the magazine rack by Patterson Beckwith May 1996Art in AmericaFlash ArtArtforumFriezeArt in America's cover story is a nine-page
interview with Agnes Martin by Joan Simon,
a writer who used to be the magazine's
managing editor. On page four there's an
advertisement for a Ross Bleckner show at
Mary Boone, showing the outside of her new
building on Fifth Avenue near 57th Street.
On page 31, the "Front Page" news section
has a quarter-page box titled "When Artists
Publish," where we learn that "Walter
Robinson, Art in America's contributing
editor, artist and former writer of Art in
America's news section, is the editor of a
new online publication called ArtNet
Magazine." The article also notes that
"Robinson recently showed his legendary
spin paintings at Tricia Collins' Grand
Salon," and that "the cyber mag's publisher
is Doug Milford, who ran the East Village
gallery Piezo Electric in the mid-'80s, and
later the Milford Gallery." The second
half of the story is about Peter Halley's
new magazine Index. Index is edited by Bob
Nickas and the premiere issue has an
interview with DJ Spooky.
If you like Vermeer, Art in America has got
two back-to-back eight-page articles about
the Dutch painter, starting on page 62.
Both articles are reviews of the big
Vermeer show at the National Gallery in
Washington, D.C. The first article, by
Svetlana Alpers, is about the ways that
Vermeer's technique differed from other
Dutch painters of his day. The second
article, which was written by Trevor
Winkfield, speculates on Vermeer's life.
"He could have been a heavy drinker,
probably liked a good time, and was
obviously very fond of sex (since he was
survived by 11 children)."
On page 79 there is a four-page article
about Tom Friedman by Ken Johnson. The
author says that the young sculptor's work
"transcends art-about-art cleverness." The
story is mostly descriptions of some of
Friedman's work: a pharmaceutical capsule
on a pedestal "filled with myriad minute,
variously colored balls, each individually
rolled from Play-doh by the artist... a wad
of bubble gum stretched some 20 feet from
the ceiling to the floor... a tiny ball of
(the artist's) own feces displayed on a
white pedestal" and "actual-size,
delightfully realistic representations of
houseflies made out of plastic, fuzz, Play-
doh and wire."
On page 82 is Art in America's cover story,
a comprehensive nine-page interview with
Agnes Martin by Joan Simon. Martin is curt
and witty. She says things like "I just
hate de Kooning's women. I think he was a
masochist. The women that he chooses are so
vicious," and "I thought that [Rothko's]
work fell off in the Rothko Chapel. For
some reason or other he didn't make
paintings up to his standard." When Simon
asks what she thinks of the idea that her
work "shows an affinity with weaving,"
Martin says "Oh, don't give me that." Simon
persisted, asking, "What do you think was
meant by raising those relationships?"
Martin: "Somebody undercutting me, saying
it was like weaving. Do you think my
paintings are like weaving?" Martin's new
paintings, which she showed in January at
Pace gallery, are a little different from
what she usually does because she used a
paintbrush to make light washes with red
and blue acrylic paint, and you can see the
brushstrokes. Martin says she doesn't know
why she did it, "it was just an
inspiration." The interviewer asks, "You
were saying earlier that the inspiration
comes from..." Martin: "...your mind. It
comes from your mind." Simon reminds Martin
that she said she considers herself an
Abstract Expressionist in another
interview. Martin says, "The Minimalists
were nonobjective. They just recorded
beauty, I guess, without the emotions--or
at least without personal emotions. My work
is a little more emotional than that."
On page 25 of Flash Art, artist Mark
Kostabi has taken out a two-page ad for
himself, which is a collage of letters that
people have sent him and six of his own
identification cards: a driver's license,
museum passes, and chess- and police-
federation memberships. He has written
things free-hand all over the collage, like
"That arugula salad tasted good at
Ballato's today" and "Coagula and Flash Art
are the best magazines. When will the
others learn?"
In Flash Art's news section there is a one-
page article by the artists Vanessa
Beecroft and Miltos Manetas called
"Slownet: A Special Guide to the World Wide
Web." Showcasing the stilted prose stylings
typical of Flash Art's English-as-a-second-
language writers, the authors begin with
this paragraph: "It is slow, too slow...
cries the mouse, but the connection is
kept. As you wait for the heavy pages to
finish downloading, it clicks on void." The
article is about what Manetas and Beecroft
think is interesting on the Web: They start
by recommending two Websites that choose
pages at random for you to watch, called
URouLette and Autopilot. Next they talk
about Timothy Leary's site, which they say
is "just boring stuff hanging on virtual
walls in a typical `gothic' house, built by
pixel-bricks into an autobiographical
statement." They continue, mentioning a
site where you can get free software, and
then go on to say: "Art is on the net as
well, or at least art people are, smearing
their stone-age make-up on the electronic
surface. It is interesting insofar as you
still have the chance to meet artist's
works." They recommend Adaweb and Tractor,
but not ArtNet; and the pages for Artforum,
and Frieze. They say that "We like this
gallery presence on the Net. Somebody has
offered the gallerists a page, for free or
for a charge, and there you find many
jammed all together like in the magazines.
Each one likes the other, they make their
own interactive neighborhoods and are
encouraged by all the mutual respect." At
the end of the article they say "magazines
are still faster. But the Net is New! It
highlights! The printed pages of magazines
know not how to highlight."
Also in the news section is the weirdest
thing in this month's Flash Art: three
letters, one from the editors of the French
art magazine Purple Prose and a group of
Swedish artists, another from a Russian
curator named Viktor Misiano, and a third
from the publisher of Flash Art, Giancarlo
Politi. The letters concern an incident at
the opening of a show curated by Viktor
Misiano in Stockholm: one of the artists in
the show, a Russian named Brener, did a
performance in which he destroyed a hair
sculpture made by another artist in the
show named Wenda Gu. [see last month's
"Magazine Rack"--Art in America]. The letter
from the Purple Prose people and the
Swedish artists condemns the destruction of
the hair sculpture and accuses Misiano of
"using theory to legitimize a new form of
totalitarian ideology. His discourse plays
with and uses the discourse of art,
although it has nothing to do with art
theory, but with hooliganism and skinhead
ideology." In a response to the first
letter, written at the invitation of Flash
Art, Viktor Misiano defends the destruction
of the hair sculpture, saying that the
dialogue of western Europeans with his
countrymen "has always been unequal, based
on help, sympathy and correctness," and
warns that "there are real fascists in
Russia and...if they come to power we will
be far from exchanging open letters."
Giancarlo Politi takes the side of the
Russians and begins his letter with: "Art
is emerging from its habitual context, but
Olivier Zahm & Co. (authors of the first
letter) appear not to have noticed. They
are erecting stockades to prevent the
horses from bolting, and searching for a
redefinition of art according to their own
paradigm. Upstart commissars of the people,
or Robespierre in shorts, these young
marshals are dreaming of new wars hot or
cold." Whatever.
A Kcho sculpture of a boat is on the cover
of Flash Art. Inside there is a five-page
interview with the 25-year-old Cuban artist
by the magazine's news editor, Jen Budney.
Budney asks him, "Isn't your work in part
about a deluded socialist utopia? What will
happen when this deluded utopia turns into
a capitalistic reality?" To which Kcho
replies: "It is not about that so it is not
going to matter." Then Budney says "What
I'm getting at is a comparison with the
state of Russian art, which was more or
less devastated by the "freedom" of
perestroika...the artists there began
making work which merely reflected the
bitterness of their capitalist dream come
true. Is this a risk which Cuban artists
are running?" Kcho: "Well, what I want to
know is, what's going to happen to American
art when there isn't anymore AIDS, or when
the consumer lifestyle collapses, or when
there's not the same kind of necessity to
be angry about gender politics--when
artists don't need to deal with gender-
bending or androgny because it is no longer
an issue?"
On page 98, there is a four-page article by
Robert Thill about Marcel Broodthaers's
Section Publicite du Musee d'Art Moderne,
Department des Aigles. Broodthaers's widow
allowed the work, made in 1972 for
Documenta 5, to be reinstalled for the
first time since the artist's death in
1976. Broodthaers, a Belgian and arguably
the first Institutional Critique artist,
spent four years near the end of his life
working on a fictional Museum of Eagles,
of which the Publicity Section was the
final phase. Thill says that the eagle
museum project consists of "objects of
every imaginable type, including painting,
packaging design and taxidermy, that were
borrowed from international galleries,
museums and private collections. Each
object featured an image of an eagle in its
design." Broodthaers organized the objects
haphazardly and without regard to ordinary
museological practice. In the Publicity
Section, Broodthaers exhibited printed
reproductions, documentation from lending
institutions, and photographs of his
installation. Thill says that "Through
emphasis on reproduction...the continuative
aspect of this project...was an accurate
allegory of a work of art inevitably
becoming an advertisement for itself,
thereby publicizing the artist, the gallery
or the museum."
The first article in Artforum, on page 11,
is a vicious pan by Jeff Weinstein of the I
Shot Andy Warhol movie. He says that the
film's portrayal of the Factory "goes on
and on without a shred of wit or acid
reflexiveness" and that "even Paul
Morrissey could make a better one." The
second article, on page 13, is a review by
Bruce Hainley of two Velvet Underground
books, a Velvet Underground box-set and the
Nico Icon movie, which he says is really
good: "Nico's talent was to illuminate the
maelstrom within stillness and absence. She
confirmed the aristocracy of being bad:
nearing a customs check, Nico would be
putting heroin up her ass." On the next
page there is a paragraph about Nusrat
Fateh Ali Khan, a Pakistani singer whose
songs, Joel Segel points out, are used by
Hollywood producers to haunting effect for
death scenes; the crucifixion of Willem
Dafoe in Last Temptation of Christ, and
Sean Penn's execution in Dead Man Walking.
On page 17 is the same ad that was in Art
in America for Mary Boone's Ross Bleckner
show, with a photo of the exterior of her
new (Art Deco) building on Fifth Avenue.
On page 25, there is a piece by Brian
D'Amato called "Game Show," which is
nominally about the Abstraction in the 20th
Century exhibition at the Guggenheim, but
actually about "abstract" computer games
like Tetris, Tempest and Endorfun. D'Amato
thinks that the games look like Mel Bochner
paintings. He says of the Guggenheim show,
"by the top of the spiral, the
nonrepresentational strategies
deployed...begin to feel as exhausted as
your legs," and ends his article with:
"what work carries abstraction's torch
further up the [Guggenheim's] ramp? Video
stress-relievers may be the best hope out
there." Facing this, on page 27, is an
advertisement for a Willem de Kooning
sculpture show at Matthew Marks' gallery on
West 22nd Street. The ad is a photograph of
a giant bronze in a outdoor setting. This
writer heard gossip to the effect that the
sculptures were fabricated by scaling-up
palm-size clay bits formed by the aged
painter himself. We do not think this is
true, however. On page 30, DJ Spooky is
listed in an ad for a show called
"evolution of an image" at the State
Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
On page 65, the artists Liz and Val have a
quarter page ad for themselves. It has five
little drawings of faces that look like
they are painted with a Q-tip. The drawing
was made on top of an announcement for an
art show--maybe an ad in Artforum? The
original ad is totally obscured by the
drawing; all that I can make out is "essays
by Jan Avjikos and Ronald Jones."
Then there is a four-page article by Jan
Avjikos on page 75 about the video
installation artist Diana Thater, whose
work is on the cover. The article begins,
"It's easy to feel abandoned if not
somewhat put off by Diana Thater's video
installations, to be left, that is, with
the uncomfortable feeling of having missed
the point." Avjikos says that "Thater's
work is unarguably aligned with the tenets
of structural film--the emphasis on real
time, the mixture of abstraction and
representation, and the interest in the
perceptual avenues opened up by cinematic
space."
On page 85 is a two-page story by Ralph
Rugoff about a show curated by Jeffrey
Vallance at a pewter clown statuette
factory near Las Vegas called Ron Lee's
World of Clowns, one of a series of
exhibitions curated by Vallance in the Las
Vegas area at locations like the Liberace
Museum, the Magic and Movie Hall of Fame,
and the Debbie Reynolds Casino-Museum. The
exhibitions, which usually only last for a
weekend, have included the artwork of
Vallance, Jim Shaw, Terry Allen, the Rev.
and Mrs. Ethan Acres and Renee Petropolous,
among others. Rugoff says of the shows that
"Busloads of unsuspecting tourists visit,
but few travelers from the art world. Las
Vegas, after all, doesn't occupy much of a
place on the contemporary - art map. But one
of the "morals" of Vallance's adventures in
curating is that art can exist outside the
normal channels and existing frequencies.
Indeed, with their inspiring certainty, his
exhibitions lead you to wonder how art can
survive anywhere else."
On page 87 is another article about the
Broodthaers show at Marian Goodman, this
one by George Baker. He quotes a
Broodthaers text that was part of the
"Section Publicité" installation at the
gallery: "To the extent that art had
entered the realm of advertising and the
media, determining the techniques of its
images and its messages, advertising and
the media had entered the work of art,
circumscribing the latter's incessant
mediation through catalogues, exhibition
announcements and the rise of glossy art
magazines. Under these circumstances, can
we still think of culture as having any
importance? In my opinion all the more so,
when it succeeds to incorporate within its
own frame of reference a theory that
enables you to defend yourself against the
images and the texts that are circulated by
the media and by publicity that determine
our rules of conduct and our ideology."
At the end of his piece Baker reproaches
contemporary artists, particularly those
whose work, "so nonsensically, so
uncomfortably, but so perfectly [is]
grouped under the label `neo-Conceptual
art'." "Just as Conceptual art loosened the
shackles of traditional artistic forms only
to feel empowered to rise to ever higher
artistic glories, proclaiming itself
transcendent over the older contradictions
that had plagued the esthetic project,"
Baker writes, "so too has much recent
practice dissolved traditional artistic
forms only to openly recuperate fixed
meanings, reactionary concepts of
unremediated beauty, and esthetic aura." He
names four young artists who he says are
taking up the legacy of visual pedagogy:
Mark Dion, Christian Philipp Müller, Andrea
Fraser and Renee Green. He says that their
projects "share a concern with preserving
the critical potential of the institutional
spaces of art--they seek to retain the
capability of museums and galleries to
transmit information and promote
pedagogical projects."
Frieze has an article on page 32 by David
A. Greene called "Who's Who?" promoting
anonymity in the art world. His first
example is Duchamp's urinal sculpture, and
his second the Guerrilla Girls. He says
that "visual art is notorious among
intellectual and creative disciplines as a
place where, frequently, the more
successful and established an artist
becomes, the worse his or her art gets.
Quick--name an artist you think deserves a
lifetime achievement award." And he draws
from this the conclusion that "anonymity in
art should be the vigorous pursuit of those
popular and comfortable artists who have
reached a plateau of success...constancy as
a virtue in art is a self-perpetuating and
self-defeating myth." He also says that
while in America being anonymous is the
"purview of criminals and cowards" and that
"full disclosure is encouraged as a
national virtue" it is still acceptable in
other creative fields, like writing or
music, to work under a pseudonym "as a way
of trying out new or different material."
He writes that for visual artists "to
tenaciously cling to a salable style is
understandable," and then continues, "but
if art is going to continue to bill itself
as something intellectually and ethically
superior to other forms of popular culture,
it should start acting like it."
There is a two-page article by Mark Sladen
on page 50 about a photo-essay book by a
young photographer named Richard Billingham
called "Ray's a Laugh." The project is a
documentary of his father, Ray, who is an
alcoholic. Accompanied by a reproduction of
a color photo of Ray with a bottle of
booze, where it looks like he is falling
off a chair, the article says that the
photos "teem with emotional chaos and
physical squalor."
On page 52 is an article called "Survival
Kit; Stuart Morgan Visits the Chris Burden
Retrospective at the MAK, Vienna." Morgan
has to explain why Burden's large,
expensive `80s sculptures are as important
as his `70s performance work. The page
facing the beginning of the article is a
black-and-white photo of Burden holding two
live electrical wires to his bare chest,
sparks shooting everywhere. Morgan starts
the article by describing a dozen of
Burden's early performances, from being
shot in the arm to being nailed to the top
of a Volkswagen, from living in a tiny
locker for five days without food to lying
under a tarpaulin on a freeway. After
describing the performances, Morgan tries
to connect them to the later work in the
retrospective, saying that Burden's project
has evolved from re-examinations of the
possibilities of the individual into
depictions of "civilization at the end of
it's tether." Morgan talks about later
works like Pizza City (1991), toys and
model buildings from railroad sets arranged
on 20 wedge-shaped tables, and Medusa's
Head (1990), "a rough sphere 14 feet in
diameter, made of rocks, concrete, steel,
and covered with model trains, a glimpse of
dystopia as petrifying as Medusa's gaze
itself." Morgan also describes All the
Submarines of the United States of America
(1987), which is made from hundreds of
models of submarines, and Tower of Power
(1985), which is $1 million worth of (fake)
gold surrounded by tiny stick figures
looking at it. He says that "in retrospect,
it seems, [Burden's] performances were not
only rehearsals for the worst that is yet
to come but also a recipe for coping with
any eventuality...patience, meditation, or
simply the ability to endure will be
crucial, while first-hand experience of
starvation and torture may certainly prove
beneficial."
Patterson Beckwith is an artist who lives
and works in New York.
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