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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.
Shot a video with live audio of me riding through the streets of Times Square to Town Hall with a camera mounted on my helmet. The final video will be used as a show-beginning gag at Saturday night’s “How New Yorkers Ride Bikes.” After the third take, just as we were leaving, Steve Earl entered the theater with his new wife Allison — Lucinda Williams was doing a three-night run there and Steve was guesting. We chatted and on the way out Lucinda’s guitarist invited me to sit in that night.
I couldn’t, not that night…but last night I did. I gave them options of three tunes we could do — Buck Naked, Heaven and Overtime (the latter is one of hers, a duet with Willie Nelson) — and they said, “We’ll take all three.”
She’s been doing these shows where she plays an old album top to bottom, then takes a ten minute break and does about another half hour with guests, etc. Last night she did her Lucinda Williams album. I realized I could sing along with almost every song — God she’s written a lot of memorable songs!
I came in after she’d started and took a seat. Immediately she played a song I knew that gave me chills. Another song almost had me in tears. Her voice was a little ragged, but sometimes that just made it seem more real. She stopped a few times in that part of the show, sometimes feeling that a song was not off to just the right start, and then she’d start it over. She made some jokes about her perfectionist insecurities, quipping that she was keeping her legend intact. Sometimes she’d stop and then change the key to make the song more comfortable to sing. Whatever. Her insecurities vanished in the second half and she relaxed and smiled and had fun.
David Johansen was the other guest in that section, which goes to show how widely Lucinda’s influences range. They sang a hilarious Jailbird song duet, and then David performed “Lookin’ For a Kiss,” an old New York Dolls song. Somehow it all made sense.
In the end, they dragged me out as Lucinda wanted to do “Take Me To The River” (she had the words printed out and everything). She has a great band, so with a few hand signals from me they pretty much nailed it. Susan, L’s backup singer also sang with Cat Power and said Teeny Hodges, who joined Chan Marshall on her last tour, would be happy I had announced that he wrote that song.
Went to see Animal Collective and Vampire Weekend at Webster Hall last night. VW was really good — poppy, but fairly skewed too, with bits of soukous guitar thrown in from time to time, as if it was just a way of playing lilting guitar and not a specific African style. They’re not a “world music” act by any stretch; these various styles of playing are all just out there now, to be used when appropriate. I wondered if they sounded a little like early Talking Heads, a little bit, maybe, which of course wouldn’t bother me. They got the crowd moving, which is pretty impressive for an opening act. Catchy tunes too. I’d heard some on an EP or demo CD. They said they’re working on an album now.
In the past, Animal Collective were very briefly lumped in with the freak folk crowd, but they couldn’t be further from that now. Very few acoustic instruments remain — a cymbal got hit and a guitar appeared briefly, but the rest was all pre-recorded tracks, loops and samples. Their instruments were an array of tiny mixing boards and electronics that played Mini Discs or samples. “Playing” mainly consisted of pushing faders up and down. To be fair, two of the three guys took turns singing, though I couldn’t make out any of the words; so yes, there was more to focus on than just faders moving. Musically, it was an enjoyable sonic collage that never stopped, rather it ebbed and flowed, building up to big washes of sound with echoey singing and then sinking back to a single shimmering loop before building up into a new song.
It was a funny mixture — they arrayed themselves on stage as if they were a traditional rock band. They’re more akin to laptop DJs than a band, though a band can be anything these days, I guess. The singing and dancing about are not usually part of the laptop scene, so that part energized the show in a good way.
Went to see “Transformers” last night by Times Square (there are hardly any places to lock one’s bike on 42nd st). It was long, for a CG based action flick. 2 and 1⁄2 hours I think. I realized today, per my earlier post re video games, movies and emotional involvement that video games could achieve what this and a few other recent blockbusters do without too much further development. Add some amusing quips and asides based on “character” and behavior patterns, scattered them here and there, ditto base the actions and gestures on “character”, maybe insert a love (or a pinup, in this case) interest — and then let the fights, battles, puzzle solving and chases commence — the McGuffin, whatever it is, leads one, as it does in video games, to the conclusion of the movie, or the game. The path could vary somewhat, but by clever design one could somehow always return to the main plot thread. One leaves the cinema drained, but energized — one imagines 42nd street (in my case) rocked by alien monsters, fighter jets, tanks and girls in halter-tops. Then, 1⁄2 hour later, the adrenaline rush has worn off, and that’s it. There’s no more of a take home than there is in a video game. When movies aspire to be video games — although on larger screens — they’ve given up already.
I realized that in these movies the military and the government ministries that are involved with them are often portrayed in a flattering light — the military, despite their initial difficulties and surprise, are fairly competent in these movies — there isn’t any evidence of careerist backstabbing, politicking, ideologically based decision making and lame excuses. Granted, those are mostly the arenas of our political leaders, but lately, since the military have been slow to stand up to them, they’ve been infected as well.
CS and I visited the late Philip Johnson's Glass House during the week and I got a fairly in-depth tour of the grounds.
Although it is the house — really a pavilion, as it’s not that big — that is always pictured in books on modern architecture, it is really only one part of a spread-out complex of buildings. About 40 meters closer to the road is its “dark” twin, the guest house, which was built in the same proportions but made of brick and with no windows on the wall facing the downhill view and the glass house. Inside this two-room hut it’s dark and womb-like, if one can imagine a modernist womb with thick purple pile carpets. There is a regular old basement-style closet here with a hot water heater, electric meters, mops etc. that feeds into a hidden tunnel leading to the glass house. The support system was outsourced. Which answers that recurring question.
Further away are structures that house Johnson’s art collection, a reading library and, almost completely out of sight, an old shingle house that contains the stuff for tending the grounds, bottled water, and “the help”. In theory — in someone’s theory, anyway — all the structures together made one “house”. The glass house itself has a bed on one side, a lounging/dining area, a shower, toilet, sink and a wet bar with an electric stovetop. If one really tried to live in just this building one would have to be a monk. Otherwise there would be the things that all of us live with piled everywhere — magazines, dish soap, pens and pencils, notepads — you get the idea.
Cool idea, to have the various elements of a house made into separate buildings and pavilions. I think another contemporary architect actually did it too, probably in a warmer clime. Of course, in warmer latitudes that kind of partitioning and separation is not modern — it’s thousands of years old. In the tropics and in Africa houses are often composed of a compound of huts: one for washing, one for eating, one for receiving guests, one for cooking and one for sleeping. This complex, in New Canaan, Connecticut — a town now filled with colonial McMansions — doesn’t quite deconstruct and compartmentalize one’s living situation as much as that, but the separation at least helps answer everyone’s 1st question: Practically, how does one live here? A: with a lot of help and probably not for long stretches of time
So, if this icon isn’t really a “house”, in the practical sense, then what is it?
A: It’s a showcase — an extreme version of ideas current at the time, pushed to their logical endpoint. An answer to the architectural question “What if?” Nothing wrong with that. In LA, just after WWII, when the issue of housing loomed large in the public’s attention, the magazine Art and Architecture sponsored local modern architects to build the Case Study houses. Eames, Saarinen, Ellwood and many others were part of this program. These houses were meant to be examples of each architect’s interpretation of the modernist dream as well as being affordable. In LA, of all places, the idealist Bauhaus directive that these places be relatively cheap as well as being no-nonsense severe — a rejoinder to and a liberation from the frilly tastes of the wealthy and the bourgeois — was more or less kept intact. The LA crowd, some of them, used inexpensive off-the-shelf materials and nodded somewhat to the car and the (sometimes) dry desert environment. The idea was that in the post-war era, there was an opportunity created by the housing shortage — and one could either look to Levittown as the solution, or to something more light, airy and revolutionary.
All the architects had trouble getting commissions, so no one could actually see their work at the time. So that program, and the later houses in New Canaan, built by Johnson and 4 of his contemporaries, became, in effect, their sales packages — a little more extreme (certainly in Johnson’s case) than what a client would probably go for, but, because the building was all self-controlled and financed it could be aesthetically rigorous and uncompromising in its design and construction. For a while, in the 80s, I lived in a version of one of those LA houses (though not a Case study house) that architect Gregory Ain built for himself in 1939. It had its faults, but it really was something special — the whole bedroom wall slid on rails to be open to the outside.
When the idea of modernism was brought to NY from Europe, much of its idealist utopian socialist baggage was left behind; it became, in America, mainly through the efforts of Johnson and his circle, a style rather than the structural and architectural equivalent of a political movement.
Not only was the famous glass “house” a showcase, but the surroundings were subtly modified to make a visit into a cohesive experience. If this is more a sales tool than a messy lived-in joint then that somewhat obsessive attention to the surrounding context would seem natural. The attention to detail all around was a little shocking to me, but if you see the whole place as display then it’s totally logical. In a sense Johnson and his partner David Whitney made the whole place — the woods, pond, lawns and houses — into one sprawling gestamkunstwerk.
To the reported shock of their rustic neighbors, the two went on a tree-chopping spree. Views into the surrounding forest were created by removal of any inconvenient and offending trees, meadows and vistas were “improved” by clear-cutting, and limbs and branches that blocked the view were trimmed. It all appears to the eye as quite natural — as if they’d cleverly chosen a naturally landscaped plot on which to build — but, as my guide said, it’s about as natural as Central Park. The trees around the glass house create a canopy, their tall bare trunks like a series of regal columns that one looks through to the pond, the forest, and the marshy depression below. All very controlled and thought-out. The architecture doesn’t stop at the glass walls. One could conceivably view Central Park as a massive work or arboreal architecture.
The surrounding forest itself is meticulously groomed, kept clear of undergrowth and low-hanging branches. Trees were removed here and there to allow patches of light to fall in the middle distance, “improving” the visuals. There are no accidents — you see because they want you to see.
The lawn is mowed according to Whitney’s instructions:
And the purple carpet is vacuumed in a far from careless fashion:
Lovely, no? The repetitive minimalist patterns — the grass, the carpets, the little ripples on the (round) pool, the dappled light — it all seems like one very considered vast modernist artwork, or stage set, as if to say that modernism doesn’t stop at the door of the museum or at a building’s edge. It’s a way of remaking the world.
I don’t know the social details, but I got the sense that Johnson brought people of influence and interest up here. It became, in effect, a modernist cocktail lounge where, with a little lubrication, the doctrine of the modern could be spread.
Johnson abandoned modernism after a while and was criticized for adopting a slew of current architectural trends, but one can only justify those criticisms if one wishes to view him as a great architect associated with a characteristic look, which I don’t. I see him as an early adopter, a proselytizer and an advocate of styles — some of which he himself adopted, others were more associated with other architects or artists. He promoted modernism and other styles relentlessly and powerfully. He seems to have been such a tireless advocate that he even became associated with styles and movements he participated in sometimes only briefly.
Such a powerful and socially-connected advocate had a huge and lasting influence — not all of it good. Early on, as a young man, he was enamored with the rigorous no-nonsense philosophy of Nietzsche, which carried over to an admiration for Hitler and the idea of the will to power. There are some embarrassing photos floating around. “Safe danger” was a catchphrase he used in reference to the feeling one should get in a space or surrounds — maybe sometimes his life was not so safe. Although Johnson, along with Alfred Barr and JR Hickock, helped to kick-start MoMA and the idea that modernism was the unstoppable wave of the future, this dalliance with the dark side didn’t go down that well, and reportedly Johnson had to slowly win back the favor of his NY pals. Cocktails may have helped.
Beyond the round pool-object a path leads across a field to the art collection. Johnson has donated truckloads of art to MoMA (and elsewhere?) but there is still a substantial collection here. In an underground bunker one enters a sort of machine for viewing paintings (and large photos):
The paintings, some of which were being restored that day, hang on carpeted panels that rotate around cylindrical columns. With this method one can store a substantial art collection within a limited space. It can’t be viewed all at once; you have to turn the pages of these colossal “art magazines” to do that — well, in order to see more that the 6 paintings that can be seen from the center, the median point amongst the 3 “magazines”.
One imagines Johnson bringing guests over here after a cocktail or two and first surprising them with the fact that there is a bunker hidden under a small hillock, then impressing them with the extent of his holdings and his prescient taste as he flipped through the pages. There are quite a few Schnabels and Salles, a whole Stella retrospective, a few Rauschenbergs, a Warhol portrait and couple of Cindys.
I commented to CS later that it was a little strange that he obviously loved the artwork, but deliberately didn’t choose to live with it. The bunker was his Wunderkammer or box of bijoux, to be opened and shown to guests on special occasions rather that a living environment to inspire and enjoy.
It’s also a very Japanese idea that you don’t overindulge in looking at beautiful things — scrolls are tucked away and only brought out for viewing, and they traditionally build so that a view or vista is only glimpsed fleetingly, briefly.
Further on from the bunker was a concrete structure for Johnson’s sculpture collection. A whitewashed building like a 3-dimensional MC Escher or a miniature Greek village, with stairs leading up and down and around, and with most large pieces on their own unique levels. Pretty innovative design; it’s surprising more museums haven’t adopted this approach.
There are other structures: one made of chain link fence, an homage to his pal Frank Gehry; one that references Mario Botta or Michael Heizer, or both (I’m guessing), and a pond pavilion that seems to echo Lincoln Center (!) — in miniature.
As an influential advocate of the work of other architects, designers and artists Johnson was incredibly and unusually generous, though he no doubt had a huge ego. Many of his peers are not so kind to one another, so his and Whitney’s social sponsorship must have been refreshing, whether you like the various architectural styles he himself adopted or not. He might be viewed as a kind of impresario, someone who presents for our delectation something new and exciting. Traditionally, this referred just to the entertainment business, but as Jacques Cousteau referred to himself as “an impresario of scientists” one could take a generous view of Johnson in this way — not as someone who merely changed styles according to the current flavor but as someone who, from his glass soapbox, could learn from and advocate for what others were doing.
Oh yeah, one more Berlin thing. CS and I saw a piece in Berlin by a Polish artist we’d never heard of, Katarzyna Kozyra, and it was terrific. It was a group of videos of retired folks, naked, except they all wore opposite sexual prostheses (men with merkins, women with penises) doing, via stop-motion animation, moves from Nijinski’s choreography for Rite Of Spring — naturally. It was both disturbing and funny.
[Link to video]
Spent a little over 2 days here in Venice. One mostly allotted to viewing the Arsenale, the ¼ mile long former ship facility, now a massive exhibition space, and one day mostly at the Giardini, a park with national pavilions, each mostly featuring an artist from that country. An American, Robert Storr, curated the Arsenale and the Italian pavilion, which is always given over to being a group show. There’s always grumbling about these things, but there are always some wonderful surprises too.
The first half of the slog through the Arsenale featured a lot of fairly didactic political art. Some of this was pretty good, but it also seemed out of context. Not that we just want to be entertained, but some of it seemed educational, journalistic. Large-scale photos of crumbling Beirut buildings and a moving and elaborate memory piece about a Palestinian intellectual living in Rome assassinated by Israel both deserve to be photo essays in a glossy magazine or in a newspaper’s Sunday supplement. Sadly, there aren’t many magazine formats dedicated to this kind of work. For a while Doubletake tried to do this — to mix arty journalistic photos with writing — but it’s a tough sell, I guess. Online versions of quite a few magazines offer expanded versions of the photos they run.
Here is one from a series by Brendan Corr that was in Foreign Policy magazine (of all places!)
And one by Brian Ulrich that is in Mother Jones — online.
What is odd is that these often adhere a little too tightly to the photojournalism/Magnum model to be thrown into the rarefied arty context of this show. The memory piece on Wael Zwaiter, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Ed Burtynsky’s Chinese photos and another artist’s drawings of U.S. war dead could all be combined with writing, and not necessarily didactic writing, to tell us about ourselves in ways that include history and current events and that go beyond aesthetics. They don’t have to be relegated to the weird insular art world — in fact they may have more power outside of that world.
What they collectively do, maybe what makes them seem odd here, is they point to something else — they ask us to look through the work at something else — a situation, a person, a place. It’s a fuzzy line, and maybe who am I to try and draw it? Even Andreas Gursky’s stuff sometimes (moreso in the past) could almost be viewed as journalism — but now it’s so heavily photoshopped that it represents a mental impression of a place more than the actual place.
(The tiny drawings on one wall of U.S. war dead, are, in my opinion, in poor taste. The Iraqi war dead — most of them civilians — so vastly outnumber the American casualties that in an international art forum this commemoration of only the U.S. deaths seems symptomatic of the current U.S. xenophobia)
Anyway, for a while it felt like we were being lectured at a bit, but there were lots of other pieces that, while not merely existing in a imaginary dreamworld unrelated to our harsh reality, were much less obvious in their intent. While some of the more didactic pieces would be lovely and poetic in another context here they seemed swamped and overpowered by the poetic ambiguity surrounding them.
And then there is encroachment from the other side. Journalistic snaps these days are looking more and more like performance art or elaborately staged film stills — how can an artist compete with this image below? All matching outfits — with the occasional Disney touches! 
Photo — John Raoux/AP
About 1,000 people from 75 countries took their oaths together under the turrets of Cinderella’s Castle at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., as Gloria Estefan sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Or this one by James A. Rodriguez (via BoingBoing) of a demonstration in Guatemala. These simple sheets with faces of the disappeared — they don’t need text to speak volumes.
In another section Joshua Mosley did these odd claymation films of famous philosophers mouthing off as they stroll through a forest — eventually one of them gets viciously attacked by a huge (clay) dog.
[Link to video]
A Chinese artist/filmmaker Yang Fudong had a whole series of boxes spaced throughout the Arsenale: each featured another chapter of his film Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest. The title sounds like a classic story, and it is, but the film was of young hipsters full of ennui and intellectual angst wandering aimlessly, sometimes among rivers and streams, sometimes by modern apartments. It was shot in 35mm (!) and made to look like it was made in the 30s with scratches, flicker and all. Nice to see such high production value in an art context. Why this film had to be shown fragmented into 5 separate booths wasn’t clear — this extravagant presentation did however encourage one to spend a little time in each room, watching for 5 minutes or so. If one were expected to stand or sit on a bench (as is the art installation style) for 25 minutes one might balk — but in smaller doses, little by little we got a substantial taste.
I wouldn’t mind watching the whole thing on DVD, but I imagine if he’s showing it as an art piece and not as a film then only collectors get the DVDs.
In the Russian pavilion crowds lingered over a 3-screen video by AES+F, "Last Riot", that inserted young models having a ritualized battle into a super elaborate computer-game-like landscape, all set to Wagner. It struck a nerve — shirtless models, swords, missiles and explosions — pretty apocalyptic shit. The Wagner didn’t hurt either.
[Link to video]
Another Russian artist, Alex Ponomarev, made a shower stall that rained TV feeds — here it was raining news programs, but apparently if you turned the nozzle you got porn, sports or financial news. It was an homage to Nam Jun Paik, but seemed equally informed by the Matrix.
[Link to video]
In the Korean pavilion Hyungkoo Lee had made a fake natural history museum exhibit of bones and skeletons — which, when you looked closely, turned out to be super realistic bones of cartoon characters! Here are the fossilized remains of Tom and Jerry.
In the Spanish pavilion two artists called Los Torreznos made hilarious videos of themselves. For some reason their stuff reminded me of conceptual comedy — Andy Kaufman or others whose comedy borders on weird theater.
[Link to video]
In a separate building Francesco Vezzoli made two short fake political ads that were completely believable. The style was dead on and the sound bites and graphics were perfect. Of course, the fact that one featured the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy as a U.S. presidential candidate and the other Sharon Stone sort of gave it away. Stone's campaign ad was produced by Mark McKinnon, Bush's top advertising strategist in 2004, who is senior adviser to Senator John McCain's presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the "BHL" ad was managed and directed by Bill Clinton's advertising gurus from 1996.
[Link to video]
Francis Alÿs did a lovely little animated film of a shoe being shined. The way it works with the song is perfect. I guess someone thought that wasn’t enough, for the adjoining room was filled with the animation cells, which seemed completely unnecessary.
[Link to video]
A Belgian artist, Sophie Whettnall, made a video ("Shadowboxing") of a professional boxer coming really really close to hitting her.
[Link to video]
These days many people know of Stasi, the East German internal security agency, from the recent movie The Lives of Others. Not too long ago I read the wonderful book Stasiland [link to journal entry] which has a lot of horrible/incredible anecdotes about domestic spying in East Germany. And then a number of years ago two artists, the Wilson sisters, did a moody surreal art film in the former Stasi headquarters that features a levitating chair. The agency was known for turning citizens against their neighbors by subtle pressure, implied threat or economic incentive. It seems it’s something that many national agencies do from time to time (“If you see something, say something”.) Turning the citizenry into rats makes the entire populace scared and docile, as no one knows who’s informing on whom. ANYONE could be an informer or an agent. The world becomes a Phillip K. Dick novel — although in his version everyone would be informing on themselves.
Sure enough, just like I read about, and as seen in the movie, there were smell samples in jars, bits of cloth holding the odor or suspected citizenry (often a stolen piece of underwear — the perverts!) These were filed away just in case that person should disappear, and then a dog could sniff the rag and discover the bad guy’s hiding place.
The Stasi Museum is inside one part of a former massive compound that enclosed many city blocks. Parking and entrances were inside the compound, so no one could see who was coming or going. And the whole complex is now for sale! For one Euro! Well, I’m sure there are conditions. I think the city is trying to sell it to the country if they will turn it into a proper museum. As is, it’s rudimentary. One floor of former offices displays clunky spy devices: cameras in logs, behind buttons and in fake rocks. Here’s one in a birdhouse — a little obvious, I think.
Maybe the intent was NOT to hide this surveillance gear too well, the idea possibly being to make people aware they were being looked at and listened to. If you’re not aware you’re being observed then you won't live in fear, so what’s the point? Sometimes buildings here in the U.S. put up fake surveillance cameras in the hopes of discouraging perps. Of course, it wasn’t all just nutty surveillance stuff — people’s lives were ruined, destroyed, their careers came to a dead end at the least suspicion, there were prison terms and torture without stated reason (where have I heard that one before?) and information and culture was heavily censored. And the food wasn’t that great, either.
On a higher floor were the offices of the head of Stasi, a Mr. Mielke. They weren’t very grand by Western standards, but he did have a little apartment attached, which was pretty cute if one can now look at this style as very peculiar design aesthetic.
Hardly luxurious — but then maybe these higher-ups saw themselves as modest functionaries just doing the noble work of the state rather than as secret oligarchs or royalty. I remember visiting Pravda HQ in Moscow in the 90s and the decorator must have been the same guy. In that room there were also no decadent touches — just one long bookshelf that held the collected works of Lenin. (When did Lenin have time to write all those volumes?)
The Stasi AV room: 
As the wall was coming down the shredding machines in this place went into overdrive. Most of them clogged and they had to call for reinforcements. Many many documents were destroyed but there were too many to shred in just a few days, so there are organizations now that will allow you to locate your file if it is readable. Here is a page from John Lennon’s FBI file, for example — not a lot of it is “uncensored” — a sort of piece of conceptual art, if you ask me.
The next day we checked out some more of the local museums. The Hamburger Banhof (a former train station and freight terminal) was massive! Bigger than DIA Beacon or the Arsenale in Venice! An endless series of identical galleries. Here is the adjoining hallway, disappearing into an art-filled infinity.
CS has some pieces in a room juxtaposed with some Paul McCarthy grotesques. She said one of hers had been hung upside down — a giant grotesque vagina.
The hotel sells pieces of the Berlin Wall in addition to overpriced Pringles above the minibar. This piece of the wall looks like a cookie. 
You can also take rides in a Trabant, the cheap plastic-bodied Eastern car that was a joke and now is nostalgia. Or Ostalgia, as it is called here.
At Arndt Gallery there was a stuffed tattooed pig — a real pig. On another floor in another room (many of the successful galleries have expanded rapidly) there was a piece by Thomas Hirshhorn that I liked of manikin hands holding aloft literary tomes and ordinary tools — a sort of hilarious intellectual “workers arise!” image.
An idealized revolution on a (large) tabletop. I can imagine this as a crude proposal for a large-scale monument that would have been made years ago in the former East. Maybe done here by a high school senior using available materials: paperbacks rather than more impressive bound volumes, and puny screwdrivers and measuring tapes rather than hammers and sickles. And of course all held together with packing tape, a Hirshhorn specialty by now.
I like this much better than his recent installations that feature scenes of horror and photos of mutilated bodies from Iraq or elsewhere mixed with slogans, art and detritus meant to amplify or heal — those pieces seem too obviously shocking or didactic. Images of mutilated bodies are indeed the part of the U.S. invasion that are carefully kept from the view of most Americans. Accounts of every car bomb, reported almost daily, are not, for example, accompanied by close-ups of the body parts that inevitably accompany those events. Usually we see a smoking car or building in the medium distance and people running away or carrying stretchers. But we don’t often see the toll on human flesh. There was a show at White Columns about a year ago in which a photographer re-photographed the images seen in a museum in Vietnam whose subject was The American War, as they call it. Mangled bodies, living and dead, Agent Orange victims, denuded countryside. Again, the human toll was brought home in ways that Life magazine and CBS never did.
In a strange way, however, the censoring of war’s toll seems reasonable. Both sides of many conflicts can, to some extent (though hardly in Iraq, it’s so one-sided) hold up gruesome images of maimed loved ones and partisans to justify their outrage and need for revenge. The images further inflame passions, anger and distrust. The images demand “justice”, not an explanation. And in order to obtain the “justice” these horrors demand, one must create equal and opposite horrors. But then we have sunk to the level of beasts, clawing at each other, an eye for an eye, until nothing is left standing. And eye for an eye may be justified in a stable society, or at least one could argue for it, under the tight control of an impartial body. But in wartime, without the controls, it spirals quickly out of control. Besides, an eye for an eye rules out forgiveness, repentance and rehabilitation. I know that our prisons are mostly about punishment and revenge — as are many wars — but those three hopeful words are the only way out of the spiral. The Israeli, Soviet and U.S. solutions — not really solutions but stopgaps — are to build massive walls and keep the parties, the entities, separate. It didn’t work in Berlin, or in South Africa, or even China, but it seems to be a recurring idea — as if no one had ever thought of it before!
At another gallery the little-known German pop artist Thomas Bayrle had some surprising pieces. He’s been making stuff since the 60s, some of which now looks like psychedelic posters. He came up with Polke and Richter, but never had the success they did. One wall was covered with wallpaper covered with a repeating graphic of women’s shoes. Possibly before Warhol’s cow wallpaper, who knows? He likes swarming patterns. In another room was an old B&W 16mm film of a rubber plant slowly turning, but on its leaves, swarming like aphids, were tiny people. They seemed be images from a busy street scene, shot from a high angle. Somehow it almost matched the angle on the plant’s leaves so the people really seemed to be crawling all over them. The explanation said it was done frame by frame.
[Link to video]
In another room he there was a wall-sized video projection of a crucified Christ (without the cross) seemingly made out of thousands of shiny angled crystal facets. There was a familiar but unidentifiable whooshing sound. As the “camera” moved in closer one could see that every facet of every “crystal” was a tiny oddly shaped high angle moving image of a highway with trucks and cars zooming by — hence the strange whooshing sound. The “camera” pushed in further, until the “Christ” was no longer discernable and all one could see was weirdly shaped films of cars and trucks on a highway.
[Link to video]
Here are some quotes from the artist:
"The entire world opinion lies in a couple billion halftone-dots."
“I never say good motorway or bad motorway.”
"I consider the relationship between individual and collective/community the same as that between dot and grid, the dot representing a component of the grid, and between cell and body, the cell being its basic element." Lastly, there was, tucked under a river embankment, a tiny museum of DDR life, complete with with a recreation of an apartment interior. Apparently nudism was a popular idea in the East, as the museum included a detailed and extensive diorama of a nude beach: 
So maybe there were some perks to living in the East after all. This museum has an odd format — much of the stuff is in drawers — so if a panel describes the clothing, for example, the drawer might be filled with actual clothes manufactured in the DDR. You can reach in and touch the stuff. Nobody steals anything. The website for the museum has an extensive photo archive of the contents of the museum, life in the DDR, and also of the details of the step-by-step construction of the space. Here’s their toilet in construction. 
There was a wonderful design book, reissued by Taschen in smaller form, called SED (Stunning Eastern Design). It emanated from an exhibition in Germany in ‘89. It celebrates a now vanished universe of “bad” design, shoddy printing and oddball aesthetics. The stuff was so “bad” it was good. 
Of course, the original version of this book became a fetish item in the 90s. Designers like Tibor Kalman, Stefan Sagmeister and Deborah Norcross all plundered its wacky pages, layouts and typefaces. This Cornershop record, for example, accurately recreated (!) a hosiery ad from this design book — funky printing and all. 
I guess at some point designers (and others) get bored with “good” design and the increasing ease of making tasteful design that looks more or less like everything else, which is exactly the point, and also not the point. At some point I guess people designing things want them to look tasteful so that they’ll appeal to a semi-sophisticated crowd. And now it’s pretty easy to do that. With computers, and under the influence of the wealth of slick packaging in the world, tasteful layouts are pretty easy to emulate. The general public is fairly sophisticated in their design sense these days — they “read” the language of design — but, it being a visual language, they are not able to articulate the “text”. But if as a designer you want to be really hip and to appeal to those who deem themselves above mere tasteful design, then you have to have to work a little harder. One way to achieve this ultra cool surprise is to look intentionally bad, but to drop little visual ironic winks into the mix so that the audience knows it’s not really buying a record by a crappy East German band.
So, over the years, every genre of crap design — East German products, tacky back of magazine ads recycled by Warhol or Lichtenstein, sleazy RnB and Rock and Roll record covers, amateur porn and scientific textbooks — gets regurgitated as “good” design. Everything gets mulched and reused. So how does anything truly new ever get created?
CS and I biked around town all day. Started off at the Tate Modern where there were some giant themed shows, which were not what we came to see. One of them was about minimalism — we gave that a pass — and the other was called States of Flux — a headline that seemed in this case to encompass just about everything in no particular order. It was the weirdest mish-mash of a show either of us had ever seen. One room was filled with lovely Matisse paintings, but then on one wall of the same room protruded 4 Maurizio Catalan manikin arms giving Hitler salutes. Huh? Maybe there was some intellectual or academic construct at work here, some thread tying this disparate work together, but it remained invisible to us.
I’d read that somewhere in the museum there was a show of contemporary art from Kinshasa, and that was what drew me there. That show was not listed anywhere on the walls or listings — but there it was, tucked in a room inside the States of Flux show. Huh again? Here’s one of the Kinshasa paintings: 
The most well known of this group is the painter Cheri Samba, whose paintings are funny, political and inventive. Many of the paintings impart advice, or offer lessons or allegories of the crazy times we live in.
Next to this was a room devoted to the artist Dieter Roth, who lived part of the time in an extremely remote village in Iceland. He had some great images made from postcards which were then painted or silk-screened over. Here’s one based on a postcard of Piccadilly Circus: 
And then (wall texts said these were all part of the same large States of Flux show) there was a room of spreads from a Russian magazine published in the 30s and designed by Rodchenko and other fairly radical artists of the time. The layouts were beautiful — obviously propaganda (printed in a few languages), and sometimes corny as hell, but gorgeous.
At the time, if one didn’t know other things, one might look at these beautiful and radically innovative layouts and think, “Wow, what a cool place, what a hip scene it must be and what an enlightened government they must have to produce such a cool magazine.” Here is a layout featuring images of a tractor factory that featured “illuminations” for the enjoyment and excitement of the workers. Google, the current hip place to work, has some catching up to do.
Other spreads were elaborate foldouts, duotones of smiling peasants next to Stalin and one incredible spread of a paratrooper in which the top of the page unfolded to become a duotone of the round parachute sail.
On to the Whitechapel gallery (in renovation), a delicious lunch on Brick Lane (very busy as it’s market day — but good for people-watching), St Paul’s cathedral (very spooky organ music playing — big ominous chords). The revolving entrance door had these words on it: 
That’s quite a claim for a revolving door!
On to the ICA, which was closed for installation, then lastly a Paul Chan show at the Serpentine. Lovely animated projections onto the floor, mostly of semi-recognizable objects and people floating up or down, as if gravity had lost its grip and things had become unmoored. The one below featured a kind of pageant along the bottom, with mainly just the flags and banners visible. 
That evening we had dinner with C’s former gallerist here, an American woman and her Italian husband, who both now have galleries across the river near the Imperial War Museum. Christine Amanpour, the CNN talking head, came in with some swanky-looking folks. The restaurant (Scott’s, a renovated traditional fish place) was a mish-mosh of styles, too: there were blobby sculptural objects holding beds of crustaceans, shiny mid-century lighting fixtures and dark woody walls on which hung contemporary art given in trade for meals. Down near the toilets was a Tracy Emin that said something like, “I WILL eat my fish sticks”. Mostly, though, the artwork disappeared, blending into the décor and the dark walls. It made me realize how ubiquitous the typical white walls have become for displaying art, as anything else swallows it whole. Contemporary art seems to be all the rage — every joint and everyone has got to have some, even if it gets a bit lost.
The next day CS hung her show while I went off to the Design Museum for a meeting — the director had visited my studio in NY, saw the chairs and drawings of chairs, and had offered a show. The museum, if fairly off the beaten track (there are no tube stations nearby) has done nice shows over the years, so I was pretty excited. I’d seen a Peter Saville show and a Helen Jongerus show and the former director even did one of the Queen’s flower arranger.
One of the current shows was of an Italian designer, Luigi Colani, who was mainly active in the 60s and 70s doing incredibly prescient blobby biomorphic streamlined objects, most of which were never built. The show, therefore, was mainly of his self-financed prototypes: futuristic flying machines that looked like sea creatures and aerodynamic cars. 
CS and I have lunch with two youngish guys who run CS’s gallery here while the owners are otherwise disposed or are out of town. A thin German man who has moved here a few months ago and an Englishman transplanted from another local gallery. The gallery is in Mayfair, the zone of gilt-framed stodgy landscape paintings, antiques and antiquities, luxe designer boutiques and shops that seem peculiarly British — one is called the Cufflink Connoisseur, while another displays polo gear and riding crops in the windows.
The gallerists ask me what I’m up to. It’s always a little weird when people obviously think you haven’t done much since the hit records they remember from their childhood. The subject turns to live music we’ve seen lately and the German man says he’s only been to about 5 live shows in his entire life; he grew up on techno and electronic dance music and that’s pretty much all he listens to — DJs. I ask what time those “shows” begin and he says the name DJs usually don’t go on before 1. I feel a little old fashioned — I’m usually in bed by then.
The Englishman mentions that techno is a very German obsession, which gets a slightly puzzled and possibly annoyed look.
I think to myself how very different our concepts and uses of music are, how varied they can be. I assume that for him music is a sort of machine, a tool, that facilitates dancing and some kind of release. It’s simple, clear-cut, and it either does its job or it doesn’t. I imagine it’s pretty context-dependent, too — not too many offices have booming techno bouncing off the walls. Music, in this case, is pretty much something that is confined to certain spaces at certain times of day. Maybe there is some social interaction at the dance clubs as well, so the music helps that happen, too. Music, in this case, is definitely not about the words, that is obvious.
What then is music for in my case? Well, I like dancing to music, too, though I suspect I find that more syncopated rhythms — funk, Latin, hip-hop, etc. — get me moving more often than the repetitive thump of house or techno. But if it’s well done the genre doesn’t really seem to matter. More often I listen to music with singing, and I find the arc of a melody, combined with harmonies and a pulse, can be incredibly emotionally involving. Sometimes the words help, too. So that’s two “uses” I have for music. Lastly, I sometimes listen to soundtracks, contemporary classical and vaguely experimental music as a background, a mood enhancer or facilitator. We get doses of music this way in films and on TV all the time. I forgot to mention to the gallerist my recent collaboration with Paul Van Dyk, the techno master — I would have scored some point |
