Megan and Murray

After the Fair

We met our friend and gallerist Myrtia Nikolakopoulou in New York: she was in from Athens and, although she's quite widely traveled, it was her first time in the States. We asked about her impressions (noting that it's quite unfair to base any experience of this country solely on NYC).

She was surprised at just how open and friendly Americans are (in the art world? really?: yes, she said, you should go to Basel if you don't believe me). But she also noted that it must be very stressful to live in New York City, because it is so business-oriented. Although everyone's friendly, they're always working. In Europe, she said, people take time off to enjoy life.

Yesterday I ran across a review of some of the working habits of the world's most successful people. Interestingly enough, most of them spent a lot of time relaxing, worked much fewer hours, took afternoons off.

There's something to be said about the over-professionalism of the American art life. That's how we end up with the polished, friendly work so popular at art fairs. Maybe we need to take a break, take a breather, take some long lunches, linger a bit, let our minds drift.

Sackler and Fogg Art Museums at Harvard University

Leonardo Drew, Number 122, 2007, installation, Fogg

Leonardo Drew, Number 122, 2007, installation detail, Fogg

Louise Lawler, War is Terror, 2001/2003, photograph, Fogg

East Pediment of the Temple of Aphaia (Original), Greek, c 490-475 BC, marble and Warrior's Head (Copy), synthetic marble, Sackler

The art museums at Harvard are better, in my opinion, than Boston's august *Museum of Fine Arts... and a ticket to all three is half the $17 price-tag of the big museum. The last image is from the current show at the Sackler, Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity, on view through January 20, 2008, which is the most comprehensive and educational grouping of painted reproductions of ancient sculpture I've seen.

* I'm holding out hope for the "new" MFA.

Exploring Art in New England

Since moving to Providence in August, we've begun to explore the rich art resources in our new surroundings. In the past two weeks, we've been to MASS MoCA to see the Spencer Finch show, to the ICA for Philip-Lorca diCorcia, to the MIT museum for the whimsical and Tim Hawkinson-esque Sculpture of Arthur Ganson, and to the South End Open Studios and most of the major galleries in Boston.

In the next few posts, we'll begin to unpack some of what we're thinking about the art we've seen.

Natalie Jeremijenko, Tree Logic, 1999 [at MASS MoCA]

Dallas Renaissance

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Bronze Crowd, 1990-91

It's only since we've been in Dallas this month that I've come to realize the extensiveness of the renaissance that's happening in this city, particularly in the arts and cultural realm. Of course, this has been in process for a long time, but now that buildings are finished or heavily under construction and roads are re-routed and whole blocks have been removed, the difference is visceral. Dallas is an entirely different city than it was even ten years ago.

The arts district is one of the areas that is the most changed. The Nasher is open just a block away from the Dallas Museum of Art. The new opera house is nearing completion next-door to I.M. Pei's Meyerson Concert Hall. My old high school, the arts magnet, just a few blocks from the museums, is shut down while it's being renovated by the same firm that designed the Contemporary in St Louis.

That's to say nothing of the proposed Calatrava bridge over the Trinity River. Or the just-built Victory Park with its postmodern digital "Kunsthalle." This city has some serious momentum.

With all the change, it was really reassuring to visit some familiar faces at the same museum where I spent many teenage hours avoiding the heat and trying to stay off the radar of my demanding orchestra director.

Hello, Spanish Elegy, you old friend.

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic 108 (The Barcelona Elegy), 1966

Tending, Turrell, Dallas Sky

James Turrell's skyscape, Tending, at the Nasher Sculpture Center: one of the best places in Texas for a long conversation with an old friend.

The Art of Shopping: Northpark Center, Dallas

Right now we're in Dallas for a few weeks spending time with family. Our worldly belongings have moved ahead of us to Providence, we've turned in our keys to St Louis, and we're leaving for London and Greece at the end of June.

Dallas is a great city for art-lovers. Great museums and galleries — the DMA, the Dallas Contemporary, Art Prostitute, and Angstrom, the Crow Collection, to name a few. Plus, it's just a short drive to the first-class offerings of Fort Worth's art district, like the Kimbell and the Modern. We'll be posting about all these places and more in the next few weeks.

Then, there's NorthPark Center. The ridiculously high-end mall with the equally high-end art collection. NorthPark is beautiful in every way: architecture and design, store design, landscape design, and artwork. It's a collecting institution, and there is thoughtfully sited artwork everywhere you look. NorthPark is truly, even though it's technically a "shopping center," an art destination not to be missed.

We wrote more about NorthPark Center here.

Introducing an Artist: Jorge Javier Lopez

Jorge Javier Lopez, Dogs Love Too, 2006

When we were in Laredo, we were introduced to a number of talented people, including an artist named Jorge Javier Lopez. You can tell immediately when you are in the presence of someone truly gifted as an artist, who lives outside the realm of the social politics and insider culture of today's art world, whose life is consumed with art and practice: this is man is an artist.

Jorge graciously invited us to his home and allowed us to page through a tall stack of filled sketchbooks. The content of the work is powerful, gut-wrenching at times, and utterly true. It's also beautifully crafted, and I have rarely seen an artist with such a consistent perfect pitch when it comes to composition. He draws intensely, often emptying an entire pen on one page, and knows intrinsically where on a page to start a mark and when exactly he has laid down the last necessary line of a drawing.

While formally untrained, Jorge is committed to a wide-ranging practice of drawing, painting, reading about art history and theory, and watching films and documentaries about art and art-making. While we were visiting, we got to talking about some of Gerhard Richter's essays that have had a big impact on Jorge's practice. He is also humble and generous, and sent us away with this drawing, one of our favorites of his series of dogs.

You can see more of Jorge's work on his blog. Here are some of his recent paintings. His newest series of drawings of tumors, which he sees as physical manifestations of emotional pain, remind me of Tim Hawkinson's intestinal circles. You can see some of the tumor drawings here and here. Jorge's figurative work, I think, is his most profound and finely-tuned, you can see examples here, here and here. You can contact Jorge through his (still under construction) website.

Update: Popp, Pevnick

Rainfall, 1996 Olympics, [source]

On the issue of the similarity between Popp's Bit.Fall and the Rainfall at the Jeep convention, a reader pointed us to Steven Pevnik, a digital media professor in the art department at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, who holds a 1978 patent for a "water droplet fountain for producing a free falling program of water droplets [which]... can be controlled by a computer program to produce various forms of three dimensional images." Prof. Pevnick, who created the Jeep waterfall, has shown his fountains internationally at trade shows and special events, including at the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Popp Vs. Jeep

Julius Popp, Bit.Fall, 2006 [source]

Jeep Waterfall [source]

A post today on BoingBoing linked to a YouTube video of "...a 25-foot-high sheet of falling water that can display arbitrary bitmaps in falling water" at a Jeep dealership. Bears a suspicious similarity to the Julius Popp piece, Bit.Fall, don't you think? It would be interesting to know which came first.

Our take on Bit.Fall here. A short documentary on the making of Bit.Fall on YouTube here.

Top 20 Highlights of 2006

2006 was a banner year for seeing art. Here are our favorite exhibitions of the year (in chronological order):

1) The year began in Marfa, Texas with our first visit to the Chinati Foundation. We posted about our trip here, here, here, here, and here. Forget the October open house, try Marfa for New Years: it's wonderful.

2) Also in January, we happened upon the installation of Nancy Rubins' newest work at MCASD, Pleasure Point, 2006. We stood on Coast Blvd forever, with the ocean breeze and the palm trees and the California blue sky, watching that huge crane lift the boats into place, where about 5 workers were wiring them together. It's all tension: no bolts, no welding. Just boats and wires and precise geometry. We blogged about it here.

Before we left for our residency in Spain (which accounts for a huge portion of our best art moments), we saw four great shows in LA. Looking over the year and the work we've made, I can trace back to the influence of these four shows.

3) In April, there was Robert Rauschenberg, Combines. So good, what can you even say? All we could say was YES.

Then in May there was the one-two-three punch at the Hammer:

4) the inspirational Société Anonyme: Modernism for America

And at the same time, two project shows at the Hammer that tipped our art practice on its ear, and challenged us to rethink previous assumptions and come up with new solutions for old problems:

5) Jesper Just changed the way we think about video. We wrote about it here.

6) Elliott Hundley changed the way we think about incorporating photos into collage. Our take on that here.

Then we spent the early part of the summer in Barcelona. We saw so much art there we could hardly keep up posting about it all. There was plenty of great stuff that never got a mention because of our limitations, but not because of merit, like the Tàpies Museum, and the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. But for us, the best art we saw in Spain boiled down to:

7) Histories Animades at Caixa Forum was hands-down the best animation show we've ever seen. We didn't review it, but our fellow resident, Megan Lynch, did here. Some American museum should get this show to travel to the states.

8) The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya is an amazing museum in an old palace on Montjuic. The museum's Renaissance and Gothic collection are mouthwatering, but it was the fresco exhibition that stopped us in our tracks. A postmodern mash-up of ancient frescos resurrected on ultra-contemporary plywood and plaster apses. What really struck us about this show was that most of the frescos were only partially intact, and so the curators floated these wonderful shapes on the white plaster surface. These perimeters inspired us and show up in Bruc Fugue, the work we made during our residency.

9) The Sagrada Familia. It's unbelievably wonderful. Nothing more to say.

10) The Cathedral at Mont Serrat. This was going to be a location for our video shoot, but ended up being logistically impossible, but what an amazing place. A cathedral carved into the mountain, as impractical a place to worship as it is magical.

11) Pauline Fondevila at Galeria Estrany De La Mota. We did a round-up of some of the best work we saw in galleries, and Fondevila's work is the last two images of the post, check it out here.

After we got back to Los Angeles, we only had a handful of weeks before we were scheduled to move to St Louis. We crammed in as much as we could, including a trip Baja, where on the way back to LA we stopped in on the wonderful:

12) Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana

Then my favorite fun show of the summer:

13) the Waist Down exhibition at the Prada store in Beverly Hills. I wrote about it here.

Fall brought us to St Louis, and since we've been here we've seen some great work as well:

14) John Watson and Andrea Green's show at Laumeier Sculpture Park

15) the City Museum

16) the Remote Viewing show at the St Louis Art Museum, which I'd seen the year before at the Whitney

17) Tara Donovan lecturing at the St Louis Art Museum

18) the new Kemper Art Museum at Washington University.

And two of our favorite gallery shows this fall:

19) Bill Smith at White Flag Projects

20) and Georgia Kotretsos at Boots Contemporary Art Space.

Here's to more great shows in 2007 — cheers!