Review Roundup

This week!... Some fun rememberences of Bucky in the day from Charlie Finch and John Perreault... Review of the Week is Jerry Saltz's rhapsodic take on Jeff Koons' "Balloon Dog," writing that it's "a cross between a classical equestrian sculpture and a Toys ’R’ Us display" and represents "an updated version of Duchamp’s urinal" and a "postmodern fertility symbol or Venus of Willendorf." Jerry also takes the opportunity (again) to ponder the sunset of art-world excesses, comparing it to an Elton John concert: "Future generations will see that we passed through a super-mannered period where razzmatazz became an end in itself." ... And, don't miss Kenneth Baker's pissed-off rant on the tacky Dale Chihuly show at the de Young in San Francisco ("like surrealistic passages in a forest fit for Gump's").


Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney (-Sept. 21)
Paul McCarthy at the Whitney (-Oct. 12)
Dalí: Painting and Film (-Sept. 15)

"...Buckminster Fuller... He used to decamp at Yale, during my undergraduate days, sometimes just after Ken Kesey left town with a bus full of empty nitrous oxide canisters, and informally lecture all comers without limits. ... Below Bucky, on the Whit’s third floor, doors bang and screens flash. It must be Paul McCarthy, who is Bucky Fuller pumped full of crack and thorazine. ... On the other hand, over in midtown, 'Dali: Painting and Film' is one of the most spectacular shows ever mounted at the Museum of Modern Art. ... This show is one long amusement ride through Dali’s fermenting brain, snaking down the escalators to subsume the fey pretension of Olafur Eliasson, not to mention your correspondent’s meager descriptive powers. ... There can be no doubt, as this show confirms, that the champion influence on the art made today by Rachel Harrison, David Altmejd, Thomas Hirschhorn and a thousand others is not Picasso, Warhol or Duchamp, it is Salvador Dali." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet

Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney (-Sept. 21)

"I was once persuaded to attend one of Uncle Bucky's marathon lectures. How could I not have been intrigued? I thought the Dymaxion Car and then the Geodesic Dome at Expo 67 in Montreal were swell, in a Popular Mechanics kind of way. Bouncing around the stage, as advised by his dancer daughter, Bucky seemed more Barnum than beatific, more gasbag than gallant. Blather by any other name is still blather. Baloney is baloney. He gave a new meaning to Wall-of-Sound. I stuck it out for two hours and, deciding it was double-talk, and headed home to Hegel. ... He was the Pied Piper in a business suit. He was, in the name of the greatest good, an elf infected with predictomania and oracularitis. He was infected by neologorrhea, demonstrating that made-up words and new meanings forced upon old words can create another reality you might want to invest in, but not necessarily one you could trust. ... What was disarming about Fuller was his optimism and his idealism, however misplaced. He really seemed to believe that technology, specifically his version of same, would save the world. Progress was not only possible, but inevitable. Toward that end, unlike the dropouts constructing geodesic 'drop cities' out of recycled materials, he had no qualms about dealing with governments of all stripes or with any willing corporate bigwig." -John Perreault/Artopia

"At the Whitney one can hardly keep straight what came to exist, what lives on in the imagination, and what merely fell by the wayside. Fuller's structures might save humankind or force it into a mold. They could blend art and science or muddle the two. ... Both exhibitions show Fuller as a bundle of contradictions and as something of a street-corner prophet. However, the Whitney makes it easier to pin down the contradictions and the prophecy. His idealism, his connections between art and design, and early interest in mass-produced structures have obvious parallels with European Modernism—from the Russian revolution to the Bauhaus. The housing shares its setting and stilts with Le Corbusier's garden city, with the jellyfish swimming over from the Viennese school. In crossing the Atlantic, though, the map of the world has shifted. The architect of utopia has become the entrepreneur of the fantastic. ... Where Le Corbusier seeks perfection, Fuller demands efficiency. He has his head and housing in the clouds, and he can offer to instruct the United Nations, but to teach recycling. Like the image of the hustler, the lesson has its dark side. Early on, he imagines a zeppelin simultaneously delivering his 4D Towers and dropping bombs, like a vision of capitalism's 'creative destruction.' Stanley Kubrick might have turned it into a dark comedy. Is it an accident that he caught on in the 1960s, the summer of love and of Vietnam?" -John Haber/HaberArts


Jeff Koons at the Met Roof Garden (-Oct. 26)
Jeff Koons at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) (-Sept. 21)

"When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won’t miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event. Giant heads made of pots and pans; tigers flying through museums; muscle cars buffed by bikini-clad girls; bronze Hello Kitty sculptures in courtyards; enough plywood, plastic, aluminum, and steel constructions to wall off Mexico from the U.S.—big isn’t necessarily bad, but it isn’t automatically beautiful, either. ... It’s like an Elton John concert. Future generations will see that we passed through a super-mannered period where razzmatazz became an end in itself. That said, one artist who has excelled at this Nouveau Versailles aesthetic—despite never working on a truly giant scale—is Jeff Koons. Right now two of his three sculptures on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum may send you. They did me. The showstopper up here is Balloon Dog (Yellow), a ten-foot-tall representation of just what it sounds like, made of yellow-tinted high-chromium stainless steel. It’s a cross between a classical equestrian sculpture and a Toys ’R’ Us display, and Koons has called it 'a Trojan horse.' I think of it as an anti–golden calf. Yet, except for moneybag collectors, no one worships Balloon Dog. It worships us, basking in our presence, displaying its fake luxury (steel, not silver or bronze), and reflecting everything around it in hallucinogenic distortion. The philosopher Thales said, 'Everything is full of gods.' Balloon Dog is full of everything except gods, a de-deified sculpture that radiates irony and Eros. It’s an updated version of Duchamp’s urinal. Balloon Dog is also a postmodern fertility symbol or Venus of Willendorf. While its phallic shapes are pretty evident, a hermaphroditic buzz develops as the balloons create vulvalike vortexes where they are twisted together; the pooch’s anus actually resembles a budding flower. Balloon Dog occupies a zone between Platonic contemplation and randy sensation. It isn’t a sacrificial animal to be killed in place of humans; it’s so perfect it exists in some undisturbed eternal state. Call it the reflective sublime. ... Maybe some of Koons’s recent work is the sculptural equivalent of a dazzlingly polished Abba song. But even something as impeccable and weightless as that isn’t bad. Whether you like his work or not, Koons allows you to toggle between abstraction and reality like few other contemporary artists. Koons’s flawless surfaces are devoid of human touch, but they’re charged with physicality, intelligence, and humanity." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.


Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure at the Met (-Sept. 21)

"Despite signs to the contrary, conspicuous consumption is not what it used to be. Most exhibitions of decorative arts from the past, especially Europe’s monarchical age, drive that fact home in thrilling, and sometimes off-putting, fashion. But few shows do so with quite the dazzling vehemence of 'Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure From the Palaces of Europe,' a stealth blockbuster... A sumptuous sprawl of 170 objects borrowed from palaces and former palaces (that is, museums) all over Europe, it is the first in-depth survey of the arts and crafts of pietre dure. ... has something for every taste, meaning that almost all of us will find something in it that seems disconcerting or ugly in its excess. But over all, this extraordinary show suggests why the quest for beauty may be hardwired into humans. Nature habituated us to beauty, and we feel driven to equal its high, inspiring standards." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Woven Splendor from Timbuktu to Tibet at the New York Historical Society (-Aug.
17)

"Once I actually peeked at the spectacular rugs and textiles on display, I forgot names and was lost in rich colors, vibrant patterns, and complex abstract designs that would leave any Neo Geo or Op artist gasping. This array of more than 100 carpets, coverings, decorative items and pieces of clothing dates from the 15th to the 20th century. And it is spectacular." -N.F. Karlins/ArtNet


The Real Men and Women of Madison Avenue at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library (-Sept. 26)

"Advertising’s greatest hits are mostly there — like Clairol’s 'Does she or doesn’t she?' campaign, Morris the Cat and Volkswagen’s 'Think small' ads — as well as some more obscure samples from the 1920s and ’30s that illustrate the industry’s shifts in sense and sensibility. ... The library’s exhibition is sponsored by the One Club, the trade’s nonprofit cheerleading arm, so there is very little about advertising’s darker moments and no discussion of questions like advertising’s influence on consumption, waste and values." -Patricia Cohen/NYTimes


Elizabeth Peyton: Portrait of an Artist at teh Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT) (-Nov. 16)

"Elizabeth Peyton’s endearing, jewel-like portraits are frequently, and transparently, based on photographic ephemera: newspaper images, film stills, vintage black-and-white prints. Her own snapshots, taken over the last two decades with 35-millimeter, Polaroid and, most recently, digital cameras, are an important but rarely acknowledged source. Some 50 photographs by Ms. Peyton are now on view... ... With a Peyton survey scheduled to open in Manhattan at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in October, the Aldrich’s exhibition tries to deconstruct the mystique surrounding Ms. Peyton’s paintings, emphasizing her social-documentary ambitions rather than her technical facility or fan-girl romanticism. ... Ms. Peyton photographs with the acquisitive determination of someone amassing Facebook friends. ...extends the promise of a less fussy, more authentic Peyton, but it certainly doesn’t strip her paintings of their mysterious aura. Admirers will be left wondering how Ms. Peyton’s brushwork converts her awkward photographs into graceful, intuitive portraits." -Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Anish Kapoor at the ICA (Boston) (-Sept. 7)
Chantal Ackerman at the eList Visual Art Center at MIT (Boston) (closed July 6)

"Kapoor's a sculptor who continues to get better and better. His early work involved seductive interior spaces that glowed with the high-keyed intensity of unbound pigments, and one wondered where he’d take it. Big, for one; and he pulls it off, as anyone knows who’s seen his extraordinary and extraordinarily popular Cloud Gate (2004-06) in Chicago. He’s also continued to work with materials that have a mysterious beauty even though they’re no more esoteric than acrylic, resin, wax and stainless steel. ...Chantal Ackerman... It would be worth seeing if only for the first work: D’est: Au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction), 1995, which I think is one of the most important artworks of the last couple of decades." -Andrea Kirsh/FallonandRosof


Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series at the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.) (-Oct. 26)

"The painter's most famous work -- a set of 60 narrative panels, on view in its entirety in a rare exhibition at the Phillips Collection -- tells, of course, a single tale. Created between 1940 and 1941, it's the account of the great exodus of more than a million African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North in the years following the outbreak of World War I. ... An interactive kiosk allows you to type in your own migration story and to read those of others." -Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post


Thoughts on Democracy at the Wolfsonian museum at Florida International University (Miami Beach) ( -Dec. 7)

"... artists’ responses to Rockwell’s wartime 'Four Freedoms' series. ... a meditation on an American crisis of self-confidence: the sense that trust in American ideals is giving way to fear and uncertainty about how they are exploited. Culture has long been a documentarian of sorts, and this somber mood is also reflected at the box office these days, where the dystopian world of 'Wall-E' is a hit, and in bookstores, where titles like 'Are You There, Vodka, It’s Me, Chelsea' are best sellers." -Damien Cave/NYTimes


Dale Chihuly at the de Young Museum (San Francisco) (Sept. 28)

"Admirers of empty virtuosity may thrill to 'Chihuly at the de Young,' the de Young Museum's celebration of contemporary glass master Dale Chihuly. But so will those among the art public building a dossier against director John Buchanan's leadership of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Perhaps in today's arts funding environment, every museum must work a potboiler or two into its exhibition calendar. But Chihuly has come to personify everything meretricious in contemporary art. The most exciting thing about his work: Its status as art stands in question. ... The earliest of Chihuly's installations, from 1972, and one of the latest, 'Mille Fiori' (2008), look like surrealistic passages in a forest fit for Gump's. The many inanities of conceptual and other contemporary art may have inflamed the appetite for craft skill that Chihuly superficially satisfies. ... The history of art is a history of ideas, not just of valuable property. Chihuly has no place in it, and the de Young disserves its public by pretending that he does." -Kenneth Baker/SF Chronicle


Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art at the SFMOMA (-Oct. 5)

"...several dozen works by contemporary Asian - predominantly Chinese - artists... The "half-life" of guest curator Jeff Kelley's title refers to the rate of decay in individual artists' memories of Mao's dream of an ideal society engineered by fiat - a nightmare to most who experrienced it. The output of Chinese artists born before or during China's pivot from totalitarian socialism to predatory state capitalism traces the last avant-garde worthy of the name." -Kenneth Baker/SF Chronicle


Bruce Busby at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (-Aug. 9)

"...a white nylon tent, large enough to sleep in and open to anyone willing to take off her or his shoes. Despite a curious, off-kilter slant and a number of mysterious cylindrical protuberances, it's a slick, snazzy contraption that would look right at home on the floor of a sporting goods emporium. ... In its reflection of undeniably familiar stereotypes of California (and, to some degree, American) culture -- the ecological paranoia, the exaltation of personal expression, the longing for therapeutic consumer solutions and the pseudo-scientific language in which these solutions are generally couched -- the work actually rings more true than not." -Holly Myers/LATimes


Jim Campbell at the Berkeley Art Museum (-Aug. 30)

"About 30 minutes after seeing Jim Campbell's Home Movies 1248-1 at the Berkeley Art Museum, I couldn't remember what the heck the piece was about. I remembered the extravagant, near-floor to near-ceiling strings of wall-facing LED lights that make up the physical part of the piece. I remembered that Home Movies existed of shadowy objects, figures and shapes that I could make out on the wall. But I couldn't remember a single image or sequence of images. Considering that Campbell's work is substantially about memory, about what we remember and what we don't, about how we remember and how we don't, that seemed just about right." -Tyler Green/Modern Art Notes


This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs at the Huntington Library (Los Angeles) (-Sept. 15)

"Maybe it’s just my personal fixation on Rauschenberg’s epiphany, but he seems to me to be the absent hub at the center of the Huntington’s This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs — a surprising outburst of world-class curatorial practice from an institution whose arcane tweediness has always been one of its main attractions." -Doug Harvey/LA Weekly

The National Museum of Wildlife Art (Jackson Hole, Wyo.)

"In 51,000 square feet every painting, drawing and sculpture is of wild animals; one gallery is devoted to buffalo alone. ... The point of wildlife art is its subject, and the uneven quality of some of these works — even by well-known wildlife artists — shows an impulse other than the purely aesthetic at work. Realism is the dominant style, and kitsch is the familiar currency." -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes