NEWSgrist - where spin is art

The New Museum: Unmonumental, but Svelte

via The New Yorker: Critic's Notebook

The Thing Itself
by Peter Schjeldahl
December 24, 2007

ILLUSTRATION: NAHO OGAWA

Keywords

New Museum;

"Unmonumental";

Art, Artists;

Genzken, Isa;

Gibson, Mel;

"Braveheart"

The new New Museum is a svelte stack of fine, white spaces, and its first show,"Unmonumental," of junk sculpture by thirty international artists, is auspicious. Consolidating an anti-fashionable fashion in contemporary art, the exhibition addresses seriously hip folk, who needn't be briefed on the precedents: Schwitters, Rauschenberg, Cady Noland. The doyenne of this return to jury-rigged detritus is Rachel Harrison; her shiny dirt bike, atilt on pigment-slathered blocks and accessorized with rock-filled handbags and a photograph of Mel Gibson in "Braveheart," stars. Antic parsimony rules. A conservative spirit pertains. Most of the works are neat and clean. You could take them home, and, in the case of powerful congeries of this and that by Isa Genzken, you might want to. At issue is a restoration of studio romance (the artist in what-the-hell action) after a spate of market sex (the artist as deluxe fabricator). This is brave news. The show will be augmented, in stages, with collages, sound installations, and digital whatnot.

Art Viewing Public: Stupid or on Crack?

After NOT falling on my ass this weekend at Urs Fischer's fabulous hole in the ground (see below), my mind wandered back to late November when there seemed to be much grumbling and wondering about "dangerous art". Happily, artnewsblog has cleared up any residual confusion:

Tate's Crack - People are Stupid!    

Either people are on crack while visiting Doris's crack at the Tate Modern in London or they are just downright stupid. How could 15 people hurt themselves in the first four weeks of the "Shibboleth" installation by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo?

I mentioned a story a couple of weeks ago where the first few idiots fell into the Tate Crack, but that figure has been rising each week.

Times Online has reported that the Tate Modern may have to implement options that could include "higher levels of control of entry, barrier or demarcation lines, Perspex bridging over certain sections or other physical interventions which may become required."

The museum already has warning signs everywhere and leaflets about the work are handed out. So, unless you are blind, there is no excuse for falling into a crack that is clearly marked as a crack (unless you are trying to sue the museum!).

More on "dangerous art" via NYMag:

Photo: Ellen Page Wilson/Courtesy of Gavin Brown's Enterprise

Can You Dig It?
At Gavin Brown, Urs Fischer takes a jackhammer to Chelsea itself.
By Jerry Saltz

Urs Fischer has reduced Gavin Brown's Enterprise to a hole in the ground, and it is one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a while. Experientially rich, buzzing with energy and entropy, crammed with chaos and contradiction, and topped off with the saga of subversion that is central both to the history of the empty-gallery-as-a-work-of-art but also to the Gavin Brown experience itself, this work is brimming with meaning and mojo. It was also a Herculean project.

A 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep, extends almost to the walls of the gallery, surrounded by a fourteen-inch ledge of concrete floor. A sign at the door cautions, THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH; intrepid viewers can, all the same, inch their way around the hole. Fischer's pit is titled You, and it took ten days to build, costing around $250,000 of Brown's money. (Heaven only knows what his landlord thought of it.) The gallery's ground-level garage doors facilitated the jackhammering and removal of the concrete floor and the use of a backhoe to excavate tons of dirt and debris, after which a crew closed off the space with immaculate white walls. There's also a cramped antechamber, superfluous but well executed: A smaller reproduction of the main gallery, down to the air ducts and electrical outlets, it’s sort of a mini-Me You. Ducking through its pint-size entrance is like going though a door in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. You have to crouch as you enter and watch where you step in preparation for the more precarious and thrilling main event beyond.             

Fischer's extraordinary gesture touches on the tradition of indoor earthworks that includes pieces from the sixties and seventies by Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Chris Burden, and others, while also bringing together many of his ongoing themes of transparency, transformation, disruption, and destruction. He's cut holes in gallery and museum walls and created sculptures that merge with one another. You simultaneously attacks and fetishizes the attributes of galleries, the qualities that the critic Brian O'Doherty has described as "something of the sacredness of churches, the austerity of courtrooms, the mysteriousness of research laboratories, something that, together with stylish designs, makes them unique cultic places of the aesthetic." You is like a nest, a bunker, or Caspar David Friedrich's The Wreck of Hope, his painting of a ship smashed to pieces in a sea of ice. It is a perfect metaphor for a revved-up art world as it is stripped down by the market.

[read on...]

Art World Zoolander

Simon Watson, left, an art consultant, and Louise Fishman, an artist, at the Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea. Photo: Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

via NYTimes: Executive Pursuits {excerpted}

Sticker Shock a Hazard, Even When the Artists Are Only Potential Stars
By HARRY HURT III
Published: December 15, 2007

I PLOTTED my executive pursuit of starting a contemporary art collection from a supercaffeinated base camp in the Empire Diner at 10th Avenue and West 22nd Street in Manhattan. It was dark and early on a wintry Thursday morning. The sky outside the diner's Art Deco-style windows looked like an ominous gray abstraction. But my guide, Simon Watson, a 52-year-old art consultant with close-cropped silver hair and indigo clothes, was in a sunny mood.

"This is very exciting!" Simon exclaimed. "We're going on a safari in the Chelsea zoo!"

I nodded, sipping a cappuccino with the affected nonchalance of a novice collector who knows just enough to be a danger to himself and his bank account. Unfazed by my naïve pretensions, Simon urged me to take a "portfolio approach" to collecting contemporary art.

"Don't put all your eggs in one basket," he advised. "If your total budget is $5,000, divide it up and buy six pieces for around $800. It makes financial sense to diversify your portfolio from an asset value perspective. Also, it's more fun."

Although my budget was so small as to be virtually indivisible, Simon had arranged visits to five galleries and two artists' studios. I figured that gave me at least an outside chance to pick up a bargain in what he'd called the zoo, the West Chelsea district, bordered by 30th and 20th Streets and 10th Avenue and the Hudson River. With more than 300 galleries and countless studio spaces, it is one of the world's most fertile cultural preserves.

Simon and I were hunting for rather elusive quarry: emerging artists with potential star quality. As Simon defined the term, an emerging artist is just about any heretofore mostly unrecognized and/or widely undervalued painter, sculptor or photographer between the ages of 19 and 95 whose work sells for prices in the three- to four-digit range.

"When their work sells for over $10,000, they're not emerging artists anymore," Simon said. "They've made it to the big time."

If the entry fees for collecting contemporary art are relatively low, the financial returns can be of hedge fund proportions. Last year, sales of works by Picasso and Andy Warhol totaled over half a billion dollars, according to artnewsblog.com. Living artists are commanding astronomical prices as well. In August, "For the Love of God," a diamond-encrusted skull by the 42-year-old Damien Hirst, who was regarded as an emerging artist barely two decades ago, sold for $100 million.

"The obvious question is, Who's going to be the next artist to make the leap to warp speed?" Simon noted. "But there's no way of predicting that. Art collecting is not about posing. It's not about amassing wealth. The base line is genuine interest in the artist's work. One hundred years from now, people will look back and wonder what it was like to live in the moment in 2007, to feel the anxiety about the stock market and the political shifts in the world. Artists are the ones who are capturing that."

Simon spoke from nearly 40 years of art collecting experience. Raised in Rochester by parents who collected Asian art, he started buying art at age 14 with money from his paper route, and he went on to study art history at Williams College. From 1979 to 1991, he operated a gallery devoted to emerging visual artists, including some who are now well known, like Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince. In 2002, he was a co-founder of Scenic, an independent curatorial and corporate art consulting agency that has produced 20 shows for emerging artists in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

At the first stop on our safari, the D'Amelio-Terras Gallery on West 22nd Street, I suffered serious sticker shock. One of the featured emerging artists was Noah Sheldon, whose "Pink and Tan" installation of environmental photographs and sculpture under pink fluorescent light was going to be displayed at the Art Basel Miami Beach show the following week. Mr. Sheldon's photos were priced at $2,500 each. The price for a set of chimes made of metal fence post caps was $12,000.

I got my first taste of "participatory" art at the Daniel Reich Gallery on West 23rd Street. A Brazilian-born artist, Jarbas Lopes, showed us a series of ballpoint pen drawings that included a clown face, a mouse and a pool table, priced at $2,000. But the piece that caught my fancy was "Short Environment," which was basically a body-size condom made of yellow vegetable fiber. At Mr. Lopes's behest, I took off my shirt and slipped into the condom. I discovered to my delight that I could see out, but the other people in the room could not see in. According to Mr. Reich, the condom was meant to give the wearer "a break from the cellphone world we live in today."

"I'll take it," I announced. "How much?"

"We haven't set a price on it yet," Mr. Reich replied. "I'll have to get back to you."

My breath still bated, Simon escorted me to the Derek Eller Gallery on West 27th Street. It featured André Ethier's paintings of Star Wars-like creatures for $3,000 to $5,000. The nearby Clementine Gallery offered DVDs of decomposing and recomposing words made of alphabet soup by the dyslexic artist Hugh Walton for $5,000. Evan Gruzis, a 28-year-old Hunter College graduate student, showed us some provocative ink drawings in his Midtown studio for $900. But my favorites, "Cosmic Wayfarer" and "Shadow Man," had already been snapped up by a prominent collector.

By the time we entered the Cheim & Read gallery on West 25th Street, I was beginning to think that collecting contemporary art was simply beyond my means. An 8-foot-tall sculpture composed of tan and rust wedge-shaped pillows by the 95-year-old artist Louise Bourgeois was priced at $1 million. A large-scale painting entitled "Breaking and Entering" by Louise Fishman, 68, a second-generation abstract expressionist, was listed at $100,000.

"Louise Fishman is an undervalued artist," Simon insisted. "Historically, women artists have been so overlooked by collectors. But many of them are now making a late-career jump. Louise Fishman could be the next Louise Bourgeois."

Simon proceeded to steer our safari to Louise Fishman's studio on West 26th Street. The artist greeted us in a paint-splattered sweatshirt and jeans and red horn-rimmed glasses. She displayed several of her "little-little paintings," which were 8 inches by 10 inches and priced at $9,000. Then I spied two multicolored rectangular scraps of paper on her worktable. They turned out to be "leftovers" from her contribution to the annual AIDS benefit "Postcards From the Edge." The postcard I liked most featured a bright red curlicue. Louise said she'd sell it to me for $800, and I immediately wrote her a check.

A few minutes later, Simon and I left Louise's studio en route to a late lunch at Bottino restaurant. The sticker shock I'd suffered all day paled in comparison to the sinking sensation I felt in my stomach. "I just paid $800 for a postcard," I moaned. "What was I thinking?"

Louise must have been reading my mind. Shortly after Simon and I ordered a round of adult beverages, she arrived at Bottino with the second postcard I had seen on her worktable, a predominantly blue and yellow abstraction with an enticing three dimensionality. She insisted on giving it to me, declaring, "Your postcard should have its mate."

My buyer's remorse all but evaporated. Louise had just doubled the size of my holdings, and halved my average acquisition cost to $400 a postcard, which suddenly seemed like a bargain.

"Congratulations!" Simon exclaimed as the three of us raised our glasses in a toast. "Now you're a real contemporary art collector!"

Skin Flics

via The Brooklyn Rail (Dec-Jan):

     

Of Skin and Snoods

by Williams Cole

Zoe Lister-Jones with Williams Cole

Zoe Lister Jones showing skin in Guy Richards Smit's Nausea II.

Zoe Lister-Jones is a star of the new film Arranged, the story of the friendship of two women, one an Orthodox Jew and the other a Muslim. Directed by Diane Crespo and Stefan Schaefer, the film is set in contemporary Brooklyn. Opening at the Quad Cinemas on December 14th, the film premiered at South by Southwest and went on to win the Best Narrative Feature prize at the Brooklyn Film Festival. Lister-Jones, a Brooklyn native, has appeared on Broadway in The Little Dog Laughed, has had a one woman show at P.S. 122, and is the youngest actor to ever appear on all four Law and Order TV series. She was also featured in Guy Richards Smit's art video Nausea II (2004). The Rail's Williams Cole sat down with Lister-Jones and talked about her experiences growing up in Kings County, playing an Orthodox Jew, wearing snoods and showing skin.

Williams Cole (Rail): Tell us about the plot of Arranged.

Zoe Lister-Jones: Arranged is the story of a young Orthodox Jewish woman and a young Muslim woman who are both teaching at a Brooklyn public school and connect because they're both outsiders sticking to what most people think of as antiquated traditions. As they get to know each other they find out they're also both going through the process of arranged marriages. I think it's a wonderful story to tell, especially because it's so Brooklyn-centric. What's amazing about Brooklyn is that you have neighborhoods where it's literally the Jewish block next to the Muslim block and while the communities are so weirdly segregated from each other, they're so head-to-head that they're much more aware of each other than more spread-out communities, where I think it's easier to be ignorant. And in both the Muslim community and the Orthodox Jewish community there are political ties abroad and, at this time especially, that clearly has an impact on their relationship here.

Rail: You grew up in Brooklyn. What was your perspective on the Orthodox Jewish communities?

Lister-Jones: Growing up my perception was fairly negative, because I was raised by artists who had a very distinct connection to their own Judaism and spirituality. So it wasn't just like "Oh, that's some Jewish nonsense." We were very identified as Jews, but the Orthodox seemed like Evangelists to us. I remember that some Orthodox rented a space underneath us in our synagogue and that they were very judgmental. And I didn't like their judgment. It was really uncomfortable. And I also remember my mom teaching me that when the Hassids would come up to you and ask "Are you Jewish?" on the street, that I should say "Yes, but I don't believe in your brand of Judaism!" which is really a funny thing to teach a kid to say. But because I don’t have balls like my Mom does, I would just say "Uh, no." But she was like “don’t say no! You are! You are Jewish! You just take a stand!" I think she was always questioning their line of thinking because, as Jews, you are ultimately sharing the same beliefs. For her, it was about questioning why those communities do what they do and asking: Why do they have to be so based on tradition?

Rail: Arranged is loosely based on an Orthodox Jewish woman from Brooklyn who is actually the executive producer of the film, right?

Lister-Jones: Yes, her name is Yuta Silverman and she's a totally interesting character. I wanted to meet her before I started working on the film because I was struggling with inhabiting this woman whose community I judged pretty heavily. So my mom and I went to meet her in Borough Park, which is an Orthodox hub. And it was really funny because my Mom and I knew that area of Brooklyn pretty well because we’d go and get our hallah there. My mom and I keep kosher, so there's an aspect that we share with that community. But Yuta was surprised and asked, "How do you know about this place?" It was like we were coming in from Mars. We would say, "We're from Brooklyn, of course we know about this place." Then we got into this really interesting discussion where I asked her what she thought about feminism and she said, "I don't like the 'Feminist Group.' I don’t believe in the feminist group. You know who I like? Rush Limbaugh." And I was like, "Oh no! Here we go, my mom’s gonna have a fit!" But my mom then said, "Well do you think it’s fair that women teachers don't get the same salary as male teachers?" She said no. "Do you think it's fair that a man can divorce his wife but a woman can't divorce her husband?" And she said, well, no. So it was about kind of taking away the stigma of the so-called feminist group and actually asking her questions that she could relate to specifically.

Rail: How does the Orthodox community look at what she's doing?

Lister-Jones: What's so fascinating about Yuta is that she's an executive producer of a film—something that, in that community, to my knowledge, is pretty unheard of, especially as a female. I think she's totally revolutionary in her actions but has no idea she is. But that's what's so cool about her. She's in a community that seems misogynistic and really old school, and still, within it, she's pushing certain boundaries with no real self-awareness. That's what I could relate to in her character. She's just like a really ballsy tall chick with flaming red hair—she kind of looks like an Orthodox Molly Ringwald. Most interesting characters are the ones that don’t wear things on their sleeves and have a certain mystery. I was fascinated with playing her character but I guess I didn't know how to play it without judging her. I was actually judging the community as a whole rather than seeing there are really cool things going on in that community which I don’t think get a lot of press. There are women who are actually trying to push the envelope. Just the fact that Yuta isn't married and has found a life where she loves to be independent of a mate is something really subversive in that community. She's also started to make her own all-women films that are shown only to women! And it's so funny to see a young woman who says, "I don't believe in the feminist group" to essentially become a feminist filmmaker—and she does it all on her own. Also, one thing most people don't understand about these communities is the different levels. For example, there's modern Orthodox and regular Orthodox and, of course, that's very different from the Hasidic communities. A lot of the time you can tell the differences in dress. I actually became obsessed with dress during shooting because sometimes I'd see a woman, say, showing elbow!

Rail: Clothes seem like the most obvious thing people outside these various communities notice. What did you start to see while inside the community?

[read on...]

More about Arranged, show times, etc...

The Future of media (Experience Becomes the New Reality)

(narrated by the avatar of Philip K. Dick) ... Man is God. He is everywhere, he is anybody, he knows everything. This is the Prometeus new world. All started with the Media Revolution, with Internet, at the end of the last century. Everything related to the old media vanished: Gutenberg, the copyright, the radio, the television, the publicity. The old world reacts: more restrictions for the copyright, new laws against non authorized copies. Napster, the music peer to peer company is sued. At the same time, free internet radio appears; TIVO, the internet television, allows to avoid publicity; the Wall Street Journal goes on line; Google launches Google news. Millions of people read daily the biggest on line newspaper. Ohmynews written by thousands of journalists; Flickr becomes the biggest repository in the history of photos, YouTube for movies. The power of the masses. A new figure emerges: the prosumer, a producer and a consumer of information. Anyone can be a prosumer. The news channels become available on Internet. The blogs become more influential than the old media. The newspapers are released for free. Wikipedia is the most complete encyclopedia ever. [...]

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