TIME Magazine
Art Vent Letting the Fresh Air In
April 9, 2012
I just finished writing my review for Art in America of the Kehinde Wiley exhibition at the Jewish Museum, The World Stage: Israel (to be published sometime during the run of the show, which is on through July 29th). I’ve been interested in Wiley’s work for some time, and in 2008, commissioned from him a portrait of Obama for the cover of TIME which, sadly, never ran.
However what I love about this exhibition is the totality of the experience: the paintings in the context of Wiley’s selection of examples of antique papercuts and textiles from the museum’s collection, and the grand, historic Fifth Avenue mansion that houses it. I began to think about how frustrated I’ve become with the white-box gallery format, so sterile and one-dimensional it rarely shows art to advantage—like staging a fashion show in a hospital. However, uncharacteristically, I don’t have an answer to the problem. Most “designed” museum exhibitions are even worse. Like Jorge Pardo’s installation of Pre-Columbian art at LACMA, they always seem to be in competition with the art they’re showcasing. The Tod Williams and Billy Tsien design for the 2008 Louise Nevelson show, again at the Jewish Museum, stands out as the best I’ve seen. Probably I’ve never gotten over seeing a stunning Pop Art show, many years ago, in the baroque multi-balconied atrium of the Palazzo Grassiin Venice (including a 20-foot high Warhol Mao), where the contrast and interplay of old and new showed both to exciting advantage. That’s what happens here as Wiley’s hip-hop sensibility is set off against the cased antiques and the wood-paneled opulence of the museum’s interior.
Photos: Bradford Robotham/The Jewish Museum.
Doing my research I read “The Diaspora is Remixed,” Martha Schwendener’s review in The New York Times. As I remember, she’s written other pieces that didn’t raise my hackles (or you would have heard about it!). This one, however, is marked with surprising vitriol, as if there’s a subtext we’re not getting.
….the show raises some difficult questions. For instance, what is the position of the Ethiopian Jew in Israeli society? The gallery installation gives the impression of Jewish culture as a seamless visual narrative, slipping faultlessly from old Europe to modern-day Tel Aviv. It also posits, particularly in a video accompanying the paintings, Israel as a haven for persecuted Ethiopian Jews.
First, I question if it’s fair to critique an artist on the basis of the success or failure of his presumed intention, rather than on the work itself. Secondly, what is it about the “gallery installation” that gives the impression of Jewish culture as a seamless visual narrative? The fact that Wiley’s paintings are shown alongside works from the museum’s collection? If that’s what Schwendener is referring to, my understanding is that the antique objects are part of the exhibition because Wiley was inspired by such patterns and it provided an unusual opportunity for the museum to display them. To see it as an attempt to rewrite history is a stretch worthy of Fox News.
Also, in the video where Wiley’s subjects talk about their lives in Israel, it’s about not being fully accepted. As for Israel being a “haven,” maybe it is, all things being relative. Perhaps being discriminated against is better than being persecuted.
By not mentioning the others, Schwendener gives the impression that Wiley has focused solely on Ethiopian Jews, when they’re only a third of his subjects. The rest are dark-skinned native-born Israelis and Arab Israelis—who, no one can say, have had an easy time of it. On the hand-carved frames Wiley designed for the Arab Israelis, inscribed in Hebrew, is Rodney King’s famous cry, “Why can’t we all get along?” The point made in the video is that hip-hop and reggae have brought these spurned groups together; the music scene is the “haven” where all are accepted.
Another question is why Mr. Wiley’s work focuses solely on young men, when many of the textiles on view were made by women, and, as the catalog informs us, one of the best-known Israelis of Ethiopian descent is a female singer named Hagit Yaso, who won last year’s edition of an Israeli show similar to “American Idol.”
My answer to that, which is the only answer to why any artist does anything, is because he wants to. Why didn’t de Kooning paint men? Because he didn’t want to. (Has anyone even asked that question?) Are we obligated to be equal-opportunity artists, presenting society as society would prefer? However if it must be discussed, Wiley has explained that his initial impulse came from having seen, in his childhood, portraits in museums of men who didn’t look like him—which could have little to do with painting women, regardless of the fact that….
Part of the answer is that Mr. Wiley has generally painted preening young men, and there is a strong homoerotic element in his work that is glossed over here.
Gasp, Wiley is gay! I don’t know who’s glossing it over, since he’s hardly in the closet. Is it mandatory to discuss in depth an artist’s sexual orientation at every turn? (Or rather a “gay” artist’s orientation, since the same does not apply to straight artists.) Should the Jewish Museum, in their promotional material, be faulted for not making a bigger deal of it?
And finally….
Just as music critics have complained of hip-hop’s becoming a corporatized global commodity, Mr. Wiley can be accused of using it to neutralize differences and difficulties….And it is those very difficulties that we rely on art to broach.
[This when, a few paragraphs back, she writes, “the show raises some difficult questions.”]
Regardless, I never thought art had a responsibility (to whom?) to broach differences and difficulties. (I’m becoming more and more grateful that I’m an abstract painter.) Further, by highlighting the “disenfranchised” (Schwendener’s word, BTW) in a way that enables them to be seen and empowered as individuals, it would seem Wiley is doing just that. It’s not Wiley who is somehow using hip-hop to “neutralize”—i.e. make it seem as if differences don’t exist. His work celebrates a vibrant global community that does not recognize racial distinctions thereby, quite literally, neutralizing the differences—which can only be a good thing.
Everything Schwendener criticizes Wiley for avoiding, he seems to have provoked her into discussing. In other words, his art has made her think about and explore the very issues she is critiquing him for lacking—by her own criteria, Wiley has succeeded!
It seems that unless black artists approach their subject matter in a thoroughly predictable, heavy-handed and didactic manner, they’re not doing their job, are not “political” enough—and apparently poor Wiley has the double burden of not being gay enough either.
A gay black artist—especially one who gets involved with anything having to do with Israel—just can’t do anything right.
Note: The rumor that Wiley himself does not actually paint his paintings, that they’re farmed out to workers in China, is perpetuated by Schwendener when she says that they look “factory-produced.” In the interest of thoroughness, I called his gallery, who told me that although Wiley does, like many artists, have assistants who may help with the intricate backgrounds, but he alone is responsible for the central figures. Not that I care, one way or the other. They are beautifully painted and the marginally mass-produced look relates to the intention, like images on postage stamps, posters depicting African potentates—or covers of TIME Magazine. More about his process here.
Comments (7)
December 15, 2011
By now everyone knows that TIME’s Person of the Year for 2011 is “The Protester” and that Shepard Fairey created the cover. Those who’ve followed this blog for a while know that I worked as a consultant for TIME on the covers for over 20 years, and introduced Fairey to TIME in 2007, when he created an image of Putin that ran on the inside (see post here). While the Person of the Year, along with the magazine itself, no longer has much cachet, I’m still glad TIME made a good call (over, say, Kate Middleton for getting married or Steve Jobs for dying) as it represents formal recognition that this is a massive, worldwide movement—unlike the New York Times, which is still waiting for Occupy to go away so no one will notice that they haven’t been covering it.
I admire Shepard Fairey and feel his success is deserved; I have absolutely no patience with the kneejerk reaction that commercial success = sellout (Coldplay remains a favorite, and I’m glad Radiohead left their major label so they, too, don’t have to be a guilty pleasure). However, if I still worked for TIME, I wouldn’t have recommended Fairey for this cover simply because the protests represent the new and unknown, where his now-ubiquitous style is associated with the known, the past, and is simply too sleek and realized (again, nothing wrong with that per se) to represent the nascent, unformed and gritty surge that is this movement. If they’d asked, I would have looked for the street artist who is now what Fairey was in 2007. It's no one I could name off the top of my head. Because a TIME cover has very specific requirements, that would require the research that was once my job. I might, however, start here:
Although it’s had the Internet on fire for weeks and was a headline today in Britain’s Guardian, another event the New York Times (along with the rest of the mainstream media) hasn’t covered is the hasty passing—ironically on 220th anniversary of the Bill of Rights—of the latest iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act, which many feel compromises our most basic American rights to due process. But you can learn about it on the Huffington Post, and if you need a laugh to mitigate the fright, on The Daily Show.
Meanwhile, in the art world, I received a press release today announcing that Gagosian will be showing ALL of Damien Hirst’s dot paintings (they call them “spot” paintings) in ALL of the eleven Gagosian Galleries throughout the world—Paris, Athens, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, Rome and New York. Now there’s an event to stay home for. My opinion as a critic is, if you’ve seen one dot painting, you’ve seen them all. You can quote me.
Banksy's take on Hirst's dot paintings.
Banksy's take on Hirst's dot paintings.
November 20, 2009
From the Web, copyright may apply.Oh my, it’s a rather gloomy time for Art Vent. Today I was saddened to read that Jeanne-Claude died, and I’m sad for Christo; I’ve never known a couple more intertwined. It seems significant to me, and was significant for them, that they were born on the same day, same year. They met through Jeanne-Claude’s mother, for whom Christo was a kind of art project. She commissioned him to paint her portrait and even live in their Paris home for a time, never dreaming that this poor Bulgarian immigrant and her debutante daughter—meant for better things—would take up with each other. They were my neighbors in SoHo, but I really got to know them when we worked together on a cover for TIME’s Planet of the Year, 1989. Ever after we greeted each other as friends; they came to my opening at Gary Snyder in 2002, and invited me to the openings of all their events. Below is an excerpt from a paper I gave on the occasion of The Gates at a symposium presented by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) at the Guggenheim. Sadly the postcard, which was tacked to the bulletin board in my former loft in SoHo—the only one I ever got with such an ego-gratifying message—fell through a crack behind the built-in desk, never to be seen again.
My first contact with Christo and Jeanne-Claude was In 1989 when, as fine art consultant to TIME Magazine, I proposed commissioning Christo to do the cover of a special issue about the state of the environment: “The Planet of the Year: The Endangered Earth.”
But when I met with them, Christo said, “The idea is banal.”
Jeanne-Claude said, “Christo doesn’t do commissions.”
My deadline was the next Wednesday. “If you change your mind,” I told them, “you can call me at home any time.”
Jeanne-Claude called me at 7:00 Tuesday night. “Christo has an idea.”
The next morning, the art director, Rudy Hoglund, and I went to the studio, where Christo presented his plan to wrap a globe of the earth in semi-transparent plastic, tie it with twine, and photograph it on the sand at Jones Beach with the sun rising behind it. It was the perfect image: the earth bound and enshrouded in a claustrophobic film, with the sunrise a sign of optimism.
Leaving the studio we were walking on air, until Rudy asked me what I’d negotiated about the copyright.
Copyright? It was my first commission for TIME, and I had to admit I hadn’t considered it.
Hearing this, Rudy's face turned bright red and he started stomping up Broadway.
I spent the next weekend on the phone between Jeanne-Claude and TIME’s lawyer, working out the details of a contract that became TIME’s standard agreement with fine artists. In the process I learned a lot about copyright and also about the way Christo and Jeanne-Claude work.
I learned about their openness to possibility. Their decision to refuse all commissions was one that served them, but it didn’t blind them to the one situation that might be different.
I was impressed by their willingness to negotiate a solution that would maintain their integrity in the project without impeding it. It was a remarkable exercise in both flexibility and inflexibility that comes, not from ego, but from recognition of what’s really important.
After it was over, I received a post card that read simply “You were right,” signed: Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
So although the TIME Magazine cover was their smallest public project, it was also the one that reached the most people. And according to newsstand sales, one of the most popular TIME ever ran.
Their work illustrates that even with a minimalist, non-representational approach, high art need not be elite, that artistic rigor and public engagement can indeed go hand in hand. There’s a distinction to be made between work that seeks to be popular by pandering to existing perceptions of what art is, and art that transcends those expectations to create an event that becomes a vehicle for social and esthetic advancement.
____________________________
Recommended:
Five Films about Christo and Jeanne-Claude by Maysles Films--after watching these unusually candid films you will feel as if they are your old, intimate friends.
Also Christo and Jeanne-Claude, A Biography by Bert Chernow.
August 15, 2009
The other day, thrilling to the new Silversun Pickups while driving on the Mass Pike to Boston, I found myself wishing that I could get the same feeling from art—the exhilaration, the physical surge in the chest—that happens when I hear great music. Roberto and I were on our way to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) to finally catch Shepard Fairey’s show, “Supply and Demand,” before its closing tomorrow. My attempts to attend the winter opening were foiled by the weather, the following months were filled with travel and constant precipitation, so now—rain or no rain—we were making the two–hour drive.
What did I expect? Well I was a big fan of Shepard Fairey’s graphic work, and I’ve always been captivated by the way graffiti and street art in general can add (as in this photo I recently took in Reykjavik) a layer of poetry to the gritty urban landscape.
What did I expect? Well I was a big fan of Shepard Fairey’s graphic work, and I’ve always been captivated by the way graffiti and street art in general can add (as in this photo I recently took in Reykjavik) a layer of poetry to the gritty urban landscape.
As consultant, I was enamored enough to suggest Fairey to TIME for the 2007 “Person of the Year” cover of Putin (it ultimately ran on the inside, and he did a new image of Obama for 2008’s cover) and loved his iconic Obama poster, the way it captured the spirit of the man, the campaign and the times, and how simply beautiful it was. I also admired Fairey’s philosophy—in the ridiculous brouhaha over his appropriation of the AP image of Obama (exacerbated by a news media that insists on reproducing the AP photograph not as it originally appeared but as Fairey cropped it) hardly anyone has pointed out that Fairey never intended the image as a money-maker, but made it available for free on his Web site.
However I’d also read Peter Schjeldahl’s New Yorker review, where he described the work in the show as “formulaic,” “slick and resistible,” and Christopher Knight’s review in the LA Times that talked about Fairey’s “limited pictorial vocabulary.”
Therefore I was not prepared for Art with a capital A, or a rush similar to the one I’d just gotten from the Silversun Pickups—or to find that most everyone I talked to afterwards who’d seen the show shared my enthusiasm, including a museum administrator who put it in the top five of museum shows she’s seen…ever.
It was gorgeous.
Photographs cannot reproduce the nuance, depth and complexity of Fairey’s surfaces. Clearly his inspiration comes from the street—the way peeling posters can reveal chance fragments from earlier ones, or how signs painted on the sides of buildings often wear away to expose a jumble of previous messages—yet the result is elegant and sophisticated, as well as soft and sensual. Further, Fairey wrests all this texture and nuance from what every artist knows is the most hard-edged and unforgiving of media: silkscreen.
What I want from art is that perfect marriage of concept and execution, both so fully developed that, as viewers, we are aware of neither, but powerfully in the experience. Yet I hardly ever find it—so much of what is offered seems half-realized, as if the artist is afraid to take a stand, afraid to actually make something, afraid to commit him/her self fully to an image, an object. Execution is either overdone relative to the flimsiness of the idea, or too casually rendered, as if the idea in itself should be enough. I want to see work that holds up from afar but gives me something to look at up close. I want to see art that looks as if the artist cares.
Packed with complexity and contradiction as well as humor, Fairey’s work does all these things. We stay with his messages about money, power and war because they are embedded in a richness of visual detail, the sumptuous mélange of influences (Russian Constructivism, Middle Eastern art, Pop Art, official engravings such as paper money and stamps, advertising, to name a few) that adds up to his very singular style.
It felt like a feast.Afterwards we gave the permanent collection a run-through, but following Fairey everything seemed tepid and flat. Then, after a delicious lunch on the windy outdoor terrace overlooking the Charles, we went through the exhibition again. I attempted to get a press kit, images for this blog and to present for reviews, and to find out if the show is traveling, but was told that the administrative, curatorial and press staff were all on vacation that Thursday afternoon and photographs, even by press, were prohibited. (Photography prohibited? In a Shepard Fairey exhibition? )
We’d intended to augment our Boston visit with a stop at the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum and some fabulous seafood dinner, but decided instead to just get back in the car and drive home.
We were full.
All Shepard Fairey images borrowed from the Web, by necessity.---
Silverson Pickups' "Panic Switch"
February 6, 2009
Christmas lights, Great Barrington, MA, December 2008"What the cynics fail to understand, is that the ground has shifted beneath them."--President Obama's inaugural address.
I started writing this a month ago, but was so bored I didn't finish, because it's just too boring to write about being bored. But truly, since returning from Berlin in November, I've not been able to get interested in art, which is a problem considering that it's not only my field, but too late in life to take up another profession--such as plumbing or neurobiology, or become a concert pianist after all. However either out of habit or false hope, I've continued to trudge around to museums and galleries looking for inspiration, not just to write about, but for my studio practice, which is in need of a reboot.
What first set me on the road to ennui was Eleanor Antin, The King, 1972 (image from the Web)
Eleanor Antin, The Angel of Mercy (Florence Nightingale), Myself-1854, 1977 (Image from the Web)After that it was the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, a museum I want desperately to like, whose new building (and admission fee—$12 per person plus $11 or more for parking) sets off all kinds of expectations that, so far, have not been met by what’s inside. This time the main show was Tara Donovan, who makes installations with mass-produced disposable objects, such as plastic cups and toothpicks. I can see how the idea might be interesting (“Ooh, Honey, did you realize this is made of plastic straws?”) to someone who hasn’t taught a gazillion graduate students. In my experience, at least one third of the graduate population has latched onto similar ideas as a way of getting out of actually making something without having to spend much money or travel farther than the nearest convenience store (I wish I had a dollar for every piece of art I’ve seen made of black plastic garbage bags). Then there’s the text that suggests that because Donovan has figured out a way to make a cube out of metal sewing pins, she’s part of a lineage that includes Donald Judd—with whom she has about as much in common as Santa Claus.
Which brings me to one of my favorite subjects: wall text (some of my readers may already be aware of my promise to abolish it, along with artist statements, when I’m king). I’m clueless as to why such a small museum would give over any space to a permanent collection, but if they do, they’d better make sure it stands up to multiple viewings. This one threatens to become a Saatchi-esque time capsule, with texts that read like exercises one might be required to write in curator school. This, for instance, next to a painting that appears equally academically-driven:
Untitled continues Lucy McKenzie's exploration of latent meanings in design styles, expanding a detail from an advertising image she found on a condom vending machine of two robots amorously engaged. The scene is rendered in a Mondrian-esque style using geometric blocks and is rendered in faux marble to make the "ugly" scene appear more elegant. The work also includes two figures in shadow, as if in conversation while looking at the painting.
And back in New York, at the New Museum, while Elizabeth Peyton's paintings were charming, did they justify this curator's paean?
Where her earliest portraits can be compared to those of Dutch masters or Spanish painters in their quietude and focus on the aspect of a single subject in the center of the picture plane, beginning in the 2000s, Peyton's maturity as a painter is expressed in the increasing complexity of her compositions. In the history of portraiture, these later works can be more closely compared to figure compositions by Henri Matisse or Eduard Vuillard, both of whom integrated their human subjects with their static ones in dense surfaces of pattern and brilliant color.
But what finished me off was the Marlene Dumas painting exhibition at MoMA (through February 16th). As Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker:
She has been favored by a fashion for sensationalized moral seriousness which explains the recent prestige of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud and of younger masters of sardonic melancholy, including Luc Tuymans of Antwerp, and Neo Rauch of Leipzig. Is this taste a self-flagellating compunction of the spendthrift rich? Surely no one would paint pictures as aggressively uningratiating as those of Dumas unless she meant them.
Well, I don't care whether she means it or not, the "artist's intention" holds little interest for me, only the result--which here, despite Schjeldahl's rhapsody over Dumas's brushwork, is heavy-handed and depressing. I’m not opposed to so-called “serious” subject matter, but a little nuance would be nice. Interestingly, in that same New Yorker, David Denby reviews the film “Revolutionary Road,” and while finding it “honorably and brutally unnerving,” suggests that it “may suffer…from the illusion that pain and art are the same thing.” He could have been writing about Dumas.
After that I was sure I never wanted to see any more art ever again.
Later I began to think that my reaction had to do with the sense that the art I was seeing was looking old, because--in case you haven’t noticed--we’re in the midst of a great cultural shift. And unlike generations in the past who experienced the massive change that came with the invention of the printing press or the rise of the Industrial Revolution, we know it, can feel and see it. It’s fast, so fast that when I was working with the art director on TIME’s Person of the Year, he noted that if we had commissioned a portrait of Obama in October, it wouldn’t be the one we’d want to run in December. And the Tom Friedman piece of December 23rd that I wanted to link to when I started writing this, Time to Re-Boot America now feels as if it was penned a year ago rather than just a month or so.
It’s a time of purging, of getting rid of what doesn’t work and replacing it with…well we don’t know. But it’s inevitable that art will change with it, old systems will be replaced with new ones, and that which doesn’t deliver, will fail.
And while I don't have a crystal ball, I'll make some predictions just because this is my blog and I can. I believe that in the future (which, the way things are going, could be next week) we’re going to be less fascinated with human dysfunction (a la Dumas and Sherman) and seek more art that inspires us, has substance, puts us in awe of human capability. I hope that we’ll also figure out another way of experiencing art that doesn’t involve rectangular rooms, white walls, and track lighting. I want art to engage and involve, be more than this static thing that we look at while standing on our feet (although I dislike so-called “interactive art" even more), but has to do with its context and, like music, is woven into the fabric of our lives. I believe the era of the individual genius is waning, and instead collaborative ventures (between individuals as well as disciplines) will come to the forefront. That means chucking the our current system of teaching visual art, which has hardly changed for centuries (okay, so we teach “media arts” now, it’s still a separate department) and move toward one that’s integrated with science, mathematics, agriculture, history, and technology, as well as the other arts.
I also believe people will always be fascinated with painting.
With these thoughts in mind, I went to Chelsea yet again, and this time saw two exhibitions that looked not only far from tired, but fresh and new. The irony is that one was done by an 80-year-old, Robert Irwin, and the other by Fred Sandback who, were he still alive, would be in his mid-sixties. Both installations are serene, sure, engaging and beautiful. Oh, did I mention beauty? Well I believe in beauty, and think it’s a human need, as important as fresh air and water. It's definitely due for a comeback.
Installation view of Robert Irwin's Red Drawing White Drawing Black Painting, on view at PaceWildenstein, 545 West 22nd Street, NYC through February 28, 2009. Photo by G.R. Christmas/Courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York.
Installation view, Fred Sandback at David Zwirner, January-February 14, 2009. Photograph by Cathy Carver, Courtesy Zwirner & Worth.These images , however, hardly convey the experience of being there, which is why Irwin, in the early days, refused to have his work photographed.
And Shepard Fairey is, for sure, of his/our time. Creator of the now iconic image of Obama that became so important to the campaign—as symbolic of our decade as Robert Indiana's Love was to the 60’s—the attention given him now is well-deserved. I knew about Fairey’s work through my son, Matt, and last year suggested to TIME that they commission him to do a portrait of the 2007 Person of the Year, Vladimir Putin, which ran on the inside of the magazine:
Vladimir Putin by Shepard Fairey for TIME, 2007This year TIME invited Fairey to do another image of Obama (see video) for the cover, and it's every bit as strong as the first--and updated, more "now" than last year's poster. What I especially like about Fairey’s new fame--in this time of fallout from extreme greed--is that it stems from an image he gave away (which is why I think the current copyright flap won't hold water--as a picture-researcher friend, put it: "Since the poster/image took on a life of it's own, was 'used' by so many people without even Fairey's permission... how could one begin to determine a use fee?").
Barack Obama by Shepard Fairey for TIME, 2008And now the ICA in Boston (so critized above) is on its way to redeeming itself in my eyes by being smart enough to mount the first museum survey of Fairey's work, which opens tomorrow and runs through August 16th.