"The Fair"

1. "... emergent art, a term that is indicative of changing times. In the 1980s, when people started to feel uncomfortable with the word avant-garde, they adopted the euphemism cutting edge. Now, with emergent art, anticipation of market potential replaces vanguard experiment." "Uncomfortable" is a euphemism. The various avant-garde made the "next," "new" "move" in an intellectually rich, disciplined, visual "discourse." Then market forces colluded with cynicism and simply bet on newness for newness' sake. Donald Kuspit argued a few years back that the only "move" left is to play one's own idiosyncrasy; i.e. artists no longer participate in a "discourse" or dialogue larger than themselves and their own doodlings. Or, said another way, wanting to participate in a discourse larger than oneself has now become some kind of idiosyncratic desire. I rather think this is the corroding effect of market capitalism on art rather than art's necessary endgame. The above comments pertain to the remaining highlights below as well. I refuse to give in to the depressing conclusions it would be easy to draw from the text's sustained attention to economic aspects of art -- I refuse!

2. "Unlike other industries, where buyers are anonymous and interchangeable, here artists' reputations are enhanced or contaminated by the people who own their work."

3. "More and more collectors are opening their own exhibition spaces. Their official reasons are philanthropic, but their covert motives have more to do with marketing. The work of living artists needs to be promoted to generate consensus."

4. "... there's still an ideological antithesis between art and commerce, even if the two are inextricably intertwined and even when artists make the market an overt or ironic part of their practice. In a world that has jettisoned craftsmanship as the dominant criterion by which to judge art, a higher premium is put on the character of the artist. If artists are seen to be creating art simply to cater to the market, it compromises their integrity and the market loses confidence in their work."

5. "The amount of art in the world is a bit depressing. The worst of it looks like art, but it's not. It is stuff cynically made for a certain kind of collector." -- Jeremy Deller.

Chelsea Galleries 1

I visited about ten galleries on my first trip to Chelsea this fall. I like Maya Lin's new work but thought the pieces were not displayed to their advantage: Too cramped. James Turrell's holograms were endlessly engaging and prompted reflections on the difference between the illusion of space and the creation of space. Enoc Perez' paintings of architectural landmarks were strangely haunting, and Mark Bradford's abstract "paintings" composed of found paper from discarded billboards and posters were terrific. But, to my mind, the best find was a small show of Vincent Fecteau's inexplicable papier-mache forms, suggesting some kind of pile-up of alien 3-D typographies or car parts run through a blender and re-assembled.

Chelsea Galleries 2

I saw several shows that pushed my thinking about both the sculpture installation I envision for thesis exhibition as well as some paintings I am currently working on.

Prior to the gallery visit, I had been puzzling about how -- or whether -- to relate the somewhat sexual, though still geometric, forms I showed at the BA/BFA Open show to the cinderblocks I have been casting in semi-translucent, candy-colored resin. It occurred to me that dropping the color would let me let the forms interact, and I began rethinking the installation in terms of forms that spanned the spectrum from clear to white. I wondered, though, how clear or transparent forms would fare: Would they be invisible or close to it?

Serendipitously, I stumbled upon the David Kennedy Cutler show at the Derek Eller Gallery on Friday. Cutler manipulated 8' x 4' sheets of clear plexiglass with 2 heat guns and the twists, turns and tension of his own body. The result is a series of large, clear forms that suggest, faintly, the figure and yet also some kind of clear skin of vision. As noted in press release, when the forms are installed in the gallery context, " these 'invisible' sculptures present the paradox of emptying a space and filling it up." Because my interest in the forms I use is focused on the voids they present, the use of a clear material adds another dimension of "emptying" which I have to consider and, if I use it, activate as I develop my work.

The other serendipitous sculpture show I saw was Rebecca Warren's Feelings at Matthew Marks. Warren showed both overtly sexual forms as well as nearly pure abstract welded forms -- but for the occasional pom-pom she added here and there. Nearly all are large scale and made of either steel, bronze or unfired clay. The show is quite funny. As the press release notes, she often manages to both invoke and skewer familiar male artists like R. Crumb and de Kooning with her forms. For me, though, the show served as an example of what it might look like to display female sexual forms with abstract forms together. I'm not sure yet what I think. My feeling is that the success of the show rides more on her humour rather than the successful interaction of the forms. While humour is also an aspect of my work, I want my forms to interact well -- synergistically -- so this is something I'm keeping an eye on now.

Lastly, I spent over an hour at the Linda Christensen show at J. Cacciola Gallery. There were about a dozen gorgeous paintings the careened between figuration and abstraction. I am working with figuration and abstraction in my own painting, albeit in baby-steps. In front of her paintings, though, I felt I could see how to go, how to continue and how to grow along that path. It was an amazing instance of paintings talking to me -- discoursing! -- without words, on and on. The show closes on November 28th. I'll be back before it does.

Roxy Paine's Maelstrom on the roof of the Met

Roxy Paine's Maelstrom is a seven ton web of stainless steel currently on view on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There it fills the rooftop space with an airy tangle of welded stainless steel tubes, drawing the eye back and forth between its shiny, hand-polished lines and the turbulent spaces they frame . Gargantuan yet fragile, industrial yet oddly organic, Maelstrom suggests some kind of mammoth, post-nuclear tumbleweed high on ozone.

Paine is well-known for counterposing natural and industrial forms and materials. Maelstrom is a descendent of Paine's Dendrite series, a series of stainless steel tree-forms inserted into the natural environment. Paine describes the Dendrite project simply: "I'm translating the trees into the specific language of industrial pipelines." (Bomb Magazine, 2009). Like the Dendrites, Maelstrom uses the specific language of pipelines to create something more akin to an experience of an industrialized tree -- and a fallen one at that -- than an isolated object found in the galleries below. Maelstrom reaches into nearly every rooftop space in some manner or other, and visitors must negotiate its presence at every turn.

And yet there is something childlike and innocent about this giant wayward form. With its horizontal orientation filling the rooftop space in a rather charming and playful manner, visitors are easily drawn in and under and over its branches, watching how the piece frames the sky and the tree tops of Central Park or turning, up close, to the welds that connect every piece of tubing. As an "interactive" sculpture, Maelstrom is enormously successful. Unlike Maya Lin's new work at Pace Wildenstein, which is beautiful, profound work hampered by the claustrophobic and unyielding manner of its presentation, Paine's piece is perfect where it is.

A visitor was overheard wishing he could see Maelstrom downstairs, in the landscape, from afar, and yet so much would be lost if one is not forced to grapple with it at close hand and the reflections the piece may give rise to. Alissa Davis of WHITEHOT Magazine put it beautifully: "Maelstrom questions what we as a culture have made, what we have destroyed, what we can repair, and what we might be able to learn if we consider our habits of creation." Questions like these must be grappled with and not placed at "arm's length" in an ever-diminishing landscape.

Highlights from "The Studio Visit"

1. "I was taught that one of the defining premises of modern art was its antagonism to mass culture. If I wanted to be accepted more readily by the academic establishment, I could argue that Takashi is working within the system only to subvert it. But this idea of subversive complicity is growing stale, and more importantly I just don't believe it's a viable strategy." -- Scott Rothkopf.

Agreed: Subversive complicity just doesn't work. We're no longer in the age of modern art, however. Does Rothkopf mean "current fine art practice"? If so, there is no necessary antagonism as far as I can see -- at least in terms of content and/or form. An artist working today can pick and choose a relationship to mass culture -- or not. No harm, no foul.

2."What makes Takashi's art great -- and also potentially scary -- is his honest and completely canny relationship to commercial culture industries." -- Scott Rothkopf. I would say Murakami's relationship to commercial culture industries makes his work important; I'm not sure that it's "great." It's important because it makes one think about "fine art" in relation to the "commercial culture industries" and the economic conditions of art -- fine, commercial, etc. I don't think this is the sole task of art nor do I think that Murakami's practice is the only "honest" one. It 's transparent and thought-provoking and demands further reflection/discussion.

3. Takashi Murakami: "I threw out my general life, so that I can make concentration for my job." I like this.

4. "An artist is a necromancer... My mentality came from ... animation geeks. I idled my time, imagining that Japan was a Philip K. Dick world... An artist is someone who understands the border between this world and that one. Or someone who makes an effort to know it." -- Murakami. Thornton's editing of this conversation(s) is a bit confusing. Murakami seems to be saying something quite traditional about artists -- artist as necromancer, communing with spirits of the dead, influencing the future, i.e. artist as shaman, artist as spiritual guide, etc. But, then -- and here it is unclear from the editing -- does Murakami's subsequent remarks about the Philip Dick world mean that he sees the exclusive role of the artist as "understanding the border between this world" and the world of animated fantasy? It's interesting as a way of looking at his work -- shifting "the other world" from the spirit world to the fantasy world, i.e. what occupies the place of the spirit world in mass culture -- or at least for one segment of mass culture. But surely he can't be prescribing that shift to all artists. It seems more likely that his concern with "survival" as an artist and "being popular" led him to that substitution. And, again, it's quite thought-provoking.

"The Crit"

Five highlights from Sarah Thornton's "The Crit" in Seven Days in the Art World:

1. "Talent is a double-edged sword. What you are given is not really yours. What you work at, what you struggle for, what you have to take command of -- that often makes for very good art." -- Paul Schimmel

2. "I don't care about an artist's intentions. I care if the work looks like it might have some consequences." -- Dave Hickey

3. "You have to find something that is true to yourself as a person -- some non-negotiable core that will get you through a 40-year practice." -- W. E. Jones

4. "An artist thinks about culture through visual means." -- Thomas Lawson. I might shorten it up a bit: An artist thinks through visual means. I'm not sure it's necessary to specify the subject matter of the artist's visual thoughts. Or confine those thoughts to culture.

5. "I'm a painter and I know that painting is not about talking." Thank you.

New Museum

David Goldblatt's photographs are understated and, at times, quietly horrifying. The New Museum's exhibit juxtaposes his Apartheid and post-Apartheid photographs, and while the small, standard museum tags provide some context, the show's impact relies heavily on the viewer's knowledge of the horrors of Apartheid and South Africa's post-Apartheid experiments with Truth and Reconciliation. One powerful set of juxtapositions involves the Apartheid-era systematic destruction of black South African homes and post-Apartheid, government-sponsored chronically unfinished homes for black South Africans. What has changed? One of the most unsettling photographs shows a few black South Africans at a dilapidated work site moving tires. Given white Afrikaners' use of "necklacing" blacks to death with flaming tires, this photograph makes the skin crawl. My concern, for an important show like this, is that viewers without the necessary historical background might miss the "meaning" of the juxtapositions or focus on the photographs' "aesthetic" qualities rather than their ethical import.

The New Museum's Emory Douglas show, by contrast, strikes me as a model for showing important political-cultural-historical work to new audiences. It was powerful, engaging and contextualizing information seemed more readily available than that of the Greenblatt show. I learned a lot, despite knowing quite a bit about the Black Panthers. With the Greenblatt show, by contrast, I had to rely on what I already knew to "activate" the images. Again, though, I feel a little queasy about seeing "artifacts" of an important political movement -- and one that is not over, despite the election of Obama -- in an art museum. But I keep arguing with myself over this issue. In the end, I am simply glad this show is on view somewhere.

Rigo 23. It was an odd experience to see a a spotless, well-lit cell-shape. Having spent a night in a NYC jail for civil disobedience, this pristine shape did little to evoke the experience, which appears to be its intent. A jail cell is an assault on all the senses: Cold, dank, dirty, a stinking toilet (no lid) in the corner, 24 hour fluorescent lights, constant blaring of the guard's radio, periodic visits for, yet again, one's name, address, Social Security number throughout the night, no sleep. For those who have never spent time in one, this piece seems to aestheticize incarceration in a truly creepy way.