Archives for February 2010

From a New York Times profile of Steve McQueen:

Three years and several short films later, Mr. McQueen won the 1999 Turner Prize, Britain’s most prominent art award, in part for Drumroll (1998), a massive three-screen video that puts viewers in the midst of urban cacophony. He made it by attaching three cameras to an oil drum and rolling it down Fifth Avenue; he once called it “a musical.”

In an earlier story, McQueen elaborated:

In Drumroll, for example, the central idea was that three cameras would be rolling through New York City inside some oil drums. This was the best way for me to document a very specific urban situation. Everything was filmed. People in the street, I myself. Everything was perfect, I could do no wrong. I felt almost like a musician. All I had to do was to keep this oil drum roll almost like keeping a beat. The chaos that was recorded of people, cars, trucks, etc. was almost like improvisation. Everything that slipped into frame was permitted, it was impossible to make a ‘mistake’, everything is allowed.

It’s possible to see still images from the piece online, as in this one, from The Guardian:

I was unable to find even a portion of the piece live. The same is true for David Hammons’  Phat Free from 1995. (Hammons is always first.)

From Artforum, no writer given on the link. (What’s that about?)

Phat Free is only seven minutes long, but it works on the mind like a musical composition that takes days to digest. Once I’d realized that the video wasn’t about a band playing, I began searching for other clues. “Kicking the bucket” is a euphemism for dying; so I started looking for other metaphors of morbidity in the video. It was late and the streets were foggy and deserted, other than the protagonist. He looked ghostly in the blue light of the morning; perhaps he was the figure of death visiting the neighborhood.

But the video was simply too playful to support that reading.
Clearly the man was kicking the bucket the way a drummer plays a drum. The bucket rolling on the concrete established a steady rhythm, and the man – Hammons himself – repeated the same steps to reach and kick it again. I thought of the Surrealist creed that adventure is on the corner of the street – the man could be a homeless person who had found his adventure in the game and was enjoying it to no end.
By the time the video was over, I was finally getting it. Or was I? Had Hammons planted recognizable narrative motifs like “kicking the bucket,” as well as allusions to jazz and homelessness, just to keep us working endlessly in pursuit of meaning? That may be the case, since what seemed to count most was the energy of the piece. The narrative motifs were mobilized to contribute to this energy, and when the video ended, it was like putting an end to all these stories and letting the playful rhythm and movement take over as an abstract sign of the black good life.

Clearly, for Hammons, there is no good life without a measure of absurdity.
After the video, Hammons told us he felt that younger black artists lacked the “black confidence” of jazz musicians. They have no control over the definition of the art they’re making. For him, black artistic confidence means a willingness to transform blackness into a higher level of abstraction. (more)

(Image via)

I’m fortunate to have seen both pieces, the McQueen by lucky accident and the Hammons by dint of determined effort, but I’d love to be able to see them again. Sitting in my living room is ideal, but also good would be in a nearby library, museum or arts center. In the future that is almost here, we won’t be restricted by what’s on view but can make our own shows out of video/art film videos near at hand. For that service, I’d be willing to pay, and not just flash my press card to get in.

For beauty – Alidra Alic‘s Orchid

For the beast – Debra Baxter‘s Crystal Brass Knuckle (I am going to realign your chakras motherf*****)

One of the better dustups in recent memory took place in L.A., after David Pagel unfavorably reviewed Diane Thater in the L.A. Times. The comments rocked the house and spread to blogs, most impressively, on The Hairy Prone Companion.

I respect Pagel, but this review sounds as if he wrote it from his lizard brain. There’s a big group of artists (“fourth and fifth generation Conceptualists,” in Pagel’s condescending phrase) he can’t abide. Why go to their shows, then? Every single time out, as Marat told de Sade in another context, critics have to pick themselves up by their own hair, turn themselves inside out and prepare to see the world with fresh eyes. If they can’t entertain the possibility that an artist they don’t admire will surprise them, they need to stay home.

Diana Thater: Between Science and Magic

Pagel is King Solmon compared to Thater, however, who logged into the comments section to fight back:

Ahhhhhh this is all SO interesting! But …would you like to know why David Pagel actually wrote this incredibly personal, mean-spirited and low so-called “review” of my show?
I’ve posted a factual account of my 13-year history with David Pagel and Christopher Knight on my website. Read it and ask yourself why these people actually have jobs at a major newspaper if this is how they use their positions and the power they’ve been accorded.
Thanks to those of you who have defended me and my work against the rabid anti-intellectuals. (And will anyone ever tell me what a 4th-generation conceptualist is?????) (I’d be satisfied just to know what everyone thinks they’re talking about when the use the word “conceptual”). And is everyone who is not dumb an intellectual by default or is there an IQ minimum? Didn’t Pol Pot make a point of putting the “intellectuals” to death? Hmmmm seems like a bad road to be going down…but if that’s what Pagel is about – let’s just be glad he doesn’t have an army.

Pagel is not against intellectuals. He’s one himself. And to compare him to Pol Pot in Los Angeles, where people who survived Pot comprise a large community …I’m speechless. 

On her blog, Thater recounts the time that Pagel and Dave Hickey sent a funeral wreath to the opening of a group show featuring artists whom Christopher Knight, Pagel and Hickey had all panned. That was the point of the show, that these critics wrote them off.

The wreaths were on stands and had wide ribbons draped across them. Both said; “With Deepest Sympathy” and the cards were signed by David Pagel and Dave Hickey.
The message? These two art critics didn’t just hate us and our work – they wished we were DEAD.

Note to Thater: I wasn’t there, but I don’t have to be a weather man to know which way this wind blew. Sending a funeral wreath didn’t mean Pagel and Hickey wished you were dead. It was a theatrical gesture, intended to provoke a response. They don’t like your work, but they like you and the artists in this show enough to engage. In the future, think Dada, not death threat. And leave Pol Pot out of this. You want to compare a critic to a killer, go with Attila the Hun. No one alive has a stake in his story.

Back to Pagel: It’s interesting that he wrote the review without any mention of a back story. This is not the first time he has come down from the mountain with this set of injunctions. He owes his readers the context for his comments. Once he sent the wreath, it’s part of his story. He’s now a participant on stage, not a member of the audience. To pretend otherwise is dishonest.

I understand how tricky this is. An artist once threatened to sue me. It didn’t get far, but lawyers were involved. I wondered ever after how I was going to write another review of his work. After he had filed papers in court attacking me, he gave me a reason to be way past grumpy. Fortunately for me, the occasion for a second review did not arise. Big history needs to be acknowledged, especially big negative history.

Other news:

From Slate – Michelangelo did not whistle while he worked.

My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s
pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy’s.

Justice is done – Christoph Büchel prevailed against Mass MoCA on appeal. From John Silberman’s The Art Law Blog:

Today the First Circuit reversed
his decision, holding that “the record permits the inference that …
Museum staff members were disregarding [Büchel’s] instructions and
intentionally modifying ‘Training Ground’ in a manner that he did not
approve.” (more)

And justice is not done – From Culture Monster, Shepard Fairey will face a  criminal investigation in the AP case. When did the Associated Press begin to stink of sulfur? Surely in a country brimming over with criminal conduct in high places, there are better people to investigate than Fairey.