Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Sometimes the best reason to look at art is being able to avoid what others have to say about it. Examples from the weekend that was:

• MOCA LA curator Paul Schimmel quoted in an incoherent NYT story on painter Laura Owens:  “This reluctance to lay claim to a fixed position might at one time have been attributed to youth but is now an integral aspect of Owens’s methodology.”
• In a talk at the Hirshhorn, Curatorman Dan Cameron repeatedly referring to “using” artists in the Istanbul Biennial. Not showing them, “using” them. In two hours of talking, Cameron never once said he liked or loved an artist’s work. He did, however, repeatedly refer to his poltical world-view and how he “used” artists to build a show about his world-view.

Some recent posts for weekend reading:

• Five favorite young Whitney Biennialists;
• Kristine Moran at Toronto’s Sis Boom Bah Gallery;
• Shameless commerce at the Philly Museum of Art;
• MAN visits the Scope fair;
• The Gugg does minimalism;
• Five favorites from the Whitney;
• Bestiality is the new black.

Or dash to your nearby newsstand/Whole Foods Market to pick up a copy of Black Book magazine, wherein I discuss Cathy Opie.

It’s 70 and sunny in DC today. Translation: Don’t expect a lot of blogging.

Remember Joywar? This is the funniest link (and the last one, I promise) yet.

Charlie Finch is not wrong. MAN proposes a solution: Let’s buy him a case of wine, send him to Bottino after a Mary Boone opening and let the sparks fly! 

Updates ongoing…

• The LA Weekly features a story on MANpal art.blogging.la. Super cool. Speaking of abLA, it tells us that LACMA is doing a late-night party to celebrate its Diane Arbus show. (Insert your own joke here.) Here in DC when the Hirshhorn stayed open for 24 hours, it was free. In LA, a party from 8-11 pm is $40.
• A Daily Dose of Architecture has the rundown on critical response to Zaha Hadid’s Pritzker. The post immediately after that one discusses James Turrell in the context of architecture. AJ’s James Russell talks about Hadid too.
• Thickeye has the lowdown on Cory Arcangel/BEIGE’s recent performance at the Whitney.
• Reader Mark Cunningham sends in some more art-related political donors: Rhona Hoffman: $1000 to Kerry, Richard Gray: $500 to Kerry, Chuck Close: $2000 to Clark, Wolf Kahn: $1,450 to Dean, Roni Horn: $1,000 to Dean, and Ross Bleckner: $2,000 to Clark.
• AJer Andrew Taylor on the Getty’s The Business of Art show.
• Filmmaker Magazine blogger Steve Gallagher on Eve Sussman’s Whitney video artwork 89 Seconds at Alcazar (via Coudal).

The Philly Inky has finally written about the role Ker-Feal could play in the Barnes saga. This story (username: ajreader@artsjournal.com; password: access) doesn’t discuss what Ker-Feal is worth or what it might be worth and it doesn’t include any real news, but if you’re a completist, take a look.

First, MANfave Cup of Chicha wrote about some Whitney faves a few days ago and I inexplicably missed it. I rarely get to link to Chicha, so go check her out.

Much has already been written about the mix of the mature artists with the younger artists at the Whitney. The most interesting thing about it to me is this: there are standard-bearers in this show, artists against whom all the young turks may be measured. For me, it makes it easier to point out some young (say, under-35) artists that I’m looking forward to following. (Cecily Brown would be on this list but she was already in my five faves list.) The ages I give is their age at the end of 2003. Here they are:

1.) Chloe Piene (31). Chloe Piene is the luckiest artist in this year’s Biennial. Her drawings are in The Masturbation Room, right next to two Cecily Brown paintings of a woman finding joy in her own dreams. The juxtaposition of Piene and Brown makes for a vibrant, energetic room. Drawn at sex-level, the shaky line of Piene’s drawings is so unsteady as to make the viewer (well, me) wonder if the drawings are made by the masturbating woman herself. While Piene’s drawings raise the question, the answer doesn’t really matter. The energy in her line is seductive in its own right. And oh yeah, her video was captivating. But those drawings…

2.) Emily Jacir (33). Jacir’s mix of conceptual art, documentary, biography and photography didn’t work for me the first time I saw it. I have no explanation for why, but it is the mark of good work that it grows on you over time. (That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.) Perhaps I’ve just been seeing all documentary-style work through the New Topographics lately, but Jacir’s work reminded me very much of New Topo California landscapes. Instead of chronicling the incursion of man into the desert, for example, Jacir chronicles the incursion of law into the dailiy life of ordinary people. As the New Topos ostensibly made neutral photographs but in reality loaded them with wistfulness (see Deal, Joe), Jacir’s photographs at first appear commonplace, but the accompanying text loads them with sadness.

3.) Amy Cutler (29). Cutler is a story-teller. There are not many story-tellers in the visual arts. There are fewer still with her visual sense of humor. Her works are installed in the Kusama Fireflies line, so they’ll either get lots of viewers or they’ll be lost behind the line.

4.) Julie Mehretu (33). Much has been made of how Mehretu’s canvases are growing and that this is a good thing. (One of her Whitney pieces, Empirical Construction: Istanbul, is her largest ever. New York Magazine (click on Top Ten Young Artists link for the Flash) is one of the outlets that noted this.) It is nice and good and rare that Mehretu can work at a large scale, but what is really wonderful about her work is that her large works hold together as tight bundles of energy just as well as her smaller works. This is a very rare thing in contemporary art.

5.) Erick Swenson (31). Like Cutler, Swenson tells a fairy-tale-style story but does it with surreal animal-centric scultpure. His Untitled sculpture of a deer on a carpet (in the first room of the show) isn’t my favorite Swenson, and it doesn’t quite belong in the room, and it was a 2001 piece in the 2004 Biennial, but it was nice to see a Swenson all the same.

• 2 Blowhards tips us off to the (early) website and trailer for the movie Modigliani.
• Via AJ, Art in America’s Lee Rosenbaum takes to the WSJ to express her frustration at people for not hating the Whitney. And for hating the Armory show. Or something like that.
• Painting and its relationship to photography: Discussed at The Daily Gusto and by Jerry Saltz.
• Stolen from abLA, Texas art zine Art Prostitute.
• Ess Eff’s Asian Art Museum welcomed 427,000 visitors in its first year. (There are other bizarre details/writing bits in this story too.) If you haven’t been, go. The permanent collection is installed beautifully.

One of the great traditions of this website is my propensity to throw out brilliant ideas that the world promptly ignores.

MAN’s latest idea is a shout-out to the National Gallery of Art. (I can hear the blue-blooders blanching already: What is a shout-out?) It involves the large, stone wall inside the atrium of the East Building of the NGA. The wall once housed a particularly awful Miro tapestry (known locally as the Snotty Miro because it resembled, well, uh, yeah) and is now the resting place for an increasingly stale Ellsworth Kelly installation.

This is a really big wall. Over time it seems to swallow anything that is hung on it. So here’s the latest MANidea: Why not make that wall a Turbine Hall-inspired space for installations by living artists? (I can hear the blue-bloods now Living artists? Oh come on, we just did Jim Dine. How many living artists can there really be?) The installations could be rotated quarterly, thus providing a bit of buzz. The prominence of the space would instantly make it a great get for artists. For the first year, MAN nominates Carter Potter, Michal Rovner, Leo Villareal, Ed Ruscha, Bill Viola or Toba Khedoori. It would also be interesting to see what Anselm Kiefer, James Turell, Michael Heizer or Robert Irwin could do with the space as well. And that’s just off the top of my head.

UPDATE: You don’t think Vogel soft-pedals stories in exchange for the excloo do you? Artnet.com noticed it in Vogel’s handling of MoMA’s upcoming sale of some significant modern works. (See the fourth item.) Artnet is right. Kind of like how Vogel pretends news is news because she’s the only reporter who bit on it… (see the following)

I tried, I really tried to lay off Carol Vogel’s morning missive. But I can’t help myself.

There is no news in Vogel’s story. Museums have been teaming up to buy art and to co-commission video art for years. So why the this-is-news-toned story?

Furthermore, video art certainly isn’t necessarily so expensive that half a dozen institutions have to team up on it. (For example, Christian Jankowski’s The Holy Artwork, which was on view at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, cost virtually nothing to produce.) Three major museums, the Tate, the Pompidou and the Whitney, teamed up to buy a Bill Viola several years ago, a joint acquisition that (as I recall but can’t find documentation of), prompted the Met to make their first video acquisition — a Viola. It’s not even news on the West Coast. SF MOMA teamed up with a European museum to commission a Christian Marclay a couple of years back.