show in the new issue of Time.
May 10, 2007 12:22
Jeez Louise: Nevelson, Part 2
Just a few more quick thoughts on the Louise Nevelson show that just opened at the Jewish Museum in New York.
The lead catalogue essay by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, who organized the show, makes a lot of Nevelson's practice of redeeming junk she found in the street by incorporating it into her art. But for some reason Rapaport doesn't draw the connection to the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, whose collages of the 1920s were built up out of bits of urban flotsam, scraps and oddments of paper and cardboard found wherever. He later expanded his practice into wall assemblages with tin cans and bits of broken furniture and then into the multiple-room-sized Merzbaus that were a precursor to installation art, just as Nevelson's big wall pieces were. For the record, Nevelson claimed not to have known about Schwitters when she started her assemblages, and she may well have been telling the truth. But it's useful to know what Schiwtters did before her because Nevelson's work is best understood in part as a variety of Dada's discovery of the expressive power of offbeat juxtapositions.
But only in part. As for Nevelson's own account of her influences, her preferred ancestor was Picasso and Cubism. This is a useful way into her work, but only up to a point. Cubism had to do above all with dynamic space and form, and no one would deny that Nevelson had an intricate sense of the possibilities in shallow space. The topography of her pieces is never less than fascinating, smartly, even suavely arranged, but disoderly enough, most of the time, to keep the dreaded word decorative at bay.
But psychology, which was crucial to her, wasn't one of Cubism's concerns. That's why Nevelson's boxes have much more to do with Joseph Cornell's miniature worlds and the box dioramas that used to fascinate Max Ernst and Dali — cupboards that hide or reveal secrets, cramped enclosures where memories and obsessions are placed under pressure, proscenium stages for mystery plays. Those crates and boxes that Nevelson used not only gave her wall pieces a structural armature, a literal framework that prevented her bits and pieces from spinning off into chaos. They also conveyed an instant power of suggestion by providing human scale and hinting at the mystique that attaches to rooms and compartments. This is precisely the source of the wall pieces' fascination, the key to their power of compressed, enigmatic utterance, even as they stop short of uttering anything in particular.
In the years before and after the big wall pieces, which she began in the late '50s, Nevelson's output was a mixed bag. But at least one of the slightly earlier pieces in this show is a great one, First Personage, a 1956 sculpture consisting of two vertical elements of painted wood, both somewhat larger than human scale and one placed a few inches behind the other. (It was part of an ensemble of free standing pieces that Nevelson exhibited together as an "environment" that she called The Forest.) The piece in the foreground is a more or less smooth, solid slab, like a shroud. Near the top it has a prominent knot that Nevelson thought of as a mouth. Behind it stands the second element, a column of irregular horizontal spikes that thrust outward like a fever chart turned on its side.
First Personage, 1956 — Brooklyn Museum
This is a powerful and witty piece. As a totem of the divided self, of the bristling inner nature bursting from behind the composed public facade, it's a saw-toothed triumph, a Rodin reimagined for a Freudian age.
May 9, 2007 12:21
Jeez Louise: The Return of Nevelson
Sky Cathedral Presence, 1951-64 — Collection Walker Art Center Minneapolis
I got an early look last week at the Louise Nevelson retrospective at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. Nevelson was already 60 when she had her breakthrough in the 1959 MoMA show Sixteen Americans that also featured Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg and other much younger players. Over the next three decades she assumed the role of artiste with the energy of someone who had waited a long time to take the stage. She had a grand manner and a personal appearance — those triple layer false eyelashes, that heavy make up, those head scarves — that situated her somewhere between Isak Dinesen and Edie Beale. I remember a friend coming back from a party in the early 1980s who told me that he had found Nevelson holding court there while perched on the host's Gerrit Rietveld chair. The image seemed exactly right, a modernist throne for the empress of modern art.
By the end of her life, in 1988, she was hugely celebrated, but since then her star has faded a bit. This is odd, since installation art, which owes so much to her, was taking off in the same decade. Maybe her intricate wall pieces were too repetitive. Maybe her formal vocabulary couldn't carry the burden of Big Meanings assigned to it — a problem, too, for some of the Abstract Expressionist painters whose work Nevelson's always brings to mind. An artworld satisfied with media and pop culture references no longer speaks the language of myth and archetype that was her native tongue. Maybe it was just a case of diva fatigue.
Whatever the reason, the Jewish Museum show, which was handsomely designed by the architects Tod Williams and Billlie Tsien, is a reminder of why her work still matters, or at least the best of it. I'll have more to say tomorrow.
May 8, 2007 11:44
Rule Britannia
With Elizabeth II all the rage in the U.S. this week — look, she looks just like Helen Mirren! — the time is right for a quick check of news from the U.K.
And the news is — the four nominees for the Turner Prize were announced yesterday.
But the problem is — I doubt that the Turner carries much weight for most Americans. A number of past winners have gone on to lasting careers — Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread, Anish Kapoor. (To say nothing of the winners from the early years of the prize — it started in 1984 — like Howard Hodgkin or Malcolm Morley, who already had significant careers when they won.) But more recently the short list can seem like one of those anthology CDs of British pop bands you've never heard of and never will again. When I was in London last November to catch up with the fall shows of Velazquez, Holbein and Adam Elsheimer — does this sound like one of those Paris fashion week reports? — Tate Britain was holding its annual Turner Prize show of last year's nominees. (This fall the show is moving up to Tate Liverpool. ) Tomma Abt's series of meticulous, uniformly sized abstractions seemed the best of the lot and a few weeks later she took the prize. But even those just seemed like agreeable cabinet painting, and none of the other three made any impression at all.
All the same, the Turner Prize and the publicity it generates has done a lot to get Brits to think and talk about art. Contemporary art is part of ordinary conversation (meaning media coverge) in London in a way unimaginable in the U.S., where, outside of the art magazines, it mostly comes up in the context of the auction market. (And when I say that contemporary artists make news in Britain, I don't just mean the tabloid-friendly shenanigans of Tracey Emin or whatever other YBAs were out drinking last night, though that's all part of the mix.) So whatever its shortcomings, maybe the U.S. could use a Turner all its own.
May 7, 2007 12:06
When Sammy Met Bobby
Sam Wagstaff & Robert Mapplethorpe by Francesco Scavullo — © Francesco Scavullo Editions
Over the weekend I caught a screening at the Tribeca Film Festival of Black White + Gray , a debut documentary by James Crump about Sam Wagstaff, the wealthy curator and photo collector who was mentor and lover to the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Wagstaff was 65 when he died of AIDS in 1987, two years before the epidemic took Mapplethorpe.
In the years since then his name has gone into eclipse, though if you were anywhere near the New York artworld in the 1970s and '80s you were probably aware of Wagstaff, his photo collection — he sold it to the Getty in the early '80s for $5 million, a head turning sum at the time — and his role in shaping Mapplethorpe's taste, guiding him into society and promoting his work. In return Mapplethorpe, who was 21 years younger, conducted Wagstaff, who had been miserably closeted in an earlier part of his life, ever deeper into the New York leather scene.
The film is a decent introduction to an enigmatic man. (Best moments: the interview segments with the rock star Patti Smith, who lived with Mapplethorpe for years and was close to both men, and who comes off as one of the most lovable people in the universe.) Wagstaff was the good looking son of wealthy parents who emerged from Hotchkiss, Yale and the wartime Navy on the road to the kind of success that would have made him miserable if he had stayed with it. He tried for a few years to work in advertising but hated it, decided instead to pursue an art history degree and ended up in the 60s as a curator of up-to-the-minute art, first at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn. and then at the Detroit Institute of Art. Over the years he was an early champion of Warhol, Agnes Martin, Tony Smith, Richard Tuttle and Michael Heizer.
In the '60s Wagstaff let loose and in the '70s, after he inherited his mother's millions, left the museum world and met Mapplethorpe, he let looser. He had the time and money to indulge his passion for photography, which was not the focus of many serious art collections when he started buying in 1973. Though Mapplethorpe had attended art school, his association with Wagstaff was an education on a much higher level. For one, I've always assumed it was Wagstaff who directed Mapplethorpe to look at the classically composed, sharply lit nudes of George Platt Lynes, which are one obvious influence for Mapplethorpe's shrewd mixture of conservative form and radical content..
I've also assumed — the film doesn't shed much light on this — that it was Wagstaff who encouraged Mapplethorpe to make both his S/M pictures and his drop dead elegant (but strictly G-rated) portraits and still lifes. It was an aesthetic strategy that was also a marketing scheme. Collectors who wouldn't be caught dead hanging a picture of some guy in bondage gear could show off their Mapplethorpe tulip shot and still enjoy the cultural cachet of owning something by that famously out there photographer. I'm betting that Mapplethorpe sold many more of those flower pictures than he did of anything from his "black portfolio", but the fetishy pictures gave the more presentable things a contact high that made them more desirable. (Means marketable.) Wagstaff, who went from closeted to hedonistic, knew something about the psychology of wealthy collectors, and about their desire sometimes to tiptoe right up the edge of their own limits. The difference with him is that he had broken right on past them.
May 4, 2007 1:24
The Last Word on Hopper
Or at least my last word. For now. Or until my review of the Boston MFA's Hopper show appears next week in Time.
While going through the show last week I was always aware of Hopper's dark foliage, his way of indicating trees with a feathery mix of green and black, which makes the woods seem both beckoning and mordant. A few of the better known examples:
House at Dusk, 1935 — Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
Cape Cod Evening, 1939 — National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., John Hay Whitney Collection
Gas, 1940 — The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund
Second Story Sunlight, 1960 — Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
But it wasn't until last week that it struck me that in Nighthawks, though there isn't a tree anywhere in sight, the pallette in much of the canvas outside the diner is in the same green/black combination, as though Hopper were invoking for us the city as forest primeval, with all its terrors and wonders, and the diner as the campfire enclosure that promises protection of whatever kind.
Nighthawks, 1942 — The Art Institute of Chicago
Maybe these nighthawks have been woodland birds all along.
May 3, 2007 12:48
Deja Vu Some More: Hopper Department
While making my way through the catalogue for the Edward Hopper show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts I came across a reproduction of this Caillebotte in Judith Barter's essay on Hopper's Nighthawks
Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877/Gustave Caillebotte — The Art Institute of Chicago
Barter cites the Caillebotte to contrast the position of the viewer — that means you — in that painting and in Nighthawks. But what struck me for the first time was that the structure of Caillebotte's famous canvas — a vertical divide with plunging space on the left side and a foregrounded figure on the right — may have been appropriated by Hopper for one of his own best known works.
New York Movie, 1939/Edward Hopper — The Museum of Modern Art
No?
May 2, 2007 1:25
Hopper Hits Boston
Room in New York,1932 /Edward Hopper — Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska-Lincoln UNL-F.M. Hall Collection
I headed up to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts last week to catch an early look at the Edward Hopper retrospective that opens there on May 6. ( I'll have more to say about it in an upcoming issue of Time.) While I was there I grabbed lunch with one of the show's organizers, Carol Troyen, curator of American painting at the MFA. Here's a bit of what we talked about:
LACAYO: Hopper produced so many memorable paintings, you tend to forget that he wasn't actualy all that productive.
TROYEN: The catalog raisonne lists about 350 to 400 oils over 60 years. That averages out to about six or seven a year, and in some years there were just one or two. I think Hopper regarded painting almost as a process of deterioration. He had an idea in his mind and every stroke on the canvas took him further from that vision. He made lots of preliminary studies, and the studies are almost a form of procrastination. So long as he was sketching he didn't have to face the canvas.
LACAYO: For a long time Hopper was grouped with the American Scene painters of the 1930s like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. He eventually became uncomfortable with the limitations of that association. It confined the understanding of his work to an almost folkloric context. He certainly looks to us now to be operating in much darker psychological territory than Benton or Wood.
TROYEN: Well, the critics give you an identity and sometimes you give it a little push yourself. Hopper became an American Scene painter when people were looking for one. You might say that our isolationism and his "American-ness" were there at the same time. So he was described for a while in those terms and for a while he let it happen. Then the "existential" interpretation of his work comes along in the 1940s.
LACAYO: There's actually a note of dread in some Hopper paintings.
TROYEN: Alfred Hitchcock did more to condition our view of Hopper than anyone else. Rear Window and Psycho, the voyeurism, the isolated old house, put a different twist on Hopper's material.
Captain Upton's House, 1927/Edward Hopper — Collection of Steve Martin
The Hopper show will be on the walls in Boston through August 19. It moves from there to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and then to the Art Institute of Chicago. Hopper never disappears from the collective memory but this is actually the first full scale retrospective since 1980. Highly recommended.
May 1, 2007 11:16
Deja Vu All Over Again, Again
This morning, a few days after touring Frank Gehry's new IAC headquarters on the lower west side of Manhattan...
IAC Headquarters/Frank Gehry — Photo: Albert Vecerka/ESTO
.... I was walking along 57th Street on the upper east side, where Christian de Portzamparc's LVMH headquarters (from 1999) is located.
LVMH Headquarters/Christian de Portzamparc
Ah, I said.
About Looking Around
Richard Lacayo writes about books, art and architecture at TIME Magazine, where he arrived in 1984. He is the co-author, with George Russell, of Eyewitness: 100 Years of Photojournalism and has won various lesser known journalism prizes, which he keeps in his desk drawer. Read more
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