Miranda July’s “Eleven Heavy Things”: Too Much For Union Square?

While it’s better to love than not to love, and thus, it’s better to have public art than to have none at all, I’m wondering if Miranda July’s “11 Things” sculpture installation, which first appeared at the Venice Biennale, was installed  in the wrong New York City park. Since June, July’s whimsical sculptures — set up as pedastals or soapboxes or props upon which visitors can sit or stand and with insightful, telling intimate messages written across them — seem to go completely forgotten in this cynical stomping ground for world-weary Manhattanites or are treated like outdoor furniture for park dwellers. Look at what I mean:

Straw fedora hat-wearing guy is using the “This is my little girl. She is brave … ” pedastal as a coffee table to hold his stuff during his impromptu guitar-strumming session. Miranda told ArtInfo.com that kids would likely be the biggest benefactors of these objects, even though their messages can include adult jokes, but is Union Square, a non-toursity haven for hipsters making their way from downtown to uptown and the homeless, the right place for this? What about Central Park or Battery Park, which are brimming with out-of-towners, where people are in the mood for fun, for an experience? Union Square Park is where the strung-out collapse and the avid chess players set up shop. It just doesn’t seem like anyone’s paying attention to the art.

Though, here’s another picture that shows how the sculptures can thrive, when people engage with them, from Gothamist’s Flickr account (below). Maybe I was just there on an off day. Admittedly, it was 95 degrees in the shade.

Middle Eastern Artists Fight Back: “Barakat” at Stux Gallery

I visited the Chelsea galleries on opening night back in late mid-June (before I took a month-long break to move apartments and to travel to Germany) and this is the only exhibit I remember, Stux Gallery’s Barakat: The Gift. I’m pretty convinced that the measure of a successful art experience — whether a painting, film, play, etc. — is if it stays with you for  days afterward. Is it memorable? If yes, then it matters, and in my humble opinion, it is successful.

Anyway, I’m still thinking about Barakat and want to visit this show again. I have time. It’s, not coincidentally of course, running till September 11th.  Put together by Italian curator and critic Gaia Serena, the show includes nine Middle Eastern and African artists’ work that relates to the concept of “barakat,” which in Arabic means a blessed gift from God (though it can be a gift used in the wrong way, according to the show’s press release). Though the theme is open-ended, the resultant display deals heavily with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab diaspora, and the East-West culture and ideology clash.

The show includes mostly 2D work, paintings and photographs. Much of the art here deals very specifically with war imagery, including Moataz Nasr’s war scenes with Arabic writing on quilts  meant to mimic propaganda, Shadi Ghadirian’s photographs of a soldier’s clothes and tools (including boots, gas mask, and shattered artillery) wrapped in those symbolic red ribbons, and Turkish artist Baris Saribas’ paintings of planes dropping bombs in an abstract expressionist style.

One of my two favorites in the show is this image by photographer Sara Rahbar, one of many in a series devoted to flags worn as textiles:

The series is called “Love Arrived and How Red.”  I like how Rahbar brings a pop art sensibility — of combining a series of potent symbols and images — to photo portraiture. This startling combination of symbols — flag, wedding dress, mask — acknowledges the complicated identity of a Middle Eastern-American woman and the prejudices that each side of that equation are burdened by.

Also hauntingly compelling is the series by Iraqi artist (who now lives in Colorado) Halim Al-Kalim. His digitally enhanced photos are composites that fuse real with the surreal. Behold the plasticity, or the veneer, of the surface and easily digestible monochrome whiteness against the raw humanity of the eyes in this triptych, below, from “Witness from Baghdad”:

Peaceful and fearsome are these images. After reading more, I learned that the artist is invested in exploring opposing emotional realities, and that these faces — recycled in different ways in his recent works — represent his “inner consciousness” (according to a SaatchiGallery.com write-up on the artist).  The Iraqi-born artist had a firsthand experience with war. He opposed Saddam Hussein’s military regime during the first Gulf War and escaped to the countryside where he hid in a hole covered by rocks for three years. Local Bedouin villager women were his saving grace and helped him to survive. This harrowing journey shaped him as an artist — these haunting images are meditations on those experiences. Al-Kalim now lives in Colorado.

Activism Is More Fun With Art: Spoofed Subway Poster

We found this poster up at our B/C train station at 96th St. several weeks ago and had to take it home.  The MTA subway patrol men/guards would have taken it down shortly anyway. Who says guerilla street art is reserved for graffiti artists?

For those who don’t live in NYC: posters in this design/style/font are found throughout the MTA subway system. Rather than a computerized board or overheard announcement, these signs are the only indication you have that you’ll be waiting in vain for that C train to come or that no trains are going express (so it’ll take you 2 hours instead of 45 mins to get from Upper West Side, Manhattan to Park Slope, Brooklyn). And since the MTA is increasingly in debt, apparently over 300 million in the hole now (if you can begin to comprehend that), more and more services and trains will be cut in the coming days, so we’ll be seeing a lot more of these posters, the real ones. Sigh.

Overheard Conversation: At Marina Abramovic’s MoMA Exhibit

I’m starting a series of posts on conversations overheard at museum exhibits or in art galleries. They will always be ridiculous, I promise. Here’s one I just found in a notebook from when I attended the Marina Abramovic exhibit, The Artist Is Present,  opening weekend, on Sun. March 14.

woman #1: wearing fur vest, lacy tights, teased-out, long blond hair, in her 50s, thick Long Island accent
woman #2: in her 30s, wearing mostly black, long light brown hair, simple, has Eastern European accent
These women are strangers to each other.
#1: “Her apartment was featured in the Times magazine. It looked very pop-y, bright colors. I was surprised. Very cheerful.”

#2: “Oh.”

#1: “What are you getting out of this?
#2: “Oh, it’s a stranger looking into her eyes.”
#1: “I’m not sure what I’m getting out of it. … They said in the article that was a costume … I like how that dress has such a good fitting even when she’s sitting down. My husband hates when I wear a dress like that, so unflattering.”

R.I.P., Louise Bourgeois – Major Sculptor of 20th Cent & Feminist Icon

Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois in 1982 with Fillette (1968, latex over plaster)

What a life this lady had. At age 98, the French-born artist Louise Bourgeois has passed away from a heart attack. The artist is best known for her anthropomorphic, sexualized, Freudian-symbolic sculptures, and for standing strong as a female artist for decades of an art history marked mostly by men (and, inevitably as a feminist icon, even though she herself didn’t seem so comfortable with genderizing her work). Although the 2008 Guggenheim retrospective of her work would have happened even in her death, it was sort of perfect to have a survey of her work in the twilight of her life, in the city she lived in, while she was available to make visits and still hosting Sunday afternoon salons  for artists at her Chelsea townhouse.

If you ask me, the best place to see her work is at the DIA Beacon in Hudson Valley New York (about an hour north of the city), where a whole floor is devoted to her work, and this sculpture gets its own room, rightfully:

Her best quote ever, to The Washington Post in 1984, as noticed on The Greenwich Time this morning:

“I really want to worry people, to bother people. “They say they are bothered by the double genitalia in my new work. Well, I have been bothered by it my whole life. I once said to my children, ‘It’s only physiological, you know, the sex drive.’ That was a lie. It’s much more than that.”

Shepard Fairey Mural Becomes More Meaningful When Bombed

Last week I happened to walk by the Shepard Fairey mural  “May Day” to see that, after only being up for a few weeks, it had been graffitied to the nines. Bombed, as the kids say. Behold:

The mural, an extension of Fairey’s solo show at Deitch Projects’ last exhibit before it closes, has a mash-up of references — bullseyes (Jasper Johns nod?)/targets, American flags, the iconic OBEY-type profile, and the constructivist-socialist aesthetic that Fairey’s putting into such murals. But back to the bombing, as those kids say:   ironic or to be expected?  One wonders if Fairey finds this unnerving and disrespectful or is smiling about it somewhere, and perhaps he even sanctioned it somehow.  The day after I was there Gothamist reported that the wall was getting whitewashed and buffed, so maybe it’s un-tagged again. Perhaps in this post, I’ll keep a tally of the tagging episodes.

Better snaps can be found on the blog EV Grieve.
More info on the history of this wall can be found at the blog Vanishing New York.

The Play “Red” Shows Us The Rage Of Abstractionism and Rothko

Still from the play "Red," starring Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko.

Just had to mention the stunning Broadway play, “Red,” devoted to the high priest of abstract art. I saw the production on Mother’s Day with my mom and husband and, truly, it was one of the most captivating works of theater I’ve ever seen — for the performance and the ideas.  Though you don’t need to be fascinated by modern art to be enraptured by it. As theatergoers filed into the theater, Alfred Molina sat in a chair with his back to the audience. He would sit there for the next 20 minutes without moving. When he lit a “cigarette,” the play commenced. This subtly simple yet intense energy endured for the next 90 minutes.

Molina plays abstract expressionist Mark Rothko — yet another artist made even more famous and valuable by his death (in 1970 by suicide) — during the period when he was working on the biggest commission of its kind for an artist (the payment was $35,000), to paint a series of murals for the brand-new Four Seasons restaurant in the new (Mies van der Rohe-constructed) Seagram skyscraper. All set in Rothko’s studio, with a grand hanging contraption to showcase large-scale color field paintings, the set and premise are simple. All the action hinges on conversations, well, more like disagreements, between Rothko and his new assistant (Eddie Redmayne).

When Rothko asks the assistant what he sees  in a particular painting, and he answers simply “red,” the two get into a verbal battle over whether he really just saw red … Rothko says there is no such thing as simply red and lists a variety of shades … scarlet, crimson, sunset, berry, etc. The assistant talks of Pop artists and clearly believes that art with a more specific and literal meaning has more power because it can be accessible to the mainstream — he doesn’t entirely buy into Rothko’s romanticization of art, his claim that abstraction is purity and truth. (Though, it’s been widely reported that Rothkos have a profound effect on viewers – it’s not uncommon for one to be brought to tears while standing in front of one, feeling absorbed by its aura, overcome by its visceral effect.) Anyway, the assistant says, in so many words, that those are just colors. Though he dismisses the assistant as a boob in so many words, this clearly crushes Rothko and his whole raison d’etre, and his unraveling, and the play’s drama, begins …

So simple yet so profound is piece of theater in conveying a shift in thought, the passing of the guard from modern to postmodern, that shift in art history’s narrative, just as the ’60s were revving up, when the romance of abstraction — its escapism, simplicity, arrogance, individuality and elitism — was becoming overpowered by a sexier, fresher approach to painting … in the form of more politically and socially tuned-in artists more interested in putting a mirror up to the real world and all its foibles than dismissing and escaping from its vulgarities.

If you’re in New York this spring, “Red” is more than worth seeing.

Call for Artists: Commissions for NYC Subways

NYC-based artists, here’s your chance to be re-imbursed for all those train tickets! There’s this call for artists on MTA’s Arts In Transit webpage:

7 Line Extension Station, 34th Street-11th Avenue

MTA Arts for Transit seeks artists’ images of work to be considered for a commission at the extended 7 line station, located at 34th Street and 11th Avenue. Please download the Call for Artists brochure for submission guidelines and for more information about the project.

Submissions must be postmarked by Tuesday, June 1, 2010.

Arts For Transit: One Thing We Can’t Hate The MTA For Doing

photo by Joanne Hinkel; poster of subway mosiac by Andrea Dezso

Sometimes a subway train ride can feel like a tortuous exercise in trying to avoid eye contact with fellow passengers. Right? Well, despite all the services that the MTA has slashed to incense New Yorkers lately, there’s one thing they’ve added in recent months, a blissful visual distraction, that has put a smile on my face: posters representing public art commissioned for various subway stations. Most notably the one above –  “Under the Garden” by Andrea Dezso — makes me happy for its colorful, fantastical, optimistic and sweet translation of the underground travel experience as an enchanting adventure for diverse species of creatures and beings. (And Andrea is a friend, so that makes me smile too.) Since 2006, this utopian vision, the larger than life and original version, has graced the Bedford Park Blvd. Lehman College subway station in the Bronx (the #4 line).

Oh, MTA, I do appreciate your Arts For Transit program, which pays for subway station art installations and for the posters on the train, which apparently you’ve been putting up since 1991.  Really? Thank you, MTA, for the deviation from staring at the “1-800-Divorce” and bunyon surgery ads. What a novel idea! Put some art in the trains to look at instead! Could we just have some more of it, MTA? Oh, yeah, you just cut $400 million from you budget; I’m going to go ahead and guess that more art is not in the cards.

Stuck Inside of Apartment With Flu-Born Blues Again (And Laurie Hogin)

Home-bound for the past 10 days, thanks to a debilitating cold, I’ve not been able to see any of New York’s sights for the past two weeks. Been meaning to get to the New Museum’s Skin Fruit, curated by Jeff Koons, and to the Whitney Biennial, and to openings in Chelsea, even the Grateful Dead exhibit at the New York Historical Society on the Upper West Side. But my body wasn’t having any of that last week or weekend. And the only New York sounds I heard were the sirens and traffic that whiz by on my street outside, 96th St., a major crosstown thoroughfare. (Well, I still worked my 9-to-5, but that’s the New York way — one must be  industrious.)

So, what’s a sick girl to do for her art fix when she’s home-bound? Why, stare at the art she has in her apartment. So, I got real cozy with the below painting that my hub and I bought in 2006 in Chicago.  I could commiserate with this angry wild beast. I felt trapped. (I guess you could say we are “collectors” in a sense; for us this means rather than spending money on a new couch, we buy an artwork that tugs at our heartstrings and hope that the second-hand furniture and dumpster dive discoveries from yesteryear hold up).

Behold “NPR,” by Midwestern painting goddess Laurie Hogin:

“NPR” by Laurie Hogin, oil on panel, 2006

I first heard about Laurie Hogin, who is the chair of the art department at U-Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (last time I checked), while I worked for the Chicago art consultant Rena Sternberg in the spring of 2004. Some of Rena’s north-shore art collectors were interested in Hogin’s work, but ultimately thought it was too over the top, in so many words, too garish, too violent to live with. Though also terrified, I was mesmerized instantly. With the precision of Enlightenment-era science-inspired realism, of nearly perfect photographic detail, her style references so many movements — most notably the Northern European tradition of 18th century portraiture/still life, specifically Dutch. The technique and skill is painstakingly  vivid and hand-worked, which is a lovely thing to behold in the new millennium since the machines are taking over, even much of the art.

The same vivid decadence and rich rendering can be spotted in any Dutch 17th to 18th century painting — like in the below “Still Life With Lobster” by Pieter de Ring (c., sometime in the 17th cent.). Hogin has said that Dutch society and culture (as Amsterdam was a rich port and hub for trade and thus a thriving empire in the 17th century) influences her paintings. Moreover, she sees important parallels between that empire and America today (a groovy Salon.com article by Douglas Cruickshank in 2002 pursues this angle more) and this relates to the content of her paintings.

“Still Life With Lobster” by Pieter de Ring (c., sometime in the 17th cent.)

Compare de Ring’s still life with this by Hogin:

“Accounting for the Bubble: Market Still Life With Lay’s Marmot (Mania),” by Laurie Hogin, 2002.

Yeah, so, what about Hogin’s content? It’s thoughtful, angry, loaded with meaning, and activist at heart. I like that Hogin’s technique is exquisite and refined while the message is quite raw.

Hogin paints all kinds of postmodern allegorical mash-ups of creatures — from crocodiles to monkeys to birds to bunnies, and so on; they’re almost like zoological studies. “NPR” was one in a series of 24 paintings called Allegory of Psychodemographics: Twenty-Four Brands My Family Uses On A Typical Summer Day (2006), which we saw exhibited at Peter Miller Gallery in Chicago (the 24 brands are about 18″ x 12″ each) in 2006. Some other “brands,” or allegories, were “PBS,” “Colgate,” “Ambien,” “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter,” “Microsoft,” “Visa,” etc.

“NPR” has a microphone, appropriately, is painted in red, white, and blue — it’s a national enterprise this public radio thing, and this nearly human-like face is definitely yammering away about something, as Ira Glass and Teri Gross love to do. Each painting was a different allegorical rendering of this monkey genus. Hogin developed this visual language — of hyper-realized, fantastical, aggressive wildlife — to acknowledge the pollution and affect of man through technology, industry, politics, and culture on the natural world. These creatures, rendered to appear life-like though with unrealistic attributes represent the natural and artificial forces, the real and fabricated, the truth and un-truth that are at odds in our everyday life and that we are endlessly negotiating. I find the monkey in “NPR” to be horrifying and appealing at the same time, sweet in the eyes and nearly violent with its open mouth — it’s trying to sell itself and fight for itself, but I’m interested in what it has to say to me and believe I need it, or at least want it.

And so, I leave you with another Laurie Hogin painting (the image was downloaded from the artist’s website) –  “Satire Monkeys: U.S. Agricultural Policy”: