Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Tom LaDuke makes paintings of how we see, paintings that take our synapses through the process of seeing. Yesterday I talked about how LaDuke paints the light of LA.
The painting shown here is LaDuke’s 4 PM, 1980 (2007). It’s 45-by-60 inches. The Albright-Knox purchased it late last year.
In his new work LaDuke gives up the outdoors for artificial light. 4 PM, like other paintings LaDuke made in 2007, is apparently lit with fluorescent light. (In this LaDuke follows Robert Olsen, a young Los Angeles-based painter who who fetishizes fluorescents and rejects LA’s natural light — and the art history associated with it. An untitled 2005 Olsen is below.)
It’s hard to tell whether we’re looking at the reflection of a winter landscape in a window or if we’re looking through a window into some type of fantastical scene. (The fluorescent bulbs at the top of the painting seem to argue for the former.) Maybe it’s less important to us what we are seeing than it is how our eyes and brain work together to try to solve the visual riddle in front of us: Is it real or is it a reflected facsimile? (And are those cleaning-material bottles in the lower right? Because if they are, it would suggest that the window needs cleaning in order to…)
Maybe we’re looking at neither: Maybe LaDuke is painting a photograph. After all, the painting’s title is a kind of time-stamp, a clear reference to the past.
In LA Weekly, Peter Frank raised the prospect that LaDuke’s 2007 works are references to Gerhard Richter’s gray paintings. I think of those paintings as being about memory and the ways in which memories do and do not remain clear. (Eric Fischl, too.) Maybe that’s here in LaDuke too. But to me they’re first about looking, seeing, and how.
Related: Robert Olsen blogs, too.

From the website of a certain exhibition that should just roll over and die (or be radically re-invented):

The 2008 Biennial… presents eighty-one artists working at a time when art production is above all characterized by heterogeneity and dispersal. However, within the enormously differentiated field that we (perhaps absurdly) continue to yoke under the term “contemporary art,” certain prevalent modes of working and thematic concerns are particularly germane to the moment.

And it gets worse from there. (Yes, it’s possible.)

For years museum people have been asking me about how to make blogs work at their institutions. For years I have failed to come up with a good answer. The best I’ve been able to offer is: Hand the blog over to some people who believe in the institution’s mission, who want to mess around and try new things, and then get out of the way and let them make mistakes. (Doesn’t sound very institutional, does it?)
I can’t help but notice that none of the museums with good blogs asked me anything. Here are some favorite recent posts:

Update: Shift, one of Richard Serra’s earliest and most important earthworks, is still not protected, says Anneleen Naudts in the King Township Sentinel.

Last week the paper reported that two town councillors will serve as an ad-hoc committee that will approach developers in an effort to make sure Shift is saved. Shift is located in King City, Ontario, in exurban Toronto. (That’s the only reason I can think of why the south-of-the-border art world has yet to take much note of the preservation battle around Shift.)

Previously: Some background on the piece.

This is the best thing Christopher Knight has written since I-don’t-know-when.
Short version: Kara Walker is a “queer artist,” says Knight. Walker is deeply indebted to Lari Pittman, who was using silhouettes in a similar way — both formally and with similar content — long before Walker did. Plus, Knight says, the New York-centric curators who put the Walker show together fail to write Walker’s debt to Pittman into the scholarship in the exhibition’s catalogue. It’s just another example of California being shunted aside. (The show is at the Hammer.)
Pictured here: Pittman’s magnificent This Wholesomeness, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless (1989-90). It’s been in LACMA’s collection since 1995. There’s a detail in the jump.

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Hassel Smith is one of the most under-appreciated American painters of the post-war era. A nice Ana Davis story recounts how the San Jose Museum of Art is remembering Smith’s life and work. (He died late last year at age 91.) The SJMA has installed a memorial show and it has just acquired Bird Lover (1957).
Smith’s paintings are in the collections of lots of museums you know and love, but they rarely make it out of storage. The Hirshhorn’s No. 14 (1960) is a primo example.
Sadly Smith’s legacy has foundered. Museums that should champion him, notably SFMOMA, haven’t. (Stunner, eh?) Heck, you can’t even view Smith’s work in the collections portion of their website (or on LACMA’s). That’s too bad. Smith deserves better.

Sources tell MAN to expect a major Getty acquisition to be announced soon. When asked if the Getty was sitting on a big purchase, Getty Trust spokesman Ron Hartwig laughed and said: “Stay tuned.”

***UPDATED at 11:10am EST.***
MANscoop: J. Paul Getty Trust CEO James Wood sent out a one-page memo to Getty staff yesterday acknowledging that a reduction of Getty staff is “likely.” The Getty Trust is the largest arts philanthropy in the U.S. and the third-largest foundation overall, according to Foundation Center.
Getty Trust spokesman Ron Hartwig told MAN that expected staff reductions are a result of Wood, who has been with the Getty for just over a year, bringing the Getty in line with his priorities and are unrelated to turmoil in world financial markets. The Getty’s most recent annual report indicates that the Trust’s endowment grew from $4.3 billion in 2003 to $5.6 billion in 2006.
“This is more about long-term planning,” Hartwig said, adding that the planning process began last July, five months after Wood started as CEO. “We’ve looked at everything: Is our structure right? Is the management team right? Are the programs we’re doing correct? Is our presence in LA correct? We’ve examined all the things one might consider when you go through a strategic planning process, including how do we ensure the long-term success of the Getty knowing that expenses continue to increase. While we experience increases in the endowment, [we] still need to plan.”
MAN acquired a copy of Wood’s memo, which includes this passage:

“Everyone should assume that we will find things that need to change. It is premature to say right now what those changes might be, and what impact they might have on our current levels of
funding and staffing, but there will be an impact. Indeed, there will likely be some reduction in
our staffing levels [emphasis added], and some initiatives may be cancelled or changed as we work to prioritize the Getty’s many activities. We will be a stronger institution in the future by making decisions now to do a bit less even better.”

Wood acknowledges that the memo is his response to a swirl of rumors that have enveloped the Getty for the last week or so as the Trust and its board go through the budgeting process. In the memo Wood promises to announce the “results” of that process by the end of June. The memo does not say whether staff reductions will be limited to the elimination of unfilled positions or whether the Getty is considering layoffs.
The full memo is after the jump. More to come…

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On Wednesday I expressed my displeasure with Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos for saying that the A-K’s goal was to find “a world-renowned architect to design an extraordinary building that will attract visitors from all over the world.” I said that museum directors should stop pointing to tourism as a rationale for whatever they do. A museum’s most important audience is is its hometown crowd.
I asked Grachos about that. “I totally hear you and I understand what you’re saying,” he said. “But look at the legacy of architecture in Buffalo. It’s a phenomenal city. Frank Lloyd Wright wrote about the Darwin Martin House as his opus. The Louis Sullivan building is a phenomenally important late 19thC building and the Saarinens’ building for the Buffalo Philharmonic is personally my favorite building. The concert hall is — you just want to be in the building it’s so beautifully done. The H. H. Richardson tower is certainly an icon in Buffalo, so there’s a real legacy of important architects who have done important buildings in Buffalo. And so I think our collection is a very important modern and contemporary collection. And I think that warrants an important architect. We hope there is an architectural legacy in Buffalo and we want people to realize that.”
Grachos never said this directly to me, but the sense I got was this: The path to state and possibly other government money for a new Albright building is through regional cultural promotion, and so that’s how he’s going to talk about the A-K’s need.

More with Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos tomorrow morning. Meantime: