LeMieux-Ruibal

This Wondrous Region...

2010-10-12T02:35:00.004-04:00

I love Ohio.

At the corner of Three and Ferris

2010-10-12T02:24:00.004-04:00

There is this old house in Columbus. It seats on a busy corner by two highways in a not-so-good area of town. A beautiful, decaying 19th century Italianate house built atop an ancient Native American earthwork.

Two of my favorite things in Ohio- earthworks and Italianate houses, in my favorite Ohio city. I would so happily move there and ponder the origin and use of my own prehistoric monument from the porch.

Of global malls and segregation

2010-10-12T02:03:00.004-04:00

Cruising through Columbus on our way to the Cultural Hub of the Midwest we drove by a place called "Global Mall". She was intrigued enough that we took a detour and stopped to check it out.

The mall turned out to be a giant flea market of sorts where merchants peddle their wares in smallish booths/stores. But this is no ordinary market- all of the vendors are Somalis. Stumbling upon this place took me back to the medinas of Morocco and the street shops of Sri Lanka. Suddenly the Midwest sprawl outside disappeared and I was transported to faraway places both familiar and unknown. It made me long, if only briefly, for the uncomfortable joys of traveling outside my comfort zone of America and Europe.

There are no white people here. Muslim women, covered head-to-toe, congregate and run the booths; they speak very little English but their friendliness and big smiles suffice as means of communication.

I knew Columbus had a big Somali population, but I had never "seen" them. They are the invisible major minority. Inside the "Global Mall", they have everything... stores, a barber shop, a butcher, coffee place.

Right across the street is "La Michoacana", a Mexican/South American market. White folks don't seem to frequent this area of Columbus.

Polls in local magazines routinely position Olive Garden and Chipotle as the best Italian and Mexican in Columbus, respectively. Somali/African food is not even an option.

Again, another fine American city segregated, separated. Divided.

America! The Art of Complaining (Re: Ref #: 003950881A)

2008-09-10T02:44:00.005-04:00

Go ahead, complain. Yeah. It’s one of the greatest pleasures of being an American. Don’t like something? Voice your concern. Let them know you’re not pleased. Tell The Man. He cares, and if he doesn’t… well, he should, dammit! Because America is all about the people. We the people!

It doesn’t always work, though. Some big companies are stingy, rude and careless. You complain to them and they will not only not send you freebies but fail to even acknowledge your letter. Some may even blame you for not liking their stuff. Those companies should be stripped of their Americanness, you hear?

Enter Pepperidge Farm. This is one of those companies that used to be small and family-run and all that but it is now a multinational conglomerate worth billions of dollars doing business as the small bakery that cares (emphasis mine, their slogan is different and trademarked). Bullshit. America rocks, but there’s so much bullshit around us, specially in food companies. They all started in their mom’s basement, delivering by hand their time-honored recipes and suddenly making millions and turning into enormous corporate behemoths headquartered in India. But we still bake/brew/cook/produce/deliver like mom use to bake/brew/cook/produce/deliver!

See for example the story Pepperidge Farm tells us about the origins of the company:

Henry Rudkin began carrying Margaret’s bread with him on the train to Grand Central Terminal to be sold at specialty shops in New York City. And as word about the extraordinary product got around, the tiny company grew. It had no business model, no strategic plan. Margaret just baked the bread by hand in her kitchen, making sure that every loaf was as good as it could be.

Bullshit. Beautiful bullshit! But who doesn’t love a good old American bullshit story of overnight rags-to-riches success? I do! Fuck Yeah. I love America.

But I digress. Enter Pepperidge Farm, now for real. They say this and that, blah blah blah, we’re so natural and good and premium. Don’t get me wrong, Wife and I like them and buy their stuff, until we tried a batch of “Milano Double Chocolate Cookies” and were seriously turned off. They taste like industrial refuse. Mom would definitely not be proud!

So I wrote to Pepperidge Farm, as it is my obligation being a proud American aware of my duties as citizen of the world’s greatest nation (Fuck Yeah!). And I said:

Hello,

My wife and I usually enjoy Pepperidge Farm's cookies. They look good and taste great! But I wanted to tell you about the Milano cookie.

This one cookie doesn't taste good. This cookie feels industrial, artificial and plasticky. This cookie has very little taste and it is akin to munching on Ikea cardboard furniture.

It is sad that a company such as Pepperidge Farm that prides itself so much in "natural" and "traditional" baking delivering "exquisite golden cookies" is actually producing these industrial cookies with very little flavor.

Is this the "art of the cookie"? The "baker's soul"?

And what about the ingredients!?

Do you think a real natural baker would use a list of ingredients longer than the Bill of Rights to produce one single type of cookies? And using such "natural" (note the irony) ingredients as "palm and/or interesterified and hydrogenated soybean and/or hydrogenated cottonseed? "

Just like Mom used to bake, you know. So natural.

We are so disappointed with Pepperidge Farm's Milano artificial and/or industrial cookies that we may even lose our faith in Chess Pieces. God help us!

Nice and convincing or what… The concerned customer service agents at Pepperidge Farm in Norwalk, Connecticut (now wholly owned and operated by Campbell Soup in Camden, New Jersey!) promptly got back to me. And they said:

Mr Bruno Lemieux-Ruibal, we received your message and appreciate your taking the time to contact Pepperidge Farm about the oils in our products.

We value the product comments and suggestions our consumers provide to us. These very comments led us to reformulate many of our products to reduce the level of trans fat. Due to oil availability constraints, we originally labeled our products to preserve the option of using any combination of oils, one of which was palm. However, our accessibility to our preferred oil has increased, and we now use it in the majority of our cookies. The ingredient statements on each package will be updated on an ongoing basis as new packaging is re-ordered.

Only a very limited number of our cookie products continue to use palm oil due to manufacturing and ingredient supply constraints. We continue to look at alternatives to eliminate this oil in as many products as possible.

Cottonseed oil, a vegetable oil, is an ingredient in a number of our products. This wholesome and edible oil is used interchangeably with corn, palm, soybean and canola oils

Hydrogenation, which changes a liquid oil to a semi-solid, is necessary to maintain the texture of our products. Such is the reason, for example, why consumers use solid shortening rather than liquid oils in making pie crusts from scratch.

Our ultimate commitment is to always provide consumers with the delicious, premium quality products they love and expect from Pepperidge Farm. By bringing your comments to our attention, you have helped support our high quality standards and we appreciate your input.

I am sending you coupons via the mail that are redeemable for any Pepperidge Farm item. You will receive them within 7-10 days. I hope you will give us another opportunity to delight you and make sure that with Pepperidge Farm products, you “Never Have an Ordinary Day”.

Thank you for visiting the Pepperidge Farm website.

Pepperidge Farm Web Team jxb

003950881A

Yeah, whatever. You will keep on making crappy artificial industrial cookies that taste like Ikea cardboard and marketed as if they had just come out of Margaret's oven. But I got some free coupons!!! We’ll buy Brussels and Chess Pieces (the only real good stuff from Pepperidge) and celebrate the art of complaining.

America!

Fuck Yeah!

Bacon and Hirst (in Hell)

2008-09-01T02:15:00.002-04:00

The Art Newspaper carries a lengthy and interesting special on Francis Bacon and the crazy market for his works (he is the world's top-selling artist right now). Not that it reveals anything substantially new, but it is a good read. For this matter they quote some art experts, who offer their insight on the artist.

Says curator Matthew Gale, organizer of the upcoming Bacon retrospective that will visit the Tate in London, the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan in New York in this 2008 and next 2009:

"His unflinching awareness of transience, his stance of being outside the mainstream..."

Says artist Damien Hirst, richest and loudest-mouthed contemporary artist ever:

"Francis Bacon is the best. He has the guts to fuck in hell."

Fuck Fucking Yeah.

Looking at Times Square

2008-08-14T23:20:00.000-04:00

Times Square, that place where Broadway and Seventh Avenue are one surrounded by neons, bland attractions and too many tourists, looks mighty interesting from 43rd towards Eighth Avenue.

There, by the old New York Times building, you're walking on a pretty empty street from which you see that endless stream of tourists walking to-and-fro, going around in circles, never straying from their path. Must stay in Times Square.

If you manage to go pass them, leaving the circulating masses, you'll soon reach another fairly unpopulated street (43rd between Sixth and Fifth) and wonder, what the hell was that!

Times Square is a fish bowl: people move around it forever but never get out.

My Own American English

2008-08-13T14:50:00.000-04:00

Your Linguistic Profile:

55% General American English

30% Yankee

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Dixie

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Anyone interested in words, languages, writing and communicating will be attracted to this who-knows-how-unscientific test that supposedly determines your own particular variety of American English. In my case, the 30% Yankee should come from my being a New Yorker, the 10% Upper Midwestern from being married to a Minnesotan-Iowan. But the 5% Dixie? I've never been down in the South beyond Alexandria, Virginia, and despite a certain tendency to catch local accents and phrases, I doubt I have anything whatsoever in my English from the KKK states (other than a preference for "y'all" over "you guys")

When I took the test again after almost three years, it came like this:

70% General American English

15% Yankee

5% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

I love to see how I've become just a plain general American. Wait 'til you hear my accent!

"Alexia, The Movie" (Believe it or not)

2008-08-11T02:46:00.008-04:00

I have a cousin. I mean, I had a cousin. She’s no longer. In fact, she hasn’t been for over twenty years. Twenty-three to be precise.

My cousin Alexia died of a devastating cancer in December 1985 at age 14, having been diagnosed with a malignant tumor at 13 and suffered through ten months of pain and surgeries. Through all of it, she remained an optimist child, always smiling, resilient.

Young cancer victims are, sadly, not a rarity. Entire hospital wards are filled with them. So what was with Alexia? How can a teenager be accepting of a brutal disease that ruthlessly kills you before you’ve set out to discover the world? Alexia had strong religious beliefs, firm and highly uncommon for a kid her age. This supposedly made her ordeal sweeter and is certainly facilitating her beatification by the Pope, a move long pushed by her immediate family.

I say supposedly because I don’t have religious beliefs and find it hard to believe that a 14-year-old can be comforted by Jesus or whoever during a painful and fatal disease instead of crying and going crazy. But Alexia did. She died a happy kid because she was going to meet Jesus. Go figure.

Her endurance and mature acceptance of illness and death put my cousin on her way to sainthood. Her beatification cause is under way, and so one day she’ll be the first ever Saint Alexia and I’ll be proud. Or something.

(My aunt married her first cousin and had seven kids. Two of them died before Alexia, and then it was her turn. Love is the most powerful feeling a human can gather and cannot be stopped, but marrying your cousin means that genetic problems will most likely ensue.)

My relationship with Alexia has seen its ups and downs. I’ve been proud, indifferent, critical, skeptical, even mocking (for this I feel mighty bad)… I’ve felt close to her and far apart because of the peculiarities of my family, including my own father who –as a long-time priest- baptized Alexia but is routinely left out of biographies and stories on her because he left the Catholic Church, married my mother and had me.

I visited Alexia, along with my parents and siblings, at the hospital where she was dying. I was five or six years old. I remember her vividly, and that memory still surprises me and kind of haunts me today, for I am a guy with no memory and no childhood yet I can recall being there, in that room, looking at my cousin Alexia sitting in bed, her body adorned with a strange metal piece on top of her shaved and bald head, her arm in a sling. What a mess, but she was smiling. That’s what has always stuck with me, her smile. I mean, my mind has consciously or unconsciously let most of my life slip away with no recollections, yet there it is that image recorded in my brain, never to leave me.

Despite my lack of faith, I was always close to my aunt, Alexia’s mother. I’d have good conversations with her and my uncle about the existence of god, no less. I never saw her as an extremist. She knew of my interest in Alexia’s cause so she would periodically send me the newsletters, and I was the only one in my immediate family to be invited to the latest chapter of Alexia’s cause for sainthood. My aunt would tell me, and I never forgot, that Alexia prayed for me and my siblings to be baptized and converted to Catholicism.

She failed.

When I married and moved to America I lost touch with everyone but my close friends and family. I barely heard about Alexia. My aunt died not too long ago after a long, painful death and was buried in the family mausoleum in Northern Spain, in the same little town where I had conversed so much with her about religion, god and Alexia. I was living in New York, far from everything. Here, Opus Dei and Alexia meant almost nothing.

About my only contact with Spain is the occasional newspaper clips my father sends me. They’re usually about contemporary art or Spanish visions of New York, but the latest batch was different. It had a color spread on a movie about to open in Spain- a movie about my cousin Alexia. When I saw it and read it, I was floored. But calm. I guess being far away from everything brings a different perspective. Yet I couldn’t hide my amazement.

My cousin, my aunt, my family in the movies.

I read the article. The director says everything in the movie is “respectful and objective”. Yet the journalist calls my aunt a “religious fanatic” and my uncle a lost man grappling with the devastating loss of a child. Then I saw the trailer and my aunt was there, saying “I am thankful every day for our daughter’s illness”. I couldn’t help shedding a tear. Is that respectful and objective? Did they know my aunt? Did they talk to my family before making the movie? When I read about my aunt in one of the most important newspapers in the world, Spain’s El País, described as a “religious fanatic”, is that respectful and objective?

Sure, Alexia was not an easy kid. Her catchphrase before dying was “Jesus, may I always do what you want me to do”, and she celebrated her first communion in Rome with Paul John Paul II, to whom he gave a letter in which she addressed her desire to be a saint. My aunt devoted her life after her daughter’s passing to remembering her and, in a way, making her a sort of household name for Spanish Catholics. Both actions are difficult for me to deal with.

Zealousness or pure devotion and faith? Perhaps both?

And yet, despite my not being religious, I loved my aunt and remember and respect my cousin. I am already not feeling comfortable about this movie, billed as “inspired in a real story” but having obviously more than just plain “inspiration”. The actress portraying my aunt looks so very much like her, and so does the rest of the cast. The movie, titled not “Alexia” but “Camino”, which is a fairly common female name in Spain but also means “path”, seems to focus on Alexia’s love story with an unnamed young boy, something that’s only mentioned in passing in the books written about Alexia. Many other aspects are literally copied. I know. Why didn’t they consult the family? There is this scene, shown in the movie trailer, where my cousin approaches a handyman working on a broken washing machine at the house and asks him whether he thinks that by fixing machines you can get to be a saint (!). According to my aunt, this occurred for real, only the handyman was working on a broken TV.

Don’t they have to ask for permission to reproduce this?

The problem with the movie and the sour disagreements it will generate is not strictly due to my late cousin but to Opus Dei, the religious organization she belonged to, and that –upfront- it looks like the director has constructed a quite critical view of the group, despite his claims of objectivity. Opus Dei is indeed a highly controversial entity. Officially sanctioned by the Pope and the Catholic Church, which recently canonized its founder, Spanish priest José María Escrivá de Balaguer, Opus Dei is viewed by many as a sect or cult- not unlike the Mormons in the United States.

Although a minor, almost unknown group in America, Opus Dei is a big deal in Spain, for obvious reasons. It was founded there and there it grew into a complex behemoth with political, economical and social ramifications. Many of dictator Francisco Franco –ruthless military ruler of Spain for almost forty years-‘s ministers belonged to Opus Dei, and the wealth –both financial and political- of the organization has long been a subject of discussion in Spain. Recently, writer Dan Brown turned Opus Dei into one of the key players of his bestseller “The Da Vinci Code”, reviving the controversy and throwing some light on it for unbeknownst Americans.

The movie is already –before it even opens- creating a stir in Spain, where no discussion about the issue is civilized. The mere announcement of the production has had Spanish newspapers and blogs flooded with readers’ comments pro- and anti- Opus Dei. Because Alexia died comforted by religion, people are calling her a brainwashed mess of a manipulated kid. Believers strike back, calling atheists and agnostics all sorts of non-pretty things.

All because of my cousin, who died twenty-three years ago.

3600 miles away, in a place where virtually no one knows about Alexia, Opus Dei or will ever see this movie that’s already dividing Spain, I am –ever agnostic and respectful- feeling sad, perplexed and quite nostalgic.

(I knew Alexia)

From Baghdad... to The French Laundry (Three Days of Everything)

2008-08-07T02:42:00.008-04:00

My wife Mary (celticat1.multiply.com) and I have this weird hobby of flying and driving around trying the greatest and best restaurants in the world, mostly following the 50 Best List (www.theworlds50best.com). I took on that liking long ago while living in Spain, home of probably the best food created anywhere these days, but never had the money to support it, so it was a heavenly match to find a life partner who shared the love for crazy tasting menus by famous chefs (a passion new to her) and made the money to enable such an expensive pastime. Thank you, Capitalism!

It was only natural that, in a recent visit to the Bay Area, we included a critical stop at The French Laundry in our route. The Laundry is, for now, considered the best restaurant in The Americas (North, Central and South- from Alaska to Patagonia) and Thomas Keller the most important chef in our country. He was the master chef who almost single-handedly created a new generation of fine dining in the United States by skillfully blending the classicism of refined French cooking with the tradition of America’s comfort food and our plentiful table and agricultural bounty. That and a painstaking, almost maniacal attention to detail and service made for a unique style that ushered diners into a new experience of amazement, awe and sheer delight. Forget the old, buttery French-dining thing with snotty waiters and heavy sauces that dominated America's restaurant scene for so many decades. This was something else. A new world.

Keller is still there, at the top. Not only in California, where he created his empire, but in New York as well, where he grew as a chef and failed as an entrepreneur. His famed restaurant Rakel bombed at the end of the crazy 80’s, when hungry Wall Streeters chose to go to their local diner instead of choosing second helpings of Keller’s luxurious French cooking . He is now back with a vengeance at Per Se, the ultimate Keller experience where everything is so fastidiously flawless you’ll either leave the place (if you ever get there) crying or wondering how such ideal perfection is possible in this deeply flawed world. Or perhaps both. We are now in an economic crisis so bad that will soon make the Late Eighties look like a bad-hair day, and yet diners are still flocking and anxiously hammering their piggies to have their own slice of the Per Se and French Laundry experiences. Keller is not at risk of going down like Rakel did- this time, in this crisis, it is the chain eateries such as Bennigan’s that are filing for bankruptcy. Fine dining is alive and well, thank you very much.

Wife and I are fans of Chef Keller, and I would rate Per Se as my favorite restaurant in the world. (Oops, did I say that? Yeah. I think I know what I’m talking about.) So we had to try the original, the Yountville outpost that started it all. I was afraid that I wouldn’t find the Laundry too special, that I would feel like dining at the Western version of Per Se. Unfortunately, I was right. The Laundry is like Per Se, only in a small town in sunny Napa Valley, California surrounded by a garden where you might run into Thomas Keller picking a fresh pear from a tree instead of an enclosed mall where the chances of sighting a famous chef (or sighting anything at all) are extremely slim. Other than the setting, the food and experience are a precise clone, minus the perfection I found at Per Se and thought somewhat missing at the Laundry. That venerable old building is just too small for so many waiters and diners roaming around clad in fancy jackets and dresses.

Also, I am finding myself jaded, almost cynically insensitive to the fine-dining world I love. No, perhaps I do not care anymore about that beef that came from a farm in Pennsylvania located 3,000 miles away from California, or the Australian black truffle (in season now!) presented in a black jewel case or the Montana cave salt that may be 40 million years old. You hear! 40 million. Enough of that. I care for good, imaginative, mold-breaking and mind-blowing food. I can do without the rituals and trappings.

Yes, the food was generally excellent and the service magnificent and warm, if flawed. But the whole thing lacks excitement and surprise. So I found the Laundry formulaic, a bit tired- a place and an experience in need of a good kick in the ass. You don't want your creation to get old and worn-out like the old French cooking you toppled and replaced, right, Keller? I know you don't.

Slightly disappointed (although excited to see Keller himself), I looked at the customers- those searchers of the Keller experience. We talked to a rich-looking couple from Cleveland who- along with their absurdly polite and mature but adorable young children- were having their first serious culinary experience. Unaware they were of the almost-mythical status of Keller's Laundry until we popped that cherry for them. The son, seven or eight years old, provided some clever and resourceful insight into life when we asked him what did he want to do when he grew up... and he immediately and surely said, "I want three days of everything".

Including The French Laundry, I assume.

I looked over at a table where five redneck ladies, all bad hair, clunky manners and bright Sunday dresses were having their first and last gastronomic journey aided by a solicitous sommelier who, no doubt, promptly coaxed them all into buying the most expensive wine flight ever conceived in Napa Valley.

And yet these colorful types all pale if compared to the one sight I cherish the most of my Laundry experience: the Iraq veteran. I said it right, an Iraq veteran at The French Laundry. He entered the dining room in full military fatigues, making his way to his assigned table with the help of a cane and flanked by his beautiful, overdressed and visibly nervous (probably overwhelmed) girlfriend. This Asian-American California guy was barely in his 30's and yet had seen the worst of (in)humanity and was about to see some of the best. He had been in Baghdad, enjoyed it and survived to tell his story, back in America.

Wounded but happy. He was no charlatan. We talked to him in the garden, during one of our breaks from the 4-hour food trip. He spoke of Iraq as we would of going grocery-shopping, unaffectedly and down-to-earth. He believed in it, he went there, did his thing and came back. His dream was to dine at The French Laundry, and there he was, with his cane and his uniform; his limp and vivid memories.

He chose not Bud Light and his neighborhood sports bar with his buddies and the local cheerleaders but Napa Valley and one of the best restaurants in the world, surrounded by people who might look at him as an outsider (Why are you not wearing a jacket? What are you doing here?) and frown. He was a hero, in many ways.

You may not agree with our current government, with the Military of the United States, with the wasteful and useless invasion and war on Iraq. I don't either. But I hope that you, like me, respect and admire these men and women who chose to fight a war (wrong or not, and for whatever reason) in trenches and faraway hellholes instead of sitting comfortably at home.

They have the guts we lack. They deserve to be remembered, respected and admired when they come back, whether they choose to celebrate at their local dive with the frat boys -as we saw in Hartford, Connecticut, in another moving sight of a young veteran coming home from Iraq- or at a sushi bar in Manhattan. But when you take your wounded veteran guts from Baghdad to The French Laundry to celebrate your return, You -the Iraq gourmet soldier whose name I'll never know... You will forever be etched in my mind.

And that is indeed what I remember the most about my French Laundry experience, well worth paying over 700 dollars for. Come to think of it, and predictable as the Laundry may have become, only Thomas Keller could be behind such an unforgettable feat.

(A different kind of perfection)

Spencer Tunick in Vienna... the showers of Auschwitz?

2008-08-06T00:50:00.002-04:00

I intented to go to MoMA today, but -after months of procrastinating at home and cursing at the art establishment- I chose the wrong day. The only day of the week that has the Modern closing its revolving, mall-like doors. I felt like a tourist for a second or two. But I'm used to be disappointed by that museum, though. MoMA hates me and I hate MoMA. Will it ever change?

So I saw myself wandering the disgustingly crowded and hot streets near Fifth Avenue, overrun with tourists, sweat and a mixture of rotting garbage and Saks perfumes. New York in the summer, of course (or should I say year-round?). Wondering where to go to see some art, I thought of the Austrian Cultural Forum, this weird and wonderful little-known gem of a public gallery on 52nd between 5th and Mad that showcases weird and wonderful little-known contemporary art, mostly European and particularly Eastern European. MoMA's postcard pictures it ain't.

Now on show, for the whole summer and then some, an exhibition on "Bread and Soccer", or how Europe is under the spell of sports to an extent where the masses forget their everyday problems because... their favorite team is kicking a leather ball in the stadium!! Yeah... panem et circenses, said the Romans. They knew about this. In America, we call it "Burger and Football", or "Hot Dog and Baseball", but the concept is the same. Watch some sports and forget about the creeping price of groceries.

The show is worth watching. Turns out that contemporary artists have a lot to say about sports, most in a funny way, others in a heroic manner, some pulling a pathetic and funny act. One work in particular caught my attention: a Spencer Tunick photo performance (or whatever you want to call his stunts) at Vienna's main soccer stadium.

Tunick is famous for his massive displays of naked human flesh in public places. He's found his niche as much as, say, Richard Serra found Cor-Ten steel. Whether he's getting boring and predictable or still pushing the genre of photography is debatable, but I found his latest performance to be something new: disturbing, almost wrong.

Here we have two thousand people, all white and mostly skinny but indistinguishable, shedding their clothes in a stadium. Following orders, doing what they're told to do. Looking vulnerable, almost miserable, always pathetic. Now lie down, now hold the soccer ball, now get up and clap. Wounded but proud, the citizens of Wien expose their bodies. Tunick excels at extracting, removing and destroying the sexuality out of humanity. If you've ever thought, "I'd like to see that girl or guy naked", well, you don't. They're boring, natural, average. Just body parts hanging and bouncing. Even the best-looking bodies in Tunick's performance are reduced to nothing but flesh.

The disturbing aspect of Tunick's video comes not only from this awareness of the human body but the accepted totalitarianism of the performance. Those bodies are there to be commanded, moved around, tossed, used. That's where I thought of the immates of Auschwitz, receiving a shower they thought purifying. Tunick takes those readily eager and available Austrians and goes wild on them, with their enthusiastic if uncomfortable approval. Smile, clap, run... thank you, Austria.

Would you want to fuck one of those chickens hanging from the dirty window of a dingy Chinese restaurant in the worst part of town? Tunick transforms us into one of those, and then some. Say goodbye to your sexuality. You'd be proud.

That, and you get a limited-edition soccer ball to remind you of the day you made your otherwise OK body into a mass of vulnerable white flesh for the sake of art.

Let Us Now Praise Famously Unknown Texans

2006-03-05T20:58:00.000-05:00

“His photo saw through me”. “It felt like I had left my body, that I had died, and my spirit was looking at the photograph”.

Billy Mudd is a Texas trucker and one of the protagonists of “In the American West”, Richard Avedon’s masterpiece and one of the most important photographic books ever produced (as well as one of the most controversial and contested).

As is well known, Avedon was commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, to create a series of portraits of people in the American West. After five years of work, the “In the American West” exhibition opened at the museum in 1985, and became a polemic classic overnight. Twenty years later -and a year after Avedon’s death-, the Amon Carter showed again 78 of the 124 impossibly powerful images, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram sought out to find, interview and photograph some of the unforgettable subjects.

Celebrated by many and despised by more than a few, “In the American West” is certainly not a spontaneous collection of portraits- Avedon gave a fixed meaning of the West, one that probably coincides with what the so-called collective imagination (specially East Coasters and Europeans) thinks about the epic West. Yet despite a mediated look, faithful or not, Avedon cannot be accused of dishonesty. His photos were carefully staged and worked- but the subjects are real, the eyes and souls strongly, painfully human. There is truth in their pain, in the sadness and restlessness we feel coming from those existentialist portraits, regardless of their arranged drama.

Pages and pages have been written, and more will keep coming, on Avedon’s supposed pitilessness and cruelty towards the individuals he immortalized. Personally, I see this mercilessness not as coming from the photographer’s eye but being simply the nature of the subject. If Avedon’s method enrages his many critics, it might be for his uncanny ability to portrait the unknown and invisible. We see the body and face of the subject, but also his or her soul, thoughts, inner lives.

Avedon had that magic to go beyond the skin and unveil the spiritual.

Besides, where Kissinger famously begged “Be kind to me” before being shot by Richard Avedon, the unknown Westerners seem to have no fear in having their bodies traversed and their souls exposed, unbeknownst of Avedon’s reputation.

Much of all this can be seen and felt in the impressive Star-Telegram’s interactive feature, “Avedon’s Lone Stars – Then and Now”.

In briefly peeking at the current and past lives of ten of the eighteen Texans gathered by Avedon, we see letters, signed books and photos, invitations, follow-ups, words of warmth and friendship… Certainly not what we would expect of a supposedly manipulative and ruthless photographer that traveled throughout the American West to laugh at and caricaturize the honest folks of the desert and show it to the cultured people of New York.

In each and every interview included, we hear proud people talking with affection about the man who desperately wanted to take their picture. It is truly a mind-opening, vital contribution to a better and more complete understanding of “In the American West”. Here you’ll hear and read the protagonists reflecting on their own super-famous portraits, and what they think is not what many angered critics (mainly from the West) thought twenty years ago and continuously afterwards. Where they saw a hard-to-find-in-the-West freak, a non-representative type fastidiously picked by Avedon to stand out as the image of the desert land, the protagonist sees it his way:

“This picture really reminds me of the toughness of the job… I also see in the photo someone struggling to make it to the next paycheck by holding down a job that he is not really satisfied with. That oil-field job was hard and nasty work”

(James Law, Oil Worker at the time of the shoot)

Law felt not only what Avedon tried to communicate, but also compelled to finish his college degree after seeing himself and the others at the Amon Carter in 1985.

This extraordinary reaction comes from someone whose contact with Richard Avedon lasted no more than 30 minutes. Those who kept in touch with him (or rather, he with them) have even friendlier words and remembrances, calling the artist “Richard” and cherishing the moment they got immortalized as one of the most important in their lives, while ardently identifying themselves with their Avedon images.

This should, then, and contrarily to what has been widely written, assert that -whatever the many views and conceptions of the West- Avedon was respectful and caring to a great degree in treating his subjects, at least those captured “In the American West”.

Billy Mudd’s words with which I have started this reflection are probably the most touching of all, and surely the most vivid description of Richard Avedon’s artistry coming from a non-art person. But there’s plenty to be moved to tears by among the recollections of these humble, working-class Texans with thick accents and big hearts whose lives where forever changed by a classy, unpretentious Manhattanite sent to the American West.

“The Trailer is the Key”: Destroying Spiral Jetty

2006-01-30T02:44:00.000-05:00

Spiral Jetty never ceases to change, surprising scholars and art writers. First it was its reappearance after twenty-plus years of being under water. Then, last summer, photos showed the Jetty had returned to its initial brown-soil color, its white-salt crust washed away by the rising waters of the Great Salt Lake. Now that Spiral Jetty is seemingly under water again, on and off (as of January 2006, the water level is 4195, exactly the same Smithson had when building the work), art bloggers have spread the news of an apparently massive cleaning in and around Spiral Jetty first reported by the Salt Lake Tribune (sltrib.com/search/ci_3425267). The small news clip reads:

Utah officials last month removed several tons of junk from Rozel Point, the area along the Great Salt Lake's north shore that is home to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
"Anyone who has made the trip to see the famous Spiral Jetty . . . has passed through the area and certainly noted that it was an eyesore," says Joel Frandsen, director of the state Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, which supervised the cleanup along with the state Division of Oil, Gas and Mining.
Workers removed 18 loads of junk and plugged more than a dozen abandoned oil wells.

Greg Allen of greg.org writes the “junk” is the trailer, the amphibious vehicle, the burned cars, everything that signaled the final stop right before the Jetty.

This is an enormous loss. What the Utah government calls "junk" and wiped out with the noble intention of tiding-up the Great Salt Lake shore and the access to Spiral Jetty is actually an important part of the earthwork and the Jetty experience, as anyone who's made the trip there can tell. Robert Smithson himself included the compound in his Spiral Jetty film as well as in the writings and documents that accompanied the earthwork. In his "The Spiral Jetty" essay published in 1972, Smithson wrote:

The mere sight of the trapped fragments of junk and waste transported one into into a world of modern prehistory.

Two dilapidated shacks looked over a tired group of oil rigs. A series of heavy black oil more like asphalt occur just south of Rozel Point. For forty or more years people have tried to get oil out of this natural tar pool. Pumps coated with black stickiness rusted in the corrosive salt air. A hut mounted on pilings could have been the habitation of "the missing link". A great pleasure arose from seeing all those incoherent structures. This site gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes.

Here is the difference between the eye of the functionary and the eye of the artist. One sees "junk" and an "eyesore", the other looks at evocative, poetic ruins fueling his thoughts.

Moreover, Smithson actually used the trailer ruins to create art, a 1970 piece called "Mica Spread", in which he tossed mica he had found in the site, creating both a mirror-like effect and a pouring. These actions are a constant in Smithson's art, as it is the use of ruins. The shed in which he spread mica in Utah came after completing in Ohio "Partially Buried Woodhsed", a work close in concept and appearance. A photowork, "Mica Spread" was also recently shown in a video directed by Jane Crawford and produced for the Los Angeles-Dallas-New York Robert Smithson retrospective.

The beauty and magic of the ruins, and their being a beacon. The trailer and other ruins were the last step and stop before the Jetty, the sign that told the visitor "you're there". "After the trailer, park and walk to the Jetty". This guidance will never be given again.

Blogger Todd Gibson wrote about the trailer junk and said:

The refuse on the site isn't limited to the trailer. And it's clear that the junk here isn't going anywhere soon.

Now it is. The soaring popularity achieved by Robert Smithson and Spiral Jetty have contributed greatly to this destruction.

Notoriously inept blogger Tyler Green, whose understanding of Robert Smithson and Spiral Jetty is obviously very limited, will be happy. This "cleaning" is the first step towards that better access road he demands for the Jetty (Hotel? McDonald’s? Eight-lane highway? Airport at Rozel Point? Just ask, Mr. Feckless)

The Estate of Robert Smithson has not yet issued a word. Dia Art Foundation, owner and supposed caretaker of the monument is, as always, mute and dead. Despite installing prominent signs along the road to the earthwork (most likely the only work ever done by them at the site), the very-outdated website Dia maintains for Spiral Jetty (www.spiraljetty.org) still offers detailed directions, based in the now-destroyed trailer compound as a reference.

11. At this gate the Class D road designation ends. If you choose to continue south for another 2.3 miles, and around the east side of Rozel Point, you should see the Lake and a jetty (not the Spiral Jetty) left by oil drilling exploration in the 1920s through the 1980s. As you approach the Lake, you should see an abandoned trailer, an old amphibious landing craft, and an old Dodge truck.

From this location, the trailer is the key to finding the road to the Spiral Jetty. As you drive slowly past the trailer, turn immediately from the southwest to the west (right), passing on the south side of the Dodge, and onto a two-track trail that contours above the oil-drilling debris below. Only high clearance vehicles should advance beyond the trailer.

“The Fine Art of White Castle Architecture” or “Popularity Killed the Museum”? Indeed

2006-01-30T00:16:00.000-05:00

We thought famous architect Richard Meier's perfectly sleek, gorgeous-looking white buildings were inspired by Minimalism or Malevich, the sublime. Dead wrong we were. In the architect's own words, the clue to Meier's pure, whitewashed trademark design: (http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/00/11.9.00/Meier_visit.html)

In 2000, as a visiting professor at Cornell University, Meier told students why he prefers white buildings, and how he was persuaded to vary his aesthetic with the Getty design (where he included non-white, earth-looking travertine stone).

"As a kid I liked going to the White Castle for hamburgers," he said, describing the smooth, shiny white tiles that still cover the hamburger chain's restaurants. He described how he has tried throughout his career to recreate in concrete and painted steel that memory of perfection.

Richard Meier, a white trash white supremacist (in color choice only) embedded within the celebrity architects. Now you know, the Getty perched up on the hill above LA is but a White Castle gone stratospherically huge. I have seen the light and I'll never look at Meier's buildings the same. How come nobody ever made the connection? A search on google under Richard Meier “White Castle” yields only two results: the revelation above and a note by a sarcastic Atlanta travel writer whose note on the High Museum of Art reads: (http://www.thebigrockcandymountain.com/thingstodo.html):

You could probably kill a couple of hours in this museum - but don't expect anything that compares with a decent art museum in any other major metropolis (even the New Orleans Museum of Art has a better collection and is housed in a far more beautiful building). The building, by "renowned" architect Richard Meier (all of whose buildings look suspiciously like one another), resembles an out-of-control White Castle.

A visit to the High Museum’s website indeed confirms this writer’s account and a depressing pattern of the type of museum we're irreversibly immersed in: the collections are uninteresting to put it mildly and certainly unworthy of the High’s fame around the world. That might be the reason for their focusing on buildings by celebrity architects (Meier first, now outrageously-in-demand Renzo Piano) and blockbusters like “Rings” (a thing on Frodo’s world timed for the Olympic Games 1996), “Norman Rockwell” and “Andrew Wyeth”.

High Art this is not.

Google’s description of the High is fitting and exact: Cultural tourism destination and entertainment attraction.

The museum of the 21st century. A big bad White Castle, with all the fat and a twenty-dollar tag.

After the Critics

2005-12-20T13:02:00.000-05:00

New York art critic Jerry Saltz is one of the few critic voices among the art critics. From his column in The Village Voice, Saltz punches whatever or whoever he doesn’t like, speaking out and taking no bullshit. He is a real art critic in a corporate art world that cares not for authenticity and dissenting voices.

A recent article for the Voice had him focused on the nature of the art critic. Taking questions from Frieze magazine on the "de-skilling of art criticism" and "our post-critical era", Saltz goes on to accuse art criticism of being too elevated in its language and not critical enough. He is right, but by focusing on the lameness affecting many critics today, he avoids treating the real problem posed by Frieze magazine: “our post-critical era”.

What Frieze means by "our post-critical era" is simply the current state of art criticism: not only that critics are not critical, but specially art criticism in general is devalued, unused, unread, ineffective.

Dead.

And when you’re dead, what if the reviews are not sharp enough? We art critics don't count. Nobody reads us, and those who read us are not important anymore, or never were (gallery-goers, art-lovers, struggling artists, friends and family). Dealers, curators, museum directors, artists, power figures- all these are the ones counting today. A written word on the art world today? Who cares? Does anyone think Glenn Lowry will reconsider his next step at MoMA after reading a Saltz, Kimmelman or LeMieux-Ruibal piece critic of his management?

A stand on an art fair with cool music and hot chicks is what people pay attention to nowadays. Robert Hughes put it very clear in a statement for Art & Auction a few months ago:

"Criticism has come to matter less and less in the great scheme of things. To talk about the power of the critic today is like talking about the power of a beekeeper. It's pretty ridiculous".

It's not only that many critics are not critic, just descriptive. There are Michael Kimmelmans and Roberta Smiths and Jerry Saltzes who sting and shout and fight with their words. And? Nothing happens. No one cares. Power brokers may read it, but they'll dismiss it. It is not like the Bob Woodward of the art critics will create a Watergate on the Getty, MoMA or LACMA.

We are ignored, or anesthetized.

Kimmelman panned so bad the "Greater New York" concoction in The New York Times with an already-famous "Youth and the Market" title, and you know what? They had it on display at the PS1 front desk. The critical critique, the real art criticism, exhibited- tamed and stripped of its power.

I am publishing long reports on Young New York Art and the Art Market in Lapiz magazine in Spain. They're critical, negative, enraged. Artists and friends come to me and say how much they like to see the bubbling frenzied fake art world exposed.

And? Who cares? If any of the important people read me, it was on their way to Art Basel Miami Beach. Parties, more parties, money, dealers, glamour, youth, looks, sex, plastic surgery...

"Art criticism". Excuse me. We're losers. We're writing for the family and fans, and we all know or should know it.

Even the locked-upon-itself community of art critics is isolated, not only from the art world and the real world out there somewhere, but inside itself, where critics hate each other, ignore any piece authored by others and refuse to consider any view out of that one they penned and deem brilliant.

But we're all so happy with our onanist exercises of futile closet pleasures.

"Bad Art Makes Great Scrap": Celebrating the Theft and Melting Fate of a Henry Moore

2005-12-17T12:49:00.000-05:00

"British police hunted for three men on Saturday who stole a huge bronze Henry Moore sculpture worth up to 3 million pounds ($5.30 million) and a spokesman said they feared the piece would be destroyed for scrap. Police said the 3.5 meter long (11 ft 5.8 in) sculpture, "A Reclining Figure," was stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire, north of London, on Thursday night by three men who drove it away."

You know Henry Moore. I mean, you do know Henry Moore. Even if you’re not into art or never heard of him, you’ve seen his stuff. You live in Wichita, Kansas or Winnemucca, Nevada? There’s a Henry Moore in your town. It's the pride of the local Civic Plaza and/or Performing Arts Center!

Henry Moore’s annoying ubiquitousness has chased us in our travels. I remember the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) filled with those little and big (mostly huge) pieces of poo for which Moore considered himself as being part of the pantheon of “great artists”. Our visit to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City almost turned into a nightmare after being surrounded by what the museum claims to be "the biggest collection of Henry Moore’s outside England". (The AGO is said to have “the world’s biggest Moore collection", period).

Taking pride in bad art.

In every one of the sculpture parks we’ve visited in the United States, a Henry Moore never fails to haunt us with amorphous visions of abstract detritus ("dead or decaying organic matter"). That, and a Calder, another artist whose art fails in big size but was and is immensely popular.

Here in New York we suffer Moore’s “organic” things in at least the United Nations (very aptly) and Lincoln Center (not less so).

With so many magnificent (and unknown) sculptors, why was the dreadful Henry Moore always awarded every damn public commission around the world? Moore’s contemporary Barbara Hepworth, the other world-famous British sculptor, is an immensely better artist than him, yet her presence out of England is minimal.

Should I be the Public Art Commissioner of any city, the likes of Walter de Maria, Juan Munoz, Michael Heizer or Richard Serra would be my choice. Henry Moore is so fifties, so United Nations grey bureaucracy. Totally unadventurous- the safe choice of a state functionary.

Big and rich, Henry Moore was paying “about a million pounds a year” in taxes. “By the end of the 1970’s, there were some 40 exhibitions a year featuring his work”. Fame and fortune devoured the imagination and inventiveness he once had in the 40’s. His surrealist sculptures a la Giacometti and his not-so-famous subway drawings, made inside subway shelters while London was being bombed, were probably his last examples of high art. That was the 1940’s.

Now a 2-tons Henry Moore has been stolen right in the face of the Henry Moore Foundation. For once, I agree with the newspapers putting the accent in the monetary value: 5.3 million dollars is a lot of scrap. And crap.

The definition of "scrap" is very clear and fitting to Henry Moore's sculptures:

"Rubbish, worthless material that is to be disposed of"

Stealing a Henry Moore, recycling it and getting some money at the junkyard is one of the brilliant, useful ideas one can come up with for Moore's things. Another two I've found among the stir the theft has caused, as reflected in the press all around the world:

- Turner Prize winner Simon Starling's project for Toronto: submerging Moore's "Warrior With Shield" (completed in 1954) in Lake Ontario to be encrusted with tiny zebra mussels over a six-month period". And then, show it at the Power Plant, Toronto's only center for contemporary art. The Henry Moore Foundation reportedly loves the idea.

- Use a Henry Moore as a legal bribery: Wellington, New Zealand, only Moore sculpture was bought in 1987 by some collector for 900,000 New Zealand dollars (around 620,000 American dollars) "and donated to the city in exchange for the right to build taller buildings", says a New Zealand paper. Too bad the sculpture is threatened (by some art connoisseur, I assume) and "under 24-hour guard", costing the city 4000 New Zealand dollars a week.

My conceptual project:

1.- Melt all the Henry Moores in public plazas around the world in one big blast furnace constructed in the site of the Henry Moore Foundation.

2.- Celebrate the end of bad art while watching the smoke go up, high in the sky.

3.- Use the proceeds from the sale of the biggest amount of scrap ever gathered in doing good to the neediest.

4.- Repeat the process, with Jim Dine.

Taming Egon Schiele- With a Blockbuster

2005-12-07T19:52:00.000-05:00

The current exhibition "Egon Schiele: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections" on view at the Neue Galerie in New York until February 20 2006, is undoubtedly one of the most eagerly awaited art events of this season. My wife and I, patrons and lovers of the Neue Galerie, were looking forward to such a landmark exhibition for many months. Once it came and we visited it, we couldn't be more disappointed.

The show, for it is a veritable "show" more than an "exhibition", is -as Ken Johnson's review accurately described it in The New York Times- "The Wider, Not Wilder Schiele". Yes, there are many works on display, but they fail to offer anything new, exciting or thought-provoking on the artist. In fact, this show feels like a regression and involution from the Egon Schiele we all love and treasure. The passionate artist with nerve, tension and prone to expose the eroticism and harshness of the human body and existence looks now at the Neue Galerie like a master draughtsman, a prolific creator with an academic profile in portraits and landscapes. Bland and innocuous.

"The current exhibition provides an opportunity to deepen our understanding" of the artist, says Ronald S. Lauder, President of the Neue Galerie and longtime Schiele collector, but this is sadly not true to the trained eye and Schiele-lover after one single visit to the Neue Galerie these days.

Quantity does not mean quality is a very appropiate aphorism for this show- or merely accumulating pictures does not suffice to mount an exhibition that transmits energy. It has been said that Schiele "represented the body to explore the soul", yet it is difficult to see a soul in the "Egon Schiele" blockbuster at the Neue Galerie. Many bodies and a missing soul- the striking Schiele cabinet the museum had before was far more powerful and revealing than the two-floors current show.

Truly enough, we cannot blame Serge Sabarsky and Mr. Lauder for collecting the Schieles now generously offered to the public, but we should lament this missed opportunity to offer "a real Schiele" to the American audience, that Schiele one can see in Austria in the public museums or in the excellent Leopold Collection: devastating portraits of himself, drawings of little girls, exposed vaginas, young boys and girls masturbating like if it were the last thing they will ever do... If both Sabarsky and Lauder did not completely avoid the thorny core of Schiele's art, they certainly did not focus on it, preferring the more conventional portraits Schiele made of his friends and family, as well as landscapes and cityscapes.

Even a very small exhibition of works on paper from the Wien Museum that circulated in Spain with almost no publicity this summer and fall had more nerve, angst and sex than the current New York blockbuster. It was eloquently titled "Egon Schiele- In Body and Soul".

One has to go to the excellent catalogue published by the Neue Galerie to find scholarly studies, fresh views and engaging aspects of and on Egon Schiele. As weak and dull as the blockbuster is, the catalogue strikes me as easily the most important addition to the Schiele literature since Jane Kallir's catalogue raisonné. Insightful and innovative essays trace the uneasy reception and painfully slow acceptance of Schiele in America and the influence of the artist in contemporary art and culture. This monumental catalogue is a magnificent volume I count as among my favorites in my library.

The foremost victim of the Egon Schiele blockbuster concoction is the Neue Galerie itself. Renee Price, Director, is quoted in the Neue Galerie website as saying the Egon Schiele show "is drawing large crowds" and "The Cafe Sabarsky has become a cherished spot". Certainly, and those large crowds are the reason why long-time patrons of the Cafe and the Galerie like my wife and I feel upset and sad to see our favorite museum and cafe in New York overcrowded and impossible to enjoy. The cherished spot, gone.

Thousands of tourists fill the Cafe Sabarsky where before the Schiele venture a table was always available on Friday nights to enjoy Viennese delicatessen before proceeding to the museum, always almost empty and a marvellous pleasure, now something similar to the Museum of Modern Art- an attraction park. The Neue Galerie has lost its charm searching the economic benefits of a blockbuster.

Raising fees, the Cafe assaulted by tourists, the galleries packed, the art made hard to enjoy.

Is it worth to convert the most elegant and tranquil museum in New York in just another noisy-lousy tourist attraction for Middle America in the name of money? Is this the future and new direction we can expect from the Neue Galerie? I find it extremely displeasing and sad.

I can only hope the sparsely-attended, well-curated cabinet exhibitions that were a Neue Galerie signature return soon, and this dream-turned-nightmare Schiele business venture gives place to the old Neue Galerie we love, in which the sound of the piano soared from the Cafe to the third floor on Friday nights, creating that magic, fin-de-siecle atmosphere now lost. Wasn't the museum designed as an upscale, elitist venue of sophistication with 500-dollars memberships? In risk of being labeled as "old fashioned", I would say let's preserve the spirit of the Neue Galerie. For blockbusters and cheap entertainment, tourists and masses can go to the Met and Rockefeller Center.

Valente / Rothko: An Encounter In the Limits

2005-11-27T22:43:00.000-05:00

Spanish poet master Jose Angel Valente (1929-2000) was not only the most singular and outstanding lyrical voice of Post-War Spain but also an insightful art critic, or more precisely a writer on art, for his words probably had no critical aim, positive or negative. He dedicated texts to those visual artists that were either personal friends or had influenced his poetry.

Any reader of Valente with a visual art memory would not fail to associate the words of the poet with the paintings of Mark Rothko (1905-1970). The sublime and the infinite, the metaphysical tragedy; the ethereal and the nothingness, the everythingness in the void. Rothko's oeuvre seems to have been created to be the most accurate painterly rendition of the poetry of Valente, or Valente's words spawned to describe the rapturing, expansive surfaces of hazy color of Mark Rothko.

Both the poet and the painter, the written artist and the visual one shared a vocabulary of essence, transcendence and pureness. Yet they never met, in paper, canvas or life.

Fate would eventually unite them. Valente and Rothko.

In 1999, already very ill with cancer, Jose Angel Valente visited in Paris what most likely was his last exhibition: the celebrated Mark Rothko retrospective that, originated in Washington, DC, and presented later in New York, was having its last stop in France. No written accounts or recollections exist of Valente's "first" and last dramatic encounter with Rothko.

Paris-based Ramon Chao, writer, journalist, radio broadcaster and a friend of Valente, has penned a brief and touching memory of that moment
(www.otrarealidad.net/opinion/ramon-chao/index.php?x=1832). It was Chao's last meeting with a dying Valente that was "finally" meeting Rothko. As "one of the most moving moments that I'll take to my eternity" describes Chao the time. It was Chao himself, he writes, who drove in his own car Valente and his wife Coral to the museum to see Rothko, saving the ailing poet not only the transportation but the long lines with his press pass.

"Dentro sentí que Valente vivía uno de los momentos más felices de su existencia".

("Inside I felt Valente was living one of the happiest moments of his life")

The curator of the 2003 exhibition "The Word and its Shadow. Jose Angel Valente: The Poet and the Arts" held in Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain) begins her essay "The shadow of the word" imagining Valente staring at the last picture of the Rothko exhibition, one of the dark canvases made before his suicide, and feeling a connection between his poetry and Rothko's paintings.

I have tried to make visible the powerful, mesmerizing thought of Valente and Rothko together in the threshold of death in the following verses:

Ante el muro,
de luz.

Rodeado, absorbido.

Energía del vacio.

Lo sublime sangra sobre el lienzo.

El poeta de la nada,
materia y palabra precisa,
se encuentra en silencio
con el pintor del trágico infinito.

En el límite,
antes de morir.

(Valente/Rothko, Paris 1999)

Facing the wall,
of light.

Surrounded, absorbed.

Energy of the void.

The sublime bleeds over the canvas.

The poet of nothingness,
matter and word precise,
meets in silence
with the painter of the tragic infinite.

In the limits,
before dying.

(Valente/Rothko, Paris 1999)

Between Friedrich and Burzum: Banks Violette

2005-10-18T13:26:00.000-04:00

Continuing its dedication to the youngest artists, the Whitney Museum presents the first solo exhibition of Banks Violette (Ithaca, New York, 1973). Responding to the commission of a specific project for the museum, where his work excelled in the 2004 Biennial, Violette created Untitled, an installation composed of an oversized sculpture cast in salt recreating the ruins of a burned church along a musical composition made for the work by the Norwegian musician Snorre Rauch, placed in a black-painted room with dim light.

Untitled is the grandiose, museum-scale culmination of the usual narrative that appears in Violette´s art: an aesthetic of horror, death, fascism, Satanism, juvenile subcultures and extreme music. In this ambitious project, Violette recreates actual events that took place in the underground- churches being burnt by Black Metal musicians in Norway around 1992- in an installation with multiple visions.

The reflection on beastly acts occurring when the individual, normally an adolescent, realizes his obsessive identification with certain images and ideas of the extreme metal cult is a constant in Violette’s work. In this sense, Banks Violette´s burnt church is a triumph of the apocalyptic music subculture inside the elitist museum environment and a certain understanding between high and low.

Macabre and gloomy, but also attractive, Untitled is a minimal sculpture or a romantic ruin, as well as the famous and controversial cover of a Black Metal album. The implication of the viewer is part of the artist’s intention: if we grasp the beauty of the work, we will be participating of the violence that inspired it, part of the complicity between a dark artist, a murderer musician and a spectator that sympathizes with the devil, even momentarily and in the safe surroundings of the museum.

(Originally published in Lapiz, July 2005)

The S. Incident (and other stories of museum "security")

2005-10-14T14:32:00.000-04:00

Days after the new installation of the contemporary galleries at the Museum of Modern Art, my wife and I visited “Take Two: Worlds and Views”. Coming out of the magnificent Janet Cardiff sound piece we were shocked by a group of girls climbing up to Yinka Shonibare’s mannequins, holding them and taking photos (with flash) of each other. We run and threw them out of the platform, outraged and horrified.

Hard to believe museum-goers would wait for a guard to leave with the intention of attacking an artwork.

The Shonibare incident prompted reactions from MoMA officials (“This is getting too far”) and an inspection from the artist himself. Yet it is not the first time this happens. An Anne Truitt sculpture was damaged and the brouhaha was considerable. I was forbidden by the illiterate guards at MoMA to walk on the Carl Andre floorpiece until I achieved a compromise from Glenn Lowry, John Elderfield and company to teach the guards about Andre’s desire to be stepped on. Now I’m happy to go there and feel the lead (indeed, the reaction from MoMA officials has been always seamless and remarkable).

Two thoughts came to my mind repeatedly after the Shonibare incident my wife and I were involved in at MoMa. One is how much I miss (despite never having met any of them due to my very young age) those museum guards that, in the 1960´s, kept art safe at MoMA and other museums. Brice Marden, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Robert Ryman knew the art and cared for the art. How painful to compare them with the current type of guards: illiterate in art, lacking any interest in any artistic manifestation whatsoever, prone to leave art unattended and neglect their duties, unable to provide any directions to paintings or artists, working on it for the (scarce) money and doing it unwillingly and showing evident apathy...

This kind of worker is to be found, typically checking the time to leave, disdainfully leaning against a corner at MoMA and most museums in America and the world, unfortunately. The heads of security say they have art degrees and some are artists, but I see mostly uninterested minorities for whom “Jasper Johns” is as unknown as the sublime in Abstract Expressionist painting. Don’t even ask. It’s dispiriting.

The laziness and disrespect (outright rudeness) of the Latino guards at the excellently classy Neue Galerie enraged me and prompted me to write a complaint to the museum. A palatial ambience and a 500-dollar membership need much more than nose-picking, cell-phone-playing, loud-talking guards that don’t guard, don’t like their jobs and will make sure every visitor knows they’d rather be bouncing salsa clubs in the Bronx. Let them go!

How fondly I remember that veteran guard at the wonderful Des Moines Art Center in Iowa who, retired, worked at the museum as a hobby and loved it, knew the art and drew himself!

At the Metropolitan it is not the laziness or unprofessional conduct of the guards. It is simply the blatant lack of them. Many times I’ve seen entire galleries unattended, tourists touching, seating on sculptures, taking pictures with flash. Sometimes I have talked to guards about this alarming situation- they agree. There are not enough guards, but nothing seems to be done about it. My complaint letters have gotten no response.

Wouldn’t it better to close galleries than have them opened and exposed to vandalism? The famously (and infamously) unguarded Lehman Wing is so stripped of security you could carry the graceful Princess de Broglie painted by Ingres on your shoulders and go away.

It is indeed a miracle that nothing grave has happened yet (that I know of) but it might be just a matter of time until some freak slashes a Greco or shatters a Frank Lloyd Wright window. Then, only then will the Met place a guard in every room, not one for each twenty five like now.

New York museums seem to have a less-prepared staff than museums in the Midwest or elsewhere. I cherish conversations my wife and I had with knowledgeable guards at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Des Moines… Mega-museums seem to be attacked by a certain big-city syndrome of lame guards.

The second thought aroused by the Shonibare attack is the frightening kind of public museums face. People that will go to MoMA not to enjoy the art but to concoct a way to avoid the guard and attack a sculpture. This is a frightening thing to happen, but it is a challenge museums have to cope with: no peaceful, art-loving visitors but tourists needing to touch, teenagers needing to harm, individuals with prepared assault plans (the slashed Lichtenstein in Austria has inevitably to be thought of).

Right now, I see museum security at its minimum in terms of quantity and quality. How MoMA (and most museums) will deal with uninterested guards and poisonous visitors is something that will have to be watched in the present and future.

I Beg You, Billionaire Collector: Just Stop Giving To MoMA!

2005-10-14T11:05:00.000-04:00

Malibu-based real-estate tycoon Edward R. Broida has given 174 works to MoMa, carefully chosen by curators John Elderfield and Ann Temkin, including 36 by Guston (the museum already had 12 paintings) and dozens of works by Vija Celmins.

I don't celebrate. In fact, I think of it as a near-tragedy. One hundred and seventy four works that will not be seen again in many years. I've been thinking about it lately: giving to MoMA is not a good idea, for it means putting the art away and hidden, as much as it was in the private collection.

I cannot grasp, and would like to ask a curator, why MoMA would want fifty Philip Guston when in the whole life of the museum only, say, twenty of them will be exhibited. I cannot understand why the Modern accepts and seeks more and more donations of works, numbering hundreds of thousands, when at any given time, no more than 100 contemporary pieces are shown. Why have 100,000 if you can only show 1000? Is keeping in storage most of the collection defendable for a museum that serves the public? We want to see more.

The Dannheisser collection, the recent gift of the Robert Gober majestic church-like installation presented at Matthew Marks this very same year, now the Broida collection. Will we enjoy these works ever? Whenever a significative gift is announced, the museum mounts an exhibition to show the works. Then, the vault. Darkness.

The Guggenheim Museum's collection is 98% in storage. The Whitney was given dozens of outstanding modern art masterpieces (Pollock, Barnet Newman, Jasper Johns and the likes) in 2002 by a group of collectors and philanthropists headed by Leonard Lauder. They were shown in a temporary exhibition to celebrate one of the most important gifts ever assembled for and by a museum. Afterwards, will we ever see them again? The Whitney Museum does not even have permanent galleries for its Post-1945 collection (blame it in the trustees, who endowed permanent space for the Modern, but not the Post-War). Why gather twenty major Jasper Johns, then? For the enjoyment of conservators and archivists?

I have always favored giving to lesser-known museums. If St Louis or Iowa City lack a Koons, why not give your Pink Panther to them, instead of bequeathing it to MoMA or the Guggenheim and never see it again? Why fifty in one place and one or none in other?

The riches of this country are truly impressive, but -just as its wealth and democracy- not well spared.

In this sense, the planned gift and dispersion of the Samuel Kress collection of Old Masters stands for me as the ideal type of philanthropic giving with practical means.

Kress scattered his paintings all over America, wherever a small regional museum needed a Tiepolo or a Titian, but also giving -the greatest paintings- to the powerhouses (Metropolitan, National Gallery). It was a gift to the nation, global and aiming to have a lasting, positive impact. He greatly succeeded.

Private collectors may not have the broad intention of benefiting the whole nation Samuel Kress had and may be attached to a specific museum and place regardless of the existing collections and conditions, but my thought lately is some gifts actually harm the museum affected by overloading.

If we cannot stop collectors from giving to MoMA instead to the Des Moines Art Center, at least MoMA could implement a plan to show its treasures in the style of "the dispersed Prado". The Museo del Prado in Madrid has a collection of some 20,000 works, of which only 1,500 are in exhibition in the galleries and around 10,000 are in storage. "The dispersed Prado" has long scattered lesser-value paintings and other artworks around Spain (numbering more than 4,500), hanging in public institutions, museums, schools, offices and even embassies abroad. The visibility of the collection is thus assured (although the conditions of it are said to need improvements).

MoMa could and should put the Robert Gober church installation on permanent view at its space in Queens (the former MoMA QNS) or any warehouse/exhibition space it owns. Visible storages following the succesful installations of the Luce Study Center of American Art at the Metropolitan and Brooklyn museums would be a seemingly reasonable solution for accepting the continous stream of works donated to MoMA and assuring its public exhibition.

And above all, billionaire collector: Please think of Des Moines when generously giving away your art. Midtown Manhattan is just too damn crowded with everything. Seeing a dozen Pollocks in an ATM-size of a room as to create a fuzzy effect of blurry nothingness or a Clyfford Still devouring a Rothko, fighting for space while the Barnett Newman bangs its edges struggling to breathe, all in a narrow space severely mobbed by the dangerous tourist crowds makes me sad and sick.

Dada Junk Verse Automatic Poetry Machine-Generated

2005-10-12T02:35:00.000-04:00

eliot dreg pumpkin predictor penultimate apollonian tatty bluish saviour cantonfold mullen argus vibrant flex yokuts buzzard anus dispersionbarbell extremis guffaw less totemic summertime blest joy yoke jilt bereaverembrandt antler cup barefoot trade precursor bloop cayugaczarina bolt confide depict fluorescein mine caliper catchyclutch enthusiast lifeboat cosponsor adhesive conjecture scandinavia shunt

(from an inspiring spam e-mail)

Spain is indeed different

2005-10-06T13:27:00.000-04:00

Going through news clips from the culture sections of Spanish newspapers I am reminded yet again of the ever-disastrous state of the arts in my ex-country. Retardation, lack of progressive thinking and perennial politic interference trumps any efford or possibility of getting Spain in the avant-garde of arts. Six examples from the news follow.

1.- Madrid tries to get a symbol of modernity, a landmark for the new millenium and world-class skyscrapers designed by international stars, but reportedly fails miserably: “the new four towers will not be symbols, neither a reference in the city; they will not be part of the cultural debate, neither of the architectural dialogue. It’s as simple and sad as this. They will be tall towers, tall and four”, writes architecture critic Anton Garcia-Abril comparing Madrid’s construction effort with the successful “Torre Agbar” by Jean Nouvel, a +130 million euro initiative with positive real estate, symbolic, urban, cultural, economic and politic repercussions, among others. The result of, in his words, Barcelona’s “daring urban policy and conscience of city”.

2.- Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia (the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) goes from 51,297 square meters (552,156 square feet) to 84,048 square meters (904,685 square feet)- but the galleries grow a ridiculous 20 square meters (215 square feet), the core of the costly and lengthy expansion going to “stairs, corridors and halls” (no less than 12,831 square meters or 138,111 square feet). One of the biggest museums in the world now, but apparently made of "stairs, corridors and halls", a constructed metaphor of Spain's twisted system of burocracy and government.

Similar to the Herzog & De Meuron celebrated expansion of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, in which the old building retains the galleries and the new futuristic building houses the restaurant, shop, education and other public services, but apparently poorly conceived, the Reina Sofia Museum is now (as always) in the eye of the storm after the new director presented a highly polemic new plan for the collections, dubbed as “conservative” by the most benign critic. The galleries devoted to temporary exhibitions will in fact be reduced in the new museum from the current five to three, all anew and shrunk in space, looking more like a small commercial art gallery than the cathedral-style museum of contemporary art now en vogue in America. These galleries will be most likely unable to present anything but small paintings of the historic avant-gardes.

The museum is paid for by, like most museums in Spain, the Central Government. Its direction and managers change every time the government changes in an election. The Jean Nouvel-designed expansion officially inaugurated now opened partially a year ago for a Roy Lichtenstein retrospective and then closed for construction. Now opens for giving some services (restaurant, shop) but it will not be fully operative –and the new display of the collection presented- in a number of years.

3.- Similarly, Valencia’s new Palau de les Arts (Opera House, kind of a Lincoln Center), designed by New York-based superstar and Valencia native Santiago Calatrava is having official (political) openings these days, with a musical program budgeted at 3.5 million euros. Politics and the architect will get together and smile, Lorin Maazel and Zubin Metha will conduct their orchestras during October and 3500 musicians of municipal music bands will play (this being a very Spanish tradition of “the bigger and the more people, the better looks like we're doing something”). Then, the Opera House will close and won’t be ready until the 2006-2007 opera season.

4.- The Spanish Art Auction Christies’ conducts in Madrid in the fall offers this year a rare Antonio Lopez canvas as highlight of the sale. The auction writer of a Spanish newspaper warns that the estimate of 400,000-600,000 euros is “a big amount affordable only by a very few in our country”.

5.- "Madrid finds her own SoHo" is the title of a long, celebratory article published in "El Pais", Spain's most important newspaper. "We're not going to be the SoHo of Madrid. We already are", says Oliva Arauna, one of the commanding dealers of the Madrid gallery scene.

Ten years after the agony and painful death of New York's SoHo as a gallery district and its conversion in an expensive shopping mall for European fashion victims, Madrid is proud to have her "own SoHo". What SoHo? Not a single mention of Chelsea in that article.

6.- Eugenio Ampudia is one of many contemporary Spanish artists whose work will not be supported or collected by the Reina Sofia and its new plan, for being either "too young" (he and many of his peers are in the 40's, just like, say, Maurizio Cattelan) or "not established" enough; rejected by a museum that will end being nothing but a big coffin for "Guernica" and the foreign tourists that flock to see the Picasso masterpiece. Reflecting on the Reina Sofia expansion and the current situation of the arts in Spain, Ampudia says:

"Nowadays, saying abroad you're a Spaniard doesn't help at all. It's a thousand times better to be a Brazilian".

Somebody said once, "When in New York is 3 am, in Europe is 1985". And indeed it is not fair to compare this mighty city with anything else in the world. But I have to wonder whether Madrid can be compared to even Kansas City or Minneapolis. Des Moines maybe? Friends in Madrid assure me the city is changing and is not the provincial, lacking place I used to live in and despise. But the news I periodically get from Madrid reassert my vision of that place as an irreparable cave of backwardness where the few things that ever get done are slow, wrong or nixed by politics.

Visions of the "American Dream"

2005-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

"I came to America from Pakistan in search of a better life. I spend 10 hours a day in a small room with a big hot oven making slices of 99-cent cheap pizza. I want to buy a deli with some friends and be succesful. I believe in the American dream."

"Yo vine a America. Soy ilegal, no tengo papeles. Trabajo 11 horas al dia por menos del salario minimo pero esta bien, no mas, pues gano siete veces mas que en Puebla y mantengo a una familia de quince."

(Mexican immigrant, doesn’t speak English, doesn’t know about the American dream, will return to Mexico as soon as possible, or never)

"I was born in the ghetto. I got out of drugs and trouble and found a job as a doorman in the rich neighborhood next door. They treat me like shit. There's no American dream for black folks."

"I came to America from France. I'm staying a couple of years working here on a company's assignment but look forward to go back to my country. This is nice, but just not for me. I like France and don't really understand America."

"I am from Japan but live in New York. I don't know about America, never been there, but I love the Western style and the luxury I find in Madison Avenue. Also, there are many Japanese girls to chat with and go shopping. I like it here in Manhattan."

"I came to America from India escaping poverty. I got an education, a life. Now I am the CEO of one of the biggest companies in America. I am the American dream."

"I've lived in Kansas my whole life. I didn't go to college 'cause I got married and had three kids. My husband drives a truck coast-to-coast and I stay home. He treats me nice, never beats me. We bought a big house in a nice suburb, we'll own it in the year 2035, hopefully. We're saving for private school and college tuition and recently got a loan for buying an SUV. We've never been out of the state but would like to go to Disney World. We are the American dream."

America.

“words lost in the cacophonous clamor arising from New York City streets”: a Robert Smithson symposium

2005-09-26T18:09:00.000-04:00

The much-awaited Robert Smithson symposium hosted by the Whitney Museum at Hunter College last Saturday September 24 (in conjunction with the Smithson retrospective and the “Floating Island” event) was a huge disappointment and a painful bore, but it offered some insights and perceptions of merit.

It was rewarding to see Nancy Holt, mythic figure and important artist for me. Her brief comments on her and Robert Smithson’s experience building "Spiral Jetty" were remarkable and enjoyable- no scholar with brainy theories can match the appeal of an artist talking about how he or she created a piece. Nancy Holt’s presence and words carry and transmit that closeness -artistic and personal- she had and shared with Robert Smithson. Being there listening to her talking about “Bob” and his death, and how she and Richard Serra and Tony Shafrazi built “Amarillo Ramp” I could almost feel the pain of Smithson’s tragedy and sense his absence.

But at the same time, I expected more from her than just showing slides of Smithson’s work and saying the name and location. Her speech seemed to be slow and laborious to deliver, improper of an eloquent artist author of the classic “Sun Tunnels” and other astronomy- and geology-related complex installations, accompanied by essays in some cases. Perhaps she’s just public-shy?

She was nevertheless natural and funny- it was intimate and emotional to listen to her story of “Bob and Nancy looking in The New York Times for buying an island with purposes of creating 0 on it”. Smithson was fascinated with islands and water (his “Floating Island” is a developed example of this). Nancy Holt bought an island of off the Maine coast –she still owns it-, but when they saw their property it was too beautiful for her husband, and he couldn’t create on it. Smithson needed a barren, uninteresting space.

Nancy Holt did present a clear idea on Robert Smithson’s long-discussed earthworks’ conservation. Rebuild or let nature act? Keep or let it go? I cannot conceive any doubts about the issue, for she doubtlessly expressed her vision, that of Smithson himself: PRESERVE.

She proudly showed an extended series of the “Spiral Hill” and “Broken Circle” earthworks in Emmen, The Netherlands (1971), explaining how the community cares for them, the owner of the mine where they were built loves them and the two works have been repeatedly reinforced and preserved in order to keep them visible, against water damage.

A slideshow of “Amarillo Ramp” showed its dramatic change, from a solid tail of earth to a minimally-arising line of overgrown soil. Nancy Holt’s words on how Stanley Marsh (the owner of the ranch where the earthwork was built, not mentioned by her) drained the entire Tecovas Lake (and it’s been dry ever since) to allow Holt, Serra and Shafrazi building the piece were proof of the dedication of Marsh and other business people to help create non-orthodox art by outsiders like Smithson and Michael Heizer.

But -above all- the slides helped Nancy Holt point the way “Amarillo Ramp” has being cared for, controlling the growing weeds and tiding the site. She also defended the sometimes-discussed fact of being the earthwork in Amarillo an idea of Smithson but an actual construction of her wife and friends after his untimely death. Nancy Holt said, reasonably, that it is as much a creation of Robert Smithson as any other piece, for he had fully developed the project and “only” the making it real was lacking. If we consider “Floating Island” a Smithson artwork, or all those sand-stone-and-mirror sculptures recreated in museums and galleries after his death, there is no reason for denying the originality and fully attribution of “Amarillo Ramp” to Robert Smithson himself.

Furthermore, and despite her not having mentioned the “Spiral Jetty” preservation/rebuilding delicate issue, she closed her intervention by reading “morceaux choisis d’apres” (chosen fragments from) the Moira Roth-Robert Smithson conversation published on the recent “Robert Smithson” retrospective catalogue. And what she read was and is meaningful and decisive, although it did seem to impact nobody:

“I was never interested in works without substantial permanence, you might say. I wanted works that would have a longer duration”.

“Robert Morris attempted to build his Observatory, which has since disintegrated. But the Broken Circle and Spiral Hill are still there in their new condition... The ground cover is now growing on the hill, and Broken Circle has been reinforced.”

(Asked about preservation), “What do you mean? Just let it…”. “No, I’m not interested in that. The effects of erosion I don’t find especially edifying”.

“So I’m interested in something substantial enough... something that can be permeated with change and different conditions”.

Solid and substantial, meant to last long although naturally affected by changes. Robert Smithson wanted his works to endure.

Shouldn’t these paragraphs suffice to demonstrate Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt’s advocacy for the preservation of his earthworks? Whereas “Broken Circle-Spiral Hill” and “Amarillo Ramp” have been protected to guaranty conservation arising no protests, why is “Spiral Jetty” such an issue?

***

The restoration-reinforcement of Robert Smithson’s earthworks was virtually the only point of interest derived from the symposium (I admit we left after the first session, fretting and cussing). What was supposed to be a discussion between scholars and Nancy Holt turned to be a “let me read my prepared essay with no spontaneity and cause mental weariness to you all”. “Public” was not the word for this event, since the authors did nothing else than clumsily reciting their papers and leave. “No time for questions, sorry”. For the people this was not, just a self-celebration of braininess.

Ann Reynolds showed once again her well-deserved position as “most deadly tedious scholar in America” offering an opaque discourse on I-don’t-have-a-clue-something about “The dematerialization of the artwork” with no slides and without moving from her seat- straight, no water. Like her Robert Smithson book, 500 pages of dry indecipherable theory. And that’s it- I’m Ann Reynolds, happy to meet myself!

She did mention, though, the “disappointment” one feels (I felt) upon arriving to the Jetty, promptly substituted by feelings of unfamiliarity with the awkward environments and everything it entails. Conversely, it was proof of how locked upon herself Ann Reynolds may live that she didn’t know “Spiral Jetty” has been washed out of his salt crust, showing now the original black tone of the basalt rocks. This is a notice that popped out in the national media last May, even in the front page of Yahoo News!.

The evolution of the “Jetty”, its constant changes and colors was Hikmet Loe’s contribution to the general dullness of the symposium. Living in Salt Lake City and studying the “Jetty” continuously she knows better than anybody else about how the work looks day after day, first-hand. But she preferred to throw upon us yet another mortally dull read paper, no imagination left.

I did agree with her, though, and shared the feeling of how “"Spiral Jetty" is shaped by your experience”. We could say there are as many Spiral Jettys as visitors to it, for our being there and our perception of the piece are an integral part of the work, probably much more than the famous video some say is the work. The physicality of the experience in Great Salt Lake, the weird lunar landscape, the journey to Rozel Point- they’re all part of the work. The video is just a compressed taped statement of all that, shown in a gallery.

Reflecting on this, Robert Smithson said in his 1973 interview with Moira Roth:

“That’s a work (Spiral Jetty) that’s very much involved with the processes of nature insofar as it goes through all different kinds of climates, dates and seasonal states. It’s involved with a kind of ongoing process. It’s very much in the actual landscape”.

A video shot in a specific time and situation will never reflect the constant changes “Spiral Jetty” has gone through after 1970. Thus, the movie is only a reliquary of a dated time and place. Watching the reel will never ever substitute or be equaled to witnessing and living the "Jetty" in the landscape. Those taped images shown in museums around the world may only be an aesthetically rich but frustratingly incomplete, aseptic substitute; a physically dead remedy for those who will never experience the apocalyptic visions of Great Salt Lake. A reproduction of an original very much fitting with its/our times, where time and landscape cannot be transmitted.

As for the “Jetty” being shaped by our own experience, Robert Smithson himself again in the 1973 interview with Moira Roth acknowledged his considering the different views of the piece:

“How the public views the land has to be considered too. In other words, this isn’t a private, cult thing. When you get out to a place like Utah you’re not dealing with rarefied mentalities. One has to consider the ordinary view of the landscape as well as the more cultivated”.

For “Spiral Jetty” is famous in part due to this dichotomy of receptions: scholars and rednecks alike flock to the Great Salt Lake to experience what is probably the most famous (or widest-reaching) artwork of the Twentieth Century. Some know (or think they know) everything about its creation and meaning, others –locals- have just read about in their town press and are curious. Some will walk down and feel the “Jetty”, some will stay on the SUV and drink a beer. Smithson thought about all of them. He created a democratic artwork linked to his interest with Frederick Law Olmsted and Central Park as “a landscape for all”. Unlike many of his peer artists and critics of the Sixties and Seventies, he was not interested in Communism, as he remarked in the aforementioned 1973 interview with Moira Roth.

Robert Smithson was intellectually thick and opaque, probably boring, but at least his “heap of language” was meant to be “matter and not ideas”, “printed matter” with “a kind of physical presence”. A stack of words forming an earthwork, perhaps with no meaning. This separates and differentiates his dullness from that of Ann Reynolds and other famously irksome Smithson scholars who actually care and give grand meaning to their unattainably dreadful heaps of impossible language (would this mean that Smithson didn’t take himself serious? Hard to believe).

***

Another one of Hikmet Loe’s thoughts that caught my attention was her saying “"Spiral Jetty" offers an experience of the land and of ourselves”. Being in an isolated corner of the Great Salt Lake surrounded by desert and mountains will, as do the other Earthworks in Nevada and Utah and any desert landscape of the American West, make us aware of ourselves and our being in the place, in the Nature. We become self-conscious of our being human in an expansive, seemingly infinite environment that overwhelms our senses.

A visit to “Spiral Jetty” is a visit to the landscape of the American West, and ultimately a visit to our inner selves.

***

The Robert Smithson Symposium in New York City, September 24 2005 was a tremendously arid heap of language. Bob would have liked it that way.

"A Texas Cockroach the size of a Chihuahua": The Dark Side of "Art" Dealing

2005-09-21T23:44:00.000-04:00

There is in America a very special kind of art gallery. A gallery that Donald Trump would like, appealing to the tasteless billionaire, the nouveau riche, the wannabe suburban family, New Jersey Mafia types and illiterati in general. Those who are called by gold-and-glitter and a desire (necessity) to impress, pretend and show off.

You don’t like art but need “something pretty” for that wall. You’re all for baroque designs and kitsch stuff, and you take it serious (no Jeff Koons here). Your name is carved, Rococo font, in your McMansion’s monumental gate. You wear gold chains and jogging suits when using your gold-leaf bathroom.

If any, the art you like is the Impressionists, of course! Specially those fluffy, fatty adorable Renoir women in screamingly garish colors. But mostly landscapes, depicting things you can recognize, some photorealism; and Norman Rockwell.

You’re all this and proudly so.

Come on then, fellow American, please! “Suburban Fine Art, Inc.” is a gallery exclusively tailored for you, and there’s always one around, right where you need it, whether you live in the capital of tackiness, Las Vegas, or in seemingly brassy suburban paradises like Scottsdale of Metro Detroit. In your suburb, in the mall, in that part of the big city locals avoid and tourists flock to (think of SoHo in New York). They will decorate your house, your office, your yacht and your casino, too- interior designs included.

“Motel art”, we call it.

They have three certain exhibitions a year: “Picasso”, “Chagall”, “Rembrandt”. Dalí, Miró and Calder are other common fixtures (not a coincidence that all those are the most faked and forged artists). If you don’t like the Picassos, they’ll have colorful prints for you, or posters, Sports memorabilia, The Sopranos prints. Some pretty preppy sculptures for your lawn will be available, gnomes and eagles, all-American boys fishing, some huuuge lions casted in bronze (or plastic, or something). They will wonderfully complement your purchase of that Russian Contemporary Impressionistic Master, chosen from a list comprising Max, Tarkay, LeKinff, Krasnyansky, Fanch, Medvedev, Kipniss and other renowned artists.

They will even frame your acquisition and put a ribbon on it. Fine!

The owners will be attentive and solicitous- they know how you are and what you want. After all, they’re in it for the money! And you’ll be able to share insights on those not-so-legal businesses or downright fraudulent stuff you specialize in. Not in vain “fraud and forge” is what arts people think of these very special gallery runners, and googling their names will yield as much “rip off” and "lawsuits" entries as gallery addresses.

***

One of the brassiest and most dishonest of these suspicious shops, Rima Fine Art in Scottsdale, Arizona, is being exposed now. Their agreement with a California-based great-grandson of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (master of the fluffy kitschy women) to mass-produce original copies of the Impressionist artist sculptures is being denounced in court by the heirs of Richard Guino. Guino was Renoir’s assistant in the late years of the painter’s life, when crippled and disabled, he was barely able to hold the brushes, let alone cast a sculpture. Guino must be considered the actual maker of famous sculptures like “Venus Victrix”, modeled after Renoir’s sketches and ideas.

Renoir’s great-grandson sold the use of his family name to “House of Renoir”, an enterprise set up by the owners of Rima Fine Art to produce “limited” editions (just 400,211 of them) of “Venus Victrix” and other sculptures by Renoir and Guino. The business plan, recently revealed by The Art Newspaper, called for appealing to “the most Neanderthal of art fans” by including “kitchen, bath, bar, furniture, patio & garden, office, clothing, cosmetics, food, jewelry, sports and pet categories” to be sold at Costco and other nation-scale retailers.

But Renoir’s descendant appears not to have legal rights over Renoir and Guino sculptures, Richard Guino’s family claims. A lawyer to Renoir and Guino heirs was cited in the same The Art Newspaper article calling the “House of Renoir” business “the largest fraud scheme in the history of the art world”.

The website of “House of Renoir” has been put down recently, “for construction”.

One of the veterans of these Suburban Mafia Galleries, Park West Galleries in Southfield, Michigan, housed in a mammoth building resembling a funeral home, conducts auctions at sea during cruises, probably attempting to avoid international laws. The very successful (and disreputable) 25-years-old dealing business of Albert Scaglione, earring-clad preposterous gallery owner with half-thug half-aged Italian model looks, “sold 200,000 pieces of art on more than a half-dozen cruise lines last year” (2000). Quantity, obvious is, means much more than quality for the Neanderthal (I mean, “unsophisticated”) art fan and the dishonest dealer. "Park West Gallery is the largest seller of "fine" (emphasis added) art in the world", they say, and I guess they spend as much time defending themselves from constant accusations of rip-off, forgery and illicit business as shipping “fine” art from their Florida warehouse or their funeral headquarters in Michigan.

***

The sad, outrageous story of abuse and dishonesty these “Suburban Fine Art, Inc.” types of “art” galleries are leaving behind are proof of how the lack of education but hunger for “art” of many Joe and Jane from Arkansas or Rocco and Carmela from New Jersey is voraciously profited by non-art individuals with a keen eye on easy money and no ethical principles. Perhaps a basic training on art and a better education would end not only this corrupted system of cheap shops pretending to be fine galleries, but also the disdain for the most cutting-edge art.

Talking rich rednecks into buying a Maurizio Cattelan instead of a fake Dalí print might be the hardest mission ever undertaken in the history of mankind.

What Will Be Left of New York After the Fashionistas?

2005-09-18T13:22:00.000-04:00

There was a time in New York when and where streets were probably as dirty as they are now, but the homelessness, poverty, urban decay and crime were far greater than they will ever be. The city’s fiscal crisis and loss of federal monies, the general distrust of a suburban nation towards the cities and a worlwide recession, all seemed to merge, shaping a broken city that bordered ruin and self-destruction, yet (most likely for this reason) was more alive and exciting than ever (survivors say).

Reading about Gordon Matta-Clark’s life and projects in Seventies Manhattan, when and where everything seemed possible among the dilapidation and lack of money but abundance of creativity and neighborhood/artist activity.

Attending the launch of Robert Smithson’s 1970’s project “Floating Island” and hearing Nancy Holt talk about their loft on Greenwich Street overlooking the Hudson. Times gone where and when art was art, not money and pose; living was cheap and what mattered was art and ideas, not looks, social connections and fake attitude dressed in Prada.

SoHo was an abandoned quarter where a young starving artist could virtually occupy a story on a warehouse and go unnoticed, able nevertheless to create and show art. Chelsea, the West Village and the Meatpacking District, or NoHo, Nolita and all the newly-invented, ultra-chic and hyper-expensive quarters of Manhattan had an authentic grittiness that would put Chelsea’s current version of urban shabbiness (that mixture of garages and art galleries) to shame.

All those places are now taken over by soulless hipsters, Marc Jacobs stores, boutique hotels, miniature dogs, models and $2000 bags. Rampant crime, abandonment and prostitution are substituted by fashion victims, overdevelopment and more whores, this time clean-looking.

Conceptual art and artists’ communities have yielded its way to trillion-dollar Warhols and bubbling young artists anxious to show their crafty creations in a mainstream gallery that will produce cash and fame, fast.

SoHo has gone from industrial wasteland to mallified fashion clown paradise overflowed with posh European tourists.

That art has lost its soul and authenticity is painfully obvious. The loss of New York City’s soul and heart, truthfulness and rough rawness in favor of the false posies of the fashionistas is what hurts the most.

A city of contradictions and contrasts, New York is capable of looking rundown and filthy and ultra-manicured and plastic at the same time. Lately, since the new millennium “New York Renaissance” (a real, spectacular one) got started, New York is veering towards its “too rich” side. Without being nostalgic for the crime and death days, I do feel the danger of Manhattan being slowly transformed into a big island department store that only the absurdly affluent can afford.

That our city might lose its traditional crude vibe in favor of this homogenization of the commercial banality (they way it already feels in many/most neighborhoods) is a worrisome concern.

There seems to be no happy medium for New York. It’s either the abysmal desolation of SoHo in the 70’s or the overdeveloped SoHo of the 90’s and the new century.

Will New York be able to maintain her traditional, fragile but steady equilibrium between rags and riches?

America (again)

2005-09-13T21:07:00.000-04:00

Months ago there was an article on the (very young, corrupted) mayor of Detroit in Yahoo News.

I went to the Message Board, and of course everybody was screaming "n***ers destroy cities", "we're safe in the suburbs", etc.

So I tried to explain how the demise of Detroit and the creation of ghettos is pretty much a white thing, but also a very complicated chain of events along 20th century. They would say, "blacks rioted and white left". And I say, "blacks rioted because they were oppressed and segregated".

One from Michigan said "blacks destroyed the automobile cities of Michigan". And I say, "no, the automobile industry crisis since the 1950's killed the cities".

And then they kept on saying, "you black and your race", "you and your brothers", "stop blaming slavery".

So I had to explain a million times "I'm as pale white as the snow in the woods of Northern Minnesota".

And then they would say, "you're a liberal!", "why do you care for them".

So I left. Detroit's still in ruins.

(And Baltimore, Gary, Newark, Camden, Flint, Cleveland, Youngstown. New Orleans...)

America.

"Aprendí... / "I learnt..."

2005-09-04T23:39:00.000-04:00

Aprendí
a escuchar y no decir,

pero tu voz me llegaba
fragmentada y rota;

quizá nunca hecha.

Aquel atardecer grisáceo trajo
una noche oscura y abatida
en la que no supimos qué decir.

Mi llanto sordo se reflejaba
en tu rostro,

vivo espejo de la nada.

I learnt
to listen and not saying,

but your voice reached me
fragmented, torn;

Perhaps never built.

That greyish dusk brought
a dark, disheartened night
in which we did not know what to say.

My unvoiced crying was reflected
in your face,

acute mirror of nothingness.

Derrida in the Ghetto (via Eisenman and the NYFD)

2005-08-26T14:18:00.000-04:00

Peter Eisenman (Newark, NJ, 1932) is one of the grandest theoreticians in the field of architecture that America and the world have spawned in the second half of the late twentieth century. As a thinker, educator, professor, writer and polemicist, Eisenman barely has any rival.

His scarce built work is a different story of appreciation, impact and result.

Part of a certain generation of post-war, "post-modern" architects that drew heavily and wildly in theory, imagination and drawing but rarely actually built, the work of Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid was synonym with challenge and daring in books, admired all as projectists, but criticized whenever an uncommon building of them got built and opened. Theirs was an architecture that did not work, bound to fail for it belonged to the intellect and the written paper, not the constructed matter for the use of the people.

That was and is the thought about and reception of the so-called "Deconstructivists", brilliant thinkers whose wild, inventive architecture looks fantastic and attractive in abstract renderings, but does not always function as a building to be used for the daily routine of living. These "post-modern" "deconstructivists" know and reflect in their plans everything from the writings of Derrida and French Post-structuralism to Greek Philosophy through Anthropology and Cultural Studies, but alas not always know how to put up a bathroom that flushes without making a mess.

Sometimes they might even make it flood on purpose, if they know how to run it, for their position as outsiders is said to be an attack and rejection of society and the needs of mankind (Eisenman is the most famous case of this "aggression to the client", in his highly unlivable houses of the 70's where husband and wife would not be "allowed" to sleep together for a cut separated their beds- and other acts of apparent senseless behavior).

Impressive writings and sketches, overwhelming minds; unbuildable, aggressive designs thought to pester the people. Not your Skidmore, Owings & Merrill type of architect.

Some of the "wild beasts" of post-war (which war? all wars) architecture have, since the 90's, slowly but unstoppably been "absorbed" by the mainstream- Gehry, Libeskind, Koolhas and Hadid are now seeing their fantasies erected in the surface of our cities, aided by computer programs and image generators. Still criticized, their "rebel spirit", if any, has been curbed. They now serve the public (mainly by means of museums) and not their own egos, minds or coffe-table books.

Creativity and functionality, formal exercise and social responsability- the not-long-ago-thought-impossible union of passion and control seem to be working today.

Eisenman and Tschumi remain largely unbuilt, though. And will most likely. Eisenman's handful of built structures in the United States have been eagerly anticipated and brutally criticized, which he probably enjoys. That his world famous Wexner Center for the Arts has required millions of dollars in renovations and adaption to transform it into a "usable" arts center only years after being unveiled should make nobody happy.

I cannot but think in the genial Louis I. Kahn, brilliant architect, thinker, innovator and constructor of livable buildings. His few museums, libraries, universities, laboratories and governmental headquarters achieve the rare combination of functionality, daring, beauty and uniqueness, all without preposterousness, with the calm and monumentality of the ancient monuments.

An arts center that disorients people and allows direct sunlight on the artwork, as the Wexner is reported to suffer from is something I, as an art historian and museum organizer, have to decry. Functionality does not mean boredom SOM-style, it can be combined with inventiveness and a personal touch, as Gehry's Bilbao or Calatrava's Milwaukee have succesfully demonstrated.

Does Eisenman build against the people? Or does he not know how to build correctly, period? That the magazine he founded along the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies was called "Oppositions" should not be a mere coincidence. After all, this is the architect that has been said to laugh at his making people vomit after experiencing the disorientation of his buildings.

He does share a similarity with a master of architecture that would have hated him (or not): Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps the greatest American architect ever, was a great designer and prolific builder of magnificent structures. But, as Eisenman, his vision did not include practicality of construction and habitability. Only decades in existence, Wright-designed house owners, museum directors, church principals and university officials face costly reparations, renovations, leeks, cracking paint, falling bricks, unstable grounds... He knew what he wanted to build, but perhaps he did not totally command how to live in his idea, with normal stairs, bedrooms, bathrooms? Why is that Frank Lloyd Wright-designed homes look so cozy and intimate yet so uncomfortable and claustrophobic, even old?

Eisenman seems to be more engaged to the common man and woman lately, designing buildings that "work" and can be used without suffering and expanding his practice to Europe, where he built the recently unveiled "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" in Berlin, in colaboration with Richard Serra and tons of his ever-accompanying controversy; and the yet-to-be-opened "Cidade da Cultura" ("City of Culture") of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of the region where I was born. Projects for a Stadium in Arizona and a Train Station in Naples, Italy indicate that this Eisenman is far, at least in the intention of reaching the masses, from the personal madness of his 70's houses.

But my digression on Eisenman here refers to what is still his only building in New York City, the little-known Firehouse for Engine Company 233, Ladder Company 176 at 20 Rockaway Avenue, Bushwick, Brooklyn (1983-85).

If, as it has been said, Eisenman considers "the physical and cultural archaeologies of sites, not just the buildings's contexts and programs", then the Bushwick Firehouse is built both as a defense from the surrounding ghetto and a laugh at it, with its capricious forms, playful lines and steel columns in a neighborhood of poverty and decaying buildings.

Deconstructivism and post-modernism is present in the Firehouse, but (or so) it looks like a bad, annoying joke, very Eisenman: in one of the most severely depressed slums of New York City, where people are hardly literate, schools fail and drugs make a living for families of ten, lies a firehouse reflecting the writings of Derrida and Nietzsche.

Architecture for the people this is not.

That the City of New York commissioned Eisenman to build the Bushwick Firehouse is admirable, for it goes beyond the corporate-style, indistinguishable architecture of SOM. But I seriously wonder whether the adventurous forms of Peter Eisenman fit in the ghetto, although the fragmentated, broken shape of the Firehouse does imply a communion with or at least an understanding, perhaps indirect and/or involuntary, of the destabilized, disfunctional environment of the authority-created American ghetto.

I recently paid a visit to the building, dragging along a friend after being advised not to go there by myself. Bushwick at the border with East New York is indeed the worst ghetto I've ever seen, and I have ventured into a couple of these all-American creations. Outside, the Firehouse hardly resembles the striking building seen in the rare photos available. Its bold colors are gone; the distinctive, clearly discernible spaces of yore are tough to see due to the dirtiness and continous use, the Firehouse now looking like a bulky mass instead of the "deconstructed", separated spaces once it reflected.

We were lucky enough to get a tour of the inside, gaining then not only access to an important example of contemporary architecture, but to the life inside of a New York City firehouse as well. Nothing indoors could tell we are in an Eisenman-designed space. The rooms and spaces are taken by the firefighters, their duties and lives.

It is up on the roof where the "annoying" Eisenman design makes itself visible. From the street, you can see steel arches framing nothing. Once we're up, the spaces where those arches lie appear inacessible except when sneaking through short windows. Thus, the four corners of the roof of the firehouse, the whole upper space in fact, is unused and unusable.

Placed by the Municipal Art Society of New York City in the "30 Under 30" group of recent architectural landmarks to preserve in the near future, the Eisenman Firehouse has been touted as "a wildly inventive arrangement of interlocking cubes". Inventiveness certainly there is here, but hardly any interlocking, since the Firehouse is a maze of non-connected spaces and unutilized areas.

Upon arriving to the place, we had a brief conversation with two firefighters:

We: "We would like to visit the building, sir, it is a landmark of contemporary architecture and the only building of the architect in New York"

Firefighter 1: "A landmark!? This!? Look at the wasted space there (pointing at the fragmentated spaces in the roof), is this a landmark!?)

Me: "But that's what Eisenman's architecture is about, sir, pissing people off!"

Firefighter 2: "Yeah, but you know that in architecture form should follow function!"

This is an architecture-savvy man, but above all a firefighter that wants a building for doing his work properly. Can we play deconstruction with fire and people's lives?

Up in the roof, a different firefighter that guided our visit told us the building Peter Eisenman concocted for Engine Company 233, Ladder Company 176 works well as a Firehouse.

Indeed, form should follow function, but with a touch of decoration (L. Sullivan),
brains (Kahn) and wildness (Gehry).

Even Peter "Against the World/In my World" Eisenman designs for the people sometimes (and a firefigther in Bushwick cannot be wrong).

"Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling."

(Louis H. Sullivan, 1896)

In Apocalyptic Detroit, Ruins and Segregation (Fragments of America)

2005-08-09T01:53:00.000-04:00

Detroit, Michigan.

Few cities have left a stronger impression on my mind and soul. Traversing 8 Mile Road, the physical and psychological divide of eternally-in-crisis Detroit and its ever-thriving suburbs, listening to the haunting music of Jocelyn Pook accounts as the most brutal, direct immersion into the realities of America: those of, basically, rampant social and racial inequality as makers of all injustice.

8 Mile Road should be designed an All-American Road. The dark path to Hell, America, deserves no less than Route 66 to epitomize our country. Whereas 66 symbolizes freedom, openness and adventure, 8 Mile is hopelessness stuck in a ruined stretch of forgotten urban land.

Why should we close the eyes of the nation to how “the other half” endures the physical and metaphoric roads of America?

A Harley Davidson crossing Arizona through an infinite highway is surely more appealing than a burned car in an abandoned auto parts store in 8 Mile, but this embodies America as much as the desert road.

Detroit.

They say it’s a city of neighborhoods, but you could say it’s a sprawling jail divided in non-communicative cells. While Metro Detroit, the suburbs, thrive and soar, the City of Detroit agonizes in a never-ending Golgotha since the 1967 riot that transformed a severely segregated metropolis into an all-black ghost town filled with ruins, unemployment and high crime, affected by the fastest and most implacable white flight America has ever seen. Race Riot. What a sad, depressing event to have as defining moment for a centuries-old town like Detroit.

I knew about the opulence of the Grosse Pointes and the poverty of Detroit, separated only by a street, but I did not expect a mile-high fence to physically separate the City of Grosse Park from the City of Detroit on Alter Road. On one side, well-kept suburban residences, tidy lawns- the American dream. On the other side, blight and bleakness, decrepit buildings, ruins- the American nightmare.

This is indeed America and we’ve seen it before, all the time, everyday. Segregation is our daily bread, whether in all-white suburbs or inner-city white and black ghettos. I see it in New York City, my home and a place that never fails to score high in the top-ten list of most segregated cities in America. Separated by mere feet, East 95th Street in Manhattan lines trillion-dollar mansions with million-dollar gold-and-glitter bathrooms; East 96th Street in Manhattan counts social housing and drive-by-shootings. Upper East Side/Harlem: difficult to conceive pockets of human life that, located together, are so traumatically far from each other. The commuter railroad makes for such a wounding abyss in the heart of the city, but America has gone out of her way to separate, divide and segregate. If railroad tracks don’t exist, fences and walls will be built to enforce inequality and white supremacy, an American tradition.

This is the case in Detroit, surpassing by far the intense segregation of New York City: The current fence on Alter Road and the invisible barrier that 8 Mile Road represents, or the actual concrete wall built by whites along the Eight in the 40’s and 50’s to keep blacks away (source: http://www.67riots.rutgers.edu/index.htm is an excellent site documenting the 1967 Riots of Detroit and Newark)

African-American psychologist and race riots scholar Kenneth B. Clark said:

"It took me 10 to 15 years to realize that I seriously underestimated the depth and complexity of Northern racism. ... In the South, you could use the courts to do away with separate toilets and all that nonsense. We haven’t found a way of dealing with discrimination in the North."

New England Yankees condemning in-your-face Southern racism while condoning and promoting “invisible” segregation and creating ghettos, destructive forces that mine the individual and the society. It should not surprise us to know that many blacks preferred the "colored only" world of the old South than the hypocritical "free but segregated" society of the North. Neither that almost all the race riots, either white- or black-triggered, in Twentieth Century America have occurred in the North.

***

I have been reading and writing about Detroit with amazement, sorrow and obsession. How could one of the grandest cities in America turned to be and symbolize one of the biggest urban failures in the world?

The answer is as complicated and multi-layered as America herself, but segregation and white supremacy, Detroit’s “institutional apartheid”, are the main reason.

As the Motor City, Detroit absorbed a great number of African-Americans that moved North in the Great Migration. Whites tried everything possible to degrade and marginalize them. Lack of housing, police harassment, governmental abuse and neglect, segregated jobs and services, unemployment, urban renewal (called by blacks “Negro removal”) that destroyed entire black neighborhoods to build highways to the suburbs…

The racist, abusive policies of white Detroit against African-Americans paved the way to a badly contained anger and resentment that exploded first in 1943 and then in 1967. Both riots were triggered by acts of police abuse, but in 67, when the automobile industry was already declining, unemployment soared in Detroit and the suburbs were unstoppably luring city dwellers, the rising was brutal, bad and definitive.

43 people died, almost all by the indiscriminate shootings of the National Guard and police. Looting and burning left Detroit in ruins. Thousands of houses were abandoned overnight, neighborhoods lost their whole population.

What I saw in 2005 is probably not very different from how the city looked the morning after the battle. The “urban prairie” is its most characteristic feature: a city block where all but one or two (if any) of the houses have vanished, the site taken over by weed, trees, debris. The sidewalks and roads disappear under the action of Nature, and you would think you’re in the expansive fields of Iowa if the skyline of downtown Detroit were not staring, imposing but impotent, at your back.

In the urban prairie, along remnants of buried houses, poverty and destruction. Walking ghosts with dead, vacant stares wander around. No hope, no present. No future.

***

Metro Detroit is an area of striking contrasts. My wife and I drove from West Michigan into Detroit. I had only a couple of hours to experience first-hand the eagerly awaited ruins of the city, but I didn’t get disappointed, if correct it is to expect a city to be ruined as hell. From Bloomfield Hills, where the exquisite architectonically masterful Cranbrook Educational Community lays, to Detroit through infamous 8 Mile Road is a trip into the extremes that make America.

We go from expensive, rich suburbs to middle-class suburbs, then to the poorest, most rundown address in the country on Eight Mile, then to the richest, most ostentatious mansions in the absurdly affluent Grosse Pointes and then again into the segregated poverty of Detroit. All within a few miles and within yards of each other. The poorest and the richest of America packed altogether into a tight area, never crossing each other’s roads and backyards, never talking, never looking at each other.

Harlem-Upper East Side in New York City is idyllic mankind compared to Grosse Pointes-Detroit. Heaven and Hell, Night and Day. America does not get more schizophrenic and divided than in this corner of Michigan.

Human living in Detroit.

***

Apocalyptic Detroit (cont.)

2005-08-09T01:51:00.000-04:00

People will systematically try to hide the realities of Detroit. “Most of the problems associated to Detroit are invented or exaggerated by the press.” “Ruins? What ruins? You mean you’re visiting the construction downtown?”

No, the ruins. Detroit is a big field of ruins.

They’ll say, “Look at the renovated Fox Theater”, “the city is going up”. It’s true that Detroit is washing its face for hosting the 2006 Super Bowl. But, having decay, poverty, unemployment, segregation and high crime all over the city, what is restoring a couple of buildings downtown? Isn’t it but a vain attempt to look good?

Dead join the flight to suburbs / Families moving remains from Detroit

Thus read the headline of a Detroit Free Press article in 2000. Is this “exaggerating” problems in the press, or the harsh reality of a city that loses even the dead?

Cleaning facades and demolishing ruins may trick tourists and officials, but certainly will not restore the urban prairie into city living, reverse poverty and create an environment fit for settling in and calling it home.

Does Detroit have a solution, at all? Should we cure this city, or keep it as a "Ruins Park" where America and the world could learn what not to do?

Although, will America and the world ever learn from the atrocious past?

***

From Alter Road where the Pointes end and the city of Detroit starts its sprawling death to downtown through Jefferson Avenue we follow a never-ending series of boarded-up storefronts and houses, ruined factories, empty lots and monstrous housing projects.

Never entering a city was this gloomy and soul-affecting.

Ironically and coincidentally, as I was sketching these lines riding a train to New Jersey we stopped at Newark Broad Street, right across the three high-rise apartment buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe, the Colonnade Park Apartments and the Pavilion Apartments (both 1960). Ironic for Detroit was for Mies, as Newark, a presently little-known field of experimentation in moderate-income housing. The Lafayette Park was an attempt, said to be successful, to re-attract people into city living, combining tall apartment buildings with low-rise structures Crown Hall-style designed for shopping. Both the Detroit and Newark Mies van der Rohe projects sit in cities affected by the worst riots of contemporary America, white flight and segregation. Both complexes look like blighted housing projects, big inhabitable glass-and-steel boxes seriously dated and in need of reparations. My problem with Mies and my problem with America folded together.

***

From downtown Detroit, where the People Mover moves no people, you can see Windsor, Canada, a place said to be healthy and enjoyable, with almost non-existent crime and poverty and where no building is burned down or ruined.

Just across the river.

But in Detroit, and up north along Woodward Avenue, there are many worlds into one: the cultural campus with the Public Library, Wayne State University and the Detroit Institute of Arts is racially mixed and alive. Just a street across north, the urban prairie and a succession of decayed buildings and empty lots strike again, in an industrial area once inhabited by important factories that gave America the automobile and today in serious disrepair or recent charred ruins.

***

Coda

The opening in Detroit of the famous Eminem semi-autobiographical movie “8 Mile”, in which tough 8 Mile Road is portrayed as what it actually is, the unsurpassable racial and social divide between all-black Detroit and all-white suburbs, marked yet another time for the real-life staging of the race issue in America. The Christian Science Monitor run then an article called “Along Detroit's Eight Mile Road, a stark racial split” in which the racial wounds of Detroit bled endlessly yet again, exposed. A city of almost a million, Detroit has one single cinema for new releases, and it is in 8 Mile Road. Being Eminem popular among whites and blacks alike, whites from the suburbs would not cross the line to see the movie in Detroit, even if the theater is the closest to them in this strange urban area of side-by-side separated cities. Dane Chinni reported for the Monitor:

Michael Rhodes, who is black, says he isn't surprised. "That's the way it is here," he says, as he exits the cinema. "We stay on our side and they usually stay on theirs."

The problem of racial segregation is not unique to Detroit. Indeed, 40 years after the death of Jim Crow, blacks and whites often live separate lives in separate communities all over the United States.

But the problem is especially ingrained in the Detroit area. It is, according to the 2000 Census, the most segregated metropolitan region in the country.

It is not easy to cross Eight Mile, as it is not easy task to leave the American ghetto, that most unfair creation of the land of supposed, never-reached freedom. If you do get out, you may be an achiever, but also a traitor. Living in (some many) suburbs of Metro Detroit will not be easier for an African-American, or maybe for any given Detroiter or out-of-suburbia individual.

Detroit. The Balkans and Israel-Palestine plus the Deep South altogether, the most schizophrenic, paranoid living (war) zone in America.

An ex-Eight Miler now living in a big house in the suburbs was quoted in the 2002 “Monitor” report as saying, "This is the most racially charged area I have ever seen". "People don't talk about it, but it hangs over everything".

Detroit, America.

New York, New York City. You...

2005-07-30T01:05:00.000-04:00

Weird city of us where I can’t give a buck to a beggar with cats after spending $110 in bedding and $6 in a cab.

Schizo city where they offer me a Rothko in Madison Avenue at $5.5 million that I deem overpriced. But I can’t buy the $55 catalogue of his work.

New York, where a $2.2 million townhouse in Harlem strikes me as very affordable, but we can’t move to a $2000-a-month walk-up.

Strange island where one block divides a white ghetto of mansions and luxury and a black ghetto of poverty and hopelessness.

Million-dollar condos with homeless at the front door. Picassos and illegal aliens washing cars sharing coffee in the deli.

Fiery zoo of freaks and misfits.

Town embedded in my heart and soul that takes me from Egypt to Cattelan- and everything in between.

And beyond.

Place I love and I love. Inspiration and fascination.

Never repulsive despite rats, plastic surgery, tourists, noise, heat, cold, traffic, noise, chaos, misery and overpricing.

New York. You are too rich, too filthy, too damn attractive and hot.

Brutal and easy. Absurd and addictive. Epic, mythic, classic.

Restless and quite.

A river ride from America, yet so far.

Equal parts outrageous falseness and roaring authenticity, never exploding, always rising, resurrecting.

World of generous charities and rampant injustice, staggering on high heels while crawling on bloody naked feet.

These hectic streets where I run fast, fast- just for buying a gallon of milk.

New York. New York City.

Out of my window, pass the hookers and the homeless, I see the whole world.

New York Now (and Then): When Mies, Marcel and Walter were Kings (or “My Problem with Mies”)

2005-07-22T16:54:00.000-04:00

Walking around Midtown Manhattan, home to one of the most impressive concentrations of skyscrapers in the world (and undoubtedly the most famous), is highly misleading and deceiving. I/You/We all love New York and her distinctive tall buildings. But- how many of them are actually remarkable, architectonically?

It took me years to wake up from the dream and realize, only after living here, that Manhattan is a nightmare, speaking buildings. The science and art of erecting skyscrapers has not graced our glorious city. Or maybe the science has, but certainly not the art. What we have in the streets and skies of our mighty city is a depressing catalogue of boring, uninventive corporate architecture at its most dreary and drab. The sterility of Manhattan skyscrapers is only comparable to the similarly dismal, corporate-communist-style Soviet official buildings. Where New York is a skinny vertical glass box, Moscow is a bulky horizontal stone box. Both share a brutal lack of creativity.

So, what happened in New York City after 1945? The first half of the bloody twentieth century saw many fine tall buildings in Manhattan.

What was the blessing and inception of modern (and postmodern) architecture was also its curse: the glass box, light curtains of post-war transparency. The so-called “International Style” or “Modern Movement” that dominated architecture was a very American movement, created actually the term by Philip Johnson and Henry Hitchcock in a book and exhibition at MoMA 1932, but it had (as almost everything in America) European roots. The “Modern Architecture” was, in fact, an American variant and implant of the German Bauhaus architecture, spread in the States when many of the pioneers fled the Nazis and settled in the East Coast: Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Josep Lluis Sert.

The expansion of the glass-and-steel style of the Modern Movement boomed in America after the II World War. Ever since Gordon Bunshaft from the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed Lever House (1952) in Park Avenue, New York City, nothing was to be the same ever again in the American city and landscape. Suddenly, the country said goodbye to the stone-and-brick architecture of yore, and welcomed (voluntarily or forcedly) the new style, all lightness and functionality.

The inventiveness, creativity and beauty shown in first-half-of-the-century New York tall buildings like the Flatiron, Empire State, Woolworth, Chrysler or Louis Sullivan’s Bayard-Condict were gone, substituted by conservative, non-charismatic containers of offices and cubicles for the American corporation post-1950’s. Quantity surpassed quality in terms of architectural output. Whereas in the 1930’s Johnson & Johnson commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a wonderfully innovative corporate headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, in the 1960’s Chase Manhattan Bank was calling SOM to build a… glass-box skyscraper. Tall, very tall- dead.

Manhattan Island was being filled, overnight, with soaring black glass boxes signed “SOM” and resembling a bad copy of Mies’ Seagram Building.

What happened? SOM and its monstrously harming corporate machines in every city of America, Asia and beyond are not what Mies envisioned as the glass-and-steel construction for a new era. The bastard sons of Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius are a misleading reality against modern architecture. Or are they?

As often, the originators of the American glass box were distinctive, distinguished, elegant. You will not or should not confuse a Mies van der Rohe or Gordon Bunshaft with a SOM-type post-sixties corporate skyscraper. Along Park Avenue, where glass-and-hollowness office buildings reign, Lever House and Seagram Building stand proudly, surrounded by dastard SOM’s. They’re the real thing and shine.

But even the fathers of corporate-architecture-before-boredom pendulated between grace and brutality: Mies could create a floating marvel of pure light in the Farnsworth House or depressing apartments caged in steel boxes in Detroit and Newark; Marcel Breuer achieved impossibly high levels of linear beauty and harmony in his Minnesota and Michigan churches, but built ugly corporate steel boxes in the Pirelli and IBM Buildings. Walter Gropius never had much for beauty or grace, but his Bauhaus at Dessau building or his own house in Massachusetts are a counterpoint for that most-hated building in New York, the one your eye can’t avoid, the ex-Pan Am now Metlife Building.

The International Style is as confounding as these extreme polarities of the masters. If New York is today an island of bad, brutal architecture is not only because the disciples of the Modern Fathers took a wrong lesson, but also because the very fathers were bad and brutal themselves sometimes. Let’s not forget that Walter Gropius was actually proud of his Pan Am thing, and that he proposed, as Head of the Harvard School of Architecture, bulldozing entire parts of the city of Boston to replace them with his vision of modern architecture.

And Mies tried really hard to ingratiate himself with the Nazis. Goebbels did like him, and he would have being the official grand architect of the Third Reich, if only Hitler wouldn't have come across Albert Speer.

It is seemingly fitting then, as somebody has pointed out, that the “everything’s valid coming from the master” attitude is responsible to some or many of the disastrous architecture in America and elsewhere after the fifties. Should we accept the lame UN Headquarters because it’s a Le Corbusier creature? Should we hail the bleak and cheap Lafayette Apartments in Detroit and the Colonnade in Newark for being a Mies van der Rohe creation? Should we preserve the Pirelli Building in New Haven as a Marcel Breuer masterpiece, or tear it down for being an ugly piece of bad architecture?

At least (almost) nobody respects the Pan Am…

Once accepted the calamities of Masters Mies, Breuer & Co. as masterpieces, the SOM epidemic is just a predictable result of that laxness.

The deceiving aspect and reality of the Modern Movement in Architecture is affecting its conservation. There is a “battle” nowadays for the preservation of everything modern, whether hotels, diners, federal buildings, banks, churches and any other contribution to the gloomy architecture of the American fifties and sixties. How far are we going, with organizations trying to save even SOM offices? Is the glass box the new colonial? The “in” thing to save. The rage to save our recent past must be a very American thing. But- shouldn’t we be more discerning?

As if trying to make up for the wide destruction allowed in the recent past (Penn Station will be forever mourned), America wants to save now everything and anything from that recent past. Even if that means fighting for the likes of One Penn Plaza.

In a city living in a never-ending process of destruction and reconstruction, I (we) would like to see so many fifties and sixties things torn down to leave room for the new architecture.

Who is to blame, that in a small stretch of land with hundreds of skyscrapers, only a very few are masterpieces?

Meanwhile, it looks like if the cityscape of Manhattan-New York could be in the wake of a promising change. A new generation of Europeans (not Germans, thankfully?) arrives to the capital of the world to transform, once again, our architectonically lower-achieving city, now for the new millenium. The ingenuity of Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Christian de Portzamparc, Jean Nouvel and the Americans Richard Meier and Frank Gehry should be that long-awaited slap in the structure of the corporate glass box.

At the same time, though, the feverish construction of high-rise apartment and office buildings profiting the real-estate frenzy is granted to the conservative firms of Fox&Fowle, Costas Kondylis, Cesar Pelli, Gwathmey Siegel or Kohn Pedersen Fox, among the most renowned and unappealing constructors of postmodern glass coffins.

And the most symbolic, decisive and important project of the new century, the Freedom Tower on the World Trade Center site, will be built by SOM.

What future, then?

Just what we have: an island of bad architecture with a couple of remarkable buildings.

So much for this, Mies!

Explaining Cézanne... to a New York Art Critic

2005-07-16T15:25:00.000-04:00

Mark Stevens is the art critic for "New York" magazine, the author who infamously perpetrated that monument to hatred, disrespect and nonsense writing in form of an op-ed piece in The New York Times called “Form Follows Fascism”. In that text, Mr. Stevens trashed, with Fascist violence and irrationality, Philip Johnson´s seventy years career of architecture and arts for having embraced the Nazi aesthetics in his thirties. That piece automatically set a new low, despicable record for opinionated, absurd writing with no purpose in life except gratuitous harming to a dead public person (brave you are, Mr. Stevens!) and a very low, open-for-all level for the Times to publish any pulp and bloody bowels arrived in an envelope to the office. Want to kill the Pope with words? Need to denigrate an ex-boyfriend? Have personal issues, something burning inside your tormented soul? Call the Times, insult the dead! No reason, pure cussing! Feel better, or worse!

Reviewing the “Cézanne and Pissarro” blockbuster at MoMA for the July 18 issue of “New York” magazine, in a piece called “Waking the Dead” (what is with him and the dead??), Mark Stevens gets seriously confused:

““What makes Cézanne the modern touchstone?” The answer is elusive—visual rather than verbal. When you stand before two juxtaposed paintings, however, you’ll see what I mean, even if you can’t explain it. I can’t imagine a better introduction to what makes the modern modern.”

Well, certainly you can’t, Mr. Critic. For Cézanne IS the father of Modern Art. But you have said nothing. Just "go and see what I mean". An art critic lazy word to not explaining the pictures.

Picasso himself, never open to talk about his art or methods or influences, told his friend Brassai: “As if I don't know Cézanne! He was my one and only master. Don't you think I've looked at his paintings? I spent years studying them, Cézanne. He was like the father of us all. He was the one who protected us.”

In a famous letter to Emile Bernard, 1904, Cézanne exhorts his pupil and correspondent to “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone”. Is a stronger summoning for Cubism to come conceivable? And to Russian Suprematism, and Mondrian, and Geometric Abstraction, even the Minimalist movements of the Sixties!. Revolutionary Cézanne opens the Twentieth Century; his innovations remain alive and look alive today. His enseignements must be followed by any serious painter.

(Father of Matisse, too, who called Cézanne, “the master for all of us”.)

So, why has it Mark Stevens so difficult to explain the essence of "le peintre des peintres"? This wordly impotence (actual or deceiving) comes from the author of a highly-praised biography of Willem De Kooning, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Is the myth of De Kooning easier to write about than Cézanne´s illuminating but obscure paintings? Or does he in his book say the sort of “De Kooning paintings are, like, you know, painted, with colors, pretty, or not” explanation he gives in his Cézanne-Pissarro review?

What makes Cézanne modern?

The furthest a major art critic like Mark Stevens can get is:

“His (Pissarro´s) landscapes are prettier than Cézanne´s and describe the countryside more exactly. You might think, I wish I could walk down that lovely country lane, or wonder who lives in the handsome stone cottage.”

Lovely! Pretty! Sappy Crappy! Enter the realm of Thomas Kinkade, Inc.! Is Mr. Stevens writing an introduction to Impressionism for toddlers? Is he treating the readers of “New York” like toddlers?

Being at MoMA, pairing a Cézanne and Pissarro with your eyes, you really can´t see and write how Cézanne deconstructs the landscape and reconstructs it in volumes and facets, turning houses and trees into cubes and squares and flat surfaces, sketching but solidifying the picture, creating abstraction whilst Pissarro is painting pretty, tidy Impressionist landscapes that a Norman Rockwell-loving Midwestern grandma would happily approve?

Cézanne made of painting a painful matter of life and death, a quest for profound meanings. Totally devoted-obsessed, his eternal quest never saw an end. He almost never signed a work, for they were all temporary stations in a continuous, existential search. The High Priest of Painting was probably aware of his eminent mission: ”Je vous dois la vérité en peinture et je vous la dirai”.

Honestly, Mr. Stevens, if explaining all this goes beyond your capacity or willingness, I think you should step down, go back to college, learn some basic art history and writing and hand me your position.

For I learned how to narrate the difference between Pissarro and Cézanne beyond prettiness and lovely cottages at the age of twenty. And I have no Pulitzer for that.

Richard Serra: The Matter of the Prophet

2005-07-07T17:20:00.000-04:00

In the wake of the inauguration of the seven new sculptures that compose his monumental installation at Guggenheim Bilbao called “The Matter of Time” (“La Materia del Tiempo”), already billed as “one of the great works of the past half-century” by Michael Kimmelman, Richard Serra traveled to Spain and gave a number of interviews to the cultural supplements of the main Spanish newspapers.

Reading them and looking at him, both the interviewers and the readers got to sense, once again, Richard Serra’s grandiose presence. Here we have a man that for ordering a burger in a diner will deliver a god-like speech and message to humanity. Permanently dressed in black, fiery-looking and grave, there’s little doubt that Richard Serra has bear on him and his persona the monumentality and drama of his mammoth sculptures.

Famously, Richard Serra’s personality is as large as his creations in Cor-Ten steel. His imposing figure, magnetic stare and cold-like-steel rhetoric has overwhelmed more than one interviewer; he is said to have as many followers of his art as haters of his personality. But those that dislike him personally will not fail to praise his art.

No doubt the infamous “Tilted Arc” polemic and its final destruction embittered him and awoke on him a responsibility for the fate and permanence of his art. Richard Serra works now (didn’t he always?) for mankind, making clear that, as an artist, he has the task of leaving a trace of his work on earth, for generations to come.

Richard Serra works for the same people, just humans, that hated his Federal Plaza installation. But this time they are not grey functionaries narrowingly looking only for an easy way to get to their boring jobs. In Bilbao, art-loving tourists and art pilgrims will witness and experience the emotional impact these sculptures deliver. Having secure, informed commissions from read institutions, the artist has guaranteed his art will survive and influence- the Spirals and Toruses will be inside the Guggenheim Bilbao for at least 25 years.

Museums will always be safer than the government.

In his interviews in Spain he stated that Bilbao’s is an installation for the people: if visitors react and are moved, if “La Materia del Tiempo” makes people think, stop and reflect, even momentarily, on how they have been affected by the sculptures, the purpose will have been achieved. Furthermore, he conceives his Guggenheim installation as a personal and social experience.

All his huge sculptures since the late eighties are (or seem to be) destined for a wide appreciation. Richard Serra does not aim low. And the fact is- it is very difficult, probably impossible, not to feel touched and overwhelmed walking through a Spiral, Sphere, Torus, Snake or whatever form Richard Serra concocts. The difference within Bilbao’s Serras is, as he himself has said, the encounters with people. Whereas in Dia:Beacon you will probably have the experience of your brain and senses shocked alone and surrounded by nothing but rusted steel, the heavily-visited Guggenheim Bilbao will make inevitable that people run into each other in and around the sculptures, entering and “escaping”.

Richard Serra has insisted not to be searching the sublime, but such a feeling is evoked and felt upon entering one of the Torqued Ellipses permanently installed in Dia:Beacon: they inspire awe, reverence, fear, transcendence, grandeur. They overwhelm, suffocate, terrify. They will unsettle you, disturb you and make you feel insignificant, like the open vastness of a desert or the soaring tallness of a gothic cathedral. They might even bring you to tears.

They will surely dislocate your conceptions of space and time. Surrounded by a mountain of oxidized steel, you’ll start looking for an exit, among echoes of your own voice and sounds that could be right behind the steel, or miles away. You will be lost and anxious.

Such is the majestic, infinite power of Richard Serra’s sculptures. Never was cold, hard steel so immensely affective of human senses. Rarely has steel reached the gravity and lyricism of Serra’s sculptures, where tons of massive metal appear to be floating. And then suddenly deeply anchored to earth, heavy and motionless.

Richard Serra’s grand, prophet-like personality is nourished by his sculptures, and his sculptures nurture his ego and godly presence. It probably couldn’t be any other way.

(He is the chosen one. Follow his path)

Human Decomposition? Suicide? Nasty Meth Kitchens? No Problem...

2005-07-05T23:37:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Michael of Amdecon, Inc.! (www.amdecon.com)

Many many thanks! Their “No one gets out alive” t-shirt is the coolest thing I’ve seen around in ages!

And indeed, cleaning a meth lab is such a necessary task in America…

"Cracker Barrel" Nevermore! In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sophisticated Tapas from Spain

2005-06-29T17:25:00.000-04:00

The Midwest is all about steaks, burgers, deep fried stuff and greasy mom-and-pop rural shacks with no style -no class -no quality. But then you happen to be in Grand Rapids, Michigan and stumble upon San Chez (www.sanchezbistro.com), the greatest, most creative restaurant between Chicago and New York, period. The relief San Chez (“A Tapas Bistro”) provides from all the Middle America cheap fare the traveler has endured around Michigan accounts for a heavenly climactic experience.

San Chez is an amazing cocktail of unexpected flavors, surprising mixtures and imagination, loads of explosive imagination. These are not the traditional, basic tapas Spaniards enjoy- San Chez presents the products that made Spain famous filtered through a smart, creative American vision, making ingredients like artichokes or scallops reach levels one would not expect out of Catalonia or Paris. Here we find Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific touches, counting for Spain, North America and Latin America.

If mixes and culture-crossings are always dangerous, San Chez hits with ease and triumphs, clamorously. Never have I seen Spain so gorgeously and intelligently blended with the regions of the world that share a common language.

Executive Chef Casey Bell lived for twenty years in Spain and maintains a house in Barcelona, reflected in San Chez in the Gaudí-esque tiles adorning columns and walls and the Catalan Bistro atmosphere. Despite some minor errors in the spelling of the Spanish menus and certain Mexican decoration, San Chez tastes like Spain, and beyond.

At San Chez, dining is not a simple act of feeding but an experience, an artistic happening of small delicatessen concoctions in the style of those multi-plate dinners made famous by the likes of masters Ferran Adrià and Thomas Keller. Though San Chez is not on that level neither intends to, its eclectic Mediterranean-American cuisine deserves the highest praise. The unbelievable, different sensations bombarding the mouth in each bite are a not-to-forget peaking moment, probably not far from those served in Roses and Napa Valley.

It did help having a knowledgeable, friendly server named Adam, who was honest and straight in telling what’s best. His recommendation of Alcachofas a la Parrilla (“Marinated and grilled artichoke hearts with roasted red peppers and alioli”) turned to be one of our favorites: heavenly-crunchy, exactly-grilled huge artichokes with a great alioli (a mayonnaise-like Catalonian sauce made of garlic, olive oil and egg). The Seta Rellena Grande (“Portabella mushroom layered with serrano ham, manchego cheese, green onion, and roasted red pepper. Accompanied by organic greens and tomato vinaigrette”) makes a deliciously thought-provoking concoction, meaty and juicy.

Quality, creativity and sophistication reign supreme in San Chez, so stay out of the too-common deep-fried Fritos de Queso Azul (“Blue cheese fritters”) and let your senses be shocked opting for the unusual stuff: the brilliant Banderillas de Vieiras Marinadas y Tocino (“Spicy marinated scallop and bacon skewer with mixed greens and habanero, grape, mango chutney”) are a top-notch crossing of cultures and opposite flavors. Two classical ingredients from Galicia (Northern Spain) like scallops and bacon skewer, seafood and meat, that would never ever get mixed in Spain work superbly together, with a spicy sauce rooted in Latin America.

Traditional tapas (here called “entremeses” or “starters”) are also served, and make for a perfect cold first step before merging into the innovative delirium of small platters. The Surtido de Queso, selection of cheeses from Spain (cow, goat, sheep) is delectable and authentic (the cured, aged Manchego must be one of the best available in the United States).

Room must be saved in the stomach (Midwesterners will have it easy) for the Crema Catalana (“Baked sugar glazed custard laced with hazelnut liqueur”), rightly rich and sweet, seamless with a perfect caramel crust in the greatest Catalonian tradition.

The Sangria is the drink to have, perfectly fruity and juicy, as in the best spots in the Spanish Mediterranean Coast, but the recommended mojito, too tangy, could use a serving of sugar.

At $80, dinner for two including dessert and beverages at San Chez may be highly priced for Grand Rapids and the Midwest (where a party of eight gets potato-and-meat for 40 bucks or a brutal, artery-clogging bacon/sausage/egg/pancakes breakfast for half of it), but coming from New York, my wife and I had one of the most unforgettable dining events. I only wish it were in New York, but the San Chez experience will keep us coming back to greasy, stuck-in-the-60’s old West Michigan.

Among trailer parks, bad hair, outrageous pink-and-yellow outfits and country hicks, in that empire of white trash that is Michigan, it’s still hard to believe for me that such an upscale precious restaurant exists in Grand Rapids.

Take a flight, go there, now. San Chez is the “El Bulli” of the Midwest.

The Art of Cleaning a Meth Lab

2005-06-23T15:45:00.000-04:00

Yahoo! offers (via an ad) a necessary service in 21st century America:

Meth Lab Cleanup Course
This is the only class of 2005 and it is almost full.
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(2-day Meth Lab Cleanup course for $1295, but hurry up, will fill out quick!)

America, you never cease to amaze me.

Being Jasper Johns

2005-06-22T18:18:00.000-04:00

The lukewarm (or downright negative, aggressive) reception New York has given to Jasper Johns’ new oeuvre (at Matthew Marks Gallery) should come as no surprise. Johns is bound to disappoint, fail and be ferociously criticized since the eighties.

Collectors fight for his work, which is not publicly sold in galleries but snatched privately from the artist. Museums die for his work, patrons buy his work and present it to museums. Museums organize exhibitions of Jasper Johns: “Jasper Johns since 1974”. “Jasper Johns since 1983”, “Jasper Johns: New Work”. Dealers, collectors, curators cherish and chase Jasper Johns.

Critics, art historians, writers are all but content.

I cannot but wonder whether he himself, mighty Jasper Johns cares, whether is that what he prizes and wishes he had, the only support he fails to achieve over and over in the last years, decades.

“Being Jasper Johns” must not be easy- living legend, revered god, national treasure.

An insightful profile of Brice Marden published in “ARTnews” had a friend of the abstract artist talking about the difficulties Marden sometimes had dealing with “Being Brice Marden”. I find the dedication of Johns and Marden to art commendable. In this present “scissors-and-glue” bubbling young art world we’re living that considers money, rapid success, fairs, parties and beautiful people as the Five Commandments of Art, true artists like Jasper Johns and Brice Marden, tirelessly devoted to the art of painting as their only way of living, breathing, existing are a rarity we should care for more.

Theirs is the real thing, art in capitals, no crafty bullshit.

The negative responses to Jasper Johns’s “Catenary” series are just the habitual lines, but I admit they surprise me, and sadden me a bit. For the “Catenary” exhibition at Matthew Marks is a surprisingly moving, beautiful exploration of color, surface, form in subtlety and lyricism- it deserves a much warmer reception than the one New York has given.

The few reviews published have attacked, once more, the impossibility of understanding, the negation of meaning, the tiresome repetition of exhausted yet impenetrable themes… Peter Schjeldahl in “The New Yorker” goes further, deconstructing –trying to demolish- Jasper Johns’ myth. Questioning his greatness might be the latest efford in “the cause against Jasper Johns”.

I will not, in the opposite, curb my enthusiasm towards these highly enjoyable, superb creations presented at Matthew Marks as “Catenary”- they represent a flux of admirable energy and artistry, an extraordinary and necessary cure against certain personal disappointments with Jasper Johns’ work (at the Walker Art Center’s last exhibition of his art, at the MoMA’s “Bushbaby” new acquisition).

Predictably, everyone has focused on the troubling intellect and hidden motifs of Jasper Johns paintings. Amazingly, nobody seems to have focused on the emotional appeal of the “Catenary” series. Like a gathering of critics trapped in “The Exterminating Angel” salon, they all appear to be afraid of getting out of their common headlines.

Wouldn’t they forget about what Jasper Johns is concealing under layers of painting and simply let themselves be free, getting blown away by the calmly tense strength, color forces and challenging nuances of these canvases, drawings and prints?

Sometimes, I would say, dealing with the task of “Being an Art Critic” seems to have a burdensome cost on our ability to see and feel.

How free are we to capture Jasper Johns?

Spiral, Washed

2005-06-15T14:14:00.000-04:00

Ever since its temporary reappearance in the last decade of the twentieth century, the Spiral Jetty has been white, engulfed by a deep crust of salt. Now, starting in May 2005, the Spiral Jetty is been washed off of his white covering, slowly submerged by the rising waters of the Great Salt Lake and recuperating, thus, the black color it had in 1970 when it was built. Recent photos of the Spiral Jetty show this crucial change and a new, basalt-colored jetty not seen since the classic Gianfranco Giorgioni pictures.

Even though these dramatic events are part of the Jetty's life and "raison d'etre", the process affecting the piece nowadays is of the uttermost importance not only for the specific piece and the artist, but for our whole conception and understanding of this crucial monument of contemporary culture: entire meanings and interpretations might need to be reconsidered.

In a timely happening, starting June 23, New York City will host the first grand American retrospective of the art of Robert Smithson. Many aspects of this exhibition are based on the new white Jetty, those white salt crystals that dictate "every aspect of the Spiral Jetty pilgrim´s experience of the site" and now are mostly gone. An important essay by Jennifer L. Roberts in the catalogue is devoted to "Salt and Spiral Jetty". Furthermore, many of the photos of Spiral Jetty included in the book reflect the white surface it had until recently.

Now in the process of disappearing under water and recuperating its darkness, the absence of the salt-crusted Jetty of our current discourse, configuration and acceptance of Robert Smithson represents a shock to the written art history.

The slowly-washed Spiral Jetty of June 2005 should frame and affect the presentation of the Robert Smithson retrospective in New York, as well as elicit responses from Smithson scholars nationwide.

Ways of Seeing or the Politics of Abundance

2005-06-03T14:51:00.000-04:00

When last March I visited the MoMA with two young Spanish artists, I had the chance to see what starvation can do in an individual, or what abundance does as well. Entering the realms of MoMA, I expect from literate viewers a response of awe, but also a critical position on the many flaws and failures of the new Museum of Modern (not Contemporary) Art.

A certain American viewer, long accustomed to visit rich museums with important collections, may reflect on the losses at and of the MoMA. But how to expect a critical reaction from a hungry-for-art Spanish artist, coming from a country where the museums are in a permanent crisis, contemporary art barely exists in their collections and the lack of contemporary culture (or plain culture) is exasperating? Whereas a museum overloaded with masterpieces may be boring and unexciting for a certain literate American, it is an undeniably shocking experience for a Spaniard.

The exhibition of the UBS collection at the MoMA was undoubtedly boring, insipid, soulless and way too corporate and neat (much what the museum itself suffers from): the habitual masterpieces from the habitual masters in the habitual gift to the almighty gifted MoMA. I would say the reaction in New York was one of disappointment rather than excitement (many art critics felt so). A critical engagement arising from abundance: when you have it all, you want something else.

Chuck Close, Brice Marden, Willem de Kooning, Anselm Kiefer, Jasper Johns? Please! We see them and have them in every corner! (if not at home). We want art that communicates, art that is mounted in a lively way, a display that shakes and moves the mind and senses, a challenge to the eye and brain. Accumulating masterpieces? Corporation-style museums? That’s what America tends to give: bigger, more, but not necessarily better. Or how the small New Museum of Contemporary Art can be far more exciting than the monstrous Museum of Modern Art. Size, tag and brand do not always matter, when we’re in search of a soul and heart. That same soul and heart so many American museums choke-full of big art lack, catering more to the corporate body than the artistic spirit.

And yet that judgment cannot be expected from a Spaniard, or from an Italian, or a Portuguese. Or any non-American visitor, in fact, since even the Tate Modern holdings feel rather poor (but displayed in a smarter way), visiting from New York. As much as we cannot expect a critic of fast-food from a Sudanese child transported to America, a Spaniard in the MoMA will gasp rather than cuss upon entering the cathedral at 53rd street. As an ex-Spaniard myself, a thought comes to my head sometimes, when I myself happen to be visiting a museum out of New York: “this room, this sole room contains more Cézannes than all the museums in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece” (and…). Any Madison Avenue blue-chip gallery contains more Modern and Contemporary Art at anytime than Spain has ever had. How do we like that? How easy is to grasp and take such a raw statement of facts?

The opulence and riches of America and the philanthropy of our art patrons are an immense blessing, but also a curse. Museums that look and taste like corporate offices, masterpieces that look and taste decaffeinated and sad.

Mark Rothko in Las Vegas, Tadao Ando in Texas and other displacements of spiritual energy.

So many museums have vast, wealthy holdings of art but lack the significance, flavor and impact to touch our souls and senses and give a meaning to art.

Larry Clark in New York: What Oklahoma Looks Like

2005-06-03T13:19:00.000-04:00

After years of delays and rejections (due more to the personal reluctance of the artist than the negative of institutions) the polemic work of Larry Clark receives its first retrospective in America. The vulnerability and mystery of the adolescence and its alienation of adults are the key subjects of his production from “Tulsa” (1971) to “punk Picasso” (2003).

Clark was a pioneer in the unveiling of the other side of American youth: suburban ennui, drugs, senseless sex, guns and violence, self-destruction and death; creating besides a new style of photography alien to aesthetics and focused in the subject (and shocking those who thought drugs, guns and misery were exclusive of a certain race or races, only to see their own kids fall).

The choice of the impossible world of teenagers as the sole topic of his work conditions the way of seeing, the reaction, reception and message. The artist speaks of didactics and moral, his critics (in America) accuse him of perversity and exploitation. The art of Larry Clark provokes confusion and a feeling of loss: the youngsters portrayed do not know where they go; the portraying artist dedicates his life to decipher the adolescence, but will never succeed; the spectator that looks at the portraits and the artist gets lost in a myriad of feelings, all negative: rejection, disgust, disapproval, inability to understand.

The discomfort of Larry Clark is due to the brutal presence of juvenile violence and sex and also the being the artist a protagonist of his own work, which disturbs the looking. Clark recalls (in images and words) his sexual, criminal and hallucinogen experiences, and the viewer struggles between the rejection of such an ego show (the inanity of the homemade videos of his teenage girlfriend in “punk Picasso”) and the condemnation of his acts (rape, attempted murder).

Whatever the reaction, indifference is not a possible answer to these images.

The “classic” work of Larry Clark (“Tulsa” and “Teenage Lust”) is honest and real, innovative and even beautiful. Afterwards, in his videos and collages of the 90´s, his intentions and results are less clear and satisfactory. “Tulsa”, his great masterpiece, is a powerful shadow that shrinks the rest of the exhibition.

Worth noting is that Clarks’ long-awaited retrospective has not stirred any kind of negative feelings or Mapplethorpe-style polemics from visitors or city officials (unlike in Brooklyn 1999, Giuliani and “Sensation” seeking some publicity), as if the not-so-yore times of censorship and religious fanaticism were over, in progressive New York City and weird America.

Nevertheless, the art of Larry Clark fits better in a cabinet size than this big retrospective he has gotten, but in one or the other the power of his images and the mystery of adolescence spark debate and doubt, symbol of a transcending artist.

(originally published in "Lapiz", May 2005, this version modified afterwards)

A Crowd Favorite: Tim Hawkinson at the Whitney

2005-05-30T01:51:00.000-04:00

The intriguing and strange oeuvre of Tim Hawkinson has received in the Whitney its first grand-scale retrospective, curated by Larry Rinder and installed by the artist himself. In Hawkinson´s varied and multimedia art we spot the industrial absurd of Jean Tinguely, the corporal and psychic of Bruce Nauman, the personal and autobiographic of Charles Ray, the element of performance and body art of Chris Burden (both write precise descriptions of the actions executed), and the powerful presence of Duchamp in the utilization of objets trouves and the home-made, artisanal fabrication of enigmatic readymades out of common materials.

Thus, “Signature” is a motorized school desk with a pen that signs the name of the artist ad infinitum and drops the paper on the floor, forming a pile of material that gets increased every minute. His “Index (Finger)”, a mutilated blood-stained fingertip, is stuffed with pens and pencils, the same the artist used for drawing his expansive mural “World Chart of World History from the Earliest Times”.

The art of Tim Hawkinson is autobiographic and universal, a study of his body and persona and an analysis of the absurd (humoristic, not tragic) of the human condition. His creations speak of the pass of time in the human being and things, the ephemeral and vulnerable of life and materials, besides being a spiritual reference and of Christian faith (“Jerusalem Cross”) in shape of music (the anthems of “Überorgan”).

But accessing these meanings of Hawkinson’s art requires more than a single reading, and it does not come easy. That’s why the other side of his work is the fun, humor, viewer action, the childish and school-construction looks of his machines, like in a fantastic laboratory or a circus show. This popular attraction that Hawkinson’s gigantic sculptures exert is reinforced with the display: there are no beginning or end, no educative texts, no historic references, no long paragraphs. The visitor explores, finds his own way, observes, investigates; discovers, laughs. It is evident, by strolling and observing around the grotesque figures of Tim Hawkinson, that the public is having fun, and their interest and attention in deciphering the objects surprises and rewards.

(published in "Lapiz", April 2005)

“This is Fascism! Misery, Destruction, Persecution and Death” or “Sex and the Bible”: The Political Art of Josep Renau

2005-05-05T18:52:00.000-04:00

Josep Renau (1907-1982), master of photomontage, was a Spanish artist compromised with social advance and progressiveness. In the difficult years of the Spanish Republic (1931-1936), he aligned himself with the legal government of the left, being a compromised member of the Spanish Communist Party. After the Civil War exploded, Renau was named Director General of Fine Arts. From his position, he reignited the production of propaganda posters, believing in the power of image and words against the threats of Fascism, in Spain and around the world.

What John Heartfield did in Germany, artistically and personally responding against the Nazis in shape of aggressive photomontages denouncing Hitler’s regime, Josep Renau did in Spain. He was the first Spaniard to introduce and use photomontage massively, believing the poster had a social function, and thus, after 1937, being the Head of Fine Arts, covered the half-Spain loyal to the Republic with colorful, vibrant posters full of energy and the power to convince the population to stand by the Republic and resist the attack of the Fascists.

Renau also coordinated the evacuation of the Spanish artistic treasures from the Prado Museum and elsewhere to Switzerland. Besides, and more famously, he instrumented the organization of the renowned Spanish Pavilion for the World Fair in Paris, 1937. In the midst of a highly political decade polarized between Communism and Fascism, the small but powerful Spanish pavilion outstood among the massive architecture and looks of the Soviet and Nazi German pavilions nearby. The pavilion was a “who’s who” of the arts in Spain, all aligned with the Republic and leftist beliefs: Josep Lluis Sert was the architect, aided by Luis Lacasa; Picasso painted the Guernica for the interior, Alexander Calder designed a Mercury Fountain in memory of the miners of Spain, Joan Miró contributed a painting, “Catalonian Peasant with a Sickle”, and Julio Gonzalez the iron head of the “Screaming Montserrat”, the cry of a Spanish peasant woman against the war. Outside of the pavilion, a sleek, tall surrealist sculpture was installed, the work of Alberto Sánchez: “El Pueblo Español Tiene un Camino que le Conduce a una Estrella” (“The Spanish People Have a Path that Leads to a Star”).

But neither the artistic posters of political propaganda nor the famed and celebrated Spanish Pavilion could help win the war, and after the Republic was defeated and a Fascist dictatorship headed by General Francisco Franco began a military bloody rule of Spain, Josep Renau, with him millions of defeated Spaniards, chose the exile rather than a life under oppression. Spain got sucked of its brilliant minds and brains. Not only the avant-garde artists that had made of Spain an outstanding nucleus of creativity and modernity but doctors, scientists, professors, writers fled Spain seeking freedom. And in Spain, a wasteland of starvation, destruction, censorship and intellectualness remained. It was all grey and dark, for many decades to come.

For Renau, politically and personally committed to denounce oppression and injustice with his art, his career in Mexico and later in the communist East Germany was a life devoted to the revolutionary art of photomontage with strong political meaning. Ideologically armed, it was in East Berlin where he eventually gathered and published (1967) the series “Fata Morgana USA- The American Way of Life”, which he first envisioned in Mexico, 1940, living near the United States of America, and completed between 1952 and 1966, both in Mexico and East Germany.

Relying on images from Time, Fortune, The New York Times, Renau sought to expose the other side of the American Dream: alienation and objectification of women, machismo, sexuality and censorship, Hollywood; corporate power, oil kings; racism, racial inequality, lynching, Southern bigotry, white supremacy, hatred; violence, crime, war; the Hiroshima genocide, the Saigon brothel, Vietnam; capitalism, militarism, hunger, injustice; imperialism, abuse, aggression, interference in other countries; death penalty, McCarthyism, paranoia, suppression of liberties; religious hypocrisy; poverty, social inequity; ignorance, popular culture.

Renau dealt with America’s darkest side at a time when America was being harshly criticized for the Vietnam War, but also, still, always, mystified. Whilst the American Pop artists were exploiting the machinery, consumerism and popular culture that aroused in post-war America with little to none critical achievement, Renau chose, from his political commitment, to attack, brutally and pitilessly, the lies, contradictions and hypocrisies of the United States.

His sympathy with the struggle of African-Americans for their rights was unparalleled in the artistic field. The capacity of his photomontages to move, inspire and provoke thought and reflection is truly remarkable.

Josep Renau was to post-war, capitalist America what Heartfield, Grosz and Dix were for the Weimar and Nazi eras of Germany. A critical conscience anchored in deep believes of social, racial and human equality. Despite the contradiction of his art being created under a communist military dictatorship with little respect to liberties and personal expression like East Germany, which he supported, the power and force of his raw art remain present to this day, periodically reaffirmed by the events that shape America and hence the world.

I cannot but totally agree with the statement Josep Renau wrote for the 1967 edition of his “Fata Morgana- The American Way of Life”:

“quite contrary to what is being put forth in commercial and tourist advertising, life in USA is forcibly more complex, contradictory and dramatic than the promoters and apologists of the “American way of life” would like to admit”.

That I have discovered since I am an American. Nothing is more mentally challenging and personally troubling, but also rewarding, than the struggle of accepting America, its darkness and brightness. Whereas, in art, a Roy Lichtenstein carries the optimism and content of the Americanness, the extraordinary art and achievements of Josep Renau bring us the bleakness, the necessary look at the other half and side of what is still a wondrous nation.

Kevin Carter, a Victim of Mankind

2005-05-05T14:49:00.000-04:00

The life of Kevin Carter (1961-1994), South African photojournalist. He covered in the 80’s the daily violence of the apartheid regime. Later, he went on to capture the brutal gang battles in South African townships near Johannesburg.

What he saw affected him greater than other journalists assigned to cover the inhumanity of human condition throughout the world’s misery and oppression. He would cry, drink and do drugs seeking oblivion.

In 1993, he photographed a little Sudanese girl collapsing in the way to a feeding centre, her tiny body curving over a dry, sandy ground. A vulture watches nearby.

“Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried.” (Scott McLeod, Time, Sept 12 1994).

Photojournalists have to think visually, shoot, work. Inside, it burns. Later, it’s time for mental misery and a soul in pain. Capturing death and human misery leaves deep scars, both mental and physical.

Observing the “homo homini lupus”, but not acting.

"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering," said the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, "might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."

His photo of the Sudanese girl made him and the whole world cry, earned him a Pulitzer Prize and harsh criticism, too. He waited about 20 minutes to capture the perfect moment, watching a human collapse of starvation stalked by a well-fed vulture. First he acted as a photojournalist, then as a concerned individual. One chooses to most difficult job in the world not to feel good personally, but to make the world know.

Witnessing the horrors of human condition and having to live with it takes a toll.

"I sat under a tree and cried and chain-smoked. I couldn't distance myself from the horror of what I saw."

He went to New York to receive the Pulitzer Prize. Manhattan was a haven for him, he called her “my town”. Back to South Africa, depressed, worrying about money and haunted by what he saw, Kevin Carter gassed himself in his truck to carbon monoxide.

"I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen."

In Detroit 1925, a Little-known Achievement for an Oppressed Race

2005-05-05T14:45:00.000-04:00

Dr. Ossian Sweet was an affluent doctor in Detroit, 1925, after the Great Migration had caught the industrial city unprepared to receive the masses of Blacks from the South. Wanting to get a better life for him and his family than the overpopulated slums blacks were forced to live in, he purchased a house in an all-white house neighborhood of the city. And got armed for defending his household. Soon the home was surrounded by a white mob intending to get the black family out of the area. When somebody from the Sweet house shot a gun and killed a member of the mob, everybody inside the house was arrested for murder.

At the trial, Dr. Sweet said, "When I opened the door and saw the mob, I realized I was facing the same mob that had hounded my people throughout its entire history. In my mind I was pretty confident of what I was up against. I had my back against the wall. I was filled with a peculiar fear, the fear of one who knows the history of my race. I knew what mobs had done to my people before."

Sweet’s words on the atrocious past of fear of lynching and white mobs his race had had in the United States were admitted as having influenced the psyche of the occupants of his house.

After reviewing the slavery, the oppression, the white supremacy, Dr. Sweet’s lawyer, Clarence Darrow, a living legend of the practice at the time, declared that African-Americans were owed a debt and obligation by the white race.

“There are persons in the North and South who say a black man is inferior to the white and should be controlled by whites. There are also those who recognize his rights and say he should enjoy them. To me this case is a cross-section of human history. It involves the future and the hope of some of us that the future will be better than the past."

In the end, all charges were dropped against Ossian Sweet and his immediate family. The judge reasoned that the shooting had been in self-defense of his house. Thus, the “a man's home is his castle and that no one has a right to invade it” belief was extended, for the first time, to African- Americans, if only in paper. It was a landmark in the path to the achievement of Civil Rights for blacks, but one that stood isolated in the middle of an era of hatred and injustice.

Clarence Darrow spoke of the trial in a grandiose manner: "Your verdict means something in this case. It means something more than the fate of this boy. It is not often that a case is submitted to 12 men where the decision may mean a milestone in the history of the human race. But this case does. And I hope and trust that you have a feeling of responsibility that will make you take it and do your duty as citizens of a great nation, and as members of the human family, which is better still."

It took a long, suffering time and a painful way.

"All Men Are Created Equal": Struggling with America's Atrocious Past

2005-04-21T13:52:00.000-04:00

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was a newspaper editor and journalist who went on to lead the American anti-lynching crusade. Working closely with both African-American community leaders and American suffragists, Wells worked to raise gender issues within the "Race Question" and race issues within the "Woman Question." In her "Crusade for Justice" (1928), she wrote (source for the following quotes: www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk)

"I also found that what the white man of the South practiced as all right for himself, he assumed to be unthinkable in white women. They could and did fall in love with the pretty mulatto and quadroon girls as well as black ones, but they professed an inability to imagine white women doing the same thing with Negro and mulatto men. Whenever they did so and were found out, the cry of rape was raised, and the lowest element of the white South was turned loose to wreak its fiendish cruelty on those too weak to help themselves. No torture of helpless victims by heathen savages or cruel red Indians ever exceeded the cold-blooded savagery of white devils under lynch law. This was done by white men who controlled all the forces of law and order in their communities and who could have legally punished rapists and murderers, especially black men who had neither political power nor financial strength with which to evade any justly deserved fate. The more I studied the situation, the more I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income".

In the brief article "Confronting the Past" (17th February, 2000), Roger Rosenblatt considers a series of photographs on lynchings in America, exhibited at Roth Horowitz Gallery in Manhattan and in the book "Without Sanctuary":

"That ordinary people did these things is deeply disturbing; that they manufactured a social rationale for their acts is more disturbing still. Look for a while at the picture of the lynching of Rubin Stacy, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1930. Look first at Stacy, then turn to the little girl in the summer dress, looking at Stacy, and then to the man behind her, perhaps her father, in the spotless white shirt and slacks and the clean white skimmer. They will stand there forever, admiring the proof of their civilization".

Congressman John Lewis writes in the Introduction to "Without Sanctuary": "Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe-don't want to believe-that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. These phototgraphs bear witness to ...an American holocaust".

It is this aspect of the American lynchings, the banalization and socialization of evil, what disturbs many the most. Lynchings, despite being illegal, were carried out in public places, drew masses and were a momento to remember in postcards sent to the family. Kids watched the burning of the flesh, young couples cuddled at the warm light of the pyre, elegant white men in suits and hats (symbols of social distinction at the time) posed, proud, with their victims, casting a smile. The whole town enjoyed a celebratory social event.

While the Nazis were conducting their crematories for Jews like business, orderly and casually, Americans were perpretating their own Holocaust against fellow Americans and making of it a party. Those Southern soldiers that fought the Nazis in Europe would come back to Alabama or Georgia to witness a lynching in the Land of Freedom and Democracy. As Roger Rosenblatt puts it: "Glimpses of human depravity take on even greater horror when they are attached to a system, when they are civilized". What we in Europe would think of primitive, sadistic assassinations and sadistic brutality was but the law of the common man in many states of America (slavery, lynching, segregation).

Rosenblatt writes: "One of the postcards reads: "This is the barbecue we had last night." The barbecue was a man". America, the cradle of modern civilization, behaving like a Prehistoric subhuman.

"There was both formality and method to these atrocities: Red hot pokers applied to eyes and genitals; bodies roasted over flames; souvenirs of fingers, toes and ears taken by the crowds". Not even the bones after the human cooking were left to rest in peace, and were fastly collected by the excited mobs, who dressed in their nicest for the occasion (and yet this is the country that cries against public executions in Iran). Harry Truman was ending the war by nuclear-bombing civilians and being knighted as member of the Ku Klux Klan. America, Land of the Free.

Despite the hopes of the NAACP in his presidency and the being his wife Eleanor a long-time opponent of lynching, President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused in 1935 to speak out in favour of a bill that would punish sheriffs who failed to protect their prisoners from lynch mobs. He argued that the white voters in the South would never forgive him if he supported the bill and he would therefore lose the next election ( http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlynching.htm).

Arthur Raper wrote for the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching in 1933:

"3,724 people were lynched in the United States from 1889 through to 1930. Over four-fifths of these were Negroes, less than one-sixth of whom were accused of rape. Practically all of the lynchers were native whites. The fact that a number of the victims were tortured, mutilated, dragged, or burned suggests the presence of sadistic tendencies among the lynchers. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers, only 49 were indicted and only 4 have been sentenced."

Mississipi Democratic (Southern Style) Representative James Eastland said in his speech in the United States Senate (27th May, 1954):

"Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination. Segregation is not a badge of racial inferiority, and that it is not is recognized by both races in the Southern States. In fact, segregation is desired and supported by the vast majority of the members of both races in the South, who dwell side by side under harmonious conditions.

Let me make this clear, Mr. President: There is no racial hatred in the South. The Negro race is not an oppressed race."

***

James Cameron (1914) is the only survivor known of an attempted lynching: he escaped, rope around his neck, of a mob-and-Klan lynch in Marion, Indiana, in 1930, when he was 16. He has since then found the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee and relentessly spread his story, that of state-sponsored terrorism of Americans against Americans.

For most present-day Americans, this awful, shameful past does not count, probably does not even exist, forgotten or never told. My explorations in the history of my new country horrify and shame me. As much as I love America, our murderous, barbaric past represents a struggle to live with, a profound calamity that makes the being an American a mentally complicated task.

Germany has made of its life after 1945 a continous, painful and tortuous process of never-ending pardon, reflection and guilt over the Nazi era. Nothing seems exempt in Germany of being analyzed in the context of a post-Holocaust country, and the society appears to live in constant struggle with such a burdensome, shameful past. America has done none of that and only now seems to timidly present (in form of books and films, never officially) some of the harrowing events that shaped our criminal history.

The Black Holocaust has not yet achieved the deserved status of a state-sponsored race murder mourned and observed nation-wide; it's time for scholars, historians and politicians to start acting German-style, and beyond the Civil Rights' monuments: live with the pain, remember the shame, ask for forgiveness, repair the victims, institutionalize the nation's regrets for our savage actions against fellow Americans in the past.

Slavery, riots, lynchings, torture, assassination, hate, massacre of innocents: against silence and oblivion, history and truth must be spoken out and remembered in the present, and the future to come. For I love America.

Caravaggio, Beuys, Nauman: London Calling (I)

2005-04-15T16:13:00.000-04:00

London is a killingly boring, sad city overcastted with depressed people in funny accents that seems awfully provincial coming from New York, but their art museums are choke-full of high-class art exhibitions. On a recent weekend there, my wife and I sank into major shows of the art of Caravaggio (National Gallery), Joseph Beuys (Tate Modern) and Bruce Nauman (same venue).

I had long for catching “Caravaggio: The Final Years” ever since I felt under the spell of a powerful chronicle of the artist’s last dark struggles written for the New York Times by Keith Christiansen, Curator of European Paintings at the Met and part of the curatorial team behind this much-touted exhibition. The show initiated in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy, as “Caravaggio. L’ultimo tempo. 1606-1610”; Mr. Christiansen had gone back to New York in awe and shock for what he had prepared and seen there. His and Caravaggio’s emotions were energetically transmitted into words to spread and read. I enjoyed and felt the Times article as much as I lamented and sobbed my loss of the exhibition, which was originally intended to travel to the Met but had to be withdrawn. Then it all went to sleep for a while, until a friend advised me, “going to London? Don’t miss Caravaggio!”. I did not, thanks to him. But the fuss failed to live up to the (high, very high) expectations.

Caravaggio’s last, obscure and extraordinary years saw him wander, physically and intellectually, between Naples, Sicily (Palermo, Siracusa, Messina) and Malta, and back to Rome, which he never reached. Merisi left some astonishing examples of his somber, strongly human art in Sicily, now sheltered in museums in Siracusa and Messina I was unable to visit in my stay in the island. This exhibition would have been an opportunity to see the much missed Sicily masterpieces, but –despite presenting two of the three surviving paintings, the two kept in Messina- the Siracusa painting (the magnificent “Bury of Saint Lucy”) was absent from the London display, and those two in exhibition, hailed as masterpieces, were too much varnished, darkened and unreadable as to impress. Similarly, the huge altarpiece from the Co-Cathedral of Saint John in Valletta, Malta ("The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist"), never travels, and the other Malta painting presented in Naples (“Saint Jerome Writing”) didn’t make it to London. The superb “Seven Works of Mercy” conserved at the Church of the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Napoles did not travel to London, either. The grand “Nativity” from the Oratorio de San Lorenzo in Palermo, one of his most astonishing masterpieces, was robbed for by the Mafia in 1969 and has never reappeared.

What we had left in London, thus, were easily accessible paintings from London itself, the Met, Cleveland, Madrid, Rome or Florence (many of them I had seen), badly lightened and assaulted by excited crowds of elders armed with audio guides. The space was tiny and narrow and the masses were overwhelming, thanks to the greediness of the National Gallery; the masterpieces, missing. Caravaggio’s brutal humanity and straightforwardness was there, but almost buried despite its amazing strength. All I can recall back in New York is not awe or astonishment, but the disappointment and anger of such a messy loss. Feelings, otherwise, Caravaggio would have readily taken as definers of his extraordinarily difficult life.

A New Conception of "Art": The Art World Buys, Parties and Socializes (I)

2005-03-30T14:31:00.000-05:00

Or is it not so new?

The alarms are sounding in the art world of the new millennium; didn’t it happen before? In the late 80’s right before everything crashed? Is the current situation of the art world-market an exception, or just a pattern on the cycle of explosion-destruction-renovation? Still too early to know, I’m gathering here some of those “symptoms” of what I see is going on.

We’re in what is commonly named a “bubble” in the art market. High optimism, large sales, new and wealthy collectors, auction records broken every other month. After the depression and weirdness of the 90’s (when a Gerhard Richter abstraction was offered at $50,000, Andreas Gurskys and Cindy Sherman’s at 25,000, and Jeff Koons’s vacuum cleaners had an estimate of 150,000) and the momentary confusion of 9-11, the market has risen big and brutal (and ruthless, too).

Word has it (the Times already spread the secret) that most or at least some of the explosion in prices at auction houses is driven by this new generation of Wall Street hedge fund managers that may not know a lot about art (even less contemporary art), but they surely have the money and the desire to enhance their status and their lofts with those things their advisers say look cool on them.

That is but one of the objections observers and insiders alike pose: this certain new generation of Wall Street young fast billionaires is buying for status and not for pleasure. One artist complained to Artforum’s Rhonda Lieberman, “it used to be a system of patronage”, “it used to be about the artist. Now it’s about them”. The collectors, the buyers, the dealers- they are what matters now.

Certainly and definitely, the utopian happy years of art-for-art’s-sake patronage of the late 60’s are gone. Except for an institution like Dia Foundation, there seems not to exist anymore a Virginia Dwan dealing in (and losing lots of money with) earthworks just for fun, or a Robert Scull commissioning Michael Heizer to dig holes in the Nevada desert just to be a patron of a young struggling artist.

Hence, too, (perhaps) the explanation of the lack of funds for projects like James Turrell’s Roden Crater or Michael Heizer’s City, but the massive trade of billions in art on any major night at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. Collectors like to collect and possess and show off, not funding a volcano in Arizona (the Riggios aside, I salute them). But, then again, this is not the 60’s (and the 60’s too ended abruptly with a huge profitable sale, the Sculls 1973).

Money talks, now and ever.

So there we have this art world more market-driven than ever, excessively and obsessively market-driven, many would say. There seems to be not a message like in those forgotten years of generous patronage (“changing the world with art”, or some grandiose postulate alike). Partying and socializing is now the goal (only after buying and trading).

Yesteryear we would discuss artists, their art and exhibitions. Nowadays, the tribe is most likely to pronounce “art fair” first, “auction” then, and “party at a young (of age and/or spirit) collector’s loft” to top the day.

There is an obsession with youth in the art world, and all things young are rapidly marketed and mainstreamed via supposedly-cool-but-boring-and-corporate fairs (The Armory Show, Scope), surveys in corporate museums (Greater New York at PS1), galleries (Chelsea, for Williamsburg seems not to be enough anymore), avid collectors and parties at Chelsea clubs and Tribeca lofts.

Once upon a time, a young artist had to struggle and wrestle with one too many factors to become an artist and making a living off of it. Now, they all get out of the school of art and design and are happily absorbed by galleries and dealers. Michael Kimmelman’s inflamed review of Greater New York in The New York Times makes it clear on the title: “Youth and the Market: Love at First Sight”. He did not like the show, which looked for him rather predictable and prepared for the market. He points out how the so-called “young art” (a darkly eugenic concept for art) seems crafty and hand-made. It is what I called here “the scissors and glue” syndrome. Young new art looks cheap and childish, amateurish and unprofessional; if this is what they teach in Yale, I’m amazed, but the art market loves it.

"A show that, like the burbling young art world now, seems gladly co-opted and almost too able to please". "I don't grasp why there's so much buzz about some of what's here". Neither do I, Mr. Kimmelman, I’d rather be in Garden Valley visiting Mike Heizer.

Writing on the Daniel Buren exhibition at the Guggenheim New York, Linda Yablonsky said on the Times: “It is hard to imagine the kind of argument that Mr. Buren set off then taking place today, in a market-driven art world characterized not so much by impassioned manifestos as exclusive dinners with collectors”.

Daniel Buren observes: “Today everything is nice, everything is accepted". "And nothing makes any sense".

And I say, not everything. The “no rules” and “free for all, everybody's an artist” traditionally associated with postmodernism and contemporary art has been and is a fallacy. There has always existed a canon, whether artistic or commercial; curators, directors, dealers, collectors establish --with their tastes, directions and acquisitions-- what is and what is not. It’s an almost embarrassing obviousness to remark.

Right now, It ought to be young, handcrafted and marketable, or big-star-name and expensive to be taken in consideration. While certainly the whole thing seems to make no sense, definitely not everything is either nice or accepted.

A New Conception of "Art" (II)

2005-03-30T14:29:00.000-05:00

The Basquiat exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the East Village U.S.A. survey at the New Museum of Contemporary Art have prompted some to review what from the 80’s has survived, in spirit and work. The results are surprising: despite the bigger-than-the-Everest consume of cocaine or the famous Wall Street frenzy of wild market, a protagonist of those boom years like Eric Fischl says in Time Magazine: "What's going on now in the art world makes the '80s seem positively spiritual".

The lack of values other than financial in the present bubbled-and-partying art market infuriates many observers and worries professionals inside it alike. The shocking auction record achieved by a Marlene Dumas painting in London this last February has made not critics but auctioneers to stand up and say “enough is enough”. The evolution of Dumas’s prices is a pitiless example of the current patterns: in 2002, the record for a painting of her was $50,000; in June 2003, a piece soared to 307,663; May 2004 saw a $993,600 number; November 2004 broke the million-dollar-frontier with $1.24. Last month, a Marlene Dumas artwork fetched $3.34, and (almost) the whole world was stunned and scared, at a point where I’m expecting the first “oh my god what have we done” laments. It looks like the calm before the storm- if it comes, it will probably be bad and ugly.

Michael McGinnis, Phillip's director of contemporary art: "I think there should be a very conscious effort on the part of auction houses not to price her paintings above the million-dollar mark". "It's a scary thing".

Carol Vogel of the Times: "The contemporary art market is so pumped up right now that even auction house experts are occasionally amazes, as when an artist suddenly fetches a dizzying price, without any obvious reason".

One lesson that interests me of this auction-created monstrosity is how a single bidder can create a wave in the art market that moves much more than the sole piece he longs. On the bidding madness war, and with a little help from the auction house estimates and marketing, a work may go beyond any expectations up until bringing absurd prices. This destabilizes not only the artist and his or her market but the expectations and possibilities of other potential buyers and the general situation of the market as well. All forced to rethink, reframe and refocus their strategy and direction (and the artist trying to concentrate on the canvas while thinking “millions, millions I made”). The power of one is dangerously almighty.

The $100 million Picasso last year, this Dumas record, world biggest art collector Sheikh Saud Al-Thani of Qatar’s arrest (and the subsequent preoccupation of the auction houses) or the famously infamous Charles Saatchi are but widely known examples of this pattern. Saatchi, you know who he works: buying a lot with top dollar, typically in bulk, benefiting an artist or group of artists; but also harming when dumping en masse at the auction house and plummeting the prices for excessive product.

The artist is who gets affected by these financial movements. Despite they don't get a penny from those way too high prices or even from the resale of their work by dealers, the whole art world watches them, ready to criticize, like if they had a conspiracy plan to be rich. Reality is, artists overwhelmingly abhor this kind of publicity laid upon them (remember Jasper Johns in the 70’s and 80’s, Bruce Nauman in the 90’s) by greedy-but-spendthrift buyers and dealers and auction houses or market.

Nevertheless, this schizophrenic ride the art market is has a bit of everything: high prices sure, but critiques and complaints for low prices, too. Laurence Miller, photograph dealer, recently sold a Walker Evans for $195,000 and said: “The picture sold too fast". "It must have been priced too low". At the same time, Janet Borden, another photo dealer, raised the prices of the Tina Barneys she sells to $15,000 because, “at $12,000, they were selling too fast". "If they're all sold out too quickly, then they are undervalued".

That “fast selling means undervalue” equation is a rather simplistic one coming from a dealer. The sale of the Lambert Photo Collection last Fall at Philip's New York was fast and furious, but with a Cindy Sherman's at $478,400 and a Barbara Kruger estimated at $80,000-$120,000 knocked at $601,600 hardly can we say "undervalue"; on the contrary, fast and ridiculously expensive.

But I guess the art market diverts in having recklessly wasteful buyers and cheap dealers, whose minds narrowly and exclusively conceive either absurdly high prices or too low prices. Fair tags don’t exist and never and nothing is enough. After all, it’s time to party and socialize while it lasts, not to meditate upon the justness of the market.

We’re just bubbling.

The Woody Allen School of Real Estate and Other Sad Stories

2005-03-28T17:11:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, I happened to live in Madrid (Spain) and be a dedicated fan of all things Woody Allen. 5000 miles from New York, everything Woody presented as genuinely Manhattanite, I took it, proudly. After all, I hadn’t visited the city yet, and everybody seemed to agree that Woody Allen was the storyteller of New York as original as it can be. New Yorkers were like that.

Now I live in Manhattan, New York. Woody Allen’s films look totally and shockingly different from here. I saw first Annie Hall and Manhattan, and they passed the test. They are not as magic as they were seen in Spain, for Manhattan is mine, here now, but they are great films nevertheless. Great human and urban stories of the city of our dreams.

Then came Melinda & Melinda, his latest release and my 30th Woody Allen movie (that is devotion). It opened first in Europe, last year, and only now, spring 2005, in America. My friends in Madrid were shocked to know it took so long to have the movie here, and only in one single theater in Manhattan. I mean, this island was supposed to be Allen’s refuge out of Europe. We do not expect Woody’s features to open in multiplexes along Nebraska and South Dakota, but New York! Manhattan! I guess nobody cares anymore about Woody Allen in America, not even in Manhattan, New York City?

I can understand why that would happen. It’s called “Woody’s world”. A very peculiar, ludicrously unrealistic, out-of-any-real-touch bubble that happens only in Woody Allen and friend’s existences. You, reader in Europe, think this that you saw in Melinda & Melinda was about New York. Oh were you wrong!

As a New Yorker, I thoroughly enjoy and live everyday this amazing city composed of five boroughs. New York is noise, crowds, skyscrapers, pollution, clogged roads, harsh snowstorms, torrid asphalt-melting summers, smells (nice and awful), different languages, many skin colors, annoying tourists, immigrants, a subway falling to pieces, garbage on the sidewalks. Art everywhere.

New York is an outdoor city to be walked and experienced. New York is a super expensive city where high-salary Wall Street professionals live in average-to-small apartments or migrate to the suburbs of New Jersey. New York is an ever-boiling melting pot, the crossroads of the world where everything happens and everything can be found. New York is awe-inspiring and weird, approachable and untreatable, beautiful and brutal. New York City is a bigger-than-big megalopolis whose nuances and details cannot be grasped in a whole life.

And then there’s the New York Woody Allen presents. Which is NOT New York, but the Upper East Side. And not even the Upper East Side but certain carefully selected tree-lined, neatly clean streets with rows of perfectly immaculate townhouses suffused with the most beautiful light. Woody Allen lives in that elitist, closed community of rich people, heirs and socialites that is the Upper East Side, where he had a 22-room Georgian townhouse in 92nd and Park bought for $17.7 in 1999 and sold in 2004 for $25 million, establishing a record for the Carnegie Hill neighborhood (he is wealthier for his real estate movements than for the revenue of his movies).

Woody Allen lives in the UES, and never leaves. The Upper is his haven and his prison. He has lived New York from the crime-porn-crack years to the present day of booming prices, tourists all over and brightness on the city. But he has not reflected these changes- on the contrary, while the people in his films have more or less remained the same (struggling actors, directors, writers), their houses seem to have grown disproportionally bigger until become a ridiculous anachronism.

More and more, he has been losing touch with the city he loves and the people inhabiting Manhattan Island. He has locked himself and his tribe in increasingly narrower places that read as refuges from the reality of present New York. Sheltered luxury caves where they live their odd, bizarre lives far from the flow of New York.

In Woody Allen’s dreamy world, Manhattanites declaim like Shakespeare characters whether in social parties or buying the newspaper. Woody’s world has people, young and old, whose favorite Saturday-night pastime is going to a studio to watch a trio of Koreans record a Bartok piece. A tribe that throws parties to match single friends in $5-million lofts and apartments despite being struggling actors, unemployed art historians, fresh filmmakers with no film to make. A.O. Scott, the New York Times film critic, calls Woody Allen a “Real Estate Pornographer”. The characters of Melinda & Melinda talk about being penniless while walking through endless aisles, ample living rooms, halls and magnificent bedrooms.

The New York Woody Allen imagines is not the New York a New Yorker lives everyday, as I’ve said. In fact, there is no trace of New York in Melinda & Melinda. The crowds, the noises, the races, the colors, the traffic, the mass transit? None of that. Woody’s world goes from the interior of swanky lofts to the interior of wealthy apartments, taxi ride and a visit to The Hamptons in between. The most city we see is a brief stroll of two of the characters walking around Madison and 77th, passing by the Carlyle where Woody plays the clarinet every Monday night at an $80 cover charge for excited tourists.

The aristocrat, elitist, racist, old-fashioned or plain non-existent fenced world Woody gives on film is a ludicrous fantasy of outrageous unrealism. There is no real life anymore- not only the places but the people are a product of his imagination. Young professionals in their 20’s and 30’s talk, live and behave like the 60-something denizens Woody knows. The first black character he introduces ever is a white in the body and voice of a black man.

Where once his personages appeared as appealing examples of intellectualism, high culture and the struggles of life and human relations, now are mummies stuck in their boring hobbies and habits of an era long gone. Woody’s white rich liberals are rejectable snobbies, unmoral hypocrites- extramarital relations are cheerfully accepted. Couples and friends lie on an every-hour basis, and it’s right. Their selfish, self-centered dysfunctional lives with their neurosis and psychiatric stupidities do not attract anymore but annoy and bother.

In 21st century New York, who cares anymore about the personages of this ghetto populated by “urban rednecks”, like one critic labels the people in Melinda & Melinda?

The film critic for the Washington Post says: “After some 40 years of watching Woody Allen films, starting with 1965's "What's New Pussycat?", it's finally time for me to acknowledge the sobering truth: I don't like his people anymore. The characters, I mean. Those inhabitants of New York. Not real New Yorkers, mind you, but his New Yorkers.”

That the mixture of comedy and drama Woody Allen has tried in Melinda & Melinda does not work (the drama is not dramatic, the comedy is not funny) and the whole movie is tremendously boring and unappealing probably does not matter. The people and places of Woody’s world are so exorbitantly and offensively out of any reality that is difficult to get passed that.

If all those white rich people in matching parties, Bartok sessions and failed humanity would at last and least laugh about themselves, the comedy would work. But these irritant idiots take themselves so grossly serious that you have to laugh at their arrogant stupidity to avoid jumping on the screen and rip them off yelling “I love New York”.

The "Killing" Architecture of Philip Johnson

2005-03-28T13:44:00.000-05:00

Philip Johnson died, and as with Agnes Martin, it was a shock for me- once they go beyond their 90´s, I somehow expect them to live a lot more. She was on my visit list, he was part of my Christmas card mailing. Both were gone before I acted. I had admired Philip Johnson for years, ever since a strong interest in architecture grew on me. The Sony Building in New York was and is one of my favorite creations of the twentieth century. His boldness and vision, his adaptability to the times, commissions and corporate years drew me to him. His being harshly criticized for all that, for being Philip Johnson, was yet another factor of my delight towards his peculiar architecture and persona.

And then he died, and I was already living in New York, and the extensive coverage the press gave him (too extensive sometimes) was revelatory for me. Not only I learned he had been a Nazi-supporter in the 30´s, after leaving the MoMA, even tripping to Germany to support the Hitler "cause", but -particularly lurid for my somehow spotless vision of Philip Johnson- he was gay. And he had been living for many, many years with David Whitney, curator of -among others- exhibitions of Michael Heizer. Everything is connected.

There was even an op-ed in The New York Times written by the art critic of New York Magazine in which he more or less disdained the whole architectural and personal career of Philip Johnson for his Nazi years. Outrageous. But the shock and the carnage of him and his art slowly faded. A brief feature in the Times reminds us of the problems of his architecture (not only of ethical or artistic matter). This is about safety. The author lists a number of buildings that are in danger of being demolished or badly restored, thus harming Johnson´s original concept.

The New York State Pavilion he constructed for the 1964 World Fair in Queens is one of them. A gorgeous ruin, Philip Johnson chose it for the cover of his 2002 monograph. Many have been attracted to the circles and tall towers of the building and its whole decay and abandonment, menacing and impressive. Johnson wrote for the foreword of the aforementioned volume, "The New York State Pavilion at the 1964-65 World's Fair is now a ruin. In a way, the ruin is even more haunting than the original structure. There ought to be a university course in the pleasure of ruins". In consonance with Camilo José Vergara's vision of Detroit as an American acropolis, it would be truly rewarding to have a ruin kept in New York City, where everything seems to be rebuilt and revitalized.

Also, this is the building that in 1964 housed the art of all those then-unknown Pop artists (Rauschenberg, Indiana, Chamberlain), including Andy Warhol's infamous billboard depicting the Thirteen Most Wanted Men by the FBI at the time, a mural that was officially censored for avoiding hurting the Italians (most of the most wanted men where Italians) and was covered with silver paint.

Today, despite all these illustrious moments, the Times says the building may be demolished for its unsafety (and I have to visit before that calamity happens).

The other architectural example of Philip Johnson's inventiveness currently in danger of being irremediably transformed is the Water Gardens in Fort Worth, Texas. The story around these set of urban pools, cascades, fountains and swirling water is worth telling. It was designed and built in 1974 at the cost of $6 million and donated to the City of Fort Worth by the Amon Carter Foundation, which has a museum of American art also designed by Philip Johnson. Soon the Water Gardens were one of the most popular attractions of downtown Fort Worth, an oasis of water and freshness amid the city's hotter-than-hot temperature.

Along the years, safety was a concern, and Johnson himself cited "the element of danger" he had poured into the Water Gardens. "He felt the thrill of what he called "pseudo-danger" increased the visitors' appreciation of the park", according to Franz Schulze, Johnson's biographer. The New York Times called it in 1975 "useless and absolutely splendid". But the Gardens were never designed to swim or be walked; the water is just to be looked at. And despite signs warning the people "No wading or swimming", the word was commonly ignored. The potential danger was always an issue, and for years the City of Fort Worth paid thousands of dollars to visitors injured in falls.

"4 visitors drown at Water Gardens- Girl falls in; 3 others die attempting to save her". In June 2004, "a Chicago father, two of his children and a third child drowned in a swirling pool at the Fort Worth Water Gardens despite frantic efforts by bystanders and emergency workers to save them" read the Star-Telegram of Texas. One of the children slipped, and that started a chain reaction of falls and death.

Now, the water plaza, one of Philip Johnson's masterpieces, will take a $14 million renovation that will, the Times says, "decrease the depth of one of Johnson's pools and add railings and concrete walls. They are also planning to add a memorial to the victims."

This is a very American thing to happen. In Texas. And to Philip Johnson. Ruins in Queens, death and stupidity in Texas. What did he ever think of this absolutely bizarre and sad story?

Scissors and Glue: What I Saw in the Art Fairs of New York

2005-03-22T15:19:00.000-05:00

There have been some important art fairs in New York in this last month: first it was The Art Show; then came Scope Art Fair and The Armory Show, together, plus a certain video fair that went rather unnoticed.

Going to fairs is interesting, but not fun. It tires, overwhelms, and many times irritates. Even though some of them are a good place to watch beautiful people and others are a great spot to catch first-class art, they are invariably boring and predictable. I see them more as an obligation to check the state of the art (market).

What I saw first in fairs was The Art Show, mounted at the Seventh Regiment Armory, Park and 67th, in a snowy freezy late February weekend of this snowy freezy winter we have had in New York. I went on a Monday afternoon, so the whole place was calm and quiet, like if all the sales would have been done in the opening night and a probably intense weekend (despite the snow storms).

The Art Show is an Upper East Side-driven fair. It is that fair where the opening night and all ticket admissions go to charity. That fair where, paying a $1000 ticket, you will dance among Park Avenue mummies, plastic-beyond-belief faces and stratospherically-rich-and-generous collectors plus the most revered museum directors and curators.

The Art Show, organized by the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America), hosts only the very best of the best among the superbly excellent. Forget Chelsea galleries, young artists, Tribeca lofts and rock stars. This is all about Madison Avenue dealers (except for Larry Gagosian, who I’m still to find in any fair in New York), townhouse galleries, suits and ties, fur, surgery, bigger-than-anything names and labels that say “3,500,000 million dollars”. It is the museum-style fair that I normally enjoy, for - nothwithstanding my interest in cutting edge art and young artists-, nothing compares to a Willem de Kooning here, a Picasso there, Diane Arbus on the corner, Klimt in between… or “better the great known than the to-be-known”. Is that a symbol of conservatism on me, fear of the unknown? I think it's just a taste for high art. The museum-quality fair has, nevertheless, the inconvenience of being boring and predictable. It’s all so good and perfect that you die for something incorrect. “The most prestigious art show in America”, The Art Show is called, and spotting old ladies with their mouths full of canapes feels like and adventure. That boring it is.

Highlights that I remember from my visit are, first of all, a couple of those wonderful late de Koonings, where the brush of the master seems to have floated magically, subtly over the canvas, spreading surfaces of pure color, lyricism and the simple joy of the art of painting. Totally opposite, a Maurizio Cattelan in Richard Gray was the sensation of the fair. Titled “Good Versus Evil”, it is a chess set that includes in the Good side figures like Mother Teresa and in the Evil side the likes of Hitler and Stalin. Amazingly crafted and painted, funny and historically responsible, it is a great table-size example of Cattelan’s humor without the grandeur and excessiveness of his roomed installations.

One of the most astonishingly powerful pieces of art presented at the fair was a small acrylic on paper by Mark Rothko in Greenberg Van Doren St. Louis. In vaporous and ethereal red tones, executed in the last years of the artist’s life, it had the remarkable capacity to move the soul of his oversize canvases (even with the $1.25 million label on the side).

C&M had a nice, surprising find- a big Ethel Scull black-and-dark multiple portrait by Andy Warhol, like the famous one she donated to the Whitney. Picassos, Lichtensteins, Warhols, were more or less all over the booths, as did photography: great prints of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Walker Evans or August Sander. I was shocked to see a Robert Frank 1972 print of “The Americans” priced at $125,000, but apparently it has become normal to see those tags attached to photography. Charles Sheeler's photographs of the cathedral of Chartres were a discovery for me, in which the arches and vaults took an almost menacing aspect due to the effects of light.

The stand of Galerie St. Etienne New York was outstanding as the gallery accustoms to be. There was a Klimt, and a number of Schieles, and a Modersohn-Becker, and tons of great German Expressionist prints priced as if you and I could have a Grosz right away.

After a non-exhaustive walk around the place, I left the fair with that same feeling you get at places like MoMA: oh it’s so great, so masterful. But so boring and perfectly tidy.

Then was the turn for Scope Art Fair, where I was actually participating in one of the booths, aiding a certain gallery from overseas. This is a fair I abhor and loathe- the concept of Scope, a fair in a hotel with the booths in rooms, is cheap, unfit for a correct display, unable to manage crowds, poorly looking (art in the bathroom!) and just well below the standards one expects from a professional fair. What many people label as “cool, young, alternative” I call “cheap, low-class, stupid; even denigrating for the gallery employee that has to close the whole booth to take a pee”. That is. The mission of Scope is, they say officially, “to demystify the buying process of contemporary art while challenging our static views of the art world”. Excellent proposal, but you need not to diminish the quality of an art fair and make it look poor, unprofessional and rather pathetic to “demystify” the art market. I would remember that boring and good is better than deceptively challenging and cheap.

Narrow aisles and big-but-small rooms plus few elevators made the hotel hosting Scope New York 2005 overcrowded, messy and unmanageable. There is a certain uncomfortable feeling of getting one’s privacy violated when people walk into the rooms. A booth on a warehouse is meant to be opened and public, a hotel room is private and feels private. And then the art; mostly young art lacking quality and looking childish, like if it were a big scissors-and-glue fun class in school. Although there are not yet results of sales, what I got there was a feeling of few sales and many visitors. Young, generally bad-looking rich indie-punkies and many foreigners flocked to the hotel, but probably only a very few actually spent bucks.

I was at first doubtful about the gallery I worked with in the fair- while most of the art presented by other galleries looked young and cutting edge, using video, installation, photography, we had a stand full of paintings that made me thought sort of “we’re out of place, we’re old-fashioned”. But in the end, good classy art demonstrated its power and appeal- people not only came en masse but bought, and those who didn’t shake the wallet praised profusely the quality of our paintings and artists while taking cards and papers. It was literally a “Triumph of Painting”, Saatchi style. You better have good-but-old-looking art than young-but-childish-and-empty pseudo-art. And I say “old-looking” being the artists we had as young as those using scissors, glue and poop to create their supposedly innovative but cheap creations of contemporary inanity.

The Armory Show coincided with Scope, totally not by chance. It was a monumental disappointment that I was not expecting, at all. I thought I was going to The Art Show, Tribeca version: big names and galleries, high art, but a younger, fresher look. But oh was I wrong! The Armory resulted to be not an Art Show cool version but a Scope in huge! Two entire piers by the Hudson near my home (that was good) filled with junk, crap and garage art. Bad Art! The same I saw in Scope, the scissors-glue-and-poop young vacuity, but magnified and corporatized. Whereas in The Art Show I went inside most of the booths, looking at the pictures and prices, browsing, enjoying, in The Armory Disaster I crossed fast the aisles looking left and right but not stopping. It looked bad, cheap, awful, uninteresting, unappealing, low-class. I felt bothered by that big wasteful concentration of amateurish and childish art.

The very few pieces that made me stopped and look, even making my heart beat like it happens with great art, were two photographs by Todd Eberle in the stand of Kenny Schachter Rove London. One was titled "The Art World (Jeff Koons' 50th Birthday)", 2004. Jeff Koons’ birthday is widely considered the biggest and grandest event the art world has seen in New York probably in decades, and the multi-faced photo of Todd Eberle offers a glimpse into many of the classic presences of the art sect, a veritable who-is-who that I observed with interest, distant envy and disregard. Yes, it is all so fake, collectors and dealers and curators and critics and socialites hugging each other while thinking “I’d kill you, loser” (but isn’t that just life, period?). The other photo-work by Todd Eberle (Agnes Martin, 2004) was a big, clean portrait of the late artist wherein she looks at the viewer with affection, fear and fragility. The immense power her eyes exude despite that sense of weakness is contradictorily fearful and astonishing. I felt like if she were actually there, staring at my eyes, silent. Agnes Martin was an artist I enormously admired and respected; I wanted to visit and get to know her, thus her death came untamed to me, despite her 92 years of age, leaving me saddened and mournful.

(Back to the commerciality of the fair) there was a lot of photo art, and Stephen Shore’s depictions in that medium of the American suburbs of the 70’s got my attention, not in vain I am passionate about urban planning and the way America lives, socially and geographically. A German gallery was devoted exclusively to photography, with gorgeous prints of August Sander, an übermeister still affordable in comparison to the young German artists of the medium (there were a lot of brutally pornographic pictures by Thomas Ruff in the fair, of which I wonder how easy they sell)

A photo of a Nevada mountain gap in some booth I don’t remember the name totally caught me, due to my love for the desert and the great raw beauty of the Silver State's landscapes of sublime nothingness. Also, a Jasper Johns rare and colorful painting of 1987 I’d never seen took me to the Haunch of Venison booth. And it was good to meet Jeffrey Kastner, author of my adored “Land and Environmental Art”, though I just said “thank you, thank you for a great book” and left, not wanting to have any conversation and/or presentation.

Last but not least, I have to say the best of the fair was the people watching- beautiful young girls, no plastic surgery, and people looking at me in that way, like my wife says, of “that’s got to be somebody I want to know”. Well of course I am.

Seeing and be seen + beautiful girls did not, anyhow, help to raise my impression of The Armory Show. If this, and Scope, is what we have as “art” and “cool” and “fashionable” now… I’d rather take a late de Kooning in the Park Avenue Armory surrounded by scary mummies.

Bad Art, Redefined: Damien Hirst in a Trailer Park

2005-03-18T15:19:00.000-05:00

Damien Hirst's first show in New York since 2000 has opened at Gagosian Chelsea. As predicted, the lines for getting into the opening were huge. He celebrated at Lever House (where a grand sculpture by him has been installed) with people from the art world. He is happy. Larry is happy. We are not happy.

The circa 30 paintings presented all around the cavernous galleries of Gagosian's domains are photo realist translations into canvas of photos depicting those things Damien Hirst likes: pills, medicines, death, brains, drugs. This new work marks a radical getaway (or just a pause?) from his previous stuff, whether the cow sculptures, the cabinets or the dots and butterflies paintings.

All that masterful, powerful art that divided the world between Hirst-lovers and Hirst-haters is gone, and now we face cheap, ugly realism sheared of any meaning or enjoyment that will most likely gather the whole world in the Hirst-haters side.

“The Elusive Truth”, the name of Hirst’s show, is Bad Art recalling the infamous Black Velvet Paintings, those tasteless images of fluorescent Elvis, pin-ups, tigers in the jungle and flashy Virgins that defined Kitsch in the 60's and 70's. A total disgrace.

The titles have lost all grandiosity and/or pretentiousness of Damien Hirst's effords in the past (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, his infamous shark; Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings, the title of his last show in Gagosian, 2000). His metaphysical baroque prose is gone, welcome "Credit Card Fraud", "The Devastating Impact of Crack Cocaine", "Addicted to Crack, Abandoned by Society", "Football Violence", "Suicide Bomber" and other silly, risible titles.

If this were the work and words of a chicano painter from Tijuana shown in the curb of a border highway, it would be meritorious. But trying to deliver this at Gagosian Chelsea as "Art" it's pulling the leg of any serious viewer.

The “Credit Card Fraud”, a big painting full of credit cards with one hand sliding a card, is so pointless and empty that hurts and bothers. The “Suicide Bomber” is not only awful and disgraceful, but a senseless exploitation of the Baghdad tragedy for what?. “Football Violence” is silly, so very silly and garish. The Minerals and Gemstones leave me perplex. Why!? What in earth for!?

The two paintings of the crack addicts remind me of "the faces of meth", scary photos of physical transformation caused by the methamphetamine in white trailer trash in Oregon published on the internet. Now, if a Pacific Northwest painter starts making paintings of the meth destruction in America, would that be even considered? Exploit! Exploit!

The stupidest and brassiest, lousiest and tawdriest of all these wacky, ignoble creations that will embarrass the City of New York for more than a month are the two twin big paintings of skulls, heavy-metal-style. An 80’s fan of Judas Priest would have died for hanging these pieces in his-her room. They are so bad! So, so bad they’re even cute for making us smile.

Other gaudy examples of Damien Hirst’s free downfall into the realms of non-art include a monkey being tortured in a laboratory and an open bloody brain.

They all inspire disesteem and disrespect, the same he transmits in his paintings (I coincide with young critic David Shapiro in his saying, "Hirst's art is impersonal, lacking empathy, and variously amoral and immoral", even though he applies this to the work presented in Gagosian 2000). Hirst insists in his interest in death and suffering, but the metaphysic preoccupations that his work before this showed are now gone for pure mental emptiness and opaque, dead images. There is literally and artistically nothing in “The Elusive Truth”.

The only savable stuff from all this enormous mess is the pills and medicines paintings, if only for being Hirst signature and remembrance from the good past.

Waldemar Januszczak, an art critic for the British The Sunday Times, was invited by Damien Hirst to preview the “The Elusive Truth” series before it was shipped to America and sucked by collectors with no sense of taste but ample pockets and financial vision. This critic person paid back the favor of being selected to sneak into the studio, and wrote things like “Hogarth, Turner, Bacon would have risked it this way”, saying that it is “exciting stuff” and the paintings “work”. In which sense, may I ask?

Another thorny aspect of Hirst’s latest explosion is the authorship. Januszczak writes that “the team of the assistants do most of the bread-and-butter copying" and Hirst "patrols the results". "A dab here, a daub there". "They are not their paintings" (the assistants'), "they're his". "And to ensure this is clear, he swaps the assistants around from picture to picture so nobody is ever responsible for the whole thing".

The question of who makes what and who gets the name is difficult. Jeff Koons is a famous example of conceptual artist- he has the idea, his large studio makes it happen. Sol LeWitt has probably never executed himself a wall drawing, but that’s part of his game. Richard Serra does not found his million tons mammoth steel sculptures, but the models are his. Felix Gonzalez-Torres used piles of candy bought in some supplier. From 1964, Donald Judd never made his art himself again but had it manufactured by a commercial fabricator. And nobody yet complains about the authorship of the art of these giants of contemporary creation.

But ah, the painting. The noble art of painting. It’s not the same to make sculpture or conceptual art and painting. And definitely not the same if we talk photo realism, in which we assume and ask for a highly personal skill and capacity to recreate the aspect of real life. What if Richard Estes, Chuck Close or Ralph Goings would not have an actual brush in their famously photorealist canvas? Collectors and dealers and museums and viewers wouldn’t be happy.

But these are painters that may spend years in a single painting, while Damien Hirst’s assistants made 30 paintings in three years. And this is hardly new, though. Most of his art of the 90’s, the sharks and the pharmacies and the dot paintings, was handled by assistants. The Sunday Times said in December 1999, “If Hirst is notable for anything, it is for finally severing the link between the "artist" and the person who actually saws up the wildlife, colours in the dots, polishes the surgical instruments and so on (his assistants take care of all that). It is safe to say that he rarely gets his hands dirty”, in a statement very similar to those of Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, and conceptual art in general.

The paintings are the problem, and it will be. Nowadays, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have the idea and sign the canvas, but others do the actual work. When that happened with the Old Masters (Rubens, Raphael, Perugino, Velazquez), it made curators, conservators and collectors in the 20th century to carefully find out who made which part of the painting, how much of the work is the creation of the master and how much is workshop aide. A painting in which only the heads are original Rubens will be obviously dropped off consideration and price compared to one totally executed by the master himself.

The key seems to be why the authorship matters in Rubens but not in Hirst (or if it will matter for Hirst in the future to come), and why painting raises questions of originality conceptual art doesn't.

Also, Rubens needed a workshop and assistants because he had plenty of commissions and requests, and couldn’t deliver himself alone. In the case of Hirst, he has the idea of making a photo realist painting, but he does not know how. He lacks the ability, and that’s dangerous waters to navigate through.

But forget the authorship. The business! Oh Ah! The business! The “Elusive Truth” series on view at Gagosian Chelsea are priced between the 200,000 dollars (the smallest ones) up to 2,000,000 million dollars (the biggest canvases). The show opened on Friday night. On Thursday evening, everything was sold. Apartments in Park Avenue, mansions in Greenwich, Conn., summer palaces in The Hamptons. All will be soon filled with Crack Cocaine Addicts, Tortured Monkeys, Big Skulls, Credit Cards, Minerals and Suicide Bombers. That world from which the buyers of a Hirst painting are so outrageously disconnected will show up over their Ralph Lauren sofas. Or hide on storage awaiting profitable resale. If that’s the point of the Hirst show, it is well done. If it’s not it, there’s no point to these paintings.

Larry Gagosian will profit not only for the millions of Damien Hirst’s pieces, but also from turning his super swanky gallery in a cheap Wal-Mart offering a Hirst-signed poster for $250, unsigned for a mere 20 bucks. All sorts of catalogues and books ridiculously overpriced (the catalogue for the Hirst retrospective in Naples, Italy, sells for $90, with an original price of 32 euros/42 dollars). And the grandest retail offering- t-shirts with the skulls! Buy one if you cannot afford the painting! Show the world your love for ye olde heavy-metal fashion!

(Richard Serra has signed posters at Gagosian Chelsea for sale, $20 dollars; wonder what he thinks about his boss Larry and the $250-Hirst-posters business)

***

I recently read a destructive critic of the Damien Hirst retrospective in the Museo Nazionale Archeologico of Naples, Italy, penned by destructor critic Jonathan Jones in The Guardian of London. And I thought, “he’s whacking Hirst for being Hirst, for doing sharks and dot paintings”, on the same style he used for criticizing Julian Schnabel for being “baroque and grandiloquent”. You can’t attack the essence of an artist if you want to have a reasonable critic. Would you laugh at Michelangelo for painting ceilings? Write against El Greco for paintings expressionistic figures? Wordly destroying Damien Hirst seems to be a favorite hobby of the British press.

Now I find myself whacking Damien Hirst, for my own mourn and pity. I vividly remember the deep impression a canvas full of black butterflies that made it look like an Ad Reinhardt caused on me during a visit to the recent Guggenheim New York’s exhibition of minimal art. That was the work of a genius mind that I revere(d). Now, I face paintings that I see hanging in a meth lab inside a trailer parked in the wastelands of Indiana. Their proud owners shake their mullets and show their skulls t-shirts while talking about the 20 bucks they paid for the whole series in a trailer camp sale.

"When you brain's rotted away, you won't have any ideas" (Damien Hirst)

When the Bronx Was Burning, America Watched from Suburbia

2005-03-18T00:38:00.000-05:00

The place currently occupied by Detroit as the archetypical American ruin and urban failure was held in the 70's by the South Bronx. A mixture of many factors (poverty, discrimination, public abandonment, crime, poor urban planning, arson, greedy landlords, welfare concentration, failed housing projects, Robert Moses' highways, more arson) converted the once thriving neighborhood in a huge vacant lot full of rubish, waste, debris and the ruins of entire city blocks destroyed by fire. The Bronx was burning, and nobody did anything to stop it. "People got used to sleeping with their shoes on, so that they could escape if the building began to burn", writes Robert Worth in an article about "Guess who saved the South Bronx?".

It famously and infamously got turned into the example of urban decay in America, portrayed in movies and books and newspapers and in the collective mind. All around the world, the word "Bronx" still means "scary urban destruction", despite the renewal of the area. The stigma of the burning years will not be easily taken off the borough's name.

Like a sinister opening to the firing destructive decade to come, a study of three streets in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, published in 1969 in The New York Times, found that residents had only a one in 20 chance of dying of natural causes- most were murdered or died of drug overdoses (source: www.livingcities.org).

When President Jimmy Carter visited the South Bronx in 1977, strolling in despair through the destruction and ruins of Charlotte Street, the Times said that a visit to South Bronx was as "crucial to an understanding of American urban lie as a visit to Auschwitz is crucial to an understanding of Nazism".

Carter himself coined a famous definition: "The worst slum in America", only two years after the City of New York declared bankruptcy and the Daily News invented his classic headline of October 30 1975, "Ford to City: Drop Dead". New York was being abandoned by a nation living in the suburbs and governed by suburban minds. As Carter asked and answered himself during his tour through the urban battlefield, most of the destruction of South Bronx happened after Nixon cut off the urban renewal funds, in the harsh years of 72-77.

Photos of those blight times show a dead landscape similar to Berlin in 1945. In the wake of his visit in 1980, Ronald Reagan compared the ruins of the South Bronx to London in the Blitz. Awkwardly enough, the Bronx was the broadcasted, official slum of America for who knows what purpose; the fail of the dream and the place presidents chose to be seen, only to do nothing to fix it.

All this I found by browsing South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City, a book that tells the tale of a miracle. Charlotte Street went from the dead blight Blitz of a burned wasteland to the pretty tree-lined streets with ranch-like houses and life called "Charlotte Gardens". When in December 1997 Bill Clinton visited the South Bronx, there were no more comparisons with bombed Berlin or London but the story of a salvation taken by the citizens, the community, the city (even though the area is still poor, and crossed with Moses-highways, and industrial depots and bad air).

The case of the Bronx is part of a certain developing of urban centers in America after decades of decay. But we are far from a renaissance, like many say. The "socioeconomic destruction of low-income communities of color" might not happen anymore, but the results of the past are still here and there, ruins run in the cities. In New York, it is not anymore the Bronx, but it is still some areas of Harlem, and many in Brooklyn. Going east, in East New York and the Rockaways, the empty lots and urban falling are visible. The fascination for the American ruins mixes up with the thought of renewal and end of social inequity on a visit to these forgotten spots of decay.

Even in those cities where the physical ruins are low or non-existant, a different kind of disintegration ambushes- the racial and social segregation. Cities like Minneapolis, Denver or Dallas appear generally as examples of healthy and safe American living. But only for whites. An invisible net of low-paying jobs, lack of affordable housing and poverty affects the urban black and Latino population, while the economic rise of America focuses in those whites that never had problems to buy a house and a garage to shelter two cars + the SUV + the snowmobile. In New York City, the intense urban renewal has brought along a deepening income gap- the population growth in the 1990's was at the top and bottom of the income scale (source: www.livingcities.org)

A new kind of racism, more subtle and understated, that seems not to be contested. For many people, it probably is just "how things are", poor and rich.

The ruin is in the mind and the pocket, and that will be far more difficult to cure than a burned lot in South Bronx.

"Aquella tarde..." / "That evening..."

2005-03-17T17:17:00.000-05:00

Aquella tarde había quietud,
silencio en la ciudad.
Expectación entre los cuerpos que,
errantes, deambulan en masa solitaria.
Herida la memoria,
la noche acechaba con sus sombras,
habitando las últimas luces.
Paisaje
gozoso y enigmático
de una hora
extraña aún visible.
New York.

That evening there was calm,
silence in the city.
Expectation among the bodies that,
errant, wander in solitary mass.
Hurt the memory,
the night waylaid with its shadows,
inhabiting the last lights.
Landscape,
elated and enigmatic
of an odd
hour still visible.
New York.

Fragments of the City

2005-03-17T16:34:00.000-05:00

He complained about the quality of cocaine to a drug dealer on a street corner at 2:30 am. The seller shot him.

* * *

Three pieces of ugly ghetto trash stay on the way down the escalator to the subway tracks. A woman tries to walk pass them, they laugh while one blocks the way. I push the trash to the right and wish it would fall down and disappear. Forever.

A group of black and Hispanic ghetto youngsters get out of an apartment complex. One of him holds a baseball bat that hides in his underwear. A cop car passes by, stops. It’s afternoon in the city.

A black young woman is sitting on the sidewalk of a deserted street, afternoon. She screams and moves frantically, dances, shakes the head voodoo-style. A firefighter’s truck stops, four firemen get out and look at her, chatting between them and laughing. An ambulance pulls over, a paramedic talks to the woman. All of them leave, the woman dances and smiles. Then walks away. The street gets dead again.

Walter de Maria: Experiencing the Unknown

2005-03-11T00:41:00.000-05:00

The Broken Kilometer is a hidden, widely unknown treasure of sublime spirituality in the heart of Manhattan. Less famous than The New York Earth Room, the experience it grants is far more intense and shocking.

Both are sculptures by Walter de Maria maintained by Dia Foundation and open to the public since 25 years ago. They were born with me. They are in me.

The awe-inspiring sensation of The Broken Kilometer is reinforced by the impacting contrast it offers with SoHo, that sad and degrading theme park of senseless consumerism, upscale boutiques, street vendors; posies, poshies, fakies; noise, crowds, tourists. No trace of the art scene that changed the world in the 70’s and 80’s.

Then I go inside the loft that shelters The Broken Kilometer. I cross a corridor, and another corridor. Silence, white spaces, columns. And the floor covered by polished metal rods, almost blinding in their intense fulgency. Extending like a menacing presence over the whole surface, they powerfully overwhelm the soul and the mind, the senses. You cannot proceed, go on, walk through the poles; touch them or feel them. You feel their brutal presence that disarms you and bares your soul, but you are disabled to respond. Again like in The New York Earth Room, but more subtly, a barrier shuts down the action, putting despair upon the already conflicted feelings of the viewer.

Another world, a mysterious place. A sanctuary; mystic retirement where the golden of the blazing brass illuminates the room like gold and glitter, in an embracement of awkward pureness and painful silence. Creating a unique environment estranged from any urban perception.

I let myself lose into the magic and irresistible attraction of such an alien creation, a place where 500 rods of impossible mathematical perfection lay scattered all over the floor to human amazement and awe.

And I get out to the street, 393 West Broadway. I get disturbingly woken up from the daydream, and SoHo- with all its commercial rottenness and flocks of tourists, reminds I am in New York City, not in another planet or an arid mesa of the desert in the American West.

"Apprentice of Nothing": The True Story

2005-03-06T21:18:00.000-05:00

This is the sad but funny story of how an insult develops into an almost a phenomenon. And nobody gives credit. Literally. "Anonymous"? Please read on.

Greg Allen is an individual related to the Arts based in New York City. He has a blog where he posts a bit about nothing. He is more interesting for his occasional articles in The New York Times, like the excellent feature he devoted to Dan Flavin and the conservation of his lights. He is also interesting for being a well-connected person, arrogant, vain, self-centered and just a "me me me my deeds my influence and my celebrity acquaintances" type of those the New York art world and its environments has. If you are not one of those types, he will not talk to you. That over-the-top silliness makes Greg Allen interesting.

One day, and another day and yet one more day he kept posting about The Gates project, Christo and Jeanne-Claude and their money, possessions and habits like only a paparazzo chasing Martha Stewart to publish the color of her underwear would do. It was frankly embarrassing, uninteresting, gossipy, vain, frivolous and similar adjectives. Think about it, how would you feel if a stalker goes around you asking if you pay your taxes, how did you afford your car, your house and rambles about it on a website? This is what Greg Allen did. Do Christo and Jeanne-Claude deserve being scrutinized and harassed like that? The “privacy” word does not apply to them because they are famous artists?

He hinted at fraud and tax-evasion when itemizing The Gates “expenses”, but his so-called estimates were conducted so poorly, incompletely and probably biased that I felt appalled and disgusted.

All in all, this deplorable and very poor attitude of this Allen person enraged me. So much that I decided to canalize my anger by ways of an “anonymous” e-mail. I pointed out his vacuity and waste of words, time and brains on pursuing every Christo and Jeanne-Claude movement to report the price tag. And I finished the e-mail by saying

“You ridiculous apprentice of nothing”.

I sent the e-mail under a name that coincides with an artist of the 60’s. He not only thought I was the real artist (gullible individual), but went on to create a series of t-shirts on the orangey Gates color with a single phrase on the chest: “apprentice of nothing”. The idea was funny, but outraging- here we have an insulted person that tries to cash on the cuss words sent to him. As amused as I was, I was also very frustrated; this Greg Allen person insists freakily in his web not to be “ripped off”, and yet he is the first to rip off other people!

I sent him an e-mail, still under that name that is the same of a certain artist, asking to withdraw the sale of t-shirts with MY words for HIS profit. He responded me (thinking I was famous and a sort of celebrity; if not, I would not have had a single line, he humbly talks only to the elites). He told me how much he admired my work and bah bah bah, and poo pooh and this and that about him, the artist he thought I was and the Christos and their interiorities.

By then, my “You Ridiculous Apprentice of Nothing” flag-phrase was making the hits on google and the blogs community. After a series of movements and e-mails, I exposed my identity, so he knew and knows my real name, this one displayed here prominently on this very blog. The real name of the creator of “You Ridiculous Apprentice of Nothing”. My name. My words.

But the story didn’t end here. Days later, just yesterday, The New York Times features an article written by Mike McIntire that goes on the same mission that occupied Greg Allen (and some other bored bloggers) for a while: finding the “real” price of The Gates project. After the first four paragraphs, it reads:

“A New York filmmaker who dared to dissect the $21 million figure on his Web site was savaged in an anonymous e-mail message, which included a suspiciously European-sounding putdown: "You ridiculous apprentice of nothing!"”

I was flabbergasted and shocked. So my now-infamous phrase had made it not on a blog or a crappy personal place but in The New York Times! And I was and am still anonymous for Greg Allen and his journalist friends. Whatever pieces this sneaky Greg Allen (always seeking more name and recognition for him) moved in The Times for having his story published, his personality and hobbies mentioned, his art collection, his early Christo, his past as a Wall Street man reported to the nation I ignore them, but something he definitely moved to get a whole bunch of name for his web, his person and his remarkably grand vanity.

Of course, my phrase was kept as “anonymous”, even though he already knew LeMieux-Ruibal had sent him the “You Ridiculous Apprentice of Nothing” e-mail under a name that he thought it was the one of an artist. So he cashed in the story as usual, and I was left as a “suspiciously European-sounding” anonymous communicator. “Suspiciously”? Does Mike McIntire think I am Christo himself!?

Greg Allen gets interviewed by his friend on The Times, saying no less than “but just because you’ve spent a lot of time and money on something doesn’t mean it’s very good”. (!) Oh really!? So? We’re talking privacy and solid art writing, not if The Gates are “very good”. Allen just wants some publicity. And he got it.

Daring reporter Mike McIntire runs into Christo in Central Park and asks him “how much, Christo, how much”. Christo is understandably pissed by this stupid violation of his privacy, and the reporter goes away feeling exactly like a damn

“apprentice of nothing”. (!)

So here I am looking like Michael Heizer interviewed by Michael Kimmelman in The Times, pathetically yelling “I did it first”, “those words are mine’, “I’m not anonymous”, “Greg Allen and Mike McIntire are truly real apprentices of nothing”.

At least, I unveil the truth of the famous phrase and its author. Next step will be copyrighting the words to avoid sneaky individuals like Greg Allen cashing and making a name off my words.

The whole world must know, hereby, that I, Bruno LeMieux-Ruibal, am the original, one and only creator of

“YOU RIDICULOUS APPRENTICE OF NOTHING”.

(Allen and company, please stop ripping me off, dammit)

An Evening at The Hudson (Bar)

2005-03-06T13:00:00.000-05:00

Trendy bars and clubs are the ultimate silly-but-cool thing in the capitals of the world. Or not so ultimate?

This is a brief account of how nightlife and art have been put together in the name of excess, joy and money in New York City, under a single clubhold name. Classic start, the larger-than-life Studio 54 (which happens to be a couple of blocks from my home, now reconverted into a theatre-cabaret), where I don't know if there was ever art on exhibition, but Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí liked to hang out there. The club was created by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, being the former the brother of Don Rubell, real-estate magnate, prominent figure of the New York art world of the 80's and now one of the biggest and most influential collectors of contemporary art, along with his wife Mera, both based in Miami as is their collection, opened to the public in a former DEA warehouse. Unintended homage to Steve Rubell, busted by the cops in the company of Ian Schrager for possession of cocaine? (there was more snow in 254 W 54 than in the whole Rocky Mountains, you can't blame them).

Rubell & Schrager, Schrager & Rubell revolutionized the way of the night in New York. Who else could mount a place where Roy Cohn (ex-aide of evil McCarthy, targeter of homosexuals, closeted gay himself, IRS-evader, powerful lawyer and AIDS victim) partied among Andy Warhol, Donald and Ivana Trump or Christopher Reeves (?).
The show didn't last long- in 1980 Rubell and Schrager were thrown into jail for tax evasion, and even though the club was left opened a couple of years more, it was not anymore the same as in the golden years of 77-79.

After being released from a prison in Alabama, the two men in their 30's didn't take long before founding the next-big-thing: The Palladium. Designed by Arata Isozaki, and filled with art selected by Henry Geldzahler by Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Warhol and a mural by Francesco Clemente + video-installations by the likes of Laurie Anderson, the Palladium had it all for being the grandest creation ever in nightlife, period. And it surely was: "The world's ultimate disco" was called, and yet every new invention by Schrager and Rubell seemed to carry similar laudatory adjectives. In the meanwhile, the golden boys mounted their first design-hotel, Morgans Hotel in New York, and Steve Rubell died of AIDS. The Palladium was outrageously demolished (the art previously saved) in 1998 for constructing an NYU dormitory (all over the place, razing landmarks and historical buildings for the art historians of the future).

Ian Schrager has gone to create a series of well-known boutique-chic-cool-trendy hotels all over the world that, designed by Andre Putnam or Philippe Starck, cater to the wealthy-but-not-boring and also to the non-affluent-wannabes. It's all about dim light, wooden interiors, beautiful and handsome staff, sleekness and elegance without the over-the-top silliness and shallowness of Madison Avenue types. Cool for good, I would say, with a reason. The only one of this collection of cutting-edge hotels I've visited is the Hudson Hotel, which happens to be in my neighborhood (just like Studio 54; is this chance, or Ian Schrager lives around?). The Hudson Bar inside the Hotel has been considered since its launch "the quintessential post-millennial hotspot" (these are words by New York Magazine), and for sure it's one of the hottest spots in New York. Tons of celebrities hang around there, but I probably don't care about it, I just wanted to peek at the mural by Francesco Clemente and have a cocktail in the innest place. The Hudson Bar has the more uncomfortable chairs and furniture and the most overwhelming low-ceiling, plus awfully loud and vulgar music, friendly but not-so-pretty waitresses and not-at-all-beautiful people to watch. My wife and I paid 70 dollars for four strawbellinis; it was worth for being in the most-talked place once and most likely never again, but we were expecting much more from the Hudson. Everything was disappointing and didn't meet the (high) expectations, but strangely enough we didn't regret it. It's just one of those things in New York you must experience at least once. The widely-talked French-Rococo-meets-A-Clockwork-Orange decoration is not so, and the whole thing gets diminished and brought to earth if you're not a "whatever-looks-cool I praise" type. The bar is rather cheap but superexpensive. And the mural is, Clemente-style, boring.

Possibly the most famous contemporary arty club is Pharmacy, launched by Damien Hirst in London's chic neighborhood Notting Hill and closed after a couple of so-so running years. The auction of its contents (medicine cabinets, butterfly paintings, furniture and tons of pills) in Sotheby's last year promised to be a talked-for-years influential sale Scull style (by the way, two of those pills-filled pharmaceutical windows designed by Damien Hirst for his Pharmacy place were bought by real-estate mogul Abby Rosen and now are on prominent display at the lobby of Lever House, partially broken after a bunch of paparazzo stumbled over the artworks chasing the Olsen twins).

Another Hirst-butterfly painting, possibly bought at Larry GoGo's gallery, adorned the walls of Loft 8, stupid Chelsea club designed by Rafael Viñoly where the only excitement lies (or lied, since the crowds are gone) upon making it over the velvet rope and the bouncers. It once had art by Hirst, Salle. Now it's one of many Manhattan clubs that are ultrapassé. They seem to have their 15 minutes, barely. Cool bars last less than an aged celebrity with botox shots, so checking out the Hudson makes sense. Or is Ian Schrager protected against the unpredictable trend waves?

And Now for One Piece of Low Culture

2005-03-05T22:17:00.000-05:00

I have avidly and almost tensely read "The Most Expensive Album Never Made" in The New York Times of today. It is, primarily, a passionate and vivid chronicle of how Axl Rose has spent $13 million so far given to him by record companies to deliver his "Chinese Democracy" new album with Guns N' Roses and, after 11 years on the making, there is no music (published).

One can read this article as a story on rock music and its well-known excess and failures (and triumphs, too), or as a typical cautionary tale on the rise and fall of rock stars (and other fields stars). I couldn't help but being drawn to it, having been a great fan of Guns N' Roses in my stupid-and-rebel teens and a follower of those "Whatever Happened to Mr. Once-Famous Now Forgotten", but also for being the article a highly addictive piece on human behavior, personal failure, dry minds and generously-fund patronage. A parallel with the high arts is inevitable.

Hours later, I kept thinking about the piece. 13 million dollars! If James Turrell would have been given that amount of money long ago, we would have Roden Crater now, opened for our amazement and inspiration. That the world is poorly, badly sadly and unfairly distributed, we all know, and this kind of (stupid) waste of precious money in a singer that cannot escape its own mental and physical trap ("I have traversed a treacherous sea of horrors to be with you here tonight", Axl said in his first-in-seven-years gig in Las Vegas 2002) and needs 11 years and counting to produce a bunch of silly hard rock tunes makes me sad. Roden Crater is a much wiser inversion, but you tell that to the Los Angeles industry of entertainment and spiritual vacuity.

Has anybody complain about these dollars being thrown in the culvert? Where are those Christo and Jeanne-Claude bashers shouting "Axl Rose, feed the hungry"?

Nevertheless, the article is fascinating and captivating- a devastating account of how a whole world is watching over an anguished and overwhelmed creative mind that seems to be battling more than the blank paper syndrome. Psychiatric and psychoanalitic types abound in Axl Rose's inner world; the side-stories originated by his virtuoso guitar-player Buckethead are priceless and widely amusing: he wears a "mannequin-like face mask and a KFC bucket on his head". He seems to be the king of rock star eccentricities, or an outright freak- first he was about to quit Guns N' Roses, so Axl Rose accompanied him on an excursion to Disneyland. Then, he thought "he would be more comfortable working inside a chicken coop, so one was built for him in the studio, from wood planks and chicken wire".

Geffen (the Pollock and Jasper Johns collector, the patron of the arts, name-giver to a branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles) investing money in these characters. Amazing how VH1 didn't produce a reality show of off it. It is so very American.

More than one person will dismiss this New York Times article for being a music story on the Guns N' Roses. But, as with almost all in life, it can and should be read beyond the topic- it is a tale with a moral, and an intriguing look inside a tormented creative mind assaulted by ghosts and invisible forces. He has it all and he is unable to give anything. So many have ideas and not a single penny to show them to the world.

An evening at the Rubin with Ikhlaq Hussain and Narendra Budhakar

2005-03-02T11:09:00.000-05:00

I'm not a fan of gallery openings. They're embarrassing, almost stupid, always invariably pointless. It is about socializing, and I have no interest in socializing. What is socializing, anyway? "The act of meeting for social purposes", being social "living together or enjoying life in communities or organized groups". Sounds like no fun, kind of a sect and its commandings.

If you want to see the art, you'd rather come any other day. If you want to meet the artist, you better be a friend of him or conform yourself with saying "hi, I love your art". Is that what you want? Pretty poor! You don't look at the artworks at an opening, you watch the people ("been seeing... and seeing who else is there"). And for that, bars are more useful, and anonymous (yes, you have to pay $15 for a toast, but I still prefer it). Not to mention the space is typically small, or not enough for the thousands of "social watchers" that gather on a ground floor. Even the biggest gallery in the world, Gagosian Chelsea, can be assaulted and overwhelmed on a Damien Hirst opening night, generating long lines in the street of people trying to make it in (should we expect that this very Friday, new Hirst show right there?)

Anyhow, gallery events are not for me (at least not now); that's why, on the other hand, museum openings are more fun, more relaxed, and I favor them (in the improbable case I'm invited to one). Galleries are open to everybody, therefore crowded and unbearable. Museums are open-for-members-only (and certain members, exclusively), so there's space and many floors and areas to enjoy, not just a ground-floor white cube with no air. Unfortunately, you will have to be a sustaining member or higher to be invited to an opening in the grand museums in New York ($100-membership take you nowhere). Not a problem with the Rubin Museum of Art (of the Himalayas), recently opened in Chelsea and already a success of collections, display, facilities, building and philanthropy. It does not have yet an awful lot of members, so everyone of us was invited to attend.

Interesting how a group of protestors of "Students for Tibet" gathered at the door giving brochures that mark the pieces in the exhibition as "stolen" and the exhibition as being "Chinese propaganda". Mr. Rubin is probably not happy with this, specially since their protests -which apparently will take place every weekend while the exhibition runs- have encountered echo in the press (Artforum.com via The Tibet Times). I think, with the curators at the Rubin, that -despite a sympathy for their protests and activism- their claims on the exhibition are out of focus. This is a unique chance Tibetans in the United States have for seeing and learning their art with actual examples. Tibetan art was and is and will be Tibetan before and after the Chinese invasion. This exhibition is about Tibet, not China, and while condemning the Chinese politics of abuse is necessary, enjoying these artifacts from Tibet in New York is a great pleasure and a lesson of history and art that I will not protest, much on the contrary, I do thank.

As I told the protestors, "I'm gonna have some cocktails while reading the brochure". That I did. The event was highy enjoyable for the silly social thing was confined to the ground level, where the shop and the cafe, and the rest of the upper floors with the collections and exhibitions were open. That gave a lot of space to closely and rather comfortably watch the wonderful Tibetan mandalas and then walk down to have a couple of free wine and Spanish cheese. Das is gut!

But the greatest happening of the night was not the art, not the alcoholic freebies. Meet Ikhlaq Hussain from Pakistan, sitar, and Narendra Budhakar from India, tabla, courtesy of Donald and Shelley Rubin. The musicians were seated on a rug, barefoot, looking small down there. Party plastic-surgery queens were not paying attention to them, and even the noise from the crowd was too loud as to diminish the sound emanating from the two players. But I got powerfully drawn to them, so I made the listening of their heavenly music my almost-exclusive enjoyment. Having listened to Ravi Shankar play with Allah Rakha and Zakir Hussain's masterful tabla-skills, the performance by Ikhlaq Hussain and Narendra Budhakar ranked at a similar level of brilliancy. I've never seen in live musicians playing sitar and tabla- it's thoroughly amazing and awe-inspiring to see those fingers of Ikhlaq Hussain travelling the sitar up and down so fast yet so gently that you cannot catch an eye on them; the delicacy and subtlety of Narendra Budhakar's hands playing the tabla- just a slight movement of the top of the finger produces the sound, the wrist seems to be the player. It goes beyond description.

Ikhlaq Hussain and Narendra Budhakar perform often in the East Coast, and we must be grateful for having such immensely talented and gifted musicians living among us, poor mortals. Their talent is otherworldly, of a mystical and transcendental world.

I'd rather enjoy a trance-inducing five-hour raga by Hussain and Budhakar than going to any gallery opening in New York in the next five centuries.

Bob & Mike & Nancy (when they were all friends)

2005-03-02T00:13:00.000-05:00

A mailman from Transilvania had me a sweet time this morning listening to stories and the history of Eastern Europe, Spain, Germany, USA and the usual conspiracy theories about this country, in an impossible accent that made me completely unavailable for understanding. Something about the FBI plotting to bomb Oklahoma City and Romanian crooks in Madrid. It was amusing and extra weird. Like he would say, "vateva" (whatever)- the fact is he delivered in my hands a craved, eager and long-awaited book, the ultimate experience in Earthworks reading: "Land and Environmental Art", from the Phaidon Series (25 dollars, original price is 75, with stamps from the Hennepin County Library, Minnesota, that will forever remind me the good time I spent living there). I managed to get this best bargain ever for the best book ever to be gathered- all the earthworks you can imagine, wonderful photos, insight short texts on each of the works presented, essays from the past and present, a nice modern-yet-oldie design and type. From Herbert Bayer to Cai Guo Qiang, they are all here, classics and cutting-edge, forgotten and in-the-spot. A multifaceted, varied and very complete pleasure; a magnificent learning. An instantly definitive and necessary classic.

What I want to recall here is the mind-blowing effect that I fell on upon encountering in the first pages, just opening the book, a poster-size photo of Robert Smithson taking a photo of Michael Heizer in Mono Lake, California. Both looking like young, casual cowboys, dressing alike, in those restless and brutal desertic environments where you can almost feel the ruthless hot melting your hands while peeking at the rugged heroes on the book. I have read about their trips together to the desert of the American West, but this is the first image I've ever seen of those travels. And it's good to remember, so vividly and freshly, that there was a time, not long ago, when Mike and Bob, Bob and Mike (and Nancy, too) were all good friends exploring the desert and making art with dirt.

Specially moving is, in this sense, the fair and sense-making inclusion of Nancy Holt's "Buried Poem Number 4 for Michael Heizer", a private artwork that Nancy dedicated to him, as well as to Carl Andre, Robert Smithson and other friends. The liricism and heart-touchingness of Nancy Holt's art, spirit and persona can be understately experienced here, in just a hand-marked topographic map that leads to a present hidden in a remote spot of the desert, specially created for that specific friend.

Thirty four years later, Michael Heizer had that "something" on the brain that made him revolt, incrompehensibly and unnecessarily, against his old good friend long-time-dead Robert Smithson. Nancy Holt, though, does talk with no hard feelings whatsoever about Michael Heizer. Noblesse Oblige. After reading the story on the New York Times and writing about Heizer's mental fragility, these fragments of true friendship from the past put together in "Land and Environmental Art" are a treasure greatly appreciated. They were good buddies.

Gardner to Frick: "Drop Dead"

2005-02-25T02:11:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite kinds of museum is the private collection left as is, as the owner inhabited and furnished it and wanted it to be opened to the public. The joy in them is more due to the homey coziness and privacy one seems to invade as an uninvited guest than to the collections itself. Seeing the pictures at the Met is grateful and wonderful, but seeing those pictures in their original environment, where the collector once lived and displayed his art the way he wanted, orthodox or not, implies a special reward.

England has plenty of these private collections opened to the public as they have been for centuries. The Heritage of Palaces, Country Houses and Manors in the Great Britain is truly amazing- Many Titians, Tintorettos and Rembrandts remain sleepy hidden-but-opened in royal and wealthy houses around the famous English falsely-wild landscape. My darlings of these private collections are two in London: the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square and the Kenwood House (the Iveagh Bequest) in Hampstead, North London.

The Wallace is simply the most magnificent collection of European art in the most magnificently lavish rooms and settings. If only for the justly famous and delightful “The Swing”, Fragonard´s masterpiece and the archetype of French genre painting of the 18th century, a visit to Hertford house would be worthwhile. But there are also dozens of great Canalettos and Watteaus, and one of the best examples of the portraiture of Frans Hals, a superb Poussin and some of the most intimately enchanting works of the minor Dutch masters of the Golden Age, Pieter de Hooch and Gabriel Metsu. The Wallace is grand, big, beautiful, amazing. Except for a Vermeer, it has it almost all.

Kenwood House is a different kind of enjoyment- here is the palace and the landscape what matters the most, although the collection is masterful and has that Vermeer that the Wallace lacks. The villa, remodeled by the great Robert Adam, lays serene but powerful on a hill, overlooking an extensive view of carefully landscaped gardens, woods, pathways, bridges- complemented with eagle-views of London. The perfect image of the English landscape garden, picturesque and romantic (as manicured as the orderly French type they rejected, but artificially forested and set with fake ruins). The house is a masterpiece of Robert Adam´s English classical style, following the Roman architecture so fond to him. Adam is one of the greatest but most unrecognized (out of Britain) architects the Western Civilization has bred. He was a first-class architect, a remarkable theoretician and writer and a favorite of the royal elite of the Great Britain- in the eighteenth century, everybody wanted an Adam-designed palace. I like to compare him with Frank Lloyd Wright in twentieth century America, only Wright catered to the middle-upper working class (and occasionally to the very rich).

Regarding America, palaces and houses left as the original wealthy owner had them are not as common as in England, though the model comes from the British Islands. Thus occurs not for a deficiency in philanthropy (much on the contrary) but because the greatest private collections of this wealthy and generous nation have been bequeathed to museums and subsequently dispersed and/or decontextualized out of their original environments and settings. Which other country can claim a Met, a National Gallery, a Lacma, a thoroughly masterful, encyclopedic museum in every big city and small town, in colleges and universities, in the country and the urban knots? American philanthropy deserves a special chapter.

The most distinguished example of private collection given to public enjoyment of the arts in the United States is the Frick Collection in New York City, whose riches have no parallels but in its overseas peers like the aforementioned Wallace Collection and Kenwood House. Henry Clay Frick´s wealthy, made of coke and steel in Pittsburgh (surely over the sweat, tears and blood of many thousands of immigrants from all over the world at miserable wages, but lets focus on the philanthropy) furnished not only his mansion on Fifth Avenue but the Frick Art Reference Library near his house, his place in Pittsburgh and elsewhere with flows of cash for the arts, hospitals, universities, parks. 80% of Henry Clay Frick's $145-million wealth as bequeathed to philanthropy at the time of his death. His eleemosynary contributions rank among those of the greatest and wealthiest of America: Andrew Carnegie, Andrew W. Mellon (both from Pittsburgh), the Guggenheims and many more.

Similar museums as the one Frick gave to the people are the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston or the Philips Collection in Washington, D.C., but the masterpieces gathered by Mr. Frick have no paragon.

But why, then, is the Frick Collection the dullest and deadest of all these special museums (and probably of all kinds of museums)? If you know the Gardner Museum, you’ll be aware of their excellent program of Contemporary Art exhibitions, their artist-in-residence series (which has included in past years the likes of Juan Muñoz or Joseph Kosuth), strong music programs and brilliant education department. The Barnes Foundation, despite being burdened by a load of restrictions and prohibitions and a serious financial crisis, offers an extraordinary rich and varied series of workshops, courses, seminars. Both museums have the same core as the Frick: an unmovable collection left as joy and charge, but they seem to be on the move while the Frick languishes, unmovable, unchangeable, oldie, boring. The museum as a deadly pantheon.

Spectacularly and rather surprisingly (for me at least), The Gardner Museum has even undertaken an expansion, something very unthinkable for these small museums whose exhibition is a private collection in its original case and display manners. The much sought-after Renzo Piano will work the Gardner out, as he is doing already (towards the end) with the Pierpont Morgan Library, yet another example of these private treasures of powerful philanthropists exhibited. The Barnes, too, has recently being granted on court the permission to move to downtown Philadelphia, to escape (only in part) the strict requirements ordered by Dr. Barnes. Furthermore, what heavier burden to carry can we imagine than having to show the empty frames of the Vermeer, Rembrandt and other beloved jewels stolen like the Gardner does? And the museum performs such an onerous task with no fear if normal pain, no dramas- there's life after the awful event. And what a life! Can anybody, on the other hand, even begin to imagine what would happen to the Frick if such a horrendous crime occurred in 1 East 70?

Alright then, the Frick keeps his free-falling never-to-come death, affected only by its own gravity of nothingness. It will never die, but it always seems to be agonizing. Take this: when a curator or director steps out or in, the museum releases a press communiqué with his or her achievements and triumphs. When Samuel Sachs III stepped out of the directorship of the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1996, some of his success stories included the tripling of the museum endowment, the raising of $25.3 million from private funds and the renewal of important areas of the building; all that in the middle of the brutal and never-ending crisis that is killing Detroit since 1970 (you lovers of the ruins of Detroit know about it). Mr. Sachs went to direct the Frick Collection for six years, and stepped down in 2003. His accomplishments in that not-so-short tenure? “A website, a Collection audio and printed guide in six languages, and a new publication for members have been produced”, reads the press release from the Frick. Then, I think I fully qualify for an upscale museum directorship- my achievements as museum professional are right now in that same level.

This statement should talk clearly enough of what’s moving on the Frick Collection: nothing at all that I know, except for the habitual concerts and occasional lectures. Certainly not much for one of the best, most beloved and visited museums in the United States, and yet it is part of the paradoxical contradiction inherent to the Frick- public success, ever-soaring number of visitors; financial tightening, no activities, dullness, perennial standstill.

It kills me and bothers me every time I stroll throughout the museum (and I do quite a bit, as a member) and I get to see the venerable old ladies volunteering, the very old women at the shop whom I wouldn’t think they will be around next season, the creepy rusty oldness of the restrooms and public spaces, the highly replaceable green carpet... Everything in the Frick looks old, ancient and aged, mummified; it is all shouting for an urgent revamping, physical and mental. Some new appliances and an injection of conceptual art to scare all the old farts out there who do not conceive anything artistic done after Bouguereau. But this same staff that has already chosen the color of their coffins is probably busier, more comfortable and much more interested in hosting the fashion ball with Laura Bush and look like they all come out of Madison Avenue in the 60’s than in boosting activities, renovations and giving a younger face to the oldie Frick that would shake the smell of cadaver in every corner.

And yet, who will ever complain, having Ingres, Velazquez, Bellini, Hals, Rembrandt, Goya, El Greco, Fragonard, Boucher, Manet? The impressive collection of first-class masterpieces of Western European painting is the biggest and only attraction of the Frick Collection, but for his immense power, also his most dangerous weapon, that that apparently has the team of movers of the place more stuck and sleepy than a reliquarium (I wonder how’s the daily schedule of the director there).

All in all, I can imagine the exchange of words between those two admirable philanthropists of America, Isabella Stewart Gardner and John Clay Frick if they could see the fate of their museums today (considering the enormous differences in their collections):

Drop dead, John.

Michael Heizer: All or Nothing

2005-02-09T14:44:00.000-05:00

I started a text on Michael Heizer on January 24 but never advanced. So much to say! I didn't know how and where to begin. Then, on February 6, The New York Times Magazine published a long, very long (11 pages and 8355 words scattered in various parts of the magazine from the cover to the back and in between) article on Michael Heizer and his ever-going "City". Penned by Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic for the paper, this story follows an article published in 1999 by the same author that marked the renaissance of "City" after years of lack of funding and the artist's attention diverted to many other projects. Many of us Earthwork-lovers and Michael Heizer admirers treasure that almost-mythical and widely-circulated 1999 article as a unique source on "City" and its endless avatars, loops, problems, excentricities.

Now, in 2005, this extensive, in-depth coverage comes as surprise, a very welcome surprise. Not in vain Mr. Kimmelman’s reports of his visits there are almost the only information available on “City” and the Michael Heizer whereabouts, despite his desert sculpture and he himself being generously (and undisputedly) funded by Dia Art Foundation and its satellites of the Lannan Foundation and Brown Foundation (as well as by Leonard "Mr. Barnes & Noble" Riggio) Nobody says a word.

Michael Kimmelman reports that Michael Heizer plans in taking at least another decade to build and finish his “City”, which I imagine as an essay- one cannot stop adding a word here and a comma there, correcting, revising, writing some more… but if you're getting paid, is your patron going to wait forever? Dia said he would fund Michael Heizer "to help complete this epic project over the next few years"... (Writing, anyway, is inexpensive and classy; building a huge city-sculpture in the middle of the highest desert of the American West drains you fast. And it’s very dirty)

There are so many lessons to extract from Michael Kimmelman’s story of “Art’s Last, Lonely Cowboy” as the title of the article says. I first saw the magazine in Dia:Beacon, where it was proudly displayed (“Do Not Remove”) at the front desk. In Beacon I had a feeling of excitement and eagerness for reading the piece- I’m always eager for news on “City” and Michael Heizer. Then at home in New York, and after having finished the article, a quite different thought came to my mind: it has to be Michael Kimmelman and The New York Times and not Dia who informs about “City”. I wrote e-mails signaling the issue to Michael Govan, Lynne Cooke and Sarah Thompson (Director, Curator, and Public Affairs Associate of Dia Foundation, respectively, though “Public Affairs” and “Dia” do not seem to match well), not having received yet an answer (I won’t).

At the same time, Michael Heizer told Dia not to divulge anything about his “City”. The artist also made them shut down the web section devoted to his project and is relying exclusively in carefully screened friends among the journalism (Kimmelman) and the curatorial affairs (Germano Celant) to leak some news and photos of what’s going on in Garden Valley, Lincoln County, Nevada. Foundation funds the artist, artist wants no coverage; Foundation pledges, gives no info; artist talks and opens his ranch and sculpture to critic-journalist friend. An awkward cycle of hidings, egos, funding and a Manhattan newspaper that goes to the desert. It would be easy to blame the whole mess in Michael Heizer and his eccentric ego, but I’ll point at everybody involved (and yes, I am jealous of Michael Kimmelman).

The responsibility of informing/not informing is a first thought. A second one follows rapidly: the (mental) state of Michael Heizer. It is bad. I wish I wouldn’t have to write about it and focus on the astonishing sculpture he is building in the high desert of Nevada. But no one can intend to write about him and skip the mental issue. It’s part of Michael Heizer’s zeitgeist. Furthermore, one of the biggest appeals of him is his weirdness and paranoia, his mystery and secludedness (definition from Webster 1913, “To shut up apart from others; to withdraw into, or place in, solitude; to separate from society or intercourse with others”; it seems like it was invented for him specifically).

If Michael Heizer were accessible as James Turrell and his place open to the public like Walter de Maria's The Lighting Field, we wouldn’t be trying to chase him so bad. The lure of the secrecy and hideaway is strong- it calls and awakes our senses and minds.

The 1999 piece on the Times was a fascinating portrait of an embittered, contradictory and angry-against-all man. He cussed on Robert Smithson for the first time that I know (at least in a public statement), calling him and other earth artists “high-speed hustlers” and asking himself, "What was some guy from New Jersey doing building a sculpture like mine on a lake in Utah?". I don’t know where in Earth can Michael Heizer see a similarity between the "Spiral Jetty" and any of his own earthworks in the West, whether "Double Negative", "Nine Nevada Depressions" or "City" itself. What was Smithson doing in a lake in Utah is well known: creating the most famous of the Earthworks, an icon of the work with dirt in the vastness and openness of the American West. Ah, that hurts. How can anybody else dare to achieve fame and surpass me. ME. Michael Heizer is all about ME.

His next confession to Michael Kimmelman in 1999 was: "But I figure, how much more original can you get than having nine different people doing what I did first, and none of them giving me credit? Actually, it's the academics who did not do a good historical job who are really to blame. I wasn't political enough to write articles about myself or go to cocktail parties, meaning that not only has my art been pirated and my intellectual property rights stolen, but my work has been misrepresented."

That left us all speechless, worried for his sanity, amused and kind of bothered. “Nine people doing what I did first” means “we were a series of different artists and friends working with dirt, participating in group shows, being funded by the same patron and dealer and admiring each other”. “It’s the academics who did not do a good historical job” means “the few exhibitions on my art that have ever taken place are those I personally authorized and supervised; many critics have written about me without being monitored by me and I hate them all and they’re all wrong”. “I wasn’t political enough to write articles about myself” means “I published an article on my work in ArtForum in 1969 and a number of statements and controlled-interviews and essays in the catalogues approved by me and published about my art”. “Or to go to cocktail parties” means “I was a friend of Andy Warhol and a figure in the New York art scene of the 70’s and 80’s along my chic wife Barbara, check the portrait Andy did of my tough face and don’t miss the photos of parties and artists socializing where I appear, cocktail on hand”.

Suzaan Boettger, historian of the Earthworks, wrote a letter to the Times after the 1999 story on “City” appeared rebating (and making kind of fun of) some of the self-attributions of Michael Heizer. She does not like Mike, not in small part due to his ban on granting permission to publish any photo of Heizer’s art in Suzaan’s “Earthworks”, the one and only (even photo-less) magnificent chronicle of those dirty years that dug the desert and beyond. She even includes a section in her book to “the issue of Earthworker’s Priority” where she gives credit to Michael Heizer as been “the first to work in the western desert”, in the spring of 1968. Well, Mike, you were first, at least in that.

Suzaan Boettger whacks Michael Heizer in her book for whacking Robert Smithson, in a footnote that also calls Michael Kimmelman “a gullible critic”. Take no prisoners, but that 1999 piece in The New York Times was indeed a non-critical, well-served, all-praise to Michael Heizer that disappointed as much as enticed- Kimmelman seemed not to argue about Heizer’s insults and personal issues, being just a microphone for the artist’s loudmouth. Now, five years and a month after that visit and too-domesticated chronicle, Kimmelman goes back (a visit in the summer of 2004 in between) to Garden Valley and reports. This time he gives it all and involves himself when treating Heizer’s paranoia and anger towards the world- more accurate, more real, more in-depth, more human, failure and success. The result is fascinating, compromising, devastating. “Michael Heizer makes me sad” was a choice for this writing when I first started it before Kimmelman interposed himself between my subject and me. Now, national coverage in between, the feeling stays, even accentuated.

Heizer appears in the NYT Magazine story heroic and epic in photos and (some) words sometimes; pathetic and nearly defeated in others; paranoid and aggressive almost always. When a moment of humanity and normality is depicted, one cannot believe that Michael Heizer laughs and stays homey around his wife, the artist and ex-assistant of him (before they married) Mary Shanahan.

But most of the time we assist to the weird and mostly unrewarding spectacle of Michael “I was first, you better write that down and clear” Heizer talking about him and his work and his deeds and how he and only he himself was a pioneer and the one and only. He does not help himself to look better before the expansive number of people that avidly read and look at him in the world's-best-known newspaper. The first caption gives the sense of what follows: “You just don’t get it, do you? This is a czarist nation, a fascist state. They control everything. They tap my phone. They’ll do anything to stop me.”

It’s all about ME, you listen? I did it first, the rest are copycat rats violating my rights and brilliancy. This is not an actual dialogue of him, but it would perfectly among its peers included in the Times piece: “Double Negative” was the most incredible sculpture I’ve ever seen or done. When I finished I laughed. I knew I’d done it. There was no precedent in the history of mankind”. Kimmelman writes in the next paragraph, “as he sees it, he single-handedly, without influence from any other living artist, started a “revolution”. And Michael Heizer goes, “I’m self-entertaining”. “My dialogue is with myself”.

Indeed it is, and that, as Kimmelman points at the end of his long story and journey, might be his problem- the lack of people out there in the desert to talk back and respond him, pinpointing the contradictions and failures of his macho, never-confronted aggressiveness and putting him a bit down, lowing him. His nest and his circle and his friends and his patrons will always say “yes, Mike”, “whatever you want, Mike”. His fragile invincibility needs to be exposed; probably a good thing to do for him and the humanity.

Yet another “Mike the pioneer” moment in the NYT Magazine story: “I burned hot and was making something totally original”. “It was a moment of genius and unprecedented” (and then, the typical insulting Robert Smithson that complements his self-portrait as an isolated genius).

Virginia Dwan, her patron and dealer, who gave money to Heizer to (un)build “Double Negative”, met him at 24 and says he was “a young 24, sensitive and vulnerable. He has changed over the years, as a result of defending himself from attacks, real or imagined”. Paranoia acknowledged.

It is her, Virginia Dwan, saint and revered patron of the Earthworks, who gives the best depiction of Michael Heizer I can imagine, portraying him as a hero (and so a victim) of the loneliness and toughness of the desert and his enormous sculpture there, always drawn to criticism for its grandiosity, as well as his mission: “building what he must”. Dwan says that that “takes courage”, and it really does, but it is eventually, for me, as castrating as Heizer finds the New York art world to be. I distrust and am very skeptical of personal missions that take a life to fulfill, though his having a dream come true is a fact to identify myself with (but at what price)

The article, it’s got to be said, was fueled by the news of last year that loosely reported Michael Heizer as threatening (to whom?) to destroy “City” if the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Train eventually passed by his ranch as it’s been scheduled. An article in Las Vegas Review Journal in April 25 2004 showed three things: a rare photo of him, the first public one I know since the 70’s and 80’s; a very rare tranquil and normal Michael Heizer talking about the Yucca Mountain Rail and his impact on the area; and an apparition on a Las Vegas paper after he more or less (Las Vegas Mercury reported) made clear his decision not to talk to any Nevada media (the piece also showed his dirty cattle jacket and baseball cap, which in the piece for The New York Times have been substituted by an impeccably new cowboy outfit, though I suspect the jacket is the same but washed).

What in December 1999 was an all-open, no-boundaries to Michael Heizer to spit his fury against everyone out of himself and his people in the desert, in February 2005 is an emcee for him and a commentary for the world. Mike from Nevada talks, Mike from Manhattan remarks. “Soliloquy crescendos”, “even paranoids may be right sometimes”, “his usual gratuitous whack at Smithson”. Heizer is not anymore the “only one and pioneer”, Kimmelman gives credit to other Earth artists and fits Heizer in, tightly adjusting his story, Heizer’s story and the Earthworks’ story. Not easy, when your friend’s name is Michael Heizer, lives in the high mountainous desert and is considered by most people as a nuts freak with a rifle ready to shoot you if you try to visit and a Caterpillar for building something around (which is, of course, not untrue)

Now we know that the grave disease that affected Heizer in 1995 –so much that he had to be flown in an helicopter from his ranch and then to New York- and still does was a “neurological disorder”, which makes me think if it was that disgraceful fact what causes his strange mental state and behavior- it was in the middle nineties, I would say almost exactly in 1995, when he started to be a weirdo, divorced his long-time wife Barbara and defected from New York, the art world and the world in general to hid himself in the ranch (while Barbara Heizer, by the way, who always loved the New York art world and commodities and luxury much more than living in a trailer in the desert of Nevada continues to enjoy the life of a socialite in her loft that was theirs in Tribeca, with her portrait by Andy (Mike the Cowboy’s one whereabouts unknown), her Manolos and her Guccis. Michael Heizer is grateful to her, says Michael Kimmelman at the end of his story)

It was probably that disease and a sudden sense of mortality that prompted him on one hand to isolate himself and distrust the world outside his mind, and on the other hand to feverishly build his sculpture as never before, trying to finish his artistic and personal consecration before time runs out while trying to reassess and confirm his status and leave a definitive, permanent trace in this world and the world to come: a monumental sculpture and a larger-than-life ego and aim to be acknowledged. Both shall grant him the long-craved transcendence.

What a difference (in work and ego) with Christo and Jeanne-Claude! These days I can see them supervising his monumental The Gates installation in Central Park. Totally opposite to Michael Heizer, these urban New Yorkers work for the public and within the public, no barriers whatsoever: you can go to Central Park and watch them, the construction crew, the cameras, the cranes, the whole thing is there, open and free. No secrets, no hidenness, no mysteries. In your face to enjoy, built for your enjoyment and pleasure.

Mike builds for himself and his ego. He doesn't want us to peek at his weird and in-a-hurry soul.

Since I discovered Michael Heizer’s art recently (a year ago I barely knew who this Heizer artist was, no fault if you know how much of the Earthworks subject reaches Spain), I've dipped into his art and persona, sank and dived inside his fascinating attraction to making trenches and cuts and bulldozing the desert. I was amazed to know that he built (or un-built) his monumental "Double Negative" at the tender age of 25, and at 28 he already had purchased the land in Garden Valley and started the construction of his “City”. His revolutionary concept of "negative sculpture", his building sculpture on the void, being the core an absence, an empty space. One can think that being so groundbreaking and thought-provoking at such an early age can disturb and distort your mind and sense of being. That could have been the beginning of his Napoleon complex.

Michael Heizer broke in the perfect moment, found the wealthiest and most cultured and interested of the patrons and dealers and was admired. He also loved the desert, the American West, Nevada. When I first read about his career a year ago, I was craving to jump into the art world and was slowly but deeply falling in love with the desert of Nevada. Later, I visited his "Double Negative" in Mormon Mesa, Overton, Nevada, and inadvertedly passed by Hiko, the closest point on a highway to “City” and site to his post office. Further on, I became obsessed with his project and his living in Garden Valley, away from everything.

I still now find myself many times wandering around a Nevada map, looking for traces of him and his cryptic monument, even though I have found the precise location of it, published on more than one site on the web. The exploration of his persona, his difficult character, his contradictions, his issues, his denials and insults to former friends followed.

The image I have of him is nitid, I know him well, I admire him. I feel sad for him, the more I read the worse I feel for him and his paranoia. I would love to visit him and declare my total admiration for him and his art, but at the same time I criticize his incoherence and point his mental fragility. I respect his privacy but believe his project should be given more information since it is funded by foundations that intend to make the place accessible. I deconstruct his miseries and failures, but I would love to be in Garden Valley giving him a hug. At times, he has possessed me, invaded me, oft-obsessed my soul, my brain, my mind. I devour any word and line, rumor and gossip about him. I search for him and he does not want it. With Michael Heizer is all or nothing. I take it all. For that and for being as passionate and contradictory as him, for devoting my time and words to him, for admiring him and cherish him and even almost love him, I think I deserve a visit to “City”.

Mike? You hear me?

My new country (II)

2005-02-09T09:32:00.000-05:00

the language, the landscape, the snow, New York, skyscrapers, Native Americans, road trips, museums, exhibitions, Beauty, opportunities, the desert, the openness, the vastness, highways, the West, earthworks, the Great Salt Lake, the dark side, Las Vegas, variety, architecture, Elvis, the contrasts, Pop, kitsch, trash, oldies, the fifty states, art.

(America the wonderous)

My New Country

2005-02-07T01:29:00.000-05:00

violence, guns, racism, ignorance, white trash, ghetto trash, mullets, trailer parks, farms, rednecks, urban slums, McDonald's jobs, religious fanatism, corruption, women abuse, meth labs exploding across the rural Midwest, single moms, pregnant teens, no health insurance, beaten kids, poverty, social division, extreme right, misery, corporation abuse, child abuse, orphans, ruined cities, crime, psychos, pedophile priests, retardeds, incest, rudeness, suburban nightmare, hypocrisy, freaks, nerds, public censorship/biggest porn industry, hatred, pollution, illiteracy, the race issue, alcoholism, sports diet, junk food, college crisis, education demise, sickness.

(America the Beautiful)

Weeping

2005-02-03T15:46:00.000-05:00

ARTnews features in its February issue an interesting report on "Why people cry in front of pictures". That's the headline on the cover, ARTnews style, but the piece does not really reveal the reason of our weepings (thankfully). It is a story on a book about the topic, Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, by James Elkins , a professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the reactions shared by curators, art historians and "normal" people.

Elkins says he wrote to many famous art historians and most of them treated the crying as "irrelevant, incommunicable, misguided, ignorant" and more. I am desolate to read this. But I am amused to read what other historian said to the author: "It will close the gates of Harvard to you forever", adding, "of course, that doesn't mean much anyway..."

I have found Robert Rosenblum's words about the weeping to reflect exactly what and how I feel towards art and the extreme emotion generated by it. He writes about his choice of artworks that prompted his emotion: "In each case, it was a response to my first view of the work. By the time of the second, I was already invulnerable. I suspect we art historians, in particular, wear too much armor".

In that sense, I can recall having wept -a very heartbroken weep- only once in front of a painting- in The Wynn Collection, Las Vegas, Nevada, when I confronted for the first time "Le Reve", the rapturous and subtly pornographic portrait of Marie-Therese Walter Picasso painted in Boisgeloup, 1932. It was the feeling of anxiety and realization of being there after years of studying, seeing, looking at, imagining what provoked the tears, not the picture itself (which is shiveringly beautiful and powerful, but not, in other circumstances, a likely agent of lacrimae for me).

If not tears, I have had certain moments of "physiology", as Robert Rosenblum accurately describes, in reaction to "what I guess we might still call Beauty, or some other kind of magic in art", he says. The incomprehensibleness force of art that moves us and touches us with mistery and emotion, whether Beauty, Sublimeness, Astonishment, Overwhelmingness, Pureness, Infiniteness or other quiet undescriptible feelings.

The Abstract Expressionists are favorites in provoking powerful emotions to the viewer- of course Rothko, who wanted the spectator of his art to weep, but also Barnett Newman and his linear purity, Clyfford Still with his fields of pure color and Jackson Pollock with his torture soul reflected in canvas affect the viewer. I was closest to tears and certainly shocked and overwhelmed by all those feelings and more emanated by the Ab-Ex room of the Art Institute of Chicago, probably shed some mystical tears standing upon the Rothko.

Those same emotions and the silence of my bared soul, my being human exposed to the grandiosity of the open desert certainly knocked my brain and changed me forever, affecting me greatly. The Great Basin Desert in Nevada and Utah and its sublimity as explained by Edmund Burke: "the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling". Prompted by fear of the unknown, the infinity of the nothingness/everythingness. "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. The mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor reason on that object which fills it".

Edmund Burke never visited the desert of the American West, but he perfectly captured the feeling of the horror sublime, as reflected in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, in which the open sea and the feelings it provokes in a monk staring at it are the equivalent of my persona standing in the middle of a vast, endless desert feeling thoroughly overwhelmed, breathless. Vastness, vacuity, infinity, solitude, silence. In a sea or in a desert, the sublime. The highest emotion ever conceivable by the human mind -even in all its incomprehension. Not to be understood but felt, strongly, painfully.

Of course the desert is art, and if not it the Sun Tunnels that lay in it, an earthwork by Nancy Holt that facilitates that sense of human fragility one feels in the open desert.

Going back to art (visible and tangible), and to contemporary art, a number of experiences, mostly recent, can be considered within the tears, even if I did not actually shed them. And if life is art and art is life as German-extremeño artist Wolf Vostell stated, many more would be commented (though far more prosaic)

My first visit to Dia:Beacon in January 2004 crossed me with the bright light of the frozen Hudson River on the way there, then with the meditative silent and purity of the minimal art installations sheltered in that necessary temple of contemporary religion, that of Dan Flavin, Fred Sandback, Walter de Maria, Robert Ryman, On Kawara. A place to believe in the power of art to affect, move and touch. My mind and perception changed after the Dia:Beacon experience, only to be shocked days later by the Malevichian white infinity of the Farnsworth House surrounded by snow in Plano, Illinois, an otherwise very dull, small redneck American place (first the shock of rural America, then the shock of one of the greatest architectural masterpieces ever created, all in the same place)

The Mies van der Rohe masterpiece of minimal poetry had been bought at a Sotheby's auction and saved from eventual destruction only a month before our visit, thus neither the property nor the road showed any announcement of the jewel. The search was not difficult and my wife and I spotted the house between the tree-fence, almost haunting and menacing. Like a space alien landed in the middle of the woods by the river, the perfect geometric-shaped structure levitated over the field forming a Suprematism image of white on white, pure absolute, architecture and nature. We managed to get in crossing the frozen Fox River, and the unique sensation of being in front of the Farnsworth House was overwhelming and heart-stopping. It was just five minutes (we were supposed not to be there), but five minutes that are deeply stuck in my mind and heart forever. That decisively inner and spiritual moment ranks among the very best of my magical mystical trips in America and artistic pilgrimages.

There were no tears but durable, positive emotional scars in my heart, soul and mind. Later on, already living in New York City but only months after the Dia:Beacon, Farnsworth House and Great Basin Desert mind-expanding experiences, a visit with my wife to the Harlem Heights Riverside Church in Upper Manhattan brought us both to tears, heartbroken by all the Beauty summoned inside a serene space traversed with light and the unearthly sound of a grand organ where we were the sole visitors. Positively overwhelming emotion prompted by pure Beauty.

Yet another emotional mystical moment charged with powerful feelings was the unexpected gathering of a Native American tribe in front of Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to sing a Chant for the Fallen Warrior. My first contact with the Indian roots of America resulted in a spiritual journey with tears and my soul touched, moved profoundly. The overwhelming power of the music emanated from the drums and voices of the Indians, all dressed in full costume- feathers, painting, clothes. A vivid, intense mind-blowing voyage into the spirits of the earth. They truly communicate.

Years ago, an exhibition in Madrid of Sebastiao Salgado, "Exodus", with photographs of the pariahs of humanity escaping from hell to nowhere brought me to tears, in the middle of a mental crisis that had made me to interiorize very painfully the human suffering as mine. Not the art but the message is what broke me down, or maybe both, indissoluble; I understand that Salgado uses photography to throw a message to the people, "look what happen, what do you do?". I cry, what else can I do? Of pain, impotence, shame.

Last but not least, I remember very brightly my first visit to New York, March 2001. My biggest and most passionate dream, fulfilled. Approaching Manhattan from JFK, the majestic skyline illuminated and shining with pride and vanity ("look at me, I am New York") shows up suddenly and I gasped, breathless. The fabulous grandiosity of New York City was there. I didn't shed a single tear in that visit, but I got affected so badly and profoundly that New York got to be my one and only obsession. I had to make it mine. Now that I am a proud New Yorker in body and soul, I still have those moments of speechlessness where I can just look high at the sky between the skyscrapers, smile, maybe shiver, and say "I love you, New York". I truly madly deeply love you forever.

The Great American Ruin: Visit Detroit

2005-02-01T16:22:00.000-05:00

Nowadays, the discerning tourist, traveler, visitor does not or should not ignore the biggest attraction of Detroit, Michigan: its ruins. You can browse the official web of Visit Detroit and see pretty photos of kids and parks and a marina or go to to www.detroityes.com and take a tour through the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, the real thing. Entire neighborhoods, good parts of downtown itself, of course all the industrial buildings once occupied by the thriving Detroit automobile industry. All dilapited, some demolished. The gorgeous poetry these urban and industrial ruins exhale have longly enticed photographers, writers and artists. Chilean-born photographer and sociologist Camilo José Vergara is fairly the most famous and important teller of the lugubrious fate of the American metropolis. He has documented and captured the demise of urban downtowns in America in the last 30 years. "American Ruins", "The New American Ghetto", "Subway Memories", "Unexpected Chicagoland"; all speak very literally in images and words of the destruction of urban centers in the nation. Places like Newark, New Jersey; Gary, Indiana; Chicago; Cleveland; Minneapolis; Detroit; St Louis; Los Angeles; New York, in her old infamous days and still now in some areas, are sad but fascinating examples of the present reality of a certain America: the deserted, vandalized and crime-ridden (non-white) urban downtowns of major cities agonize in decay while the suburbs thrive with affluent (white) population fleeing the urban destruction.

For most Americans, the city is a pest to avoid, a place where working and getting the hell out of there to go back to the green, peaceful neighbor-community outskirts and their houses built like identical mushrooms (Richard Nixon's wish to God to destroy New York City in the 70's is an over-the-top example of this attitude). The "American dream" might be in reality just a "escape from the American nightmare", or "from nightmare to nightmare". Leave the cities, take the country, this nation has a lot of land. Above all, if the choice is Detroit or Newark, wouldn't you go to "Residential Upper Golden Silly Hills"? The American urban destruction may be attractive for visiting, but surely not for living in.

This was not always like it is now, of course. At the turn of the century and up until the post- Second World War, many of the now-dying American cities soared in population, business, economy, architecture as a result of, between many other factors, a strong industry and a strong demand, due -in large part- to the many wars the United States was involved in. Look at Gary and South Chicago-Northern Indiana: all the steel companies, many government-owned, and the port and its heavy trade commerce; or Detroit and its automobile industry; also Cleveland and its industries everywhere, steel mills, oil refineries, auto and electronic parts. All this heavy industry declined and in many cases disappeared completely, whether a victim of the lack of demand provoked by the absence of major wars, or the oil crisis, or the huge importations the USA relies on; leaving, almost always and because of an urban planning that relied almost exclusively in the economic splendor (that never lasts long), deserted gritty downtowns and grimy, rusty industrial belts in polluted, broke and broken cities with no clear future. Or not even a dark one.

As an unavoidable circle and cycle, many of these cities have, as I said (and in a phenomenon slowly affecting Europe too), their long-time white population fleeing to the suburbs escaping the unemployment and urban-economic crisis of the downtowns (a process explicitly called "white flight"). The core of the towns are subsequently occupied by a non-White (mainly Black, also Hispanic) population typically newly arrived in the last 40-50 years, post-war times, from the empoverished and white-terror stricken South and attracted by that prosperity in the North that was to last no more than three decades. Destruction, crime, drugs, gangs, homicide, arson and general downfall almost inevitably followed. Those cities like Gary or Detroit than once where admired centers of urban life and culture are now undesirable shallow stretches of waste and wrecked remnants of the not-so-long-ago splendor where the National Guard has to patrol the streets. A post-landscape of doomsday whose statistics are to be found in the list of the most crime-infested cities of America, always on top and breaking numbers.

This phenomenon, still uncomprehensible for me as a whole in its vastness and multiple causes and origins, has been sadly utilized by the American white suprematists, racists, ignorants, conservatives, Nostradamus-types and other freaks to spread their apocalyptic word of "the end is coming to America, the Western civilization dies, blame the black and the minorities for the destruction of our cities". Unfortunately, they have the facts for showing: Detroit, Gary, Newark. Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis. Crack, guns, devastation, fire, death. No future.

While the average middle Californian moves to the sprawl, drives two hours a day to commute, beats his wife and has her daughter being a cocaine-user and sex-addict at 16, living his all-American suburban dream-nightmare, the average Detroiter sells crack in a corner of some ruined building of downtown surrrounded by houses on fire while two friends lay on the floor shot in the head, dead, and the police does not intervene for lack of funds.

America the beautiful, watch the show, the two sides of it. America trying to escape from itself, in vain.

The beaches and parks are now not the only touristic spot of the nation- the ruins of Detroit and other once-industrial-now-irreparably-damaged cities of America are places to be in, study, learn, think; and enjoy the beauty of the delerict buildings and surrounding urban demise. "Belgrade and Manhattan rolled into one". As Camilo José Vergara says, no joke in it, the ruins of Detroit should be preserved as a great American Acropolis, Athens and Rome style. A "skyscraper ruin park" that will contrast with Disneyland or Malibu.

Visit Detroit. Witness the grand downfall of a great American city.

Trapped in the Woodshed

2005-01-29T20:09:00.000-05:00

Robert Smithson’s most famous earthwork –and anything- is Spiral Jetty, "Disneyland of the Earthworks", attraction for European curators and Utah rednecks alike. Second to it, Partially Buried Woodshed. This was executed in January 1970 in Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, during a stay of Smithson as visiting artist and lecture in there, by loading twenty tons of earth over a shed until the central supporter beam cracked and the woodshed partially collapsed, remaining partially buried under the dirt. The Spiral Jetty was the next earthwork, completed in April 1970. Then, in May of that same packed year, the shootings at Kent State University by the National Guard of Ohio that killed four students gave a new dimension to the earthwork, still fresh, when somebody chalked on the front of the woodshed “May 4 Kent 70”. After that event, Smithson decided to turn the temporary character of the piece into permanent, in honor of the students. A monument, in contrast with his prior expectation for the piece to just go back to the land (thus the present fate of the site respects and makes sense to the artist’s first will and idea).

But from there, everything down. Robert Smithson dies in 1973 (still mourning you) and Nancy Holt wants the shed's remains to be preserved; two years later, 1975, an arsonist burnt down half of the structure. Kent State University must keep the piece, but officials hate it, considering it an "eyesore" (“something very ugly and offensive”, the definition says) and over the next decade campus workers removed all of the pieces that periodically fell to the ground (the image of men picking up and throwing away the pieces of the Woodshed that were periodically falling is an evocative if sad one that suggests man-made entropy)

At the same time, the Woodshed and its remains soared not only uglily in the uncultured eyes of KSU but in fame in the eyes of the art aficionados all over the world. The piece is debated in Kent and beyond, with ardent supporters (the art community) and haters on fire (the bureau of chiefs of Kent State University, the people of Ohio and elsewhere). Artists around the world traveled to Kent to visit the earthwork while people on campus and elsewhere considered it garbage. The virulent reactions that a ruined woodshed provoked in humans at that time are something to recall, if only to notice that they are nothing new- today those same feelings of hate and love are spread by the likes of Maurizio Cattelan, Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. It's OK, it has to happen, human condition.

The same year of 1975 that saw the shed burn down, attacked, had a headline published on the Akron Beacon Journal crying to “Burn the Woodshed!” and bringing to the front page the discussions about the ill-fated work (even though the rednecks of Ohio, the Midwestern white trash, are not to blame exclusively; uncultured reactions against art fueled by ignorance are not exclusive of hick America, and in that sense, the case of the destruction of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in Federal Plaza, New York, is well known).

The grade of polemic created by the piece and its controversy can be considered in the light of a surprising aspect of an earthwork: its monetary value, made from $10,000 by Smithson himself before he left the campus and upon transference of the work to the University to $40,000 by the KSU School of Art to $250,000 according to his New York gallery.

In January 1984, anyhow and despite of everything, the remains of the Woodshed were removed from the University, when an “errant snowplow”, rumor said, destroyed it completely. Professor Brinsley Tyrrell, who collaborated with Smithson in preparing the piece, has said nobody in the university realized the shed had collapsed and was gone for about six months, a fact that would diminish the role of the authorities in purposely destroying the artwork.

Today the remains are hidden in a grove of trees, most of which were planted some time ago to obscure the ruin. The grove is surrounded by the new Liquid Crystal Materials Science building, a football field, and a parking lot. A very dull, American place for an extraordinary site.

And yet, as with other human destructions, later on the demolished work is recuperated and celebrated: the Kent State University School of Art mounted an exhibition in 1990 on the earthwork, a “Smithson Inventory” with Partially Buried Woodshed-related materials has been gathered, the piece included in the faq’s of the campus web, a big photo of the big forested nothing/everything published on the web as part of “KSU attractions”. On my visit there the site was fenced in loud orange, probably to protect it from the excavations and constructions around (Michael Heizer style, by the way). The “Smithson Inventory” even keeps a “charred fragment of wood removed from Partially Buried Woodshed following the 1975 fire that destroyed half of the work”, kind of a souvenir of necrophilia.

For many reasons, seems natural to say the Woodshed was bound to disappear, doomed from the start not by entropy but human deliberate destruction. Even the series of disgraces and “unexpected” events that eventually destroyed the piece could be seen in the context of paranoia, crisis, political corruption and decay of the American 70’s. The Woodshed was the last of the victims: the dreams and hopes of the community-driven 70’s destroyed in the capitalist-individualistic-money-driven 80’s. Dreamers vs. authorities, again. Or dreamers turned to authorities.

The breaking of the woodshed has been linked to the breaking point that for America was the Kent State University shootings in May 4 1970. That breaking and collapse that was visible from the road inscribed with the deadly date and the authorities decided to erase. Now it is a forested mound, authority-made: to hide the piece by planting trees, the shootings, the story and history of Kent and all that happened there. But the appeal of the shed goes beyond the physical destruction of the piece and the useless and counterproductive for their intentions concealment of the site by the University: the location is now unmissable and unmistakable, a pretty visible beacon in the Kent campus, being a forested mound in an otherwise rather prairie environment. Furthermore, and as said, the University is for years now promoting and/or conserving the site. The human cycle of destruction-celebration.

Many have viewed the May 4 1970 shootings as the beginning of the Watergate and eventual destruction of Nixon: the collapse of the woodshed was felt beyond Ohio. The politicization and re-politicization of the earthwork is not a caprice but a necessity: that gesture of the student that chalked the forever-stuck-in-collective-memory date of May 4 1970 in the broken but resistant beam of the shed gave a whole new meaning to the work that actually transformed the piece and how was and is perceived, forever too. Thus, the accumulation of weight that made the central supporting beam to crack and the structure to fall and collapse, remaining partially buried under 20 cartloads of earth, is/was felt as the same kind of weight that, through the Kent shootings, converted a hippie movement into a world cry against war and, as said, the beginning of the very heavy accumulation of dirt that killed Nixon, politically.

All in all, there is this collective idea of the Woodshed, but everyone has its own. Contrarily as in the Jetty, where the actual physical piece, its own strong but subtle presence and the pilgrimage required to visit it copes the experience and makes it sort of uniform (the articles published by Jetty-visitors are more or less poetic and rich, but they all have in common a similar, shared experience: the landscape, the roads, the ruins, the oil jetty, the salt crust, the lunar aspect of the lake), the "Woodshed experience" lays more upon the personal disposition and state of mind than in the actual fact of being in what once was the Partially Buried Woodshed.

You walk in over the Jetty, but you walk on the site where the Woodshed once stood. The dialogue between the Jetty and Woodshed experiences is the one of site and non-site that made Robert Smithson famous, and the reality is that the non-site is probably more enticing than the site, for its lack of presence, for the power of its absence. For making possible to construct your own personal Woodshed, in contrast with the straightforward, in-your-face presence of the Jetty. The Jetty is there, take it. The Woodshed was there, invent it, reconstruct it in your mind and imagination. A mental evocation.

As that, the Shed entices the mind and fuels the creation of stories, remembrances around it. There's hardly anything to see, so we have to daydream. The Jetty is awe-inspiring, sublime and unearthly in all its earthness, a beyond-words experience, but already done and conducted- one just has to digest its gorgeous, powerful beauty. Anybody can appreciate the jetty; only an intelligent creative mind can have the ride of the shed. Fun vs. intellect. The jetty offers everything and the everythingness, leaving close to nothing to imagination. The shed offers close to nothing, leaving everything to imagination. Two ways of addressing and assessing an earthwork. Physical experience vs. mental experience.

I tend to compare, in a way, the mental visit to the Woodshed in Kent, Ohio to the one a knowledgeable traveler does to Germany. If you know that the vast majority of the ancient monuments in German cities are a post-war reconstruction that rebuilt what the Allies fire-bombed in the II World War destroyed almost completely, your mind and eye and way of seeing change completely and one starts to reconstruct in the mind how all that urban grid and churches and palaces and museums would have looked before 1940, when it was real and authentic.

It's most likely this mind-opening raison d'etre of the Partially Buried Woodshed that has made it into a fertile source of contemporary, current experiments in art. No less than four artists have reconstructed and appropriated the woodshed in the last decade, both metaphorically and physically and with various intentions and results.

The list is: Renee Green, Partially Buried, 1996; Tacita Dean, From Columbus, Ohio to the Partially Buried Woodshed, 1999; Sam Durant, Upside Down and Backwards, Completely Unburied, 1999; Mike Nelson, Tripe Bluff Canyon, 2004.

Sam Durant and Mike Nelson pay a direct homage to Robert Smithson's earthwork by meanings of literal and metaphorical reconstruction of the woodshed. In Durant's piece, a miniature model of the shed is packed with three CD players spitting loud music from The Rolling Stones, Nirvana and Neil Young. A monument to the young martyrs slain and a nostalgic, melancholic song to days gone. Mike Nelson reconstructs in actual size the woodshed, covered this time in sand, and makes it accessible, inviting to get inside and feel the physical opression and claustrophobia of the interior as well as the metaphorical overwhelmingness that restrained America in those weird 1970's that are felt by these two artists as sweet times lost.

Renee Green and Tacita Dean, on the other hand, use the Woodshed not to assess a respectful deference to Robert Smithson and his creation like the former artists but to tell their own stories and messages, giving a certain feeling that they could have used any other landmark of post-war art (specially in the case of Tacita Dean). Their renditions (rendering: "processing and manipulation of information in order to represent it") are problematic, raising questions of ethics and opportunity up to the point of being highly objectable, opposable and even rejectable.

Green’s complex installation, composed of videos, actual blocks of the foundation of the Woodshed, books, photographs and other objects, tries to confront her own past and experience, her time in Kent, the shootings, America and their fate; being an artist, being African-American, being a black artist in America. But in her account of her travel and her story, she supposedly brings from the site actual pieces instead of the photographs travelers (and tourists, and writers, and artists) normally do, thus not only destroying furthermore the heavily destroyed earthwork but decontextualizing those remnants in a treason of Smithson’s ideas:

"A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world."

"I am not interested in art works that suggest "process" within the metaphysical limits of the neutral room."

(Truth is that, following Smithson’s strict statements, his own work shown in galleries at his time and the reconstruction and showing of his pieces done by the estate after his death betrays his spirit; also Durant and Nelson's pieces, and almost everything that we place within walls. But in the case of Green’s piece, it totally corrupts and kills any meaning that it could have for having supposedly appropriated of the ruins of a critical work of art)

Tacita Dean needs a special, final analysis. In fact, this essay that has gone through similar destruction and reconstruction and unforeseen events as the Woodshed to a point of trapping me inside the subject could have been titled "Partially Buried Brain: The Case against Tacita Dean".

Tacita is a British filmmaker, video artist and conceptual artist specialized in never making it despite being right on the spot (or never there). She crosses the world to get to hidden places just to slip away the high point, the climax, failing pathetically and being miserable in the name of video art and human condition. Tacita Dean deals on feelings of absence, loss, confusion, memory, deplacement, disappointment and (supposedly) tragic memories of a never-spotted treasure that has been long awaited.

The what-if and what-happened-to enticing feelings that disappearance and absence offer are understandably attractive. I let myself on them. Antoine de Saint-Exupery disappeared in his plane over the sea, never to be seen again, imagine the possibilities. Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader (a favorite of Tacita) was crossing the Atlantic sailing a boat, the conceptual piece of his life, from America to Europe when he missed contact and never was seen again. 33 years old, Exupery was 44. Myths to explore. The presence of the absence and the wide open field it allows to work in (human imagination, no less) is fertile and evocative: fictioning stories that never happened, imagining what could have occurred, staging different ends.

But Tacita Dean delivers an art of tricky nature, manipulative, false. If we ask for art to be true, Tacita is not it. The permanent loss and deplacement that she suffers while traveling and searching are part of a carefully orchestrated show (fake, so) . Some might find interesting her creation and recreation of moments of loss, confusion and tragic non-finding. But, more earthly, who would be stupid enough to be so close to the Spiral Jetty but renouncing to actually see it in order to make a video of it? (if she ever went there, or was the audio piece made in her studio in London? Do you believe her? How strong is your faith in her?)

Furthermore, who can be as **** to be walking around the foundation blocks of the Partially Buried Woodshed and pretend to be confounded and unsure to the point of suddenly suspend the search? Fiction and Fakeness shouldn’t be the same. If her video actually shows the site of the Woodshed and the artist denying being there for good, what should we think of Tacita? Fascination of her failure? Or plain irritation?

In her video From Columbus, Ohio to the Partially Buried Woodshed she travels from the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus to Kent State University in Kent, Ohio to search for the site of the Woodshed, as said. Tacita Dean received the Wexner Center Residency Award in Media Arts in the 1997–98 season, and in response she created the Kent piece the following year of 1999. She was accompanied in her journey by a member of the Wexner, which makes the piece to contain not one but two dumb personas: an artist in permanent search of being lost in remote places and a curator that likes the game. She "successfully" finds the campus and that for being Tacita is a heroic deed. She goes around, asks a student, vague directions, all loosely, finds the grove of trees that hides the ruins of the woodshed, investigates, walks on the blocks, denies being there, "it's not it", "it cannot be it", leaves, video ends in the parking lot across the site. The habitual drama of imposture and fakeness- she is there, but she cannot be there, she must lose it or there will be no video!

As critic Tom Holert puts it: "despite all its exertion of control, its erudition and conceptuality, a tendency toward the self-indulgently moribund lurks through the highly elaborated texture of allegory and decay". Tacita loves to be a false loser and recreates herself on it. Her very meditated, controlled, conducted and manipulative art is well thought to lead to that inevitable failure- because she wants it, she makes it possible, no matter how, creating an already prepared destiny that compromises the Truth.

"Tragic fates and ruinous moments". What a depression. Her paraphrasis of Smithson and Kent is sad and risible. I went there, found the site of the woodshed, walked on it, strolled around, took a bunch of pictures and left from that same dull parking lot where Tacita stages her failure to New York to begin a new life with my wife. That can be much prosaic, but it is thoroughly true, authentic, real. Not to mention that we also found the Jetty.

Nancy Holt: Beyond Amarillo

2005-01-23T20:08:00.000-05:00

I've always loved the photos of artists. Not the artistic photos but the real ones, the portraits of them. How do they look, how is the face of this master, of that genius, of this other bad painter. Seeing the face and body of an artist is seeing their soul. It's not difficult, then, to view their physical expressions reflected in the art they create: Robert Rauschenberg's expressive, in-a-way-anxious gestures are in his in-your-face, agitated canvases and constructions; Jasper Johns' rather dull and average, impenetrable face seems to be a metaphorical map of his indecipherable art; Brice Marden's seriousness and kind-of-sad-and-bored face would be the perfect mirror for his very meticulous and fastidious art as well as his rigorous devotion to the cause of abstraction. That the human faces communicate is nothing new, but in the case of the artists they give a whole new meaning and dimension to their work, artistic and personal.

It is in this context that a particular photo of two artists calls me intensely: Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt are portrayed in Rozel Point, in the site of the Spiral Jetty in the dawn of its realization, by Gianfranco Giorgioni, the Italian photographer that witnessed and captured in images the process of construction and exposure of Spiral Jetty. April 1970. Robert Smithson bends his knee over one of the volcanic rocks that gather in that side of the Great Salt Lake and that will constitute the material for the jetty. He looks epic and heroic, with a grave gesture on his face and a sense of transcendence, pointing to somewhere in the vast lake with his fingers and a raising arm, a pencil between them and a sketchbook in the other arm. Nancy Holt at his side looks rather lost on her thoughts, looking East where Robert looks North, wearing a slight smile with a touch of skepticism, even irony, I might say.

Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt were inextricably united, being one and a team, a partnership of personal and artistic endurance; an admirable one. And yet it was not until Robert Smithson sadly and unexpectedly died that Nancy Holt was "born" as an artist on herself, not as -before- a collaborator and supporter of her very famous husband. Some widely known examples of married artists can be easily summoned and brought to comparison: Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta, Gordon Matta-Clark and Jane Crawford, Robert Mangold and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Brice Marden and Helen Marden (this one, sure, not so), Christo and Jeanne-Claude (maybe the only arty couple where he creates, she dominates).

Lee Krasner, as we all know, was devoted to Jackson Pollock and his career. The moment she began to achieve some heights as a painter for herself, Jackson got depressed, even more heavy-drinker, and stopped painting. It was only when he died that Lee was freed from the self-imposed obligations of being the wife of Jackson Pollock, hero and myth, and could develop a remarkable artistic career on her own. Sylvia and Helen are hidden to a greater or lesser degree under the large abstract shadow their husbands cast, but they probably don´t seek to gain a prominent position. Jane and Gordon were dramatically and against-the-clock together, united so briefly, so passionately. Carl Andre could not probably resist the irresistible ascension of Ana Mendieta and decided to pull her down- forever. Another kind of rising.

It would seem like being a marriage of artists implies difficulties in getting along and very human feelings of inferiority, jealousness and skepticism of each other´s capabilities. That´s why I assume Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson cannot fit in this group of personal-artistic tumultuous stories full of love, hate and suffering. We don´t have any clue of how their life was together, but I believe they were far from being the Lee and Jackson of the late 60´s and 70´s- their photos together (all of them, of course, available only in books on Robert Smithson) show a very confident partnership, where he usually shows a face of "I´m in an intellectual mission" and she peacefully and lovely stays by his side, "I will help you to conquer it". No submission, no complex hard feelings of despise or being neglected. Pure love and mutual understanding.

And yet for that she was clearly annulled or rather self-annulled, devoted to her husband´s art- the only known artworks she made before Smithson´s death were videos and certain pieces connected to his creations, and in the photos we have of her she appears "collaborating", "helping", "involved" in his husband's projects. Her first work after the forever-tragic-and-mourned disappearance of his husband was the completion of his last piece, the Amarillo Ramp in eccentric-arty oil baron Stanley Marsh´s ranch in Amarillo, Texas, aided by Richard Serra and artist-aggressor-dealer-celebrity-millionaire Tony Shafrazi.

That was in 1973 and I like to think she said "up ´til here, now on my own with him in my soul" or similar beautiful, profound words and started creating art herself. The famous, impressive and mystical Sun Tunnels in the Great Basin Desert of Utah were her first and gorgeously grand achievement. Then, commissions by universities, cities and corporations for making those pieces of her that gather environment, earth, nature, light, sculpture, transcendence, fun and sensorial experience. She got to be an artist, not a wife or a widow, and yet she has not a single book on her art, nobody seems interested in communicating her talent and vision to the world. She is being awarded public commissions and keeps working in projects, but for many, her only interest in her is the fact of her being the key to some secret, intimate knowledge of Robert Smithson. It has to be difficult to overcome the status of "late genius´ wife" as much as it has to be impossibly painful to be torn forever from your soulmate at 37. Fact is, even her having merit and proof enough to show the world she is much more, scholars prefer to skip, or flat out ignore, her art and have her as teller of the past. Is that why Nancy Holt is far more unknown than Lee, Elaine, Ana, Jane, Sylvia and even Helen were and are? (gossiper, party-goer and occasional writer A. Haden-Guest even calls her first "Smithson's wife, Nancy" and then "Nancy Smithson" (!!) in his irritating but absorbing "True Colors" chronicle of the art world)

Oddly and contradictorily enough (or not so), the very-macho-man art of the earthworks has been studied by more than one female (feminist?) writer-curator; all of them have devoted thousands of words and pages to the tough art and personae of Carl Andre and Robert Smithson, all of them have given one or two words to the female earth artists (Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, Maya Lin, Alice Aycock), none of them have dared to treat them longer and more in-depth, all of them have treated Nancy as an "accessory" of Robert Smithson, just a resource.

Thus, for the intense sympathy I have towards Nancy Holt and her art, I wish somebody would change her being included in the acknowledgements section of the tons of every year new books and catalogues on Robert Smithson to make her the subject of a well-deserved and long-denied study of her art. Somebody who starts talking to her about her and her art and her pieces, and write about her and publish her amazing achievements, ideas, projects, vision.

In proportion, we have had fair enough Robert Smithson for years to come and nothing at all Nancy Holt after 30 years of her art. Anybody out there?

Peter and Tom, Tom and Peter (and Frank, too)

2005-01-20T14:03:00.000-05:00

First time I heard of Peter B. Lewis was just recently, months ago in a visit to Cleveland, Ohio, where my wife discovered an amazing shiny-titanium-Bilbao-like building near the Cleveland Museum Art. It was, of course, a Frank Gehry, the Peter B. Lewis Building for the Wheatherhead School of Management of the Case Western Reserve University. That is, no less. You know how Americans are for names and donors.

That building was constructed between 1999 and 2002 at a price of 62 million dollars, of which Mr. Lewis gave $37 million. That's reason enough to have your name in the building and wherever necessary- you should see the clumsy "ooops I'm falling" state-fair-attraction-type sign that carries Mr. Lewis's name on the very front of the facade of the building. It's OK, when you pay.

The facility, with all its Gehry-trademark curves, loops, twists and unexpected turns is said to encourage students to interact with professors and have ever-new perspectives of study. That is a good reason for a Gehry; I've largely considered his designs utterly brilliant but silly and unnecessary. Does a university really need to spend $62 million in a Gehry when you can have a normal hall with classrooms at a low price and good use? At that point is where Mr. Gehry's vision enters in all its reason: build me and you'll have not only a university place but a landmark, an attraction, a milestone that will attract new students, tourists, investors. Like a peacock showing off, the magic and point of having a Gehry is the side-effects that it provokes. No need to mention Bilbao, the perfect achievement of his collateral policy of "architecture and beyond" (but maybe the failure of Iowa City?).

This Peter B. Lewis is not only a donor to Cleveland, but also the chairman of the Guggenheim Museum and its biggest benefactor, having given around $77 million. I mean, was. Yesterday he said "here no more" and, after a meeting of the board, left. He does not like Guggenheim's global empire. In fact, Mr. Lewis probably loathes the branches Thomas Krens is creating everywhere, not always succesfully, and he wished yesterday that the museum "would concentrate on New York and less on being scattered all over the world", according to the New York Times piece published yesterday night on the web. But Mr. Krens has a superior mission that he will fulfill by all means and at any cost, so Peter is out, Tom is in, the Gugen empire goes on (having the support of most of the board helps, too).

Peter and Tom, Tom and Peter have clashed, one is left and a museum is harmed (some wish a museum director would, too). You cannot blame a director for having a mission for his museum, it's their job, but the case of Tom Krens seems to me as being more of a rather strange personal enlightenment and awkward vision guided by some ethereal forces, "I have a dream" (and I shall enforce it). Obsession, some would say. And the fact is he's so tremendously powerful nobody will ever confront him. Or will they? I've been hearing for years rumors of Mr. Krens being about to be fired, even Peter B. Lewis himself threatened him: you better stop spending and balance the budget or star looking for another job. Well, you see, that was in 2002, and roughly two years later, Mr. Lewis is out and Krens stays on board. With his bikes, his Aztecs, his blockbusters, his sketches for a building in Senegal, a show in Alaska and a meeting with some local authorities in Polynesia. Hey, they want a Gugen, too.

Check his godly power, anybody around knows of a museum director that is able to permit himself and his museum to have the biggest benefactor stepping out and not doing anything about it except for thinking "Taiwan, Mexico, Brazil, where next?".

The article on The New York Times ends with some words by Peter B. Lewis: "Tom is a man of enormous ability, and he will continue to be doing the things he likes to do". Now, that is utterly impressive. Again, can anybody imagine any of the unearthly powerful and influential members of the board of the MoMA leaving their chairs because of the director's stubbornness and hardhead, "my vision and mission or death"? In a normal world, the director would calm down and keep it low, carefully avoiding the fury of the ultra-millionaires that are feeding the museum. In Guggenheim's empire, everybody's out, Tom is in. That's the law of the land.

"He's got the world following him", says Mr. Lewis, the evicted chairman. Surely, the third world: everybody wants his money and his paintings for growing locally. There he goes, Tom in a mission. Don't you dare to stop him.

Beuys in Minnesota

2005-01-19T14:26:00.000-05:00

Ever since I discovered the powerful art and persona of Joseph Beuys (some five years ago at a university class where an image of Beuys explaining the pictures to a dead hare on his lap changed my way of seeing art forever), I thought his only contact with America was at the René Block Gallery in New York, 1974, when he lived for five days with a coyote. "I like America and America likes me" is one of the most powerful artistic statements ever created, and one cannot but being in awe before those epic, dramatic images of Beuys totally covered in felt, mummy-like, being attacked by the bites of the coyote, though the shaman and the beast eventually became friends and had a peaceful stay together, not in small part due to the powers of Beuys as a communicator with animals and earth, his capability to understand the coyote, its behave and reaction, his touching the spirit of the coyote.

The choice of a coyote was a commentary on the lost Native America; Beuys didn't want to touch American soil, remarking that "whole American trauma with the Indian, the Red Man", so he was wrapped upon his arrival to JFK Airport, transported in an ambulance to the gallery and left alone, isolated and focused on himself and his dialogue with the coyote, blinded by the felt that covered his head and whole body. He wanted to see nothing of America but the coyote. After the action ended, Beuys was wrapped again, supposedly blind for the whole trip and action, conducted to the airport and flown to Dusseldorf.

Now, this could be the "official" story and history for many people including me myself, but there is a visit that I didn't know and I think many people don't know: the other day I found a book at the Strand in Fulton entitled "Beuys in America" that tells the story and photos of Beuys' first visit to America, in January 1974, that is, some five months before his Coyote action. He visited New York, Chicago, Minneapolis invited by Ronald Feldman of New York and John Stoller of Dayton's Gallery 12 in Minneapolis. He gave his lectures, painted his chalkboards; he had walks in the streets of Chicago, a breakfast in a New York deli, a visit to Dayton's store in Minneapolis (owned by Kenneth Dayton, the founder of Target and champion of artistic philanthropy and museum giving in the Twin Cities-Minnesota). The photos are a discovery for me, an impact- I've lived all these years thinking Beuys never actually touched American soil and his only visit was to talk to the coyote, and now I find out that he had a 15-days tour.

Hard to imagine Joseph Beuys in Minnesota, in the snowy freezing Midwest. His schedule and reschedule of flights that appear in the "Beuys in America" book remind me of my own first visit to the Midwest, also to Chicago and Minneapolis, also from New York, also among heavy snowstorms, also in January, exactly 30 years later, in 2004. Also a European, also a first contact with America (not New York City).

It's disappointing to discover that Beuys visited America on a normal trip. Somehow, that makes "I like America and America likes me" less original, less authentic. He had touched America, certainly. Was it "legitimate" to perform a piece that carefully avoided any contact with American soil after he had being touring no less than the heart of America, the Midwest?

But while this disappointment is unavoidable and quite shocking, getting to know that Beuys' academic tour to New York, Chicago and Minneapolis and first visit to America coincide with my own personal experience in the exact same cities and dates opens a whole new perception-connection between the master shaman and my living that pleases me and intrigues me.

Now, Joseph Beuys, after all these years, does America really like us?

MoMA makes me sad and some other feelings

2005-01-18T21:28:00.000-05:00

An Anne Truitt sculpture that was on view at MoMA has been damaged by a visitor. A number of art bloggers are responding to the incident, and, apparently, a newspaper will run a piece on it. Maybe MoMA will then (re)act. Or not.

The issue has drawn some obvious connections with my own experiences and incidents at MoMA, that frustrating place. Mine is about the lead on the floor: enraged for having my right to walk on the Carl Andre floor piece denied by the museum guards, I wrote to John Elderfield and the rest of curators, even Glenn Lowry himself seeking curatorial justice, but only Mr. Elderfield and Gary Garrels replied. You know, MoMA curators are too busy being themselves and having their assistants reading the e-mail.

Mr. Chief Curator told me "let me see what I can do" which probably means "I kinda care but I will do nothing".

He says they permit adults to walk on the Carl Andre, but not children, since the lead of which the piece is made of could poison them and kill them. We the adults don't bend over the floor in a museum and start licking Carl Andre's floor pieces, so it's OK. We can. Then I go to the museum again, with the Chief's permission and blessing and ask the guard in there. Can I? (walk, not lick). And he says "it's allowed, but the museum doesn't want anybody to" (walk, not lick).

So, no Carl Andre experience, which is always a tremendously rewarding one for various reasons.

My silly curatorial complaint sounds that, very silly, when compared to a damaged sculpture or a grave problem of overcrowding and danger to art and people. But it's just one more on a list of many failures that flaw the MoMA and turns it into the favourite target of our artistic hate. "MoMA, the museum you love to hate". Don't you love it?

It's that and it's the useless guards, the illiterate voluntaries that discover new words when I ask them for Jasper Johns, and the long lines, and the general chaos.

It's also the stupid, unnecessary huge but certainly gorgeous building with its thousands of stupid bridges (what's up with them and their voyeurism??) that give infinite chances to peek at the masses like if it were Grand Central Station from Cipriani Dolci. It's the mall-like escalators, and the no-benches in the video rooms, and the shameful, high-schoolish presentation of contemporary art, and the torpedo-style display of modern art, just as it was sixty years ago with Alfred Barr, nothing changes in the twenty-first century.

It's all that and because of that MoMA sucks, and sucks so very painfully much.

One day in Christmas I was at the MoMA and, watching the crowds menacing to overflow the place and blow it out, looking at the guards not giving a **** in their indifference, staring at the infuriating sound and thunderlight of the flashes unbounded by hordes of careless tourists, staying on that absurd atrium where Monet gets reduced to a matchbox size and the ceilings are so high and soaring that makes Chartres look like a Manhattan studio apartment. Suffering, last but not least, the emetic, horrifying vision of yet more tourists touching a Giacometti I felt ashamed and left. I had to stop and shut down my visits to MoMA, since there's hardly a worse feeling than that of being a museum member and feeling shame, rage and embarrassment for your museum.

My last year was an anxious wait for the opening of 11 W 53 near my home. Now, it's a place to avoid by all means. A touristic trap, an overcrowded mall decorated with art, a disappointing awful experience, a disgraceful so-called museum.

Am I too brutal? Ask Glenn and he'll tell you "people would come en masse to MoMA even if we only showed Post War and Contemporary Art". Liar, liar. Shame on you.

Chelsea-SoHo

2005-01-18T14:34:00.000-05:00

Since Roberta Smith wrote his long article on the "high baroque period" Chelsea is entering, many have posted it, quoted it, stolen it, footnoted it, talked it. Many others are still wondering what the **** is that "high baroque" period. Reality is, Chelsea rocks and insofar has not been SoHo-ized. That's a reason for loving it passionately. It's been now 10 years since Matthew Marks moved from Madison to Chelsea in 1994, being not only the first to venture in the gritty yards and deserted streets of the Far West with commercial aim (DIA Foundation had established its headquarters in 22nd Street in the amazingly early year of 1987), but also the pioneer of the Chelsea boom. And, after 10 years, a visit to Chelsea is still a kind of adventure, the long walk from the subway, the creepy garages, the taxi-washers, the parkings, the auto parts stores, the trucks, the freights, the gas stations, the no-amenities-just-galleries, the desolated sidewalks, the near-by piers, the gigantic old warehouses casting an imposing shadow over the gallery buildings. Chelsea is cold and eerie, uninviting and weird, inspiring and evocative, hard and cool. It is New York.

The more I hate SoHo, the more I love Chelsea: you won't find any Prada, any posh restaurants, any tourists, any crowds (except on Saturday afternoons, and they're easy), any MoMA store branch, not any cheap or expensive store. Just a row of galleries and garages. It's sort of true New York vs. fake New York; tourists vs. Manhattanites.

I love the funny contrast between the macho-style of the taxi drivers, mechanics, collision workers and the super-gay-cool-silly look of the gallery employees behind the solid, blind metal gates of all those temples of contemporary art. There's no fake in Chelsea, apart from the fakeness inherent to the art world: here you have an in-your-face atmosphere where your rough and raw "On-the-Waterfront"-like dock-worker immigrant drinks the same gas station coffee as the Brooklyn-transplanted young, successful art dealer. High and low, the two New Yorks, and beyond, authentic stuff.

SoHo on weekends bursts with tourist crowds from Europe searching the flagship stores of the latest fashion designers, and one has it not easy to access the Walter de Maria installations, the Judd Foundation, or some of the very few important galleries that resist/refuse in SoHo. SoHo is a big mall that has taken over by assault and intimidation (mean checks and money), perverting and destroying a once-cool area of art and artists. SoHo is, like Times Square and the new MoMA, a tourist trap to avoid by all means. So fake, untrue and made over that is pukey-yucky.

Chelsea has not been SoHo-ized and will probably never be: if something happens, it will be the end of Chelsea as a gallery-district and its relocation to other place. That's just a cyclic movement in Manhattan-New York. The next, of course, Hell's Kitchen. It's going on. But for now, let's go down to the yards to check some art. Lest it last, long.

I needed to tell you

2005-01-18T13:57:00.000-05:00

Some thoughts on Art from New York.