Below you will find a long piece looking at some works of art that caught the eye and provoked the mind at the Art Institute of Chicago. It is well worth the read, I feel. And is written in the trademark entertaining and informative style that you've hopefully come to love from Art or Idiocy?.
Also direct your attention to recent contributions: First is artist Ben Meisner’s account of meeting the late Agnes Martin. And the most recent installment of our popular TOP TEN, by arts organizer Britton Bertran.
Erik Wenzel
Director, Editor-in-Chief & Head-Bloggist, Art or Idiocy?
Contact via the electronic post? artoridiocy@yahoo.com
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
On View at AIC
This painting is by one of my favorite artists, Georg Baselitz. It is currently on view at the Art Institute. It used to be on rotation in the Contemporary Galleries and that is where I first saw years ago. It has recently appeared in a new location, presumably as part of the crazy re-arranging going on. The American Art Galleries have been expanded to include the upper and lower levels of the Rice building in order to accommodate the new works on extended loan from the Terra Foundation (still very much in existence, unlike the Terra Museum.) Also bringing change is the beginning of construction of the New North Wing. The windows Marc Chagall created for the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off have been de-installed for safety and conservation. It is rumored they were never intended for that location in the first place, rather the large lobby in front of the Contemporary Galleries by the winding stair case (Gallery 135). The America Windows were created in 1976 to commemorate the USA’s bicentennial. That kind of makes them suck. Also removed are works from the adjacent Indian and Southeast Asian galleries. Selections are being relocated to Gallery 135.
Georg Baselitz’s Woodman (1969) is on view at the top of the stairs at the end of Gunsaulus Hall, facing the expansive Sky Above Clouds by Georgia O'keefe. Baselitz's Woodman is such a good piece because it is difficult. Being an uninitiated kid first seeing it, and then growing up with it, I didn't know what to think. My first impression, seeing it alongside an Alex Katz, an Ad Reinhardt and Richard Serra, was confusion. I thought it was a "nonpainting" or a "false" or "fake" painting. It was nothing like the medieval battle scenes or Picasso's I favored more in my youth. It is such an odd thing, this figure, split in half and nailed to a tree. It is violent, but not physically. It is violently painted, but the severed figure seems almost to belong that way, like a mannequin to be assembled. And how odd it is on a tree like that! I am certain that it is a little girl, a Gretl, Bavarian mountain maiden, or at least a man dressed as one. And isn't that a gigantic wiener (penis AND sausage) rammed through his head, from ear to ear? It is not explicit or gross, though. Like Jake and Dinos Chapman sculptures. It is sort of straight forwardly suggested, or stated. This, I think, makes it more disarming. The colors are off and displeasing. Strangely, over time, they have come to be right on. Those footprints remind me of Philip Guston. Like the missing element: The prints left behind by his trademark shoes. The exposed canvas, all beige and regal, is exquisite. So are those charcoal lines, as fresh and gestural as the moment in which they were being drawn.
Yutaka Stone • Highway Junction 14-5 • 2002 • Marble • Edition 3/3 • David Zwirner Gallery
Meanwhile in the Contemporary Galleries are selections the Society for Contemporary Art is considering purchasing for the museum. Last year they picked a crappy, but sure to be popular for many years to come, installation of shiny glass bricks by Pae White, Late August Songs (2003), which is also on view. There are artworld insider photos by Louise Lawler, a marble diorama with some palm trees by Yutaka Stone, a display of earthenware by Andrew Lord (courtesy of Donald Young Gallery) and a video by David Hammons. The video, Phat Free (1995-9) is of a guy in New York (obvious from the loading dock platforms) kicking a bucket down the street. It sounds good, almost musical. Like something by a Minimalist composer from the 1970s. But it is also bland. It is very standard and straightforward and pointless. Is Hammons trying to get us to think about a social issue, or a tired metaphor? I don’t care because it is simple in a bad way. It is almost laughable. The video seems to be emblematic of the techy arts’ problem: the potential to be just as tired, dead and repetitive as the oldsters of painting and sculpture. The still image is deceptive, the video could be anything, and you look at it as an image, not a moving picture telling a story.
Also on view is a B&W painting by Albert Oehlen (untitled [1997]). This former co-conspirator of Martin Kippenberger has, of late, gone seriously into painting, and painting with a decidedly digital bent. Almost parodies of what the 90s Painter and Color-It! computer geeks thought would be the utopian revolution of art. Oehlen mixes heavily pixilated lines with spray paint, screenprinting and oil. How amazing it would be to see it alongside the Christopher Wool piece created with a similar frame of mind.
There is an underwhelming pewter drain inserted into a whole in the wall by Robert Gober. Looking at the wall card it took him quite a few years to make it (untitled [98-04]). If you notice, pieces with no titles are usually called “untitled.” Exhibition organizers confronted with this situation tend to put the word “untitled” where the title would go on their wall placards or “didactics.” To further undermine the fact that the work has no title, the word “untitled” is usually capitalized and italicized. Essentially titling the piece. In the abstracted photos Louise Lawler has on view, she addresses this, calling them Not Yet Titled (2003) and Twice Titled (2004-5).
For some reason Robert Gober has been re-enthroned as important. He is mainly a bad reminder of what people of the 80s and 90s thought was good art. You see Robert Gober, and you think, “thank god that time period is over with!” Except it is not! Matthew Marks and Artforum seem to have decided it is time we all bow before the Goober. Hal Foster was called in to provide critical backup for Gober’s triumphant return to the limelight in the pages of Artforum. Hal Foster’s writing is illegible for a number of reasons, as his tenure with October would indicate. Regardless, the cover is the cover, even if no one reads the feature. So Robert Gober is featured in the new Walker Art Center, has a solo show at Matthew Marks and the cover of Artforum.
I could be wrong, but I thought all the October editors were banished from Artforum a while back in order to save art. I guess we are back to killing it from above as well as below. It should also be mentioned that, as reported in New York magazine, Matthew Mark’s longtime partner, Jack Bankowsky, was formerly Artforum’s editor-in-chief. (Just sayin’ is all.)
Next to the Gober are some extremely beautiful fiber-tipped pen drawings of flowers (untitled, 2003). They aren’t drawn by Laura Owens, they are drawn by Charles Ray, which makes them more endearing. This is because they are only one unique facet of a wide range of work. In the next gallery is the Magnus von Plessen Focus exhibition. Reproductions do this work no justice, and so they must be seen in person. They are amazing, hovering on the walls at once static and vibrantly alive with the vigor of fresh execution.
The previous Focus of Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, working in a totally different mode, was also very good. What sticks with one most is the look and feel of the exhibition, its sparse and polished aesthetic. Vanishing Sky (2005) was a three-screen projection of “a self-generating digital image of a constantly changing night sky.” And Iceberg (r11i01) (2005), a scale model made of tubing and based on radar and sonar scans of a real iceberg in the Labrador Sea. The iceberg was suspended in the Alfred Shaw-designed staircase of Gallery 135 (see, it all fits together).
Manglano-Ovalle and Plessen represent two methods of working, one collaborating with a team of experts, the other working alone in the studio. No one method is correct, but it is interesting to compare the vast array in which people make art.
The main short coming of Manglano-Ovalle’s exhibition is that it easily falls into the art-pseudo-science category (see Matthew Richie). Art that is a veiled science lesson, that teaches you something only when you read the handout about it, can only give so much pleasure to a viewer. Is “we wrote a new program to calculate this video” the art&tech equivalent to “it took three hours to shade your upper lip”?
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Uh-Oh
Monday, June 06, 2005
Art Shows That Opened on Friday, June 3
Here are the vapid rapid fire reviews of the shows which opened this past weekend in Chicago...
MYSTIC VITRIOL
Kavi Gupta
Curated by Simon Watson. Painting in the “I refuse to paint” way, but still good looking, with quite a few highlights. Spiritual Heroes of the Show: Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger, Peter Doig & Daniel Richter. But those are everyone’s current heroes; Mary Heilman as well.
TAL R has one good painting, it’s the one in all the magazines and Saatchi owns it (for the time being.) Unfortunately it looks like none of his other ones. One of the other ones is here, which looks like a Miró in the Art Institute, which looks like fake vomit.
Matthew Connors has the best work, with a sloppy garish abstraction. His is an abstraction draws you in again and again to look carefully at its hypnotic simplicity. Mike Paré’s work is the worst. It is stupid pencil drawings of hippy rock crowds (large format) and stupid neon references to Jr. High ghosts and goblins metal music in the form of appropriated fuzzy black light posters.
Sarah Nesbit: Small panel paintings are the voice of skill and craft for the show. Very Doig and Kai Althoff, but also Edvard Munch. So: “nice,” “pretty” and “muddy” are words to use. I guess you’re not supposed to use the first two, though. So just say “exquisite” instead.
Huma Bhabha: Photos of a creepy dead monster spilling out of a garbage bag/praying like Muslim. So there are lots of implications and coded messages there. For once, good results from a sculpture taken out photographed in different settings.
PRINTS AND SCULPTURES
Kraft Lieberman
The generic title is apt for this show of minor editions by mismatched modernist heavy hitters.
Best part: Victor Pasmore’s signature.
Best Name: Betty Merken
MARK BOOTH
Panda Bear Insemination Team Picnic and other Thought Formations
Bodybuilder and Sportsman
Drawings and paintings tell weird stories and stream of consciousness musings in the form of comic style word bubbles and thought balloons. The installation is most effective when the paintings and drawings of various sizes, some with graphic abstraction, are all crammed around each other. The writing is good, but visually, the pieces are not enough for the large gallery space. There is a little too much of sameness going on, but the work is, on the whole, good. I would have liked some punctuations of color. Or reversals of value, too much black on white. This paired with white walls and things get troublesome. Maybe it reminds me too much of me.
The works seems much better off in the tiny project room, or seen along side work by other artists. Can there be such a thing as someone’s art better off with company than on its own?
As result, the work seems to stop short and fall into repetition. The trouble with poetic abstract writing in your pictures: Raymond Pettibon.
TODD PAVLISKO
mmg
Answering the question, “what if I blew up museum membership brochures and printed them on canvas?” Answer: about 2 people give a fuck.
Also: Unnecessary surgery: a plastic tube threaded through the skin of a surgeon. What an exquisite quasi, semi, not quite Orlan gesture.
UNSEEN, BUT HEARD OF:
Near Foundation is ARC, with the much advertised Chicago Solutions Show. This was Ed Paschke’s baby, but James Rondeau has juried (curated?) it this time around. My feeling is that unless there is art about the growing trade gap between the U.S. and Asia, it probably sucks. Art can’t solve very much of anything, unless it is the problem of “how do we cover up that hole in the wall?” Remember: Guernica didn’t hasten the end of WWII by a single day. In fact, it was created long before things got really crazy, it was painted in 1937.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
BMOMA #2 opens Saturday June 4, 2005
3213 S. Lituanica VISIT BMOMA
The Art Institute of Chicago may have just announced it expansion plans with a star-studded media blitz, but there is a new kid in town capturing the hearts and minds of critics and commentators everywhere.
The press release states:
- Th’ Bridgeport Museum of Modern Art is having another
show this week end I'm sure it will prove to be a heel
of a time ---but don't just listen to me --here is
what the critics say:
"This isn't retarded it's quite wonderful"- –J. Yood
"The most important insitiution since the.....what do
you call it?.....the MCA "-- M. Workman
"Chris Uphues…who is that?" -- F. Camper
Indeed, in the grande tradition of Moe-Muh, Sfuh-Moe-Muh and No-Muh, is Buh-Moe-Muh:
The Bridgeport Museum of Modern Art!
So what is the BMoMA? One simply must confer with the website: “The Bridgeport Museum of Modern Art was founded in 2005. Exhibits are periodic and held for the duration of one evening.”
But cultural critc (pop culture) L. Burke says, "Just because it has a website, doesn't make it a museum. But B. MoMa is a force to reckon with, unlike your momma."
Agnes Martin Remembered
On December 16, 2004, Agnes Martin passed away at the age of 92. Amidst all the academic renderings and theoretical canonizations exists the life of a simple, down to earth artist. Moving from the New York scene to the stark beauty of Taos, a certain self-imposed monastic exile, was Martin’s reaction to the art world. Art or Idiocy? asked artist, and fellow Taos resident, Ben Meisner, to recount the story of how he met the late Agnes Martin.
AGNES
Ben Meisner
I met Agnes Martin for lunch in late May of 2002. I had written her a letter a month earlier explaining that I was graduating from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and that I would be returning home to Taos within a few weeks. I asked her if she would be interested in meeting with me when I came into town. Soon after I sent the letter, I received a message on my answering machine. I wasn’t quite able to make out the message on the first listening, but from a second listening I was able to decipher the slow raspy voice; “This is Agnes Martin. You can call me when you get to town.”
Agnes ate lunch at the same restaurant every day. When she suggested that we eat at the Trading Post Café, I wasn’t too surprised. She asked me to meet her at her apartment at around 11:45. When I arrived, I quickly found her door which was nestled into the back section of the Plaza de Retiro retirement community. I knocked on the door. Agnes welcomed me in. She was wearing the turquoise-blue shirt she is often photographed in. Her apartment was small and simply furnished. A small still life painting was the only thing on the wall. She told me that it was given to her by one of her friends. After a few moments of introduction, she suggested that we go eat. I offered to drive, but Agnes insisted on driving us in her car. She owned a large white Mercedes, which is a fairly distinctive car for Taos, New Mexico. After pulling out onto Camino de la Placitas, we made a right onto Ranchitos Road. “I like going this way,” she said. At the light near Larry Bell’s studio, we made a quick left onto Salazar.
The rumble of motorcycle engines is a familiar sound in Northern New Mexico during the Memorial Day weekend. Bikers from all over the country converge on Taos to ride around the mountains and visit the Vietnam Memorial in Angel Fire. The motorcycles seemed to put Agnes in a nostalgic mood. As we blasted through each intersection without stopping, she told me a story. She told me about the night she had been at a party and decided she wanted to go for a ride. She hopped onto one of the motorcycles that was parked outside the party and drove off. “Whose bike was it?” I asked. “I didn’t know,” she said, “I just took it.” Later that night she picked up a guy, and the two of them cruised around the neighborhood. It was getting late, and somehow they lost control of the motorcycle. “He was hurt pretty bad,” she said. “I don’t really remember what happened. The doctors came to help. Nobody noticed that I was lying by the side of the road. I was in a daze. I just sat there. When everyone left, I just got up and walked home.” Agnes sensed that I was gripping the armrest tightly as we blew past another stop sign, and she tried to reassure me, “Oh, don’t worry about the stop signs. I do this all the time.”
We arrived at the Trading Post just past noon, and we were quickly shown to a shaded area on the back patio. Agnes wasn’t very interested in the menu. She ordered the soup of the day and the special chef salad. She seemed a bit preoccupied as we sat waiting for our food. The silence became slightly awkward, and I asked her if she could tell me a little about her early years in New York. After a few minutes she began telling me about how Betty Parsons bought her paintings and convinced her to go to New York. She told me how cheap the rents were on “the Slip” in those days. She told be about the bums who lived at the bottom of her stairwell. She told me that she only painted for about three hours each day now that she was getting older. She told me about inspiration and patience. Mostly she told me what I had already read in the literature. Her answers seemed well ordered and well rehearsed. It was strange to hear her tell stories verbatim the way I read them in books and magazines. I sensed that being at the restaurant had put her into “interview mode.” She presented me with her official persona. Once our food arrived, her priorities quickly shifted. The time for talking was over. It was time to eat. We ate our lunches mostly in silence. Occasionally Agnes would comment on the food. I decided not to push the subject of art any further.
I came away from my lunch with Agnes feeling a bit stunned. After a relatively quiet ride back to her apartment, I thanked her for lunch. She wished me luck. I said thanks again. “You can wish me luck too,” she said. So I wished her luck and said good-bye. She didn’t leave me with any advice or words of wisdom. Instead, she had shown me what it means to be a real artist. Her presence and manner had spoken volumes. Agnes Martin was a great artist. She had no interest in her celebrity or status. She lived a humble life, and she left us with her great paintings to remember her by.
Ben Meisner is a Taos born artist who has lived in New Mexico for most of his life. He is an alumnus of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has attended Yale’s summer art program in Norfolk, Connecticut. His work has been shown in galleries in Chicago, Norfolk, and Taos, where he was most recently included in the Harwood Museum’s Contemporary Art Taos: Finalists show at the All Points Gallery. Although he continues to maintain a studio in northern New Mexico, he is currently working at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas as a conservation assistant and an instructor in the Museum’s summer art program for children.
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