No, Martha
Martha Rosler
Great Power
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th St. [btwn 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.744.7400, www.miandn.com
Martha Rosler
Great Power
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th St. [btwn 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.744.7400, www.miandn.com
Sept 6 – October 11, 2008
The entrance to Martha Rosler’s show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash was blocked off by a black and chrome turnstile. With no written explanation. I was told that I had to pay a quarter to be able to gain entrance to the show. I was told that it was for charity—Artists Against Whatever. I was also told I wouldn’t be able to get anything else like it for a quarter.
It would be easy to make comments here about not wanting to pay money to see photo-collages, but that is not the point [and Jerry Saltz made it better: http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/50974/] . The point is that being able to go to galleries free is one of the greatest gifts we are given and I don’t want that taken away. While a quarter is indeed cheap, I’m old enough to remember when we were told that paying for tv would be a great idea and that it would only ever be for a tiny fee.
Worse though is that Rosler’s strategy is, writ small, the exact kind of left wing tyranny that turned so many people off to most of the other right headed thinking embraced by progressives. It provided kindling for so much of the reactionary behavior of the past 30 years because it turned so many people so decidedly off.
Consider that my .$25, Martha.
Yes, Richard
The entrance to Martha Rosler’s show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash was blocked off by a black and chrome turnstile. With no written explanation. I was told that I had to pay a quarter to be able to gain entrance to the show. I was told that it was for charity—Artists Against Whatever. I was also told I wouldn’t be able to get anything else like it for a quarter.It would be easy to make comments here about not wanting to pay money to see photo-collages, but that is not the point [and Jerry Saltz made it better: http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/50974/] . The point is that being able to go to galleries free is one of the greatest gifts we are given and I don’t want that taken away. While a quarter is indeed cheap, I’m old enough to remember when we were told that paying for tv would be a great idea and that it would only ever be for a tiny fee.
Worse though is that Rosler’s strategy is, writ small, the exact kind of left wing tyranny that turned so many people off to most of the other right headed thinking embraced by progressives. It provided kindling for so much of the reactionary behavior of the past 30 years because it turned so many people so decidedly off.
Consider that my .$25, Martha.
Yes, Richard
Richard Kern
Feature Inc., 276 Bowery [just below Houston], New York, NY 10012, 212.675.7772, http://www.featureinc.com/ October 2 - November 1, 2008
I was on my way up the Bowery to visit the new Feature for the first time. I ran into Deb. I hadn’t seen Deb in a long time. I told her I was on my way to visit the new Feature for the first time. We talked about Richard Kern. She had seen the show and told me he was revisiting his toothpaste cum shots. She told me she had come up with that idea when she posed for him back in the day. She didn’t want to take her clothes off and did that instead. She’s that girl with the braces.I am not sure why I don’t hate Richard Kern. He has the exact job I would love to have, and yet I don’t resent him for it. It is not hard to understand why. Like Helmut Newton before him and unlike Larry Clarke, Kern seems to be honest, professional and non-exploitative [or as non-exploitative as one can be in these things] about what he does. He’s also really good at it. I don’t know if he is good at finding sexy women or finding women sexy. Either way [or both] there is no denying that the kind of old school pornography that Richard Kern practices oozes a love of women. Kern’s women seem most decidedly in charge of their sexuality. Go to a Richard Kern exhibition and you will leave it looking at the world differently [that’s what art does for you]. You will be surprised to find all the sexy out there. Women you might otherwise have overlooked, Kern finds them and makes you want them and it seems like you can have them because they seem to want you, want sex. These are not women who secretly want to be spanked and hope you catch on; these are women who pull down their pants, slap their asses and tell you to step up and smack it like a man.
But I digress.
Just as Morandi is the painters’ painter, Richard Kern is the pornographers’ pornographer. The internet has served to explode the porn phenomenon and saturate our consciousnesses and our cookies. It has not, however, succeeded in undercutting or diminishing Kern’s work, because, like desire, porn is infinite and like the priapus continually [we hope] reconstituting itself. In this show Kern has borrowed back from the web with upskirts, wet t-shirts and two girls in a tub—all now staple genres. He even includes among some of his framed shots the actual panties worn by, and/or shared by his models [order now].
No matter what pops up in my inbox or google searches, few experiences will ever outstrip the times I spent pouring over books of Kern’s pics at the old St. Marks’ Bookstore back in the day. I stood there among my fellow hipster art book aficionados hungrily poring over each page and with each page, I was laid bare, seduced and dismissed by one dirty ev girl after another. I was left sweaty, exhausted and utterly in love. Stay hard dude.
