Eggleston (and Six Others)

William Eggleston, "Untitled," c. 1975

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (-Jan. 25)

Whether he's shooting landscape, portraits or still lives, the photos of Memphis-born William Eggleston have a sense of place, and are often labeled with the city they were taken -- "Untitled New Orleans," "Untitled Nashville," etc. He visited New York, meeting contemporaries like Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand, but unlike them he never shot the streets. His is a rural roadside milieu. Born into wealth, he has carried himself like a dandy, affecting capes, driving cars like a Ferrari and a Rolls Royce. In the 70s, he embarked on long road trips, sometimes joined by Dennis Hopper, drinking and shooting photos as they went.

There is a bit of, for lack of a better word, slumming going on: His subjects are mundane in the American vernacular -- drive-ins, grocery stores, strip malls, living rooms. The shots have the casual intimacy of the snapshot, yet there is always something alien or off. He is drawn towards messiness and decay -- exemplified by an early black & white image of a car with one working headlight.

His eye -- and that of his editors (he never culls his own images) -- is drawn toward the freakish in the familiar: the empty stare of the scruffy tie-dye-wearing man sitting in the backseat of a car with a license plate beside him; the old man wearing a suit, sitting on a bed loosely holding a pistol; and the naked man on a sofa, gun rack on the wall. These made me think of Thoreaux's "lives of quiet desperation."

The moments Eggleston captures can be tacky, but without being camp of judgmental: an old woman sitting on a sofa in her untended backyard, her bold dress clashing with bold patterned sofa; the big man with a greased pompadour playing pinball; a young woman wearing a puppy dog t-shirt straddles a fire hydrant, her face contorted, apparently in some kind of religious ecstasy.

This sense of heightened reality also comes from the juxtaposition of bleak scenes with bold color. He was one of the first art photographers to use a dye-transfer printing -- an expensive process theretofore mainly used in advertising that could selectively intensify colors to eye-searing results. This can especially be seen in still lives like a blood red ceiling crisscrossed with a tangle of white electric cords, an open oven door in sickly metallic green and a half-empty bottle of cherry pop on the hood of a car (the latter, a perfect 20th Century American take on the classic still life arrangement).

Eggleston's last major showing in New York, his 1976 debut at the MoMA, launched his career, and kicked opened the door for color photography as serious art -- despite the show getting panned.

In the mid-70s, he experimented with video, modifying a Sony Portapak with infrared tube and documenting the colorful demimonde he encountered in Memphis and on the road. An edited version of this footage called "Stranded in Canton" is included in the retrospective, nicely presented on four CRT monitors paired with stools. There is much drinking, culminating in one scene where a man bites the head off a live chicken. While the video experiments were short-lived, Eggleston's aesthetic has been influential to filmmakers like David Lynch, David Byrne ("True Stories"), Gus Van Sant and Sofia Coppola.

Since the 1980s, Eggleston has been shooting fewer people. The bad news is that his newer work, all tightly-cropped still lives, is suffocating and charmless. The good news is that everything else is sings. At his height, Eggleston had a unique ability to capture the uncanny in the ordinary.


Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Dec. 14)

Giorgio Morandi is thought by many to be the greatest Italian painter of the 20th Century. This is a bit odd considering Morandi's known for contemplative still lives. Brash like Picasso or Pollack, he wasn’t -- on canvas or in his life. Born in Bologna, the shy artist lived with his two sisters for most of his life, rarely traveling outside the city. His style emerged through a friendship with Giorgio de Chirico, and Morandi's early paintings share the metaphysical artist’s proto-surrealist style, down to the bare mannequins. The exhilarating Met survey includes several lovely Cézanne-influenced landscapes and a couple of early self-portraits, but the main attraction is his renderings of objects on a table. He did some traditional arrangements of roses, shells and such, but Morandi's breakthrough idea was fashioning semi-abstracted forms -- bottle, box and cylinder -- painted-over Platonic objects that he grouped as models in his studio and painted. The results often have the deliberately imperfect look of Japanese wabi-sabi ceramics with wavy outlines. The palate is muted, mostly limited to grays and browns. This flattens the image. There is just enough tonal variation and highlights to keep the illusion of three dimensionality and volume. The paintings must be seen in person -- reproductions just don't do them justice. Morandi followed this formula for decades, creating a monomaniacal fugue of still lives. The variations evolved towards abstraction until his final paintings look like Rothkos (although his true artistic beneficiary is Wayne Thiebaud).


theanyspacewhatever at the Guggenheim Museum (-Jan. 7)

Relational aesthetics seems like a good idea -- an arts movement about tweaking the relationship between artist and viewer and even rethinking places like museums, galleries, biennials, etc. Rirkrit Tiravanija was one of its original instigators, best known for cooking meals for gallery goers. Now he's one of 10 artist-friend-collaborators in what is the Gugg's confoundedly awful "anyspacewhatever" show. His main contribution? An Illy-branded coffee stand that resides somewhere near the top of the spiral. The caffeine does little to overcome all the half-baked tackiness. The most memorable object is a rotating bed, which could be reserved at luxe hotel rates for overnights at the museum (a couple critics, including Jerry Saltz, took the bait). Most representative, however, is a tedious video of Tiravanija and his friends, including a few other art luminaries such as Elizabeth Peyton, as they hang out and shoot the shit. Did I metion you have to remove you shoes and sit on pillows to watch? Whatever is right.


The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Feb. 1)

The Met’s farewell to Philippe de Montebello is a microcosm of the museum itself, stuffed with exquisite objects of the most diverse kind. Celebrating the treasures acquired during the museum director's 31-year tenure, the show features remarkable juxtapositions. For instance, Baroque statuary with a Francis Bacon, a Balthus lolita with Guercino's "Sampson Captured by the Philistines," or 15th Century playing cards and a Rothko. The show also reveals visitors' own favorites. With some guilt, I skimmed over much of the non-European objects, although there are amazing examples from the Americas, Asia, Africa and on. My overall favorites were Thomas P. Anshutz's handsome 1907 John Singer Sargent-style oil portrait "A Rose," and Joachim Wtewael's fleshy dayglow "The Golden Age" (see image at left) and Rubens' oil of the painter with his wife and child -- one of de Montibello's favorites. While remarkably inclusive, the show also reveals some gaps in the museum’s collection, particularly the scarcity of any art other than photos from the last 50 years, the Bacon excepted. Thinking about this show, I'm reminded of all the times I've visited the museum, beginning sometime in the mid-70s. While I've never met the man, I have to wonder, how much as my taste been influenced by Philippe de Montebello?


Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (-Jan. 7)

I had always thought of Catherine Opie as a lesbian Mapplethorpe who documents and celebrates the gay, transgender and s&m cultures. One of her best known works is a self-portrait with the word “pervert” carved raw into her chest. But as this seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim shows, she is so much more. Even her most sexually provocative images exude a warmth and vitality missing in Mapplethrope’s brutal black and white formalism. This difference becomes more pronounced in her newer work. Adjacent to the “pervert” photo, is a more recent matching shot of Opie breastfeeding her son. The scar from the self-inflicted wound can still be seen, but the focus is motherhood and domesticity. Her photos documents her family life -- such as with one of her son in a pink tutu (see image at right) -- and other lesbian households with and without kids. My favorite series in her diverse body of work are landscapes that have nothing to do with sexual preference -- such as black & whites of lovely curving highway overpasses and on-ramps. Best of all are her recent images of surfers and ice fishing shacks. Brilliantly installed on opposite walls, the images illustrate how communities pull individuals together.


New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937–1940 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Jan. 4)

In 1940, Swiss photographer Rudy Burckhardt and his pal, poet Edwin Denby collaborated on a book celebrating the city where they lived -- New York. The work was created on aimless walks, which they sometimes took with their Chelsea neighbor Willem de Kooning. I didn’t have much patience for Denby’s poetry or for Burckhardt’s dogs-eye-view photos of pedestrian legs, fire hydrants and so on.


George Tooker: A Retrospective at the National Academy Museum (-Jan. 4)

George Tooker was trained at the Art Student’s League by social realist Reginald Marsh, where he developed a style known as American Magical Realism. Taking the psychologically tinted real-life representations of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, he adds a hallucinogenic and cartoonish quality that is heightened by bright colors of egg tempera painting method of Piero della Francesca. Tooker's work of the 50s and 60s has an element of social critique, taking on broad subjects like alienation. One of his more famous works, which is owned by the Whitney, portrays the fear of a woman on her own in a subway station. Another conveys the bureaucratic oppression of waiting in line for what might be the DMV. A third, a menacing grid of office cubicles with no way out. Tooker's art also increasingly takes on non-political themes. A 1940s painting depicts a group of young men and women under a Coney Island boardwalk that references traditional imagery of Christ's crucifixion (see image at right). Tooker also made paintings of his Puerto Rican and African-American neighbors -- mainly homoerotic images of shirtless men in their windows. While there's nothing earth-shattering about this work, there is something refreshing about his allegiance to representation, like a gay Norman Rockwell.

The Eternal Return

"Arch of Hysteria" (1993)

Louise Bourgeois
Guggenheim Museum
June 27-Sept. 28

For many years Louise Bourgeois hosted a Sunday salon for artists at her West 20th Street apartment. A few years back, two of our friends decided to go, carrying with them examples of their work — no slides allowed. As it happened, on the day they were there, the 90-something Bourgeois decided to speak exclusively in French. They didn’t understand a word.

Now we’re invited into the exotic world of Louise Bourgeois by way of an enthralling and essential retrospective at the Guggenheim. It’s arranged chronologically, populated by objects spanning most of her seven-decade career, spooling out and winding its way up, with turns towards surrealism, primitivism, cannibalism, mutant sex parts, stuffed dummies and psycho-trauma.

As others have observed, the Gugg’s a perfect venue. Frank Lloyd Wright’s off-white spiral so perfectly matches her organic sensibility, it’s as if the museum itself has been revealed to be one big Bourgeois sculpture. This point is nicely underscored by twin silver swirl cocoon shapes that hang in the rotunda. The museum's spiral ramp also shows how her career circles back on itself as she reworks earlier ideas, adding new twists.

Born in Paris into a comfortable (yes, bourgeois) family of tapestry restorers, she experienced the lasting trauma of having her live-in English teacher become her father's mistress (this could explain why she sometimes prefers her mother tongue). After getting a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne, she took up art, studying under artists, including Fernand Léger. In 1938, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York.

While she made art in Paris and even had a couple gallery shows, the show opens with works made in New York, the first of which are her surrealist-inspired “Femme Maison” paintings, which depict naked armless women joined with buildings, the architecture subsuming their heads. These images and ideas -- the body, buildings, sexuality and mutilation -- would be remain major themes throughout her career.

Next is a group of 17 wooden anthropomorphic “Personage” sculptures, each resembling a totem pole crossed with a Constantine Brancusi. Each represents someone from her life. In the same room is the extraordinary “The Blind Leading the Blind,” an abstract wooden centipede that reminded me of Theo Jansen’s beach-walking robots.

In the 50s, her sculpture becomes more abstract and varied. Her skinny totem towers are now made of a variety of pieces, some that look like they’re made of stacked children’s building blocks, others like shish kabobs of stones. She also begins clustering forms together horizontally on a single object, some resembling a gathering of bird-like forms, a kind of penguin huddle. They are somewhere between representational and abstract, a liminal space that radiates uncanny presence. It's like we're looking at some bizarre life-form from the original Star Trek series.

In the 60s, she starts working with new materials, especially marble, but also latex and rubber. The objects are increasingly organic, you could even say ugly, recalling the fecund and fungous underbelly of nature. They're also ever more ambiguous and open to interpretation. It makes for fun guessing games. Is it a diseased eye or a danish? Maggot sex or two potatoes? Burial mounds or tumors?

These organic abstractions have much in common with the sculpture of Eva Hesse, and in fact the two were featured together in seminal 1966 exhibition “Eccentric Abstraction” at the Fischbach Gallery in New York.

Sexual imagery also becomes a prominent theme, making us think of a much weirder version of Georgia O’Keefe. Penises, vaginas and breasts are everywhere. Hermaphroditic shapes too. The small bronze “Labyrinth Tower” is a building, a forearm arm and a penis. It also literally looks like poop.

The work also exudes menace, most strikingly in two installations. “The Destruction of the Father” is a subterranean table or altar is covered with bread and pieces of meat. While not immediately obvious, it's said to represent the cannibalistic consumption of a father by his children. “Confrontation" is also oedipal, dealing with the destruction of a relationship between two generations. It again features a table covered with bread-like shapes, some like muffins, others larger and over-leavened. Video taken of the gallery opening shows an accompanying performance featuring a parade of participants wearing latex suits with breast-like protuberances.

Bourgeois has said that she is not a feminist artist, and it’s evident that her work isn’t political. But it has some strong overlap with themes in feminist art. This is especially the case of “Hysteria” a stunning hanging bronze male figure with an arching back reaching towards his toes. Interesting that it’s a man, since hysteria was once considered a “woman’s disease.” Another example is her decision to change the name of the “Blind Leading the Blind” to “C.O.Y.O.T.E.” in honor of a prostitution rights group.

It's not only names she revisits. In the 1980s, her “Femme Maisons” reappear in sculptural form. The best example is the lovely hanging bronze “Spiral Woman,” a floating figure with a fecal cocoon spiral subsuming all but her arms and legs. More recently, she has revived her stacked-block tower, covering it with tapestry fabric — a double reference, one to her sculpture of the 50s, and second to her parent’s profession.

This backwards-looking tendency is most pronounced in her “cells” — room-like spaces, with a dramatic arrangement of objects. “Cell V” has two large weathered wooden balls enclosed by a series of doors. In “No Exit,” a old stairway penetrates a space enclosed by a metal screen. Less successful examples recall David Lynch, with a cluttered and heavy-handed arrangements of objects with specific personal psychological meanings, a visual language of memory: underclothes hang on animal bones, clenched hands made of marble sit on a mirror, spools of thread are arranged on a metal stand, a shelf holds a variety of old-fashioned laboratory vessels.

Bourgeois has said these cells are about pain. It’s a statement that brings to mind Frida Kahlo. And, like Kahlo, Bourgeois has made deeply autobiographical works fashioned with her own personal visual vocabulary.

Her more recent fabric-based figure works are refreshingly subtle. I especially liked “Three Horizontals,” which shows two armless female stuffed figures stacked above a shape that could be a heart or fetus.

We're captivated with her works' singular strangeness -- no matter if we don't always understand what it's saying.

Fireworks

Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe
Guggenheim
Feb. 22 - May 28, 2008

I guarantee you'll be slack-jaw wowed the minute you step inside. Seven automobiles suspended overhead, some upside down, flash colored lights like fireworks or some Vegas hallucination. Up the ramp, you soon encounter a streak of tigers stuck with arrows, then a pack of flying wolves on their way towards death against a sheet of glass.

(One nightmarish figure you won't run into is longtime Guggenheim director and art-as-commerce evangelist Thomas Krens, who recently announced his overdue departure.)

This art's mind-bending and breathtaking visual punch is certainly a delight -- kids love it -- but is it all style and technical trickery? With his theatrics and fireworks (more on that later), is Cai Guo-Qiang the Michael Bay of contemporary art?

But this isn't Jeff Koons eye-candy stuff. Cai's work takes on weighty topics -- the stuffed tigers and wolves are meant to be stand-ins for civilization and ideology.

Another installation -- "Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: the Ark of Genghis Khan" (1996) -- takes on globalization. A Mongolian-style raft of roped-together animal skins floats overhead, backed by three working Toyota engines. And if you didn't get it the first time, mounted to one wall are old copies of Newsweek and Forbes with sensationalist Asia-phobic headlines.

A room-size "mini-retrospective" curated by Cai called "An Arbitrary History: River" features a twisty artificial river and boat. You can take your turn on this charming water-park ride floating past several other works like several of his smaller-scale pieces from the 90s such as "Snake Bag - Multiculture" (1993), with live snakes presumably meant to make us think of multiculturalism, and "Trap: Project for the 20th Century" (1997), including live birds and a model PT boat.

The metaphors are awkward and heavy-handed. His political messages are silly, safe or obvious. But while Cai is trained in stage design, what's left manages to be more than amazing stage sets. Even if it's not up to its grandiose pretensions, this is art -- a dash of surrealism, a twist of Hong Kong Disneyland, a sprinkle of Damien Hirst.

Cai is best known for his pyrotechnic performances. Born in China and currently living in New York, he travels the world, putting on elaborate earthworks-inspired displays with gunpowder explosions in the air and on the ground. In "Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters" (1994), part of his "Projects for Extraterrestrials" series, a line of gunpowder explodes through the Gobi Desert. In another ET project, "Fetus Movement II (1991), set in a German military base, the artist is attached to seismograph, electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram to take measurements during the explosion.

Unsurprisingly, many of his pyro-performances have taken place around museums around the world. Here in New York, he collaborated with Grucci Brothers in "Transient Rainbow" (2003) a smoke rainbow executed from Roosevelt Island to commemorate the MoMA's temporary relocation to Queens. And in the summer of '06, he set off smoke bombs on the Met's roof garden.

He also does more mainstream displays. As early as 1994, he executed a performance for the Asian Games. In 2001, he did a massive show for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation event -- easily the most elaborate fireworks I've ever seen. And this year he's a key member of the team organizing the opening and closing ceremonies for the Bejing Olympics.

Conveniently for collectors, each of Cai's performances is paired with a large drawing done using gunpowder on paper. They resemble cave paintings of a shamanic snake oil salesman. Better are the videos of the performances, and a video of the making of the gunpowder drawings.

Visual blitzkrieg, overloaded metaphors, and mystical goofiness aside, there's something likable about Cai. For all the monumental bang, his materials are natural and humble: bamboo, burlap, gunpowder, paper, clay, etc.

For me, the standout is "New York's Rent Collection Courtyard," a recreation of a Mao-era Chinese sculptural installation depicting the oppression of peasants by the landlords. First appropriated and recontextualized by Cai in 1999 for the Venice Biennale, where it won the top prize, the work ingeniously uses the original Chinese artisan collective to sculpt the 20 or more clay figures. (Oddly he was sued for copyright infringement and won.) Last Sunday, two members of this team were still at work, adding some finishing touches while become a living part of Cai's art. Intriguingly, the installation's final section depicting the revolutionary triumph of the peasants will be left undone, the armatures left bare. I'm not sure if it's deliberate, but it's a nice instance of metaphor done right.

Also making use of Asian labor is "Reflection - Gift from Iwaki" (2004). This evocative piece features a boat excavated by residents of northeastern Japan, who were invited to reinstall it in the Gugg. The wrecked boat overflows full of broken porcelain, including Buddhist figures.

The exhibition continues in two semi-hidden areas. The Gugg's reading room has a porcelain bas-relief flower stained with gunpowder ("Black Peony," 2008), a limited edition of 20 available for purchase at $50,000 each, limit one per customer. For those with less jack in their pockets, head to the gift shop for some smart-looking alternatives, including some Chinese stamps given the gunpowder treatment. Disclosure: Our friend K.L. works in the museum's merchandising department.

Downstairs in the Sackler Center, there are some objects documenting Cai's "Everything is a Museum" project, which have been installed in unusual spaces in Japan, Italy and Taiwan. Works include objects by Norman Foster, Jennifer Wen Ma, Kiki Smith and Tan Du.

While there's much to find fault with, there's also something irresistibly likable. A lightness and joy, something like mid-summer fireworks display. Or could my mood be buoyed by the lifting of the Krens curse?

Let's Talk About Why They Were Disturbing (Richard Prince at the Guggenheim)

"Nurse of Greenmeadow," 2002

Richard Prince: Spiritual America
Guggenheim Museum
Sept. 28 - Jan. 9, 2008.

Stopped by the Gug to check out the Prince retrospective before it closed. I wasn't expecting to like it, and mostly I didn't. But I like that it was called "Spiritual America," big pretentious title and makes you think about Prince and, well, America. That is, you think about it until you want to throw yourself off the vertigo-enducing spiral and into the white void center of the Gug's Ron Perlman rotunda. (Incidentally, Spiritual America is also the name of a creepy re-photo Prince did of the infamous pedophiliac Brooke Shields.)

Good for you, Richard Prince! Not only did you survive the 80s and move beyond the re-photography technique that put you in the art history books, but your photos are setting auction records. And now the Gug.

I understand the appeal of the Marlboro man photos. Cowboys, death, commodification, appropriation, objectification -- all sexy and cool. Although, honestly, only one or two of them are visually exciting.

But the joke paintings? Please! These are so horrible. Tacky, 80s.

What about the newer stuff like the nurse paintings? How about this -- we overheard some dad telling his kid in sotto voice, "okay, now let's talk about why they were disturbing."

Hey pops, maybe it's all the retro-sexist pulp images made up like a horror show?

Spiritual America is a spiritual void. But, notsofast--isn't this what hipster-trickster Prince has in mind? Isn't that skin-crawling creepy feeling we get looking at his art his intention?

Perhaps Prince doth protest too much? Does he look in the cracked mirror of American wasteland and see himself? Is his ugly art, more ugly than art?

Prince is conjuring a sad, demented America. But the fact remains that, for the most part, there's nothing happening -- no cultural critique, no frission between critique and celebration, no dance of deconstrucitivism. Braindead.

But critics like it, the market likes it. Maybe it's a sign of the times. Ugliness, goth and self-hate are big in these Bush years.

An exception was Prince's Upstate New York photos -- lyrically lonesome landscapes of doughnut tire tracks and a basketball hoop in an overgrown field. And the Jimi Hendrix checks used in a couple of the more recent joke paintings made for a lovely color field. (I copied down his address, in case you want to send him a note: Box 12, Rensselaerville, NY.)

All in all, the show resonated nicely with my negative feelings about the mismanaged museum. Prince and Guggenheim are a good fit. The joke's on us.

One more thing. We noticed that many of the prints on display were labeled as exhibition prints. After polling a few museum staffers, it seems these are one-offs that aren't part of the original series and intended only for this show. (I guess the Hollywood collector types weren't willing to lend their precious Princes, even to the Gugg.) After the show these exhibition prints are meant to be destroyed. Maybe there's a bonfire happening somewhere right now. That I'd like to see!

Notes:
Roberta Fallon (artblog): "How can a car compete with the aesthetics of this museum? My head turned away from my Prince and to my Guggenheim at every bend in the road."

Roberta Smith (NYTimes): "...the path of a brilliant artist whose sense of visual style is matched by an ear for language, as he progresses from hip, hermetic mind games to hip, inclusive generosity and even tenderness."