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.

Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib Provisional Monument for the New Revolution, 2011 multi-channel video installation dimensions variable Courtesy of the artists

Local artists Matt Suib and Nadia Hironaka portray loneliness in a crowded setting in a piece that’s both political and poignant. “Provisional Monument for the New Revolution” is a large, multi-channel video projection with sound that wraps around two walls and envelops you in a black-and-white, barely moving image of protesters in an urban square in some Middle East country. In the grainy, X-ray-like scene, it’s impossible to tell exactly where these people are. The ambiance is spooky. The sound, which is not the sound of the crowd, swells from a quiet hum to a rhythmic ticking that grows so insistent it commands the air space in the gallery. What little motion there is has been frozen into a never-ending stuttering. If you approach the wall, your shadow gets projected on the video and you become a giant black hole in the crowd, a piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit. You are alone in their crowd.

Lucas Ajemian and Julien Bismuth Set Pieces, 2008 digital video (color, sound) and powder coated steel dimensions variable Courtesy of the artists and INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York

Julien Bismuth’s and Lucas Ajemian’s work features side-by-side video monitors that show them talking during their collaboration, often like a couple on the verge of divorce. The pair makes videos (as part of the show they’ve made bright green metal sculptures that echo foam-core sculptures in the videos), they write (you can take a free selection of their newsprint zines from the downstairs lobby), and they seem obsessed with alphabet letters and symbols. The art seems argumentative without reason, but the zines contain a lot of good writing and are much more personable.

The companion totems of clay and wood by Nicole Cherubini and Taylor Davis are a palette cleanser in this show. The way the materials are put down—a glob of clay here; a stick of wood there—makes the pieces likeable, albeit not as memorable.

Megawords Megawords Installation, 2011 dimensions variable mixed media Courtesy of Megawords

Less likeable is Nick Mauss’ and Ken Okiishi’s “One Season in Hell,” an update of the 1873 Arthur Rimbaud poem A Season in Hell. The framed book pages are displayed on the wall but it’s far too much to read or even look at in a gallery. Perhaps a little desk and the book itself to flip through would have been more in keeping with the intimacy of the piece. Framed pages are not engaging and make the book more precious than it maybe is.

The opposite of precious, Megawords collaborators Dan Murphy’s and Tony Smyrski’s raucous installation on the mezzanine has a jumble of photos, adolescent-boy memorabilia and a handmade display desk and chair. The installation is upbeat, energetic and affirmative about life lived, times experienced and collective memory.

Sam Green, Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and Mrs. Al Paul Lefton Jr. of Villanova at the Factory. Photograph originally published in the October 1, 1965 Philadelphia Bulletin. Courtesy of the Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives.

Don’t miss the Andy Warhol documentary show in the Project Space, which tells the story of Warhol’s 1965 exhibit at the ICA and includes a great piece by Alex Da Corte (a Romeo and Juliet-style balcony filled with a large silver bouquet.) It’s a fabulous tribute the pop artist would love.

Alex Da Corte Silver Screen, 2011 MDF, wood, enamel paint, foam, glue, bucket, silver spray paint, epoxy resin, cable, grapes, baby powder, plastic flowers, shampoo, conditioner, soda, acrylic rods, and plastic bags 90 x 66 inches Courtesy of the artist

Read this at Philly Weekly.

Through Aug. 7. Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St. 215.898.7108/5911. icaphila.org

Dan Flavin, installation view of works from the "monuments" for V. Tatlin series, various dates (1964-1981), and Untitled, 1970. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson.

The museum is a squat brick building—a former Nabsico box printing factory—lit almost exclusively by natural light that pours through skylights perforating the ceiling. The Foundation was founded in 1974 with the aim of supporting site-specific artwork, and continues to manage outdoor works such as Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah and De Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico. Dia has a strict no photography policy, but the gift shop can supply you with keepsakes.

The first project a viewer encounters in the museum is Dan Flavin’s “monuments” for V. Tatlin, the Russian Constructivist best known for his proposal to build a colossal spiral tower of glass and steel. While pieces from this series exist in the multi-colored fluorescent tubes that Flavin is most known for, the light sculptures installed at Dia: Beacon shine pure, angelic white. Each “monument” is its own entity, glowing quietly on an individual wall situated diagonal to the viewer. What is stunning about these pieces is not the mysterious combinations of colors from competing light sources, but the two-dimensional forms Flavin organized with the fixtures. They offer a rigid poeticism—the result of arranging pre-fabricated materials dispensed in standard dimensions.

Walter De Maria, Silver Meters, 1976, and Gold Meters, 1976-77. Installation detail courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Jerry Thompson.

Walter De Maria’s Silver Meters and Gold Meters earn a type of beauty through similar means. The two series are installed in one line on the floor of their own gallery. Each is comprised of eight square stainless-steel plates, three feet wide. Each plate has inserted into it a troy ounce of silver or gold, which is installed as a plug flush with the surface. Within each series, silver or gold, the number of plugs in each panel jumps by square numbers: the first plate having one plug, the second having four, etc., so that the plugs get indiscernibly shallower with each increasing plate. The installation—all 16 plates laid out flat in ascending then descending order—barely murmurs, spanning the entire length of a gallery in one dimension and just one inch in another. Its limitations, however, bestow upon it an expressiveness that is unique to Minimalism.

Imi Knoebel, 24 Colors--for Blinky, courtesy of Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson.

The first instance of blatant color found in the museum is Imi Knoebel’s 24 Farben-Für Blinky (24 Colors-For Blinky, a series of large panels cut into abstract shapes like excited quotation blobs. Knoebel completed the project shortly after the death of color formalist and close friend, Blinky Palermo. It was his initial exploration with hue. The panels are sculptures wearing the cloak of painting. They are visually expressive—anti-conformist shapes dressed in flamboyant color–and they contribute an exciting eruption to the museum’s collection. They do not, however, share the particular reserved expressiveness key to Flavin and De Maria. Dia’s personality hinges on constraint and these lose their cool a little.

Robert Smithson, Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis), 1969. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Florian Holzherr.

Robert Smithson’s materials set him apart from the other artists at Dia. His glass and earth particle sculptures are gatherings of splintered material—a language that differs greatly from the solid bodies and clean surfaces that fill most of the museum. The piles of gravel Smithson employs in Four-sided Vortex, a mound of dirt which encapsulates a mirrored box, and Leaning Mirror, allude to a material reality–nature–that Flavin and De Maria’s sculptures deny (while creating, instead, a religion of the industrial). Text printed on a glossy informational card in the gallery offers this idea: “Smithson’s work suggests that the concrete materiality of sculpture depends on the mind’s ability to see metaphorically in order to comprehend meanings…” Smithson’s sculpture relies on a parallel metaphor: the viewer sees one thing and understands that it stands for something else. His work relates back to the physical world; it exists to affirm nature in a hyper-industrialized society. Flavin, De Maria, and Judd’s work, on the other hand, does not necessitate that the viewer “sees metaphorically”.  Instead, the metaphor proposed by their work is embedded in the work itself: the viewer literally sees the metaphor, because these artists’ work does not allude to our lived reality but to a new, unexperienced reality. The hyper-specific forms created from industrial materials propose an alternate set of laws. They are not, like Albers or Mondrian, form for the sake of form, but rather form as metaphor/meaning. They are like dancers in that their beings in space elicit significance.

Dia: Beacon is accessible by the Metro-North railroad from Grand Central, New York. Other notable installations include Andy Warhol’s Shadows, Michael Heizer’s North East South West, and Sol LeWitt’s Drawing Series. Winter hours are Friday through Monday, 11AM to 4PM. The train will take you past hills that fall into the Hudson River, with strange ice formations in the winter time. For lunch or coffee, Main St. is a ten minute walk from the train station the opposite direction from Dia.

Target Practice; Painting Under Attack 1949-78 (Seattle Art Museum, 2009) ISBN 978-0-932216-64-9

Those of us involved in the art world never seem to tire of looking critically at the way that world works. Self reflection has been the basis of a number of exhibitions in recent years;  I saw two devoted to artists’ studios: The Studio at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (discussed on Jan. 3, 2007) and Picturing the Studio at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009-10). The Making of Art, at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Target Practice; Painting Under Attack 1949-78 at the Seattle Art Museum, addressed further aspects of art production, circulation, and valuation. While I saw neither of them, given their thematic nature their catalogs offer significant interest and are likely to be particularly appealing to art world insiders. Simply studying the illustrations is bound to provoke fruitful associations, dialog and argument.

Cheri Samba ‘Une Peinture À Défendre’ (1993) acrylic on canvas, The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva

Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkácová ‘International Private Collection’ ongoing project, objects stolen from well-known art galleries

The Making of Art addresses the broader topic and includes artists working beyond Western Europe and the U.S.. While there’s a Piero Manzoni of 1963 (Merda d’artista) and several works from the 1970s, most dates from the past two decades.  The artists selected question art production, the special role accorded the artist (and, indeed, artists’ role models) and most aspects of the art market including the proliferation of art fairs; they conduct broad institutional critiques and analyses of the way art’s presentation creates meaning; and they investigate art’s subject, authorship, and standards of art world success.  Some idea of the range is encompassed in the title of Wolfgang Ullrich’s catalog essay: Art as the Sociology of Art.

Claire Fontaine ‘True Artist (Spiral)’ (2004/09) reads: ‘The true artist produces the most prestigious commodity’

John Baldessari’s early works using language to interrogate art world practices  are well-known and feature in both exhibitions discussed here. Other work is less familiar: a jab at the commodification of dissent by the anonymous collective working under the pseudonym, Claire Fontaine, in True Artist (Spiral Version) (2004/09),  a spiral of words a la Bruce Naumann, written in smoke on the ceiling; in the video, Portrait With a Curator (2002),  four Polish artists who collaborate under the name Azorro have themselves filmed in various art world settings, then circle the image of a curator in attendance (always in the background and  oblivious to the artists) as a way of underlining the function of networking in creating and sustaining artists’ reputations;  Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkácová perform acts of petty theft as attacks upon the commercial art world, then display (and sell) their spoils, with provenance indicated, in the gallery which represents them; commenting on his video, MoMA Visit (2009), documenting a trip to China by MoMA’s International Council, Ai Weiwei includes the statement: In 1986 I wrote “If a person can walk into MoMA and not feel ashamed, it can only mean either that his senses are compromised or his morality is wanting. MoMA is a place full of prejudice, power and vanity.” … I still believe what I wrote then.

Andrea Fraser video still from ‘Untitled, 2003’

Andrea Fraser gets to the heart of many artists’ objections to the market with Untitled, 2003 in which she offered a sexual encounter (with various specifications) at a fixed price through her gallery.  If selling one’s work amounts to prostitution, Fraser doesn’t offer a less compromised way to put food on the table, and one suspects she’s never been through the process of applying for tenure in an art department.

John Balsessari ‘I Will Make No More Boring Art’ (1971) lithograph

Target Practice; Painting Under Attack 1949-78 addresses an art form that might long have claimed, as did Mark Twain, that news of its death was an exaggeration. The attack on painting was carried out in a variety of media and the exhibition was flexible in the examples it chose (both in textual illustrations and for the exhibition), including Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Shigeko Kubota’s performance, Vagina Painting (1965), Lygia Pape’s communal action, Divisor (1968), Bruce Nauman’s photographs, Art Make-Up (1967-68), Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light works, and Baldessari’s video, Six Colorful Inside Jobs (1977).

Lucio Fontana ‘Concetto Spaziale’ (1957) ink and pencil on paper on canvas, MoMA

The exhibition’s argument begins with extensive attention to Lucio Fontana, who punctured the canvas in the late 40s (ignoring the fact that Miro had done so more than twenty years earlier, although to little attention) and places a significant emphasis on the role and manipulation of the canvas in the history of attack it explores.  These attacks on the canvas include work by Alberto Burri, Howardena Pindell, Linda Benglis (knots), Piero Manzoni (bandaged-looking Achromes), Nikki de San Phalle (a photograph of her shooting at a painting with a .22 rifle is on the catalog’s cover), Shozo Shimamura and other Gutai artists, and Sam Gilliam, who hung stretcher-less swags of canvas.

Yves Klein creating 'FC1' with blow-torch, 1961

The exhibition was an occasion for the Seattle Art Museum to feature works in its collection, and combined with the practicalities of loans that may well have resulted in a narrower exhibition than the curator, Michael Darling, would have liked. Even so, some omissions are particularly surprising, and the range of his essay might certainly have been expanded. The perfunctory attention given Yves Klein is baffling, as is the omission of Warhol’s use of screen-printing as painting (although one of his small group of piss paintings is included).  Darling ignores the racial politics that likely figured in the attack on painting’s status quo by Sam Gilliam and Al Loving, as well as the use of humor as intellectual attack by Robert Colescott. And he left the feminist critique particularly under-explored; works such as Carolee Schneemann’s Eye Body (1963), Eleanor Antin’s Representational Painting (1971), Anna Mendiata’s Body Tracks (1982) and Janine Antoni’s Loving Care (1992) would seem tailor-made for Darling’s subject.  But this is really the fun of reading such essays: responding to and arguing with them, and generally getting the intellectual juices flowing.

Carolee Schneemann ‘Eye Body’ (1963)

Both catalogs would have been more useful with indices, and the Seattle catalog suffers from a particularly silly design decision to limit captions to alternate double-page spreads, so the reader must flip back and forth to identify the images, and to no obvious benefit. But both contribute to evergreen subjects and make for enlightening and entertaining reading.

Anna Mendiata ‘Body Tracks’ performance(1982)

Virgil Marti’s “Set Pieces” at the ICA, including Marti’s shadow play

The first object in Marti’s arrangement is a table-top sized model of the Fairmount Waterworks and the reservoir behind it, now the site of the PMA; like all models, it alludes to something else, and the themes of referentiality and illusionism run throughout Set Pieces, where a candlestick refers to a Caryatid; basalt-ware ceramic passes for stone or, when lustred, for metal; and the inlay of a writing-desk features a trompe l’oeil shelf of books.

Model of the Waterworks, c. 1875

Circling counter-clockwise, Marti has arranged a group of works illustrating his interest in the uses of artistry to fool the eye. The first is an Austrian porcelain coffee-pot (1795) painted in unlikely imitation of wood, as if it’s exterior were the paneled walls of a room.  Affixed to the knotty paneling are two engraved, Italianate landscapes, rendered in such detail that the artists’ names and engravers’ initials are legible, and a slight tear is revealed along the lower margin of one of the prints.

On the wall beyond the coffee-pot is a still life by Abraham Pietersz. Van Calraet of a bowl of peaches. The seventeenth-century painting was certainly intended as a reminder of the fleetingness of life, but the highly realistic fruit and small bug crawling on one peach will also remind some viewers of the earliest writing about painting, Pliny’s Natural History, in which the painter, Xeuxis, demonstrated his skill by rendering grapes so life-like that they fooled the birds.

l to r: Oldenburg, anonymous, Duchamp-Villon, as Marti found them in storage

In a vitrine to the left of the entrance, Marti demonstrates the mute abjection of a group of sculptures as he found them: Claes Oldenburg’s Miniature Drum Set (1969) and Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s Aesop (c. 1906) flank a marble Head of St. John as a Boy (purchased as fifteenth-century by John G. Johnson, but now considered a nineteenth-century fake), brought together by nothing more than their common size and storage requirements.

A delightful arrangement of small bronzes in the second area evokes another story from Pliny.  Marti has placed table-top versions of classical statuary and various animals by Barye on a high platform, and lit them so they cast dramatic shadows on the walls behind. These looming shadows are the stuff of children’s games and grade-B horror movies, but the tableau also recalls Pliny’s tale of the origin of painting, when Butades of Corinth’s daughter traced her beloved’s silhouette on a wall, to remember him by.

Virgil Marti’s “Set Pieces” at the ICA, including basalt ware (center) and multiple George Washingtons at left, against wall

Marti has found marvelous stuff in the store rooms that are certain to delight any visitor, none more spectacular than Dorothea Tanning’s Rainy Day Canapé (1970), lovers that merge with the couch on which they dally; why the PMA allows this extraordinary work to languish in storage is beyond me.  Marti’s free-ranging imagination has animated a group of 18th-century, tilt-top tables that surround the couch, discreetly turning their backs upon the couple en flagrante, while mirrors on the wall behind remind us that we are the voyeurs.

detail of “Raid the Icebox with Andy Warhol” (1969-70) at the RISD Museum, with entire collections shown as Warhol found them in storage

Daniel Buren, in a famous article published in Artforum in 1973,  described the Museum as the single viewpoint (cultural and visual) from which works can be considered, an enclosure where art is born and buried, crushed by the very frame which presents and constitutes it. Over the past forty years museums have turned to artists to give new life to their entombed collections, and I freely admit to an enthusiasm for these artist-curated exhibitions. I wrote about the subject, from Andy Warhol at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (1969-70) and Scott Burden at the Museum of Modern Art (1989) to Joseph Kosuth at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2003) in a post on Jan. 3, 2009.  Some artists have used these opportunities to explore museums as sites for artists’ education, others to look at the museum as institutional frame. In 1989 the PMA invited Andrea Fraser to present Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk and Fraser, acting as a docent, chose to highlight the museum’s social functions and rhetoric, rather than its collections.

Andrea Fraser’s “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk” at the PMA (1989)

While Marti emphasizes the imaginative possibilities of work in the PMA’s store rooms, his exhibition at the ICA makes another point: that the identity these objects assume in the museum setting is not their natural one but rather, as Buren might put it, a posthumous identity.  In their original incarnations, the objects Marti selected (with the possible exception of the Waterworks model) were domestic accouterments, produced for a middle class wealthy enough to afford them. Their original placement and context would not have been determined by their makers or by the disinterestedness of history (the museum’s usual assumption), but by their owners.  They would have been selected according to the purchaser’s taste, wealth and living space (hence the multiple busts of George Washington, in various sizes), and arranged according to the fashion of the day.  Marti’s selection is a reminder that, counter to our usual assumptions, we are witnessing the artificial afterlife of such works when we see them in museums.

The ICA has produced a handbook-sized catalog to the exhibition: Set Pieces curated by Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (ISBN 978-0-88454-119-6). It contains humorous and urbane comments on the selected works by PMA curator Joseph Rishel, articles by ICA curator Ingrid Shaffner, Tom Devaney and Lia Gangitano, and an interview with Marti by art historian Richard Meyer.  The design by Purtill Family Business, with its wonderfully blind-stamped frames for each page, poetically suggests Marti’s exhibition as an imaginative frame for the objects and includes numerous details and installation views of this memorable project.  The ICA is to be congratulated for its rare habit of producing such catalogs after exhibitions have opened, so that they become serious records of the exhibitions as installed.  When the exhibition is itself an artist’s work, this is particularly pertinent.

Thomas Eakins ‘Salutat’ (1898) 50" x 40"Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover

It is book-ended by two images, which indicate the looseness of the curators’ definition of a portrait. On entering one runs into Thomas Eakins’ painting, Salutat: we see the back of a slender young man, nude but for shoes and a bit of cloth which covers his loins but exposes his buttocks. He raises his hand to greet an enthusiastic crowd of properly-dressed men who ogle him. The final work, facing the exit, is a huge self portrait head of a bewigged, middle-aged Andy Warhol, overlaid by a pattern of military camouflage. The Eakins reveals a crowd that undoubtedly largely considered itself heterosexual, unselfconsciously admiring male nudity. The Warhol reveals the artist as hidden, even as his visage is exposed.

Andy Warhol ‘Camouflage Self-Portrait’ (1986) 80.5" x 76", Philadelphia Museum of Art

The next work is Eakins’ tiny photograph of Walt Whitman as an aged sage, in which I find no obvious questions of sexual identity. Beyond it is J.C. Leyendecker‘s illustration for Arrow shirts: two beautiful young men lounging in a gentlemanly setting, which reveals to contemporary eyes that Bruce Weber was onto nothing new. Sex always sold merchandise, even if most of the audience was blind to the actual object of desire.

Thomas Eakins ‘Walt Whitman’(1891) platinum print, 4 1/16" x 4 13/16", National Portrait Gallery

Perhaps the most startling example of willful audience (mis)reading is also the most explicit: George Bellows’ lithograph, The Shower- Bath. Jonathan Katz, in an extraordinarily clear and interesting catalog essay, reveals that the print sold out in three editions, suggesting more than a niche appeal. He also discusses the sexual mores of the period, and the fact that hetero-identifying men might maintain that identity and have liaisons with other men, as long as they maintained the male role. There’s a long tradition of representations of public baths as sites of sexual activity; note the faucet’s spout only barely occluding the genitals of the standing man on the left in Durer’s version, below. But the clearly depicted erection of Bellows’ protagonist, draped only to reveal it, goes considerably further than the Durer.

George Bellows 'The Shower-Bath' (1917) lithograph, 16 1/16"x 23 7/8"

Albrecht Durer ‘The Mens’ Bath’ (1497) woodcut

As mentioned above, the exhibition is rather free as to what it includes in the name of portraiture, marshaling images of anonymous as well as specific individuals; the inquiry into sexual coding clearly overrides that of genre, and is a sufficiently compelling subject. A number of abstractions were clearly intended as portraiture via attributes; Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley produced notable examples. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), one of his piles of cellophane-wrapped candy, is an intriguing revival of abstract portraiture where the resemblance is indicated, not by iconography, but by equivalence in weight. I am less convinced about Georgia O’Keeffe’s Goats Horn With Red, which appears to be included so as to allow a discussion of O’Keeffee’s consistent denial of sexual intent in her imagery.

Marsden Hartley ‘Painting No. 47, Berlin’ (1914-15) 39 1/2" x 31 5/8" Hirshhorn Museum

The exhibition includes some wonderful work whose acquaintance I was happy to make: Larry Rivers’ much-reproduced but little-seen portrait of Frank O’Hara (below), nude but for his boots and considerably larger than life:

Larry Rivers 'O'Hara Nude with Boots' (1954), 97" x 53", Larry Rivers Foundation

David Hockney’s Two Boys Together Clinging, painted in the manner of childrens’ art and done as agit-prop for gay rights when homosexual activity was against British law:

David Hockney ‘Two Boys Together Clinging’ (1961) Arts Council Collection, London

a small collage of 1965 by Robert Rauschenberg; Jasper Johns’ coded narrative, In Memory of My Feelings – Frank O’Hara:

Jasper Johns ‘In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O’Hara’ (1961), 40 1/4" x 60", MCA, Chicago

and numerous outstanding photographs, including Cecil Beaton’s arresting portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Bernice Abbotts’ assured and confrontational Janet Flanner, George Platt Lynes’ Marsden Hartley, which borrows its conceit from film and is stunning, despite its melodrama, and a group of images from David Wojnarowicz’s poignant series of self-portraits as the poet Rimbaud. A provocative pairing encapsulates the exhibition’s theme of self-presentation and disguise around gender: Christopher Makos’ well-known portrait of Andy Warhol in the none-too-convincing guise of a mannishly-dressed Marlene Dietrich. Above this hangs Deborah Kass’ self-portrait in imitation of Warhol in the guise of Dietrich in men’s clothes.

Bernice Abbott 'Janet Flanner' (1927) gelatin silver print, 9 1/16" x 6 13/16", Library of Congress

David Wojnarowicz from the series ‘Arthur Rimbaud in New York’ (1978-1910), gelatin silver print, 8" x 10"

The curators, Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward, further suggest that the social suppression gay artists experienced and their need to develop a hidden language of desire and identity was an influence in the turn to abstraction, and hence modernism, in America. I am less convinced about this – given the influence on American abstraction of Europe modernism, where identity politics had little place (unless one wants to argue for the significance of Kandinsky’s and Kupka’s origins outside major art centers) . There is certainly a history of American abstraction being used as a shield against unpopular ideas, if one thinks of the championing of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s by critics of avowedly Communist background; whether this motivated the artists they supported is open to question.

George Platt Lynes 'Marsden Hartley' (1942) gelatin silver print, 9 1/4 " x 7 1/2", Bates College Museum of Art

Hide/Seek explores a topic that has received serious attention in academic circles and recognition in popular culture, but almost none in mainstream museums, and the National Portrait Gallery should be congratulated for organizing it. Same sex desire is no longer a marginal subject in American culture. Twenty percent of the states allow same-sex marriage or domestic partnerships,  and  newspapers have been filled with tragic stories of the consequences of  bullying gay adolescents. This exhibition should not be notable or brave. But it is; and that is worth taking seriously.

Andy Warhol, Paul Anka , After Aug.1975. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., The Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. 2008.21.60

After his death, Warhol’s photos became part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and in 2008 the Foundation began putting them out into the world. It made gifts of historically significant prints to art museums and galleries that are also teaching institutions, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which received some 150 works.

PAFA has a selection of 23 Polaroid and 21 black-and-white prints on view in a small show that’s laid out, appropriately, like a time capsule or scrapbook—photos are grouped in a loose grid, with a lot of the same faces popping up multiple times.

The black-and-whites were Warhol’s personal diary photos, and they are the more visually compelling. Taken with a 35mm automatic point-and-shoot, the midsized prints may not be great art, but they’re great Warhol.

Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft and unidentified man, undated. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., The Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. 2008.21.131.

Liza Minelli, captured in profile at a party, is one of the best shots. The white light of the flash washes over the standing celebrity, who looks like she may be going out for a cigarette with what looks like a lighter in her hand. Minelli’s sister, Lorna Luft, is seated at a table, with an unidentified man standing to the left. The background is black except for a few small lightbulbs in the chandeliers. While the composition is not great—the unidentified man should be cropped out and two aggressive candlesticks in the foreground are phallic and weird—there’s a sense of the bright-burning, tragic star reminiscent of Warhol’s Jackie, Marilyn and Elvis portraits.

Polaroids were the basis for Warhol’s many commissioned silkscreen portraits, which helped make the artist a millionaire. (Emile de Antonio, a filmmaker and one-time friend of Warhol’s, tells a story in the 1987 documentary Andy Warhol about how the artist came back from a two-month trip to Germany saying he’d made 50 Polaroid-based silkscreen portraits of German industrialists and their families, each of which cost $50,000. As de Antonio says, you do the math.)

Looking at the Polaroid collection at PAFA, you may experience sudden moments of déjà vu recognizing source material for Warhol’s later works, or just because there’s many of the era’s celebrity faces in here as well: dancer/choreographer Martha Graham, Olympic skating champ Dorothy Hamill, ’60s pop star Paul Anka, starlet Pia Zadora.

Far more than The Brady Bunch or That ’70s Show, the small photo exhibition immerses you in the era with real people wearing real suits, dresses, jewelry and hairstyles. There’s an almost anthropological charm to the show, since many of the people portrayed are unknown today, their 15 minutes of fame having long expired. Pia, Hugh Downs, Neil Sedaka, Henry Geldzahler—they’re like some lost tribe from Planet Disco.

It’s ironic that Warhol—whose famous 1968 quip about 15 minutes of fame seems so creepily prescient more than four decades years later—is still exercising his 15 minutes. Warhol is bigger than an art star: He’s an art galaxy. Here, he lends another 15 minutes of light to those whose own flame burned out long ago.

Read this article at Philadelphia Weekly.

Andy Warhol Polaroids and B&W Prints
Through Sept. 12.
PAFA
Walter and Lenore Annenberg Gallery
118-128 N. Broad St.
215.972.7600

Andy Warhol's ambivalent Last Supper (1968) *credits at end

During my brief time of welcome at the Union Square North Factory, Andy asked me to interview anybody for his magazine, Interview. I decided to interview Daniel Berrigan, SJ, a poet and activist. Bob Colacello was Interview’s right-wing editor and he was skeptical. Nor did Dan understand Andy. Andy to Dan symbolized wealth and decadence. Colacello rejected the interview.

Interview was originally Inter-View. Gerard Malanga was the first editor of Inter-View. He viewed Andy’s magazine as an update of Charles Henri Ford‘s avant-garde magazine View. And consequently in his first issue of Gerard published poetry by Kenward Elmslie. Andy was annoyed. “No Poetry!” Andy ruled.

Poetry is not Pop Art. Catholicism however is always art.

Notes
The interviews were in Art NEWS, Small Press Review, and Unmuzzled OX [this is Michael Andre's own publication and also the name of his blog]. The Small Press Book Fair, incidentally, was offered a free billboard on Times Square, but Suzanne Ostro, who ran the Book Fair, knew no one who could do a billboard. At her request, I offered Andy a free table for Interview if he would. Naturally he agreed. But the other exhibitors were outraged. They didn’t understand Andy either but they knew they disliked him. The billboard was never done.

*image info: Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987). The Last Supper, 1986. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 116 x 390 in. (294.6 x 990.6 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © 2010 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Andy Warhol, pixillated, in the last scene from "Andy Warhol," the 1987 documentary by Kim Evans.

In the movie directed and produced by Kim Evans, which I watched over the weekend (from ArtHaus Musik), Brigid Berlin, one of Warhol’s Factory entourage says Andy thought death was abstract and that people just went away — they were only shopping in Bloomingdales.  So to have the artist pixillate his way off the screen talking about funerals and makeup is great.  It makes him the abstraction he thought he’d become in death.

Berlin is one of many great talkers in the 77-minute long movie that’s got just enough biography mixed in with clips of the artist, photo montages of his work and a steady stream of interviews of people through the ages who know Warhol and were friends (Emile de Antonio), early dealers (Ivan Karp) and others.

Portrait of Andy Warhol by Arnold Newman, seen at Woodmere Art Museum in 2007

Produced soon after the artist died, the movie skirts some of the seamier aspects of Warhol’s life that have been written about (the hedonistic Studio 54 years, the perhaps less than loving treatment of his mother and family, his stinginess with money) but it doesn’t pull punches when it comes to Warhol’s strengths as an artist.  The movie is enthusiastically pro-Warhol’s art, especially the early art — and the late self-portraits. De Antonio, who comes across as the most articulate and thoughtful of the many articulate and thoughtful talkers in the movie, quotes Duchamp on Warhol (to wit, What’s interesting is not the image of the soup cans but the mind that thought up the image).   De Antonio says that Warhol was all about “the thingness of things…In a thing-oriented culture Andy was a god. He was deeply religious that way. He gave us what we wanted.”

The movie also has a generous smattering of archival clips of Warhol being interviewed. He was a slippery character and always wearing the mask of the idiot savant.  He made the groundbreaking Pop images and then confessed that he didn’t know why he did so or what it all meant except that it looked nice. There’s one interview from the 1960s where he’s standing in a gallery in front of a stack of Brillo Boxes.  Ivan Karp is there next to him.  Warhol is poker faced as the interviewer asks him “Is pop art becoming repetitious?” And he stays poker faced and answers quietly “Yes.” Karp, surprised by the answer, turns to look at Warhol and they both smile like at some inside joke. Next question, “Are you going to carry on?” Warhol: “Yes.” End of interview. Karp later talks about the gallery debut of the Brillo Boxes and how they didn’t have any idea how to price them — they didn’t expect any to sell. He remembers they settled on $200 or $300 and that they sold two or three.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987). Electric Chairs, 1971. silkscreen on paper; 10 prints. ed 66/250. 33 1/2 x 48" each from PAFA New Acquisitions show, 2007

Karp is a lively raconteur and his best story is about how very early on he told Andy to lose the abstract expressionist drip marks and just go with the images.
Andy: But you must drip!
Karp: Why? Just deal with the images.
Andy: Really? That’s wonderful! I don’t think I want to drip.

Taking telephone bids for Warhol's Small Torn Campbell's Soup Can at Christie's in New York in 2006. It went for $11.8 million

Then there is the great 1966 clip, played widely (it was in Painter’s Painting I believe). Warhol is sitting on a high stool in front of a double Elvis painting and he’s being difficult.  He doesn’t want to answer the questions.  Rather, he says he’ll say whatever the interviewer tells him to say.

Andy: I wish you’d tell me the words and they’ll come out of my mouth….I think it’d be so nice.

The film deals well with the changes over time to Warhol’s entourage, from the wild and wooly 60s in the Factory with all kinds of weird hangers on, drug use and lots of great experimental art making to the 70s with the commercial portrait paintings that netted him millions of dollars and entree to the rich and famous.  And in the 1980s he sought new energy and relevance by collaborating with young artists (Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat).  He also had a couple of cable tv shows ( “Andy Warhol’s TV” in 1982 and “15 Minutes” on MTV in 1986 — both on cable tv).

There’s not much commentary on the late work.  The most memorable is Robert Rosenblum who says of Warhol’s last London show in 1986 at the Hayward Gallery (all large self-portrait heads) that the show reminded him of the great artists late in life who turned their gaze inward — Rembrandt and Van Gogh.  Rosenblum confesses he feels a little self-conscious saying that but his words stick.

Vincent Fremont, who was the Warhol studio manager at the time of the artist’s death, says in this movie what most people feel today — that Warhol will be bigger in death than he was in life, by virtue of his art and the Warhol Foundation, which gives millions of dollars to artists and institutions for creative projects that might not be fundable elsewhere.

Andy Warhol is buried in the family plot in a small cemetery in Pittsburgh. People come to visit and leave him memorial objects. This is being documented in Madelyn Roehrig's project, Conversations with Andy.

One thing is sure. Warhol’s art is ubiquitous in museums around the world and he’s one of the most loved and respected artists, by art insiders and others.  Two shows of Warhol’s late works are around this summer.  Check them out at Pafa and the Brooklyn Museum.
Andy Warhol, 1987, documentary directed by Kim Evans, available on DVD from Art Haus/Musik via Amazon

Andy Warhol Polaroids and Black&White Photographs, to Sept. 12. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building
128 N. Broad Street
Philadelphia, PA 19102
215-972-7600

Andy Warhol the Last Decade, to Sept. 12. Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn (718) 638-5000

Andy Warhol. Self-Portrait, 1986. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm). Mugrabi Collection. © 2010 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Brooklyn Museum also was hit by the need to conserve energy. Some of their galleries were closed, but the special exhibitions were all up and running–including a terrific exhibit of women’s dresses that proved to be full of ideas about bodies, aesthetics and the times in which they were made. Also up and running was a jam-packed exhibit by Kiki Smith.

In contrast to the bursting-at-the-seams Smith exhibit, the Andy exhibit takes up galleries on two floors, but with too little art and artifacts (photos of folks, video clips, copies of Interview Magazine) for too much space.The museum could have conserved a bit more energy by packing the Andys into two-thirds of the space and shutting down the extra galleries.

Not that I wasn’t thrilled by time I was done. I was.

What thrilled me were the late self-portraits in which he’s Pagliacci, playing the mournful clown. These works are chilling and ominous. In them, Andy includes skulls, or makes himself disappear practically, with mainly the spikes of his wig emerging from the penumbral canvases.

And then he really did disappear. He died in 1987!

Andy Warhol. Self-Portrait (Strangulation), 1978. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, ten parts, 16 x 13 in. (40.6 x 33 cm) each. Collection of Anthony d'Offay. © 2010 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Which brings me to the other really wonderful stuff in this show–a video of the star-studded eulogies from his funeral. Andy would have been thrilled by the parade of celebrities, the stories, the admiration and affection, as well as the somber religiosity.

In contrast much of the remainder of the show seems like a shallow shadow of his more youthful work. Silk-screened Marilyns are just repeats. The bombastic Rorschachs and Shadows, the exuberant but uneven mid-life-crisis Basquiat/Clemente collaborations and the bad-boy urine paintings seem more experimental than thought through.

On the other hand, the camouflage paintings, with their decorative motifs and unlikely color choices have some gravitas–fashion meets war and death and invisibility–invisible like the Andys in the self-portraits.

The Last Supper, Andy’s largest work ever, comes up short on visual pleasure; its translation of the Da Vinci painting into Warhol’s own Benday dotty factory reproduction is ambivalent–religious as much as irreverent. The Detail of the Last Supper (Christ 112 Times) captures with some sincerity the idea of Christ as a celebrity or a product.

Andy Warhol. Rorschach, 1984. Acrylic on canvas, 158 x 110 in. (401 x 279.4 cm). The Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchase with funds provided by Laura R. Burrows-Jackson, Baltimore; and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © 2010 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Mitro Hood

A lengthy Andy-produced video of an interview between Henry Geldzahler and Diane Vreeland fills a huge wall, top to bottom, dominating an entire gallery room. Geldzahler dithers incoherently while Vreeland, delivers statements and speaks about herself, herself, herself. But the Enormous Scale of it seems like curatorial inflation. Honestly, Warhol was not showing these people as giants.

The best of the show is in the fifth-floor galleries. I’d go back again for the self-portraits and a series of black-and-white paintings based on Pop commercial images. They drip with wit. I’d also go back for the funeral orations. In one eulogy (I think it was by a priest) the artist is quoted as saying, “I’d like to disappear.”

(Look for Roberta’s upcoming post about a documentary film, Andy Warhol).

The exhibit is up to Sept. 12, 2010 in Brooklyn. It is traveling to it’s final stop, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Oct. 17, 2010 to Jan. 9, 2011. The show was organized by the Milwaukee Museum of Art and stopped in Fort Worth, too.