Saturday, March 25, 2006

Resume Of The Month

Here is my art quote of the month, that pretty much resumes
the way I think about art these days, and why I got bored by
my recent art visits and tend to reduce them so I can stop
feeling like I am wasting my time:


"We live in a period of conceptual mannerism, one steeped in academic practice."
(Mark Stevens)

He then goes on...
"The ideas of Duchamp, Beuys, and Warhol, exciting in their time, are rarely being challenged or advanced in a significant way. They’re just being diddled with."



To me, simple quotes like this are as interesting as reading the last Baudrillard book "The Conspiracy Of Art" (which take turns and turns and then profess similar sentances).

These lines are actually from an article on the Whitney Biennial 2006, which means it is supposed to talk about the art that is coming up next, but frankly, only fools never change their minds: I just bought a Taschen book recently about conceptual art simply because while standing in the bookstore, I was flabbergasted while turning the pages to realize that I was being overwhelmingly bored by images of artworks that I once admired.

I thought, "gee, something's changing in me, what happened?". I wonder if it has anything to do with my recent health poroblems. It's like a convulsion of consciousness. Something is twisting.


Turns out that I walked away recently (and I mean, literally, as in getting toward a place and turning back) from exhibits that I would have never missed a couple years ago, such as the last Grauerholz exhibit, because I didn't feel like turning pages and pages of books, and I still reproach her to have hidden all her great photographs in a stupid archival conceptual glasswork.

May I still quote Mr. Stevens ?


"Earnest, well-meaning art is usually boring. Self-righteous art is worse...."


"Too many artists have ideas instead of intuitions. We could use more introverts."


Hmm...wow...I almost feel like he's calling me. That pretty much describes what I'm into these days.

Recently I was thinking more and more about this idea from Baudrillard that "art is everywhere but where it thinks it is"...And I realize that it is so true how it is very tempting for an artist, to just bring bits of that "everywhere" and patch it up inside a gallery. Show to the world just what it is you found so fantastic in your everyday perusals, or attempt to agglomerate a synthesis of all that information you have amassed, or offer an opinion on items that provoke you (what in any case always resolve in talking about yourself).


That path is so very tempting. I see many artists do it, and I can see exactly
how I could be doing it. It's like for each art thought I must fight with myself
and insist: "No, Cedric, No !! You don.t want to do Scrapbooking".



These days there is an exhibit at the Metropolitan about an artist who
apparently (judging by rumors) succeeded at joining both methods: conceptual scrapbooking and intuition. That's the Combines exhibit by Robert Rauschenberg at the Met. I feel like however will turn out my reaction to this one if I ever see it, it will conceal my thoughts on these issues for good.



Nevertheless, I write rarely to this blog these days because
I.m having fun discovering all sorts of things which have nothing
to do with the artworld. If I'd enter a gallery I'd probably go to
the desk and look at pens and erasers, sprinklers, the shapes of windows,
the light set up and how cables are hidden, the dust covering the floor,
you know, trying to grasp how this world came to exist before me.


To be blunt I an more into exotic travelling, reading about health,
nature promenades, and playing video games than art these days.


I'm even considering waiting to see Rauschenberg in LA,
so I could see how things are going over there next summer.


Hmmm...



Well take it easy for a while now, if something pops up that really stand out I'll
come babble about it.



Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com


PS: I might present something this autumn but I'm considering doing
it on my own, outside of any art circles. I'll post news here.

Monday, March 06, 2006

Exhibits Not To Miss In 2006 (America)

This first half of 2006 will
mean sort of a tabula rasa for me,
as for various reasons (including the
need of time to consecrate myself
to some art projects), I will not
be able to see as much art shows as usual.


So I decided to start a list of shows
that I really do not want to miss,
so that at least I'm able to visit the
ones that I consider essentials.

Maybe that list could serve other onlookers,
so I decided to paste it here.

The list will probably change over time.




The old classic painters (or sculptors:




- Edvard Munch at Moma (New York), until May 8

- Cezanne at National Gallery (Washington) until May 7

- Dada at National Gallery (Washington) until May 14 but it comes to Moma this summer.

- Degas To Picasso (Boston MFA), until Summer.

- David Smith at Guggenheim (New York), until May 14



The contemporary arts:


- Andrea Zittel Retrospective (either at the New Museum in new York until May 27,
or the future gig at the Vancouver Art Gallery, since I will be visiting people there next Summer)

- Robert Rauschenberg retrospective at Metropolitan, until April 2 (luckily the Met is a bit boring until this Autumn).

- Without Boundaries (Islamist contemporary arts) at Moma (New York), until May 22.

- Sugimoto at Hirschorn (Washington) until May 14

- Anselm Kiefer at the Mac (Montreal), until late May.

- William Wegman at Brooklyn Museum (New York), until May 28.

- Contemporary African Photography at ICP (New York), until May 28

- Mayyyybe the Whitney Biennial, but not if everyone says it sucks.



This list is not finished, and will include some gallery
shows as they come up, but frankly, since January,
everything seems boring, except this new trend of
neo-asian or neo-middle-east painting (the only stuff
that shakes your eyes as you flip the recent international
art magazines gallery ads.)



They are only 3 shows from all what I read about recently
that I regret missing these last 2 months: Ghada Amer
(hopefully a museum will re-present those textiles
works at some point), Thomas Hirschorn (an artist whose scrap-book
aesthetic I actually despise, but who seemed to have been the
talk of town last month so I'd have seen it just for the sake of seeing it),
and Angelo Filomeno (actually ending next week, another textile
artist, representative of the "asian touch" I was referring to).


Ok...add to this an exhibit of over 40 canadian artists
in New York but that was probably all unconsiderable works
(ohhh, that's bitchy).



Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com