Of Art and Selling of Art: Sid Harth
navanavonmilita
http://navanavonmilita.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/of-art-and-selling-of-art-sid-harth/
Art Review
Art? Life? Must We Choose?
Chris Kendall
From the “Philippe Parreno” show, “June 8, 1968” (2009), a film work
closely based on photos taken by Paul Fusco on the day the train
carrying Robert F. Kennedy’s body made its way to Washington. More
Photos »
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard
College here may or may not have intended a pair of summer exhibitions
on view at its CCS Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art as a parable for
the ideological rifts that characterize our artistic moment. But that
is the combined effect of “Philippe Parreno” and “At Home/Not at Home:
Works From the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg.”
Slide Show
An Alternate Universe of Art
Chris Kendall
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Untitled 1993 (shall we dance),” includes a
record visitors can waltz to. On the shelf, puppet figures of Mr.
Tiravanija and other artists. More Photos »
On one side, in a spare, slick show of work by Mr. Parreno, a French
post-Conceptualist, art objects are kept to a minimum and spectacle
prevails. The presentation consists mainly of wide-open, red-carpeted
spaces — nearly 10,000 square feet — punctuated by two immense video
screens, each playing, in alternation, one short video. Born in 1964,
Mr. Parreno has since the late 1980s been a mover and shaker in the
artistic development known as relational aesthetics. In this realm,
artist-orchestrated social exchanges, situations and communal
experiences are generally preferred to art objects, which are seen at
best as optional — props whose formal qualities are almost beside the
point — and at worst terminally corrupt in their role as art-market
commodities.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/07/02/arts/02parreno-2.html
On the other side, in the Eisenberg exhibition, art objects are
rampant, domestic in scale and often overtly handmade. The show —
which has been selected and expertly if rather too densely installed
by Matthew Higgs, director of the Manhattan alternative space White
Columns — presents around 150 works by 106 artists, most of them
dating from the last decade. Painting, sculpture, photography and
their hybrids and derivatives dominate here, along with various forms
of drawing and a couple of videos.
Seen together, these shows seem to argue about a familiar litany of
issues: Is making art objects regressive? Does making work that sells
amount to selling out? How valid is self-expression in art? Is there
nothing left to do but appropriate, restage and rearrange? Has art
become primarily a mirror of larger contexts, whether social,
historical or architectural?
Luckily art is more about questions than answers, and in any case
cultural clash is always invigorating — especially if it reduces the
penchant for simple dualities and oppositions. What at first appears
to be an either-or choice in these two shows starts to blur once you
spend time with them, as the underlying messiness of both art and life
seeps through.
Mr. Parreno’s exhibition, characterized as a retrospective, originated
at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It seems to have progressively
slimmed down and also to have been continually rethought by the artist
as it moved on to London and then Dublin and then here, for its fourth
and final “iteration.” This one, which has been overseen by Maria
Lind, who was until recently the director of the graduate program at
the center, unfortunately will not teach the uninitiated much about
Mr. Parreno’s art. But the two videos, separated by nine years,
nevertheless trace what may be the essential trajectory of his
development, from hermetic and dryly cerebral to less hermetic and
more accessible and emotionally layered.
The first, “Anywhere Out of the World” (2000), stars Annlee, a female
character. Mr. Parreno and the artist Pierre Huyghe purchased the
rights to use Annlee from a Japanese Manga agency and then made the
character available to other artists to work with. (The arrangement
has a slightly sordid comfort-woman tinge, even if one or two of the
artists were women.) Like a flatter and less compelling version of the
androids in “Blade Runner,” Mr. Parreno’s Annlee laments her existence
as “no ghost, just a shell,” a vessel to be filled with narrative, but
she’s as interesting as a blank canvas.
After her video ends, the second screen shifts into action that is
much closer to reality, and to life, with “June 8, 1968” (2009). In
lush color and alternating waves of tumultuous sound and windblown
quiet, this film piece restages scenes from the summer day when
thousands of people gathered along the railroad tracks to pay last
respects as the train carrying Robert F. Kennedy’s body made its way
from New York to Washington for burial. The scenes are closely based
on photographs taken by Paul Fusco, a photojournalist who was aboard
the train and show Americans of different ages, races and demographics
in settings variously pastoral, banal and gritty.
“June 8, 1968” imbues the past with the familiar mediated immediacy of
live television, creating memories unfamiliar even to people alive at
the time, since the journey was not televised live — unlike, say, the
carefully orchestrated funeral of President John F. Kennedy years
earlier. Do the color, camerawork and sound — provided by a Hollywood
cinematographer and sound editor — make this history real to people
who were born later? Does sitting together on the red carpet watching
the film provide a momentary sense of community? And does this have
the weight of a substantial work or just a well-made, arted-up
documentary?
The high production values and dwarfing scale of this work are
hallmarks — and often pitfalls — of some of the more recent works of
relational aesthetics, which are frequently made possible by
enthusiastic institutional support. But here Mr. Parreno gets beyond
that easy impact to achieve an emotional resonance that seems light-
years away from Annlee. He may go a bit Hollywood — he has before —
but he creates moments of indelible beauty and poignancy. Not the
least of these is the film’s almost silent final shot, in which
several people stand along the crest of a slope, isolated from one
another above an enormous and gnarled tree — a sign of both endurance
and vulnerability.
Across the broad, glass-fronted lobby that connects the Center for
Curatorial Studies to the Hessel Museum, “At Home/Not At Home”
presents a seemingly alternate universe. Mr. Higgs’s selections from
more than 2,000 works by 350 artists that the New Yorkers Martin and
Rebecca Eisenberg acquired over the last two decades fill no less than
17 galleries. (Mr. Eisenberg is a vice president of Bed Bath &
Beyond.)
This array may seem to offer immediate respite from the high-
mindedness of Mr. Parreno’s show, and yes, these pieces are
commodities, among other things. They were made mostly by hand and
were bought, taken home and lived with, with the proceeds of the sales
going to artists as well as to galleries and their staffs (which often
include other, younger, not-yet-selling artists).
But the real difference between the Parreno and Eisenberg shows is not
so much nonobject versus object as public versus personal, which is a
matter of scale and tone. As if to prove this point the Eisenberg show
opens with an early example of relational aesthetics, but a small-
scale and intimate one: Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Untitled 1993 (shall we
dance),” which consists of turntable and record that visitors can
play, waltzing to the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from the album
(vinyl) of “The King and I.” Also in the first gallery is a cohort of
five puppets commissioned by Mr. Parreno and Mr. Tiravanija that
portray the artists themselves, along with Mr. Huyghe; the artist Liam
Gillick; and one of the group’s most vocal advocates, the critic and
curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who is now the director of the Serpentine
Gallery, a noncollecting exhibition space in London. Like many
puppets, they exude an inanely cheerful self-satisfaction.
While Mr. Higgs has presented many impressive exhibitions at White
Columns, this is his most ambitious on the East Coast. It is
interesting to see him spread his wings, even if the crowding is
initially off-putting. But conditions improve as you focus, moving
from work to work and gallery to gallery, and you start to see that he
has often made the best of some outstanding efforts by more and less
familiar artists (but for a change, no meganames).
Certainly he, like the Eisenbergs, is at heart object-oriented, with a
highly eclectic sense of formalism. He groups things according to
medium, subject, color and texture, revealing all kinds of mutual
sympathies and unexpected connections. Into a small gallery dominated
by strong pieces about identity by black artists like David Hammons,
Rashid Johnson and William Pope.L, he places a large, monochrome black
painting by Mark Grotjahn, who is not black. He nominates Alexandra
Bircken’s 2007 “Spindel” — tree branches held together by knitted
squares — as an expansion on Jim Lambie’s 2000 “Psychedelicsoulstick
#7,” a piece of bamboo wrapped in silk thread, by placing them not
side by side but in the same corner two rooms away.
In one small gallery works by Ricci Albenda, Mr. Hammons, Shinique
Smith and Tony Feher meditate on black, white and transparency in
circles, spheres or bulges; Gabriel Orozco demurs with a black-and-
white wall piece in nylon mesh and polyurethane foam that is all
angles and ooze. Another gallery might be titled More Than
Photography. Here the efforts of Wolfgang Tillmans, John Stezaker,
Walead Beshty, Shannon Ebner and Michaela Meise push the medium beyond
its usual function as a two-dimensional record of reality, into
abstraction, seriality, sculpture.
Mr. Higgs draws interesting distinctions between art involved with the
figure in art history — like Matthew Monahan’s Roman-Egyptian-
Michelangeloesque “Youth Fenced In,” Anne Chu’s riffs on Tang ceramic
statues and Nicole Eisenman’s painting “Death and the Maiden” — and
more visceral evocations of the body itself, as in assemblage
sculptures by John Bock and John Outterbridge. Similarly, there is
abstract painting as process-oriented image — Mary Heilmann, Richard
Hawkins, Josh Smith — and paintinglike abstraction in video
performance, installation or wall sculpture — Alex Hubbard, Guyton/
Walker and Mr. Lambie. Everywhere there are striking juxtapostions, as
with Charline Von Heyl’s weirdly foliate white on black painting and
Hayley Tompkins’s even weirder wall sculpture made mostly of a branch
of dried leaves.
These two exhibitions exemplify the different paths opened up by
Conceptual art and its early 1970s offshoots. In tending away from art
objects, Mr. Parreno’s works perpetuate the sense of historical
inevitability that Conceptual art in many ways sought to overturn. In
contrast, most of the artists in the Eisenberg collection are using
the new freedoms unleashed in the early 1970s as a way to reinvigorate
art objects. This show has a great spirit and a sense of artists
operating on all cylinders in many different kinds of engines.
It some ways it is easier to sit back and enjoy Mr. Parreno’s efforts,
with their streamlined confidence that history is on their side.
Things are considerably messier in terms of both art and life on the
Eisenberg side of the lobby. There you can only take comfort in the
feeling that ultimately we never really know whose side history is
on.
A version of this review appeared in print on July 2, 2010, on page
C21 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/arts/design/02parreno.html?_r=1&src=mv&pagewanted=all
July 1, 2010, 11:17 am
Metropolitan Museum Posts Best Attendance in Nearly a Decade
By LARRY ROHTER
Metropolitan Museum of Art
12:21 p.m. | Updated
More than 5.2 million people visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art
during the fiscal year that ended Wednesday, the institution’s best
performance since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Despite the
impact of an economy in recession, the number of visitors was up more
than 10 percent over the comparable period a year earlier. “Attendance
fell by a million” after 9/11, said Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the
museum, “and has been working its way back” ever since, “hovering
around 4.7 million” in recent years. Visitors from abroad accounted
for nearly 40 percent of the attendance, and the single most popular
exhibition was “Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” which
opened on April 27, will close on Aug. 15 and has already attracted
more than 380,00 visitors.
The Museum of Modern Art also reported robust growth in its attendance
during the fiscal year just ended, drawing more than three million
visitors, a record, despite discouraging economic conditions. That
represented an increase of about 9 percent over last year, with a pair
of exhibitions performing especially strongly: “Monet’s Water Lilies”
drew 857,386 people, and “Tim Burton” attracted 810,511.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/
July 1, 2010, 1:19 pm
‘Promises, Promises’ Says a Little Prayer for LeBron
By DAVE ITZKOFF
It’s not clear yet whether the newly minted N.B.A. free agent LeBron
James will sign with the New York Knicks for many, many millions of
dollars. But will he do it for a song? The cast of “Promises,
Promises” seems to think it’s worth a shot. In the video above, Mr.
James is reminded of all the qualities that might make New York an
appealing place to live and play — from Gray’s Papaya to Jazz at
Lincoln Center to the abundance of his beloved Fruity Pebbles cereal —
in a song performed by that Broadway show’s backup singers.
(Apparently, Kristin Chenoweth and Katie Finneran are fine if he stays
with the Cleveland Cavaliers.)
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/
Saatchi Says He’ll Give Britain His Gallery and Over $37 Million in
Art
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: July 1, 2010
LONDON — Less than a month after his 67th birthday, the British
advertising magnate and gallery owner Charles Saatchi announced on
Thursday that when he retires he intends to give the nation his art
gallery here — a 70,000-square-foot space in Chelsea — along with
artworks valued at more than $37.5 million.
Saatchi Gallery
Richard Wilson’s “20:50” (1987) is the only permanent installation at
the Saatchi Gallery.
Saatchi Gallery
The collector Charles Saatchi.
But the building, in a former military complex known as the Duke of
York’s Headquarters near Sloane Square, does not belong to Mr.
Saatchi. He rents it from Cadogan Estates, a London developer.
(Cadogan Estates said in a statement that it hoped the government
would keep the gallery there.) And the British government has not yet
accepted the gift, although discussions are in progress, said Ruth
Cairns, a spokeswoman for the Saatchi Gallery, who added that she had
no timetable for a final decision. Also unclear is when Mr. Saatchi
plans to retire, which Ms. Cairns said had not yet been determined. A
statement from the two-year-old gallery also said that Mr. Saatchi
would receive no tax benefits from the gift.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/07/02/arts/02saatchi-2.html
But if all goes as Mr. Saatchi hopes, the Saatchi Gallery would be
renamed the Museum of Contemporary Art, London. And the art, which
will include more than 200 works by popular British names like Tracey
Emin, Grayson Perry and the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, would be
given to the government in the care of a foundation that would own the
works on behalf of the nation and oversee the gallery in much the same
way it has been run.
The aim is to keep the space free to the public, with operating funds
coming from individual and corporate sponsorship along with revenue
from its restaurant, bookshop and rentals for outside events held
there.
The gift would also include artworks that could be sold to acquire
other art so that the museum could remain a showcase for the latest
works.
Mr. Saatchi did not return a phone call requesting comment. But the
gallery said in a statement that he felt it was “vital for the museum
to always be able to display a living and evolving collection of work,
rather than an archive of art history.”
He began collecting and showing Young British Artists — among them,
Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili, Marc Quinn, Rachel Whiteread, Jenny Saville
and Ms. Emin — years before they became popular. Mr. Saatchi is also
known for buying and selling the work of young artists in bulk,
causing the prices of their other works to rise quickly when he buys
and fall as quickly when he sells. In 2003 he sold about a dozen of
Mr. Hirst’s works back to the artist and his dealer, Jay Jopling, in a
deal that was said to be worth around $15 million.
An advertising impresario with a keen eye, Mr. Saatchi has also
reached out beyond his gallery to help heighten public awareness of
many of his artists. His collection is well known to American
museumgoers who saw the traveling exhibition “Sensation: Young British
Artists From the Saatchi Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.
That’s when Rudolph W. Giuliani, mayor of New York at the time, called
the exhibition “sick stuff” and threatened to cut city subsidies
because Mr. Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary included clumps of
elephant dung.
Beyond exhibitions at his gallery, Mr. Saatchi has also built a Web
site that receives millions of hits a year. Besides showing off his
collection, it allows artists who register to post their work and sell
it without having to pay a fee to a gallery or dealer. (About 140,000
artists have contributed.) It also has a social-networking component,
allowing art students to talk to one another and post their work.
Ms. Cairns said the site would continue under its existing management
and that once Mr. Saatchi retired, he would no longer be involved with
it.
For years now Mr. Saatchi has had a contentious relationship with the
Tate. On Thursday the Tate issued a statement saying it “welcomes the
news that the national collection of contemporary art promises to be
enhanced in this way.” The statement continued, “We look forward to
contributing to discussions about how the collection will be used by
the nation in the long term.”
A version of this article appeared in print on July 2, 2010, on page
C9 of the New York edition.
Art Review
Country Divided in Black and White
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
“South African Photographs: David Goldblatt,” at the Jewish Museum,
includes an image of riders on a bus (1984). More Photos »
For the last few weeks millions of fevered eyes have been fixed on
South Africa, host to the World Cup, which ends next weekend. For half
a century the probing gaze of the South African photographer David
Goldblatt has been trained on the same country, his self-lacerating
homeland.
Multimedia
Slide Show
The Hard Facts of South Africa
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/07/01/arts/design/20100702-goldblatt-slideshow.html?ref=design
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
The scene at a soccer cup final in Soweto, 1972. More Photos »
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/07/01/arts/design/20100702-goldblatt-slideshow.html
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Blacks and whites together at a Methodist church in Boksburg, a
Johannesburg suburb (1980). More Photos »
Sports events go for cheers and tears, delirium. Mr. Goldblatt’s art,
avoiding the overt display of big feelings, goes for hard South
African facts. A resonant survey of his work from 1948 to 2009 at the
Jewish Museum, records the everyday particulars of a racially divided
country in images of white suburbs and black settlements, Afrikaner
nationalist political rallies and Soweto soccer games. The 150 black-
and-white photographs also document institutions and individual lives
that are now part of the historical past but that have, in complex
ways, shaped lives in the present, including Mr. Goldblatt’s.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/07/02/arts/02goldblatt-3.html
He was born in 1930 in the gold-mining town of Randfontein, near
Johannesburg, the grandchild of Lithuanian Jews who immigrated to
Africa in the 19th century. He began photographing in his teens, and
even pictures from his high school years invite complicated readings.
One of the earliest pieces in the Jewish Museum’s exhibition, “South
African Photographs: David Goldblatt,” is a 1948 shot of a black
stevedore in Durban doing a springy little look-at-me dance. Only at a
second or third glance do you notice what could be the picture’s real
subject: a graffiti of a swastika scrawled on a wall, its pinwheel
lines echoing the man’s leaping form.
Throughout the 1950s Mr. Goldblatt studied photography while running
his family’s business, a men’s clothing store. By 1962, when he began
taking pictures professionally, bruising political developments had
been unrolled. In the late 1940s the ruling party, dominated by Dutch-
descended white Afrikaners, had instituted a national policy of racial
segregation, or apartheid.
Almost immediately, specific restrictions kicked in. In 1949
interracial marriage was made illegal. In 1950 cities were divided
into districts by race. By 1951 blacks were required to move to
government-designed reservations called bantustans, or tribal states,
often far removed from jobs and services. By 1953 access to many
public amenities — beaches, water fountains — was race-specific.
This campaign of exclusion is history now, and we have seen, partly
through photographs, the shattering violence it eventually produced.
What we are less familiar with is what it felt like to live in South
Africa during the years when these measures were still relatively new,
and organized resistance hadn’t begun.
On the one hand, South Africans were living a moral nightmare. A
modern government — their own — was sorting out an entire population
on the basis of skin color and afflicting much of that population with
inconceivable disadvantages. Yet daily life went on. People got up and
went to work, dealt with bosses, neighbors, family, money or the lack
of it. It was as if institutional racism had become so encompassing as
to be — particularly if you were white — invisible, normal, ordinary.
It is this South Africa that Mr. Goldblatt has photographed: not the
struggle-era nation of heroes, martyrs and villains but a below-the-
radar society in which everyday courtesies and cruelties papered over
a system rotten at the core. In his own way Mr. Goldblatt exploited
this model of layering. He created pictures that at first seem blandly
anecdotal, generic, even contentless. Yet as you quickly discover by
reading his written annotations, almost every image comes with a back
story that deepens and darkens it.
In a sense his art is about back stories, about the coexistence of
different, interactive realities, overlaid or set side by side. In a
photograph from around 1955 a black family — the mother carrying a
suitcase, the father tending to a child — crosses an empty
Johannesburg street. They’ve just arrived in town, Mr. Goldblatt notes
in a caption. They look confident, at home in the city.
From 1964 comes another Johannesburg picture far less optimistic in
mood. Now there are many black people in the city, a crowd of them at
the end of a work day, filling sidewalks as they head for trains back
to Soweto (South Western Townships) and other containerlike ghettos.
Meanwhile the street is jammed with cars going in the opposite
direction, presumably to homes in white suburbs.
In 1972 Mr. Goldblatt spent almost every day for six months shooting
in Soweto. He has always worked that way, by making extensive
commitments of time and energy to a particular place or group of
people, from which a thematically linked series of images emerges.
Often the subject he chooses to focus on is fraught with difficulties:
the place is dangerous or hard to get to; the people are puzzling or
unsettling. But his choices are deliberate. Discomfort will keep his
attitudes off balance.
He has published, several decades apart, two series on Afrikaners, a
group of people he experiences in contradictory ways: as shapers and
enforcers of apartheid, and as generous neighbors and friends. The
nuanced array of Afrikaner series photographs in the Jewish Museum’s
show, organized by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, gives a good sense of how
he can keep his art both commentarial and open ended, as he also does
in a 1979-80 series devoted to a white town, the Johannesburg suburb
of Boksburg.
Life in this enclave of immaculate homes and well-watered lawns, which
closely resembles the town he grew up in, seems ideally ordered. A
genial town councilman enjoys afternoon tea at home with his wife. The
Women’s Zionist League meets for a monthly discussion. A Dutch
Reformed Church minister visits a parishioner at home and shares a
joke. All of them are clearly at ease with Mr. Goldblatt, as if he
were one of their own.
But there are the back stories. One of the councilman’s duties is to
monitor segregation, to keep Boksburg white. The progressive women of
the Zionist League will talk about anti-Semitism, but not about
apartheid. The Dutch Reformed minister probably won’t talk about it
either on his pastoral call, though his denomination, which is the
official Afrikaner church, claims scriptural justification for the
system.
So in this nice suburb the bad dream goes on. Even people of good will
and good sense don’t see it, though there are a few who do. One of the
surprises of the Boksburg series is a shot of a meeting in the town’s
Methodist church, with blacks from townships and local whites
gathering together for a clear-the-air talk about racism and class
inequity, and the murderous disorders they cause.
Boksburg churchgoers arrived at this reality through active conscious-
raising; other South Africans knew it simply by living their lives. In
one particularly moving series Mr. Goldblatt documented the grueling
daily commute of a group of black workers from their government-
assigned KwaNdebele homeland to the city of Pretoria, where they clung
to desperately needed low-wage jobs. The trip took three to four hours
each way. The workers caught a packed public bus — standing room only
was not unusual — at close to 3 a.m. to reach the city by dawn. After
working all day, they took the bus back, reaching home late at night,
where they got a few hours’ sleep before making the trip again.
In 1984 Mr. Goldblatt traveled with them. By the glare of the bus’s
headlights he photographed workers waiting to board at different
stops. Once on the road, he caught them at closer range, sitting,
standing, dozing. These pictures have no back story, no hidden side.
They are what they are, emblems of survival.
And the people in them are, we have to think, illusion free about the
realities of racism and power; they know the score. Maybe that’s what
keeps them going, keeps them looking, like Mr. Goldblatt’s art, both
quiet and alert; wide awake even when they seem asleep.
“South African Photographs: David Goldblatt” continues through Sept.
19 at the Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street;(212) 423-3200,
thejewishmuseum.org.
A version of this review appeared in print on July 2, 2010, on page
C23 of the New York edition.
...and I am Sid Harth