Rivane Neuenschwander 'I Wish Your Wish' (2003) installation detail

The exhibition was held in the domestically-scaled rooms of the IMMA’S New Galleries, the area open during the renovation of the primary spaces in the Royal Military Hospital, Kilmainham. The initial room held At a Discrete Distance, a series of precisely-painted and rather cheerful landscapes which emphasized patterning of floor tiles, roof beams and stairs; they were painted on small panels which the label related to Brazilian devotional paintings, although they gave no clue to wished-for desires.

Rivane Neuenschwander 'The Tenant' (2010) video still

A room full of Involuntary Sculptures (Speech Acts) (2001-10) held vitrines full of of small, hand-made objects that Neuenschwander had found, abandoned, in various bars and restaurants. These small sculptures, three-dimensional doodles really, had been fashioned from corks, plastic straws, matches, toothpicks, paper napkins, chop-stick wrappers, pop-tops and champagne cork wires that had been twisted, folded, shredded, crimped and burnt. They were by-products of social activities whose excess energy had been channeled through manual activity. While they bore signs of varying degrees of craftsmanship and imagination, Neuenschwander’s interest was in their association with sociability, hence the second part of their title, Speech Acts. Intriguing as they were, it struck me that almost anything laid out carefully in vitrines comes to resemble art.

The protagonist of the video, The Tenant (2010) is a large soap bubble which meanders through the rooms of an empty house, and the conceit is so charming that it doesn’t matter how it was effected. I was willing to accept the agency of the wobbly sphere, always a moment away from bursting, that magically refracts light at its periphery. The wonder at soap bubbles does not diminish with age.

The widely-appealing, interactive installation, I Wish Your Wish (2003) is again based upon vernacular, devotional practice, where the faithful bind their wrists with ribbons which they then leave tied to the church gates. Neuenschwander’s adaptation had visitors leave a wish in exchange for a ribbon printed with a previous visitor’s desire, which ranged from the individual to the universal, the selfish to the profound: wishes for a dog, to get into grad school, for family’s understanding, for respect for native people’s sovereignty, peace in the Middle East, not to die completely alone. Participants were forced not only to declare their own wishes, but to choose among those offered by their predecessors, and while the process was something of an exercise in ethics, it was surprisingly effective. I left with my wrist wrapped in a turquoise ribbon inscribed I wish to find pleasure in things as much as I used to as a child; it struck me as particularly appropriate to Neuenschwander’s art.

Rivane Neuenschwander 'A Thousand and One Possible Nights' (2008)

A Thousand and One Possible Nights are collaged images of constellations, created from confetti punched from an edition of Scherehazade’s tales, A Thousand and One Nights. Images of the stars are always beautiful, as are these; the printing on the tiny dots only becomes visible at close range. Yet a second thought reminds us that Sherehazade told her stories to forestall death, something behind much art, perhaps, but the connection is rarely so literal and immediate.

Lygia Pape installation view of 'Ttéia 1 (The Web)'

I had hoped to get more context for Neuenschwander’s work in London, where the Serpentine Gallery is showing Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space, organized by the Reina Sophia (through Feb. 19, 2012). Pape’s two and three-dimensional work obviously derives formally from Constructivism, and some of it resembles Bauhaus pedagogical exercises. The large installation, ‘Ttéia 1 (The Web)’, whose illuminated wire shafts create an otherworldly atmosphere, looks like a stage set for a play about heavenly revelation.

Lygia Pape detail of 'Livro do Tempo (Book of Time)' (1961-63)

The 365 small wooden reliefs of Livro do Tempo (Book of Time), that covered a large wall, formed an irresistibly-fascinating grid of variations on a square; small sections had been excised from each and displaced on top of the original, with varying colors emphasizing the variations in forms. It and a room of black and white prints and drawings combined seductive elegance of both formal interest and execution. Yet the connection between this work and the interactive, communal performances for which she is known was unclear, nor did labels to several filmed performances provide much help. This was disappointing, since with many recent artists working communally and sociability an ongoing topic, the comparison should have been illuminating.

Lygia Pape 'Divisor' (1968), still from a filmed performance

For understanding the social and political implications of working in a repressive state for Pape and her fellow Brazilians, it was very useful to read the recent publication: Subversive Practices; Art under Conditions of Political Repression: 60s-80s / South America / Europe, Edited by Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2010,  ISBN 978-3-7757-2755-6 ). The catalog to an internationally-curated exhibition held in Stuttgart in 2009, it illustrates work by some 80 artists working in Latin America, Spain and Eastern Europe. Much of their surviving work consists of publications, documentary photographs and ephemera printed in connection with communal events, so reading the book might be almost as illuminating as seeing the exhibition.

Collective Actions Group's performance 'The Appearance,' one of their 'Trips Out of Town' in the countryside outside Moscow (1976)

The catalog is an extremely valuable complement to a number of recent publications addressing conceptual practices beyond the U.S. and Western Europe (such as Global Conceptualism; Points of Origin 1950s-1980s, the Queens Museum, 1999, and anthologies by Camnitzer, Albero and Stimpson, Breitwieser, Katzenstein and others). It includes essays by the editors and their 13 co-curators, and provides the first translations (into English and German) of numerous artists’ statements and manifestos. They give valuable context for a range of art practices and activities in public spaces that were inherent affronts to state power, despite seeming tame and unobjectionable in a Western European and North American context. Examples are Collective Actions Group’s Trips out of Town (above), which were nothing more than organized outings to the countryside, and the gathering organized by Edgardo Antonio Vigo in La Plata (Argentina) in 1968. Vigo advertised in the newspaper and on radio for people to meet at a specific time at a major intersection in the city; the object of their assembly: to contemplate the traffic light as an aesthetic object.

David Hockney painting "Felled Trees on Woldgate", 2008, Photo Credit: Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima © David Hockney

Hockney is first out of the gate with the launch of A Bigger Picture this past weekend [and some rather feisty jabs at Hirst’s integrity as an artist because of his use of assistants]. The current show features the artist’s depictions of the landscape of his native Yorkshire, many specifically made for the Royal Academy’s grand spaces. Hockney links himself with England proper in responding specifically to its geography. Is this allegiance to the countryside meant to invoke a modern reference to British landscape painting? The artist also revives his original Polaroid/proto-cubist joiners project by mounting paintings in multiple parts and creating multi-faceted videos. The artist, thus, in a way reminds us of his earliest projects, transposing his artistic vision throughout his oeuvre. For me, however, Hockney’s strength lies in the paintings of his American period and his role within the Pop Art movement. I can’t help but feel that the current show falls short of representing England here and now. Hockney just seems to be one of those long-lingering stalwarts of British art, whose golden age has passed.

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991

While the Hockney show has been forcibly underlined to not be a retrospective, the Tate Modern’s upcoming show of Damien Hirst announces itself to be just that. It is tough to include Hirst in the cannon of British sculptors such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Lynn Chadwick.  Yet, he has – for better or for worst – been a defining force of British (and international) art of the 1990s and 2000s. Just as his complete set of spot paintings currently on display in every single Gagosian Gallery worldwide is polarizing opinions, the most prominent of the Young British Artists (YBAs) has always been a sensationalist playing with the art market. In his art, he has articulated and preserved an era of the art world much like – forgive the analogy – a shark suspended in formaldehyde.

His 2007 skull encrusted with diamonds called For the Love of God was created at the height of the art market bubble and remains the most expensive work of art ever created. Controversy aside, Hirst’s work does draw from a British tradition, prominently influenced by the great Francis Bacon. For his part, Tate Director Nick Serota understood the importance of billing a prominent contemporary British artist in 2012, to capture the world’s attention. I have no doubt that the Hirst show will be a podium-worthy exhibition, an Olympic event in its own right.

Hirst at his usual antics with For The Love of God, 2007

The truth, I think, is simple: big names capture attention. And it is difficult to encapsulate national identity with just one artist – controversy and discussion will always tag along. Even group exhibits will inflame discussion as to omissions (the Royal Academy’s uneven Modern British Sculptors show of last year is a prime example). Museums elsewhere in London have chosen different strategies for the big year: The Hayward Gallery will install contemporary artist Jeremy Deller’s first retrospective while The National Portrait Gallery will mount the unnervingly well-timed exhibit of portraits by the late Lucian Freud. The National Gallery will stage a Turner show earlier in the year but will focus on Titian during the Games, and the V&A will go the group-route, surveying British Design from 1948 to 2012. Freud is probably the best choice for 2012, honouring a fallen hero and a great of British art.

The duality of collective national identity and individuality is especially appropriate in an Olympic year, when solo athletes distinguish themselves from a group representing their country. However, the very foundation of contemporary art today, in my opinion, transcends national barriers. Which begets the question: Am I only scrutinizing the offerings of the art world in 2012 and testing their British-ness because of the abundance of Olympic news floating around?

His last show is the result of a choice he made more than ten years ago to no longer fill the entire pictorial plane with paint and to  renounce all figuration. He now  prefers to compose exhibitions with semi complete  elements leading to a whole rather than necessarily making each element a work unto itself.

This tactic is clear when we visit the studio. No paintings are on display. The sculptures are pressed up against the wall ready to be deployed, or not. Mair seems happy to leave them be and to deploy them in his head. He pulls some out for me and kind of throws them out on the floor like carpets. He arranges them and then arranges them again. There is no set arrangement. The spectator can meddle there as well, I guess. But who would ever dare rearrange a show? Well actually there is Captain Culture & Herr Doktor Kropp, a team of art consultants who will fix your show free of charge, but that is another story.

Taken together Mair’s work has an  IKEA quality to it  – decoration that is derived from a furniture sensibility. You  are always wondering about a work’s  possible function.

The objects are more or less flat. Volume is derived by assembling flat elements. There is always a painted edge or plane somewhere that suggests an orientation. Paint is applied in strips in an allotted space. It doesn’t transfer, travel or overflow.

Color is emitted and diffused on neighboring elements of the painted plane. The color becomes lighting and the art/ furniture combination is fulfilled (but do not try to read by this light). According to Mair the color is a  residue of a greater mass or color that was there before.

Enclosing colored planes gives the color mass.

His works often suggest that they were once bigger but that a part was detached and dispersed.

Mair’s work is a little messy. Canvas and wood meet imperfectly in a jury rigged fashion, painted edges are vague and fuzzy. A straight line misses its mark . . . there is a fuzziness which avoids a conclusion. It is a  controlled messiness which alleviates the seriousness that this work could deploy.

Mair likes to brush up against the line separating art and utility. Is this a bookcase I see before mine eyes? Its shelves before my hands?

You are also free to turn his pictures this way and that (look above and below).

The tug in two opposing directions — that of painting and sculpture — that many artists have felt is at work in Mair as well.

In one work the frame slides out from behind the canvas. In another the two vertical elements of the frame rise like goal posts out of the top of the picture.

Mair uses canvas and stretcher structures as the building blocks  for his objects. The canvas and chassis entente remains as a support and surface for the paint, but they have become objets d’art in their own right. This is a sly way of painting and sculpting.

The paint, however, cannot reciprocate. It is happy to lie ensconced in or on the object. It bends to the will of the canvas stretcher structure and from there it faintly diffuses itself onto the white planes of its keeper.  Overall there is a persistent flatness which means that Mair is still mostly painting.

Mair’s studio is on the edge of a long straight canal typical of the landscapes of northern Europe with their straight lines and flat lands. I ask him if his proximity to this cityscape has influenced his work and he professes that the open space is a pleasure to be in but he cannot point to any work that might be a result of this landscape.

Although Mair’s work calls to mind many other artists he himself doesn’t work within those references. He is looking to make art that can still serve a  purpose and open new perspectives. If he proposes a hint of utility it is in hopes that the spectator will go beyond that and confirm the object as art. Letting the spectator confer the status and value of the work is risky but honest.

There is a lunge towards the infinite here and it is achieved without a draughtman’s means. Mair has come far from the huis clos of the picture where all is controlled and described to a place where suggestion sets us in motion.

The bits and pieces add up to what most bodies of work are becoming: a set of  pieces to a board game that are looking to be deployed on the great board of the contemporary art game.

However it seems that the more artists create the more fragmented art becomes. The number of pieces needed for the game is infinite and their signage forever evolving. There will always be missing pieces.

I like the line that Mair is pursuing. It is  unhurried and consists of a few brush strokes and a few strokes of the saw combined with gravity’s will and a certain nonchalance. You can follow the signs or not.

Shepard Fairey's Occupy Wall Street design supports the 99 Percent, although we're pretty sure he's a 1 percenter.

Meanwhile Europe is flailing and talk of a euro collapse is now a bit of a broken record.  The financial markets are whipsawed daily while the art market, on the eve of Art Basel Miami , steps around the see-saw and the swings and heads for the candy store where everything is shiny and new and all dressed up for the big lick.

But there’s a disconnect going on – and there has been for quite a while.  Anyone who seriously makes art has always felt the tug of war between what goes on in the studio and what goes on in the galleries. Work with paint, canvas, paper, wood, or video, and what you take in annually from these aesthetic investigations compared to what the blue chip artists pull in is undoubtedly a pittance.  Yet the art world ticks on. Yes, we understand it’s all supply and demand, but there’s also hype and myth and probably price rigging.  Recently a New York art dealer came to Paris and told me that he’s really only interested in working with artists whose works sell for at least $5000.

Clearly no parent in his or her right mind would encourage his or her art school child to attempt to earn a living as an actual artist. Better to become a baseball player; at least the odds seem better. (For the record there are fewer than 750 professional Major League baseball players and practically every boy and many girls entertain the fantasy of playing shortstop for the Yankees, or even the Phillies).  Most artists are in the 99.9 percent category.

So along comes the OWS, the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon,  the swelling ranks of the 99%, the disgruntled, often out-of-work folks gathering in New York’s Zuccotti Park and other public areas around the country and the world.  What are they doing?  Mostly grumbling about how the rich people are rich – and have great tax advantages! – and gosh darn it, they’re not and they don’t.  If they were rich, would they have spent nearly two months in the Park?

Clearly the wealthiest slaves of capitalism – the investment bankers, hedge fund traders, the quants – have done pretty well since the financial tsunami hit the shores of New York and London and the rest of the capitalized world – wiping out trillions in wealth, killing home values, and putting friends and family out of work.

The OWS crowd though recently turned its ire to another ivory tower of privilege and wealth – The Art World – surrounding the entrance of MoMA a month ago and whining about ticket prices ($25) and the elitism of high-priced objects in the Museum’s collection.  So, a quick vote, please check: Stupid [  ] Dumb [  ]. They could get an annual membership for $75 and come and go as they like. And support the museum in more fruitful ways than stopping traffic on W 53rd Street.

The OWS Art World splinter group is pissed off because…well, why?  They don’t like supporting an institution that is world class and not on the government teat? Or because these protesters (artists) are not in MoMA themselves?

An acute artist-observer of the 99 per-centers takes umbrage with me over my vitriol: “I think it’s appropriate to criticize art institutions because they mainly support the 1% of artists and art collector class,” he writes.  “And the commodification of that top 1% of art products to a hyped-up and overvalued object status is akin to what we have in the rest of society, particularly in the investment community.  I believe the only way to prevent the masses from revolting and killing the rich is to have a buffer class, a middle class. So, you spread the wealth around; in my opinion, this is the role of government.  Where is the 1% going to get their income from in the future if they’ve already taken it all  from the 99%?”

Well, okay, then. Why not Occupy Julian Schnabel? Or better, Occupy Jeff Koons!  Or heck, why not occupy The FIAC, the art fair in Paris?  It would have been easier to occupy this year as the fair was reunited under a single, glorious roof: The oxidized copper struts and gleaming glass of The Grand Palais. However, 33 euros a pop (FIAC’s ticket price) to have the opportunity to pay $3 million+ for a collection of Damien Hirst’s fish might irritate the Occupy folks.  In any case, you can download free Occupy posters made, one would believe, by the Occupy Artists, like the always controversial Shepard Fairey.

I have to admit I didn’t go to the FIAC this year, but I did stroll through the Tuilleries where several large-scale sculptures were on display during one of the most beautiful autumn days in Paris in my memory.  Here’s a report about the FIAC in The New York Times :  Sales were exceptionally strong despite the global economy swirling around in the “toilette.” Key quote: “Maybe we’re in a bubble.” – Nathalie Vallois, Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois Gallery, Paris.

So last week, as I am ambling along rue Saint-André-des-Arts, between St Michel and Odéon in Paris, I pull into a retail store called Carré d’artistes, one door down from a Starbucks.  Their slogan (above the door) is for the 99 percenters: “L’art pour tous en grand format.”  (Art for everyone in large sizes). There were four artists on view – one who sticks things on canvases, another who schmeers paint, another who does a Latin number in a surreal portrait style and the last who knocks out cityscapes that capture, in thick globs of paint, the movement of yellow taxis and wet pavement.  It was all horrible, but hey it came in five sizes, and three prices, right up to 3000 euros.  I asked one of the half dozen sales girls if on this day, a Sunday, anything sold.  “Oh yes, we sold five works today.”  I couldn’t imagine anyone buying anything there, but that’s a pretty good day, I imagine, in any art gallery.

FYI, here’s the “concept” announced on their site:  Our ambitions  Liberate Art ! Carré d’artistes® is the crazy gamble of art lovers whose ambition is to revolutionize a market previously inaccessible and compartmentalized, and to become a major actor in that market. 
The self-service exhibition spaces of Carré d’artistes® do away with any distance, or any intermediary, between the spectator and the artwork. By presenting all the artists on an equal footing, Carré d’artistes® shakes up the traditional rules. It is an alternative that democratizes contemporary art, and a generous undertaking that is respectful of the artists.

Grapes of Wrath? Andy's "Grapes" pulled in $104,500 at Phillips de Pury's New York October editions sale.

Maybe we’re not in a bubble. Recently I had a phone conversation with the folks at London-based The Fine Art Fund, an investment group that uses art as an asset class for profit.  Its CEO, Phillip Hoffman, who famously doesn’t collect art himself says : “The world’s rich are putting their money into art.”  He said it here.

Launched in 2004, The Fine Art Fund is one of several new investment instruments that seeks to take a hard asset like art (it could be real estate or gold or teak wood futures for all that matters) and hold it for a time period until there’s interest enough to sell it for a profit.  The track record is actually pretty good according to Ruth Knowles, the Director of Global Marketing & Business Development at The Fine Art Fund.  While the private equity group remains tight lipped regarding most everything  – until, of course, you invest the minimum $250,000 –  the group reported more than 25 percent returns on one of their investment venues and better than that on others. And at the end of the 10-year run investors earned before management fees about six percent or better on their investment, and notably for The Western Art Fund the annualized return of 33% on works sold.

While The Fine Art Fund incubates the value of works, investors can “borrow” the paintings to hang on their walls. You just have to pay for the privilege. For the Fine Art Fund II, the minimum investment is $250,000; for the Chinese Fine Art Fund, the minimum investment is $100,000. As a shareholder, can publicize your savvy with an original Matisse in your study.

“We don’t speak about the names of the artists we have in our portfolio,” explains Morgan Long, Director of Art Investment at The Fine Art Fund.  She explained however that the composition of the portfolio is “35% Old Masters, 15% Impressionist, 15% Modernist and the balance in Contemporary. Old Masters are very much in demand and they are not correlated to the rise and fall of the stock market… Contemporary art, though, is highly risky asset.”

So who’s hot?  Who should the Occupy Art World folks be fuming at?  Morgan Long wouldn’t exactly say which artists the fund is buying but in mentioning Damien Hirst, and his 1990s stuffed and sliced horses, sharks and sheep, you’ve got a long term holding. She indicated that these works are “unique, iconic works,” adding: “I don’t think anyone disagrees that he’s the most important artist of his generation.  Tate Museum will do a major retrospective during the London Olympics and that will bump up his…I would put my money into these unique 1990 works…they are consistently high.”

What to do?  Don’t look at your 401k account and let go the creeping feeling we’re all going down the proverbial krapper.  As much as artists want to maintain some aesthetic integrity – and their dealers some kind of cash flow – it’s pretty clear that only the bluest of the blue chippers can maintain and increase their values as well as the distance (in dollars) between themselves and the rest of the pack.  So while few artists like talking about money, dinero, dinars and dollars are what make the world go round.  However seeing your own art star rise and zeroes added to your prices is another kettle of fish; complaining about your occupying art world career won’t get the pot to boil. Better to haul down those Old Master paintings your grandmother bought 70 years ago and call up Christie’s to come take a look. Then take your profits and get yourself a MoMA membership.  For most artists (and dealers), now is a great time to be poor.  Isn’t it?  Real artistic creation has nothing to do with creature comforts.  Think Van Gogh, think early Pollock, think early de Kooning, think early Me.

Sophie's Room. All photos this post by Cate Fallon

Sophie’s Room, open to visitors around the clock for one weekend, was on the third floor. The room itself reflected the care and attention to detail promised in the hotel literature and seemed a welcome environment for the objects placed with equal care and attention around the room by the artist Sophie Calle.

Sophie's cake.

As part of  Crossing the Line, the annual fall festival of contemporary arts produced by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Sophie Calle, one of France’s leading contemporary artists, created a site- specific installation incorporating an array of personal objects placed as multiple mini-stages around the room.

Sophie Calle's room, in the kitchen. Note card with story on it

With numbered cards to follow, one could journey about the room experiencing the nostalgia laden dioramas found on the table, in the bookcase, across the mantle, draped over the bed, tucked in the kitchen or hanging in the bathroom. In the center of the room the stuffed cat and its sweet-sad story seemed to anchor the couch while letters, books and clothing were strewn about offering other stories of crushed dreams and fanciful tales.

Sophie's cat

Even the room-safe, propped open for the day, revealed that she, Sophie, had recently acquired a plot in the Bolinas Cemetery in Bolinas, California and that her dilemma of after-life transportation to the final resting site as by UPS or by FedEx had been resolved.

The safe, with her funeral preparations

While autobiographical in nature, the viewer is encouraged to become the director or creator of the narrative hinted at in the various corners. The suite seemed filled with life lived. The wry acerbic wit of the artist evident in the various scenes, which seemed to weave time and object in a dense quilt of memories.

Typewriter in the living room

Some visitors, while welcome, seemed almost uncomfortable. As they bumped past each other in their commitment to read and review everything set out for consumption, their own lives seeming not equal to the richness of what they were given the chance to observe. Some seemed almost afraid to laugh at some of the stagings, and then leaving almost as one might leave a funeral parlor or  a crime scene, not knowing what to say. And yet, I found the room welcoming, filled with stories like an open journal book of a most refreshing adventurous life.

Sophie's bedroom

Sophie’s Room, co-presented with The Lowell Hotel, was a wonderful afternoon’s reading and a fitting addition to Fiction & Non-Fiction, one of “Crossing the Line 2011′s” three curatorial program perspectives. FIAF, in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, opened its fifth edition of “Crossing the Line” in mid-September with performances, exhibitions, an audio-guide walk and events stretching the length of Museum Mile.The festival ran for a month closing on October 16.

Sans Titre by Tonico Lemos Auad. Made of sculpted brick.

The Bird nested in the steel and glass Grand Palais, with her blue chip eggs, while her attendant flock cobbled together tents to create ephemeral spaces in niches and alcoves around town. The artists and collectors that have the privilege to ride under her wing slid down to the Parisian soil to begin posing, hanging, leaving samples and creating  impressions.

Beneath the  din of chirping there was no buzz. It was all birds and no bees.There was a self-conscious tentativeness all about, as perhaps the art world sales people and collectors were dogged by the European financial chaos. This is in contrast to the exuberance that the FIAC as well as Frieze exhibited in the face of brewing financial storms in 2008, ’09 and ’10. Personnally I was surprised that no one stormed the fair in order to reclaim some art — to be redeemed for shelter and perhaps used for start up capital for a small business. Instead the line to get in on opening night wound its way around the palace like a long worm that was going to feed itself to the multi-materialed, multi-clolored shimmering Art Fair Bird.

Effet Pas D'Affect by Simon Nicaise. The table turns the track beneath the train.

The unheralded highlight of the fair was embodied by a drawing that was more a carte de visite or artist’s signature than drawing. A bird was drawn swooping down towards the bottom left of the picture. On the lower right was a hole left by the artist where he made a cut out on which he wrote his name and then pasted it by the bird’s beak. His name became the bird’s song. The bird sang “Marcel Duchamp”. For 385,000 euros this original Marcel Duchamp sheet music on show at the  UBU / Sophie Scheidecker space could be yours.

Trunk by Jonathon Callan consisting of previously soggy Reader's Digest.

If Cubism opened the door to infinite possibilities of form, shape and perspective, Duchamp certainly opened an even bigger door on the other side of which all and/or nothing could be art. Duchamp is the artist everyone has to deal with at one point or another. Part of knowing who one is as an artist and affirming that identity entails determining what is art and what art one is going to make . . .as well as what one will wear and what games one will play. This part of the artistic identity journey takes place on Duchamp Lane. We all pass through…and it is a toll road.

Dark Star by Pierre Besson

I am surprised that the drawing wasn’t sold the day before in the pre-opening where the millionaires get first dibs. What are collectors thinking? Is this reviewer stuck in pre-world-war-thought-mode admiring defunct prophets? Is the drawing just detritus? Are we in a post-industrial era where there will be no more readymades? Was Duchamp a charlatan and a hoax?  Do we really think that  Maurizio Cattelan is a deus ex machina phenomenon?

This sad gentle supine giant in a Moscow suburb moved me. Photo by Boris Mikhailov.

Any other Duchamp would be literally priceless on the open market. It is true that this drawing was little more than a signature . .. . and so lacked the heft of a pivotal art work such as the readymade urinal, aka Fountain.   Still, it was surprising to see a Duchamp for sale with an actual price. It somehow didn’t feel Duchampian . . . . In contrast consider Impressionism. Impressionist works continue to increase in price no matter what the economic climate. This  is because these works are caught in the buddy system where millionaires heap money on each other in an endless cycle of selling perpetually-appreciating goods to each other. They are like mother birds regurgitating food to feed their offspring and brethren.

Forking Circle In Pea Bog. Drawing by Robert Smithson which was not for sale.

Duchamp made too little to be a player in the art market. There aren’t enough works to go around. That that drawing was unmolested by a buyer infers a rewriting of modern art history, confirms a general blindness in the collectors’ ranks and a warp in the values conferred on art works today. Like a rippled 33 1/3 record warped by the sun, or a radiator, the resulting hump  distorts the music. The Art Fair Bird’s beak used to be the needle on this record which was her song. Now recorded music is all digital and warp has to be built in.

Best in show goes to Taysir Batniji principally for his admixture of humor and the history of destruction:

Sans Titre. Taysir Batniji. Photos of homes and land for sale that were destroyed by hostile forces.

For Taysir Batniji it's a free market. The Fiac crowd dialled in instantly to the real estate format.

On Monday morning I saw the Art Fair Bird spread her wings and preen herself while her passengers climbed onboard. She cocked her head for a bearing and then  launched into the air  to  soar towards her  next destination where the artists and the public  have prepared her a nest and her next meal.

Richard Jackson.

Last Tuesday a Degas painting was estimated to sell for more than twice the price it was bought for in 2000. It failed to sell. Always use the buddy system when buying and selling art.

Dan Walker's installation of his Moleskine collage books filled an entire wall in his Unstuck exhibition in Paris.

1. I remember meeting you about a year ago and you showing me a collection of your Moleskin book collage journals.  At the time your production was intense but limited to smaller works in these books.  Your exhibition Unstuck is astonishing for both the range, size and quantity of works.  What happened?

DAN WALKER: The Moleskine journals (exhibited as an installation in Unstuck) are an ongoing project. I fill about a book a week with a mixture of diary entries, collected scraps, drawings and ideas. They are memory maps but also a simple and effective way to record and grasp what goes on around me each day. They’ve become my hard drive and I’ve relinquished a large part of my memory to them. I wanted to liberate myself a bit and started making bigger and freer works. Ideas would often incubate in the books and I allowed myself to develop them on a larger scale and this became “Unstuck”.

2. There is a very clear poetic sense in your works; they read like poetic musings literally torn out of books.  What is the genesis of your texts such as SHOUT QUIETLY PLEASE or KEEP IT FOR LATER?

Most of the words and phrases came from everyday conversations going on around me. Living in France and being surrounded by the French language is wonderful but I miss the idiosyncrasies and idioms of English and when I hear or see words that have nice shapes or meanings I pluck them away and stick them down.

Walker's compositions riff off of the Affichistes from the early 1960s, but add a twist with his own idiosyncratic texts and close cropping of his found papers..

3. Like many collage artists you employ scraps of paper and antique or vintage books as your supports. Your use of rubber stamps to write your texts also follows from a long line of art creation in the collage and dada traditions.  How did you come to this aesthetic?

I’ve always collected junk of all kinds so when it came to making bigger works it seemed natural to use stuff that was already in the cupboard. I think we’ve lost the reflex to re-use and re-condition things for new purposes and that’s a shame. It’s often far more aesthetically pleasing than the new stuff. I’ve collected rubber stamps since I was a child and love their imprecise form and the fact that each impression is as unique as a fingerprint.

EMPTY brings together found wall paper, paint, rubber stamps in a simple, elegant pun about the past.

4. Your history is as a film maker and producer. Your company Force Majeure has produced several films. Have you put that career on hold or are you still engaged in the industry.

I still write and produce films but the nature of the industry is sporadic and frustratingly slow. I’m hoping to produce a film next year about a stay at home mum who becomes an undercover operative with Emma Thompson in the lead.

5. What is the role of film in the production of these works?  Is there a narrative you are exploiting?  Or is Unstuck a play on the word collage, which is French and indicates gluing.

I think the works are more graphic than filmic. Unstuck is a reference to glue and “collage” but it’s also about giving myself the freedom to make pictures. We tend to be very compartmentalized in what we do and who we allow ourselves to be and I wanted to “unstick” myself and start doing more of what I really love.

6. Your compositions also touch upon the Nouveaux Realistes, particularly the affichistes like Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé and Mimmo Rotella who recuperated the torn posters from Paris and Italian walls and made keen sense of the sorts of juxtapositions exposed when one image – or rather a part of an image – was removed, revealing the underlying image.  The results there were often surreal and implied a new urban folk art, presaging in many ways graffiti. What do you consciously borrow from this action of artists to take the real and recompose it into a pictorial fiction?

Dan Walker with his Keep It For Later collages at his Unstuck exhibition.

It makes a lot of sense to me to take the mundane and everyday and recondition it into something different and hopefully meaningful and engaging.  We’re given hundreds of pieces of paper each day that we hardly glance at and generally throw away: envelopes, tickets, bags, invitations etc. Every shop and café receipt now has an address and the exact time it was printed and that fixes you in time and space. We do hundreds of things each day and without keeping a trace of them I’d forget most if not all of it.

7. In your exhibition you exhibit a mini architectural model of the installation – it’s lovely in its brut form.  Was this part of the original concept for this show? And by the way, the idea of serving Mojitos for the entire duration of the show is a great concept, too.

The installation included a model of the exhibition.

Originally, I only had the gallery space for three days including setting it all up. So I needed to pre-prepare roughly where each piece was going to go and be ready to get it on the walls in a morning.  I made the maquette from an old cinema décor I’d saved from a film set. Happily, the show has now been extended until November 19.  Although I’m not sure if I have enough rum to pour until the 19th.

8. Tell us a bit about your history as an artist – education, background, where you grew up and if you walked around as a child with a book of Kurt Schwitters under your arm….

I’ve had no formal art education but when I was a child my mum forced me to keep diaries when we went on holidays. So I guess it’s all her fault! I dreamt of becoming an architect but at that time you needed to be good at maths and physics and I was hopeless. So I trained and worked as a lawyer. It took me about 15 years to realize I was miserable and that’s when I started writing and producing. But it was also a large step towards a more creative existence and the collages and artworks grew from that.

9. You produced a series of collage works that are both painted and rubber stamped in the form of a bottle. These are very simple and elegant works. In the one large grouping of the grid of eight bottles is significant because the one in the middle is missing.  The work that stands next to it on its own features the printed word EMPTY.  Tell me about the origin of this work.  It feels quite different from the others.

I’m renovating an old house in Burgundy and found rooms with remnants of 19th Century handmade wallpaper. It’s extremely fragile and disintegrates upon being touched but is the most amazing color blue.  I’d made a piece of work based on the idea of the glass/bottle being half empty/full which I ultimately threw away but I retrieved the preparatory pictures of bottles and dressed them in pieces wallpaper that I could keep intact. The “empty” picture made at the same time escaped the formal grid but wanted to stick around.

10. The entrance to the exhibition features several vitrines filled not only with your Moleskine collage books but a number of assemblages of wood and metal works as well as time pieces, clocks and other detritus…

A nod to Duchamp. Unstuck: Installation view from the street.

There are two travel books from Japan and New York that document trips I took. They felt too lonely on their own so I thought I’d make a “cabinet de curiosités” from bits and pieces of junk I had lying around.

10 1/2. Finally, now that you’re “unstuck,” what’s next for Dan Walker, artist?

Well all this activity has generated a whole new set of material, I need to clear out my cupboard again and probably load up on the Moleskine books and a few gallons of glue. Say, care for another Mojito?

DAN WALKER: UNSTUCK Galerie d’Architecture, 11 Rue des Blancs Manteaux 75004 Paris, France – through November 19, 2011.

Amidst the “The Golden Triangle” of museums in Madrid — the Prado, Reina Sofia, and Thyssen-Bornemisza — a new gallery has popped up with interesting aims. Centro Mexico Madrid opened on September 15, 2011, hoping not only to create an exhibition space for Mexican artists but also to become a headquarters for celebrating Mexican art, culture, and traditions.

Betsabee Romero Untitled. 2007. Carved tire and print. 55cm x 20cm

Centro’s first show is a solo exhibition by Betsabee Romero titled “Memoria frente al espejo” (loosely translated “Memory in the mirror”). You may remember Romero from the 2010 Moore College Philagrafika exhibit, where she displayed prints in a traditional Mexican style made with recycled tires turned rubber stamps. The artist is best known for her public art sculptures incorporating manipulated cars, usually Volkswagon Beetles.

Betsabee Romero Untitled. 2007. carved tire. 55cm x 20cm

Romero has exhibited internationally for about 10 years now in important institutions in Mexico and South America as well as in the US (Los Angeles MoCA), Europe and the Middle East .

Betsabee Romero Desde la Alhambra. 2007. 6 half tires and gold leaf. 63cm x 17cm

In “Memory in the mirror” she continues her work on the sentimentalizing of traditional Mexican art and that art’s clash with consumer culture. Romero uses familiar materials such as tires, strips of rubber, and gum, but she also incorporates metallics in her palette with gold and silver paint and convex mirrors. And here, she adds remote control toy cars and trucks with bright colors and miniature sculpture in the mix.

Betsabee Romero Siempre en la mira. 2009. Acrylic security mirrors, frosted and painted with gold leaf. Sizes variable.

On the gallery’s first floor the metallics take center stage. Although the designs in the carvings and prints are pre-Columbian my first thoughts go to the Mexican-American “tricked-out” car culture. The convex mirrors resemble wheel rims or safety mirrors. Gold and Silver prints made using tire carved tire treads as rubber stamps wrap around the gallery’s columns. One tire remains in mid-print on the ground while others hang on the wall cut up and painted to create patterns or simply display exquisite carving.

Exhibition view including Cruzamos hasta el otro lado 1-111 and Carne de canon. All 2011.

On the gallery’s lower level Romero’s work creates a totally different mood. Brightly-colored, remote control trucks and cars are miniature art cars that carry portable graveyards with crosses and flowers. A more modern and slightly larger silver car is parked in the gallery’s front claiming superiority.

Betsabee Romero Cruzamos el otro lado I. 2011. Painted remote control truck with roses and crosses. 49cm x 15cm x 15cm

Romero’s handiwork, creativity, and juxtaposition of modern and ancient motifs make this show worth seeing. The show runs to November 10.

Centro Mexico Madrid is located at Calle Alameda, 3. 38014 Madrid, Spain. Their website is under construction but there is plenty of information on their facebook page (brush up on your Spanish).

You can see all of Betsabee Romero’s work on her website.

–Brittany Papale graduated with a BFA from University of the Arts in 2011.  Currently, she is teaching English in Spain.

I spent this summer in Europe and this time around I decided not to visit the major museums but instead explore some of the smaller local spots. Here is a list of six places you may not have heard of that are definitely worth a visit:

1. Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen

Danish cottage (north coast of Zealand, Denmark) Photo by Lee Arnold

This museum has a nice mix of international and Danish art, and it is probably the most beautiful setting for a museum that I’ve seen. Located on the water just outside of Copenhagen, when you get tired of looking at art you can sit in the garden and look across the water to Sweden.

2. Villa Schönigen, Berlin

Sculpture park at the Villa Schönigen (Berlin, Germany) Photo by Lee Arnold

A small museum housed in a former villa built by the King of Prussia in the 19th century, the museum is located next to the Glienicke Bridge, which was used to exchange spies between East and West Berlin during the Cold War. It has a great outdoor cafe and sculpture garden.

3. Kirchner Museum, Davos

View from the Hotel Schatzalp (Davos, Switzerland) Photo by Lee Arnold

A major collection of Ludwig Kirchner’s alpine-themed works is housed in a modern Swiss building in Davos. When you’ve had enough of looking at pictures of the Alps you can go out an explore them yourself.

4. Musee Unterlinden, Colmar

Vineyards (Colmar, France) Photo by Lee Arnold

Housed in a 13th Century former convent in the picturesque Alsatian town of Colmar, the main attraction at this museum is Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. When you are finished feeling pious go out and enjoy the fruits of the regions famous vineyards.

5. Goethe’s Summer House, Weimar

Goethe's Summer House (Weimar, Germany) Photo by Lee Arnold

The center of German culture for centuries (and the birthplace of the Bauhaus), Goethe’s summer house is one of many cultural institutions you can visit in the small city of Weimar. Relax and soak in the sublime.

6. Spinnerei, Leipzig

Outdoor cinema, Spinnerei ( Leipzig, Germany) Photo by Lee Arnold

A hot bed of new European culture housed in an old factory, the Spinnerei is a collection of galleries, artist studios, and other artistic non-profits. This is the next Berlin.

–Lee Arnold was born in London in 1972 and lives in Brooklyn. His work explores the nature of time and perception using a variety of media, including film, video, photography, drawing and sound. He has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad including at the ICA Philadelphia and at SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

Larry Louie, from the A Working Day in Dhaka, Bangladesh series, 2010

Our first stop is in a most unlikely place–the office of an optometrist named Larry Louie. There we find treasure. The office turns out to to be a gallery with an office attached. The main gallery space is right off the entryway. And more spaces are upstairs. All of them are beautiful white box spaces.

Larry Louie, from the A Working Day in Dhaka, Bangladesh series, 2010

Louie as an ethnographic documentary photographer. His wife, who runs the gallery spaces, said she goes with him on his trips around the world (Turkey, Tanzania, and Tibet for example). Her role in the enterprise is to hang back, watchful, as he befriends people who might not be so welcoming or kind. “I have his back,” she says. Eventually, though, Louie gains enough trust so his subjects allow him to record them with the camera.

The resulting photos, mostly black and white, have velvety darks and luminous lights and midtones. The people in them are compelling. The images do not have the political edge of say Sebastiao Salgado. Rather the message is social without the isms–clear-eyed explorations of people’s lives in context. Louie has a sympathetic eye, at the same time that his photos record the harsh realities.

Larry Louie, Campfire Under the Bridge, Kathmandu, 2010

One of the images reminds me off Jeff Wall’s posed images of people living their lives invisibly, under an overpass. Then I decide many of them have that feel–of a nether world the middle class never touch, never notice.

The group shots have the gravitas of history paintings, hugely ambitious in their sweeping descriptions of people’s lives, Louie’s exquisite management of details filling the picture frame.

Louie does dodge and burn his images in PhotoShop. The resulting images have won Louie awards including the IPA Lucie Award and National Geographic Photo Essay Award. He had a solo show at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton in 2010 and has shown in the UK and Spain as well as around the US. Louie also supports SEVA Canada and its Vision 2020, a global initiative for the elimination of avoidable blindness, and the battle for gender equality in eye care. His photos also document some of the group’s work and have that same passion for people and social issues.

After that beginning, the other galleries we visited are a bit of a comedown. We walk down empty streets, and the August art scene there is a bit scaled back, just like everywhere else.

Barry with camera. He has become an avid photographer.

Louise at the Reynolds Alberta Museum

Fortunately Edmonton has other charms–besides of course Barry and Louise, who live in a large suburban house, the back wall of windows overlooking a large park area. Interestingly enough, this suburban house is a twin, really, but the partner house falls away thanks to some smart design. I don’t really understand the thinking. Is it for heat retention? Nah. They like burning oil in Edmonton, where oil is king–oil from the ground and Canola oil.

Edmonton sunset seen from Barry and Louise's deck

The house’s surrounding land is minimal, which strikes me as funny in a place that has so much land to burn; even the McMansions in the development (and there are some horrifyingly large ones) have minimal land. But Barry and Louise’s place looks out on communal park land. Nice view, nice place to walk.

Wally, an Aussie, entertains a street crowd with tricks and insults.

Another charm in Edmonton is the Fringe. Edmonton was the first North American city to host a Fringe Festival, and it seems as if all Edmontonians come out for it. We certainly did, going to four plays, five performances.

The highlight was The Surprise, a funny, sad monologue by a guy from New York named Martin Dockery, who tells about how his family has a don’t ask don’t tell policy of non-relating. Dockery tells all, fortunately, as he tells on his father, his girlfriend and of course himself! If you see his name somewhere, buy tickets.

The Fringe up there gets good newspaper coverage, with a daily growing list of performances ranked via a ranking system that’s really helpful in making choices. The Edmonton Journal must deploy a huge posse of of people to help them sort through the volume of shows.

The aircraft annex of the Reynolds-Alberta Museum. The museum is located on ultra-flat prairie in the middle of nowhere. There's a race track on the right.

The show wasn’t the only surprise of the trip. Another was the Reynolds-Alberta Museum with its rehabbed Model T, Duesenberg and an array of cars and planes you never heard of.

Murray with a simple weight-lifting machine at the Reynolds-Alberta Museum, which had lots of basic mechanics demonstrations.

The museum crops up like a giant airplane hangar in the middle of the ultra-flat prairie fields in the town of Wetaskiwin. It is the outgrowth of a private collection–one man’s passion for collecting machines. Picture him running around from farm to farm, taking off people’s hands their old rusting vehicles, parked in the back 40 (sort of like my old printers, scanners and VCR–call me up if you’re interested in these). Reynolds is still alive and still collecting–and donating to the museum.

1918 Snow Flyer Conversion Kit--Take your 4-wheeled vehicle and turn it into a whatchamacallit.

The highlight for me–well there are numerous ones. Here’s my short list:

• The grain elevator gizmos. Now I get it! I never before understood how they worked
  

  A restored Duesenberg is a thing of beauty. There were also cars we'd never heard of--a Winton for instance?

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• The retrofitted cars with skis instead of wheels and other redesigns by farmers and others who needed their car to work in a variety of ways. There were even kits to turn cars into flat beds, for instance.
• The way that cars affected how the whole region (and by extension, the whole world) developed and grew. That social history was pretty darned great, with cars affecting the culture and the culture affecting the cars.
• The interaction between social class interacted with car history.

My brother is like a pig in shit in this museum. He loves cars. He takes me for a ride in his little sports car, an old Honda sports car in mint condition, top down. I hang on for dear life, although the prairies don’t exactly offer much by way of curvy corniche roads to dazzle me with. Louise does not like the sports car. She likes her Element. They also share an Explorer, which also likes burning through fuel.

Athabasca River (I think; so many rivers, and they all seem to criss cross)

Murray and I begin the vacation driving the Explorer into Jasper. The fuel costs us an astonishing amount of money. (Well, we do drive a Prius in real life, so we’re spoiled). We’ve been to Jasper before. And we find our decision-making brings us to the same places we visited last time we went there–same hotel, Becker’s Chalets, near The Whistlers and same day-hike into Maligne Canyon. It seems insignificant that we’d been there before. The elk in Becker’s parking lot probably are different elk from the last time.

Elk in the Becker's Chalets parking lot, after snacking on the greens at right

And the canyon cannot grow old. Second to second the water is new.  It gushing down the narrow canyon, slows to a swift slide where the canyon widens, and then resumes its whitewater descent.

Springs from inside the rocks, feeding into the Maligne River

We find something new to us at the Jasper-Yellowhead Museum and archives–an explorer and mapmaker named David Thompson, a native of England whose maps of the Canadian West were both political and geographical wonders, mapping the tribal spheres of influence, the mountains, the rivers.  He’s a hero in Canada. We never heard of him of course, in our usual American-centric know-nothing way. I don’t think this was the huge map of his on the wall at the museum, but they did have on loan an original map of his (maybe 8 feet wide) on the wall. I found this one on Thompson’s Wikipedia page, which states, “Thompson’s 1814 map, his greatest achievement, was so accurate that 100 years later it was still the basis for many of the maps issued by the Canadian government. It now resides in the Archives of Ontario.”

Map of the North-West Territory of the Province of Canada, stretching from the Fraser River on the west to Lake Superior on the east. By David Thompson, 1814.This media file is in the public domain in the United States.

Barry has been taking photographs lately in a very focused sort of way. He snaps and then he photoshops–he has taken some courses and says he still has a long way to go in knowing all the things he can do. But some of his results are swell. He’s still in the playing/learning phase. He gives me a photo (of me); Louise gives me one of her paintings! Lucky me. And soon they will be in Philadelphia for Alex’s wedding!

Thanks to Barry and Louise for great cooking, great company and great love. And to Hani for the fire pit visit!