Thursday, January 31, 2008

'BANKSY'S IDEAS HAVE THE VALUE OF A JOKE' by Matthew Collings & "ART ATTACK" by Peter Kennard

January 28, 2008

'BANKSY'S IDEAS HAVE THE VALUE OF A JOKE'

The respect given to 'street art' is a measure of
how puerile and idiotic contemporary art has
become

Matthew Collings

Do you like adolescent entertainment? Do you have
the mentality of a teenager? Do you find Cézanne
a bit overrated? If the answer is yes, yes and
yes, then I don't know what to do with you. You
are a childish philistine literalist. Get down to
Bonhams (one of the world's oldest and largest
auctioneers of fine art and antiques) next
Tuesday for their first-ever dedicated sale of
"street art" - this is the experience for you.

"Street art" means graffiti, comics-style stuff,
spray-paint art, flyposting - the art of groovy
youth. The stars of the street-art sale will
include Banksy, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Antony Micallef, Adam Neate, Faile,
Paul Insect, Space Invader, Swoon, D*Face and
Shepard Fairey.

Basquiat, who died of an overdose in 1988, was
funny and witty, and he had a great sense of
bitter irony about black cultural history: he
shared this sensibility with many people. But he
was a great mark-maker, an arranger of forms, he
could make surfaces breath and colours sing, and
all this made him extremely rare. As an artist
Haring (who died of an Aids-related illness three
years after Basquiat) was nothing like in
Basquiat's league: he had commercial appeal but
was too visually repetitive and sterile to be
significant beyond his own brief moment.
Basquiat's shining light shows up the visual
boredom of the rest of the "street art" crew -
they are funny and punky, sure, but, well, who
isn't?

Gareth Williams, the urban-art specialist at
Bonhams, says: "By transposing their images from
street wall to canvas, urban artists are now
creating a permanent legacy without compromising
the vitality of their art." Poor Williams - how
giddy and weightless life must be for him, to be
in the business of using words without having any
interest in what they mean.

"Vitality" is what Matisse or Goya has, or
Islamic mosaics, or Greek statues, or abstract
paintings by Jackson Pollock - all that old
obscure stuff. Vitality in art is a rare quality,
it means life - you see it and you feel life is
worth living. It goes with originality and
surprise, a mixture of the fresh and the eternal.
It's found throughout the history of art. It's
the opposite of convention and routine. The point
about street art is that it has to conform to
street-art convention. It has to be a routine. It
has to express the personality of a stoner,
grinning, funny and kidlike.

What can you get at the auction? You can be the
owner of Banksy's Laugh Now, in stencil paint on
canvas, for only £40,000. It shows a chimp with a
sign round its neck that reads: "You can laugh
but one day we'll be in charge." What would you
really be buying? A status symbol - the work has
no value as art. But owning it would make you
modern and clever. Or stupid. It's a fine line.

A work by Banksy sold at auction for £288,000
last April. He is collected by Damien Hirst, who
we know is incredibly wealthy - but so what?
Hirst's paintings of his son being born cost £1
million each and visually they are junk. They are
only valuable because of a market consensus, not
because they connect to anything important. Most
of life is made up of trivia, and there's nothing
wrong with celebrating it. But it's something
else again to revere it as if it's the pyramids;
there's something sick about that.

"Street art" is adolescent. With the exception of
Basquiat, the artists whose work is on sale at
Bonhams next week are talented people in that
area, but the area itself is of absolutely no
interest unless you've got an arrested mentality.
Its rise as something to take seriously says
something about the weird state of art now. The
core of art today is satire and gags and
attention-getting stunts. As a society we all
kind of know this but somehow we also accept that
it's a social faux pasever to mention it. Banksy
being considered a "conceptual artist" is only a
measure of how banal and feeble the "concepts" of
contemporary art are, and an indication of art's
slide into all-out philistinism. To appear
tuned-in we now have to pretend that a literal
crack in the floor at Tate Modern means global
unease (the latest commission by Tate Modern in
its annual Unilever series), that a lot of real
people standing on a marble plinth means
"humanity" (Anthony Gormley's proposal for a new
work on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square)
and that Marc Quinn's new sculptures at White
Cube of foetuses are "influenced by Michelangelo".

Banksy's ideas only have the value of a joke.
What is an idea in real or high art? This is a
puzzle for Williams, Bonhams press-release
writer, but also apparently a puzzle for the
guardians and spokespersons of culture now. When
contemporary-art explainers are asked on to Radio
4's Front Row or BBC Two's Late Review to enthuse
about new art shows, the hosts never challenge
the rubbish they spout. Mark Lawson doesn't know
about art, but also he doesn't want to seem
offensive. And yet he does know about ideas, and
he must see that Anthony Gormley doesn't really
have them in any important sense - Lawson starts
reasonably enough, not wanting to appear gauche
in a conversation about art, but he ends up
actually believing the bullshit.

The result is a culture subscribed to by many,
many intelligent people, in which another level
of meaning operates where art is concerned than
the level that operates for, say, books by J. M.
Coetzee. With the former we accept an unaesthetic
experience and an explanation that is shallow
where it is not incomprehensible. And with the
latter we're in awe of wit, learning, craft,
knowledge and surprise; we're amazed that the
depths of what it feels like to be a suffering,
feeling, joyful, thinking human being right now
can be captured by art. With Banksy (as with
Hirst) we're just amazed that he could be so rich.


Laughing all the way to the Banksy

Online bidding for a wall painted on by Banksy
closed earlier this month with a final price of
£208,100, after 69 bids. The owner of the wall,
Luti Fagbenle, estimated that the cost of removal
of the piece would be around £5,000, to be paid
by the buyer.

In October 2006, a Banksy painting used for the
cover of Blur's Think Tank album - of an
embracing couple dressed in deep-sea diving gear
- sold at Bonhams for £62,400, ten times the
original estimate.

The previous month, the graffiti artist staged a
show in Los Angeles, at which Angelina Jolie is
reported to have spent £200,000 on his work.
Christina Aguilera is another celebrity fan - she
visited Banksy's Soho gallery during a trip to
London in April 2006 and paid £25,000 for three
works, including one depicting Queen Victoria in
a lesbian clinch with a prostitute.

Bombing Middle England, a painting of pensioners
playing bowls with bombs, fetched a whopping
£102,000, more than double its highest estimated
price of £50,000, at Sotheby's in February last
year.

In the same sale, Banksy's Balloon Girl sold for
£37,200, and another work called Bomb Hugger for
£31,200.


© Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.


>>>


ART ATTACK

Peter Kennard

Published 17 January 2008

Banksy attracts the press attention, but around
him is an increasingly influential movement of
political artists operating outside the mainstream

The phone rings; the number is withheld. It's
Banksy. He wants to know whether I can go to
Bethlehem over Christmas. He is putting on an
exhibition, bringing together like-minded artists
from all over the world to raise awareness of the
situation in Palestine. Like the annual guerrilla
art shows that have taken place in London for the
past six years, it will be called "Santa's
Ghetto". Two weeks later, I find myself involved
in an experience that transforms my ideas about
what artists can do in the face of oppression.

We are living through an exciting time for
political art. I have been an artist for 40
years, and my work has always focused on
political and social issues. In the 1970s, I
started making photo montage work, drawing on
imagery from the Vietnam War and the row over
nuclear armaments (a retrospective opens at the
Pump House Gallery this month). Since the
build-up to the Iraq War in 2002, I have been
collaborating with a younger artist, Cat Picton
Phillipps, developing new techniques and using
digital technology to expose the lies that led to
the invasion and the subsequent humanitarian
disaster.

Over this period, our work has become linked to a
group of young artists who work outside the
official art world. Most of them started out
painting graffiti on walls. The central figure in
this group is Banksy, but although he attracts
most of the press coverage, he is surrounded by a
growing band of talented, politically committed
artists. Our associates come from Spain and
Italy, the US, Britain and Palestine. Since the
era of the Bush/Blair war in Iraq, this movement
has become increasingly politicised, just as my
generation was politicised by the war in Vietnam.
These are artists who want to connect with the
real world, rather than work for the market,
which has more of a stranglehold on art than
ever. They combine creativity with protest,
insisting that art should be more than the icing
on the cake for the super-rich.

We arrived in Bethlehem with four fellow artists:
Blu, an Italian who has painted on walls from
Bologna to Buenos Aires; Sam3, from Spain; the
long-standing Banksy collaborator Paul Insect,
from Britain; and Gee Vaucher, another Brit and
the only other artist of my generation. The rest
are all in their thirties and come from
street-art backgrounds. All of them are well
informed about the Middle East and came to
Bethlehem to show their solidarity with the
Palestinians.

Banksy had been to the West Bank a number of
times to paint on the Separation Wall. He knows
and understands the situation and had a team of
focused, sussed people working with him. They
found a disused fast-food joint in Manger Square
and managed to rent it. The idea was to show a
combination of western and Palestinian artists.
The art was available to buy on site only, so if
you wanted to get hold of the latest Banksy or
any of the other artworks, you would have to
travel to Bethlehem to place a bid. This was
important, because Bethlehem is being starved of
its tourist trade as visitors are bussed in to
see the Church of the Nativity and bussed out an
hour later back to Israel. All proceeds from the
sale, which exceeded $1m, went to local charities.

For our contribution, Cat and I decided to print
a dollar bill across 18 sheets of the Jerusalem
Post, ripped through to expose images of
pre-Naqba Palestine. The pictures show the
richness of Palestine's history and the diversity
of its culture - a sobering antidote to the
stereotype of a violent, irrational people that
we so often see on the news. We wanted to make
the work in Bethlehem because taking finished
pieces over would be difficult, given Israel's
heavy and ever-changing restrictions on what and
who can travel in to the Palestinian territories.

We teamed up with a group of Palestinians, who
helped to get hold of materials and sort out
logistics. They also gave us all a window on life
in the West Bank, with looming Israeli
settlements and endless checkpoints. Every night
we would pile into a kebab restaurant, where we
would drink and dance, arguing over and
discussing that day's work. One night over
dinner, the Palestinians recounted how they had
been held and tortured by the Israeli authorities
while they were still in their mid-teens. It was
extraordinary how welcoming they were to this
motley band of artists. All the privations and
restrictions have only increased the
Palestinians' resilience and their desire to
communicate with the outside world.

Through these friends we found a commercial
printing house in Hebron, which got involved in
sorting out our highly unconventional printing
needs. This involved printing a giant dollar
across many sheets of newspaper and also making a
giant print to plaster on the Separation Wall.
The printers immediately committed their time and
energy to the project, and ended up printing for
Banksy and the other artists.

Through this process of making, the people of
Bethlehem became involved in what the work was
saying. After we pasted our picture on the wall,
we went for tea in the cafe opposite. The cafe
owner, whose business has been destroyed by the
wall, told us he appreciated the statement we had
plastered on to the cement that he has to stare
at every day of his life.

Sticking up a poster or painting the Separation
Wall in the West Bank might sound
inconsequential, but these are highly practical
ways to help, in contrast to the intellectual
interventions prevalent in much contemporary art.
They contribute to a town and a people that are
having their lifeblood strangled out of them.

In this context, it is important that the work
communicates directly to the Palestinian people.
While there has been a move to take on
contemporary issues in a direct way in the
theatre, in visual art the idea still holds that
if you have something to say about the world, you
have to hide it behind theory and obscurity. It
sometimes seems that Britain's art colleges turn
out experts in camouflage, rather than fine art.

The pressure of world events is so great that it
is increasingly difficult to sustain the idea of
art for art's sake. Radical art and politics
converge in times of crisis, and that is
happening now. I know, from my experience as a
tutor at the Royal College of Art and at the
University of the Arts in London, that the
ironies of the Nineties YBA movement are now a
thing of the past. Many art students and young
artists are searching for ways to make a direct
connection between their awareness of how things
are in the world and their own art practice.

This involves thinking about not only the form of
the art itself, but also the process of making.
There are many collaborations taking place across
media and disciplines, and artists are looking
for new methods of distribution.

Unlike in my youth, there is no organised "left"
into which artists can slot, but there is a
concrete wall, 425 miles long, and we can turn it
into an international canvas of dissent.

"Uncertified Documents", a retrospective of work
by Peter Kennard, opens at the Pump House
Gallery, Battersea Park, London SW11 on 30
January.

Four to watch

Blu burst on to the public-art scene after the
success of his contributions to the "Urban Edge"
show in Milan in 2005. His reputation is built on
expansive, surreal, often aggressive wall and
pavement murals. Though renowned for his
playfulness, acclaimed pieces from 2007, such as
Fantoche in Switzerland, Letter A in New York and
Reclaim Your City in Berlin, have a more macabre
tone.

Suleiman Mansour co-founded al-Wasiti Art Centre
in east Jerusalem, which he now directs, and went
on to lead the New Vision artists' group, which
proved influential during the first intifada. A
pioneer of resistance art, Mansour makes work
that revolves around the Palestinian struggle. He
was head of the League of Palestinian Artists for
four years, and won the Nile Award at the 1998
Cairo Biennale as well as the Palestine Prize for
the Visual Arts the same year. He is famous for
using locally sourced materials, such as mud and
henna, in his pieces.

Sam3 (Samuel Marín) comes from Granada in
southern Spain, where his ephemeral long, black
silhouettes haunt the cityscape. Famous works
include his 12 Shadows project for AlterArte and
the iconic Erase Yourself, a silent protest
against the civic legal authorities for removing
graffiti in Barcelona.

Paul Insect is a London-based ex-designer whose
pioneering of "steampunk", a mixture of Gothic
Victoriana and futuristic themes, has proved
popular with the British arts intelligentsia. In
July last year, Damien Hirst bought his entire
"Bullion" show at the Lazarides Gallery in Soho.
His painting Unicorn sold for an estimated
£24,500 at Sotheby's last month.

Pics <http://www.blublu.org/>

<http://tinyurl.com/2gnv4v>

<http://www.ixovoxi.com/>

<http://www.paulinsect.com/>

<http://www.woostercollective.com/2004/12/new_work_from_paul_insect.html>


© New Statesman 1913-2007

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

"THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ART AND EXHIBITIONISM" by Germaine Greer

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ART AND EXHIBITIONISM

Why do so many female artists put themselves in
their work - often with no clothes on?

Germaine Greer

January 28, 2008

It was my good fortune a week or so ago to hear
the Luce annual lecture on American creativity,
given by pioneer feminist art historian Linda
Nochlin. The title of her lecture was Dislocating
Tradition: Women Artists and the Body, from
Cassatt to Whiteread. Having for years grappled
in vain with the peculiar role of the body as
both medium and message in women's art, I
hotfooted down to the Royal Academy and prepared
to have my perplexities unknotted and my
vestigial puritan revulsions dispelled.

It is a truism of feminist history that women
have been regarded primarily as body, passive,
fertile body, as essential to human survival as
earth. If women artists were ever to engage with
anything, they were going to have to engage with
body as earnestly as Cézanne engages with
landscape, and so they did. The model became the
artist, but at the same time she clung to her
role as model, so that she became her own
subject. At first, this was manifest in a
tendency to produce an inordinate number of
self-portraits. In 18th-century France, Vigée-Le
Brun never tired of painting flattering portraits
of herself, which was quite a good move for a
society portrait painter, who was expected to do
a similar job on her clients. At the same time,
Angelika Kauffmann produced dozens of dreamy
versions of herself not only in portraits, but
also in allegorical paintings in which she
figured as the personification of art or music or
both. Frida Kahlo could engage with no subject
other than her fictionalised and glamorised self.
Her proliferating faux-naive paintings are
advertisements for the performance that was her
life.

For the women artists of surrealism, in the words
of Whitney Chadwick, "the idealised version of
the woman as muse was no help ... rejecting the
idea of the Muse as Other, they turned instead to
their own images and their own realities as
sources for their art. Even when the subject of
the work is not the self-portrait per se, there
is a persistent anchoring of the imagery in
recognisable depiction of the artist." The
thought of art as solipsism has me tearing my
hair. The convention of the muse is simply a
trope figuring forth male creativity; if the
convention was useless to women, they could
simply have done without it, but, as most of them
also chose to become sexually involved with male
artists, they wasted a good deal of time playing
the muse's illusory role, apparently unaware that
the muse is rarely the artist's actual bedmate. A
male artist's recognition of his consort in the
role of muse is mere gallantry. Why did the women
artists of surrealism have to follow such a
sterile, narcissistic paradigm? As for their
images being recognisable, they made sure of that
by posing for at least as many photographs as
they made paintings. Most of them put more paint
on their faces in a lifetime than they did on
canvas.

The advent of performance art produced a tide of
women artists, many of whom were not content with
starring in their own show without stripping.
Since the 1960s, when Carolee Schneeman took off
her clothes to perform art in New York basements,
I have wondered what the connection might be
between art and exhibitionism, and why it was
that so many of the nude female performance
artists had beautiful bodies. Could it have been
coincidence? Even Helen Chadwick, a serious
artist, took pride in displaying her own
wonderfully elegant young body when somebody
else's would have done.

Professor Nochlin explained to us that Sam
Taylor-Wood's Portrait (1993) in a Fuck Suck
Spunk Wank T-shirt, with her trousers around her
ankles, was a "marvellous parody" of Botticelli's
Birth of Venus. She pointed out that the cabbage
on the table was a reference to the volute out of
which the goddess steps in Botticelli's painting,
but she didn't explain why Taylor-Wood chose to
pose herself and let someone else (Stephen White)
take the photograph. Any of Taylor-Wood's
art-school chums could have put on the T-shirt
and adopted the pose, and Taylor-Wood could have
taken the photograph herself. Sarah Lucas's
self-portrait with fried eggs on her chest was
correctly described as "as arrogant as any male
portrait", but why did Lucas pose it herself? The
fried-egg reference would be as appropriate to
any other woman, no? Why is Tracey Emin the
subject of all her own work? Is this good or is
it pathological? Why does Jenny Saville
deconstruct her own body? Why can't she use
someone else's? There is a possible answer, which
is that the use of the nude is necessarily
exploitative, and therefore a female artist who
needs to use a body has no option but to use her
own, but surely it can be no more than a
sophistry. Why does a female artist need to use
flesh in the first place?

The feminist art historian can no more ask these
questions than she can ask why most women's art
is no good. Her duty is to cry up women's work,
to see it as reactive and transgressive, as
dislocating tradition indeed, when the painterly
tradition is always being jolted and set off on
contradictory tangents, more often and more
fundamentally by men than by women. The woman who
displays her own body as her artwork seems to me
to be travelling in the tracks of an outworn
tradition that spirals downward and inward to
nothingness.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

"EMERGING, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS" By Jerry Saltz

EMERGING, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

The gallery gold rush has allowed artists who've
spent decades on the fringes to grab at the prize.

By Jerry Saltz

Published Jan 24, 2008

One of the good things about the supposedly evil
art boom-setting aside for the moment the notion
that it may be destabilizing right now- is that
underknown mid-career artists are getting second
chances at recognition. In November, Mary
Heilmann, who is 67 and whose work has always
been respected but never A-listed, scored the
covers of Artforum and Art in America
simultaneously. Today, she's the subject of a
traveling retrospective, selling paintings for
upwards of $200,000. Amy Sillman, 52, made the
cover of Artforum last February, and her prices
have reached $85,000. After decades of neglect,
Marilyn Minter, now 59, not only ended up in the
last Whitney Biennial; her work was featured on
the cover of that show's catalogue, and her
paintings now sell for more than $130,000. Recent
seasons have seen the reemergence of Robert
Bechtle, Olivier Mosset, and Michael Smith, all
of whom, along with Heilmann, will be in this
spring's Whitney Biennial.

Joyce Pensato is the latest overlooked artist
getting a shot at the limelight. For more than
three decades, this Brooklyn artist has made
demonic black-and-white (or black-and-silver)
enamel paintings of cartoon characters. In her
Easter Island-meets-Disney-de Kooning-and-Warhol
portraits of Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Mickey
Mouse, and others, Pensato combines the
gesturalism of action painting, the painterliness
of Abstract Expressionism, the blatancy of Pop,
and the wild style of graffiti. Warhol gave us
Double Elvis; Pensato paints a diabolical Double
Mickey. De Kooning destroyed the female form to
make his Woman paintings; Pensato destroys
preconceptions of cuteness and innocence. An
older woman is using Expressionistic male angst
to make these buggy subjects while pointing out a
disturbing racism inherent in many of our most
loved cartoon characters.

Pensato spikes her mix with the black-and-white
starkness of Christopher Wool and the defiant
abjection of Joan Jett's "I Hate Myself for
Loving You." To this she adds discredited strains
of East Village Expressionism, the stuff typical
of painters like Rick Prol and Richard Hamilton,
who spilled splattered paint at random. I also
see the garish bravado of near-forgotten German
neo-Expressionists like Rainer Fetting and Helmut
Middendorf. Her work even evinces traces of
nineteenth-century academic figuration.

In her gnarly Petzel show (open through this
Saturday), Pensato gives us a rogues' gallery of
raving, debased, pop-eyed beings-a pale
fright-mask Homer Simpson, a psychotic-looking
Felix the Cat, a slaphappy Daisy Duck, South
Park's Stan Marsh looking like a Warlock out of
H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. A few of
Pensato's new works are as voracious and haunting
as anything she's ever made. In fact, I would've
liked to see representative samples of the rest
of her art: Because all the works are paintings
of around the same size, depict similar subjects,
and display consistent surfaces and palette, the
show gets repetitious. Pensato is an
extraordinarily versatile artist who also makes
amazingly physical wall drawings and lush works
on paper, and, had she included a few of these
wonderful monstrosities, she might not need
another show after this one to prove her point.

Why all the newfound interest? For almost twenty
years the art world has been fixated on the
artists of the sixties and seventies as a kind of
"greatest generation." It goes without saying
that Nauman, Serra, Morris, et al. are fine
artists, but really, that's a misleading term.
"Greatest" means different things to different
people in different places at different times,
and every generation elects its own defining
artists. Nowadays, artists aren't automatically
rejecting isms, approaches, and styles that until
recently were deemed tainted. For the first time
in years, I know students who appreciate Julian
Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer unironically. Serious
mid-careerists such as Marlene Dumas or William
Kentridge or Huma Bhabha all employ types of
physicality, surface, and gesturalism, as well as
cut-and-paste assemblage-collage methods, that
are widely held to be dumpy eighties leftovers.
They are not, strictly speaking, part of the
preapproved, much cooler conceptual lineage that
still dominates galleries.

One artist who combines cool-school cerebralness
and assemblage is 53-year-old John Miller. Not
exactly undiscovered, Miller, who lives in Berlin
and New York, has been represented by Metro
Pictures Gallery for decades. In addition to
being a talented critic, he's known for a series
of wall works made of junk that has been painted
all brown. In the eighties and nineties, these
things were excellent analogs for the
intersection of abstraction, scatology, commodity
art, and the rise and fall of the art market.
These ugly-beautiful puddings made him into a
brown version of Yves Klein, he of the all-blue
monochrome paintings. Then Miller stopped making
them and produced over-ironic installations and
paintings involving game shows.

He's back to making monochrome paintings. Only
now they're gold. This makes them perfect
metaphors for the fusion of new money and new
art. On view at Petzel through Saturday (along
with another show at Metro, through February 9),
Miller's gaudy gold-leaf bas-reliefs look
simultaneously like Schnabel plate paintings, the
ocean floor, ersatz architectural artifacts,
kitschy bling, and modern-day Dutch still lifes
touched by Midas. They play a snarky,
Quasimodo-like American cousin to Damien Hirst's
$100 million death's-head bauble. But where Hirst
goes with diamonds and death, Miller gives us
soda cans, sunglasses, belts, and bras, in effect
putting a clown nose on Hirst's skull.

It's not just nice that the market is allowing
dealers to take a flyer on artists who haven't
had enough chances. Artists like Miller and
Pensato are gaining relevance, as the art world
consciously looks for ways to not attack the
market as evil but try to comment on the system
from within, without playing directly into the
hands of commerce. (He doesn't need to sell
designer objets, for example, the way Takashi
Murakami does.) Miller's gewgaws can be seen as
modern equivalents to Warhol's dollar-sign
paintings and Daniel Buren's stripes-fetishes
that have no inherent value in themselves but
that externalize unconsciousness, destabilize our
relationship to art, and are vivid symbols for
their own status as placeholders for the rich.
These paintings could easily be labeled stylish
crap. Still, they're ornery and raffish and show
an artist being served by the market's excess,
our uneasy awareness of it, and artists grown
tired of greatest-generationalism.

Pics <http://joycepensato.com/>

<http://www.metropicturesgallery.com/index.php?mode=current&object_id=269>


New York Magazine
Copyright C 2008, New York Media Holdings LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Ramak Fazel, "ODYSSEY OF STATE CAPITOLS AND STATE SUSPICION" By Kathryn Shattuck

January 20, 2008

ODYSSEY OF STATE CAPITOLS AND STATE SUSPICION

By Kathryn Shattuck

In a recent morning interview in a Midtown Manhattan office Ramak
Fazel came across as the quintessential world citizen: tall, slim and
elegant, his English tinged with an untraceable accent and peppered
here and there with an Italian phrase.

He also exuded the weariness of a frequent flier, having arrived the
afternoon before at Newark Liberty Airport, where he was delayed for
nearly three hours while United States Customs and Border Protection
agents questioned him about the purpose of his trip, searched his
baggage and photocopied the pages of his personal agenda.

That routine is something that Mr. Fazel, a 42-year-old freelance
photographer who lives in Milan, Italy, has come to know well, and he
takes pains to come across as favorably as possible. For starters, he
makes sure his face is always immaculately cleanshaven.

"I have become the poster boy for Gillette," he said, somewhat ruefully.

Shaving was one of the last things on Mr. Fazel's mind when, on Aug.
7, 2006, he set out on a photographic and philatelic odyssey from his
mother's home in Fort Wayne, Ind. His mission was to photograph each
of the nation's 50 state capitol buildings and dispatch a postcard
from each city, using postage stamps from a childhood collection.
Each postcard would be mailed to the next state on his journey, where
he would pick it up, continuing until he had gone full circle back to
Indiana.

But there was a problem. On a flight from Sacramento, Calif., to
Honolulu, Mr. Fazel described his project to a fellow passenger. He
later discovered that she had reported him as suspicious - perhaps to
the pilot or the Transportation Security Administration - and taken a
picture of him as he slept.

Maybe it was because he was vaguely foreign looking, he reasoned, and
his photographic endeavor seemed menacing in a post-9/11 landscape.
He also had a three-day growth of beard, he recalled. And, although
Mr. Fazel grew up mostly in the United States and is an American
citizen, there was his Iranian name.

In his view that woman's report began a chain reaction, turning him
into a person of interest for officials from local law enforcement
agencies on up to the F.B.I. On a stop in Annapolis, Md., for
example, he was interrogated about his activities and read his
Miranda rights. Today, he said, his name lingers on what he thinks of
simply as the "the list." (He doesn't know where it originated or who
controls it.) He believes it has prevented him from receiving a visa
to India and caused him be questioned at the border of Poland, both
of which he had visited in the past. He said he has been interrogated
the last four times he has entered the United States.

That sense of stigmatization - and the pursuit of life, liberty and
art - is a steady undercurrent in "49 State Capitols," an exhibition
of postcards, photographs and ephemera from Mr. Fazel's 2006 trip
that is to open on Wednesday at the Storefront for Art and
Architecture in SoHo. (He ran out of money before he made it to
Alaska.)

"I wanted to learn about America," Mr. Fazel said. "Visiting the
capitols - I don't want to say it's a dream, but we're led as
children to believe that it's kind of an obligation, that you need to
see up close the country you call home.

"I may live abroad, but my sense of being an American, of loving my
country, has never changed."

Mr. Fazel, who moved to Italy in 1994, conceived of the trip in 2006
while visiting his mother in Fort Wayne, where she called his
attention to his stamp collection in the attic. "Do something with
these,' " he remembered her saying.

He went to a collector who offered him less than he believed his
stamps were worth. "I thought, what a shame to just sell these for
$1,000," Mr. Fazel said. "I felt they needed to be released from that
static state, needed to be released for their original purpose to be
postage."

What specifically inspired his trip was a page of stamps of the flags
of the 50 states, in the order of their admission to the union,
issued for the nation's bicentennial in 1976. That was the year he
began collecting, shortly after moving to Fort Wayne, where the
Fazels were the only Iranian family.

Mr. Fazel was born in Iran but moved to the United States when he was
2 months old. His father, who was then working on his doctorate in
psychology, and his mother, who eventually became a potter, settled
in Logan, Utah, and then in Fort Wayne. In 1970 the family briefly
moved back to Iran, where his father taught in a satellite campus of
Harvard Business School in Tehran; in 1976 they returned to Fort
Wayne.

Mr. Fazel, feeling something of an outsider in a community divided
into white and black, athletically gifted and not, turned to stamp
collecting at his father's urging. "Through stamps I had the chance
to learn about America and American culture," he said. He collected
enthusiastically, using money he earned from mowing lawns and
shoveling snow.

But with a driver's license came adult freedom, and Mr. Fazel tucked
his collection away. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering at
Purdue University, then went to New York to study graphic design and
photography. In 1994 he moved to Milan - "to enrich myself, invest in
myself," he said - and to overcome a sense of his cultural
limitations. He feels that he succeeded, he said, yet he never
stopped pondering what it meant for him to be American.

So in the spring of 2006, stamps in hand, he began to plot his road
trip, researching the shortest distances from state capital to state
capital and the locations of post offices and Y.M.C.A.'s (where he
could shower and swim). He spent $1,500 on a used Chevy van in which
he would live and another $2,000 to refurbish it. At night he would
often seek out Wal-Mart parking lots, where security was tight, to
park his van and sleep.

In each capital Mr. Fazel would research the state's history in a
library and then design a 10-by-14-inch postcard on white stock,
adorned with mosaics he concocted from stamps related to the state.

The postcard he sent from Florida to Georgia honors space flight; the
one from Hawaii to Arizona pays tribute to Pearl Harbor. The postcard
sent from New York to Pennsylvania bears 11-cent stamps from 1965
that Mr. Fazel arranged in the shape of the twin towers - one
toppling over, the other being pierced by a commercial aviation stamp
- and with fire truck and ambulance stamps and a commemorative stamp
of St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan.

Mr. Fazel drove 17,345 miles in 78 days, mailing a postcard from each
city and picking it up in the next one, with the speed of the mail
dictating the pace of his trip. "It was such a nice surprise to
discover how reliable the postal system was," he said, adding that
some of the cards arrived within 12 hours.

But in Jackson, Miss., his journey took its bizarre twist. One night,
as he sat in his van, a beam of light pierced his reverie. He heard
his name over a loudspeaker and a command to step out of the vehicle
with his hands held high.

Suddenly, Mr. Fazel said, he was forced to the ground, face to the
concrete, and handcuffed by a city police officer. His vehicle was
searched, and when the officers determined that nothing was amiss,
Mr. Fazel was ordered to leave the parking lot and continue down the
road.

He said the officers told him that they had received a report that he
was aiming an automatic weapon at passing traffic.

Lee D. Vance, assistant chief of the Jackson city police, said he
could not confirm the incident because it had not resulted in an
arrest and because Mr. Fazel has not filed a complaint.

As Mr. Fazel continued his travels, he slowly began to perceive that
he was on some kind of watch list. In Atlanta he was prohibited from
entering the Capitol, he said, even as others did. In Columbia, S.C.,
he was questioned on the grounds of the Capitol by a police officer
who mentioned that he knew Mr. Fazel lived in Italy.

On the morning of Oct. 3, he entered the Maryland Capitol in
Annapolis, where he presented identification and signed his name on a
visitors' sheet. A guard asked him to wait.

Suddenly, Mr. Fazel said, he was handcuffed and rushed through
corridors into a police station, where a man he later learned was a
member of the Maryland Joint Terrorism Task Force with the F.B.I.
started speaking to him in Farsi.

As Mr. Fazel related it, the experience went as follows:

"I'm American," Mr. Fazel said. "I speak English."

Another officer asked, "Where are you really from?" Mr. Fazel
produced his Indiana driver's license.

"I can tell by looking at you that you're not from Fort Wayne," the
officer replied.

After a four-hour encounter in which he was asked about a recent trip
to Iran for an Italian design magazine and about who was financing
his trip to state capitols, he was released without being charged.
But he was also warned by an F.B.I. official that he was now in the
system and would have troubles if he continued his trip.

Richard Wolf, a media coordinator with the F.B.I. in Baltimore, said
he had no knowledge of the incident. He added, "We don't normally
respond or comment on any sort of leads we've conducted with the
Joint Terrorism Task Force."

Asked whether Mr. Fazel was on the government's terrorist watch list,
Bill Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman in Washington, said that as a matter
of policy, "we can't verify whether an individual is on a watch list
or not."

After the incident in Maryland Mr. Fazel called Brett R. Fleitz, a
lawyer in Indianapolis and a childhood friend. Mr. Fleitz said he
immediately sought to reassure him. "I implored him to continue
because he was very, very doubtful about the prospects for going on
and the dangers that might lie ahead," Mr. Fleitz said. "I said,
'Dude, you're an American.' And Ramak said, 'No, I'm a naturalized
American.' And I said: 'It doesn't matter. There aren't two tiers of
citizenship here. You have nothing to hide.' "

He advised Mr. Fazel to greet law enforcement officers cheerfully and
"lay it all out," as well as to ask for and photocopy the business
cards of the authorities he encountered.

Mr. Fazel forged toward the last half of his destinations with his
camera, a 1964 Rolleiflex. Despite being questioned at or denied
entrance to the remaining capitols, he got every one of his pictures:
sometimes an image of gilded rotundas or historic murals, other times
pictures of the everyday, the mundane. He photographed visitors in
House chambers; a funeral procession for Ann Richards, a onetime
Texas governor; a portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife,
Maria Shriver, in the waiting room of the California governor's
office.

And as the mood of his trip changed from joy to disquiet, he
photographed police officers at one capitol, and, at another, a
"caution" tape blocking an entrance.

In Albany, Mr. Fazel was asked to wait at the entrance of the Capitol
until investigators talked with him. One gave him a big slap on the
back, Mr. Fazel recalled, and said, "I know everything about you, and
I know you've been getting a lot of attention."

Thomas M. Peters, a senior investigator with the New York State
Police, confirmed that Mr. Fazel's journey from capitol to capitol
had raised suspicion.

"We were notified in advance that he was making his way up the East
Coast from his stops at other capitols, where he was challenged by
law enforcement agents," he said. "They indicated that at some times
he seemed agitated and seemed to be giving evasive answers to their
questions, but we don't know for sure because we were basically
getting this information thirdhand."

Mr. Peters added: "He was fine with us. And if he was agitated, it
was probably because he got tired of being questioned."

Looking back on his travels, Mr. Fazel said: "Notwithstanding the
intense scrutiny, the trip was a positive experience. I'm neither
rancorous, nor do I feel offended."

Still, he said, he would like to see his name removed from "the
list," or whatever it is that caused him to be repeatedly stopped and
questioned.

The journey ultimately left him wondering what it means to be
American - and, more fundamentally, who he really was.

"What I thought would be an exercise in self-betterment turned out to
be something a little bigger," he said dryly.

Video
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/arts/design/20shat.html?_r=1&ref=design&o
ref=slogin>


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Monday, January 21, 2008

Darren Almond, "THE DEVIL IN THE DETAIL" by Adrian Searle

THE DEVIL IN THE DETAIL

Darren Almond's images depict hellish toil and
uneasy cultural change, but they never tell us
how to feel. Adrian Searle admires his complex,
brooding work

Thursday January 17, 2008

A man labours in hell. He is harvesting sulphur
from inside the crater of a volcano, breathing in
the acid smoke swirling up from the ground. All
he has to break up the sulphur is a metal rod.
All he has to carry the chunks are two baskets
slung from a pole balanced on one shoulder. His
only protection is a bit of cloth, which he
intermittently stuffs in his mouth to suck air
through. His eyes are bloodshot, his teeth are
eroded, his breathing is wheezy, and his knees
are ruined from carrying his loads - maybe 100kg
- over the crater rim and down to the weighing
station.

Darren Almond walks with him, a camera on his
shoulder. The Indonesian worker's journey, down
the side of Kawah Ijen in Java, is filmed in an
almost continuous take. Other human mules are
making this same journey, in both directions. We
hear rather than see them - a sudden yell, the
sound of someone retching in the fog, stones
dislodged as feet scrabble for balance. For much
of this grim descent, Almond focuses on the man's
face. There are frequent pauses as the worker
tries to catch his breath. He looks stunned by
the work, the poisonous air, the rattle of his
wrecked lungs. The man spits, grimaces and
trudges on.

Bearing, Almond's 35-minute video, is not the
first time this exploitative, appalling job has
been exposed to a wider audience. Tourists have
often been here, posting snapshots on the web.
There are films on YouTube. But it is still
overwhelming. Bearing is fascinating, shocking,
uncomfortable. But what is our discomfort
compared to the plight of the workers? What is
Almond asking us to think about it? We might talk
about how the video takes us from the collection
of the sulphur to its weighing and unloading. Yet
what is made clear is that this is simply a
single turn of an endlessly repeated cycle. As
soon as the camera stops recording, the man will
turn round and walk up the volcano again, and
pause with a new load on the way down, hawk and
spit and stuff the cloth in his mouth and
grimace, again and again.

This does not tell us what to think or feel.
There is no Michael Palin here to offer a cheery
encouragement or to scratch his head at the gross
injustice of the world. Filmed without comment,
Bearing escapes voyeurism. It bears witness and
is at its most painful in the periods when the
camera waits with the man as he rests, labouring
over his breath, the crippling weight, the
inhuman conditions.

Bearing is Almond's newest work in Fire Under
Snow, opening this week at London's Parasol Unit.
The show's title echoes that of the autobiography
of Tibetan dissident Palden Gyatso, who spent 33
years in Chinese prisons and work camps. In
Almond's work, one thing always leads to another.
The second film in the show is In the Between, a
three-screen work shot in Tibet. For most of its
14 minutes, the central image shows Buddhist
monks chanting, eating and meditating in the
oldest monastery in Lhasa, capital of Tibet. On
the screens to either side, we watch the new
bullet train speeding across the arid plain of
the world's highest plateau. Sometimes the camera
is on board, looking out at the bare landscape,
the intense blue sky, the distant Himalayas. The
train speeds through empty stations and a blank
green landscape, taking its tourists and
businessmen to Lhasa, to a soundtrack of cymbals
and chanting.

Some 1.5 million passengers came to Tibet by this
train alone last year. China is opening up the
country, swamping the Tibetans. "Almond is an
artist, and artists are connoisseurs and
articulators of the ambiguous, the ambivalent,
the cognitively dissonant," writes the Buddhist
philosopher and academic Robert Thurman in his
pungent and often angry essay in Index, an
accompanying new primer on Almond's work.

Thurman is angry about China's continuing
presence in Tibet. He is also right about
artists, and we do well to remember the
importance of ambivalence and ambiguity in
creative works. Art isn't meant just to press a
happy button, pull the tragedy lever, turn the
prettiness dial or ring the relevance bell. And
it should do more than tick issues or be
well-meaning. If it is any good, art deals with
the complexity of being in the world. Artworks
mean more than one thing, often more than the
artist knows. There's more to it than a message,
a slogan or a sentiment. Often, artists don't
know what they mean, or only find out later.
Sometimes they intend one thing and end up with
another. They work in between meanings and reason.

Thurman sees the train as a phallic instrument in
China's rape of Tibet. But it is hard not to fall
for the train a little, the way it squeezes time
and geography. Part of Almond also loves the
train (he was a trainspotter growing up in
Wigan). In the Between is the final part of a
trilogy of films about train journeys. Mobility
changes the world, and goes on changing it - that
is one reason why In the Between is so
exhilarating and awful.

One thing I have grown to like about Almond's
work over the years is its complexity. It is
about all sorts of things: time, places,
journeys, the telling and retelling of lives,
memory, nostalgia, private lives and public
histories. Working with video, photography,
installation and objects, Almond goes his own
way, mostly avoiding the cliche of universal
statements and the mawkishness of the overly
personal. In the same show, there is a room of
photographs of dead trees, their trunks like
black drawings against the blank snow and the
steely sky. It is almost impossible to imagine
colour here, or even life itself. Yet the images
have a final, calligraphic beauty. They are a
sort of writing of the end of the world.

There were taken in Monchegorsk and Norilsk in
northern Siberia, above the Arctic Circle, where,
between 1935 and 1953, a third of a million
prisoners toiled in the Soviet gulag, mining and
processing some of the biggest deposits of
nickel, platinum, cobalt and copper on the
planet. It is one of the most polluted places on
earth, a blunt fact that the whiteness of the
snow cannot conceal. Almond's photographs are
titled Night & Fog, in reference to Alain
Resnais' 1955 film about Auschwitz, Night and Fog.

Resnais focused primarily on the abandoned
buldings at the concentration camp. Almond
himself has made several works about Auschwitz,
using the old bus shelters from the road which
runs past the camp, which is now a museum.
Instead of showing us something overtly dramatic,
he points to the quotidian, the echoes of the
terrible resonating in the everyday. This is why,
perhaps, he quotes the exiled Russian poet Joseph
Brodsky, in two aluminium relief plates, the kind
bolted to the sides of locomotives bearing
commemorative names. "Only sound needs echo and
dreads its lack," reads one. The other: "A glance
is accustomed to no glance back."

There is no one looking back from Almond's
photographs at Moons of the Iapetus Ocean, his
concurrent show at White Cube in London's Hoxton
Square. Though these colour images are full of
historical echoes, they have a brooding,
inexplicable silence about them. Shot at night,
with long exposure times under the full moon,
they show British beauty spots: Flatford Mill,
where Constable painted; the Yorkshire limestone
ravine Gordale Scar; Cader Idris; St Abb's Head.
Because of the long exposures, waves have become
a soft-focus mushy whiteness about the coast; a
waterfall is a leaden blur; a river's surface
molten and deathly by moonlight. There's not even
a fox, just the yellow trace of the night mail
train crossing a viaduct.

This isn't cinema's day-for-night so much as
night-for-day. The effect is quite unlike human
night vision, and closer to the way the world
appears in old tinted postcards, in dreams and in
memories of childhood. The world is slowed down,
but this only serves to quicken the senses.
Everything is impending.

Pics
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2008/jan/17/art.photography?picture=
332104196>

<http://www.parasol-unit.org/index.php?id=148>

<http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/da_wc_hs/>

. Fire Under Snow is at Parasol Unit, London,
from Friday to March 30. Moons of the Iapetus
Ocean is at White Cube Hoxton Square, London,
from Friday to February 23.


Guardian Unlimited C Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Pierre Pinoncelli, Marcel Duchamp, "READYMADE REMADE" by Leland de la Durantaye

READYMADE REMADE

by Leland de la Durantaye

A man walks into a room. He is elderly. The room
is white. He pauses for a moment, glances around,
moves towards the far wall. He begins to relieve
himself in a urinal. A few hours later, the
sixty-four-year-old retired seed merchant Pierre
Pinoncelli is arraigned on charges of vandalizing
a work of art valued at more than three million
dollars.

The story of the seed merchant's arrest began
more than seventy years earlier. On a spring day
in 1917, the twenty-nine-year-old French artist
Marcel Duchamp left his studio on West 67th
Street on a peculiar errand. Accompanied by art
collector Walter Arensberg and artist Joseph
Stella, Duchamp went to the J. L. Mott Iron Works
at 118 Fifth Avenue in New York City, made a few
polite inquiries, and then asked for a single
white porcelain urinal. Duchamp then took his new
purchase back to his studio to begin work.

There was nothing strange in an artist personally
selecting his raw materials. Michelangelo was
famous for spending long hours in the legendary
marble quarries of Carrara-. It was recounted
that he could feel a tremor of future form in the
rough-hewn blocks. Once the marble was quarried
and carted back to his studio in Florence, Rome,
or wherever else he happened to be working, he
would spend still more time examining the stone,
watching and waiting before at last taking up
hammer and chisel. Once begun, his work was long,
hard, and physically exhausting-one of the
reasons that Leonardo da Vinci looked down upon
it, dismissing sculptors as being much like
workmen, and rating their manual labor
considerably lower than the more intellectual
cosa mentale that was, for him, painting.
Michelangelo cared nothing for such distinctions,
and over the course of thousands of hours of
arduous work, covered from head to foot in marble
dust, he feverishly sought to liberate his vision
from the rough stone until what remained before
him was a work such as his Pietà, the Redeemer
and the Mother who immaculately conceived him,
who loved him and lost him, the world's sorrows
concentrated into a crushing burden which she
held with sunken head and outstretched arms-and
which a vandal would one day attack with a hammer
in St. Peter's.1

Half a world and a half-millennium away, the
young Duchamp proceeded differently. He may have
looked long and hard at the matter before him,
may have listened with passionate intensity to
the white porcelain, wondering how to make it
live, how to hold a mirror up to nature and
culture, how to make it speak to its age, how to
tell the truth of its strange times. But whatever
the nature and extent of his deliberations, his
physical activity was minimal. The urinal that
emerged from Duchamp's studio was much the same
one that had entered it. The slight but crucial
difference lay in the special signature it bore
on its side: "R. Mutt 1917." The rough pseudonym
Duchamp chose was also a suggestive one. Mutt was
only a letter away from the name of the initial
producer of the object, Mott.2 Being a work with
a less-than-exalted artistic pedigree, Duchamp
found appealing the name's mongrel associations,
ones particularly alive to him through his
reading of "Mutt and Jeff" comic strips, as well
as from one of dogs' favorite activities:
urinating (to mark their territory). These
low-cultural notes were accompanied by a
high-culture critique. When heard with ears
trained in the language with the most lofty
tradition of aesthetic reflection-German-"R.
Mutt" sounds less like a name and more like an
indictment. When spoken aloud, it sounds exactly
like Armut, German for "poverty." Perhaps
Duchamp's "R. Mutt" wanted to remind spectators
of the poverty that surrounds us, and alongside
of which art might seem like a craven escape. Or
perhaps the poverty was of a less literal sort: a
poverty of imagination and invention, a poverty
of possibility for today's artists with the
Leonardos and Michelangelos of the past crowding
the horizon, filling minds and museums, and
making all later work seem poor in their blinding
light. When later asked, Duchamp laconically
replied that R. stood for "Richard," which could
have meant a great deal-richard is French slang
for a wealthy man-or nothing at all.

There was, however, a further element to the game
of the name-and a more practical one. Not only
did Duchamp not want to sign his own name, but he
could not. The urinal he had purchased was
destined for the immense 1917 Independents art
show to be held in the Grand Central Palace and
funded by a host of wealthy New York patrons
(including Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Harry
Payne Whitney, and Archer M. Huntington). It was
to be the largest exhibition ever held in America
and would present 2,125 works of art by 1,200
artists. It was to stretch over nearly two miles
and was double the size of the legendary 1913
Armory show where Duchamp had attracted so much
interest with his Nude Descending a Staircase. It
was announced that every artist was welcome to
exhibit at the Independents show so long as the
entrance fee ($6) was paid. Buoyed by his recent
success, the young Duchamp was on the show's
board of directors, and it was widely rumored
that he would submit a Cubist painting, a
successor to the work that garnered so much
interest at the Armory show, to be titled Tulip
Hysteria Coordinating. This work never arrived.

Two days before the scheduled opening, R. Mutt's
urinal was quietly delivered to the Grand Central
Palace with the required membership fee and a
title: Fountain. Put to this extreme test, the
Independents' board of directors refused it. The
ground given was that it was, in the words of the
president of the board, "by no definition, a work
of art." Duchamp immediately resigned in protest.

Shortly after the show opened, Mutt's Fountain
was discovered in a corner of the Palace (no
return address had been given for the work). It
was unceremoniously removed and soon found its
way to a prominent New York gallery where Alfred
Steiglitz took a photograph of it that would soon
make its way around the world. Duchamp was
revealed to be the real R. Mutt, and the
surrounding scandal brought the young artist
still more fame. He had taken the viewer out of
the traditional museum space and led him next
door (to the restroom). Duchamp became a hero for
his generation of artists, and an icon for those
to follow. From its lowly standing point,
Duchamp's readymade urinal asked difficult
questions about how context affected content,
about how the art of the present should relate to
the art of the past, about humor and seriousness,
about the relation of creation to criticism, and
about the nature of artistic artifice. As every
philosophically minded art lover from Plato to
the present has remarked, works of art are
things, but they are not things like other things
in our world. A painting is not like a person
even when it is of a person; and a sculpture is
not like a chair, even when the sculpture is a
chair. Kant noted that art was a purposeful
activity but that it had no definable purpose;
for works of high art, this purposelessness was
like the natural world, and great works of art
seemed so integral and complex that they almost
ceased to seem made, their artifice disappearing
into their art. Duchamp stood at a crossroads of
artifice. The movement had begun in the previous
century when the subtle mastery of Ingres and the
salon artists had ceded to the wild works of such
figures as Gauguin and Van Gogh. Whereas the
salon painters of the mid-nineteenth century
employed brushes made of sable fur because they
left finer traces of their passage, painters at
the end of the century no longer strove to
conceal such artifice, no longer covering the
tracks of brushstrokes and going so far as to use
tools as rough as Van Gogh's palette knife.

Duchamp's work was a quantum leap forward in this
radical lineage. By the time of his death in
1968, his readymade urinal was the century's most
famous piece of free-standing art and had been
exhibited around the globe. It had changed the
way that people thought about the cloistered
space and unspoken rules of the museum, as well
as about ideas of disinterested appreciation and
aesthetic judgment. It was the precursor of much
to come. Without Duchamp's readymade urinal, a
great many things are difficult to conceive of,
from Robert Rauschenberg's "combines" of the
1950s such as Monogram (an Angora goat girdled
with a tire atop a canvas), to Andy Warhol's
"Oxidation Paintings" of the late 1970s (made by
urinating on a copper surface). The course taken
by conceptual and minimalist art movements is
equally difficult to imagine without Duchamp's
cosa mentale, just as are the brilliant and
irreverent hijinks of Maurizio Cattelan (such as
his stealing an exhibit from a gallery in
Amsterdam and presenting it as his own). But,
along the way, something had gone missing: the
readymade urinal itself.

Duchamp's iconic invention left the world as
strangely as it had entered it. It simply
disappeared. The exact circumstances remain a
mystery, but in all probability the original was
discarded as a urinal-a fitting, and, for a
urinal, noble death. It is here that the chain of
events leading to the arrest of a French seed
merchant began to tighten. As interest in the
work grew despite its disappearance, Duchamp
responded with a surprising decision: he
authorized a series of "replicas," first in 1950
for an exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, and
ending with an edition of eight that he put up
for sale.

When Pierre Pinoncelli walked into a white room
in Nîmes in 1993, he knew he was not in the
bathroom; he knew the urinal in front of him was
marked as Duchamp's Fountain, and he also knew it
was not the Fountain refused by the Independents
in 1917. Pinoncelli was not only a seed merchant;
he was also an artist. He revered Duchamp and his
reverence fueled his disappointment with
Duchamp's decision to replicate the original
readymade. For him, in reissuing and reproducing
Fountain-in merchandising and franchising
it-Duchamp had betrayed it. Feeling that the
punishment should fit the crime, Pinoncelli took
matters into his own hands. He peed into the
false idol, and before the guards could overpower
him, he produced a small hammer from his pocket
and gave the urinal a single sound whack.

The French courts saw this incident in relatively
straightforward fashion. For them, Pinoncelli had
vandalized the property of the state-and the
property he vandalized was particularly valuable.
For his part, Pinoncelli found the charges
"narrow-minded." When Pinoncelli was given the
occasion to explain his act in court, he pointed
out that what he had attacked was a fake, was not
Duchamp's urinal-or R. Mutt's or J. L. Mott's. It
was not the original it pretended to be (an
ironic position for a work that prided itself on
its lack of originality). When asked about his
first gesture, Pinoncelli offered a laconic (and
Scholastic) explanation: "The invitation to
urinate is offered ipso facto by the object
(L'appel à l'urine est en effet contenu ipso
facto)." Of his other act, he said, "My hammer
blow was that of the auctioneer's gavel coming
down on a new work of art." When the prosecution
accused him of "vandalism," he was indignant,
claiming that, on the contrary, he had added
value to the work. The other "fakes" were
faceless replicas, but this one now had a history
and was thus immeasurably more valuable than
before. Pinoncelli declared that he would welcome
remuneration from the French state but did not
require it. The defense rested.

The French government was not amused and
convicted Pinoncelli of "damaging a monument or
object of public utility." The formula contained
more irony than its legislators could have ever
suspected as it managed to touch upon both sides
of the readymade's singular being: both its
iconic, monumental aspect-the part worth millions
of francs-and the "public utility" for which the
object had first been designed. (I assume that if
I am ever caught by the French authorities
damaging a urinal-let me stress for legal reasons
that this is in no way my intention-my charge
will be: "damaging an object of public utility.")
Pinoncelli was ordered to pay a hefty fine and
placed on probation. He refused to pay and a
group calling themselves "The Friends of Pierre
Pinoncelli" stepped forward on his behalf to
raise the necessary funds. In the meantime,
Pinoncelli got back to work.

This work had long ceased to be that of a seed
merchant. Pinoncelli had definitively dedicated
himself to "happenings." Combatting the society
of the spectacle required that he advance on
numerous fronts. In 1967, he had squirted the
Minister of Culture and national icon André
Malraux with red paint. Changing weapons, in 1975
he held up a bank in Nice with a sawed-off
shotgun, asking for, and escaping with, ten
francs (he said he was going to just ask for one
franc, but the inflation of the period was so
high that he changed his mind at the last
minute). Inspired not only by Guy Debord but also
the Cynic philosopher Diogenes, Pinoncelli
continued his activities. It is said that for a
time Diogenes lived naked in a barrel. In Lyons,
Pinoncelli took up and then let fall the toga of
the Greek philosopher. He soon grew tired of the
barrel and stood next to it until he was arrested
for exhibitionism. He continued to plan new
happenings in his studio in Saint-Remy (his
neighbor complained to the local authorities
after he painted a mural on his wall, clearly
visible from her garden, of Mickey Mouse giving
her the finger). When Christmas time came, he
stood outside an elegant department store in Nice
dressed as Santa Claus. As happy children massed
round him, he opened his sack of toys, emptied
them on the sidewalk, and began to smash them to
bits, declaiming a lesson all the while to the
spectacle-loving children about the
commercialization of affection. (Moments later,
the tide of public opinion turned, and
Pinoncelli, still dressed as Santa, was chased
down Nice's streets by a group of irate
capitalist parents, a spectacle if French society
ever saw one). Most radically, in Cali, Colombia,
in 2002 Pinoncelli chopped off the end of his
left pinky finger with an axe to protest the
violence tearing the country apart (his finger
tip is in the Cali Museum of Art).

But alongside all this iconoclastic activity,
Pinoncelli's obsession remained Duchamp's
readymade urinal-a "holy grail," as he called it
on one occasion, "a great white whale" as he
called it on another. And so with Ahabian
single-mindedness, he continued to pursue his
quarry. On 4 January 2006, Pinoncelli visited
Paris's Museum of Modern Art in the Pompidou
Center. The exhibition was a crowded one. He
walked up to Fountain (if it could speak, it
would have screamed at his approach) and slid
into the dark waters of recidivism.

After a modified repeat performance-he only hit
it with a hammer this time-the French government
was even less amused than it had been the first
time around. The director of the museum, Alfred
Pacquement, denounced Pinoncelli as a "vandal"
and claimed his trespass was "just as serious" as
Laszlo Toth's 1972 attack on Michelangelo's
Pietà. Pinoncelli's arguments remained the same
as before, and he lost in the same fashion, this
time forced to pay 200,000 euros in "moral
damages" to the French state (calculated as a
percentage of the work's total worth) and, more
curiously, an additional 14,352 euros for
material damages. Pinoncelli continues to claim
that, once more, his act of "creative
destruction" has increased the worth of the work
and has stated that if the French authorities
remained blind to this fact, the English need
not. In an article published, appropriately
enough, in The Independent, Pinoncelli told John
Lichfield that he hoped the directors of Tate
Modern would offer to exchange their Fountain for
the French one. He also announced that he was
retiring.

What is today's student of art to make of such a
series of events? Perhaps Pinoncelli is a
monomaniacal, toy-smashing, self-mutilating
vandal. Perhaps he is an artist. Perhaps he is
both. How are we then to understand his repeat
attacks on Duchamp's not-so-singular Fountain?
The question is difficult because of the
spectacular status of the object in question. Two
years after the Independents show, Duchamp
produced a work entitled L.H.O.O.Q.-this time
under the pseudonym Rrose Sélavy. L.H.O.O.Q. was
a reproduction of Leonardo's Mona Lisa with a
handlebar mustache and pointed beard painted on
it, and with its title written at the bottom.
When spoken aloud, L.H.O.O.Q. becomes the French
sentence, "Elle a chaud au cul," "She's horny."
Asked in an interview, "What is a readymade,"
Duchamp's first response was to laugh. When this
laughter subsided, he gave an example: Mutt's
Fountain. Asked to expand upon the matter, he
turned to other possibilities for readymades. He
noted that there was the "assisted readymade"
(ready-made aidé), and gave as an example his
mistreated Mona Lisa. And then he offered a final
variation, what he called a "reciprocal
readymade" (readymade réciproque). He said that
this would be a work of art used as an everyday,
readymade object, such as "using a Rembrandt as
an ironing board." The readymade took an everyday
mass-produced object and treated it as art. The
assisted readymade took a mass-produced
reproduction of a work of art and made it into a
unique commentary on that work. The reciprocal
readymade took a unique work of art and treated
it like a mass-produced utilitarian object.

I mention this because it seems that the best way
to understand Pinoncelli's acts is in Duchamp's
terms: as part of the natural history of the
readymade. One might claim that by being
reproduced for commercial purposes, Duchamp's
fountains had lost their readymade authenticity,
their unique identity, and that what Pinoncelli
did was to dynamically infuse one of the replicas
with just this. Thanks to Duchamp's commercial
reproductions, the work had descended to the
level of the first unmade readymade; Pinoncelli
arguably returned it to the level of a readymade.
Might we not also see Pinoncelli's acts as an
assisted readymade-one in much need of aid? In
L.H.O.O.Q., Duchamp not only offered a radical
interpretation for the enigmatic smile
(lascivity), he drew a mocking moustache and
beard around its lips. But, of course, it was not
the actual Mona Lisa, not the singular and
irreplaceable Mona Lisa, that Duchamp playfully
defaced, but a readymade reproduction of that
work. Which is precisely what Pinoncelli did to
Duchamp's Fountain-he did not deface the
original; he defaced a reproduction, albeit a
valuable one. And, finally, did Pinoncelli not go
a step farther than Duchamp in effectively
creating a reciprocal readymade? He did not take
a Rembrandt and use it as an ironing board, but
he did take a work of art-worth as much as a
Rembrandt-and used it as an object of everyday
utility-as a urinal-which, aptly enough, it was.
Pinoncelli remade a readymade that at the same
moment, depending on one's viewpoint, was also an
assisted readymade and a reciprocal readymade. An
artistic trifecta.

1 For more on Laszlo Toth's acts, see Steven
Goss, "A Partial Guide to the Tools of Art
Vandalism," available here.

2 There is debate as to whether Mott was the
producer or distributor of the urinal, as
historians have been unable to find a urinal in
Mott's product catalogue that matches the urinal
shown in Stieglitz's photograph. The urinal may
have been produced by a manufacturer that
distributed its wares through Mott.

Leland de la Durantaye is assistant professor in
the Department of English and American Literature
and Language at Harvard University. Alongside of
his scholarly work, he has written for the Boston
Globe, Harvard Review, Rain Taxi, Bookforum, and
the Village Voice. His book, Style is Matter: The
Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov, was published by
Cornell University Press in 2007.


Cabinet! © 2007

Friday, January 11, 2008

AES+F' GROUP by Virginia Billeaud Anderson & Douglas Britt

DISTURBING VIEWS OF TODAY'S YOUTH

Macabre exhibit pictures kids in violent scenarios

By Douglas Britt

The roles of youth in today's culture come under
scrutiny in an exhibition by four Russian
collaborative artists known as the AES+F group.

Curated by Olga Sviblova, director of the
Multimedia Art Center in Moscow, the show at the
Station Museum of Contemporary Art brings
together two photographic installations and a
mind-blowing, post-apocalyptic video that show
why the group's members - Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev
Evzovich, Evengy Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes -
are in demand on the international art circuit.

The three-channel, high-definition video, Last
Riot (2007), pictures the rapid expansion of the
virtual world taken to end-of-history extremes.

Androgynous teens

"Epochs of the past exist simultaneously with the
future, and creation walks hand in hand with
disintegration," Sviblova writes in the
exhibition booklet of the eerie cyber paradise
AES+F has created to spectacular effect using 3-D
animation.

Apparently the only people left in this brave new
world are a group of androgynous teen models
locked in never-ending, choreographed combat,
which Sviblova aptly describes as a
"somnambulistic dance battle" reminiscent of
Caravaggio's aesthetic, not to mention those of
countless magazine ads and video games.

As the music of Richard Wagner plays, signs of
the world's continued destruction and renewal
abound around the oblivious combatants.

Missiles fire and planes crash, but meanwhile,
rodents copulate, and pterodactyl-like creatures
share the landscape - sometimes arctic, sometimes
desert, sometimes green with tanks.

Remnants of the cultural residue of all nations
and times pervade the new epoch.

Nobody feels

Meanwhile, the teens keep at it in slow motion,
firing their guns, slitting each other's throats,
pounding one another with baseball bats. But not
one drop of blood gets spilled, and nobody gets
hurt. Nobody seems to feel anything.

As the artists write in the booklet, "there is no
longer any difference between victim and
aggressor, male and female. This world celebrates
the end of ideology, history and ethics."

And along with it, the end of passion.

There's a lot of commentary here about the
sanitizing of war and the narcotizing effects of
advertising.

The artists have struck an ideal balance between
using seduction and repulsion to make their
points. They've created a truly mesmerizing video
in the process.

It's easy to see why this video was well received at the 52nd Venice
Biennale.

Half and half

For Suspects: Seven Sinners and Seven Righteous
(1997), AES+F photographed 14 girls between the
ages of 11 and 15. Shot against neutral
backgrounds, these straightforward images could
be enlarged yearbook photos, but there's a twist:
Half the girls were photographed in a Moscow
school, and the other seven were shot in a
reformatory for criminal girls. The members of
the latter group had all committed murders, often
during arguments. Their victims were frequently
men they said were coming on to them.

The installation surrounds you with the
photographs of all 14 girls and challenges you to
try and figure out which ones are the murderers.
Of course, it's impossible to tell, and the
artists are withholding the girls' identities.

Seeing a piece like this in Texas, with our brisk
pace of executions and overturned death-penalty
convictions, is particularly unnerving after you
realize you have a 50-50 chance of being wrong
about who the killers around you are. But the
artists are also presenting the phenomenon of
juvenile female murderers as a symptom of the
social and economic upheavals of Russia in the
mid-90s when, as Sviblova writes, "one was
desperately seeking for a way to survive in the
new circumstances of 'wild capitalism.' Women and
children, who sometimes turned out to be the
'weak link,' sometimes reacted to the situation
in destructive and inadequate ways."

Decked-out corpses

Defile (2000-2007) consists of digital collages
mounted on seven lightboxes. To create the
series, the artists photographed and videotaped
seven unknown bodies in a morgue, then shot live
models wearing fashion garments. They then
manipulated the imagery to create a Project
Runway nightmare: corpses decked out in
high-fashion attire, clothes fluttering as if the
dead models were on the set of a photo shoot or
breezing down a catwalk.

As the artists point out, humans have been
"decorating death" for a long time. The way they
pair the youth-fixated temporality of high
fashion with the inevitability of decay and death
is interesting, but does it, as AES+F writes,
grant "these morbid forms a sense of dignity and
beauty in death"?

Maybe. Since these corpses were classified as
unknown, perhaps this project gives them the
proper send-off they never had.

Pics <http://www.aes-group.org/default.asp>

Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7X07ZDnu2o>

<http://en.rian.ru/video/20071225/94089919.html>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7TbvFyabrg&feature=related>

* Where: The Station Museum of Contemporary Art, 1502 Alabama.

* When: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays, through Feb. 29.

* Admission: Free.


Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle


>>>


AES+F'S "LAST RIOT" AT THE STATION

by Virginia Billeaud Anderson

December 2007

Could an entire generation be psychically altered
by media images of violence and war? By computer
technology and its virtual capabilities? What
about the unsparing assault of advertising? Last
Riot (2007), a video by the Russian collaborative
artists AES+F at the Station Museum of
Contemporary Art, jacks around in a big way with
these questions. Last Riot is a breathtaking,
unhinged piece of work that draws from fashion
photography, print-ads, video gaming, popular
culture, film animation and Caravaggio. And then
there are the fornicating mice.

"It was the strongest thing there," said Station
Museum's Jim Harithas about Last Riot's success
at the 52nd Venice Biennale . "I did everything I
could to get it here," he said, which was not
easy given the artists' heavy exhibition
schedules. "They're the biggest thing in Europe,"
Harithas said. The "they" in AES+F are
Moscow-based video and photo artists Tatiana
Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and
Vladimir Fridkes. The exhibition's curator is
Olga Sviblova, Director of Moscow's Multimedia
Art Center. Presented on three HD screens, the
Station Museum's exhibition of Last Riot marks
the first time the work has been shown in an
American museum.

A battle fought by fashion model-looking young
people dressed in Benetton-type sportswear drives
the video's narrative. They swing swords,
daggers, and other obscene weapons in a
constantly changing landscape. As the rioters'
figures slowly and majestically shift in battle,
their pimply adolescence is magnified,
exacerbating the horror of their machine guns.
The Leonardo putti face of a curly-headed male
child is a brilliant casting choice. The battle
scenes are interspersed with allusions to
death-dark clouds, flying nuke warheads, rolling
Desert Storm tanks, 9/11 crashing planes? all
vivid metaphors for cataclysmic doom and worldly
destruction. Meanwhile, those humping lab mice,
along with random flying dinosaurs, conjure
visions of an earth repopulated without humans.
Check out the music -you don't have to be capable
of discerning Tristan from Valkyries to be moved
by the power and sweeping majesty of Wagner. This
music is big like death.

Despite the video's death imagery, blood and
dying are absent from the kiddie battle.
Stylistically, Last Riot's battle action borrows
from video gaming; it's a commentary on computer
game warfare that permits virtual annihilation of
an enemy without risk of death. There exists a
Western-world generation for whom war has become
sanitized. "We lost the knowledge of war,"
Sviblova explained. "Death has become separated
from our consciousness. Blood, death?it's not a
reality. That can change human nature!"

Just as Last Riot dissects virtual war, it also
offers discourse on the advertising world's
cultivation of un-caged consumerism. The rioters'
mall clothes, media-genic beauty and runway
physiques, along with print-ad style
compositional arrangements, parody advertising's
glossy packaging, which is gangsterish in its
persuasive power.

There can't be a more damaged crackpot in all of
art history than Caravaggio, a murderer and
fugitive whose dissipation, homoerotic
utterances, extensive police record and sublime
talent make him perhaps the weirdest of the old
masters. AES+F pay homage to the painter by
appropriating Caravaggio posed androgynous youths
in mythological compositions, staged scenes of
dramatic struggles and grotesque torture in his
religious works, and created dizzying emotional
intensity in his paintings' conversion and burial
narratives. A boy staring into the water like the
mythical Narcissus is one of AES+F's many
allusions to the Baroque master.

Along with Last Riot, AES+F present two powerful
but warped photographic series. Defile
(2000-2007), offers jaw-dropping conceptual
creepiness with life-size light box photographs
of morgue corpses digitally dressed in high
fashion. The viewer is not spared grotesque
deathbed details such as IV punctures, bruises,
edema, and ghoulish opened-mouth rigor mortis.
Pairing the faddishness of designer fashion with
the inevitability of death devilishly mocks the
funeral practice of trying to dress-up death. Try
to imagine the artists' refrigerated photo
sessions. These images are as shocking as they
are beautiful.

Suspects (1997), in which the artists
photographed fourteen young girls-seven of them
are convicted murderers, and seven aren't. All of
the portraits are shot in the same attractive
frontal style, making it a game for the viewer to
guess who is a killer and who is innocent.
Included in the installation is chilling wall
plaque text describing each crime-a 13-year-old
kitchen-knifed her 40-year-old male neighbor, a
15-year-old stabbed her uncle, a 15-year-old
helped her friends kick a man to death, etc. The
series addresses the tragedy of those who
detonated due to the tremendous societal changes
during mid-1990s post-Soviet "wild capitalism."
"Women and children were the weakest link. The
evidence can be seen in the prisons," Sviblova
said,

Controversial art can get your ass in trouble. A
now iconic work from the group's 1996 series,
Witnesses of the Future: The Islamic Project,
which depicted the Statue of Liberty holding a
Koran and covered in a burka, caused some fuss.
The work's ironic commentary on Western paranoia
about the spread of Islam was lost in the
post-9/11 climate, drawing inconvenient attention
to the artists. AES (this was the pre-Fridkes
era) was dubbed "anti-Islamic" and called "media
terrorists." Curator Olga Sviblova has also been
controversial. This is the woman who brought the
work of Mapplethorpe to Russia when things were
"opening up." She has also exhibited images by
Andres Serrano of "Piss Christ" fame. The
exhibition at the Station continues the
provocation.

Virginia Billeaud Anderson is an artist and
writer currently living in Houston. Add Comment


C 2001 - 2007 Glasstire Jan. 4, 2008