d i a r y

I just returned from two fantastic shows in Chelsea - feeling greatly enriched. Pablo Picasso at Gagosian Gallery and Alice Neel at David Zwirner. Names, names, names. Although I don't have the proper amount of time to articulate a decent response - I will say that I leave both of these exhibitions with a new found appreciation for their work.

Pablo Picasso
From Left to Right: Buste, 1970. oil on canvas 39x32"
installation view

In these shows, both Picasso and Neel are generally focused on that romantic ideal where the essence of meaning and enlightenment can be achieved through the painted portrait. Los Mosqueretos, curated by John Richardson, tries really hard (with beams of success) to repudiate the notion that in the final years of his life, Picasso was a mad man in a last gasp. It's easy to say that the best parts of him are in those little areas where line, color and texture intertwine harmoniously. His invented "characters" - these musketeers and reclining nudes - I think, are really just pawns for him to continually surprise me (and undoubtedly him, too) with a remarkably refined form of visual luxuriance.

Alice Neel
Left to Right: Mrs. Paul Gardner and Sam, 1967. oil on canvas 56x35
Ruth Nude, 1964. oil on canvas 40x48"
Dana Gordon, 1972. oil on canvas 48x32"

Neel distills that feeling into a more sincere process of observation - where the painter is translating something more visceral than sheer skill. As my eyes roll around her lovely lines, sections of raw canvas are exposed next to combed textures of fleshy hues - the identity of Neel and her subject becomes more profound and revealing with each moment.

LOREN MONK

Working Tuesday through Saturday really curbs your ability to see things in galleries. Besides attending an overcrowded and potentially nauseating opening reception, your only choice is to catch an episode of the Kalm Report. But as the internet goes, not getting what you want (experiencing things firsthand) is a little bit ironic. On the other hand, bypassing the social subtext within the New York art world through your computer screen is really great because the sort of cringing interactions that happen at openings (read: posturing) are deflected by your man in the trenches: James Kalm (The Guy on the Bike).

His program is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me - full of intellectual underpinnings about today's visual ideas and what it means to document them so casually. He is also about how sad it is to live in New York and miss (in person) nearly every important show because you're locked down to the 10-6.

LOOKING TIME

How can speed coincide with understanding great art? Can we still see the tiny connections between the paragons of the past and the quipped-visual-snarky-ness of today? In other words, can we still see the inner workings of contemporary art without the opportunity to focus for long periods of time on it?

I thought about this as I breezed through the Museum of Modern Art last Monday. Besides gaining a slight sense of distinction within each work, I was mostly extracting a lot of lateral associations to other things in the museum and quick memories of artists back home in Phoenix.

MANIFEST DESTINY

Into the Sunset: Photographing the American West, organized by Eva Respini, was sure to bring about all sorts of personal flashbacks. For the most part, this is the result of thematic arrangements between artists that touch on a variety of perceptions that I (and most folks) have about the West. In one sense, this is about the expansive landscape and the possibility of an easygoing lifestyle amidst crisp desert heat and swimming pools. In another, it is about struggling to define yourself in that environment - something that can often feel like a perilous existence on the fringes of society. I left Phoenix for New York last year because of this, and now I'm looking back on that decision with some anxiety. I now realize how much I took for granted in what the illustrious Greg Esser calls, "the invisible infrastructure" of downtown Phoenix's visual arts community.

Left to Right: Ed Ruscha Parking Lots, 1967. silver gelatin prints
Matthew Moore Mirage 1, 2007. c-print

Ed Ruscha has a really nice grouping of his Parking Lots series (which are much easier to take seriously than his often stiff and repetitive word paintings). The bird's eye view got me thinking of Matthew Moore's work. Where Ruscha can feel intellectually drab and over saturated in his own stylistic nook, Moore brings a certain sensitivity to his ideas and the imagery that represents them. Just look at the subtleties within the composition of Mirage 1, 2007. There's this sort of infinity shaped rotation of model homes plotted in the desert with mirrorized milar. In my head, this is about how so many people have taken to the western landscape in search of whatever it has to offer; reinvention, escape, liberality - they think it will be easier, that it will be different. But Moore is also addressing the general feeling of lament by locals at how quickly and drastically their landscape has changed into "the grid." I remember growing up at the edge of an endless desert and by the time I graduated high school, my small suburb in North Scottsdale had turned into a refugee camp for 'El Lay' mentalities and east coast retirees looking to buy into their idea of culture.

Left to Right: Cindy Sherman, Beverly McIver

Cindy Sherman has that classic black and white Untitled Film Still #43, 1979, of her sitting on a tree branch in Monument Valley, Arizona. She also had the image above, which is more visually suggestive of her recent work - heavily applied cosmetics, gaudy dress, full-frontal poses, representations of renowned paintings, etc., etc.. Sherman has always recorded her self-transformations by playing with stereotypes and visual cliches and while these performative actions focus on a lot of theoretical and social issues - they never reveal who she actually is because, "These are pictures of emotions personified, entirely of themselves with their own presence - not of me." (Cindy Sherman, 1982).

This is where I jump ship for something more genuine in terms of the artist's identity - and my old professor, Beverly McIver, takes this kind of thing head on. Comparing the images above, I reminisce (almost eerily) on the visual similarities between the two - within the patterned garments, wigs and makeup. In this painting, McIver is addressing a wide-range of personal emotions related to the loss of her mother and newfound responsibilities in taking care of her older sister Renee (who is mentally handicaped). "With my eyes closed, I depict or hide the pain one feels when they grieve. Furthermore, it is a way in which to exhale from the chaos in my life. The wig, which is disheveled, further masks these vulnerabilities." (Beverly McIver, 2005)

Left to Right: Richard Prince Untitled (Cowboy), 1992. ektacolor print.
Kjellgren Alkire Camp, 2009. installation and video.

Richard Prince had one of his Cowboy photographs - a series where he rephotographed Marlboro cigarette ads. He made all sorts of sensitive aesthetic decisions by leaving out the original text, cropping the image, and enlarging the final print. This series really makes the rest of his oeuvre struggle to match the appropriated beauty of these images.

The American cowboy jumping through his own hoops of rope makes me think of a fellow eye lounge alumn, Kjellgren Alkire. Where Prince is elaborating on strategies of commodification by lifting images from every which corner of popular culture, Alkire is more focused on the synthesis of our cultural meanings. He is a hodgepodge of things like Evangelical Christian culture, rural life, odd versions of carnavalesque performance, and the belief that art can and should be a more democratic process of audience participation.

BAH, KIPPENBERGER! I KNOW YOU ARE BUT WHAT AM I?

For I'd sooner see museum directors hang before I receive forms of 'recognition', like 'hanging in a museum'. And that will never happen.

- Martin Kippenberger, in conversation with Jutta Koether, 1991

Above: The entrance to Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective

Hurtling over confused onlookers in the retrospective-like exhibition, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, curated by Ann Goldstein, I find myself particularly struck by Kippenberger's fatuously bratty attitude. He definitely feels more genuine and serious than he does adolescent - but then again, most things do inside a handsome museum of modern might.

Above: The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika.” mixed media, dimensions variable

This show does a great job of laying out Kippenberger's attention-deficit-dis, er, ostensibly serious visual practice and his always exploitive forms of constructing the remainder of what you get from pissing on everyone's heels. Or is this a conversation about the wellsprings of inspiration and homage? Regardless, every time you turn a corner, from gallery to gallery, things are locking themselves into place with a kind of provocation. Underneath the visual Tourette's that was Kippenberger's style, he was actually very good when he picked up a brush. He had a wonderful array of painterly sensibilities - particularly in the series where he was positioning himself as Pablo Picasso's last wife, Jaqueline Rogue - the series was appropriately called, Jacqueline: The Painting Pablo Couldn’t Paint Anymore.

Above: Martin Kippenberger

But Kippenberger was never really about slow and deliberative conclusions to anything of great importance. He seemed more interested in subverting the heroic impressions that most people have about artists. This idea inevitably gets me into trouble which is why I think the genius of Kippenberger is in his ability to jive that conversation completely.

One example is when he hired a billboard painter to execute an entire exhibition of oversized photographs of himself (Dear Painter, Paint for Me, 1981). All of the seams were showing - both in the ideas and the visual fraudulence of another person's brush strokes. The paintings look decent enough from 15 feet away, but up close they're sloppy - sections of exposed lines, graphite pencil from someone else tracing the original photos through a projector. The shittyness comes full circle into a sort of intellectual hilarity where nothing means everything and everything means nothing.

Above: Martin Kippenberger

I started thinking about the How to Make a Modern Art Library: Selections from the Eluard-Dausse Collection downstairs and the two Gerhard Richter works on paper. It's easy to see that Kippenberger was thumbing the visual seriousness of contemporaries like Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke and Josef Beuys.

Above: Gerhard Richter

Then again, Kippenberger's goading wasn't really centralized on one specific movement or person. He was all over the fucking place with priceless moments of debauchery - i.e. when he drunkenly walked into a bar in Germany and acted like a Nazi, only to get the shit kicked out of him by the patrons, and then celebrating the moment by making a painting of his bruised face. Van Gogh is turning in his grave. Or is he?