Root Around

Jed Perl is right!?

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:25:00 +0000

Just a quick note about my current thoughts on the differences between editors and curators. I've got a long standing hate for everything on the web being 'curated' when I feel it's been edited. Seems trifling, but I think it's a symptom of the web being 'visual' to people (I'm delivering pictures of shoes I want, therefore I'm a curator) rather than verbal.

Visuality aside, I believe that if you are taking the course of information we all see daily as (metaphorically) a flow of water, then editing is narrowing down a river to a garden hose (again metaphorically). If you are reducing the scary amount of information to a smaller state, reducing the disorder, then (to me) that is an act of editing. Yes, editors select and organize. That is part of their gig. The editor of an academic book filled with her colleague's work is arranging and organizing, but the reason she was invited to build that book is because she can see the wider seascape and can see the importance of the essays that she selected. That winnowing down to a smaller selection, presenting the original essays without lengthy comment, is an act of editing. Writing a new book that quotes those same essays with new original comments for each and charts how these same essays relate to a wider story, is what curating is to me.

It's publicly adding original information to an existing body of work.

So on to Perl

The challenges involved in such curatorial work are the challenges of interpretation. Scholarship and erudition are essential. So is an instinctive feeling for the freestanding value of the work of art. And all of this must be combined with a sense of how works that emerged in a particular time and place can most effectively be presented in another time and place—in a way that is true both to the past and to the present.

Perl's notion is that real curators are there to present the contextualization of objects, ideas, and situations, and this rings true to me. Curating is the activity of knowing a subject and being able to add to it rather than arrange it.

A consequence of this notion is that it would be easy to say I think that editing isn't scholarly but curating is. I think that editing is equally academic, but it doesn't function synthetically. Editing is analytic and curating is synthetic. For an edited book of essays synthesis happens in the readers mind rather than in the creation of the book.

the unexpected links between fifteenth-century Italy, Oscar Wilde’s England, and New York today

That's what a well curated show delivers. Unexpected relevance.

2011 is over, long live 2011

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:09:00 +0000

Instead of remembering the memories with a top ## list, I'm giving out awards:

Object I most wanted to play with: Manuel Rocha Iturbide's I Play The Drums With Frequency
I wanted to plug my ipod in and see how other sounds changed this sculpture. Disponible would have been a much more pedantic show without this sculpture.

Object I had the most fun playing with: Wendy Jacob's Ice Floe
Good clean fun, eerie, and smart. You could "look" at art without using your eyes, which is always a bonus. Was also a great place to check your phone or think about how awesome art is.

Object I loved, even if I only saw half of it: Christian Marclay's The Clock
I'm not sure how much of The Clock I saw, but it was a lot. The next time someone tells you art has to be experienced completely to be understood, be skeptical.

Nerdiest show: Drawing with Code
This show was fantastic. The Purple Blurb talk at MIT was fantastic. The artist talks at the DeCordova were fantastic. This show was solid with historically interesting work that is often disregarded for being too far outside what art "should be."

Best talk given to a bunch of captive undergrads, their professor, and myself: Katy Siegel talking about Art Since '45 at Tufts.
Seriously, the book was sensational and the talk was compelling. Why did no one show up to this? While we're at it, Art Since '45 should also be considered one of the best books of the year.

The "Live Locally, Show Globally" award: Jaap Pieters at Spectacle
This award is the anti-yokelist award. Pieters work was about the world outside his apartment's window. It reminded me of Rebecca Meyers, but more cogent and succinct. His vision of a micro-local becomes mythical, extending the confined into a elaborate, but universal archetype.

Show most reflecting a generation: The Strange LIfe of Objects, Annette Lemieux
This show was great. It's one of the exhibitions this year that I kick myself for not writing about. Using only a few works, Lelia Amalfitano and Judith Hoos Fox brought more than just Lemieux's work, they illustrated a whole generation's concerns. These objects made visible for me just how complicated art was when the international art market started to dictate artistic value. The concealed personal meaning mixed with social metaphors created/creates meaning that survives to this day.

The I wanna talk to that guy about art all day award: Matrix 162, Shaun Gladwell
Anybody who creates Pacific Undertow Sequence (Bondi) is someone I feel that I could relate to. The work is lovely and I think it expands his visual subject matter just enough to move past the hyper-masculine, Mt. Dew, X-Games style he's become known for.

Best historical document: Record > Again! 40 Years of Video Art in Germany, Part 2
I heart video art so much, and yet knew nothing about almost any of these works. You could teach an entire semester's course off of this collection or maybe finally end the myth that video art sprung fully formed from Nam June Paik's head in 1965. It didn't. It also includes a great window into what the artistic situation was in divided Germany; it was complicated and low-tech.

Best plea for donations: the MFA's contemporary wing.
They have an ambitious staff that truly care about the subject, it's time for the collections to grow. Anyone got a friend who owns some really interesting art?

Mark Bradford- convert

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 02:09:00 +0000

Been considering Mark Bradford's Merchant Posters lately. He is subtly moving his practice with these works. Instead of inventing via pictorial abstractions he is now attaching himself to forms of concrete communications and their instability.

He purposely culls the posters that are self-help. Their messages are spiritual and practical at the same time. The practical advice is for those that are close to rock bottom. The disenfranchised turn to people who may not have their best interests in mind. Need to do something illegal or what seems illegal? There's a number for that. Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson laid out the list of his subjects in the book about these objects.

My issue is that Jacobson's, and the other essays from the book. relegate Bradford's work to the past. Archaeology, archive, travel document, memory, reclaim, maps, movement, etc. I feel that these works are current. They're not the things of economic bubbles that we've already experienced, they are more present tense than that.

These phrases come from Bradford's voice instead of the invisible con-man.

The stories are about self-motivation and survival on a very basic level. The self-employed, which I consider myself to also be, understand that they have to make their life happen, and that it's up to them to get out there and be heard.

(Huffpo)

He's not making a joke for rich art patrons, or those that hate them (everyone else). He's actually talking to you, not a stand in other.

You.

Do you need help? Call.

He sees the logic in the statements. He see's why they are convincing cons, and wants to use them to get you involved. Dive into these thoughts. Feel them personally. Listen to him. Form a link with him.

His work here is deconstructionist in nature. In this instance, I don't mean that he doesn't want a meaning connected to it but instead there is a disconnect between the thing being shown and the intended meaning. The grammar is indistinct rather than ineffectual. He does not place his faith in the determinacy of context.

Maybe it's more post-structuralist. There is no rigid connection between the sign and the signification. The symbol here has no correct context that unlocks a singular meaning. There is no structural definition to these posters. His usual work invents a format that you have to buy into, here he relies on the unstable meaning of these posters as a form of realism.

Gluing squares to hepcats

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:06:00 +0000

Brian O'Doherty's Inside The White Cube has a paragraph that I've always puzzled over:

Happenings were first enacted in indeterminate, non-theatrical spaces -- warehouses, deserted factories, old stores. Happenings mediated a careful stand-off between avant-garde theater and collage. They conceived the spectator as a kind of collage in that he was spread out over the interior -- his attention split by simultaneous events, his senses disorganized and redistributed by firmly transgressed logic.

The formal question of dividing spaces into white cube/black cube/non-cube is simple enough. It fits into the history of high modernism's theatrical explorations as I understand them. Groups like the living theatre "attacked the senses" of the audience and confronted their levels of taste, but they did not do so in accepted venues:

In the 1970's, The Living Theatre began to create The Legacy of Cain, a cycle of plays for non-traditional venues. From the prisons of Brazil to the gates of the Pittsburgh steel mills, and from the slums of Palermo to the schools of New York City, the company offered these plays, which include Six Public Acts, The Money Tower, Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism, Turning the Earth and the Strike Support Oratorium free of charge to the broadest of all possible audiences.

Factually, I'm with it. Happenings happened in non-theatrical spaces, often the very spaces that the artists lived in. Where I start to strain is where the happening is between theater and collage, specifically that the spectator is a collage.

After spending time with Greenberg's essay Collage though I think I understand where he's coming from. Greenberg's essay is a earnest attempt to define a key moment in two specific painter's journeys to understanding how abstraction works. Greenberg has a special relationship to both Picasso and to art writers of the 70's. Someone like O'Doherty would certainly be knowledgeable about his views on collage. Even if he was writing for Art Forum, and he was their rival, he still would have repressed Greenberg orthodoxies floating in his writing.

If Greenberg said it, than everyone read it. If it's about Picasso, than it's about where the members of Greenberg's Abstract Expressionist brand can find their genealogical basis.

So what is he on about, and what is "firmly transgressed logic?"

Braque and Picasso had obtained a new, self-transcending kind of decoration by reconstructing the picture surface with what had once been the means of its denial. Starting from illusion, they had arrived at a transﬁgured, almost abstract kind of literalness.

I'm shortening an epic to a haiku, but for Greenberg, the moment of collage is one of exiting the flattened extreme of analytical cubisim and entering into synthetic cubism due to the "independence of the planar unit in collage as a shape." They lost their ability to continue the essence of their brand by being too good at painting things in flattened planes, and had to invent a new way of doing things through collage. It became more real when you glued something on a canvas (at least to the rules of the cubist metaphysic), and for Greenberg especially, they needed for their cubist abstractions to be more real than realism could be.

Happenings often are defined by their inclusion of random people. The chance encounters with art in real life (Marjorie Strider's 1969 Street Works, James Collins' 1970 Introduction Piece #5, Adrian Piper's 1970 Catalysis Series for example). The audience's connection to these events is mere happenstance.

Except when happenings were in the galleries or when people were invited. As I understand it, the audience for this kind of art was tiny at the time. I've seen numerous quotes from artists who talk about feeling obligated to show up to exhibitions from this era as they knew that no one would be in the audience if they didn't. It was a revolving form of credit. If you showed up to Philip Glass's music, than he'd show up to your exhibition.

So back to the audience as collage. If a patently false realism is the highest form of realism, than an audience who were usually insiders and a few chance viewers, then maybe the collage is that the audience is a form of faked random audience?

I feel O'Doherty's intention was that a group of audience members, transfixed by this random event happening in front of them were in a state of collage of random people stuck against the purity of art. By being at a happening, you were effectively glued onto the idealized avant-garde model as a square of conformity in their non-conformist art world. From the spectator's perspective, being unable to look away at a happening is a moment of collage in their lives too. Interrupting the field of daily life is this glued on happening, it fragments their world, complicating the audience member's relationship to real life.

So, the audience is glued to the art. The art is glued to the audience's normal life. The audience is glued in as a false member of the audience, viewing the happening, but accidental and separate from the pure audience. The invited audience is of course not glued to anything as they are uninterrupted in their connection to the happening. They are made of the same stock as the happening. Lots of glue here.

One last part though: the "firmly transgressed logic." Later, O'Doherty defines the principles that make avant-garde art:

Classic avant-garde hostility expresses itself through physical discomfort (radical theater), excessive noise (music), or by removing perceptual constants (the gallery space). Common to all are transgressions of logic, dissociation of the sense, and boredom. In these arenas order (the audience) assays what quotas of disorder it can stand. Such places are, then, metaphors for consciousness and revolution. The spectator is invited into a space where the act of approach is turned back on itself. Perhaps a perfect avant-garde act would be to invite an audience and shoot it.

Now Renato Poggioli enters our conversation. The happening is part of the avant-garde as it assails the audience, attacking their comfort with ill-founded spaces, unproven methods, objectless art, and confrontational inclusion. The work can't be for a new audience, an experiment that is evolving, or even a new format. It has to fit into the avant-garde model by being against your supposedly monotonous level of taste. Art supposedly has to divide us for it to be new. It just seems so old fashioned today.

False Dichotomies

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Wed, 25 May 2011 18:07:00 +0000

So I'm always doing art shitz. It apparently means that I'm a happier dude than everyone else.

But lately, I've been visiting very diverse art events. Some might call it high or low culture or maybe some of it is stuffy or relaxed. I don't know what it is, but I think that these two types of events just have different audiences. Two photos as examples:

The top is the 4th floor of the Harvard Art museum. Wonderfully filled installation with a solid showing of art from around 1870/1880. Historically important and vital to understanding art history.
The bottom is from the final party/performances at MEME in Cambridge. A bunch of drunken fools playing kazoos and laughing as they improvise music at the behest of the conductor (the blur in the middle).

Are these the poles that people in universities use as high and low? No. They would certainly define a painting from Harvard's collection as high, sure, but they would likely use lady gaga or some advertising spread as the painting's opposite. This low-brow-as-advertising crap has been encouraged deeply by Roland Barthes (pdf). Barthes is an inescapable corner stone of art theory eduction (with Sculpture in the Expanded Field and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as at least two of the other corners).

Low-art is usually described as advertising partially because of Barthes' analysis of static advertising images. It becomes most clear when you consider this: if you asked the supposed commoner who decides such things, is The Hangover from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or is MEME's improv "real art?"

My assumption is that your average person would say that T-L is real art and the improvised music is not real art.

The T-L is easier to read as art, like the advertising spread. From the content to the handling of the paint, this is a great example of how we have been taught that hand-made abstractions are the definition of art. It's also easier to "skim off" the semiotics of what the painting is trying to do. The white wall, the silence, the paying money to get in, the frame, the guards, the space around each work, the wall text announcing the provenance and the official statistics. These are as clear as the pasta advertising's attempt at reading Italian. The culture of high art museums is showing how cultured each work is through the semiotics of the presentation.

This is not evident in MEME's event. Instead the linguistic, coded and non-coded iconic messages are ambiguous. What are we being directed to think in this situation? Is this just a good party? Are nerds like me supposed to remember this event and write about it to anchor it in art history? To use Barthes' ideas for a moment, there is an arbitrariness here that is absent from a museum presentation. The frankness of the image is incomplete at MEME. The "what it is" non-coded message is just a bunch of people having fun. Is that art now?

So Barthes' brand of decoding static images is a bad method to explore what was happening at MEME that night. I think that the "message in the medium" is that performance is something that is not static and functions outside the rules of advertising. I think that low-art, low-brow, whatever you want to call it is best used to look at things like advertising, pop art, graffiti, comic books, or graphic design. Barthes' brand of semiotics is not a universally applicable tool in art.

If people want to continue arguing about the cultured qualities of The Hangover and The Hangover, let them, but if you tell me that a party atmosphere can't be art, then we are going to have to find another reason why besides it's "lowbrow."

I'm sure that someone wants to argue that it's neither: it's avant-garde. Can relaxed performance be ahead of the curve in 2011? Nope. In the 1960's, maybe. Why can't the two just have different audiences that are social equals? Why does everything in art theory have to encourage political divisions?

Rain. Hate it.

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:40:00 +0000

It's Museum day e'reybody! It's also another rainy day! oh boy!

I'm about to move house, so that's fun! Went to the PEM yesterday to see Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection, which proves that a rich couple with a singular interest can bring together a collection of pretty great works. There are a few stand-outs and a bunch of filler, but it's a pretty good selection of work.

Worth the price of admission: Isaack Koedijck's Barber-Surgeon Tending a Peasant's Foot, van der Heyden's View of the Westerkerk Amsterdam, Ruisdael's View of Haarlem, Cuyp's Orpheus Charming the Animals and the one Rembrandt, a portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh (scrabble won't accept that spelling).

The PEM's Freeport exhibitions continue to be great. #2 from Marianne Mueller is a collection/installation. The overall feeling you get is confrontation. Things from the PEM's collections are held in opposition--two objects are kept in tension over and over again. The walls are covered with very specific pantone colors. Mueller included some of her photographs in the installation too. There are three videos of women standing facing the camera. They are, again, confrontational. I do want to know why women as video subject, are they to be gazed at, or are they gazing at us, or both? It seems deliberately gendered either way.

Freeport #3 is up at currently too, Susan Philipsz has an 8 channel sound piece installed. It's her singing the same song 8 different times exposing the differences in song. It comes in and out of focus over and over again. I assume it considers the change in oral histories over time, as it's a multi-version layering of a traditional song.

The NGC And MFA Acquired Christian Marclay’s 24-Hour Video, The Clock recently. I've been thinking about it and its place in art right now. It's a hit. I don't know how long it will last, if it's an instant classic or if it's going to change over time to a dated work. One of the reasons why I think it's popular outside of hardcore contemporary art circles is that it is a collage of popular movies. It has the same connection to popular culture as the new Beastie Boys video. Not that interesting, unless you care about seeing celebrities when you don't expect them. I personally can't wait to experience the sharpening of time in it. But I'm an insomniac, so it might just feel like another day...

Installations from Ai WeiWei, Olafur Eliasson, and Tomás Saraceno were exhibited at Harvard. I think that you can experience 2/3 of it via video the same way that you would have in person. The Eliasson was more intimate and wider in scope at the same time. He put more into his work.

The cyberarts festival is done. I almost agree with Greg Cook's review, which is a rare. There was something disjointed about this year's festival. There seemed to be fewer cyber artists and more +1's who wanted the publicity. The stand outs are Jim Campbell at Howie's gallery, the German videos at Goethe Institute (my writing about that- symposium and works), and the Drawing with Code exhibition at DeCordova (review is in draft form at Printeresting.org).

Anyway, off to the Harvard Museum to make more museum memories. But before I go, if you are in Boston area, go to meme's closing this weekend, a sad/happy event.

photo dump, contained

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 15:12:00 +0000

So Greg Cook published a review of Contained today and I got some photos of the exhibition in order, so it's time for a photo dump. The exhibition comes down after this week, so if you've been sleeping Boston, go see it now.

Another gap

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 14:58:00 +0000

More accounting for myself after a long absence. I do have plans to get back to blogging soon, so if you are paying attention, now is the time.

Since my last mea culpa post, I finished traveling too much (Oct-2nd week of Jan, I was home about 1 week a month), wrote quite a few reviews for the Daily Serving, wrote a review for artsfuse about the new Americas wing, applied and was rejected from CMS at MIT, became a contributor for Art Writ and printeresting, and finalized/installed/feted my show at the BCA.

I plan on laying out a curator's thingy for that show soon-- including pictures etc. Briefly, knowing that I am biased, I love this show and I love all the artists in it. It seems to have been beneficial to the space, artists, and me, so I think we all win.

I'm writing some thoughts on internet nerdery, social media in the arts. I will likely post something about that soon.

Things you should see if you are near Boston-
Drawing with Code and Rachel Perry Welty at DeCordova
Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection at the PEM and Mirror of Holland: Drawings from the George and Maida Abrams Collection at the MFA.
All of the upcoming ICA exhibitions including the AR works (that the ICA approved, but doesn't seem to know how to advertise for or have even mentioned yet) during the Cyber Arts Festival.
Nathalie Miebach at Fuller Craft

If you are in NY, go see the amazing Lucy Lippard talk about Ghosts, the Daily News, and Prophecy: Critical Landscape Photography Thursday, April 7, 2011, 7 pm. She's the smartest art nerd I know and is we should all wish to be half as smart as her.
Feel free to ignore my dear friend the Museum Nerd who didn't like Mark Morisoe at the Artists Space. I wanted to see this show as it is an important part of the Boston School that the ICA cemented as a thing. (Also go to the Shellburne Thurber show at Bab's Gallery)

If you are in NJ, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage at Princeton should be worth your attention.

In bad news, 57 Delle is closed, MEME is closing (but has a great schedule over the next few months), Walker Contemporary/Anthony Greaney/Carroll and Sons are all moving. We have so few contemporary spaces, this is a big deal to me. Boston seems to always seems to be on the edge of slipping into a dark ages, now is no different.

Where I've been

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:56:00 +0000

Minneapolis, Philly, New York, Chicago, Princeton NJ, Southern Maine, and a few other spots along the way. I've been on a crazy travel schedule. It's been great.

I started writing for DailyServing and started a blog for print nerdery (the Wandering Printmaker). It's been crazy, and tomorrow I'm headed back to NY for Print Week.

Some recent ideas in no particular order:
- NEJAR, and Greg Cook can bite my left ankle. The worst public art thing is redic. It's insulting to the artists and myopic.
- Minneapolis Institute of Art is one of the best museums I've ever been to. With a good olde-fashioned dictator and a few hundred more years, it would be Louvre or Prado good.
- Writing about the arts is hard, but I love it.
- Seeing art is awesome, and I love it.
- Sarah Sze is a good artist.
- College art museums are the entrepreneurs of the art world. Some of their ideas are great, some suck-- all are pushing new ideas though. Their work makes big museums look better than they are.
- Independent curators are the risk takers that drive the college museums entrepreneurial spirit. Thank god the AAMC finally allows them to be members.
- I like this.
- I like Pipilotti Rist a lot.
- I need to go drinking with Natalie Jeremijenko and say smart and funny things to impress her.
- AICA/USA is the secret decoder ring I want. They are the art mafia illuminati that I want to be part of.

I'll be in Chelsea and at the E/AB fair tomorrow, the IFPDA fair, the Met, Prints Gone Wild, NYU, and maybe Brooklyn Museum over the next few days. My show at BCA is right around the corner in March/April 2011. I'm still applying to MIT. I'm absolutely ready for a nap.

Curator's Statement for Open Air @ The Nave Gallery

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:47:00 +0000

Open Air at The Nave Gallery in Somerville MA.
Artists:
Matthew Best
Nathalie Miebach
Carolyn Muskat
Ted Ollier
Jason Shoemaker

These five artists use the outdoors as inspiration without relying on the timeworn landscape tradition. Each has his/her own way of dealing with the outdoors. A quick description of each project:

Matthew Best's 2+ year suburban foraging project is a visual diary centered around food, life, death, and our insufficient attention to these concerns. Rejecting the clinical delivery of fruit and foods from around the globe, he restores the dependence on our immediate surroundings for nourishment.

Nathalie Miebach's sculptures weave together literal meteorological storms and personal emotional storms. These objects attach the external chaos surrounding us with our internal emotions. These are further developed by collaborating with the accomplished Elaine Rombola to create musical scores out of these storms.

Carolyn Muskat's sculptures revolve around the idea of top soil and ground cover. Buried below the ground we see is our history. Creating granular constructions from her own history she explores geological dimensions, humanizing the process and producing new ways of understanding old tropes.

Ted Ollier's photographs trick us into thinking that he has created a "zen like" calligraphic scroll. Instead, the asphalt patches in the road are brought to our attention in such a quiet and sly way that it is shocking to earnestly find meaning in such a humble object.

Jason Shoemaker's large narrative print of flying objects escaping the manufactured city fits in well with his allegories of roosting birds. These symbolic creatures move out into the wind, finding new roosts. Oddly, at the far end from the large and complicated city we find the impossible-- a man sitting on a horse that is standing in a boat.

Taken together, these works introduce original interpretations of the outdoors. Neither relying on outdated aesthetically motivated images of bucolic scenes nor currently stylish politically motivated "green" readings of our world they form a new modality in the landscape genre.

Each has found a new focal point that guides their work. Miebach, Best, and Ollier's work relies on some form of scientific method; primarily gathering data. Of course, the gathered data is used in divergent ways. Miebach's explosions of color and structured form demand a short book like 1971's Entropy and Art (PDF copy at link) by Arnheim. Her sculptures enthrall the viewer and reward continued study but escape simple explanations.

In contrast with Miebach, Best uses his data as object. Forming a hermeneutic circle, without the individual information from each day, the project is restricted and without understanding the end goal, any individual page is not intelligible. The viewer who possesses both the end goal and the details can project themselves into the project.

Ollier's photographs capture everyday objects from an impossibly impartial perspective. He illustrates his ideas with objective systems, and relies on these systems to provide the images for each piece. Even though he goes through a rigorously concrete process, the final images retreat from what could be entirely too literal and boring.

Shoemaker and Muskat both have overarching themes that strays into the allegorical. In Shoemaker's case, he seems to challenge his own world view with this print. It would be easy to read the work as a indictment of urban sprawl encroaching on the natural world, but his careful and sensitive depiction of both the city and birds who escape it should be read differently. Seen in his wider oeuvre, these birds need a place to rest and the city is where they return to at the end of the day.

Last, Muskat's two sculptures come from her long-standing exploration of the earth under our feet. She sees the top soil as the current chapter in world history. Beneath us, no matter where we stand are buried histories, with boundless narratives and connections. The way our life builds up is similar to how geologic formation are created, for example: from explosions, from wear, or from exposure to hardships. As we excavate the earth, we can do the same for our own self, and unearth hidden pains and triumphs.

In the end, these five artists are creating works that are part of wider dialog about who we are and what our surroundings say about us. From Anne Hamilton's explorations of site specificity, Kader Attia's questioning of location, to Fallen Fruit's various projects centering on fruit-- Open Air's artists may be creating new and previously unseen works, but they are also taking part in a wider conversation currently playing out in art today.

For some pictures see my Flickr.

Open Air

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:46:00 +0000

Installing Open Air this weekend. If you're around the Boston area, stop by during the upcoming weekends. It will also be open, preview style, Monday the 6th from 6-8.

ubu web is awesomer!

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:30:00 +0000

In order to see more of her work and get beyond her staring at you, you should watch this Marina Abramovic, 1975-1976 performance video.

1. Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful.
2. Freeing the voice
3. Freeing the memory
4. Freeing the body.

She's one bad ass cat.
And, no, I didn't watch the whole thing while eating popcorn either. It's long and sometimes intense.

B/R/S 135, the final episode

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:55:00 +0000

That's the end of Big Red and Shiny. Issue 135 is the end. Love it or hate it, it was a great place to publish reviews without major pressure. I'll miss it. My review of Rivane Neuenschwander is in 135. I'm smitten with that show weeks after seeing it, which is better than most shows I see. Hope everyone gets to see it.

Saw Anna Hepler and the Wadsworth's traveling show of American moderns on paper (also reviewed in B/R/S 135) up in Portland ME. The Portland Museum of Art is such a badly designed space, but everything they have up is wonderful and important, so you overlook the cramped spaces and narrow hallways-as-gallery. They have a nice Vuillard nude and a hybrid book painting from Anselm Kiefer that should be seen. Unfortunately I went on a day when the commercial galleries were closed, so I missed a few other things I wanted to see.

The print/drawing/paper New Works show is up at the MFA. Man did that department get the short straw in the new MFA redesign. They use to have what's now the Torf Gallery and the space next to the musical instruments. Today, they have 30% of the space in the Brown gallery. Either way, the show has some great work in it. 6 Christiane Baumgartner prints, a 95 Jasper Johns print, Julie Mehretu, and Michael Oatman’s collage Exurbia. A nice group for such a small room.

I think the best part of being in the MFA right now is the random crap you see due to the redesign. Upstairs in what will be the contemporary wing is Kara Walker, plastic wrapped Jonathan Borofsky, and a ton of plywood.

It's quite fetching.

More books

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:41:00 +0000

Found a new-to-me book publisher, and they've got some books I'm gunna buy.

JAN VERWOERT- Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want
ROTTERDAM DIALOGUES- The Critics, The Curators, The Artists
E-FLUX JOURNAL- What is Contemporary Art?
MARIA LIND- Selected Writing
HANS ULRICH OBRIST- Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating* But Were Afraid to Ask

Steffen Schleiermacher

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:31:00 +0000

Also, feel free to use the comments section at Big Red and Shiny to tell me that my review was (insert angry internet criticism here). Or that you think Steffen is a crap pianist. Isn't that what the internet is for?

Another 10 hours of my life on Rt. 84

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:09:00 +0000

New York. Lots of art spaces to root around in. Visited again this week.

New museum's Brion Gysin show was excellent and I ran into a friend from undergrad that I haven't seen in years. This show was a disappointment for me in some ways, and completely what I wanted in others. The good news first, much of his important work from his career is shown here. The bad news, it is way too crowded for the amount of work and is a pared down show compared to the retrospective shown in the town he spent his childhood, Edmonton Canada, in 1998. If you want to learn a ton about his life and career, buy the book from Edmonton, and go to this show to see the works in person if you can get to NY at all. It's well worth it.

The reason I have to complain about the way the work was put up is that a lot of his work is very loud and chaotic. If it overlaps, you can not escape the other stuff happening in the other room. His work was mostly composed in solitude, and is very hard to find in private or public collections. This is truly an important show to see if you are interested in the artists who had no interest in Greenberg, minimalism, conceptualism, etc. He was an outsider of sorts. His work presaged a whole other way of working that was related to anything in the mainstream of art history in the 50/60/70's.

The surprise in store for me at the New Museum was Rivane Neuenschwander. She may not be an household name, but I think her work deserves this mid-career retrospective. Her work is massively influential in her native country, Brazil, and is better known in Europe. I appreciate the ephemeral nature of her work and how smart the work shown is. She creates new and accessible objects, or installations, but their immediacy, their lack of large historic critical myths is what makes me love them. It is refreshing after seeing so much conceptually driven work in Boston.

After the Storm (scroll down most the way) is one of the new works on display. The newer works do not show the influence of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, her metaphorical Brazilian artistic parents. Instead of being an experience, a video of an experimental moment, or an installation, it is a collection of 12 maps of NY's counties that have been left out in the rain to decompose. Then they are drawn and painted on. It's an object, but still requires you to pay attention to the ephemeral and non-restraint involved in the making of the work. The maps have all but been eliminated by the artist losing authority (author-ness) in the beginning stages of the creation process.

I moved on to Chelsea. Saw a pile of galleries with just one piece in it worth talking about, so I'll skip them.

The Graffiti NYC: Artists of the Third Rail was stuck in one generation of graffiti. They were nice enough to let me charge my phone and the DJ was excellent, but it wasn't the historical show about the growth of writing in NY that I hoped it was. It is always worth seeing that era. I hope it doesn't get forgotten in this mass-market driven hip hop light world we live in now. These guys lived it. Well worth seeing the paintings and the photographs of early hip hop pioneers.

Kaleidoscopic Adventures at Blank Space was cool. I was too tired by the time I got to see Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham to appreciate the work, but I'll see his show at Portland Museum next year.

The Hans Op de Beeck show at Marianne Boesky was interesting. I'm not sure what to think about these large watercolors. They might be greeting cards done large, or they might be just fantastic oversized explorations of single themes like absence and presence or the often explored memory. But I like them and they stayed with me for days now.

The real reason I went down was to see the IPCNY summer show. My friend Deborah Chaney (printer at Gowanus) was a juror and wrote the essay for the show. The gallery was a milllllion degrees and louder than anything should be without amplifiers. But, the show is excellent. Heat is such a nebulous idea to jury, but hey, I didn't have to make those calls!

Hartford/New Britain

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:02:00 +0000

Ran down to CT in the heat yesterday.

Visited Trinity on Main in New Britain. Gonna be putting up a show this coming spring hopefully. Might be sooner. Going to help with a show at the Mayor's gallery in New Britain this summer too.

Went to NBMAA after that. Great space. They are doing it right. Elana Herzog's works made of paper and fabric stapled to the wall were nice, but many of their paintings were what really got me excited. Tom Yost's Painter Hill Road is an excellent little landscape. Christopher Gallego's Interior with Three Rooms is another excellent realistic painting. It's exactly what it sounds like, a painting of a house's interior. Walton Ford's Fallen Mias (see above) is another stunner.

Headed up to the Wads-Ath to at least see the Matrix 159 show of Justin Lowe.

Can't say enough about this installation. He really used his chance in a museum to its full potential. The image above is from my cell phone, so it's hard to see, but this is the acid room, the 60's acid room if you ask me. The floor is a carpet of pulp horror novels, the walls are reflective, the windows are colored green and pinkish, the tv shows overlain with other acid movies, the paintings are composed from the novels in the floor. It's intense.

Next to that is a hallway that has a slide projector. This room did nothing for me, but that's ok, as it leads to the post acid, punk rock cocaine and beer CBGB's bathroom. It's a dark place and dangerous. Maybe the hallway was the aftermath of the free love era where one moves to northern Cali to grow your own food or Aspen to be free. Either way, the bathroom is what everyone seems to be talking about. It was too clean and smelled too good to be the real CBGB, but that's fine by me.

Next door to that is the 90's rave chill out room. The music Brooklyn hipsterish-- a mellow non-genre slog of noisy chillout. With the symmetrical video projector showing another set of videos mashed together, this felt overpoweringly content. Too content. Melting into the carpet content.

Hiding behind all this drug reference is a great site specificity. He reflected the museum by being era conscious and making period rooms, he brought a Jackson Pollock into CBGB's bathroom for example. He made lots of puns about what he included in each room that reflect on the Atheneum's holdings. Very smart show.

Glad I went. Any museum that has a strong contemporary tradition and a Rembrandt, Zurbaran, and a pair of Glotzious's (or is it Glotziouseses?) paintings is alright by me.

How one might read modern art.

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:18:00 +0000

Everyone who might be slightly interested in Museums and/or art exhibitions has to watch the first 5ish minutes of this talk. Lowry is laying out a seriously important changes that are going on at the MoMA. Ann Temkin spoke at Harvard last month, and echoed these sentiments from her perspective as chief curator.

I've been reading the early history of the MoMA written for the 10th anniversary. I'm going to start writing about these years, but Lowry and Temkin both certainly know their history from what I've read already.

If you make it to 24 minutes in to Lowry's video you hear him talk about a subject I watched butchered at teh Fast Co. Wicked Pissah Bahston crap this morning. A portion of the conversation went as such: How does a Museum reach younger adults?

A: Their kids.

And kids coming off their school buses are the M-F daytime shift of art goers was what else I found out today! Man, I thought it was shifting your programing and understanding what non-AARP visitors need/want. So, if you know anyone at the MFA, let them hear that the MoMA dropped their average age from 55 to 40 years old by working with a younger audience that PS1 understood, not by forcing 30 somethings to bring their kids.

And speaking of twisting mom's arms, I guess I had more info about this than the speakers this morning, as I read this. Moms and kids are a complicated creature to court.

P.S. I just reread my Dürer review. I needed one more edit. I apologize.

Dürer review

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:52:00 +0000

Grab the PDF of my review of the MFA's Dürer show that's up right now.

That Nuevo York place.

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 02:36:00 +0000

Ran down there this week. Had to see the Bespoke show as I know all but one of the bike builders in the show. It's complicated and interesting. I'll be writing up a review and as long as it makes sense on paper/screen/smarty-pants-phone it'll be published in the following weeks.

I also saw the Dead/Alive show. Has numerous good works and icky ones too. I like icky works. The birds turned into synthetic diamonds were awesome, but I wouldn't spend 30 hours trying to explain how the show functions-- as it's pretty straightforward. Ick, death, and odd smells.

The baskets from the Sara and David Lieberman collection is a perfect example of how design often works in museums. It sometimes reduces what probably should be considered a sculpture to design.

I hit up that Frick collection I keep hearing about. Dude had deep pockets. 3 Vermeers is not natural. Having two essential Rembrandts also on the scale of hedonistic. The perfect early power portrait and probably the best self-portrait. And the Holbeins! good lord. I believe fortune smiled down on Mr. Frick in order to have those two portraits facing each other in such a well funded public collection. Everything else he did and collected (including the Franz Hals portraits) were just padding around those two Holbeins.

Around the corner at the Asia Society is Mariko Mori. I won't belabor this either, as Kumano is from 1998, but it's the work from Mori that is who she is to me. If you have the time, go, but read up on the signs and signifiers of Japaneseness. That work is jammed full with how the Japanese understand themselves. From the calligraphic style to the moon, to the temple, to the fox spirit. It's her best work to me as it's solid packed with complicated images.

Throw in a drunken evening in Brooklyn, and it ended up being a good distraction.

Speaking of distractions, I hope people know that the work of art thing on the TV shouldn't be taken seriously or talked anywhere near as much as it has. It's a tv show kids. Like Futurama, the return of which I'm more excited about. It's worse than tv, it's reality tv. Like the housewives, but with corporate art whoring instead of die job ladies selling their bodies and souls for fame.

Scheduling two years out.

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:18:00 +0000

Apparently pictures of AARP Rock and Rollers isn't populist enough in Brooklyn? Who knew?

Even if No sleep till... used a guitar hook, maybe 50's rock photos should be considered outside the normal populist crap for NY. I know that the white hipsters listen to... whatever the hell that is, but if you had put together an early hip hop photography show, I think it would have done better and fewer competing institutions could say that they got there first.

Essentializing the Brooklyn audience aside, museums are always brooding about what to put up 2 years before we get to make fun of them. Look to the successful shows from this article and you'd probably not want to drop your money and schedule a show about religion in contemporary art or the Indian highway system if you are hemorrhaging viewers. You might alienate someone.

But the thing is, that if the NYT numbers are correct, you are reaching 2.4 times the number of viewers over all and 2.3 times the numbers daily with Leibovitz and Mueck (love to see the numbers separately for each artist, but oh well) than you are with RnR photography exhibit. Also, as Robert Storr says, the audience of the unholy combination of Leivovitz and Mueck is more likely to return to see art, than some rock bros or mid-life crisis boomers are to return to see Kiki Smith or the upcoming Warhol.

You have to keep your museum focused on something but there is space for being open to wide programing. I love old fashioned encyclopedic institutions like the MFA Boston or Philadelphia Museum of Art. The MFA can afford to have a popular show of Egyptian artifacts as it doesn't get in the way of them having a Dürer, Harry Callahan, Toulouse-Lautrec, and a show about the women in Firdawsi's Shahnama simultaneously. Philly had up mediocre Picasso show, but was balanced with a Bruce Nauman installation and Jennifer Levonian, Martha Colburn, Joshua Mosley's work.

You have to keep your popular but questionable shows balanced with your quietly worthy shows.

I'd ask Brooklyn to consider their mission statement:

The mission of the Brooklyn Museum is to act as a bridge between the rich artistic heritage of world cultures, as embodied in its collections, and the unique experience of each visitor. Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience, committed to excellence in every aspect of its collections and programs, and drawing on both new and traditional tools of communication, interpretation, and presentation, the Museum aims to serve its diverse public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.

Can you make it less generic? You might do better then.

Curator's bibliography

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 15:02:00 +0000

No joke, there has been a lot of books published on the subject of curators in the last decade. I've been reading a fair number of them and for a while, have been making a list of ones I need to get. Today I'm going to share them with you.

I don't doubt curators as much as others do. If it weren't for curators, there would only be two type of shows: solo shows in galleries and museum based historical retrospectives of dead artists. I do think that the word is being used way too much and we need to expand our vocab. Personally, I wrestle with how and what I do when I plan a show-- is it merely an illustration of an idea or is there something bigger going on, does the work or theme of the show lead, am I telling artists what to do, is it understandable to a wide audience, could I have found better artists or written about them differently, etc.

And yes, I don't shy away from books about museums.

Here we go:
Brief History of Curating
On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators
A Brief History of Curating New Media Art: Interviews with Curators
Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance
Rethinking Curating
What Makes a Great Exhibition
Cautionary Tales
Thinking About Exhibitions
Inside the White Cube
One Place After Another
Collecting the New
Salon to Biennial
Studio and Cube
Exhibiting Cultures
Art and Its Publics
Exhibiting Contradiction
Academies, Museums, and Cannons of Art
The Arts of Democracy
Contemporary Art and the Museum
Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects
Good and Plenty
Curating Consciousness
International Dialogues about Visual Culture, Education and Art
The Modern Eye
Money for Art
Museum Basics
Museums and their Communities
Museum Exhibition
Museum Legs
Museum Prejudice
New Media in the White Cube
The Place of Artists' Cinema
Spaces of Experience
Sponsorship
Museum Frictions
This is the Flow
Harald Szeemann: Exhibition Maker
Harald Szeemann--with by through because towards despite
Under Construction
Whose Muse?
Women Gallerists
Curating Now(PDF Yup, it's a free book! Goes for over 100 on amazon.)
Curating Subjects

If you know of a book that isn't on this list, let me know!

The museum is supporting

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Mon, 24 May 2010 20:27:00 +0000

Marina Abramović. Up till this year, I knew of her, but after the MoMA started hosting her show The Artist is Present, I think I know her. No, I haven't been taking part in the performance, crying in front of the artist. I've been getting to know her work and her career in a way that I think many people have and I hold the MoMA responsible for it.

It's a good thing. So much of her work and the work that the MoMA did not choose to support at this time has been in discussion, that I think that a dent is being made in the historicization of her era has begun in earnest. From today's opinion piece by Danto, to Laurie Anderson sitting down to interview Ambamović we have been treated to numerous resources that we should not take for granted.

But, as I've not experienced the work, I'd like to explore what it means that this is going on inside one of the NY'iest of NY institutions. Instead of being merely a review of other work, allowing a window into an era this is a show of surviving documents and new experiences for both the artist and the museum. The revival of Imponderabilia is not just a redo, a rehash, but brings up new problems that are unavoidable in a 3 month show that wasn't an issue in a one evening performance. This work has no heuristic issues when simulated on the interweb, but when actually planned for by an institution there are numerous legal, ethical, and ridiculous issues that will "arise."

Dick jokes aside, the twitterverse was a tweeting about a catheter, astronaut's diapers, and holding it. However this is dealt with, it's just the tip of the iceberg. She needed an army of performers to be able to pull of a fresh large scale attempt at these works. They cost money, and the MoMA supported her and her process. There is a bevy of naked people in the galleries that the audience is asked to touch in a polite manner. Imagine the lawyers at the MoMA when they were told about this performance?

By lending their venue to this type of work, the MoMA is saying that this work is equal to their physically present works like sculptures and paintings. This allows for their curators and historians to explore an area that they are often not, expanding the institutional knowledge and allowing for people like Danto to engage with the work on a historical level. The hybridity inherent in these performances (other people standing in for Abramović, the non-physical location of the work, the shift changes for the performers) increases the chances that newer artists will be allowed a space in the MoMA in the future, and the institution will be a comfortable with these questions.

It also cements her career in a way that probably everyone from her generation is jealous of. From the photographs, to her and Ulay breaking up during the Great Wall Walk I've seen people talking about her work like no other performance artist. For now, this show is the biggest thing going on. Explore her work. Find out what you do and don't like. There is more here than an empty chair.

May has been friggin busy...

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Mon, 17 May 2010 22:56:00 +0000

Some good news. As soon as B/R/S #131 is published, you'll see a review I wrote for Carlin Wing at Anthony Greaney. It's effectively what I wanted to say. It took less than a week to write, so it could be better, and will be when I send it Frieze for their young critics contest.

I also expect a review of Dürer at the MFA Boston to be published by the SGC newsletter. I'll put that review up after it's finalized.

September at the Nave is Open Air. The show brings the work of Matthew Best, Nathalie Miebach, Carolyn Muskat, Ted Ollier, and Jason Shoemaker together for the first time. Each are exploring the outdoors in different ways. I'm a fan of each, but together I think they augment each other's work.

Last, and certainly not least, The Mills at Boston Center for the Arts has accepted my proposal for Contact with Density. This show will be scheduled soon, and currently has 12 artists in it. Each of the artists are dealing with part of the urban landscape or just the experience of living in the city.

So I'm tired. Oh, and I'm hoping to get mean angry comments in the comments section of B/R/S... It's just what happens.

Giuseppe Panza

noreply@blogger.com (John Pyper) — Tue, 04 May 2010 00:39:00 +0000

Collector Giuseppe Panza died just over a week ago. I didn't really know anything about him prior to the numerous great articles on him after his death. Particularly good are Christopher Knight's writings on him. I'm half way through reading his 9 hour interview with Panza, and one of the more telling proposals that the Panza puts forth is about Oldenburg and the German Expressionists.

Probably a third of the way down is this...

MR. KNIGHT: In the interview that you did with Bruce Kurts in 1972, you said, almost in passing, that when you met Oldenburg and saw his work, you felt a relation with European experience, especially German expressionists.

DR. PANZA: Yes.

MR. KNIGHT: And that's a very intriguing notion, and I wonder if you could discuss that?

DR. PANZA: Yes, I felt this relationship because of this opposition of so different colors. And also, the German expressionists used the same technique to put very strong colors one aside of the other. They don't use difference of tone of colors, just pure color against another one, but without a transition. And this was a technique used by the German expressionists in order to give more violent force to the expression. And I found the same thing in Oldenburg.

MR. KNIGHT: It's interesting, because Pop is usually thought of as such an American sensibility.

DR. PANZA: Yes.

MR. KNIGHT: But in a case such as this, you seem to connect it with the European tradition.

DR. PANZA: Yes. In some ways, yes. Perhaps I am wrong; perhaps is not real. But I had this feeling, and it was interesting for me to make this confrontation; because it was helpful for understanding the work of Oldenburg.

If you look at Oldenburg's 60's work that Panza collected, I can see this connection. Here are the MoMA Oldenburgs. And, to be exact in which ones we are looking at, the ones Panza actually collected which live at the LA Moca.

It's not an issue of historically attributing the Oldenburgs to the influence of the German Expressionists. This may be true, but like Panza, I'm not willing to state it definitively. The two have similar formal concerns and techniques though. They act the same way. They preform the same formal methods. It's interesting to consider and is a relationship I probably wouldn't have ever considered without this interview. Thank you to both Knight and Panza. RIP dear collector. Your collection lives on.