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further nuttiness at 303 Gallery

all eyes

In spite of the power of my day-to-day fancies, sometimes I'm reminded that the art world is not all sweetness and light, especially when power or money is involved. There are definitely some real Grinches out there, but I'd like to hope that eventually they'll all sled back to Whoville.

I'm talking about people behind this business of camera bans. I've been arguing and demonstrating against photo prohibitions on this blog and elsewhere for years. I think I've seen and heard just about everything on the subject, but I'm finding it incredibly difficult to stomach the latest photo-ban nuttiness coming from 303 Gallery. On Wednesday Barry received an email from artist/blogger Mark Barry which included an email Mark had received from someone at 303 asking him to remove from his Flickr set two images he had taken of work by one of the artists the gallery represents in New York. The two-year-old photos were taken during the press preview for the 2006 Armory show. Barry posted this item on Bloggy yesterday. Today it's all over the art blog world and the comments are still coming.

There are some terrific arguments in defense of the right to the non-intrusive use of cameras in galleries and museums, but my favorite to this moment is the one which comes closest to my personal understanding of what I and many others are doing when we use cameras in these places. Juana B. Riquena made this comment this morning on C-Monster's post:

When I go into a gallery, I want my readers to see what I see. That’s why I’m writing my blog. If it were just a matter of J-pegs, I could write “Thomas Nozkowski, Pace Wildenstein Gallery,” and provide a link.

Also, shooting a show is part of the thinking process. I’m connecting the dots visually and verbally. I want to be able to get up close for a detail or shoot two paintings that are in a particularly interesting visual conversation.

Journalists and bloggers work in different ways. When I worked as a paid journalist, I had the luxury of planning a day’s worth of gallery visits, calling from my office, and then going to the galleries. As an unpaid (but no less serious) blogger, I don’t have that luxury. I’m a working artist who fits in visits to the galleries. I don’t have an assistant or a secretary. I do it all myself.

I do understand and appreciate a gallery’s need to protect its artists and images, but bloggers–whose reach is far greater than the average print journalist, if only because the posts remain viable in the blogosphere pretty much forever–offer far greater long-term coverage. The art fairs recognize this and issue press passes to bloggers. Some of the galleries understand and permit pictures. I’m at the point where if I can’t get permission to shoot, I’m not reporting on the event.

I would like to go beyond galleries and museums and assert here that were it possible for me to capture photographs of live concerts and performances without either audience or performers being distracted (and without interfering with my own experience of the work) I would do it in an instant and the best images would appear on this site. In the meantime, if this blog continues to concern itself (beyond the occasional perfervid political distraction) almost exclusively with the visual arts, to the relative neglect of everything else I cherish, meaning work from emerging artists in theatre, music, dance and performance, it's because on this picture screen it's the visual arts and only the visual arts that I can represent visually.

"I want my readers to see what I see."

*
303 Gallery was already on the list of galleries Barry and I maintain which prohibit photography. We will not announce or review shows which these galleries host on either our blogs or on ArtCal.

[image from freemasonry.bcy.ca]

Disarmory

attendant

art dealer

Disarmory art fair, the child of the dBfoundation, "dedicated to creating and fostering ephemeral edifices and intangible structures", had the potential for being the most fun (and genially provocative) experience of the entire New York art fair week this past March. The all-weekend party/exhibition was inspired by the original Armory Show, installed inside the 69th Regiment Armory building in New York City in 1913, for which the huge, annual New York fair, "The Armory Show" (now ten years old) was named.

A number of events teasing the arts and political establishment were scheduled both on and off premises during the three days in which Disarmory was installed at the venue on Mulberry Street (there was even a handsome, zesty newspaper) but Barry and I could only visit it on one evening. We did manage a thorough tour of the heart of the show, an curtained installation of work by ten contemporary artists, each of whom was inspired by one particular early 20th-century antecedent exhibited in the original Armory. We were eventually able to access the gallery precinct itself, overcoming the faux-barrier presented by the classic haughty guardian of the velvet ropes. Inside we spotted another poseur, a faux-diffident, conservatively-suited, make-believe "art dealer" (in fact the righteous artist Dan Levenson) perched on an elevated platform.

Meanwhile, much further uptown the fair which began in 1994 inside the slightly tatty guest rooms of the old Grammercy Park Hotel, and then moved to the historic site of the 1913 show, where it picked up its current name, sat fat and prosperous in its current incarnation on the Hudson River piers which hosted transatlantic luxury liners through much of the century which followed America's legendary introduction to modern art. During the art trade shows of this past March only Disarmory seemed to remember the party which started it all.

The artists we saw "disarming" early 20th-century monuments were Aaisha, Joan Banach, Madeline Djerejian, Jacob Dyrenforth, Peter Gerakaris, Sarah Oppenheimer, Tom Russotti, Aaron Sinift, Suzanne Treister and Treva Wurmfeld.

Aaron Sinift revisits George Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase"

Madeline Djerejian addresses Renoir's "Algerian Girl"

Peter Gerarkis's impression of impressionist Allen Tucker's "Mount Aberdeen"

Sarah Oppenheimer's work disarms the modernist statuary in a photograph of the original Armory show installation

[detail]

Beka Goedde with Glowlab at Bridge

Beka Goedde Replacement (study) 2008 etching, pencil on panel 10" x 9.5"

Beka Goedde Resettle (study) 2008 etching on panel 18" x 13"

Beka Goedde Watershed collection 2007 paper and pencil on canvas 6" x 12"

Beka Goedde For the destruction of successive suns 2007 plaster gauze, etching,
pencil, gouache on panel 28.5" x 31.5"

Thinking they looked just as mysterious and almost as tactile as cuneform texts on stone and still as delicate as the lines of an early Chinese landscape scroll, a collection of Beka Goedde's stunning etchings pulled me into Glowlab's space at the Bridge Art Fair last month.

I had already made this allusion to texture or touch, first in my mind then and just now in the rough draft of this entry, before I actually took a look at the gallery site. There I read that as an undergraduate at Columbia Goedde had concentrated on Behavioral Neuroscience and Philosophy. The note further explains:

Her thesis work focused on the sense of touch, specifically a non-dualist way of conceiving of the space of one’s body and the space surrounding oneself, on both a phenomenal and neurophysiological level.

Wherever it comes from, the work is really beautiful, and it just keeps on going on, in space and, it seems, even in time.

Some of the drawings are very small, but these are no less complex or seductive than the larger pieces; in fact they seem even more so. I like the more abstract pieces, and that's what I'm showing above, but abstraction here seems to be no more than a light gloss; these elegant etchings feel barely any remove from whatever material things may have inspired them - or not.

There are more images here on the gallery site.

[images from Glowlab]

Ena Swansea with Andre Schlechtriem at Volta

Ena Swansea One 2007 color serigraph 39.5" x 29.5" [large detail]

Ena Swansea Three 2007 color serigraph 29.5" x 39.5" [large detail]

Andre Schlechtriem showed some beautiful work by Ena Swansea at Volta. The oil and graphite paintings were very beautiful, but I think I was even more excited about the large-scale serigraph print portfolio, "4 Seasons".

Because of light problems inside the space at the fair I don't have a decent image of my own documenting any painting from the show. All of this gorgeous stuff has to be seen in person to be properly appreciated, but still I wanted to show a painting here too so I looked on line for a good copy of a work I found particularly interesting. Swansea's mammoth study, "Theory of Relativity", fills the bill very nicely, even if it is from a few years back and wasn't at Volta.

Ena Swansea Theory of Relativity 2004 oil and graphite on linen 120" x 98"

[third image from Saatchi]

Adrian Williams with Voges + Partner at Volta

Adrian Williams ALBATROSS ADO 2008 16mm celluloid silent film [large detail of video still from installation accompanied by performance]

Rarely have I been so totally engaged in a work of art as I was with Adrian Williams's "Albatross ADO" shown by Voges + Partner at the Volta fair last month. And the materials were so simple: A film was projected in softly-faded colors onto a wall in a partitioned space otherwise empty except for some unattended string instruments. The ten-minute picture was shot during a visit Williams and an artist friend made to Patagonia in 2006. In it a small house is seen being carted through the town of Ushuaia as two men perched on the roof use a broomstick to lift cables and wires, clearing the way for the structure's passage. There are a few spectators along the hilly route and two dog buddies make several appearances in the road. That's it.

Of course no small part of the work's impact was the fact that every hour on the hour the projection was accompanied by a small string ensemble of young musicians playing some very elegant atonal music in live performance.

The title of the musical piece was not provided. It may share a title with the visual element and I confess I don't know whether they exist independently. The composer was Theodor Köhler and the performers were Christoph Klein and Alma Deller on violas, Friedmar Deller on string bass.

The effect I describe might be difficult to reproduce in a collector's home (although what a wonderful thing to contemplate), or for that matter inside even a very well-endowed museum, perhaps demonstrating the artist's lack of interest in art which ends up as a commodity, sometimes even in spite of itself. A look at the gallery site and at the small pamphlet I was able to take home on this very musical visual artist's work would later confirm this impression. In addition I was pretty impressed that any gallery would present this ethereal performance inside a Midtown trade show, even if it was one of the more high-minded of the batch of fairs which arrived in New York this spring.

My Googling today taught me also that Williams may love birds as much as Barry and I do.

We stood or sat for two performances. There were a lot of young people crowded inside that space during both. Yay!

[large detail of video still from installation]

May Day!

What gives them the right?

I heard the news of our latest murderous bombing strike in Somalia on Public Radio this morning, just after the network had reminded me today was May Day. Almost in the same breath which described the massacre of at least eleven people (and perhaps many more) in a home in Dusamareb as a part of the war on terrorism, there was this interesting attachment [quoting here from the BBC story on line]:

In its annual report on terrorism published on Wednesday, the US said al-Shabab militants in Somalia, along with al-Qaeda militants in east Africa, posed "the most serious threat to American and allied interests in the region".

So which is it? Are we fighting terrorists without portfolios (i.e., non-governmental terrorists) or people who threaten our "interests"? Is it about another Red Scare or another United Fruit?

While I thank the BBC for including this information in their report, I think they might have made more of the difference between the two explanations for our rogue state's latest atrocity, especially since the dumbed-down American public knows nothing about events which happened the day before yesterday and is notoriously incapable of making simple rational connections between facts and statements without serious outside help.

But even aside from its clear immorality, this American obsession with bombing people and things we don't understand and in normal circumstances would prefer not to have anything to deal with is ineffective, and much worse. Reasonable people can see it's not in our true interest, and it accomplishes the opposite of what we intend (or at least what we are being told we intend). How are what the government's report calls our "interests" being served by these kinds of horrors? Before we try to answer that question maybe our perpetual-war shoot-em-up government should explain to us just what those interests are. I won't even bring up the question of interests of a million dead Iraqis, but are our own lives, liberties and pursuits of happiness more secure today than they were before we had our armed forces stationed on the soil of most of the nations on earth?

Almost my first thought after hearing about the overnight raid was to put it into a more objective context [very unAmerican, that]. In my mind I decided to deny for a moment my status as a privileged U.S. citizen and I threw out the (temporary) reality of American superiority in conventional arms. The somebodies in charge in Washington think they have the right to bomb people on the other side of the world whenever they decide it's the appropriate thing to do - to protect our "interests". What's to argue against the right of the somebodies in charge somewhere on the other side of the world to bomb us here? We are even more obviously a serious threat to the interests of most of the people in the world than any of them are to ours.

I believe some of them have already told us this, and I expect that bombings in Somalia and a series of aggressive wars initiated in poor countries on the other side of the planet will only persuade them of the truth of their position: That their interests are not those of the mad somebodies who author these atrocities. We can expect they will continue to remind us of this.

In 1787 Benjamin Franklin addressed the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in these words which were read to the assembly by a friend:

I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

I had read this passage long ago, but I came upon it again yesterday while reading Gore Vidal's erudite and extremely entertaining little 2004 volume, "Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson". In the next paragraphs Vidal looks ahead, and back, at the government left to us today:

Now, two centuries and sixteen years later, Franklin's blunt dark prophecy has come true: popular corruption has indeed given birth to that Despotic Government which he foresaw as inevitable at our birth. Unsurprisingly, [the current edition of a popular biography of Franklin] is now on sale with, significantly - inevitably?, Frankin's somber prediction cut out, thus silencing our only great ancestral voice to predict Enron et seq., not to mention November 2000, and, following that, despotism whose traditional activity, war, now hedges us all around.

Happy May Day.

ADDENDUM: For me one of the most painful parts of the continuing nightmare of our post-2000 world has been the deathly (literally) silence of most of the people of this country. We may repeatedly have been proven powerless, our opinions irrelevant to the conduct of the state, even when polls and balloting have finally revealed clear opposition to what is being done in our names, but how can so many still remain silent?

This bombing raid will go almost totally unnoticed, and unremarked.

[image of Howard Fast's pamphlet, with Rockwell Kent illustration, from trussel.com]

Saul Becker with Sunday L.E.S. at Volta

Saul Becker The Beginning of Every Story Seems Ridiculous at First 2008 oil on panel 29" x 35"

Saul Becker Tender in Every Joint 2008 oil on linen 29" x 35"

Although I'm now embarrassed to say I found them a bit underwhelming when I first saw them, the paintings of Saul Becker which Sean Horton showed at Volta very quickly managed to give themselves real presence. Maybe I was suspicious of the subdued earthy colors (my favorites) in these foggy landscapes, but my eyes quickly opened when I started to notice here and there oddly-natural elements of grafitti, industrial fencing and even more heavy-duty detritus. I then learned that the artist, currently represented with a solo show of large-scale ink and gouache drawings at the Lower East Side [L.E.S.] gallery which I have not yet seen, works just somewhat outside en plein air landscape practice. These scenes don't exist except in Becker's eye. The show's press release tells us, as a matter of fact, that the works, "best described as composite landscapes, combine fragments from different places and sources to create new, invented locations."

Adam Dant with Hales at Volta

Adam Dant Liberty 2008 ink on paper 95" x 72" [installation view, including the entire drawing, but cropped just inside the edges of the folio]

[detail, shot from an angle below]

Adam Dant was the artist London's Hales Gallery chose to show at Volta last month. Although the artist showed work drawn entirely from iconic sites of New York City, William Hogarth, his home town's genius hovered over these large ink drawings on paper.

Barry and I also saw a portfolio of a handsome print edition which was a version of this image, but run without including the Watteau Pierrot inside the construction scaffolding, in fact without including any figure. Dant had instead added a different character, in contrasting red ink, as a unique drawing on each print. Every one of them is a distinctly different monument substituting for the familiar "Liberty", something of an extended commentary on a subject dear to this engaged, lampooning artist.

Dant is perhaps still best known in England as the the creator of "Donald Parsnips' Daily Journal" [sample], a quirky broadsheet he wrote and drew, photocopied and handed out to fellow Londoners (and Parisians, Berliners, New Yorkers and Cairenes) every day for four years beginning in 1995.

six years of the jimlog

(I have no idea why the 99¢ store across the street has a second sign reading 69¢)

Today marks the anniversary of this blog, begun six years ago. I had conceived it as a modest but public means of expressing my dismay with the incredible folly of this country's response to the events of September 11. It was to be a more structured form for the series of emails with which I had been plaguing my friends since that date. It would also be broadcast more widely - but also less intrusively, probably a good thing for my friendships.

As I sit here today I confess that six years ago, even in the extreme distress produced by the mindless, seemingly universal jingoism of the moment, I could not have imagined the horrors we have brought upon ourselves and the world in the years which were to follow.

Due at least to lack of interest, except among those entrenched in power, I don't expect much will change after this November (I believe our republic is beyond restoration). So, for my own mental health and for the day-to-day survival of this blog, I'm grateful that I'm still crazy about a few other things that can be written about in public: The concerns of "the jimlog" will always include the arts, queerdom, history, New York and the world.

I observe another anniversary on April 27, one infinitely more important than the launch of this modest little outlet: I met Barry, my perfect partner and Wunderkind webmaster, seventeen years ago today.

Vincent Gagliostro with Margaret Thatcher at Pulse

Vincent Gagliostro After Louie, an excerpt video [stills, and large details of stills, from installation]

Margaret Thatcher showed a video by Vincent Gagliostro at Pulse. I'd like to describe it as an art trailer for a full-length film not yet produced, but even in its current form it's certainly a complete work of art. There's not a single ugly or unnecessary frame in this piece. I snapped only five images while standing in front of the video screen last month; five images appear here.

Gagliostro describes the work as:

. . . a political love story set against the backdrop of a time when the gay movement mattered, when lovers were not looking for their rights within mainstream structures and when activism existed in its rightful home: the streets.

The artist is a friend and an activist colleague of mine.

Although I'm also no stranger to the world which inspired Gagliostro in creating this film, I prefer to let the gallery press release set the scene with the help of the director's own input:

"After Louie" hits you like a time bomb . . . was there really ever a New York like that where adventure and discovery and sexual tension were still palpable and possible on the skinny island of Manhattan? Was there a meatpacking district before Pastis? When you watch Gagliostro’s video, you actually remember, for a moment, the streets and the clubs and the boys with nice abs.

In the visual and audio collage of Gagliostro's piece you recall that New York City from the not-so-distant end of the last century like it was yesterday. You remember it all not with nostalgia, but, quoting Gagliostro, "with relief that this New York actually existed and actually happened before it was too late; that despite the tragedy and loss and pain of that era there was still the nourishment of real off-line experience and the comforts of heart and sex and art and strangers and bodies and life, and soul growth before everything was already discovered, developed, trained, tracked, exploited, done, over."

There's a clip of the video here, on the artist's very beautiful site.