Escaping Artist

A friend of mine jokes that our similar interests tend differ when it comes to our preferred tastes, which break down something like the approval matrix in the back of the New York Magazine. Our combined personalities form a like grid of current events, interesting shows, and noteworthy articles of gossip, with my contributions covering the “highbrow” and his the “lowbrow,” and together we seem to cover almost the whole spectrum. Our highbrow/lowbrow tastes were exemplified this past Saturday on our day trip to Philly, an exhausting trip full of good food, bad good food, and sunny weather. Having read much of Bruce Nauman because of his representation of the US at the Venice Biennale last year, I was curious to see his piece reinstalled at the Philly Museum of Art. My friend, on the other hand, wanted to see the much blogged about Love Letters, a public art installation in west Philly by new york based artist Steve Powers. Both artworks were well worth the trip, and both represented the best aspects of the so-called highbrow/lowbrow art scene.

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Roni Horn aka Roni Horn

I will always be surprised by how well we remember our early influences. While I have a hard time recalling some of the artists I studied in grad school, I vividly remember those I was exposed to as an enthusiastic teenager. I remember these early artists badly in the sense that I didn’t yet grasp what they were about or why, but on a purely visual level I remember them to this day: Man Ray, Adrian Piper, John Baldessari, Sophie Calle. I recall how long it took to find a Man Ray book at the local library, trying to spell his name with a group of elderly librarians. I remember diligently watching The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari because of a piece I had made with shadows and masks, and I could not for the life of me see the connection between the two. All of them, however, settled somewhere deep in my visual memory next to those I had discovered myself: Sharon Lockhart, David Hockney, Roni Horn. I remember learning about Roni Horn at an LA museum where she had installed her Still Water images in unpredictable places. I kept running across images of dark and murky water in the stairways, elevators, hallways, and balconies. I wondered what they were, and if they were art or not. I can picture myself, fifteen or sixteen with pencil and pad in hand, determinedly demanding the name of the artist. I know I succeed in finding out her name because I have remembered it ever since.

Who Shot Rock & Roll, on display through the 31st at the Brooklyn Museum, was surprisingly one of the best shows I saw in 2009. It was oddly underwhelming at the same time that it was deeply satisfying, in the same way that a chocolate covered strawberry never tastes as good as imagined, but in itself remains difficult to dislike. On the surface—despite the multitude of reviewers forced to discuss the deeper connections between rock & roll, celebrity and their constructed image, and the roll photography plays in mediating between the two—this show could be summed up as a crowd pleaser. While it is easy to roll our eyes at yet another Van Gogh or Dali exhibition, shows that appeal to our cultural understanding of “good art,” it is harder to make an argument against the type of images we simply can’t resist. Who Shot Rock & Roll goes deeper than this, however, not necessarily because the exhibition really is deeper, but because whatever the photographs lack the viewers make up for through the interest they bring to them.

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(For better or worse Robert Irwin–think Getty Garden–landscaped the museum)

I always mistakenly assumed that the Dia Foundation was founded in order to house the work of the Minimalist artists of the 1960s, and perhaps subsequently related movements. Somehow I pictured a figure such as Donald Judd arranging it. While this is not actually true, viewing the collection of the Dia Beacon, located an hour or so upstate in the run-down town of Beacon itself, rendered the mistake an understandable one. The Dia collection seemed to foreshadow the recent trend I have noticed amongst wealthy collectors showing in public spaces (Eli Broad for example), of collecting numerous works by the same artist. Never have I seen so many Judd’s, Flavin’s, Nauman’s, or Smithson’s shown together. The space itself reminds me of PS1, an “alternative” building turned into a clean, well-lit venue with huge rooms and long hallways, as opposed to the traditional museum or gallery cube. While PS1 used to be an elementary school and now haunts contemporary artwork with its institutional architecture, the Dia used to be a Nabisco printing plant built in the 1920s that now cozily embraces the geometric artwork it houses—the industrial nature of the building, all brick and cement, suits the industrial material choices of the artists inside. Dia is also a convincingly coordinated collection. While the artists are not necessarily like each other, they share the same intellectual concerns. Wandering through it feels like looking at the problems of an era dissected visually by various minds, and though the concerns were similar the individual answers appear to have been different.

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Certainly not the second review I have written, but my second review for Whitehot is published! Here is the link to the article, and here is my neon picture on the cover. Questions, comments, concerns?