Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Today I’m catching a plane for the Southwest. I’m heading out to Quemado and Marfa, and I can’t wait. (Posting Wed-Fri? No idea. Maybe.) My mind is full of earth art, in part because of where I’m going and in part because I revisited Smithson at the Whitney over the weekend. Here’s what I wrote about visiting the Jetty last September:

Understandably, the greatest Smithson isn’t in the retrospective either. That work, titled Spiral Jetty, is a 6,650-ton, 1,500-foot spiraling installation of rock that extends out from the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The Jetty has long been a point of pilgrimage for art lovers; with MOCA’s exhibit and a renewed public interest in earth art, attendance is up. According to a National Park Service ranger at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, in the last couple of weeks the number of visitors to the Jetty is running three-to-five times normal.

After seeing the MOCA show, I went to the Jetty to see for myself whether it is great art or if those who have made the trip talk it up as a way to justify the trek into Box Elder County, Utah.

After flying to Salt Lake City, renting a truck, driving two-and-a-half-hours, and after finally swerving my way down a rocky, rutted road only an SUV could love, I was ready to believe that the journey begat the Jetty legend.

Once arrived, I extracted myself from my battered SUV, looked out at the Jetty and became a believer. After five minutes of staring at it my entire face was sore, just like it is after a roller coaster ride. I couldn’t stop smiling.

I walked out onto the Jetty, following its spiral curve to the center. Most art isn’t made to be touched, let alone walked on. The Jetty is. Like virtually no other artwork, Spiral Jetty transforms art viewing into a five-sense experience. I smelled brine, I heard chirps and voices carried over the flat by the light breeze; I tasted the lake on my lips, I felt the crusty salt crystals that cover the black basalt of the Jetty, and my eyes happily ignored the topographic drama around me so they could fix on the Jetty.

Until now, like most people, I had only seen the Jetty in photographs. Jetty images usually fall into two categories: aerial shots that make it look like something big enough to be seen from space, or pictures shot from over the lake, looking back at the shore. No one, save a few pilots, sees the Jetty that way. The way to see it is from land, with northern Utah before you.

In pursuit of the best view, I scrambled 300 feet up a hill of volcanic debris called Rozel Point. To my left and right mountains looked down on the lake in front of me. Islands far, far away provided visual depth, reminding me how huge the Great Salt Lake is. From Rozel Point, the Jetty is just a doodle on the landscape. It is art as ornament, Smithson-made bling-bling for Mother Nature.
 
The Jetty is one of the masterpieces of American art. It explodes the 19th-century landscape painting of Frederic Church and his contemporaries, exposing it as the art equivalent of transitional technology. Here Smithson doesn’t merely borrow land as a subject, he uses it as the canvas for his art.

A few hundred yards east of Smithson’s spiral is an old industrial jetty, used for oil exploration from the 1920’s to the 1980’s. It is rotting toward dissolution. While he didn’t write about it, Smithson saw it when he was building Spiral Jetty. He must have known that the oil jetty would eventually decay and disappear, while his artwork would survive, forming a partnership with nature. It will last.

Thanks to everyone who said hi in NYC on Friday evening. The show looks good. Go take a look if you have a chance.

1. Later this week I’m headed out to Lightning Field and Marfa. So naturally I think this is damn cool. (via greg.org)
2. On Sunday the Los Angeles Times wrote about a 100-ton Tim Hawkinson commission at the University of California, San Diego. (No, that is not a typo.) The New York Times wrote about how some people install video art in their garages. Ahem.
3. The Getty gets it again. With publicity like this, Barry “Koz” Munitz probably wishes he was off on Eli’s yacht somewhere. (Oh wait…)

I did some Ess Eff gallery/museum notes last week. Today some sightems from around the Southland…

Dmitri Kozyrev at Cirrus: Kozyrev is a landscape painter who has changed what landscape painting is. If Julie Mehretu paints globalization, Dmitri Kozyrev paints the movement that makes globalization possible.

Americans experience the fruited plain (or the fruited subdivision) at 75 miles per hour. Sometimes we fly over it at six times that speed. So that’s how Kozyrev paints it.

Each canvas is made up overlapping planes of color. Among them are distant horizons, some sunny, some cloudy, some dotted with buildings, some not. Strips of road — or maybe runway — run through the paintings, appearing to be going somewhere in the distance. Strangely, you can follow them from the inside of the paintings into the foreground, but as they get closer to the viewer they dissolve. Other landscape elements sit amongst the planes: flat farm buildings, smokestacks, freeway overpasses, onramps, valleyes, rock outrcroppings.

American landscape painting has long been about stasis, about sitting and enjoying a pretty scene. Americans do not sit and look at pretty scenes anymore. (Kudos to Cirrus for putting high-res Kozyrevs on their website. As with a lot of painting, small JPEGs don’t do it.)

Daniel Dove at Mark Moore: Dove is the perfect example of an equation artist. Richter’s squeegy + Kiefer’s sunflower + David Schnell’s geometry + Michael Wesely’s photos of process + Butterfield’s horses + Smithson’s favorite idea = Daniel Dove. These paintings are amalgamated appropriation as originality. They’re too slick, too clean, too pretty, too easy.

Amazingly, it often works. Dove’s paintings are about the buildup and then the decay of American environments. Thirty years of entropy happen instantly in one of Dove’s paintings. The things he paints, say an Applebee’s-style exubran food shack are an amalgamation of styles themselves. (Aside to MM: The painting is 96 inches tall. The JPEG doesn’t even make it to 96 pixels.)

Invader at sixspace: An artist named Banksy has been getting a lot of pub by invading art museums and installing fake paintings in galleries. The idea seems kind of lame, the exact kind of thing that a general assignment writer at AP finds exciting, but that everyone else finds tedious.

Much more clever is the work by a French artist who goes by the way-too-gimmicky name Invader. He treats built-up environments, like Los Angeles, as if they were the playing field of a video game. At night, during a recent stay in LA, he drove around the city and ‘invading’ areas by placing his little tile-and-resin critters on buildings, billboards, signs, and the like. Some critters look straight out of Pac-Man, others like pixellated versions of pop-culture iconography. (And by installing at night, Invader mimics the look-and-feel of early video games, which were made up of colored dots on black fields.) 

If you’ve driven around Los Angeles in the last week or two you have probably seen Invader’s work on LA landmarks, lightposts, on the entire side of a building (somehow), on the boardwalk, or on the beach. I was strangely thrilled to find one on La Cienega, in the Culver City gallery district.

I can’t imagine that they feel as right anywhere else. (Invader seems made for the festivalism of the biennial circuit, I suppose. Yawn.) The entertainment industry (+ Eli Broad) runs LA. Movie and TV billboards are everywhere. A few times a year a porn company invades the Sunset Strip with a risque billboard, sucks up the hoped-for publicity, and then limps away. Why shouldn’t art invade the urban environment too? (Disclosure: sixspace owners, and art.blogging.la webgods Caryn Coleman and Sean Bonner are good pals.)

If you’re in NYC, please come by this evening and say hi!

If you’re at the Getty, say in communications or in Barry Munitz’s office, you really, really, really, really, really, really, really wanted the LA Times’ expose of Munitz and the Getty to go quietly away.

Isn’t gonna happen. Today’s headline is “Senator Rebukes Getty,” but the story indicates that it isn’t just Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, who is upset with the Getty. There is much more trouble coming Barry “Koz” Munitz’s way. The Munitz/Getty story not only has traction, but it’s rolling downhill…

P.S. Grassley doesn’t screw around. When the Washington Post exposed problems at The Nature Conservancy, Grassley’s committee slappled TNC around pretty good. If I’m at the Getty and close to Munitz – or on the board — I’m aware that I’m about to get slapped around too.

Because I love reading other people do all my thinking for me:

• Permanent collection displays rock. Has anyone else noticed that artists appreciate them more than anyone?
• No matter how good a show, some exhibits are bittersweet. A survey of Margaret Kilgallen’s work, for one.
• Normally here in AtB, we try to come up with a clever way to link to a post. But Edward Winkleman has so many good posts up on his blog right now that you should just go read the whole front page. And you should do that everyday.
• Herzog & de Meuron’s Walker just opened and the de Young opens in October. Kriston Capps reminds us that there could have been a Herzog & de Meuron museum at the University of Texas, and the blow-by-blow is funny, sad, and image-filled. (Added bonus: Kriston loves Herb Caen too.)
• Newspapers are getting into culture blogs (broadly defined). First up: The San Francisco Chronicle.
• What is shiny, twisted, occasionally overheats the neighbors’ homes, houses a concert hall named after an animator/entertainment tycoon, and wears boxing gloves? It’s a Gehry-fight! In one corner: That Brutal Joint. In the other: City Comforts.
• Photos of Renzo Piano buildings, taken from above the planet; and
• Today’s funniest picture ever.

UPDATE: Plan on hold until September.

According to MANfave Andy Towle, under new DOJ regulations that go into effect today, images of military abuses at Abu Ghraib would be banned from the web. What next? Will Americans be allowed to dissent from government policy or action at all?

It’s a day o’ links:

• Major Chelsea fire. It happened behind DCKT. All galleries apparently OK. News at I Get My Show on the Road.
• WPer Philip Kennicott with a really good essay on Visual Music, which just opened here in DC.
• LA Observed discovers Ben Stiller, Julius Shulman, and the definition of ‘crap.‘ And the full story is here.
• More below (scroll down) in today’s Around the Blogosphere.

While I’ve been busy with Tut, Clyfford Still, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, the rest of the art world is focused on Venice and Basel, which aren’t so different. (I’ve been trumpeting that line for two years now, so it’s kind of nice to see some other folks agree.)

The Telegraph (UK) is the latest to agree on fairs and biennials. Still, this line from Colin Gleadell’s story reveals a remarkable amount of cluelessness about how the art world works:

The fair is considered the most important of its kind because its organisers rigorously select the dealers who can supply the best quality from early 20th-century classics to the latest art fashions.

Right, and art gallery world politics have nothing to do with it.

In Slate, Marc Spiegler writes about the Venice Biennale art fair. At Louise T.’s Artinfo.com, Sarah Douglas and unnamed contributors blogged days one, two, and three from Basel, but LTB ran it in an old-media format: a notebook. (Blog it people, blog it.) At least it was dishy and entertaining. Oh, and Artinfo also noticed that Venice is an art fair and that Basel is an uniennial.

Artnet’s Walter Robinson engagingly mixed scene reports with some critical writing in his first Venice dispatch, and tackled some broader ideas with a chattily entertaining top ten list. 

So it’s official: Art criticism and art writing is now mostly writing about the market. Why? That’s what fascinates art world folks and with only a couple exceptions it’s American art pubs who sent people to Venice.

What else do you expect when America’s major regional papers don’t send their art critics to Europe? I haven’t read anything on Venice with a Boston Globe, Philly Inky, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, or San Francisco Chronicle byline, just to name a few.

Meanwhile, NYTer Michael Kimmelman and LATer Christopher Knight (he has strippers!) and even WPer Blake Gopnik took the more traditional approach, finding actual art and ideas between the parties and dealmaking that preoccupied everyone else. Strange isn’t it — to the general-interest pubs it’s about the art, but to the art world pubs it’s about everything else.

Over at blogging.la, Vienna-based Johannes Grenzfurthner is blogging observations from around Los Angeles. His observations of American culture are unlikely, correct, and thus absolutely hilarious. His latest is titled “Aesthetics of Decay.” To see more, click here, here, and here.