artist's diary



by Robert Goldman







"...aesthetic preconceptions stripped away"

--see Bruce Hainley's quite interesting 

piece on Rirkrit Tiravanija in the Feb. 

1996 Artforum.


In early Feb. I went to 580 Broadway, a 

building with a couple of young galleries 

and the slowest elevator in Lower 

Manhattan, to see a ten-minute performance 
 
by Michael Smith, one of New York's great 

comic video and performance artists (he 

performs in character as "Mike"). The room 

was small and so crowded that the audience 

was spilling out into the hallway.


Mike appears wearing boxer shorts and a 
 
leather patchwork vest. He begins by 

reading a come-on, a Publishers Clearing 

House-like letter that offers him the 

benefits of being nominated as "One of the 
 
Outstanding Young Men Of America"--for the 

payment of a mere $100. 


Mike--who's not a young man--decides to 

throw a party to celebrate his good 
 
fortune, and goes back to the era that was 

for him "party time." The intro of Disco 

Inferno by the Tramps repeats over and over 

as he tries to pull on a pair of ridiculous 
 
patchwork disco pants. Unfortunately, time 

has expanded his waistline to the point 
 
where it's impossible for him to zip up the 

fly. Undaunted, he discards this outfit for 

a baby-blue polyester leisure suit which he 

does manage to squeeze into. Appropriately 

attired, Mike starts practicing sexy, 

gyrating-hip dance moves. By this time 

audience-member Bob Nickas, the new editor 

of the Peter Halley-published magazine 

Index, is laughing his head off.


Dramatically, the room darkens. On a row of 

mirrored disco balls ranging from key-

chain-sized on up, Mike shines a focused 

flashlight beam that throws multi-colored 

reflections sweeping across the walls and 

ceiling. With the beat of Disco Inferno 

continuing to pulsate, he blows smoke from 

a puffing cigarette into the beam of light 

like a hokey smoke machine.


The lights come on again, and smoothly and 

subtly the mood and music changes. Snippets 

of In My Room by the Beach Boys and finally 

Warmth of the Sun, a ballad of lost love by 

Brian Wilson, cast a warm shadow. Michael 

Smith's well-timed, deadpan punch lines are 

hilarious--everybody's laughing the whole 

time. But when you think about it 

afterwards, you realize the performance was 

dealing with deep, personal themes--memory 

and nostalgia, like Proust, In Search of 

Lost Time. The show suddenly becomes sad 

and melancholic; from the very beginning 

Mike's search was futile. Even people who are 

too young to have experienced the disco '70s 

have become caught up in his nostalgic 

memory. 


Michael Smith: "Warmth of the Sun," a solo 

performance Jan. 18 and Feb. 8, 1996, in 

"Show and Tell," a performance series 

organized by Andrea Scott at Lauren 

Wittels, 580 Broadway, New York City.






Although I was unaware of it when I first 

went to her installation at David Zwirner 

this February, Diana Thater is a 

hot video artist who was included in the 

Whitney Biennial and featured in the New 

York Times, and who had curated a show at 

David Zwirner of new video from Los 

Angeles. Stepping into her installation 

"China," one is surrounded by video 

projections onto the tall walls of the 

gallery of images of two trained wolves, 

their handlers and six camera operators. 

When I first walked in I liked it and spent 

15 minutes figuring out what was going on.


Multiple images of the wolves circle the 

perimeter of the room. One sees them from 

the front, the back, from one side and the 

other. Sometimes the image of a wolf will 

walk from one projected frame into the 

next. The visual construction is like video 

Cubism. Surrounded, the viewer has stepped 

into the space the wolves and their 
 
handlers occupied during the shooting. The 

video projectors are beaming sometimes only 

one or two of their three colored 

headlights. At a certain point a sequence 

of projected single images flashes for a 

30th of a second, spinning around the room. 


"China" is beautiful in a simple way and a 

fun room to be in. It has a tricky 

perceptual construction that directly 

refers to Dan Graham and early videos of 

Joan Jonas's performances with mirrors.


Thater begins a text she has written on 

"China" with the phrase, "I wanna be your 

dog," that she attributes to art critic and 

painter Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, but that I 

know from the classic Richard Hell song. 
 
Dogs, Thater explains, have been bred from 

turncoat wolves. In fact, she leads us 

through a fascinating survey of wolf 

mythlolgy, from Little Red Riding Hood and 

werewolves to an Angela Carter story (about 

a Little Red Riding Hood character who 

doesn't get eaten by a wolf but becomes 

wolflike), Deleuze and Guattari, and Sam 

Fuller. If Thater claims this mythology for 

her piece, I don't see it. It's not a Sam 

Fuller movie, it's an ambient installation. 

Video flattens out the wolves.


I've been to Disneyland maybe 20 times. 

This piece is like a slowed-down surround-

sound attraction, but silent with pared 

movement and the same purpose: to put a 

spin on a fairytale or a myth. Just like I 

don't buy into Disney's spin, I'm not sure 

I buy into Thater's either.


Diana Thater: "Video Projections and 

Monitor Works," Feb. 10 - Mar. 16, 1996, 
 
at David Zwirner, 43 Greene Street, 

New York City.





In Nabokov's short story La Veneziana the 

character Simpson enters the space of the 

painting La Veneziana in his imagination. 

Then suddenly, "The enchantment had 

dissolved.... He was mired like a fly in 

honey--he gave a jerk and got stuck, 

feeling his blood and flesh and clothing 

turning into paint, growing into the 

varnish, drying on the canvas. He had 

become part of the painting...." Don't 
 
get stuck, readers.


Julian Schnabel is showing paintings from 

his cycle "The Conversion of St. Paolo 

Malfi" at PaceWildenstein's downtown space. 

They are very large, of course, and the 

most colorful of Julian's paintings I've 

seen. On stretched canvas he uses reds, 

blacks, greens, his custom-mixed Schnabel 
 
Violet, deep and bright Prussian blues, 

ubiquitious whites, as well as poured 

sheets of honey-colored yellowish alkyd 

resin.


Paolo Malfi is not a saint to be found in 

the annals of the Catholic Church, but 

rather a young, contemporary artist who was 

tragically killed by a car in the summer of 

1995. Francesco Clemente, in an essay in 

the exhibition catalogue, claims Paolo had 

a "secret illumination." There are three 

groups of works here spelled out in paint: 

the conversion, the saint and the final 

adieu. In typically outrageous fashion, 

Julian declares the apothesis, the 

deification, of Paolo Malfi, through his 

body of painting. Julian's intelligence is 

that he recognizes the sentimentalism of 

this position and defies it.


Could somebody please explain to me Pepe 

Karmel in the New York Times calling Julian 

"inept"? Is this starved for ideas or what? 

Karmel (and plenty of other Schnabel 

critics) don't bother to deal with what's 

there. There are plenty of things to 

criticize in Schnabel's paintings, but 

"inept?" Give me a break. What do you think 

dear reader? 


Julian Schnabel at PaceWildenstein, 

142 Greene Street, New York City,

and Sperone Westwater, 142 Greene Street,
 
New York City, Feb. 15 - Mar. 23, 1996.






I was walking up Greene when I ran into 

Steve Kaplan eating a tuna sandwich. 

Michael Smith once told me that eating on 

the street should be against the law, 

except for ice-cream cones. Kaplan said 

that he was on his way to Dennis Hopper's 

opening at Tony Shafrazi to gawk at 
 
supermodels. Tuna breath and all, I, of 
 
course, accompanied him.
 

As most people know, Dennis Hopper has been 

a serious photographer since the '60s. At 

Shafrazi he is showing large (75 x 50 in.) 

color photographs of sections of grafittied 

exterior walls, doors, a security gate, the 

surface of a street, and in one case a 

chromed industrial machine. The photos are 

mounted on unprimed canvas and framed in 

wide unpainted wood. The photos were taken 

in Venice (Italy), London, Prague, Los 

Angeles and Berlin. Many have a smoothed-

out Abstract Expressionist look to them, 

locating Dennis in the '50s as well as the 

'90s. Surfaces like these have such rich 

textures that one could go on forever 

picking out their details. 
 

The images Hopper has chosen include 

sprayed stencils of bounding red horses and 

a big curved band of yellow with some 

reddish pink sprayed lines on the choppy 

textured surface of a London street. Dennis 

Hopper photographs those places that have 

caught his eye.


Kaplan was right. The opening was well-

attended with actors, actresses, fashion 

models and painters--among the stars were 

Christopher Walken and Francesco Clemente 

as well as MTV chairman Tom Freston. The 

paparazzi were out and, in fact, Tony 

Shafrazi had hired a security guard to 

protect the celebs from any over-zealous 

ones. When I myself was photographed with 

Dennis he mentioned to me that he will 

never get used to paparazzi. Paul H-O and 

Cathy Lebowitz of New York's Art TV were 

there dutifully recording the event on 
 
video.


Dennis Hopper: "New Photographs" at Tony 

Shafrazi Gallery, 119 Wooster Street, 

New York City, Feb. 15 - Mar. 16, 1996.