CHELSEA DIARY, No.35: Is The Armory Show Friezed Out?

March 6-9, 2013 

There was already a slithery mix of snow, rain and sleet falling in Baltimore on Wednesday morning when my wife and I bravely or foolishly decided to keep our appointment with Armory Week in New York. So we boarded the train not knowing what to expect from the possible nor’easter Saturn or from the art world. By 11:30 we had dropped our luggage off at our hotel, the streets were dry and we made our way to West 57th to visit two of our favorite galleries, Marian Goodman at 24 West and the newly relocated Peter Blum at 20 West. Seeing Blum in his new space really made us feel old; he occupies the light-filled gallery where Ameringer spent several years after Blum/Helman was in the same location for a long time. We knew them all. Now Blum has left both SoHo, nearly empty of galleries, and Chelsea, a wind-swept, storm-cleansed area filled with gigantic commercial emporia to head back up town to a more traditional art environment. Here he is still showing an excellent mix of conceptual objects and process-oriented paintings. The latest in the latter category is Rosy Keyser, born in Baltimore, who attaches Duchampian objects, sawdust and videotape to slashed canvases with a decidedly morose darkness and chemical veneer a la Sigmar Polke crossed with Motherwell or Kline. Keyser is not afraid to acknowledge her sources but has the emotional energy and intellectual verve to stamp the work with her own personality. We thought it unlikely that the Armory Show at the Piers (94 & 92) would contain anything this fully conceived, let alone the estimable large wall drawings and films of the more senior Tacita Dean at Marian Goodman.


Rosy Keyser Unfortunately, our prediction proved correct. This wan edition of the Armory show at the piers took place on the 100th anniversary of the much more exciting original Armory Show in 1913, the one that introduced America to Matisse, Duchamp and Picasso; as it happened this year was also the 50th anniversary of the much more elegant Art Dealers Association (ADAA) fair (actually held in the Park Avenue Armory) and the 25th anniversary of Warhol’s death. We saw the Armory show on Wednesday afternoon with the “VIP” crowd; they were assailed by shopping bags and tea shirts designed by this year’s commissioned artist, Liz Magic Laser. In a lousy conceptual follow-up to last year’s Theaster Gates, Laser trumpeted the average income of the fair’s attendees, the cost of a booth and other fiduciary details better left unspoken. This was the most dispiriting Armory Show in history. As the Times made clear in its review, it’s a little late in the day to crown Warhol the symbolic father of an art fair. The link between art and commerce or art and fashion is blatant enough without rubbing it in the face and eyes of those hoping to see visually significant work. Reducing the number of booths, increasing the width of the aisles and emphasizing single-artist shows only made the vacuity of the work on display more evident. For a change, the classic modern section on Pier 92 was even more depressing than the giddy contemporary scene on Pier 94.There were exceptions. The wrap-around flat screens of Diana Thater’s new flower-themed video at Zwirner were beautifully imposing and the re-discovery of a classical African-American Minimalist forefather, McArthur Binion, by Chicago’s Kavi Gupta was inspiring. The two best group shows were at Francis Naumann’s booth, where the eponymous Duchamp scholar convinced a number of contemporary artists (including Sophie Matisse, the granddaughter of Henri) to do clever riffs on the master’s Nude Descending A Staircase (1913), and at Armand Bartos who managed to collect his usual number of late-modern treasures, including an Andre floor piece, two de Kooning drawings and a ravishing Cavallon painting. Major pieces by the great figures of the last 50 years were thin on the ground; no doubt some of the best dealers are waiting for May’s second edition of Frieze/New York, either as participants or if they were at the Armory show saving their best things for the other fair. Unlike Miami, the piers felt empty without the presence of Sonnabend, Barbara Gladstone, Pace or White Cube; a few real Warhols at Gagosian and fake cardboard Brillo Boxes as free Armory gifts for the rich hoi polloi couldn’t make up the difference. 


The state of the Armory show was a frequent topic of conversation at dinner that evening with close art world friends and the next day at the ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory (it confuses cabbies too: the Armory show is at the piers and not at the Armory, got that?). Major changes are afoot. There’s a new business model on the horizon given the paucity of mid-level dealers, the financial pressures on small galleries in Chelsea, especially after Sandy’s sojourn in their basements, the dominance of internationally-oriented mega-dealers like Gagosian, Pace, David Zwirner and White Cube, the faltering of the entry-level art market at auction and of young galleries in the face of unrealistic rents and artist expectations. Everyone we spoke to, including collectors, thought the Armory was crowded, physically unpleasant and artistically uninteresting. Blue-chip dealers and visitors continue to be charmed by the ADAA show, its manageable size, it’s relative calm and quality, and the chance to have a meaningful conversation. On the other hand, the Frieze show attracts deep pockets that fly in on private jets to attend the May auctions; more and more dealers will leave the Armory for Frieze and some will follow Peter Blum’s lead and leave Chelsea. The most memorable one-person shows at the ADAA fair on Thursday included one by Jannis Kounellis, the Arte Povera master, who closed off the entire front of Cheim & Read’s booth with a giant wall of steel plate, cobblestone and ancient sewing machines. We also liked the copper-foil covered paintings by Tam van Tran at Ameringer, the stellar collection of Motherwell’s work from every period at Lillian Heidenberg (the recent publication of the gorgeous 3-volume catalog raissonne is going to change Motherwell’s market), the dark thinly striped canvases by Sean Scully from the early 1970s at Lelong, and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, the works in different media by Damian Hirst at van de Weghe. Early circus-based Milton Avery paintings from the 1930s made for one of the most unusual and powerful shows at the fair; the fact that this took place at David Zwirner only made it more bizarre. Other strong shows were those of Mona Hatoum at Alexander and Bonin, Sal Scarpitta at Boesky, Mary Corse at Lehmann Maupin, Zarina Hashmi at Luhring Augustine and Louise Lawler at Metro. At Pace, Kiki Smith seems to be making decorative product for the market; John Zurier’s paintings looked washed out at Peter Blum. One of the most beautiful group shows was at Barbara Mathes; there were impressive pieces by Italian process artists like Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi as well as a stunning black and white painting by John McLaughlin. Terrific things were to be had at Brooke Alexander, including an early Albers. Sitting there one had an excellent view from across the aisle of a remarkable Frankenthaler paired with a luscious Morris Louis at John Berggruen. Two wonderful young photographers, who don’t use cameras and new to us, were Chris McCaw and Alison Rossiter at Yossi Milo.


John McLaughlin at Barbara Mathes, ADAA


Before visiting the ADAA Show we had an early morning private view of the remarkable Surrealist drawing show at the Morgan Library followed by the special treat of seeing Inventing Abstraction at MoMA. Both exhibitions expand their respective fields by emphasizing formerly little known artists (like the Spanish-American surrealist Federico Castellon) or by revising the geography of pioneer abstractionists (i.e. Eastern Europe). The MoMA show practically opened with five major paintings by Frantisek Kupka, from Czechoslovakia, and an extremely imposing mural-sized work by Picabia. Important contributions by women were everywhere from figures such as Sophie-Tauber Arp, Sonia Delauney and Georgia O’Keefe. However the primacy of Arthur Dove’s 1911 drawings, as old as anything by Kandinsky or Kupka, were not in the show, and his role as O’Keefe’s role model was scanted. The influence of Robert Delauney on American Synchromists like Morgan Russell and Stanton McDonald Wright was never clearer. Balla looked like a major artist here, not just a niche Italian Futurist and a single gigantic painting by David Bomberg revealed why all later members of the so-called School of London revered him. There were lessons to be learned in every room. And we ran into Baltimore friends everywhere who also regretted going to the piers. After the ADAA fair we had cocktails at our hotel and a fabulous dinner at Blue Hill in the Village.


Kupka: Madame Kupka Among the Verticals, MoMA, 1910-11


Friday morning the bad weather finally arrived with slush and snow but it didn’t stop us. We took a cab from the hotel to the Guggenheim and explored its massive tribute to the Gutai artists of Japan (1955-1971), a group of visionaries who seem to have invented minimalism, process art, happenings, interactive sculpture, artistic social action and just about everything else at the same time as or even earlier than their contemporaries did in the West. We felt overwhelmed by our ignorance. One of Gutai’s earliest and most significant members was Atsuko Tanaka, the inventor of the notorious electric dress (1956). There were beautiful paintings by the group’s founder Yoshihara Jiro and by Sadamasa Motonaga. Off the ramp the Guggenheim had an excellent survey of contemporary art from Southeast Asia (mostly political, some of it derivative in form from Mona Hatoum) and a nice survey of Hashmi’s meditative prints and paper works. Then it was off to the Met to learn the art of painting from Matisse, In Search of True Painting. In this grand show the degree of his struggle with materials and composition came alive as never before. Subjects were represented by pairs or trios of paintings illustrating his approach to revision; almost always the most recent version was the best solution to the problem he had set for himself. An increased degree of abstraction, a scumbled or bare background and a liberal use of black were frequently used strategies. In other rooms single works were surrounded by a squadron of photographs Matisse himself had ordered made of each stage in the construction of a masterpiece; he had engaged the photographer with the specific goal of educating the public as to his methods in an attempt to dissuade their belief that it all came too easy to him. It obviously didn’t but the final result always appeared effortless. Lastly we tried to see the fashion, modernity and impressionism show at the Met but the crowds were too much for the small distances between the paintings and the vitrines containing dresses, shoes, hats etc. Many of the paintings were not first-rate and our feet were killing us. So off for drinks at the Algonquin and a ride uptown for another wonderful dinner. By then the rain had stopped and the snow had melted from off the streets.


Tanaka, Electric Dress, 1956


Saturday’s weather was the best for our highly adaptable schedule: clear skies and warming temperatures arrived just in time to see The Independent fair in Chelsea and lots of galleries. We started out on West 20th with a private tour of David Zwirner’s newest gallery, an impeccable five story building designed and constructed to museum standards. The opening show in the public spaces came from the estates of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin and the works (floor boxes and quadrilateral light pieces, respectively) were of size as they say. In an upstairs viewing room we saw the best three-piece survey of California finish fetish imaginable, a John McCracken blue plank, a Craig Kauffman plastic color curtain hung on a bar and a translucent De Wain Valentine yellow pyramid. Whether you call it California Minimalism or Light and Space, it looks gorgeous, some of it done so early it had to come from the example of John McLaughlin and not from New York. Another room was practically wall-papered with outstanding drawings by Al Taylor. The less intimate series of galleries on West 19th will continue to show contemporary shows by gallery artists. On West 21st street we visited an outstanding group show of New York Minimalism at Paula Cooper and a remarkable show of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings from the 1950s at Gagosian. The single most impressive object in New York has to be Miroslaw Balka’s The Order of Things (2013) at Gladstone. Two gigantic steel reservoirs of water colored to look like oil re-circulate their liquid contents from bottom to top, from behind forward, the “oil” pouring down into the boxes towering above you like spouting oil wells. A small wooden platform (the original organic source of the oil) gives one a place to sit and watch all the menacing grandeur and ponder its implications.


Balka: The Order of Things, 2013 


After all this, the 40 galleries on three floors at the Independent didn’t give one much to delight the eye or confound the brain. As before the fair was located in the former Dia Museum at 548 West 22nd street. All of the art received beautiful natural lighting through the building’s many windows and the absence of conventional booths (and terrible or non-existent labeling) caused the offerings to interpenetrate the space of their neighbors. You often couldn’t tell which gallery was showing which artist even if you could identify either one. For oldsters like us the single miserable elevator and the two-way traffic on the narrow staircase were a nightmare but each floor had convenient bathrooms. The best looking gallery space was that of Maureen Paley, a real pro and a refugee from the bigger fairs. She showed new drawings by David Salle and a nice contrasting pair of Rebecca Warren sculptures, one organic in lumpy ceramic, the other a pair of  steel bars leaning against the wall like bent skis. Bjorn Braun’s colorful bird nests at Meyer Reigger, rescued by him and embellished by finches with colored ribbons and threads supplied by the artist achieved a good deal of notoriety. A display of bundled money (“Art Cash”) from 1971, originally made by Experiments in Art and Technology ( Rauschenberg’s E.A.T.), at the stand of Broadway 1602 was a cheeky hit. There were terrific Richard Aldrich paintings, big and small, at Bortolami, and deposed dictator faces on the clocks by Meschac Gaba at McCaffrey were worth a brief conceptual chuckle. This fourth edition of the Independent was the weakest by far and not a disconcerting competitor to the more established Armory and ADAA shows.


Bjorn Braun, Bird Nest, The Independent

The gallery offerings on West 22nd weren’t much better. Nayland Blake at Matthew Marks is still using stuffed bunnies as stand-ins for his black/white and gay/straight identity issues and Elger Esser’s enormous photographs at Sonnabend still look like over-exposed plates from the nineteenth century. We get it. So we hurried over to 24th street and saw every imaginable size of Alighiero e Boetti’s woven alphabets at Gladstone’s original location; a very colorful treat. William J. O’Brien’s simulacra of paintings created from a wide variety of materials according to minimalist principles of organized chaos looked a little dry and academic at Marianne Boesky. At Andrea Rosen, Aaron Bobrow’s first NY solo showed some punch; his abstract paintings seemed to have turned their backs (i.e. stretchers) to us in displaying their rents and imperfections much like his urban videos do. There was video by Ragnar Kjartansson at Luhring Augustine and lots of little paintings by Andrew Masullo, the smallest of which seemed the best composed and the least like Tom Nozkowski. Gagosian on West 24th was absolutely packed for the retrospective of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the legendary artist who can look like the best mash-up of abstract expressionism and Pop (1981, 1982) you’ve ever seen or, towards the end of his brief but explosive career, totally out of control.


Al Held, Cheim & Read

On 25th Street we visited Cheim & Read and saw the enormous Alphabet paintings by Al Held; these were so cropped that it was often impossible to discern which letter was the subject of any given painting. They gave the impression of true massiveness, a feeling usually encountered only with Minimalist sculpture. At the Pace outpost on 25th there were new paintings by Jim Dine in a new style or with a new subject (thank goodness); the most abstract work he has ever produced. In this centenary year for the Armory Show of 1913, Dine’s new and very welcome paintings look like Orphic relations of Stanton McDonald-Wright and Robert Delaunay. We really wanted to see some more galleries on West 26th but four days of gallery-going, museum-tramping and art-fair roving had finally done in our legs. So we aborted our mission, headed back to the hotel and cabbed it to the train. Much of the best art we saw all week was at the galleries on our last morning. Whether the Armory can ever deliver the excitement of 24th street remains to be seen.

 

 

 

CHARLES STREET DIARY, No.7: AI WEIWEI’s RETROSPECTIVE AT THE HIRSHHORN MUSEM, February 14-15, 2013

My wife and I celebrated Valentine’s Day in Washington. After a delightful poetry reading and panel discussion on the subject of Love and The Brain at the National Academy of Sciences on the evening of February 14th, we headed to one of Washington’s best restaurants, Bistro Bis (you should too), and made the acquaintance of its charming and elegant manager, Don Leak, who also turns out to be a writer! He told a hysterical story about his aunt coming to his grandfather’s funeral and bringing a platter of fried chicken that she dumped into the casket much to the chagrin of the rest of the family. Her retort? “Well, if he can smell the flowers he can certainly smell the chicken!” The next morning we drove over to the Hirshhorn’s concrete doughnut on the Mall to see the Ai Weiwei retrospective, “According to What?”, before it closes on the 24th of the month. If you care at all about contemporary art and whether it can encompass profound thought and deep feeling, you must see this show before it closes.
Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957, the son of Ai Qing, a revered Chinese poet, and has spent most of his career in Beijing and Shanghai; he is arguably the most important Chinese artist in the world and the most significant legatee of the Warholian mantle. When the artist was an infant his father was denounced and the family was sent to a labor camp in 1958. They did not return to Beijing until 1975. Like Warhol Ai is a master of media, many of which only came into existence after Andy’s death. Weiwei uses the internet, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, to organize his followers and fans, to crowd source themes, to disburse his videos and political messages. Unlike Warhol, superficially cool and disengaged, Weiwei is a “hot” artist who uses his sculptures, buildings and installations to promote social justice and change in Chinese society; as a result he has become a primary target of abuse by various governmental agencies, including the police and the taxation system. Financial penalties have kept Weiwei a virtual geographic prisoner even when he is otherwise free to roam around the country; the government also has bulldozed one of his studios (2011). He has been kept under house arrest and beaten by police in Chengdu (2009) so severely that he required neurosurgical drainage of a subdural hematoma or hemorrhage within the skull. Naturally he managed to export hospital pictures of his bandaged head out onto the internet. You will see the MRI scans of his brain at the Hirshhorn. Like Warhol he is never without a camera and frequently photographs himself with his middle finger raised in front of a major cultural monument or symbol of governmental power, not just Tienamen Square but the Eiffel Tower and the White House too. The retrospective at the Hirshhorn contains all of his most famous photographs including the black-and-white pictures he took during the ten years (1981-1993) he spent in New York learning to be a conceptual artist, meeting with other emigres as well as Allen Ginsberg. When he wasn’t at Parsons or the Art Students League, Ai was in Atlantic City supporting himself by playing blackjack. During this time he came under the influence of Duchamp and when he returned to China for his father’s final illness he was more than ready to lead his generation of artists out of their traditional working methods and conceptual beliefs. The show also contains suites of color photographs you can walk on documenting the urban renewal and destruction of traditional Beijing neighborhoods as well as the construction of the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium designed by Weiwei and Herzog & De Meuron (2008). Upstairs there is a fascinating, almost hypnotic display of more than 7,000 images on 12 television monitors (2012).

Weiwei is a product of his post-Minimalist times, assembling photographs in architectonic and geometric arrays, arranging seeds on the ground to produce a photographic image of Duchamp (just cross a pollen floor piece by Wolfgang Laib with the general strategy of Vik Muniz), building concatenations of useless furniture (e.g. Table With Two Legs On The Wall, 1997) or bicycles (like Orozco), erecting generic model buildings (think Laib again as well as early Joel Shapiro and Monopoly tokens) out of compressed tea leaves. Almost always, there is a political or cultural point to his activity, one that often contrasts the present day world (China) with its cultural or ancestral roots. The walls of the museum are liberally stenciled with Ai’s philosophical musings on art, culture, freedom and human dignity. After helping found several artists groups in China, Art Stars (1978) while attending the Beijing Film Academy and Beijing’s East Village group after his return in 1993, Weiwei produced artist’s books (the Covers series), architectural projects (1998) and his distinctive series of useless tables, screens and chairs constructed from rescued materials scavenged from destroyed temples. He started an architectural and design firm, cheekily named FAKE Design (2003), and began his Blog (2005). In 2008 a massive earthquake in Sichuan killed thousands of young schoolchildren who died in shoddily built schools constructed so as to maximize the amount of graft paid to government officials. Weiwei initiated an extensive citizen’s investigation and has prosecuted the results through his art and through the new media in such a way that he has become the Chinese regime’s most prominent target for personal retribution. I have already discussed some of the unhappy results. Fortunately, Weiwei’s international prominence has protected him somewhat. He exhibited at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) and was featured at Documenta 12 in 2007. His retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2009-2010), “So Sorry”, featured a giant array of 9000 children’s backpacks in bright colors (Remembering), one for each dead child, knitted together to form giant Chinese characters on the facade of the building; these characters spelled out the sorrow of one of the mothers who said: “She lived happily for seven years in this world”, very much like the young children recently murdered in Newtown. His Sunflower Seeds (2010) in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, 100 million hand-painted porcelain objects created by a team of 1600 workers, caused a sensation. The recent documentary film, Ai Weiwei Never Sorry (2012), available on Netflix and nominated for an Oscar is not to be missed. In October Weiwei’s performance of a cover of Gangnam Style dancing with his hands held as if in shackles went viral on YouTube; not unexpectedly, he was not allowed to attend the opening of his Hirshhorn retrospective.  
In the lobby of the museum you first encounter one of his most popular pieces, a visually transparent tower constructed out of linked bicycles (Forever, 2003), the most traditional sort of Beijing personal transportation, now useless and slowly giving way to the city’s unmanageable auto traffic. Upstairs there are “maps” (c.2004) of China fabricated from re-cycled Tieli wood from dismantled Qing dynasty (1644-1911) temples, one too tall for the average person to see the country’s outline, another that appears as negative space in the end of a fabricated log. In either case, China has disappeared from view. Weiwei’s furniture similarly focuses on the disappearance of traditional crafts and Chinese “style”, the famous concatenation of 40 antique Qing dynasty chairs called Grapes (2008) or the corner piece, Table With Three Legs (2006) made from late Ming or early Qing dynasty (1368-1911) wood. Weiwei’s most notorious repurposing of traditional arts and crafts occurred as a performance piece early in his career (1995): he dropped a series of Han dynasty pots (206 BCE- 220 CE) on a city street, an action memorialized here by a sequence of three giant photographs. His most colorful productions have been the Colored Vase Series in which Weiwei takes Neolithic pots (5000 to 3000 BCE) and casually paints them by dipping them into cans of industrial paint; he then arranges them as Allan McCollum-style multiples. They are astonishingly beautiful. So too the hand painted Han dynasty and Tang dynasty (618-907) pots inscribed with the Coca-Cola scrolling logo (1997), the most direct evidence of Weiwei’s debt to Warhol and the influence of Pop Art on his career. The exhibition even includes an echo of the site-specific Remembering from Munich: a giant Chinese serpent made of linked children’s backpacks slithering flat against the ceiling of the Hirshhorn’s second floor. You first see the serpent’s head on your way up the escalator. There are other treats that deserve mention, including Weiwei’s version of Tony Smith’s prototypical metal cube, Die, this one made of mahogany, its surfaces everywhere imprinted with the same pattern seen on a small cigarette case (also displayed) owned by his poet father and the outdoor series of giant bronze animal heads representing Chinese astrological signs (2012), subtly altered and arranged in a circle within the central plaza of the museum. This installation was previously seen at Columbus Circle in New York. As I have often said, much of the best of so-called post-Modern art displays Pop imagery within the context of Minimalist structure; think of those 1980s stacked vacuum cleaners Jeff Koons placed in a Judd box and how he lit them with an array of Flavin fluorescent tubes. A recent review of Weiwei’s show in the New York Times couldn’t have been more wrong-headed; he was criticized as an inferior object maker who had not invented his own forms and praised more as an inspirational public figure of great moral courage. In point of fact, Ai Weiwei is that rarest of cultural figures, someone like Goya, an artist whose very excellence as an image-maker acts as a partial disguise for the risk he poses to politics as usual, a man who commands a profound understanding of aesthetics with a deep understanding of power.   

Poetry in Washington For The New Year

I am pleased to tell my readers about two upcoming poetry events in Washington DC that may be of interest:

 
On Saturday, the 19th of January I will be participating in a launch reading and party for the new on-line issue of LINES + STARS, a Washington area  journal of poetry and short prose. The journal also publishes an annual print compendium of the work that has appeared throughout the year. The reading will start at 7 PM and take place at the DC ARTS STUDIOS/ WILLOW STREET GALLERY, 6925 Willow Street, NW, Washington DC 20012. You can learn about the DC Arts Studios at http://www.dcartsstudios.org/. Our host is Rachel Adams, the Editor of LINES + STARS.
 
And on Thursday the 14th of February, I am very proud to join panel members, Helene Fisher, a biological anthropologist, Claudia Hart, artist and curator, and Bianca Acevedo, social neuroscientist whose work/research includes the “neurobiology of love”, at one of the regularly scheduled Cultural Forum Events put on by THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. The subject of course will be Love and the Brain. The readings and panel discussion will take place from 6:30 to 8:30 PM in the auditorium of THE KECK CENTER OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES, 500 Fifth Street, NW, Washington DC 20001 (202-334-2000). It should be a very brainy way to celebrate Valentine’s Day! You can get directions on the web site of the National Academy of Sciences  http://www.nasonline.org/. Our host is JD Talasek, Director of Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences. You can reach his Senior Program Associate Alana Quinn at 202-334-2415.
 
Hope to see you at one or both events.
 

HILARY MANTEL’S GLORIOUS NOVEL, “WOLF HALL”

I have just finished (belatedly) reading “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel, her first novel to win the Booker Prize (2009) and the start of her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII. The book truly is a masterpiece, as poetically written as any long poem. It magically ends with the two word sentence (spondee) “Wolf Hall”. It describes the loving relationship of Cardinal Woolsey and Cromwell and reverses our usual estimate (see A Man For All Seasons) that Cromwell was the monster and Thomas More, actually an evil religious fanatic, the saint. The book includes a lengthy description of a book by Pacioli, the mathematical monk I have recently gone bonkers over (he taught Leonardo math and was one of the originators of the concept of The Ideal City, as described in my in-print essay for LPR on the greatest Renaissance painting in existence without a known author— The Ideal City in permanent residence at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore), as well as Cromwell’s friendship with his portraitist, Hans Holbein, and Wyatt the poet. Mantel did five years of research to produce the book, the finest historical novel I have read in several decades, brought to life by casting all events in the present tense as seen through Cromwell’s eyes and heard in his consciousness. Mantel avoids the use of archaic language but the narration placed in Cromwell’s head is never less than gloriously beautiful, filled with sounds and smells, and acute psychological insight.
Mantel has just won the Booker Prize (2012) a second time, an almost unheard of feat, for the second installment, just published, “Bring Up The Bodies”.
A stronger recommendation I cannot make.

CHELSEA DIARY, No.34: After The Storm

CHELSEA DIARY No.34: After The Storm

November 17-19, 2012

My wife and I were due in New York for a poetry event on monday the 19th so we thought to take advantage of the weekend and see some art as well and find out how Chelsea was recovering from hurricane Sandy. The worst storm in the region’s memory flooded the most important concentration of commercial galleries in the world with four to five feet of the Hudson. Flooding was especially severe towards the southern end of the area from 19th to 23rd streets. Even the massive David Zwirner gallery had to shut down. On saturday the 17th, We went directly with our luggage from the train to Mitchell-Inness & Nash on west 26th (we had called ahead to make sure they were open); Lucy Mitchell-Inness is the head of the Art Dealers Association of America (the ADAA) and she and David Zwirner were collecting contributions to help the smaller galleries survive. The Times had reported that many of the Chelsea buildings had un-renovated basements and first floors from their factory days and that the back rooms of galleries, often used for art storage, historical documentation and financial records, were four feet deeper (one presumes to allow drainage from the factory floor!) than the public exhibition spaces. As a consequence, several dealers lost more than 90% of their stock and important files; the impact of this on both gallerists and the life-work of artists cannot be fully imagined. Almost three weeks after the Halloween storm you could still see the high water line on the outside of buildings (!) and most of the major galleries on west 24th (the street of Gagosian, Luhring-Augustine, Barbara Gladstone, Andrea Rosen, Metro and Marianne Boesky) were closed and under repair. It was mid-day on a Saturday and very good weather; the streets were quiet and the open galleries almost empty.



The most spectacular show on west 26th was at Mitchell-Inness & Nash, a celebration of Color Field painting from the 1960s with half a dozen extremely large and very beautiful pieces: two by Frankenthaler, a Noland chevron, two by Louis, a glorious unfurled and a lovely transitional painting, and an early Stella from his pre-Black period. Now that the anti-Greenberg fires have been damped and most of the artists, excepting Stella, left to history, the taste for such painterly opulence is sure to drive a market more and more bereft of first rate work by the earlier abstract expressionist school. Next door a Chinese mainland artist new to us, Lin Tianmiao, was showing at Galerie Lelong an excellent installation of giant samplers (“Badges”) in hooped frames embroidered with misogynistic terms for women in Chinese and English; these words were then pronounced by a child’s voice looped from a speaker in the ceiling. Lelong has always had a strong feminist bent. You may wish to see Lin’s her first retrospective at the Asia Society Museum uptown. James Cohan across the street from Lelong had new work by Trenton Doyle Hancock, most of which was too busy for our taste. On 25th street we stopped at Pace to see yet another Chuck Close celebration of his art-world friends in large portraits, almost photographic but made up by cells filled with abstract lozenges of color. The best was a triptych of self-portraits in which the center one faced dead-ahead and the other two Chucks were turned slightly in towards the center from right and left, much like the well-known display of Richter’s forty portraits of famous men from the 1970s. At the other Pace venue we saw Michal Rovner’s latest work, more wondrous illusions of moving people and branches projected onto stone surfaces. Of course the line between what appears to be a magic trick and technological kitsch must be tread very carefully. Driscoll has moved the venerable Babcock Galleries from Madison Avenue to Chelsea’s 25th street; the show of very tall horticultural paintings by Marylyn Dintenfass was very attractive if not quite up to its “Drop Dead Gorgeous” title. At Cheim and Read was a big show of work by Tal R, an artist we first saw at the Rubell Collection in Miami; the subjects and handling seemed to me wholly derived from the late flowering of German Expressionism in the 1920s. And that was it; two streets, the shortest Chelsea outing in memory. So we gathered our luggage, checked into our hotel and made for upper Madison at 80th, and the start of the nicest walk we’ve had in years down the former center of the art world. At Barbara Mathes we encountered a very good show of post-minimal or post-conceptual painting by Italian artists from the 1960s to the present. Apart from Castellani the other three artists were new to us, all of them puckering, pricking or cutting away the canvas as good sons of Manzoni and Fontana. The most poetic shaped canvases seemed to be those by Agostino Bonalumi (b.1935). On east 79th Acquavella treated us to a full retrospective of confectionary still lives, street scenes and portraits by Wayne Thibaud, the west coast popster, a darling of the auction houses and formerly not a favorite of ours. Go see this show and you too will become a convert convinced of his technical mastery, the suave way he abuts abstract horizontals (shadows, countertops, walls) into objects so as to hide mini-Noland stripe paintings in figurative work, getting to eat his cakes and purplish icing too! Next door, at Skarstedt, a nice collection of early joke and cartoon paintings by Richard Prince were good for a laugh or two. At L & M on 78th we saw the complete bronzes made by Calder when he wasn’t using sheet metal and wire; quite a few of the bronzes are accompanied by their plaster models    . Most of them were made in 1930 or 1944. Calder balances the tips of bronze pivots on a table top or the head of an acrobat with the same masterful engineering used in his mobiles. Who knew? Calder’s contributions to 20th century art history seem to grow bigger and bigger all the time. And Cy Twombly at Gagosian (980 Madison) seems to have saved the best for last, not only the remarkable suite of eight giant paintings in orange-red, green and yellow on the 6th floor but his formerly un-exhibited photographic oeuvre on the 5th. We especially liked the studio shots of his white plaster sculptures, our favorite works by Twombly, these looked much like Brancusi snaps. But the last paintings take your breath away (sold out at 7 to 10 million each). Gone are the self-conscious stylistic tricks of signature scrawl, thin color and obscure references to Greek and Roman culture. In these final works, alive with clashing colors and spontaneous drips, Twombly has at last admitted to and joyfully embraced his Abstract Expressionist roots.

 


 

Gagosian’s flagship finally has a neighbor at 980, the romantically named Venus Over Manhattan gallery, though most people will guess the name of its chief backer, formerly a money manager and private collector. Here you will find a lively exhibition, almost a retrospective of work by Jack Goldstein, one of the founding members of the Pictures Generation, who, together with Cindy Sherman, inaugurated the Metro Pictures brand. Goldstein’s West Coast appropriation strategy hinged on motion pictures and Disney; after a flurry of excitement he was forgotten until he committed suicide in 2003. Since then his star has once again risen. There are several large classic paintings from the 1980s present, as well as a reconstructed installation and a film from the 1970s; all of this fine work is presented in an unnecessarily dark and spooky cinder block environment.  Two small but excellent group shows are well worth your time and they are both in the 1018 Madison building at 78th street, recent British sculpture by Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, Douglas Gordon and Tony Cragg azt Van de Weghe, and a show on the theme of red paintings with a terrible example by Warhol, a wonderful Philip Taaffe and an excellent Kusama. Either show is sure to cause object envy. You can skip the hot (temperature) and annoying, impossible to walk through, installation of dolls and books by the current flavor of the month Bjarne Melgaard (and you thought he simply ripped off his painting style) at Luxembourg & Dayan on 77th street.

And that was all for gallery going on this trip. We had reached the Whitney Museum at 76th street and needed to drop in on its two retrospectives, one for Richard Artschwager, a pioneering conceptual sculptor and painter at the junction of Pop and Post-Minimalism, the other a mid-career survey of Wade Guyton, one of the hottest contemporary artists in the world. Like the reviewers in several prominent publications, I have never liked Artschwager’s work and unlike some of them this show did nothing to change my mind. He practices a type of conceptual art that would be more interesting without the objects actually being constructed. He is a master at producing a kind of studied visual boredom, his favorite and almost only color being Formica grey, the jokes in his sculptures (except for the magnificent early tables) obvious and forgettable, and his manner of “energizing” ordinary spaces with oval BLPS or blips stupefyingly dull. We’ve seen all of this show before, in a previous Artschwager exhibition. Guyton, on the other hand, is a major find, an artist who has rescued minimalist painting by running canvas through large inkjet printers and incorporating the accidental wheezes of automation and computer design into his elegant “painted” X’s and his “sculpted” chrome-plated U’s. Often seen in tandem as one half of Guyton/Walker, Guyton on his own has managed to carry forward the abstract experiments of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. That he is an American who studied at Hunter College is no small revelation either. Let us hope that little of his work was destroyed in the basement of Friedrich Petzel’s Chelsea gallery. On the other hand much of it can be reconstructed by re-opening some computer files and further wrestling with his printer.

On Sunday we began the day with the wonderful Picasso show at the Guggenheim, a survey of paintings, sculptures and drawings done in black and white (almost never in gray!), fully exposing his supreme graphic gift for visual invention. No other colors were needed here. Once you’ve seen it, a Picasso show in black and white, like solutions to some mathematical puzzles, seems like the most obvious and inevitable thematic conceit for a great exhibition. When Picasso wasn’t inventing cubism, energizing surrealism or expressing his disgust at war in the most horrifying way, he was doing portraits at a level of plastic beauty only Matisse could rival. No wonder neither one of them could ever let go of the figure. This exhibition leaves you breathless. At the Metropolitan, on the other hand, we dropped in on a show with the most banal theme imaginable, the importance of Warhol to subsequent art. Duh. Every bad thing you have heard about this show is true and worse than described in the press. Important artists who have pushed the envelope of mechanical reproduction, like Wade Guyton, are left out or, in the case of Debbie Kass, seen all too briefly. The wall panels imply that everything here is simply a variation on a Warhol theme without carefully explaining how Richter’s work, for example, veers away from Warhol in multiple major ways. The show is an excuse to display the Met’s holdings in Warhol in an attempt to play up its hipness. The new curators coming over from the Tate have a lot to do.

Between poetry events Sunday evening and the next afternoon, we managed to squeeze in a visit to MoMA on Monday morning! If you are a member you should go right now and experience the members-only early viewing hours when you can commune with Munch’s “Scream” in paradoxical quiet or look at a nearby roomful of great Matisses without anyone else in the room! No crowds, no noises, no acoustguides clicking away. Subtle shifts in the permanent collection are always welcome; the Minimalism rooms have been cleaned up and Joseph Beuys has finally been given his due, surrounded by the great German artists he taught, confounded or annoyed: Polke, Kiefer and Richter. The best thing at MoMA right now is the posthumous exhibition for Alina Szapocznikow, “Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972”. This is figurative work with a visual and conceptual punch you don’t often see. Unlike Bourgeois, It wears its feminism lightly and almost looks like what Kiki Smith’s decorative effusions might have achieved if she was powered by the desperation of external events. Alina was born a Polish Jew and died at 47 from cancer. She has a way of morphing flowers into people’s heads that is quite disconcerting; a female Paul Thek, an even more intense Hannah Wilke. The other good show takes as its theme avant-garde artists working in Tokyo from 1955 to 1970; it is interesting to see the Japanese sensibility wrestling with Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism ten years after the atomic bomb. A lot of this work could have been made in New York except for the very strong Surrealist influence in both the objects and the paintings, a kind of melding of European and American concerns. Martha Rosler’s Monumental Garage Sale in the atrium of MoMA allows visitors to the museum to browse, haggle over and buy lots of donated and scavenged stuff. Seen from an upper floor it has a pleasantly coloristic effect on the otherwise architecturally imposing and bland space and fills it up nicely. What this has to do with her notorious career as a primarily political artist is anyone’s guess and why either MoMA or the artist feel comfortable about this marriage of convenience has not been suitably explained by anyone in print nor do I feel compelled to do so.