March 2009

Upcoming at The Project, Jessica Rankin:

Currently at Andrea Rosen, Michael Raedeker:

About 10 years ago, Ghada Amer:

Painterly or "base materialistic" use of embroidery, among other topics, was considered in an essay I wrote in the Ghada Amer era, for an exhibition at Cristinerose gallery called "Thread."

Ghada Amer also embroiders, but her alphabet consists of the ritualized sexual poses of male-oriented pornography--girl with legs spread, girl separating buttocks, girl tonguing other girl’s labia--in repeated quasi­decorative patterns across the surface of a stretched canvas. Here, too, the thread departs from the implied continuity of the dotted line, jumping from one image to another in a meandering, random flow that recalls Pollock’s drips or Marcel Duchamp’s “standard stoppages.” Removing pornography from the dark confines of the sex-shop and spotlighting it in the gallery, then robbing it of its clarity and specificity with a kind of physical “static,” Amer’s work both reveals and obscures.

It was interesting to encounter two recent examples of this way of working within 24 hours of each other, through my email inbox and a gallery visit, respectively. Minus the porn, as far as I know.

Above is a still from Paul B. Davis's Compression Study #4 (Barney) /short version [YouTube]. Although the Matthew Barney video it's based on is Art that sells for the big bucks at Barbara Gladstone gallery it somehow ended up in smaller form on YouTube, and that's Davis's actual source. I saw Barney's show at the Guggenheim and may have seen snatches of the video of his wall-climbing performance there but I now mainly know the event through this YouTube, which I've watched more times. Davis's process (called "Data Moshing" by some and also seen in some recent pop music videos, although Davis did it before they did) adds some much-needed ambiguity to the Cremaster series' rather literal, theatrical surrealism. Data moshing is all about strange, temporal shifts and it's creepy, for example, to watch a cat-creature emerge suddenly out of a cloud of frozen Barney-pixels in the Davis version. As with the analog-scrambled porn channels one might have encountered surfing around the TV dial in the 80s and 90s, you tend to look more closely at what you think is there. The imagination can supply prurience or horror but Barney is the type of artist who likes to do all the imagining for you.

On the art-pop-culture-art loop front there are curious echoes between the Davis piece and a painting from a decade ago by Michael Bevilacqua, also dealing with Barney. This had a real transgressive frisson at the time, and rumor has it Barney was annoyed by these paintings (and, I suspect, the fact that Bevilacqua was selling them out).

Here's what David Ebony said about that work in his Top Ten for artnet, 1997:

Perhaps the most astonishing works in the show are those based on scenes from Matthew Barney's 1994-95 film, Cremaster 4. The large painting Dig Your Own Hole shows Barney's so-called Faeries, in orange wigs and blue jumpsuits, carving a large hole on a pier, an early scene in the film. The upper left portion of the canvas is tightly packed with fragments of corporate logos, as well as a logo for the band Oasis. In these brilliant canvases it seems as if Bevilacqua has succeeded in creating a bit of instant art history. By transforming such a recent work as Cremaster 4 into a pop icon, Bevilacqua reminds viewers of, among other things, the speed at which culture can be assimilated.

This was in the super-slow world of painting and gallery practice, and now we're talking about the same things happening in seconds online.

Digby's thoughts on Lisa DePaulo, the TV journalist who smeared politician Gary Condit (as a murderer, no less) and is still attacking his character after he was completely vindicated.

I can't stand to watch TV news so I missed all this firsthand. You couldn't escape the campaign against Condit, though, during the "summer of the shark," before 9/11 gave the media creeps their perfect story and two wars, to boot.

The movie Broadcast News did a good job of explaining how people with no talent other than the ability to look poised before the camera rise to positions of power in the modern world. Unfortunately the movie didn't cure people of relying on TV as the main source of their news.