Rain in New York

I think there's a germ in Chelsea. It's making people weak and sickly, and in their weakened state they are taking their mental cues from their clogged up nasal passages, which make them feel beleaguered and misunderstood. They are becoming cantankerous and, truth be told, a little, well, demanding. They want orange juice, and for people to bring them things, and they hate everything. You bring them magazines and chicken soup and they dash it to the floor and yell at you that they have taken a turn to the vegetarian and they want nothing to do with your chicken soup and your middle-class cold remedies. They want oscillicosenum, and they want it from France. They hate you and they hate themselves and they wish you would take your pretty smiling face out of there and stop trying to cheer them up. They don't want your damned sunshine and quote unquote ideas, they want to sit around watching old Barney Miller and hating every minute of it.

It's best to leave them alone at times like this.

Which is to say that a random survey of this month's shows in Chelsea, taken between 2 and 5 yesterday afternoon in a rainstorm revealed a weird preponderance of art that seemed to be infected by a negative nostalgia and little else: there were paintings of family photographs with everyone's eyes gone all red and demonic, and ink pen drawings of mean cheerleaders from the seventies and giant paintings of old Doors album covers made to look stupid, stupid, stupid! I went up to Chelsea last month and saw tons of great stuff, so I'm hoping it's a phase. It feels like one. You can walk through the galleries and hear the art yelling, "I hate you, Dad! And I hate your stupid music and nobody understands me!"

But what can you do. Everybody gets a cold sometimes and no one behaves well under the influence of a malicious germ. Plus I hear the rents are going up, which is bound to weaken one's immune system.

There was some great stuff too: I liked the James Lee Bryars and Nicole Eisenman is up to some nice new tricks that are good to see. And there's a funny Basquatch/Dubuffet show at Pace that featured cow paintings. And there was a really lovely show in the back section of the Cue Art Foundation. Man, that was good. It was work by an artist named Valerie Hammond and it made me wonder what genius curator had picked up her work: it turns out the show was curated by Kiki Smith. Shows ta go you. Valerie Hammond's work is gorgeous and kind and humane and interesting: a marked contrast to the preponderance of superior stuffy-nosed art we saw in a lot of the rest of the galleries. Definitely worth a look- pictures don't convey the beautiful fragility of her pieces.



Hatshepshut at the Met was great too. Apparently around Hatshepshuts' time there was an Egyptian fad for seated sculptures in which the figure becomes a simplified block with a tiny indication of hands and feet on the top and bottom. Those were gorgeous and moving: I love the idea of the mix between written language and image in these.



And check out the feet on this chair from 1548 BC! Guess that caught on.




We also went to see Kara Walker's After the Deluge, which was gorgeous and sad. My mother just went to New Orleans for Jazzfest, and she told stories about driving through the outer districts at night. She said it looked like a war zone, and described seeing a house that floated off its pilings leaving everything inside a mess except a closet with neatly hung white shirts floating in the stream of the headlights. She talked about crowds of people at Jazzfest crying as they sang and the shock that you can see on people's faces as they are forced to really realize that the government does not care. The trash is still piled up to the second story windows and the National Guard is being deployed to the border to protect us from illegal immigrants. It's awful, and there's a sense of Kara Walker reacting to that obliviating pain in the exhibition. She made some new work and rifled through the Met's collections to make a sad poetry of objects that included this incredible Winslow Homer painting that somehow says it all:


(Click here to enlarge. )

Or maybe not all. Kara Walker also says this, which is more to the point.


It's hard to see this image on the web, but the smoke has ignots and silhouettes of African Americans and buildings and all kinds of devastation in it.

We couldn't see everything in this exhibit because yesterday's rainstorm had caused leaks in the roof of the contemporary section, which had caused the galleries to be closed off. One painting was removed and there were little wastepaper baskets catching the leaks in front of an Anselm Keifer, which had been half-covered in plastic in a funnily sweet kind of way. The scale of the Met makes you think that they'd have high-tech rain catchers and massive white-suited teams to protect the Keifer, but no: somebody's office lost their garbage can.

The last thing I saw at the Met was one of my favorite things: Florine Stettheimer's Cathedrals series is out again. I love Florine Stetheimer, and her Cathedral of Art is so funny and terribly eternal. Her work doesn't reproduce well, I've found, but next time you're in the met, go see Florine. She's amazing. She was very famous in her own time, was friends with Duchamp, wore fabulous outfits, and used cellophane, a newly invented material, to decorate her Manhattan apartment at one point. There's nothing not to love about her.

(This is a bad image of the work, but if you click the link above you can see it better.)

Podcasts for tender, artsy souls

I'm going up to NY again today to look around Chelsea and the Met and possibly the Whitney- the only thing that's positively on the agenda is that we need to see Hatshepshut at the Met. Thom (the beloved) has a way of knowing about things like Hatshepshut that never fails to amaze me. While there's a good chance that I might know that there's an Egyptian show at the Met with some pharaoh or other, Thom will have known it was coming months before it's on my radar and if it happens to come up in conversation he will be able to give me a rundown on the history of the specific pharaoh. And he's not even particularly interested in Egypt. I mean, he is- he's the force behind Hatshepshut being on the top of the art to do list today- but it's more about bikes, guitars, urban planning, cooking, gardening, the environment and everything else. It's like living with Wikipedia- the person.

Me, I need help to know about Hatshepshut, so I listened to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's podcast, which is narrated, weirdly enough, by Sam Watterson. He was in a Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, so I guess, um, it makes sense?



(Apparently she's sitting on the Ark of the Covenant.)

The met podcast was pretty fascinating, and since Wikipedia is still asleep and I'm loathe to get out of bed, I thought I'd copy the NY Times and make an entry about some fabulous podcasts I've found.

There's a New York Times article about museum podcasts today that lists a bunch of great podcasts I already know about. They talk about the great Metropolitan Museum of Art podcasts, but there also looks to be an interesting one at MOCA (conversations with Dave Hickey, Rauchenberg, Kentridge) and MOMA has one called "Think Modern" that records conversations with artists and critics as well. I'm stocking up for the drive to NY.

Hammer Conversations features artists, filmmakers and writers talking about their work. It's downloadable from the same site as KCET's Aloud at the Central Library program, which I've listened to a few times and like very much. You can download these from the websites I've linked to, but if you do have an ipod, it's easier to just search for them in itunes.

There's also the WGBH Forum Network, which has random talks on the kinds of geeky subjects I like to listen to during long hours of cutting out stencils. There's a really fabulous lecture called "Impassioned Experience: Art in a 4th Grade Classroom" that just kills me. It features a super-sincere British man analyzing photographs taken by fourth grades with the weight and gravity normally given to...Well, normally not given to pictures featuring Stephanie's fuzzy bunny. In Our Time is a consistently interesting show from the BBC that deals with art in a tangential way- they get panels of academics together with a cranky commentator to discuss Big Ideas in an accessible way- it's a good time.

I keep trying to like the Exit Art podcast, but the last one I listened to had verrry insider artsy pants tone that put me off. I can't handle Artdispatch for the same reason- it looks like it should be right up my alley, but the very tone of voice of the podcast narrator makes my hair stand on end. Which is pretty scary, because Artdispatch calls itself the voice of the art world. But I do love the portentious voice of John Ciardi, who NPR has republished from beyond the grave. His On Words with John Ciardi is my favorite podcast ever.

Thanks, nice airport people!

The Philadelphia Airport has a little blurb about my piece on their website- neat!

To Blog or not to Blog

I thought I would write about the art I've been seeing in NY, but seeing so much art has made me want to stop spending time writing and reading blogs. I went to the Pierpont Morgan museum and saw handwritten manuscripts by Dickens (meticulously planned) and the Brontes (very tiny tiny writing about the kingdom of Gondor).

And I was knocked over by an incredible line drawing by someone I'd never heard of that I wish I'd made. Writing about art is nice, but writing like I want to write- writing that just says "Oh, it was so cool!" is not. Translations of admiration for a certain piece of art can't be communicated by utilitarian language- the best form of communication for enthusiasm about art is another art form. Maybe if I was a really inspired essay writer I could do it, but I'm not, and so I'll make some art,and in the meantime a shout out should do it. The shout out seems like the appropriate form: it precedes the work of art, expresses gratitude, and is louder than a dedication. So. A shout out to the Brontes! A shout out to Hoefnagel!

A shout out to the Piepont Morgan Library, and a big fat shout out to the people at Pace Editions, who were so freaking nice!

That I can write about, because the love wasn't so visual, or planted so deep- it was tail-wagging brain love. Pace Editions is the print shop for the Pace Gallery, and we went to see it because the people at the Pace Gallery are so fabulously classy and kind that they invited my mom and Druck, who run a printmaking studio, to come see the way they print editions for people like Chuck Close. The Pace printers were great fun- they paused their work to answer technical questions and show us the fabulous art that was hung all over the room and they let us poke a plate by Tara Donovan, who printed a pile of rubber bands to great effect- her rubber band compositions look fantastic: they look like drawings by Martin Ramirez.



They told us about some subtle little Terry Winters- looking prints that looked full of little bubbles- they were very beautiful, and it turns out they were made by Tara Donovan mixing bubble stuff with acid and transferring them with a straw to the plate.


Printmakers, if you haven't met any, are fantastic people. They are the artists you want to meet- I've been seeing previews for Art School Confidential all over the place, and in the manner of the great art school stereotype narrator, when I was in art school the stereotypes ran like this: painters are self absorbed and mean, sculptors are dumb, performance artists are crazy, ceramicists are fun and stoned and printmakers are....awesome. They're funny, down to earth, smart, work well in groups. Their very art form means they have to play well with others. Mine means I gas up a room and listen to whatever is in my own head for more hours than is good for me. Thus the damned blog. But I'm done now.