Spring 2006 - Art In New York And Around (A Recapitulation)

A little late with this but I'm still busy and without
a portable.




Dear Onlookers,


I have managed to visit quite a few shows (about 70) in my recent visits
to New York, Washington and Philadelphia. I actually had to make a second one-jump visit to New York because I was going to miss a "legendary" retro of Donald Judd that I had not seen listed anywhere in the usual gallery lists because it was happening at Christie's.



Frankly I was glad that the temperature was generally cold and wet.
Rain goes very well with art visits, and they are always a little less visitors.



Let me just cover a rapid overview of some of the art that I saw since a month
in these couple categories (these are NOT reviews, you won't see much mentions
of specific works):


(ps: COME BACK LATER WHEN THIS MESSAGE DISAPPEARS IT WILL MEAN I WILL HAVE PROVIDED LINKS TO THE SHOWS)




THE BAD/BORING SHOWS:


Antoni Tapiès (Pace Wildenstein): It's not that it's bad. It just didn't move me. Paintings of antique symbols, loose body parts, traces of figures and animals, but mostly handwritten words engraved within large strokes made with earth and/or of colors and textures reminiscent of earth and sand. Sometimes it looked like an aestheticized (decorative) version of a meeting between Cy Twombly and Ana Mendiata. I'm sure it will sell. (See the show here)

Early Basquiat (Deitch): First in 3 shows of Basquiat that I've seen (read below), this one was absolutely awfully filled with ridicule hand-me-a-minute kiddie drawings, as though Basquiat especially made them to laugh at the art market and see who was going to buy them. I suspect that in truth, someone else actually dug up all his crap notes and sketches and encased each one of them in its own canvas. Really bad and demeaning to the greater art of this artist. Art of the street? Show pictures of actual Basquiat graffitis instead. Thanks. (for the moment this show has been hidden, which is usually not a good sign. See a press poster here)

Felix Gonzales-Torres (El Barrio Museum): this exhibit had its cool moments, like a video of the artist seemingly having sex while whispering the name: "New York, New York", and a few collage-poems poster pieces that the viewer could take up from piles on the floor, but generally it just looked like a tiny didactic exhibit of the type that would accompany a larger museum retrospective. Even though it was announced that the exhibit was only covering the early years, I was surprised to discover merely 3 small windows with press clips and biographic stuff, and about 7 small works dispersed in 2 rooms. I mean this is less than you get in a Chelsea gallery exhibit and they call this a museum. The curators seem to think that it's a good idea to have the visitor stand above a window display and read the press clips written in the tiniest typos for an hour. Can't you just print them in a book at this point? I was highly disappointed: Gonzales-Torres just deserves better. (the museum only offers a boring press release online, so instead, for two shots of the best works, go here)

Samuel Palmer (Metropolitan): It's a sacrilege perhaps to admit that I was utterly bored by the small darkmoodish landscape drawings of Samuel Palmer. The pre-surrealistic ones were daunting for their era, but somehow it didnt fullfill me. Much more gloom than lush, these works only served to remind me that artistic skill doesn't mean that the art will be interesting. Or maybe I just didn't get it, but the Met have this tendency of writting up explicit wall panels for each work in theirs exhibits and this time it seemed so redundant from one panel to the next that I rapidly stopped reading. I wonder now if the art was really that bad or if it was more the blandness of the presentation that discouraged me. (view images from the exhibition here)

Bill Henson (Robert Miller Gallery): First exhibit I ever saw from this apparently important australian photograph artist, but I wasn't impressed by these post-David Lynch scenes of people (mostly young girls) standing or lying in near total darkness. There was a definite cinematographic tone in these photographs, but somehow, they looked more like fashion photographs taken in pitch dark than anything remotely Caravaggiesque (ie, of any artistic splendour). The obscure micro-lanscapes could please to some, but they reminded me that the only reason why I submit to David Lynch's dark romantic cliches is because there is a narrativ envelop that sustains them, which hereby was lacking and made everything seems pointless. Maybe the work is meant to be an inquisition of these apprehensions that I had watching them, maybe it's all that self-conscious, but it just felt too forced and artificial. Sorry. (see portions of the exhibit here)

Grey Flag (Sculpture Center, Queens): Hmmm... I usually much like the shows at this spot, but this time it was sort of disappointing: a conglomeration of semi-artstars (Gabriel Orozco, Helen Chadwick, Liam Gillick, etc...) presenting art of undergraduate quality, under the pretext of a very vague theme concerning the middles of ying and yang in all things. Unapologetic apoliticalism. Sounds great, huh? Well, not when you get 3 small fountain-like, priapic sculptures made of plaster by Chadwick, next to two boring painted photographs by Orozco, and a whole floor filled with annoying party pink sparkles by Gillick. They are blogs to get lazy on them, you know? Don't do it in art museums. Than you get a film of a rising sun by Tacita Dean and a similar document of lebanese rising suns by The Atlas Group, or some other film of fires in an industrial furnace: I guess they were all rejects of the Day For Night Biennial exhibit? (see below) Allen Ruppersberg spreading tons of post-it notes about how to rearrange his art collection could have been funny, but mostly they were parasited by the interior decoration collages that they tried to elevate, these way too reminiscent of Richard Hamilton to feel original. The only good work, Kelley Walker rearranging the Centre's wall bricks vertically, was not enough to save the show, and I actually oblige myself here to not count the poignant documentary about child sex abuse in Asia by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, because I thought that piece was tragicallly misplaced. Really, a bizarre show (thanks to Paul Pfeiffer and Anthony Huberman for hiring Seth Price to write an upsetting press release not mentioning any artwork, actually a prosaic thingie written a few years ago). (see a few works from the exhibit here)





THE OK /CORRECT SHOWS:


Christian Holstad (Daniel Reich): This exhibit had been a hot mention in New York for the past two months but it wasn't up to the gossips. The artist transformed an abandoned Deli on 3rd Avenue into an obscure fetischist-bondage shop (some handmade leather clothes hanged in very low lighting) adorned with a couple goofy sculptures like a giant green plush spider. In the basement there was a secret backroom (I think this was meant to relate to gay culture, but that was much more confusing than obvious) which contained very loud noise techno coming out a tan machine (these giant cylinders with neons that look like instruments of torture). Unfortunately, the use of a tan machine (intended here to be a climax) had been seen recently in art by Nari Ward, but I must confess that the artist succeeded at instauring a glauque ambiance and that is why the exhibit merits points for its generous
share of theatricalities. Beside the apparant first-glance humor, some closeted, unpronunceable desires and emotions seemed to evanate from this installation, emotions as dark as those portrayed in the excellent film Dealer (2004) by Benedek Fliegauf, also making plenty use of the metaphor of tanning machines. (read a descriptive press release here. Alas, no images)

Robert Watts (Leslie Tonkonow): early conceptual art of the type that detained on contemporary arts and made so many artist sell their junk because they had idiot morning-coffee ideas about how to present them. But wait a minute...At least here we get the true spirit of the Fluxus era, before this artist moved on to make chrome copies of african sculptures, which, if you can forgive how appropriative they are, are indeed prescient to Jeff Koons. Unfortunately, apart from a couple rare laughs, I just wasn't moved by anything, not even his ambitious project of attempting to patent every art terms containing the word "Pop". I guess it reminded me too much of how conceptual art was so often about signature instead of what it was supposed to be: clever ideas. And I know somewhere along Mr. Watts wishes to critique that (baseballs signed with big art names, or throwing markers at paper targets, some early pieces here that recalled one of his late work, a revolver with a bullet entering a lamp bulb), but... The best would be to bring the better pieces here in a larger retrospective of conceptual art that would serve to put the nail down for good on an era that believed too much that the governing of ideas in art meant the suppression of applied skills and craft. (see some of the exhibition works here)

Georg Condo (Luhring Augustine): Sort of like if Philip Guston or Carroll Dunham decided to go classical with their cartoon aesthetics, Condo is presenting here mostly portraits or nudes of people deformed by his surreal madpop palette that totally defeat John Currin in their unconstrained grotesque. Some of these are truly nightmarish, like they represent sad-faced monster-people, mutant victims of very dark genetic experiences. The "Jean-Louis' Mind" painting is a stand-out, with its re-reading of cubism provoked by the facelift of a deformed clown. There is not anything here I would put on my wall (you really don't know where to laugh and where to be scared watching these), because I'll admit this stuff is a little too wild for me (ok, am I the new conservative now?), but it was fun for a 20 minutes visit. (see the exhibit here while you can)

Basquiat Heads (Van De Weghe): This exhibit presented exactly what the press release said it was going to: many paintings of heads by Basquiat, a recurrent theme of his. Or not really a theme, these are not exactly portraits, but mostly a recurrent sign. A format. A method. A pretext to paint. The paintings were fine, but in fact, totally predictable, as I had seen a couple of the best pieces elsewhere already. I'm sure the fans liked this show but I left thinking that I wasn't emotionally or intellectually attained in any degree. What they retained though, is that cool anti-conformist aesthetic familiar with Basquiat, that would make any of the works here look well-situated in an east-village punk or avantgarde jazz club (I just get this constant mind image of Basquiat listening to a lot of music while making these.). Maybe what I mean is that they were paintings to bang your head against rather than to watch.The best Basquiat paintings were going to appear in another show (see below). (see some of the works here)

Ceal Floyer (Gallery 303): This artist is selling a blue balloon with a tiny projected light on its surface for 25 000 dollars, probably thinking her play on comicbook hyperrealism was a brilliant post-conceptual take on, watch your mouth, Lichtensteinian pop-art (when it was just a cute party pun), but the only thing redeeming in that exhibit (which also included a self-deceptive sound loop piece featuring an Abba sample) was the fountain video made with macro shots of sparkling water. This piece rocked for revealing some of the wonder hidden in the great banality of things. The exhibit was once again a proof that playing with the infinitely small and simple in conceptual art is a dangerous path that lead to a lot of presomptions about the value of quick reasoning, but that sometimes you happen to fall on that right idea with enough revealing subtlety to make a piece really work out. (try to see the exhibit here, but it is tricky, it will go back to the front page after a couple seconds, so you will need to find the artist page and than find the exhibit page of this artist slated in spring 2006, ok?)

Ashley Bickerton (Lehman Maupin): The second of two parts in a mini-retrospective (the other was happening at Sonnabend), this exhibit presented a variety of grotesque cartoon paintings presenting sleazy unnatural people sitting or gathering in pseudo-exotic settings (apparently they were meant to be interpreted as ecological warnings, but they just looked goofy), next to other works from sometimes drastically different periods of the artist's career, including mixte-media collages that looked like 3d glossaries of found junk, or big wall sculptures that looked like parts from imaginary scientific machines. It is the pieces from the latter category that I found the most intriguing, them from an earlier era. Extrapolating from Donald Judd without having anything to do with minimalism, you could have easily mistaken them for something else than art if you actually found them in unusual places, but yet you would have never been able to guess their function. These abstract constructions loosely borrowing from the aesthetics of security and survival appliances seemed pretty relevant with present post-apocalyptic social tenses. (see some of the works here (two pieces are from the Sonnabend show), but the best is to go to the official gallery website
and find the page for this exhibit. I cannot link it directly as it is all flash.)

2006 Whitney Biennial: Day For Night (Whitney Museum): It was thrashy !! I almost regretted having gone. It was overwhelmingly filled with bad or average "no-surprise" art of the youth. I think they're getting to show them too early these days. It was the victim biennial of the new "be a star now, die next year" market philosophy. I was already suspicious that there was a large number of names that I had never heard from in the exhibit list. The curators seemed to have preferred doing the same as what new collectors are trying to do: beating off the usual paths and try to seek cheaper art from the underground spots. But sometimes art just seems like it's meant to stay underground. Forever. It was more of a total "no future" spit pit this year for a biennial that is reputated for launching art careers. The best art here was either pieces I had seen (or at least heard about, which still add to a small portion) elsewhere, or art made by the older, established guest artists. But let's not be too harsh just for the sake of it. They were some good stuff, maybe 15 to 20 excellent artists out of 108. That is simply way below what it should be. I won't name anything as I wish to come back to this exhibit in a future post. (the site of the 2006 biennial is here but you will only see samples from the show and no images of insitu installations)

Jessica Stockholder (PS1): Just one large sculpture of architectural proportion by Stockholder, an artist whom I think has been a frontrunner of the sprawling aesthetic that has been recurrent in recent art from younger artists. I wasn't really put in awe by this new structure of her's, called "Of Standing Float Roots In Air" (2006), and made of numerous aligned, and suspended, plastic washing containers, filled with brightly colored electric cords extending out of them, among many other objects, but I was happy to finally see (again) a large piece by this artist, almost as if I had missed her art (she had a retro in 2004 but it was far and I couldn't attend). The piece here had the singularity of offering as sole position view for the viewer, a bird-eye's angle, so I kept wondering about how this sculpture was attempting to defy gravity by starting up from the ceiling as the base, and then going down in sort of a reversed climb fashion. Nevertheless, nothing unforgettable here, but a fine meeting between the domestic mundane and abstraction which is this artist's speciality. (get a small idea of what it looked like here)

Wilhelm De Kooning (L&M Arts): Nearly 15 paintings by De Kooning from the late 1970's. Apparently this is a reworking of the very first exhibit at L&M (than C&M), so the exhibit was meant the celebrate the gallery as much as the artist. The blobs and laces of De Kooning here are colorful and free, far from an early abex angst, but I like to interprete these works as being late. I'll go as far as to say that by this time they were made, they were merely decorative. It is quite plausible that they were in fact influenced by the dunes and streams of where the artist was living during this time (East Hampton), because they really looked like they could be representing close-up of sand, roots, and water, but the anecdotal intrigue that they would be micro-landscapes didn't bring anything perticularly stimulating for me. I'm not saying I disliked the show: I think the paintings look pretty. But that is where my problem lies: they look nice but not THAT nice, more like lazy-afternoon nice, more like cool cocktail-party background nice. Certainly not the best argument for the survivance of abstraction as a pertinent mode of communication. Nice, but not engaging. (you can see two samples of what was on show here)

Goya: The Last Years (Frick Museum): I had seen the film Goya In Bordeaux, which I think was about his latter days, but I didn't expect this exhibit to be filled with so many bland and banal portraits. Yes, I know, Goya is a sacred cow, and who am I to babble, but whatever, I found it hard to imagine Goya being sick and living through a bad comfort zone while looking at these honest but polite portraits of friends and family, or his late personal drawings that rarely approached the genius of his big series. They were, of course, a couple standouts, and you've all seen them in the brochure: the Self-Portrait With Dr. Arrieta (1820) was as sublime as can be, maybe one of the best Goya paintings ever (it's not just the powerful association of autoportrait and decay, but also how the picture transcended the altruism and compassion of Goya's doctor, like capturing your last erotic moment), then, the cute Man On A Swing (1824-28) was really coming out of nowhere in the drawing section, like from a surprise-cake (it made me girgle), and finally, the bullfighting drawings at the end seemed like the perfect conclusion for a career that had been so much riddled by anger. Alas, I wasn't moved by the tiny ivory paintings that were offered as a curiosity, and I left the museum thinking the exhibit was unfair to the artist as I could only remember the general tiredness, not physic (the portraits are quite firm, thank you) but artistic, of most of what I saw.(find the website for this exhibit here)

The Other Side (Tony Shafrazi): Tony Shafrazi does these huge exhibits that are very badly announced, like the gallerist wants the least visitors possible to attend. This time it's a pot-pourri of all kinds of big names from different eras since the 60's, brought together under the very vague themes of "subversion" (I suppose their main argument is that most new trends in contemporary arts begin with a subversion) and "decay" ("please hate my art because that means it's good"). Though I wasn't really deeply affected by any perticular piece, it was fun to discover some art I had never seen from some favorite or not too favorite artists of mine, like the "Male And Female" drawing from Mike Kelley (looked like an appropriation of two drawings made by kids or adolescents, male and female) or "Memory Ware Flat 29" by the same artist (a collage of cheap jewelry), or one of his more recognizeable stuffed animal, or a couple fun Untitled Film Stills by Cindy Sherman, or the very recent "Theory Of Catastrophe" by Malcolm Morley (ok, this one I have seen before but it is just damn good: an hyperreal painting of a truck accident), or the classic "Riot" by Christopher Wool (just those letters printed in large on white: I only had seen it in books yet), or yet another medicine cabinet (he has made way too much of them) by Damien Hirst ("Liar", 1989), or a fantastic "goldengunny" painting by Marylin Minter ("Bullet", 2003), or the best of the show: a prophetious image of Warhol from 1962 of a man falling down a building ("Suicide", 1962) . Far from being a truly memorable show, basically I simply enjoyed the fact of getting all this art mixed together on nearby walls without much apparent reason. (until the link change you can visit the show here)

Olafur Eliasson (Tanya Bonakdar): My first impression was: "Wow..... Quelle gallery!" He oui: Bonakdar have expanded, adding two rooms at the ground floor, and so they believed that the best way to celebrate this event would be to invite one of their best installation artist to create 4 new artworks. It was a fine idea, but as much as I usually adore whatever Eliasson touches, I was mildly disappointed this time around. It is just too easy to let yourself impressed by the fact that a work of art is physically large, or share the dimension of architecture. I mean to resist falling for grandeur and ambition when it doesn't bring the goods. And with Eliasson, this is usually easy to evaluate because most of his works are immediate: they attack the senses and in a minute you can tell if it is functioning for you or not.. His first piece here, a circular room with the shadow of a stream reflecting from a water pool was irrevocably weak compared to a similar water pool installation made by The_User last year. His other circular room playing with circling shadows of target circles (printed on glass) gave me the opportunity to realize what was starting to go wrong with this show: instead of engaging the viewer through his usually visceral, body-challenging experiences on perception and space (using effects of temperature or color, among other medias), here the artist was merely trying to conceptualize them, to resumate them in simple intellectual models, presenting the viewer a couple helpful, schoolish, easy-to-grasp lessons on the wonders of relativity. Well, thanks, Mr. Teacher! How neat and practical. How boring. The "geodesic" lustre in one of the room on the second floor, actually an homage to Buckminster Fuller, used light coming from inside its sharp angular motifs, to present yet another theoretical work that sacrificed on the visceral. Was this really the eclipse of a Buckminster Fuller, or was it rather representing the eclipse of Eliasson's creativity? In the end there was only one work that I really enjoyed: it was a pitch black room inside which you needed to stand a long time before being able to perceive tiny arrows of light flashing one after the other in all sorts of directions in a minuscule, almost imperceptible, light circle on the wall. If you dared to move on and open a curtain in the back of the room, you could discover how the little arrows were in fact pinholed from a large, hidden, neon structure representing a Rose Des Vents, like a giant shop sign, or an incongruous Dan Flavin, that flashed intermittently in any chance direction. I liked this element of surprise, but mostly, I liked the poetry of it all. It was like discovering a key, a map, a secret. revealing to you why you had felt so lost just a moment ago. It represented exactly what Eliasson was looking for in this exhibit: an image that best revealed the mechanism of human dimension. (make your own mind, visit the show here)




The Very Good / Interesting Shows:


Sugimoto: Malgré a certain austerity, this exhibit offered a blissful pelerinage down the memory lane of the works of one of our greatest photograph conceptualist Maybe I should have culled this show to the category below, but I had seen too many of the main series in previous exhibits to be able to let myself surprised: mainly, the Theatre series at CIAC in Montreal, the Seascapes series I forgot where, The Sea Of Buddha series in a group exhibit about buddhism, the Conceptual Forms series at Sonnabend, and a few of the Dioramas in museum collections. Theoretically, his suites surpass their documentarish outlook. They consist of irreprochable philosophical essays about hyperrealism, perceptualism, idealism and illusion. Though a lot of collectors would probably prefer to fill their walls with the sensual chic of the later conceptual forms series (they look like if Robert Mapplethorpe or better, Berenice Abbot had been a dada-surrealist, as their shapes caress the beauty of a panoply of mathematical tools), I still think the best of Sugimoto are his early series. For example, "Dioramas" is simply mandatory: really a visual art interpretation of some aesthetic concepts that were still recent in the socio-philosophic writtings of the time (through the writtings of french luminarists like Baudrillard). The photos, all shot in natural history museums, reveal how men, by recreating it through artificial means, idealized a concept of nature. The fun part is that because these photographs are black and white, we viewers aren't really sure at first sight of the veracity of what is represented (if they had been in colors they would have probably been too tacky to look real). It is the mental movement of jumping from one picture to the other that resolved what was so uncanny about them. This demonstrates how the series format is genuinely indispensable in Sugimoto's tactic. The "Theatre" series is another landmark. It pinpoints to an historical determination of mankind to build their own plato's caves: scrutinizing the singularities and craft of emptied cinema rooms, only identifiable through architecture, while anonymous film screenings are being reduced to mere rectangle of evanescent light. To demonstrate how theoretical claims of minimalism could be applied to everyday entertainment was a brilliant move. The "Seascapes" series follows from a similar idea, but launch us right into the middle of zen, with cold, formally perfect portrays of seas around the world. Again they question the identity of nature, or they simply demonstrate the philosophical ambivalence between similarity and difference. I hope this exhibit travels a lot because I think Sugimoto has a few elemental lessons to teach us with his art. (there is a fantastic website about the show here)

Basquiat / Dubuffet (Pace Wildenstein): Don't seek them elsewhere: the remarkable Basquiat paintings were all here at Pace. His flamboyant canvases are as colorful as Picasso or Matisse, but if you can dig through the doodly aesthetic, Basquiat also represents a visual art synthesis of punk, that is, an art that's deliberately blunt, nofuturist, anarchist, upset, quasi-puerelistic, added with tons of pop references and angry comments. These paintings are so wild and ferocious that the Dubuffet pale by comparison, suddenly looking overstudied and lacking in expression, but not too much, as the exercise of demonstrating Basquiat's unacknowledged affiliation with french expressionism is still convincing. Not that Basquiat was in any way influenced directly by Dubuffet himself (who did all these paintings in his latter days, while Basquiat did his in his early days (he died young as everyone knows)), because I don't think the two artists ever met. But somehow the show did help to historically link Basquiat's art with the early 20th century french modernists, a link that couldn't be more pertinent but not first-sight obvious when we see Basquiat's art shown alone. The best part of this exhibit was how each artist's works were inter-spaced with a work from the other, really in fact making you wonder if they had ever met, as they shared a very similar form, sometimes even similar themes and motifs, both using large canvases, and adorning them with series of doodled figures in complex agglomerations, often compartimented in boxes or squares, and of course, at times conveying political messages about the fate of urbanism. For a commercial gallery exhibit this one embraced the dignity of a museum essay, but simply put it was mostly an occasion to see many great paintings. (jugdge by yourself: look here)

Without Boundaries (Moma): many people critiqued that show of "contemporary islam art" (or art with islamist themes) at Moma for treating the subject too superficially. But I didn't read much of the curatotial text that day as I was getting tired from visiting the Munch retrospective earlier. What then grasped me from my very own superficial state of mind was that all this art accentuated heavily on craft and design, making plenty use of unattributable motifs (or at least, using motifs that I wasn't able to fill with any meanings). They were in fact many different approaches to making art featured in this exhibits: many works were political (women artists from islam culture dealt much with women freedom), others were purely formal researches (deconstructing essences of orientalism), while some were more concerned with exploring the mystics or hidden meanings of oriental symbols or calligraphy. Ideologically, the exhibit was moving in all sorts of directions, but what made the exhibit sucessful for me was the only thing that really unified all this art: the usually strong quality of technical skill. These artists are VERY applicated, and couldn't be further away from the usual junk-ladden and lazy aesthetic of much of recent contemporary western art. Yet, their art never sacrificed concept to dwell on pure decoration or abstraction. On the contray, craft here have been thoroughly intellectualized. Is this the sign of a new silk road to contemporary arts? I believe most artists here are names to follow . (there is an audio tour available here, but alas, no images....weird, huh?)

Anglo-Mania (Metropolitan): This was an exhibit of british fashion from the past couple centuries that looked more like a bal costumé. All the english decorative rooms of the Metropolitans were filled for the occasion with dressed mannequins, theatrical props, and special lightning that turned this show turn into a wacky wax museum's party. It was a short ride but worth the distraction from the usually austere contemplation that the other museum exhibits demanded. And what can beat an audio guide commentary by Johnny Rotten-Lydon? (hear a podcast here, alas, without images, but look back here later on)

Ilya Kabakov (Sean Kelly): At first I was disappointed by this traditional ensemble of paintings by master-installationist Kabakov. For once, one of his (their, when he works with his wife) exhibition looked like any other in Chelsea. But then I couldn't help but fall for these socialist russian sceneries revised by colorfield abstraction: they were simply too gorgeous. These paintings were in fact extracted from a huge installation of a fake museum that was a recent project of the artist, whom actually had been obsessed with the mediums of "museum" and "painting" since the beginning of this century. The point was that the paintings were supposed to be the creation of an imaginary missing artist (also named Kabakov) from Russia's past art history that Kabakov was curating. Sort of an attempt to marry a tradition of post-world war II socialist art from Russia with what was going on in the USA during the same time, reflecting on nostalgia and missed opportunies when the russians, apart from exceptions, had to re-adapt themselves to contemporary arts from the mid 1970's. Those large canvases, including a quasi-abstract tryptich that actually featured blurried decorative motifs of flowers, were mostly depicting idealized images of russian life in the countryside, interfered with large incisions, or irregular patches, containing layers of dark, flowery yet abstract, motifs of paintings spread in allover fashion, exploiting an aesthetic midway between wallpaper design and abex. They were completed by a selection of brand new "revisions" of some old drawings from the artist, in which he seemed to have wanted to synthesize, in large spaces around the main drawing frame, the pure gestural textures of drawing. It is in fact hard for me to decipher the reasoning behind this method. As I've said, there seems to be a mean to parasite and interfere with traditional art languages. But more importantly, it could be a way for the artist to make today the art that he wished he had made back in the mid 1970's (all the titles sports fake dates from the 70's), again, sort of desperately wanting to fill the gap of Abex in russian modernism. Strange. (the exhibit site used to be here but the gallery website seemed put down, but you can get some rare samples here)

The Garden Party (Deitch): This looked like Deitch had pre-scheduled their summer group show. But it was a little more than your average: it had a pertinent theme (rehearsing the erotic garden) and some of the work were created specifically for the exhibit. I am rating this exhibit high because I really adored some of them, like the head-burling,stroboscopic hidden fountain by Olafur Eliasson ("Anti-Gravity Cone"), or the promiscuous underwear chandeliers by Noritoshi Hirakawa (you were invited to take off your underwear off and attach it to one of the metal hanger coming down the ceiling), or the large elevated land piece in the back of the room that was offered for any visitor who wished to... roll down that hill (!) ("Untitled (Slope)" by Paola Pivi), or the series of in-the-flesh Venuses by Vanessa Beecroft. or a flabbergasting wall painting by Assume Vivid Astro Focus, or even simply the wish tree by Yoko Ono, filled with all sorts of secrets written by visitors. If not exactly a raunchy bacchanale, it was the delightful humorous show that we're used to encounter at Deitch, meaning that it was refreshingly filled with people from the artworld meaning to have fun and actually able to. One picture resumed the show for me: "5 Second Party" by Mika Rottenberg, who photographed a quick choreography of two person having a real harsh party on a sofa. Cool. (Go see it now: look here)

Hatshepsut (Metropolitan): A rare occasion to visit an exhibit of egyptian art about a precise era of the empire, which is the beginning of the New Kingdom (1479-1458 BC is Hatshepsut's reign). As any connoissors of egyptian art would expect, the art was granite pink, or limestone beige, austere and classical, polished and impersonal. There wasn't much to learn about customs of the era, as much of the exhibit concentrated on royal art: busts and bibelots, with fair portions of vases and jewelry. They were a couple seated Hatshetsup that were exceptional, much as the two large Sphinx with Hatshepsut heads. Black stone sculptures representing Senenmut, a great egyptian architect, in singular activities (including holding the daughter of Hatshetsup) were the most intriguing part of an exhibit that was a little predictable, but nevertheless executed with great care, and provided another opportunity (since Catherine The Great) to testify how women had ruled with great success in ancient history. (see a cool slide show of works from the exhibition here)

Wolfgang Stillman (Ps1): Unapolegetically "pure" abstract photography. I suppose some of them were just macro close-up details of objects, but you rarely could tell what they were (this show made me wonder if picking a snapshot out of nowhere blindly would mean abstract photography, but that is another story). The main room was lusciously filled with soft, ethereal scapes. Does anyone remember Billy's reddish scape in the third season of Six Feet Under? That looked like a Wolfgang Stillman. But how can you tell good from bad abstraction? Simply: this stuff breathes, it's soft, economic, even ergonomic: it would fit on your bedroom wall as much an on the walls of your local health centre, so much they are removed from the harschness of Stillman's earlier art. They sometimes look like the old V23 4ad sleeves from the mid-80's and later (and I must precise that though this sounds like a cliche to say, to me this is far from downsizing their appeal). The art in the other rooms (this is retrospective of nearly 80 photos) was more hermetic, focussing on explorations of "blacks" or other textures, as much as they presented "accidental" experiments that were meant to provide a link with the recent works. Some other pictures were figurative and seemed misplaced, like they were from another artist, but truth is that it's abstraction that is the "new thing" for Stillman. (there are barely two tiny images next to the press release here)

Jenny Holzer (Yvon Lambert): I picked this one out of two shows by Jenny Holzer. Most people would have picked the other, probably thirsty for some political juice about current events, but this one was a whole retrospective of her public text projections, presented in the form of large black and white photographs featuring written scripts (either personal or appropriated) that had been superimposed on architecture and landscape sites in the middle of the night. Thing is, regardless of all the babbles that Holzer feels she needs to exult, her topic remains "art", and by this I mean that it's through her associations of found texts and places that I find she is the most eloquent, more than she is when she just throw text in a gallery. Here, the ghostly aspect of these photographed spaces, mostly urban and historic, is surprising. She must have barricaded the streets to do these projects: there is barely ever a soul in sight. Almost as if it was the projections themselves that were the ghostly events that no one ever noticed at their time of being. Certain sentences, often of personal nature, thus become amazingly empowered through this method of sending them anonymously into free air. As if "shouting at the ground" was the only thing that really ever mattered, regardless "if it could hear or not" (Lamargi). Some of these phrases are dark, even sarcastic, others seem to personalized or interioralized space (as obvious in the picture of the words "My Skin" projected on a lake or public basin). The problem with Holzer's art is that it helps sometimes to know the origins of the texts she is projecting, and the functions of the buildings she is projecting them unto: why is she choosing these situations to happen? There was not much to explain anything at the gallery, you pretty much had to figure it out by yourself. Which made the scenes of the projections on forest or water seem the most powerful, because their meanings were less specific. Nevertheless, when extracted like this from the original performances, the photographs of Holzer becomes artworks of their own, bereft of any context. All you get are these words now, and how you respond to them, and I can only assume that the artist carefully selected them as such pivotal art statements for her projects before she went and enlarge them for the gallery. A truly amazing collection, for sure. I hope they are being published in a book sometimes soon. (samples from the exhibit can be found here)

Andreas Slominski (Metro Pictures): this exhibit was just plain queer, though you would expect anything from Slominski to be sort of ackward. The exhibit consisted of spraypainted colorful polysterene reliefs that looked like gigantic kid postcards. There was a definite christmassy feel to the experience as you gazed to the panoply of objects (like snow skis or scissors) that had been replicated and enlarged in foam before being collaged into loose associations featuring nifty decorative motifs for a background, like flowers or pin trees. What was that all about? This goes beyond pop art and kitsch. It's like appropriating child craft and magnifying it. Sometimes it reminded me of a "Mart-shop" window aesthetic, but I don't think this is about consumerism. I think it's just an original method of going back to the ancient surrealist theatre of the objects. Well done. (the beautiful website for this exhibit can be found here)

Guy Ben-Ner (Postmaster): the artist designed an IKEA-esque tree which parts can be demounted into many domestic applies, like a table and chair, or a bed. The exhibit of this meta-furniture was accompanied by a video of our protagonist (dressed in convenient shorts and costumed with a long, fake Crusoe's beard) demonstrating the practicability of his art. There, bluntly: It was an humourous but yet touching comment on urban survival and loneliness. It was seconded by an older video work that took the form of a surreal, again, Crusoesque video diary of the artist living on a tiny beach installed in his kitchen. That piece had cracking segments like lypsinching provided by the artist's penis. I had a great moment there. (I can't link the exhibit directly from the gallery website, you need to find it in their archives, but there are some images at the artist's website here)

Donald Judd (Christie's): Well wow... My first Judd retro. Actually the first retro of Judd in America in nearly 20 years. It was perfect considering what they had to offer, which means that if they have had bigger pieces, and less of the second-rate, smaller pieces that were obviously made for personal home consumption, I would have slated this exhibit in the better category below. I didn't know that high floors from a midtown skyscraper could look like exactly like an old school Soho loft, but here it did. And so the exhibit looked surprisingly respective of the environments where these objects had been created. The sculptures reflected many eras and approaches of the artist, including, cloned industrial structures, bright hot colours vibrating against metal, spatial inversions, additions, and substractions, easy mathematical suites, etc... Actually I wonder why the artist made unique copies of each of these work, that now sell at incredibly high prices. He could have mass-produced some of them, so much the art is functional chic. Is there a pertinence to their unicity? Or would it downsize the quality of the work if it had been overproduced? I kept asking myself these questions. Why not create art as a design multiple, or a piece of furniture? ("ok, we'll put the sofa there, and please put the Judd right here, next to the lamp"). Somehow I prefer to establish Judd's art as infiltrative, but I guess I am transferring unto him my own aspirations. In the meantime, I don't find the conceptual tricks in Judd's work much interesting anymore ("oh...look at all these slabs and how they each look differently depending of how they are angled in respect of your sight"). Nah...I really only like them because they still look sharp and totally upfront in the endlessly unadressed war between art and design, and art and architecture. Minimal, yeah, but sexy. (the website for this exhibit is here)



The Excellent / Fantastic Shows:


Cezanne In Provence (National Gallery, Washington): It was like travelling back in time. The small rooms, the way the walls were painted (a different color per room), the building itself, made me feel like being in the late 19th century salons. This was not yet a fully complete, retrospective of Cezanne, but it's the best they could do. Every styles of his were represented, as Cezanne had been travelling back to Aix-En-Provence all his life, until he established himself there for good. Ok, I'll be honest here: I'm fed up with impressionism. But Cezanne being that great Buddha of modern and contemporary arts, I felt sort of obliged to be marvelled by these compartimented strokes of blue, green, orange, beige and brown. I wonder now if Cezanne wasn't simply autistic. That would explain why his forms kept detaching themselves from reality (how he'd interprete them as abstract), and why he painted so many Mont-Victoires, which by the way, consisted of about a sixth of the show (around 16 paintings, but that is still a very low number for a show that focus on the region). The couple Large Bathers were the standout of the show for me, very prescient to Picasso. I mean, if your goal as an exhibit is to prove that Cezanne was way ahead of its time:...just show the bathers. Overall I seemed to have preferred anything that wasn't a landscape (the early portraits were perticularly fantastic), but they were a share of them too that were quite attractive, cozy and summerish. Among them, the Chateau Noirs series added the perticularity of being enveloped with mystery. I hardly could reproach anything to this show, I think they did the best they could. (there is a fantastic website on the exhibit right here)

Edvard Munch (Moma): Everything was there except The Scream (the one showing the artist actually screaming, which of course was stolen, but they were a couple lithograph variations and another painting sharing the title offered as replacements). The show was heavy on emotional vibes for me. Someone threw their weird look at me because I had a tear oozing out the left eye while watching a painting. Thank god it wasn't Artist In Hell ! No, it was Vampire (1893-1894), a painting that really doesn't show much except, well, two people crying, but it reminded me of a sad moment I had with my mother a few weeks after learning about my health issues (back in February). But I could have shed a tear in front of many other paintings here: The Dance Of Life (1899-2000) looked more like a melancholic farewell party, The Kiss (1897) gave a good demonstration of how people can consume each other through love, or I could name many other sad paintings, likeThe Sick Child (1896). It must be the way that each one of us can set ourselves in these representations of sorrow and despair that makes Munch so popular. He is like a dark Chagall. Whoever been inside a Chagall? Everyone has been inside a Munch. The artist once claimed that his goal was to express all the important human dramas (loneliness, lovesickness, sickness, lost of dead ones, getting old, etc). The middle section of the exhibit pretty much covers them all in one large room filled with the strongest pictures, or at least the most surreal and ghostly. His Madonna looks like a punk goddess, way ahead of her time. I didn't know the paintings from his later life too well, so it was interesting to discover his sexy homoerotic paintings of nude men, or his auroportraits that read more like soliloquies. The last two paintings, the artist on an operating table, and the artist in hell, was way too much for me, considering what I have been true recently. I left totally scared. (there is a pdf checklist here containing tiny images of every works)

Tara Donovan (Pace Wildenstein): a reflection on industrial waste and ecologia that spouses the form of a minimalist chef d-oeuvre, "Untitled (Plastic Cups)" is a gigantic landscape made of piled plastic glasses, and certainly one of the best artwork from 2006 yet, if not the best. It's ambitious yet simple, it's jawbreaking beautiful. I have written about it in an earlier post so there is no need for me to defend it any further here. (see the show here or here)

Candida Hofer (ICA, Philadelphia): I had seen many solo shows of this artist in the past, so it was certainly time for me to witness a mid-career retrospective. I am surprised that this doesn't come to New York. All of her great series (at least the ones that I know about) are represented: mostly, Kubrickian ghost libraries, or icey-cake palace rooms, or luxurious theatres and museums. She seems to wonder why people are building these places, and why do they look like they do. These are portraits of our illusions of grandeur, portraits of the man's ego or spirit (you decide) and how it manifests itself in the things we build and design. I think her point is strongly archeological. They could send some of these pictures inside a NASA time capsule anytime. Grandiose. (a press release and barely 3 tiny images can be seen here)

John Waters (Marianne Boesky): Ha ha ! Waters makes art about (or against) the artworld and the cinema world that can be as virulent as it is exhiliratingly funny. Most of this are photographic collage puns about certain cinema stars or recurrent motifs in american cinema. But the best works (I find) were the ones pocking at cliches of of the art gallery world, like his series of postcards featuring sentences that know too well what the gallery people think but won't say too loud (like.."Nothing is ever for sale here"), or the "Faux-Video Room" which got me knock myself against a black wall after I opened a curtain, hearing some dialog coming from behind (honestly the best video-art piece I've seen in a while!!). I loved also the picture of mr. Waters adding blockbusters video films in a bonfire. I think the gallery world fits him better now than his last couple films. I hope that he pursues these side activities because there is really something going on here for him, and the artworld needs the sarcasm badly. (very few images can be seen here)

Kara Walker (Metropolitan): a surprising show! Kara Walker had amassed an intriguing collection of old art from the Metropolitan collection that was mostly about african-americans, colonialism, and water, in an assemblage that served as an impressive outcry about the recent political turmoils surrounding the lazy help of the american government after the Louisiana Katrina catastrophe (the show was called "After The Deluge"), and how that shared already too much with america's "cultural heritage" of racist ostracism. Or so is this Kara's argument, but quite vigourously supported by her reseach material. She adds to this collection many drawings or cut-out paper collages of her own, many somehow prophetic as they also presented motifs of water and sea. You'd think this exhibit would be embarassing to every white american conservateurs, but those who expected gentle pro-black art were also in for a surprise. Miss Walker's art is akin to the neo-folk art of Marcel Dzama, in that it borrows from archetypes of expression to better accuse a prevalent decadence of civilization. What more can I say? She really hitted a hard nail this time. You go girl! I'm impressed. (see images from the exhibition here)

Richard Serra (Gagosian): Speaking of sea, Serra presented us a couple seas of steel at his new Gagosian show. This time he went for the multi-parts and the thick. One work looked like an oblong sanctuary as the viewer was invited to ondulate (walk) among elongated metal plates standing on their sides, at different heights. I think this was sort of a way for the artist to experiment the tradition of landscape in the third dimension, while still respecting his deconstructive minimalist origin. It's this connection with minimalism still prevalent in the work that forces me to seek zen interpretation that could be as well misplaced. You decide. Pragmatically, I kept wondering if the installation was safe because it seemed to me that these plates could fall down at any moment, especially if someoned pushed them. Imagine the domino effect! It was beautiful nonetheless. More than beautiful, it captured an essence of solemnity, almost as if the installation evoked archetypes of sacred sites: monoliths, cemetaries, or stones garden. The unity and heavyness of the material transgressed rapidly to the mental zone and the earth-like tones of the metal recalled the structures of ancient temples. Another work, presenting a series of large cubes of steel, made me wonder who and how they had install them. They look as majestuous as menhirs, like a contemporary Stonehenge. You don't need a specific god or religion anymore to feel enlightened. Mies Van Der Rohe said it first: you just need a basic structure. And Serra somehow and perhaps unknowlingly, is genuinely providing it. (some views of some of the works can be seen here)

Andrea Zittel (New Museum): one of my favorite artist ever, at least theoretically, had her first retrospective in New York, and obviously the curators filled the space the most they could to stay fair to the chronology of her main projects. It seemed a bit ackward at first to see her self-made designs presented like luxury objects in a museum, surrounded by guards, considering all of the post-hippy philosophy enveloping their creation (there is a nice slide show diary included to demonstrate the reasoning behind all of Zittel's art), but nevertheless, it was a moment of pure bliss to finally be able to see brought together all of her personal dresses, examples of her leisure stations, (which really are just small metallic cabins turned into jacuzis or listening stations), or the more austere and practicle model units for living spaces (kitchen, bedroom, etc...). But the objects in her art are not the only ends in themselves, and may sometimes seem drab or unartistic to the newcomer (though her shit pots are actually funny), so the generous visitor will remark that the real elegancy in this exhibit is Andrea's purpose: to observe how the artist designed each living facilities she needed for herself through the ambition of realizing her political ideal of perfect autonomy. Which is really where her enteprise becomes successful, when all of her means had been develop to prove how it's possible to live at the peripheries of standard technological, economical, and I suppose, social systems. Hey: there is even a whole mini-apartment block on show ! How's that for building your own city ?! My fave piece of hers' is her floating island, well-represented here by two floating prototypes (they're small, they're just the governing seats). An important exhibit from a truly unique artist. (there are three tiny images and a press release here)

Hiraki Sawa (James Cohan): Fluffy, dreamy, surreal scapes of baby rocking horses migrating in bathwater or gently balancing on pianos. This is a giant video tryptich lullabye that I had to watch 3 times in a row so much it was lovely. It was a total caress, I could sleep with this on at night. I am confident now that with the new possibilities of digital animation, video art has far from reached its final days. This finely crafted and applicated film should give a lesson to the numerous lazy conceptual single-shot crap that we've seen presented in other video art shows these days. Simply put: our expectations have been levelled, artists ! Some would think that this was destined for the theatre, but there was a definite sculptural appeal to this art, that didn't follow any linear narrative as it is usual in traditional animation. The other piece on show had the artist draw, among other things, a horse on his apartment walls that then started to move by itself and walk along the furniture. The sweetest show of this season, period. (images from the videos can be seen here)

Matthew Barney (Barbara Gladstone): Speaking of cinema and sculpture, Matthew Barney follows a very original working method in making films that are "about his sculptures", without them being documentaries at all. His films sort of expand from his sculptural and performances explorations, and that is for me the central reason why his art is so unique, more than the fact that his preferred themes involves sex and fetishism, or that he enjoys petroleum jelly or other liquid materials as a medium. His new project at Gladstone was entirely Barneyesque, quickly recognizeable, featuring large portions of seaship cabins or ship poles replicated in white plastic, petroleum jelly, sugar, and even vynil tissue. So what are these new strange metaphors is he going after ? Who cares for now: the art is ambitiously large, professionally crafted, aesthetically irreprochable (if you're not disappointed by the lack of colors), but above all, it is incomprehensible ! Only the small drawings in a nearby room begin to give the viewer clues of explanation, but unfortunately for the not-curious-enough, it is only through the viewing of the full feature 35mm film that the project will start to become clearer (and even then, only to those able to develop their own interpretations). The movie itself, to which this exhibit was an extention, or vice-versa, so much the artist entangles these two mediums, was a gargantuan affair for a piece of contemporary art, a Colossus Of Rhodes. It was presented elewhere in the city in a "real cinema" screening room, exactly where it should be, because these buildings exist to give the viewer the ultimate cinematic experience, and because Barney's art addresses the
medium of cinema directly, by subconditioning it to the world of sculpture. Indeed, this movie, called "Drawing Restraint 9", will certainly give headaches to film critics unable to grasp how the film vascillates with other mediums: for example the building of an actual sculpture on the top floor of a large japanese ship. What part of this film is not film but artefact? I am interested in learning how these boundaries will be defined by criticism in this perticular case. The film employs the acting of Barney and his real-life partner Bjork (she also composes the music) to convey a metaphor about heterosexual desire and relationships, and how fecondity nurture all creation (not very pro-gay, but at least this is how I interpreted it). It was probably a predictable move for Barney, but I don't understand why this have received so many bad reviews: I thought it was the perfect (and logical) theme to exploits after his Cremaster series, and thoroughall it was a majestuous essay unlike anything I have seen on the subject. The title may be boring (no need to make series just for the sake of it), but I still think Barney is one of the important artist of today. (the website for this exhibit is here)

Tony Smith (Matthew Marks): Just 3 architectural sculptures made to be installed outside, but realizing that they were made during the mid 60's , they made me wonder why Smith, though relatively known, didn't become a name as legendary as Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt in the field of minimalism. Why is there no Tony Smith at Dia Beacon? The 3 sculptures here seemed austere at first sight, but they were in fact interactive monoliths that enticed the visitors to walk through them, or around them. The fun was to evaluate them in comparison of what made them pieces of architecture or not. What did they take away or enhance from a strict architectural experience (mostly, they were all experimentations on the archetype motif of the porch). In the end a good portion of Tony Smith's work are just variations on the theme of the big black wall. But someone had to do it and he did it. It's as simple as that. I'm only saying that the pieces here made it seemed like a worthwhile project. (this exhibit's website is here)

William Wegman (Brooklyn Museum Of Art): Like with the John Waters exhibit, this one was filled with cracking jokes, often playing on words or ridiculizing simple aesthetic concepts. Somehow the curators or the artist decided to mix it all up: drawings, photos, paintings, and videos from any eras of the artists's long career (since the 1960's to now) following each other without order. There was sort of a post-surrealist approach to conceptual art in the artist's doodles from the late 60's and 70's. Well, in fact, all his photographs and videos follow a similar conceptual surrealism, and announced the trend of light, humoristic, fun art that emerged from the late 80's to the late 90's. I definitely think the theatrical photographs made with the costumed dogs of the artist had a strong influence on that. . There is a certain care for art theory, but filled with detachement, as if the artist's only ever artistic goal was to prove to art thetory itself that it didn't need to take itself so seriously to make some sense. If John Waters at Boesky had been the rare occasion that you could witness visitors laughing in a gallery, this was the opportune occasion to see visitors laugh in a museum. I may come back to this one. (see a small promo video for the exhibit here)

Snap Judgment (International Centre of Photography): This show was a total treasure hunt, as it made me discover many artists I had never heard about. All were africans, and the big unifying tendancy was conceptual documentary: art that borrowed from or served as an approach to documentary. Which was a luck for us western viewers, considering we know already too little about the continent, both itself and what they're up to with contemporary arts (totally aware and out there, it seems). The panoramas of Mandela's prison (with their present day inmates) were quite impressive and discomforting. They still amass people there like it's a war camp: terribly shocking stuff. They were also fine photograph portraits of minor workers, or photographs of peasants' means to transport water. But they were also some experimental projects, like a neat performance piece involving pictures of family photographs that had been glued to the floor until people walking on them had erased them. I unfortunately don't have the names of these artists next to me but I think I should come back to write more about it. A must. (see samples from the exhibit here)

Sarah Sze (Public Art Fund): Again, a top notch piece from her. It looked like corner walls spreading out of a huge building that would have been burried under the pavement. When you approached it, two small windows (on each sided) revealed that the artist actually excavated a good portion of the ground under the pavement to present us yet another complex assemblage of her speciality, made of everyday domestic objects amassed in series. The whole doesn't make much sense, but that is all the genuinity about this art, how it is building up expansive abstract collages from the mundane and everyday consumer products. The fact that this structures stood in the middle of nowhere (or not so in the middle of nowhere) at the corner of 5th avenue and central park recalled a preoccupation of the artist with issues of fear and threat of possible catastrophes, wrether natural or criminal. A great piece for New York and the best Public Art Fund project in a while. (read and see about this here)

Sze Tsung Leong (Yossi Milo): If Edward Burtynsky could do it, why not a true chinese? This project documents in large scale photographs the peripheries between urban scrawls and industrial worlds in contemporary China. What more can be said? One of the most pertinent show of the season. I don't know if the rest of the world will like it or not, but China is irrevocably transforming, and the picture is not always pretty. (the site for this exhibit is here)

David Smith (Guggenheim): Much better than I expected. Apart from Brancusi, I am usually not a big fan of mid 20th century steel and wood sculpture, but this exhibit convinced me, surpassing itself in presenting a perfect chronology of this master steel sculptor from America. But the standouts were not necessarely the delicately tangled sculptures posted along the main museum ramp. For me they were the virulent anti-world war II reliefs sculpted on giant bronze medals. A masterpiece of political angst, it could be considered the americans' Guernica. Then the large pre-minimalism aluminium sculptures at the end on the top floor were quite sexy. In fact, most of the pieces were relatively large. I thought I was going to see series of small model-type sculptures, but this artist obviously preferred the main meal category size. The techniques and crafts were often the matter of interest here, rather than the actual subjects or poetry of what was depicted. Thus the pleasure of this exhibit rapidly became sculpture itself, as somehow what transcended the most about these works was the pleasure that the artist had when making them, subordinating metal to each and every of his fancies and formal desires. (see samples of this exhibit here)



Ok, well that was about 2/3 of what I saw during these trips.


I'm stopping because I'm tired and I can see how that affects my writting. I am loosing all inspiration and vocabulary.

I probably shouldn't do it like this, but rather come back to the shows
for which I have the most sentiments to express.


This'll do for now,

I'll see If I can correct this list later and add some links
so consider it a first draw.



I'm gone to see Da Vinci Code....
I wasn't going to but a friend invited me.
Have pity.



Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com