Massimiliano Gioni, "THE UNCURATORIAL CURATOR" by Ilka Scobie

THE UNCURATORIAL CURATOR

by Ilka Scobie

"I guess I am expected to bring a little disorder
into this institution," confessed the dapper
33-year-old Massimiliano Gioni, who is the
director of special exhibitions at the New
Museum. Gioni has been a hard man to pin down for
an interview, what with his duties as co-curator
of "Unmonumental," the vast survey of new art
that debuts the New Museum's glamorous new
facility on the Bowery, which opens with a
30-hour festival beginning at noon on Nov. 1,
2007.

"Since I joined the New Museum in October of last
year," Gioni said, "we've been having this
conversation every day, asking ourselves how to
rethink what an art institution can be. That was
the reason I accepted the invitation to join the
staff. The New Museum is still a place that wants
to re-invent itself, and I'm drawn to places that
are not afraid of accepting change."

Gioni has worked on a variety of impressive
projects. He has helped organize the 4th Berlin
Biennial (2006), Manifesta 5 (2004) and "The
Zone" at the 2003 Venice Biennial. Since 2003,
Gioni has been the artistic director of Milan's
Nicola Trussardi Foundation, which he continues
to run while living in New York. The Trussardi
Foundation specializes in showing contemporary
art "in unusual spaces that have not been
traditionally open to the public or used to
display art." He also oversees the Wrong Gallery
with Ali Subotnick and Maurizio Cattelan.

"The New Museum is now 30 years old, but it's not
weighed down by it own history; it's still very
flexible," he says. "For example, now we are
working on the schedule for next year, and we are
making a big effort to re-think the pace of our
shows compared to other institutions. We will be
doing quite an intensive number of shows."

"You can see this from our very first exhibition,
which is curated by Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman
and myself. 'Unmonumental' starts off as a
sculpture show, with more than 100 works by 30
international artists. All of the sculptures are
installed in the galleries without any partitions
or temporary walls. The installation reveals the
original architecture in all its purity, with the
artworks occupying space but not as a rule
touching the architecture.

"All the walls surrounding the sculptures are
left empty. Visiting the show should feel like
walking around a landscape, maybe a landscape of
ruins and instability. All the sculptures, in
fact, share a sense of fragility and
precariousness. They are all assemblages or
collages of sorts, they are all going to pieces
or, vice versa, they are carefully assembled by
bringing together bits and pieces of found
materials.

"After one month, all around the sculptures, we
plan to install on the museum walls an exhibition
of collages and two-dimensional works. So the
show gets more intense, with the works of 11
artists taking over huge walls. Many of these
pieces are actually site-specific works, realized
especially for this exhibition.

"And after another month, we are adding sound to
the galleries, acoustic symphonies and noise
collages, composed by 13 artists whose works end
up taking the dimensions of collage a step
further, in the realm of sound. Lauren Cornell is
one of the curators of this section, together
with me and Laura Hoptman.

"So a visit in February 2008 should give a
completely different experience than a visit in
December 2007. Sculptures, collages and sound --
it should be an incredibly dense environment, a
collage in itself, or maybe a contemporary
'merzbau'.

"The show also migrates outside of the museum
walls. Rhizome, which is an affiliate institution
of the New Museum, has organized an internet
component, so part of 'Unmonumental' is also
visible directly on your computer.

"That might give you an idea of what the New
Museum is interested in. Changing the rules a
little bit, trying out new formats to present
art, trying to learn directly from art and
artists to create new strategies and new
experiences. So, for example, 'Unmonumental' is
an exhibition about collage that becomes a
collage in itself."

With a title like "Unmonumental," I asked, is the
New Museum signaling a lack of interest in art of
prodigious accomplishment?

"Well, we are interested in that, of course,"
Gioni assures me, smiling. "But this exhibition
itself is focusing on three ideas. First of all,
it is interested in a particular kind of esthetic
which is that of assemblage. 'Unmonumental' tries
to demonstrate that collage, from its roots in
the beginning of this century, has become very
important to contemporary artists. All the art
works in the exhibition were made after the year
2000.

"The second thing that 'Unmonumental' addresses
is the present moment, the time we live in. It's
not just a show about contemporary art; it is
also an exhibition about a century that starts
with monuments, buildings and sculptures being
razed to the ground. If you think of this new
century, the most striking images are not of
victories or heroes, idols and icons, but of
monuments being toppled over and statutes dragged
to the ground. Think of the photos of Saddam
Hussein's monument in Baghdad, or the Buddhas in
Afghanistan, or even the Twin Towers.

"It's a century that opens with the erasure of
symbols and a disappearance of monuments. It's a
century that begins both metaphorically and
literally with sculptures being knocked off their
pedestals. That's also what 'Unmonumental' is
about. In the first section of the show, the
sculpture section, this relationship with ruins
is more metaphorical, but with works by artists
like Martha Rosler, Thomas Hirschhorn and Kim
Jones, it will become clear that the show talks
about a century of conflicts and wars.

"Still, we tried not to be too literal. Since the
beginning of the 20th century, collage has also
been read as a mirror of the unconscious, and you
will find a lot of strange dreams and obscure
desires in the exhibition as well.

"The third thing 'Unmonumental' is about is
modesty. After all, from its very title, the show
is a way to remind ourselves that we're building
a beautiful museum, but we don't want it to be an
ivory tower or a monument in itself. We are more
interested in things that are a little bit more
unstable, more open and questioning."

Asked about the silvery, mesh-covered rectilinear
building designed by the Tokyo firm SANAA -- a
dramatic addition to the Bowery landscape and to
Manhattan as well -- Gioni replied, "When you get
inside, you will be surprised at what a simple
functional building it is. From the outside, it's
very spectacular, but it's spectacular in a way
that is quite modest. It doesn't have the
aggressiveness, say, of a Frank Gehry museum. It
is a building that is much more interested in its
surroundings. Industrially rough, yet completely
elegant.

"And then the inside is incredible in the way it
gives space to the art. The entrance level is
completely transparent; the street comes right
in, in a way. Also the ground floor is open --
free to the public -- and has a café, a bookstore
and a gallery, also open free of charge."

I asked about the experience of working closely
with the internationally acclaimed and
provocative Italian artist, Maurizio Cattelan.

"I don't know if I can answer this in a few
words, because we have been friends now for more
than eight years. I can say I have learned a lot
from him. When our relationship started, I was
his spokesperson. I would give out interviews in
his name, and even do lectures in his place. I
guess that might have taught me to speak a lot,
and to lie a little. It also taught me how to
spin a story, how to talk to the press. I have
been Maurizio's media consultant on many of his
projects, like the Caribbean Biennale in 2006,
which was a biennial without art, or like the
Hollywood sign that he installed in the hills in
Sicily.

"Perhaps most importantly, Maurizio taught me how
to think in images, which is something I'm very
thankful for. You know, I tend to think more in
images than in words. This is useful when
organizing an exhibition.

"Also, Maurizio influenced a lot the work I do in
Milan with the Trussardi Foundation. The
foundation doesn't have an exhibition space, and
it changes its location with every show and every
appearance, so it has to grab the attention of
the city for 30 days, and then we close and
concentrate on the following project. It's sort
of a nomadic practice in which communication and
art often mingle. That's another aspect I learned
from Maurizio's work. How images can become
stories. And how they have to penetrate a system
of communication.

"I hope Maurizio learned from me as well. It has
been a very interesting exchange. We still do a
lot of work together. We continue doing the Wrong
Gallery with Ali Subotnick, who is our third
partner in crime. She's now a curator at the
Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She has been a
friend for a long time. Besides the Wrong
Gallery, we've done Charley magazine and our
other publications together, and the Berlin
Biennial."

Next I query him about what role the New Museum
will play in the already robust contemporary art
world in Manhattan, which is crowded with
galleries and museums anxious to expand their
contemporary art programming.

"It's a question we will answer in practice," he
answers. "The location on the Bowery really
shapes a lot of our identity. It's the only
museum of contemporary art downtown. So, it's a
museum that wants to entertain a close
relationship with artists. It's also a place
where we want to work at different speeds and
different scales. The New Museum does not only
open with 'Unmonumental.' There are five other
projects and exhibitions that animate different
parts of the building. We are not just a
monolithic structure, we are much more diverse.
We are not an elephant, we are also the mouse.

"One project that is particularly dear to me is a
performance by Sharon Hayes, a young artist who
lives and works in New York. She's going to
perform on the Bowery, where she will be reciting
love letters in public. They speak about a love
story in a time of war, though it's unclear
whether these letters are autobiographical or
fictional or somewhere in between. Hayes'
performance takes place on the streets, and her
voice is also heard inside the museum, in a small
intimate space, which -- maybe because I am
Italian -- makes me think of a confessional."

Do you like painting, I ask?

"I don't believe in divisions based upon media. I
love painting. It might sound obnoxious, but I
believe I love all good art. It can happen in
painting, performance, photography or any other
medium. I do have tremendous respect for
painters. And painting has always played an
interesting role in my relationship with art.
Lately, in the last year or so, for example, I've
been enjoying the company and work of George
Condo, who is a great artist and also has become
a friend. I love how bizarre his paintings are,
and how complex the world he imagines for them is.

"Also, how could anyone not like painting? What would art be without Richter?"

Do you miss Italy?

"I was born near Malpensa, the international
airport in Milan, which is maybe the reason I
take so many planes. I go to Italy at least once
a month. What I miss is time there. Time in
Manhattan and time in Italy are very different.
In Milan, I can read more, I can think more."

I ask about the New Museum's interactions with the surrounding community.

"Two years ago, the museum launched a project to
gather as much information as it can about the
Bowery and the artists in the neighborhood, and
the area's connection to art and artists. So the
museum itself is designed to become a place where
the memory and the presence of the street is kept
and preserved. We plan to have "free nights" with
no admission charge at the museum, and to
translate the brochures into Chinese and Spanish.
And we are trying to find a language in English
that is not cryptic art world jargon!

"We want to do shows that are immersive. You come
to an exhibition and the whole exhibition is an
experience. It feels a little like being in the
head of an artist."

This sounds like a journey that Sig. Gioni could well guide us on.

Pics @
<http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/scobie/scobie11-27-07_detail.asp?picn
um=1>

ILKA SCOBIE is a poet.

©2007 artnet

"ROBERT IRWIN, IN THE HERE AND NOW" By Leah Ollman, Christopher Knight & Robert L. Pincus

ROBERT IRWIN, IN THE HERE AND NOW

The mind is his playground. That's where his use
of light and space becomes in-the- moment
experience.

By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times

November 25, 2007

San Diego -- Dashes of white light flicked on one
by one as the installation crew at the Museum of
Contemporary Art San Diego worked its way across
an expansive wall, mounting custom-built
fluorescent fixtures in a syncopated, fragmented
diagonal grid. On the eve of the museum's Robert
Irwin exhibition, the largest since MoCA's
retrospective in 1993, the 79-year-old artist, in
trademark baseball cap and jeans, paced the space
with barely tempered eagerness. A birth was
imminent.

When the last of the lights on the 20-by-50-foot
wall went on and the work was complete, Irwin's
smile added at least another thousand kilowatts
to the room. The wall had come alive in a
calligraphic dance of brisk luminosity and
shadowy echo, an homage to both spontaneity and
order. "You just get swallowed up in it," Irwin
beamed.

"Light and Space" was, for Irwin, the riskiest
piece, the cutting edge in a show tracing his
50-year evolution from Abstract Expressionist
painter to choreographer of ephemeral experience.
He had mocked up a small version of the
installation in the museum's residency studio
(which he is the first to occupy), but conditions
in that modest space differed dramatically from
those in the large gallery. He wasn't at all sure
what he would get when the work went full-scale.

Conditionality has been, ironically, the one
unchanging characteristic of Irwin's work since
the early 1970s. The L.A. born-and-bred artist
had spent the '60s reducing the vocabulary of his
work on canvas. He distilled fields of active,
multicolored gestures to monochrome canvases with
austere pairs of raised lines. The line paintings
gave way to slightly curved canvases across which
thousands of fine green and red dots appear to
dissolve. His push toward pure presence advanced
further with the disk paintings of 1967-69.
Mounted more than a foot away from the wall, the
convex disks seem to merge intangibly with it.

In 1971, Irwin gave up his Venice studio and
turned away from making self-contained objects.
He began creating "site-generated" installations,
many using translucent white scrim, that
responded to the scale, shape, surface, light and
shadows of a particular space. Irwin's aims at
the time have since remained central to his work:
to heighten attention to the processes of
perception, expand sensory awareness, reawaken
wonder.

The San Diego exhibition, "Robert Irwin:
Primaries and Secondaries," fills both of the
museum's downtown venues with work drawn almost
entirely from its own holdings as well as five
new installations. Each of the new works extends
lines of inquiry that Irwin, based in San Diego,
launched in earlier work. But each is also
startlingly new, devised for a specific space and
set of circumstances. "When you're working with
the conditional, it's always an experiment," he
says.

"Square the Room" does what its title states, a
wall of scrim quietly trimming an irregular wedge
off an upstairs gallery. Another new piece sets
five floor-to-ceiling black scrim panels at a
right angle to five white panels of the same
size. The clean angularity of the structures
generates something far more ephemeral, a dynamic
dialogue in translucency and recession.

"Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue," an
expanded version of a work Irwin debuted this
year at Pace Wildenstein in New York, sets three
immense painted honeycomb aluminum planes side by
side on the floor. Suspended high above each is
another of the same size and color. Like elegant,
elemental reflecting pools, the glossy surfaces
catch the shifting natural light and mirror each
other. As you walk around the piece, looking up,
down and across, the hues intensify but also mix,
the primary colors yielding secondaries --
orange, green, violet. "Primaries and
Secondaries," a separate installation of 13
wall-mounted panels (including black and white),
engages similar phenomena in a different format.

These are but his latest staged surprises.
Touring the exhibition, Irwin philosophized on
the new works, the unique role of art and the big
ideas that intrigue him the most.

On breaking the frame

"At one point, I looked around and I realized
that there are no frames in the world. That's not
how we see at all. We're like in an envelope,
stuff happening on every dimension -- visual,
auditory, tactile, smell. Our dialogue with the
frame is part of a highly stylized, learned
logic. It's a way we've learned to see, but it's
not how we actually see. In terms of how human
beings see and understand and order the world for
themselves, it seemed we had to address that. I
had to paint a painting that broke the frame.
That's what the disks were. Once you break the
frame, all of a sudden you are in space. You're
dealing with energy as opposed to matter. [The
disks] really do get lost. They become light and
space."

On being and thinking about being

"There are basically two realms, two kinds of
consciousness. They're mutually dependent and
mutually exclusive, and that's what makes them
work. A little story I tell to try to illustrate
that point: When you open your eyes in the
morning, you're laying in bed, the world is
completely formed. You sit up, swing your legs
around, you take the world with you and you don't
ask yourself how you did that. You just go off
and take a shower.

"But if you laid there, for even an instant, a
couple of amazing things would be revealed. One
is that the world is not a given; you actually
form it. But we do it in a time frame that is
nonexistent, intellectually. Not only that, but
if we did wait a moment, that is, [cogitate] on
the act of perceiving, we wouldn't be able to
move, because at every moment we'd still be
forming [the world].

"The human being is spectacular. The cognitive
mind is never conscious of the process itself,
and it can't be. We wouldn't be able to move if
it was. When you start looking at what human
beings are, from that point of view, what is the
one thing that art does that nothing else does?
What is the unique role of art? I would propose
that art is a continual examination of the human
being's potential to perceive, know, understand
and act in the world."

On Modern art, abstraction and why the new isn't easy

"Most of our ideas are homogeneous. We maintain
the basic structures, the basic ideas, the basic
concepts. We build on them. But once in a while,
something comes along that actually challenges
those most basic assumptions. Modern art is doing
that, or has done that. People used to ask
abstractionists, 'What is it?' That's a literate
question that says, 'Take this, in front of me,
and let me understand it, not by participating in
it directly, but by referencing it in the world.'

"And [the abstractionists] would say, 'It is.'
That's a whole different way of looking at the
thing. It's not about something, it is something.
When you make that kind of shift, it throws
people off. It challenges the basic structures
we've built. So people have a great degree of
difficulty, because that's asking too much, in a
way, to give up this structure and cut yourself
loose, to float in this other realm. It's going
to take a long time to see if we really want to
play the game in this new realm.

"The history of Modern art, in my mind, is at
least a couple hundred years old. It will be
another couple hundred years before we're going
to know if it works and what kind of idea it is.
I pursue it because my questions feel right, they
hold water and I like the beauty of it."

Pic @ <http://tinyurl.com/2g333a>

<http://www.artseensoho.com/Art/PACE/irwin98/irwin.html>

<http://www.mcasd.org/cms300sample/uploadedImages/exhibitions/LightSpace_web.jpg
>

Video @ <http://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/StuartCollection/Irwin/irwin.mov>

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

>>>

ROBERT IRWIN'S USE OF LIGHT, SPACE AND PERCEPTION

A San Diego exhibition traces his development from 1959.

By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 13, 2007

San Diego -- Lots of artists extend established
traditions in their work, adding to what came
before. Some artists overturn them. A few begin
new ones, starting from scratch.

Then there's the rarest artist of all -- the one
who manages to extend, overturn and radically
innovate simultaneously. These are artists who
set the culture on its ear. Their art conjures
previously unsuspected possibilities, energizing
other artists by changing art's terms.

Robert Irwin is such an artist. Light and Space,
the sensual art of perceptual discovery he
pioneered in the 1960s, is now synonymous with
Los Angeles' emergence over the last half-century
as a distinctive cultural powerhouse. With human
perception as his inexhaustible subject, Irwin
is, at 79, an eminence of postwar American art.

Now he is the subject of an eloquent, tightly
focused and sometimes startlingly beautiful
career survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art
San Diego. (It's the first since his 1993
retrospective in Los Angeles.) The show occupies
both buildings of the museum's downtown outpost.
Nearly two-thirds of the works are from the
museum's permanent collection or they're promised
gifts; that's an extraordinary, enviable
institutional commitment to a major artist.

One building houses 16 works that together trace
Irwin's development since 1959. It begins with
brushy, gestural abstract paintings and concludes
with a new, room-size installation made from
stretched fabric scrim.

In between is the most gorgeous installation I've
yet seen of a classic 1969 Irwin disk. A
horizontal stripe of dark acrylic lacquer is
spray-painted at eye level across the center of a
roughly 4-foot circle of clear acrylic, which
stands away from the wall on a post. It's
illuminated only by natural light from an
overhead skylight, reflected and diffused off a
bright white wall in the light well. The disk
virtually disappears.

What remains in full view is an inexplicable
stripe of horizontal darkness, opening in space
before your puzzled eyes. This wide, shadowy line
inscrutably appears to recede into a deep void at
the center. In reality, the convex curve of the
disk means that the dark line is projected at
you, but visually it seems to withdraw into
infinity.

Irwin's disks always make me think of the famous
scene in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's short
1929 film, "An Andalusian Dog," in which a
straight razor slices across a woman's eyeball
just as a thin cloud passes before a full moon.
(Coincidentally, the movie is included at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art in the current
exhibition "Dalí: Painting and Film.") The
difference is that Irwin's work is not an
illustration, and the grim violence and dread of
that cinematic bad dream is absent here.

Instead, when Irwin tears a gash in the fabric of
perceptual space, it resonates with the perfect
exhilaration of Emerson's "transparent eyeball."
You plunge into bracing currents of hyper-acuity.

Irwin's public projects

The other building compiles 20 drawings,
photo-collages and plans for public projects at
airports, parks and other sites in Arizona,
Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas -- none of
them realized. Hence, such celebrated works as
Irwin's magnificent 1997 Getty Center garden are
not included.

Also here are three new large-scale installations
made especially for the survey, and one offers a
surprising twist on Irwin's previous work.
Arguably the show's best piece -- no mean feat,
given the high level of quality overall -- it
suggests that we have much more left to see from
this robust artist.

This installation, fittingly titled "Light and
Space," is composed of scores of colorless
fluorescent lights, arrayed across a very large
wall in an otherwise unlighted room. Steel
structural braces that hold up the ceiling high
overhead seem the obvious source for the work's
composition: 2- and 4-foot lights, set at
45-degree angles.

No immediately discernible rhyme or reason guides
the pattern, however. The placement of lights,
the arrangement of different lengths and the
considered interplay of light and shadow all
appear intuitive -- not capricious, but playfully
attuned. The effect is spellbinding.

The syncopation provides visual interest. The
composition yields a smooth, even illumination,
which takes into account natural light variations
in the room's large volume of space. And the
experience recalls encountering stained glass
windows in a Gothic church -- Sainte-Chapelle,
say, or Chartres -- but without the slightest
trace of grandiosity or intimation of
supernatural spirit. This is a wholly modern
secular chapel, erected to exalt perception as
the experiential creator of our universe.

Almost equally fine is "Who's Afraid of Red,
Yellow and Blue3," which represents Irwin's
fullest engagement with color since he planted
the Getty garden. Big panels of honeycomb
aluminum are suspended from the ceiling and laid
directly beneath on the floor in a large gallery.
The pristine panels are lacquered to a mirror
finish in vivid primary hues. (Jack Brogan, who
has been solving technical problems for Irwin's
art since the 1960s, fabricated them.) You can't
look at these colored panels the way you would a
painting; instead, they make you look into and
through them.

I could find no place to stand in the room where
it was possible to visually isolate one
primary-colored panel from the rest. Whether
you're on the periphery of the work, at a
distance from it or even within the spaces that
separate the three pairs, no segment remains
autonomous. See any part of any one of them and
other fragments are inevitably reflected,
flipping the room and shattering the space.

Look up and you see yourself reflected standing
upright on the ceiling; look down and you see the
reverse. View the work from afar and you might
glimpse the sky through a window. The primary
colors mix in the reflected layers trapped within
your eye, unraveling the spectrum.

The scale of this piece was surely calibrated to
the size of the room. One result is that the
space defined by the paired panels seems
logically carved from the larger volume of the
gallery -- much the way a traditional sculptor
would carve a figurative composition from the
given contours of a block of stone. Irwin always
articulates a formal fusion between the object he
makes and the space in which it is encountered.

So, because it isn't clear just where this work
begins and where it ends, you carry it with you
when you leave. Art, which we habitually regard
as a physical object, dematerializes into
heightened, ineffable experience.

Making a statement

"Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue3" was
inspired by a famous group of four similarly
titled Color Field paintings (1966-70) by Barnett
Newman, a philosopher king among the heroic
generation of Abstract Expressionist painters
that Irwin greatly admires. Newman's title toyed
with the 1962 Edward Albee play, "Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?" The playwright stumbled on the
title as graffiti scrawled on a barroom mirror,
and he once said it means, "Who's afraid of
living without false illusions?"

Like Newman, Irwin changed the question into a
statement -- a declaration of fearlessness. His
site-determined art poses an aesthetic question,
and the answer lies in the experience of it.
Sometimes that encounter leaves you gasping.

Take "Five x Five," a new installation composed
of five tall panels of black fabric scrim and
five tall panels of white fabric scrim. Each
group of five is installed in layers, with
separations between them that are large enough to
walk through. The black panels stand at a right
angle to the white panels.

When you look through them, the black scrim is
transparent and the white scrim is opaque -- a
complete reversal of expectations. Surely a
simple scientific explanation stands behind the
preternatural phenomenon. But knowing it wouldn't
come close to the thrilling perceptual experience
of seeing through the darkness and being blinded
by the light.

Pic @ <http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2007-11/33755602.jpg>

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

>>>

LIGHT, SPACE ARE MAGICAL IN IRWIN'S EXHIBITION

By Robert L. Pincus, Art Critic

October 26, 2007

Robert Irwin's career is epic. Odyssey would
probably be a better word than career. And this
journey, spanning a half century, is richly
presented in "Primaries and Secondaries," an
exhibition that fills both of the downtown spaces
of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Museum director Hugh Davies, who curated the
exhibition, has likened it to a group show
because of its variety. And the phases of Irwin's
life as an artist are many. Yet, as Davies also
says, the thread uniting all of this work is the
artist's unending fascination with the limits of
perception - his and ours.

Chronologically, the selections begin with his
abstract expressionist canvases of the late '50s
and early '60s, which reveal an intensive
devotion to the power of the gestural brush
stroke. Then, in the course of a decade, Irwin
simplified his approach to painting, paring the
canvas down to two lines in the same color as the
canvas as a whole, or creating a field of dots
that fuse into one optical field.

The most remarkable of his wall works are the
untitled acrylic disks from 1969, which marked
the end of his life as a painter. They are
beautifully crafted objects that seem to
dematerialize before your eyes.

These discs ultimately signaled the second phase
of his epic odyssey. In the '70s, he began
creating installations in response to invitations
from galleries and museums to design works on
location. In the '80s, he became interested in
creating works for public sites, and the
exhibition features elaborate and precise
drawings for proposed works, some realized, for
places like New York's Battery Park City and
Phoenix's Desert Botanical Garden. (No drawings
are included for his most famous work in this
vein, The Getty Garden.)

It's fitting that the MCASD would organize his
first major museum retrospective in 14 years,
since Irwin has lived and worked in San Diego for
the past 17 years. Davies, who has followed his
work for decades, curated the show and has also
made the museum the largest repository of the
works by the artist.

To coincide with the show, the museum is adding
the five new installation works currently on view
to its collection, along with a work it has shown
several times in La Jolla since he created it in
1992: "1°, 2°, 3°, 4°." (A substantial share of
those funds comes from a $1.75 million grant
received from the Annenberg Foundation.)

Irwin is a pioneer of the light and space school,
arguably the most important movement that the
West Coast has produced. Like James Turrell - who
is concurrently having an exhibition at the
Pomona College of Art in Claremont - he
introduced new media to heighten the viewer's
experience of space and light, both inside and
outside the museum.

Irwin is an eloquent philosophical-minded speaker
about his work - and an inspiring one, too. But
his line of thinking, as compelling as it is,
isn't necessary to enjoy his art.

The disc paintings defy logic. Their hard
surfaces appear soft to the eye. And in most
settings, they are dramatically lit, creating
multiple shadows. But Irwin prefers them to be
seen by natural light, as the museum's version is
here. It is something of a revelation; the edges
of the disc virtually disappear into the space
around them.

Scrim, a semi-transparent fabric, has become
iconic in Irwin's installations, and he uses it
to sublime effect in "Squaring the Room," a sheer
wall of white that veils a triangular portion of
the room. This new work is closest in spirit to
his "site-conditioned" installations of the '70s.

"Five x Five" uses scrim far more elaborately.
The title refers to its 10 lofty rectangles, half
in white and half in black. They are arranged in
vertical rows, reaching nearly to the ceiling,
and are akin to abstract paintings in three
dimensions. Viewers can stroll between the
panels, too, creating a new set of absorbing
sights. And for those standing on the outside,
the views become kinetic.

This logic of extending painting into three
dimensions gets its fullest treatment in "Who's
Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue3." It consists of
polished aluminum panels in the primary colors,
with groupings of the panels positioned on the
floor and high above our heads: blue above blue,
red above red, and so on. Looking up or down, the
transformation of the room is astonishing. It
looks impossibly deep. And color coats the
surroundings, giving them a fantastical look. The
title - minus the 3 for "in three dimensions" -
is the same as a famous painting by Barnett
Newman, which is clearly a catalyst for Irwin's
installation.

The same sort of panels, with secondary colors
added to the mix along with black and white ones,
form a set in another gallery. Thus the title of
this work: "Primaries and Secondaries." These
coax the viewer to see some panels reflected in
others and create new colors in the process. The
newest work of all, "Light and Space," uses pure
white fluorescent lights, spread across a
towering white wall. But when they are lit, the
wall is gray - or, more accurately, many
gradations of gray.

In its sweep, this exhibition confirms Irwin's
standing as one of the greatest living artists.
He has extended the possibilities of what art can
be, in myriad ways. His influence on other
artists has been great, too, larger than most
accounts of contemporary art say. Though many of
his works were intentionally temporary, Irwin's
art, in its entirety, seems sure to become even
more important as the present becomes history.

© Copyright 2007 The San Diego Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

Urs Fischer, "CAN YOU DIG IT?" By Jerry Saltz

CAN YOU DIG IT?

At Gavin Brown, Urs Fischer takes a jackhammer to Chelsea itself.

By Jerry Saltz

Published Nov 25, 2007

Urs Fischer has reduced Gavin Brown's Enterprise
to a hole in the ground, and it is one of the
most splendid things to have happened in a New
York gallery in a while. Experientially rich,
buzzing with energy and entropy, crammed with
chaos and contradiction, and topped off with the
saga of subversion that is central both to the
history of the empty-gallery-as-a-work-of-art but
also to the Gavin Brown experience itself, this
work is brimming with meaning and mojo. It was
also a Herculean project.

A 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep,
extends almost to the walls of the gallery,
surrounded by a fourteen-inch ledge of concrete
floor. A sign at the door cautions, THE
INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND
INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR
DEATH; intrepid viewers can, all the same, inch
their way around the hole. Fischer's pit is
titled You, and it took ten days to build,
costing around $250,000 of Brown's money. (Heaven
only knows what his landlord thought of it.) The
gallery's ground-level garage doors facilitated
the jackhammering and removal of the concrete
floor and the use of a backhoe to excavate tons
of dirt and debris, after which a crew closed off
the space with immaculate white walls. There's
also a cramped antechamber, superfluous but well
executed: A smaller reproduction of the main
gallery, down to the air ducts and electrical
outlets, it's sort of a mini-Me You. Ducking
through its pint-size entrance is like going
though a door in Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland. You have to crouch as you enter and
watch where you step in preparation for the more
precarious and thrilling main event beyond.

Fischer's extraordinary gesture touches on the
tradition of indoor earthworks that includes
pieces from the sixties and seventies by Gordon
Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria,
Michael Heizer, Chris Burden, and others, while
also bringing together many of his ongoing themes
of transparency, transformation, disruption, and
destruction. He's cut holes in gallery and museum
walls and created sculptures that merge with one
another. You simultaneously attacks and
fetishizes the attributes of galleries, the
qualities that the critic Brian O'Doherty has
described as "something of the sacredness of
churches, the austerity of courtrooms, the
mysteriousness of research laboratories,
something that, together with stylish designs,
makes them unique cultic places of the
aesthetic." You is like a nest, a bunker, or
Caspar David Friedrich's The Wreck of Hope, his
painting of a ship smashed to pieces in a sea of
ice. It is a perfect metaphor for a revved-up art
world as it is stripped down by the market.

In a very minimalist yet surreal and
expressionistic way, You makes space palpable.
Initially the chasm dominates your vision and
takes over the room, like Magritte's painting of
a giant green apple filling space. As your vision
adjusts, your inner ear goes into high gear as
you realize that while standing at floor level
you're no longer at the base of the gallery but
halfway up the walls. The room transforms into
something unmoored, like a Tiepolo or Correggio
painting. As you survey everything from this
unfamiliar perch, your eye takes over and details
come into focus. This I-can-see-everything
realism echoes the experience of paintings by
Ingres and David.

You is less a Deconstructivist avant-garde
gesture or a parodic work of anti-art than it is
an inversion machine. To be in it is to be above
and below at the same time. You are indoors and
outdoors; there are the perfect white walls of
the gallery and this red-brown New York earth.
Jeff Wall has talked about how painting a person
is "the simultaneous trace of two bodies and so
is inherently erotic." You is a tracing of
Brown's gallery and galleries in general, and it
pulsates with erotic energy. Intensely lit and
rigidly framed, it also has the abstract presence
of a photograph, recalling the trench in Wall's
own photos Dead Troops Talk and The Flooded Grave.

A hidden layer of content adds more meaning.
Gavin Brown was a leading member of a wave of
dealers who opened galleries in the midst of the
early-nineties art-market downturn and who helped
reinvigorate New York. Over the years his gallery
has been a site of experimentation, provocation,
and community. Among other accomplishments, Brown
was the first New York gallerist to mount solo
shows of Chris Ofili, Jake and Dino Chapman,
Piotr Uklanski, and Anselm Reyle. But as Brown
helped frame the discourse of the nineties, and
rightly profited from it, the recent money frenzy
has seen Ofili leave for David Zwirner and
Uklanski and Reyle defect to Gagosian; the
Chapmans now show at Gagosian, too. You suggests
that exhibitions themselves have become
conventional, that too many of them go down easy
or look the same-product after product, all lined
up on the wall or in a room, like orderly items
for sale. Thus, You is a kind of warning sign. At
the same time, it's making fun of the convention.
After all, there is a clownlike exaggeration and
madness to the piece.

Mostly, You is an amazing sight that warps
psychic space. It's a bold act that brings on
claustrophobia and agoraphobia at the same time,
makes you look at galleries in a new way, and
serves as a bracing palate cleanser.

Pics @ <http://www.gavinbrown.biz/>

Urs Fischer. Gavin Brown's Enterprise. Through December 22.

Copyright © 2006, New York Magazine Holdings LLC. All Rights Reserved

"THE STUDIO SYSTEM" By Linda Yablonsky

THE STUDIO SYSTEM

By Linda Yablonsky

Published: November 17, 2007

Jeff Koons has 87 of them laboring in shifts.
Damien Hirst employs several teams, as needed.
Jasper Johns has had the same one for 23 years,
and Kiki Smith's accompanies her everywhere. Yet
John Currin can hardly stand the idea. A studio
assistant? "I'm a terrible coworker," he says. He
prefers to go it alone.

Most artists today depend on at least one extra
hand to keep their studios in order and help
prime their creative pumps. That could mean
anything from mixing paint and cleaning brushes
to listening to the boss think out loud. It can
also involve making the actual pieces while the
artist supplies the vision-the identity for the
brand, so to speak. Traditionally, a young
wannabe's best entree into the profession has
been to assist an established mentor. Some parlay
these jobs into big careers; others may remain in
the shadows.

What is curious is how differently the market
treats work done by assistants in different eras.
Consider how quickly a putative Old Master
painting priced in the millions is devalued
should new evidence prove it to have been made by
other hands. A 1995 exhibition at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York,
"Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt," explored this issue by
juxtaposing pictures by the master himself with
those of his disciples. His studio, it seems, was
happy to employ imitators skilled enough to turn
out "Rembrandts" like a machine. Still, it was
relatively easy to tell genius from its
reflection.

Such distinctions are not always so clear-or so
necessary-in the realm of contemporary art.
Paintings by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat
may require authentication before sale, but no
doubts about genuineness haunt artworks by living
artists such as Hirst, Koons or Takashi Murakami,
whose prices can be astronomical. None of them
makes his own paintings or even thinks he should,
not when others can do the job better. Likewise,
the intense labor required to produce Sol
LeWitt's wall drawings was never entirely his
own, yet no one ever said the work itself was not
his creation.

It is fair to ask if the art market operates on a
double standard that treats certain kinds of
"assisted" works as deceptions while accepting
others as unique. For an answer, says Laura
Paulson, senior director for contemporary art at
Christie's New York, "we have to go back to
Duchamp's readymades and the idea of liberating
the artist's hand."

The Duchampian notions of mechanical reproduction
reached full flower in the 1960s, when artists
like Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg began
silkscreening with helpers. "The idea of art
changed to be less about individual brushstrokes
and more about the image," Paulson says.
"Mechanical means expanded the artist's product.
The studio assistant, who became almost an alter
ego, enabled this process.

"Look at Ronnie Cutrone and Warhol," she
continues. "Andy set up the still life. Ronnie
made the photo and the screen. And this whole act
has become amplified to an extraordinary level
with artists like Koons and Hirst."

Cutrone, who was Warhol's principal painting
assistant from 1972 to 1982 and has retained
ownership of the photographs he took for Warhol's
paintings, describes their working relationship
as almost codependent. "I was born with a
duplicate color sense to Warhol's," Cutrone
recalls. "He would say, 'Ronnie, mix me a green.'
And I would attempt to clarify: 'What green?' He
would say, 'Up-front green.' And I would know
what he meant. But I wasn't going to paint his
paintings." Warhol, he adds, painted for hours a
day but also took time to experiment with new
ideas-not all of which were his own.

Take the "Shadows," the 1978 series of 102
abstract panels that Warhol called "one painting
with parts." According to Cutrone, they were his
idea. "It was Andy's dream to make abstract art,
and he could do it fairly well, but people didn't
like it," Cutrone explains. "I said, 'Look,
you're Andy Warhol. If you want to make abstract
art, you have to make something that is but
isn't: a shadow. I had this idea a long time, but
I was never going to do it. So I mixed all the
colors and stretched all the canvases and
installed them in Heiner Friedrich's gallery in
SoHo. I wasn't jealous. They didn't sell."
(Seventy-two of the canvases from Freidrich's
collection are now on permanent display at
Dia:Beacon, in upstate New York.)

How should we evaluate an assistant's role in the
act of creation? Does it really matter if artists
touch their own works, as long as these works are
unique and are made in their presence?
"Regardless of the artist's distance from the
process," Paulson says, "there is a nuance that
gives it his identity. If there were to be dot
paintings generated by someone who used to work
for Hirst, you would feel it, and it would not be
seen as having any value in the market."

By helping an established mentor, novices learn
firsthand what being a working artist actually
involves. The painter Carroll Dunham assisted
Dorothea Rockburne off and on from 1970 through
1973 in New York. "In a way, that was my art
school," he says. "It's important to be involved
with the daily operation of a studio and how you
organize it both physically and psychologically.
But the best part was the incidental talking
about art."

Today many aspiring artists skip this journeyman
step. They enter the market while still in
school, as collectors buy work from thesis
exhibitions and dealers cherry-pick talent for
group shows. Not long after graduation, the most
promising may be preparing solo debuts and hiring
assistants of their own out of the same pool.

At 28, Dan Colen is a budding star who was
featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and whose
paintings sell for around $50,000 each, according
to his dealer, Javier Peres, of Peres Projects,
in Los Angeles. Lately, these works have been
colorful abstractions that Colen calls "bird
shit" paintings-an accurate description of their
appearance. "He made the first couple of them and
gave us directions," says Theo Rosenblum, one of
five $15-an-hour part-time workers in Colen's New
York studio. "A lot of the work involves
developing our own ways of painting them. That is
what's interesting: There are different styles of
bird shit. The way these paintings are, it's
almost better to have different hands on them."

No such leeway is given to the staff at Koons's
studio, which was operating around the clock last
spring to prepare paintings for a show at the
Gagosian Gallery in London in June. "There's a
learning curve," says Koons's longtime studio
manager, Gary McCraw. "The painters learn how
Jeff sees things so they can make his art. The
work is very laborintensive. Tracing might
require six people on one painting. Basically,
he's quality control."

Murakami runs an even tighter ship at his studios
in Asaka, Japan, and Long Island City, New York,
which are modeled on both Warhol's Factory and
the artisanal workshops of the Edo period in
Japan. The artist has 35 employees in New York
alone and nearly 20 in Tokyo. "All of the design
work is done on computer in Japan," says Yuko
Sakata, director of the New York offices of
Kaikai Kiki, the company that produces Murakami's
paintings, sculptures, prints and animations and
also manages the careers of seven other Japanese
artists. These include Chiho Aoshima and Mr., who
both worked for Murakami.

Although many artists maintain large studios like
Murakami's and Koons's-Matthew Barney and Julian
Schnabel are two who combine art making with film
production- others prefer a more personal
approach. "I'm a mom-and-pop operation," says
Ross Bleckner, who brings in one or two art
students to work in an office beside his studio
but prefers to create alone. "I'm the mom-and I'm
the pop. And I like to keep it that way."

Kiki Smith retains two assistants to help her in
her studio and one to run her office. "What I
like is that, when people show up at a certain
time of day, it kicks you out of your own
subjectivity and forces you to think in an
orderly fashion instead of drifting," she says.
"For self-employed people, that's a big thing."

What about the impact of such jobs on the
assistants? They can reap unexpected benefits-but
there are also drawbacks. Painter Carl Fudge, who
spent nearly 10 years in Smith's employ, says he
started out "grinding glass sperm" but soon found
himself becoming part of her life: "She used me
as a barrier against people she didn't know. I
sort of protected her." He also helped install
her shows all over the world. "We went to amazing
places and met the most interesting people," he
recalls, referring to such travel, however, as "a
great experience rather than a career benefit."
His tenure, which ended in 1998, affected his own
identity as an artist as well. "Even a couple of
weeks ago," he says, "a museum called asking for
Kiki."

The painter Alexander Ross helped Julian
Lethbridge move his New York studio to a SoHo
loft and ended up managing the whole building,
where Hirst, artist Michael Hurson and 303
Gallery director Lisa Spellman also lived. "From
Julian I learned how the art world functions,"
Ross says. But meeting the others didn't really
advance his career. "It opened doors to my mind,"
he explains, "not anywhere else."

Many artists bring on additional people just for
specific projects. To prepare "The Invisible
Enemy Should Not Exist," his exhibition last
winter at Lombard-Freid Projects, in New York,
Michael Rakowitz needed plenty of help from his
team of six. The show consisted of about 60
small-scale reconstructions-made with Iraqi food
wrappers and Arabic newspapers-of artifacts
stolen from the National Museum in Baghdad after
the 2003 American invasion. Rakowitz intends to
remake all 7,000 of the looted pieces.

In this case, the assistants-students, mostly-may
make long-term commitments. But how long is too
long to stay? Bleckner rotates his helpers out
every few years. "After a certain point, you fear
they may hold working for you against you if
their career has not happened the way they
thought it should," he explains. Dunham concurs:
"If you're ambitious, you have to get out."

The sculptor Joel Shapiro, who generally works on
a large scale, has long relied on assistants,
including some who weren't sculptors themselves.
Back in the early 1980s, for instance, painter
Christopher Wool cut wood for him ("It was the
best job I ever had," Wool says). These days
Shapiro works closely with Ichiro Kato, a master
woodworker, and Patrick Strzelec, an artist who
is expert at casting. "But while they're
realizing your work, they sometimes have to
suppress their instincts," he says. "They have a
role in the shaping of a piece-but they also have
their own art to make. Those who are pivotal to
your work stay with you, but it's not necessarily
a happy position for that person."

James Meyer's 22 years with Jasper Johns have
brought him security. He's been careful, however,
to maintain his own painting practice, even
though it means he has to get up at 5 a.m. to
work for a few hours before starting his day with
Johns. "That way you don't feel like you're not
moving ahead," he says.

Meyer also points to the dangers of being
associated so long with so celebrated an artist.
Five years ago, he started working in encaustic,
Johns's signature material. "So my work is
perceived as reflective of Jasper's," he says.
"But it's figurative-very different." Meanwhile,
his family has had to adapt to his travel to
Johns's three studios (in Connecticut, St.
Martin, and South Carolina) and various
exhibitions. "It's just part of the job," he
remarks.

On the other hand, John Currin insists that "it
wouldn't help me to have an assistant. I'd end up
micromanaging to a degree that there would be no
point. That's like hiring someone else to drive a
two-seater sports car. Why bother?" Still, he
says, he has taken on an artist-bookkeeper who
also straightens up. "My studio looked like
Francis Bacon's," he admits. "Now it's a much
more pleasant place to be."

Pics @ <http://www.artinfo.com/articles/enlarged_image/25912/65166>

<http://www.artinfo.com/articles/enlarged_image/25912/65165>

"The Studio System" is originally from the
November 2007 issue of Art & Auction magazine.

ARTINFO
Copyright © 2007, LTB Media

Ricky Jay, "HOKUM THAT STANDS THE TEST OF TIME" By Michael Kimmelman

November 15, 2007

HOKUM THAT STANDS THE TEST OF TIME

By Michael Kimmelman

Los Angeles - Before I arrived here, a flier was
in my mailbox, an advertisement for "China China
- Le Grand Cirque." It described "an
unprecedented dimension of body control,
acrobatic precision and unbelievable capability."

My neighbors tossed their copies into the recycling bin.

Obviously they didn't know about Ricky Jay. For
years Mr. Jay, the sleight-of-hand artist and
archivist of all sorts of eccentric
entertainments, has been collecting historic
equivalents of the circus broadside, some dating
back to Shakespeare's day.

These are handbills mostly, not posters: single
sheets, usually printed on a letter press with
lots of hyperbolic language, not much color and
only sometimes a crude illustration, rarely fine
ones. They trumpet horses that jump through
hoops, armless dulcimer players, German
strongwomen who lift anvils with their hair,
contortionists, fire eaters, magicians and
pig-faced ladies.

"Extraordinary Exhibitions," here at the Hammer
Museum (it's only on until Nov. 25, so consider
yourself forewarned), presents part of his
collection, about 80 marvelous works. I got
together with Mr. Jay the other day. He was eager
to show me some prints related to Mathew
Buchinger, "The Little Man of Nuremberg," who
grew to 29 inches, married four times, fathered
14 children before he died, in his mid-60s, in
1739, and became famous for his exhibitions of
conjuring, swordplay, dancing, and the playing of
various musical instruments. Buchinger had no
arms or legs.

He drew too: incredible micrographic pictures,
visible only through a magnifying glass. Mr. Jay
owns Buchinger's great self-portrait with the
Psalms and the Lord's Prayer written into the
curls of his hair. "I am not amazed that people
kept remarkable samples of Buchinger's
calligraphy and microscopy, " Mr. Jay said -
neither was I - "but I am surprised that small,
undistinguished announcements of his appearances
at fairground booths and rooms in public houses
also survived."

He was talking about the plain handbills,
advertising Buchinger and others; like nearly
everything in the show they weren't supposed to
last longer than what they ballyhooed. Mr. Jay
calls them the "Thai menus of their day."

But the handbills must have been appreciated, or
else they landed by mistake in a pile on
someone's desk or inside someone's library, as
bookmarks, avoiding leaky roofs, small children
with soiled hands and generations of tidy owners,
to transmute into prized artifacts that passed to
the antiquarian market, from which Mr. Jay, a
century or two or three after they were printed,
acquired them.

And now they've landed in an art museum.

Art works that way. It can turn up, unexpectedly,
and once you see it, you can't imagine how you
missed it in the first place. The art is there in
the worn, throwaway sheets, dog-eared or tattooed
with the rusty imprints of paper clips. It's in
the typefaces, varied to catch your eye, and in
the wacky texts, which interest Mr. Jay, "as
much, if not more, than illustrations," he said.
"As I think of it now, I like either the
classically elegant or the downright peculiar.
That's what you would see in my house: a
black-and-white stone lithograph of Barnum, so
delicate most people think it is a pencil
drawing, in between an 18th-century unillustrated
playbill of a 'teritoepiest painter' capable of
rendering a picture in under two minutes of a
subject mentally chosen by a spectator, and an
image of a juggler balancing a piano on his head
while playing a trumpet."

Akin to that last one, there's an 18th-century
broadside here, an illustration for Duncan
MacDonald, a Scottish slack-wire walker. He is on
the wire, wearing stilts, balancing on his right
toe, a wheel supporting a plate sustaining a rack
of 16 wine glasses holding up a globe that props
up a piece of straw. At the same time he plays
the trumpet and the French horn, while two eggs
rest atop the hilt of a sword, whose tip is
poised on his nose. Also, a dog perches on a
chair that MacDonald balances on his left
forefinger. Beneath him spikes replace a safety
net.

It's hokum, no doubt, and the handbill may even
have been some Scottish piece of anti-Jacobean
propaganda, not an actual advertisement for a
real performer, as Mr. Jay mentions in the show's
accompanying book. But, whatever, it's glorious,
and an example of another sort of art: the art of
salesmanship.

Part of the attraction of these printed
curiosities, after all, stems from the sheer
chutzpah of their hucksterism. Any idiot can sell
a quality product that people need at a
reasonable price. But try passing off tickets for
a singing mouse or for an enormous head ("18 feet
in Length, 7 Feet in Breadth, and Weighing 1700
Pounds"), or for Joice Heth, age 161, now a
"living skeleton," weighing 46 pounds, once nurse
to infant George Washington, or so the handbill,
from 1835 claims. Surely patrons went to such
entertainments not because they were more
gullible than we are (considering what our
politicians have been selling us, how could they
be?), but because they wanted to judge for
themselves the quality of the con. Salesmanship,
in its extreme form, is a sleight of hand, a
trick, whereby people are persuaded, to buy in
cash or just mentally speaking, what is patently
not true and unbelievable.

Art is also about what's inexplicable and out of
the ordinary. Painting is the world's oldest
conjuring act, colored dirt smeared on a flat
surface to create an illusion. We may know it's
not real, but we still enjoy seeing how the magic
is done.

"Yes, yes, yes!" Mr. Jay said, about that
analogy. From Buchinger to the Chinese circus,
clearly nothing changes, except maybe the
refinement of the handbill. Life was just as rich
and perverse centuries ago, and people delighted
in the bizarre and subversive, just as we do.
It's history that sanitizes the past, makes order
out of chaos.

But art - whether it's the mnemonic art of Rabbi
Hirsch Dänemark, remembered in the show via a
19th-century German handbill, beautifully printed
in Fraktur typefaces on luxurious mold-made
paper, or whether it's the art of those ancient
pornographers who left naughty mosaics at Pompeii
- reminds us that the world has always been
messy, weird and wonderful.

"I like to show artist and designer friends
Buchinger's work," Mr. Jay said. He covers the
name while they look. Then, "after they rave, I
remove my hand so they can read the tag: 'Drawn
by me, Mathew Buchinger, without hands or arms.'"

Presto!

Slide Show @
<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/11/14/arts/20071115_RICKYJAY_SLIDESHOW_in
dex.html>

<http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/131/work_707.htm>

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

"FRANCIS ALS' MEANDERING JOURNEYS" & "286 SAINT FABIOLAS = ONE EPIPHANY" By Reed Johnson & Blake Gopnik

November 11, 2007

FRANCIS AL�S' MEANDERING JOURNEYS

Much of Francis Alÿs' work is the result of
paradox, indirection and purposeful wandering. He
seeks the unpredictable, the dramatic.

By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Mexico City - Francis Alÿs is doing something
pretty extraordinary, for him. He's sitting
still, more or less.

But this relative stasis probably will be
short-lived. The gangly Belgian artist already
looks restless, dragging on a cigarette, his
6-foot-4 frame scrunched into the corner of a
packed cafe surrounded by a quintessential Mexico
City scene: barking dogs, a TV fútbol match
blaring in the background, an old man playing
harmonica for spare change, a dozen conversations
bouncing off the walls -- the relentless,
seductive chaos of contemporary urban life.

It's the kind of purposeful disorder that Alÿs
relishes, a situation rife with the sort of
unpredictable, dramatic possibilities that he's
constantly itching to see unfold -- and to goose
along, when necessary. This is an artist, after
all, who gets his kicks by running into killer
tornadoes with a rolling video camera. Who
stalked the elusive ñandú, a South American
ostrich, across Patagonia like some big-game
hunter bagging exotic metaphors. Who wandered
around Copenhagen for a week stoned each day on a
different drug. And who once loped through the
streets of this hair-trigger metropolis dangling
a loaded 9-millimeter Beretta from one hand, just
"waiting for something to happen," as he put it.

It did too: Several members of the Mexican
constabulary, understandably mistaking Alÿs for a
homicidal lunatic, threw him in the back of their
squad car and took him away. The next day Alÿs
went back and explained to the cops that he was
an artist, then asked them to restage the
incident exactly as it had occurred, while a
collaborator filmed the reenactment with a Sony
HandyCam. Using reality as a dry run, an
aesthetic calisthenic, Alÿs fashioned a startling
dual-screen urban parable in which physical
peril, like verisimilitude, lies in the eye of
the beholder.

"The first bit was pretty tense," Alÿs recalls in
his gentle French-accented English. The police
officers "still were pretty upset about the whole
scenario. And then at one point the word 'art'
came in, and then it was fine, because art wasn't
serious. You know, you couldn't mean it to be
dangerous if it was an artistic kind of
manifestation."

Of course, there's a double-barreled irony in the
cops' perception that art is harmlessly absurd, a
perception that gets scrutinized in "Francis
Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal," which runs through
Feb. 10 at the Hammer Museum. Curated by Russell
Ferguson, professor and chairman of the UCLA
department of art, "Politics of Rehearsal"
examines how Alÿs takes a calculatedly
off-the-cuff approach to art-making, seizing on
momentary opportunities and embracing
haphazardness.

"He's very interested in things that are
ephemeral or impromptu or improvised," says
Ferguson, who in his catalog essay compares Alÿs'
approach to that of an actor preparing for a role
that is always, essentially, a work in progress.
Alÿs regards this seemingly ad-lib approach to
art-making as "a better solution," Ferguson says,
than some overarching system that tries to bend
everything in its path to a fixed set of
principles or objectives. "He loves to create a
kind of situation or a mini-narrative or a set of
events and then set that loose and let it
reverberate around him."

Between intent and result

In spite of, or rather precisely because of this
methodology, Alÿs' conceptual interventions and
their video byproducts give memorable, if
transient, form to the scattershot nature of
contemporary existence, particularly as it plays
out in sharp-elbowed hyper-cities like this one,
the artist's home for most of the last two
decades.

He arrived in the Mexican capital at an
auspicious moment for artists. It was the
mid-1980s, shortly after the city had been
leveled by a magnitude-8.0 earthquake that left
at least 10,000 people dead. In Mexico City's
devastation, Alÿs, an aspiring architect at the
time, witnessed first-hand the literal
destruction of what he calls "blind Modernism,"
the secular faith of the 20th century Western
world.

Practically on the spot, he dropped architecture
and decided to become an artist. Apart from a
brief European sojourn in the early 1990s, Alÿs
has remained here ever since.

Not only Mexico, but other parts of Latin America
such as Peru and Patagonia have become his
creative milieu, and his work often alludes to
the region's incessantly cyclical problems: the
gaping economic disparities, the entrenched
political corruption, the glacial pace of reform
and the grinding repetitiveness of daily life
among the working poor.

This idea of an entire hemisphere afflicted by a
collective sensation of déjà-vu-all-over-again,
condemned to keep repeating its historical
traumas and setbacks, informs the stop-and-go
tempo of much of Alÿs' art. The Mexican art
critic and curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, who has
collaborated with Alÿs, has observed that the
artist's political interventions expose and
comment on Latin America's "general problem of
the entropy of daily economic life, that is, the
unimaginable effort we all make in getting
nowhere."

Few of his projects have expressed this idea with
more succinctly humorous eloquence than "Paradox
of Praxis 1" (1997), in which Alÿs spent more
than nine hours pushing a large, rectangular
block of ice through the streets of Mexico City's
historic center, a complex public space whose
grimy baroque grandeur encapsulates all the
contradictions of Mexican society. By nightfall,
the monumental glacial mass had been reduced to a
dinky frozen chip, kicked along by the artist in
his trademark Converse high-tops.

Odysseus or Sisyphus? A mytho-poetic journey of
discovery, or a ludicrous, anti-heroic exercise
in futility? Much of Alÿs' art questions what, in
the end, is the difference between the two, while
simultaneously smudging the boundary between
artistic intent and result.

It would be a mistake, however, to get the
impression that Alÿs simply lets his art sneak up
on him or his viewers.

Once he develops a rough concept for a project,
he typically storyboards the idea on paper, as if
he were scripting a movie. He gathers props and
materials together, orchestrates the action up to
a point and documents the effects with photos and
video.

Then, at some crucial, unforeseen moment, the
gesture acquires its own momentum and takes on
its own life. Usually, no one is more surprised
at what happens next than the artist himself.

"As much as I'm clear why I'm doing something,
when I'm stepping out I very quickly lose
understanding of why I was doing it," Alÿs says.
"Whereas while I'm in it, it's crystal clear. And
that's probably what helps the . . .
'improvisation' is not the right word. But on the
base of a very simple plot, sometimes a quite
complex and sometimes a quite long action can
start developing without any strict rules, but
there is a clear pattern which I'm following,
although it is pretty much built up every other
day."

He compares his artistic method to a swimmer
watching the riverbank steadily recede from him.
"The more I'm developing the narrative, the
further I am from what I'm trying to say."

Yet many of those who have observed or
participated in his narrative-building projects,
or both, have found that Alÿs' work speaks with a
deceptively simple, blank-verse elegance that
translates into many languages and across many
cultures.

One of his most publicized and representative
projects took place five years ago in Peru, as
part of the Lima Biennale. He, Medina and a small
team of collaborators recruited 500 volunteers
armed with shovels to the outskirts of a desert
shantytown, where they attempted by collective
spade-work to shift the top of a sand dune by 4
inches. The resulting performance piece/political
intervention, "When Faith Moves Mountains" --
which shared certain affinities with the Earth
Art of the 1970s but implicitly subverted its
grandiose ambitions -- functioned as a subtle
symbol of how ordinary Peruvians, their country
rived by years of guerrilla-backed civil war and
brutal government reprisals, could unite around a
common purpose, however ultimately
inconsequential.

"I think what I'm trying to do is twist the plot,
slightly, so that people can look at the
situation from a different perspective," Alÿs
says.

"The little you can do as an artist," he
continues, is to "offer for a few minutes or a
few seconds the possibility of another reading or
observation.

"It's kind of bizarre, but you can physically
feel the shift, if you want, around you, the way
somebody just creates a moment of doubt."

In that moment, he believes, lies the potential
for gaining some small understanding of a place,
a culture or an idea that once might have seemed
utterly alien and impenetrable. Alÿs' style is to
arrive at that moment not by taking the shortest
distance between two points, but through
indirection, paradox and purposeful meandering.

In "The Green Line Walk" (2004), Alÿs ambled
through Jerusalem carrying a dribbling can of
green paint, roughly retracing the boundary that
Israeli commander Moshe Dayan drew on a map with
a green grease pencil when he partitioned the
city after the November 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
"The reason I went there, it wasn't clear to me,"
Alÿs says characteristically, "but probably
because I found it such an archetypal situation
of human conflict over thousands of years."

'A fable or an urban myth'

Given the politically charged, physically risky
character of some of his projects, Alÿs
occasionally can seem to be less involved in a
"politics of rehearsal" than in playing Russian
roulette with a loaded allegory. But as Ferguson
notes, Alÿs' approach is as much poetic as
political. His interventions are "not agitprop in
the traditional sense," Ferguson says, "they're
just things that get into your mind the way a
poem may get into your mind, and you can turn it
over a number of different ways."

Accordingly, his absurdist beaux gestes aren't
insider-ish, Dadaist quips but relatively
straightforward jokes that most everyone can get
-- for instance, the time that he sent a peacock
to represent him at the Venice Biennale. (The
creature obligingly strutted around showing off
its fine plumage to the assembled glitterati.)

Alÿs says that his narratives aspire to pass from
the temporal realm of action into stories spread
by word of mouth, however vaguely recounted, that
can outlive their "artistic" genesis. He has put
it this way: "If the script meets the
expectations and addresses the anxieties of that
society at that time and place, it may become a
story that survives the event itself. At that
moment, it has the potential to become a fable or
an urban myth."

There's another key to many of Alÿs' projects,
whether they involve traipsing past Israeli
military checkpoints or charging into the middle
of a natural disaster. "You learn to walk fast,"
he says. A man in motion stays in motion, and
Alÿs is eager to head back to work at his studio,
a 40-minute walk away, in the city's historic
center.

But before he leaves, he agrees to stand still
long enough to have his picture taken. As it
turns out, the photographer is on her way to
cover a hurricane that's blowing into Mexico from
the Caribbean. Alÿs smiles and pleads, only
half-jokingly, "Can I come?"

Isn't running into cyclones kind of dangerous? he
is asked. Alÿs considers this.

"You wait 10 hours for two tornadoes to pass," he
says, as if tedium were a greater threat to
mortal flesh than 100-mph winds.

"Sometimes it's very tense," he concedes. "But then, it just suddenly clicks."

Slide Show @ <http://tinyurl.com/yrtqv7>

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

>>>

IN NEW YORK, 286 SAINT FABIOLAS = ONE EPIPHANY

By Blake Gopnik, Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, November 11, 2007

New York -- In the far reaches of uptown
Manhattan, beyond Harlem, there's a suite of
wood-paneled galleries hosting work the like of
which they've never seen before: 286 portraits of
the same female saint, crafted by artists ranging
from skilled hacks to ungifted amateurs, all
showing their subject in the same pose, in the
same clothes and in general as much alike as they
could make her.

Over and over and over again.

Your jaw drops, your eyes pop and you can't
suppress a chuckle. Here, in a museum as
venerable as any, you're up against what's not
supposed to be in a museum: The unculled, the
unprecious, the unlovely, the unvaried. It's so
much business-as- un usual, it can only be
contemporary art.

And it is. All those look-alike portraits make up
"Francis Alys: Fabiola," an installation mounted
by the Dia Art Foundation, one of New York's
leading supporters of the avant-garde. The
antique galleries it has borrowed belong to the
103-year-old Hispanic Society. It's known mostly
for its holdings in Goya, El Greco and Velázquez.

Alys is a 48-year-old Belgian long based in
Mexico City. He is a major player in contemporary
art, with work that varies more widely than most.
It ranges from a video that shows him kicking a
huge block of ice through his adopted city (we
watch it melt to the size of an ice cube) to a
12-hour documentary of the city's main square (it
shows locals crowding into the shadow of a huge
flagpole, and moving with it as the sunny day
wears on) to paintings to snapshots to delicate,
hand-drawn animations with an almost sentimental
side.

Fabiola is a Catholic saint who died in Rome in
399. Born into a wealthy family, she was the
subject of a scandal in the early Christian
church -- she dared divorce an abusive husband --
but later renounced all worldly goods and became
a chum of Saint Jerome. Fabiola was mostly
ignored until 1854, when a sentimental novel
about her life became a bestseller. She got
another boost in 1885, when a French artist named
Jean-Jacques Henner painted what became her
iconic image. Henner's painting hasn't survived.
But over the past 120 years, thousands and
thousands of copies of it have been made by
professionals, part-timers and faith-filled
outsider artists.

"Francis Alys: Fabiola" simply presents the horde
of Fabiola pictures Alys has been able to
accumulate, at flea markets and wherever else
they have turned up, in the 15 or so years since
he started his collection.

Lots of important artists have built major art
collections. How many have set out to build a
determinedly minor one, made up of insignificant
copies of an unimportant lost original? Alys's
collection is in a class of its own, with
holdings more interesting than many.

Given the mania it launched, Henner's original
Fabiola was surprisingly staid: A
head-and-shoulders profile of a woman looking
left, shown wearing a red wimple against a plain
dark background.

Most derivations keep that basic format intact:
At most, Fabiola's head may veer from profile, or
it may look right instead of left. But otherwise,
the copies can play fast and loose.

There's a Fabiola meticulously inlaid in precious
woods. There are Fabiolas carved or cast in low
relief, and others almost in 3-D. Fabiola is
rendered in sophisticated needleworks that come
surprisingly close to what the original painting
might have looked like (they seem as if they were
all made from the same stitch-a-Fabiola kit).
Other sewn panels are crude home-drawn affairs
that barely capture her outline. There's a
surprisingly proficient Fabiola done entirely in
grains, beans and seeds -- a kind of farm-house
pixelation -- and another done by backing glass
with colored foils.

Most Fabiolas clearly reveal when they were made.
In 1920s pictures, the dour saint has a hint of
the flapper about her; by the '40s she's a bit
Lauren Bacall. She can be rendered with the thick
impasto of impressionism, the slick surface of
Victorian sentiment, or even, in a rare modernist
moment, in a portrait floated on an almost cubist
cityscape.

That last picture is signed "Iemus" and must date
from the '30s, but that's just a single Fabiolist
among several whom we know by name. The saint was
also painted by a certain Jos. Bissehops in 1922
(his Fabiola has some silent-film-star verve), by
"Arely" in 1976 (that artist makes Fabiola
doe-eyed but with a kewpie-doll-pert mouth) and
by a guy called Fred who didn't date his work but
managed to stick the saint with an echo of his
own masculine features.

Some artists, whether signing their works or not,
clearly put everything they had into their
pictures. Others did a very cursory job; they
must have felt that having the image at all is
what mattered, not its look or the labor it took.
Much contemporary art has striven for precisely
what each of these modest Fabiola pictures has
achieved: A power that is purely in the thing it
shows, not the manner of its showing -- content
absolutely dominating form.

That, maybe, is one of the crucial insights of
this installation: Thousands of people have
wanted -- needed -- to bring Fabiola into their
homes, in whatever form she took. The exhibition
pamphlet notes in passing that she is the patron
saint of battered and abandoned women. But it
doesn't dwell on that unnerving fact: on what the
amazing spread of her image might tell us about
the state of Catholic womanhood. Even Fabiola's
distinct second-billing in the pantheon of saints
hasn't quashed her picture's popularity, given
the huge and continuing call for her area of
saintly expertise.

But once you've come to grips with what this
quantity of Fabiolas might mean, there's still
much thinking left to do about the qualities
particular to each avatar of her. Where most
installation art lets you into the mind of one
artist at one time and place, this piece yields
insights into how art plays out over time and
around the world. It doesn't ask you to look into
the mind of Alys, so much as through his eyes at
the art of others.

As the saint changes from artist to artist, place
to place, date to date, she gives a kind of easy
lesson in all the ways that art can intersect
with what it shows, and with its viewers. A fine
carving in wood gives the saint almost Incan
features, perhaps so she can work more
effectively for an Andean clientele. Or, as we've
seen, she can take on movie-star good looks,
maybe for the American faithful. Did the hint of
testosterone she got from "Fred" serve a
particular end, or is it the kind of happenstance
that's bound to happen when you're making any
work of art? That's the kind of question Alys
gets us asking as we ponder his peculiar theme
and variations. As we try to sort a picture's
signal from its noise, we always end up
wondering: Which part's the deliberate art, and
which the accident?

On the walls of the Hispanic Society, for
instance, we get to watch a twisting fold in
Fabiola's wimple start out as something captured
from the world of living nuns, then become, in
its colored-foil version and in several others,
an almost purely decorative swirl without much
meaning to it -- a significant detail becomes an
empty artifact of copying. Something similar
happened to the realistic highlights on the
drapery in Greek and Roman painting, which became
streaks of ornamental gilding when medieval
artists took them up, as demonstrated years ago
by the great art historian Ernst Gombrich. That
change spanned hundreds of years; Alys lets us
see the same process speeded up.

Or we can watch things go the other way: In some
of the later Fabiolas here, the look of portrait
photographs exerts a force, pushing Alys's
Fabiolists ever further from the Renaissance
stylings of Henner's original.

In general, looking at all these Fabiolas, we
realize there's no such thing as a "standard"
realist portrait. There are about as many ways to
render reality in art as there are ways to paint
and sculpt and inlay -- or to glue down beans. We
see the same sighting of the saint rendered in
thick dabs and thin glazes, on black velvet or
crude plywood, outlined in black or colored in.
And it's never clear that one is simply "better,"
or even more straightforwardly realistic, than
another. It's not nearly enough, as is often
claimed, for realists to look extra closely at
the world they're copying. Even when they've got
the narrow goal of reproducing someone else's
painting, they've got options, options, options.

Pic @
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2007/11/09/PH2007110900678.h
tml>

Francis Alys: Fabiola runs through April 6 at the
Hispanic Society of America in New York, on
Broadway between 155th and 156th streets. Call
212-926-2234 or visit http://www.diacenter.org.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

"IF YOU WANT TO BE AN ICON OF VIRTUE, THIS IS THE MOMENT BECAUSE YOU'LL STAND OUT" by Dave Hickey

"IF YOU WANT TO BE AN ICON OF VIRTUE, THIS IS THE
MOMENT BECAUSE YOU'LL STAND OUT"

Dave Hickey

29.10.07

Issue 185

The question of how to sell without selling out
is especially relevant in the contemporary art
world and there are few people better qualified
to grapple with this thorny topic than Dave
Hickey. Not only is he Professor of English at
the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Hickey is
also one of America's best known art and cultural
critics, admired for his aversion to academicism
and his robust analysis of the effects on art of
the rough and tumble of the free market. Last
month he delivered a keynote speech at Frieze:
"Schoolyard art: playing fair without the
referee." Here we present an edited transcript.
The lecture is available as a podcast at:

www.friezefoundation.org/talks.

The title of this talk comes from a legend about
the great basketball player Julius Irving, Dr J,
who was famous even in his schoolyard days; he
wanted to be a professional player so much that
he always played by the rules even on the school
yard. He would call fouls on himself. Any of you
who have been around the art world for the last
few years will realise the aptness of this
comparison because whatever rules there may have
been, no longer apply. There are people out there
who like art more than money. The only bad thing
is that there are a lot of artists who like money
more than art. This is a problem but consider the
benefits. There has never been a better chance to
draw attention to oneself by behaving honourably
and honestly and meticulously. If you want to be
an icon of virtue, this is the moment because
you'll stand out.If you behave well, if you
behave correctly, if you make art that will still
matter in 200 years, all you can lose is money.
Did anyone get into the art world to make money?
I got into it for sex and drugs but not for
money. Why is everyone worrying about money? What
are you going to do if you get a lot of money?
Are you going to buy a boat? Are you going to buy
an apartment in Paris? Jesus, stop it! Unless you
have an incredible drug habit, I don't really see
any reason to have money at all. I really don't
care about money, as my wife will tell you. I do
care about being right. My rule is Leo Castelli's
rule and a lot of what I'm telling you today
comes from Leo. Leo said: "You can't be right all
the time but you can never be wrong." If you go
by that rule, you're going to be ok. Leo's idea
of being wrong was to sell something for too much
money. The example he gave was a painter named
Jennifer Bartlett, who was represented by Paula
Cooper Gallery. Jennifer had a little bubble
moment, she began selling her pictures in the
high six figures-they really deserved to be sold
in the low twos. So I asked Leo what was wrong
with that and he said: "It hurts Carl Andre's
prices." Which is to say, the prices of
everybody's work are compromised by selling art
for too much money. For a dealer, this is
virtually impossible to avoid these days. My
friend Bob Shapazian, who was director of the
Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, quit. And why
did he quit? He said: "I'm not an art dealer
anymore. I sit around, a crate comes in, I see
who the crate's from, I go to the waiting list, I
make up this outrageous fucking number and send
it out. That's not being an art dealer. I am
creating value but it is not real value."What we
have here is a strange moment which is the return
of primary practice. In the 80s and 90s, you had
one of the biggest hypocritical moments in the
history of art. You would walk into a gallery and
in the front room would be the work of somebody
called something like Hernando which was
completely composed of confetti and dog turds.
There would be a serious essay about confetti and
dog turds-their interchangeability, their social
relevance, the way they relate to late
capitalism. And then, if you could get into the
back room with your shoes clean, you would buy
the Donald Judd that was back there. We went
through two decades of what was mostly a
secondary market in which the front room was just
a place to put up installation art with popcorn
machines, that nobody had even the faintest
interest in selling, as a loss leader to lure
people into the back room to buy the Donald Judd
and the Claes Oldenburg. With the collapse of
this moment, a lot of things happened. The public
funding disappeared. With public funding gone,
the power of the museum receded. Kunsthalles
closed like little violets across the country. At
the same time we have seen the development of a
business world which benefits from a condition of
borderline hyperliquidity. I was talking to the
president of the Venetian Resort hotel and casino
in Las Vegas. He said: "You wouldn't believe it.
We are bringing money home by the bucketful, we
bring bucket after bucket of money. We are
running out of buckets." When you run out of
buckets, when you run out of places to put your
money, that's hyperliquidity. And I needn't tell
you that hyperliquidity is good for the art world
because if you really want to piss away some
money, the art world is the place to do it. There
is so much money out there at the moment it just
makes you cry. And it's harder and harder to get
hold of it unless you're selling art. So we have
a bubble. Art bubbles are great. Art bubbles suck
money into the art world. Who gets hurt in an art
bubble? Greedy artists; stupid collectors. Who
else? Nobody with their wits about them gets hurt
in an art bubble.Also institutions today have the
power of sucking all the money available in the
community into the museum. I said to a friend of
mine who runs a museum on the West Coast: "You've
had 17 installation art shows, are you ever going
to show any objects again?" He said: "If I show
objects the people on my board just buy them, and
then they don't give me the money." What has
changed is the whole format of the art world as
it existed before 1970: you had artists who
worked in their studios; they took their work to
galleries; the art galleries sold this work to
members of the community. When a community had
purchased a critical mass of this work it was
presumed that it had some aspect of public virtue
and you had to show it in a museum. So what we're
dealing with for most of the 20th century is the
transformation of objects of private delectation
into icons of public significance. This is what
happened when I was growing up in Fort Worth.
There was a moment, and I'm ashamed to admit it,
in which every mid-century modern dining room in
Fort Worth had a Maurice Lewis on the wall. So,
quite naturally, the museum had a Maurice Lewis
show because it presumed you could look at a
Maurice Lewis and figure out something about Fort
Worth-which you could but you didn't want to know
it. The same thing happened with Frank Stella.
When Stella's work permeated the New York art
world to a sufficient level, there was a Frank
Stella show at MoMA [in 1970]. One of the
interesting things about this process is that the
museum shows did not depend upon the
professionalism of their staff, they depended on
the collective taste and wishes and desires of
the community. So when you were looking at the
Frank Stella show you were thinking: "What is it
about these that turns on bond salesmen?" It was
a fairly straightforward business. The
transformation from private delectation into
public significance took place through the
auspices of honest brokers. An honest broker is a
critic like me who is not going to lie but who is
actually going to try and figure out what is
important about Frank Stella. It is going to be a
magazine editor who does not lie who publishes a
review of the exhibition. It is going to be a
curator or a dealer who has staked his or her
reputation on being right about this. The last
example I remember: in 1971 Bruce Nauman joined
the Leo Castelli gallery. Marcia Tucker at the
Whitney put up a big Nauman show and Phil Leider,
editor of ArtForum, assigned critic Peter Plagens
to review it. What this means is that Leo
Castelli who does not compromise, Marcia Tucker
who does not compromise, Phil Leider who does not
compromise and Peter Plagens who does not
compromise, endorsed this work by Bruce Nauman.
This is especially important because they all
have very different taste. So this represents a
consensus of investment from people whose job it
is to be right, and to never be wrong. In
economics we call this a "price point". Phil
Leider's investment was a price point. Another
price point was when Leo Steinberg, one of the
great art historians, would stake his art
historical reputation on Bob Rauschenberg and
Jasper Johns, who were then these two virtual
unknowns living on Ludlow Street. This was a
major risk. But, if Leo Steinberg takes that
risk, and if he succeeds, that's a price point.
Ask yourselves: Who can give you a price point
today? Who is never wrong? Who makes a profession
out of never being wrong? Nobody. Who is the
dealer who tries to be never wrong? Who is the
dealer who tries never to sell anything for too
much money? This world no longer exists. The art
market in the 20th century is first of all a
finite market which means there are always more
works of art than there are people to buy them.
What does that mean? It means, as Leo says, that
somebody has to buy two. Somebody has to buy four
or five. If the art does not change, nobody's
going to buy two. To maintain itself in public
vogue, art needs perpetual reinvestment, an
artist needs one show after another show, one
essay after another essay-all these are occasions
for stylistic development. If I happen to have
written about your frog paintings last year and
if you put up another show of frog paintings, I'm
not coming by. But, if Barbara [Gladstone] calls
me and says: "You haven't seen the salamander
paintings, Dave," then I'm going to rush right
over. What happens when you have an institutional
market is that nothing changes. Installation art
did not change, though it had great moments of
innovation. In 1968 Bruce Nauman invented the
plywood box. Do you remember the plywood box?
I've been in every plywood box in the universe.
You could not make the plywood box go away. I've
been in plywood boxes with coal on the floor,
with cotton on the floor, I've been in plywood
boxes you climbed into with a ladder, I've been
in plywood boxes in which there was nothing there
except for, written on the wall, the tiny word
"boogie". All of this created a steady-state
market place in which there was nothing to drive
style change. The logic of an institutional
market is: "We don't care. We're just filling up
this hole in our schedule." It's really more
important [to institutions] if the person
building the plywood box is a Zuni [Native
American] warrior than if we've ever seen the
plywood box before. And the presumption is: We
don't have style development anymore because
history is over. I date the end of history to the
assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968. When they
shot JFK everybody said "Oh God, it's so terrible
it's the end of the world." When they shot Bobby,
everybody said: "Oh no, not again." And the end
of history is pretty much marked by: "Oh no, not
again." The problem is that even though history
may be over-time keeps on going. Not having
history doesn't disable ennui. The art world
works on ennui, that's the only thing that makes
it go. I am bored with giant cibachrome
photographs of three Germans standing behind a
mailbox. It doesn't mean it's bad, it just means
I'm fucking bored with it. This is the crisis
that happened, with the death of installation
art, with the enormous escalation of available
capital, with the collapse of institutional
authority; all this created the world that we
live in today and the art fair is the embodiment
of it. Another appropriate analogy: a couple of
years ago I was at one of those hotel art fairs,
where you walk down the hall and every door is
open and there are little sculptures sitting on
the bedspreads and light works stuck up on the
walls. I was walking through one of these, and I
was thinking it was kind of strange, it was like
Amsterdam without the prostitutes. You're walking
down the hall and looking into all of these rooms
with all of these things. Then I went home that
night and turned on the television. This was two
days after Americans had entered Baghdad and
overthrown Saddam Hussein. There's a guy with a
camera, walking down the hall of the Baghdad
Hilton and every door is open. In here you can
buy Xerox machines, in here you can buy ancient
Sumerian artefacts, in here you can buy
everybody's medical records in Iraq. Every room
was full of stolen shit. And the analogy between
that little moment in the hotel and the little
moment in Baghdad put a special spin on the art
fair phenomenon for me, the idea of absolute,
raw, rapacious capitalism. I have no problem with
it, I love it when people buy art. When I walk
through Frieze looking at everything, I'm saying
to myself, "Does this meet my standards?" My
standards for any gathering of art are: is 99% of
this bullshit? Yes. But, is 1% of it interesting?
Yes. That's about your percentages for anything
in the world.Eventually some dealer will think,
"I've got this great idea. I'm only going to show
art I like." Everybody else will go, "Oh, no,
don't do that. You're fucking kidding.
Everybody's got to show one of each." When you
walk to their stands at art fairs, dealers
currently ask you: "Would you like to see my
Iranian minimalist? If not, our Berlin
pornographer is quite interesting. We've got one
of each here for any taste." What this means is
that the dealer currently has no power. One day
one dealer may say to himself: "I'm going to
gather power the way Leo did, I'm just going to
show stuff I really believe in." That's going to
really change things. And the art world as we
currently know it will disappear. As exciting as
this moment is now, imagine how exciting the
collapse is going to be. It's really something to
look forward to. Boom! Thousands of Icari
plummeting into the surf. Eventually all the
windows where you sell your soul are going to be
closed.

©2007 The Art Newspaper