Ciceronian Review

My Copy Is Better Copy

The Whitney is presenting a fairly large show of work by Sherry Levine, a retrospective, reviewed in today's Wall Street Journal.  Ms. Levine's work is found in many museums and sells for very large sums.  She has become quite wealthy over the years. She is famous for her work on issues of appropriation and commodification.  She took photos of 21 of Walker Evans works, arranged them in a grid on a wall and enclosed them with a frame.  So she had a 22nd so to speak.  Or, a bronzed urinal after Duchamp.  The review is scathing about the work, and I have, or more accurately, happily, agree.  The ideas of her work are very thin indeed.  It is quite dificult to take seriously purported commentary on commodification that is itself just commodification of someone else's work.  And sold for high prices.  (One should form A Sherry Levine Production, LLC and then sell photos of Sherry Levine photos.  Be a bit weird for her to object.) 

There are a number of problems with the project (so to speak).  First among them is that it is entirely insular and precious.  There is no significant challenge to notions of originality, for example, in the work because it merely replicates the claim of originality -- her copying is original.  Well, hardly.  It is not even an original idea, having been explored pretty thoroughly in the first half of the 20th century, although for much less remuneration.  Second, it requires so much explanation to have any value that the objects themselves are of no consequence.  And then one is back to the dull ideas being enacted.  And third it is built out of intellectual and empirical mistakes. 

Or I am old and crabby, which may well be.

Little Lights

There is a lot of precious photography to be seen -- photos of dioramas, photoshop extravaganzas, the staged homes, and so on.  Sometimes the technical manipulations, however, turn out something very interesting, something to look at carefully and over some time.  At least some of what Demetrius Oliver has been doing is in that category.  Take a look.  Or go to his own spot.  You can also see them, as I did, in Contact #160. 

Not everything is magic.  I like the Ember series and not nearly as much the Firmament series.  They have similar technical constraints, but take on different objects and images.  The simple start is that the camera is taking images as reflected by illuminated light bulbs.  The interaction between the curve and the composition is much more interesting than I would have expected from a description of what was being done. 

Gallery 291 in San Francisco has some interesting work up.  I have long liked Sunday's work, and own a small number of images.  More of her work is here.  This piece of a few years ago is one.

Big Lobby

The December 2010 issue of Art in America has an interesting essay by Peter Plagens on the failure of new American museums (and additions).  As architecture, that is, as museums, I think the essay is right.  American art museums are increasingly badly designed buildings.  Make a distinction here between the buildings as architecture and the buildings as art objects.  Maybe they succeed in the latter sense, some of them at least.  I am a bit doubtful, but at least that category is truer to what the architects seem to be aiming at.  The argument of the essay is that American museums are far more expensive than corresponding efforts overseas, the results are inferior buildings and inferior museum buildings.  One get massive buildings with remarkably small amounts of gallery or display space.  Instead, the buildings include giant entries, entryways that soar three stories.  This is largely useless space.  The galleries, in contrast, are modest  and disorganized.  The latter point is important to visitors.  The galleries have no natural flow, and include little or nothing to indicate to visitors where they should go or how to get about the museum.  My experience is consistent with the observations of the essay.  MoMA’s addition does not appreciably increase what is on display, and it does not really have a natural progression.  True, the entry space has been put to use.  Credit due.  But put to use how?  Performance pieces are mounted that interpret movement, that have no real place inside the museum.  (The monetizing of performance art is, in its way, shocking.  The notion that there is a museum (or part of a museum) devoted to curating or preserving art that by its nature was ephemeral performance, art of a moment, is both bizarre and a sad indication of the intellectual bankruptcy of the art profession.  Enough of that digression.  The massively expensive buildings do not enhance access to or understanding of the contents of the buildings – the art.  Some of the problem, I think, is that museums want new buildings that are themselves attractions, more than they want new improved space for the art already in the museum.  (So I do not think that the figure to hold up, pace Plagens, is Geary.)  It is not just boards of museums and the absurdly wealthy folk funding the things, another piece is the weakness of architectural criticism.  It is a good indicator of how serious the problems are in the critical world when a building housing hundreds of workers is praised without any notice that it has just two bathrooms.  It is as though the architects and their critics have come to think that the little drawings of people they place in around their designs are real. 

 

 

Black is Black

In light of the comments on Kulok's art, I went back to look again and reconsider my views.  I looked for the commentary on photography, and the insightful conceptualization, and, well, just looked again.  Nope.  (First, an inconveneint aside -- other work by KuIok (or this) I have found interesting, and I do recommend wandering around the site.)  I don't see anyting interesting in the way of commentary on photography or processes in this project.  First, because I still don't see what the process of creation has to do with or how it connects to photography.  Collect a series of network names on a cell phone, list them in black on a black canvas (is it canvas or something other backing?).  He used a cell-phone which may have had a camera.  Or more likely, the capture of electronic information somehow relates to digital images.  Alright, is a digital image (of a name).  And then these images are printed in black on black.  But that is not enough to get us to a comment on photography that is made by the objects displayed -- and the creation process is not distinguishable from this one, and so everything turns into photography and comment on photography.  A poor result.  I might buy a story about comment on printmaking, but not photography.  Second, the presentation is opaque, and off-putting I think.  There is nothing about the images or presentations that invites one to think further about the project.  To put the point another way, the image do not lead to an investigation of the process or the concepualizing; instead the latter are necessary to care about the image.  I think that is the wrong way round.  (I admit to a predisposition against conceptual art work for reasons to be discussed another day.)  All of the interest lies in the explanation, and that is failure.  Third, I still do not think it much of an idea -- There Are a Million Stories in the Naked City, these are the names of a couple of dozen.

Having gone on about it, let me again note that there is other work by Kulok that I find more interesting and would recommend.

Robin Lasser

Most of the time when I look at conceptual art, I get bored.  And that has usually carried over to the school of staged photography.  The work too often depends essentially on the accompanying text explaining what one is supposed to think about the images, which by that point are entirely dispensable.  In the March 2011 issue of Color, however, my predispositions were put by the side.  The issue (not up on-line yet I think) has a spread of images by Robin Lasser with text by Trena Noval.  The images come from several different projects by Lasser, two of which I think powerful and successful -- Floating World, and Eating DIsorders.  The Floating Worlds images involve placement of constructed lit tents in urban locations.  There is a discussion with images here. The project, no doubt, has a narrative element, or rather, an attached disquisition and polemic about shelter and geography.  I think this project works because the images lead back to the other content, and both sides stand independently.  (I should note that there are very different qualities to the images in the magazine and those on the sites linked to above; unfortunately.)  The images are well made (art least those I've seen), formal composition, and so on.  After the images, the text was something I wanted to read.

The other project -- Eating Disorders -- is also worth the look.  And it is even more surprising for me, because on the surface it reeks of Holzer.  Holzer is the apex of postcard makers, but that is it.  These pieces jump above that, they are more than odd advertising slogans.  I am doubtful that I can yet explain or identify why Lasser's work strikes me so differently from Holzer.

Crabgrass

The LRB has a rather curmudgeonly review of a book about creative writing graduate programs --MFA like the Iowa Workshop.  Elif Batuman does not think much of most contemporary fiction or the writing programs from which most of the writers come.  Two separate sets of complaints.  The complaints intertwine a bit, and I think all have been articulated before at some length.  E.g., the polished boredom of much writing, the identification of ethnicity with authenticity, and so on.  Quite a long piece, and all of it annoyed.  It turns out I've read all the authors and pieces he refers to, and the sad bit is that I largely agreed with his assessment.  Novel gets great reviews and turns out to be pedestrian plotting using limited characters cast in a somewhat unusual circumstance.  The essay did not bother me because of what it said, but it did bother me that I agreed with so much of it and so find myself in a kind of cultural conservatism.  I really did find Mukherjee's novel a poor read -- there really isn't anything much under the Bengali decorations.  Not much is learned about Bengali culture and the characters are not interesting.  Over and over.  

It is difficult to sort out the habits from critical appraisal.  I.e., do I reject the works because they are new?  Are they worse than the books I still love?  Is it all too colored by prejudice and sloth?  I am not able to tell (at least not today).  And so I consider that I have turned into a cultural reactionary.  Same in visual arts and architecture.  

What do you re-read?

Architectural Tinkertoys

Like all recent Olympic games, the event is an excuse for massive building programs -- giant welfare projects for construction companies and architects.  And now monuments to the games are part of the building program.  London has unveiled the monument it will build.  Awful is, I think, the apt description.  Well, it is big, so it will cost a lot.  But then, the UK still is a monarchy.  

The image is from the NYT, which got it from Getty Images.

Reverse Causation

The Sunday Arts & Leisure section of the NYT carried a first page story about an artist who started achieving success in her 90's.  A curious tale about someone who pursued her work apparently in relative isolation -- only a couple of shows over the many decades, nothing sold, and so on, although she lived mostly in Manhattan.  A kind of heart-warming story, I suppose, although I wonder about the many who labor on and never get even the late recognition.  Anyway, Ms. Herrera does geometric paintings.  Now she is getting recognition and sales -- gallery representation, paintings selling at $30,000 and above.  And now seen as increasingly important.  To wit:   

“Those of us with a passion for either geometric art or Latin American Modernist painting now realize what a pivotal role” Ms. Herrera has played in “the development of geometric abstraction in the Americas,” Mr. Sullivan said.

That is a very odd statement.  I don't see how she could play a "pivotal role" if no one knew what she was doing.  That she was doing geometric paintings before others does not make her work pivotal to anything.  I don't see how it could be pivotal.  

Lautreamont was important to 20th century literature, but not 19th century even though he wrote in the 19th century, because no one read him until the 1920's.  Pivotal to the history has to mean causally active, and Ms. Herrera surely was not.  

I

Schnabel

Julian Schnabel has directed four films, of which I have seen three: Basquiat, Before Night Falls, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  All three are quite good, and not of a kind I would say.  They are all quite unlike his prior work -- his paintings, etc.  It is a curious case where the second line of work - the film making -- is much better and more interesting than what brought Schnabel fame in the first place.  The latter I found to be entertaining, but only.  Post-card art I would say.  The movies are visually interesting and inventive, well-paced, intellectually engaging.  Thoughtful.  The other art is commodity work.

Basquiat, for example, conveys the art effectively, and also the person.  It is a good biographical film, at least in the sense that it conveys a good deal about the nature of the artist, his context (what the old would call his milieu), and the drift into death.  It is one of the best about a visual artist that I have seen.  (There is a video about Cartier-Bresson that is quite good as well, although that is almost all art.)

The first time I read that Susan Sontag believed that she would never die, I thought it was a small joke or some insider shorthand about fame.  The statement keeps being repeated, and each time apparently the iteration is serious.  Apparently Sontag really did think, until shortly before her death, that she would not die.  Of all the people in the world over all the many hundreds of thousands of years there have been human beings here, she alone would live without end.  Not, mind you, the widespread (and nevertheless terribly odd) view that somehow or other something survives death or is resurrected after death.  No immortal soul for her.  Seems she thought instead that she would just go on and on, like some Star Trek episode or Greek myth.   Or maybe it was that God picked her out, among the many.  This is hard to make sense of, coming from an adult.  I understand that children get all sorts of odd ideas in their heads, including that somehow they are Hercules reborn or some such.  But Sontag held this thought as an adult.  And made no secret of it.  Of course, she was free to.  No rules (none enforceable anyway) against ridiculous ideas, and it was her time to use if she wanted.  But it does raise a question about the fact that people listened to her, read her work, talked about her as though a serious thinker.  (I admit, I have a bias here in that I never liked any of her works.)  How is this not believing in magic?  Say the right words and up comes the mummy.  And now her notebooks are being published.  The excerpts I have seen suggest that publication is a bad idea.  Of course the notebooks of youth make for some moments of cringing, which is okay if there is a proper reward.  Is there?  What did Sontag say that would make anyone want to read her every word?  I doubt that even the likes of Wittgenstein or Quine, etc., would warrant such publication.  Surely not every word ever from the pen of Eliot or Bishop should be put out in print.  In general I am not much for the publication of the entire corpus of anyone's writings.  Even less reason to give such treatment  who held such a plainly idiotic view -- she would never die -- .