MANscoop: Olga Viso will be named as the new director of the Hirshhorn, probably today. She had been deputy director. (Update: Announcement made.)
Ned Rifkin, who had been running Bunshaft’s Bunker, becomes full-time Smithsonian Under Secretary for Art (no such alliteration available).
Things that amuse me: The Hirshhorn held no press conference introducing their new director. The Corcoran, however, just held a presser to announce that they don’t have a director!
A month ago a thoughtful story in the LAT Calendar section would go uncommented upon. Sure, occasionally blogs, er, stole content from Calendar and shared it with the blogosphere (ahem, whistlin’ dixie here…), but that’s not the same as content being widely available.
So my guess is that some folks at the LAT must be quietly thrilled that they’ve started a meme that has rippled throughout the blogosphere and the MSM. Scott Timberg started it a week ago with a story headlined: “Critical condition: Once almighty arbiters of American taste, critics find their power at ebb tide. Is it a dark time for the arts, or the dawn of a new age?”
Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones picked up the meme on Sunday (you’ll need BugMeNot) and so did Dominic Papatola of the St. Paul Pioneer Press (you’ll need BugMeNot again). And at Art Basel, Marc Spiegler (who wrote about all of this for The Art Newspaper several months ago) and Jerry Saltz will take the meme across the pond. Speaking of Saltz, his write-up for the VV this week could be read as a lament that auctioneers and those-who-buy-at-auctions have more oomph in the art world — and sex — than do critics. It’s a fascinating read. Saltz slyly reminds us that while a collector can make an ass of himself by dropping $1M on a Marlene Dumas, that ultimately it’s the critic who points out how big an ass he is.) And of course the blogosphere is all over this one: Grammar.police and Modern Kicks have gone back and forth, to name two of a dozen. (And I took on a variant of this convo too.)
So I was going to leave all of this alone. Then I started reading today’s email. Everyone seems to want to talk about either this topic or the new MoMA (you hate it, you really, really hate it). So let me add two thoughts:
1.) The Whitney’s “Landscape,” a show of work from the Whitney’s permanent collection, isn’t a strict landscape show (Flavin?), but it is a reminder that the Whitney needs a place to show their permanent collection. (The Rothko and the Newman are delightful. But no Clyfford Still?) Next summer the Whitney will hang its permanent collection all summer. And it would have been neat-o if the Whitney had slipped its fantastic new Florian Maier-Aichen into the show as well. (It’s on view, three floors away.) (Related: From the Floor did the Whitney this weekend too.)
2.) I’m happy to report that Anne Truitt’s Catawba is back out at MoMA. (It was damaged several months ago.) It’s nestled up against a wall (which is how the Hirshhorn has installed their Truitt for now), but that’s a start.
That’s not to say MoMA’s off the hook regarding security problems. (Why is there reflective glass on a Brice Marden beeswax painting? I mean… talk about unclear on the concept!) I saw lots of examples of guards doing nothing — except talking on their cell phones. In the galleries. Not a supervisor in sight. The most remarkable thing I saw on Saturday was this: I was looking at the fifth-floor Don Judd (yo, MoMA: dust it!) and a woman walked up, only-semi-sneakily gripped it with two hands and pulled and pushed to see if it would move. Fifteen feet away, a guard chattered away on his cell phone and did nothing.
3.) In the middle of the Met’s gallery of 10 Clyfford Still paintings, (the 10 given to the museum in 1986 by Still’s widow Patricia) is a David Smith sculpture. Why? It’s horrible. It destroys the room. (I’m working on a magazine story about Still and the coming Still museum in Denver, so I’m extra-sensitive to all things Still at the moment.)
4.) Among the good news to come out of the resignation of David Levy at the Corcoran: The museum confirmed that it will not consider deaccessioning as a way of balancing its massive budget defecits.
5.) I’m surprised how little comment there has been to the replacement of Paul Signac’s Portrait of Felix Feneon at the entrance to MoMA’s “first” painting gallery. Van Gogh’s Portrait of Joseph Roulin has replaced it.
A few days ago I wandered through the Hirshhorn, taking a look at the latest permanent collection hanging. A couple of things jumped out:
The Hirshhorn just acquired Miguel Angel Rios’s A Morir (’til Death), a fantastic three-screen video installation showing a Central American playground game. All three screens show a contest involving spinning tops on a grid. The tops buzz around, they fall down, more tops enter, they fall down, and eventually only one is standing. It’s plainly — almost too plainly — a five-minute metaphor for life. (As I watched the video, I thought to myself that it’s about as long as a pop song.)
The other Hirshhorn gallery that I enjoyed included several paintings by Spain’s Juan Genoves. (The gallery put together by curator Valerie Fletcher.) Genoves’s paintings (and etchings) address surveillance and the power of the state. In Man, Genoves splits the canvas in two. On the top half, a fleet of shadowy, silver planes hovers. On the bottom half, in a red spotlight, a man runs, attempting to flee from or hide from the ominous planes. It feels futile.
In each of the Genoveses the H of H has up, the individual seems doomed to control by shadowy figures that seem to represent the looming, oppressive power of the state. Given what we know about American practices at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s an uncomfortable thing to think about.
Related: As Congress watches and does nothing, the Smithsonian’s physical infrastructure is falling apart, allowing objects from our nation’s history to be damaged or destroyed. Read the summary of the report here and the full report here.
Have a laugh, enjoy the weekend. Back Tuesday.
P.S. This is definitely more neat-o than King Tut. (Full disclosure: Caryn & Sean are pals.)
Because you can never be too rich or have enough Edward Burtynsky — and because the blogosphere picked up the Burtynsky meme yesterday…
Gallery Hopper speculates on whether Burtynsky’s works are environmentalist or more simply documentation of what man is doing to the planet. In his San Diego Union-Tribune review, Robert Pincus points out that Burtynsky isn’t exactly advocating for anything in these photos, he is more interested in catching grandeur-on-a-flat-surface the way 19th-century landscape painters were.
And that’s how Burtynsky talked with me about the work. Is he personally concerned with the condition of the planet? Yes. But he doesn’t load up his photos with muck and grime to call extra-attention to our destruction of the earth. He doesn’t have to.
Related: Help The OC Art Blog decide which Burtynsky to buy; Writer’s Edge thinks about Burtynsky and painting too; Z+Blog on Burtynsky and consumption; distillusions looks at Burtynsky’s Three Gorges during construction — and after.
In June, the Whitney will open the Robert Smithson retro that’s been traveling from MOCA east. Several months ago I posted that the Whitney was working on realizing Smithson’s Floating Island, and yesterday I found out that they’ve raised enough money to build the Island and to have the Island floating around Manhattan for a weekend. No word on if there will be a brownstone on it.
Speaking of Smithson, From the Floor has pictures of how dramatically the water level at Spiral Jetty has risen in the last year. When I was in Utah last fall, several years of drought had driven the Great Salt Lake about 200 yards away from the Jetty.
And speaking of Smithson again, the Hirshhorn’s Gyrostasis, deemed by the H of H types too delicate to travel for the retro, is on view now in the Bunshaft basement.
Related: Artist Anti-Defamation League.
“Having witnessed the spaz bacchanal of New York’s regional Air Guitar Championship, I’d like to see a statistical graph of the relative fortunes of performance art and air guitar. ” — Guess where.
In today’s LA Times: Christopher Knight’s thoughts on Edward Burtynsky as a dramatic updater of Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan, a “chronicler of human intervention.” It’s really good.
(The occasion is a Burtynsky show at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. A larger version of the show originated at the National Gallery of Canada (lots of cool multimedia here), and I saw an expanded version in Burtynsky’s hometown, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, last year. The show will touchdown in New York this fall at the Brooklyn Museum.)
Last year I wrote a short profile of Burtynsky for Black Book. I think he’s one our most important artists. I especially admire how his work comes out of his own biography and his own life experience (and not from an MFA degree): Burtynsky grew up in southern Ontario, the son of an auto worker who died young from cancer likely caused by exposure to PCBs. (“PCB” is, essentially, a fancy way of saying ’super-toxic oil.’) As a young lad, Ed worked in the same auto plants his father did and saw first-hand how dangerous PCBs were: Nearly everyone who had worked with his father, nearly everyone who had mucked around in the same PCBs, was dead.
I didn’t use this paragraph in my Black Book piece, but after reading Knight’s piece last night I wanted to post it. Knight points out that Watkins and others chronicled human intervention in the west. Watkins in particular photographed how Americans began to exploit one of America’s most prominent national resources: trees. Burtynsky updates their work not just formally, and not just in spirit, but by chronicling our abuse of another natural resource: oil.
Ed Burtynsky is the world’s only oil tourist. Ever since that first day of PCB cleanup at the GM plant in St. Catherine’s – they all died – Ed knew that working in industry wasn’t for him. Obviously oil drove the auto industry, but it drove everything else around Ed too. There would be no mining without the means to power the mines and transport the minerals. That was powered by oil. How are goods shipped around the world, creating the much-praised phenomenon of globalization? Oil. The ships that are destroyed and recycled in Bangladesh: What fuels those ships? Oil. The highway interchanges, truck stops, and fields of pump jacks Ed has photographed? Oil, oil, oil. Even when Ed photographed things that weren’t directly tied to oil, the connection is there. The Three Gorges Dam, which will provide one-ninth of China’s power, is considered a necessity by the Chinese because they don’t have any oil. Just dirty coal.
Related: Me on Burtynsky at Charles Cowles in 2004; tease for my Black Book story (with a great image from the Three Gorges Dam series); the remarkably good catalogue for Burtynsky’s show; Burtynsky’s own image-filled website; Burtynsky, with Bono and Robert Fischell, wins the 2004 TED Prize, complete with video and other fun.
I don’t expect that there are too many Hilton Kramer fans among MAN readers, so I’d bet that most of you skipped Kramer’s latest NYO salvo. It’s headlined. “Realist Richard Baker Confers His Anxiety On Tulips, Lemons.” The first two paragraphs are, uh, remarkable.
