20 November 2008

red

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27 October 2008

on borrowed time

Well, it had to happen. 16 chapters in and Peter Plagens comes up with one of his gems of insight, buried deep within a cringe-worthy roman à clef:

Yes, I’m still reading…

…and, yes, I’m still here.

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14 October 2008

bleu

My apartment was broken into, and my computer stolen today. I won’t be updating this for a while, perhaps not until I return to New York.

Here’s the short version of the post I was writing last: Jeff Koons at Versailles sucked.

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5 October 2008

white night

Last night was La Nuit Blanche here in Paris and despite some rather disappointing Art Events I had quite a good time. According to the official map, there were over 75 different projects and other assorted events throughout the city. It’d be tough to see them all, but since things ran roughly from 7 p.m. until 6 in the morning or so, you could have a pretty good shot at it. Unfortunately, the only thing I was truly excited to see – Patti Smith playing two shows in a church – was impossible to get into, the 600 free tickets for each show vaporizing before I got a chance to get one…

The other disappointment was that almost everything turned out to be some sort of Video Projection. Is that what public art has come to, the Great Intervention of only mildly interesting moving images shone on some facade? Most of the public spaces allotted for the art were either churches or grand courtyards, and with only one exception the architecture just blew away the art. The worst example of this was for poor Jeremy Blake, whose multi-channel video piece was relegated to a few medium-sized flat-screen TVs arranged in front of the much-better-lit altar at the Église Saint-Paul. I don’t love Blake’s work, but at the very least it can be immersive and somewhat hypnotic – just not here. The church was much more beautiful. I would have rather seen what Robert Stadler did there last year, but, alas Video rules in ’08.

There were, of course, other things going on – open galleries at the Pompidou, lectures and things (unfortunately too full), even open swimming pools… I did enjoy a global web-cam reading of Proust, a project by Véronique Aubouy, although, of course, what you saw when you went to the space was… video projections. I really should have made it up to see Shaad Ali and his Bollywood spectacle – I bet that was the best thing all night! – but I spent the evening going from spot to spot in and around the Marais and hoping for the best.

The only exceptional piece I saw was Christian Boltanski’s environment in a courtyard in the Marais. Working with the composer Franck Krawaczyk and lighting designer Jean Kalman, Boltanski transformed this hidden space into another world. Barely lit by his trademark lightbulbs, the courtyard was subdued by fog and a paper snowfall. The only lit windows were papered-over, behind which silhouetted figures could be seen: a man playing the violin, another on piano, and in a lower window, a child practicing at the barre. The music was faint but beautiful, then suddenly the lights flashed and glowed and an old man in an overcoat walked a circle around the yard, ringing a bell. I’m sure one could tease out some narrative meaning if one wanted to, but why bother? Boltanski has always been a master of mood, and his elegiac (and, yeah, death-obsessed) work has always done it for me, so easy and manipulative as it is. (Another artist I first saw as a teenager – and the teenager in me hasn’t let go…) Here he just transformed us to some snowy Eastern European night, and left us there to dream what we would.

I thought a lot about the superficial charms of Festival Art as I walked around last night. Not long ago I would have ragged on the cheap tricks of the genre – a thousand flags! a million band-aids! a courtyard filled with salt! But who knew things could get worse? I’ve already written how I feel about Video, but what a Lazy Spectacle it all becomes here, like a series of Walk-In Movies projected large enough to hide the lack of Depth. Really, the best part of the night was the somnambulist city, and my friend Cydney and I wandering freely, gently guided by the Promise of Art. That promise was enough, I guess… We re-crossed our own path and covered miles, it seems, drinking from a bottle of cognac and practicing our weak French. None of it was very deep, I’m sure, but none of that mattered in the end.

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3 October 2008

the whirlwind tour

Well, today’s Adventure at the Louvre was my least favorite so far. I just barely managed a few drawings, but I had to escape the crowds to do so – and that was no easy task. I suppose I deserve it for trying to go on a Friday afternoon… Poor Géricault and Delacroix were just overrun by the Japanese, and any room with a “famous” painting (as in, all of them) had at least one Troubling of Tourists, its leader waving a flag or bottle or map aloft, weakly flailing her arm like a drowning woman in a sea of digital cameras.

I may need to re-think my Study Plan. There are so many other museums I need to visit, and so much happening in this city. The Art Fairs are soon, and just this Saturday night is La Nuit Blanche, an all-night happening of art-related events throughout the city.

I have been keeping up my exploring, even making it up to the first in a series of lectures by a new friend, Manuel Cirauqui, called Adieux à la dialectique, a multi-valent montage of discourse guided in part by the compositions of John Zorn. Unfortunately, my French still wasn’t quite able to keep up with the whirlwind of ideas presented, even with the sound and video and the occasional English text. What I did get (supported by a later discussion with Manuel himself) was the focus on collage and montage within the form of the lecture as well as the content. Even the snippets I got were fascinating… I must say, I am loving the French for their continued adoration of the Intellectual.

In fact, so many things seem just as one wants them to be here… There are indeed berets, beards, insults, people smoking, hot chicks on scooters and an inordinate love of Woody Allen. I may be trying to live small (and mostly on on pain au chocolat and coffee) but there’s just so much to this city, and I am wowed by it every day…

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26 September 2008

oh, old man

I’m embarrassed for Peter Plagens. Here’s a rather well-respected critic (for both Newsweek and Artforum, among others) with his own art career to boot, and a pretty solid reputation. Ok, so he’s a bit of a Populist (yeah, Newsweek) – still an insult in some Art circles – but the guy is smart, and has written clearly-worded and insightful gems about the Art World for years. His book Moonlight Blues: An Artist’s Art Criticism (from 1986, I think) has an incredibly prescient article on Photography that permanently changed my thinking about the medium.

So why the hell did he decide to write a novel? This thinly-veiled roman à clef, being published serially on Artnet right now, seems to be some last-ditch effort to get off his chest just what he really thinks about artists and dealers and critics and sex and marriage and so on. And, of course, just what’s wrong with the world these days… Unfortunately, it’s just terrible. What’s that line about seeing how the sausage is made? The fictional surface is so thin, the main character, an “Art Critic for a Major News Magazine”, might as well be named Meter Magens. What’s worse, however, is that Plagens’, um, sausage is heavily spiced with a carmudgeonly blend of sexism, racism, and kids-get-off-my-lawn-ism. It makes me cringe…

…but of course, I’m reading every word.

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21 September 2008

thank yous good and bad

For inspiration, it’s hard to beat a solid conversation with a fellow Idealist… Carlos Cardenas (of CardenasBellanger) kindly spared an hour of his Saturday to sit and talk to me about Paris and Contemporary Art, and to give me ideas of things to do and see while I’m here. I’m starting to get a better sense of the city, but no sense of the Art Scene yet, despite my diligence in going to openings…

I asked Carlos a bit about the “house style” of Paris, since I’m told there’s a long-standing tradition in Paris of Conceptual work by artists like Sophie Calle and Loris Gréaud. Although I’ve already seen plenty of work similar to what I see in New York, it’s hard to get a handle on what’s really going on here. More than one person has said there’s a resistance to new things (but “new” since when…?) When Carlos first opened his gallery (I think five years ago, maybe) he was told, “You’re different… You just don’t get it.”

I would have guessed that the Western Contemporary Art World was pretty homogenous, at least between New York and the main European Art Capitals, but I’d have been wrong. I’ve certainly picked up some clues to that by now – not only in coming across artists like Kounnellis or Broodthaers whom I never see in Museums at home, but also in that scent of History suffusing my walks around town. I mean, of course it’s different… Apparently Yves Klein and Marcel Duchamp still hold some real sway over Contemporary Artists over here, where in America so much still falls back on Warhol. The difference may just be irony, as Carlos suggested to me. Irony is not really done here, but that’s our own House Style in New York…

There was a great story about a German artist Carlos had shown, who was covering walls with offset-printed sheets of Full Black – the most CMYK you could get printed. For the artist, it was part of a grand conceptual leap in his work, where I think Carlos was responding in part to the simple physicality of the works, how they’d reflect the room and raise every detail of the surface of the wall (a “history of the gallery walls,” as he put it.) Of course, he also laughed and thought of Spinal Tap, but the poor artist didn’t get the reference, nor appreciated the joke… Now see, in New York, you can have it both ways. You can call that piece None More Black, even, and get all your nice Pop references and a healthy “Heh” over your PBR, while still having a conceptual leap about, um, Nothingness and Walls or what have you. (Thank you, Andy...)

In the end, I think Carlos and I probably have some slightly different tastes in art, but I really appreciate his love of materials, as seen in the artists he shows and other artists he likes. He suggested a bunch of people to look at (only some of which I knew of), and gave me all sorts of places to check out, many just outside Paris (the kind I’d never find on my own.) He even offered to help me get into FIAC, the Art Fair here in October. (Yes, my timing is excellent, what with FIAC and Paris Photo... though I admit I chose these months for the Fall Weather.) Anyway, thanks so much, Carlos. I can’t get completely stuck in the 18th and 19th Centuries here…

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