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C warned me that there was a not so complimentary review in the NY Times this morning, and advised me against reading it. I don’t read all the press and reviews we get, but as I do read that paper regularly, I would have inevitably stumbled upon it. Apparently the reviewer, Jon Pareles, loves the Bush Of Ghosts album and has some kind of nostalgia for those days. We all know music snobs who like to remind everyone that they heard so and so back when they were really good. This, however, is the same reviewer who leveled charges of “cultural imperialism” against Bush Of Ghosts in his Rolling Stone review back in the early 80’s. For years afterwards, almost every interviewer asked me to respond to his charge, and many press articles quoted it. It was like the joke about “When did you stop beating your wife?” — the charge was silly and ill-informed, but one was constantly put on the defensive, and even assumed to be guilty, simply by the question being raised. It was annoying, it lasted for years, and it hurt. Given that track record, I guess 30 years from now he’ll figure out what this show was about. I still haven’t read the review, and don’t intend to. While taking criticism on board can be constructive, it can also be detrimental to the creative process if it’s considered while that process is still under way. It undermines one’s enthusiasm and will — which is OK, beneficial even, but only after a tour (for example) is over. This review, by all reports, wasn’t helpful criticism anyway — it seemed to be one of those reviews that comes from some psychological issues the writer has — and therefore even a belated reading is not going to help us refine what we do.
The dancers are in the venue early, working on accumulating ideas for the two encore songs that currently serve as our finale. At present they aren’t dancing in those songs, and it seems a shame for them to essentially drop out of the show at that point — so that will change after our Thanksgiving break. Some of their ideas are based on the movements I’ve been doing during those songs, but both their movements and mine will probably get expanded, tweaked and organized during some dance rehearsals we have scheduled over the break. It’s a rainy day here, and, as sometimes (but rarely on this tour) happens, we’re stuck at a hotel in the middle of nowhere because everything in town was booked many months ago for some massive convention. I wake up on the bus and look out the windows and see an expanse of highways, parking lots and identical building blocks. We’re 6 miles from the center of town and at least 4 miles from the venue. I inquire about whether there is any mass transit into town nearby — PHART (Philadelphia area rapid transit), as Paul Frazier refers to it — but it’s not close by, either. I hitch a taxi ride into town with Jenni and Steven, who are going to the Mütter Museum, a wonderful wunderkabinett of gross-outs and medical curiosities. I’ve seen it before, so I head to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where there is an exhibition of Gee’s Bend quilts and a retrospective of work by a man named James Castle, whom I suspect not many have heard of. At the top of the steps to the art museum tourists strike Rocky Balboa poses, their fists up in the air. There are lots of Rockys today, as it’s a weekend — a black-suited Chinese man, a young black kid from a school group and a large white man all assume the position simultaneously. The Gee’s Bend quilts are something special. They were previously shown at the Whitney in NY, and one can see why. They are made by a small community descended from former slaves on a river near Selma, Alabama. The website states: After the Civil War, the freed slaves [almost all from one plantation] took the name Pettway, became tenant farmers for the Pettway family, and founded an all-black community nearly isolated from the surrounding world. During the Great Depression, the federal government stepped in to purchase land and homes for the community, bringing strange renown — as an "Alabama Africa" — to this sleepy hamlet.
From Seattle PI:
New York Times senior art critic Michael Kimmelman called the quilts "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced. Imagine Matisse and Klee arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South.
Thelma Golden, chief curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, took a contrary view. She wrote in Artforum that she loved the quilts but hated the exhibition, "which, with its shockingly politically correct tone, under the transparent cover of high/low intervention and demolished media categories, was the most culturally repugnant, retrograde moment I have ever experienced, perhaps in my entire professional life."
Kimmelman's reaction was widely shared. Golden stood alone, or nearly so, at least in public. The subtext of her argument seemed to be that she recoiled at the sight of white people exclaiming over black craft. Their admiration struck her as patronizing. For the same reason, some black people do not want to listen to black blues artists playing in clubs filled with white people "getting down," because white joy of that sort saps a black experience of its legitimacy, creating a chasm between the art and its original audience.
Kimmelman and Thelma’s reactions raise a whole world of questions. Does it matter where these objects — or others exhibited, recorded or written — come from? Does context and history determine the meaning of what we look at and see? In other words, are these quilts amazing because they are made by women unschooled in art history or are they incredible for what they are? Is a song by an unschooled self-taught musician any less moving, deep and wonderful that something by an academic composer? (There’s an amazing record of spiritual songs recorded at Gee’s Bend.) Is there any way to hear or see things free of history, class or context? Probably not. Does it matter? All of this sort of applies to James Castle’s work — and to lots of other stuff as well. We’re not just talking about some quilt makers here.
Here’s one made with leftover blue jeans: 
When we see these quilts, do we see them through our knowledge and experience of Klee and Matisse? (I’d add Rauschenberg and Sigmar Polke to that, too.) Here’s one made out of football jerseys: 
And another that incorporates images and text “panels”: 
Have we learned to experience these disrupted and “musical” patterns though our experience of fine art? Is that similarity what makes us stop in our tracks when we see these quilts? That certainly must have had something to do with why they have been exhibited in a series of high art institutions. But I would argue that’s not the whole story. The inventiveness, the mixture of African rhythm and Amish austerity, the humor and creativity visible in these quilts is not something only students of art history can experience. Those qualities, I maintain, are human, and they cross race, class and social barriers. I think that the erasing of those lines is part of what we’re seeing and experiencing as well, and it feels good. It doesn’t lessen the work’s context, the specific nature of the history of Gee’s Bend or of each artist in the collective, to feel that either. Though part of the picture painted here is of an isolated community, separate from the contamination of the marketplace and the art world, that’s not entirely true, at least not the first part. Some of the Gee’s bend quilters were contracted by Sears, the giant mail order dept store, to make pillowcases in mass quantitites that were informed by their tradition. The remnants from the pillowcase material, particularly an avocado green fabric popular for one decade, found its way into the quilts as well. So they’re not “pure” in that sense, though we might wish they were in certain ways. But that lack of purity is often where the joy and creativity lie, and the obsessive need for authenticity and purity are often what saps the life out of a tradition or out of a person’s creative impulse. James Castle was a deaf man born at the turn of the 20th century on a farm in Idaho. He refused to learn to read, write or sign, but he made lots of art. The work I’d seen previously were “drawings” of banal farm scenes — a barn with a fence, a shed with a chair — made out of soot and spit. This show, a retrospective, shows that he made a lot more than that, in a variety of styles and mediums. As with the Gee’s Bend crew, one can’t help but be shocked at the uncanny parallels to works by Warhol, Ruscha and a whole mess of others. Once again one wonders if those parallels make Castle’s work more incredible. Once again it would be hard to deny that those parallels are probably why his work is being shown here in a giant art museum. Here’s one of the shack interiors. Completely banal and schematic. There are lots of shack drawings, as if he was cataloging a typology of shack interiors and exteriors. His world, maybe? 
A kaleidoscopic rendering of matchbox labels: 
And a similar kaleidoscopic rendering of a photo of businessmen: 
In these works and in some of the quilts there is what is now called appropriation — using recognizable labels, texts, and images — grabbing them, re-working them, re-presenting them. It’s a recognition that the glut of reproduced images, photos, logos, typefaces and texts that makes up our world and that of the 20th century is indeed our environment….even that of rural Idaho. Now, one of the qualities that is often brought up to separate Castle or the Gee’s bend artists from those who more regularly show in fine art galleries, auction houses and museums is intention. It is assumed that there is an awareness and intention in a work by Warhol, Ruscha, Betcher, Polke, whomever, that is not there in someone like Castle. I would suggest that his work proves that this is just not true. His intentions may not be geared towards the same marketplace, collectors and trade publications, but aesthetically it’s all there. The response to the world, a way of looking, a seriousness, and an investigation of phenomena, thoroughly done and from multiple angles — it’s all right there. I would argue that his work and that of the quilters proves that, well, nutty as it might sound, some part of the visual and material response to our world is innate — and like myths, a similar response might occur and recur across time and space — unconnected yet uncannily similar.
I saw Errol Morris’s film Standard Operating Procedure, the “documentary” about the Abu Ghraib photos. I have the term documentary in quotes because, as the interviewees describe past events, the film re-enacts scenarios not filmed or photographed at the time. For some, these re-enactments are a problem, as documentary convention prescribes a style and logic that, in most cases, simulates truth telling and objectivity. Many assume that in documentaries, the camera is a mute witness to “facts” and “events” and any interference or fictional techniques or touches destroys this, well, myth.
The re-enactments do not adhere to the form typical of those criminal investigation TV shows, which recreate the crime scenes with actors, out of focus, slow-motion shots, and voiceover narration. Instead, Morris employs fragmentary images: a close up of snarling dog, its teeth lunging at the camera; a close up of skin covered in swarming ants; and most expensive, a helicopter exploding above our heads, the flaming parts descending on the camera.
It should be obvious that all documentary filmmakers have an agenda they hope to put forward. I’m not talking about Michael Moore and Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, The Smartest Guys in the Room) who obviously have a polemic to deliver, but about the countless docs, TV shows, news reports and educational pieces that evince a style that says, “We don’t have a point of view. We’re simply recording what’s in front of the camera and you make up your own mind.”
These ostensibly objective works invoke specific filmic devices that audiences have come to accept and recognize as indicators of truth telling and impartiality. Upon examining these “unbiased” films, we may sense their deep, inherent agendas, but for the most part, the style masks the filmmakers’ underlying prejudices, and we buy into it.
In a sense then, fiction films are also just recording what’s in front of the camera, but in their case, it happens to be costumed actors staging events. Fiction films are documentaries of the performances of actors.
Next, I watched Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA, an incredible, award-winning documentary about a violent mine strike in Kentucky. It took her four years to make the film, which she originally intended to be about something related, though different. It’s obvious that Kopple was embedded with the miners. During some particularly violent confrontations, the camera is clearly on the “side” of the striking miners, as scabs and corporate toadies take shots at them. The filmmaker hung with the mining families and otherworldly community in these hollers in order to secure some of the intimate details. Upon release, the film was an exposé, drawing attention to lives and injustices that otherwise would have been ignored.
Likewise, as Errol Morris and some of his interviewees point out, the photos taken at Abu Ghraib are responsible for drawing attention to the prison’s systemic practice of abuse. Had these photos never surfaced, the whole situation would have been swept under the rug, as was the violent, habitual torture practiced by the CIA and MI, never photographed. Since these practices can’t be proven, most media outlets pretty much ignore them. To paraphrase one of the film’s talking heads: ‘These photos made the President of the United States have to apologize to the world, so someone was going to pay.’ Unsaid, although implicit, is that those who caused the embarrassment to Bush would pay over those responsible for setting up a situation where abusive behaviors were condoned and encouraged.
Morris doesn’t broach the “Chain of Command” issues Seymour Hersh examines in his book of the same title. Hersh carefully traces the legal maneuvers of Gonzales and the policies of the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush tripartite, effectively encouraging and excusing torture and anything goes behavior.
The film details the fascinating use of forensics to establish accurate information about the photographs. Metadata embedded within the digital images is extracted and cross-referenced to handwritten logs to recreate a timeline, and uncover who took the pictures and with what camera. Morris limits the focus to the Americans, not the Iraqis. Some interviewees have the look of those whose experiences have twisted and mangled their souls deeply. They seem haunted and possessed. Especially the young women, former innocents who, like characters out of some horror movie, were fucked over by some invisible, monstrous entity.
So maybe the film is not a documentary in the accepted sense, or maybe we must realize that docs are not exactly what they appear to be. At any rate, by examining a set of infamous photos, how they came to be, who authored them, and how they survived, Morris creates a meditation on the meaning and reception of images—particularly news images—in our culture at large.
As these photos are reexamined, one can’t help but wonder whether a people often rounded up, imprisoned and tortured for no reason—many prisoners are simple cab drivers and local shopkeepers—will keep their grudges and desire for revenge close. And of course, one wonders whether a terrible price will be paid somewhere down the line. George Bush might be dead by then, Cheney will surely be gone soon—he’s running on watch batteries as it is—but some naïve and “innocent” generation will pay for our current government’s policies and actions and wonder, “What did I do to deserve this?”
I pick up Malu, and we have breakfast at a funky, charming little place in Silverlake. As we eat, the couple next to us are chatting while busy knitting. Both of them! The coffees we have later at Intellegencia are incredible. This seems to be common knowledge — the place is filled with hipsters waiting patiently to order. The sun is shining, and the hyper-colorful exteriors of the Salvadoran markets and clubs remind me that this city has pockets where a wonderfully crazy mixture of all different kinds of people end up living in more or less in the same hood. I’m not sure the disparate layers of Angelinos actually mingle and cross paths very often — as sometimes happens in old NY neighborhoods in transition — but the visuals are great and the availability of authentic regional foods is incredible.
Afterwards, Malu and I go together to the Murakami show at the downtown Geffen Contemporary museum, notorious in some circles for having a Louis Vuitton boutique right in the middle of the museum — just for this show. Murakami designed some versions of the LV handbags a few years ago, and has also had his anime eyeball pattern printed on them alongside the LV logos. These designs are also presented on canvases, as works of art.
Other rooms display the copious amounts of merchandise that Murakami has produced — T-shirts, plastic figurines, toys, CD covers — so the mix of art and commerce is pretty fluid and seamless. To some of us, this mix is scandalous, sort of, but to M it isn’t even worth a mention. It’s a non-issue. I tell her that some people find the mix of art and luxury branding disturbing, and I get a strange look. There were lines to get into the museum and lines just as long to get into the Murakami gift shop. (NOT the LV shop, which has turned over a reported thirteen million in goods, no part of which goes to the museum. I’ll bet the curator who made that deal won’t work again in LA any time soon.)
It’s a hugely popular show, mostly filled with kids around Malu’s age and slightly older (in their twenties I’d guess) wandering around the museum-cum-recombinant psychedelic manga universe. Not everything he did is cute. As is common in the okatu and manga world, there is sometimes a pervy undercurrent of nerdy sexual obsession. Some short videos on a plasma screen show a CG character — an adolescent alien boy with no hair, a huge head, and beady eyes — obsessing over the uniformed Japanese schoolgirls in his midst. In one piece, he returns home after school and lying in bed he remembers a girl classmate and as a result his (plaid?) pants poke up. His face gets a look of confusion and horror.
Other fabricated mannequin-like sculptures show a manga boy spurting a massive steam of jism out of his hard on.
The front of a transformer girl’s body — her breasts down to her pinkish red vagina — flips forward on a hinge, and there are little dragonfly wings on her back. The rest of the stuff is pretty cute, though fragmented and freaky, as only the Japanese can do.
Some of the relentless merchandising seems out of control, like the infinite variations of the DOB character on t-shirts and everything else, its jellyfish eyes arrayed on any imaginable surface. But some of it is truly inspired — little teeny figurine versions of some characters were given away inside candy boxes sold in Japan. Like luxury arty Crackerjack prizes! And the carpet in the video screening room is a subdued pattern of flowers with his smiley faces in the middle of them.
Tonight the Grammy Awards will take place. They’re held at the Staples Center, a huge downtown sports arena, which, I am told, explains why downtown seems so lively today. The talk is all about Amy Winehouse’s substance abuse problems, and which megastars will give good moments on TV. The dire situation of the record business is never mentioned, not once.
We attend a gala opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a massive new wing of the County Museum here. C has many, many pieces in this new wing, so they flew her out for this. (Eli Broad has amassed more of her work than any other collector.) The County Museum is situated on a massive park site off Wilshire Blvd, which is also the location of the famous tar pits. As you approach the museum complex from the east, one of the pits is plainly visible — a small black lake can be seen just off Wilshire Blvd. A white statue of a struggling wooly mammoth sits within it. The animal is depicted lurching and crying out, so we can imagine the theoretical scenario.
When the rains fall, these bubbling ponds of tar and oil emanating from beneath the LA geology become covered in a thin layer of water. Long ago, prehistoric critters, seeing only the aqueous top layer, would wade in the pond thinking it was comprised of fresh water, inevitably becoming stuck in the black goo. Nearby, a covered pavilion houses a dig that has continued for decades, uncovering lots of bones and fragments. Somehow, the sight of giant beasts stuck in tar pits amidst the backdrop of LA’s extreme luxury and urban sprawl seems a too perfect metaphor: big lumbering creatures lured to their demise by what they think is a lovely sparkling fresh water pond…or something like that.
Outside the museum entrance, valet parking attendants await newcomers, systematically arrayed so that no one has to wait too long to be relieved of their car. We have a rented Prius, and I overhear one of the parking guys asking another if he knows how to drive it. (They don’t start like regular cars.) Guests are immediately dumped onto the red carpet and I ask C if she wants to let the photographers get some snaps or just run for it. Too late — a young woman quickly attaches herself to us and makes us stop every few yards, allowing pack after pack of photographers to get their snaps. I’m kind of game, up to a point. At each stop, I urge us on after enduring a minute of flashing bulbs. C is taken aback, blinded by the barrage of flashes, which I suspect she must have also endured at the various NY fashion shows she has attended; but this is more drawn out and structured.
The actual entrance features a collection of vintage cast-iron lampposts from LA County, painted light gray by Chris Burden. I read about these somewhere. He bought them when he heard that these and other bits of civic detritus were being sold or auctioned, and then he stored them on his Topanga Canyon property. Now he has declared them a “piece” and I assume has sold them to the museum, or to Eli Broad, the developer who funded much of this wing.
The elevation of an individual’s personal collection of curios to the status of an artwork in it’s own right seems increasingly common these days. Recently, a NY gallery featured an artist’s collection of kitsch sculptures of a monkey holding Darwin’s skull. It seemed like an eBay collection to me — charming and wacky if I saw it at someone’s house, but presented as a stand-alone artwork?
The artist Francis Alÿs did a similar thing last year at a museum in NYC, where he presented his collection of found paintings of the same Mexican Saint. Some were refined, some crude, and they filled the whole place — again, a sort of eBay collection as an integral original work. Or not. My friend Ford has some wonderfully eccentric collections: grotesque clown dolls and paintings, a whole series of bottles made to look like logs, yardsticks.
Jim Shaw, the LA artist, did something vaguely similar years ago when he presented his collection of paintings he’d picked up in thrift stores as “his” show. (This was pre-eBay.) It was great, and the book of these paintings was and still is inspiring. He picked out the weirdest and most disturbing, the creepiest and most surreal artistic attempts I’d ever seen. In a sense, the show was really about his eye and sensibility — and the objects had obviously been diligently accrued over quite a few years. Together, these paintings suggest a mass of dark, twisted creativity lurking beneath the amateur Sunday painter — a deep strangeness informing some “unprofessional” art making. The intimation is such that this unusual and powerful creativity also lurks beneath the country at large. It was a powerful show.
We wander around the throngs of black suited elderly men, and women dressed in unusual gowns. I comment that the age of the folks at this gathering made me feel young.
We aren’t yet allowed into the new museum wing — that prize would be saved for later. Instead, we are herded into a huge enclosed tent the size of the Parthenon, through a dark, covered passage, containing small, isolated pools of light.
The new wing is the pink and blue boxes seen below (shouldn’t those colors be reserved for Miami?) and the tent is the big gray thing behind them. The other wings of the museum are over to the right, and further over are the tar pits.
Photo: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Inside the tent, huge white cubes the size of small houses hung from the ceiling, the BCAM acronym on their sides, and some abstract projections undulating on their bottom surfaces. We found our seats and were served some food as various speeches congratulate Broad, Renzo Piano (the architect of this extension), and others, one after another.
Afterwards, Lionel Richie, Nicole’s “father”, takes the stage and sings about being easy like Sunday morning. I head to the restrooms. Kind of shocking that a place purporting to support innovative and groundbreaking contemporary art plays such middle of the road music. Well, OK, if they’d asked me to perform while people finished dessert and networked, I’d have said no, so maybe it’s not that surprising. And maybe contemporary music requires an investment of time and a bit more focus and involvement — whether it’s academic, quasi-classical, post-rock or electronic — than the average work of contemporary art. So maybe that explains the disconnect as well.
Lionel and Co., leave the stage and a second smaller platform descends from the ceiling, hosting a piano player and a fiddle player — and maybe a third musician? — playing a version of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir! Duh duh duh — duh duh duh — go the grand chords, while the violin (it sounds like there is more than one) does the Indo-Arabic fills and licks that lend that classic rock tune its exotic identity. It’s a great song, but not what I expect to hear right now. And this slightly lounge version of it — though still powerful — is less than thunderous. It’s been somewhat tamed, even though it’s still a nicely weird surprise.
It’s not long before the little stage ascends once more to prepare for the coup de théâtre — the wall of the tent separating us from the new wing suddenly drops (a trick I’d seen in quite a few Kabuki shows) to reveal a walkway leading to the huge, illuminated buildings. On either side of the walkway there are some fiddlers made up like the blue man group, only these ones have bald heads painted red (to avoid copyright infringement?) They’re situated on either side of the walkway, on a lower grassy area, on a grid of little plinths, sawing away as the Zeppelin tune continues.
The museum wing is enormous. There is more space inside than in two of the major NY museums put together, or so I hear. On the outside it’s nothing spectacular — it will never be an architectural destination or a landmark like some other recent museum structures. But the building does its job. The large rooms are easy to understand and to navigate; they don’t distract or try to upstage the art, which is a relief these days. Even the stairs have been moved outside (a possibility in LA). So other than a large elevator, the whole building appears to be display space. Many artists, including C, have gigantic rooms devoted to (mostly) Broads’ collection of their work over the years. He seems to have collected some artists’ works in depth, seemingly ignoring others all together. Maybe, as is rumored, this is only a small sampling of his holdings, and this is just what he has decided to put on view here now.
In other cities, like Miami, some major collectors have built their own independent museums – separate from any city institutions — to display their private collections and curated shows of newly acquired work. They don’t have to contend with other board members or museum directors. Here at the LACMA wing, things are fuzzier — it is clearly a Broad showcase, but it’s also a county institution. Yet, the works don’t belong to the museum, they’re on loan.
The evening’s elaborate spectacle was, I suspect, the work of the folks who usually do “industrials,” its lavish fanfare the type usually reserved for trade fairs and at corporate shareholder events. I’ve always wanted to attend one of those, as they often employ the most advanced spectacle technology and money is generally no object. These things are deigned to hype the product, produce oohs and ahhs, and entertain the armies of shareholders and board members who have traveled from far and wide to attend. It’s true industrial theater: auto-ballets, smells, massive screens, sound and light are typical, so I hear. The public is never invited, but I still think maybe one day I’ll get to see one. I guess I am seeing one. (I had storyboarded my version of one for possible inclusion in my mid-80s movie True Stories, but that scene didn’t happen.)
I suspect that a spectacle on this scale can be ordered up pretty easily from one of those outfits, though I’d like to think that someday, someone might say, “Hey, why don’t we have one of the artists, or a contemporary theater director do the spectacle?” Julie Taymor is a no brainer. Or Robert Wilson (though the dinner might then go on for five hours). Or David Lynch. Or Peter Sellers or….
Same issue as with the music, I surmise. Why not make it as contemporary and groundbreaking as the art on display? Funny how things can be compartmentalized that way.
Went up to MASS MoCA — the contemporary art center in far western Massachusetts —where my friends Terry and Jo Harvey Allen were showing a music theater piece in progress about Antonin Artaud. It’s a great piece, covering the period when Artaud completely lost his mind and was strapped to an iron bed in a straightjacket in the hold of a ship. He was being sent back to France after causing trouble in Ireland, where he lived out the rest of his days in an insane asylum called Rodez. (Oddly, his asylum days were also very productive!) Prior to his trip to Ireland he’d been to Mexico, intent on visiting the Tarahumara Indians and joining their peyote ceremonies, which he did. They thought he was nuts too.
I’ve read Artaud’s short books on theater — they’re great, and were hugely influential. Apparently he wrote a lot more. Some of it went pretty far out and is not suitable for reading aloud in the office.
Terry wrote some nice new songs for this piece. One is called “Do They Dream of Hell in Heaven?” His wife, Jo Harvey, was the sole actor. She wore a bright red wig and white makeup with thin red lips. She told elements of the story from multiple points of view, cackled ominously, and occasionally quoted Artaud.
In the galleries, there was a huge Anselm Kiefer show and one by an artist Spencer Finch. But I lingered longest in the Jenny Holzer room, which has two incredibly powerful projectors at each end scrolling the text of a poem by an eastern European poet Wisława Szymborska (who won the Nobel Prize in ’96). The room is massive — almost the size of a soccer field — so it’s a bit like stepping into the opening sequence of the Star Wars films where the text scrolls, recedes and distorts into the distant star field. 
In this picture you don’t see the nice distortion so much, as the text bumps over the ceiling beams and the giant bean bag pillows. But you can see the overlapping effect of the projections coming from either side.
Holzer has other pieces in the back room, including reproductions of US government PowerPoint slides outlining the plans for Iraq, pre-invasion. In retrospect these look frightening in their naïveté. On the wall hang enlarged reproductions of US government documents about torture and the Cheney decision to adopt a “gloves off” approach. (Which experienced military personal admit does nothing to produce reliable intelligence.) The projected poems may relate to these, but truthfully it’s a little hard to read the poem texts, though I’m not complaining. (But it would have been nice to have the poet’s work available in the bookstore.)
Likewise, it would be nice to see a catalog of the work of Jarvis Rockwell, who had an amazing show here some years ago. C and I stopped at his late dad’s museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts on the way home. His dad is Norman Rockwell, the famous illustrator. From a pretty early age Jarvis collected action figures. But unlike a typical collector, who might normally want just one of each, Jarvis had a new, rather curious method — he wanted to create crowds. In an interview with artist Laurie Simmons, he mentions that he has eighty identical Burt Reynolds figures. Here is a crowd of Ewoks at a business conference. 
Photos: Christine Fichera
About this photo, Jarvis writes: "That's essentially my father and me. My father is tied to a tree, with a light set up. I'm standing in a coracle with a pacifier in my mouth and the coracle has no prow, so it just floats like a lily pad. E.T. is reading from the book."
There were more nice stories. In one, his dad visits him in NYC. Jarvis goes to his father’s hotel room to find him sitting on the bed with a postcard of a de Kooning and one of a Piero della Francesca on the pillow. And he's looking at them: "I don't know," he said. "I just can't . . . I just don't understand."
To be fair, his dad never saw himself as an artist but an illustrator, at least according to Jarvis. The implication is that rather than following interior artistic impulses, Rockwell instead saw himself as performing a job for the client, most famously The Saturday Evening Post. Norman often used local townspeople and family members as models in his work. At first he may have had them sit in costume (he had lots available) and with props. But soon he just photographed the various types and characters individually. For example, he would cast an audience for say, a boxing ring scene, or perhaps a telephone lineman, and then photograph them and any other characters, and even the backgrounds all separately. Only in the finished work would he join them all together.
For one illustration in which an elderly woman and her grandson pray in a diner before eating, Rockwell had his assistants photograph a number of views out the diner window. (Suitably, he chose an industrial landscape from Pittsburgh.) Most of the remnants of his work process are not on view, although one image shows Norman posing Jarvis for a “home from college for the holidays” themed painting. (Norman must have had to come up with endless holiday themed scenarios for these magazine covers.) Jarvis’s back is towards us and he’s holding a small suitcase. Norman stands behind Jarvis facing the camera, making an entirely exaggerated welcoming gesture. I guess I can see why more of these are not on view, but they’d make an amazing show. They relate to a lot of contemporary work— probably more so than the paintings.
Some of the illustrations verge on cartoons or caricature, but maybe those were simply in his casting choices. Appropriately, a show in an adjoining gallery featured contemporary graphic novel work by Will Eisner, Jessica Abel, Crumb (!) and even Howard Cruse, who famously did a series called Stuck Rubber Baby that dealt with being gay and with race and civil rights.
Norman’s caricatures and painting technique reminded me a little of the contemporary artist John Currin, who recently did a bunch of “porn” paintings. Rockwell never did any overt sex pictures, and even if he did we’ll probably never see them, as the folks here have a pretty tight grip on his legacy. But I can imagine what they might be like: a tangle of naked limbs in the hay for example, with some gingham dress partly visible on the floor, and from a side window a freckle faced boy peeks in, mouth agape.
Caetano Veloso
Saw Caetano’s show last night. It was his version of a rock show. He had the audience singing along in Portuguese, “I hate you, I hate you”. Caetano mixed in some older songs with songs from his last record, Cê, which is lyrically angry and sad, and takes a minimal rock approach quite unlike anything else. There’s lots of space in the sound — sometimes the chords and harmonies, often pretty sophisticated in Caetano songs, are here barely hinted at. I wasn’t sure how this band — all young musicians centered around the amazing guitar player Pedro Sa — would handle the older stuff more familiar to the audience. They changed some of the older songs, giving them spikier and more fractured textures, but it worked. Lyrically, the differences may be more radical; the older stuff is generally sweeter than this new batch of songs, more often filled with turmoil and testiness. But this initial feeling of disquiet leads inevitably to captivation — even the cries of “I hate you” were somehow beautiful. They weren’t snarled as a punk or Emo band would do, but sung almost sweetly, and with a bewildered sadness that somehow those heavily charged words and feelings are bursting forth — the sadness of watching yourself say you hate someone.
It was my first time in the Nokia Theater, a weird underground corporate space. I ran into Stokes, who remembered that it was a big Times Square movie theater years ago. He said this was where he saw Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. For this show the “orchestra” area was standing, with some VIP balcony tables and then rows of theater seating further back. The sound was so good I didn’t even notice how clear it was until after the show. I don’t know if the theater’s remodeling should be credited for the sound clarity or Caetano’s sound mixer.
Tall and/or Wide News
On the way up to Times Square I passed the new NY Times building, whose lobby was all lit up. Beyond the atrium I could see masses of black-suited people at the far end. They must have been there for a grand opening — this new building, designed by Renzo Piano, has been under construction in my neighborhood for years. The Grey Lady gets a punk haircut is how I would categorize it. I’m sure there are some lovely spaces inside, and it will be a great relief for the employees to have more light, but the building seems unremarkable outside, and pretty big, imposing and tall too. Rather than being sequestered in a mere 14-story block of rabbit warrens, now the news media can gaze down on their former haunt and on the rest of us, as befits the US national newspaper (not counting USA Today and The Onion.) There is a new auditorium space adjacent to the tower, so it will be interesting to see if the Times begins to present music, speakers, symposiums and other events in that new space. That would be a welcome addition.
I can’t help but look at this new skyscraper and think, “They sure are optimistic ‘bout print journalism”. Or maybe they have plans, and are diversifying in ways I am unaware of. I myself read the NY Times and about three other newspapers online most mornings. I also look at a few blogs and other sites fairly regularly. I paid to be member of Times Select for a while, until they decided to make all that material available again without charge. I also pick up newsstand copies once or twice a week. I don’t know if I am typical, but if I am I suspect not too many people will be buying print journalism for much longer — most people will become accustomed to getting the news for free, as many folk already feel that they do when they turn on a TV in the morning as they get ready for work, or as they listen to the car radio on their commute.
Of course, much TV and radio is paid for by commercials, so the “free” part is a bit of an illusion. “Television Delivers People” as Richard Serra (yes, that Richard Serra, the iron man sculptor) wrote in a video piece he did decades ago. Television “delivers” the viewers, the audience, to the advertisers. The content, whether news or American Idol, is generally just sufficiently interesting to hold your attention through to the next commercial. Federal laws mandated that TV networks give a certain amount of time to news and “public affairs,” the latter usually relegated to dead time on Sunday mornings. Legislators in the past realized that an informed populace is essential for a democracy, or some semblance of one. Without those mandates I wonder how much less the populace would know. In other countries it’s easy to see that when one controls the news media one controls what people think. When it works best, the populace barely knows the news their getting is filtered and skewed.
In print, ads are massive and expensive. I admit, I occasionally glance at them and sometimes I read the ad copy. I suspect that the print newspaper costs a little more that its newsstand price of $1.25 to write, print and distribute, and those ads cover the losses. In glossy fashion and art magazines there are more pages of ads than there are of copy; the copy seems more like interruptions among the pages of gallery ads or pictures of petulant models. It’s fairly easy to see how these pages might pay for the rest of the newspaper or magazine.
Google has tiny ads on the sides and tops of their search pages. They’re fairly unobtrusive, which means they load quickly, don’t take up much room and can give the appearance of not being ads, but instead more unbiased, useful information. If I’m looking for something — tent poles maybe — and an ad at the side of my search names a retailer that sells them, I have been known to click there. These ads are generally filtered to be relevant to your searches; they prey on (or cater to) your interest at that moment. Online versions of newspapers and magazines have slightly larger, more intrusive ads than Google, though nothing like the full-page movie or fashion ads in the print media. There are often just a few per page. Here are some from a page in the Arts section of the NY Times. Two movie ads are paired with a (fascinating and hilarious) review of a Polish metal band.
I assume, without any justification, that to some extent these ads pay for the “newspaper”, or whatever one calls an online news source. They allow me to go to these sites for free. Once in a great while I do indeed click on those movie ads in order to see the trailer. I wish there was also a link to the Behemoth (the Polish band) website, or a streaming version of some of their songs, or a video clip of the concert. Sometimes there is. Whether a review can remain objective and link to the bands website or to their record company is an unanswered question. I think it’s risky, but it seems obvious and easy, UNLESS that record company pays for the link.
Anyways…this is a long round about way of asking if these teeny little ads pay for that big skyscraper and all the news trolls working in it? Is that really possible? Economically how does that work? It boggles my mind. It doesn’t seem feasible, but maybe I don’t know how much these little banner ads cost.
I also ask myself, if it is as unfeasible as I imagine, what will happen to print, or any form of journalism, as everything migrates online? The writers’ strike accurately points out that, at least for many of us, our computers are now our TVs. We watch streaming programs, from either a network site or You Tube or wherever, anytime we please. Some of these have adjacent ads and some have ads before the “show” starts. One doesn’t, to be honest, feel quite as captive to the ads as one did on traditional network TV, but that could be an illusion.
I wonder if a wiki online newspaper could work? Wikinews already exists, and its articles consist of both original and hybrid (i.e. cobbled together from other sources) pieces. If eventually it becomes impossible to have investigative reporters, foreign correspondents and writers spend time performing extensive research — as is the case more and more — then does the news media necessarily have to turn into a version of a White House press office handout, as it sometimes seems these days? Maybe not. Much reporting from various parts of the world already originates from bloggers and other “amateurs”. Admittedly, much of it is celebrity sightings and gossip, or tales of personal woe or prurient interest, but sometimes major stories and opinions missed by the official media erupt from blogs and other outside sources. And sometimes the truth emerges, as opposed to official lies. Danielle says that Wikinews was way ahead of the traditional media reporting for Katrina. If all the folks in every far flung town who have local knowledge, digital cameras, and an ability to write clearly (and accurately?) contributed a wikinews site, or to the Wikinews site, then wouldn’t that save the cost of correspondents, some investigative research (lots of folks adopt digging up info as a personal obsession), office space (that skyscraper), etc., etc.?
Well, I can’t imagine how that obsessive network of lunatic amateur reporters could be filtered to yield an approachable, readable, and vaguely trustworthy experience, but somehow dispersing and widening the net that catches news seems to have already happened, whether it’s in Wikinews or not. It merely awaits a structure, an (self-) organizing principle of which there may be some examples we can borrow from nature, from our neurons, from the various biological and ecological systems that surround us. (Lots of poop jokes based on intestinal based algorithms here, but anyway…) I can’t figure out why Wikinews isn’t filled with gossip, or news according to a retired Czech schoolteacher (which might pass their criteria test as well as anything) or hundreds of thousands of articles of purely local interest.
Someone, some group, or something is, I suspect, make selections and acting as a filter. There’s an aggregate of wikieditors out there making what amounts to a (partially comprehensive) news source. Would the wiki world be using some algorithm to sort through contributions? Surely news shouldn’t be featured according to what is the most popular — if it were we’d be seeing mainly to gossip, gadgets, sport, videogames and porn in a minute. As it is, it doesn’t seem anywhere near as comprehensive as, well, the NY Times, but time will tell. By policy the wiki world excludes reviews and such: there are no movie reviews, concert or CD reviews, or theater reviews. It might be opening Pandora's box to make the people’s choice available, but it might be all the more interesting. To some extent a critic’s job is to help us see (or hear) something we might otherwise pass over, or not take the time to investigate, and I doubt the herd will likely fulfill that function. But who knows?
Went to see Sufjan Stevens’s piece at the BAM. The first half was a new “cinematic suite” called “The BQE”. Various elements evoked semi-romantic film soundtracks and the Phillip Glass movies (there were three projected videos running simultaneously). But it didn’t matter; the nutty celebration was so inventive and wacky and sometimes genuinely loving that none of those connections affected my enjoyment.
The inclusion of hula hoops, both live and on-screen, juxtaposed with car wheels, Coney Island rides, fireworks and traffic at night, was out of left field and pretty wonderful.
The second half was a sort of greatest hits with expanded orchestrations. Essentially similar to, though shorter than, his last touring show, which was good.
Today was the NY marathon.
Wanted to bike to Long Island City, but the Queensboro Bridge bike lane was closed (for the handicapped they said, though it was completely empty). Took the Roosevelt Island tram instead (the view is from there), and rode down by the abandoned lunatic asylum. There was no one around. From the tip of the island one has a great view of the UN building and a rocky island filled with cormorants — an odd sight for NYC.
We had a snack at a nice Hunters Point café and watched outside as the cleanup crews picked up the piles of paper cups and tissues that had been handed out to the runners. Here the streets ran bright yellow with Gatorade — it looked like the marathoners had all peed themselves. A few stragglers limped and walked by, and I wondered if I would be privileged to see the very last person in the marathon, a sight more rare and more difficult to establish than who came in first. I think it was a man in a multicolored headwrap with a few-days-growth beard, who might have been smoking a cigarette as he made his way up the street, listing slightly towards the curb.
Halloween
Walking around town I have to constantly remind myself it’s Halloween. It might explain that woman in a white gown across the street — isn’t her makeup unusually white? And the couple in front of me as I walk to the deli — the woman sort of looks like a Raggedy Ann doll. They’re really not that far from how people normally look around here. And where’s the Birdman?
Speaking of scary…Bush’s nominee for Attorney General still refuses to call waterboarding torture, amongst many other sleazy things. He’s clearly an apologist for the policies of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush. And if the Democratic congress passes this man — who by nature of this absolution puts the US and its citizens in harms way, to say nothing of the boys in the services — they will be as guilty as he is. It goes without saying that the Bush crew does NOT support our troops, providing every justification to render our soldiers the pariahs and targets they are fast becoming.
Martin Puryear
Went to see a MoMA show surveying the sculptural works of Martin Puryear, old and new. In my opinion it’s incredible. I found his work both beautiful and moving. I got choked up.
They sculptures are all wood mixed with other materials, partly abstract but with recognizable elements and shapes too: wheels and an axle from an old fashioned cart, but giant; an old wooden wheelbarrow; baskets, upside down and out of scale; fishing nets, the kind used by native Americans; yokes, fence posts, ploughs, tools and their handles, worn into smooth biomorphic shapes with use and age. The works evoke the lyrics of gospel songs and spirituals, and the novels of William Faulkner and Flannery O‘Connor.
Ladder for Booker T. Washington
Photo by Mark Interrante
There are references to the history of Africans in the New World, to traditional African cultures, to farming, working the land and making things by hand — the way one comes to know one’s tools as if they are extensions of oneself, the way they almost come to have a life of their own.
The pieces are calm, but highly charged, both conscious and comfortable with what they are, but also aware that there are layers to get lost in.
None of this is obvious — the scale has been changed and the references are not right upfront or blatant, instead embedded in the shapes and materials, in how they must feel to the hand. (There were more “Do Not Touch” signs than I’ve seen in a long time — maybe they knew the urge to touch these would be strong).
Here is an outdoor piece that wasn’t included in the show, though there was one sculpture with one of these impossible needle like trees that seem to point to the sky just as its diameter dwindles to nothing.
Went to see an act named The Blow, which is essentially one woman, Kaela Maricich. Her initial collaborator, Jona Bechtolt, made the beats and has since moved on. What a great show! She was the only one on stage in her all white outfit, but she held everyone’s attention throughout. Her act is a little hard to describe — containing elements of hip hop and pop, she rhymes and sings catchy choruses over loopy beats. She also reminded me of Miranda July (who happens to be her friend), and Ellen DeGeneres, but with a lot of really unique dancing, or throwing shapes, as they say in the UK. There was a lot of patter between songs, stories that flowed and connected the music — sometimes the punch line of a story would seem to trigger a beat and a song. The timing, the flow, was perfect. In that sense, it was almost a musical, though not like anything else out there. Sometimes she used props, like a dry-cleaning bag or a plastic water bottle. (Here is a picture from her Flickr page.)
The songs, some of them, are super catchy, and as a result she attracted a healthy sized, and fairly young audience in this alt-rock venue (The Blender Theater) — but her act is pretty damn eccentric and arty for a pop act, even for an alt-pop audience if you ask me. But here it was, something that was determined to be what it was and not pander to pop performance expectations. Yet, she jumped into a pop context and succeeded.
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