Please note: New site, www.briansholis.com

Please note that I have launched the new version of my website, www.briansholis.com, and that from today all blog posts that would have been published here will instead be published there. The new site contains an archive of my writing for magazines and books, a selection of the blog posts I have published here during the past two years, and a new section, “short takes,” with quick links to articles, essays, and interviews I find engaging. The RSS feed for the new site is available here.

New reviews, new essay, and an update

My review of Michael Gross’s new book, Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, has just been published on the website of Frieze magazine. It begins this way:

In September 2007, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened ‘The Age of Rembrandt‘, an exhibition presenting the museum’s entire collection of Dutch paintings made between 1600 and 1800. Included alongside Rembrandt were such acknowledged masters as Frans Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael, Gerard ter Borch and Johannes Vermeer (of whose 35 known paintings the museum owns five). But rather than arrange the canvases by date of creation or by genre, the curator somewhat controversially chose to display the paintings in the order in which they entered the museum’s collection. The first gallery featured part of the fabled ‘1871 Purchase’, made the year after the museum’s founding, and subsequent galleries highlighted individual bequests, such as the one made by Benjamin Altman in 1913. Donors’ names, in block letters, hovered high on the wall above many of the works.

Michael Gross’s Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, published this week by Broadway, follows a similar logic. Rather than pay close attention to the merits of individual exhibitions or examine the public’s perception of the institution, Gross revels in the internecine squabbling among Met directors, board members, curators and New York City officials over the growth, acquisitions and public orientation of the museum. The book, akin to a 500-page Vanity Fair article, is an unabashedly unofficial history…

To read the rest, click here.

Elsewhere, the May issue of Artforum contains my review of “Regift,” a recent exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York, and my essay on recent trends in New York’s art scene appears in the catalogue raisonné of The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, published by the Museum of Modern Art to accompany its exhibition “Compass in Hand.”

I am in the midst of having my personal website, BrianSholis.com, redesigned. When complete, the new site will contain both my archive of published texts (currently over there) and my blog (right here). This will hopefully coincide with the end of the academic year, and I will resume regular updates of both sites.

Slot Machine #10

1) “Even though the idea of originality has been dissected and pulverized by so-called postmodern artists, they are still expected do so in an original way. In the end, I think sincerity and integrity are the primary value in art, and these result from making something as good as you can make it so that it reflects your ideas, interests, and your passions as clearly as possible. That is a very tall order, but it’s more about drive than talent. If an artist can do this—in whatever medium—he or she can achieve some degree of originality. Whether it’s going to change the course of history is another question. On the other hand, we all look for things we haven’t seen before. You don’t want to listen to cover bands doing Beatles songs the rest of your life. You know that Arrested Development is a different kind of sitcom than anything that’s come before it.” An interview with Roberta Smith in the Brooklyn Rail.

2) “I have been to many library sales since and can vouch for the fact that these duplicates are rarely examined, or their source respected, for out of them have fallen, as out of book fair books, treasures that sometimes surpass even their pages: not just the debris readers normally leave behind to keep their place—paper clips, kitchen matches, rubber bands, foil, curls of hair, bookmarks, bills, sucker sticks, lists, letters of love, postcards, postage stamps, gum wrappers—but photographs and threatening notices, greenbacks, checks and a draft of a telegram to be sent to the Allied High Commissioner asking him to expedite the transport of Werner Heisenberg out of Germany, which fluttered to my floor when I riffled one of Arthur Holly Compton’s books after purchasing it for 50 cents at a Washington University purge.” William H. Gass on libraries in St. Louis Magazine.

3) “I want to emphasize that my point is not to correct Sontag politically; nor do I want to denigrate the significant positive effects of Sontag’s political arguments and activities. Everyone, after all, is self-interpreting and self-inventing–writers and artists more than most. Sontag was a true cosmopolitan, and that is an achievement not only of morality but also of imagination. But cosmopolitanism, too, is a set of choices, and Sontag’s choices in this realm so strikingly resemble her choices in the realm of literature and culture that one must wonder whether for her being itself was not, in Peguy’s famous formulation, “elsewhere.” At a certain point you have to ask why there was this unquenchable need to comfort, this limitless sympathy, for Bosnians, but not for lesbians.” Daniel Mendelsohn on Susan Sontag, in a brilliant essay published in the New Republic. I recommend all three of these, but if you are to choose only one, let it be this one.

Mark Ruwedel review in April issue of Artforum

Mark Ruwedel, Denver and Rio Grande Western #4, 1996.

I have just uploaded three recently published texts to my personal website. Two, a review of books on the relationship between man and nature and a review of a documentary about shopping malls, were mentioned here last month. The third is my review of “Westward the Course of Empire,” Mark Ruwedel’s recent New York solo exhibition, which was published in the April issue of Artforum. Here is the opening paragraph:

At the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865, there were 35,085 miles of operable railroad track in the United States. Eight years later that number had doubled. Midway between these dates, on May 10, 1869, a golden spike joined the rails of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah. It was near this site that photographer Mark Ruwedel was inspired to begin his series “Westward the Course of Empire,” 1994–2007. This exhibition brought together seventy-five of the small black-and-white photographs, which document the railroad lines, now abandoned, that knit together our country (and Canada) in an unprecedented wave of industrial ambition and governmental largesse. For centuries to come we will be untangling the ramifications of the historical process he charts.

To read the rest, click here. To see additional images from the exhibition, as well as read the press release, click here. Last summer, Yale University Press published a book of Ruwedel’s photographic series, with an essay by Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery. It is a remarkable book; I recommend it.

Three Events for the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” exhibition

The New Museum has posted information about the three events I have organized to accompany “Younger Than Jesus,” the museum’s forthcoming survey of fifty artists under the age of thirty-three. Those events are:

“Then and Now: Redefining Generations” – Saturday, April 18, 3 PM
Artists Carroll Dunham, Joan Jonas, and Mira Schor discuss the sense of generational consciousness at the outset of their careers and today. How did artistic generations cohere several decades ago? Does being part of a particular generation mean the same meaning at the outset of an artist’s career as it does after one is established? How does writing or teaching undermine or reinforce the sense of belonging to a particular artistic generation?

“Networked Equality: Technology and Access” – Saturday, May 30, 3 PM
Networked Equality is a conversation about the promises and limitations of technology, at home and abroad, with Ethan Zuckerman and Farei Chideya. To what extent is the Internet truly “global”? What steps can be taken to ensure those who do not speak English will have equal access to the Internet’s information? In the United States, how does class structure one’s relationship to the Internet? How does unfamiliarity with the Internet disadvantage individuals in today’s society?

“Who Are Our Peers? A Conversation Across Creative Disciplines” – Saturday, June 13, 3 PM
Rob Giampietro, Marco Roth, and Astra Taylor discuss generational coherence, generational self-consciousness, peer networks, and other themes related to the exhibition The Generational: Younger Than Jesus. Do the definitions of “youth,” “emerging,” and other terms used in the contemporary art world translate to the worlds of graphic design, literary criticism, and independent filmmaking?

I will moderate all three discussions. For more information on the participants, click the title of the event to be taken to its page on the museum’s website.

“A Natural Inclination”

My review of two new books on the natural environment has been published in the March issue of the Brooklyn Rail. The books are Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery, by Steve Nicholls, and A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature by James William Gibson. Here is the opening paragraph of the review:

Early 20^th century environmentalist Aldo Leopold once wrote: “A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the community; and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna and flora, as well as the people.” This strikes me as an admirably inclusive statement of principles, and one that usefully elevates the natural world to the plane we believe humans inhabit—the necessary first step toward just environmental action. Steve Nicholls, a director of nature documentaries, quotes Leopold’s remark near the end of Paradise Found, a book that ranges across five centuries of North America’s ecological history and narrates a striking diminishment of earlier natural abundance. In doing so, Nicholls offers copious evidence that even today our society is far from embracing as members of our “community” all of the earth’s living organisms. Yet, in recent decades, the sense of connection to the natural environment felt by figures like Leopold has swelled into what sociologist James William Gibson labels a “culture of enchantment” that is potentially broad, deep, and socially transformative. Successfully reorienting American society’s relationship to the environment—thereby restoring its precarious biological equilibrium—will likely depend on our ability to bring together the modes of thinking documented in these two books.

To read the rest, click here.

Malls R Us review

My review of Helen Klodawsky’s 2008 documentary Malls R Us is now online at Artforum.com. Here is part of it: “Though Malls R Us dexterously balances seduction and repulsion, it’s not necessarily due to Klodawsky’s attempts at neutrality. One senses that her fascination is morbid and her intent exhortative. [...] Nonetheless, at the end of the film there remains something to the claim made at the outset that the mall is a kind of sacred place. [...] What undergirds this ongoing romance with shopping malls, even among those whose critical faculties lead them to acknowledge the enormous fiscal, social, and environmental costs of building and maintaining them?”

The film screens this Saturday and next Monday at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the series “Canadian Front 2009.” Here is a YouTube link to the film’s trailer.

Not newspapers, but rather news

Two more sensible essays on the future of news, by new-media gurus and pop analysts Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson, are making their way around the web. Both suggest that instead of worrying about the future of newspapers in, we focus instead on nurturing news itself.

Shirky:

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

Johnson:

The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what’s happening to us now: today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past.

To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.

I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself.

Three snapshots from Iceland

In May, 2007, I traveled to Iceland for the opening of a specially commissioned project by artist Roni Horn. (I wrote about the experience for Artforum.com.) While there I was struck not only by the feral beauty of the country, but also by the high cost of consumer goods. The American dollar was weak, the Icelandic kronor was strong, and, for example, the cheap Thai takeout I ate one night, which would have cost seven or eight dollars in New York, cost the equivalent of twenty-two. At the time I chalked this up to the currency discrepancy and the fact that many, if not all, of the ingredients had to be imported from some distance away. Fifteen months later, the Icelandic economy crashed in spectacular fashion, and the autopsy reports now being published suggest that I may also have been experiencing one side effect of an enormous bubble: According to journalist Michael Lewis, “From 2003 to 2007, while the U.S. stock market was doubling, the Icelandic stock market multiplied by nine times.” Lewis’s article, published in the April 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, follows Rebecca Solnit’s October 2008 report from “Iceland’s polite dystopia,” published in Harper’s, and accompanies Ian Parker’s dispatch, published in this week’s New Yorker. (The latter is available in full online only to subscribers.) Lewis summarizes the first part of the problem this way: “When, in 2003, [Icelanders] sat down at the same table with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they had only the roughest idea of what an investment banker did and how he behaved—most of it gleaned from young Icelanders’ experiences at various American business schools. And so what they did with money probably says as much about the American soul, circa 2003, as it does about Icelanders.”

At one point, Lewis describes the harbor-front development I saw in Reykjavík: “The rocks beneath Reykjavík may be igneous, but the city feels sedimentary: on top of several thick strata of architecture that should be called Nordic Pragmatic lies a thin layer that will almost certainly one day be known as Asshole Capitalist. The hobbit-size buildings that house the Icelandic government are charming and scaled to the city. The half-built oceanfront glass towers meant to house newly rich financiers and, in the bargain, block everyone else’s view of the white bluffs across the harbor are not.” Here is a photo I took of this construction work on May 11, 2007:

Solnit was one of the first writers-in-residence at the apartment Horn constructed as part of her installation. (Horn’s photographs illustrate the article.) She mentions at the start of her essay that she bumped into the country’s president at an art opening–likely Horn’s exhibition at the Reykjavík Art Museum–and asked for a meeting. Solnit, too, notes an American strain in the contemporary Icelandic character: “ ‘I think the twenty-first century will be a fascinating period,’ [the President] said, a period in which we will ’see the relevance as well as the renaissance of small states.’ But the vision he described as we ate our catfish and salmon seemed decidedly mainstream, even American. He celebrates small states mostly for how they function economically and in the international society of states.” Whereas Lewis focuses solely on the world of finance, Solnit, as has been the case with her historically, discusses the environment and political protest (or lack thereof). Parker, arriving to report for the New Yorker in December of last year, encounters the first flickerings of just that protest. From the article abstract online: “To see Iceland this winter was to be reminded of that queasy split second during which a spectacular injury decides on its accompanying level of pain. But if Iceland’s economic misery was largely still to come, its cultural and political trauma had been immediate. Iceland was having a revolutionary moment, if of a sometimes hesitant and self-mocking sort.”

Slot Machine #09

1) In the TLS, historian David Wootton reviews Keith Thomas’s The Ends of Life (out in the US on April 15), and in the process offers a nice overview of the career and working method of “the world’s most distinguished and most influential historian of early modern England”: “The texture of the book reflects the author’s method of working. He reads voraciously and indiscriminately (‘I try to read everything’), and copies out telling phrases he notes onto pads of paper. Thus when Thomas tells us that John Donne, in one of his sermons, says that ‘work’ is ‘a word that implies difficulty, and pain, and labour, and is accompanied with some loathness, with some colluctation [ie, struggling]‘ it is a reasonable guess that he has come across this quotation by the elementary procedure of reading all twelve volumes of Donne’s sermons.”

2) At the Artworld Salon, curator Eva Diaz asks, “Whither Curatorial Studies?“: “Curatorial studies programs feed students into art museums, non-profit or university art centers, and commercial art galleries; the art magazine world and the grant-giving/foundation sector can be folded in here too, though generally they do not involve curating narrowly defined. Working as a curator generally means intersecting with at least one of these art display institutions, whether or not the curatorial work is independent or salaried. Though these sites have different masters, different ‘employers’ so to speak, the non-profit and museum worlds in particular share certain professional similarities. Yet curatorial studies programs don’t seem designed to educate students about the expectations of these institutions.”

3) In the Boston Review, Catherine Tumber examines “the role of neglected cities in a sustainable future.” She discusses renewable energy, local agriculture, transportation infrastructure, energy efficiency, and, briefly, the cultural mythology that attends smaller cities. “An inversion is at work here: placing smaller cities at the center of analysis leads to an imaginative template that is decentralized, deconcentrated, relocalized.”

Department stores and modern art at the turn of the last century

I’ve just finished William Leach’s 1993 book Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, which “tells the story of a fundamental transformation in the culture and economy of America—the rise of mass-market consumerism and the attendant shift to a society ‘preoccupied with consumption, with comfort and bodily well-being, with luxury, spending, and acquisition, with more goods this year than last, more next year than this.’” It is very good at tracing how networks of mutual support arose between big business and institutions (education and government in particular). What I did not expect to find was the following bit of information about the reception of modern art in the United States. While my radar sets off alarms about the categorical nature of its first sentence, the rest is fascinating:

It was in the department stores, not in the museums, that modern art and American art found their first true patrons. The pastel paintings of John La Farge, one of America’s most original colorists, appeared in the show windows and picture galleries of Marshall Field’s in 1902. Field’s conducted its “Hooser Salon,” a picture gallery for young artists from Indiana and Illinois. In 1910 Theodore Dreiser, in walks about Philadelphia, saw in Wanamaker’s a Fauve-style mural in four panels, depicting scenes from Parisian life, by the American Anne Estelle Rice. Hung above the first-floor elevator, it “suggested” to Dreiser “a sense of life and beauty.” “The light,” he raved, “the space, the daring, the force, the raw reds, greens, blues, mauves, whites, yellows!” (Rice, an artist trained in Paris at the Academy of Art, founded by Rodman Wanamaker, was to become one of Dreiser’s many female lovers.)

The Gimbel brothers, inspired by the Armory Show of 1913, became among the most ardent supporters of modern art, buying up Cézannes, Picassos, and Braques, and displaying them in their store galleries in Cincinnati, New York, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. Five years later Carson, Pirie, Scott in Chicago exhibited the work of Americans Henri Bellows, William Glackens, and John Sloan in its new galleries on the fifth floor, as well as the paintings of the Taos Society of Artists of New Mexico.

John Wanamaker, the man most apt to advertise his stores as “public institutions,” was, not surprisingly, also the most innovative merchant of all in his display of art. He deplored the way museums jumbled pictures together “on the walls, destroying the effect of the finest things,” and month after month, to sustain customer interest, he rotated pieces in his personal collection from the store “studio” in Philadelphia—a Constable here, a Reynolds there, to say nothing of a Titian or a Turner, a Wanamaker favorite—to his New York store and back again. (Of the “moderns,” Wanamaker admired Manet the most.) He applied what he called the “new display principles,” setting a standard later followed by museum curators. He wanted to make art “breathe” by giving it plenty of space on the walls, as if it were to be sold. “What is not for sale,” he said, “is still for sale.” “Everything that is lovely, everything that is worthwhile needs the eyes of the merchant … to show it off to best advantage.”

I wonder what it must have been like for a housewife from Cleveland to come across, in 1916, a painting by Cézanne or Braques in her local department store. I also wonder to what extent such display strategies are acknowledged in a book like Bruce Altshuler’s recent Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions that Made Art History, Volume I: 1963–1959. Anyway, one thread of Leach’s book that may be interesting to readers of this site discusses the evolving relationship between curators at the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History and department store owners, industrial designers, and trade associations during the first decades of the last century.

UPDATE, 2/24: Alex Farquharson reviews Salon to Biennial in the current issue of Frieze magazine, and offers this summation and, in a parenthetical aside, a relevant detail:

The aim of Salon to Biennial is to offer direct access to archives normally consulted by professionals only: the bulk of its material consists of installation shots, reproductions of catalogues and publicity material, statements by its organizers and several reviews (ranging from the sympathetic to the vituperative). Consequently, Altshuler’s words – consistently insightful and measured – are restricted to the essentials (some readers will wish Altshuler had given himself more interpretative licence). Beginning 42 years – but only three exhibitions – before The Avant-Garde in Exhibition, Salon to Biennial is essentially a 20th-century narrative whose way is paved by ‘Salon des Réfusés’, the Impressionists’ break with the official Salon in 1863. Volume Onewisely leaves the reader on the brink of the 1960s, with ‘The New American Painting’ (1959) – Abstract Expressionism’s (and New York’s) supposed triumph over Europe – acting as a cliff-hanger.

More often than not, exhibitions are selected for the central role they played in ushering in key avant-garde tendencies, even if the original circumstances were touchingly modest (we learn that ‘The First Brücke Exhibition’ was held in a Dresden lighting shop, for example).

The article is available online to registered users of the magazine’s website.

79,936 AD – 80,495 AD

   

On Kawara, “One Million Years,” installation view

Last Saturday, Valentine’s Day, I celebrated with my fiancée in a somewhat unconventional manner: For a little more than an hour, we read numbers aloud, from 79,936 to 80,495, in a small recording studio. We did so as part of artist On Kawara’s decades-long ongoing project One Million Years, which was being presented at David Zwirner Gallery. From the gallery’s description:

One Million Years is a monumental 20-volume collection, comprised of One Million Years [Past], created in 1969 and containing the years 998,031 B.C. through 1969 A.D., and One Million Years [Future], created in 1981 and containing the years 1996 A.D. to 1,001,995 A.D. Together these volumes make up 2,000,000 years. The subtitle for One Million Years [Past] is “For all those who have lived and died.” The subtitle for One Million Years [Future] is “For the last one.” Documenting the passage of chronological time, each leather hardbound volume  contains 2,068 photocopied pages. The size of each volume is 12 ¼ x 10 x 3 ¼ inches and weighs 8 lbs. 12 editions of [Past] were produced from 1970 to 1971, and 12 editions of [Future] from 1981 to 1998. 

Since 1993, invited guests, in pairs, have been recording an audio version of the artwork that is later presented on CDs. Julia and I were the final participants in the first live recording of a public reading; prior to our session, four pairs a day had read, five days a week, for four weeks.

Kawara is perhaps best known for his “date paintings,” which is the colloquial name given to his “Today” series, begun in 1966. Each work in the series must be completed by midnight on the date it is started, and depicts the date (in white text on variously colored monochrome backgrounds) in the language and grammatical conventions of the country in which it is made. Each is made by hand, and accompanied by a cardboard box in which the painting rests when not on display; often a clipping from the day’s newspaper lines the interior of the box. I am a fan of Kawara’s art in general, and this series in particular, and have profited from the temporary suspension of the present afforded by viewing exhibitions of these paintings. Despite their specificity—JANUARY 25, 1966; 9.JULI 1976; 27 MAI 1993—I usually feel mildly unmoored from time’s ceaseless regularity as I contemplate them. The mental effort of reconciling the present to the past causes my sense of both to dilate and contract.

Somewhat to my surprise, then, while recording our allotted numbers I didn’t think much about the past, the future, or the passage of time. (At one point, though, I began to imagine what certain animals might look like after 78,000 years of additional evolution.) For the first half hour the predominant feeling, because the recording took place in the semi-public environment of an art gallery, was a performer’s self-consciousness. We were sitting in front of a large window and could see everyone who came into the gallery as clearly as they could see (and hear) us. It was less difficult than I had suspected to keep track of our place in the black binders full of pages printed with miniscule rows of numbers, and after a few minutes I began confidently acknowledging those on the other side of the glass by nodding my head. I waved at small children and at the many friends who trooped through the space in the final hours before the exhibition closed.

After a while, the experience shifted and became more intimate. My performance was for Julia. She was reading even numbers and I was reading odd numbers. Though in my concentration on the dates for which I was responsible I neglected to listen to the particular numbers she was reading, I was deeply aware of the sound of her voice  in my ear and of her physical presence at my side. The call-and-response became tinged, very subtly, with erotic feeling.

Being enclosed in an intimate space and on view to the public became a metaphor for the bond we share, and to which we had made a lifelong commitment just one week before. It didn’t feel like us against the world, but rather us in the world, indivisibly together. All too common are the tragic events in life that make you aware of the bonds that connect you to friends and lovers. Rarer are the happy occasions in which relationships are instantiated. I am grateful to On Kawara for inadvertently providing one to me.

Slot Machine #08

1) The Virginia Quarterly Review has made available to the public all of its articles published from 1975 to 2003. There is much to delight in; Waldo Jaquith picks a few starting points on the magazine’s blog.

2) On The New Yorker’s website, Steve Coll explains the unique qualities that make big-city newspapers worth saving: “their audiences, their scale, their reporting, and the nature of the talent they develop over long careers.” This follows an earlier post on nonprofit newspapers.

3) In The Guardian, Rachel Cooke interviews Iain Sinclair, a writer whose significant talent for description of the contemporary manmade landscape is to my mind not enough celebrated on this side of the Atlantic. For those who know Sinclair’s writing, who in America is similarly engaged in a project to describe for us the (often unattractive) places we have created for ourselves? I think of Luc Sante, and look forward to Michael Sorkin’s forthcoming book on his daily commute from the West Village to Tribeca, but few other names come to mind.

Notebook: “theanyspacewhatever”

       

Philippe Parreno’s marquee. Photo via Flickr user 16 Miles of String)

My review of “theanyspacewhatever,” the recent exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, has just been published on the website of Afterall magazine. First, if you’re interested in contemporary art and haven’t heard of Afterall, I recommend you browse the site. Each issue features two essays each on five artists, as well as a number of contextualizing essays. The magazine generally does well in balancing scholarly inclinations and accessibility. This “notebook” will be paltry, because in preparation for this review I read, re-read, or skimmed a number of things that are not available online: Nancy Spector’s exhibition catalogue; Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics (here is an unpaginated PDF excerpt); Grant Kester’s book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art; Claire Bishop’s essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” published in the Fall 2004 issue of October; the letters published in response to that article, written by artist Liam Gillick and Bishop; and miscellaneous other articles and reviews.

An excerpt:

“theanyspacewhatever” aimed to make sense of what Spector sees as a shift away from mimetic representation that characterized the art of the mid-’90s, yet it used artworks almost exclusively created during the past two years to illustrate this point. The result was not the first American survey of the mid-’90s relational/social/non-mimetic moment—which, since this moment occurred largely in European kunsthalles and museums, would have benefited American audiences—yet neither was it a coherent snapshot of any trend now taking place. Since the artists were first corralled, their individual practices have necessarily diverged. Though they occasionally collaborate and, as Spector notes, their affiliation is still “grounded in friendship,” their interests are perhaps not as closely aligned as they once were. Originally invited to collectively formulate a scenario for the exhibition, it seems the ten artists met the prospect of erecting a monument to their past selves using current artworks with a profound ambivalence, a feeling everywhere apparent along the Guggenheim’s spiraling ramp.

My take on the show is decidedly cool. For other opinions, see Jerry Saltz in New York magazine (decidedly autobiographical) and Roberta Smith in the New York Times (decidedly upbeat).

Slot Machine #07

1) Want to see bullets flying inside New York’s Guggenheim Museum? It’s apparently one of the only scenes worth watching in the new Clive Owen and Naomi Watts vehicle The International, according to reviewers who saw it at the Berlinale the other day. Click here for the four-minute extravaganza.

2) Mark Robinson is a renaissance man. Not only has he spent the better part of two decades making great music (in Unrest, Air Miami, Flin Flon, and as a solo artist) and running an indie-pop record label (Teenbeat), but he has also designed all of that label’s releases. Here is an interview with him about his design work.

3) This Gertrude Himmelfarb essay in the February New Criterion, on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a bit suspect—Burke and the Federalist Papers? Really?—but is part of one of my favorite literary sub-genres: the reappraisal. This type of essay holds out for me the hope that decades from now my appreciation for the texts I love (or don’t understand) will ripen. Threepenny Review editor Wendy Lesser has a whole book about this, Nothing Remains the Same, that I can also recommend.