Writing in Slog, Jen Graves’ reflections on Chamberlain betray a sense of regret for not having looked harder. “He made the same thing so many times, it became impossible to see it,” she wrote, vowing to find the car crash in the next sculpture of his she saw. At ArtNet, Charlie Finch writes: “it is difficult to remember when Chamberlain was young, innovative and experimental…He coulda done better [sic]” in an obit that ran less than six hours after news broke of the artist’s death.
Not everyone shares Mr. Finch’s knack for discarding a piece of news – no matter how recent, sudden, or upsetting – as trivial. Others are willing to wait a while longer to make up their minds. Meanwhile, the sculptures, many of which are on long term view at Dia Beacon, aren’t going anywhere.
Though canonized for his work in body art and performance art in the 1970s, for the past four years Chris Burden has moved his skills towards moving architecture and sculpture. When looking at “Metropolis II” (2011), his room-sized, bafflingly complex road way of matchbox-sized cars, one begins to understand how life in Burden’s home city of Los Angeles can often feel so de-centered as to be placeless. “It wasn’t about trying to make a scale model.” he says. “It was more to evoke the energy of a city.” In a short documentary on the sculpture, the chiming minimalist background music played under an interview with Burden recalls a Michael Mann film. California art and Hollywood action movies apparently have a lot in common.
No less an ode to wide-open spaces is his "Beam Drop" (2008). You can't help but be reminded of the Los Angeles landscape when looking at the background of a video reposted today byHyde or Die.
Flux Factory Director Christina Vassallo with Paddy Johnson
Filled with naches, I visited the old DIA foundation location in Chelsea last night to see my editor, Paddy Johnson, honored for her work on the art blog Art Fag City. During a silent auction to benefit the Flux Factory, presenters talked about how much she has done to lend exposure to emerging artists and to improve public dialogue with honest, intelligent criticism that "meets the reader at eye level." One of my co-workers got a little teary eyed after Paddy gave a speech. It was really touching.
If you missed the auction event because of a work-related scheduling conflict, a babysitting obligation, or a crucial visit to a karaoke bar, worry not. This time of year, there are still many opportunities to help this organization. By buying the work made by their resident artists, or make a fully tax-deductible donation, you can go a long way towards supporting the work Flux Factory does giving time, mentorship, and exposure to young and emerging artists in Long Island City.
"Revolt against a tyrant is legitimate; it can succeed. Revolt against human nature is doomed to failure...Most of us have to conquer and ceaselessly reconquer the person whom we desire." - André Maurois, The Art of Loving.
AFC's critics try to blend in when they go out in public with clever disguises
“The system is destructive: Grown-ups are ignored for much of the year, cast out like downsized workers, and then given eight good movies all at once in the last five weeks of the year.” Such was David Denby’s justification for letting an early review of “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo” slip in The New Yorker before the film’s theatrical release, responding to an disapproving email from producer Scott Rudin for having violated the film’s press embargo date. Notwithstanding the terms of their disagreement (which, with Rudin’s retort, “You’re an honorable man,” sound pretty personal), Denby makes a good enough point. While you may feel guilty about buying into the late-December consumption spree, there are a few gems not to be missed.
It’s good news that MoMA will be showing a series of films by Henri-Georges Clouzot between now and Christmas. Long before today’s vogue for “extremity,” Clouzot made films that fiercely challenged audiences’ moral and emotional sensibilities, creating some of the most admirable achievements in French cinema. If, like me, you wish there were more movies like “Enter the Void,” or “L’Enfant,” ”Demonlover” or “Ma Mère,” then this is a retrospective for you.
None of those movies, incidentally, are Clouzot’s. They’ve come up in conversation among critics on large number of films from France made in the 21st century that sometimes resemble snuff. Extreme libertinism abounds in the oeuvres of Catherine Breillat and Philippe Grandrieux. François Ozon’s work frankly portrays genital mutilation and cannibalism. Gaspard Noé’s films have featured a nine-minute rape scene and a vagina cam (earning John Waters‘ ardent respect). In an essay in Artforum, James Quandt pulled together the trends toward extreme violence with the term “The New French Extremity,” disapprovingly attributing their hardcore sensibilities to something shallow and weak. Granted, these films aren’t for everybody, though in their exploration of the darker facets of the human nature, they owe an awful lot to Clouzot.
Peter Schjeldahl’s lecture at The New School was titled “The Critic as Artist,” taken from an essay by Oscar Wilde by the same name. It could have easily been called “The Critic as Rebel,” given the degree to which it reflected the worldview of a self-taught Village Voice homeboy who works at home largely because he can smoke there. A well-behaved, well-dressed sexagenarian, Schjeldahl is a cutting writer and speaker who can’t always resist wielding his talents for making people laugh out loud. Such was the case when I heard the following description of artistic movements that had emerged during his time as a critic:
“Marcel Duchamp kept being hauled from his grave and sent, zombie-like, against imaginary oppressors.”
Just to confirm: there’s always room for zombies.
How a person with such an old-fashioned reverence for art criticism can so often confront his audience with the nonsense of it all is an interesting contradiction. In Seven Days in the Art World, Schjeldahl described his profession as superfluous, the last thing a civilisation needs. He nevertheless sees the nobility in making it his life’s work, holding fast to Wilde’s observation that critics be important as artists and equally deserving of defense.
Indeed, the best artists are critics, as far as either Schjeldahl or Wilde are concerned. Both groups are bound with tasks of shock and awe, shining light on “the conventional wisdom that we didn’t know was conventional yet.” For lack of a more original way of putting it, both groups force audiences to reconsider their view of the world. ”Like the artist, the critic creates and affirms values to the degree of his or her individuality,” Schjeldahl observed on Thursday. “This is a rule without exceptions.”
With air running audibly past his moustache and through his two front teeth, he continued: “Independence of spirit doesn’t rule out the worldly-wise career with dealers and assistants and a house in the country, but I do insist that an original, burning dissatisfaction, likely inherited ignited in early childhood, distinguishes artists from their fellow citizens. The same goes for critics as artists.”
I don’t consider myself a critic, but the personal resonance I felt with Schjeldahl’s lecture hit its zenith on this point. I am someone who admires rebels, but seldom identifies as one. It’s the sort of attitude that suited me well to the University of Chicago, where, in the winter of 2005, I listened with few rebellious inclinations as a graduate student showed me some sidebars in the resume of Émile Durkheim.
A Frenchman of Jewish ancestry, Durkheim had a healthy audience of readers when Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer in the French army, was wrongfully tried and convicted of treason. Reactions to the charges against Dreyfus, who was also Jewish, were divided along cultural lines; if you were still proving your worth in ambitious society and wanted to flex your conservative muscles in public, then you echoed the frequently anti-Semitic sentiments of the anti-Dreyfusards. If the bleak, bellicose conformism that the trial represented concerned you, then you joined Durkheim, whose essay, “Individualism and the Intellectuals” described Dreyfus’ innocence as a matter of common sense. It was the duty of France’s intellectual élite, Durkheim argued, to wake up and speak up, but above all to take themselves seriously.
As with Schjeldahl’s lecture, hearing the graduate student tell this story was like watching the part of a Rocky movie where he sprints up the flight of stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was a Friday afternoon. Instead of returning to my dorm room to relax or spend time with my girlfriend, I was enraptured by visions of Durkheim stopping students in the hallways of the Sorbonne to sharply demand: “Why aren’t you studying?” I marched to the library, resolved to make something of myself. As I walked through campus, my path was crossed by a several groups of students out together on a run, their shoes crunching over patches of wet sleet and snow. They were almost completely naked. Only decorum prohibits me from evoking the image of Peter Schjeldahl jogging happily among them.
After leaving Russia in 1917, as fraught a moment as any in the country’s history, Sergei Rachmaninoff became one of many Russian Romantics who shouldered a deep ambivalence toward their native land. Living in the United States, he was frequently homesick, and put off becoming an American citizen until 1941. Even after the Communist party officially banned his work, the virtuoso musician continued to donate proceeds from his concerts to the Russian army. He longed to be buried at Villa Senar, the estate he built in Switzerland to resemble his childhood home in northwestern Russia, the outbreak of World War II made that impossible. Instead, when he died of melanoma in Beverly Hills in 1943 he was buried at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, an arbitrary plot of land about 30 miles north of Manhattan that was chosen only because it was near the home of a distant relative.
This past Saturday, as part of Performa 11, the Dutch artist Guido van der Werve led a group on a run from Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea to Rachmaninoff's gravesite. A sprightly red-haired man in his mid-30s, Guido could play Rachmaninoff's “Piano Concerto No. 3” as a preteen and was trained at a conservatory as a young man before deciding to study art instead (while learning Russian on the side). An experienced athlete — and a veteran of demanding endurance-art feats, such as standing stock-still at the geographic North Pole for 24 hours — he approached the group pilgrimage with characteristic seriousness. He stretched carefully, wore knee-high socks to prevent shin splints, and took frequent breaks for water and Gatorade that was carried by a crew of gallery staff who followed the runners' path upstate in a cozy SUV.
This was a Jeffrey Deitch kind of night, eliciting reactions that run exactly parallel to how people feel about Jeffrey Deitch. If Deitch’s penchant for campy spectacle is not to your taste, then you probably found the gala distasteful. If you admire Deitch’s approach to fundraising and attention-farming, then you’d likely describe the donor gala as a success. If you’re often overcome by imbalances of power and capital in the art world, then you won’t overlook how Deitch’s employment of Abramovic, a fellow art superstar, discouragingly affirms that order. The full post is on Art Fag City.
There have been concerns that Hard-to-Reach might be taking the form of a passive Tumblr without enough original writing. I nevertheless feel like this is worth sharing. Read the full post (and the ample exchange of comments) on Art Fag City.
Sirens are sounding as word has spread of a letter written by choreographer Yvonne Rainer to LA MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch. Rainer isn’t happy. Dismayed after hearing details of the performance artwork organized by Marina Abramovic set to take place during a donor gala for the museum, she describes the planned performance as ”degrading” and “grotesque,” denouncing Abramovic’s project as “another example of the Museum’s callousness and greed.”
Despite the broad popular support for Occupy Wall Street, its art world incarnations have been more hotly contested. Chief among the critiques of Occupy Museums, Occupy 38, and Occupy Internet has been a lack of clearly defined goals; while some of us want to tear down the walls of MoMA, others like our de Koonings well enough to prefer change over demolition. Across the spectrum, artists and critics call out for a single purpose that is objectively worth our energy and attention. One such opportunity has arisen in the dispute between Sotheby’s and the union representing its art-handling staff. The line between the good guys and the bad guys couldn’t be clearer if Sotheby’s PR staff had goatees and East German accents and one of the Teamsters looked like Bruce Willis. Read the full post.
The only offensive thing about Howard Halle’s list is that it might give people the impression that they’ve actually learned something. I really hope commenters were being ironic when they applauded the “art history” lesson available from the slideshow captions; apparently some people can’t imagine how real art history might differ from a brief paragraph with some fun facts. This list is too brief, too arbitrary, and too thin to gather anyone’s attention for more than a few minutes. It is a tremendous success. Via Art Fag City.
Irreverence — for the art world, for art history, and for the culture at large — seems to be the defining feature of “All.” The famous demonstration of this sensibility is Cattelan’s mischievous sculpture “Him” (2001) — hung towards the top of the mass of suspended works — in which Adolf Hitler is depicted in his knees, his eyes and face in an entreating pose, with his body reduced to the menace-free scale of a hobbit. (“Fun-size Fürher!” exclaimed one visitor, as his companion rolled her eyes.)
This Halloween weekend, you could shrug your shoulders, nod your head, and go see some solid sets from established live acts. For $30, you could see Big Freedia, Pictureplane, and Spank Rock are at the Mid. Hell, you could avail yourself to a $40 shake-down to see Paul Oakenfold and Paul Van Dyke at the Congress Theater.
That is, if you're into that sort of thing. And Lord bless you if you are. I'm not judging. I just think a two-day music festival at the Happy Dog Gallery is a much, much better idea. It'll be crowded, but pretty small all the same, capturing the late-autumn charm that typifies CMJ, but without the neck-craning over the bobbing heads of striped shirt types at a enormous, faceless venue.
Tonight, come before 10 to see the art on display and then see sets by Valis, Lazer Crystal, The North, and Mr. 666, as well as a DJ set by Omar Padron. This will be followed, tomorrow, byThe-Drum, Yen Tech, Sich Mang, and DJ sets by Supreme Cuts and DJ Tralala.
If you get nothing else out of this post, it should be an encounter with the 10% joking, 90% serious, 100% awesome latter-day boy band called #HDBOYZ, whose members recently made the Chicago-New York move:
The shot of girls swooning at them onstage is pretty crucial. Apparently, I'm staying at the apartment of some of their more ardent fans.
An interview that you'll really want to read: Last month, I spoke with Elizabeth Harper, the vocalist for Class Actress, whose full-length album Rapprocher dropped last week. Typing and talking at the same time has produced a rather disjointed transcript, so I'll skip to a part in our conversation where we were talking about Hurricane Irene.
Elizabeth Harper: A friend of mine was at the pier in Long Island City and the police were sending him off. I was thinking: "Don’t they know that you have to hear the water to hear your soul?" The hurricane had all these different tones to it. You need to connect with nature to hear things, things that have sounds are things that you can’t hear. We’re a city of romantics. Whatareyagonnado? There’s all sorts of people in New York. There are people who go running in the rain. They’re the stalwart, Wuthering Heights characters in the city. Howling on the cliffs, howling in the moors.
Reid Singer: A lot of people seem to dig the photo of you and the other band members on a couch. Where was that taken?
EH: Oh yes! That was taken at the Tribeca Grand Hotel. [The photographer's] name is Sarah Forbes Keough, a good friend of mine. That was one of the very first shows, I had this idea of doing these black and white paparazzi shots, where you’re catching me in this Lou Reed moment. I wanted a black and white, large flash, hotel shot.
Arthur Felling, (aka Weegee), "At the Palace Theater," ca. 1945. Image via Metmuseum.org
RS: Lou Reed?
EH: There was a specific photographer that we were referencing, it was all based on these photos. Maybe Sarah’s online. I can ask her. Oh, that’s what it was. Exactly. Don't you just love the internet? We were trying to do Arthur Felling. There were these old photographs that he used to take of emergency services and crime photos, and he later worked with Stanley Kubrick.It was a specific thing we were going for.
RS: A lot of your music is written in the 2nd person. Does it come from any aspiration to sing your own lyrics to someone (perhaps at a show, a la Phil Collins)?
EH: Yeah. The songs are directed at people. All songwriters, when you write a song, it’s a feeling that’s happened inside of you because of a dysfunction with another human. I don’t know who the inspiration was for "You're So Vain," or for Phil Collins, or for Bruce Springsteen, but these love songs were written for someone. They’re letters to different people. They were written, in a moment, about a person.
When you think about Rousseau and the book Julie, or the New Héloïse, the stir that it caused in 1761, people got so attached to these characters who were from fiction. People were like, "I sobbed when such and such happened. I can’t believe this happened." What can you say about that? The fiction and non-fiction...that’s just how you make it.
It's in Julie that you read the line, "Je suistropheureuse. Le bonheurm’ennuie." ("I'm too happy. Happiness bores me.") When I was writing the other day, I came across the quote and put it up here so that I can see.
RS: And the lyrics, "You're holding me too high," or "This is the thing you do to me," in the Journal of Ardency title track?
The new record, once you hear it, you’ll understand. It’s pretty lovable. If you think Journal of Ardency is calling to somebody, this is calling somebody out. Journal of Ardency is a note. Compared to this, Rapprocher is a full-on love letter. It’s a wider a sea of despair and longing. The Journal were kind of desires that I had and kept to myself, and Rapprocher is a deeper understanding of the feeling and coming to terms with it.
It sounds serious, but it’s pop music. It’s sleazy dance music. It’s not really though. I mean, I’ll say that, but it’s Phil Collins sleazy dance music. It’s got the same sentiment. "You know I love you but I’m playing for keeps." So intense.
I got to get some armor on if I keep referring to Phil Collins. It's a little too tragic, but people love love songs. The first time I heard Alicia Keys, I got chills.I love RnB. [Class Actress] is a white LA girl's take on RnB, gone through an 80s blender. That’s all I could say about that. I know it’s a little too self-deprecating, but, you know.
RS: How do you like the Dr. Dre / Journal of Ardency mash-up?
EH: I love it! I think it’s great. The Hood Internet did it, and it’s perfect. I just wished some big rapper would hit you up for one of your beats. It fits so perfect into this song, I totally saw it. It was so me, West Coast early 90s rap is stuff I love. I wish a good modern day rapper would hit me up.
RS: What should we listen to between now and when Rapprocher is released?
EH: A few new records come out on Sept 13th: the new Das Racist, the new Neon Indian, and the show I'm going to tonight which is Cant [aka Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear]. He put out the Journal of Ardency record for me. Those are three great records that come out the 13th. Until then you should be listening to your own mind. Or your own higher self.
David Shrigley, "Untitled (museums are Full of Crap)," 2011.
You’re probably a fan of David Shrigley and you don’t even know it. Acting in the fields of graphic art, studio art, books, music and animation, Shrigley has earned renown for making high-brow works on paper with a disturbing, punkish bite since the early 1990s. Though trained formally at the Glasgow School of Art, his drawings maintain an unskilled look, belied only by their being witty as hell. In late September, I met with Shrigley to talk about his career and the compilation What The Hell Are You Doing?: The Essential David Shrigley, which was published earlier this year and is now available in the US.
Read what he has to say about his career, his working process, his upcoming projects, and the Glasgow music scene (way more solid than I'd realized) on Art Fag City.
Starting in 2012, the commercial work of “authenticators” will be separate from the scholarly work of art historians. I doubt that art history will be affected in any significant way when we find out that such-and-such an edition of fifty prints were actually made by a studio assistant and sold for something illegal. Answering these kinds of questions shouldn’t be a major part of the Warhol Foundation’s job. Read the full post on Art Fag City.
You have a gift for unexpected simile, eg, "Snowflakes fell from the sky like tiny pieces of a snowman who had stood on a land mine." Who are your literary influences, if any?
A true writer, a good writer, refuses to be influenced by any other writer – it's cheating otherwise. My influences come from elsewhere. I'm inspired by the chord choices of Sting, the camera angles of Scorsese, a dog catching a frisbee, the satisfying gu-dum of a German-built car door shutting, the shimmy of Shakira's sweet ass. I draw on every one of these things when I'm in my study.
Read the full interview from the Guardian. I, Alan Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan is now available on Amazon.
This weekend, the Creator's Project will host a series of musical performances in DuMBO, in a program that will very much resemble a music festival. A few of the promoters will talk about how it's "so much more than that." None of the attendants will care.
At the Tobacco Warehouse by Brooklyn Bridge Park, be sure to catch Yuksek, who'll go on at 5:30 PM.
It’s very hard to comment on a list ranking anything — beer, Star Wars movies, or art world figures — without negotiating some serious sass fallout. When reading comments to the 2011 Power 100, published today by Art Review, I thought of tuning my ear by spending a few minutes listening to the trash talk that follows a competition on Drag Race. What would people have to say if Dasha Zhukova gave RuPaul a “bad girl” makeover? Or if Takashi Murakami could talk about how funky his chicken is? And who wouldn’t want to see Damien Hirst lip-sync to the Stacy Q song “Two of Hearts?”
Age of Consent have been making dark, dystopian gothic-pop influenced by bands and production duos such as The Knife, Suicide and Yeasayer. Made up of Joe Reeves and Darren Cullen, the former members of Shitdiscoposted a remix of The Beach by Chicago favorites VALIS a year and a half ago.
In only a few months of playing live, Age of Consent have taken their drum heavy live show to Italy and Austria, playing with such established names as Tiga, such ungoogleable names as The Drums and Fiction, the eminently lovable Is Tropical, and the eminently eminent Koudlam. AOC are about to embark on an extended tour that Australia would be crazy to miss. Here are some dates:
7 October - Sydney, Australia - Gaelic Hotel (upstairs)
8 October - Brisbane, Australia - Uber
14 October - Adelaide, Australia - Fowler's Live
15 October - Melbourne, Australia - Revolver Upstairs
27 October - London, UK - 93 Feet East
3 December - Genoa, Italy - Banano Tsunami
7 December - Italy, Venice - Wah Wah Club w/ Metronomy
A new remix of The Beach went up on Soundcloud today:
A reception following Tuesday's memorial service shared space with Twombly's 'Untitled' (1970), installed last week.
The Museum of Modern Art's Titus Theater was close to full Tuesday morning as a large crowd attended a memorial service for the painter Cy Twombly, who died this summer in Rome at the age of 83. Though Twombly had been struggling with cancer for several years, his passing in July came as unexpected news— even to friends and colleagues with whom he was quite close — and the loss still resonated at the gathering.
