Cake Walk 2007

Winners of this year's Art Show Cake Walk (a.k.a. my personal favorite art sightings of 2007)


More Barney! The Cremaster Cycle in it's entirety. Because you can never have enough Barney! (I know he believes this too, else his works wouldn't be so Big and Long, yah?) Since I hadn't ever seen them all, this was a real treat. (Thank you Red Vic Theatre.) Revisiting the endless car-crashing/smashing was good—like old friends so indelibly rubbed and rammed into my head (Cremaster 4.) But the motorcycle race (Cremaster 3) around the island, the yellow and blue, oh that was the best. Crawling up the entrails of the land. Oh he has tap danced his way deep into my heart.

An honorable mention goes to Matthew Barney: No Restraint the film by Alison Chernick that revealed just what was happening to Matthew and Bjork below the waist, below the surface, in his film Drawing Restraint. It was almost like being back there on the big whaling ship extending the Barney love-fest into a second year following on his residence at SFMoMA in 2006. We miss you Barney—oh 'tis true. A gold star for The Red Vic Theatre for showing great films.


Kate Garner show (at Varnish Gallery) of large loud photographs of UK club stars knocked me out. The portraits of Identitists (ID - identity artists) Leigh Bowery and Booby Tuesday (see pic) were super—superhuman—bigger than life, breathtaking. Besides for the bold makeup-mask-total body transformations, there was a cut up of bits and parts of the very image making the images dance on the page. What's real, what's not? I loved it.


A Rose Has No Teeth —Bruce Nauman's early work from the 60s at the Berkeley Art Museum was a great show. There was latex sculptures, neon, plates of steel, and video, such as Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square which was completely engaging. There was also his Performance Corridor a tight 20 inch wide, corridor constructed of plywood that you could walk down just like he did getting the experience of narrowness first not just second-hand.

And then, speaking of second-hand, there were old works reworked into new works: stills of his face-pulling videos now self-portraits, second-hand. (Infrared Outtakes: Neck Pull, Opened Eye, Cockeye Lips, Hands Only, (photographed by Jack Fulton), 1968/2006)
There's something so marvelous about these rough-and-ready works, so stripped down and direct. It's been how many years now, and still they leave bite marks.



Zidane: A Twentieth Century Portrait It was after the World Cup, so I actually knew who Zidane was before seeing this incredible film by Douglas Gorgon and Philippe Parreno made using multiple cameras located all around the field. I loved the slowed motion, the repetition, the use of film not as narration but revelation.




Speaking of revelation, getting to see a Marilyn Minter in person made me ecstatic. I missed her big show at SFMoMA in 2005 being out of the country (a good excuse if there is one), so I was happy to see the piece—Strut— the museum acquired. Her painting of a bejeweled high heeled slipper is just exquisite in a romantic Cinderella sort of way. This is the flipside of Zidane, painting that is sharp, cinematic and wryly narrative.




Berkeley Art Museum hosted new work by Abbas Kiarostami other than his incredible, moving, spare feature films. His still photos of trees and rain and hillsides are like the best of his filmmaking—the presence of the land, the elements, the living breathing non-human. Pacific Film Archive then took the cake by showing Five his sequence of five short films of a seaside: stationary camera, single shot, lean; a steady gaze on what happens in a space and within a time frame. There was nothing so thrilling as sitting in a theater watching a black screen listening to a frog sing. A black screen. Not for a few seconds, but for as long as it took. This man is a powerful visionary.

Best Of Lists are sort of boring mostly—things I've seen and liked, things you might not have seen, so what? But don't you like the way these pictures go together? The wild hair-headdress/face mutilation thing going on in the first two, the gritty men's faces, the leaning feet n trees, rain n mud-? I did it on purpose. Now it's not so boring.

Art Insurance

Art is a Guaranty of Sanity, pencil inscription on pink paper by Louise Bourgeois. I received this in the form of a card for the holidays. Lifted my spirits, it did. Coming as it did at the dark time of the year, dark and cold. The sentiment an echo of my own year-end greeting years back when things felt particularily bleak. Two things you can count on: The Sun Rises. Art Saves.

In a few days, Grande Dame Louise Bourgeois, born December 25, 1911, will turn 96. Happy Birthday Madame, may you live long (you have) and prosper (yes, that too). I expect the reason she has fared so well is because of art. "Art is just one way of reaching an equilibrium—of becoming a sociable person," she said in explanation of this inscription. (ArtForum, Summer 1993)

"If the artist cannot deal with everyday reality, the artist will retreat into his or her unconscious and feel at ease there, limited as it is—and frightening sometimes. But since love excludes fear—suddenly if you are in love, you are not afraid anymore. This is amazing, but it is true."

So art is a refuge. She was speaking of a specific sculpture in this article, Precious Liquids. In this piece there is a coat (the unconscious she refers to above). Inside the coat there is a little dress embroidered with "mercy merci." Art arise out of this ground—this dress inside the coat—mercy, thank you, the saving grace of art. It's what makes it possible to go on, to reenter the fearful social context. And then there is love.

Just the balm needed at this time of year. Art ensures we make it through the dark and troubling times. Keeps us sane. And then there is love.

May we each live well and prosper in the New Solar Year.

Alternative to Alternative

Having written the previous post, I find myself still ruminating on the need for, the reasons for, the use of the word "alternative." Alternative is related to alternate: this or that, on or off. Alternative is defined, in fact, as one of two mutually exclusive options; if one is chosen the other must be rejected. Alternative is an oppositional word suggesting a binary situation. In common usage, of course, we say there are "many alternatives," but at the root of it is still this notion of only one way. For me or against me. For-profit or not. Straight or gay.

So I was looking for a poly word. Or a multi word. An inclusive rather than oppositional word. Polyoptional. Multivalent. Polyvalent. Optional implies choice. Valent refers to worth. Multifarious is nice. I dunno...

I don't want to dismiss the value of the resistance or opposition that is (sometimes) implied in the use of "alternative." I don't want to be pollyannaish about the art world (even if I am generally optimistic.) Like those that want to believe in "alternative," I have faith in diversity and I suspect that "alternative" says, I'm right, they're wrong more that it says, I question authorities, conventions, and categorizations.

I suppose what I am suggesting is a more nuanced way of speaking about art that doesn't fall into the trap of us against them—whoever them might be, let alone us. I also want to move myself out of my own presuppositions. So that if I encounter a gallery named, say, Three Bat Gallery, I won't immediately assume and dismiss it as a fly-by-night artist-run place filled with look alike art-school assignments any more than I might assume that a high-end place might have nothing earth-shaking to see. Sometimes the privileged old bats have a lot of shaking going on.

There are so many strands in art and so much of value. I want to foster this wide-openness, let it spill like a full-to-the-brim, wide-mouthed jar in an earthquake.

Sentimental Notion

Maybe "alternative" is just a sentimental notion. It has long been useful for selling art, but with the market so flush, nobody even needs it anymore. Yet people still want it, and live it, and have a kind of faith in it: the "it" that can't be mass-produced, can't be packaged for museums, can't even be made to make sense. —Holland Cotter, New York Times, Dec.1, 2007

Holland Cotter is writing about galleries, little galleries, not in Chelsea but on the Lower East Side, galleries which advertise as alternative. I wonder, is alternative alternative?

Seems to me, alternative is now like avant garde was to modernism: says unconventional, breaking limits, pushing boundaries—but really, isn't it all passé? Even in the toniest galleries—or museums for that matter, anything goes.

Alternative used to mean you'll find something different, something challenging to the status quo, something other than the mainstream. Something that the market won't bear. What is it now that the art market won't bear?

Seems to me the only thing that alternative can mean now is not-for-profit. Or is that what alternative really means? Is it a codeword for doesn't sell, makes no money? Well I'm alternative then, but not proud of it.



The sentimental notion that art couldn't, shouldn't make money is linked with ye olde Bohemian term avant garde. The marginalized outsider took a vow of poverty when he (yes, back then it was mostly he's) took up the standard against convention and advanced the line—that linear historical party line that demarked the boundary of accepable and subversive. Artists and gypsies pushed the boundaries of what was legitimate or desirable, and the Victorian ladies, evidently, said, Shame on you! And what artists and gypsies wanted—so goes the sentimental storyline—was to be free from the constraints of manners, rules, and obligations. The thought that followed was that market success had built-in demands: for saleable product (consumer-oriented) and always more (art that could be manufactured). Success resulted in legitimacy and stability and so it was just better to die young, avoid all pitfalls of making a capitalistic living.

Students and creative types still believe this. As Cotter says, "people still want it, and live it, and have a kind of faith in it." Whole neighborhoods exude it, a sort of sophmoric anti-establishment, self-righteousness dressed in machine-worn designer jeans and Peruvian woolen hats that says "of the people." Excuse me? And how are you different than everybody else on the block?

Being down on the street, flaneur, with the people is code for being progressive—the artist subverting commodification, or at least rankling her art-school tuition-paying parents. Art as critique, as against societal ruts and wrongs is another aspect of the avant garde breaking through to the new society—or at least breaking the limits of conceptuality and making aesthetic change (which ultimately brings about societal change). Now this is a notion of new and different that I can get behind. Seeing concepts in a new way, hearing stories I've never heard before, or the old ones told a different way in a different voice. This is a concept of new, different, alternative that is postmodern and always contemporary for it assumes always new particular ideas, views, voices—anything goes, everybody's welcome. The ultimate democracy.

So how alternative is alternative? Is it a necessary term? Seems to me, and I may be naive, but the art world seems more welcoming of radical, upside down, inside and other points of view than any world I know of. Seems to me the art world is an alternate world, a parallel universe, running on its own imaginative steam with a unique economy following a fantastical standard of its own making. It seems reduntant to say alternative art, alternative gallery. Better to be specifically descriptive: political art, feminist art, figurative, installation, found, narrative, video, conceptual, invisible. I mean, really. Alternative? Diamond encrusted skull. Now that's alternative. And I'm not joking.

Hands & Feet, Standing & Falling

In the installation by Douglas Gordon at SFMoMa, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now. To be seen on monitors, some with headphones, others run silently, and all simultaneously, there is a video of a hand, palm forward, abruptly coming at the camera, again and again. There are a lot of hands in Gordon's works, but this one reminded me directly of Bruce Nauman's piece of himself bouncing into a corner. I saw that one installed in the basement of the Berlin contemporary art museum Hamburger Bahnhof as part of the Flick Collection. [see photos above] Nauman falls back into a corner and bounces back upright and then into the corner again; again and again. Gordon is obviously, probably, most likely—why not—influenced by Nauman's early work, straightforward videos documenting performance. Maybe it doesn't matter if he were influenced or not, but more to the point they are in the same conversation of repetitive movement, the body, the gesture, on film. They could be in the same room, falling and bouncing and turning and gesturing, simultaneously together as they are in my head.



In the Bahnhof basement there was also Nauman's video of himself slathering himself black. Remember Gordon's piece, The right hand doesn't care what the left hand isn't doing? His hands are lathered in shaving cream and one hand shaves the other.


Displayed side by side, Nauman's films showed the continuity of the artist's body as work in much the same way as this installation of some 50 of Gordon's works in one dark room wove together, reflected and conversed together, a new whole that is the artist's body of work, work using body, movement, expression. I wonder if he was surprised, looking over these individual pieces done over the last 15 years, to see how repetition in one reflected the same movement in another? How they danced so well together, the shell-shocked man falling, the elephant falling, the hands gesturing, the hands and eyes opening, closing? It was beautifully choreographed as though on purpose which just goes to show the purposefulness of a person's being, of an artist's perspective, that streams through her life-work, the hidden intention.

Sausages and Ale

So what is it about sausages?

There are 300 sausages suspended (with sheep, shark and cow) in Damien Hirst's new installation, School: The Archaeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge, created for the lobby of Lever House, NYC. Meat, ground and encased, then encased yet again in formadehyde and glass.

At the Moscow Biennale this year, the Blue Noses Group showed Kitchen Suprematism, sliced salami and bread arranged into abstract compositions on a kitchen counter.

Did it all begin with Wurstserie, the 1979 Sausage Series of photographs by Peter Fischli and David Weiss? Sausages dressed up in slices of deli meats - bacon and mortadella clothing and carpets and cups: a sausage world?

Wolfgang Tillmans photographed sausages in a pot. He also photographed man meat in hand - the ol' blood sausage, turkey neck, wiener, salami, boner, sausage. So there it is: that's what it is about sausage...

Sausage takes the cake.

Toasts n Trust

It is September. [Not really. It is October and I see I forgot to post this. Better late than never.]
Earlier in the month, Julian Schnabel received the 2007 Gucci Group Award for remarkable film achievement. The Gucci Group agrees with little ol' me: Schnabel takes the cake.
Upon receiving the award, Schnabel said, "Painting can be compared to life, but is about optimism and faith. Artistic expression is the embodiment of hope." hmmm, okay. Faith in the new and optimism that there are different—better even— ways of doing things; but hope..? "the embodiment of hope..." Hope is "expectation with confidence, trust." Schnabel says, "Artistic expression is the embodiment of hope."
Oh, I get it! Artistic expression, which relies on the creative act, is a demonstration of trust in the infinite possibilities of the universe, trust in the possible. Yes. Yes yes. Art Saves. Trust in Art.

Cellophane Matters

Little art spread wide.

Artists in Cellophane is celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the Art*o*Mat next week with a swap-meet party - with bands! - in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, tobacco country, where the good idea was conceived. Yessirreebob, art from a cigarette machine was a very good idea! spread now to some 90 locations nationwide, machines dropping art the size of a pack of smokes. Ten Years Kerplunking Culture is their anniversary slogan.

Kilgore Trout claims cellophane is the stuff of the universe.

Clark Whittington noticed that the happy sound of crinkling cellophane inspires consumption. He made art, wrapped it in cellophane, stacked it in a vending machine. The Art*o*Mat was born.

After the first one, Whittington filled the next and the next with work of artists of all kinds, from all over. I myself have a pinhole photograph by Emily Long of Chicago from an Art*o*Mat in Santa Monica. You could too. Visit Art*o*Mat for an Art*o*Mat near you.

Venetian Cake - Pompeii Pink

Let me get on the bandwagon.
Julian Schnabel has built a building in NYC and the neighbors don't like it. Big news.
Big building. Big color.
Schnabel is a big artist. He needs those 18ft ceilings!
Seriously, Schnabel is a great big artist, a great big filmmaker, a big man with vision and there is always complaint - frenzied even - about someone doing something that commands attention.
Well it seems in building construction the man is as attentive to aesthetic detail as in anything else. Give it time, and the neighbors will learn to love it too. Italian stylings, 18ft ceilings, 3ft walls, French windows, brass railings, and 17 storys red. Well, yessir it's a big building -and I like it.

360 W 11th St. NYC
*photo for The Villager by Lincoln Anderson

Good Gods

I stir up the gifts of the gods in me and around me, and I am blessed on every side with happiness, success, and true achievement.

Well, with that affirmation let me return to this blog. (No, I haven't been sleeping on the job, but out of town, down at the mouth, otherwise occupied.) Let me stir up some good news that the Olympian (read true) gods are yet alive and living in ...London.

My favorite bookseller, lent me an advance copy of a delightful read, Gods Behaving Badly, a new British novel by Marie Phillips. It seems Aphrodite, Artemis, Apollo, et al., have been living in London these 2000+ years after having been displaced in the people's affections by the messiah. They're having a hard time of it, being forgotten and all, cooped up in one ramshackle residence, getting on each other's nerves.

Of course they're in London. The ancients always have British accents in movies after all. It's an effortless book because it all makes perfectly good sense. Dionysus is a dj in an underground club. Demeter is plum worn out. Aphrodite is - well, Aphrodite must be played by Catherine Zeta Jones in the movie, because Aphrodite is gorgeous, but she has that nasty streak. Brad Pitt, oh god yes, would be Apollo. Sean Connery, Zeus. The big stars are gods, the gods are big stars - even as they age, they are gorgeous.

I'd vote for Maggie Gyllenhall to play the waif-like mortal heroine of the story. Who wouldn't go to the underworld for her? Even Marie Phillips likes her. You can read about that here: normblog When it comes out, in December in the US, read the book. Revive these gods. We'll all be better off for it.

Champions Take the Cake

Is there a theme here? Well, lessee. This blog is about art, art that I like, art that I take pictures of (or find pictures of as the case may be), and especially big art - that follows because I like big art. The theme(s) so far.

And then there is Vonnegut. I have been re-reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Champions take the cake, of course, win the prize, are favorites primed to please.

Breakfast of Champions is a wry wacky work with drawings. It stars the great Kilgore Trout, consumate pessimist, but still the book gave me a certain hopeful perspective on the mess of things that is humanity. In this way:

Dwayne was hoping that some of the distinguished visitors to the Arts Festival, who were staying at the Inn, would come to the cocktail lounge. He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.

Poor Dwayne mishears the truth and ends badly... but still, Dwayne looked to art for truth and sanity. Me too.

My motto is: Art Saves.

So far, I am not insane, off my rocker, loony toons, nor vicious. Wacky wingnut...well, why yes, that I am.

To enourage you to ingest your Breakfast of Champions, I offer these bits, my favorites.

"Americans are always afraid of coming home," said Karabekian, "with good reason, I may say."
"They used to have good reason, " said Beatrice, "but not any more. The past has been rendered harmless. I would tell any wandering American now, 'Of course you can go home again, and as often as you please. It's just a motel.'"

***
The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights above street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it; in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan his mistress kept in front of the refrigerator. Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made.

***
(ETC)-C-CH2-C-CH2-C-CH2-(ETC)

And when [the chemist] sketched a plausible molecule, he indicated points where it would go on and on just as I have indicated them - with an abbreviation which means sameness without end.
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.
And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I begin so many sentences with "And," and "So" and end so many paragraphs with "... and so on."
And so on.
"It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.

Hail Kurt Vonnegut. May he enjoy cakes, ale, peace, etc. forever.

di Suvero

In San Francisco there is also di Suvero.
This is not meant as a travel guide - I am just saying: In San Francisco there is also di Suvero. And like Richard Serra, his work is worth making pilgrimage to see. If not to big art, then to big trees. And mountains. For now I recommend making way to the waterfront and gazing upwards at the di Suvero planted there where he and his family first landed refugees from China. The wrapped ship shape wobbles slightly as if on unseen waves, and above a compass-like turns round the anchoring four legs extending down to the earth - or conversly lifting the rotating complex high.
Like Serra, di Suvero grew up around the shipyards and got the notion that men could make big things. Di Suvero's story is amazing. For though he made big things - out of huge planks of wood initially - he was crushed in an elevator accident and thereafter made huge things from a wheelchair, single-handedly, from a wheelchair. Leverage, he says, is what it takes. It is something else besides.




The piece on the Embarcadero is somewhat pressed by the stadium and street nearby. But in Venice (CA) the di Suvero on the beach has the air and space to breathe and soar. It is a delicious angular construction of enormous i-beams that lifts you up and out of the small human busyness of the boardwalk. I love it, pointedly above the small knolls of lawn, the palms, the sand and sea beyond. It is grand to stand in and under and near, and on this stretch of public space you can get space and get close.






This last, the just-so image for the Solstice. Amen.

Go See Serra Pt 2: Serratopia

The Richard Serra retrospective in NYC. John Perreault went to see it. The next best thing to being there.

Who is John Perreault? Art critic, curator, artist, poet, collector of books and ... dishware. On the scene since the mid-60s, writing erudite, clear-headed essays and reviews. He provides consistently intelligent insight into the various strands that make up the arts, exemplary of why arts critique is valuable, necessary. I am a fan. For freedom's sake he writes an art blog, Artopia, where he writes what he wants to write. This entry is about Richard Serra - the massive materiality of his works filling the new MoMA.Artopia

Not Vivienne

Wouldn't it be something if Richard Serra's wife were named Vivienne? I mean just in keeping with things here. In this little world of my opinions? But no. His wife is Clara. Nice name Clara. But not Vivienne. Vivian neither.

Go See Richard Serra

Since returning to San Francisco I had it on my list to go see the Richard Serra at the Gap Headquarters building on the Embarcadero. But first the new Richard Serra at the new UCSF medical campus was unveiled. Quietly. Last time, it seems, there was an uproar about a Richard Serra being installed in a public space in San Francisco, so this time they just did it without a lot of fan fare. (Who are these people complaining?) Now there's Richard Serra on TV (with Charlie Rose last night), Richard Serra at MoMA (see above, by Fred Conrad for NYTimes).
Richard Serra Richard Serra Richard Serra. Well, if I were Matthew Barney I'd have Richard Serra in my movie too.

Richard Serra takes the cake.

Last night when Charlie Rose tried to impress as an insightful instigator of the profound, Richard Serra held his ground and firmly impressed. The man is articulate and sure, and for the first time I really saw how a person's work is an emmanation out of their character. This man is as large and profound as his works. He is virtuous.

"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" (Twelfth Night)

There's virtue and ... virtue. Morality (no, I don't mean that) and power (yes, that) and quality. Virtue is the Te of the Tao (as in Tao Te Ching which means The Book (Ching) of the Way (Tao) and its Virtue (Te).) Virtue is quality - and character. The more one is centered and grounded in the Tao, in the natural particular way of oneself, the more sure and clear ones virtue (essence) appears. Serra's work is a tangible material manifestation of the quality of the man. Serra's work is powerful.

Serra in San Francisco






This piece is tall. Two tall flat steel panels situated in a quad by a dormatory in the flat campus by the bay. The panels are slightly, whimsically tilted. They are massive. Standing next to them they are like redwoods. Up. And then there is that tilt. Tilt. 2 -3 inches thick. Stately. Tall. Very simple, and surprizing how two panels so can cut and shape the air that is in that vast space above the ground between big buildings. Amazing they don't fall over. Tilt and awe.




Charlie Brown is the piece inside the Gap Headquarters. (When it was being built, Charles Schultz died, so Serra named it after his character. Art trivia.) Four tall panels gently folded inward at the top leaning shoulder to shoulder creating a hollow space that sound travels up into an extended reverb out the top. (Yes, look, it's true: steel can be gently folded.) It stands inside a courtyard four stories high. Cozy.
(I took the first pic just before the guard ran over and told me No Photos! So I nabbed the top-down pic from www.scultura-italiana.com.)

Serra in Berlin




While I'm at it I might as well reminisce about finding a lonely Serra in Berlin - beside the golden Berliner Philharmonie, but now situated in a driveway - so it's aptly named Berlin Junction but looks somehow like a traffic obstruction. Two panels laid horizontally and curving into one another, the ends sweeping into the sky and echoing the lines of the concert hall.


(Pic from www.scultura-italiana.com.)

I like Richard Serras. If I were in NYC now, I'd go see the retrospective. Go rub up against a big piece of steel. Works for me.

More Viva

My stylin stylist tells me he had a dance partner named Vivian. Wore a little twirling skirt. This said after we'd sat together and looked through the Vivienne Westwood catalog. Fabulous Viv in green satin, her man in lace. Vivienne the queen. We'd both been to the retrospective at the de Young (museum) and loved her cut-up, deconstructed, mixed and mashed, accentuated fabric creations that said big n loud n proud to be towering tall in high purple platforms - beautiful. (This is an art blog after all.) (Oh, didn't I mention that?) But that reminds me - there's another VivVivaciousVivienne Soto, she's the beauty queen. Vivienne Soto. She does the cakewalk but Vivienne Westwood takes the cake.

VivaVivVive

Isn't Vivian a wonderful name? Sounds like vivacious. Vivienne Westwood. Vivian Gornick. I wonder if I would have been different with Vivian as my name. Vivienne. (yes) I wonder what it would be like. Be vivacious.