Next Thursday I will finally get a chance to view Doug Wheeler's Infinity Room at David Zwirner in Chelsea up now thru February 25. The wait is apparently long so be prepared, but the reviews are off the charts.

UPDATE:  February 28, 2012:  After waiting in line and then in the gallery anteroom for nearly 2 hours, I finally saw the exhibition on February 16.  I forgot that I had seen one of the previous three iterations of Wheeler's infinity room.  It was in 1983 in Los Angeles, at the inaugural show at MOCA.  I think for whatever reason, the execution of the piece was much more seemless there than at Zwirner.  I could see some dark areas in the upper areas of the so-called Infinity room. 

The Men in Dresses Win Again

In the issue between the medievalists and the modernists concerning contraception, the Obama Administration appears to be capitulating to the medievalists.  On this issue the White House got spooked because a few of its reliable media allies like EJ Dionne, Mark Shields and Chris Matthews got their panties in a wad over a silly issue that comes down to tribalism and sentimentality.  These old-timers are still sentimental about their religion and their identity as Catholics.  Funny who the ones really tied to identity politics are.  

That these U.S. Catholic Bishops have been planning this campaign for months speaks volumes to the fact that the Roman Catholic church hierarchy is committed to joining forces with the right wing here in the United States.  They pay lip service to the social justice teachings of their purported leader while getting all worked up about what they always get worked up about--women's bodies, and gays. They obsess on these two things.  These privileged men who protected child molesters and protect obscene wealth get some kind of perverse pleasure in their assault on women and their rights.  

Obama should not give in to them.  Fight them.  Just like we fight the crazy Muslims, fight the crazy Christians with their hypocrisy.  This is not a theocracy.   The U.S. Catholic Bishops really know how to play the victim card.  They are  a disgrace.  

Mike Kelley Kills Himself

Mike Kelley died of an apparent suicide in his bathtub a few days ago in Southern California. He was perhaps the most influential artist to emerge in the 1980s.   His progeny spread far and wide especially in the 1990s when his brand of the art of the abject was celebrated all over the world.  My own take on Kelley's art was that it bore the same relationship to art-making as snuff films did to the world of cinema.  Except that Kelley's was a world of make believe gross out juvenilia with a patina of filth thrown in along with the punk guise of Darby Crash.  The collectors and curators ate it up.  Why own something slick and austere and beautiful when you can announce your own dark/alt side by owning a gen-yoo-ine Mike Kelley.  Are you a boring haute bourgeois hedge fund investor?  Not anymore, not with with that creepy looking Kelley doll with pus coming out of every orifice in the living room.  The guys at the office will think I'm positively edgy!  

His curios were inspired by many trips to the now defunct AMOK book store the former Los Angeles emporium for the study of the bizarre, ugly and the unsettling.  Kelley's work was a practiced detached engagement with these subjects but he ultimately could not avoid trivializing them.  He tried to make the muck cute; reveling in it while simultaneously dismissing it.  He was always superior to his subjects.

In the meantime, I look forward to seeing the wonderful art of that other Kelly in a few weeks when I will be in Los Angeles.  You know, the 88 year-old guy running around with an oxygen tank but still making achingly beautiful art with his spare language of color and form? The guy that the likes of Kelley in his black leather jacket have been launching spitballs at all his career from the back of the class.  Rest in peace Mike Kelley along with all those demons and all those spitballs.

Tadaaki Kuwayama at Gary Snyder

Tadaaki Kuwayama had his first solo exhibition in New York in his late 20s in 1961 at the famed Green Gallery.   He was an early exponent for a radically new reductive language for painting.   In the past 50 years, he has shown all over the world and last week a  new exhibition of his work opened at Gary Snyder in Chelsea.  The new Snyder gallery space is the perfect setting for Kuwayama’s  beautiful work.

Snyder’s gallery is one of the few in New York that specializes in abstract art, similar to the role Eric Stark played in the 1990s in SoHo and Chelsea.  However,  Snyder has focused more on representing artist’s estates and re-igniting interest in overlooked or forgotten artists.  Tadaaki Kuwayama is an artist who has produced an extraordinary body of work , working quietly in his Chelsea studio while art fashions have come and gone.  He is revered in his native Japan but in America has remained known only among those keenly interested in abstraction. 

That has been changing over the course of the past few years beginning with a   wonderful show of his paintings from the 1970s in 2008 at Gary Snyder.   He is currently part of a show at the Guggenheim in New York focusing on 1960s monochrome painting and will be having major museums shows later this year and next in Japan and South Korea.   

The centerpiece of  this new show is a work comprised of 22 identical 8 x 8 x 2.25” panels of reddish anodized aluminum.   Spanning an entire wall, they are both monumental and light as air.   Behind that wall,  is a new floor piece made up of 8 identical units of anodized titanium.  They strike me as little Olitskis (the sprayed ones)  that somehow dematerialize.  The installation of his work at this show is of the highest order.  
The exhibition runs through February 25. Gary Snyder is located at 529 W. 20th Street, 10th floor 

Sunday Morning, 40th St. and 11th Ave.

Photo by Max Estenger 2012

In The Studio with Jocko Weyland

Jocko Weyland has been primarily known through his photographic works, his writings, and his cult zine "ELK." But recently he has made a major foray into drawing and painting and the results have been quite impressive.  His "China" drawings were first shown at Franklin Parrasch two-years ago and his first paintings more recently last fall in the group show  "SCRUFFY"  at KS Art in Tribeca.  I ventured over to Red Hook in Brooklyn to see what was up with Weyland's paintings and discovered some new gouache on paper paintings (all generally measuring one to two feet).  The source material for these paintings is his recent publication The Powder (Dashwood Books)  which is comprised of images culled from the pages of 1970s and early 1980s issues of the  magazine Powder--a lifestyle magazine centered on the then emerging glam world of skiing. 

Weyland has made delicate paintings of details of some of these images.  Some are oblique, while others make their referent obvious. I like the ones where I can get what they are better than the more obscure ones.  But he is already on to a technique that is producing some seductive surfaces to match his always keen color sense.  The next move will probably involve a bigger scale and most likely canvas but seeing his initial works makes the anticipation all the more exciting.

 

The work above is based on a detail photo of a ski

Nightmare on 53rd St.

Art as backdrop.....

Today, I decided to pay one more visit to the de Kooning retrospective at the MoMA before it closes for good next week.  Having lived here for over 20 years, I know that the MoMA has become almost impossible to visit except on Tuesdays when it is closed to the public and various art educator events go on.  I have been to crowded museums in many places, but what I witnessed today was unprecedented--artwork being manhandled by adults and children and guards letting it happen.

Apparently the MoMA has no limits on how many people can be jammed into their $25 carnival of Modern Art. Yankee fucking Stadium has a seating capacity. Does the MoMA have a limitless capacity?  Are there no fire marshals?  The world's greatest collection of Modern Art is being presented in the most crass, disgusting anti-art atmosphere I have ever seen. The noise level is unbearable, the screaming children omnipresent and every artwork a mere photo op. The trustees and directors of this museum should be ashamed of themselves.  This museum is a shithole.  Period.  

Problem number one is that they place no limits on the amount of visitors because all they care about is making that $25 dollars, not making sure that the kind of care and time and talent that went into producing many of the works on view deserves some kind of reciprocal respect.  I'm sure Ronald Lauder is never around when the rabble is present.  How much money does the museum have to generate?  Is all the money going to the poorly paid clerks and guards?

Problem number two is that the Museum thinks that its good for business to have every tourist snapping pictures instead of looking at the art.  It's not even that they are taking pictures so much as taking pictures of themselves with the artwork. Every artwork is a photo op. The great Pollock painting above was just a backdrop for a slew of pretty girls to pose and mug and post the pic on Facebook asap.  This is the culture we live in.  Technology giveth but it taketh awayeth a lot.  Pity the poor soul who trekked in from Sydney on his first trip to the United States to view his favorite artist Jackson Pollock.... All photography should be banned at the museum.  Take a picture of yourself outside the museum in front of the MoMA sign.

Worse than anything I have described was the rampant touching of the artwork by museum visitors.  I verbally castigated a guard who was asleep at the wheel as usual as a Judd brass box was finger pawed by several children. That work always looks like its been treated like shit and the Judd Foundation should have it removed from the museum. A Lee Bontecu relief became the source for much amusement and was banged several times by visitors posing in front of it.  The worst treatment of all was reserved for a recent acquisition, a De Wain Valentine 1966 fiberglass/polyester sculpture and gift from Marie Josee and Henry Kravis last year (see photo above).  Unfortunately, the museum doesn't think too much of that gift since it lets passerby after passerby cop a feel.  I saw at least 5 people in 15 minutes touch it as they walked by.  One hapless guard can't see everything.  Eventually this beautiful gleaming example of West Coast Minimalism brought to the New York art world's attention by Tim Nye will look as shabby as the Judd does. 

That's why Donald Judd left for Marfa.  He knew that museum people didn't ultimately care about the preservation of artworks so much as the preservation of their careers.  I will be writing at length about Judd's vision in Marfa in the coming weeks but the man cared more about art than the trustees of the MoMA and the people who run the museum.  I used to lament that Dia:Beacon was 90 minutes from the City, but now I see that as one of its great strengths.  Keep the art as far away from the people as possible.  That's the only way it will physically survive unless a whole new set of policies are put in place.

I was amused by how the the curators decided to mix things up a bit and so I saw LOTS of work by Marcel Broodthaers and Daniel Buren from the newly acquired Daled Collection. This dreary assortment particularly by the supremely overrated French hack Daniel Buren was the one empty gallery in the entire museum.  Yes, it was those tarps of stripes that the Octoberists masturbate to.  Lots of snickers at the sublime Ryman painting Twin 1966, though.   That one had people wondering WTF.  But it's easily one of the 10 best works in the entire museum.  I can also say that I finally saw a Lawrence Weiner work that was great--a drywall cutout and a Robert Barry piece from 1968 that looked a little too much like a Fred Sandback for comfort.  It's too bad that we can't see work here in New York by the only great artist produced by the whole Institutional Critique genre--Michael Asher, instead we get  Broodthaers and Buren who are like double doses of chemotherapy.