|
the magazine rack
by Patterson Beckwith
September's Artforum has an article about
Jean-Michel Basquiat on page 19. In it,
David Rimanelli writes that the movie is
director Schnabel's "paean to Romantic
myths of creativity and alienation."
Rimanelli says that Schnabel has served up
a clumsy pastiche of art-house filmmaking,
and that the problems with the film are
"not on the level of storytelling, but on
the level of metaphor and interpretation."
He says that while the story is easy to
follow, it is hard to take the director's
predictably self-conscious artiness.
Rimanelli says that during the film's
depictions of supposed artistic rapture or
beauty, "Suddenly felt like I had
masochistically decided to catch a few
underground masterpieces at a Stan Brakhage
film festival at Anthology Film Archives."
On page 27, Stan Brakhage's name appears
again. In a one page article by Ben Ratliff
about a Japanese experimental musician
named Keiji Haino, whose improvised music
Ratliff describes as monotonous, long-
winded and compulsive, but important.
Ratliff says that Haino always wears
sunglasses and black clothing and that "his
electric guitar music is to heavy metal
what Stan Brakhage is to Hollywood." On the
next page are three more music reviews. One
is about a band that Sonic Youth's Steve
Shelley is in called Two Dollar Guitar, and
the other is a review of a book by the
British communist art-school collective and
punk band The Mekons. The band, which has
been together (with lots of personnel
changes) for nearly 20 years, has published
a catalogue called Mekons United, which
includes a CD, lyrics and excerpts from a
novel in progress, along with pseudonymous
letters discussing the Mekons' relationship
to leftist critical issues, and
reproductions of paintings by the band. In
her review Katherine Dieckmann says that
"everything in the catalogue reads like a
practical joke," and that "Truly, the
Mekons are most alive when they dance
lightly on heady concerns, when their
considerable humor accompanies the
dispensing of ideas."
"Hot List," the monthly column by Mark Van
de Walle about Websites, is about music-
related pages. He lists an Elvis site
called Disgraceland, a Jazz site called
Jazz Web and Heavy Metal: Blood, Death
and Satanic Forces of Evil
(http://www.kuai.se/~lanner/heavymetal),
which Van de Walle says focuses on his
"favorite metal subcultures, black metal
and death metal" which are respectively
"music for death-obsessed Satan lovers and
music for Satan-obsessed death lovers." He
also mentions something called The
Ultimate Band List
(http:american.recordings.com/WWWoM/ubl),
which he says lists thousands of bands and
has links to Websites about them.
"Proof that art can emanate from a big
corporation" is what Barney's advertising
director and art critic Glenn O'Brien says
about a Diesel jeans catalog in this
month's "Real Life Rock Top Ten" column,
which features a reproduction of a Diesel
print advertisement. The ad is a photograph
of six pigs sitting on chairs smoking
cigars and eating at a big table on which
there is a whole pig with an apple in its
mouth. "In keeping with big-board esthetic,
there are no credits or human names" on the
catalog, but he "happens to know that it
was ... commissioned by avant-garde Swiss
executives." He concludes by saying that it
makes him "think that even in my jobs
writing fortune cookies or care
instructions for lingerie I can be an
artist."
On page 35 there is a five-page "Letter
from Paris," with four short articles about
French art. The first, by Jean-Pierre
Criqui, is about Jean Dubuffet, Guy Debord
and Gerhard Richter. He says that Dubuffet
"regularly championed art--that is, the
individual and his subversive capacities--
as opposed to culture, which he viewed as
an extension of the State." Criqui includes
a quote from one of the last things the
artist wrote, where Dubuffet says that he
doesn't like museums, because they
indoctrinate people and make them
unreceptive to artworks presented
elsewhere, and he hates the word "art,"
because of "the praiseworthiness,
stuffiness and venerability" that people
attach to it, which he says is "contrary to
the spirit of licentious, if not criminal,
play from which art is inseparable...true
art," Dubuffet writes, "exists only where
the word art is not uttered, not yet
uttered." Criqui says that the attitude of
Guy Debord was similar to Dubuffet's, and
the next part of his article includes a
quote from something Debord wrote in the
last issue of the news bulletin of the
French Lettrist International. Writing
about artists who have become famous for
destroying art, he says, "With this
destruction brought to a successful
conclusion, its perpetrators find
themselves, of course, incapable of
realizing the smallest of their heralded
claims outside esthetic disciplines," and
that the lesson to be learned is that the
avant-gardes need to extend their
activities beyond the field of artistic
practice and "in relation to a complete
lifestyle." Criqui concludes--"for those
who persist in visiting places devoted to
contemporary art"--by contrasting the ideas
expressed by Dubuffet and Debord to those
in a Gerhard Richter exhibition in Nimes.
"More than ever Richter seems to be
allowing echoes of past painters to enter
his works...Courbet's landscapes, Degas'
monotypes...Fragonard, or Ingres. The polar
opposite of the kind of work advocated by
Dubuffet, the art here accepts itself as
such, calls itself by that name, and warmly
welcomes those memories proper to this
ancient appellation."
At the end of the "Letter from Paris,"
Jerome Sans wrote three paragraphs about a
recently inaugurated museum in a little
town in France called Blois, called the
Musee de l'Objet, the collection of which
is "devoted solely to the object as it appears in
20th-century art." The museum's collection,
described by Sans as "eclectic," includes
work by French Pop artists, Lettrists,
members of Fluxus, Conceptual artists and
the generation of English sculptors that
came of age in the `80s. "Many of the
artists either make or work with objects,"
Sans says, "others (Joseph Kosuth, Art and
Language, and so on) advocate their
complete erasure."
On page 50 there is a half-page
advertisement for the soundtrack of the
movie Basquiat, with songs by Public Image
Limited, David Bowie, PJ Harvey, Tripping
Daisy and the Toadies. On page 58, there is
a two-page spread with blurry pictures of
people wearing turbans and riding horses.
It is an ad taken out by Philip Morris
promoting their sponsorship of the Brooklyn
Academy of Music and in particular the
BAM's presentation of a horseback dance act
called Zingaro--"See man and horse combine
for a thrilling display of magical grace
and beauty," the ad copy says, "in a
spectacle of daredevil horsemanship, circus
artistry, and mysticism."
On the next page Liz-n-Val have a quarter-
page black-and-white ad with a drawing of
what looks like a big eyeball. At the
bottom it says "Liz-n-Val's something from
nothing art challenge." Beginning on page
71, there are five pages of advertising for
the SoHo arts festival, then the next page
is an ad for the SoHo Grand Hotel, which
was one of the festival's sponsors. On page
78 there are two long pieces about Jasper
Johns, on the occasion of his retrospective
at the Museum of Modern Art. One is by
Rosalind Krauss and the other by
Christopher Knight. On page 86 there is a
seven-page interview by Artforum editor
Jack Bankowsky with a filmmaker named
Christopher Munch. The article is about the
writer-director's second feature, Color of
a Brisk and Leaping Day, a black-and-white
movie about the coming of age of a second-
generation Chinese-American via his quest
to save a foundering railroad line (his
family had come to America to build the
railroad). Michael Stipe appears in the
movie playing "an introverted railroad man"
named Skeeter. One of the film stills
accompanying the interview shows the lead
singer of REM gazing out from behind a
train-car window, wearing a blue and white
striped engineer's hat and wire rim
glasses.
On page 97 is Artforum's monthly fashion
piece, "Flash Track," with photos by Steven
Klein of clothes by British designer
Alexander McQueen on one page and a text by
Bruce Hainley on the other. The photos show
a topless model wearing McQueen's "bumster"
pants, which have a really low waist that
reveals a few inches of the wearer's butt.
Hainley writes that McQueen is "fashion's
new naughtiest darling in the tradition of
Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano...[in
whose work] as much as is possible, fashion
conventions--easy class distinctions,
ugliness/beauty, fantasy/reality--are told
to go fuck themselves." At the beginning of
the reviews section at the back of the
magazine, there is a review of the recent
Damian Hirst show at Gagosian in SoHo by
David Rimanelli. He begins by quoting from
Anthony Haden-Guest's report on the opening
of the show in the New Yorker: "On opening
night, there were black velvet cords
attached to brass stanchions outside the
gallery. Among the guests were 40-plus
Britons, who had showed up to support
Hirst; most of them had flown over
specially, including the bassist from the
band Pink Floyd and a member of the
roasting-hot band Blur." Rimanelli writes
that this was not just an art opening, but
"an event, evocative of a dead era of
capitalist and media expansion within the
art world." Writing about the art in the
exhibition, Rimanelli says that rather than a
"major show, Hirst gave us a sort of mini-
mini-retrospective: a lot of samples of
past work, old work...which doesn't hold up
under renewed scrutiny. The spin
paintings," he continues, "are new, but
only for Hirst. Walter Robinson did the
same thing at Metro Pictures a decade ago."
The show also included a giant ashtray with
real butts, which Rimanelli says is "so
painfully obvious in its Oldenburgian
reference...that one sniffs out a bit of
contempt on Hirst's part for an audience
willing to swallow it." He quotes the
artist from an interview published in the
show's catalog, "I like the idea of rich
people buying my burnt-out fag ends."
Rimanelli identifies this as "a filmy gauze
of institutional critique comique," and
concludes, "One leaves Hirst's show with a
mounting sense of disappointment, and the
show's impact quickly fades."
The September issue of Art in America has
two articles about the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago. One article is
about their new building, which opened in
July. The second article is about their
inaugural exhibition, "Negotiating
Rapture," which explores spiritual themes
in art by 11 postwar artists--among them
Bill Viola, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt and
Anselm Keifer. On page 39, there is another
article about Julian Schnabel's Basquiat,
by Brooks Adams. Adams says that Basquiat's
a "quite wonderful film," but that Schnabel
made the movie about himself as much as
Basquiat. "Right from the outset Schnabel
the director and writer is cooking up a
rich iconographic brew of allusions,
associations and sources that subtly
reaffirm his own art...[the movie] can be
seen as a huge, lurking self portrait of
the artist--Schnabel, not Basquiat." A
scene where Warhol (David Bowie) and
Basquiat are making a collaborative
painting is presided over by a giant Warhol
portrait of Schnabel, and there is a
character in the film played by Gary Oldman
called Albert Milo who is supposed to be
Schnabel, and whose parents are played by
Schnabel's parents. Milo dispenses advice
to the young Basquiat like, "Put a little
more pink in that painting." The paintings
that Jeffrey Wright, who plays the artist,
works on in the film aren't actually
Basquiat's, because the estate refused to
let any of Basquiat's work in the film, and
Adams writes that they were actually made
by Schnabel and his assistants, and are
"remarkably successful evocations of that
artist's work," if more "Twomblyesque and
more monumental in scale than Basquiat's
actual paintings."
On page 51, there is a two-page review by
Eleanor Heartney of a show called
"Mediascape," an "exhibition of multimedia
and interactive art which inaugurates the
downtown Guggenheim's new partnership with
the telecommunications giant Deutsche
Telekom". Heartney says that the various
pieces and installations in the show (by
Nam June Paik, Jeffrey Shaw, Bill Viola,
Bruce Nauman and others) "are presented in
a manner that is uncritical and
celebratory, with occasional tribute to the
democratic potential of interactivity and
multimedia." Where interactivity is
concerned, however, Heartney doesn't see the
point--"The programmed randomness of the
computer and the arbitrary choices of the
viewer who pushes random buttons and clicks
a mouse yield remarkably similar
results...how interactive is it, really, if
human choice is just another means of
achieving random juxtapositions?" She says
that many of the works "share a deliberate
flight from constructed meaning, which is
normally one of the goals of human
creativity." Heartney continues,
"Interactivity is supposed to draw viewers
in, providing what is essentially an
illusion of participation through selection
from a set of predetermined choices...but
thus far few artists have figured out how
to turn the new possibilities into art
works which use the technology to say
something that could not be said any other
way."
On page 76, there is an eight-page article
by Trevor Fairbrother about the
collaborative paintings that Andy Warhol
and Jean-Michel Basquiat did together in
the mid-'80s. Fairbrother says that
although the two "certainly differed with
respect to age, race, class, sexuality and
artistic training," they both "perfected
outlandish personas for themselves
involving big hair: Warhol donned screwy
wigs and Basquiat fashioned Medusa dreads."
The article is full of revealing quotes
from the Warhol Diaries about the
collaboration and Warhol's relationship
with Basquiat, some of which Fairbrother
says are "ambivalent and sometimes racist."
Warhol says, "The paintings we're doing
together are much better when you can't
tell who did which parts," and worries that
Basquiat will "one day come up and say, "I
hate all these paintings, Rip them up.""
There are even two quotes from the diaries
about Basquiat's penis; "Jean-Michel is
half Haitian and he really does have the
biggest one.", and, "He was up front by the
phones with a big hard-on, like a baseball
bat in his pants." Fairbrother says that
bad reviews of a show of the collaborative
work were the reason the two did not work
together again. Fairbrother ends the
article by reviewing the coverage Basquiat
received in the New York Times, his
obituary and two art reviews, both by
Vivien Raynor--one for a solo show at Mary
Boone and another for the Warhol/Basquiat
paintings at Tony Shafrazi. Fairbrother
points out the use of the word "mascot" in
all three articles. Raynor wrote that
Basquiat "is a very promising painter, who
has a chance of becoming a good one, as
long as he can withstand the forces that
would make him an art-world mascot." The
obituary reported that Basquiat cooled his
relationship with Warhol "partly out of
fear that he was being viewed as Mr.
Warhol's mascot." "Thus, having broadcast
the mascot analogy at least twice before,"
Fairbrother writes, "the Times used it
again to end it's account of the 'ill-
starred' black artist."
Robert Taplin has a four-page article on
page 84 about Charles Le Dray's miniature
sculptural objects. This article is about
the same show that Jeff Weinstein wrote
about in last month's Freize. Le Dray began
his career sewing doll clothes and teddy
bears and has more recently been hand-
throwing and glazing thousands of tiny
porcelain pots, which Weinstein said
confirms Le Dray's belief in the humanity
of work, and that his art "is a textbook
affirmation of the survival of unalienated
labor." Taplin says that "the most
astonishing object in LeDray's exhibition
[is] "Milk and Honey (1994-96) a cabinet
containing approximately 2,000 tiny hand-
thrown pots, jars and vases of every
description, all glazed a shiny porcelain
white...the pots are miracles of dollhouse
craft [and] in their multiplicity they
evoke the infinite and the individual...the
microcosm and the macrocosm in confluence."
He continues to describe the rest of the
show: "There were other striking
pieces...though none quite such a tour de
force as Milk and Honey". One of those was
Mother of Pearl (1996), "a gorgeous little
carving of two guys happily
screwing...carved directly into the
interior of a large oyster shell." Taplin
writes that "Much fuss has been made over
the obsessive quality of LeDray's
production, which interests me not a whit.
What makes him more than just a highly
skilled maker of miniatures is the density
of personal and cultural anxieties and
elations that he puts into his best
work...public eroticism, the power of the
handmade in a machine-made world...a gothic
display of pain, guilt and anger, the
wonder of a cosmos without a providential
deity--all of these things are part of our
moment," and, Taplin says, "LeDray is
packing them into his objects."
On page 88, there is a six-page article by
Richard Kalina called "Measure for Measure"
about Mel Bochner's conceptual art as seen
in a retrospective at Yale University
called "Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible
1966-1973." The article has descriptions of
a dozen of his early conceptual works from
the exhibition, like To Count :
Intransitive, which is numbers written by
hand in order on a soaped-out window, and
Actual Size (Hand), a black-and-white
photograph of the artist's hand and arm
taken next to a line that has a 12-inch
segment marked and labeled on it. Kalina
explains: "He then had the photograph
enlarged so that the 12-inch line visible
in the photograph again measured 12 inches.
In this deadpan documentary work, Bochner
manipulated the photographic process to
give an image an accurate, one-to-one
relationship to reality, something
photography is naively assumed to establish
by itself." Another work Kalina writes
about is Language Is Not Transparent, which
consists of that phrase, as Kalina
describes it, "written in block letters
with white chalk on a patch of black paint.
The top and side edges of the painted area
are straight, but the bottom ends in ragged
brushstrokes and drips. In an overt
challenge to other language-based
conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner
or Art & Language," Kalina says, "who
approached language as a neutral (or
"transparent") medium, Language Is Not
Transparent demonstrates the truth of what
it states...it refutes the notion that
language is just a neutral conveyer of
information and ideas."
Patterson Beckwith is an artist who lives
and works in New York.
Be sure to go to your newsstand and buy resal-world copies
of Artforum and Art in America to display
on your coffee table
|
