Regina Hackett

Peter Schjeldahl knows his way around a sentence. His appear tossed off but take their place in the deep end of the pool. In spite of their brilliance, however, some drown there, sunk by writer’s contempt for his subject.

I hope to see Urs Fischer at the New Museum but haven’t yet. Has Schjeldahl? He wrote his paragraph review to bury Fischer, not consider him. It’s brilliant as writing but inert as criticism.

“Why must the show go on?” Noël Coward wondered. The question recurs apropos a desperately ingratiating Urs Fischer exhibition at the New Museum. Frail japes by the mildly talented Swiss-born sculptor–the international art world’s chief gadfly wit since Maurizio Cattelan faded in the role–are jacked up to epic, flauntingly expensive scale. There are huge aluminum casts of tiny clay lumps (you can tell by the giant thumbprints), walls and a ceiling papered with photographs of themselves, and big mirrored blocks that bear images of common objects. When a hole in a wall is approached, a realistic tongue sticks out of it. A faux cake is suspended in the air by hidden magnets. It’s all nicely diverting–but from what? If you spend more than twenty minutes with the three-floor extravaganza, you’re loitering. The New Museum could just as well not have done the show while saying it did. The effect would be roughly the same: expressing a practically reptilian institutional craving for a new art star.

Schjeldahl could be a broker glancing at stock results – who’s up, who’s down – or an insult comic, his quips his weapon. Almost any artist can be made to seem ridiculous by describing the work in this kind of seen-one, seen-all tone. Schjeldahl’s real target is the New Museum. I love this phrase – “a practically reptilian institutional craving for a new art star” – but isn’t it possible that a suspect platform can still deliver a real thing?

A recycled glass menorah from Vertige via Olympia Dumpster Divers.

The ties that bound American families on the East Coast loosened for the loners who headed West. My brother the gambler explained it to me this way: “If we’d stayed in Boston, somebody would have a word with an uncle who’d talk to his brother the priest who’d tell a cop from the neighborhood in confidence. They’d work it out. In Los Angeles nobody knows you, and they break your legs right away.”

When Richard Avedon’s In The American West came out in 1985, some said it traded in stereotypes. He photographed small timers wheeling in their own worlds like planets. They pumped gas or stuck up the station, stood on their feet all day behind a counter or sat in front of a TV set, failing to respond when paged by their charges in the welfare nursing home.

Avedon:

She’s made of money from the petty cash drawer. What happens when this image is recast as embroidery?

Allison Manch:
The act of sewing seeds a barren ground with domesticity. The figure is the same person in the same moment, but every inch of her has a achieved a homey acceptance. She’s now a name written in her grandmother’s Bible that no one ever crosses out.

Manch’s Gimme Shelter is at Grey Gallery through Feb. 6.

From a email written by a traveler:

Through a palazzo entry on the Via de’ Bardi is the entry to the newly-opened Bardini Gardens. Right beyond the Via de’ Bardi, which is one block across the Arno, the hills begin to rise up steeply to where the old fort is located at the back of the Boboli Gardens. The entire hillside – I’d guess 20 acres – is composed of formal and semi-formal gardens.

None of this has been open to the public – ever. It has been restored over five years or so and just opened within the last few months. Statues, fountains, rivulets, massive and mini stairways, plazas, and perches. Trees and other flora of every conceivable variety. Plus . . . and this is a stunning plus . . . closeup views of the whole city. The views are like being swept on a magic carpet from San Miniato al monte so close to the city that you feel you can reach out and touch the Duomo. The gardens are peaceful, beautiful, fanciful, stunning, thrilling, eccentric, and a joy.

From the back of the Bardini Gardens you can go down a short block and through a back gate into the Boboli Gardens. Liz and I truly loved the Bardini Gardens. Fortunately we forgot to bring our camera. We would have wasted our time trying to take thousands of pictures. As Ama’s mother said, “Pictures not enough.” You need to go there. “Web site not enough” either, and the Web site pictures don’t approach what the eye sees, but there is a Web site.

Gil Kane, in an essay by Gary Groth:

In the commonplace world, all new arts are trash. In Elizabethan times,
it was commonplace to say that Shakespeare’s theatre was trash. And
then it was the novel’s turn: the novel, they said, was trash. And then
the film came along. First it was the silent film, and the commonplace
was that it was trash — until the sound film emerged. Then the silent
film suddenly became an art, as the theatre and the novel had, and it
was the sound movie that was trash. Today, all film is becoming art.
What’s trash today, then? Comics, of course. But now that the newspaper
strip is ailing, the commonplace is that it may be art. Those comic book stories, though, they’re surely trash…

Evan Blackwell

Brent Crothers

Crothers via C-Monster

Anish Kapoor, what the right angle delivers, image via.

Jun Kaneko

Max Nowell

Egg Nest Via

Egg Road (Arid)

Gloria Bornstein

Hank Hofstra

And early in the 20th century, the giants of the theme:

[Read more…] about The incredible inedible egg

Although curators of the 2010 Whitney Biennial say they weren’t thinking about gender, the lineup is 52 percent women. (Jerry Saltz story here.) Saltz doesn’t say so, but no other art critic in the last two decades has written as effectively on the issue of gender inequality. (Sample here.) Quotas are ugly; bigotry is uglier.

Left to its own devices, the art establishment tends to contract around white males. Few curators want to admit to considering the issue when making their choices. It’s much loftier to say they only think about art. Saltz helps them pause before finalizing unconscious prejudice into their lineups, even if they won’t admit it. 

Other news:

Tyler Green lets New Orleans Museum of Art E. John Bullard have the first word, interviewing him on why he decided to turn the museum over to Disney Studios. (Green followed the next day with his opinion, but I’m not sure he needed to. Bullard hung himself.)

Leah Ollman on Culture Monster sort of reviews an artist-selects series at Steve Turner Contemporary:

The series will draw from local private collections, with contemporary artists doing the choosing — a nice variant on familiar curatorial practices but one that would be even better accompanied by a statement from the artist in charge.

Ms. Ollman: The artist’s statement is the work selected. Written commentary is your job.

The Houston Chronicle’s indefatigable art critic, Douglas Britt, has taken a job as the paper’s society writer. It’s a real job, unlike his previous. Being the art critic meant he was  under meager contract, one short step up from freelance. Here’s what he wrote in the paper:

There I was, minding my own business as the Chronicle art writer, when my boss said, “You’d look good in a tux.” (more)

I’m happy he’s getting a living wage at a daily newspaper and know he’ll continue to write about art, although obviously not as frequently in the Chronicle.

Kenneth Baker reviews an exhibit based on Moby Dick. Sounds like the theme is a stretch for some of the participants. Rigor would have been easy to add if the curator had thought of Grant Barnhart. Barnhart’s acrylic painting, Private Thoughts Are Lost, serves as a coda to the white whale’s fate, even though the mammal depicted is not a whale. (It’s not a pipe either.) The painting’s soul is right out of Meville.
Also, via This Isn’t Happiness:

Abbey Road

Abbey Road again:

And again, from Joan Engelmeyer:

Engelmeyer’s paintings are at Zeitgeist through December in an exhibit titled, From Here to There.

Dorothy Rissman found a tarp washed up on the beach at Whidbey Island. The coat she made of it is sacramental, battered into an abandoned gravity.

When my sister’s husband refused to speak to her all night and into next morning for a trivial mistake, I suggested that next time he insisted on the silent treatment, she could pour honey in his work shoes. When he slipped them on in the morning, he’d talk. If not, she could cut up his favorite suit and leave it in shreds on its hanger.

Ruined clothes carry a message. They rebuke us for our rage and take up space in our heads long after they’re gone.

Eric Yahnker, Analogous To The Fall Of That One Empire (Gap Shirt) 2004-2005 Shirt in which all of the thread has been removed excluding the pinstripe pattern.

Peter Shelton’s whitecoat is not an empty husk. It stands on its own, having squeezed whoever wore it out of the picture.

Early in 1980, a friend who freelanced for a wire service was in Oregon to cover the hostility between the Rajneeshpuram and its neighbors in Oregon. The colors-of-the-rising-sun community (later famed for poison and guns) invited him to spend the night. Directed to a pup tent, he found on his pillow several condoms and a pair of rubber gloves, in case he happened to get lucky.

The Rajneesh were pioneers of the antiseptic erotic. They favored frolic but feared additions to their bacterial count. Anyone aspiring to an evening of bliss had to agree to wear the gloves. Thirty years later, Elizabeth Jameson creates art that could be said to be made in their image. She too tends to favor shades of the rising sun, and she too imagines a world in which absurd safeguards to health are essential.

In that world, the air you breath is out to get you. Isolation wraps each figure, even when they’re holding hands.

No one mourns or appears to notice anything out of the ordinary in their downward evolutionary spiral, from the human to a space-age insect realm.

In 1968, Philip Dick asked, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? What  are the dreams of Jameson’s women? Silks made of rose petals and of blood, as distant as the North Star.

At Fetherston Gallery through Dec. 19