Fair Day
I had a little time to go the armory show at the pier and less time to go to the pier show at the armory, but I ran over to Volta because Golf Dave asked me to, and he’s the only one who can fix my swing, tell me where to surf on Long Island, and hook me up when I’m in LA. So I went.
It a nice concept for the mono-focused: Exhibitors showing one artist at a time so you can take or leave it, and I mostly left it which isn’t entirely fair because I ran through the joint at record speed. Dave’s friend, John Kinkead was showing Heather Cantrell who takes photos of people and prints those pics as her work ongoing. Sometimes she hops nude into the shots. Sometimes less nude. I promised to return also nude to have myself shot, but at $200 a pop she missed my price point by about $150.
The Armory was also a good one for the single minded. The booths were quieter: less noisy crap. I don’t remember much of it except running into Solange again after last running into her at the Armory three years back—with Beth next to me both times. Always so comfortable running into an ex named Solange with your wife and the mother of your children at your side. I also remember Amy Bennett’s work at Richard Heller’s booth [he's also from LA]. Bennett, working out of Bklyn, has perfected a style of locked down suburban landscapes which have the singular most amazing veneer I have ever seen on a work. Clearly worth the 20k they were fetching. If I had it, I would have paid the money just to make her tell me how she did it.
A Moment at MOMA
Tim Burton is the kind of facile genius that I always wished to be. He seemed to have emerged fully formed from thin air like a Cheshire cat.
Marina Abranovic was totally staring at me.
And in the End...
Health insurance. Yay!
Hollow Cores
Visited the Death Star on West St.: the new Goldman Sachs building. M got me in. The security of the place is subtle but pervasive. Artful landscape to prevent truck bombs. Elevators off to one side to prevent hollow core collapse. Sky lobbies with restricted access to upper level elevators to prevent lower echelon employees from staging coups or Alan Rickman from holding the building hostage. And on and on. How sad. But then it’s a small price to pay for a building made out of 100% foreclosed homes.
And off to one corner in the main lobby, in a handsome frame: the last dime!
A bit more front and center is Julie Mehretu’s enormous, immaculate mural. Made from five separate panels each huge in its own right, the piece is quite perfect in its place and a splendid commitment to art. M said the surface was like vellum and the marks floated and landed on it with the smooth precision of Kim Yu-na’s tiny blades.
According to Calvin Tomkin’s article on the mural in The New Yorker, Mehretu was paid $5 million for the work of which roughly $4 million went to fabrication costs. Tomkins does not cite his source for those numbers--especially on the fabrications costs, but if they’re Mehrtu’s, it is easy to see why Goldman Sachs was attracted to her in the first place.
Though perhaps ultimately all surface, Mehretu’s piece is far better than the Franz Ackerman in the rear lobby. Goldman, though often pr savvy-less, at least had the smarts to send the white dude to the back of the bus. Although his space is also huge, it lacks the cathedral lighting that bathes Mehretu’s piece. Ackerman also somehow manages to make the room looked cramped. Though formed by strong intuiting shapes, the mural is plagued by the twin Teutonic problems of didacticism and bad color [they tend to think being colorful means using lots of heavily saturated, clashing colors--whee!].
Good Friend
The last time I saw Joey Cruz he was breaking his hand on the hard head of a drunken Irish man who had very much been asking for it. Now JC was in town to put up a project with Mark Dion and sit on panels. We were supposed to go to the Whitney together, but he got too busy with his new friends talking grad schools and art making strategies. To make matters worse Golf Dave, who was also with us that night, now runs Raid Projects in LA and is himself a bit of an art professional. Ugh. All this respectability hurts worse than the Irish man’s jaw no doubt did.
So I went to the Biennial alone and completely sober.
Not since Klaus Kertess’ swipe at solo curating in 1995 has a Whitney Biennial looked so tasteful. Bonami took a well intentioned shot at putting the “art” back in the Whitney Biennial of…
It came up short because it came up thin. Not enough finds and not enough work [never thought I’d say that about a Biennial]. On the bright side the Whitney, like the Armory, was another nice break from the usual noisy cluttered committee crap fest. But it was so uncluttered that I went through it in 20 minutes! I am fast [I did the Hermitage in a day—didn’t want to, had to, so I did it, long story], but I never did a Biennial in 20 minutes! I even had time to go through it again. The only thing I missed the first time around was Babette Mangolte’s recreation of her 1978 piece How to Look [or as I like to call it, Go Fuck Yourself]. I wished I’d missed it the second time as well. Mangolte’s art is of the endless scrapbooking milieu that Hanne Darboven is so fond of plastering on the walls of Dia. So interesting and now I know how to look! It’s a miracle!!
I missed Mangolte the first time around in part because Bonami was kind enough to separate her piece from the rest of the exhibits with a black curtain. He did this to some degree with most of the video work—the entire third floor was almost completely occupied with discrete, entirely avoidable video rooms which begs the question: why include them in the first place? My guess is that deep down Bonami has about as much interest in video as I do but feels guilty about that. Hence he over-compensated by filling almost the entire floor with the trenchant, the insipid, the slice of life and a series of male dancers who looked as if they were, no shit, auditioning for parts in Bruno Zwei.
I did stop to watch Kate Gilmore doing Lucy Gunning by videotaping herself in heels and a dress climbing out of an enclosed column [the one in the space we were watching the video in!]. You kind of root for her to not get out.
In the end quiet and discrete was the rule of the day.
Even the de riguer Biennial vehicle in situ was a quiet ambulance parked nose in towards a wall.
Martin Kersels drums lay silent.
And quietly painting and abstraction in particular made some noise. Lesley Vance busted out some abstracted still lives in sweet oils, Taura Auerbach’s gi-nourmous canvas fold paintings were a bit been-there/done-that process-y but still lovely, as were the giant Suzan “with a ‘z’” Frecon’s across from them. Pae White straddled the ever entrancing line between abstract and representation with her best in show smoke tapestry that greeted visitors to the third floor. White’s piece impresses not just for its revival of tapestry [sucking up to Thomas Campbell?], but for the celebration of the magic of smoke as both here and there and here and not and forever and gone. And I’m not just saying this because I paint smoke [that just informs my judgment!]. I’m also putting photographer Josh Brand in here as an abstractionist because one piece of his, untitled corner, managed to channel Albert Pynkham Ryder via James Welling—sublime.
On the wall perpendicular to the Brand’s corner, Maureen Gallace found herself in an unusually sunny mood as did I as I stepped out of the museum and into a prematurely warm spring day.
It’s All About the Benjamin
When in the course of several prematurely warm spring days, we strolled the stupendously accessible historical sites of Philadelphia, it all came to seem as straightforward and cogent as a bunch of dudes saying, “These Articles of Confederacy are just not cutting it. Let’s get together and write a constitution!”
The city has come far in the decade or so since I noodled around her nether parts. Once dead or derelict neighborhoods are now filled with bars, shops and street life—crosses between Wicker Park and the Village abound.
Given that some of the most historic sites to the founding of this nation are located there, it is amazing how low-key the place is. The Liberty Bell is guarded by Wackenhut Security Personnel. I didn’t see a cop or a national guardsman all weekend. It’s sort of like an anti-Washington D.C., and everything is free or cheap to visit except for the somewhat incomprehensible Constitution Museum which charges $12 - $20 a pop for I’m not quite sure what.
There are two things I learned on this trip: Ben Franklin was most definitely the man and, believe it or not, I’m wiz with.
Meat Bags Update
The bread is chicken.
No longer a young man, I am now both overweight and none too limber, so for me stopping short in the middle of a block to bend over and tie my shoe may have all sorts of disastrous consequences. If there isn't a massive pile up of pedestrians behind me, there is still a good chance of all sorts of things untucking and popping out which would invariably lead to mass panic and stampeding on the street as other pedestrians attempt to flee the scene. What's more, bending at the waist and reaching for my feet is far more likely to lead to my having a heart attack or stroke than my not tying shoe would lead to my tripping. In fact, in all my nearly half-century of living, I cannot recall myself or anyone else ever actually tripping over an untied shoelace. A stumble maybe, but never a full fledged trip. Neither can I recall anyone ever falling onto a pair of scissors while running with them, nor have I ever seen a baby choke on the dreaded uncut grape or suffocate inside the nefarious dry cleaning bag. Furthermore, I have never had the misfortune to witness a child poke someone's eye out with a stick or jump off a bridge because his friend did. 
Renzo Piano's addition to the Morgan Library Museum is a creature both beautiful and rare: a museum expansion/construction that is not a grandiose testament to the egos of its architect and the museum's trustees, an abysmal breach of duty both to the art going public and the art they are going to see, or a colossal waste of money. Instead it is a seamless add-in that yokes together three disparate spaces across the better part of a highly developed city block. The main space is wide open and airy, and yet still manages to have nooks and crannies capable of surprising the visitor and granting her privacy and repose. Primarily steel,wood and glass, it is an incredibly warm space. The steel girded and gridded supports are painted, but in the grey December light seemed plated in silver and no doubt would have been had J.P. Morgan himself been footing the bill.
The Armory was also a good one for the single minded. The booths were quieter: less noisy crap. I don’t remember much of it except running into Solange again after last running into her at the Armory three years back—with Beth next to me both times. Always so comfortable running into an ex named Solange with your wife and the mother of your children at your side. I also remember Amy Bennett’s work at Richard Heller’s booth [he's also from LA]. Bennett, working out of Bklyn, has perfected a style of locked down suburban landscapes which have the singular most amazing veneer I have ever seen on a work. Clearly worth the 20k they were fetching. If I had it, I would have paid the money just to make her tell me how she did it.
A bit more front and center is Julie Mehretu’s enormous, immaculate mural. Made from five separate panels each huge in its own right, the piece is quite perfect in its place and a splendid commitment to art. M said the surface was like vellum and the marks floated and landed on it with the smooth precision of Kim Yu-na’s tiny blades. 
