Megan and Murray

The 08 Whitney Biennial Top 8

The Whitney Biennial is perhaps the most well-known weather forecast of contemporary American art. Many people I’ve talked with about the show were blasé about the 08 version curated by Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin. I agree that much of the show is unmemmorable, however, there were several notable works. Here’s my top eight:

1) Omer Fast, Production still from The Casting, 2007 (source)

2) Phoebe Washburn, It Makes for My Billionaire Status, 2005 (installation view, Kantor/Feuer Gallery, Los Angeles, 2005) (source)

3) Mika Rottenberg, Still from Cheese, 2007 (source)

4) Lisa Sigal, The Day before Yesterday and the Day after Tomorrow, 2007 (source)

5) Leslie Hewitt, Make It Plain (2 of 5), 2006 (source)

6)Stephen Prina, Sonic Dan, 1996 (source)

7) John Baldessari, Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), Etc.: Elbow (Blue) with Desk, 2007 (source)

8) Melanie Schiff, Water Birth, 2007 (source)

Off to the Fairs

[source]

We're on our way to New York to meet up with Myrtia Nikolakopoulou, our gallerist, and curator Sotirios Bahtsetzis for a weekend of fair-hopping. Also on the docket: the Biennial and Cai Guo-Qiang.

We're also planning on catching the art-blogging panel at Red Dot on Sunday. We'll blog throughout the weekend.

Alison Owen Installation in Our House

Alison Owen, Untitled, 2008, installation, adhesive, dust, lint, animal hair

Installation artist Alison Owen, a former New Yorker now living in Providence, uses the existing elements of an environment to make sharp and witty tromp l'oeil works with conceptual heft. In previous bodies of work, Owen has painted shadows behind architectural oddities, extended lines, and otherwise ever-so-slightly modified the palette of a room.

In her current work, she has branched into creating "decorative" motifs out of the invisible contents of an environment. Her most recent installation is a faux floral wallpaper pattern constructed out of the dust, animal hair and detritus she harvested from the corners of the room.

From a safe distance, the material seems velvet-like and tactile, and the color shifts from flower to flower in each iteration. Yet as soon as you're close enough to see what it's made of, the experience changes from aesthetic pleasure to mild disgust coupled with the voyeuristic interest piqued by seeing somebody else's "dirt."

Up indefinitely and viewable upon request.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum [source]

Why, oh why, did it take us six months of living here before we finally got ourselves over to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum? Perhaps it's because we were biased by so many American museums with pre-1945 collections that feel as sleepy and dusty as a great-aunt's parlor (The Huntington and Norton-Simon spring to mind). Surely a museum bearing such a flowery gilded-age lady's moniker, featuring her personal collection peppered with Singer Sargents, would be as fussy and yawn-inducing as museum's come.

Please pass some humble pie — I deserve a full serving.

It's rare that Murray and I truly linger in art museums, and even rarer that we meander back to see a gallery in a museum on the same trip, just to soak it up further. Yet we spent most of the afternoon wandering around the magical ISGM, pulling back the quaint velvet curtains covering the rickety wood and glass vitrines to see handwritten letters by Dante; opening cabinet doors covered in drawings, fascinated by the terse typed sign saying "STOLEN" where one of Degas' drawings used to hang; comparing Giotto's Christ child with Botticelli's with Martini's with da Rimini's in the Long Gallery and Gothic rooms on the third floor.

And we lingered further, listening to the xylophonist of a contemporary sextet warming up before a concert in the Tapestry room, leaning over the balcony overlooking the courtyard, taking mental notes about the wall hangings curving around corners, the Italian bed-frames used as railings, the layering of patterns, textures, styles, periods.

How perfect that the ISGM has a vibrant artist-in-residence program that has featured over fifty contemporary artists, including Laura Owens, and Henrik Håkansson: this is a museum for artists.

Virtually unchanged since its origination under the careful and inventive hand of Mrs. Gardner, this museum reads more like a large-scale assemblage of art and objects than a clinical exhibition out of an art history text book. The museum invites the viewer into an intimate and homey place for contemplation, for wonder, for close observation, for shared transcendent experience. That's about as cutting edge as museums get.

US Navy Submarine Force Museum

I dare you to not be interested in touring the first nuclear powered submarine to travel to the North Pole — complete with mannequins in bunks, operating machinery and plotting maps. A surprising delight, the US Navy Submarine Force Museum, in Groton, Connecticut, is the home of the USS Nautilus (SSN 571). It's also got real periscopes you can operate, models of subs, bombs and knowledgeable veteran submarine docents who were able to answer all of my lingering childhood submarine questions: like the rumor that nuclear submarine artificial oxygen generators created oxygen that was "horribly smelly" (not true). Here's the kicker: admission is free.

Styrofoam at the RISD Museum

Folkert de Jong, Mount Maslow, 2007, (detail), styrofoam, polyurethane foam and pigment, [source]

Any exhibition where the organizing factor is as straightforward as material runs the risk of reading like a treatise on variation and the artists' ingenuity of the material's exploited uses. With a material as ubiquitous and malleable as styrofoam, the title and basis of RISD museum's current exhibition, the risk of catalogued variation seems a pitfall hard to avoid.

Yet, in this quirky show, the stuff the artwork is made of stays in the background, allowing the works to speak to one another in surprising ways by using the properties of the material as a point of conversation.

Richard Tuttle's carved arrowhead-shaped works play at the crossroads of high / low art and old / new technology. B. Wurtz's photographs of the contours of packing material are a humorous take on modern landscape. Heide Fasnacht's Exploding Plane, which hovers in the airspace above the other works, though made in 2000, draws the conversation into a possible political commentary on exploited natural resources and the lead-up to the terror attacks of 2001.

It is Folkert de Jong's dancing figures that inspired curator Judith Tannenbaum to originally propose the exhibition. Carved into kilted totems of leprechaun-like hilarity, these creatures pose defiantly under the deadly plane, just, you know, keepin' it light.

Styrofoam
RISD Museum
March 14-July 20, 2008

Styrofoam Panel Discussion and Opening Reception at the RISD Museum on March 19

Heide Fasnacht, Exploding Plane, 2000, Graphite Acrylic over Neoprene, Dimensions Variable (approx 20' sq), [source]

Styrofoam presents art made of the commonplace material known for its light weight quality and wide application. Opening to the public on Friday, March 14 (opening reception on March 19, see below) in the lower Farago Gallery, Styrofoam highlights both the earlier and current uses of this material by artists in a wide range of styles and approaches. Styrofoam (extruded or expanded polystyrene) is a material whose intended uses range from building insulation and construction models to product packaging and coffee cups. In recent years, artists have used styrofoam in a variety of new and ingenious ways. They carve into it, mold it, and assemble it into entirely new forms and images that often contrast with its original functions, at times implying environmental concerns about use and reuse. Artists represented are Folkert de Jong, Heide Fasnacht, Tony Feher, Tom Friedman, Steve Keister, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Pearson, Shirley Tse, Richard Tuttle, and B. Wurtz.

Opening Reception: Styrofoam
Wednesday, March 19
5:30 pm: View the exhibition
6:45 pm: Artist panel discussion with Heide Fasnacht, Steve Keister, Bruce Pearson, Richard Tuttle, and B. Wurtz. RISD Auditorium, Canal Way. Free and open to the public. More info here.

Lauren Bon at Ace

Lauren Bon, Bees and Meat, 2007

Lauren Bon, Bees and Meat, 2007

Lauren Bon, Bees and Meat, 2007

Lauren Bon, Bees and Meat, 2007

Lauren Bon, Bees and Meat, 2007

On view through March 2008 at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles, Lauren Bon's Bees and Meat should not be missed. Lauren Bon is the artist behind Not a Cornfield, a large installation of an actual cornfield in downtown LA. Bees and Meat is her first body of new work since Cornfield. We got a chance to hear Lauren Bon speak and love her playful (and at times spooky) pursuits.

Barry Anderson at Roger Williams University

I'm curating a outdoor video space on the campus of Roger Williams University that is now featuring Vertical Blinds (2) (2007) from Kansas City artist Barry Anderson. Vertical Blinds (2) employs animated strips of people's faces. The strips are animated separately creating a space in which faces appear and disappear.

The outdoor screen is active Monday through Thursday from 7pm to 1am. Vertical Blinds (2) closes March 21.

Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA

Urban Light, 2005, Chris Burden

Tulips, 1995-2004, Jeff Koons

Firetruck, 1993, Charles Ray

The L.A. County Museum of Art used to be a hard nut to crack: a huge complex of windowless concrete where the front entrance was never clearly defined and the hodgepodge of its various buildings had no clear order. Although I've been to the museum countless times, I never once have had the sense that I'd gotten a comprehensive overview of everything that's there.

Now that the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum is open on LACMA's sprawling campus (is it considered part of LACMA itself? I'm unclear on that), I was curious to see how the Renzo Piano building full of Eli Broad's consistently cheerful and LA-centric loaner collection might change the experience of the museum as a whole. And, well, now it's definitely clear what is considered the main entrance. Chris Burden's light-posts, Charles Ray's great riff on the old Ruscha's LACMA-is-burning gag, and the first of the many, many Koons pieces that dominate Broad's collection surround a portico with the ticket counter that is now sandwiched between the old museum and the new.

As far as the rest of LACMA goes, I'm concerned that it will be a challenge to get patrons back over to the main campus now that a firetruck and shiny tulips point the way to Piano's gigantic escalator to the third floor of Broad's flashy storage house.

And it is most definitely Mr. Broad's museum: each floor is stamped with a gaudy glass plaque near the elevator featuring a stock photo of the Mr. and Mrs. and a carefully worded explanation of the tenuous state of the collections' ownership. Reading between the lines, even with no background information (like one person in our party), it is easy to parse out the institutional tug-of-war between Broad and the museums of Los Angeles in that paragraph of text.

There are some odd features of this museum: it's a top-down affair, with the escalator ferrying patrons to the third floor and straight into an altar to Jeff Koons. The over-sized elevator, which descends through Barbara Kruger text, has a hastily added bar that cordons off the majority of the floor space, because it can't handle the weight if as many people as will fit in the elevator all pile in together. The first floor is poorly lit and just a couple of Serras, and by the time you've reached the bottom, it's about as anti-climatic as Richard Serra could possibly get.

But the collection, of course, is the art equivalent of walking through the pages of the Oscar issue of People magazine: it's an all-star extravaganza and everything is dressed up to its show-stopping best. Basketballs? Check. Michael Jackson and Chimp? Check. Silver Mozart? Cindy's circus? Hirst's butterflies? Check, check, check. It's all there, flooded in the natural sunlight that made California an artist's haven in the first place.

I guess I'd have to say in that somehow it all works: like some twisted strange starry-eyed soap-opera befitting Hollywood.