Archive conundrum

So, would you say the condition of this artwork from the archive is..."good"? "fair"? "fragile"? It's for the database. Love my job.

Nikolai Kolzov, Leonid Tishkov, Poland, 1981. Lint, dust, crumbs, hair.

And yes, I do think this work is xenophobic.

Oh No, Sigmar!

Sigmar Polke, Higher Beings Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black!, 1969

The first work of Polke's I fell in love with was this one above. An absurdistist send-up of avant-garde authority from just the other side of 1968. Not that that was what I thought at the time. The thing was just so funny on its own.

And then, further down the gallery wall, I saw those weird funny drawings of capitalist fantasies. Pop art but not quite so obsessed with products. Surrealist tapping of the subconscious, but not confusing shoes with female body parts.

Sigmar Polke, Liebespaar, 1967

Anyway, it was ironic. But not in a mean way.

And then, and then! The paintings on printed sheets!

Sigmar Polke, Palm Trees, 1964

The works on resin!

Sigmar Polke, Untitled, 2001-2006 (resin on polyester)

I hate that he was called an alchemist. Like it was a whim. Like there wasn't thought or politics behind it.

Sigmar Polke, I Live in My Own World But It's OK, They Know Me Here, 2002

About the previous image: "The Afghan horsemen photographed by satellite in The Hunt for the Taliban and Al Qaeda (2002/3) reappear in History of Everything II (2002), and again in I Live in My Own World but it’s OK, They Know Me Here (2002), where they have been magnified to the point of disintegration. This repeated image reflects the rapid circulation of imagery within the mass media and shows how easily images can be manipulated, thereby drastically changing their meaning and significance." (From the Tate)

There are so many images in the world and so many paths and channels along which they circulate and appear to us. Most of them make me want to block them out. Predictable, deodorized, or giving off the scent of money. (I know, I've got issues.) But what I like the most about Polke's images (and I don't like them all--I'm not enamored of the cowboys and guns and lifeguard chairs and water towers) is that they seem to drag their histories behind them like cans on a string. He seemed interested in both the images themselves and in their print/re-print histories, the permutations, changes of context, strange printing mistakes. His pictures, the best ones, were like worm holes in the visual field.

Plus, this (from the NYT obit): "Basically he behaved as if every aspect, ritual and protocol of art and the art world was available for manipulation." WORD.

You Are Cordially Invited

June 1, 2010
2pm
Prospect Park
Watch out for horses!

Blogadultery

Matthew Jensen, The 49 States, detail (2008-09)

For those of you who have not caught the F1B1 virus, just want to let you know that there's this other blog. One where the post titles probably should not be "I Hate You, So-and-So," as is the in-house standard here at the Gote Notery. Though I'm sure, actually, that such a thing would fit right in... Just sayin'.

Austin Kennedy, Twenty-Nine (2009)

Baptism

photo: Irina Shteinberg

New performance by Andrey Kuzkin: washing glossy magazines at Fabrika in Moscow.

This has all the qualities of Kuzkin's recent work: simple (though not simplistic) concept, earnestness and bodily exertions, criticism of media/spectacle/commerce, allusions to conceptualism, this time through institutional critique, and a real attempt to break distance between artist & audience. Wish I'd been there. Wonder what happened to all the image/text-free magazines after it was all over... (Thanks for the tip, vk.)

See some other works. some

Around the World and Back Again

Tragic.

Just read that a fire has burned up much of the oeuvre of the amazing Brazilian conceptual artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980). Looks like some of it is restorable and the digital archive is almost complete, but still. This is beyond words.

Hélio Oiticica, Metaesquema No. 348, 1958. (MoMA)

I Don't Like You, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince

As members of a generation steeped in mass media and nurtured in graduate education, and following the general collapse of established values in the sixties and of revolutionary idealism thereafter, they thrilled to suggestions that their automatic sophistication could see through, and dissipate, the antediluvian authority of their elders. But they suffered, too, from a loss of credible traditions that had made life seem real and reality seem livable. Many works in "The Pictures Generation" exude a melancholy of clever artifice masking inexpressible emotion.

(Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker)

We may not have much to be proud of now, but at least it's not New York, ca. 1977. (Moscow, ca. 1977, incidentally, is another story.)

Via Post

Thanks you guys for all the love and inputs. I'm still not sure what to do, but at least the sun has started shining like crazy here and I'm feeling like whatever I end up doing, interesting and unexpected things will happen. And things will be fine.

Speaking of, two packages arrived recently. One from myself and one from my hero, Dr.C.,MD, you may know her as Cookiesforbreakfast. Totally unexpected (the one from me was ordered from UDP so many eons ago, I'd just assumed it lost), and both totally extravagant and rad! So, as I've no news to report beyond the weather and my continuing indecision, I'll just adopt the brilliant MTBE-style book review format to convey the packages' contents' bounteous awesomeness (and - ahem! - get Navel Gazing off the top of the page). OK, here we go:

1) F.R.David - The "Stuff and Nonsense" Issue (Winter 2008), de Appel, Amsterdam. [This one was from C., how did she know that it was totally what I needed right now?]

first line: "Words, Don't come easy."
last line: "Is GOLDEN!"

2) Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (UDP, 2009)

first line: "In the winter of 2008, at a launch for The noulipian Analects (C. Wertheim and M. Viegener, eds., Les Figues Press, 2007), Vanessa Place, Anna Moschovakis, and I were engaged in a conversation about the poetics of erasure techniques."
last line: "Use them all." [Actually, the last "line" is a page with a dot or period in the center, but that kind of felt like cheating.]

3) Aram Saroyan, Complete Minimal Poems (UDP, 2007)

first line: "a man stands"
last line: "Gailyn is doing the dishes."

4) Vito Acconci & Bernadette Mayer, eds., 0 to 9, The Complete Magazine: 1967-1969 (UDP, 2006)

first line: "Not '0 Through 9,' we said to each other, that would subsume us into Jasper Johns; let's call it '0 To 9' instead."
last line: "The tape is still available from The Malabe Co., Inc. but the price has gone up to 14¢ a yard."

5) Aleksandr Skidan, Red Shifting, Genya Turovskaya [et al], trans. (UDP, 2008)

first line: "In speaking about 'red shifting' I would not start with the Doppler effect, because it has no room for the word 'red,' just as in subsequent definitions of this physical process, be it cosmological, mathematical, or poetic."
last line: "knives {and}"*

*Those should be triangley brackets, but those doesn't show up in web browsers...

Bonus #1: I uploaded the editorial intro from F.R.David, cause it was just so gosh-darned right about everything. (It's about how art is not about communicating things. To which I say, YES!)

Bonus #2: Here are some of the Saroyan poems:

COUPON
Coupons are the brightest yellowest
Reddest headiest delights on the face of the earth!

--

PLACID TEAS
The cream

made an "e"

in the tea.

--

SONG
My father's my father's,
My mother's my mother's,
My sister's my sister's,
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm.

--

It may
be the
coffee-
maker

Or it
may be
the ra-
diator.

--

I see
this
little

and
even
less.

--

JULY
It'll hit you you in July.

Yoko Ono's Map Piece (1962)

Draw an imaginary map. Put a goal mark on the map where you want to go. Go walking on an actual street according to your map. If there is no street where it should be according to the map, make one by putting the obstacles aside. When you reach the goal, ask the name of the city and give flowers to the first person you meet. The map must be followed exactly, or the event has to be dropped altogether. Ask your friends to write maps. Give your friends maps.

Warm and Crusty

Justine Lai, Join or Die,* 2007

I cannot stop looking at these paintings. On the surface of it, the project sounds super-stupid: a 24-year-old recent college grad paints self-portraits of herself getting it on with each President of the United States in chronological order. Yup, that's right. But there's something about them that's kind of amazing. I'm going to try to describe it, but maybe it's just a gut feeling, so feel free to skip these next three parts.

I'm surprised, first of all, because I'm really not into art that's about artists' own sex lives.** Koons's brand of pop being the prime example of why: it feels exhibitionist, flashy, conversation-halting, kind of gross, and not really as interested in exploring meanings as using sex to get a rise. What's most annoying about this is that the rise is temporary. You either put it in the art category, or you don't. If not, you may just say it's pornography, which is fine. We've all got genitals, why not? But even if you do accept it into the hallowed halls of, say, the MCA, it's still, as Koons himself says, just a "ta-da" moment. (Not my thing, art- or porn-wise.)

Lai's works don't work this way. Certainly, her pop roots are strong. There's the initial shock of the subject-matter, the magpie treatment of cultural icons, the play with reality and fantasy. But there's also this other thing, what I think of as the sustainable side of pop. It's like this curious calling-attention-to that touches off more thoughts and resists that Koonsian hardening of the surface.***

For example, John Tyler's strange, blind fingering in her mouth and her fearful one-eyed gaze while grabbing his wrist. What's that about? Or Abe Lincoln's weary teat and wearier face. Of course! Of course, that's what that would look like! As Lai herself writes, it's about the vulnerability and the ambiguity. It becomes more than a game of three-card monte with "the artist," "the presidential likeness," and "the viewer" each cycling through their proper positions. They escape becoming fixed or known entities in the exchange, while the range of emotions on display ensures that the stakes remain fairly high, not jokey. I suspect this will become harder with the more recent presidents, since their roles in our collective sex fantasies are more clearly scripted. The first 18, though, are really impressive.

Justine Lai, Join or Die, 2008

To what else does this post's title refer? Why, homemade bread, of course. I've got a batch of this 20-hour creature rising and bubbling by the radiator right now. Should be ready to go by late-morning tomorrow. In this video, the baker from whom Bittman cribbed the recipe demonstrates how everything, even bread - especially bread! - has all this secret knowledge behind it involving squiggles and cracks, crumbs, crusts, and bubbles, proportions, substrates, and who knows what else? In other words, like snuggling up to a fat Martin Van Buren, delicious. Good night.

*No idea what the title means...
**Strange, I'm having trouble coming up with other examples not by Koons where the artist him/herself figures into the explicit image and not just images of partners, implied partners, or stand-ins. Comments?
***Like a printing error in a Warhol Car Crash.

ETA: The bread was a disaster. Better luck next time?

If You Are In DC...

Go see TJ Clark give the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery. The first one was last weekend, but there are five more.

Pablo Picasso, Nude Standing by the Sea, 1929

Here's something from an interview with Clark about the upcoming lectures (parts 1, 2):

If you want a sort of leitmotif of the whole series, it comes down to saying: Cubism now, to me in retrospect, is like an art of a certain kind of interior space, room space, space that's intimate and proximate and in which the world is a world of small things musical instruments, bottles, newspapers, possessable items, that is to say: Possessions.

You won't be surprised to hear that from me, as I'm someone who still certainly wishes to work within the Marxist tradition. I'm very interested in the way in which cubism commemorates and celebrates a certain kind of bourgeois intimacy. That's under threat of course, that bourgeois world. (That is, in the early 20th-century it's under threat.) Massively under-threat.

One of the things we can say about Guernica is that never has a picture been more explicitly about the end of a certain kind of secure interiority, the kind of ripping-apart of the world. But I think there's a pre-history to Guernica, and one of the things I'm going to try to argue about the previous 10-15 years before 1937 is that Picasso is trying to find a way of re-imagining space, and making a space which is kind of much more insecure and open and porous to the outside. At some kind of deep, intuitive level this is his response to the coming to an end of a bourgeois form of life.

It would probably be a cliche to wax on about his sensitive eye, but it should also be mentioned that Clark is one of the few art historians who cuts through the packaging and gets right to the meat. By which I mean the relationship between form and meaning - what can we say about pictures, or what is it that pictures tell us? His answers are daring and problematic, but also stated with conviction and very evocative. They really inspire (me) to go beyond schematic, empiricist thinking. To push the relationship and squeeze out meanings that matter, not just ones that could be said, but don't change anything by having been said. Whether or not you're convinced by his argument, I think the lectures will be well worth it, not least because of his sensitive eye.

I Hate You, Martin Kippenberger

For making stuff like this:

Now I'm going to the big birch wood, my pills will soon start doing me good, 1990

Ingredients: 29 birch trees (rolls of cardboard and plastic and black-and-white offset prints), metal stands, and wooden pills. Installed at MoMA. (via)

What is going on here? We have trees made of art materials and pills made of wood. We have the maudlin romantic symbols of melancholy and the practical modern-day solution to one's existential crisis, if swollen and a bit hard to swallow. I think Holland Cotter hits the nail on the head in his NYT review when he asks, quite seriously, is this "a sendup or a nostalgic sigh?"

Most critics, Cotter included, tend to weave together Kippenberger's personal afflictions/ insurgencies with questions of "history" or "culture," our quote-unquote Modern Condition:

Right from the start he understood that as an artist he was appearing on the scene at the end of a drama rather than at the beginning. By the time he arrived, the defining impulses of late-20th-century art — Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Neo-Expressionism — were old. So were the political ideologies like Socialism and Communism, and the utopianism of the 1960s, which, for better and worse, had shaped the world he knew.

Seemingly all that remained were leftover styles and ideas; bit parts and walk-ons. Kippenberger didn’t buy this. He knew that there are no small parts, only timid actors, and that with the right spices scraps make a great meal. In other words, he knew he had to take what was there, including the diminished role of the artist, and make something different, and large, and loud from it, and he did.

Of course, the review is also called, "Live Hard, Create Compulsively, Die Young." So, I throw the question back to you, HC: was that a sendup or a nostalgic sigh?

A more personal and nuanced (though still unabashedly sympathetic) view of Kippenberger's life is here, in the online version of Ronald Jones's article in Artforum. Jones similarly mixes the personal and the historical:

As much as art history fantasizes Kippenberger as the spunky art-world sophomore, his position is too phenomenally complex to leave it at that. He appeared to us when powerful enclaves of contemporary German culture were sponsoring a full-scale excavation of Expressionism. It is an understatement to say that Martin was at odds with all that. ... From the Paris Bar in Berlin to New York's Odeon, to the Anchor, he carried on, untamed - like the neo-Expressionists he held in contempt - but these passages were performances Martin always kept in quotes. He never mistook having fun [for] ideology. True, he possesses an entertaining appreciation of his culture; but more significant, he recognized what it was about to become. He enjoyed a second sight in this way, a formidable perception that modern nationalism was at last giving way to the dominion of the next culture, a culture staggering in its unity. We never really talked about this seriously (it required a sobriety he would rarely permit), but it was on his mind, and I can say that he did more than casually ponder it. Simply said, his pessimistic insight into what the culture would bring forth was one of his most remarkable gifts. (Emphasis added to highlight strange contradiction, which we could explore if I could figure out the even stranger grammar. My best guess is in the square brackets.)

And perhaps this is the right approach, after all. (If we ignore, for a moment, the looming, hovering, mouthbreathing - stop reading my goddamned blog post over my shoulder!!! - question of "the myth of the tragic male hero, whose life is over before it really began because his/our over-aggressive fathers ruined it for the rest of us by acting like such f-ing a-holes." Yea, let's hold on to that one for a minute.)

How could I say that this is the right approach? Well, because art is not a truth-and-reconciliation commission. It can speak to history, it can become part of history, but it never really drew a clear line between the artist as a guy with a drug problem and larger questions, which one guy can never really address or rectify on his own. What I'm saying is, art history has a problem with biography, because art has a problem with biography. It has one foot in the piddling, pitiable messes of lived experience

On the right: Yuri Leiderman, Silent Pity (Dinner Is Served), 1988

and the other in the quicksand into which we are all sinking and which will continue long after we have left this mortal coil. In questions of history, so to speak. Call it a problem with boundaries. Call it competence. Call it the question of painting. But it's been around for at least two centuries, and it doesn't seem to be going away.

So, why do I hate Martin Kippenberger? I suppose because he makes such a great story out of it. And he makes it so easy to tell - so productive! so compulsive! so witty! so tragic! Look how he plays with materials - the pills made of wood, the trees made of art's raw materials. A spoonful of sarcasm really does make the medicine go down. And all that.

Martin Kippenberger, The Happy End of Kafka's "Amerika," 1994; installation at MoMA

A nice story it all makes. But let's not forget that it's not just a story, at least not while we're still around.

Protest to Save Tretyakov Gallery and TsDKh

For those not following the action, there are plans to tear down the building that houses the Central House of Artists (TsDKh) and the modern and contemporary art collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery. This building:


Home of one of Malevich's Black Squares and many of Russia's most important contributions to the history of 20th century art besides, it's the place where many of Moscow's artists and art historians (I am told) first gained a sense of direction and purpose in things art historical.

The 1979 building, however, is also waterfront property on the Moscow River.

Yesterday, there was a second picket/meeting to show popular opposition to proposed plans to replace the building with commercial property and move the space to some other as-yet unconstructed building, off "to the curb." You can see pictures of the protest on the page of the lj user nefte. (You may, if you look carefully, recognize a certain blue hoodie among the protesters.)

Personally, I'm conflicted. Of course, I support the protection of sovereign art spaces and reject the notion of profit and commerce elbowing its way into all available and unavailable space in the center of the city. Of course.

But unfortunately, I wouldn't say that the Tretyakov or TsDKh are the kinds of art spaces I would want for Moscow. They are stuffy, poorly hung, with boring and/or non-existent programming and generally seem to serve little affirmative purpose apart from keeping treasured works of art out of the rain and hosting interesting book fairs. I wish the art-loving population of Moscow would go to the streets demanding truly sovereign art spaces not controlled by an old-guard bureaucracy that is uninterested in moving beyond 1979 or by wealthy oligarchs and their art-appreciating girlfriends. It may seem like the urgent issue now is to hold the line and protect the space art already has. But from the generally sombre mood of yesterday's protest, it seems to me that some more inspiring plans for the future (new space, new structure, more than what's already there instead of going back to the same old thing) may be what's really in order now...

Burdens

The conceptual art group Art & Language

intend[ed/s] to abandon the separation of competences between artists, critics and observers, and to transform the art-world into a system of communication between contributors with equal capabilities of reflection.

Maybe I'm naive, but how does one define communication? I mean, how do you (yes, you!) know you're communicating? If A & L put their "blurtings" and "annotations" up on the internet and invite people to respond to their communications, how do they know they're getting their messages across? Or, hmmm, is getting a particular message across not the point of communication? I feel dizzy.

A & L provides a clue. The group's goal

in internal discussions, [was/is] to find non-hierarchical forms of presentation with which to activate readers outside the group. The members of Art & Language developed their methodological basics within a process of »conversational exchanges« ... and they wanted to provoke readers to proceed with this process. So the form of presentation of »Blurting In« sustains a reading habit, which creates a dialogical interrelation between parts of the text/annotations as »surface-structures« ... and »set[s] of contexts« ..., which offer parts of the text. The dialogical intratextual character of the reading process should motivate further dialogues within contexts outside the group. The feedback between group-internal and group-external dialogues was the ideal case for Art & Language.

So, dialogue informed by "a reading habit" was/is the goal. But still, I don't mean to be thick, but how do you tell if your dialogue is mutually productive, that you're not talking past each other without even realizing it? This seems relevant beyond the scope of conceptual art. To teachers, for example - is our goal to inspire reading and discussion or is there content in this class? Students are, unsurprisingly, confused.

And, perhaps more importantly to me (here comes my pet gote...), are you not throwing out the baby with the bathwater when you say that

The discourse investigates functions of the art-world ..., but doesn´t explore the function of art works within the context of art ...?

That is, when you only talk about the institutional structures which support art making/looking/discussing/exhibiting/purchasing/etc. and not the art itself as art, what remains of the art? I guess that's where the idea of "blurring the boundary between art & life" turns into disregarding, denying, or erasing it altogether. Thoughts?

(Art & Language's amazing indexing project "Blurting in Art & Language" [the source of the above quotes] can be read and communicated with here.)

Man carrying a file cabinet.
Oh so painfully literal, I know.

*Please do not use the comments section to count the number of conceptual art-induced tears of boredom you have just experienced. Like A & L with "art works within the context of art," I guess I just don't care.

Eureka!

I've got a dissertation title:

"Moscow Conceptualism: Crazy Free-for-All, 1976-1995." Enh? Ennnnh???

And some other notes for the short of attention span:

1) VDNKh: I don't have to tell you twice.



Well, maybe just a little:


Also, don't you know it, people's friendship has officially been "outlived." Whew! Guess we don't have to worry about that anymore.

2) You'll get your point across better if you're naked. Witness:

Carolee Scheeman, Interior Scroll, 1975

Linda Benglis, ad in Artforum (Nov. 1974).

Wait, what was their point again? It also helps if you actually have something to say. Not sure this lady does. (But, twice in one slide-show...good work, ъ!)

Eloise Fornieles, performance at the opening of "Natural Wonders: New Art from London" at Baibakova Art Projects at Red October Candy Factory.

...natural wonders, indeed.

3) Woody Allen thinks he can get away with the same lame-ass shit he's always pulled but now with extra-perky tits. That's right, I said it. (I'm sure many others have, too.)

4) Andrei Kuz'kin inspires me with his pessimism. But he lets me touch his art, so I don't mind.

Andrei Kuz'kin - the caption reads something like: "Please, save that baby! Save it, for god's sake! Perform a caesarean section, please!!!!"

There were other, better works of his at the ArtStrelka show, but like I said, you've got to be naked to get on in the internets, so all I could find was this naked baby.

More about the Kuz'kin show here. (In Russian.)

Semiosis for the Masses, or Conceptualism in the Streets