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This review of the recent Yoko Ono “Touch Me” exhibit at the Galerie Lelong in Manhattan, is the work of two writers. Maria Logven, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, writes fiction and poetry and is a regular at art openings. Tom Weiss, a native of New York City, is the publisher of UP FRONT News and also writes some poetry. He is not a regular at art openings. Both are residents of Staten Island.

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Touch me was the intimate title of Yoko Ono’s 2008 solo exhibition held at Galerie Lelong, New York. The personal nature of the show was conveyed through conceptual photography, film, portraits, and sculptures that invited viewers to participate and become not merely part of the show but also its heart. Works of different media positioned viewers at the center of the world created by Yoko Ono, the world that viewers could connect with and recognize. Touch me invited visitors to examine themselves through their relationship to this world. Point of view, both very personal and at the same time shared by others became the intangible creation that was as much part of the show as the installations that were used to produce it. By exhibiting this point of view, the show embraced the female experience.
Connections or relationships were integral themes that united all elements of the show. Segmentation is the method Yoko Ono chose to highlight relationships.
The exhibit was physically arranged in two somewhat separated sections. Touch me I, Touch me II, Touch me III, and Vertical Memory appeared in the large space, separated from the smaller adjacent area by a partition. The smaller area, which also contained the four screens of Ms. Ono’s Cut Piece performance, represented something of a political statement regarding mental health and freedom.
Touch me I was a large canvas that covered the entire width of the gallery. The canvas had several cut-outs in which visitors were encouraged to insert their body parts and have their photographs taken with provided cameras. Then viewers could write comments on their photographs and pin them to Touch me II, a white wall forming another canvas. Inserting their body parts into the holes, participating visitors had to consider particular segments of their body that they wished to appear on a large white canvas. Was it a face, a hand, a leg, or an intimate body part some felt brave enough to expose? All the grimaces and postures became segments pinned to the second canvas. Looking at the pictures—funny, shy, cute, conservative, ugly; reading comments—silly, neutral, sharp, sordid, humorous; viewers laughed, pointed fingers, compared, and contrasted, uniting these segments into a single growing installation and becoming aware of the relationship between themselves and the multitude of others. Crowning this installation was the Sky TV, another canvas that could be filled with stars resembling the photographs of the show stars pinned to the second canvas.
Touch me III consisted of female body segments. Visitors were invited to dip their index and middle fingers into a bowl of solution and touch the soft texture. Disturbing to the eye were the deformities of the body. The text on the wall explained that the sculpture was damaged and its toes were severed by rough handling. Yoko Ono decided not to restore the sculpture but left it as a comment on female experience. Viewers’ eyes connected segments into a body, while their fingers formed a connection with their own bodies both physically and mentally as they became aware of their own body parts that correspond to the ones they touched on the sculpture.
Vertical Memory was a series of pictures of a male face created by combining Yoko Ono’s father, husband, and son. Concise and moving comments written under the pictures were distinct segments that united into a narrative about the passage through life from birth to death. This installation highlighted diverse relationships to various men throughout a lifetime.
Segmentation continued into the adjacent gallery room with a 4-screen installation of Yoko Ono’s performance Cut Piece, filmed at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965. The film featured Yoko Ono whose clothes were cut to pieces with scissors by regularly approaching strangers.
There was a series of portraits, Memory Paintings, of women from an earlier century who, according to a gallery staffer, were inpatients of a psychiatric facility in France. At the time the facility was presumably known as an asylum. While none of the subjects were depicted as in distress, none were smiling. One was somewhat disfigured. The inner side of the partition contained the outline of a door, presumably the way out of the institution.
Installations displayed in both rooms conveyed similar themes through similar methods, but taken together they demonstrated the connection of female experience through time.

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Installation view of Spider Couple, Untitled, and Untitled at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008
© Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York
Photo by David Heald
“Goose-bumps”: Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim Museum in New York

June 27,2008 - September 28, 2008

Review by Peggy Cyphers

Louise Bourgeois’ Retrospective, currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, solidifies her status as a master sculptor and showcases her inarguable aesthetic triumph, situating her solidly amongst the greatest artists of the last two centuries. Bourgeois, who was born in Paris in 1911, and immigrated to New York in 1938, emerged a key contributor to the art world’s visual language systems, which has secured her rank among the great women of history. She’s not exactly a queen, movie star or rock star, but rather a female shaman of the underworld. Her iconic figure, like the spider, is all brain and guts on that nimble skeleton, quick to thread a web around her viewers mind and send bristling goose-bumps down their spines! The artists’ web, the tangles of her life’s work, skewed with her many insidious additions like a spider’s jewels of flies and mosquitoes, creates an intriguing vortex, concentric yet never rambling. (Indeed, perhaps it’s is no accident that her focus is so intense upon on a web-making creature, as our lives have become so integrated as a result of the world-wide web and within the international net of the internet.
Bougeois has a skillful and creepy, but politically correct manner of spooling out metaphors from core psychological and emotional epicenters of trauma; to hint at unconscious horror from the safety of an armchair. As one enters the dramatically-domed museum, its retro “space age” aura consumes the senses, as the body reacts immediately to its architectural theatre. Her “Spider Couple” beautifully contrasts with the Guggenheim’s famed architecture, lacking the logic of a Fibonacci spiral and breeding a breath of foreign and perverse air into the white-washed arena. Louise’s spider’s are tactfully positioned in an effort to be more dangerous in the sterile circular room where the spider is left with no crooks or crannies in which to begin the creative process of weaving its sticky web. Bourgeois’ main sculpture here, “Spider Couple” consists of two entwined arachnids just above human height, both dwarfed by the massive white cocoon space. The audience feels a sci-fi fantasy tension prompting the question: what could be if these insect were alive, and socially with, what is actually happening at this classy museum on Fifth Avenue. The massive spiders probe us to reconsider who’s boss!? Metaphors abound both seen and unseen. Not messy enough for a web/studio, so clean! This tension between the figure and space is iconic and powerfully dramatized inside the Guggenheim’s inimitable interior. Climbing ever higher on the ramping floors one views mini stages of her distinguished career, where lexicons of past years’ labors are spiraling also through space and mind, strewn with personal vignettes, assemblies of antique underclothes and doors and objects of uncertain odd demeanors. Somehow her use of the museum space makes it feel shaft-like, more male, less feminine, and accentuates the uncomfortable slant of the runway floor. Each sculptural work from top to bottom relies on its arrangement to produce stories that make one consider time, both intimately and culturally. Louise Bourgeois’ subject works well in the niches, and descending the ramp, we embark on a fun-house ride through her remarkable artistic legacy. Louise Bourgeois’ marble carvings amaze her fans, as spectators’ views shift from soft to hard, traversing one of these well-hewn marvels. As a master sculptor, she knows the art of carving marble, and evinced by her impressive technical skill with the medium as in the work “Cumul 1″ 1968. Each work evokes the kinds of tensions that are simple yet profound, between and within the works, from rough to smooth. Her installations of soft and mixed media sculptures, and her playful remixing of materials (mainly recycled or non-fabricated) are coated with the aura of their provenance. The reality of touch and sensation that she evidences are intimate and not always sexual. She taps into an exciting, sensory world of adolescence: A young creature at the brink of sexual awakening, forming opinions, when no model works for proper human relations and seems further askew by what must take place in the home. In “Red Room”, Bourgeois’ childhood reminisces create a visual tribute to her family. She allows all to enter her world, but also prompts entry into our own unconscious mental cities. Time past and time future encompass the show and with those boundaries as markers, Bougeois seduces materials to make us ponder the fragility of time; viz., our own eminent deaths. This and more haunts, and allows the assemblies of her installations to create stories in shamanistic reunions of experience. That is why women were studying them with such protracted attention that opening night in June 2008. Back downstairs, near the bar, distracted men talked about the last show by Cai Guo-Qiang “Inopportune: Stage One” with all its dangling cars, violence and sensationalism. Tonight’s vignettes appear sweetly sinister, weirdly demure in a Victorian school girl way, with surreal layers of beauty on every surface. They tell an abstract tale of coming to consciousness, both mentally and sexually. Looking down from the top floor of the Guggenheim it’s exciting to see the “Spider Couple” occupying the rotunda. The metaphor of the spider as a goddess– one who nurtures and takes life away—is constantly at work, weaving a gooey web only it can traverse without being trapped. The entire museum is a cocoon and the viewer is now caught. Halfway down the ramp are a sampling of her accomplished etchings, originally pages from a book, a story only Louise can tell. But the curved, dramatically-lit wall next to them informs us of a bigger story: that she was the first woman artist to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art– in 1982, when she was already in her seventies. Last March we visited Louise in her brownstone in Chelsea - its beauty and her beauty crumbling and dark, as is her eyesight. Artists who alluringly attend her salon find a table of treats, chocolates and single malts, in the center of the shabby room. Yet we know the treat is to be here with Louise. She sits safely in her corner under a lamp. We are attracted to her salon or rather, the memory of it as it might have been before her age began to challenge her body. Her vision is failing from cataracts, but she still can respond to the color red, like a spider that is attracted to the warmth of life in the blood. That day, my student named Zoli, brought a bright red painting unaware of Louise’s passion for red, and was soon surprised by her response of, “Red, Red, Red!!” Lucio Pozzi also came that Sunday with his muse and Robert Storr arrived flamboyantly late. Other than that, she was less interested as each artist passed their art around the circle. I showed her a small work called “Spider Woman, for L.B” and a friend took a striking photo of us alongside the painting. In the 1960’s Louise began working with new materials like plaster, latex and resin, which aligned her art with a younger generation of artists such as Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman, who were adapting a more organic process to the sculptural art. Its fascinating to see the works she did during the 90’s and how her visual poetry, always concentrically evolving, continues to draw viewer in, like a queen spider in her lair. As she is quoted as saying in the Guggenheim’s literature, “…the spiral means that a theme can disappear and reappear twenty years later.” Her earliest work continues to be relevant even to this day; like a great wine the taste does not diminish with age but is rather enhanced, as do these multiple experiences of Louise Bourgeois’ amazing oeuvre.

Review by Rebecca Lossin

While living in an underwater dome is not something most Americans dream of past the age of five,  “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe,” on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is much more than a nostalgic contemplation of unrealized utopia.  Placing a dome over mid-town Manhattan to in order to lower heating costs and avoid inclement weather is far-fetched at best, but for a nation in the midst of a housing crisis, on a planet facing devastating food, water and fuel shortages, this collection of apparently whimsical sketches and 50 year old cyanotypes of un-built homes is the very definition of relevant.

Both inspiring and depressing, Fuller’s designs for self-sufficient, low energy, spatially maximal housing is the way that pre-fabricated housing and post-war urban development could have gone and, arguably, the way that future development should go.   Even if there are reasons not to pull the blueprints off the museum walls and commence construction, Fuller’s work reminds us that actual, practical solutions require a visionary imagination- that thinking outside of the box will get us nowhere if it remains a figure of speech.

The Dymaxion house (a neologism combining the words dynamic, maximum and tension) was a round aluminum structure that was light enough to be shipped anywhere in its own metal tube.  Its shape minimized heat loss, it produced its own power and it was strong enough to withstand earthquakes and tornadoes.  It was also cheap.  Later, realizing that single family homes, no matter how efficient, were the biggest contribution to suburban sprawl and its attendant environmental destruction, Fuller shifted his attention to large-scale communal structures.   Inspired by a wider social  movement towards small, self-sufficient communities during the 1960s, they were designed to house 40,000 inhabitants and would not only produce their own energy but their own food as well.  It is impossible to tell where the climate would be if such efficient living arrangements were instituted on a large scale, but I can’t imagine we would feel good about ourselves if that question could be answered. Or would we?

Fuller was also  head of mechanical engineering for the Board of Economic Warfare during World War II and his architectural vision of efficiency was of a particularly, if not typically, military nature. Based on the very practical notion that extant technology be re-purposed rather than new technology invented, he sought  to turn “weaponry into livingry,” thus taking advantage of the well funded, technically advanced work of the U.S. military for civilian use.   Its a very nice idea and not by any means unique to Fuller: if we used all of the resources devoted to wars to raise the standard of living, the world would be a better place.  What is unique to Fuller’s version of this simple idealism is its literalness.  He did not want to make the military hold a bake sale to buy a bomber and transfer its budget to the department of education, he wanted to build bombers and make cookies in their cockpits.

A bunker-like, cold war aesthetic runs through the designs on display, but it is a series of diminutive drawings entitled “Zeppelins Dropping Bombs and Delivering 4-D Towers”  (c. 1928) that brings the logic of a militarily accomplished utopia into striking focus . For the most part, the show presents military technology as innocuous raw material with an equal potential for construction and destruction, but these early drawings remind us that this “livingry” is actually coming from weaponry and the quiet violence of these images should make us think twice.

The first image of a fleet of  Zeppelins hovering over cratered ground is jarring and distinctly dystopic for its retrospective association with the rise of Fascism.  It takes a moment to realize that these are meant as efficiently dug foundations for the houses being delivered in the second image, and in this moment one has to ask whether this transformation from weaponry to “livingry” is actually possible.  Can technology be removed from its original purpose?  Can the ideology behind the design be discarded so easily?

There is an obvious lesson to be learned from this exhibit: our habitats need to be rethought before our population becomes largely itinerant and the ocean starts to boil over.  And to an extent Fuller’s advice is being heeded, albeit too little too late, through the institution of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards, hybrid engines and alternative fuels.  It remains, however, that Fuller’s designs were never realized.  No one ever lived in a Dymaxion home as more than an experiment.  This is problematic and while we should renew our efforts of environmentally minded reform, we should also be asking whether re-designing the car or the single family home is going to get us much further than using zeppelins to dig foundations.  The failure of Fuller’s models should serve as the real moral: it is not the products of the system that need to be changed but the system itself.  For it was a capitalist, militarily minded society that prevented the construction of inexpensive eco-friendly housing the first time around and it is the same profit driven system that will stop it in its tracks now.  What would the banks do if people could buy a $40, 000 house?

Environmentalism, as it stands, is largely an extension of consumerism and again, very much tied to the military.  A large part of the rhetoric of the green revolution revolves around oil, a substance for which we have been mired in war for over five years.  In order to save the earth we are buying expensive hybrid cars, overpriced organic produce and ultimately pouring capital into the system that caused the destruction in the first place.  If weaponry couldn’t be turned into livingry, as the failure of Fuller’s vision has shown, then it is doubtful that Ford Motor Company is the answer to air pollution.  While it is immediately necessary and practical to revise what we have, the green revolution will have to be exactly that- a revolution; a radical re-thinking of the mechanisms of productions.  It is unfortunately far more complicated than turning a car into a more efficient car.

It is perhaps odd to take inspiration from failure, but the practical failure of Fuller’s work is exactly where we should be looking.  It did not fail because it did not work. It did not fail because it was impractical.  It failed because it flew in the face of a system dependent on profligate spending and attempted to use that system against itself.  It failed because it was too practical- too possible.  Capitalism is a terribly efficient machine and if we are to take anything away from this show it is that change is not possible within it, no matter how innovative or realistic.  If Fuller’s ideas are to be realized it will not be a matter of transforming weaponry to “livingry” but the wholesale destruction of  a military-industrial complex that will never allow its inventions to be used for constructive purposes.

Inopportune: Stage I

Inopportune: Stage II

Visionary, rabble-rouser, contemporary artist, Cai Guo-Qiang is the first Chinese artist to have a major retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. In his artist’s toolbox are explosives, gunpowder, yak skin, live snakes, wooden arrows, real cars, life-like replicas of tigers and wolfs, and trenched up sunken ships. Witness the spectacle created by this modern day alchemist. Born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian province during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and trained in stage design in Shanghai. Cai moved to Japan in the late 80’s where he was a part of that country’s Avant Garde period, and then eventually settled in New York City in 1995. Cai lists among his influences, Taoism, Buddhism, 9/11, mythology, Feng Shui, utopian idealism, Maoism and military history. He is currently in Beijing serving as Director of Visual and Special Effects for the 2008 Olympics and was thus not available to be interviewed. Instead, I caught up with Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, and head curator of “I Want to Believe” Cai Guo-Qiang’s Mid-Career Retrospective.

Project to Extend The Great Wall of China by 10,000 meters

Borrowing your enemy’s Arrows

I asked Ms Munroe to describe Cai, the man and his art, and tell us what it was like to work with him.

AM

Cai is a very innovative and ambitious artist and it has been quite extraordinary to work with him. I have learned a lot about his working methodology, for which I have great respect. Everything in Cai’s world is process. He is an artist who is dedicated to change, for whom nothing is ever static, but rather in a constant state of motion and evolution. I also learned a lot from his approach to exhibition making. He ensures that every aspect of the show, its planning, its catalogue and its public program is a manifestation of the project, interconnected, and related back to the core ideas of the show. It was a privilege to work to with him.
“I Want to Believe” is indeed an appropriate title for this large-scale exhibition, which fills all levels of the Guggenheim’s impressive Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda. When viewers enter the museum, they are instantly griped by Inopportune: Stage 1. Nine cars spiral upwards, from floor to ceiling. The white cars with colorful lights spraying out of them represent a car bomb, yet they are almost cartoonesque and reminiscent of Pop art. They appear more attractive than frightening. Although a clear reference to 9/11, this work according to the artist also alludes to the glamour of Hollywood’s car obsession and should invoke a dreamlike beauty.¹ This is the essence of ‘wanting to believe,’ approaching horror with hope, matching destruction with rebirth, curiosity, and a persistent spirit. It also alludes perhaps, to wanting to believe in the promise of Western democracy, although faced with its many corruptions.
Cai frequently represents this opposing duality in his art, “Often people will ask what ties my works together, because sometimes they seem so different from each other. Among other things, conflicts and contradictions embodied in the work is one tie. The very fact that I make little attempt to offer solutions is characteristic of my work. Some artists try to offer resolutions, but I only point to the argument.” He elaborates, “If you don’t attempt to resolve everything then it is possible to talk about contradictions, difficulties, and obstacles. You can bring these up and address them, but you don’t always need to have an answer.”²
Americans have been saturated with images of real destruction through the news media and depictions of faux-catastrophe in film. Cai’s re-interpretation of these images allow us to look again, without being bombarded with one scene’s definitive meaning. Instead of: photo of an accused terrorist = evil, clip of the US president = Good, we can refreshingly remember to think for ourselves and to view the inherent contradictions in an image’s meaning, holistically.
Jonathan Shaugnessy elucidates this concept concerning Inopportune Stage I and II. Stage II depicts nine tigers, who appear to have just a moment ago been impaled by a barrage of arrows. He explains that,

” By playing with the contemporary viewer’s reactions-is this bravery or cruelty, beauty or ugliness?-the work attempts to restore a sense of primal balance between the forces of revulsion and seduction in regard to violence, forces that are often repressed as a matter of social order and conformity.”³
Cai also applies this concept to his gunpowder drawings and explosion projects. He first experimented with gunpowder in the mid-80s, wanting to use unpredictable materials. He has said that his favorite moment in the work with explosives is the time after the fuse has been ignited but just before the explosion. Cai explains, “There is a brief moment where energy is moving together before it finally goes in all different directions.”⁴ One of his larger scale explosion events was Project to Extend The Great Wall of China, in which he laid 10,000 meters of fuse in the Gobi desert, beginning at the edge of The Wall. 100,000 people came out to see the explosion and momentary extension, by smoke cloud of this artifact of ancient Chinese Civilization. I asked Alexandra Munroe to elaborate on the significance of Cai’s experimentations with gunpowder.
Robyn

In Cai’s work employing gunpowder and explosions as mediums and in Inopportune: Stage One, by simulating a car bomb, he melds destruction, beauty, fear and release. I would like to hear your perspective on these unorthodox approaches. Is there a reference being made to Hegel’s theories, and Maoist ideology? What does his approach achieve?

AM

I don’t think Hegel; I don’t think that he is so aware of Hegel. Cai is not an intellectual. He is not a scholar or a philosopher in that sense of having read modern philosophy. He is definitely not. But Maoist ideology yes, because he lived through it, intuited something from it, and is replaying that through his art. The core idea there is no destruction, no construction. You have to destroy in order to create. In Cai’s world, the actual methodology of his art making is destroying in order to create work. It is also, on a much bigger scale taking Mao’s idea to destroy an existing order of cultural practice in order to reformat a new one. Cai, again doesn’t take anything for granted, he is not literally destroying modern and contemporary art lineage, but he’s ignoring it, which is almost as bad as destroying it. he ignores its inevitability. Instead of assuming its inevitable, he picks and chooses freely from the lineage of modern and contemporary art and intersperses through it a new lineage with factors from ancient and modernist china, popular science and anything that strikes his fancy. In that regard, my interpretation of his work is that it is deeply embedded in Maoism.

I also asked her to elaborate on my favorite piece in the exhibition, Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows. A large wooden boat is floating just below the ceiling. It has been excavated from off the shore of Quan Zhou, pierced with 3,000 arrows, and adorned with a Chinese flag. The title refers to the story of a Chinese general aware that he is about to be attacked by a superiorly armed neighboring enemy. Rather than accept defeat the general loads his boat full of decoy soldiers made of straw and under cover of night sails to the enemy camp. At dawn, the opposing army just glimpsing the boat, attacks it with their great store of arrows. The general is then able to return home, with a stock of the enemy’s arrows, which he will use to defeat them in the next battle.
AM

This is a very important early work of Cai’s that dates to 1998. It was shown in an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art that was presented in New York, at an Asia Society/Ps1 exhibition called Inside Out: Contemporary Art from China. This work like so much of Cai’s is based on an ancient Chinese tale. Cai conjures that tale and presents it to the west, as if the west could be threatened by China’s overcoming the west, because of garnering Western know how. Just as the Chinese general overcame his enemy by using the enemy’s own ammunition to overtake the enemy. So, in a typical and witty way this work is provocative and challenging of the core assumptions of Euro-American supremacy. It is a very typical Cai gesture, that is, highly post- modern, representing a global- era perspective and an agitation against the status quo and presumptions that the West has had about its own position in contemporary affairs.

Another highly interesting installation in the Guggenheim retrospective is the piece New York’s Rent Collection courtyard. This is a collection of sculptures that was first presented by Cai at the 1999 Venice Biennial, but that is an appropriation and reinterpretation of a piece called Rent Collection Courtyard. The original was made as a public art work in 1965 by a team of students at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. The original sculptures and the newer versions both depict peasants being forced to work inhuman amounts under the pressure of oppressive pre-Revolutionary Chinese landlords. One of the students who worked on the original, Long Xu Li also worked to recreate the pieces in both Venice and New York. In discussion with Cai and Thomas Krens, Director of The Guggenheim Foundation, Ms Monroe spoke about the meaning of the work, interpreting it as a questioning of the qualitative value that is put on certain styles of art. I asked her to elaborate on this concept.
R

I liked the way you spoke about the question of whose art is counted. I think that connects to what you were saying earlier in our conversation about the assumed supremacy of western art.

AM

You have it, What you have said is perfect. To relate it back to what I said a moment ago, it operates on many levels. It is a profoundly conceptual piece, which really has multiple meanings. One meaning, by presenting this work in a contemporary museum setting in 1998 in Venice and in 2008 in New York at the Guggenheim, is to challenge the west and again our assumptions. During the 1960s, certain styles of contemporary art were dominant, conceptual art, minimalism and pop art for example. Our art world was entirely geared around those three movements critically, in terms of what we were exhibiting and in how are tastes were formed. Cai is saying that during that same period half the world was deeply moved and 100 percent engaged with this propaganda form of art based on Soviet Socialist-Realist styles. They were deeply moved by this particular work that was reproduced in hundreds of cities throughout China. It was consumed at a level that Andy Warhol could never even conceive of in terms of his ideas about appropriation in pop art. In that sense, it is a very characteristic Cai work. He is constantly reminding us of other alternative systems of thought that operate in the world. He does not want to replace our systems with those systems but he is constantly reminding us of the multiplicity of perspectives and the multiplicities of histories.
R

You have mentioned that process is very important to Cai as an artist; I think that there is real relevance to that approach. His work is provoking thought. It is affecting people on many different levels, which brings me to the next question. I thought it was mischievously appropriate that the yak-skin boat and the river were built at the Guggenheim. When I visited the exhibition, it was amazing to see little children and men in Business suits competing for a chance to ride on the boat
AM

That’s great.
R

It was very peaceful, a break that one could have from the city, just by being on this little river. I wanted to ask you on a more personal level, did you ride in the yak-skin boat? How would you please describe your experience?
AM

Yes, I did and it was a very beautiful experience. It is a beautiful work. I love that work. It is completely an unusual way to operate in the museum system, so the shock of that is incredibly wonderful. It is an experience that no one has ever had before, riding a boat in a museum! Just contemplating water and movement as aesthetic elements, process is again referenced. I think it is all very beautiful and a very powerful artistic experience. It was a very popular piece.
The last work I want to consider is Reflection-A Gift from Iwaki. This piece consists of a boat that was excavated from the bottom of the sea in Iwaki, Japan by Cai and a team of locally based artisans. It has been filled, and is overflowing with broken ceramic sculptures of a Buddhist Goddess, which were rejected from their intended role as prayer idol, because of their slight imperfections. It confronts the intersection between religion and culture and was made as a collaborative project, again reinforcing Cai’s commitment to an interactive art making system.

R

In an interview with Jonathan Shaughnessy, Cai responds to a question regarding Reflection: A Gift from Iwaki as follows:

Shaughnessy: “Reflection and the focus on Iwaki in the Exhibition certainly reveal your collaborative and holistic approach to art making that encompasses the local and specific-by engaging directly with a certain community- in projects aimed at fostering relationships that go beyond geographic and cultural lines.”

Cai: “You have to be very careful though, there is a fine line. You want to avoid doing a cultural exchange or some kind of Environmental activism or whatever it is that concerns you in the work that it references. After all, you are an artist, and in reality art does very little to change the world. If you understand that and proceed with caution, then you don’t fall into the pitfall of all of a suddenly trying to fulfill a function that art does not have.”⁵

In conversation with yourself and Thomas Krens, also about the Iwaki work, Cai comments that he, “Likes people who don’t understand contemporary art.”⁶ Part of the appeal of Cai’s work is that it does reach those uninitiated into the world of art and art historians alike. What do you make of the aforementioned quotes? Can art change the world?

AM

(she laughs)That’s another big question. Yeah, I think art can change the world. Art changes the world by changing the way people think about the world and progress is made in part by intellectual advancements and by expanding people’s minds to comprehend perspectives that they hadn’t even known existed before. In that way Cai is presenting us with perspectives, ideas, that I think do reflect a contemporary, geopolitical, psychic and cultural reality that is new to both the Chinese and Westerners. I think that elements of that vision do reflect specific shifts in the world today. Understanding those shifts through art makes as more interesting people. If you are a more interesting person, you can change the world. You think differently, more scopically, and with bigger dimensions. I think art can change the way people perceive and that, in turn can change the world. I don’t think it’s the purpose of art to do that, but I think art has the capacity to reflect. In that capacity, in that process, things happen.

Cai Guo-Qiang has challenged the perception of both Chinese and Western contemporary art and uplifted our senses, challenging us to experience viscerally the contradictions embedded in the process and product of expression. In his own words:
“For me the central thing about my work is having the freedom in which to make art. That’s what I discovered early on when I first saw the vitality of Western contemporary art, and that remains the most important point for me- to maintain that freedom from the East, and from the West. For me, above all, no law is law, no method is the method. This is my guiding principle.”⁷

New York’s Rent Collection Courtyard

An Arbitrary History: River

Richard Prince one man show at Guggenheim is a massive affair. The show consists of different cycles of artists work, his famous cowboys, biker chicks, car hoods sculptures, nurse paintings,DeKooning paintings, check paintings, black and white; color paintings, celebrity publicity assemblages etc…. Walking up the spiral of Guggeneheim in a chronological order you immerse yourself into his world, which supposed to be a pure concentration of American pop culture.

From the huge amount of amassed work, the thing that mostly jumps out is the Cowboy series. This is Princes most successful and justifiable his most known work. The whole show has a very 80’s feel to it and this most powerful work , the Cowboys, are from that decade ( he produced more of them through the years). That was the time of Roland Reagan and his god morning America commercials. This was the beginning of America long slide to the hard political right. The symbology is obvious, Prince consciously wants his work to be obvious ,as a continuation of the Andy Warhol Pop ethos. Reagan a perfect cowboy ,directly from the Hollywood casting, riding to save America and the free world. This is the Marlborough man before the cancer. The intent was a creation of a pure piece of Pop art, interest he shared with his contemporary traveler Jeff Koons, who did the same with his Michael Jackson. This two man were chasing pop ideal ,with Jeff Koons being more successful at it.Warhols most simple one liners and appropriations standing next to this Cowboys are like Hamlet in his deepest angst. Road started with Braque’s and Piccassos’s cubist collages, Schwitzer’s train tickets, Duchamp’s urinal context shifting, Richard Hamilton’s arrested Mick Jagger and Warhol’s Marilyn nicely resolved themselves in this cropped Cowboys. The appropriation of these perfect manly man on horses from commercial photographs from glossy magazines are looking great. In full gallop with wast American western sky and landscape or in a contemplation with a horse, like characters in John Ford films, work well as the ultimate embodiment of American art. As it was the obviousness of its meaning when it was created , today meaning is as clear as the bell, with this current president, that is pointless to write about it and just that is were he is so successful and seductive. It is no wonder that this work is a main staple in NYC auction houses, catching for a photograph in edition way over a million, because in its pure formal and visual perfection and in it’s emptiness was able to transcend some commercial aspects of Warhol’s work.

Another interesting element of this work is the appropriation as a central practice in art making in contemporary art and the issue of copyright, as is being applied today to every single thing. From Dada or Surrealists collages on, artist were using visual material from their soraunding ominous as a source material for their work, commenting on the society. Today, especially with the advent of digital technology and the web, the source material is like a constant mental flow, our media immersed life make the need for the artist to reach and grab from this stream of data and images a necessity. The fact that every single thing today is copyrighted and owed, mostly by large corporations, that you must clear and pay for it to get a permission for the use in art making, cuts into the heart of art production by paralyzing it. Apart of making art creation costly , it is being used to censure and to force artists to self-censure , because you’ll never know when you’ll lend in-front of a judge (Jeff Koons is a god example of this, there were more ominous than this one). This Marlborough man bring as back in time, that appropriating an image from your surrounding for your art, to be illegal would sound crazy.

As are this Cowboys sharp and great work, unfortunately the rest of the show dasn’t hold to Princes own standard set in them. There are still his well known ”Americana art” ( it definitely influenced many artists of younger generation) “Girlfriends” series of Biker chicks that still hold their ground, but everything after that, especially paintings are less interesting. References and style of the work, it’s like taking a walk in mid eighties trough Leo Castelli gallery, from 80’s Jasper John’s and Warhol’s work all the way to Donald Judd’s. You can see what was in the mix at that time, including text based works of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. The tone of the language in its exclamation of truths is similar, except the politics of the text. While Barba Kruger and Jenny Holzer are dealing with politics of gender, race and class his text is opposite in it’s machismo and a bit of misogyny, I guess wanting to be a bad boy.

If the Guggenheim would dedicated only one room to his Cowboys and few other pieces, it could be a great show.

Yoko Ono’s “Touch Me” at Galerie LeLong, April 1 to May 24, 2008

On first entering the Yoko Ono show, “Touch Me,” at the Galerie LeLong, one is immediately struck by the presence of a young gentleman sitting on a chair at the edge of an enclosed small room. In that room is a small objet d’art, a high-heeled shoe, with bleedings of bubbly red paint on its edge and interior. It is Ono’s “Family Album Exhibit M, High Heeled Shoe.”
It’s worth thousands of dollars and, you would think, should be enclosed in a thick, bulletproof glass case. But it isn’t. Instead, a young man is paid to sit there, bored out of his mind, and stare at the objet in case anyone might try to handle or, perhaps, steal the shoe.
So, the first question to ask about the show - one which cuts to the heart of what Ono’s art is about - is why does the gallery prefer to use a low-paid drudge rather than a lockbox to guard her art?
A superficial examination might conclude this is done merely for cost effectiveness. The super-exploited gallery employees obviously earn little money and saves the cost of fitting an expensive box. Still, I think the choice is more ideological. By leaving the shoe outside the box, as it were, the arrangement creates an atmosphere of casualness, informality and freedom, which, as long as one studiously ignores the context, gives the work an aura of being unfettered.
Let’s go further and note that this attempt to establish such a gallery tone falls in with the (sad) attempt to recreate the feelings Ono’s work evoked in her youth when she was a vital member of the Fluxus Group.
This re-creation is done most diligently by playing contrasting videotapes of her Cut Piece, a performance in which she allows random audience members come forward and clip off pieces of her dress. It was done as part of a Fluxus event in 1965 at Carnegie Recital Hall. Then, it was redone as a nostalgic tribute in 2003. The two performances are as different as night and day or, more appropriately, life and death.
Note these distinctive attributes of the Fluxus version.

1. It involves a small group of participants doing the shearing, as evidenced by the fact that the same people come on stage repeatedly, in other words, it is a community.

2. The participants are dressed in shabby elegance, wearing cast-off, shiny suits or out-of-fashion dresses, suggesting they are down-at-heels bohemians.

3. Each cut is done as a premeditated artistic act, some being more expressive or inventive than others, as evidenced by how a well-placed snip is applauded by the audience.

4. The camera woman or man is given unrestricted freedom, so that at times that person is training the lens on the back of Ono’s head, at others, zooming in on a near-invisible audience.

All in all, one gathers that the interaction combines solemnity and a sense of shared adventure.
The re-created 2003 version lacks all this and is, indeed, the diametrical and perverse opposite:

1. There is no sense of community among the cutters, who are all different.

2. They are all dressed well, though some casually, indicating they are socialites or well-off functionaries.

3. There is no finesse in the cutting, which seems almost perfunctory, the performance of a ritual that no longer has any meaning. (We’ll come back to this.) No audience response is heard.

4. The camera work is rigidly conventional, that of a hired hand, not a fellow participant.

In sum, as the participants move through the sequence like automatons, there is no applause, no spontaneity, no real life.
In fact, it is as if the participants were as dispirited and uninterested in what they are doing as the young man guarding the high heels.
And this, I think, is what Ono is saying by presenting these two tapes. For both the 2003 re-creation tape and the pervasive unhappiness that pervades the gallery (perhaps a read-off of the sensibility of the exploited workers employed in them) are clear presentations to show that the New York City art world in our neoliberal, neoconservative era - whatever the skill or even genius of the artists that show in it - is largely inhabited by tragic zombies who fastidiously re-create works of a more lively era, only acting in this way so they can be dead a little longer.

The building of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 1994
Architect: Jean Nouvel
© Jean Nouvel
Photo : Philippe Ruault

Conversation with Ilana Shamoon,
a chief curator at the Fondation Cartier

by Nina Zivancevic

I am sitting with Ilana Shamoon on the fifth floor of the Fondation Cartier,
one of the major Parisian centers for contemporary art. For over twenty years, Cartier has been developing a highly individual style of patronage through his Foundation. Since moving to Paris in 1994, the Fondation Cartier has been housed in an airy building filled with light that was designed by the legendary architect Jean Nouvel.
In this unique setting, exhibitions, conferences and artistic productions come to life. At once a creative space for artists and a place where art and the general public can meet, the center is dedicated to promoting public awareness of contemporary art.
Each year, the Foundation organizes a program of exhibitions based on either individual artists or themes and commissions work from artists thus enriching their important collection.
It also organizes « Nomadic Nights », a series of concerts and performances where artists explore the connection between the visual arts and other forms of contemporary artistic expression.
Exhibitions and the collection itself are frequently sent to institutions abroad, enhancing the Fondation Cartier’s international profile.

Question: I’ve been following the artistic activities at Fondation Cartier for quite a while, but I must admit that all your directions hadn’t been clear to me before I saw David Lynch’s retrospective two years ago, Robert Adams show and the great Rock’n'Roll exhibition in 2007. Could you tell us, Ilana, when was the Foundation founded and to what purpose?

Ilana Shamoon: The foundation was founded in 1984 by Alain Dominique Perrin, President of Cartier International at that time, on a suggestion by the artist César who is, by the way, going to have a great retrospective here this coming Fall. Mr.Perrin and César had asked themselves the same question « What do artists need today? » and César came up with the answer that they needed Space and Funding. However, when the original space was created in Jouy-en-Josas, it met with strong resistance on the part of those who were running the official art spaces in France. It is important to observe that the space was started not only as a Foundation, an example of corporate philanthropy in France, but also as a residency program for artists. Cartier himself has been supporting contemporary
art by commissioning works of art, organizing exhibitions and developing an important collection. The Fondation has quickly outgrown the purely formal framework of traditional patronage becoming a lively environment for exchanging ideas and discussions. In 1994 it had moved to Paris- in this new space we increased commissions, we have built up sustained relationships with our artists whose work we often commission and then acquire. The Fondation Cartier is distinguished by the many projects that it has developed in close collaboration with artists.
When it comes to commissioning works of art, we should say that it is an essential aspect of the Fondation’s activities. Our relationship with the artist goes beyond mere patronage, it is a truly creative partnership. It gives the artist the opportunity not only to create something original but to explore new horizons: working on a different scale, bringing a project to fruition and realizing a dream.

Question: Who were the first artists who worked in the ‘old’ space?

Ilana Shamoon: A wide range of very different artists made their presence felt: Marc Couturier in 1987, Jean-Marc Othoniel in 1989, Absalon, Chéri Samba in 1990 and Tatsuo Miyajima in 1993. Since 1994 the policy has taken a bit different turn- our commissions have become more frequent. In 1999 Sarah Sze transformed the exhibition space into her installation « Everything that Rises Must Converge » which now forms a part of the collection.
In 2000, William Eggleston photographed the deserts of Utah and California for the thematic exhibition entitled « The Desert ». In 2004, Raymond Depardon traveled around the world and, at the request of the Foundation, made a series of ten films, each devoted to a different large city.
The Fondation has commissioned individual works by artists as diverse as Balthasar Burkhard, Marc Newson, Pierrick Sorin, Tony Oursler, Gary Hill and David Lynch.

Question: I was just about to say that I was amazed by the Fondation’s open-minded policy in its choice of the international artists, especially as to its invitations to the contemporary American artists- at the times when we could have observed an ‘anti-American’ climate in France…

Ilana Shamoon: We have always kept a ’spirit of discovery’ and have looked for new talents all over the world. Serving as a springboard for young artists exhibiting for the first time or for those who were unknown in Europe, the Fondation has developed a special program which has helped them achieve the international recognition. In 1994, the Foundation commissioned a monumental video installation from Pierrick Sorin who has since become a widely-known video artist, recognized throughout the world. In 1995, a young designer Marc Newson exhibited his installation and in 1998, the Foundation commissioned a vertical garden for the glass facade of Nouvel’s building from Patrick Blanc who was a relatively unknown artist at that time. In 2005, the Fondation introduced the work of an Australian hyper-realist, Ron Mueck to the French public and in 2007, the Korean artist Lee Bul held his first solo exhibition at the Fondation in Paris. And then there was that great Robert Adams photography show last year which I personally curated and am so proud of it.

Question: If I am not mistaken, the Fondation has always paid special attention to African and Japanese photography as well?

Ilana Shamoon: In the field of photography, the Cartier has shown, for the first time in France, the work of the Malian photographers Seydou Keuta and Malick Sidibé. We have also shown a lot of Japanese artists and photographers who have already made their claim to fame such as Nobuyoshi Araki (1995), Daido Moriyama (2003) and Rinko Kawauchi (2005), but then we have shown an emerging group as well. In 2002, the neo-pop painter Murakami had his first large-scale exhibition in Europe and he shared the bill with twenty or so young Japanese artists representing the most contemporary trends in Manga art, music, fashion and animations.
Now, our next big event is going to be a major solo show of Patti Smith, entitled « Land 250 » which is drawn from her visual work created between 1967 and 2007. This show will try to provide an insight into her lyrical, spiritual and poetic universe. In order to reflect the multitude of fields explored by Patti Smith, the show is intended bto be a comprehensive project that expands beyond the exhibition space. The Fondation is giving free rein to the artist and performer to oversee the programming for the Nomadic Nights. The Cartier’s bookshop will, for a time, become the artist’s personal library and her choice of books, CDs and films will enable visitors to further penetrate the rich universe of this truly iconic artist.

Autoportrait, New York / Selfportrait, New York City
Polaroïd / Polaroid
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, March 28 – June 22, 2008
© Patti Smith
© Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

Polaroïd
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, Exhibition Land 250, March 28 – June 22, 2008
© Patti Smith, 2008

Self-Portrait
n.d.
Graphite, crayon and colored pencil and on paper
29 x 23 inches
Exhibition Patti Smith, Land 250,
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, March 28 – June 22, 2008
© Patti Smith, 2008
Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery

Question: I see that there is a constant and positive tendency on the side of the Fondation to take interest in the so called interdisciplinary approach to art as it favors the mixing of genres and the mixing of art media as much as it favors the artists who undergo an interdisciplinary experiment. Is this your particular trend or just my personal impression of the Fondation’s work?

Ilana Shamoon: It is true that the Fondation Cartier embraces all creative fields and genres of contemporary art, ranging from design to photography, from painting to video art and from fashion to performance art. We allow artists to embrace space in a way that they wouldn’t normally do. Jean-Paul Gaultier, a world famous fashion designer showed his bread pieces here and David Lynch showed his rare drawings and paintings.

Question: What was that particular experience like, to curate David Lynch’s rare and unknown works? He has been known mainly as an original film-maker.

Ilana Shamoon: Well, it was not an easy job to prepare his show: the chief curator for his show was our general art director Hervé Chandès who went through 1000 of David Lynch’s drawings. Lynch keeps everything that he has ever drawn and these drawings retrace his entire life. He himself was very much involved in the preparation of this biggest retrospective of his visual work and was keen on making many curatorial decisions on his own.

Question: I’d like to know who encourages the Fondation’s ‘cutting edge attitude’ in choosing artwork for the shows- is it mainly encouraged by your art director Hervé Chandès or by Alain Dominique Perrin?

Ilana Shamoon: It is hard to say who is making the biggest impact on decision-making in general; for instance, one of our biggest shows ever, a thematic exhibition « Rock’n'Roll 39-59 » (June-October 2007) was conceived by Perrin. For some good twenty years he has been exploring the strong link between contemporary art and contemporary music, and he realized that the key-word that was explaining this link was Freedom. Now, he waited for the moment when the timing was right to mount such a show and the right timing was the ocassion of the 30th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. Once he made the decision to mount the show, it was put together very quickly – we (Perrin, Gilles Pétard, Isabelle Gaudefroy, Katell Jaffrès and myself) have worked on it for merely eigth or nine months. There were many publications which came out during and after that show, as well as the film and media related events which attest to the seriousness of that project. A similar approach to the exhibition project was taken by Robert Adams who encouraged the publication of 35 books related to the exhibition of his prints. He disliked the idea of having a formal ‘retrospective’ and was constantly concerned about the public who were not able to see the show – he wanted them to have his books. A similar, say even ’subversive’ approach to the show is going to be taken by Patti Smith who will have a published catalogue of her drawings and photographs as well as numerous books and book-related events during her future installation at the Cartier. As a private foundation we have freedom to allow our artists to take unusual or quite eclectic approach to their respective shows.

Question: What are the immediate upcoming shows of any particular significance for the Fondation?

Ilana Shamoon: Well, there is a huge retrospective of Cézar, one of the most important contemporary artists of our times coming up this summer to celebrate the tenth anniversary of his death.
I would also like to emphasize here the importance of our permanent collection which is not on display here in Paris but thanks to the traveling exhibitions of the collection abroad many artists acquire fame beyond French frontiers. Currently it contains more than 1000 works by over 300 artists providing a retrospective of major trends that have shaped artistic creation in france and abroad since 1980s. Naturally it is open to all forms of artistic creation: painting, sculpture, video, photography, installations, design and film-making. This interdisciplinary approach to art forms and genres stems from the very structure of our space, the way it was designed and used.
The Fondation Cartier makes long-term commitments to artists and supports them from the beginnings of their careers. For example, the Fondation encouraged and accompanied Jean-Michel Otoniel, Pierrick Sorin and Vincent Beaurin from a very early stage. The international scene is of a particular interest to the Fondation – many foreign artists are respresented in our collection including Huang Yong Ping, Alair Gomez, William Kentridge, Thomas Demand, Guillermo Kuitca, Bodys Isek Kingelez and Adriana Varejao. It is important to remember that through its various projects and acquisitions, the collection has established ties with those artists whose work does not fit easily into the more usual context of institutions and museums.

Review of Master Lee Sun Don, “The Mind in Freedom” at Gathering of the Tribes Gallery, Dec. 13, 2007-Jan. 20, 2008.

Apropos the new exhibition at Tribes of paintings by Master Lee Sun Don, who, aside from being an artist of merit, is head of the Forshang Buddhist denomination, let me mention some comments my wife, Nhi, made when viewing the portrait of Lee that graces the show’s accompanying catalog. In the photograph, Lee wears neither robes nor tonsure but is in a black turtleneck and has a full head of hair. Nhi, who is friends with many monks and nuns, said, “In Vietnam [where she grew up] the monks walk around and beg for food. That’s how they eat. All they do is spend time chanting, nothing else. But the new trend is for the monk to do business.”

In talking of new trends, what she is referring to specifically is two monks of our acquaintance. When we met them, 10 years ago, both lived in temples and devoted all their time to worship. Nowadays, one, who has moved back to China, owns a condo in Beijing, part of which is used as a Buddhist study hall, and part of which is rented out to rich tourists. The other works in a law office. But Nhi might just as well have been referring to Master Lee, who, according to the press release, along with being an author, painter and monk, is an entrepreneur and founder of “GP DEVA Frontier Art, a corporate enterprise devoted to social responsibility,” which among other things, promotes and merchandises alternative fuels.

I bring this out, not to pass any judgment on the connections between religion and commerce, for, as Nhi says, “The world is accepting this new thing,” since temples (at least in New York City) are prospering. I point to this because I believe a central trait of Lee’s art is that, while rooted in spirituality, it is deeply worldly. Its central thrust seems to be to make, without diluting its message, Buddhist thought palatable, even whimsically humorous.

How else explain, for example, his work Accordance of All Dharmas? An impassive Buddha stands beside a venerable monk, in front of them …. a bat and baseball. Where is the dharma in that? But reflect further. There is no field here nor are the figures portrayed engaged in athletics, rather the exaggeratedly large sports equipment floats before them as if a disembodied metaphor of some connection between monk and Buddha. The suggestion is that, embedded in American sport, viewed via one of its primal aspects, that of bat reaching for ball, can be seen as symbolic of a Buddhist truth of the synchrony between master and pupil with both (when in harmony) moving toward the moment when the bat whacks the ball out of the park, which may represent the bump-up in consciousness at the moment of enlightenment when the believer advances to a new level of discernment and care.

Many of Lee’s paintings reconfigure the link between monk and Buddha, often with the whimsical overtones of Accordance. In Ha Ha Ha! a monk reads what could be a combination missal and limerick collection, since he looks up from it, exploding in joyous laughter. Lifting one arm, as if to bring it down to slap his knee, he touches the hand of Buddha, seated behind him. The vibrant colors of the piece: a bright yellow background, the figures in a warm brown, a few written ideographs in quiet blue, themselves add immeasurably to the gaiety.

The paintings are not detailed, verging on late Matisse (an obvious influence) in how they highlight shape and brilliant color effect to carry the theme. However, unlike the works of the French painter, Lee uses imperceptibility for key effects. In the strong To Surmount All Evils, a Buddha-like character grasps a religious staff that horizontally crosses the picture plane. Two things are given realistic details: the staff and the arm that grips it, leaving the face and body of the man to fade into the vivid, red background, which snaps with white curlicues of a spirit script. As with the ball and bat painting, this piece, by what it gives in detail, emphasizes the moment of transcendence, in which the grabbing of the spiritual “weapon” appears to draw the man’s still largely submerged body out of the consummately lovely but also effortlessly delusional world of the senses.

Emptiness is also put to good use in such works as Dream Love — Appointment Across Time, where, in a piece which illustrates the love for someone long gone from the scene, a couple face each other. They are seated, hands reaching: one is almost invisible, the other, a ghost. Emptiness is also important in the powerful Over a Sip of Tea: Drink in Heaven and Earth. In this work, a teacup and teapot, knocked together in barest outline, interact in mid space, suspended over a knobby, grassy field, in a sky shot through with dashed-down mystic writing.

This work establishes yet again one of the abiding motifs of Lee’s work: Even the humblest implements form relationships that are imbued with spiritual value. This is something I found, in a different way in the works of Richard Brown Lethem, reviewed on this site, and which is a truth and mystery Less makes clear, using his formidable skill and fluency with color and composition.

What to say about a colossal art project which opened in 2000 housing 48 galleries devoted to the display of its permanent Collection? That it possesses numerous works of art which its mother-house, Tate Britain could not house any longer? That it hides in its vast basement a ghastly amount of art work which will never see the light of day due to an endless number of objects that are already scheduled to be displayed in there through the year 4000? And that in this particular respect it resembles madly the awesome temples of contemporary art such as New York’s MOMA and French Center Georges Pompidou?

However, as the Tate Modern, nested along the Waterloo’s riverside area, opened its doors to the Londoners and the international public not so long ago (in 2000) ago, surprisingly, and in May 2006 it decided to make a major amendment and rehang its permanent Collection around an entirely new concept. The rehang which features four wings (on levels 3 and 5 ) was generously backed by the UBS, British banking investors who enabled their visitors —unlike those who visit Center Pompidou or MOMA- to see the great works of the 20th century art history for free! The four wings correspond to the four periods in history associated with Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism; Surrealism and Surrealist tendencies; Abstract Expressionism and European Informal Art; and Minimalism. Around these focal points a range of displays move backwards and forwards in time, exploring how these movements echo a continuous dialogue between contemporary art and the past. There is an introductory room for each suite bringing together a striking pairing of major works by two artists with different artistic outlooks and from different generations.

The new display also includes a special showing drawn from the UBS Art Collection counting in the specific genres that were not well represented in the Tate Collection- last year, for instance, the show was drawn from their photography stock and this year we are offered a view of their rare drawings collection.

Around 40% of the works in the new display have never been shown at Tate Modern before including such luminary icons such as Lichtenstein’s Whaam! or important pieces by painter Picabia and sculptor Kapoor. Some 20% of works on display are brand new acquisitions by the most recent avantguard representatives such as the Guerrilla Girls or Christian Marclay. In addition, Tate Modern has included in its programme additional events and displays which take their inspiration from both the permanent Collection and the temporary one (located on level 4). The first of these events to celebrate the rehang, took place in 2006- it was a four day festival “The Long Weekend”; and in 2007/2008 there are other major live events scheduled as bi-monthly live performances (as the ones of Cai Guo-Quiang, DV8 and Merce Cunningham) As displays also focus on education and interpretation family initiatives, they allow for the performance of the events to be carried out in dedicated family space, as well as on the public concourses and computers linked to Tate’s online art database.

There are numerous important conferences and symposia related to the temporary shows which are exhibited on the level 2(in Starr Auditorium); among their highlights worth mentioning is the talk on David Smith in the series “Abstraction Across Media”(January 2007) and Sean Rainbird’s lecture on Kandinsky’s works which he himself curated at Tate in summer 2006. Among the most significant travelling exhibitions which have recently taken place at Tate Modern one can count in Wassily Kandinsky’s last year’s show. The Russian artist, who was one of the most significant artists of the 20th century was also considered as a pioneer in the development of a new visual language which is abstraction. The show “Kandinsky:Path to Abstraction” mainly focused on the early, exploratory period of his career when he was moving from mere observations of landscape towards the full abstract compositions. The show could serve as an example in good curatorial taste as it showed special caring for a compilation of the artist’s very beautiful, but at the same time very symbolic and above all, difficult to interpret, work. After Kandinsky’s show was over, the museum organised in collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation the big retrospective of David Smith’s work. Widely regarded as the greatest American sculptor of his generation, David Smith created some of the most memorable work in the twentieth century. Characterised by the use of the industrial materials, especially welded iron and steel, and the exploration of an open, linear structure, his work revolutionised the art of sculpture in the United States and elsewhere.

It is worth noticing that the so called travelling or temporary exhibitions which perfectly define the conceptual direction of the museum, always get their original initiative from the most exemplary work displayed in the permanent collection. So, what are the most recent trends in the Tate Modern curatorial policy and what are the possible tendencies in art to take shape in their future shows? “Learn to Read” is the latest exhibition in the Level 2 Gallery series which forecasts themes and trends in international contemporary art. This dense and visually diverse display brings together works by 29 artists which play with text, erasure and miscommunication resulting in the works which remind us of the legacy of early Dada, late Fluxus and conceptual art in general. The display from the UBS Art Collection in the Level 3 encourages the visitors to enlarge their experience of drawing. A vast collection of more than 40 drawings examines this medium thoroughly, both as a personal expression of famous artists and their primary exploration material. The display also includes the highlights of some of the best contemporary American artists such as Chuck Close (his unforgettable self-portrait evoking c lose resemblance with Allen Ginsberg!)and Robert Rauschenberg. We mentioned that the permanent Collection consists of four wings located in the Levels 3 and 5 and that at the heart of each wing is a central part offering an in-depth exploration of key periods in the development of modern art. The wing “Material Gestures” implies the spirit of action and gesture that are characteristic of the Futurists and the Expressionists whose work, created in the 1940s and 1950s, is to be found in this section. It opens into Boccioni’s futurist sculpture and is dominated by the works of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Lucio Fontana and Clyfford Still, along with the most recent acquisitions of Rothko’s immense and quiet “Seagram Murals”, of Guillermo’s Kuitca’s work (“Untitled”) and Douglas Gordon’s short video work (“10ms-1”) from the 1990s. The second wing in this level entitled “Poetry and Dream” is exclusively devoted to the Surrealist movement. Some of the movement’s most important works, including Max Ernst’s “Celebes”(1921) and Joan Miro’s “Painting” are to be found in its central hub. This section, as to its form and content, pays an excellent tribute to the Surrealist movement as no museum or gallery in France does — thus the proverb “familiarity breeds contempt”. As it examines the surrealist revolution in art with all its critical echoes in music , film, literature and theory, the Tate’s display takes a serious approach to this, perhaps the most subversive art movement in the 20th century. However, one gets the impression that the zealous curators of this display often have a tendency to overdo it as their choice of the surrealist works of art overfeed the visitor with the visual information; their choice of objects on display is admirable but as they are placed so tightly together, this sort of art work carpeting of the section’s interior creates a counterproductive effect. The wing named “Idea and Object” in Level 5 focuses on the development of the Minimalist movement during the 1960s. It includes some of the movement’s most exemplary works such as Donald Judd’s multi-dimensional objects, alongside with the pieces by Carl Andre. There are new acquisitions which put Ellsworth Kelly’s work in new prospective as well as the recent work of Christina Iglesias.

Works which acted as precursors to Minimalism can also be seen in this level, as well as certain pieces which attest to the development to the Minimalist aesthetics and ideology. The wing opposite to this one is devoted to the “States of Flux” which explore the historic movements such as Cubism, Vorticism and Futurism. These movements which are often linked if not jumbled together in French museums are exemplified here mainly by the works of Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger and Giacomo Balla. Among the younger artists who have already become classics we can observe the respective presences of Gerhard Richter, Jonas Mekas -with his imaginative documentaries of the New Yorkers- and Steve McQueen. There is an additional series of the original music tracks that go together with the visual pieces, as well as the artists’ commentaries and archive recordings made by the leading cultural figures- all contained in the museum’s so called Multimedia Tour.

It is worth noticing that all the entrances to these displays are free or if there is a suggested concession it is fairly minimal, up to £1 or £2 which is quite unusual for a European museum of that size and scope.

The famous temporary Level 4 which houses special shows curated for the occasion — and which implies a certain entrance fee– presents us with two different shows this season, Salvador Dali’s work related to film and entitled “Dali and Film”, and the work of a contemporary Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica under the working title “The Body of Color”. Salvador Dali (1904–89) is one of the most controversial artists of the 20th century- accused from the Surrealists that he was not imaginative enough to join their crowd, often he was also criticised by other artists and art critics that he was too commercial to be truly artistic. One field where his commercial taste for self-promotion met true art was the seventh art, that is, film, thus this particular show at Tate pays homage to that particular aspect of Dali’s work- his attachment to cinema. The show brings together more than 100 works by Dali, including major paintings, photographs, drawings and films in order to explore the central role of cinema in his work. The exhibition also displays collaborations between Dali and legtendary filmmakers and producers such as Bunuel, Disney, Hitchcock and the Marx Brothers including the entire screenings of his early films made with the poet Lorca and Bunuel such as “The Andalusian Dog”(1929) and the “Golden Age”(1930). The symbolic imagery that Dali established in these films as a sort of his own painterly idiosyncratic language had served him throughout lifetime and became his own personal branding and landmark. Dali explored human psychology and his own obsessions in all modes of his practise- the ants that pour out of human body, the dismembered hands, the melting clocks and ancient statues- we find them all in his “Le chien andalou” and then in a repetative manner in all of his paintings. His critique of religions , of a small middle-class life and manners and his love for a Spanish landscape and its peasants are visible both in his and Bunuel’s film “L’age d’or” and in all of his early paintings. Very much like in Tadeus Kantor, Roman Polanski or Julian Beck, Salvador Dali saw theater and cinema as the extended painting medium where the so called paintings follow one another with an unprecedented speed but with live actors and settings that change quickly. Film was a major passion throughout Dali’s career as he was one of the first artists for whom film was a key influence as well as a creative outlet. It is true though that sometimes he was too creative for Hollywood studios and their standards- Disney studios suppressed the animation “Destino” for which Dali had written the script- his images were simply too wild for Disney’s spectators! Fortunately, the 12 minute animation has been restored successfully and is shown in Tate in its integrity. However, Hitchcock had well understood the fact that Dali’s motifs had already formed part of our collective imagination so he invited the artist to design a dream sequence for his film “Spellbound” as early as 1945. It is a sequence only 2 minutes long but it has all of Dali in it- his shadows, his chess-tables and his dreamlike atmosphere as a part of a real dream or an imagined psychological nightmare. It is interesting to know that he was also quite a talented scriptwriter, very prolific indeed, but very few of his scenarios were ever realised as the entire process of film-making often eluded him. This particularly clarifying show is at Tate Modern through September 3, 2007.

Imagine you are seven years old and you wake up in a white tulle tent and don’t know how you got there. You’re lying on a mattress on the floor surrounded by a fallen forest of balloons. Some are white and some are clear with photographs inside, though you can’t make out the images. Hanging from above are floating halos, crudely shaped discs of white tulle, edged in barbed wire.

I was witness to this startling moment in which an indelible mark was etched into a child’s consciousness. Last May, just outside of Paris, I went to the GALERIE MUNICIPALE JULIO GONZALEZ to see Rana Bishara’s richly textured exhibit, “Homage to Palestine.” The little girl’s grandparents, friends of the artist, had brought their still-sleeping grand-daughter with them on a visit to the gallery. Watching her disorientation turn to delight also delighted us, the smiling adults. At seven all the world is magic, and when events combine to support this perception it can take on mythic proportions.

If this little girl had crouched to get a closer look at the photos inside the balloons she would have seen other pivotal moments fixed in the memories of other children half a world away. She would have seen her peers in Palestine facing hostile adults in uniform, maybe staring into the wrong end of a gun, or gazing, with the rapt curiosity of children, at the small lifeless body of one of their own. We were all silently glad she didn’t. She rubbed her eyes and was returned to the safety of her parents’ assurances that all was normal and the world a safe, relatively predictable place where surprises are generally a source of wonder.

The installation, “Homage to Childhood,” is part of the larger exhibit, which displayed a warning sign that some of the imagery might be disturbing. When speaking about it she told me, “Children’s lives are hijacked every day.” She explained that this is true, not only in the death and physical injury suffered by these children, but by the fact of their inability to freely develop an imagination that is not colored by fear, destruction and victimization as identity. Bishara places these images in a context, which is both playful and threatening― What becomes of innocence that is framed by danger? If a balloon comes in contact with a barbed wire halo―illumination of the sacred―what truth will spill out? “You have to tip-toe around,” she says, “―be careful.”

These images are not just pictures. They’re images of childhood in check, in terror―ruin beyond the rubble of destroyed villages and uprooted olive groves. Densely programmed beings that we are, the “I” is not regenerative. Terrorized. Terrorist. Maybe terror has to make a friend of death.

One of Bishara’s preferred materials is chocolate. “Memory is like a stain,” she tells me. In a series of photo silks on transparent glass, “Blindfolded History, she uses chocolate as her printing medium. ”It’s the same color as dried blood,” she explains. Suspended from the ceiling are a series of glass panels, each with a chocolate photo silk of a news photo gathered from sources like Al-Jazeera, and other human rights websites. One picture shows an Israeli woman and her son in Hebron. The woman is pulling on an Arab woman’s headscarf while her son kicks the woman’s legs. It’s a tragic image of hate being transferred from one generation to another by example and consent. In another a toddler is crawling on the ground, looking up at an Israeli soldier. The soldier’s rifle is slung over his soldier, the barrel carelessly pointing at the baby, a portrait of lethal indifference.

One of the stated reasons Bishara prefers chocolate is that it’s a substance that is both beloved and bitter― what Palestine is for its exiled peoples. She explains that this includes those Palestinians living within the Israeli state, where they are obliged to sing the national anthem and honor the flag of what they experience as a country of occupiers. Essentially, Israeli citizenship is a state of internal exile for Palestinians who are treated as second-class citizens. It is tantamount to being under house arrest. Bishara speaks of Palestine with pride. Speaking of the seacoast, the hills, the palms, she adds, “My country is beautiful―there is sweetness, but you can’t get to it.” Even much of the coastline is off limits to Palestinians, she tells me, who are forbidden to wear or paint with the color of the Palestinian flag for fear of being arrested. One series, “The Patience of Cactus” includes a piece called, “Sweetie.” The artist has enrobed the bottom half of a cactus in chocolate. “The word cactus, in Arabic, means patience,” she explains.

On the opening night of the exhibit, Bishara performed “Bread for Palestine.” She sat on the floor wearing a traditional Palestinian garment, and for twenty minutes, stuffed one hundred pita breads with cotton wadding and then sewed them shut, leaving a small opening for coins, ’like a piggy bank,” she explains. Here she rendered nourishment indigestible, left on the ground, all present being starved in the presence of food.

But art is something beyond the context of what motivates it. (Period, not question mark.) A fully formed artwork transcends its own agendas and arguments. While the artist is closest to her own motivation, the viewer should be able to share in its viscerality without being steeped in its context. Thus, although the conceptual pieces, performances and installations often have a striking beauty, they rely heavily on metaphor and the symbolic interplay between material and image. Yet, the artistic frisson of Bishara’s vision is most eloquent as she takes her pleasure in the abstraction of color and the movement of line. In one painting, a hand painted grid of three by three rectangles. she creates nine portraits on an orange field with translucent colors layered in green, brown and red forming distinct, but embryonic features. The layers of translucent color are like delicate skins under which she searches for definition. The unformed identities of the faces, brushed with broad, tentative strokes, contain the basic emotional honesty that is often revealed in children’s artwork. A lithograph in black and gray, four rows of four squares, displays sixteen abstract vignettes. Their simple execution shows complexly animated relationships between human forms, reflecting one of Bishara’s major influences, the Palestinian artist/cartoonist, Naji Al-Ali. Naji was born in1936 in Al-Shajara―one of over five hundred villages destroyed by the Israelis. He was assassinated in London on August 29th 1987. According to Bishara:

“(Naji Al-Ali) was an uncompromising critic who openly criticized Arab leaders as well as Western policies in the Middle East. As a Palestinian, he represented a generation of resistance through his cartoons, specifically his signature Handala ―one of his personal iconic creations ―the little boy he gave birth to when in exile. As a teenager, I was fascinated with Handala.”

She also cites Joseph Beuys, Mona Hatoum and Oscar Monuz as important conceptual influences on her work, particularly concerning the installation “Blindfolded History.”

Bishara is effective in whatever form she chooses to formulate her concepts―painting, performance or installation. For some, she may appear obsessed with the effects of war, specifically in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In this regard, her exhibit provoked a strong reaction from the local Jewish community leaders in Arceuil, a largely Communist town. They wrote scathingly of her work on their website, becoming quite personal in their accusations, even phoning the mayor of Tarshiha and stirring potential difficulty in her home town.

In answer to accusations of ingratitude toward the state of Israel, who some claim financed much of her art education while allowing her relative freedom of expression, she answers: “The state of Israel never financed any of my education, my family and I financed my education. I was working from day one of my study for my BA degree. Therefore I do not owe them any thing.”

But that is basically beside the point. No matter who paid for her art education, the important issue here is, considering the limitations of living as a Palestinian in Israel, what is her indebtedness to a state under which she experiences life as a second class citizen? As she points out―Israel occupies land where her ancestral lineage reaches back thousands of years.

One cannot speak of Palestinian art, or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict itself, without addressing exile, longing and humiliation. These are the emotional underpinnings on both sides in a complex relationship between the Zionist desire for return to a safe homeland, where habitation was interrupted by the Diaspora, and its interface with other indigenous peoples who have lived on the land with more continuity. Early Zionist writings from the turn of the 20th century often have a naïve, if not patronizing tone in their appeals to the Palestinian people as fellow Semites and brothers in a common ancestral land. Some prophetic political analysts, even a prominent rabbi from Chicago, predicted a disastrous outcome at that time. Reading some of these warnings from a distance of more than eighty years, it seems now that the early Zionists, understandably searching for safe haven, were tragically unable to see beyond the simplistic nature of their hopes for peaceful co-existence. They attempted to apply an essentially western socialist ideal to a culture that had no interest in such intellectualized notions of economy and trade. Much faith was invested in the benefits of what they saw as an irrigated paradise, with much confidence that the Palestinian people would welcome the benefits, sharing in the wealth of the land, in a geographical environment where nomadic and desert people had managed to survive for thousands of years without such benefit. Not all Palestinians were “desert people,” or nomads. Many lived in long-settled villages, on what is now occupied Israeli land. The early Zionists attempted to create a piece of Europe in different geography, where adaptation and traditional ways of life had evolved over millennia. While so much of the Israeli experiment began with noble intentions and generated results bordering on the miraculous, so many, on both sides, have suffered in its wake.

Bishara’s work intends to illuminate the effects of these miscalculations on her people. In this regard she told me, “Give me a gun and I well give you flowers―I will give you my art.” And with the images and materials of her country and its people she has devised a rich artistic language, which can be a source of meaningful dialogue.

Bibliography

• “A Jewish Manifesto to the Arabs” in The Nation” Dec. 13, 1922 Vol.115, No. 2997 p. 64
• “Churchill and Palestine” in The Spectator, June 18, 1921
• “Dreams of a Jewish State” in Current Opinion, March 1921, Vol. LXXX, No. 3 (Zionism and Anti-Semitism.)
• “Germany and the Jews” in Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 6, 1915
• “Palestine is Flourishing Under the British Mandate” in Current Opinion, Jan. 1922
• “The Case Against Zionism” in The Literary Digest for June 14, 1919

The first piece that you see when you exit the elevator and enter the recently inaugurated Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum is, “A Walnut” by Valerie Mrejen, a video of a an older woman and a young girl, maybe six or seven (or eight or ten?), sitting at a table. The aging woman is prompting the young girl to sing a children’s song into a small tape recorder.  The exchange is one minute and forty three seconds long during which time the woman prompts the young girl, offers assistance with lyrics and intermittently starts and stops the tape player to the child’s constant annoyance, eliciting from her tiny mouth impetuous protests “no no no … that’s not how it goes etc.”  The older woman is patient, not explicitly condescending but the spectator can surely sense its undercurrent and the child’s reactions are clearly evidence that she knows what is being implied even if she cannot yet articulate it past a series of frustrated and incomplete objections.

The poster children for this revolution are two vaguely adolescent, brightly colored females — as if to imply that feminism is itself youthful (or maybe this is just the product of its makeover?).

This is not to say that Boryana Rosa’s piece is trite and adolescent. The significance of this image for publicity purposes, and as a way of framing the show, has nothing to do with the piece from which it was extracted.  It is a video still: the representative image is one that has been produced by its removal from the medium with which it was created.  There is nothing inherently wrong with reproduction but I would like to argue that this choice of video still is representative of a problematic limitation placed on the exhibit as a whole, not because it is adolescent and catchy (although its marketability is not an insignificant aspect of it) but simply because it is still. And this produces rather troubling implications for feminism by formulating it as a global movement that exists somewhere outside of time and thus outside of history as well.  The conversion of video to still image is emblematic of this effort to whitewash the historical by obfuscating time, an indisputable and indispensable dimension of both video and history.  While the quality of the image indicates its technological provenance, the temporal aspect of video — the time within which the action of the work necessarily occurs is entirely obscured.  Not to mention their silence: The banner image reminds one of a rather generic photo booth session or a souvenir snapshot of your expression the moment the roller coaster ends its uphill climb and begins to plummet.  The video conveys a similar sense of cheap narcissistic entertainment but the subjects are screeching like animals They are not watching themselves be cute, they are watching themselves behave like baboons; a factor that necessarily upsets the passive, uncritical consumption encouraged by the show’s tame and recognizable logo.  The show is thus framed (the entrance to the museum is flanked by two giant banners bearing this image) by misrepresentation: contextualized by a lack of context.

Feminism is an historical movement.  Outside of the context of historical struggle feminism has no significance and by ignoring history the show has voided itself of any meaning as well — proffering the term Globalism as a smoke-screen for what is actually a trite gesture towards a simplified multi-culturalism — culture not having much meaning outside of time either.

This is what makes the positioning of “A Walnut” so interesting to me. The first piece that we are shown is not only video, instilling a certain awareness of the fourth dimension in the patrons as they enter, it is nothing less than a parable of inter-generational feminist dialogue; one that is necessary and necessarily temporal as much as spatial (or global to use their preferred term).   Here we have the frustration of younger generations with older, an insistence that it must be done our way not theirs.   Yet the fact that we know they are wrong, sense it rather, does not allow us to articulate a different narrative — not quite yet, not while they are still holding the tape recorder, not until we have learned a few more words from them.  I am not advancing a pedagogical program nor am I attempting to encourage an unquestioning, reverential relationship to our predecessors, but their engagement is a necessary process.   We cannot start from scratch.  It is only by the prompting of this older woman that the child begins to atonally chant out a school yard rhyme, and it is the stopping and starting of the tape recorder, the authority of this historical record keeper, that provokes the child to recognize her own potential authority; it is not the illimitable future but the restrictions of the past that provoke the first NO!  A “No!” that is furthermore infinitely more complicated for its involvement and necessary dependence on the subject that it has begun to refuse.  A “No” that is not reactionary in nature in that it precludes the summary rejection of its object of protest, which is not an object at all but a subjective model; an intimation of a future self; a speaking as opposed to a stuttering subject.

While it is the opening work, in another respect it is as if the show has made an effort to suppress this video image, placing it alone in the entryway and allowing us to ignore what it is saying in terms of anything other than the elevator doors. Exiling it from the main galleries.  But although the show, through this gesture and others, makes every effort to avoid the past it resurfaces continually.  Not least through their intentionally a-historical or “global categories: “Life-Cycles, Emotions, Politics & Identity.”  This is how they’ve chosen to label the four galleries.  Suddenly we find ourselves in a strange space that reeks of the nineteenth century, depressed post-war housewives, Redbook articles about infertile unhappy career women …. From 1990 we have moved out of time and into the timeless past time of lashing women’s identities to irrational cycles and hormonal urges.

“Politics,” at first glance, seems a more relevant category.  Upon further consideration however, one begins to wonder what a ‘global’ politics really means.  The politics of what exactly?  For a show so bent on diversity and the far flung cultural components of identity, the negative implications of a global politics should be obvious.  But instead of addressing the thousand or so red flags that should pop up when we see these words juxtaposed, the curators have apparently turned in the other direction and consequently reinforced one of Western Feminism’s most notorious blind spots: the presumption that educated white women have a franchise on meaning; that our politics are politics in general or, more accurately that what falls under the category of political is a matter of Anglo-centric interpretation.  Of course the political statements made within the gallery were diverse and their authors from a number of countries, but the point is that two American women decided that these works were “political” and that, by extension, the other three galleries contained works that were not.  And what of this third category of “identity” if, as is implied by the show, it is not political? Without the ability to articulate themselves within a political context what could they possibly be saying about feminist identity?  Or about women’s identity past the ‘fact’ of its femaleness?  This is not solidarity it is pond gazing; not language but mute narcissism; schizoid ramblings that make sense to no one but the individual from whom they issue.  Thus they remain segregated from one another, alienated from the movement they have been invited to represent.   This is not an identity that I want anything to do with.

But figuring them as bodies outside of any traceable dialogue amongst subjects seems to be the show’s other organizing principal.  Most of the work does involve bodies in various states of abstraction and masquerade; engaged in speech or parodies of speech but what they are saying means as little as the screeching animal noises made by the poster girls when un-stilled, for they are, every one of them, speaking into a void, or perhaps babbling at a tower.  We can talk about them individually but we cannot speak of them collectively without reference to these arbitrary and idiotic gallery titles.  And to speak of them as individuals is to encourage voyeurism; instead of engaging the spectator in a complex of social and aesthetic negotiations, suggested by the intimation of dialogue between works, it is inviting us to identify the individual artist; to fantasize about the female body that painted itself with a dick.  Or to anticipate the image of our captured expression at the moment our steady stride is broken by the shocking image of an emaciated torso hula-hooping with barbed wire.

But there is a reason for all of this.  The blind focus on timeless globalism that has led to such a multiplicity of failures and sapped the show of any revolutionary potential is, unquestionably, a reaction to the looming presence of Judy Chicago’s gargantuan ode to biological essentialism “The Dinner Party” and its absolutely dumbfounding, Eurocentric counterpart, the “herstory” gallery.  “The Dinner Party” is not technically part of the show (although pictured in the catalog) or any show for that matter (it has its own gallery) but permanently installed in this wing of the museum.  Permanently. The space is essentially cursed.

First just let me say one thing; lame as shit.  Yes, there it is my reactionary, poorly articulated distaste for stuff like this. Lame as in stuffy and dated and really not as clever, nor as profound as it intends to be.  Or lame as in an appendage that once functioned and can now only assert its presence by accidentally breaking dishes from time to time.   But if “The dinner party is a senseless, limp arm then the “herstory gallery” is an iron mask. It isn’t just some stupid time line with a worn out title, it is a stupid time line that leads up to a stupid Judy Chicago piece; here is our history and just as social relations make little sense outside of time, temporal relationships say very little extra geographically.  Or rather, freed from the constraints of material geographical fact, they say exactly what one might want them to say. Which in this case is that the entire history of female production was leading up to a Judy Chicago Vagina ceramic, a cheesy biologically essentialist piece of pottery made by a white woman.  One that, at least in this context, is not asking the other, younger women around her to perform so much as stand in awe, their voices appropriately lowered to match the lighting.

This arrangement is not only insisting that “The Dinner Party” was the culmination of artistic contribution by women, but also that it is the source of all that came after it. No matter what the piece, anything of that scale and canonical value would have this effect on the work of lesser-known artists who have had the chronological misfortune of producing anything in this depressingly post-labial era full of silly teenage girls in photo booths.  The fact that it happens to be a giant vagina just reinforces the origin metaphor to a comical degree.  So it is simply the most idiotic of curatorial decisions ever made for reasons that have nothing to do with the aesthetics or politics of the piece itself; they have limited, extensively, the dialogue between individual works that is the curatorial purpose of a group show.  Why bother making curatorial decisions when everything will always appear to be a satellite of this gargantuan vagina enshrined under low lights behind a tri-angular prism of tinted glass?  Why bother changing the show at all?  Well, they actually aren’t going to.  Coming in August is, no joke, Global Feminisms Remix which will consist of 40 pieces selected from the current show.

This tomb-like enshrinement should indicate another facet of the installment’s oppressive and repressive nature.   It must be realized that any canon serves a naturalizing and sanitizing function; by elevating it to the level of great work, i.e., removing it from the collaborative historical process that was its crowning social achievement (the volunteer effort lasted from 1974 to 1979) and hiring a crew of professionals to re-install it over 20 years since that production ended, its protest is lost.  The NO! so clearly articulated by the frustrated child has long since transformed itself into the distant echo of tarot card images and mass marketed spiritual self-help books that insist on guiding our womyn-spirit back to its real emotions and original life cycle by introducing it to a howling wolf or something.  It is a truly perverse miming of protest; the germ of social dissent appropriated, re-formed and re-imposed as a universal, tyrannical and timeless NO.  This is no longer a protest against tyranny but tyranny itself and to this we can only respond with reverential silence or reactionary and pointless tantrums.  And this, of course is a matter of social forces reaching far beyond Judy Chicago.

The fact that the show’s curation is largely at fault for its failure doesn’t, however, let the monstrosity off the hook and while there is no way of knowing whether I would have liked it in the seventies, I like to think I would have hated it just as much.  I am admittedly someone who came into cultural consciousness at a time when crystals, Georgia O’Keefe, and old women who wore purple became very popular commodities.  I have had about fourteen years to see this already cheapened aesthetic/ethos regurgitated and am incapable of separating this from my judgments.  While I do not claim to speak for a generation, I am also not the only person who grew up with the ability to identify “vaginal motifs” and perhaps this fact alone should be enough reason to reconsider the Dinner Party’s effect on the space.

Moreover, it might be prudent to consider why this aesthetic, represented by high priestesses Judy Chicago and Georgia O’Keefe was so easily and persistently marketed in the first place.  What is preserved is often times not the most radical example of artistic production.   And I am not merely the victim of a post-modern squeamishness concerning bodies or materially existing genitals.  I am not embarrassed by vag; I am offended by racially and culturally stereotyped vag.  Emily Dickinson’s vagina is not made out of pink satin and lace.  That is an absurd idea.  And making Margaret Sanger’s vagina red doesn’t even count as a decision.  I have more faith in my predecessors, in their complexity of thought; in gestures too revolutionary to be repeated in a vacuum.  I like to think that Virginia Woolf would have found this to be rather idiotic as well.

When you the Martin Creed retrospective “Feelings” at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, it is through a room full of blue balloons.  “Half the Air in the Room” is exactly that, and for something as simple and ubiquitous as air, it manages to set in motion a rather vivid string of associations:  Those ball pits that haven’t been sufficiently deep since I was three — what happened to that girl who had those birthday parties? We had the same shoes — I never really liked Care Bears — my mother hated that place — an inland lake — slimy on the bottom — I tuck my legs and curl my toes — slime turns to plants — fish — snapping turtles — puking drunk off a dock — house boats — suburban parking lots ….

I go swimming along in a state of giggle-inducing disorientation until I finally find the entrance to the next gallery, where I immediately notice a loud banging noise coming from somewhere and then notice all of the other people noticing the banging noise.  It is a supremely unfamiliar way of entering the white box.   Unlike the anxious, if momentary, confusion one might normally experience at the threshold of such a formal space — containing as it does such revered and mystified objects — it is not generated by a distant parental warning not to break anything or a fear of speaking too loudly. Nor does it produce the more carefully disguised anxiety about your adequacy as interpreter.  No, this disorientation is pleasant, that banging makes me curious, those words on the wall make me want to get a dictionary, that person is wondering about the noise as well but we can’t yet tell where it is coming from, so it will have to wait.    My hair has become a science experiment; I want to go back to the static squeaking of taut rubber but I need to know what is making that noise ….

Martin Creed’s artwork, says the New York Times, “veers between shock therapy and something quite a bit more tender” It is also “like swimming with dolphins” apparently — an experience that I don’t share with the times reviewer and therefore can’t evaluate.  In fact most of what seems to be written about Creed’s work bears a trace of the desperate confusion revealed by statements similar to these.  Somewhere between shock therapy and anything save for unanaesthasized electrocution?  Well, yes, it is like something I suppose, but dolphins?

The alternative to this hyperbole is comparison, but in the case of Creed even statements of influence or attempts to place him within a movement have a tendency to expand and extend into the realm of exaggeration.  In a single paragraph, the New York Times declares that Martin Creed is “minimalist,” “conceptualist” and has the “rarefied art in the street tendency of situationism.”  He is also an artist in the tradition of “Dada” with “formalist savvy.”  Martin Creed, in short, is everything and anything that might have happened during the 20th century.

But then I can’t blame them much, because I find myself at a similar loss for words and lacking an arsenal of contemporary art historical jargon, I am unable to avoid one rather unsophisticated conclusion.  Martin Creed’s work is funny. This is, anyway, the quality that I value most. Not, as might think, because it is entertaining but for a sense of intimacy and secrecy produced by the coded exchange.  I don’t find myself laughing so much as smirking — allowing knowing half smiles to escape when no one else is looking.  I have this deep conviction that I appreciate these objects in the same way that I appreciate the minute particular gesture of a close friend; that I have gotten the joke; that there is a mutual understanding conveyed by a lot of winking and head nodding.

But this really makes very little sense, for as absurd as the New York Times’ placement somewhere between ECT and anything else happens to be on the level of description, it is in some ways an accurate evaluation of Creed’s oeuvre and sounds rather similar to the statement “somewhere between a wadded up ball of paper, a neon sign and a pneumatic piano.”   So then how do we understand these objects if our language is so incapable of placing them into rational, understandable relationships?

I suppose the answer is contained in the question, we understand them as objects with little or no affect on anything outside of our relationship to them, and individual experience can only hope to be approximated in universally apprehended terms.  Be it sensual, auditory or visual the objects meaning is dependent on your position vis a vis it.  And here, in the expression of a singular relationship between object and subject, art historical discourse fails miserably.  But in its complete failure it has made room for something else. It has necessitated by its utter impotence a different form of language, one that tends towards the literary, the poetic, the personal narrative … (Everything!)