SUMMER, SUMMER, SUMMERTIME

                                 Summer in Bushwick

                          (Photo by Max Estenger all rights reserved)

Tragedy at Trader Joe's

Yesterday I witnessed a horrific scene on 6th Avenue and 20th Street.  In front of the Trader Joe's, three bags of newly purchased groceries were run over by a tan livery cab.  Strewn throughout the asphalt was an assortment of TJ's groceries--broken beer bottles, smashed soda cans, squashed Butter Chicken frozen dinners and chicken enchiladas.

Right-Wing Revisionism and Imagine For A Moment....

The killing of Osama Bin Laden has been the worst week for American Conservatives since Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008.  It was painful to watch the Sean Hannity Show on the Fox News Channel with Rudolph Giuiliani as his guest.  It took nearly 3 minutes into his interview to hear Giuliani utter the words President Obama.  Before that we heard about how President Bush was to be commended for all his work on the War on Terror. 
And they all got the memo:  mention Bush's resilience, mention (without evidence) that torture had provided the intelligence to get Bin Laden. The resilience of Bush?   The same Bush who in an embarrassing rambling March 2002 press conference on Bin Laden all of a sudden was proclaiming his lack of interest in Bin Laden?  That  Bush? 

Of course, if Bin Laden had been captured or killed a week later Bush would have been preening like a teenage girl on prom night over Bin Laden's corpse and calling himself the Terror Conquerer. The Bush presidency was what Conservative governance looks like. Now, the Right runs away from Bush as some sort of apostate.  But what exactly wasn't conservative about Bush?  Tax cuts for the wealthy?  Check.  Anti-abortion, anti-stem cell  research, anti-Gay,  anti-Science?  Check.  Preemptive wrong headed war?  Big check.
Pack the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues? Double check.  Deficits as far as the eye can see?  Check.  Bush and Cheney ran the most conservative administration since Calvin Coolidge.  It was a disaster for the United States and if you happened to live in Iraq and found yourself on the wrong end of a bomb or bullet, lethal. 

This is the restoration that is promised by the Right in 2012.   The Right's fealty is not to this country or Constitution but to Conservatism.  There are no American triumphs unless they are Right Wing triumphs.  They are consumed by ideology.  They love money and pretend to love Jesus.  They are chauvinists of the worst kind.   

Imagine  that between 1993-2001 George W. Bush had been President and turned over the reins in January 2001 to a Democrat named Barack Obama.  Imagine also that he had handed over the same country that Bill Clinton had really handed him.
Imagine then that within 9 months of peace and prosperity, President Obama had been out reading to children in school and the United States was attacked on 9/11/01 and thousands had died? And this after the smoking gun of an August memo warning of planes crashing into buildings?   Would Republicans have given President Obama a pass and said we are all with you now?  Sure, maybe on the way to his execution.

But George W. Bush got a pass. He had the special pass that is called straight white male privilege.  He could then even invade a country on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction,  kill thousands, waste trillions, find NO weapons and still get reelected.  If that had been Obama some wingnut  would have been calling for a repeal of the 13th Amendment. 

Do I wish President Barack Obama was more pugnacious with his enemies and with Wall Street?  Yes.  But in 2011 America, Barack Obama is about the best we can do.  And since we have to judge Presidents versus other Presidents, this one is the best we have had in a long, long time.  Only the LBJ of 1964-1966 was better, and that was only in the extraordinary circumstances of assassination.   And then he threw it all away.   But greatness has eluded all but a tiny few,  let's see when this one decides to roll back the empire before that's even in the equation. 

High and Low

Today was Lower East Side Gallery day for me and so I headed south and east to check out the latest from the other end of the earth. But first just a mere block away from my home was Exit Art's "Geometric Days."  The clear standouts were Paul Pagk's paintings. Pagk has been at it for over two decades and the paintings in this show are both sensuous and smart.    

Paul Pagk at Exit Art thru April 30

Meanwhile the Lower East Side scene was quiet with some interesting shows at Miguel Abreau, Leslie Heller and Invisible-Exports.  The latter had a group show based on Susan Sontag's famous essay, "Notes on Camp."  This show was titled "Notes on Notes on Camp."

The king of camp in all media is John Waters and he did not disappoint with his big oversized "Rush"  bottle of poppers.  It deploys the Oldenburg, Gober  "make it big" formula but the 

spill and crinkly yellow wrapper are too creepy for comfort and just looking at the thing gave me a headache and made me dizzy.  Rather effective I would say.

John Waters at Invisible-Exports thru May 8

Christopher St. & Bleecker St. (Wed., 5:15 PM)

       Sometimes an old truck is just an old truck.....

The Rehabilitation of Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC thru April 30

Over the past 4 years, both Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland have died.  At the time of their deaths the critical reputations of both had rebounded very little since the pummeling they received in the early 70s at the hands of former critical champions such as Rosalind Krauss.  For Krauss and her followers such as Yves Alain Bois the revised painting canon went from Pollock, Newman, Kelly, to Ryman and Martin.  Written out were those that had been associated with the late-Modernist formulations of Greenberg and Fried.

This meant that Stella, Louis and especially Noland and Olitski were relegated to being shills for  a debased ideology.  They were the purged Gang of Four while Greenberg was Mao. In the case of  Noland, this had disastrous consequences for his career and his work. The paintings on view here constitute his greatest years as an artist 1958-1968.  His run during these years rank with any other American painter in the post-war period--they encompass the pre-Circle paintings, the Circle paintings, the Chevrons, the Diamond paintings and the horizontal color band paintings.  No one since Matisse had done more with color than Noland but by the early 70s he was pretty much lost.  

This is the first official exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash presented by his estate.  The paintings look as fresh as they must have 50 years ago.  The Chelsea gallery aesthetic personified by the gorgeous Mitchell-Innes space is a perfect antidote to years of abuse

suffered by Noland's work at the Andre Emmerich Gallery on 57th Street where he showed for decades.

Everything about that space was wrong--the corporate patina was stultifying.  The  jewelry mart feel of the building hallways were further exacerbated by Emmerich's grey carpet.  How this grey carpet came to exemplify Modernism is puzzling as even the MoMA itself adopted the same carpet in the early 80s.  Worst of all was what Greenberg himself did to his artists in the 1960s when he decided that Louis, Noland, Olitski would all look better with a shiny gold metallic striped frame.  Tacky, cheap, gaudy.  It was Greenberg's worst lapse in taste.  

The new Noland in Chelsea is in a concrete floored gallery and the aforementioned frames have been replaced by more elegant white shadow box frames.  Noland never looked better and some of the paintings are as good as painting gets--particularly Morning Span and Epigram (both pictured above).   One hopes that this is the beginning of many great shows from the vaults.  

A Thousand Words

I took this photo last fall at an anti-Tea Party demo in Washington, D.C.  I brought it out today in light of President Obama's overtures to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.