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

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

“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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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")

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!

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.

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(from an inspiring spam e-mail)

Spain is indeed different

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"

"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

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

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?

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)

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..."

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)

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)