Dan Peterman 2 'Running Tables' segment (1997-2011) Klosterfelde, Berlin

What appeared to be a group of vintage Thonet at Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid was actually Franz West‘s The Power of Papier Mache (2008), and required a hand-written sign to keep visitors from taking a seat. This was somewhat surprising, since I’ve sat upon West chairs in the cafe at the New Museum, New York and a functional couch by West sits in the entrance lobby of the Whitechaple Art Gallery, London. Such intimacy with the displays is unknown in my experience of exhibitions actually devoted to furniture design –  I’ve never understood why museums don’t include examples that can be sat upon and handled, when the pieces in question are in current production.  Comfort and functionality are surely significant criteria when judging furniture, and allowing visitors to assess those aspects for themselves would enrich their understanding of design.

mid 20th century vintage seating at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

Kurimanzutto had some mid-20th century wooden chairs (by a known designer – unfamiliar to me, however, and I didn’t record the name) which I could happily live with; for the right price, I probably could have taken them home.

stylish, but unidentified seating

more eye-catching furniture

The fair itself had some rather well-designed seating for the crowds, but the designers weren’t identified in any place I could find.

seating for tired visitors at Art Basel/Miami Beach

viewing pods for a continuously-running video program

After noting the furniture, I headed to the section devoted to the less well-established galleries where I figured I had most to learn. On the way I peeked into a small, dark, nook with a video monitor on the floor. It was screening Francis Alys‘ Sleepers (2008), arranged by Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, a slide show of photographs of variously dogs and men sleeping in assorted public places, most looking as though they had no other options. I couldn’t decide whether displaying the homeless to art crowds that could afford the $40 admission to Art Basel/Miami Beach was a salutary reminder of the less fortunate, or poor taste.

Francis Alys 'Sleepers' (2011), Kilchmann, Zurich

My eye was caught by a small floor installation: Avinash Veeraghavan‘s Short Story: Brine (2011) at Gallery Ske, Bangalore, in which miniature, wall-mounted equipment projected a video of swirling water onto a mound of salt on the floor. The dealer couldn’t provide any back story beside the salty brine of its metaphorical mixture, but perhaps its scale added to its poetic appeal. I did inquire whether Bangalore clients supported the gallery (a regular inquiry I make to galleries outside art capitals). Their sales are mostly throughout India (although not concentrated among the local population), whereas in the past they had primarily been to Europeans.

Avinash Veeraghavan 'Short Story: Brine' (2011) Gallery Ske, Bangalore

At Annet Gelink I saw what appeared to be a crumpled Financial Times on the floor; it turned out to be a tromp l’oeil by Ryan Gander, sitting beneath tiny wall shelves supporting what appeared to be 1) a piece of toilet paper and, 2) a sandwich of bread stuffed with bread. On the wall behind them, at floor level, a group of painted glass clip frames were arrayed, another Gander piece which read like a deconstructed de Stijl painting.

several pieces by Ryan Gander at Annet Gelink, Amsterdam

Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, had a tightly-coordinated presentation of work by three artists, each working with dust. In a free-standing case, measuring one cubic meter, Ignasi Aballi‘s Untitled (dust) contained a fine layer of dust beneath a plexiglass cover engraved with various texts about dust. Seven panels by Claudio Parmiggiani occupied two large walls of the space. They contained imagery of butterflies made with a technique he calls delocazione: he pinned butterflies to the panels and lit a fire, which produced smoke deposits on the areas not blocked by the creatures. Their images flickered in white over the soft, brownish-gray residue of the smoke. The work is clearly about the fleetingness of life, but was so subtly and atmospherically beautiful that the panels would make a wonderful environment in a domestic space, assuming the collector is comfortable with the knowledge that death is the inevitable consequence of life.  I was rather surprised that it hadn’t sold already. The gallery’s hand-out referred to the fact that butterflies symbolized the soul in Ancient Rome,which reminded me of a wonderful painting by Dosso Dossi in Vienna, in which Jupiter is shown as a painter, creating human souls as he paints butterflies.

Ignasi Aballi 'Untitled (dust)' at Meessen De Clercq, Brussles

wall: part of Claudio Parmiggiani's 7-paneled work; floor: Sofia Hulten's stones, reconstituted after being ground to dust

Another work I would happily display in my fantasy palace was Martin Boyce‘s large screen at The Modern Institute , Glasgow [note: just after the fair it was announced that Boyce had won the 2011 Turner Prize]. The screen was wonderful on a purely formal level, but I suspected that the forms had conceptual underpinnings, which sure enough they do: the tilting trapezoidal forms refer to a group of Cubist-influenced trees, made of concrete, that Joël and Jan Martel  designed for a garden  at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. Boyce has converted their abstraction of natural forms back into abstract construction.

Martin Boyce screen at The Modern Institute, Glasgow

painting conservator, Rusty Levenson, with Boyce screen

There was also a lot of dress (and undress) designed to attract attention, including one woman’s tee shirt which commented on the phenomenon of  fairs in general:

Mayor Nutter participates in the Sustainable City Mayoral Panel, Friday, May 6, 7-8:30pm ($10), part of the Festival of Ideas for the New City, a symposium May 4-8 at the New Museum, sponsored by the NuMu, NYU, Columbia and other New York organizations.  Follow their blog.

Mayor Michael Nutter

Among the other glamorous people involved in the Mayoral panel are David Byrne, the musician and bicycle advocate, who will do a prologue; Sergio Fajardo, mayor of Medellin, Colombia, who will talk about transforming his city from a gangster paradise to a safe city (it is reportedly one of the safest in Colombia now); and Kurt Anderson of Studio 360 who will moderate. Nutter will talk about his Greenworks Philadelphia project.

ICA Director Gould’s panel, Sunday, May 8, 11am, Gavin Brown’s Enterprize, 620 Greenwich (RSVP to Caitlin Stuart 
info@newyorkgalleryweek.com), is part of New York Gallery Week. The panel rounds up representatives from university-based museums around the country to talk about networking and other things having to do with running a major art institution these days.

Coming to a mailbox near you

Joe Boruchow, perfect mailbox adornment

Look for Joe Boruchow‘s specially-beautified mailboxes around the city. This artist’s one-man beautification project keeps on giving!

Pifa over, Warren goes to France

Warren Muller, in Paris this month

Lighting and furnishings impresario of Bahdeebahdu, Warren Muller, goes to Gargas, France, where he and his assistant Rebecca Pulver will be creating a sculpture for the luminary collection of Mathie Lustrerie. Follow this on Warren’s blog,

Hennessy Youngman at PAFA

Hennessy Youngman, mogul of YouTube, with a deep catalog of Art Thoughtz

Art Thoughtz creator Hennessy Youngman  keeps making noise. We hear he will be staging an intervention at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts this fall, dropping advice on the august institution about the role of the artist and other stuff. We don’t know what’s more exciting–Hennessy’s success or PAFA’s contemporary art explosion!

Opportunities

Sally Dennison New York NY "Ingrid", fifth place winner in the 2010 Photo Review Challenge Digital chromogenic print, 24"x16" Fifth Prize

Photographers – 2011 Photo Review Competition wants you. Juror is Robert Mann, Director of the Robert Mann Gallery in New York.  See website for more. All entries must be received by May 31, 2011.

Photographers 2-Philadelphia Photo Art Center wants you for its second annual juried show, “A Love Supreme.”  Juror: Peter Barberie, Curator of Photographs, Philadelphia Museum of Art. For more information and to apply online, see their website. The deadline is Tuesday, May 10th.

Artists in all media – The Wood Turning Center just announced call for artists for the next Challenge show — Challenge VIII Bartram’s Boxes Remix (BBR) –. Open to WTC members and non-members, covering all categories of artists — “wood turners, furniture makers, sculptors, painters, printers, video, installation, performance, and multi-media artists.” Collaborations are welcome. the project is a collaboration between the WTC and Bartram’s Garden. Create objects from wood from Bartram’s Garden–wood downed by recent storms. More information and pdf application here. Snail mail application due Aug. 30.

Artists in all media that fits in the display cases – Passionate for sports? Make art about it?  Be in the Art in City Hall sports-theme show, “Score.”  Snail mail submission. Email artincityhall@phila.gov for pdf with guidelines.  Jurors: Max Mason
, Sean Stoops, 
Richard Watson. Deadline for submission:  Received by Friday, June 3rd by 4 pm.

Corey Armpriester: What inspires your curatorial ideas?

Lauren Cornell: Its hard to pinpoint inspiration to a single moment. I show artists, write about their work, fundraise for projects, constantly—I always feel a sense of urgency about what I do. Art isn’t a day job for me, its my life.

Lauren Cornell in a photo by JD Lasica/Socialbrite.org

CA: Can you talk about the art you live with in your home?

LC: Looking around my room right now: I have a painting by Leidy Churchman on my wall, a drawing by A.K. Burns hangs over my bed, a print by Matt Keegan sits on my dresser next to next to a poster I took from A.L. Steiner that she’d made for the band Chicks on Speed, it says ‘Free Thinking is For Free.’ I have a new album by Nancy Garcia on my desk, its sitting on a drawing Kara Walker did of me on a placemat at Café Gitane. It was the first time I met her and she just drew everyone’s picture at the table; it’s the best portrait of myself I’ve ever had. I also have a calendar by Tauba Auerbach hanging in my window.

I used to run a screening series in Brooklyn,  I also juried several experimental film/video festivals and now see works by artists constantly on dvd and online, so I have an outrageous number of videos—in all different formats—in boxes in my closet, in drawers, sometimes playing. I was just looking at a video by Jem Cohen from 2003 that I have a screener of, because I was thinking about writing about it, so its mini-dv jacket sits on my desk. I could start an Ubuweb that would chart the 00’s, but I won’t.

Lisa Oppenheim, The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else, 2006 – 35mm slide projection, in Free at the New Museum

CA: As a curator what is most important to you, talent or technique?

LC: There are so many things that draw me to artists. It really depends. I think about how art relates to art history, and also to contemporary culture. I’ve noticed that I am often drawn to artists who write. I also like activist types, because I used to be more of one myself.

CA: How often do you look at the work of artists selling their art on the streets of NYC? Do you have a favorite street location?

LC: My mom buys work from artists outside the Met. I’ll look with her. Otherwise, I don’t really. I look at art on the streets of the Internet, by which I mean animated gifs, and other seemingly random, amazing visual culture.

Rashaad Newsome, Status Symbol #31 2010 – Collages on paper with frame, from Free exhibit.

CA: Can people get into the New Museum for free to see your next exhibition “Free”?

LC: Yes, every Thursday from 7-9 pm the New Museum offers free admission, but during regular museum hours, no, it costs $12 ($10 seniors, $8 students, 18 under always free). I was thinking Free as in Freedom not Free as in Free Beer to quote the founder of the open source movement Richard Stallman. “Free” doesn’t include open source works, I should qualify, but they do touch upon the the ethics, problems and possibilities of a new landscape for information.

CA: What’s the kindest thing an artist has done for you?

LC: Hard to say.

Trevor Paglen, They Watch The Moon, 2010, C-print

CA: Has the internet become the center of the art world?

LC: No, but its helped decentralize it.

The 22 artists featured in Free come from around the world, and include Lizzie Fitch, Ryan Trecartin, Takeshi Murata and Rashaad Newsome (full list and online show catalog here).  The exhibit is inspired in part  by an essay by participating artist Seth Price. The essay, “Dispersion” traces how culture is increasingly dispersed via media from print to video to the web, and how this shift has changed what public and popular mean to art making. The works in “Free” explore art’s relationship to the web.

–Corey Armpriester is a Philadelphia artist and photographer.

Liz Kelley (LK)- Hi Benjamin, thanks for taking the time to talk with me.  Can you tell me a little more about how a visitor can expect to interact with the exhibit? (NOTE: answers reflect a mixture direct quotes and paraphrasing)

Benjamin Godsill (BG)- There are several participatory installations.  Our lobby gallery is free and open to the public and it is currently hosting “I Wish Your Wish.”  Ribbons printed with wishes from visitors at previous exhibitions hang on the wall.  You take the ribbon, tie it on your wrist, and then replace it with a wish of your own.  The wish comes true when the ribbon wears off your wrist.  So by participating in this you are helping someone else’s wish to come true.

In “First Love” a police artist, who usually works with victims of violent crimes, asks visitors to describe their first love, which they will then draw.  As a participant you must search yourself for the memory of your first love and then put that memory into words.  The visitor does the drawing with their voice, rather than their hand.  Neuenschwander wanted to explore the way we can “misremember” people or events.

LK- What kind of work goes into making sure “I Wish Your Wish” stays stocked?

BG- Every six weeks a new set of ribbons is made.  Then the museum and artist work together to restock the exhibit space.

"I Wish Your Wish" detail. Photo by Benoit Pailley

LK- What do you do with the portraits created in “First Love”?

BG- They are hung on the gallery walls daily, added to those done previously.

"First Love." Photo by Benoit Pailley

LK- The installation “Walking in Circles” chronicles visitors’ movements through the gallery.  Can you tell me more about that?

BG- Circles from a half to three meters in size were painted on the floor with semi clear adhesive.  They were barely visible when they first went down, but as people walk over it dirt from your shoes gets rubbed into the circles to make them more visible.  The same circles remain throughout the exhibit.

LK- Can you tell me more about the installation “Rain Rains”?

BG- This is a marking of both time and space.  In the gallery space, twenty-five hanging buckets are matched with a companion bucket on the floor.  The top bucket slowly drips water into the bottom bucket.  It creates an amazing sound, like a rain forest.  The top buckets drain every four hours.  An aluminum ladder is part of the installation and staff and security guards use it to reset the buckets.

"Rain Rains." Photo by Benoit Pailley

LK- How do you think your involvement in these immersive installations affects the visitor experience?

BG- Everything changes everything—but we try very hard not to let our interpretation impose on the visitor.

LK- How does curating an immersive exhibit like this differ from a “traditional” exhibit?

BG- This exhibit takes a lot of staff resources.  But it is also very new and allows for a “generosity of spirit”—that is, everything is very open and plain for the viewer—there is very little hiding.  There is space for the visitor to engage and leave a mark of themselves behind.

LK- This exhibit opened recently, what types of reactions have you seen from visitors so far?

BG- People seem thrilled to interact.  They are very interested in the slight gestures that are mixed in with the bold lines of her work.  There have been positive reviews across the board.  We see a lot of excitement and interest in an artist who is not as well known in the U.S. as she should be.

LK- Benjamin, thank you for your time and willingness to take us “behind the scenes”!

The New Museum, New York, will host this installation, filling two floors and the lobby galleries now to September 19, 2010.

Julie Mehretu, Mural, detail, at Goldman Sachs headquarters, Vesey and West.

Julie Mehretu, Mural, Goldman Sachs HQ. Click picture to see the scale -- there's a person passing by the mural who looks tiny.

Commissioned by the investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs for the lobby of their new building at Vesey and West, the mural — called Mural — is 23 x 80 ft big. It’s one of two murals commissioned by the firm. The other, by Franz Ackermann, apparently cost $10M but that’s another story. (Read how unhappy the employees are with Ackermann’s mural (and Mehretu’s also).

Goldman Sachs, you must remember, was headquartered in the World Trade Center. Their new building is a block away from where the WTC used to be. We wonder if this new art, which Mehretu mentions in the article as being public art, is in fulfillment of New York’s percent for art requirement.

As for that, unless you’re an employee of GS, you, Mr. and Ms. Public, can view the mural through the office building’s plate glass windows. We dutifully looked and squinted and dodged glare and reflections in the glass and said, well, we can’t really see this very well.  Then we went inside. They’re nice at the front desk but no, you can’t pass through the security turnstiles to get a closer look.  And no, you can’t take a picture inside. And yes, security watches you like a hawk. Not very public, this public art.

Hans Hofmann's oil on canvas painting 'The Gate', 1959–60. , 75 x 48.5 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Mural — with its swoosh lines, dots of ink and flat, circus-colored patches — evokes the push-pull of Hans Hoffman (only skewed) and the diagrammatic narratives of Mark Lombardi.  Unlike those artists, however, Mehretu is cool and clinical about what she’s doing.  Mural — whose subject is markets and the history of capitalism —  is energetic yet not opinionated.  It’s neither celebratory nor angry/bitter. The work is like a Wikipedia page — researched and edited and neutral. It does convey bigness however.

Cover art for Mark Lombardi: Global Networks. Copyright Independent Curators, Inc., 2003.

Lombardi — who wasn’t working on commission for an investment bank — at least suggests a controlled burn of resentment about the constellations of corruption he was uncovering.  Mehretu’s mural, which is built up in layers — maybe 5-6 layers deep — doesn’t suggest that underneath the surface there are woes or shenanigans.

I’m glad a woman artist got this commission but ultimately the piece is a disappointment, and it’s certainly not public art.

Meanwhile, I want to say that the New Yorker magazine writers do a great job at biographical writing and that their articles about Mehretu, William Kentridge, Marina Abramovic recently give you a wonderful sense of the artist. But I wish the writers would devote some time in those articles to critiquing the work, because the overwhelming sense is of a great artist and great art. And that’s not always the case.

Skin Fruit at the New Museum

Charles Ray's towering woman in a power suit presides over this floor of the Skin Fruit show.

There’s been lots written on blogs and elsewhere about the question of letting Dakis Joannou — who is a trustee of the New Museum — show his collection (well, actually take over the museum) with this show. I will tiptoe into the fray to say, c’mon, get real. Works owned by trustees and collectors have long been shown at museums — collections from trustees often get donated to museums. Museums are built on those collections. Admittedly the NuMu doesn’t collect, but be that as it may, this show is not the ethical travesty it’s being made out to be. Right now we’re at a time when the market and money are in the driver’s seat and museums, strapped for cash for programming and eager to keep the programs flowing, need their VIP collectors all the more.  I’m putting my faith in everybody’s better angels.

Whether this show helps Jouannou by increasing the value of the works is impossible to say–why would it? It’s just one show and there are 100 works by fifty artists. I can’t see the collector dumping works to get the cash for new stock portfolio purchases and he seems actually to like his collection a lot (he’s got 1,500 works by 400 artists and he’s been collecting for 25 years) so probably unlikely to get rid of it anyway.

I am thinking of the Barnes collection and how Barnes didn’t want to let his collection travel, but that when a selection of works finally did go on the road how wonderfully it was received everywhere it went. For people who couldn’t make it to Merion to see the works it was a unique opportunity to see some great things. Likewise, works in this show will be new to many viewers who haven’t been to Greece to the collector’s DESTE Foundation — or who haven’t seen the works elsewhere.

The works seem to be crowd pleasers. There’s a distinct focus on the human form, spurred by Joannou’s targetting work in the vein of  ancient Greek statuary, kuoros (male youth) and kore (maidens). Of course today’s statues, by people like Charles Ray, David Altmejd and Urs Fischer, are a far cry from beautiful. Fischer’s work is a melting mass of wax.  Altmejd continues to make gargantuan Wookies, this one with taxidermic squirrels that seem to be gnawing holes and living in symbiosis with the giant. And Ray’s towering woman in a shoulder padded power suit is both funny and scary.

Maurizio Cattelan, waxen JFK in a coffin. Picture from the 2004 Carnegie International. This piece is now in the Skin Fruit show.

I loved the Nathalie Djurberg claymation videos (on a monitor in an alcove in the stairwell — she was there in the stairwell for another show too and I’m thinking it’s either the gulag or “her” space.) One work titled The Mother showed a group of children climbing back into the womb as the heavy breasted mother submitted passively like playground equipment. It is a strange video, a little long, but compelling in subject matter. Her other video involves a woman being pleasured by a tiger and is titled something like “things I am addicted to.” Also strange.

Skin Fruit, installation on the first floor.

Djurberg’s works are the most surprising in the lot….and that’s even including the stunning dead JFK in an open coffin, a waxwork by Maurizio Cattelan that Libby and I saw at the Carnegie International in 2004 that is a marvel of historical fabrication.

New Museum, assorted stuff in a hallway. More pleasing and full of content than the installation pictured just above.

The museum was pretty crowded when we visited and people were lingering on the three floors or work and not fleeing for the exits in horror/dismay/boredom.  I’d say the show’s a success.

Installation view, Brad Troemel's Pre-Career Retrospective 2009-2010

Stolen from thejogging.tumblr.com, "Artificial Rock Tag" 2010

The curators at Extra, Extra could have decided to merely project his tumblr site rather than use print outs.  The show, by printing the pieces, displays an idea of the art object.  When viewing artwork in person there is an aura an art object projects that creates a reaction.  This is the beauty of art that the internet could never replace.  The object Brad makes may not even exist to begin with, then it’s blogged and finally printed out.  This makes the art object 3rd removed from its actual origin.  Imagine instead of standing in front of an Anish Kapoor sculpture you are standing in front of a print out of an Anish Kapoor sculpture.  The beauty, the aura would be lost.  Another show I saw recently that recalls this mindset was Urs Fischer at the New Museum, “Marguerite de Ponty“.  On the second floor entitled, “Service à la française”, he had a gallery full of objects that were screen printed onto mirrored cubes.  The objects; shoe, lighter, cheese, exist in real life as 3D.  By appropriating them and then screen printing them onto cubes they become, 3D, 2D, 3D objects.  I should also mention Fischer had cardboard cut outs like, “Ashanti”, which takes this further, a 3D, 2D, 3D, 2D, 3D object.  Most people I spoke to were either annoyed or disappointed by Fischer’s second floor, which I thought, of course.  And I enjoyed the objects even more because of this natural reaction. Considering Brad’s work exists online, it’s about this removal. His artwork is able to resonate and actually gets even better each time it’s copied–it’s nature is conceptual. Urs Fischer’s art objects are quite expensive though, whereas, the act of printing Brad’s work suggest they are free.

Stolen from thejogging.tumblr.com and resized using GIMP, "We Flip Off an Animal Together" 2010

In “Pre-Career Retrospective”, there are quite a few middle fingers.  In one image a group of middle fingers flip off a black cat and in another, a foot is flipping you off.  A partially censored bean bag chair gives sentiment to the hilarity of censorship in general. Of course, there’s a banana.  There are a number of photoshopped images, other ways of lying and appropriating art through the net.  There’s no telling if an installation marked “Triangular Door” actually happened.  There’s also a stone carving of Thomas Knoll’s name spelled incorrectly, twice; Thomas Knolll, Thomas Knolll.  Thomas Knoll and his brother, Johnn Knoll, are the developers of Adobe Photoshop. As Brad pulls numerous references from art he does so equally in trends found while surfing the web. Shenanigans in the form of photoshopping are among them.  Like for instance this giant spider(?).

Stolen from thejogging.tumblr.com, "Setting a Dove Free in Target" Performance 2009

There’s video too.  The clips are short performances by the artist himself, ranging from physical feats pertaining to craft like a half court shot to tricks with microwaveable popcorn. Practice makes perfect.  By way of poking fun, there’s an underlying theme in both the videos and images that denounces the idea of commodity.  This solidifies his interest in a free art market, observing art by means of a website.  For example, one performance entitled, “Sprint”, takes place at a strip mall where Brad exits the “Back to Bed” shop and sprints to “AT&T”.  Some of the clips evoke the movies “Jackass” and “Jackass Number 2″, in which skateboarding daredevils from West Chester, PA, perform juvenile stunts.  Brad trumps “Jackass”-es by supplying the art form.

You can go to Extra, Extra this month to see the show or you could go to Brad’s tumblr.  This is where the true allure of this show lies, in the boundary of experiencing art through a physical space, an organization and the internet, a conceptual space that’s still in it’s adolescence. If you think about, they’re talking about changing the way art is made and exhibited reminiscent of the Fluxus art movement.  Brad’s work depends on using the accessibility of collaborating via the world wide web and creating work outside the structure of what would be considered the art environment.  His artwork beholds the charm and wit of work made during Fluxus’ stride, but has the attention span of the average web surfer, like us. What if the internet existed in 1962?  Artists have been learning a new medium through interacting online allying new spaces to support them.  Brad takes this route through Web 2.0 employing his tumblr blog and without today’s thriving D.I.Y. galleries–another essential element that flourished during the Fluxus’ era— there would be no way to see Brad’s work by means of context. A gallery makes you spend time with the artwork, conceptual or not. Online most people do not spend more than 3 minutes on one website. Most of the artwork we see is through the latter. And like I said before, the art object can be a beautiful thing.

On view, NOW, show ends March 29th.
Extra, Extra 2222 Sepviva St.
Philadelphia, PA 19125.
Gallery Hours, Fri-Mon 12-4pm.
Check their website for updates, there will be a video up of Brad Troemel’s artist talk.
eexxttrraa.com
Full disclosure, I’m performing at extra, extra next month

Urs Fischer, Service a la francaise, 2009, silk screen on mirrored-chrome steel

This show about reality and unreality in the art world and life, doesn’t quite do it with the panache of some of his bigger, bolder moves. Instead in one installation it looks more like Bloomies on the Bowery, filled with mirrored cubes that reminded us of David Altmejd and Matthew Monahan with merchandising display cases and emphasis on decay. But death where is thy sting-a-ling-aling in these pristine, fussy surfaces? For someone who is clearly such an object maker, these objects in that second floor installation–Service a la francaise–are merch for collectors. We don’t want to fault Fischer for wanting to make some money, but get back to making trouble, Urs, please.

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2009, cast aluminum and paint

Known for his architectural interventions, Urs’ architectural intervention on the 3rd floor is timid. Lowering the ceiling by two feet doesn’t even feel like a dropped ceiling, let alone an intervention. You have to know a priori that an intervention has taken place. The two objects in the room are swell, however, as objects, and the thought in the room is engaging. The melting piano–made out of aluminum–won our hearts as a great object of surprising materials.

Urs Fischer, Coupadre, 2009, fishing line, croissant and butterfly

Same for the moon over Miami croissant with butterfly sculpture, which uses a real croissant and real butterfly. The surreal tableau might have been more satisfying to a person alone in the room–as if encountering some artist holed up in a romantic cave creating romantic art, suggested our compadre Cate.

Urs Fischer, Marguerite de Ponty (right) and others, 2006-08, cast aluminum, 157.5 x 110.25 x 102 3/8 inches (de Ponty dimensions)

The giant –what to call them?–bone-turds? on four are the most successful pieces in the show. In fact the whole installation on that floor is good. The scale and aluminum material brought to mind Richard Serra, and of course Rodin and Dubuffet’s Hourloupes. Fischer’s method is pure bad boy. Take a piece of clay, give it a squeeze, and then scale it up from hand size to 216 inches tall (that’s the biggest one)–almost 20 feet tall. The pieces all have confusing people-name titles like Miss Satin and the Mallarme pseudonym Marguerite de Ponty.

Urs Fischer, Frozen Pioneer (right), 2009, cast aluminum and paint

Fischer suggests people in multiple ways, not just with names. There’s a lovely melting street lamp–pink, in cast aluminum, that’s like a person. And a pink birthday cake sculpture hovers above a subway seat–still another person. It’s the pathos of life–from decoration to digestion.

Urs Fischer, The Lock, 2007, cast polyurethan, steel pipes, electromagnets (the cake floats)

The whole show is theatrical, a space to walk into and absorb and interact with. Fischer’s big point seems to be about relationships–of people to each other and to the world around them. It’s not that life sucks. It’s just that it has shopping and death, birthdays and skeletons.

Although we found a lot to criticize in this show, we think it’s worth seeing. It’s populist in a more satisfying way than Jeff Koons. It takes into account the glitz and the harsh realities at the same time.

Fischer is an important artist with big bold moves (the catalog, “Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole,” shows some of them). On the other hand, the work here is quiet and contemplative compared to his wall smasher at the 2006 Whitney Biennial and his 2007 concrete smasher, You,  at Gavin Brown, his gallery in NY.  You won’t find Mr. Destructo in this particular show.

I’ve been thinking about how we interact with art, prompted by yesterday’s visit to Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone at the New Museum (through January 26, 2009; it was organized by Elizabeth Armstrong of the Orange County Museum of Art). The exhibition includes not only the paintings for which Heilmann is known and a number of ceramics (reflecting her initial training) but also a number of the artist’s chairs: plywood cubes not unlike Donald Judd’s chairs (well, sufficiently unlike to be his worst nightmare; these have wheels, webbed seats and backs and have been painted day-glo colors). They were intended to be used (I asked the guards) and were surprisingly comfortable, which meant that I spent a leisurely time getting to know the work. It was such a good idea that it made the conventional, seat-less art exhibition seem dumb. I can’t be the only visitor who’s more relaxed and takes more time over something when I’m sitting down. Imagine reading a novel standing.

You might think that looking at paintings seated would create problems with the viewing position, but that’s such a matter of personal taste anyway. It was said that Bill Lieberman (curator at MoMA and then the Met) used to sit in a wheelchair as he hung shows which was just the effect of Heilmann’s wheeled chairs. I’m almost six feet tall but tend to hang things low (at least 2″ lower than was standard when I last had a standard to work with), and only one of Heilman’s paintings was hung conspicuously low: Tomorrow’s Parties (1979-94), a diptych approximately 4 x 5 ½ feet that centered around my belly-button (in the installation shot below). The artist was involved in the hanging throughout, which I suspected because of the close groupings of works that a curator would never consider. The guard I talked with (himself a sculptor) said Heilmann attempted to create conversations among the paintings. By offering us a seat she allowed us in on the conversation.

Heilmann is always spoken of as a painter’s painter, and I suspect that’s because her paintings reveal so much of her thinking and efforts: her starts and stops and her revisions. They are full of pentimenti (the term art historians use for visible evidence of change, which literally means repentances); these have the effect in a work such as Hokusai (2004) of animating the painting. The small colorful rectangles set on a white ground appear to wobble a bit due to slight auras that are remnants of their minor adjustments of size and placement.

Installation view; third from left is The End of the All Night Movie, and to its right is Tomorrow’s Parties.

Viewing the paintings at a conversational pace also allowed me to appreciate the subtlety of works such as The End of the All Night Movie (1978) (in the installation view above). There’s a thin, black vertical stripe to the right of the pink rectangle that’s distinguished from the black ground by its gloss, which changes with the incident light. And below the pink rectangle two tiny pink specs and a longer dribble have escaped – the dribble reveals the trajectory of the paint.

Part of the exhibition installed on the ground floor. In the foreground is a bench inlaid with tiles, then a table with ceramic plates. The paintings on the walls are grouped in clusters.

The exhibition actually offered quite a range of viewing experiences since in addition to occupying the second floor galleries, another group of paintings and ceramic pieces were installed on the ground floor behind the café (above), which meant that you approach them from a distance and if you sit to eat (some of the café chairs are by Frans West and they also have colorful webbing) you see them through glass and at a middle distance. It’s truly the rare exhibition that is willing to join you at lunch.

The New Museum is also showing Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton (through January 11), and apparently I’m not the only one who noticed that the museum staff who greet you and sell tickets all look as though they just stepped out of Peyton’s work. Not only are they all young and beautiful, but they have the same casual, slender (slightly undernourished artists?) look of Peyton’s friends and the various celebrities she repeatedly paints. It was an amusing touch.

Hoptman’s on to unspecified new things. The press release doesn’t mention where she’ll be after the summer. The world of museum curating is a restless place and the Carnegie International seems to be a springboard. The last Carnegie International (1999/2000) was organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn and she pretty quickly left Pittsburgh to be senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco MoMA. Hmmm, San Francisco or Pittsburgh. I wonder how that figures in to curating decisions.

Quoting from the CM release:

Fogle will organize the 55th Carnegie International, which will open in May 2008. Fogle, who is currently curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, will assume his duties summer, 2005….

Fogle began his association with Walker Art Center in 1994 as a visual arts intern. In 1995, he was promoted to curatorial assistant, then assistant curator in 1997, associate curator in 2000, and curator in 2003….

Fogle received his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1986; he began his doctoral studies in the history of consciousness with an emphasis on contemporary visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1987 and advanced to candidacy in 1991. He was a lecturer in the Art History Board at the museum from 1992-1994. Fogle has also written for several exhibition catalogues and journals such as Artforum, frieze, Flash Art, and Parkett.

Fogle succeeds Laura Hoptman as the museum’s contemporary art curator.

So this morning I noticed at artforum that not only is Fogle leaving the Walker for the Carnegie but Walker’s Chief Curator Richard Flood is leaving the Walker for the New Museum. Here’s the artforum link to the story from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

And here’s the lead of that story:

Walker Art Center’s deputy director and a top curator said Friday that they are quitting for new jobs in New York and Pittsburgh. Their departures, effective later this summer, are part of a brain drain that leaves the contemporary art museum with four key posts to fill less than two months after opening a $70 million addition for which it is still raising money.

Richard Flood, 62, the Walker’s deputy director and chief curator, will be chief curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York starting in September. Curator Douglas Fogle, 41, will become curator of contemporary art and organizer of international expositions at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art in August.

Things are highly fluid in the museum world, I’d say. And today, of course, the Philadelphia Museum of Art hits the front page with a story about a $500 million expansion plan…including, and here’s the news all you art lovers, a 400-car underground parking garage. Can we say new revenue stream everyone? Read the Inquirer story by Peter Dobrin and Inga Saffron.