It's now been over three weeks since President Barack Obama's decisive victory over Mitt Romney and the army of Right Wing haters. Never have so many failed so miserably. And fail they did on Novemeber 6--from the filthy greedy plutocrats, to the religious right, to the Tea Party phonies unhinged by a liberal president of color.
The delusion about what happened continues. They think they just have to run a right wing Latino like Marco Rubio and all will be fine. For the right wing in America, their small minded philosophy of conservatism never fails, it is mortal men that fail it. Conservatism has always been with us--to oppose freedom for blacks, workers, women, immigrants, gays et al. It's always there with its boot on the necks of the underclass; its always at the ready to do the bidding of the rich and powerful. On November 6, 2012 a huge majority for these polarized times told the right wing and its minions to go fuck itself.
Of course, when you are funded by billionaires the threat is always omnipresent especially in off-year elections. But liberalism triumphed on Novemeber 6 in a way it had not since November 1964 when LBJ destroyed Goldwater. That is why the wingnuts are devastated. They know what happened a few weeks ago. They can blame all the poor people and welfare grabbing moochers all they want--except when its pointed out that the only age group Romney carried contained most of his government dependent 47%--the over 65 crowd.
The wingnuts hate Obama and hate liberal America and want it to fail. That's how they think. They are tribal, they are insular and they are still in shock. They are still unskewing Nate Silvers polls. Right now, they are still counting votes nearly a month afte rthe election. Obama is at 51% of the vote and Romney is slipping at close to 47%., and the votes from California keep coming. Watching them suffer is as great a pleasure and one can imagine.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Hard Surge
The battering that New York and New Jersey received at the hands of Hurricane Sandy has been devastating. I live on the far west side near the Javits Center in one of the new towers that has sprung up in the growing Hudson Yards neighborhood over the past few years. In the crucial hours when the storm pounded the Hudson I could see the water rising and flooding into Hudson River Park in the areas where the Circle Line, World Yacht and the NJ Ferries are docked. But just a few blocks south on 31st Street I could see that Ohm, a tall residential tower that unfortunately has gone dark since Monday night. I feel very fortunate I'm not one of them. Con Ed has yet to restore power to hundreds of thousands of residents in lower Manhattan.
Yesterday, I decided after being cooped up inside since Sunday afternoon, I got onto my bike and rode downtown through Battery Park City and then followed the river line past the South Street Seaport and then up through the Lower East Side, the East Village and Murray Hill. All the areas I rode through were dark. You could tell people were getting frustrated. I saw some filling up their large water cooler sized plastic jugs from an open fire hydrant.
One other remarkable site, at least for Manhattan, was what I saw at one of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel entrances--a truck submerged in water. Lots of water.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
George McGovern: An American Hero
While that paragon of right-wing macho and bravado Ronald Wilson Reagan spent World War II on the backlot of a San Fernando Valley movie studio, George McGovern was killing Nazis while flying risky raids into Germany. You see, Ronnie was always an actor and always a coward. That is the essence of contemporary conservatism as evidenced by chicken hawks like Cheney, Limbaugh or Romney. McGovern a man horrified by war, because he actually experienced it was too modest and too unchauvinistic to make his service in WW II an inoculation against charges of pacifism due to his ardent opposition to the disastrous war in Vietnam.
Many of my progressive elders cut their teeth in politics in the McGovern campaign of 1972. He was and is the most liberal/progressive major party candidate in the history of the United States. I was only 7 at the time, and was not on his side then but I always remember something beguiling about him, his name and the alternate devotion and antipathy he engendered. One Bright Shining Moment (2005) Stephen Vittorio's magnificent documentary on McGovern captures the highlights of the '72 campaign. 1972 was still the 60s and it wasn't until Nixon's resignation in disgrace in 1974 did that wild ride from 1963 to 1974 end.
The McGovern campain of 1972 was innovative and novel in so many ways--from reforming the Democratic Party to organizing in the Iowa caucuses, and pioneering a direct mail donor base of small contributors among other things. But one overlooked aspect of the campaign was the enlistment of the creative community. It wasn't just Shirley MacLaine, Warren Beatty, Gloria Steinhem and the rest. The leading contemporary artists of the day were onboard from Warhol to Flavin and both created iconic works for the campaign with Warhol's wickedly cutting "Vote McGovern" silkscreen featuring a scary looking Richard Nixon among the finest political works of the past half century.
I had the good fortune of speaking to McGovern in the '90s and I asked him a question he graciously called a great question that not many people had asked him before. My question was why he didn't run for president in 1976 after having been vindicated by the debacle of Nixon's second term? He answered that he considered it and had wanted to do it himself and regrets not having tried, but that he couldn't muster much enthusiasm from his family and close supporters. Many try to imagine the world if McGovern had won in 1972, but then we probably don't get the full story of Watergate and the disgraceful Indochina exits would have happened on his watch. But a President McGovern in January 1977 would have been a fascinating prospect indeed.
Many of my progressive elders cut their teeth in politics in the McGovern campaign of 1972. He was and is the most liberal/progressive major party candidate in the history of the United States. I was only 7 at the time, and was not on his side then but I always remember something beguiling about him, his name and the alternate devotion and antipathy he engendered. One Bright Shining Moment (2005) Stephen Vittorio's magnificent documentary on McGovern captures the highlights of the '72 campaign. 1972 was still the 60s and it wasn't until Nixon's resignation in disgrace in 1974 did that wild ride from 1963 to 1974 end.
The good Senator standing next to Warhol's brilliant silkscreen for the '72 campaign |
Dan Flavin's untitled (to a man, George McGovern) |
I had the good fortune of speaking to McGovern in the '90s and I asked him a question he graciously called a great question that not many people had asked him before. My question was why he didn't run for president in 1976 after having been vindicated by the debacle of Nixon's second term? He answered that he considered it and had wanted to do it himself and regrets not having tried, but that he couldn't muster much enthusiasm from his family and close supporters. Many try to imagine the world if McGovern had won in 1972, but then we probably don't get the full story of Watergate and the disgraceful Indochina exits would have happened on his watch. But a President McGovern in January 1977 would have been a fascinating prospect indeed.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Summer
Summer is obviously here with record temperatures throughout the entire country. Blog postings will be sporadic. Have a wonderful July!
Saturday, May 26, 2012
In the Studio with Mary Jones
Only
10 blocks south of my apartment, I recently went to the 26th Street,
ground zero for what would become the West Chelsea art district. Mary Jones has had a lovely, light-filled atelier in the Greene-Naftali building for years.
I
first saw the paintings of Mary Jones nearly 30 years ago in Los Angeles, when
I was a student and she herself was not too far removed from school. Her work then was an original amalgam of
various tendencies within the dialogue of painting in the late 70s and early
80s with elements of P&D, New
Image, and even Neo-Ex. But it was all put through her cool,
deliberate painting style and the results were some of the best painting around
in those days.
By
the end of the 80s she had moved to New York and she had emptied her paintings
of representational elements but retained her regularized hard-edged
non-painterly facture. It was not
long after that that she started to move into the territory of a much looser
gestural abstraction. She
described this change as becoming consumed by the under-painting of her
previous canvases.
The
preoccupation with developing new possibilities for gestural abstraction has
concerned her since. Her paintings
have been exhibited in New York in many solo and group exhibitions and having
seen nearly all of her shows, the paintings I saw a couple of days ago in her
studio are among the best paintings she has ever created and a brilliant new
direction for her work.
These
paintings seem to synthesize all of her concerns for the past decades into her
most complete and varied paintings.
They are her most muscular paintings with form and mass dominating where
once thin washes of paint predominated.
Her introduction a few years ago of spray paint is now incorporated seamlessly
and some of the schematic ghosts from her earliest work have reappeared.
Despite
the fact that these paintings contain more traditional figure/ground
relationships, color continues to play an important role. The newest paintings have large
swaths of paint applied with a roller, but not so much rolled as troweled. Upon
seeing one where pink predominated, I asked her if the deKooning show had been
an inspiration and indeed it had been she replied. The paintings look nothing like deKooning’s but the
confidence and depth of the paintings recall late deKooning.
With
a few more paintings of this size or larger (the ones I saw were 6’ x 5’ ft)
and equal in quality, Mary Jones will surely have one
killer show of new paintings. I can’t wait to see that exhibition.
A new work on paper |
A small painting from 2010 |
Saturday, May 19, 2012
ICFF: New York
The International Contemporary Furniture Fair is an annual affair held every May at the Jacob Javits Center. I have been attending every year for over a decade and this year's edition was probably the least exciting both in terms of actual designs and in the ambition of the exhibitors. Many major furniture manufacturers have been dropping out year after year.
Since there was little of any real interest, the ICFF affords me the opportunity to discuss the state of domestic design. Gone are the heady days of the late 90s and early 00s when furniture design was following the lead of the hyper-modernist revival occurring in architecture.
The turn of the century saw the rise of Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic, and the Bouroullec Brothers paralleling the starchitects who were transforming the skylines of world cities. But while architecture continues in the present, design has in the past 10 years slipped into complacency and nostalgia for the past (grandma chic). The art world is even worse as it long ago turned it's back on modernist form and innovation.
The relationship of modernist art and design has long dovetailed ever since cubism and its Bauhaus progeny. The early post-war period saw a symbiosis between Abstract Expressionist organicism and the designs of Charles Eames. This relationship continued into the 1960s with both Pop and Minimalism inspiring various developments. But eventually John Pawson and Steven Holl modernist houses were filled with stuff by the likes of Dana Schutz. This has never made sense to me.
Since there was little of any real interest, the ICFF affords me the opportunity to discuss the state of domestic design. Gone are the heady days of the late 90s and early 00s when furniture design was following the lead of the hyper-modernist revival occurring in architecture.
The turn of the century saw the rise of Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic, and the Bouroullec Brothers paralleling the starchitects who were transforming the skylines of world cities. But while architecture continues in the present, design has in the past 10 years slipped into complacency and nostalgia for the past (grandma chic). The art world is even worse as it long ago turned it's back on modernist form and innovation.
The relationship of modernist art and design has long dovetailed ever since cubism and its Bauhaus progeny. The early post-war period saw a symbiosis between Abstract Expressionist organicism and the designs of Charles Eames. This relationship continued into the 1960s with both Pop and Minimalism inspiring various developments. But eventually John Pawson and Steven Holl modernist houses were filled with stuff by the likes of Dana Schutz. This has never made sense to me.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Obama Does the Right Thing Again
The father of the Gay Rights Movement, Frank Kameny |
It is refreshing to have a man of decent impulses and strong character and intelligence sitting in the oval office after the
previous two presidents. The
last president was an arrogant lightweight totally overwhelmed by the forces that enveloped him and
unable to navigate through the disastrous consequences of his policies. Every time he took to the
microphone he was an embarrassment to himself and his country. The way he spoke, the way he gestured,
the tics in his face made him unbearable and yet you could not hate him the way
you could easily hate Dick Cheney (or any of the Cheneys for that matter). His 8-year tenure was catastrophic and
object lesson #1 on how conservative governance is a failure. The last president was someone to be
pitied.
The president before that was by all accounts a brilliant
thinker with serious personal flaws. His political expedience set the course for DADT and the
Defense of Marriage Act which this current president has been undoing. It is precisely why many of us
disqualified his wife from ascending to the presidency. The truth is that for myself 2008
was as much about keeping him and his wife out as putting Obama in. If she has any plans for 2016, she
better start by clearly stating her support for marriage equality . She has been a loyal and very effective
Secretary of State but the Progressive base still views her with
suspicion.
President Obama got it right yesterday on the issue of
same-sex marriage. Either you
believe in equal rights for all Americans or you do not. I’m happy to see that the administration
is done catering to the likes of hucksters
like Rick Warren.
The flak from the right as usual was predictable. It’s been predictable for hundreds of
years in the United States. Conservatism
has always been allied with the most evil forces in American history and
life—slavery, segregation, anti-union, anti-women, and anti –gay. Throw in the worst sects of
Christianity and its odious anti-science fundamentalisms and you have a recipe
for the worst aspects of our country. But the arrogance of Conservatism means never having to ever apologize for always
being on the wrong side of history.
I don’t know how the politics of the President’s decision
will play out—the white working class has been doing the bidding of the Koch
Brothers and their ilk since Nixon.
These people keep getting poorer, their children keep getting dumber
while the Koch Brothers and the one percent get richer.
Imagine for a moment if the hard core red states somehow
were their own country. You would basically have a 2nd world country akin
to Eastern Europe. Is there
anything anyone wants from people in the red states? Oklahoma?
Mississippi? Perhaps that is part of the problem. Conservatives produce little that
anyone anywhere wants (except for Texas oil, but that’s a question of geographic
luck). Most if not all that is world class in the United States is
produced by/in liberal enclaves.
Higher education? Massachusetts.
High culture? New York City. High Tech? Silicon Valley. Film & Television? Los Angeles. Look at Washington State which even
voted Dukakis in 1988 during a Bush I landslide; that state has given the world Microsoft, Starbucks, and Costco (yes Costco is now worldwide). What does red state America offer
the world? Country music? Not anymore, even the golden age of the great
country music of the 1950s-1970s is a thing of the past.
The conservative mind is a terrible thing to ponder but like
dead football players whose brains are being studied for brain trauma caused by
concussions, we need to see why so many of them have gone off the deep
end. How is it that a proposal to
raise the top marginal tax rate by 3.5%
on the wealthiest Americans to what it was during Clinton’s term somehow
amounts to radical socialist redistributionist economic policy shows how the conservative
mind has become unhinged. It is a
mind filled with petty slights, jealousies, grudges and suspicions. It is tribal and focused on suspicions of the other, at the educated while always bowing to the wealthy.
At the root of all this is religion. Red state America is not
the future of the United States and not the future of the world. It’s religious fundamentalism makes it simpatico
with our enemies in the Islamic extremist world. I’m quite certain however that such superstitions as supreme
beings and gods of all stripes will be a relic of the past by the next turn of the century. That is part of what the 21st Century project will be about.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Berlin Pt. 2
Lee Lozano 1967 |
In the basement of the New National Gallery was a survey of work from the permanent collection done between 1945 and 1970 featuring mostly American and German artists. Rothko, Louis, Warhol, Flavin, Judd, Rauschenberg, Held, were all accounted for but its always interesting to see the less than usual suspects. A wonderful Bontecu and Lee Lozano for starters as well as a Ronald Bladen filled that niche. One other surprise was a Goerg Karl Pfahler abstract painting from the 1960s. Pfahler died in 2002 and was Germany's Ellsworth Kelly
Georg Karl Pfahler 1964 |
Bontecu 1962 |
The next venue was the Martin-Gropius-Bau a lovely old exhibition space now refurbished as a contemporary art museum which was exhibiting “Kunst in Los Angeles 1950-1980" from the Getty as part of the Pacific Standard Time program. The standouts here
were Hockney’s iconic A Bigger Splash
and Man Showering in Beverly Hills both from the 1960s and both owned by
the Tate and two Ed Ruschas including his Pop MasterpieceStandard Oil Gas Station, Amarillo (1963). It has become clear to me that Ed Ruscha is the best artist produced by the Pop Art movement in the United States. He was there at its inception and the quality, scope and depth of his thinking about art as well as the oeuvre he has produced over 50 years surpasses Warhol and Lichtenstein. The exhibition also featured the largest stretched
canvas painting I have ever seen, a
Sam Francis abstraction measuring 29 ft high by 39 ft wide.
The Hamburger Bahnhof is the closest thing Berlin has to a Dia: Beacon. Housed in a former train station that had not been used since 1906, the museum serves the art of the1960s through today. It has many Dan Flavins both as discrete objects and integrated with the building itself. The museum houses many works by Joseph Beuys. And if one's inclination is to dismiss his work as mostly hysterical melodrama you won't have that opinion dissuaded. It was great seeing a work by the wonderful underrated British painter Alan Charlton. Charlton should have the same importance as Ryman but does not and is not someone you will ever see in an American museum. My first published writing on art was a 1991 review of Charlton's work for Arts Magazine, and my first group show in New York, After Reinhardt (1991) featured myself, Charlton, Uglow, Ryman, Ford Beckman, Christian Eckart, Tadaaki Kuwayama and Karin Sander. I wrote the catalogue essay for that show.
The major show on view is "Architektonika 2" a wonderful survey of the good, the bad and the ugly in work dealing with the intersection of architecture and sculpture. Very few American institutions have the space to mount such an ambitious long-term installation--it runs from April 2012 until January 2013 and includes work by Absalon, Jürgen Albrecht, Carl Andre, Stan Douglas, Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Isa Genzken, Dan Graham, Rachel Khedoori, Sol LeWitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Roman Ondák, Manfred Pernice, Andrea Pichl, Hermann Pitz, Dieter Roth & Björn Roth, Anri Sala, Albrecht Schäfer, Thomas Schütte, Thomas Struth, James Turell, Jeff Wall and Tobias Zielony are presented. A wonderful Marjetica Potrč sculpture developed specifically for this exhibition is designed on the principle of the "growing house". Marjetica Potrc recreates one of the hideous little houses that adorn the cityscape in Caracas, complete with satellite dish.
Andre's sublime wood cedar piece filling up an entire gallery whets the appetite for next year's Beacon retrospective but its the lesser seen artists who again shine. But the true highlights include the Israeli artist Absalon who died of AIDS in 1993 at the age of 2. On view is one of his exquisite Cellues. These single-person dwellings are not opportunities for instruction on decor or good design but embody the terror of psychic and physical isolation and eventually death. They are among the greatest works produced anywhere in the past 30 years. There is no "boo hoo" "gotcha" in these like you would get in a Nauman. Absalon was not a hack. These are tombs.
Meanwhile, Juergen Albrecht had 8 tiny Light and Space dioramas installed inside a wall with the viewer able to peep a look through small openings.
The pre-20th century museum scene centers around the famous Museuminsel or Museum Island in Central Mitte. The Berliner Dom above is part of the area which contains some landmarks of world civilization. Shinkel's Old Museum is there housing ancient art from Greece and Rome. But the jewel is the Pergamon Museum built in 1930 and the famed Altar from 2nd Century BC Greece is there. Topping that however is the Ishtar Gate from 575 BC and the lost city of Babylon. There is nothing quite like it anywhere in any museum in the world.
The gallery scene is clustered around the Bahnhof complex and the whole area looks a bit like Bergamont Station in Santa Monica. Nearby is the flagship gallery for global art gallery Haunch of Venison.
A former East German housing complex |
An older model subway car |
Not to nitpick but we stayed at a boutique hotel that was expensive by Berlin standards but somethings were just a little off including these rub-on vinyl decal letters used to identify rooms. Some were peeling from the heat given off by the lamp while others weren't even properly placed. Not something you would see in a comparable hotel in the United States.
Next stop, Rome.
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