High Times in Georgia

Consider this a temporary reprieve from another post about Hungarian art. For a change of pace and scenery, check out my belated video chronicaling my trip to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, its lukewarm exhibitions and its nice developing collection of contemporary art.



There's more on Richard Misrach here.

And yes, exhibitions can be described as lukewarm...I just can't think of another adjective right now...they're all being used on this stupid attempt at a novel.

Stupid novel.

Hungarian Art: Tamas St. Auby's Portable Intelligence Increase Museum

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Q: What is a "Portable Intelligence Increase Museum"?
A: A laptop.

No, this isn't material from a dated Sci-Fi novel. Nor is it part of some absurdist imaginary critique of Communism that the main record of Hungarian 'unofficial' art had to be gathered and held surreptitiously on one man's laptop. It might be absurd, but it is true. The main historical record of Pop art/Conceptual art/Actionism in the 1960s came from non-artist Tamas St. Auby's laptop.
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Tomas St. Auby was born in 1944 and has lived in Budapest, save for a 20 year expulsion by the Communist government. He 'quit' his art career early and begin to establish himself as a non-art artist, arranging the first Fluxus happening in Hungary (which the secret police came to and actively detailed in their notes). In 1968 he established IPUT, the International Parallel Union Of Telecommunications, a fake organization in which he has held and still holds a series of positions. His confrontational approach did not go down well with the communist authorities and St. Auby was forced to leave Hungary in the mid-70s.

He returned to Budapest in 1991 and joined the newly-founded Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 2003, he established the Portable Intelligence Increase Museum, an interactive computer-based exhibition that expose the gaps in official accounts of Hungarian art of the 1960s and 70s which he had documented. Over 1100 works by about 70 Hungarian artists have since been shown throughout Europe.

St. Auby holds a key position in the history of Hungarian art not only for the influence he continues to have on a younger generation of artists, especially through his teaching position, or his role in disseminating Fluxus happenings throughout Hungary, but for his documentation of art that would otherwise be forgotten.

As Culturebase puts it:

"St. Auby has recently been doing what Hungarian and international art historians might have yet to do. In 2002, St. Auby founded the Global Front of Anti-Art History Falsifiers of the Neo-Social Realist IPUT (NETRAF), in whose name he presents the Portable Intelligence Increase Museum. This interactive object makes the Hungarian avant-garde (from 1956 to 1976) accessible for the first time through objects, photos, films and documents."

Hungarian Art: Peter Forgács at the Venice Biennial

The most obvious person to foray with into contemporary Hungarian art is probably the country's representative at its pavilion at the Venice Biennial. 60 year-old Peter Forgács remembers living under what he calls "Communism-lite" pre-1989, and his multimedia art installations go back in time to reuse older film footage to tell stories in new ways. This is true of Col Tempo, his project at Hungary's pavilion.



Col Tempo takes film footage from a Third Reich anthropological study that attempted to discern the differences between how Jewish prisoners and Germans looked. Forgács turns all the footage into head shots, so the people are stripped of identifying clothing, and includes footage of people like himself and Rembrandt. The video head shots are placed in gilt frame and placed on a grid on the walls, like a macabre Victorian gallery or Hogwarts. People make their way through rooms of disorienting portraits staring back out at them.

Via Art in America,

"The allusive then gives way to the factual. In large-screen projections, visitors will see Wastl measure and film shirtless subjects on swivel chairs and assistants make plaster masks of the subjects’ faces. Monitors arranged in a triangle will show footage of prisoners on the ground and wrapped only in blankets, guards marching in formation and village women chatting. The anonymous faces from the earlier rooms become recognizable here in their real-life roles and settings, underscoring the uncertainty and contingency of our routine assessments of one another. A man with a warm smile, for example, turns out to be a Nazi guard. As a farewell to visitors, Forgács himself makes a series of absurd grimaces that are projected across three screens"

Forgács wanted to make his installation less about the holocaust and focus more on individual people's identities and question snap judgements.

His previous projects also question memory, time, and identity through real footage stripped of its original intent and repurposes it. The Danube Exodus, done in conjunction with The Labyrinth Project, takes original footage and represents it in an immersive environment to tell three different stories of displaced minorities. On view through August 2 at the Jewish Museum in New York, you can see Forgács work here even if you don't make in to Venice. This might just be in the cards for me today.
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Red Sky at Night...

The sky did the most incredible thing last night....did you see it?

Red sky at night, sailor's delight,
Red sky at morning, sailor's take warning.

Everything was bathed in a rose-orange glow and the clouds looked like pouffe balls. People on the street were stopping to take pictures. The old proverb must be true: I've woken up to the most beautiful day this June.

So I'm going sailing! Happy Saturday!

Ravels in Review

...huff...puff...sigh--repeat--huff...puff

Oh, is it time for Ravels in Review again? Great, well, in my disordered placement of life's task I'll put this on the top of the heap while simultaneously making coffee with one hand and juggling oranges with the other. Priorities are amazing things, no?

But to the ravels we're reviewing:

Things were junking up the floor of MoMA's atrium, ala Song Dong this time, and I started rethinking my Conceptual art prejudice.

Richard Misrach's large-format photographs are either either calming or unsettling, and I rather think the latter.

Words straight from the art dealer Betty Parson's mouth.

Vanished poet Rosemary Tonks is one of the most exciting things I've come across in a while. She's on my reading list for the weekend.

And then, of course, there was the beautifully-titled OUCH. My hand is fine, by the way. To sum up my thoughts on the newest film version of Easy Virtue--something went wrong when they tried to make it into a movie and Jessica Beil is only the obvious thing.

Stuff happened in other places, and yet no one had any suggestions for me about contemporary Hungarian art? Any links or vague, unformed thoughts?

I'll get the ball rolling: these images are from Peter Forgacs multimedia installation Col Tempo at the Hungarian Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennial.

Scattered Things in MoMA's Atrium: Song Dong and Martin Kippenberger

I was looking for Performance 4: Roman Ondak, above, which MoMA tucked away on the 2nd floor without telling any of the staff, but instead was struck by another opening. Beijing-based Conceptual artist Song Dong has taken over the atrium of MoMA with a sprawl of things. Things is the best word I have for the old furniture, shopping bags, stuffed animals, plastic containers, etc. that cover most of the floor.

(Note: I've always held a steely reserve against conceptual art; for an artist to focus on the idea behind the work above the physical form it takes strips away the very essence of the visual arts. It's like visual philosophy that downplays the visual...but I digress...)

I was talking about Song Dong at MoMA. So my first thought on seeing the new atrium?

Martin Kippenberger.



See what I mean?

Song Dong's objects, above left, are smaller and more plentiful, but you can see the same line of chairs and carefully ordered lines of ready made furniture in both her piece and Kippenberger's piece, above right. Both look like they had fallen out of an especially providential hurricane--the human hand and organizing principle behind them are removed enough to render them obtuse if you don't know the story behind them. (In Kippenberger's case, perhaps even if you do.)

Except while Kippenberger's amalgamation left me coldly bemused, I found this ragtag assortment of anything and everything old and worn rather moving. Even poetic in its row upon row shoes. It reminded me of New York City streets. Kippenberger's The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika' seems shiny and calculated in comparison.

And that was my thought process before I read the story behind Song Dong's work. The objects are actually the contents of her mother's house. After the death of Song Dong's father, her mother took her habit of not wasting anything to extremes. This exhibition was a way of letting go, both of the items and their grief. Fueled by this knowledge, the objects become more emotionally loaded the more you look at them and register the number of useless items. Knowing the story certainly changes the way you view the piece, but what impresses me most is how much was communicated by simply looking at the piece before I knew any background.

So perhaps Conceptual art can have visual integrity and I'll have to revise my opinion. Perhaps. If you have the chance to see it, I'd love to know what your reaction was.

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Calm Before the Storm: Richard Misrach at the High Museum

I was trying to think of some calming art work, because somehow it's only 10 am on a Wednesday and I'm stressed out.

I immediately thought back to the large-format photographs of Richard Misrach that I saw this past weekend at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. These large vistas of sea and surf take a god's eye point of view that renders the undulations of the waves in perfect detail. His use of clear, glossy color behind reflective glass and imposing size lets you get swallowed up in a paradisical landscape. Initially I wished I was one of those tiny figures, like the speck on the left side of this detail of Untitled #586-04, floating in clear aqua waters.

Then I realized that the god's eye point of view created an eiree sense of being alone and watched at the same time. I sensed Paradise could be ruptured at any moment. And then I decided I was much too much stressed for this early in the morning mid-week and went to make myself a cup of tea.

Untitled 642-02

Stuff Happening in Other Places

Yes really--stuff happens in other places. It's very distracting. So some stuff I've come across on the web:

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• Via Cultural Snow, the street art of anonymous graffiti artist in Tehran (image above) who considers his art social, not political, and separately National Art Hate week in Britain.
  
• Early photos of Barack Obama at a gallery in LA from Lisa's History Room.
  
• An amazing collection of artist's sketchbooks online. There's so much to check out. Thanks JafaBrit!
  
• LG tipped me off to lost princesses, photographs of Disney princesses who have grown up and entered the real world. Rather depressing really.

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As for myself, I've been doing some research on Hungarian art, specifically Tamas St. Auby and his Portable Intelligence Increase Museum. So the question is: Is anyone up on the current art scene there? Or street art after the Double-tailed Dog Party?

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From the Horse's Mouth: Betty Parsons

Airport time is reading time for me, and so this past weekend was a chance for me to delve into The Art Dealers, a book profiling 42 art dealers that is surprisingly interesting. Based on interviews done in the 80s, the dealers speak about art and the artists they have worked with in a personal, knowledgeable way. These people shaped much of the art scene as we know it today, and Betty Parsons is a great example of how.

Betty Parsons opened her eponymous gallery in 1946 on 57th Street where she showed early Abstract Expressionists and championed many artists who had "The New Spirit" until her death in 1982. She is mainly remembered for showing Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and other New York school painters. The quotes of her below really struck me, from the beginning of white box galleries to vandalism (!) to women as dealers.

“I was the first to put up plain white walls in a gallery. Why? Well, showing these great big pictures of Abstract Expressionists, I got to thinking about the look of the gallery itself. In those days galleries mostly had velvet walls and very Victorian decoration. I decided to hell with all that, and the artists agreed. When you’re showing a large painting by Jackson Pollack, the last thing the work needs is a plush velvet wall behind it. The white was very severe; I wanted nothing else in the gallery, no furniture, except maybe one chair of bench. That was the idea, to have it as simple as possible, and it did catch on.”

“The worst thing was vandalism. People would come in, and when they left I would notice four letter words scribbled across Pollack paintings, Newman pictures. They would try to cut the paintings too.”

“When I started my gallery, nearly all art dealers were women: people like Marian Willard and Martha Jackson. It’s surprising how many women there were given the creative push to contemporary art, the pioneering and promoting. And there still are: Virginia Zabriskie is terrific, Paula Cooper has a beautiful gallery full of good artists. I think women are more creatively oriented than the male dealers, who are all money, money, money. That’s the first male consideration. My first thought is: Is the artist any good? If he’s good, and he doesn’t sell, that doesn’t change my faith in him.”

Vanished Poet Rosemary Tonks

Rosemary Tonks, like the name Blinky Palermo, is a name I wish I had, or at least had invented. Tonks isn't the familiar name it once was, when the bearer was a promising writer in London in the 1960s. Now her name echoes like the ghost she has become of her own life. (It's a rather ungainly thud of an echo, but still.)

Tonks wrote two slim volumes of verse that you'd be hard pressed to find copies of. They are out of print and will not be republished. The author has forbidden her publisher to reprint it. Her writing reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay's in its tone and themes, but with a much updated form and sensibility.

Tonks now lives (the rumours go) in a shack in a garden in the countryside, where she accepts no visitors and she does not write. It's been so for 30+ years. There are rumours that she joined a Christian cult, which you might imagine from some of her writing was a major life change. This spirituality forbids her to write, and is given as the reason why she will not allow her work to be reprinted. Her struggle reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkin's struggle between his work as a priest and his passion for writing. I worship art more than anything, and I only wish we had more from both authors. Born in 1932, she's seems on course to die as much of a mystery as she is now.

But I salvaged a poem for you here, from The Iliad of Broken Verses. It's something I quite enjoyed reading, and if you like, I can send you more.

Actually, I decided to include a second that I also liked very much.

THE SOFAS, FOGS, AND CINEMAS

I have lived it , and lived it,
My nervous, luxury civilization,
My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.

…Their idea of literature is hopeless.
Make them drink their own poetry!
Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.

It’s quiet; just the fresh, chilly weather…and he
Gets up from his dead bedroom, and comes in here
And digs himself into the sofa.
He stays there up to two hours in the hole – and talks
-- Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to everything
It’s……damnably depressing.
(That great lavatory coat…the cigarillo burning
In the little dish…And when he calls out: "Ha!"
Madness! – you no longer possess your own furniture.)

On my bad days (and I’m being broken
At this very moment) I speak of my ambitions…and he
Becomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,
Morose, sour, mouldering away, with lockjaw….

I grow coaser: and more modern (I, who am driven mad
By my ideas; who go nowhere;
Who dare not leave my frontdoor, lest an idea…)
All right. I admit everything, everything!

Oh yes, the opera (Ah, but the cinema)
He particularly enjoys it, enjoys it horribly, when someone’s ill
At the last minute; and they specially fly in
A new, gigantic, Dutch soprano. He wants to help her
With her arias. Old goat! Blasphemer!
He wants to help her with her arias!

No, I…go to the cinema,
I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum,
…the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,
The screen is spread out like a thundercloud – that bangs
And splashes you with acid…or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,
And in the silence, drips and crackles – taciturn, luxurious.
…The drugged and battered Philistines
Are all around you in the auditorium…

And he…is somewhere else, in his dead bedroom clothes,
He wants to make me think his thoughts
And they will be enormous, dull – (just the sort
To kep away from).
…when I see that cigarillo, when I see it…smoking
And he wants to face the international situation…
Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!

-- All this sitting about in cafés to calm down
Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature!
The idiotic cut of stanzas; the novels, full up, gross.

I have lived it, and I know too much.
My café-nerves are breaking me
With black, exhausting information.

Story Of A Hotel Room

Thinking we were safe-insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom...
...And who does not know that pair of shutters
With all the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests-just guests of one another's senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit...
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
-If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

OUCH

See how stringent our security regulations in airports have become. (Thank goodness my Iphone takes pictures, otherwise my family would never have believed me.)

In other news, Easy Virtue is a better play than movie, at least in its most recent rendition. Hitchcock made an 1928 version of Noel Coward's play--

Excuse me, I seem to have burned the inside of my hand showing my mom how to use her nifty new teapot. If anyone is familiar with glass teapots where you put the loose-leaf tea down a well in the center, and then press a button to open the inside of the teapot up to the hot water outside, let me know.

We're a little confused down here as to how you are supposed to keep holding the button down. (Over the palm of your hand is incorrect.)

Ravels in Review Friday: Atlanta Edition

Well, my dreams of travel have taken me somewhere after all: home to Georgia for a long weekend. And guess what? It's hot and humid, just the way I like it. (As opposed to cold and rainy New York).

Georgia O'Keefe's Peach and Glass [Georgia...Peach. Get it? The humidity makes me punny]

I felt like Santa Claus comig down with my backpack full of presents yesterday. It's my mom's birthday Saturday, Father's Day Sunday, and my sister's birthday Wednesday. Most of my old friends are here somewhere, and hopefully I'll be able to see some of them athough it looks like I have a pretty jam-packed schedule AND I want to go the High Museum of Art. But we'll see.

As to the ravels in review, we covered our cultural bases this week. We started with poetry, ala the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, then got a dose of theater, with the Public Theater's production of Twelfth Night, and rounding us off we talked about art old (nude Mona Lisa old, that is) and new (with Clay Ketter's most recent work) with a dab of the wistful travelogue I mentioned.

Happy Friday!

No 'Eye': Clay Ketter's Gulf Coast Slabs

I missed the proverbial boat. Yep. I went on about how great Clay Ketter's work is yesterday, and payed special attention to his most recent work, called Gulf Coast Slabs. These large-format photographs from the air of post-Katrina building foundations are still beautiful, and I would still love to see them in person. In fact, I could have.

As it happens, Ketter's work was at the Volta art fair NY. I was at Volta, they were at Volta. (And I was disappointed in the offerings there.) Granted, art fairs make for a hectic sensory overload that could have clouded my judgement, but even so I think my 'eye' isn't quite up to par. I've been reading The Art Dealers, a book profiling important American art dealers, and they all talk about having a "good eye" and being able to see things before other people do. I can't even see what's in front of my face! Guess I need to rule out art dealer as a career path.

Anyhow, some more beautiful images for you.

Where I Want to Be: Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden

It's summer, which should be full of travel, the Venice Biennial just passed, and my eyes are looking abroad to see where I would like to be for some art viewing.

Where I Want to Be #1: Stockholm's Moderna Museet

Sure, the low, long building with its whimsical outdoor structures perhaps looks a bit dated and much like any other museum. But the Moderna Museet has been known for legendary shows (solo exhibitions of Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Edward Kienholz in the 1960s; "5 New York Evenings" in 1964 with Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, Öyvind Fahlström, Merce Cunningham) under Director Pontus Hulten. It's currently putting up what looks to be another great show, and one I'd love to see: a Clay Ketter retrospective.

Clay Ketter Retrospective, 30 May - 16 August 2009
"Clay Ketter was first acknowledged for his Wall Paintings (1992-99), plasterboards with spackle over screws and joints. They were both strikingly beautiful abstract paintings and a sort of fabricated ready-mades, less finished than the wall they were hung on. Trace Paintings (1995-) is another series of paintings that resemble wall surfaces being redecorated. Traces of wallpaper, shelves and electric wiring evoke a sense of uncertainty in the onlooker as to whether this is a real wall or a painting of a wall."

I wasn't familiar with Ketter's work until I saw it on the Moderna Museet's website. I love it when I discover an artist who just does really beautiful work! As it happens, the artist is with the same gallery, Sonnabend, that Hulten bought a very important Warhol from in the 60s. Small world, or things coming back around?

The image above is from Ketter's latest series, Gulf Coast Slabs, taken when the artist travelled with a photographer to Louisiana post-Katrina. Ketter has lived in Sweden for the past twenty years and is considered a Nordic artist, but is American. The image is actually an ariel view of house foundations. Ketter's work is a beautiful balance of material and painting, of abstraction and the real. There's a Minimalist aesthetic to his works that makes his ready-made objects poetic. Ah well, I can at least dream of travelling.

Not to mention, if you do happen to be in the area, it makes for a lovely afternoon to stroll past the National Gallery and bridge over to Skeppsholmen where the Moderna Museet is, surronded by museums and park space. Swedish summer days are cool, especially beneath the trees, and just on the other side of the bridge is a coffee stand with strong black coffee, cinnamon buns, and, of course, ice cream.

A Nude Mona Lisa?

Via the Discovery channel, "Leonardo da Vinci, in a Renaissance version of Mad Magazine, may have painted his famous Mona Lisa in a number of ways, including nude. Now, a painting has surfaced that looks much like the original, sparking debate over just how far the master took his iconic painting.

The newly revealed painting, hidden for almost a century within the wood wall of a private library, shows a portrait of a half-naked woman with clear links to the famous (and clothed) Mona Lisa. The work, which documents suggest was at least based on never-seen similar work by Da Vinci, is now on exhibit at the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, where Da Vinci was born in 1452. The lady in the portrait does not exactly resemble the original Mona Lisa, but there is little doubt it has parallels with the painting hanging at the Louvre museum in Paris."

While it's not likely to have been painted by Leonardo, evidence suggests it may be a copy of his work. Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa between 1503-1506. This manner of protraying the female nude is not typical for the time. Although Renaissance painters were rediscovering the human body and looking back to Greek and Roman sculpture, their nude creations were ideal forms representing gods or virtues. This is a woman, rather than a reclining Venus or a weak, defenseless Eve. And she's looking looking straight at you. How bold.

Maybe that's what she was smiling about.

Shakespeare in the Park's Twelth Night

I braved the rain this past Friday to stand in line for tickets to see the first play of the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park season, Twelfth Night. The experience both of getting tickets and seeing the play is unique. As I suggest in the video, the play is easily worth the process--I waited for tickets for only 3 hours!



I lucked out with clear skies and a faithful, delightful performance that had the audience laughing every other minute. The acting and the music was excellent, as I hope you can see in the video. Unfortunately, the Ravels in Motion crew is not used to shooting at night (and I was more interested in the play, to be honest) but hopefully you get enough of an idea to get in line at 8 AM in the upcoming weeks and see it for yourself.

Did I mention tickets were free? Anne Hathaway can sing? It's on the lake at Central Park?

Savage Beauty: Edna St. Vincent Millay's Life

To be a biographer must be a great thing, I for one find the lives of the writers and artists whose work I love as interesting as their work. I've been deep into Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like other poets I love, she difficult, demanding, calculating, celebrity-mongering, brilliant poet of love affairs and bohemianism and addictions. I swear I loved her for writing before I knew she had a place between Baudelaire and Byron in the annals of poete maudit.

I followed the poet from girlhood, where she was an ambitious poet, to adulthood, when she remained an ambitious child in an aging shell. The fairy tale Millay helped create of herself, as the little girl poet from Maine who gives voice to a generation of Jazz babies, a seductive whip of a girl sleeping with anybody whose anybody, falls apart.

Let the rest of us, she grows old. She doesn't take it well. Chronic drinking develops into addiction rather than lifestyle, and a habit for morphine steals her middle age. She becomes a hollowed out thing who could no longer write. And this she records in a notebook even as she stops writing all else. What time she wakes up, what she consumes, everything until she goes to bed.

A fascinating blog called Daily Routines pieces together how various distinguished people past and present lived. Gerard Richter woke up at 6:15 am to fix his family breakfast before starting work in his studio at 8 am. The writer Haruki Murakami for example runs marathons after working all morning. Millay in her early 50s was quite the opposite:

Chart
Miss Millay
Dec. 31, 1940

Awoke 7:30, after untroubled night. Pain less than previous day.
7:35- Urinated- no difficulty or distress
7:40- 3/8 gr. M.S. hypodermically, self-administered in left upper arm...
7:45-8- smoked cigarette (Egyptian) mouth burns from excessive smoking
8:15- Thirsty, went to the ice box for a glass of water, but no water there. Take can of beer instead which do not want. Headache, lassitude...
8:20- cigarette (Egyptian)
9:00- "
9:30- Gin Rickey (cigarette)
11:15- Gin Rickey
12:15- Martini (4 cigarettes)
12:45- 1/4 grain M.S. & cigarette
1.- Pain bad and also in lumbar region. no relief from M.S.

(M.S. is a morphine shot.)

Her devoted and charming husband Eugene took care of her like she was a little child through all this, even developing his own morphine addiction to see what she was going through by attempting to quit. After he died of lung cancer in his 50s, Edna was left alone and she kicked her morphine habit, although she continued to use prodigious amounts of alcohol and other pills. Yet she was finally beginning to write poetry again. Then, a year and half after Eugen died, she fell down the stairs of her home and broke her neck.

Ravels in Review Friday

Here we are again, two weeks into June and no sign of the rain letting up. Rain, rain, rain....

Anyhow, what did we talk about this week? Looks like we were all over the place.

• I gave a lone bad review of Summer Hours.

• No consensus was reached over a top 200 artist list by the Times. (No Surprise there).

• My idiocy became prominent at Stars Like Fleas on MoMA Monday Nights.

• Some old lady stole a notebook of Picasso drawings in Paris, or something like that.

• My formula for how to destroy a cocktail party or create change looks like art critic Jerry Saltz's Facebook page.

This constant rain is especially annoying as I was going to go get tickets to Shakespeare in the Park this morning. Now I have a conundrum. Not only if I should wait in the rain, but is the performance going to get rained out? Alas, our frailty is the cause of such concern, as Viola would say, and I think I'm go find an anarok and trudge out there.

How to Destroy A Cocktail Party, or Create Change

If I were to give you instructions on how to destroy a cocktail party at the Venice Biennial, I would give you a list like the Top 200 Artists and let the hourdes of opinionated art lovers devour each other. Why is Rauchenberg at number 13 compared to Francis Bacon's number 12 spot?, etc. To offend even further, the artists at the party probably didn't make the list! You then might smile oilily and ponder aloud why so few woman are on the list? Chaos would ensue.

If you wanted to stimulate such a phenoma online, look no futher than Jerry Salt'z Facebook page, where the art critic for New York Magazine post a short message to his friends questioning the scanty representation (4% !) of women in the permanent collection of pre-1970 art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Thousands of people responded on Facebook. Normally, discussion of top artists is mere cocktail party banter and the Guerilla Girls have seen their heyday, but in this case the social forum of Facebook took things one step further. Here is a discussion more like an online protest against MoMA.

The screen shot captures Jerry posting the following:

Your comments over the last 2 weeks have been truely amazing. MoMA gave its initial response. Next, I'm sending myself to Venice (yes, I pay my own way, D’oh!). Around June 17 we'll re-engage & ask for a response from the Curator of the Perm. Coll. of P. & S. Ann Temkin. We won’t talk about the entire museum or new buildings. We will say it is time to install A LOT more work by women on 4 & 5 NOW, no matter what.

MoMA had noticed the thousands of comments on Saltz's Facebook page and the outcry there was enough to galvanize an official response via Facebook!

MoMA had responded to Jerry, per the below, thus opening a dialogue:

Jerry Saltz (New York, NY) wrote on June 3, 2009 at 1:49pm

This is to all of you from MoMA (you all need to ask yourselfs if this is enough; we also have to ask how we also have to ask how many TOTAL works of art MoMA counted to arrive at its figure; and what gallereis were excluded):
Hi all, I am (Kim Mitchell) Chief Communications Officer here at MoMA. We have been following your lively discussion with great interest, as this has also been a topic of ongoing dialogue at MoMA. We welcome the participation and ideas of others in this important conversation.And yes, as Jerry knows, we do consider all the departmental galleries to represent the collection. When those spaces are factored in, there are more than 250 works by female artists on view now. Some new initiatives already under way will delve into this topic next year with the Modern Women's Project, which will involve installations in all the collection galleries, a major publication, and a number of public programs. MoMA has a great willingness to think deeply about these issues and address them over time and to the extent that we can through our collection and the curatorial process. We hope you'll follow these events as they develop and keep the conversation going.

To which Jerry adds:

Jerry Saltz (New York, NY) wrote on June 3, 2009 at 2:01pm

A note to all of you: Now is NOT the time to "get tired" or back off. You all have MoMA on the line, right here, right now! Even if you contributed to previous conversations, you owe it to yourselves to say something HERE. Keep it SHORT, direct, and respectful. Artists, this is your chance. Even those of you just 'listening in... Read More.' Now is the time. I promisde you MoMA will not PUNISH you (if they do, tell me); it will RESPECT you for speaking up. All 4900 of you need to STEP UP NOW, otherwise ...

So a comments section on a Facebook page has gotten the attention of MoMA, and opened a dialogue. This strange public campaign headed by Jerry Saltz, art critic by day, Knight-on-Charging-White-Steed by night, is going to discuss including more works by female artists in the permanent collection and is now trying to plan a letter. God help them, the thousands of them trying to decide on what exactly to say, which sounds near impossible, and, to be cynical, I would be shocked if MoMA actually did anything but talk with them.

Still it is an amazing use of social media as its most vocal, and it is amazing to think what is often idle, angry talk could generate something positive. I hope something comes of it. And all this from the man who doesn't have a blog because it would be too much work...

Picasso Notebook Stolen in Paris

Via the BBC:

A sketchbook of some 32 drawings by Pablo Picasso worth about 8m euros ($11m; £6.8m) has been stolen from a museum in Paris, police have said. The theft from the Picasso Museum was discovered on Tuesday afternoon but the exact time and circumstances have yet to be determined. Initial investigations showed the sketchbook was held in an unlocked display case on the first floor.

Police sources told the Agence France-Presse news agency that the theft would probably have been committed between Monday evening and noon on Tuesday. There were no signs of a break-in an no alarms were set off. The museum was closed at the time, although there was a private viewing on Tuesday.

My first thought is: how awesome would it be if the theif were some rich, old lady with cleptomaniac impulses at the private viewing? The kind with embarrassed younger relations who had to keep returning silver spoons from dinner parties. She would just have to nod drowsily as if she were falling asleep, then quickly stick her hand in there and put the notebook in her pocketbook.

While that's a ludicrous scenario, you would think museums could spare funds for security. A lock would be an especially low-tech way to go. While I gloried at how close you could be to so many Picassos at Gagosian's new space in Chelsea, now I wonder if the small white box can provide enough security.

K

The Good, the Idiotic and the Brilliant: Stars Like Fleas at MoMA Monday Nights

Museums really do try not to be stuffy, quiet libraries of art. Point in case, MoMA Monday night events. Yesterday, it included an excellent Brooklyn band, Stars Like Fleas, which sounded a bit like Radiohead and a bit like a college friend's experimental rock band. While it was a lovely evening to wander about the sculpture garden, or, oh, I don't know, look at some art, I was glued to the lobby. As you can seen from the pictures, I was hardly alone. That's the good.

What's the idiotic? Me, taking photos on my Iphone. Yes, I did get a lovely, HD Flip video camera for my birthday which would have beautifully conveyed the atmosphere and great music. But I left it at home. Why yes, I do have a handy digital camera that also shoots video as well as much better pictures than these. I left that at home too. I hadn't planned on going to MoMA; I just felt like popping in.

Which leads me to the brilliant: museum memberships. I have one at MoMA, and I walked into the concert last night without a ticket. That's awesome in itself. Plus I work within walking distance of MoMA, so I can pop in on my lunch break or after work without paying $20. I just walk past the ticket lines. The way I visit MoMA, I figure it has paid for itself 5X over. And did I mention you also get free movie passes to any of their screenings?

I'm starting to sound like a salesman, so I'm going to stop.

L

Top 200 Artists (20th Century to Now)

a poll from The Times, based on 1.4M votes. Some of it's not surprising (Hello Picasso), some of it is. Like most polls, it is deceptive. What does it mean to be a top artist? Is that similar to being a good artist? Most influential?

Italicised comments rather obviously my own.

Rank/Artist/Number of Votes
1 Pablo Picasso 21587
2 Paul Cezanne 21098
3 Gustav Klimt 20823....hmmm? between Cezanne and Monet and above Duchamp, Matisse, Pollack?--not on my list
4 Claude Monet 20684
5 Marcel Duchamp 20647
6 Henri Matisse 17096
7 Jackson Pollock 17051
8 Andy Warhol 17047
9 Willem De Kooning 17042
10 Piet Mondrian 17028
11 Paul Gauguin 17027
12 Francis Bacon 17018......... so high up? maybe Saltz wasn't being hyperbolic here
13 Robert Rauschenberg 16956
14 Georges Braque 16788
15 Wassily Kandinsky 16055
16 Constantin Brancusi 14224
17 Kasimir Malevich 13609
18 Jasper Johns 12988
19 Frida Kahlo 12940....woman number 1
20 Martin Kippenberger 12784....like Bacon, I wonder if these artists rank so high because of recent splashy retrospectives?
21 Paul Klee 12750
22 Egon Schiele 12696
23 Donald Judd 12613
24 Bruce Nauman 12517
25 Alberto Giacometti 12098
26 Salvador Dalí 11496
27 Auguste Rodin 8989
28 Mark Rothko 8951
29 Edward Hopper 8918
30 Lucian Freud 8897
31 Richard Serra 8858
32 Rene Magritte 8837
33 David Hockney 8787
34 Philip Guston 8786
35 Henri Cartier-Bresson 8779
36 Pierre Bonnard 8778
37 Jean-Michel Basquiat 8746
38 Max Ernst 8737
39 Diane Arbus 8733......woman number 2
40 Georgia O'Keeffe 8714 .......woman number 3
41 Cy Twombly 8708......who knew so many people liked Twombley as much as I do? : )
42 Max Beckmann 8690
43 Barnett Newman 8643
44 Giorgio De Chirico 8462
45 Roy Lichtenstein 7441
46 Edvard Munch 5080
47 Pierre Auguste Renoir 5063
48 Man Ray 5050
49 Henry Moore 5045
50 Cindy Sherman 5041....woman number 4, 4 women total in the top 50
51 Jeff Koons 5028........I'm not terribly sad to see Koons out of the top 50, but is Cindy Sherman a better artist? or just more of a 'top artist'?
52 Tracey Emin 4961....woman number 6
53 Damien Hirst 4960
54 Yves Klein 4948
55 Henri Rousseau 4944
56 Chaim Soutine 4927
57 Arshile Gorky 4926
58 Amedeo Modigliani 4924
59 Umberto Boccioni 4918
60 Jean Dubuffet 4910
61 Eva Hesse 4908....women number 7
62 Edouard Vuillard 4899
63 Carl Andre 4898
64 Juan Gris 4898
65 Lucio Fontana 4896
66 Franz Kline 4894
67 David Smith 4842
68 Joseph Beuys 4480
69 Alexander Calder 3241
70 Louise Bourgeois 3240.....women number 8
71 Marc Chagall 3224
72 Gerhard Richter 3123
73 Balthus 3090
74 Joan Miro 3087
75 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 3084
76 Frank Stella 3078
77 Georg Baselitz 3048
78 Francis Picabia 3046
79 Jenny Saville 3034......woman number 9
80 Dan Flavin 3024
81 Alfred Stieglitz 3017
82 Anselm Kiefer 3010
83 Matthew Barney 3005
84 George Grosz 2990
85 Bernd And Hilla Becher 2980....woman number 10
86 Sigmar Polke 2966
87 Brice Marden 2947
88 Maurizio Cattelan 2940
89 Sol LeWitt 2926
90 Chuck Close 2915
91 Edward Weston 2899
92 Joseph Cornell 2893
93 Karel Appel 2890
94 Bridget Riley 2885....woman number 11
95 Alexander Archipenko 2884
96 Anthony Caro 2879
97 Richard Hamilton 2878
98 Clyfford Still 2864
99 Luc Tuymans 2862
100 Claes Oldenburg 2843


Lists of top artists maybe better cocktail chatter than actual discussion. It seems like something absolutely no one would agree on. For the remaining 100 hundred artists, the list gets even more contentious. And more obscure--I'm going to have to do a bit of googling on some names.

Yet even so, the proportion of women artists doesn't grow.

l

A Lone Bad Review of Summer Hours

Summer Hours, a French film with Juliette Binoche, just opened in New York city and made a bit of a stir on some art blogs for wrapping a Corot in bubble wrap. The synopsis sounded charming, and I did the unthinkable a watched two films in a week, this time after paying $12.50 (!) for a ticket.

$12.50 did not quite buy me the charming, artsy French film I was expecting. The idea is that three siblings are left to divvy up the inheritance of a house and art collection upon their mother's passing. The film built up well but it didn't resolve at all--when the credits came on, I was surprised and most unsatisfied. Whatever happened to good old build up-conflict-resolution cycles? Aside from the beginning of the film before the mother dies, and the character of the housekeeper throughout, I felt like the story telling became an unravelling of separate pieces of thread with no end. So the director abruptly cuts the thread.


I've checked. I'm the only person on the Internet who left nonplussed. This film got a rave review in the NY Times and most everywhere else, has the lovely Juliet Binoche, and was sponsored by the Musee D'Orsay who let it use some of its works of art. (In return for funding the film, the Musee only asked to be included in the film in some way, which is an interesting concept.)

So maybe you shouldn't take my word for it. The treatment of the adult children and the decisions left to them is matter of fact and unsentimental, and the wisteria is indeed lovely. That's worth something.

Friday Ravels in Review

Image via Wooster Collective

For a weekly recap, I'll start with the best: the video I made about Whole in the Wall, a street art exhibit, although I did have to correct something I said in the video by noting some great street art blogs. In second place, inspired by a discussion about Francis Bacon, I was excited to see and write about his retrospective at the Met. Then yesterday I tried to explain why the film The Queen put me off with it mix of fact and fiction.

And then a long time ago, when it was May, we touched on some Vermeer forgeries via Errol Morris's series of articles Bamboozling Ourselves. All 7 are now published, if you want to check out the full tale. I also got on my high horse about a poetry scandal in Britain. But that was long ago in May.

Now it's June, and so I expect the weather will cease and desist with this dreary, cold rain. I keep giving it stern glances out the window.

f