June 29, 2007 5:16
Death in Venice, Part II
In the LA Times today, Christopher Knight feels the same way that I did in Time a few weeks ago about the wisdom of having a dead artist, even a good one, representing the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. The artist of course, is Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1996, when he was just 38.
Here's what I said in Time.
It's unusual but not unprecedented for a nation to be represented at the Biennale by an artist who's no longer living. Robert Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973, was the U.S. representative nine years later. All the same, the choice of a dead artist denies the important Biennale spotlight to a living one. Before and after his death, but especially after, Gonzalez-Torres' work was widely circulated around the museum world. But it was a brief life, a relatively small output, and it's been seen quite a bit. So there's no sense of surprise or discovery in this show, a big part of what makes any other pavilion exciting. (Assuming it's exciting at all.) Inevitably, the Gonzalez-Torres show feels sealed off and commemorative.
Knight has the same problem, and makes the useful additional point that when Robert Smithson was chosen for the posthumous honor, he was an artist not much known beyond the world of other artists, so that at least his Biennale show served to consolidate his reputation. Here's Knight:
Gonzalez-Torres is in a wholly different category — an influential superstar who has been the subject of retrospectives in the U.S., Europe and South America. His highly prized work has fetched seven-figure prices at auction. He hardly needs Venice to secure his reputation. Other artists do..
To give the Gonzalez-Torres show a little freshness, the curator, Nancy Spector of the Guggenheim, also decided to have fabricated a piece that before his death Gonzalez-Torres had developed only to the point of preparatory drawings. Called "Untitled", it consists of two low, shallow circular white marble basins that touch at a point on their perimeter. Water is supposed to flow almost imperceptibly from one to the other — a metaphor for human intimacy (and fluid exchange).
Knight has the misgivings that a lot of people have had, myself included, about the idea of realizing a work that an artist never brought to completion in his lifetime. But the problem here is worse — the piece doesn't appear to function in the way that Gonzalez-Torres hoped, at least not at any time I stopped by to see it. I visited the U.S. pavilion several times during my week in Venice, and though there was water splashed all over the outdoor courtyard where the work has been placed, I could never see even the slightest flow from one basin to another. That work simply wasn't working.
June 29, 2007 12:48
The Assault on Yesterday's Versions of Tomorrow
A shameless link to my piece in the new issue of Time, which uses the opening of the Philip Johnson Glass House as a chance to talk about the fate of other Modernist houses that are not being as nicely preserved as Johnson's little gem. Which means they're being bulldozed, or at least threatened with that fate.
And for the truly dedicated, another link to a time.com slide show of the Glass House and its environs.
June 28, 2007 1:37
Street Fight
The New York Times has taken note today of the arrest last Thursday of a guy who may turn out to be "the Splasher", or one of them, the mysterious character (or characters) who have been defacing street art around New York by splashing it with paint. And yes, I'm aware that street art, since it consists of posters and paintings on public walls, could be considered as vandalism to begin with. But at least some of it is better than a lot of what I see in galleries.
The motive behind the attacks? Pretty much what you would expect, resentment that some street artists, like Swoon and Shepard Fairey, to say nothing of that Brit prankster Banksy, are making their way into the gallery system. Better them I would say than John Currin. Also resentment that street art poses as a critique of a capitalist system it's actually just one more part of. The same could be said of course about street art vandalizers who publish 16 page manifestos. Capitalism is a pretty flexible device, and it absorbs most critiques handily. Street art won't change that. And neither will the people who deface it.
Meanwhile, if you're interested in seeing more street art, the best place to start is here.
June 27, 2007 11:56
Biennale Blues
Today's recommended reading — a shrewd and funny takedown of the whole dreary notion of artworld biennials by New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz.
Having spent a week blogging from Venice, I know where he's coming from, especially when he talks about the frenzy of press preview days, with long lines to enter the most anticipated pavilions, which were sometimes the biggest duds. (On preview days there was up to an hour wait to enter the Isa Genzken installation at the German pavilion, a show so weak I didn't even both to post about it.) With that in mind, I timed my own trip to allow two days of revisiting the Biennale venues in peace after the media days were over, especially to revisit shows that had looked weakest to me on my first time through, like Genzken's and Tracey Emin's. I wanted to be sure they still looked that bad when I wasn't being jostled by a mob. They did, but at least I could say so now with a clear conscience.
June 26, 2007 12:49
More on Morphing Modernism
My trip to Philip Johnson's Glass House last week sent me back to Franz Schulze's indispensable 1994 biography, Philip Johnson: Life and Work, where I was interested to find that as early as 1941/42, Johnson, then still the arch Modernist, the chief American disciple of Mies van der Rohe, had written an essay in which he had nothing but good things to say about the historical-revivalist Beaux Art architecture that Modernism would sweep away after the war. Why does that matter? Because as both a curator and an architect Johnson played such an important role in ensuring the predominance for a while of the Miesian version of Modernism, which, to put it mildly, had no interest in historic revivalism.
We've long since escaped from the grip of High Modernism. But the mere recollection of its world wide domination in the 1950s through '70s can still stir up passions. Late last year I was in the U.K. to profile Jan Kaplicky, the Czech-born, London-based architect whose firm Future Systems made a big impression a few years ago with its design for a Selfridges department store in Birmingham, England that resembles a large bean covered with blue disks. I was struck by the fact that when I first sat down to interview him what he wanted most to talk about was how much he hated the show called "Modernism" which had been mounted earlier in the year at London's Victoria & Albert Museum (and which is now settled in at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C.) In a nutshell, Kaplicky felt that, at least in its architectural sections, the show persisted in the error of defining Modernism narrowly through the work of a few architects like Mies, Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier and so on, a definition that left out Expressionist architects like Erich Mendelssohn whose work was important to him. (By implication, it was also a definition that excluded Kaplicky, who thinks of his curving Jetsons-ish designs as being every bit as modern as any glass box Mies ever did.)
And it's true, the narrow reading of Modernism that Johnson once promoted — and was very soon backing away from, until he had backed all the way into his silly Postmodern phase — left very little room for architects like Mendelssohn or Eero Saarinen, whose TWA Terminal at JFK airport was a typical (and now beloved) departure from Modernist principles.
All of this came to mind yesterday when I happened to walk by the construction site of what used to be Two Columbus Circle. That's the 1964 building by Edward Durrell Stone that's now being converted (and swallowed up) into the Museum of Arts and Design in a scheme by the architect Brad Cloepfil that he says preserves the essence of the building. Doesn't look that way to me, but I'll reserve judgment until we see the finished product. I'll be the first to admit that Stone's somewhat grandiloquent building, which the critic Ada Louise Huxtable once called a "palazzo on lollipops", has never been a favorite of mine. (For the record, she rather liked it.) But I was very sorry last year when the last attempts to gain it some kind of landmark status fell through. I never pass that construction site now without thinking that very often it's the buildings we don't love that we eventually learn the most from. Stone's building, with its white marble and its references to Venetian Gothic, certainly didn't play by the standard Modernist rules. But his search for a way to bring the past back into architecture is something that we now understand as a legitimate part of the 20th century story, even if he didn't always produce results that we can appreciate — yet. His forays into historicism may look kitschy to us now. Beaux Arts, Victorian and Art Deco architecture all once looked disposable, too. Now we cherish them all. Which is why I suspect the day will come when we'll wish we had that palazzo back, lollipops and all.
Two Columbus Circle/Edward Durrell Stone — Photo:Ezra Stoller © Esto
June 25, 2007 12:15
Philip Johnson, the Morphing Modernist
"Da Monsta", completed 1995 — All Photos: Paul Warchol
I wrote a bit last Friday about Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., which has just opened to the public for the first time under the operation of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. My visit there last week got me thinking about Johnson's larger career, especially in connection with the several other structures on the Glass House site that were designed and built by him over the years. He called the whole site his "fifty year diary", and each new addition was a reflection of whatever developments in Johnson's thinking were pre-occupying him at the time.
That Johnson kept on thinking is interesting because it was Johnson who co-organized, with Henry Russell Hitchcock, The International Style, the crucial 1932 show that brought the work of European Modernists like Le Corbusier, J. J. P. Oud and his hero Mies van der Rohe to the U.S. With that show Johnson and Hitchcock narrowly codified Modernism in the functional, anti-decorative and ahistorical terms they drew out from Corbu and Mies. That show eventually helped to produce the decades-long postwar triumph of severely reductive glass box Modernism as the house style of American capitalism. But in some ways it succeeded all too well. It locked Modernism into an all too narrow definition that made the style's exhaustion by the 1970s a foregone conclusion. It was a game that came with too few pieces. The succession of things Johnson built in New Canaan is the work of a man searching for a way to readmit into architecture all the things he had once worked to purge.
Entrance to Painting Gallery, completed in 1965
So there's an underground gallery for paintings, completed in 1965, that you enter by way of a red sandstone entryway built into a mound. It's a scheme that Johnson said was modeled after the dromos, or pathway, of a Mycenean tomb, the Treasury of Atreus from about 1250 B.C. It struck me that Johnson was also engaged here in something like the pursuit that Louis Kahn had been engrossed in since the 1950s, a search for modern forms that would invoke the power of ancient ones — the pyramid, the dome, the chamber — without literally imitating them in a historical-revivalist way, the Postmodern way that Johnson would embrace some years later. The Johnson who had helped in the 1930s to all but banish history from architecture was searching for ways to let it back in.
Once inside you enter a widowless gallery space formed by the juncture of three circular spaces, a kind of off-kilter cloverleaf floorplan. At the center of each circle is a column that serves as the axle for a carousel of moveable spokes that each hold a wall that can be rotated all around the column by hand (At least if you put your back into it.) This way the paintings can be changed at any time by rolling a new pair of walls into view.
Painting Gallery interior with rotating walls, 1965
Five years later Johnson completed the best building on the site, after the Glass House itself, a white brick sculpture gallery with a slanting glass roof supported by tubular steel rafters, a transparent companion to the enclosed painting gallery just as the Glass House has its conceptual opposite in the enclosed brick Guest House just across from it. The intricacies of this space are completely fascinating. It allows the language of Modernism some very new twists, and arguably foreshadows the angular interiors of Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. This time it was also vernacular architecture that Johnson was exploring — his inspiration was the white stuccoed and stairwayed villages of the Greek islands.
Sculpture Gallery, completed in 1970
The last building that Johnson completed on the site, after he had taken steps to ensure that the Glass House and its surroundings would be open to the public after his death, was the visitor center he called "The Monsta", a pavilion with debts to Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman and Hadid. As an interior space it may not be useful for much. I don't care. It's a completely delightful exercise in Expressionist building. By the time it was completed, in 1995, Johnson had transitioned out of his (mostly dreadful) Postmodern phase, the one that produced clunkers like the neo-Gothic turreted glass castle that is the PPG Plaza in Pittsburgh and the pompous Neo-Classical bunker he provided for the Museum of Broadcasting in Manhattan. Johnson had a lifelong habit of going down the wrong road, and then rescuing himself. (That would be the generous way of looking at his lengthy and really despicable flirtation with Fascist politics in the 1930s, a misadventure he later disowned.) So while Johnson's search for a usable past had led him to produce one bad joke building after another in the 80s, by the end of the decade he understood that Gehry, Hadid et. al. were translating the past into genuinely and unreservedly modern terms. Credit him for recognizing that they were the train of history and he had to get on board.
Johnson was only sometimes a great architect. But he was always a nimble operator. At the Glass House and all around it you get to see him in operation in all different ways.
June 22, 2007 11:50
People Who Live in Glass Houses
Philip Johnson's Glass House — All Photos: Eirik Johnson
Earlier this week I made it up to New Canaan, Connecticutt to see Philip Johnson's Glass House, which opens to the public for the first time this month. In the 1980s, Johnson willed the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with the stipulation that he could remain in it until the time of his death. Johnson and his partner David Whitney both died in 2005, and since then the National Trust has been sprucing up the house and the other high concept structures, including a library and two mostly underground art galleries, that Johnson added to the property over the years, each new structure reflecting the next wiggle in the serpentine evolution of his architectural thinking.
The National Trust is now conducting tours of the site, six a day for about ten people each. You can book through their Glass House website, though advance word of mouth was so strong that all of the spots are already taken for the remainder of this year.
Book anyway, even if it's for next year, because this is a trip worth making. The Glass House, which I'll write about in a larger context in Time next week, is a very famous place that until now only the lucky few have actually seen. I've looked at pictures of the place all my life, but I wasn't prepared for how profoundly, and strangely, beautiful it would be. It's literally a work of art, as much a conceptual or installation piece as a house. I don't know of any other building that distills the idea of a building so forcefully to its most basic elements, taking away almost everything until the house is just a compartment to frame your experience of nature. To paraphrase Franz Schulze, who was a biographer of both Johnson and Mies van der Rohe, it's a Classical framework for a Romantic experience.
The idea of a glass house owed a great deal, of course, to Mies, a debt Johnson was careful to aknowledge from the start. (What else could he do?) Mies had begun drawing up plans for his mostly glass Farnsworth House in 1946, plans that Johnson, one of Mies' most important American disciples, certainly knew of. But work didn't begin on the Farnsworth House until six months after Johnson's was completed in 1949. It was the Farnsworth House that inspired Schulze to come up with that Classical/Romantic idea, but it applies just as well if not better to the symmetrical and even more transparent Glass House.
Most pictures of the Glass House crop out the much less appealing guest house that Johnson built just across from it. (Actually, the guest house was completed first.) Called the Brick House, it's also the place where the plumbing and electrical systems for both houses are tucked away. As counterpoint to the transparency of the Glass House, the Brick House is almost entirely enclosed by windowless brick on three sides. Strangely, one of its two rooms is decorated in a style that can fairly be described as Miami Beach/Casbah. Nothing could be further from the austerities of the Glass House than this soft beige chamber, with its Fortuny wall coverings and its vaulted ceiling, supposedly based on the breakfast room of the John Soane House in London but looking more like it was borrowed from a Morris Lapidus hotel. One question you ask yourself when you see the Glass House is "Where did the guy have sex?" Then you open the door to this room and go: "Got it".
In that connection I was interested in something Philip Kennicott wrote in today's Washington Post, where he suggested that the two houses may have been a metaphor of sorts for Johnson's life as a gay man. One part of his life ascetic and open to inspection. The other part a concealed pleasure palace. For most of his life Johnson was in no way closeted. He had the money to live as he pleased. But he also spent most of his adult life in pre-Stonewall America, a tough proposition and one prone to produce compartmentalized lives. Johnson might have scoffed at Kennicott's speculation, but I think he's on to something.
June 21, 2007 5:48
Lawrence Small, Living Large.
Okay, I'm back to the blog. That last road trip kept me away one day longer than planned. In the interim the independent committee appointed by the Smithsonian to look into the management of its affairs under its former chief exec Lawrence Small, issued a report that pretty much wiped the floor with Small. You can find the full report here.
And as was pointed out today by my Washington-based blogger colleague Tyler Green, who has kept a close and useful watch on this story for a while, the report wasn't too kind either to the Board of Regents that let Small compensate himself ever more handsomely, and in a variety of ways, while they did not much of anything. (Go here for a report issued earlier this week by the Regents themselves.) In Japan that kind of embarassment would require ritual suicide. In the U.S., as Green points out, it gets you appointed to the search committee for Small's successor.
June 19, 2007 10:30
On the Road Again, Again
Traveling today. Back to the blog tomorrow. But wanted to post a quick link to some news about yet another building on the Modernism Death Watch.
June 18, 2007 4:52
Who Has the Stuff?
It's a question that comes to mind all the time. Who among living artists will continue to be famous a century or so from now? Who will continue to seem important and powerful? The Barnes Foundation is full of Jules Pascins, once a name that every art lover knew. Now he's one so obscure it wouldn't be fair as a Trivial Pursuit question. John Steuart Curry? He used to be big, back in the 1930s, when the American regionalists were winning the art wars for a while against the Modernists. Now? He still has murals in Kansas and D.C., and he turns up in a few museum collections, including the Whitney. But it takes a long wall card to remind people of who he was.
I was reminded of this because my blogger colleague Tyler Green has begun playing an art history list game, one that actually forces you to think about your taste and judgments, once you start toying with it. The game? Name the ten truly great artists in each century. So for the 20th, let's say Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, Bonnard, Miro, Mondrian, Pollock, Bacon, (David) Smith, Warhol. But now I've left out Malevich, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Beckmann, DeKooning, Rauschenberg, Johns, Hesse and Serra, all of whom changed the terms of the game in some way. And Klee! (A kingdom unto himself.) Green throws in a photographer, Arbus. But if you're going to do that I don't see how you can leave out Cartier-Bresson, at least for the work in the 30s that was some of the greatest Surrealist art of the decade. And then there's Robert Frank.
Maybe it's easier to start with the seventh century, when Anonymous was the only name to be reckoned with, at least in the West.
And further on the topic of fickle fame, the U.K. daily The Guardian has published the results of a survey of 6400 Brits who were asked to name their top ten "arts heroes". You'll be pleased to know that Leonardo made the cut, but probably because he's that guy in The Da Vinci Code. I don't know how you'll feel about the news that Banksy scored higher than Picasso.
June 15, 2007 10:33
Schama's (Somewhat Overpowering) Power of Art
Okay, I'm back from Venice. If you really need to read more abot the Biennale, here's a link to my overview piece in the new issue of Time International. Now on to other subjects.
Here's one. I had a chance recently to preview all eight episodes of The Power of Art, the Simon Schama documentary series that begins Monday night, June 18, on PBS. It's recommended viewing, but keep in mind that in places it's a bit of an oddball production.
Schama is both a historian and an art historian. The book that put him on the map, An Embarassment of Riches, about the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age, is a model of how to combine the two roles. The Power of Art is built around eight stories of artists facing some decisive moment and a single great work that emerged from it. The artists are Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko, which is another way of saying there's bloodshed, madness, severe depression, suicide, revolution and chain smoking.
I groaned when I learned that the series would include filmed dramatizations — "dramatic reconstructions" — a weakness in recent years of the BBC, which produced this series. But as it turns out the ones here are decently produced. In several episodes the actors playing the artists don't even speak on camera. (A relief.) Or hardly at all. So from time to time we see "Picasso" energetically (and wordlessly) painting Guernica. "Bernini" mostly just marches energetically (and wordlessly) around Rome, flaunting his good looks and making his rival Borromini seethe. And one role, a speaking one, is a keeper. Andy Serkis, the actor who did that the phenomenal CGI-assisted performance as Gollum in Lord of the Rings, makes a intense and moving Van Gogh, speaking lines lifted mostly from Van Gogh's magnificent letters to his brother. Angry, wittty and surprising, he's as good as Tim Roth in Robert Altman's film Vincent and Theo, which is setting the bar pretty high.
The problem turns out to be Schama. As a writer and critic — the eight scripts are all his — he's vivid and shrewd. ("You just can't beat the Dutch for wagging their fingers at your wicked ways.") As a talking head, he's more like a barking one, overwrought and theatrically pugnacious. You get the feeling sometimes he's concerned that when he talks to the camera, if he's not grabbing us by the lapels — or better still, the throat — we won't think that art is, you know, interesting. Did this man never see one of those Monty Python parodies of a BBC documentary? Or did he see too many? In the episode on Bernini he's so pitch-perfect Pythonesque that you fully expect Michael Palin to burst into the frame at some point shouting "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
Worth noting — the PBS series is accompanied by a hefty and very readable companion volume, also by Schama, that was published last year. He manages to tell the same eight stories forcefully, without the plosives of his PBS delivery. You get his muscular prose and you're spared his strident vocalizing.
June 14, 2007 1:13
Over and Out: Christine Hill
My stay in Venice is winding down. (After a week of running around this place, so am I.) For my last Biennale post, rather than offer final observations, I decided to talk again with an artist who has work showing here. Those are the people the Biennale is all about.
Christine Hill is an American, raised in Binghamton, N.Y., who has lived and worked in Berlin since 1991, with a six year interval in New York that began in 1998. She sees her art partly in terms of what Joseph Beuys called "social sculpture". In that spirit for years Hill has carried out an ongoing art project called Volksboutique. It operates through multiple activities, including large scale endeavors in which she temporarily duplicates whole institutions, including at different times a fashion show and a polling station — performance/installation pieces that satirize and reflect on the social structures and personal habits of mind we live by.
For one piece that she carried out in Manhattan in 2000, Hill oversaw the production of a pilot for a late night talk show. She did everything from recruiting writers to casting an on-camera "sidekick" to playing the host. For another, she created a temporary New York City tour guide business that charged real money to take real tourists around sites in Manhattan — the Tombs prison, a 99 Cent store — that the usual tour doesn't get to.
At the Bienalle she's represented by a piece in Rob Storr's international show called Minutes. Actually it's a conjunction of two projects. One part consists of what appear to be five steamer trunks. Each carries a different label: reception, production, accounting, management and public relations. All of them are standing open to display objects and outfits appropriate to that function. The trunks were first seen in 2003 as part of a five day show at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts called "Home Office". Each day Hill opened one trunk, removed the items and set up the appropriate workspace in the gallery, where she then filled that function — receptionist, PR person, etc. — all day.
For the Biennale the trunks have been supplemented with a newly published book, also called Minutes, that includes an essay by the novelist Rick Moody. It serves both as an illustrated review of her Volksboutique projects and a furher example of them — a meticulously annotated diary of Hill's daily activities during various weeks in 2006 and 2007. You can learn more about her work at volksboutique.org.
Installation view of Minutes at the Venice Biennale
LACAYO: How did you get invited to the Biennale.?
HILL: I went to The Maryland Institute and College of Art and Rob Storr was a visiting critic. Later, when I moved to Berlin in 1991, he paid a completely unexpected visit to my house. And we've had a dialogue since that time. Over the years he's commented on my work. when we've run into one another. Then the invitation for the Biennale came last year.
LACAYO: How do you decide what to put in a show like this? Does Storr come to you asking for a specific piece from the past? Do you prepare something new just for the Biennale?
HILL: When people started hearing that I had been invited to the Biennale they were like, "Oh my God, the Venice Biennale, that's so huge." But I don't usually think in terms of some big piece I've got to do. There is this over-arching project I'm doing (the Volksboutique) that's punctuated by individual shows. Though I very rarely repeat pieces, these trunks have been shown before. Because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I would just rather display a continuum of pieces that show how the larger work goes over time. Then there's the book, which is the latest part of that continuum.
LACAYO: What are some of the things that the trunks mean for you?
HILL: I think the trunks are about how I think about order. But not just how I think about it, how people in general think about it. It also has to do with the idea of exporting ideas, and making them mobile.
June 13, 2007 2:41
Campaign Fever
The Italian pavilion has a very funny video installation, called Democrazy, by Francesco Vezzoli, a satire of the American (and increasingly, the world's) political campaign process. It consists of two sixty-second videos — parody presidential campaign spots — that play simultaneously on large screens facing one another in a darkened space. In one the actress Sharon Stone is candidate "Patricia Hill". In the other, the French celebrity philosophe Bernard-Henri Levy plays "Patrick Hill", who naturally is just about indistinguishable from Patricia, though it's hard to tell because in their simultaneous babbling of political nostrums, with appropriate background music, they just about drown one another out. Which, of course, is part of the joke.
I usually don't take to video art, like Sleepwalkers, Doug Aitken's recent outdoor projection at MoMA, that features real movie and pop stars. Their fame tends to overshadow every other meaning. But the last time I checked, there was an actual movie star in the governor's mansion in California and a TV star gearing up for a presidential run, so Stone feels just right. To cap the joke, Vezzoli designed the profile for each of his candidates in consultation with a real American campaign consultant — George W. Bush's Mark McKinnon for one of the "Hills", and for the other, Bill Mulhall, a Bill Clinton spokesperson in the 1996 campaign. Interestingly, the pavilion info-sheet doesn't say which adviser shaped which candidate — which may be part of the joke.
June 13, 2007 10:04
Death in Venice
The distinguished thing itself. Isn't that what Henry James, on his death bed, called death? The distinguished thing is a motif of sorts at this Biennale. The U.S., of course, is represented by the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres. (Though the pavilion doesn't include his loveliest commentary on mortality, Untitled (Perfect Lovers), two simple round wall clocks hung side by side and perfectly synchronized, so that even their second hands are sweeping in unison. It's a wonderful image of two shared lives ticking away.) And in the big international show at the Arsenale there's Tijuanatanjierchandelier, a large and mesmerizing installation that was one of the last works by Jason Rhoades, the Los Angeles artist who died last year.
Also at the Arsenale, I Will Die, the morbidly fascinating video installation on ten large screens by Yang Zhenzhong, who asked hundreds of people all around the world, young and old, to look into his camera and repeat those three words, which, of course, will someday be true for all of them. And for everyone who is watching. People stay watching this one for a while.
But the tour de force in this department belongs once again to the French artist Sophie Calle. She's representing France this year with her witty revenge on an ex-boyfriend, but she also has a very different piece in the International show. On a single day in February 2006 Calle learned that she had been named to represent France at the Biennale and that her mother had just a month left to live. Her mother agreed to let a camera record her last days, hours and even minutes. The heart breaking climax of this installation, which also includes pictures and wall texts, is a 13-minute video that appears at first to be a still photograph. Calle's mother lies motionless in a bed, with only the very slightest rise and fall of her chest to indicate that she's still breathing. At some point, though it's impossible to say just when, she dies before our eyes. Tender, fearless and unforgettable.
June 13, 2007 4:40
Beuys Will Be Beuys
Okay, I said I would get back to the Joseph Beuys/Matthew Barney compare-and-contrast exhibition at the Venice Guggenheim. A useful show, obviously. The line between them is as straight as a crooked line could be, and I haven't seen this just-begging-to-be-mounted comparison mounted anywhere else.
In one room there are artifacts from Beuys' 1977 performance, Honey Pump at the Workplace. (Good name, that.) These include two ships engines that, back in the day, had pumped two tons of honey via various pipes and tubes through galleries where discussions, seminars and films were being held under the sponsorship of Beuys' Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, a kind of Black Mountain College with the brakes off.
In another room you find artifacts from Vacuum/Mass, which he performed in Cologne in 1968. (Actually, in the official title there are arrows, not a slash, between those two words. If you know where I can find arrows on my keyboard, you know how to reach me.) At that performance, lumps of fat, which was to Beuys what Vaseline would be for Barney, were attached by Beuys to the ends of pneumatic tubes. Then he flung them away. In the same performance he used the fat to "sculpt" the corners of the gallery, which is interesting when you remember that not long after Richard Serra would be doing something similar with molten lead. Then Beuys put everything in an iron chest ans sealed it up. That chest is one of the things you see at the Guggenheim.
All of this puts Matthew Barney in the obvious context. In a nearby gallery there's a room filled with things made from cast concrete, cast petroleum jelly, cast thermoplastic and "internally lubricated plastic". Those are all derived from Barney's Cremaster 5, the scene where a bunch of 1967 Chryslers gang up and do a demolition derby on a 1930 Chrysler in the lobby of the Chrysler building, which as I recall was a bit like watching Prince Philip being gang banged at Buckingham Palace. You will remember from that film that parts of the crushed car were re-purposed as chrome dentures, which were fitted into the mouth of the character played by Barney after his own teeth were broken for flouting the rules of the Mormon initiation. Don't breathe a word of this to Mitt Romney.
By drawing out the Beuys-to-Barney influence trail is plain, the Guggenheim show casts light on Barney's methods and intentions, but also his shortcomings. Barney's films, exasperating as they may be in their length and obscurity, at least produce magical passages. (That Chrysler mash up is one.) But the sculptural output associated with them, the remnants in petroluem jelly and cast thermoplastic that commemorate bits of the Cremaster films, never fail to bore me, which also tends to be my response to the physical remains of Beuys' performances. The Cremaster series is already a vast personal comology, which means that its meanings are to some extent always locked away within his own head. (And yes, thanks to Barney, I now know what the cremaster muscle does and so on. Does it help that much?) The sculpture that emerges from his films ends up being just as obscure and self-referential as the films, but almost never as dazzling to look at.
In short, I recommend the show, but you'll be glad that the Guggenheim's gratifying permanent collection is just across the courtyard.
June 12, 2007 3:32
That Rob Storr Show — Final Edition
I said a few days ago that I would return one last time to a description of the big international show at the Biennale organized by Rob Storr, "Think With the Senses/Feel With the Mind". And walk with the feet. It's a big, big show that begins at the Arsenale and concludes, 100 artists and a mile or so later, at the Giardini. As mentioned, in its first half its heavy on political art, especially photography.
But there comes a transition about halfway through in which a more purely sensuous art begins to make its claims. You know you're getting there when you arrive at the vast gallery with 38 round paintings by Guillermo Kuitca on facing walls, each filled with scrawled meditations from a particular few weeks or months in his life.
At each end of that same room is a piece of spectacular craft, a vast luxurious curtain of multicolored, braided debris (for instance, those thin metallic caps on wine bottles) by El Anatsui, born 1944, an artist from Ghana. (If I were a billionaire Russian plutocrat I'd snap it up in a minute. But alas, things haven't worked out that way for me.) And in a nearby gallery, three wall-sized embroidered and crystal-brocaded silk canvases by the Italian artist Angelo Filomeno, born 1963, who now lives in New York. Black skeletons on midnight purple prevail. In the best, two ride a broom stick — you may recognize them from Goya, or maybe from the cover of an Iron Maiden album — over a night time cityscape that you know very well is LA from the air.
It's the final episodes of his show, which are in the Giardini, where Storr devotes himself to painting. (For the record, there are videos and sculptural installations there, too.) Whole rooms are devoted to new work by Sigmar Polke — a suite of canvases snapped up already by the LVMH mogul Bernard Arnault for his new museum at the Gritti Palace — Gerhard Richter — more of his squeegeed abstractions with their surfaces like reflective water — he's the Monet of meaninglessness — Robert Ryman — as you would expect, clouds of white, nice as ever, but only new at the level of nuance — and — talk about the Old Masters — Ellsworth Kelly, born in 1923. Elizabeth Murray shows more of the hectic and thinly-sliced shaped canvases that were in the last galleries of her MoMA retrospective two years ago.
The complaint against this part of the show is that not enough that's truly new comes your way. There were two discoveries for me. I'm still thinking about the Pakastani artist Nalini Malani, born 1946, who makes paintings that put television and the Internet to shame. And then there was the well known (to everyone but me) Congolese artist Cheri Samba, born 1956, whose completely original synthesis of various comic and Pop styles — in the manner called Popular Art in Africa — was one of the great pleasures of the week for me. Look them up.
June 12, 2007 10:02
Peggy Guggenheim
I stopped by the Venice Guggenheim, located in Peggy Guggenheim's former palazzo, to see the joint Joseph Beuys/Matthew Barney show. (More on that later.) I got distracted by her permanent collection. Guggenheim moved to Venice in 1949, after the gradual disintegration of the community of emigre artists who had fled to New York during the war. Kandinsky and Mondrian were both dead. Her ex-husband Max Ernst had moved on to Dorothea Tanning. Yves Tanguy had married well enough to be drinking himself to death in Connecticutt. It was time to go.
She found a house with the largest private garden in Venice and had the last private gondola in the city for her daily long rides . She entertained frequently, though not lavishly. She was notorious for her scanty food and cheap wine. From her biographers you get the sense of a full life — the guest book carried names like Giacometti, Paul Bowles, Cocteau, Chagall, Saul Steinberg, Cecil Beaton, Stravinsky, Tennessee Wiliams, Paul Newman and Truman Capote — but not always a happy one. She lavished fast cars on one of her younger lovers. He died in one.
But her collection, much of which she brought with her from New York, was a great time capsule of advanced taste prior to 1960. (She never quite made the leap to Pop or Minimalism.) There are some good Picassos, including The Dream and Lie of Franco, his impromptu cartoon attack on the Generalissimo, a wonderful Magritte, The Empire of Light, and a magnificent Mondrian, black bars on white with just a single rectangle of red along the bottom right. Mondrian's concerns were formal, not psychological. All the same, couldn't this be the work of a man feeling cornered by history? It was made in 1938, one year before Europe went to war.
And she had been buying the Abstract Expressionists early. There's an interesting Motherwell "Self-Potrait" from 1943, before he had locked into the Elegies. And an early Clifford Styll from before he began turning out existential Naugahyde by the yard. Her enthusiasms were not always well understood by her Venetian neighbors. One local aristocrat, Princess Pignatelli, is supposed to have told her: "If only you threw all those dreadful paintings into the canal. What a lovely home you would have." Peggy Guggenheim could be foolish and difficult and wrong headed but who isn't at times? She had taste and courage, and her museum is one of the most agreeable spots in Venice.
June 12, 2007 6:00
Africa: Best in Show?
I'm not giving out the prizes here, but now having seen most of the official pavilions at the Biennale — and yes, I've been here for five days and yes, it takes that long and longer to do justice to this thing — the pan-African group show at the Arsenale is not to be missed. It represents Africans — defined to include Arab North Africa — and also members of what Rob Storr calls the African diaspora — those living on other continents, including the U.S. There's even a decent Basquiat.
The show comes from a single collection belonging to Sindika Dokolo, a Congolese businessman, and I'm in no position to say whether it's comprehensive with respect to African art, but I can tell you this much. It makes you want to see more.
If you get around the art circuit some of the names are already familiar, though the familiar ones are represented by good work. Yinka Shonibare, the London-based artist born to Nigerian parents, has two headless mannequins dressed in high boots and batik long coats in duelling postures and pointing antique pistols at each other's missing heads. (Hogarth would have loved it. Goya, too.) Ghada Amer, from Egypt, has two partly woven canvases, including one, called Not About Orange, in which green and purple thread is woven into a canvas painted with a bright orange, yellow and pink field, a good metaphor for whatever might be overlooked.
Also recommended? Two tough paintings of black balls - no jokes - with heavily worked surfaces by Miguel Barcelo, who lives in Spain. Two harrowing portraits of a male head by Mario Benjamin from Haiti. Post Pop F*ck 21, by the South African artist Kendell Geers, a hard-edge black and white wall painting that turns a well known obscenity into a Rococo (and unreadable) graphic. A sound-art piece by a Moroccan artist, Mounir Fatmi, called Save Manhattan, from 2006/2007, that consists of dozens of small stereo speakers — and two "tower" speakers — resting on the floor and playing a rumble of New York street traffic noises, which, given the title, feels both ominous and elegiac.
Incredibly, there's even a good Warhol from the 1970s, when he wasn't much good anymore. Warhol? African? Okay, it's a portrait of Muhammad Ali. I'm guessing it belongs to Dokolo, the Congolese collector, and he wanted it in. But it's different enough from the general run of Warhol's celebrity portraits of the 70s and 80s to be worth including. Ali is sitting with his head pointed down, as though exhausted by his own fame. (And remember that in the 1970s Ali was in many estimations the most famous man in the world.) For once, Warhol's late style brings something to the picture other than slack jawed and cynical celebrity worship, something closer to a man-to-man understanding of how tiring renown can be. And so much the better that it's rendered in Warhol's celebrity-silkscreen technique, which operates here as a commentary on its own failure to fully grasp sometimes what it presumed to show us.
It proves again that Warhol's genius in the 60s, and there's no other word for it, could have gone places in later decades that he just didn't bother to take it.
June 11, 2007 3:55
The Czech Pavilion: Say Please
At the Czech pavilion at the Giardini, you can have one of those experiences where the presentation gets badly in the way of the art. The artist is Irena Juzova. (Apologies, there are two accents in her last name, but as I've explained before, there are technical complications to doing accents over letters on this blog that would give sleepless nights to NASA.) In any case, Juzova has cast her own flesh in lukopren, a white silicone paste.
Much theoretical brooding is devoted to this idea in the catalogue and in the pamphlet provided at the show, neither of which finds it necessary to mention that in Western art its most important source is the flaying of Marsyas. (See: Titian, among others.) We're assured that Juzova's presentation of her epidermis is a critique of the various misuses of skin by commercial culture, which might be more convincing if there wasn't a brooding, Vanity Fair-ready picture of her to greet you as you enter the pavilion. (And I don't think she means that picture ironically.) And all along the walls, there are abrupt signs that order: Do Not Touch the Art.
I wouldn't dream of it. To get the signs out of my head I wandered back over to the Felix Gonzalez-Torres show at the U.S. pavilion and scooped up a black licorice candy from one of his giveaway installations. It was delicious.
June 11, 2007 11:00
From Russia With Love
Here's a nice surprise. Some artists whose work never interested me before show up at the Biennale in a different light — and it's the same work, more or less. The Russian pavilion features four individual artists and one collective, AES+F, which stands for Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes. Their piece, called Last Riot, is a panoramic video over three large screens that mixes teenage performers and animated backgrounds, all set to music, mostly by Wagner. In a landscape that varies from arctic to desert to mountainous, scattered with everything from pagodas and chalets to ferris wheels, an international assortment of adolescents rumble with knives, swords and baseball bats, assuming pouty postures as they point their blades into one another throats. Behind them all eras collide, 1930s aircraft, trains, tanks from World War I. It's a perverse Modernist fantasia, the modern world breaking down again into the inevitable human bestiality.
My only previous exposure to their work was to the photo stills connected to the video. The stills — of the kids, dressed in camos, wife beaters and gym shorts, posing mock heroically while they threaten each other with this and that weapon, have always struck me as fashionista piffle, posturing shop window Surrealism. They still strike me that way, but the video puts them into a more interesting context, a narrative of a technological society dialing back to the human default mode of barbarism. These days we all know something about that.
This is work that owes something, I think, to the paintings that the (wonderfully named) Danish artist Odd Nerdrum started showing in the 1980s, medieval watchmen carrying modern weaponry and wearing World War I airman headgear, all set against brooding skies -- a Dark Age with explosives capability, which is to say the one we live in. I still prefer Nerdrum. But now I get these guys, too.
June 11, 2007 7:00
The French Pavilion: Well My Baby, He Sent Me a Letter
I usually give this blog a rest on weekends, but since I'm in Venice I blogged right on through, fully aware that the majority of readers don't check back til Monday. Now that you're here, if you care to you can backtrack to find the posts on the U.S. and British pavilions, among other things. Now on to France.
One of my best experiences at the Biennale this year came thanks to Sophie Calle. Her multi-room installation at the French pavilion, "Take Care of Yourself", is an insanely energetic takedown of a ratty ex-boyfriend, one who walked out of her life with a pious and high minded e-mail. Or did he? Halfway through this pavilion it occurred to me that the boyfriend, and the e-mail, might be fictitious. Which makes no difference to the deliciously over the top mechanisms of the piece.
In wall texts, videos and paintings, Calle subjects the e-mail to a tidal wave of abuse and cunning deconstruction. She recruits 107 women, including a few celebrated ones like Jeanne Moreau, Laurie Anderson and Miranda Richardson, to read the letter, act it out, set it to music or cooly deconstruct it. Many of them turn up on a video wall on which they perform and deform the text more than 30 ways, including as a Bunraku puppet show, an aria, a rap song and a clown routine. On other screens a white cockatoo grabs a paper copy in one claw and eats it and a couples counselor sets the letter on a chair and analyzes it.
Calle does everything but attach that letter to the back of a chariot and drag it three times around the Colosseum. We never see him, but by the time she's through with him he's the most thoroughly humbled ex-boyfriend in history. She may have been dumped, but she's not one to be victimized, and her installation is a revenger's comedy of a high order.
June 10, 2007 5:06
The U.K Pavilion: Tracey Emin
At the Giardini, the wooded park where the Biennale's national pavilions are all set out in world's fair style, the British pavilion occupies what you might call a high ground of the Old World. As you approach, France is on its left, Germany on the right. The salmon brick and white marble neo-classical pavilion, with its columns and balustrades, suits some artists better than others. I suspect it worked well for Howard Hodgkin in 1984 and perhaps even for Rachel Whiteread ten years ago. I imagine Gilbert & George had some fun with it too in 2005.
But it's a framework too imposing for Tracey Emin's negligible show, "Borrowed Light". Actually, "Borrowed Light" is several negligible shows, collected under a single umbrella. One consists of watercolors on lined notebook paper that Emin made in the early '90s, not long after an abortion that the watercolors grow out of. Another is a series of fair to middling monoprints with debts to Klee and Schiele. There are also some larger oils and drawings. The best work is four wooden sculptures made from sticks attached to form makeshift towers eight feet high or more, totems of ramshackle desire. The worst? That's easy — the wall that displays a maudlin neon text in scrawled handwriting. “You put your hand across my mouth/But still the noise continues/Every part of my body is screaming/Smashed into a thousand million pieces/Each part/For ever/Belonging to you.”
What can I say? You can't even use art as an excuse for something like that. People like to complain that irony is the bane of 21st century culture, but don't forget sincerity. The English Romantic poets, who played a crucial role in legitimizing intense personal feeling, have a lot to answer for. There's a straight line that runs from Keats and Shelley to Emin's signature work, that appliqued tent bearing the names of “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995.’’ Emin's admirers say that her critics fail to understand that she's requiring us to confront and discard our fastidious disdain for sentimentality. I think I'll hold on to mine. I suspect that her work will look to the future the way some of the more insufferable pre-Raphaelite painting looks to us now.
Not that it matters what anyone thinks about her. Emin's career long ago reached escape velocity, at least in Britain, where she's beloved by some people for wearing her ragged heart on her sleeve. Earlier this year she was even elected to the Royal Academy of the Arts. There are times when you find yourself wondering if Marcel Duchamp had it right when he said it's a good idea "to destroy art before it's too late." And to think, when he said that he hadn't even heard of Tracey Emin.
June 10, 2007 1:20
Opening Day
It's Sunday, the day that the Biennale opens to the public for a run that continues through November 21. The rain is long gone but the high summer weather is edging in. By August the mid-afternoon heat will be Egyptian but for now it's tolerable. It's a good day to sit for a while at a shaded table and watch the tourists snapping pictures. If a city could be worn smooth by little clicks, this would be the one.
Having been here now for four days, I thought for a moment about offering some general observations of the city. Then I thought — naah. My mind keeps returning to what Henry James said about Venice. "There is nothing left to discover or describe, and originality of attitude is utterly impossible." Naturally, he wrote those words near the beginning of a lengthy appreciation of all things Venetian, simply compounding the problem for the rest of us.
A few days ago I was at another table near the Giardini, taking a break from the media previews, when a man went past near the edge of the Grand Canal, crawling on his hands and knees. I thought for a moment he was disabled until I realized he was wearing a white suit and sneakers on his hands. A performance artist. That's how I knew the Biennale was getting started for real.
I'll post again a little while from now about Tracey Emin at the British pavilion.
June 10, 2007 10:18
Kuitca Part Two
Let's finish that conversation I started a few posts back with Guillermo Kuitca, 46, the Buenos Aires-based painter who is representing his country this year at the Argentine pavilion at the Teatro Ateneo and who also has 38 canvases in the International group show at the Arsenale. We were talking about his exhibition at the Argentine pavilion, a sequence of four large abstract paintings, completed in 2006 and 2007. The first two explore the faceted Cubist space of Picasso and Braque. The last of them is a meditation on the slashed canvases of the postwar Italian abstractionist Lucio Fontana. The third is a transitional canvas i