Rapturous

Paul Chan: The 7 Lights
The New Museum
April 9 - June 29, 2008

Our first encounter with the transfixing projected work of Paul Chan was "1st Light" (2006), our favorite piece in the otherwise-awful 2006 Whitney Biennial. This winter we ran into this work again at the ICA Boston. Naturally, we were looking forward to seeing more at the New Museum.

With contemporary art chockablock with sloppy assemblages and hipster nihilism (see the New Museum's "Double Album" show), this lyrical and thought-provoking exhibit of Paul Chan's work is a welcome ray of hope.

One of three current shows at the New Museum and located in the medium-sized 3rd floor gallery, the exhibition represents the U.S. premier of New York-based Chan's "7 Lights" cycle, which was completed over the last three years and debuted at London's Serpentine Gallery.

The video works are projected mainly on the floor, often resembling light from a window. Each looping piece is 14-minutes long and represents a single day -- with a dawn of colors giving way to stark black-on-white animated forms populating a weird apocalyptic dreamscape in which assorted objects float skyward. It's fun to pick them out: In "5th Light" (2007) its violent things -- guns, grenades, bullets, luggage, a map of the United States, and in "3rd Light" (2006), projected across a long Last Supper-style wooden table are images of food -- an apple, a spoon, grapes.

Defying this anti-gravity tableau are human figures dropping from above, evoking 9/11. Deflecting any literalist interpretation, Chan's bad-dream vision connects these jumpers to what he calls a "reverse Rapture" -- inverting the idea of the evangelical elect ascending to heaven, leaving worldly possessions behind. This light vs. dark dichotomous dystopia also references Biblical Creation, with the structure of the cycle itself calls to mind Genesis: six projections ("he rested on the seventh day"). In the beginning, there was light.

An activist who has done politically-minded works, including films about Iraq and New Orleans (as well as the amusing audio piece, Lite Rock/Leftist Talk), Chan is certainly tweaking fundamentalism, but it's also a kind of Plato's cave shadow play of images from our post-2001 collective psyche, reflecting these scary, mixed up, reality distorting times of endless wars, climate change and peak oil.

In "2nd Light" (2006) a tree is stripped bare of its leaves by a stick-and-rag-carrying army -- a dark comment on humanity like something from Cormac McCarthy. "4th Light" (2006) shows a spider surviving as storm of building materials (hammer, measuring tape) ascends, its web quivering in the wind.

The literal lightness of the floating objects balances the work's otherwise dark subject matter with a figurative lightness. How can you not smile at an apple floating through space, Newton be damned?

Chan has said that the silent cycle and its strange, haunting physics of movement proffer a kind of visual music. Underlining this point, the grouping includes several framed works of sheet music collaged with shreds of black paper. Provocative, poetical and musical, these works are of the moment and here to stay.

Review Roundup

Jeff Koons at the Met (-Oct. 26)

"...three wonderful, previously unexhibited works... mischievously meaningful.. The biggest problem is scale. ...intellectually and sensuously exciting objects — 'Balloon Dog' is a masterpiece..." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes

"...the manifest content of the three sculptures is one of shrill, slightly unbalanced exuberance. ... Indeed, of all the sculptures displayed on the Met's roof garden during the past 11 summers, it is difficult to recall any others that looked quite as wan and feeble, quite as toothless..." - James Gardner/NYSun

"Does the artworld really need another high-profile showcase for Jeff Koons' faux inflatables?... I enjoyed that piece, in spite of ... the profundity that museum curators like to ascribe to these baubles. I'd sooner rely on Koons, who told reporters that his works are about 'joy.'" - Lee Rosenbaum/CultureGrrl


Dargerism at the American Folk Art Museum (-Sept. 21)

"...enlightening but problematic... A problem is that none of this exhibition’s contemporary artists, although worthy on their own merits, are in the same league as Darger. Yet this turns out to be a good thing. Seeing Darger among other artists brings into focus what makes him so singular." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes

"Whatever the merits of the other artists in this show—and some are better than others—hanging them alongside Darger’s scrolled vistas comes off at times as an exercise in rebottling lightning. ...paying homage to him hazards mere imitation or worse—a canonization that drains his work of its ineffable qualities. Some of the artists here fall into one or both of these traps; the best avoid them altogether." - Howard Halle/TONY


Asa Ames at the American Folk Art Museum (-Sept. 14)

"Ames’s artistry has a distinct personality. His work is full of signature tics, like his careful carvings of his subjects’ hair or ears. ... Ames’s inspirations clearly included the portraits that itinerant painters were making during this period, but translating these wonderfully stiff, often emotionally fraught images into three dimensions gives them an added sense of life." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Tomma Abts at the New Museum (-June 29)

"She’s pretty cool. Her one-of-a-kind (though all of a type) compositions deploy serpentines, polygons, rays, and other generic forms in schemes of astringent color: worried red, disgruntled gray-green, caffeinated peach. ... The effects feel smart: painting about painting like thinking about thinking, to no end beyond enjoyment. Most of all, Abts is at pains to evade associations with both the visible world and other art. Her success is a negative triumph that appeals to a post-post-painting generation..." - Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker


Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum (-July 13)

"The colourful, slick canvases are technically impressive, but they have all the emotional weight of the 'go-faster' stripes you see on cars. Even his largest and most dynamic works fail to move..." - The Economist


El Greco to Velázquez at the MFA (Boston) (-July 27)

"...a rich, uneven stew of an exhibition... What saves the show from being merely a hodgepodge of Spanish treasures can be summed up in a word: realism." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes

A Ribbon Around a Bomb

"Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird," 1940

Frida Kahlo
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Feb. 20 - May 18, 2008

We were in Philly for a wedding, and took the opportunity to head over to the beautiful Philadelphia Museum for the blockbuster Frida Kahlo show. Even with our $23 timed tickets, there was a long line to get in. Once inside, thankfully it wasn't too crowded.

More than just an artist, Frida's a phenomenon. Little known until some 30 years after her death, her star has steadily ascended thanks to a couple popular biographies, a few kind words by pop singer Madonna and the excellent 2002 biopic starring Salma Hayek.

The cult of Frida is born of her riveting and revealing autobiographical-allegorical self portraits. More than with most artists, it's essential to know something about Frida to know her art. Organized by Walker Art Center in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the show does a commendable job of joining her compelling story and her stunning art. The first major exhibit in the U.S. in 15 years, it's timed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mexico's most famous art export.

At the start of the show are several rooms dedicated to the display of a never-before-seen collection of Frida's own photographs. Here are small black & whites marking moments in her life like a family portrait with Frida wearing her father's three-piece suit; her marriage at age 22 to the famous muralist Diego Rivera, 20 years her senior; and the artist in traction following one of the 30 surgeries she endured to treat painful complications from a bus accident that shattered her spine.

This physical pain and the emotional pain of a rocky relationship with Rivera and her inability to have children are all major themes in her work.

She appears a sort of religious martyr in "The Broken Column" (1944), with nails piercing her skin and her torso broken open to reveal a cracked stone column in place of her spine. Amazingly candid, "Henry Ford Hospital"(1932) depicts her miscarriage, revealing her naked and bleeding in a hospital bed, connected by red ribbons or blood vessels to six floating objects, including a fetus and snail. "The Two Fridas" (1939), painted after a breakup with Rivera, shows two versions of the artist sitting side by side and encircled a blood vessels that connect a portrait of her ex-husband with the Fridas' two hearts.

Bizarre allegorical elements like the column, snail and body parts convey a kind of heightened reality that has much in common with surrealism. And while Frida did not see herself as part of that school, Mr. Surrealism himself Andre Breton was one of her earliest champions, organizing a couple of exhibitions that included her work and led to the sale of one her paintings to the Louve -- the first 20th Century Mexican work sold to the museum. Famously he likened her art to "a ribbon around a bomb."

Breton was onto to something. Take the breathtaking masterpiece "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird" (1940) (see above), simultaneously pretty and placid while being threatening and affecting. Cut by thorns, she bravely reveals herself, holding us in her steady gaze.

(Interesting aside: Ms. Museum Hours noticed that Frida is actually more beautiful in her photographs than in her self portraits. Reversing the usual tenancy of the artist to nip and tuck, she adds a unibrow and mustache -- perhaps to further convey the pain or ugliness she feels.)

More than surrealism, the exhibition informs us that her work is influenced by traditional Mexican ex-voto folk paintings, several of which are on display. These typically illustrate a catastrophe such as an accident or a bedridden person and offer gratitude for the intervention of a saint.

A striking example of this approach is "A Few Small Nips" (1935), which tells the true story of a woman brutally stabbed to death by her husband, who told the judge that the multiple stab wounds were just "a few small nips." It is one of only a few of Frida's paintings that aren't self-portraits that I liked (her later cosmic work especially, falls flat).

One quasi-self-portrait, "My Dress Hangs There" (1933), is her f-you to New York City, the capital of capitalism, which she visited with her communist husband. The symbolic landscape depicts her traditional Mexican dress strung between a toilet and a sports trophy -- what she saw as the City's prevailing preoccupations -- and a landscape filled by a breadline, overflowing trash, gas pumps and a church with a dollar-sign stain glass window.

She appears a victim, but is fiercely singular and independent, Frida's story fascinates. But it's her haunting art that speaks to us, allowing us to feel we know her spirit and can feel her pain. Suffering and art have long been intertwined (the painter Brice Marden once remarked that "painting says pain in it"). Frida's work embodies this truth more than any. In my mind she is one of the greatest self-portraitists in art history, right up there with Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso.

Review Roundup

Olafur Eliasson at MoMA and PS1

"...the Danish-Icelandic inventor and engineer of minimalist spectacle, is so much better than anyone else in today’s ranks of crowd-pleasing installational artists that there should be a nice, clean, special word other than 'art' for what he does, to set him apart. ... His character suggests both the mental discipline of a scientist and the emotional responsibility of a poet. If leadership in public-spirited art extravaganzas were a political office—and it sometimes feels as if it were—he’d have my vote." - Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"...like certain kinds of jazz, or ragas, or New Age ambient sound, this is an art of variation rather than destination. ...not-niceness is a crucial ingredient in Mr. Eliasson’s audience-pleasing art. It keeps it from being too sappy or flashy, all disco balls and special effects. ... And how radical is Mr. Eliasson’s art? How market-challenging or expectation-shifting? In the end — so far — not terribly. ...the work is too intent on appealing to our appetite for passive sensation and too readily adapted to corporate design. ... Enchanting the work certainly is, and spacious, evanescent and intellectually stimulating. In these ways it offers a model for a future art beyond the present rummage-sale glut. In others ways, though, it reminds us how far in the current decade art has not come." - Holland Cotter/NYTimes

"...monstrous fraud. ... So complete is his fakery, that he does not even supply the illusion of magic, but a kind of anti-magic which deceives the lemmings of the New York art world into denying their own senses and giving over big chunks of the city to his mediocre and mendacious tunnel vision. ... a torturer he is, with his engineering team and phony pretensions and the museofeebs and mayors and tastemakers who shut off their senses to champion his murder of esthetic sensibility. The camp of Eliasson is the camp of anti-concentration, an annihilation of all that is pleasurable, a complete nullification of art." - Charlie Finch/ArtNet

"The numerous large installations in the show foster, and repay, a contemplative approach. ... It is in the full sweep of the exhibition, in the accretion of sensory experience and generated ideas, that the power of this work is most thoroughly felt. ... an absorbing and very thoughtfully designed show. ... Mr. Eliasson's work seeks to do exactly what art has always done: make you see the world from an altered perspective, to see it anew." - Daniel Kunitz/NY Sun

"...beguiling and befuddling... this is one show that makes it hard to trust the senses, even while putting them on full alert." - Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg


Newseum (Washington, D.C.)

"Promoting the glory while burying the bad is perhaps inevitable in a museum that's funded in significant part by the very institutions it features. Which is, of course, not unusual. ... It's just that the PR tone clashes with journalism's ethos of objectivity and skepticism. " - Tony Dokoupil/Newsweek

"...the Newseum shows-and-tells at a time when media types should be doing more listening than lecturing ... It also costs $20 to get into the Newseum, which feels very strange in a city stuffed with fabulous free museums... Its placement on such an august stretch of D.C. real estate implicitly puts the news biz in league with the powers it's supposed to remain skeptical of..." - Jon Fine/BusinessWeek

"The Newseum's collage of forms is diffuse, perhaps inadvertently recognizing the tension in the news business. Its better instincts are visible up front, while its baser, and more profitable, love of scandal and celebrity are barely hinted at -- and buried deep inside." - James S. Russell/Bloomberg


El Greco to Velázquez at the MFA (Boston)

"...wonderful ... one of the show's plain lessons is that during Philip's reign, Spanish painters perfected the means of bringing recognizable human beings into their art. Spain may have been a center of Catholic piety, its eyes always fastened on heaven, but its paintings were full of vital, supple people made of real flesh and blood." - Richard Lacayo/Time Mag.


Amy Sillman at the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.)

"I say it's a gimmick. ... if all this has been done before, what exactly is the point?...why are they so bloodless?" - Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post


© MURAKAMI at the Brooklyn Museum

"The garish dollops and swirls of contrasting color may recall the psychedelic tumescence of last year's 'Summer of Love' extravaganza, but unlike that era's belief in a new, youthful movement, this work views innocence through fatalistic (if saucer-shaped) eyes, exuding a compelling world-weariness not only for this realm but for those of sci-fi and fantasy as well... As with Warhol, the best stuff here is surprising, gorgeously executed, and darkly alluring." - R.C. Baker/Village Voice


Color Chart at the MoMA

"While the exhibition’s contemporary content might be disappointing, the curatorial expertise demonstrated for the 60s and 70s yields fantastic results." - Paddy Johnson/L Magazine


Exotic Rugs at the NY Historical Society

"...both an overview of the history of the Oriental-rug mystique in New York and a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Hajji Baba Club. This little-known Manhattan organization is, according to the society’s curators, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious group of rug connoisseurs." - Glenn Collins /NYTimes


The Medieval Hunt at the Morgan Library

"'Le Livre de la Chasse' was written for medieval aristocrats, but it will appeal to contemporary athletes, nature lovers and dog owners." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes

Fluidity

"Bas Relief (people know, people don't
know)" (2007) by Mounir Fatmi

FLOW
Studio Museum of Harlem
April 2—June 29, 2008

I'm a bit peeved at the Studio Museum for their no-photo policy and having such a crappy Web site without suitable images and information for "press" like myself. But I'll set all that aside to tell you about this enjoyable show on 125th Street.

Like 2001's "Freestyle" and 2005's "Frequency," "Flow" highlights emerging artists of African descent. But whereas the first two in the series featured African-American art, the emphasis of the current show is internationalism, presenting artists born all over the African continent that are now living and working around the world. There are many more African-Europeans represented than first-generation African-Americans.

The show is refreshingly diverse in more ways than geography, making use of many different methods and media to address a wide range of issues -- some, but not all of them, dealing with Africa and African identity. Despite the continent's serious problems, there is little in the show that is angry or overtly political. These artists' works are personal and insular.

While the show's title references water and movement, I kept seeing its elemental opposite -- work dealing with land and earth -- a pervading sense of place, perhaps born of displacement.

Born in Réunion, France (an island in the Indian Ocean), and living in Australia, artist Thierry Fontaine makes photographic self-portraits that obscure his face using a shell, a piece of earth and a broken mirror.

Michèle Magema, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo and resident of Paris, creates videos of performances. Her "Overseas Stories" (2006) shows her wearing a traditional white robe and deliberately and ceremoniously placing white stones to form a path.

In a series called "Alterscape Stories: Uprooting the Past,' Otobong Nkanga (Amsterdam and Paris via Nigeria), photographs herself inside a diorama of a desert landscape as she seemingly spoils the land with a beaker of bright blue toxic waste.

A sculptural installation by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime features piles of molded monkeys, frogs and televisions made of traditional clay.

Less about earth, but also tweaking notions of traditional vis-a-vis the modern, is a wonderfully intricate patterned arabesque wall relief made of coaxial cable by Mounir Fatmi, a Moroccan artist living in Paris. (See image above.)

In a similar vein are wall sculptures by Senegalese-American artist Moudou Diey made of LPs, paper and neckties treated with a paint pattern applied using a basketball.

In these works, the flow is the fluidity of identity.

It's nice to see the Studio Museum embracing internationalism, and "Flow" is a superb and celebratory introduction to a very talented group of artists.

Review Roundup

The Newseum (Washington, D.C.)

"...a publicity-seeking monument to the news business, its history and its hyperlinked future ... as if an overstuffed newspaper Sunday supplement from the not-so-distant past had suddenly morphed into a sound-and-light display." - Edward Rothstein/NYTimes

"Despite its lofty tone, the design reeks of parochialism, not bold ideas. Its galleries, stuffed with mostly superficial exhibitions, seem engineered to accelerate the flow of crowds rather than for patient contemplation. If the building reveals anything about the state of journalism today, it conveys the industry’s anxieties over the shrinking attention span of the average American." - Nicolai Ouroussoff/NYTimes

"It's easy to see the Newseum as a monument to old-school self-regard at precisely the moment when venerable news organizations struggle to transform themselves. A visit will make you wonder who will tell these stories if 'old' media doesn't." - James S. Russell/Bloomberg


Tomma Abts at The New Museum

"...quiet, spare and luminous... ...the opposite of showy. They have a nerdy, introverted spirit." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


SANAA: Works 1998-2008 at The New Museum

"...a show housed in a major work by the same designers it highlights has built-in advantages... Wisely, the current SANAA show avoids the self-congratulatory air... these three-dimensional renderings capture the spirit of SANAA's minimalist approach to perfection." - Martin Filler/Culture Grrl


Whitney Biennial

"...indicative of a cultural landscape that has grown so fat by self-cannibalization that its guts have burst open splattering the walls of the temple of art with a feculence regurgitated so many times over that we can no longer trace its origin. " - David Markus/Brooklyn Rail

"...numerous half-baked ideas, over-thought instances of ingrown hermeticism, and good, old-fashioned narcissism. I mean, it's supposed to be American, right?" - S.C.Squibb/Art Cal Zine


Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum

"Since art history is most productively seen as a braid with several strands, it is obvious that Koons first and now Murakami have ended the Pop occultation. Murakami has appropriated image types and even themes from Japanese popular culture and used them to create a weird, off-center language to address fecundity, mortality, infantilism, and, yes, commerce." - John Perreault/Artopia

Archive Fever at the ICP

"It is an incredibly unfrivolous show... a web of references to and reenactments of revolutions, civil wars, segregation and deprivation. ... Putting the manipulation of an archive at the forefront, right alongside its own contents, is one of the greatest points Enwezor makes." - Susannah Edelbaum/ArtCal Zine


Korean Painted Screens at the Met

"...tightly focused... marvelous examples of ch’aekkori painting alongside related decorative objects from the permanent collection." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation at the Berkshire Museum (MA)

"This could be the only place where 18th-century Shakers (whose nearby farm is still worth a visit) are as celebrated as the Pittsfield plastics industry ...jumbling of the first-rate and second-rate..." - Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


Collages of John Evans and Art of May Wilson at the Morris Museum (NJ)

"a thoughtful pairing, for each contributed significantly to the history of collage and assemblage in 20th-century American art." - Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes

Takashi Murakami's Sensations

© MURAKAMI
Brooklyn Museum
April 5–July 13, 2008

Before we look at Murakami, it's worth revisiting the last big thing at the Brooklyn Museum -- 1999's "Sensation," the show that famously offended Rudy Giuliani's sensibilities by way of Chris Offili's elephant dung-adorned Virgin Mary. Less remembered but more odious to art circles was the museum's decision to exhibit works owned and unofficially curated by a single collector -- British advertising mogul and Brooklyn Museum donor Charles Saatchi. The net effect was boosting the market value of the works; and sure enough, Mr. Saatchi sold many of the works at auction within a couple years.

This all goes to show that the Brooklyn Museum and its director Arnold Lehman are more than comfortable with creative curatorial strategies that are fast and loose with the rules, ready to jump in the sack with anyone that's paying.

This time the act is consummated not behind closed doors, but out in the open, smack in the middle of the new Takashi Murakami retrospective. I'm referring of course to the special Louis Vuitton store, an actual luxury retail outlet set up deep inside the non-profit museum. This isn't some easy-to-ignore shack tucked away in one corner, but a room-size space that the visitor is made to walk through. Inside is dark-wood flooring, dramatic lighting and a staff of five salespeople -- attired in all white and eager to assist with your purchases. And people are buying everything from $300 key chains to $2,200 purses. Shopping bags are evident throughout the exhibit.

It's safe to say that that for many, the bag purchase was the highlight of the show. He's a crossover hit -- many know Murakami through his handbag designs. I'm sure you've seen them. Wildly popular, the bags combine the brand's conservative logo-bedecked look with the artist's cutesy imagery.

The L.A. MoCA, where the Murakami show originated, got a lot of flack for the Vuitton store, but critical opinion here seems a bit blasé. And why not? For one we're used to retail in museums; for years the special exhibition stores, themed merchandise and retail outposts have been upping our tolerance for commercial crap. The museum public buys it, and it funds exhibitions. Win-win. And for Murakami, isn't commercialism a major theme? He is the CEO of KaiKai Kiki LLC, a multinational enterprise dedicated to pumping out toys, calendars, figurines, t-shirts, etc., not to mention artworks. This industriousness is simply a 21st Century update on Warhol's Factory, the argument goes. His art is about the commercial enterprise, blurring the boundaries between high and low culture and paying dividends to boot. I understand all these points, but to me they're all justifications and rationalizations. Seductive as the store is, it's still wrong.

Also wrong were the Museum's decision at the show's gala party to honor bulldozer developer Bruce Ratner and to invite Louis Vuitton to create a faux knockoff handbag bazaar. In Marie Antoinette style, VIP guests were invited to pretend they were a poor plebian purchasing an imitation purse while paying 100 times the cost. And, get this, a portion of sales was donated to maybe the least-deserving charity ever -- the Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation.

Now onto the art.

Murakami aims to please. His stated aim is to create art that makes the brain go blank, and at that he's quite successful. His work is eye candy for all ages. Bright colors and cute cartoon characters -- millions of smiley flowers! -- tickle our inner 4-year-old. Transforming naked robot anime sculptures stimulate our inner 14-year-old. Less successfully, for our adult minds, there are occasional allusions to classical Japanese scroll painting and Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

For my money, he's best at the adolescent stuff. The impressive life-size transformer babes ("Second Mission Project Ko2 Advanced System," 1999-2007) rightly get the first and largest room in the exhibition. As a backdrop, the walls are covered with cosmic space imagery laced with a shooting white substance that, if you're familiar with Murakami's iconography, you know is semen. Intergalactic semen. In the sculpture "My Lonesome Cowboy" (1998), it's a semen lasso that emanates from the penis of a smiling shock-haired manga manchild. The figure faces "Hiropon" (1997), a giant-breasted woman-girl skipping rope with an arc of breast milk. It's a brilliant apotheosis of the Japanese cartoon aesthetic.

It's the Murakami iconography that I find most interesting about his work. His oeuvre seems to be a kind of world-unto-itself of recurring characters -- instead of the Marvel Universe, it's Murakami Universe. Beginning in the 1990s with the creation of Mickey Mouse-like character called DOB comes a coterie of cuteness -- anthropoid mushrooms, flowers, clouds and more. This process is reflected in a kind of violent dynamism and (radioactive?) mutability that seems to birth new creatures and worlds. We see DOB stretched, transformed, vomiting and dying. Works like the two large "Tan Tan Bo" canvases seem to show art at war with itself -- cute and not cute, sick and full of life, a recognizable character and something wholly new. For this, I give him credit.

Museum Minutes: Special Brooklyn Museum Takashi Murakami Edition

Some news items surrounding the opening of the Murakami show in Brooklyn... protesters, performers, swag fights, mock fake handbags, MTV and a penthouse tour...

• "Jamie Markowitz, the wife of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, scooped up eight pricey fiberglass place mats - works of art by pop artist Takashi Murakami - set aside for guests at a glitzy Brooklyn Museum gala. The limited-edition Technicolor mats, which have sold for $1,000 on eBay after a similar event, were included in a grab bag of pricey freebies for guests celebrating the opening of the artist's three-month exhibition last Thursday. ... Radar reported that when several guests who didn't get a mat asked for one of her eight, she replied, 'You guys really should have acted faster. This is Brooklyn!'... Along with the place mats, guests at the $1,000-a-plate dinner were given rare Louis Vuitton purses designed by Murakami, including one already commanding $2,345 on eBay." - NY Daily News

• "Chants creative and classic poured from the crowd of protesters assembled behind NYPD barricades on Thursday evening outside the Brooklyn Museum. Inside, a $1000 per ticket gala headlined by Kanye West would soon honor Bruce Ratner, the controversial mega-developer behind the increasingly challenged Atlantic Yards project, for his patronage of the arts and commitment to public service and generosity. ... At its height, the spectacle outside the Museum drew nearly 100 protestors, some of whom dressed in fancy attire to mock the swanky sensibility of the event." - Village Voice

• Not only does Louis Vuitton have a store inside the Murikami exhibit, but the company created a ersatz knockoff handbag bazaar for the gala, a pretend-poor gesture of Marie Antoinette proportions: "Here, in a bit of surreal museum theater, the stalls were mocked up again. Standing outside them were men who resembled the African immigrant vendors who haul around telltale bundles of alluring, cheapish and almost-right copies of stuff from Gucci and Louis Vuitton. This time, however, these characters were playacting. The goods laid out on trays and tarps were real Vuitton accessories. They cost, as they do in the stores, a bomb." Click to see photos. - Guy Trebay/NYTimes Update below.
  

• The Gowanus Lounge has video of Kanye West performing at the gala opening here. According to one blog, Mr. West was accompanied by this outlandishly attired woman.

• MTV had an easier time interviewing Murakami than Kayne.
  

• The New York Times T Magazine presents a video tour of an art-filled penthouse apartment belonging to Arnold Lehman, the BM's director.

UPDATE

• Somehow I missed this choice tidbit: Barry Hoggard reports that a portion of sales from the gala's faux knockoff handbag bazaar were donated to the Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation. Say what?!
  

Review Roundup

The Brooklyn Museum - ©Murakami

"I don’t like Murakami’s work, but my dislike, being moody, feels out of scale with the artist’s terrific energy and ambition. For the second time in a couple of months—the first being at the Guggenheim retrospective of the meteoric Chinese festivalist Cai Guo-Qiang—New Yorkers have a chance to absorb our new geo-spiritual fate, as provincials in a world of creative paradigms that no longer entreat our favor. That has to be good for us. ... His aim, it seems, is to control and standardize aesthetic experience, forcing viewers into a, yes, infantile mold of rote response. ... Warhol, with his work’s beautiful color and catchy evidence of manual touch, is Rubens by comparison. But Warhol as marketer, not as artist, is Murakami’s lodestar. ... Unenthused visitors to the show may find themselves, as I did, refreshed in spirit by the simple elegance and honestly avaricious passion of the Vuitton boutique—helping the rich shed their burden of excess capital at a rate pitiably slower than what the art market enables, but in there pitching." - Peter Schjeldahl/The New Yorker

"That copyright symbol in the title isn't ironic. For 46- year-old Takashi Murakami, art is the straightest path to commerce. ... Murakami's art is not just perverse. It's alienating, regressive and as sharply critical as it is exploitative of Japan's surrender to American popular culture. Of course, that ability to be both moral compass and cultural capitalist is what makes Murakami so intriguing and annoying. For all its dazzling color and shiny surfaces, this show looks more fun than it is." - Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"The Vuitton shop is also one of the visual high points of this show, which has definite ups and downs. The bags, their shiny brass fittings and the impeccable white-enamel display cases achieve an intensity of artifice, tactility and visual buzz that Mr. Murakami’s higher art efforts don’t always muster. ... The ensemble fulfills almost too completely Mr. Murakami’s stated desire to make art 'that makes your mind go blank, that leaves you gaping.'" - Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"... an unflinching and unapologetic, nearly 20,000-square-foot celebration of the lowbrow horrors and banalities of commercialism, materialism, fashion, and pop culture. ... If you thought that the Brooklyn Museum (whose installations of its sublime Egyptian art collection have been dumbed down in recent years) couldn't sink any lower or become less serious-minded — think again. ...nothing more than a marketing machine for the dissemination and blatant merchandising of a brand, unashamedly and officially wipes art's slate at the Brooklyn Museum — formerly, mind you, the 'Brooklyn Museum of Art' — clean." - Lance Esplund/NY Sun

"...Brooklyn has one terrific site-specific moment, where Murakami created a series of large murals---skulls, flowers, abstract patterns, that confront each other in a sun-filled space. And on the fourth floor (which is the continuation of the fifth-floor installation), the compactness of the museum's separate rooms heightens the intensity of the most disturbingly profound works in the show." - Lee Rosenbaum/CultureGrrl


Whitney Biennial

" It's hard to know what to do with these scattered piles of things. There's no glue to keep them coherent, or to paste them into your memory." - Annie Wagner/The Stranger


Japan Society - The Genius of Japanese Lacquer: Masterworks by Shibata Zeshin

"Zeshin is now the subject of a marvelous exhibition at Japan Society. As a display of technical accomplishment and material beauty, it is breathtaking. Including stacking boxes, trays, tea services and sword scabbards, as well as paintings on fabric and paper, the show, 'The Genius of Japanese Lacquer: Masterworks by Shibata Zeshin,' presents an artist of exquisite taste and almost superhuman manual dexterity." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


American Folk Art Museum - Earl Cunningham's America

"'His landscapes are as sustainable as they are beautiful. ... Earl Cunningham’s America' at the Lincoln Square branch of the American Folk Art Museum presents 50 of Cunningham’s cheerful, intensely colored paintings." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Studio Museum in Harlem - Flow

"... a fine-textured survey of 20 artists who, with a few exceptions, were born in Africa after 1970 but who now live in Europe or the United States." - Holland Cotter/NYTimes


Philadelphia Museum of Art - Frida Kahlo

"I hope this exhibition will kindle new interest not only from her legions of fans, but also from art scholars and researchers, as there are still many holes and gaps that need to be identified and expanded in this amazing life." - Lenny Campello/Blogcritics Magazine

History Lesson

Fazal Sheikh, "Haji Qiamuddin holding a photograph of his brother,
Asamuddin," 1998 (courtesy of the artist and Pace/MacGill)

Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art
International Center of Photography
January 18 – May 4, 2008

John Milton at 400: A Life Beyond Life
New York Public Library
February 29 - June 14, 2008

Pop quiz: What possibly could a contemporary art show at the ICP have in common with an exhibit on John Milton at the New York Public Library? Their shared proximity to Bryant Park doesn't count.

Answer: history, or better yet, historiography, the study of historic methods.

The clever concept behind ICP's "Archive Fever" is contemporary art that re-frames or remixes archival images. It's also about reconsidering recent history, especially moments of war and revolution.

One example is Fazal Sheikh's simple and affecting photos ("Afghan Images," 1998), each showing an Afghani hand holding a small black and white portrait of a relative killed in combat, accompanied by text quoting memories of the deceased (see above image). Here is a history lesson: how foreign occupation and war in Afghanistan impacts families. It's also a stark reminder of how photos can be very personal, and mean different things depending on who's looking.

In a similar exercise, Lamia Joreige's "Objects of War" (1999-2006), presents video interviews with Lebanese men and women relating their experience of war. Each talks about an object -- a rosary, book, photo, etc. -- that they associate with their memory. Standing next to the three video monitors, a glass case holds dozen or so objects.

Hans-Peter Feldman's "9/12 Front Page" (2001) is four walls with 100 newspaper international front-pages from 9/12/2001, a collective global reaction of horror with only slight variations in the photos and layout.

"The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem" (1999) by Eyal Simon recuts footage from the 1960 war crimes trial, juxtaposing testimony of Holocaust survivors with Nazi criminal Eichmann's cold denials.

My favorite piece is mediation on memory and history by Albanian artist Anri Sala ("Intervista," 1998), a 26-minute video that documents Sala's discovery of an old film reel showing his mother as a young woman meeting the country's communist-era leader. To better understand the footage, which has no soundtrack, has a lip-reader decipher what is being said, and interviews his mother, bringing up her ambivalent feelings about the old regime and her young idealism.

Less about a specific history, and more about the idea of history, memory and authorship is Sherrie Levine's "After Walker Evans" (1991) a series of of rephotographs of Evans' famous photos of rural American during the Depression. Levine's classic pomo jujitsu has the viewer reconsider the older images and how their meaning has shifted, taking on an almost religious aura, stripped of their original documentary power. (Have a look here.)

For a chronologically deeper slice of history, we head over to the Main Branch of the Library, lately named for a hedge fund billionaire, for a small show celebrating the quadricentennial of the birth of John Milton.

It figures that the author of "Paradise Lost," an epic poem that fleshes out the story of man's fall, telling it from Satan's point of view. A polemicist, he wrote in support of radical ideas like regicide and divorce (the former got him in hot water after Cromwell was defeated). He also met Galileo.

But the bulk of the show isn't biography, but rather how Milton and his famous book were reinterpreted and rediscovered through subsequent generations. He was embraced by the Classical period, and even more emphatically by the Romantics, notably through the visionary illustrations of William Blake. An 1804 edition is on display, although I would have like to have seen more than a single image. (There are a few more of Blake's illustrations from the 1808 edition on view here.)

We learn that Milton's proponents include this crazy group: Darwin, Malcolm X and Helen Keller. Among his detractors are T.S. Elliot and Virginia Woolf.

Amusingly the show has a soundtrack -- music inspired by "Paradise Lost." It's mostly Handel and the like, but every 10 minutes or so there's a jarring blast of heavy metal courtesy of Cradle of Filth. I was waiting for one of the geriatric visitors to freak, but alas everyone was blasé.

Review Roundup

"Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered " at The Jewish Museum

"What is remarkable about the paintings now, however, is how uninteresting they are. What once made them controversial — the hint of a jokey, unconscious anti-Semitism — has evaporated, leaving little more than bland, posterlike representations." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes

"These colorful, kitschy silk-screens of (some of them) serious intellectual and political figures come across as overtly tongue-and-cheek—especially when thought of in the context of the artist’s iconic Marilyns." - Karen Bookatz/Heeb Magazine

"WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" at P.S. 1

"...the best way to look at the show is as a walk-in catalogue, a consciousness- raising session, and a class reunion. This P.S. 1 show is loaded with DIY ingenuity, passion, and literal blood and guts." - Jerry Saltz/NYMag

"Making It Together: Women’s Collaborative Art and Community" at the Bronx Museum

"The show is much smaller than 'WACK!' but includes a wealth of historical material, much of which would be better served by a book or documentary film." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes

"Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster" at the Whitney

"...a small, pure, gladdening exhibition of major work by the rhapsodic and droll American modernist..." - Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"Re-Orientations: Islamic Art and the West in the 18th and 19th Centuries" at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College

"...a superb small scholarly show, one as revealing of the past as it is germane to the present... every object in the show seems to tick with a volatile history." - Holland Cotter/NYTimes

Whitney Biennial

"Disappointment lies at the heart of every Whitney Biennial. What we do not expect, however, is for the Biennial to be dull, uninspired, flat, tepid. Such is the case this year." - Edward Sozanski/Philadelphia Inquirer

"In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers From Corot to Monet" at the National Gallery (Washington, D.C.)

"... completely spellbinding ... it tells a complicated and fascinating story about the role of nature in general and of Fontainebleau in particular in art, work, leisure and progress." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"Fluids" by Allan Kaprow at the Tate Modern (London)

"More than 20 art students will erect the Tate Modern piece over half a day. It will consist of 7.3 tonnes of ice and be left to melt over a period of five days." - Arifa Akbar/Independent