CULTURETV News blog

Provocative Duo, Naked and Natty (NY Times)

2008-10-06T18:36:00.001-07:00

Dynamic duo, gruesome twosome or just plain geeks in ties and tweeds, the British artists Gilbert & George don’t seem to care what you call them as long as you pay attention, which you couldn’t avoid doing if you tried in their suffocating and disordered wraparound survey at the Brooklyn Museum.

Partners in life and work for 40 years, the artists have had a major career, particularly in Britain, where they were a sensation long before “Sensation,” and now hold a kind of national monument status. Their new show at the Brooklyn Museum, “Gilbert & George,” originated at Tate Modern in London.

Yet popular is not really the word for them. They’re too strange for that. And to perpetually temperature-taking art-world eyes, they have always stood a little outside the coolness loop, a tad beyond the pale, a touch too much.

The look-alike personal style they’ve affected, a robotic blandness, has probably had something to do with this; they are certainly no one’s idea of a glamour couple. And their sleek, photo-based, politically incorrect across-the-spectrum art is as hard to love as it is to categorize. Even if you appreciate it, you may prefer not to spend time with it.

Then there’s the perversity factor. They have a funky sense of beauty and an appetite for unsightly things, things most people come to art museums not to see. They were using images of feces back in the 1980s, long before Andres Serrano got the idea. In the 1990s, when they had reached an age at which most exhibitionists put their clothes back on, Gilbert & George, then in their mid-50s, took theirs off. More recently, when the art establishment had declared blatantly topical political art to be anathema, that’s what they made.

And they keep making it. It’s as if they can’t stop. And digital technology has only upped the output, which is one reason the Brooklyn show looks the way it does: oppressively and exhaustingly busy and dense, without even a clarifying logic of chronology to offer relief.

At the same time, for exactly these reasons, the show is a vivid experience. First look may be best look, but it’s a memorable look. And it poses a genuine love-it-or-hate-it proposition, something in short supply these days, but one these artists have been offering for years.

Gilbert Proesch (born in northern Italy in 1943) and George Passmore (born in Devon, England, in 1942) met in art school in Swinging London in 1967. It was a wild time to be there. Mild-mannered male singing duos — Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy — topped the charts while the Beatles dropped acid in India. Middle-class hippies and working-class kids faced off. Pop was already old; Conceptualism was starting.

Gilbert & George fed off all of this, but also backed away from it. Self-described country boys in the big city for the first time, and a committed couple, they stayed away from the art school set and instead moved to what was then a derelict East London, where they lived cheaply, saw almost no one and did their thing.

What was their thing? Some would call it performance art; Gilbert & George called it sculpture. An early piece, “Underneath the Arches,” was a kind of tableau vivant. It entailed their posing together for long stretches — eight hours in some cases — and barely moving as they lip-synched the recorded music-hall song of the title, about the melancholy joys of the homeless life.

In London in 1970 they presented it free on the street for passers-by. In galleries, they performed it standing on tables, their skin covered with blotchy bronze makeup that made them look diseased. You can see a 1974 performance in a video in the show. Like much of their art, it is striking, then maddening, an endurance test for artists and viewers alike.

By then they had fixed on the odd-couple look they would keep: Gilbert, short, dark-haired, cute; George, taller, spectacled, blond-going-bald. With their blank faces and matching, slightly too-tight suits, they suggested overgrown schoolboys or modish clerks, part of the present but also part of some undefined past.

In the early 1970s they translated their live sculpture into more permanent mediums, first large drawings — a gallery in the show is devoted to these — and then into photographic ensembles. Initially the photographs were small, but of varied sizes and differently arranged from piece to piece. Then a set format developed: four or more same-size framed pictures — black and white, sometimes dyed red — grouped edge to edge as a rectilinear unit.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Art. NY Times

2007-12-24T17:04:00.000-08:00

WHEN it comes to fashionably obtuse language, the art world is one of the leading offenders. Academic pretensions flash through like brush fire, without a drop of cold water splashed their way.

“Reference” and “privilege” are used relentlessly as verbs, as in “referencing late capitalism” or “privileging the male gaze.” Artists “imbricate” ideological subtexts into their images. Some may think such two-bit words reflect important shifts in thought about art, but they usually just betray an intellectual insecurity.

Referencing — rather than referring to — is probably here to stay. It has appeared in The New York Times 295 times since 1980 (including 6 transgressions by this writer). This year it was used 42 times, a record, nearly double last year’s 22. But privileging — instead of favoring — could still be deflected; it has been used only 34 times since 1980 in these pages (O.K., once by me).

Another lamentable creeping usage is not only pretentious, but it distorts and narrows what artists do. I refer to — rather than reference — the word practice, as in “Duchamp’s practice,” “Picasso’s studio practice” and worst of all, especially from the mouths of graduate students, “my practice.” Things were bad enough in the 1980s, when artists sometimes referred to their work as “production,” but at least that had a kind of grease-monkey grit to it.

The impetus behind practice may be to demystify the stereotype of the visionary or emotion-driven artist, and indeed it does. It turns the artist into an utterly conventional authority figure.

First off, there’s the implication that artists, like lawyers, doctors and dentists, need a license to practice. Of course it could be said that too many artists already feel the need for such a license: It’s called a master of fine arts. But artists don’t need licenses or certificates or permission to do their work. Their job description, if they have one, is to operate outside accepted limits.

Second is the implication that an artist, like a doctor, lawyer or dentist, is trained to fix some external problem. It depersonalizes the urgency of art making and gives it an aura of control, as if it is all planned out ahead of time. Art rarely succeeds when it sets out to fix anything beyond the artist’s own, subjective needs. (Does Paul McCarthy covered in ketchup constitute a “practice”? Please.) If an artist’s work helps other people to fix things within themselves or, more broadly, in society, though, so much the better.

Finally, practice sanitizes a very messy process. It suggests that art making is a kind of white-collar activity whose practitioners don’t get their hands dirty, either physically or emotionally. It converts art into a hygienic desk job and signals a basic discomfort with the physical mess as well as the unknowable, irrational side of art making. It suggests that materials are not the point of art at all — when they are, on some level, the only point.

Artists turn whatever intangibles they use — including empty space, language or human interaction — into a kind of material. They mess with things, making them newly palpable and in the process opening our eyes. This point is made eloquently in the current Lawrence Weiner exhibition at the Whitney Museum, with its cryptic phrases flung across walls, and the staged interactions in Tino Sehgal’s debut show at the Marian Goodman gallery, where the atmosphere is charged by mere talk and a few choreographed poses. Both artists have wrestled mightily with language and space, structuring them in a way that makes them undeniably art.

Are they practice-ing? I don’t think so.

'Las Vegas Diaspora' at the Las Vegas Art Museum, LATimes

2007-11-25T11:09:00.000-08:00

If it did nothing else, "Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art From the Neon Homeland" could claim the best title of any art museum exhibition this year. The show chronicles the scattering of 26 artists who graduated from the gambling capital's University of Nevada campus after studying in the 1990s with prominent art critic Dave Hickey. Now, 15 of those artists work in eight other regions, especially on the coasts. The remainder decided to stay in town, where the show is on view at the Las Vegas Art Museum through Dec. 30. They represent the vibrant kernel of a serious art scene in a city few would expect to have one. That's the other reason that "Diaspora" is not just a snappy name but also an apt term for this undertaking. As nomenclature, the word is usually applied to describe the fate of minorities reviled by the dominant culture. That means it fits Las Vegas art to a T. This metropolis is a distinctly American city, where modern art ideas originally forged in a European crucible often have the fit of a delicate glass slipper jammed onto the ungainly foot of an ugly stepsister. In that regard, Las Vegas is the new Los Angeles. Not so long ago L.A. was the place where culture was said to be mostly found in yogurt. Vegas, though, is still the kind of place where "Swan Lake" is assumed to be performed as a topless revue, save for the incongruous ostrich feathers. "Las Vegas Diaspora" takes that no-class, low-art slur and wisely runs with it, turning most every imaginable sow's ear into a startling silk purse. The aesthetic refinement is downright extreme. Hickey, who was guest curator for the show (his wife, Libby Lumpkin, is the museum's director), came to the forefront of American art criticism -- snagging a MacArthur prize in the process -- nearly 15 years ago, when he audaciously argued that, of all things, beauty would become the art-issue of the 1990s. It did. The topic assumes an unexpected tone of militancy in "Las Vegas Diaspora." Beauty isn't offered as some timid escape from society's crushing woes, but as a sharp rebuke: Not that; this! I surrender -- happily. The works Thomas Burke's 16-foot-long panel of undulating geometric color, "The Hots," crosses Sol LeWitt with a Navajo blanket, then turns on the neon. Jane Callister's "Cosmic Landslide" is a primordial ooze of sliding paint -- pigmented magma. It might have been the site for the Rev. Ethan Acres' "Miracle at La Brea," a digital photograph that shows the born-again preacher happily resurrecting a winged Tyrannosaurus rex from the tar pits and sending it heavenward. Shawn Hummel juxtaposes a panel enameled in cherry red automotive paint with big color photographs of a purple car hood and a late-night glimpse into an apartment building window, disturbingly illuminated by acrid yellow light. It's like a gorgeous Ellsworth Kelly abstraction that morphs into a vaguely predatory image. Nearby, lovingly described slabs of raw meat and entrails, gaily marbled with fat and painted in slick oils by Victoria Reynolds, seem right at home in their elaborate Rococo frames. No guts, no glory. Sleek, glamorous, sexy, sensational -- this art is also intellectually savvy. The artists are fluent in the complex language of contemporary art, and the best of them speak distinctive dialects. Bradley Corman's black, anodized aluminum wall relief starts with a sober, Donald Judd-style Minimalism. But the striated horizontal surface of the wide, rectangular relief is slightly bowed, almost imperceptibly engaging ambient light. Static Minimalist form careens into a speeding visual blur. Across the room, Gajin Fujita engineers a different yet related collision, pushing urban street graffiti into Japanese screen painting. With a tagger's skill he writes an angry "BURN" across the flight pattern of an up-from-the-ashes phoenix. Drawing you in Seduction is also a prominent leitmotif, with the art regularly offering come-hither glances. Philip Argent does it in luscious yet apocalyptic paintings that merge crystalline shapes with liquid color, negative space with hard-edge undulations. His paintings record the big-bang-birth of a thoroughly synthetic cosmos. In a hyper-stylized manner Sush Machida Gaikotsu paints bamboo sheltering exquisite white tigers -- an animal unknown in Japan, and thus as mythic a beast as those tamed locally by Siegfried & Roy. But the way he's packaged his nominal Asian scrolls in obsessively crafted, clear acrylic boxes turns high art into luscious consumer product. The tiger, sometimes a Nippon symbol for the West, suddenly assumes a new, ravening identity. Some of the work seems skillful but as yet unprocessed. David Reed, Josiah McElhenny and Jim Isermann were among two dozen distinguished guest faculty who taught at UNLV between 1990 and 2001, and their authority is easy to spot. Robert Acuna evinces technical mastery in painterly abstractions that read something like aestheticized consumer bar-codes stretched 7 feet wide, but the flourishes of paint echo Reed's work too strongly. McElhenny's hand-blown glass confections lurk in the background of Curtis Fairman's otherwise cheeky sculptures, assembled from discount-store candlesticks, bowls and vases and suggestive of glittery, potentially lethal erotic toys. Almond Zigmund's geometric decals on a gallery window-wall and Sherin Guirguis' jazzy, decorative wall-relief of Eames-like stacking chairs both recall Isermann's work. Guirguis manages to transform the influence into something uniquely her own, though, largely through an unexpected manipulation of materials. What looks like a raised, linear drawing is in fact painted Masonite. Sculpture, painting, drawing, relief and furniture tumble together into one marvelously polymorphic species. Odd yet effective Among the show's strangest, most unexpected works are two large, oil-on-linen "Crack" paintings by Jason Tomme. Ethereal golden-brown panels turn the show's volume way down, their shadowy hues recalling fragments of ancient wall behind the foreground action in a Caravaggio, like "The Calling of St. Matthew" or "Boy With a Basket of Fruit." Art's action lies in the breach, escaping through unexpected fissures, this canny work suggests, lurking in the illuminated void where flamboyant human dramas unfold.

An Artist’s Famous Smile: What Lies Behind It?, NYTimes

2007-11-14T16:10:00.000-08:00

Your first reaction upon meeting Yue Minjun might be, yes, it is indeed he! The face with the enigmatic, jaw-breaking grin, perhaps the most recognizable image in contemporary Chinese painting, is a self-portrait.

“Yes, it’s me,” Mr. Yue said in a recent interview, and he smiled, though in a gentler, less face-splitting fashion than the man in his paintings — the one who drifts Zelig-like past various familiar backgrounds making a sardonic, or perhaps ironically despairing, comment on the passing scene.

Mr. Yue, 45, was in New York in October for the opening of an exhibition of his paintings and sculptures that continues through Jan. 6 at the Queens Museum of Art. The show, “Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile,” is the first American museum exhibition of Mr. Yue’s work and further evidence of his remarkable rise in the superheated field of Chinese contemporary art.

A few years ago, Mr. Yue was eking out a precarious existence in one of Beijing’s artist colonies, trying to figure out a way to weave China’s tumultuous experience into his works. Now, largely on the strength of that signature grin, he has achieved stardom internationally.

Most conspicuously, one of his paintings, “Execution” (1995), a satirical Pop Art-like version of Manet’s “Execution of Maximilian” that was inspired by the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, sold for $5.9 million last month at an auction at Sotheby’s in London. It was a record sum for a contemporary Chinese painting. For Mr. Yue, the huge sums suddenly commanded by his works — “The Pope” (1997), depicting him as a prelate, went for $4.3 million in June — have involved a readjustment.

“I never thought about this in the past,” he said. “What was important to me was the creation part of painting. But it seems that something has changed. Maybe it’s the way money is becoming more important in society.”

He is not always comfortable with how his work is analyzed. The mesmerizing enigma of that reddish face painted over and over again, with the wide laugh and the eyes tightly shut from the hilarious strain, is subject to a multitude of interpretations. One Chinese art critic has identified the artist as a member of what he calls the school of “cynical realism,” though Mr. Yue doesn’t feel that he belongs to a school or movement and he doesn’t think he’s cynical.

“I’m actually trying to make sense of the world,” he said. “There’s nothing cynical or absurd in what I do.”

Mr. Yue was born in 1962 in the far northern Heilongjiang Province of China and as a child moved to Beijing with his parents. He studied oil painting at the Hebei Normal University and graduated in 1989, when China was rocked by student-led demonstrations and their suppression on Tiananmen Square in June of that year.

“My mood changed at that time,” he said. “I was very down. I realized the gap between reality and the ideal, and I wanted to create my own artistic definition, whereby there could be a meeting with social life and the social environment.”

“The first step,” he added, “was to create a style to express my feelings accurately, starting with something that I knew really well —myself.” That was the first step toward forging what has become the image that has now made him famous. The second step was to devise the laugh, which, he said, was inspired by a painting he saw by another Chinese artist, Geng Jianyi, in which a smile is deformed to mean the opposite of what it normally means.

“So I developed this painting where you see someone laughing,” he said. “At first you think he’s happy, but when you look more carefully, there’s something else there.”

“A smile,” Mr. Yue said, “doesn’t necessarily mean happiness; it could be something else.”

The smile has been variously interpreted as a sort of joke at the absurdity of it all, or the illusion of happiness in lives inevitably heading toward extinction.

Karen Smith, a Beijing expert on Chinese art, suggests that Mr. Yue’s grin is a mask for real feelings of helplessness.

“In China there’s a long history of the smile,” Mr. Yue said. “There is the Maitreya Buddha who can tell the future and whose facial expression is a laugh. Normally there’s an inscription saying that you should be optimistic and laugh in the face of reality.”

“There were also paintings during the Cultural Revolution period, those Soviet-style posters showing happy people laughing,” he continued. “But what’s interesting is that normally what you see in those posters is the opposite of reality.”

Mr. Yue said his smile was in a way a parody of those posters. But, since it’s a self-portrait, it’s also necessarily a parody of himself, he added.

“I’m not laughing at anybody else, because once you laugh at others, you’ll run into trouble, and can create obstacles,” he said. “This is the way to do it if you want to make a parody of the things that are behind the image.”

The real reason he paints himself is that it gives him a greater margin for freedom of expression, he explained.

The work at the Queens Museum ranges from a grouping of 20 life-size terra cotta soldiers, grinning versions of the famous statues unearthed years ago at the tomb of China’s first emperor, to a painting of a laughing version of himself holding another self-image aloft in front of the Statue of Liberty.

There is also a series called “Hats,” in which Mr. Yue has painted himself in all sorts of headgear, from an American football helmet to a peaked cap of a soldier in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, with that unvarying laugh on his face.

“It’s not a denial of reality but a questioning of it,” Mr. Yue said of his work in general. “And that laugh — anybody who’s gone through Chinese recent experience would understand it.”

Artwork that is truly revolutionary- LATimes

2007-10-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

WHEN you enter the show "Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas," opening Sunday at the Pacific Design Center, one image is sure to stand out. A woman wielding a spear and carrying a rifle on her back stands poised as if ready to fight, a reddish sunburst exploding in the background. A caption reads: "Afro-American solidarity with the oppressed People of the world."

Originally created by Douglas as a poster, the image has been reproduced as a 20-foot-tall mural as part of MOCA's tribute to the agit-prop graphic artist. Douglas spent the late 1960s and the '70s creating posters for the Black Panthers, and this exhibit will feature about 150 lithographs culled from his body of work.
"Everything Douglas did was handmade," says show curator Sam Durant. "He was trained as a commercial artist and worked in drawing and collage."

For the show, the museum chose to create the wall mural because the image embodies Douglas' overall visual aesthetic.

"The sunburst pattern in the background was a trope Douglas used in a lot of his posters -- a beatification of the figure," Durant says. "You also have the figure of a female revolutionary. The Black Panthers were quite a macho group, but they also were one of the few organizations that had women in positions of authority. Women were part of the revolutionary struggle for them."

Gallery Vandals Destroy Photos, NYTimes

2007-10-09T18:17:00.000-07:00

A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.

This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier.

Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, “We don’t support this,” plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints.

The bumpy video, evidently shot with a hand-held camera by someone who ran into the gallery with the attackers, intersperses images of the Serrano photographs with lettered commentary in Swedish like “This is art?” before showing the vandals at work.

No guards were on duty in the gallery, said Viveca Ohlsson, the show’s curator, although security videos captured much of the incident.

“There was one woman who works at the gallery who tried to stop them until she saw the axes and crowbars,” Ms. Ohlsson said. “These men are dangerous.”

By the time the masked men had finished, half the show — seven 50-by-60-inch photographs, worth some $200,000 over all — had been destroyed. The men left behind leaflets reading, “Against decadence and for a healthier culture.” The fliers listed no name or organization.

“I was shocked and horrified,” Mr. Serrano said in a telephone interview yesterday from New York. “I never expected something like this, especially in this magical town, which is so sweet I joked about it being like something out of Harry Potter.”

Mr. Serrano said he had flown to Sweden for the opening and was met with great enthusiasm by gallery visitors. “The reaction was so positive,” he said. “I could never imagine anything like this happening.”

Officials at the local police station said yesterday that the vandals had not been caught but that they were believed to be part of a neo-Nazi group.

Ms. Ohlsson said the attack was clearly well planned. “We think that they had been at the gallery a few days before,” she said. “They knew where to go.”

The show consists of photographs, made in 1995 and 1996, of various sex acts, including a depiction of a naked woman fondling a stallion. It was divided into two rooms. One had white walls, the other black. The vandals went to the black room, where Ms. Ohlsson said the photographs were a bit racier.

This is not the first time Mr. Serrano’s work has been attacked, physically or in words. In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts came under fire from conservative politicians and religious groups for helping to finance a $15,000 grant to Mr. Serrano related to past work that included a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine. A print of that work was attacked and destroyed in 1997 when it was on view at the National Gallery of Art in Melbourne, Australia.

It is not the first time the Kulturen Gallery has seen violence, either. About 10 years ago vandals raced into the gallery and put paint on images by a Swedish photographer.

“The History of Sex” remains on view, but with bolstered security, Ms. Ohlsson said, explaining that the group had threatened on the Internet to attack the show again.

Paula Cooper, Mr. Serrano’s New York dealer, whose gallery in Chelsea exhibited his “History of Sex” photographs in 1997, said she was horrified by the attack in Sweden. “Art inflames people,” she said.

Ms. Cooper said that her gallery was working to replace the destroyed photographs as soon as possible so they could go back on view in Lund. (Mr. Serrano produced each in editions of three.)

After “The History of Sex” closes in Lund in December, it is to travel to the Alingsas Art Museum in Alingsas, Sweden.

Making art a team sport LATimes

2007-09-30T14:54:00.000-07:00

ONE of the more intriguing art world invitations in recent memory landed in e-mail in-boxes around town in March. "Dear Friends," it read, "Friday night we will have three 2007 Escalades parked in front of Machine blasting whale songs. And other stuff. Saturday, we have a concert in the secret gallery that can be listened to on speaker phone. Both events are free. Details below. Love, Machine" Machine -- short for Machine Project -- is one of the L.A. art world's more quixotic institutions: an artist-run nonprofit in a raggedy Alvarado Street storefront in Echo Park that has become, in the four years since it opened, a haven for the hip, the nerdy and the otherwise curious. Conceived, in the words of its mission statement, "to encourage the heroic experiments of the gracefully overambitious," it plays host to exhibitions, performances, lectures and workshops on a broad and sometimes baffling range of topics revolving loosely around the intersection of art and technology. If you missed the cetacean-channeling SUVs (actually an installation by Peter Segerstrom), you might have caught "Psychobotany," an exhibition exploring "revolutionary breakthroughs in human/plant communication"; the Dorkbot Dorkbake, a bake-off in which contestants were required to construct their own ovens powered solely by the heat of a 100-watt light bulb; or the four-week Felt and Circuits Workshop, in which participants were instructed in the arts of both felt making and circuit board construction, with the goal of producing "your own noisy synthesizer creature from scratch." It's an exciting time for art in L.A., and nowhere is this more palpable -- nowhere are the reasons for it clearer -- than in a place like Machine, where the siren song of a fevered market holds little sway; anything goes, curatorially; and no one's getting paid enough to be haughty. Of all the city's cultural resources -- prestigious schools, ambitious museums, a robust gallery scene -- the most significant by far is its ever-welling population of artists, and it's from this pool that these organizations have arisen: institutions that function, to one degree or another, as art projects in themselves, driven by ideas and a spirit of collaboration, whose offbeat programming aims to challenge the boundaries of what we conceive art to be. The progenitors, most would agree, are the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Center for Land Use Interpretation (opened in 1988 and 1994, respectively). In their wake have come Machine Project, Betalevel (formerly C-Level), Farmlab, Telic Arts Exchange, Dangerous Curve, the Velaslavasay Panorama and Monte Vista Projects. There are also nomadic organizations like Art2102, the Institute for Figuring and Outpost for Contemporary Art, as well as educational experiments like the Sundown Schoolhouse (formerly the Sundown Salon) and the Mountain School of Arts. They've opened for different reasons; they have different agendas, different vibes and different financial arrangements. Machine, for instance, has a technological bent; Farmlab's focus is environmental activism. Dangerous Curve has become a center for experimental music. Betalevel, located in a basement down an alley in Chinatown, has the furtive, secretive feel of a speak-easy; the Panorama, which occupies an old theater near USC, models itself on the entertainment culture of the 19th century. Some (Machine and Telic) are registered nonprofits, surviving on donations and grants; others (Betalevel, Dangerous Curve) are internally funded. Farmlab is wholly subsidized by the Annenberg Foundation. They are, however, very much in communication, often sharing board members, as well as contacts and audiences. As Lauren Bon from Farmlab puts it: "There's a whole mushroom spore of them. They're all connected under the surface, but they are also very independent."

Art Boom in China Has Ripples Over Here, NYTimes

2007-09-09T13:41:00.000-07:00

WITH its tainted exports and crackdowns on the press, China has lately been exposing the dark side of the Asian boom. Yet the Chinese contemporary-art industry continues to thrive, as museums and art districts sprout overnight, and Western dealers join the gold rush by adding Chinese artists to their rosters and opening spaces in Beijing.

So far New Yorkers may wonder what all the fuss is about. Apart from a few major big-bang events, like “Inside Out: New Chinese Art” at the Asia Society and P.S. 1 in 1998 and a record-setting Sotheby’s auction in 2006, contemporary Chinese work has only had a spotty showing here. We don’t see a lot of it, and most of what we do see seems polished and clever but slight.

If the only way to gain any real sense of what’s happening is to visit China itself, the coming art season does offer some at-home options. Several artists from that Asia Society-P.S. 1 show are now international stars, and they are being rewarded with midcareer museum surveys.

One, Cai Guo-Qiang, best known in New York for the choreographed fireworks display he launched over Central Park in 2003, will have a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in early 2008. The Central Park work was sabotaged by bad weather, but Mr. Cai is the real deal as a creative force. Well aware of the nuances embedded in terms like Chinese and Western, he is, at his best, one of the most exciting figures around.

Another “Inside/Out” alumnus, Zhang Huan, opened the fall season at the Asia Society on Thursday with a solo show. Mr. Zhang was a member of Beijing’s art underground in the 1990s, living in the squatter slum there called the East Village. Initially his art took the form of endurance-test performances focused on his own nude body. More recently he has been making monumental sculptures and some beautiful drawings.

The work of two of China’s most ambitious young film and video artists, Cai Fei and Yang Fudong, will appear side by side in “Business as Usual” at the Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe, beginning Sept. 15. Both artists, though in very different ways, take their country’s new cultural revolution, the Bourgeois Sublime, as their theme.

Finally, China as seen by the West is the subject of two exhibitions. “Bridging East and West: The Chinese Diaspora and Lin Yutang,” opening Sept. 15 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will feature work by 20th-century artists who were born in China but spent much of their career in the United States. And “Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China,” opening in January at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass., will present a view of modernizing China from the viewpoint of Western artists. That perspective can’t help but be complex, with many lights and shadows.

Frida Kahlo's last secret finally revealed, The Guardian

2007-08-18T14:13:00.000-07:00

The artist's confessions to her doctor were locked up for 50 years. Now the details of her misery at not being able to bear children have been exposed.
She was always one of the most painfully personal of artists, producing a series of autobiographical canvases that dealt with everything from the consequences of the terrible injuries she suffered in a tram crash to her abortion. But finally the one part of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's life that has remained secret - at the orders of her former husband, fellow painter Diego Rivera - has been revealed in a new book published in Mexico. It tells the contents of a series of letters that Kahlo exchanged with her physician, and confidant, after she suffered a miscarriage in 1932, describing the devastation she felt when she realised that she could never have Rivera's child. The new material is certain to fill out the biography of one of the most fascinating artists of the 20th century, whose colourful life, which included a reputed affair with Trotsky, rivalled her art.

Kahlo's confession, My Beloved Doctor, is a bilingual compilation of the letters she exchanged with Dr Leo Eloesser between 1932 and 1951, which remained hidden for 50 years after her death. Kahlo always began her letters with the phrase 'My beloved doctor', Doctorcito querido. Hence the title of the book.

The personal letters, published in the month of the centenary of her birth, were locked away in trunks and cabinets in her house in Mexico City on Rivera's orders. Rivera, 20 years Kahlo's senior, left strict orders to his trust's caretakers not to open the letters until 15 years after his death in 1957.

However, one of Rivera's patrons left the collection hidden behind bathroom walls inside the house turned museum, fearing it might contain information that would compromise the couple's image. Curators opened the trunks in 2004, a year after the patron's death.

'She felt so disheartened because she would have loved to have a little Dieguito, but her dream did not come true', said Isabel Granen Porrua, in charge of the restoration and compilation of the material found in the house.

Kahlo's inability to bear a child, after the injuries she suffered in a tram crash, was painfully close to her. She had had one abortion when it was clear that her health would not allow her to go through with the pregnancy. When she became pregnant again a couple of years later, she miscarried.

Twelve days after her miscarriage she wrote to Dr Eloesser: 'Doctorcito querido: I have wanted to write to you for a long time than you can imagine. I had so looked forward to having a little Dieguito that I cried a lot, but it's over, there is nothing else that can be done except to bear it.'

In 1931, she wrote to him: 'I'm not painting or doing anything. I dislike the "high society" here [in New York where she had travelled with Rivera] and feel a little rage against all these fat cats, since I've seen thousands of people in terrible misery.'

Kahlo even dedicated a self-portrait to Eloesser in 1940: 'I painted my portrait in the year 1940 for Dr Leo Eloesser, my doctor and my best friend. With all my love. Frida Kahlo.'

In the letters, she elaborates on the first days of her pregnancy; her earlier abortion and her excruciating back pain caused by a tram crash in 1925.

She was operated on more than 30 times during her life. Part of her leg was amputated months before she died in 1954. It was during one of her visits to a hospital in San Francisco that she met Eloesser.

Eloesser went on to play a key role in her relationship with Rivera. In November 1940 he convinced her to reconcile and marry Kahlo for a second time. 'Diego loves you very much, and you love him. It is also the case, and you know it better than I, that besides you, he has two great loves: 1) painting 2) women in general. He has never been, nor ever will be, monogamous,' the doctor wrote in one of his letters to Kahlo.

Kahlo's confidence in her doctor continued to grow and she even told him she was jealous of Guadalupe Marin, Rivera's first wife and the mother of his two daughters.

'Please don't get mad at me over what I'm going to say: this morning, when you invited me to the concert, I was determined to go to make you happy and see you, but when I learnt that Diego invited the friends of that Marin, who I can't stand, to his box, I lost the desire to go. I prefer to speak to you frankly, since I know you understand me and will forgive me for changing my mind.'

The letters are among 30,000 other objects kept in her house long after her death and are currently on display among photographs, notes, sketches, magazines, books and pieces of clothing at her former family home in Mexico City and the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the country's most important cultural centre. Eighty per cent of the material is being shown to the public for the first time. Other items on display to mark the centenary of her birth include X-rays of Kahlo's fractured back, a trolley bus ticket and a note with a lipstick-stained kiss.

MOCA show asks: Is it business or art? LATimes

2007-08-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

In a move that seems sure to offend art world purists, the downtown Museum of Contemporary Art will merge the worlds of art and commerce this fall by including a fully operational Louis Vuitton boutique as part of a retrospective of the work of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Highlighting Murakami's longtime professional association with the luxury goods label, the boutique will offer limited-edition handbags and small leather goods featuring Murakami designs. The estimated prices of the bags, ranging from $875 to $920, represent about a $300 markup over the $575 to $665 that consumers would pay for the same line without the Murakami designs at the Vuitton store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Unlike the traditional gift shop or museum store outside the exhibition area, or a shop set up for a traveling exhibition such as the 2005 King Tut show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Vuitton shop will be situated approximately in the middle of MOCA's Geffen Contemporary space. It will be among about 20 rooms featuring paintings, sculpture and animation. "People have touched base with the play between the commercial arena and high art, but this is a little more confrontational," MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel, who organized the show, said Wednesday. Although MOCA will receive no profit from the boutique's sales and no rental fee for the space, the unorthodox plan raises questions about whether a nonprofit museum tarnishes its reputation by peddling high-end handbags in its hallowed halls. Gail Andrews, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama and president of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, said she had conversations with MOCA leaders about their concept of including such a boutique during the planning stages of the Murakami exhibition, which will open Oct. 29 and run through Feb. 11. "They are doing something that contemporary museums do, pushing the boundaries," Andrews said. "They are going to have to work very hard to get the curatorial concept across to the visitor so they do not perceive a conflict of interest. That's going to really be at the heart of this." Selma Holo, director of USC's Fisher Gallery, said that MOCA's decision is the next step in an apparent trend. "What's happening in museums is that the lines between commerce and pure art are increasingly blurred," she said. "So with respect to the Murakami show and the Vuitton shop, one has to wonder whether it is meant as a celebration of the trend, a critique of the trend or a satire?" Referring to the pioneering 20th century artist who labeled a urinal a work of art, Holo said, "Ever since Duchamp, we have trusted the artist to determine what art is. Is a latrine in a gallery any less valid than a store? "At the very least," she added, "it's going to be fun." MOCA Director Jeremy Strick said the idea of a boutique is in keeping with the 45-year-old Murakami's commitment to breaking down the boundaries between low and high art. The acclaimed multimedia artist, who has been credited as the progenitor of the art movement called Superflat -- influenced by pop culture, anime and graphic design -- has his own company, Kaikai Kiki, which mass-produces Murakami-designed products at reasonable prices and serves as a management organization for other artists. "Murakami is an artist who is perhaps the most significant and influential artist to have emerged from Asia in the last half-century," Strick said. "And one of the key elements of his work is the way in which he melds commercial practice and fine art and really makes no distinction between the two. "When Paul Schimmel invited Louis Vuitton to participate in this way, he really felt that the act of buying, the way one approaches the objects when they are consumable within the museum environment, spoke to the unusual nature of his work." "We really didn't need a faux boutique," Schimmel said. "I felt that the experience could only be achieved by having an operational one, rather than a fixed, embalmed replication. The fact that there is a new product that is only available here is very dynamic and represents that kind of relationship between the viewer and the consumer." Couldn't the concept of commerce vs. art be illustrated with less pricey goods? Schimmel said that he had also approached the artist about doing a Kaikai Kiki boutique but that the company wasn't interested in participating: "They said it was too much trouble." As is customary with artists who also create mass-market objects, another room in the Geffen will contain 350 items produced by the Kaikai Kiki company, although those will not be for sale. Other Kaikai Kiki products will be available for purchase in the gift shop. However, Schimmel contended that the relationship with Vuitton has been integral to Murakami's career. "For Takashi, it has something to do with his expanding self-vision," Schimmel said. "Every time he collaborates with a kind of strong brand identity, it seems to morph his own identity into something else." Schimmel said MOCA is leaving pricing of the products and the operation of the boutique to Vuitton -- including making sure there are enough handbags and leather goods to last through the run of the show. "The only request we made is that they operate and have it functional throughout the exhibition, that we do not have this sort of 'dead booth,' " he said.

Why Andy's 15 minutes will never be up, The Guardian

2007-08-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

Half a century on, many of Andy Warhol's iconic images may have lost their original pop culture references, but his style and vision leaves his legacy looking more assured than ever. Andy Warhol would have been 80 next summer. His soup cans and Brillo boxes, Jackies and Elvises are nearly half a century old. They have lost none of their graphic force, but what about their original content? What has time done to an art based on images that were once so familiar anyone could 'recognise them in a split second in the street', as Warhol said, but which are now instantly recognisable only as Warhols? Take this huge show in Edinburgh - A Celebration of Life... and Death, as it is portentously titled. There are a good many works here that can have no split-second factor at all. How many visitors under 20 will recognise the numerous pictures of Grace Jones, say, or Keith Haring or Nico? Can anyone spot the venerable Man Ray? And Del Monte's peach halves may still be global business, but Mott's apple juice? Did it make it over here? Who has ever heard of Eighties DJ Juan Dubose?

Dubose and the juice crates are now meaningless as icons of themselves, and I'm guessing that few enough people dine daily on Campbell's soup (as Warhol always did) that the gigantic cans currently wrapping the pillars of the building outside are only a semi-successful promotion. But what all this obsolete imagery reveals, in a sense, is just how much of an old master Warhol has become, how enduring the look and power of his art. Dubose may be unfamiliar, but the hot shimmer of his body, black on blood-red and haloed in a solar glow, declares what a star he once was: a star burned out, dead of Aids a few years after this sombre painting.

The celebration of life, not death, is a trickier proposition for this show to put over, given that practically all of the portraits commemorate the dead and whole galleries are given over to the car crashes, suicides and skulls. But the point is well made; Warhol loved the design of the Campbell's cans, the serpentine flash of the dollar sign, adored the twin stars of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. You were to relish the red, white and blue of the Brillo boxes (themselves designed by a painter) with their evocative address - Brooklyn NY - printed as if on a letter.

Of course, you were also to ponder the fact that they appeared indistinguishable from the real thing - art could no longer be defined solely in terms of visual criteria - and that everyone could and did own something exactly like this. That they are priceless today, and now look so very evidently handpainted, probably goes against the spirit in which they were made (and sold, at $5 a pop).

The Brillo boxes date from 1964, and the standard claim is that Warhol's best works were all made between the late Fifties and Valerie Solanas's attempt to kill him in 1968. This show contains a large tranche of later works loaned by Anthony d'Offay, Warhol's London dealer, that don't counter that claim - guns and burgers, ads for paratroopers' boots, Liberty wanly reprised, all set against miles of high-chrome US camouflage that suggest weary scepticism, if not joyless line-extension. But the Mao paintings, the hammers and sickles, all of the death's head self-portraits and more were made after he had recovered from the bullet.

As the years recede, death does seem to be Warhol's subject: his forte. He painted Liz Taylor when she was dangerously ill and her face is fading fast into mist. Truman Capote, his eyes blue as heaven, is nothing but soul and cigarette. Warhol's gods and goddesses are all gone. Elvis, literally printed on a silver screen, appears twice like double vision, both of himselves a blur. Marilyn loses her definition, just held on the verge of dissolution by a few final touches like make-up.

Suicidal Marilyn, widowed Jackie, grieving face growing darker like her funeral shadow until it becomes a pictogram of pure pain, the terrible car crashes where you scan the multiple image trying to find the body beneath the tyres. It isn't true that repetition deadens the emotions. The more you try to decipher these grainy screenprints the more you fear to look, dreading what you might find. There is the shattered car. Then the driver dangling from a telegraph pole barely visible in the flames and then, last and nearly worst, a man in white jeans walking insouciantly by. On suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters.

The room of skulls is brilliantly installed: ice-white wallpaper, the skulls in pistachio, pink and tutti-frutti; it looks like some nightmare version of a children's nursery, and sure enough the shadows cast at a certain angle by these old bones look exactly like infant skulls. Lurking among them is Warhol himself, looking remarkably bright, if not right at home here, a skull like a pet monkey on his shoulder.

A whole lower floor is devoted to Warhol's drawings, photographs and time capsules, and they give a greater sense of his character than any show I've seen. The sheer camp of his early commercial drawings - pouting boys, dandy clothes - prefigures so much of the deadpan humour of his films and books, and there is an unexpected nostalgia in the capsules into which he presses every fragment of his life and times.

But even the children's paintings, very rarely shown, of spacemen and police cars, clockwork mice and drumming pandas, have a minatory tone: dangerous and strange, as if liable to explode. An overlay of buzzing yellow or a lightning strike of orange can give a frightening charge to the most innocent of toys.

You can cut Warhol many ways, make of him a history painter or a radical portraitist, a philosopher or a cold parodist. An exhibition of nothing but his late portraits of zillionaires, from German industrialists to Conrad Black in his prime, would certain reveal him as the latter. This show does not want to admit that he idolised celebrity, or skimmed the shallows of the mass media, though both form distinct strains in his art. But its overall selectiveness gives a much deeper, graver Warhol than before, a Warhol who has long since passed the test of time.

Luciano Fabro (1936-2007) Artforum

2007-07-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

The artist Luciano Fabro, one of the principal protagonists of the Italian avant-garde movement known as arte povera, died Friday, June 22, at age seventy-one in Milan, reports the Italian site Teknemedia. Born in Turin, Fabro moved to Milan in 1959, continuing to live and work there until his death. In 1965, the artist had his first solo show, at Milan's Gallery Vismira, and in 1968 began his series of "Feet"—sculptures that used rich materials such as fine silk and marble, a sharp contrast to prevailing ideas about the arte povera movement. From the early 1980s, Fabro taught at the Accademia di Brera and the Casa degli Artisti in Milan. Fabro has had shows at numerous venues both in Italy and abroad, including the PAC Milano (1980), Castello di Rivoli (1989), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1992), the Centre Pompidou (1996), and Tate Britain (1997).

Venice Biennale, Telegraph

2007-06-09T15:14:00.000-07:00

The Venice Biennale, now 112 years old, is the oldest, biggest and by far the best known of all international art jamborees.

Founded in 1895, it was the bright idea of the Venetian civic authorities. In the years up the First World War, the national pavilions began to appear in the Giardini or municipal gardens - the Belgian, in 1907, being the first.

At first, numerous artists represented each country. But by the 1960s, it had become the practice for each country to be represented by a small group, or more often a single artist.

In recent decades, the Biennale has spread to the buildings of the Arsenale, where a huge exhibition, the Aperto, is organised by a guest curator, this year the American Robert Storr.

As more and more countries have taken part, national pavilions have spread beyond the gardens and fringe shows abound.

From Partygirl to Biennale Queen, The Guardian

2007-06-03T11:53:00.001-07:00

She was the enfant terrible of Britart - loud, wild and unpredictable. Not the kind of person chosen to represent Britain at the prestigious Venice Biennale. But that's what will happen next Sunday when Tracey Emin launches her new show in the British Pavilion. So, what was her secret? We discover how the former wild child cleaned up her act to fulfil the dream of her career.

Two years ago at the last Venice Biennale, I remember Tracey saying wistfully that she'd love to represent Britain, and I said, oh yes, wouldn't that be great - never imagining for a minute that it would happen. I thought she was considered too 'dangerous' by the art establishment - too loud, too drunk, too self-publicising. But of course I should have known that when Tracey sets her mind on something she generally achieves it. She took care in the intervening period to clean up her act, and to woo the sort of people the British Council (which organises the Biennale) listens to. So there have been fewer party pictures in Heat, Hello!, Tatler, but instead a weekly column in the Independent, and well-judged appearances on Wogan and Desert Island Discs. (I remember the latter as the moment when a lot of my friends stopped saying, Why on earth do you like Tracey Emin?, and started saying, Can we meet her?) She was very happy when the British Council took an exhibition of her and David Hockney's drawings to Chile, which was a hit in Santiago. And then she found that one of her fellow judges on the John Moores prize in Liverpool would be Andrea Rose, head of visual arts at the British Council and commissioner of the British Pavilion. Tracey had barely met her before and was quite scared of Rose's 'formidable' reputation, but they hit it off. Rose told me afterwards that she was very impressed by Tracey's commitment to the judging and her brilliant eye for hanging. Even so, Tracey was far from a shoo-in and she was getting very nervous by last summer when the British Council normally announces its choice for the Biennale.
And then there was the Hideous Incident of the Serpentine Loo. Tracey was having a good time at the Serpentine Gallery summer party - a good time unlikely to be synonymous with drinking tea - and then urgently needed the loo. She found a long queue in the Ladies and two women locked in a cubicle together, evidently with no intention of moving, so she banged on the door and shouted at them to come out. The next day she went off to Istanbul where she got a message to present herself to the police for questioning on her return or she would be arrested at the airport! Apparently one of the women in the loo had made a complaint that Tracey pulled her hair (Tracey denies this, and there were plenty of witnesses) and wanted to press charges for assault. Tracey was poleaxed - 'I was terrified, I was devastated, I was shaking'. She thought the British Council would drop her like a stone if they saw her as Not to be Trusted in Toilets. For once in her life she managed to stay shtum until she had gone through the police questioning and been told no charges would be brought, but it was a panicky week.

The British Council normally announces its choice for the Biennale in June or July but this time the announcement was delayed till August, which suggests there was a lot of backstage wrangling. Tracey says she knows that she was not a unanimous choice but she doesn't care. 'I knew that I was a contender because I was the right age and a woman. And they needed a woman because there are so many good female artists in Britain and they've only ever had two [Rachel Whiteread in 1997, and Bridget Riley in 1968]. But I didn't think I'd get it because I never get anything really. I thought Gillian Wearing would get it. In fact I dreamt that she told me she'd got Venice and I said, wow, that's fantastic, and then she patted her stomach and said, seven months. So then when I got Venice I thought, ohmigod, maybe I'm pregnant! I wasn't. But every time you have sex you count the months - you can be four months pregnant for Venice but not eight months. You have to be really fit to do Venice. Anyway, the thing is I was up for it, whereas some artists aren't - they're having a baby or moving house or maybe they just don't want to rise to the challenge of it. Maybe they think, actually I'm quite happy as I am - I don't want to be thrown into that arena. It is an arena. But with me I was going, Yes, yes, I want it, I want it! You don't get offered it twice. It's your time, it's your moment, it makes sense that I'm doing it now, whereas it might not make sense when I'm 50.'

Tracey was told she'd been chosen two days before the official announcement which, for the first time ever, was on radio and television news. Then she and Andrea Rose went off on a recce to Venice. The object was for Tracey to familiarise herself with the British pavilion, and she immediately said she wanted it completely renovated, stripped back to the original, cleaned and painted, which the British Council (with help from English Heritage) has now done. But of course for Tracey the recce was also about choosing her hotel. Andrea Rose told me it was the first time in her long experience as Biennale Commissioner that she has ever had to go round inspecting five-star hotels and working out the thread-count on bedlinen. The British Council normally puts its artists in a quiet old-established hotel but Tracey wanted to stay in maximum luxury on the Lido, with her own boat, a room for her assistant and an office. 'They always want to put you in some bijou hotel with inglenooks,' says Tracey, 'where they tell you you'll love the landlady, she's such a character. But I've come here to work and this is where I'd stay if I was coming to Venice by myself, so why should I stay somewhere else?' Quite - but even with contributions from the British Council and her various galleries, the whole Biennale is costing her a fortune. But she says: 'It's worth it because it's the experience of a lifetime, innit?' And anyway doing the Biennale puts up prices on her work, and there has already been a great rush from all round the world to buy Emins.

So - recce done, hotel chosen, party date and venue fixed - Tracey then spent quite a leisurely autumn and winter, holidaying in Africa, setting up a new studio and office and organising her archive, without, so far as I could see, producing any work. She bumped into Gilbert and George, who live in the same street (and refer to her as Superslag, in the nicest possible way) and they told her not to worry: four months was the right time to spend preparing for the Biennale. Any longer and she'd get stale, any shorter and she wouldn't finish in time. Andrea Rose was less sanguine and kept urging her to start.

I went round to Tracey's new studio in early April, hoping to see some of her work for Venice. I loved her draughty old studio with its long sewing tables and bales of fabric and big tomato plants on the fire escape. Her new studio looks more like an ad agency office, all computers and filing cabinets in a yuppified work/space development with a Japanese pebble garden. But she is very proud of its efficiency and spends ages showing me the walls of shelving with all her archive in neat boxfiles. But where is the work? There are half a dozen very small drawings, just back from the framers, but nothing else that I can see.

Jay Jopling (her gallerist) came round the other day, she tells me, asking to see what she was doing for Venice, so she told him: 'I'm converting the whole pavilion into a swimming pool - there aren't enough swimming pools in Venice. I got Richard Rogers to design it and he's just signed off the plans. It's costing £150,000 for the concrete alone, but I'm getting Speedo to sponsor it and they're paying a million. Everyone will be given towels saying "Tracey by Speedo". I'm going to have to warn everyone to bring a costume.'

She went on describing this pool for half an hour, without drawing breath. I thought, my god, she's really lost it. Finally she let me get a word in edgeways and I asked: 'But will be there anything in the pavilion apart from the pool?' And she cackled: 'Fooled you! Just like Jay.' Well I'm glad it was a joke, but I still had no idea what work she was doing.

I had to leave to meet friends for lunch in Brick Lane, and she said she'd walk me round there. But she took me by a circuitous route and suddenly stopped outside a blank metal door and keyed some numbers into the lock. The shutter rolled up and we were in an echoing hangar full of Tracey paintings - very big, very pale and mostly unfinished. She said she was happy with two of them but not the others. She was hoping to do a dozen. But the great thing she had realised, she said, was that she didn't need to do all new work for Venice. Gilbert and George did, but most artists mix old with new, so she was putting out requests to collectors to borrow stuff for the Biennale. But she would not show any blankets (actually, there is one in her show, but an old one) because she thinks they're becoming a bit of a cliche. 'When you've worked something out so well it becomes a formula and you've got all these pound signs in your head and a queue of collectors waiting. I thought, no, I don't want to do that! So I told Jay I'm not making any blankets for the foreseeable future, maybe five or six years, till I've forgotten how to do it and it all goes rough and starts over again.'

I went out to see her in Venice last weekend and found her much more relaxed than she'd been for months. She had been going a bit mad and was ill in bed for a week after the work had been shipped to Venice. She told me: 'This bit I'm really enjoying - the last few months I hated. I've done a lot of work and that's why I've been really stressed out and a complete cunt, really boring and up my own arse.' But in the end she finished well before the deadline - 'I always do.' Moreover, far from having too little work she now has stuff left over that Jay Jopling will take on to sell at the Basel Art Fair.

The pavilion has been completely renovated as she instructed and looks beautiful. The installation is finished except that she is just waiting for a few trusted advisers - Jay Jopling, Lorcan O'Neill her Italian gallerist, Matt Collishaw, her old boyfriend, and Julian Schnabel, her American artist friend - to inspect it before signing it off.

But she's been wearing the same clothes (a hideous shiny mumu and flip flops) for the past three days because BA lost all her luggage, and 'There's just so many times you can turn your pants inside out, Lynn.' Worse still, her computers were in her luggage, so although she'd hired an extra room as an office for her assistant, Alex, they had no office equipment apart from Alex's Blackberry. BA hasn't even apologised. Luckily she didn't bring all her clothes for the opening week parties because she was going home for a last weekend visit to see Docket her cat. But she is still furious with BA and has splashed out on a private jet for her return to Venice next week.

Has she acquired lots of fabulous new clothes? No, she says - now she is a size 14, designers do not bombard her with free frocks the way they used to a decade ago. She will probably wear her black silk Vivienne Westwood ballgown for the opening party 'because it makes me look really thin and glamorous and I feel very comfortable in it.' She says 70 friends are coming out for the party, everyone from Jerry Hall to Sandra Esquilant, her pub landlady, but Ronnie Wood can't make it because he is starting a Stones tour and George Michael is playing Wembley. Elton John is coming earlier in the week for a lunch with Sam Taylor-Wood (who, bizarrely, is showing in the Ukrainian pavilion) but he has to leave before Tracey's party. Nor are any of her family coming - she knew she wouldn't have time to look after them properly so she thought it better to bring them to Venice later, maybe in September.

Over breakfast at her gorgeous hotel on the Lido, and then by the pool, and then on the terrace, she talks and talks, not just about the Biennale but about her life generally: 'I'm having a midlife crisis actually, and I'm just so confused at the moment about what I want for the rest of my life. Some people think if only they could have success with their career, everything would be all right, but it's not. When Isabella Blow died I thought, fucking hell, life is short. It was like a wake-up call. And I realised that I'm 43, I'm probably never going to have children - I would rather have my career than children - which puts me into a very different world to other women, and I intend to live in that world. Even though sex with Scott [her photographer boyfriend] is fantastic, I don't need it. Relationships are great but I don't know how good I am at them. I realised that being an artist is actually quite difficult and I am difficult, and I want to enjoy that difficulty and not feel threatened by it.'

She is unsure what to do after the Biennale. This week will be hectic - non-stop interviews, lunches, dinners, parties - and then the art circus moves on to Basel. She will remain in Venice for a couple of days to see all the other shows, then she returns to England for a stint in Margate with her mother, and a visit to Canterbury Cathedral to collect an honorary D. Lit from Kent University. After that, she says vaguely, she hopes to build herself a swimming pool (in Spitalfields? surely not) or maybe even move to the country, though it turns out her idea of the country is 'up near you, Lynn', which is Highgate. Beyond that, she wants to do some 'giving back' - she already does a lot of work for the NSPCC but now she wants to 'get into Africa' and build a library in Uganda. But she thinks there's a problem with preserving books there - do they get eaten by insects? Huh? After a long discussion about the book-eating habits of weevils, it suddenly occurs to me to wonder aloud - is she hoping to be made a Dame? Well, of course that would be very nice, she says demurely, but she has no idea how you go about it. More NSPCC, less Uganda, I tell her, and she gives me a reproachful look.

After she has talked about herself non-stop for three hours I tell her that my tape has run out but not to worry because I've got plenty of material for this piece. What I am trying to say tactfully is: couldn't we talk about something else now? But it is no good. We are awaiting the arrival of Julian Schnabel, the American artist and film director, who is flying into Venice by private jet en route from Rome to Cannes to advise Tracey on her installation. He is coming by launch from the airstrip to collect Tracey and take her across the lagoon to see her pavilion in the Giardini. He phones every five minutes to say he is on his way. We go down to the hotel watergate to watch him arrive - a marvellous tawny-bearded Viking in fraying purple silk pyjamas and red socks. Blow me, no sooner have we clambered into the launch than he starts talking about himself non-stop all the way across the lagoon - how he is building himself a Venetian palazzo on his roof in New York, how he has just been to Rome for an exhibition and is now going to Cannes where he hopes to win the best director prize (he does) for his film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. 'Have you seen the reviews?' he asks me. Give me your email address and I'll send them. He is worse than Tracey! And she for once is completely silenced by an ego even greater than her own. Unfortunately he is happily married otherwise he would be perfect for Trace - a lovely great bear of a man.

Tracey takes him to see the pavilion but journalists are banned from the building until press day, so Andrea Rose and I meet, like spies, on a park bench. She says she is delighted with the installation but now a bit worried that Schnabel will start changing it round (and sure enough her assistant soon rings from the pavilion to say he is doing just that). But she is thrilled with the restoration of the Pavilion, which now looks more beautiful than she has ever seen it. Of all the artists she has worked with at the Biennale (and she has been commissioner since 1995) none has been as responsive to the building as Tracey. She stripped it of all its excrescences - fake cornices and lighting tracks - and even found the original colour of the loggia pillars. 'She has a fantastic spatial sense,' says Andrea, 'and is incredibly sensitive to touch and feel.' Which is why, she now realises, they had to inspect all those hotels at the beginning. 'I've never had to do that before for an artist, and of course I resented it, but that is part of Tracey. She was stroking the sheets and doing a thread count - but then you think about My Bed and her sewing and her sort of feminine work ethic and it all makes sense.'

When did she start thinking of Tracey as a Biennale possible? 'Late, I would say. There was no very obvious candidate. But I saw a little painting of hers in the RA summer show last year. When I saw it was Tracey I thought, that girl's really got something!' Andrea hoped Tracey would do some paintings for the Biennale, and Tracey was excited by the idea and rented the lock-up studio I saw and bought lots of canvases. 'But they just didn't seem to be coming. She started about six, two of which were good, but then she didn't push it - painting needs real concentration. And I was a bit perturbed that Schnabel said to her at one point, well, Tracey if you're not enjoying it, it's not you. I don't know if that's what he really said but it's what she said he said.'

Was there a moment when Andrea worried Tracey wouldn't produce enough work? 'Yes! The last three months! But I've been proved wrong - we've now got too much work and we're going to have to edit some out.'

So what is Tracey showing, if it's not paintings, not blankets, not big sculptures? All I could glean is that there is a big neon poem, several embroidered sheets, lots of watercolours and possibly some small sculptures. But we shall have to wait and see. The show is called Borrowed Light, which doesn't give much away. Tracey says: 'It's the most feminine work I've ever made.' Andrea says something similar: 'It's remarkably ladylike. There is no ladette work - no toilet with a poo in it - and actually it is very mature I think, quite lovely. She is much more interested in formal values than people might expect, and it shows in this exhibition. It's been revelatory working with her. Tracey's reputation for doing shows and hanging them is not good, but she's been a dream to work with. What it shows is that she's moved a long way away from the YBAs. She's quite a lady actually!'

'I smoke for my mental health' , The Guardian

2007-05-28T13:25:00.000-07:00

Following our G2 special on the smoking ban, artist David Hockney offers a personal view on why he will always be devoted to cigarettes

On July 1 2007, the most grotesque piece of social engineering will begin in England: the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces, imposed easily by a political and media elite. They think it will lead to healthier people and a cleaner atmosphere. They believe they can change people easily. The science of marketing has been absorbed by them and they think they can control everybody. I don't think they can. People will stay at home and do drugs instead - legal and illegal.

I have lived in California for a number of years. They started smoking bans, but they didn't affect smokers that much. In California you move around in your own private space. If one goes to a public space, say the opera or Disney Hall, then because the climate is ideal the smoker can just step outside, at all times of the year. Many restaurants have gardens and the bans have never really bothered me. But something else has happened in California since the bans came in, unreported by the media, and it took me a while to notice because I have spent the past seven years working in England.

The amount of drugs advertised on television tells me what has replaced tobacco (although 20% still smoke): painkillers, Prozac and antidepressants, mostly prescription drugs - you just tell the doctor what you need. When prescription drugs are advertised in the press there is always a lot of small print listing side effects, and on television you get a speedy talking voice listing the side effects. You perhaps hear one word in four - paralysis, diarrhoea, death, headaches. I expect it all to come here. Drugs (legal and illegal) are the world's largest business, and one can understand why, since they make us feel better.

I know about fanatical anti-smokers - my father was one of the first (although his eldest son has outlived him and smoked until he was 70, and I'm still smoking at almost 70 - indeed, my birthday is nine days after the ban). I smoke for my mental health. I think it's good for it, and I certainly prefer its calming effects to the pharmaceutical ones (side effects unknown).

Well, you say, smoking has dreadful side effects. Certainly on some people, but not on all. So we should ask the British Medical Association to explain Denis Thatcher smoking Senior Service (unfiltered) and dying at 88, or Kurt Vonnegut living till 84 after smoking Pall Mall cigarettes for 70 years. What is the explanation? Nobody seems to ask and no one gives any explanation.

In the late 90s the ex-mighty New York Times was very anti-tobacco. I kept writing letters to them. None was published. When Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader, died at the age of 92, there was an obituary in the New York Times. Three days later there was the most foolish letter which said that Mr Deng was a very bad example to the young because he always had a Panda cigarette in his hand or mouth.

I was appalled that they had printed this, and wrote to them suggesting Mr Deng had lived a very long life - how long do you expect people to live? - and the logic of his argument would be that Adolf Hitler was a very good example for the young as he didn't smoke. It wasn't published, and I began to realise the New York Times was no longer a serious newspaper. After that I was sceptical about everything I read in newspapers.

Meanwhile in England, the press, without tobacco advertising, sided with the anti-smokers. The BBC made itself "smoke-free" and I realised how sinister this was. The BBC's problem, which won't go away, is that there is no neutral viewpoint. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is part of the basis of the mathematics that led to the computer, but it also stated that the observer affects the observed - no one is neutral. The BBC used to claim that it was neutral, but now it is part of a massive social engineering project paid for by its listeners and viewers. It is against a group of 12 million people who choose to smoke - not very fair.

The British press might be quite lively, but it is also pathetically childish. I take little in it seriously, and when I am in Bridlington I only glance at newspapers. They are not sceptical enough, which is why I see them now as part of the social engineering. No one asks what the consequences will be - all will be good, they childishly think.

The Guardian says that the ban has been a "success" in Scotland. What do they mean by "success"? Pub takings have gone down, some pubs have closed. But surely the ban would only have been a "success" if the non-smokers had been flocking to the pubs. They have not.

What do I think? You're living in a madhouse, David ... Actually, I've always thought that, but I have a love for the surface of the Earth that is an escape from the mean-spirited and dreary people who seem to have taken over England.

The ban won't affect me much. I live very privately. I'm not very social - I'm too deaf, and in the world I have created I will smoke. I've no wish to meet politicians - most of them have the most odious ideas about people. England is full of big pushers of the coming pill society, and we've lost a sense of messiness - no longer any Delight in Disorder here (a careless shoestring in whose tie/ I see a wild civility/Do more bewitch me than when art/is too precise in every part, Robert Herrick).

Two months ago I started the largest painting I've ever done: 15ft x 40ft. The moment I began I found myself running up the stairs (with a fag) and realised some people are more in tune with a life force than others.

I can't be the only voice like this. In England people should speak up more, defend themselves, but it's hard against all the forces at work. Two million anti-smoking signs are going up on July 1, including inside Westminster Abbey. The uglification of England is under way by people with no vision. I detest it.

Food can be artistic - but it can never be art, The Guardian

2007-05-17T18:19:00.000-07:00

Ferran Adria, chef-proprietor of the celebrated restaurant El Bulli, has been invited to participate in the Documenta art show. But is he an artist? If canned shit can be art, why can't gourmet food be similarly elevated? Actually, there is a reason why, but it's not as obvious as Spanish art critics appear to think. The critic of El Pais choked on his morning churros at the news that Ferran Adria, chef-proprietor of the celebrated Catalan restaurant El Bulli, has been invited to participate in the Documenta art show in Kassel, Germany, this summer. He must have spent decades with his head in a bowl of Guernica stew (an entirely black mixture of beans and meat - never order a dish because it sounds like a painting) to find this in any way surprising.

Gilbert and George once sat down to a meal served by Lord Snowdon's butler as an artwork, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija cooks and serves food ... I could go on. What is more relevant is that in 1930, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, leader of the futurist movement, proposed a revolution in cuisine that anticipated today's avant-garde chefs. Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook applies modern art aesthetics to cooking, with such recipes as salami in a bath of perfumed black coffee. By all accounts, El Bulli makes food very much in this tradition, such as mini-parmesan ice-cream sandwiches. Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck is similarly experimental. These chefs are artists - almost.

They are not true artists because even the most modern food cannot disgust people beyond a certain point, or El Bulli would have no customers. The only really radical restaurant was Peter Cook's imaginary establishment the Frog and Peach, which served various combinations of peach and frog. In reality, even a genius among chefs is obliged to please the customer (and cook to order), which means no chef can claim the freedom of mind that artists won in the Renaissance.

Caravaggio could paint fruit that looked good enough to eat but he also painted tortures to turn your stomach; that's art. Until people go to a restaurant to think about death, cooking won't be art. On the other hand, I'm still wondering if Guernica stew is food.

Gilbert and George put free artwork on internet, Guardian

2007-05-08T05:40:00.000-07:00

An original work by artists and national treasures Gilbert and George would normally set you back many thousands of pounds. But from 11.30pm tonight a piece is being made available to anyone who wants it - for free.

The work, called Planed, can be downloaded from the Guardian and BBC websites from 11.30pm, for 48 hours only. It will be the first time that artists of this stature have made work available in this way.

In line with the practice of Gilbert and George over many years, it consists of a number of panels. Members of the public must download each of the nine panels to create the full artwork, which can then be printed off, at any dimension, and assembled. There is no limit to the number of times the work can be reproduced.

The title refers to the plane tree, with distorted images of its leaves and fruit forming the background. It is a tree particularly associated with London and it is the texture of London streets, from road signs to graffiti and newspaper billboards, that has informed most of Gilbert and George's work for 40 years.

As with all their work, the piece also includes images of the artists themselves - in this case neatly suited and booted, but distorted like images seen through a kaleidoscope.

The creation of the downloadable work was the idea of Alan Yentob, who tonight presents an edition of the BBC arts programme Imagine about the artists. "This sort of thing has never been done before," said Yentob, "But when I saw how Gilbert and George made their pictures it was clear that this would be a perfect match."

The artists, who used to manipulate photographic images by hand, have, over the past few years, begun to work with sophisticated computer technology. "When I put the idea to them they were immediately enthusiastic," said Yentob. The notion of a freely available artwork, he added, fitted perfectly with the artists' long-held ideal of "art for all", a principle that has formed the bedrock of their practice since they started working together in the late 1960s.

Gilbert and George rarely produce work in editions, and have never done so for free before; Planed thus represents the most wholehearted manifestation of "art for all" of their career.

Gilbert was born in the Dolomites in Italy, in 1943; George in Devon in 1942. They met as students at St Martin's School of Art in London, where they formed the most enduring and famous partnership in British art.

They adopted an identity as "living sculptures", which they retain, becoming both the subject and object of their art. Their reputation was established in 1969 when they created Singing Sculpture, in which they stood on a table and sang the Flanagan and Allen number Underneath the Arches.

That year they published the Laws of Sculptors, which stated that they would be "always smartly dressed, well-groomed, relaxed, friendly, polite and in complete control" - another principle strictly adhered to over the years.

Gradually, the artists developed a method of working with photographs, eventually devising their grid system.

Their work has always had a reputation for containing shocking and explicit material, though they have always denied that they are deliberate provocateurs, but rather, artists who depict the human condition as it really is. Works such as The Penis (1978), Rose Hole (1980), Sperm Eaters (1982) and Shitted (1983) caused a frisson in the art world and beyond. Their Dirty Words Pictures (1977) "packed a violent punch whose aftershocks continue to be felt today", according to critic Michael Bracewell.

For more than 30 years the artists have lived in Spitalfields, east London, and their neighbourhood has inspired much of their work. A recent set of works, exhibited under the name Sonofagod Pictures: Was Jesus Heterosexual (2005), tackled religious fundamentalism, one work emblazoned with the words: "Jesus says forgive yourself. God loves fucking. Enjoy!"

Their most recent work, shown for the first time at Tate Modern in the major retrospective just ended, dealt with terrorism and fear in the capital, using Evening Standard billboards to create works called Terror, Bombing, Bomber, Bombs and Bombers.

· Imagine is broadcast tonight at 10.35pm. After the programme, Planed will be available to download at bbc.co.uk/imagine and Guardian.co.uk/art

A Lost New York as Seen From Way Out West, NYTimes

2007-04-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

THE musician in the painting “The Bass Player” has long, languid arms wrapped around his instrument, his eyes half-closed. He seems lost in his own world. So at times does the portrait’s artist, Justin Bua, whose characters are from a world far away in place and time: the pregentrified streets of the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s. This is where he grew up, a latchkey child hanging out on the street, sneaking into pool halls and Ping-Pong parlors, mingling with gamblers and hustlers, watching drug pushers and gun-toting passers-by.

“They were completely survival-oriented or they were crazy,” Mr. Bua said of the street denizens who have informed his art.

Mr. Bua, 39, is a Los Angeles artist whose New York City-infused images can be found in paintings and posters, on sneakers and skateboards, and in video games and music videos. His new book, “The Beat of Urban Art” (HarperCollins), pays homage to these characters from what he calls “my culture and my time.”

The book is also an ode to the birth of hip-hop — to the D.J.’s, the M.C.’s, the B-boys of a cultural movement whose energy and lawlessness, Mr. Bua said, spawned his own “distorted urban realism” style of painting.

“Hip-hop was a raw, visceral energy that amplified the social and political climate of the street,” said Mr. Bua, who was a professional break dancer for several years. “Hip-hop was not just rapping. It was a countercultural philosophy calling for change against the social inequalities of the time.”

For the last 14 years Mr. Bua has recreated the New York street characters of his childhood and adolescence while working in a downtown Los Angeles studio not far from skid row.

“My most New York pieces were created in L.A.,” he said. “I kind of exist in my bubble.”

Mr. Bua says “work, weather and women” have kept him on the West Coast, where he received a bachelor of fine arts in illustration in 1993 from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Divorced, he now lives with his 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Akira, in Echo Park. He first found jobs doing storyboards for movies and commercials, he said, and then illustrated the undersides of slick skateboards and covers for CDs and magazines.

In the early 1990s he began creating paintings, and made posters of them. Some of the posters — like “The DJ,” which depicts a turntablist in full hip-hop attitude and regalia — have made him well known among college students and young music and graffiti-art fans. At galleries like Off the Wall on Haight Street in San Francisco, Mr. Bua’s posters are consistent best sellers along with those by poster artists like Emek.

Mr. Bua says the posters have led people to his paintings, which now sell for $5,000 to $150,000 and have attracted a Hollywood following since the actress Christina Ricci bought two in 1997. His collectors include Eva Longoria of “Desperate Housewives” and her fiancé, the pro basketball player Tony Parker.

Thirty of Mr. Bua’s paintings and drawings and 12 limited-edition prints were exhibited recently at the Limited Addiction Gallery in Denver. The gallery’s owner, Dave Smith, described Mr. Bua as a leader in the growing urban contemporary-art movement.

“You see up-and-coming artists using elements of his style,” Mr. Smith said. “His art is very hip. People connect with his characters and they feel the emotion in the pieces.”

Mr. Bua said many of his characters were inspired by unlikely father figures: men he looked up to as survivors in “the harsh realities of the urban jungle.” His own father was absent, he said, and his single mother supported the family as the owner of a graphic-design business. (Her father, Herb Field, was a comics letterer who also painted and made sculptures.)

“They were shunned by society and deemed bad, but as a child I saw them as good because they were good to me,” he said of the men hanging out on the street. “These were my neighbors. They’d say, ‘What’s up? Are you working on a new move? I like your dancing. Don’t end up like me.’ You may see them against the wall, getting cuffed, but they were kind to this kid.”

Growing up on the Upper West Side until he was 16 and then in East Flatbush in Brooklyn, Mr. Bua was swept up in the hip-hop scene. “It wasn’t about what race you’re from, which is what New York City was about at the time, but about a culture bonded together creatively,” said Mr. Bua, whose background includes Jewish, Puerto Rican and Irish strands.

Mr. Bua was barely 11 when he first saw break dancing on a corner of 99th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. He was smitten and later toured with break-dancing crews in the United States and Europe.

But Mr. Bua also drew and painted, and his talent got him into the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts. By the mid-1980s, he said, he was spending most of his time transferring the rhythm of dancing to the canvas.

Mr. Bua’s trademark loose-jointed limbs, long lashes, twisted mouths and other distorted features often suggest a self-portrait, down to the mole on his left cheek. But there are real subjects behind his portraits, as becomes clear when he describes the ones lining his studio walls: “Tigah” is the “old-school brother” under a cap; “Dina D.,” wearing status-symbol gold-hoop earrings, is a classic tough girl from the hood with “mad attitude”; and “Daisy Checks” is the 13-year-old girlfriend who once “kept me in check.”

“The Bass Player,” a work in progress that he nevertheless recently sold for $60,000, is part of a prolific output of jazz-inspired paintings and posters. They sell more than any other theme, Mr. Bua said, but more important, he considers them “cool” to paint.

“I love cool because I’m not cool,” said Mr. Bua, a self-described neurotic whose fear of elevators goes back to being stuck in one for 14 hours in New York. Jazz and hip-hop, he added, are “super-improvisational and cool.”

Mr. Bua, who teaches figure drawing at the University of Southern California and lectures in colleges and schools, is now branching out into television and film. He’s developing an animated series for Comedy Central and is working on a reality show — a “Project Runway”-type show for both street artists and the classically trained — that he hopes to sell to a cable network.

In Los Angeles he has found an urban landscape whose population, if not the same mix as in New York, also fascinates him.

“Many artists look for the beauty,” Mr. Bua said. “I look for the ugliness that tells me the story of the street. People with crazy faces. I look for that.”

Torturer's jukebox, The Guardian

2007-04-27T15:18:00.000-07:00

The first sound you hear is a bright, solitary trumpet. Then come rumbling tuba, rattling drums, and the familiar refrain of Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever. A behemothic guitar riff lumbers in, with a flurry of banjo, a skirl of bagpipes, a battery of percussion, and squeals of brass overlaid until they sound like a stampede of panicking elephants. And on it goes, like the devil's own mix tape. This is the sound of Clamor, an installation comprising music related to war, by Puerto Rico-based conceptual artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, who direct much of their work at the relationship between global politics and individual identity. The duo once protested against US weapons-testing in the Puerto Rican isle of Vieques: when the US bases finally closed in 2003, the artists attached a trumpet to the exhaust pipe of a moped and drove round the island capturing its triumphant "reveille" in the video Returning a Sound In Clamor, the music related to war - sometimes played live - is broadcast from inside a hulking chamber the artists refer to as "a bunker, a ruin, a cave and a sound booth". Allora and Calzadilla spent a year collating over 100 pieces of music, picking up CDs on their travels and scouring the internet. The resulting 40-minute collage, now at London's Serpentine Gallery, spans centuries and continents. Much of the music in this sonic arsenal was composed with conflict in mind, from the battle hymn of the Hussites, sung during the battle of Domazlice in 1431, to the Horst Wessel song of the Nazis. But the most startling thing about Clamor is the fact that some of the music it includes seems nonsensically out of place - until you learn the context. Among the many dubious achievements of the "war on terror" is the redefinition of what actually constitutes military music. Just ask the prisoners in the Iraqi town of Al Qa'im, incarcerated in packing crates and pounded with songs ranging from Metallica's crushingly heavy Enter Sandman to Barney the Purple Dinosaur's maddeningly perky I Love You. Or alleged 9/11 conspirator Mohamed al-Qahtani, kept awake by Christina Aguilera songs at Guantánamo Bay, according to a report in Time magazine. Or Haj Ali, the hooded man in the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, who talked of being bludgeoned by a ceaseless, deafening loop of David Gray's Babylon until he thought his head would burst. "Forcibly exposing a prisoner to loud, discordant or relentlessly repeated music is meant to inflict suffering," says Amnesty International UK's Guantánamo campaigner Sara MacNeice. "It amounts to torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment." Despite this, the use of loud music as a method of torture is played for laughs: when news of what had taken place at Al Qa'im emerged, newspapers and TV stations commissioned jokey playlists. On the battlefield, music can serve a dual purpose: to psych up the attacking army, and to intimidate their foes. When tanks rolled into Fallujah in 2004, soldiers blasted the likes of AC/DC's Hells Bells from giant speakers mounted on their gun turrets. Although rock'n'roll was played constantly by US forces in Vietnam, it was more for their own entertainment. The weaponising of pop songs appears to have begun with the US invasion of Panama in 1989. US troops laying siege to Manuel Noriega bombarded him with everything from Led Zeppelin to Twisted Sister. Ben Abel, spokesman for the army's psychological operations command, told the Floridian newspaper that it began as a way of keeping the soldiers energised: "Then Noriega commented that the rock'n'roll was bothering him. Once the guys found that out, they cranked it up." How do the creators of this music feel about it? Interviewed on National Public Radio in the US in November 2004, Metallica frontman James Hetfield responded to reports of Enter Sandman's use by saying: "There's parts of me that want to joke about it. There's a pride also that, you know, it's culturally offensive to them. If they're not used to freedom, I'm glad to be a part of the exposure." Hearing Clamor's elaborate din in an airy gallery in Hyde Park is not the same as enduring a musical assault, but it operates on multiple levels: as unsettling noise; as a collection of culturally specific pieces; and as an illustration of how manipulative music can be. "There are moments when you're hearing little sounds and fragments of melody that trigger certain feelings," says Allora. "You can't help it because this is what you're indoctrinated into. But then it unravels, and precisely the way it is manipulating you seems silly and ridiculous. There are moments when it moves into cacophony and chaos and it renders the whole thing absurd." "All these different tunes are in conflict with each other," adds Calzadilla. "It sounds like the work is at war with itself." Having lived with the music in Clamor for more than a year, however, Allora and Calzadilla would happily never hear it again. "I have an aversion to these songs," says Allora. "It's interesting to look at the ends to which they have been applied. Any pop song could potentially be a weapon".

Art’s Audiences Become Artworks Themselves, The NYTimes

2007-04-10T09:58:00.000-07:00

Thomas Struth’s show at Marian Goodman — rapturous, magisterial photographs of museum visitors standing before Velázquez in Madrid and looking at Leonardo at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg — culminates one of the memorable art projects of the last 20 years or so. For nearly that long, Mr. Struth has been making these pictures of people in museums. They’re looking at art, although you might say the real question is what they, and we, are seeing.

The beauty of these pictures is almost a given by now. This current show forms a coda to one lately at the Prado, where Mr. Struth insinuated a dozen or more, some nearly life-size, photographs among the paintings and sculptures. It took some gall and guile. Come upon irregularly and unexpectedly, his pictures punctuated galleries of nearly unrelenting greatness.

Sometimes they intruded. Occasionally, they seemed irrelevant. Mostly they were jarring. I found myself later recalling photographs I had thought forgettable at the time, in the way you may recall somebody you just glimpsed at a museum more vividly than the art.

Mr. Struth’s work partly entails obscuring (and thereby making us focus more on) these distinctions among the spaces in the paintings he photographs, the ones occupied by people looking at those paintings, and the ones we occupy, looking at the photographs. In a room of portraits by Velázquez, Mr. Struth placed a photograph of two young Japanese women gazing at a work outside the camera’s range, which happened to be at a spot on the wall exactly where their own picture now was. Their mix of desire and reserve, measured across a clear cultural gulf, seemed gently comic and touching. The paintings on the wall glowered back at them.

Opposite Goya’s “Third of May,” with its hero before a firing squad, Mr. Struth interjected a picture of an audience in Tokyo, seen in shadowy silhouette, admiring Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” on loan from the Louvre, inside its huge, antiseptic-white glass box. Two scenes of historic heroism, by Goya and Delacroix, were subtly mitigated by the moral twilight of modern consumption, one kind of spectacle having replaced another.

At the Prado, Mr. Struth also put up a photograph of himself (you see only his arm and shoulder, in a blue jacket, blurred) looking at a Dürer self-portrait in Munich, which, perfectly focused, stares back at us. Dürer is the real sitter in Mr. Struth’s self-portrait, the picture’s paradox. That photograph hung next to the Prado’s own self-portrait by Dürer.

And in the catalog for the Prado show there’s also a photograph by Mr. Struth of the whole installation, a virtual Chinese box of allusions, true to what is so often the experience in a crowded, diverting museum, which is that we lose ourselves in the act of looking.

Mr. Struth’s project links to a long, often undistinguished history of painting people looking at art. His deadpan affect and panoramic scale, simulating real encounters in real spaces, can be deceptive. The work is subtly emotional and not just about glossy visuals. You see at Goodman how the museum experience in general has evolved in recent years, how mobs have grown, along with the distractions of cellphones, but also what hasn’t changed.

The expression on the faces of two middle-aged women, heads leaning into one another, sharing an audio guide at the Hermitage, searching a Leonardo, is eternal. (Their looks are at once hopeful and wary.) At their shoulders, wearing a pink visor and lime-green spaghetti straps, is a kind of modern American Madonna, a young angel of tourism.

Mr. Struth set up his camera beside the painting so we see these people looking at a picture we can’t see. He grouped several such photographs, different, taken at different times, to make a frieze; the ebb and flow of bodies holds everything together. He did the same with combined views of people before “Las Meninas” at the Prado, which we do see, the figures in the painting staring at the people staring at them.

And we, in turn, scour the scenes as we do the art: here is the smiling tour guide, leaning into a goggle-eyed scrum of visitors who lean oh so slightly away from the Velázquez, as if intimidated by its reputation. There, Spanish teenagers, undaunted by the work, argue beneath it, absorbed by one another, oblivious to its power. Their poses unconsciously mimic the figures in the picture. (A girl, all in red, bent at the waist, perfectly echoes the handmaiden beside the Infanta; a boy with his hand behind his back mirrors Velázquez standing behind his canvas.) Space unfolds into the painting, which itself is a hall of mirrors.

And then there are the grade-school children whom Mr. Struth photographs, in their uniforms, scattered like flower petals before Velázquez’s “Surrender of Breda,” next to which the famous ancient bronze sculpture of the little boy pulling a thorn from his foot is a dry joke; he’s like one of the distracted kids. A tiny, dark-haired boy in the middle ground glares back at the camera, serious and unfathomable, a real-life sort of Velázquez dwarf. A little girl touches another boy’s shoulder. Her hand, swiftly moving, goes slightly out of focus. Like Velázquez, Mr. Struth discloses these little bits of humanity, which seem ordinary, but which leap out, collapsing time.

“The moments of the past do not remain still,” as Proust wrote. “They retain in our memory the motion which drew them toward the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.”

Mr. Struth’s pictures are about this continuum, from artists like Velázquez into the public spaces where their works end up, and to us. What are we looking for in a museum? We go to find truth in pictures, and we end up reading one another’s faces.

We look for ourselves.

Sol LeWitt, Master of Conceptualism, Dies at 78, NYTimes

2007-04-09T07:36:00.000-07:00

Sol LeWitt, whose deceptively simple geometric sculptures and drawings and ecstatically colored and jazzy wall paintings established him as a lodestar of modern American art, died yesterday in New York. He was 78 and lived mostly in Chester, Conn.

The cause was complications from cancer, said Susanna Singer, a longtime associate.

Mr. LeWitt helped establish Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant movements of the postwar era. A patron and friend of colleagues young and old, he was the opposite of the artist as celebrity. He tried to suppress all interest in him as opposed to his work; he turned down awards and was camera-shy and reluctant to grant interviews. He particularly disliked the prospect of having his photograph in the newspaper.

Typically, a 1980 work called “Autobiography” consisted of more than 1,000 photographs he took of every nook and cranny of his Manhattan loft, down to the plumbing fixtures, wall sockets and empty marmalade jars, and documented everything that had happened to him in the course of taking the pictures. But he appeared in only one photograph, which was so small and out of focus that it is nearly impossible to make him out. His work — sculptures of white cubes, or drawings of geometric patterns, or splashes of paint like Rorschach patterns — tested a viewer’s psychological and visual flexibility. See a line. See that it can be straight, thin, broken, curved, soft, angled or thick. Enjoy the differences. The test was not hard to pass if your eyes and mind were open, which was the message of Mr. LeWitt’s art.

He reduced art to a few of the most basic shapes (quadrilaterals, spheres, triangles), colors (red, yellow, blue, black) and types of lines, and organized them by guidelines he felt in the end free to bend. Much of what he devised came down to specific ideas or instructions: a thought you were meant to contemplate, or plans for drawings or actions that could be carried out by you, or not.

Sometimes these plans derived from a logical system, like a game; sometimes they defied logic so that the results could not be foreseen, with instructions intentionally vague to allow for interpretation. Characteristically, he would then credit assistants or others with the results. With his wall drawing, mural-sized works that sometimes took teams of people weeks to execute, he might decide whether a line for which he had given the instruction “not straight” was sufficiently irregular without becoming wavy (and like many more traditional artists, he became more concerned in later years that his works look just the way he wished). But he always gave his team wiggle room, believing that the input of others — their joy, boredom, frustration or whatever — remained part of the art.

In so doing, Mr. LeWitt gently reminded everybody that architects are called artists — good architects, anyway — even though they don’t lay their own bricks, just as composers write music that other people play but are still musical artists. Mr. LeWitt, by his methods, permitted other people to participate in the creative process, to become artists themselves.

A Dry Humor

To grasp his work could require a little effort. His early sculptures were chaste white cubes and gray cement blocks. For years people associated him with them, and they seemed to encapsulate a remark he once made: that what art looks like “isn’t too important.” This was never exactly his point. But his early drawings on paper could resemble mathematical diagrams or chemical charts. What passed for humor in his art tended to be dry. “Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value” (1968), an object he buried in the garden of Dutch collectors, was his deadpan gag about waving goodbye to Minimalism. He documented it in photographs, in one of which he stands at attention beside the cube. A second picture shows the shovel; a third, him digging the hole.

Naturally, he was regularly savaged by conservative critics. By the 1980s, however, he moved from Manhattan to Spoleto, Italy, seeking to get away from the maelstrom of the New York art world. (He had had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978.) His art underwent a transformation. Partly it grew out of what he saw in Italy. But it was all the more remarkable for also proceeding logically from the earlier work.

Eye-candy opulence emerged from the same seemingly prosaic instructions he had come up with years before. A retrospective in 2000, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, concluded with some of these newly colorful wall drawings. (Mr. LeWitt always called them drawings, even when the medium became acrylic paint.)

His description for a wall drawing, No. 766 — “Twenty-one isometric cubes of varying sizes each with color ink washes superimposed” — sounded dry as could be: but then you saw it and there were playful geometries in dusky colors nodding toward Renaissance fresco painting. “Loopy Doopy (Red and Purple),” a vinyl abstraction 49 feet long, was like a psychedelic Matisse cutout, but on the scale of a drive-in movie. Other drawings consisted of gossamer lines, barely visible, as subtle as faintly etched glass.

Chocolate Christ exhibition cancelled, The Guardian

2007-04-03T07:01:00.000-07:00

The overwhelming force of the religious right was demonstrated yesterday when an exhibition by an international artist to be held in mid-town Manhattan was cancelled after a campaign was launched against it on the ground that it was disrespectful towards Christianity.

My Sweet Lord, a 6ft representation of Jesus, was to have been unveiled over holy week in a gallery on Lexington Avenue but was withdrawn under fire from the Catholic League, an organisation of religious conservatives with 300,000 members. The group objected to the fact that the sculpture is made of more than 200lbs of chocolate and that the figure's genitalia are on display.

On Thursday the league sent emails to 500 other religious groups - including Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist with a combined reach of millions - calling on them to boycott the Roger Smith hotel in which the gallery, the Lab, is based. Within 24 hours the hotel was so inundated with calls and visiting protesters that it pulled the exhibit.

Sculptor Cosimo Cavallaro, 45, is known for his large-scale installations. In 1999 he covered a room of the Washington Jefferson hotel in New York with cheddar cheese. Two years later he sprayed 10,000lb of cheese over the entire interior of a house in Wyoming.

Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, said the work was a direct assault on Christians. "All those involved are lucky that angry Christians don't react the way extremist Muslims do when they're offended."

That the work of an internationally renowned artist can be pulled from a gallery in Manhattan - arguably the most liberal city in the US - is an indication of the power that organised religion wields within the country.

Matt Semmler, director of the Lab, told the Guardian before the cancellation was announced that neither he nor the artist had any intention to offend. "For me this is done a place of reverence and meditation - that's why I chose the piece. This is not intended to be disrespectful."

He added that over the centuries there had been thousands of depictions of Christ in many different styles.

L.A. SUBCULTURE, LATimes

2007-03-31T16:24:00.000-07:00

TRAVELING by subway in Los Angeles involves a kind of magical thinking. To get the most out of the city's Metro Rail system, you need an open mind but also blind optimism. It's not simply that Angeleno life has been literally mapped out around cars and that commuting by subway in these parts is viewed as an alternative lifestyle decision even more radical than driving a Prius. It's that to travel beneath a city regularly wracked by earthquakes — even in an era when gas prices have soared above $3 a gallon — demands considerable faith that the Big One isn't going to hit. Then there's the art. Since 1989, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has earmarked one-half of 1% of all rail construction costs toward the creation of original, site-specific artwork. So now, from Pasadena to the South Bay, Watts to North Hollywood, the MTA displays a trove of museum-worthy modern art pieces and installations at its Metro Rail stops. In the daily hustle and flow of millions of straphangers, however, much of it remains hidden in plain sight. Which is a shame, because as public arts initiatives go, Metro Rail's is world class. Put another way, the transit system — as opposed to the places the trains take you — has evolved into a cultural destination in and of itself. "Most of the folks who take our tours have never been in our system before," says MTA public art officer Jeffrey Mohr. "After that they're surprised that there's art work in there. And from there, they can't believe the scope of it." Much MTA-sanctioned artwork reflects the Southland's ethnic diversity; stylized images of Mexican American pachucos, Gold Rush-era Chinese laborers and black civil rights demonstrators are linked via underground (and aboveground) railroad. Moreover, the art often provides a meta-narrative commentary about aboveground goings-on. To wit: Daniel Martinez's "For Your Intellectual Entertainment," a sculpture at the Green Line's El Segundo/Nash station, features a 30-foot-tall wire-mesh hand rising between the tracks, poised to launch a massive "paper airplane" made out of metal — a metaphorical nod to defense and aerospace plants located nearby. The only thing left to do is ride the rails. For a $3 all-day fare, art appreciators can have an enriching cultural experience that is at once totally L.A. and totally unique in a city where public life and public transportation have never been particularly cherished. A glimpse of what awaits you. CIVIC CENTER

They float silently, swayed by gusts of wind from passing trains near the ceiling of this Red Line station — six life-size fiberglass figures that constitute Jonathan Borofsky's installation sculpture "I Dreamed I Could Fly." Arms and legs splayed outward in cowabunga posture, the statues — all of them male, barefoot and clad in jeans and T-shirts — were inspired by the artist's recurring dreams of flight. They also recall suicide jumpers, however, creating a somewhat jarring juxtaposition viewed alongside the subway. 7TH STREET / METRO

Descending by escalator from the Hope Street entrance, a ceramic triptych calls attention to the passenger's allegorical journey underground. Titled "Heaven to Earth," by Roberto Gil de Montes, it transposes figurative images that are, by turns, heavenly, earthly and womb-like: a morning glory vine wrapped around a cane, a bird silhouetted by sunset, a lush garden. Deeper down, a set of seven light boxes created by artist Sam Erenberg line the wall on the westbound platform. Each box features someone holding or contemplating a book — hence the piece's title, "The Complete Works of Roland Barthes." Again, the meta-narrative thing comes into play: It's part of an ongoing temporary installation series in which artist commissions reconsider subway commuters' cherished pastime. No, not the iPod — reading. CHINATOWN

Both Chavez Ravine and Chung King Road's pagoda roofs and fluttering paper lanterns are clearly visible from the open-air 33-foot-high platform of the Gold Line's Chinatown station. But then, the red, gold and green station is no slouch in the pagoda department, boasting its own curving pagoda-style roof on the passenger platform — a tribute to the Chinese workers who helped build America's railroads in the 1800s. At the station, artist Chusien Chang created four benches meant to reflect the changing face of Chinatown's community. But the station's must-see holding is the artist's granite "I Ching" dial. Sixteen feet in diameter, the piece (titled "The Wheels of Change") contains a magnetic compass radiating 64 hexagrams, detailing what the "I Ching" (a 3,000-year-old Chinese philosophical text) puts forth as the 64 states of the human condition. HOLLYWOOD / VINE

An altogether more lighthearted, mash-up take on local culture prevails here on the Red Line (Hollywood / Vine boasts the most elaborate installations and highest concentration of art). Above ground, an elevator entrance resembling a movie theater facade has a marquee that reads, in part, "Gas prices too high? Travel smart … take Metro." And surrounding the subway entrance, concrete bus shelters have been designed to recall various Hollywood cultural touchstones: a brown derby in honor of the yesteryear Tinseltown watering hole of the same name, a stretch lowrider limo and yet another Chinese pagoda — this time in honor of the landmark Grauman's Chinese Theatre nearby on Hollywood Boulevard. Inside the station, the pachuco-centric work of artist Gilbert "Magu" Lujan evokes a vision of the city that simultaneously celebrates immigrant culture and Hollywood glamour. Hundreds of movie projector reels cover the vaulted ceiling. And 240 hand-painted ceramic tiles line the walls leading from the street to the platform, depicting fedora-wearing Latino characters driving '40s Chevys, eating at a "Comida Chicana" restaurant and wearing sunglasses at night while contemplating the Hollywood sign. Lujan also designed five platform benches resembling lowriders. Perhaps not coincidentally, each has been heavily tagged with graffiti. ROSA PARKS/

WILMINGTON/

IMPERIAL STATION

Cropping up throughout two levels of the station where the Blue and Green lines intersect, artist Joesam.'s large-scale installation piece "Hide-N-Seek" functions more like a figural game than a work of art. More than two dozen large-scale technicolor metal cutouts of African American schoolchildren crop up near the top of freeway supporting columns and on the train platform itself. Some of the figures seem to shy away from view, others bound outward in ecstatic action poses. A kind of massive community self-portrait, the piece was created over three years with the help of 1,000 youngsters from the Watts/Willowbrook Boys & Girls Club. The station's namesake, meanwhile, is honored with an artwork titled "Pathways to Freedom" by Michael Massenburg and Robin Strayhorn that comprises five intricately decorated bus benches — an appropriate tribute for an anti-segregation pioneer who refused to relinquish her seat. Viewed from afar, they are just a place to sit. Up close, the point becomes clear. The benches' hand-set fragments of concrete and ceramic tile are intermingled with black and white images and headlines taken from the civil rights struggle: "Segregation Hurts Children" and "Negro Owned & Operated: We Shall Overcome" among them. UNION STATION

The connecting point for the Gold and Red lines is what a military strategist might call a "target rich environment." There are installations galore in addition to the terminal's textbook-worthy Art Deco architecture. "Atrain" by Bill Bell provides a sensory assault for Metro Rail passengers taking the down escalator. A conceptual piece featuring 12 vertical light-sticks capable of producing an array of colors and patterns, escalator riders are inevitably taken aback by the piece's sound component: a blast of locomotive engine noise. Nearby is "City of Dreams / River of History," by May Sun, Richard Wyatt and Paul Diez, a bench and fountain fashioned out of bottles, rocks and other detritus excavated during the station's construction. And in the airy, blond stone lobby, beneath the East Portal's semicircular glass atrium, hangs Richard Wyatt's "Los Angeles City of Dreams" — a humongous mural that comprises portraits of a multi-generational, multicultural cross-section of proud Angelenos. In a larger sense, the painting is emblematic of the MTA's thinking on its public art offerings. "The artwork can take on different layers," said Jorge Pardo, art and design manager for Metro Creative Services. "We don't just place a painting here and a mural there. It's about having the wherewithal to have a metaphor. We see it as a level of care for our customer. It's about identity."

Great leap forward, The Guardian

2007-03-28T08:43:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago, Xu Zhen was the archetypal garret-dwelling artist, scraping a living in a Shanghai apartment with barely room to swing a cat. To prove the point, he found a cat and swung it. The artist claims that the animal was already dead when he made the 45-minute performance video, which shows feline entrails being spattered across the walls. But the piece established Zhen as the rising star of the new generation of Chinese artists whose work now features in The Real Thing, an exhibition at Tate Liverpool that is the most comprehensive show of contemporary Chinese art ever staged in this country. The Liverpool show opens at the same time that a group of Young British Artists make their first appearance in China. Aftershock: Contemporary British Art 1990-2006 brings items such as Tracey Emin's bed and the Chapman Brothers' Stephen Hawking statue to the Capital Museum in Beijing. But while these pieces have a retrospective feel, China arguably has the most vital, imaginative and uncontainable art scene in the world today.

Xu Zhen and his peers represent a new wave of firebrands set to make the Tate Liverpool show go off, quite literally, with a bang. Tomorrow evening, the exhibition launches with an explosive piece by the Yangjiang Group entitled If I Knew the Danger Ahead I'd Have Stayed Well Clear. The work takes the form of a massive firework battle worth £50,000.

If the YBAs are set to be supplanted by YCAs in terms of talent and notoriety, Xu Zhen is arguably the Chinese Damien Hirst. In June 2006 he organised a warehouse show of 30 young artists in Shanghai, of which the centrepiece was a video of a panda being masturbated for artificial insemination. The show was forced to close on its opening night.

It is, however, now quite difficult to provoke the authorities into closing an exhibition, as the Chinese government seeks to co-opt contemporary art to advertise the productivity and tolerance of the new China. In 2006, the Shanghai Biennale became the first major state-sponsored exhibition of contemporary art - even the fringe show, entitled Fuck Off, was left to run unimpeded. The Beijing exhibition of Young British Artists is another example of this eagerness to embrace international influences.

The U-turn in the official attitude can be gauged by the fate of Beijing's avant-garde in the wake of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, when Beijing's radical artists relocated to an area beyond the city's third ring road, known as the East Village. With no money or conventional outlets for their work, the artists began to conduct increasingly extreme experiments on themselves. One, Zang Huan, covered himself in fish paste and honey and sat for several hours in a public toilet in 100-degree heat. The piece - a comment on the fate of the poet Ai Qing, who was forced to clean toilets during the Cultural Revolution - provoked the police to raid the East Village and evict its inhabitants. In 2001, the area was bulldozed to make way for a public park.

A new artistic community sprang up in the north-east of the city at Dashanzi, centred on a former machine tool plant known as Factory 798. This time, the government sanctioned the area as a cultural quarter, opening up a flood of international investment. Today, Dashanzi is a hub of international galleries, plush apartments and restaurants, with few practising artists left.

The official acceptance of the avant garde is a paradox for Chinese artists. Beijing-based critic and curator Pi Li identifies the emergence of "a kind of official, harmless contemporary art" which leaves artists in danger of losing their identity. "Their position had been the underground. Now they are widely shown and can sell their work very successfully. This has not brought about a good situation for Chinese art; on the contrary, it made the art lose its energy."

Works by Chinese artists have recently changed hands for as much as $1.5m - the amount paid recently by Charles Saatchi for a painting by Zhang Xiaogang - but The Real Thing's curator, Simon Groom, hopes the exhibition will re-establish Chinese art's radical edge. He has taken the bold, possibly even foolhardy, step of inviting Xu Zhen to collaborate in the selection process. "Some of his initial suggestions were a little unworkable," Groom says. "He proposed that we kidnap a drunk, lock him in the gallery and witness his reactions when he wakes up." Zhen also suggested handing out knives to exhibition visitors. One piece that did make the display is the tip of Mount Everest, lopped off by the artist during an expedition to the mountain and mounted in a glass case.

The Liverpool show also features a mammoth engineering project by Ai Weiwei, now China's best-known artist. Ai Weiwei recently collaborated with architects Herzog and de Meuron on the innovative "bird's nest" design of Beijing's Olympic Stadium. For Liverpool, he has created a soaring, illuminated spiral floating outside the Tate in the Albert Dock. "It's the kind of piece that could only be realised in China, where material and labour costs are low," says Groom. "But you cannot underestimate the speed of change in China. Young Chinese artists are less interested in politics than their own dreams and desires. That has never happened in China before, where art had always been a response to the state."

Groom still doesn't know if Zhen plans to attend. "In some ways, I'm rather hoping he doesn't. He's more likely to show up in disguise, or try to sabotage the show in some way. He might even try to close it down." That could be seen as the ultimate irony - once, the Chinese authorities used to shut down exhibitions. These days, the artists do it themselves.

They Are Artists Who Are Women; Hear Them Roar, NYTimes

2007-03-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

The combination of the “Global Feminisms” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and its Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, whose inauguration this show celebrates, is like a false idea wrapped in confusion.

The false idea is that there really is such a thing as feminist art, as opposed to art that intentionally or by osmosis reflects or is influenced by feminist thought, of which there is plenty. Feminist art is a shorthand phrase that everyone uses, but institutionalizing such an amorphous, subjective qualifier should make us all reconsider.

The center seems to have been created mostly for its publicity value. It isn’t necessary in order to showcase the only jewel in its crown, Judy Chicago’s unruly, inspiring installation “The Dinner Party,” a landmark in feminist history that occupies around 5,000 of the center’s 8,300 square feet. Made by Ms. Chicago and scores of volunteers from 1974 to 1979, this immense piece is in many ways the perfect storm of second-wave feminism and modernism: it is lashed together by pride, fury, radiating labial forms and numerous female-identified crafts, most prominently painted ceramic plates and needlework. Whatever you think about it as a work of art, it amounts to one-stop consciousness-raising and historical immersion: an activist, body-centered tribute to 39 important women. Study “The Dinner Party” close enough and your bra, if you’re wearing one, may spontaneously combust.

What is confused is the exhibition, a sprawling, sometimes energetic assembly of recent work by nearly 90 women from nearly 50 countries that has been organized by Maura Reilly, the founding director of the Sackler Center, and the veteran art historian Linda Nochlin. It seems worth noting that the show’s organizers don’t use the phrase “feminist art” in its title. The same goes for what might be called its sister exhibition, “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” which has just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and will travel to the P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center in Long Island City, Queens, next February.

While “Wack” examines art made by about 120 women in the late 1960s and 1970s, “Global Feminisms” concentrates on the present and, by implication, the future. It is restricted to artists born since 1960 and works made since 1990, although most date from 2000 or later. It is energetic, illuminating and irksome, and in all ways worthy of careful study. But it should have been much better.

In her catalog essay Ms. Reilly emphasizes the second “s” in the word feminisms. To whit, there is more than one way to be a feminist these days; feminist goals and issues are different in different places, as is the rate with which they are realized. Still, the show itself feels narrow. Nearly devoid of significant painting and scultpure and thoroughly dominated by photography and video, with a documentary slant to many of its better works, it is more about information, politics and the struggle for equality than it is about art in any very concentrated or satisfying sense.

The curators have treated New York like just another spot on the globe, which is healthy. Nonetheless, “Global Feminisms” jumps cannily back and forth not so much between mainstream and margins as between the two not completely separate success platforms of the marketplace and the institutional stage. To one side are those who sell like hotcakes, among them Tracey Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood, Sarah Lucas, Pipilotti Rist and Kara Walker. To the other are those known mostly from the international biennial circuit, like Tracy Rose, Arahmaiani and Katarzyna Kozyra.

The show begins in the Sackler Center in the space around Ms. Chicago’s opus and then advances through an adjacent wing of galleries. But in many ways it never gets too far beyond the world according to “The Dinner Party.”

Most of the work here is essentialist, body-oriented and familiar to the point of old-fashioned. Again and again and again women fall back on making art from the thing nearest at hand that separates them from men: their bodies — and often echo their predecessors rather literally. One example will suffice: Ana Mendieta’s charged earthwork/performance art is absent from the exhibition because the artist was born before 1960. Instead we have younger artists doing work similar to hers. Some, like Bernie Searle, take possession; others, like Iskra Dimitrova, offer tame indoor versions of Mendieta’s.

To some extent, this is the nature of pioneering. Just because land has been cleared and houses built in one part of the world does not mean the same techniques can be avoided when trailblazing elsewhere. Nor does this rule out originality, as exhibitions devoted to the international repercussions of Cubism and Constructivism have proved.

Art collector wins £350,000 over 'binned' sculpture, The Guardian

2007-03-18T16:22:00.000-07:00

A firm of fine art storage experts was today facing a £350,000 legal bill over the accidental "binning" of an important work by the Turner prize-winning sculptor Anish Kapoor.

The money, plus costs, will go to the Swiss-based art collector Ofir Scheps, who put Hole And Vessel II into the safekeeping of Fine Art Logistics, in south-west London, in June 2004.

A high court judge said that, on the evidence he had heard, the sculpture, which was made of polystyrene, cement, earth, acrylic and pigment, was probably placed in a skip by mistake during building works at the company's packing shop and destroyed at a waste transfer station.

Mr Scheps called expert evidence that the work would have fetched a current auction hammer price of £580,000, including the buyer's premium. The defendant's expert put its value at £250,000.

Mr Justice Teare arrived at a figure of £351,375, consisting of £132,000 as the value of the piece when it was lost and £219,375 to reflect the increase in the value of Kapoor's works since then.

The judge said the sculpture was created in 1984 and measured 95cm x 162cm x 109cm. "It is not possible for me to describe it," he added. "One expert described it as sensuous and sexy, the other as clumsy and somewhat absurd."

There was, however, agreement that it was made during Kapoor's transitional phase when he was "moving away from an exploration of the male/female dichotomy towards an exploration of the void".

In later works by the 52-year-old Indian-born artist, "the void" became an important element.

He won the Turner prize in 1991 and, in recent years, the value of his sculptures has increased very substantially, the judge said.

Mr Scheps sued for damages or the return of the missing piece, which he bought for around £20,000 - considerably less than its real value - in June 2004. It was put in storage pending its intended removal to Kapoor's London studio for restoration work.

Fine Art Logistics said it could not return the piece because it had probably been placed in a skip for disposal as waste, and that its liability for the loss was limited to £587.13 pursuant to its standard terms and conditions.

The judge held that those terms and conditions were not included in the firm's agreement with Mr Scheps and that, in any event, its liability limit was not fair and reasonable in the circumstances of the case.

The judge said it was reasonable for such a company to limit its liability to a fixed sum per weight or volume because the goods entrusted to it could vary so much in value and the owner of the property could insure it for its true value.

However, in this case the company had not taken steps to bring the limit to the customer's attention, and there was no evidence that it had offered to arrange insurance.

Kapoor has spoken of his "deep regret" over the sculpture's disappearance. "It's an important work in terms of what I was up to then," he said. "I only made seven or eight works that year, and it's a shame to lose one of them."

The importance of spotting a genuine Banksy, The Guardian

2007-03-16T17:21:00.000-07:00

Ignorance can be costly in the Banksy exploitation business. Only yesterday it was reported that "bungling workmen painted over a mural by famed street artist Banksy worth £100,000". Last week, 60-year-old Sam Khan, purveyor of luggage and football scarves to the denizens of Tottenham Court Road, London, was inconsolable after flogging a Banksy that had been painted on his stall for £1,000 and discovering that it could be worth £500,000. Poor love. These stories pose a number of questions. Were the workmen really bunglers, given they were employed to remove graffiti? Does a transient daubing suddenly become art if it is worth a lot of money? Is Banksy's work really worth half a million and, if so, should we pity stallholder Sam for failing to maximise his accidental revenue? Finally, and most importantly, how do we spot a Banksy?

The sad fact is that most original Banksys have now been removed from the streets. Steve Lazarides, his agent (yes, our anonymous-situationist-anarchist-street artist has come a long way), says: "Ninety per cent of Banksys don't exist any more."

There are obvious signs to look out for. The signature - a blocky, stencilled Banksy. (The trouble is, after a while he stopped signing them.) Then there is the subject matter - smiley faces, snogging coppers, little girls embracing bombs etc. (Another problem is that Banksy spawned a generation of copyists, so it's hard to know if a Banksy is really a Banksy.) Lazarides says there are a few genuine ones around - down the road from the Guardian, in Farringdon, is a faux hole-in-the-wall cash dispenser; there's an Apache attack helicopter in Old Street, London; a naked lover hanging out of a window outside a sexual health clinic in his hometown of Bristol; and coppers kissing in Brighton.

Finally, having spotted a Banksy, how do you claim it as your own? Tricky one. Lazarides doesn't have much sympathy with Sam. The thing is, he says, Banksy intended the work for all of us, not just to line the pockets of a fortunate few. "If you really want to claim it as your own, it would often mean nicking a whole building or at least a wall."

For the truly ambitious, once you've spotted a Banksy, you can try spotting Banksy himself. Take note, from the one journalist to have knowingly met him (allegedly): if you see a scruffy bloke who looks like a cross between Jimmy Nail and Mike Skinner, with a silver tooth and a fag in his mouth, a pint of Guinness in one hand and a stencil in his other, it's likely to be the genuine Banksy.

A little bit of Hoxton in Dubai, The Times

2007-03-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

What sold at the first Gulf Art Fair? Gavin Turk’s prized rubbish bags or a gun-wielding terrorist Snoopy? David Rose reports

Wealthy Emiratis in flowing robes, homesick expatriates and even visiting Premiership footballers were in buying mood at the inaugural Gulf Art Fair in Dubai. But despite a strong presence from international galleries, the heaviest spending was not on Western art but on Asian and Middle Eastern pieces.

Soaring oil prices and a construction boom mean that potential art investors (whether local sheikhs or hedge-fund managers) are plentiful in the Gulf, and at the beach-side fair 38 galleries from Delhi to New York were all eager to cash in, presenting works worth a total of $1 billion (£517 million) for sale in the first event of its kind in the Middle East.

The dollar sign was a conspicuous emblem throughout, whether embossed on a lurid silkscreen by Andy Warhol, contorted into a sculpture by Keith Haring or, more resonantly, forming a mould filled with crude oil by the Russian artist Andrei Molodkin.

Yet the fair’s organisers predict that Dubai’s wealth and location is well suited for culture as well as profits. They claim that the desert back-water-turned-commercial hub — although now best known for its hotels, golf courses and low taxes — could become “the most important centre for contemporary art in Asia, likely to rival London and New York within a decade”.

The boast befits a city with the audacity and wealth to build what is soon to be the world’s tallest building, the Burj Dubai tower, already 110 storeys and rising. But for all the Emirate’s aspirations to form a bridge between East and West, cultural tensions were apparent even before the fair’s opening.

Restrictions imposed on the exhibitors, including the White Cube and Albion galleries from London, meant that only art deemed suitable for exhibition in an Islamic state would be accepted. “We asked all galleries to make careful provision — that is, chiefly concerning nudity and religious imagery,” says John Martin, the fair’s director, who has established the project from nothing more than a beachside dream in less than two years. “Selling is the name of the game here, and in our first year there is a bit of a pioneer spirit, but already we hope next year to double in size.” The financial clout of the commercial art galleries causes a trickle-down effect to improving public institutions, Martin argues, and recent multimillion-pound sales of contemporary art by Christie’s and Sotheby’s in Dubai and its neighbour, Abu Dhabi, have been followed by plans for new showcases for the Louvre and Guggenheim collections in the region.

Buyers included Sol Campbell, the former England defender, who spent $60,000 (£31,000) on a photographic print of a forest by the Korean artist Bien-U-Bae while visiting the fair between training sessions at Portsmouth Football Club’s nearby camp.

Works such as Horse Mountain by Tim Flach, a close-up photograph of a stallion’s neck, were also particularly popular thanks to local interest in horse racing. But with only a handful of local galleries represented in the region and many visitors with no previous experience of negotiating such an event, experienced British, German and American dealers were bemoaning a lack of buzz.

Unlike in the current Moscow biennale, where the star billing of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and others has somewhat eclipsed local artists, the word in Dubai was that even those works by fashionable Westerners that were passed fit by the censor remained on the shelves, while those by their Arab peers, and Indian and Chinese artists, sold strongly among the Emirate’s 80 per cent expatriate population.

Graham Steele, sales executive at White Cube, said he had watched puzzled visitors carefully stepping over a sculpture of painted bronze rubbish bags by Gavin Turk, only to be confronted by a medicine cabinet by Hirst with a price tag of £825,000.

“Some visitors have become quite frustrated when trying to understand how such a thing can be worth thousands of pounds,” he said. “It has been quite an exciting challenge for us to have to explain the work and its context of art history.”

The Hoxton gallery was not alone in finding it hard to eke out a sale, highlighting a lack of understanding of modern Western art. Sotheby’s even ran an “education programme”, a series of talks at the fair aimed at introducing Arab buyers to the market. Whether this patronised local sheikhs was open to question.

But having secured a visit from Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and his ministers, Martin says: “It was disappointing to see the Culture Minister, who was fantastic in supporting the fair and is a great collector of Arabic calligraphy, only buying art of that kind, with many local buyers following suit.

“It’s like only supporting your own team in what could be a more interesting international competition.”

Indifference to Western culture verged into antipathy elsewhere in the fair, however. A solid gold knuckle-duster, designed by the London-based Pakistani artist Shezad Dawood, was encrusted with diamonds arranged to spell out “Nation of Islam” in Arabic. “Yes, it’s a bit edgy,” said Claudia Cellini, director of the Third Line gallery in Dubai. The work, she said, was bought by a local sheikh for nearly £9,000.

“He’s one of our fundamentalist clients,” her assistant joked, while standing next to another of Dawood’s works, a 6in high Snoopy doll dressed as a terrorist. Cellini corrects her: “He is, shall we say, conservative.” As a group of Emirati women in black burkas strolled past, eyeing with suspicion a nearby car decorated with Hirst’s trademark coloured spots, it was difficult to feel that the clash of civilisations had yet been overcome.

The Damien Hirst of Delhi, The Guardian

2007-02-21T17:49:00.000-08:00

India's economy is booming - and so is its art world. Its enfant terrible tells Randeep Ramesh about crazy prices and the uses of cow dung. Through the haze of frontier dust where New Delhi fades into scrub and grazing land lies the low-slung, white-walled home of the country's most coveted conceptual art. Inside the workshop, a sculpture of huge brass pots hangs from the ceiling. On the wall is a shimmering canvas of a stainless steel urn. Nearby sits a 5ft metal bucket. The works' creator is Subodh Gupta, the current darling of the booming Indian modern art market. Like a subcontinental version of Marcel Duchamp, who exhibited a public urinal in the early 20th century, Gupta takes everyday objects as "ready-made art". Pots, pans and squat stools from his childhood all recall the artist's humble, rural roots.

"All these things were part of the way I grew up. They are used in the rituals and ceremonies that were part of my childhood. Indians either remember them from their youth, or they want to remember them."

Perhaps most striking to western eyes is his use of cow dung. The 42-year-old has made installations out of manure patties, kitchen fuel for millions of Indian country homes, and painted with dung à la Chris Ofili. In a nine-minute video, Pure, the artist stands covered in thick layer of bovine excreta that is slowly hosed off in a shower. Gupta says he wanted to play with meanings of "purity". "In Indian villages, cow shit is used for spiritual cleaning like an antiseptic. But this is not true of today's [Indian] cities. I wanted to show that."

Despite dwelling on domestic themes, the artist has become a mainstay of the big international art fairs and has exhibited in the Venice Biennale, London's Frieze and shows in Moscow, Miami, Lille and Japan. As a sculptor, painter, installation-maker and video producer, Gupta is seen as the enfant terrible of the Indian art scene, a Damien Hirst of New Delhi. Last year, his work Across Seven Seas, a room-sized airport conveyor belt cast in aluminium, topped with 30 metal suitcases and bundles, sold for £550,000 to a German collector at the Basel art fair.

Perhaps Gupta's most famous fan is François Pinault, the French billionaire and biggest shareholder in Christie's, who bought a one-tonne skull crafted out of aluminium pots and pans, after one of his curators spotted it in a remarkable show at Paris's Eglise Saint-Bernard church last October.

Gupta says the monumental work, entitled A Very Hungry God, was a "one-off, unique". "I cannot reproduce that. The kitchen stuff is a phase I am going through, but a piece like that is not going to be done again," he says.

The British public have got a chance to sample Gupta's art at Gateshead's Baltic gallery, with a newly installed sculpture of a "kitchen city", which sees a stainless-steel sushi belt transporting metal bowls around a landscape of cooking utensils. Built in Singapore for $100,000, the installation is so large it took five people to set it up.

Gupta is among a generation of young Indian artists whose commentary tells of a country on the move, fuelled by boiling economic growth and a more materialistic mindset. Despite reflecting these changes in their art, the new generation of painters and sculptors are themselves part of the boom.

Last September, Christie's modern Indian art auction saw record sales of almost $18m (£9.5m). The recent spurt in prices has seen even newcomers such as painter Surendran Nair picking up $250,000 for a work.

Just who is buying the art reveals a novel trend. Indian-born but foreign-based Indians, especially those who are self-made, see the new art as a way of reconfirming their ethnic identity and as an opportunity to move up into the rarefied world of elitist arts. The result is rapid inflation in art prices.

Rajiv Chaudhri, a New York-based Indian hedge-fund manager who stunned a crowd at Christie's in late 2005, by paying $1.6m for a painting by the 80-year-old Indian artist Tyeb Mehta. The work, Mahisasura, a 1997 rendering of the buffalo-demon of Hindu mythology, was the first time a contemporary Indian painting had crossed the million-dollar mark.

The new valuations are not just down to new Indian money and a wealthy Indian diaspora intent on rediscovering their heritage, but also to the internet. A number of online auctions have connected once-obscure artists with a hungry audience.

"The pioneer of this model is Saffron- art.com, which runs weekend auctions for the NRI [non-resident Indian] community who buy with their ears, not their eyes," says Peter Nagy, who left New York for New Delhi a decade ago to start up Nature Morte art gallery.

"These guys come to India once or twice a year, but don't have time to buy art. So they sit in their computer rooms in New Jersey, pushing up prices in New Delhi. Right now, prices are going through the ceiling."

Saffronart.com burst on to the scene with a $1.5m sale of a work by Francis Newton Souza, one of the older generation of Indian painters, in December 2005.

What we are seeing, says Yamini Mehta, head of Christie's modern and contemporary Indian art division, is a pattern of sales similar to the other ancient, large-scale Asian culture: China. Chinese art grew from a curio item in auctions in the 80s to the point where Chinese painters now sell work routinely for half a million dollars.

"We are at the beginning of Indian art. Chinese art has been in western galleries for a long time," says Mehta. She points out that the Indian auctions a decade ago yielded just $800,000. "This year the figure is $42m. India is more diverse than China. But he prices are definitely following [the same] course."

Subodh Gupta owes his rise in part to Pierre Huber, a Geneva gallery-owner who spotted that Chinese work was the next big thing in contemporary art. He also saw the potential for Indian art and Gupta, and quickly signed up the young artist.

Mehta says what is remarkable about the Indian market is that you can still pick up bargains. "You cannot buy the best Picasso at the moment because it is in a private collection. But you can pick up a MF Hussain because private collectors are only just starting."

There are signs that a new crop of visual art museums is appearing in India's new metropolises, designed by Indian collectors who model themselves on cultural impresarios such as Charles Saatchi.

More than $500m is expected to flow into the market when the half-dozen private museums currently being built by India's new elite start acquiring work. These new centres will preserve and present Indian contemporary art projects.

In a warehouse on the edge of Delhi's southern rim is the Devi Foundation, which aims to replicate New York's temple of modern art, the Dia Foundation. The brainchild of mother-and-son team Lekha and Anupam Poddar, who also own designer hotels, the foundation aims to become India's main showcase for art.

Gupta's work litters the Poddars' collection: they own a life-sized, pink fibreglass statue of a grazing cow, and a huge globe made of milk cans. They have also commissioned a cow-dung painting.

"These are incredibly sophisticated people who have travelled all over the world and educated themselves about contemporary art in Europe and the US," says Nagy, who has also backed Gupta's creations. "They came back here and realised such a talent like Subodh was just doing the craziest shit. It is both visionary and a no-brainer".

Terrible twosome, The Guardian

2007-02-13T16:10:00.000-08:00

Gilbert & George's huge Tate retrospective is a roller-coaster ride of brutality, tenderness, boredom and booze. It is also deeply filthy. Adrian Searle leaves it winded - but thrilled The most striking thing about Gilbert & George is their independence. They once proclaimed that they "believe in the art, the beauty and the life of the artist who is an eccentric person with something to say for himself". Forty years after their first meeting, in the sculpture department of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Gilbert & George have cultivated an eccentricity that is to be found throughout their work, as well as in the personas they present to the world. They seem to be a single entity. And they have never stopped having things to say for themselves.

Gilbert & George may see the world askance, but they address it, and us, unswervingly. If they weren't Gilbert & George, I might be tempted to describe them as a moral conscience. Being a witness to one's age, if one is to be more than a voyeur, is not without its responsibilities. Gerhard Richter, who once painted their portrait, has said what impresses him most is that they have always taken their independence as a matter of course. They position themselves as outsiders, marked by their suits, their professed conservatism, their delight in perverse and sometimes outrageous opinion.

But their complaints about being ignored and slighted by the art establishment in Britain can no longer be sustained. Gilbert & George are the only artists, apart from Andy Warhol, to have been given an entire floor of Tate Modern. From Thursday, their retrospective occupies both of Tate Modern's suites of temporary exhibition galleries, as well as the concourse in between, the coffee bar and seating areas. Maybe I should have checked the toilets, too.

Out on the concourse, their most recent, large-scale pictures rub shoulders with early black-and-white photo works, and with display cases filled with stilted manifestos, squiffy "postal sculptures" about drinking (there is a heady bar-room haze over much early Gilbert & George), and printed ephemera from the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the artists' own annotated copy of the sheet music to Bud Flanagan's 1931 song Underneath the Arches, which they famously performed as a singing sculpture. There is also the infamous photograph of the two young artists smiling innocently to the camera, spoiled somewhat by the cut-out lettering they sport on their suits: George the Cunt and Gilbert the Shit. This all has the air of a lark by two particularly unsavoury denizens of Bertie Wooster's Drones Club.

When they began, Gilbert & George might have wanted to disassociate themselves from conceptualism and from Fluxus, from the grunt'n'grind aesthetics of welded steel sculpture at Saint Martins, and from the amateur naiveties of happenings, the everyday poetics of arte povera and the interminable longueurs of structuralist film-making. But what you reject also informs you. Just as they proselytised a democratic "art for all", so Gilbert & George entered a period of profound inwardness, photographing themselves walking and looking at nature, and redrawing the images in charcoal. (They also produced paintings of this peregrination; alas, those are not here.)

Later, they photographed themselves in the dusty gloom of their house in Fournier Street, east London, with its creaking floorboards and wormy panelling, the murky windows, the holes in the ceiling, the silences. There is an air of time frittering away, of emptiness and prolonged hesitation. Offstage, you can hear the gin glugging into a glass. Bloody life, as if to say. The artists emerge with sudden splashes of milky semen and sanguine runs of red dye.

The city about them, as much as their interior lives, became their subject. They saw beauty in a naked young man, pictured stark against a river of yellow piss; they described a mullah's face in the knots and whorls of the floorboards, and found dignity in a madman's stare. Images, subjects and bodies collide throughout their art, which is often a roller-coaster of brutality, tenderness, threat, the pretty and the disturbing. It is also frequently filthy, in every sense.

Gilbert & George have drawn cartoon hand-jobs, photographed skinheads, Asian boys, mouths, navels, bums, leaves, tears, words and expressions. Their multi-panelled pictures burst into acid colour and became ever more lurid and confrontational. In some ways, their art prefigured punk, saw fundamentalism coming and foresaw the shocks of Aids. And the mood in their art kept flipping, from celebration to horror, from flowers to shit. In Shitty Naked Human World, Gilbert & George got down to their underpants - two middle-aged naked men ungainly in their skins, George never taking his glasses off, their turds like sentinels behind them.

Graffiti on a wall, an ejaculation, spatters of bird droppings and chewing gum flattened on the pavement, inarticulate curses - "every body has prombles woste then mine" reads one hopeless message they found scrawled on the street and incorporated in a picture. Gilbert & George's London is more than a backdrop. It teems with life and dirt, shock, surprise, boredom and beauty. Their retrospective is as relentless, cumulative and varied as anyone could ask for. You exit winded - you've seen too much. Like the city itself, the show is uneven and sprawling, and goes from dark to garish, sexy to monstrous. Their best and worst are here - and which is which, one keeps on asking, and what do we mean by best and worst? Good filthy or bad filthy, raving mad or just raving? Are they brave or are they bores? They provoke ambivalence. The contrariness and contradictions are essential to their art, and to our responses to it.

Here, in one great, late room, is Nineteen Ninety Nine, whose four parts present a montage of scribbled messages, a wash of piss, globs of blood, brick walls, the London street map, the artists clothed and naked, undaunted. The atmosphere is abrasive. Opposite hangs Named, an enormous picture with the calling cards of 90 male escorts, in a sort of city grid of desire. Declan, Rudy, Guido, Bob and Felipe, the names read, listing the services they offer. Gilbert and George, suited, collide in the middle of the picture. They have said that Named is like a war memorial. It is always wartime now, one way or another. Gilbert & George may have begun as a double act, but the exhibition ends in the confusion and hysteria of London after the July 2005 bombings.

The show climaxes with their most recent series of pictures, produced for this exhibition, whose imagery largely consists of the felt-tipped bills that accompany each edition of the London Evening Standard. The bills appear outside shops, at newsstands, on vans. They are a black-and-white shout, a fusillade of bombs, bombings, bombers, terror plots, terror laws, blunders, heroes, arrests, and more bombs. Against the blunt graphics the artists loom, weirdly.

Looming is what Gilbert & George have come to do best. They emerge from a jungle of signs, lurking, mooning, grimacing, praying, howling wide-eyed and horrified. Then they stare back, mute and hypnotic, calm, from the dead eye of their theatrical rages.

It is impossible to walk through these rooms without being made aware of how prescient so much of their work has been. The artists themselves rarely travel far from their neighbourhood. Just as Kafka told writers that there was no need to leave their desks, and the world would come to them, so Gilbert & George have discovered that the world does indeed pass along Fournier Street. Their art has witnessed the rise of fundamentalisms, the grimness of the Callaghan years, the divisive Thatcherite epoch, the hollow capitalism of New Labour, the disaffection of young working-class kids, a confusion of identities.

They have recorded all this without pandering to received opinion, and without becoming lovable media stereotypes. In their more recent, digitalised and computer-manipulated images, they muck about with the lateral symmetry of their bodies, making themselves appear strangely warped. They chart their ageing bodies. To which one might add that they spit, scowl, drop their pants, are frequently drunk, bored, stilted, static, silly and utterly serious throughout this exhibition. The most shocking thing they could now do would be to be spotted on the golf course.

Their art might often appear punch-drunk, but Gilbert & George never underestimate human and social complexity. They wrestle with stereotypes. How are gay men meant to look? What platitudes are artists supposed to spout? What does it mean to be avant garde now, and, if art is supposed to be important, what exactly does it say, and to whom and how?

The 24-hour-a-day business of being Gilbert & George, and the creative struggle itself, became inextricable almost 40 years ago. They are immensely prolific: they are what they do. Truman Capote said that Andy Warhol was a sphinx without a secret. Being Gilbert & George is not an act. Their secret is that there is no secret. At the same time, they are their greatest invention.

You’ve Seen the E-Mail, Now Buy the Art, NY Times

2007-02-04T07:28:00.000-08:00

FOR his fall show the artist Tom Friedman planted two dozen characteristically demented sculptures throughout the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. He set a giant Excedrin box, made from dozens of cut-up Excedrin boxes, on the floor near the entrance. He placed three identically crumpled wads of paper on a shelf. And he affixed to the ceiling a bunch of colorful papier-mâché balloons, which magically appeared to float despite their weight. Their strings were held together not by a hand but by a pair of men’s briefs suspended in midair.

It was Mr. Friedman’s first outing with Gagosian after years of showing at the much humbler Feature Gallery in New York, and the exhibition sold out, with works priced up to $500,000. But most of the buyers did not see the installation. They did not personally see the pieces at all. Gagosian sold out the show before it opened, in large part through a flurry of e-mail messages and digital images.

When asked at the opening if the show had really sold out in three days, Deborah McLeod, the gallery’s director, replied, “More like three minutes.”

It’s another sign of the acceleration of the contemporary art market: New works, even in the six-figure range, are selling by digital image alone. For the Friedman show, Gagosian set up a private section on its Web site, accessible only by a password sent via e-mail message to select collectors. More typically, gallery directors send off e-mail messages with JPEGs — a format for digitally storing and transmitting images — to potential clients.

As with so many aspects of the art world, industrywide figures do not exist. But anecdotes abound. Howard Read of Cheim & Read in Manhattan said the gallery sold by JPEG alone “about a third” of its current show: paintings of Mexican-American laborers by the California artist John Sonsini, with prices from $25,000 to $65,000.

The Chicago dealer Kavi Gupta has presold — in large part through JPEGs — his current exhibition of paintings by Claire Sherman, a 2005 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “We debuted a painting at Basel last year, and Marty Margulies bought it,” he said, referring to a major Miami collector. “Since then we’ve been selling her work based on digital images.” The show opened this weekend, but it has been sold out since December, with prices up to $15,000.

In Los Angeles, Timothy Blum of Blum & Poe said he sold a “handful” of works by the conceptual artist Dave Muller, sight unseen, from his January show, at prices up to $100,000. “This happens routinely now,” he said. “I’ve also sold paintings by Mark Grotjahn, for over $200,000, to buyers who never saw them in person.”

But Mr. Blum was quick to add that these buyers already knew Mr. Grotjahn’s work, an off-kilter updating of abstract painting. Other gallerists made the same point. This is not the case of an Internet surfer discovering a picture on an e-commerce site and tossing it in a shopping cart, but more a sign of how efficient the high-end contemporary art market has become.

“I don’t know if this is the beginning of something wonderful, or the end of something wonderful,” said Amy Cappellazzo, co-head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s. “But we’ve seen the use of JPEGs increase dramatically, exponentially, in the last few years. It’s all about the speed of the market. Without the use of digital images, this market would come to a grinding halt.”

Lisa Schiff, a New York art consultant, agreed, saying that “99 percent” of her sales now involve a JPEG at one stage or another. “It’s changed the way we all do business,” she said. “People have begun using JPEG as a verb: JPEG me this work.” (On the resale market, where many art consultants operate, JPEGs can be shopped so widely that a seller can find himself in the puzzling position of being offered his own work.)

Mr. Gupta said about half of his sales take place without the presence of the buyer. “Being in Chicago, without the walk-in traffic of a gallery in New York or even L.A., I can’t imagine working without digital images,” he said. “We have a ton of European collectors, and we reach them through art fairs and digital images, a combined effort.” Read the whole article.

Boston officials livid over ad stunt

2007-02-01T08:14:00.000-08:00


























By KEN MAGUIRE, Associated Press Writer
Livid about a publicity campaign that disrupted the city by stirring
fears of terrorism, Boston officials vowed to prosecute those
responsible and seek restitution, while others mocked authorities on
Thursday for what they called an overreaction.

Officials found a slew of blinking electronic signs adorning bridges
and other high-profile spots across the city Wednesday, prompting the
closing of a highway and part of the Charles River and the deployment
of bomb squads.

The 38 signs were part of a promotion for the Cartoon Network TV show
"Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a surreal series about a talking milkshake,
a box of fries and a meatball. The network's parent is Turner
Broadcasting Systems Inc.

"It is outrageous, in a post 9/11 world, that a company would use
this type of marketing scheme," Mayor Thomas Menino said. "I am
prepared to take any and all legal action against Turner Broadcasting
and its affiliates for any and all expenses incurred."

The 1-foot tall signs, which were lit up at night, resembled a
circuit board, with protruding wires and batteries. Most depicted a
boxy, cartoon character giving passersby the finger — a more obvious
sight when darkness fell.

Two men who put up the promotions were to be arraigned Thursday on
charges of placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct. Authorities
say Peter Berdovsky, 27, of Arlington, and Sean Stevens, 28, of
Charlestown, were hired to place the devices.

Berdovsky, an artist, told The Boston Globe he was hired by a
marketing company and said he was "kind of freaked out" by the furor.

"I find it kind of ridiculous that they're making these statements on
TV that we must not be safe from terrorism, because they were up
there for three weeks and no one noticed. It's pretty commonsensical
to look at them and say this is a piece of art and installation," he
said.

Fans of the show mocked what they called an overreaction as about a
dozen gathered outside Charlestown District Court on Thursday morning
with signs saying "1-31-07 Never Forget" and "Free Peter."

"We're the laughing stock," said Tracy O'Connor, 34.

"It's almost too easy to be a terrorist these days," said Jennifer
Mason, 26. "You stick a box on a corner and you can shut down a city."

O'Connor said there's nothing wrong with being vigilant, but said she
said it was ridiculous to shut down a city "when anyone under the age
of 35 knew this was a joke the second they saw it."

Authorities vowed to hold Turner accountable for what Menino said was
"corporate greed," that led to at least $750,000 in police costs.

As soon as Turner realized the Boston problem around 5 p.m., it said,
law enforcement officials were told of their locations in 10 cities
where it said the devices had been placed for two to three weeks:
Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland,
Ore., Austin, Texas, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

"We apologize to the citizens of Boston that part of a marketing
campaign was mistaken for a public danger," said Phil Kent, chairman
of Turner, a division of Time Warner Inc.

Kent said the marketing company that placed the signs, Interference
Inc., was ordered to remove them immediately.

Interference had no comment. A woman who answered the phone at the
New York-based firm's offices Wednesday afternoon said the firm's CEO
was out of town and would not be able to comment until Thursday.

Messages seeking additional comment from the Atlanta-based Cartoon
Network were left with several publicists.

A voice mail box for Berdovsky was full Wednesday night. The
Associated Press was unable to find whether Stevens had a lawyer.

Authorities are investigating whether Turner or other companies
should be criminally charged, Attorney General Martha Coakley said.
"We're not going to let this go without looking at the further roots
of how this happened to cause the panic in this city," Coakley said.

In Seattle and several suburbs, the removal of the signs was low-key.
"We haven't had any calls to 911 regarding this," Seattle police
spokesman Sean Whitcomb said Wednesday.

Police in Philadelphia said they believed their city had 56 devices.

The New York Police Department removed 41 of the devices — 38 in
Manhattan and three in Brooklyn, according to spokesman Paul Browne.
The NYPD had not received any complaints. But when it became aware of
the situation, it contacted Cartoon Network, which provided the
locations so the devices could be removed.

"Aqua Teen Hunger Force" is a cartoon with a cultish following that
airs as part of a block of programs for adults on the Cartoon
Network. A feature length film based on the show is slated for
release March 23.

Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage, NYTimes

2007-01-29T09:12:00.000-08:00

“Well, this is quite a turnout for an ‘ism,’ ” said the art historian and critic Lucy Lippard on Friday morning as she looked out at the people filling the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at the Museum of Modern Art and spilling into the aisles. “Especially in a museum not notorious for its historical support of women.”

Ms. Lippard, now in her 70s, was a keynote speaker for a two-day symposium organized by the museum that was titled “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts.” The event itself was an unofficial curtain-raiser for what is shaping up as a watershed year for the exhibition — and institutionalization, skeptics say — of feminist art.

For the first time in its history this art will be given full-dress museum survey treatment, and not in just one major show but in two. On March 4 “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, followed on March 23 by “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum. (On the same day the Brooklyn Museum will officially open its new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and a permanent gallery for “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s seminal proto-feminist work.)

Such long-withheld recognition has been awaited with a mixture of resignation and impatient resentment. Everyone knows that our big museums are our most conservative cultural institutions. And feminism, routinely mocked by the public media for 35 years as indissolubly linked with radicalism and bad art, has been a hard sell.

But curators and critics have increasingly come to see that feminism has generated the most influential art impulses of the late 20th and early 21st century. There is almost no new work that has not in some way been shaped by it. When you look at Matthew Barney, you’re basically seeing pilfered elements of feminist art, unacknowledged as such.

The MoMA symposium was sold out weeks in advance. Ms. Lippard and the art historian Linda Nochlin appeared, like tutelary deities, at the beginning and end respectively; in between came panels with about 20 speakers. The audience was made up almost entirely of women, among them many veterans of the women’s art movement of the 1970s and a healthy sprinkling of younger students, artists and scholars. It was clear that people were hungry to hear about and think about feminist art, whatever that once was, is now or might be.

What it once was was relatively easy to grasp. Ms. Lippard spun out an impressionistic account of its complex history, as projected images of art by women streamed across the screen behind her, telling an amazing story of their own. She concluded by saying that the big contribution of feminist art “was to not make a contribution to Modernism.” It rejected Modernism’s exclusionary values and authoritarian certainties for an art of openness, ambiguity, reciprocity and what another speaker, Griselda Pollock, called “ethical hospitality,” features now identified with Postmodernism.

But feminism was never as embracing and accessible as it wanted to be. Early on, some feminists had a problem with the “lavender menace” of lesbianism. The racial divide within feminism has never been resolved and still isn’t, even as feminism casts itself more and more on a globalist model.

The MoMA audience was almost entirely white. Only one panelist, the young Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, was black. And the renowned critic Geeta Kapur from Delhi had to represent, by default, all of Asia. “I feel like I’m gate-crashing a reunion,” Ms. Mutu joked as she began to speak, and she wasn’t wrong.

At the same time one of feminism’s great strengths has been a capacity for self-criticism and self-correction. Yet atmospherically the symposium was a very MoMA event, polished, well executed, well mannered, even cozy. A good half of the talks came across as more soothing than agitating, suitable for any occasion rather than tailored to one onto which, I sensed, intense personal, political and historical hopes had been pinned.

Still, there was some agitation, and it came with the first panel, “Activism/Race/Geopolitics,” in a performance by the New York artist Coco Fusco. Ms. Fusco strode to the podium in combat fatigues and, like a major instructing her troops, began lecturing on the creative ways in which women could use sex as a torture tactic on terrorist suspects, specifically on Islamic prisoners.

The performance was scarifyingly funny as a send-up of feminism’s much-maligned sexual “essentialism.” But its obvious references to Abu Ghraib, where women were victimizers, was telling.

In the context of a mild-mannered symposium and proposed visions of a “feminist future” that saw collegial tolerance and generosity as solutions to a harsh world, Ms. Fusco made the point that, at least in the present, women are every bit as responsible for that harshness — for what goes on in Iraq for example — as anyone. read the whole article

A new market theory of Art, Artnet

2007-01-28T09:18:00.000-08:00

It costs about $95,000 to rent a corporate jet to fly from Beijing to New York. I learned this from the news that a corporate executive allegedly flew star CNBC financial reporter Maria Bartiromo on that route, raising all sorts of ethical squawks in the press.

What it tells me is the true value of $100 grand at the levels of the elite: not much. So it is no surprise that increments of $100,000 are to today’s contemporary art market what $10,000 was in the 1980s and $1,000 was in the ‘60s. How have these new valuations changed the art market?

First, there’s the question of accumulation. When the wealthy patron Katherine Dreier assembled a collection of Marcel Duchamp’s pieces in the 1930s, there was no demand or value to the work at the time and her collection was regarded as a daffy eccentricity. In the 1960s, when Ethel and Robert Scull cornered the market in Pop Art, they were regarded initially as social climbers and soon after as visionaries. Their collection, when sold at auction due to their divorce, was the initial contemporary art market-maker.

During the 1980s, Charles Saatchi started to corner the market by buying up the inventory of one artist, such as Sean Scully, and then dumping the work en masse, presumably for economic gain. Now, collectors such as Daniel Loeb and Aby Rosen also assemble dozens of works by a single artist (Loeb has close to 300 Martin Kippenbergers), but they have so much money that art collecting is a game for them that mimics their larger financial speculations. Using a hedge model, these collectors are able to manipulate the valuations of their holdings based on their internal financial realities, not on any outside demand per se. That is what hedging is.

This behavior creates distinct anomalies between artists of similar styles and talents. Why are works by Marlene Dumas worth millions and those by the stylistically similar Chuck Connelly worth next to nothing? Because surplus capital in the hands of a small group of moneyed types decrees it so, by fiat. Disparities between surplus capital and "normal" market behavior (the kinds of transparent demand-based prices that you can see on Artnet, for example) create two distinct "markets." The high-end market just described is the seeking of surplus capital for true value, which lands on a work of art, because that work of art is perceived as unique, often in a highly arbitrary manner that disregards questions of esthetics and connoisseurship. The news is not that a Picasso is worth $100 million, but that $100 million is worth the Picasso!

Such distortions affect the traditional ways we think about the art market. Block discounts of an artist’s entire body of work, from a hedge perspective, turn into block appreciation: each work is worth more in a group than individually. Appreciation in value over time, such as occurred with Dreier’s Duchamps, no longer exists. As in day trading on the stock exchange, profit becomes a function of trading rather than holding. Connoisseurship yields to branding. The individual qualities of a painting by Jenny Saville matter less than the fact that the painting is by Jenny Saville.

Herd behavior by collectors at art fairs is stimulated by these new realities. Nobody wishes to strike gold, because they already have gold: what these collectors want is status and cachet and, let’s face it, more gold. Greed is good. But art suffers in this context, because it functions solely as an economic and social marker, always subject to immediate obsolescence, should economic realities change. Yes, everyone is making money, but the money is really making them. Charlie Finch for Artnet.

Trans Cape on track , Flash Art Online

2007-01-21T14:14:00.000-08:00

“TRANS CAPE” a large-scale exhibition located
in Cape Town, South Africa,which  
was originally set to open in September 2006,
was postponed due to delays in funding
from key stake holders.
The exhibition is now rescheduled to open
on March 24th and run through May 2nd, 2007.
Featuring more than 60 artists from 19 different countries including
South Africa, this sprawling exhibition will be curated by South-African born
Gavin Jantjes with curators Gabi Ngcobo and Khwezi Gule.
Its guiding principle, as stated in the press release,
is “to explore the shifts, changes, and re-locations  of people on the African
continent, as well as the movements and changes in contemporary 
African visual culture.”

Bears against bombs, The Guardian

2007-01-19T10:00:00.000-08:00

The barricades came down yesterday morning, when the temporary walls obscuring Mark Wallinger's State Britain were finally removed. Running the length of the central spine of Tate Britain is a near-perfect, life-sized replica of the one-man camp that peace campaigner Brian Haw occupied on Parliament Square between June 2001, when he first began his protest against the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq, and the night in May 2006 when the police removed almost the entirety of Haw's belongings.

In between, the twin towers fell, Afghanistan was invaded, and sanctions against Iraq turned into occupation and civil war. London and Madrid were bombed, and the 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act was passed, forbidding any unauthorised protests within a kilometre of Parliament Square. It was said that terrorists might use protests such as Haw's as a cover for their activities - though it appeared to have been designed principally to move Haw on.

Over the years, Haw's public protest opposite the Houses of Parliament grew to become a rambling, gap-toothed, 40-metre-long wall of banners, placards, rickety, knocked-together information boards, handmade signs and satirical slogans. Banksy donated a big painting of soldiers. Sun-bleached rainbow peace flags flapped overhead. The placards declaimed "You Lie Kids Die BLIAR" and "Christ Is Risen Indeed!". Road-spattered appeals to motorists to "Beep For Brian" stood beside an accumulation of material that could only be read or understood close-up. Photocopied warzone reports, commemorative crosses, entreaties and signs that have crept in from other people's protests - "Pensioners want a slice of the cake, not crumbs" - compete, and an estate agent's board has even found its way amongst the piles of stuff on the far side of Haw's placards, the accumulation of a near-five-year tenure.

Lovingly copied and recreated, this has all made its way into Wallinger's work. All that is missing is the indomitable Haw himself, with his megaphone and his badge-encrusted floppy hat. He is still camped on the grass opposite parliament, but now occupying only a fraction of the space he once had. A few days before Haw's stuff was all taken away, Wallinger took hundreds of photographs of the entire, splendidly ramshackle, ranting, unmissable eyesore on which he based his reconstruction. Here is an impromptu, cobbled-together monument to a "fallen comrade", constructed from a plastic traffic cone, several lengths of taped-together garden cane and a homemade flag. There, a group of dolls in Victorian dresses is lying beside a plastic baby with missing arms and legs, bloodied with paint. Mutilated soft toys, placard-waving and card-carrying teddy bears - bears against bombs, bears saying "too much to bear" - and soft toys piled in a paper coffin.

It all has a cumulative, creepily sentimental horror. It also, weirdly, reminds one of all sorts of artwork one has seen before: the installations of Mike Kelley; the placards, swathes of photocopied material and detritus of Thomas Hirschhorn. With its recreation and representation of an individual's lair, and the stuff they surround themselves with - Haw's Tesco biscuits are here, a sleeping bag sandwiched between layers of tarpaulin, his rolling tobacco and his flagons of drinking water, and what looks like pee - it is not unlike the fictional habitats of Mike Nelson's work, or even of some of Beuys's placards and survival packs.

State Britain could be interpreted as a continuation of Haw's protest by other means, in such a place and in such a way as to mock a law designed to curtail our freedom to protest. The whole thing is a trompe l'oeil fabrication, a still life, a 2007 history painting - the modern equivalent of Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, Goya's Third of May and Manet's Execution of the Emperor Maximillian, all of which referred in contentious ways to world events. Taken as a whole, it is the sort of thing one might find documented in Jeremy Deller's Folk Archive, his collection of the amateur and the inadvertent.

For State Britain, Wallinger has also taped a line on the floor, indicating an arc of the kilometre cordon as it passes through the gallery. It first appears under a display of wrapping paper in the Tate Britain shop, crossing the floor and disappearing under a display of art-technique manuals. It crosses a room currently dominated by a bust of TE Lawrence, hitting the wall beneath Jacob Kramer's Jews at Prayer; it passes Jacob Epstein's alabaster Jacob and the Angel, and speeds beyond Nicholas Hilliard's portrait of Elizabeth I. It slides past a vitrine displaying the first English translation of the Qur'an, published in 1649, just four months after the beheading of Charles I. Finally, the line hits the wall under George Stubbs's 1785 painting of Reapers, his immaculately turned-out peasants decorously working the farm. The line may be an arbitrary slice through the building, but it adds to the effect, and creates its own resonances and echoes. The line joins as much as it divides, and places Wallinger's work in a conversation with the rest of Tate Britain.

Brian Haw is a driven individual, whose entire life is given over to his kerbside protest. To ask what drives him, apart from his moral and political convictions, is to diminish the exemplary nature of his protest, whatever one might think of the manner of his dissent. Yet he is not unlike the figures Wallinger has focused on before. Throughout his career, Wallinger has returned again and again to the theme of Englishness as a trope for identity, and to the events, myths, faiths and individuals that make up a sense of national belonging. In Passport Control, 1988, Wallinger graffitied over his own portrait, turning his photo into various ethnic stereotypes (orthodox Jew, Arab, Chinese). In his 2000 film Threshold to the Kingdom, he showed passengers emerging through passport control at London City Airport, in slo-mo and to the strains of Allegri's setting of the 51st Psalm. We see their ecstatic expressions and relief, as though they had indeed passed a spiritual, as much as a bureaucratic, test. The film is deeply sad, a miserable miracle.

Everyone from the Women's Institute to the far right has claimed William Blake's Jerusalem for themselves, but in his own work Wallinger reminds us of Blake's radicalism; he has used the word Jerusalem as if it were revolutionary graffiti, spraying it over his own rendering of a painting by George Stubbs.

Wallinger once recorded a performance of the comedian Tommy Cooper and played it backwards, reflected in a mirror, a sort of loving homage to Cooper's anarchic stage confusion. Recreating Haw's protest is itself a kind of reversal, as well as a duplication. By bringing the protest inside an institution, Wallinger gives us a chance almost to freeze it, presenting it as a simulacrum of itself.

He is very good at teasing out meanings and metaphors. In a number of paintings and videos, he has analysed the culture of horse breeding and racing - in which he saw the dynamics of race, sex and class at work. In 1994, he bought a real live racehorse, calling it A Real Work of Art and registering his own racing colours.

Looking at State Britain, I am reminded of numerous earlier works by the artist. Haw's protest stems from his evangelical faith. In several works, including 1999's Ecce Homo, Wallinger has examined what kind of faith an artwork might now exemplify or entail. Ecce Homo placed a cast of an anonymous young man dressed as Christ on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square in 1999. Wallinger's Christ was not just an everyman, he was a stand-in. What, I asked a few months ago on these pages, would be the reaction to the placing of such an overt Christian symbol there today? It might well be taken as a provocation. Certainly, it is within the sacred kilometre.

Is State Britain a protest, a readymade, a simulation or an appropriation? It is all these things - an installation, an institutional critique, an example of relational aesthetics. It touches all bases, without becoming tedious or hectoring. The title may be a poor pun, but the work itself is clever and barbed. It makes us think of the mores of recent installation art, about the "public" nature of a space such as Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries and about the Britishness of the gallery itself - what is and is not exhibited here? State Britain raises more questions than it answers, but it is not glib. While Haw's placards announce the campaigner's beliefs, Wallinger takes a step back from the slogans themselves. Walking among the banners, you realise you look at them differently here.

Wallinger is asking us to view his recreation of Haw's stuff as art (even if some of it, like Banksy's image, already is art of a sort); he is not asking us to see Haw himself as an artist. Instead, he wants us to think more in terms of place and context - another of modern art's modes, the site-specific. In an accompanying exhibition publication, Wallinger presents a montage of writings - taken from George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson, the journalist Henry Porter and Tony Blair himself ("When I pass protesters every day at Downing Street, and believe me, you name it, they protest against it, I may not like what they call me, but I thank God they can. That's called freedom").

Since the 1960s, many artists, from Hans Haacke to Daniel Buren, Cildo Meireles to Allan Sekula, have made work which offers a critique of the institution that houses it, and the structures, financial and ideological, that support it. However critical such art may itself be, it also serves to highlight the institution's liberalism, by allowing it to be there in the first place. Such inclusiveness, as Susan Sontag argued, defuses the very criticism being offered. What State Britain offers is a sort of portrait of British institutions at a time of war, of the lip service government pays to dissent, on the attacks being made on our freedoms in the name of security, on the impotence of protest and of art itself as a form of protest. How rich this work is, and how saddening our state.

'Unfathomable, repellent, delightful', The Guardian

2007-01-17T08:15:00.000-08:00

Is there such a thing as "women's art"? Do we any longer need to think of women as a special group? Should there be a prize for women artists? For many, the terms female and male are simply cultural. They may also seem dangerously binary and - in the context of prizes or exhibitions such as a forthcoming show celebrating Margaret Salmon, the first winner of the MaxMara art prize for women at the Whitechapel - likely to create a ghetto of Otherness, a special pleading that supports the old patriarchal order. At least 50 per cent of art students are female. Why is it that over the 19 years of the Turner prize, only three winners have been women? At least 50 per cent of architectural students are female. Why is it, then, that the architectural profession remains dominated by men? Why in the world at large are there so few women leaders? And why is it that, in the 21st century, violence continues, as artist Barbara Kruger depicted in an installation at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art in 2005, to "kill or incapacitate more women aged between 15 and 40 worldwide than cancer, malaria, accidents and war combined". Most would agree that we should not define ourselves in terms of gender, but the context in which we live and work remains profoundly structured by it.

In 1871 the poet Arthur Rimbaud made a prophecy that would not be fully realised until the 20th century: "When women's unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man - hitherto detestable - having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them." Perhaps the greatest of the modern avant gardes came with the rise of women artists, writers, film-makers and performers. Having been excluded from the canon, women artists had no choice but to embark on the strange, the unfathomable, the repellent, as well as the delightful.

But it was only from the 1960s onwards that feminism and art really joined forces. Through a series of radical actions and experiments, women artists ranging from Louise Bourgeois to Mary Kelly made the transition from object to subject. With all the oedipal drive of the modernist avant gardes, some took direct aim at the enemy. In 1961 Niki de Saint Phalle attached bags of paint to a wall and shot them: "The painting was the victim. Who was the painting? Daddy? All men? Small men? Tall men? Big men? Fat men? Men? My brother John? Or was the painting me? ... The new bloodbath of red, yellow and blue splattered over the pure white relief metamorphosed the painting into a tabernacle for death and resurrection. I was shooting at myself, society with its injustices. I was shooting at my own violence and the violence of the times. By shooting at my own violence, I no longer had to carry it inside of me like a burden."

Women declined the role of the naked muse and of the countless variations on the madonna/whore riff that have played throughout western art, to reclaim their bodies. In 1975 Carolee Schneemann appeared naked in a Long Island gallery. Having first adopted the pose of a life model, she then read out feminist texts inscribed on a scroll that she pulled slowly from her vagina. In 1979, at the Whitechapel Gallery in the East End of London, audiences could witness Eva Hesse's redefinition of painting and sculpture in installations that fused the two. Others jettisoned the paintbrush and the chisel in favour of the camera, pioneering a new vision in film and photography - we have only to think of Chantal Akerman's meticulous portrait of a widow's survival strategies in Jeanne Dielman (1975) or Cindy Sherman's uncanny self-portraits. Women artists also insisted on the place of political thought, anthropology and, perhaps most significantly, psychoanalysis within art theory; and that issues of gender could not be seen in isolation from issues of race, class, sexuality and geography.

Representations of women continue to reinforce their absence from spheres of power. And on an individual level, it is without question a challenge for women to continue making work, to earn a living and to remain visible in the art world while having children. Being available to take up residencies, travel to biennales and openings, can be out of the question. It can be pretty spooky just walking home at night from a studio in an old factory in Hackney. If a group exhibition features only men, it passes without comment. If it features only women it is immediately described as "a women's show". Once you have made it into the commercial gallery, other factors come into play. It is the financial sector that is fuelling the current art market boom. Almost exclusively male, does it privilege art that shares its ethos of machismo?

Many extraordinary women today have transcended these challenges to make a major contribution to the art of our times - in Britain, we have only to think of Tomma Abts, Fiona Banner, Tracey Emin, Susan Hiller, Sarah Lucas, Cornelia Parker, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Eva Rothschild or Rachel Whiteread. However, I would argue that there is still a need for a prize for art, or literature (celebrated now by the Orange prize for fiction, which marked its 10th anniversary last year), or architecture created by women. Prizes do many things. They are a fantastic way of scanning a huge field of creative production and sifting out significant practitioners. They introduce the judges, the media and the public to new work. They can help us all navigate the great cultural proliferation of the 21st century and focus on something that has been judged worthy of attention by a group of peers. Perhaps most importantly, they can make the difference for someone who has struggled against the odds to succeed. Critically, prizes for women artists will encourage those who have just started out to pursue their dream, and offer all of us a vision - strange, unfathomable - that has not yet been seen in the dominant order of things.

A movable street scene LATimes

2007-01-14T09:38:00.000-08:00

A once-vibrant work of public art obscured by grime and graffiti is the focus of a "restoration" of sorts by the Petersen Automotive Museum and SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center.

"Los Angeles: The Living City," a damaged 16-by-94-foot mural outside H&K Supermarket on Western Avenue, can be seen as it was with the installation of a one-third-scale, digital photographic reproduction in the Petersen's May Family Discovery Center. The Petersen installed a copy of the mural, created by Sandra Drinning in 1997, to highlight L.A.'s relationship with cars, culture and history.But taggers have taken a toll on Drinning's quirky vista of L.A. freeways and landmarks. And at some point, graffiti artists covered large sections with foliage, buildings and people in an approximation of Drinning's style.

No large-scale photograph of the unblemished work was available for the creation of the Petersen's replica, so SPARC's digital lab director, Farhad Akhmetov, did the restoration using a composite of several images taken when the mural was completed. Muralists Martha Ramirez and Judith Baca, SPARC artistic director and co-founder, filled in gaps by painting directly on the replica.

The Petersen split the $15,000 cost with SPARC, which commissioned the mural in 1991 — and would like to restore it someday. The replica "doesn't replace the piece on the street," Baca said, "but I think it can go someplace else and be as beautiful and interactive as it was on the street."

Baca said efforts to contact Drinning have been unsuccessful.

In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism, NYTimes

2007-01-07T09:02:00.000-08:00

After the peppered beef carpaccio and before the pan-fried sea bass there were raucous toasts and the clinking of wine glasses in the V.I.P. room of New Heights, a jazzy restaurant in this city’s most luxurious location, overlooking the Bund.

Wang Guangyi, one of China’s pioneering contemporary artists, was there. So were Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi and 20 other well-known Chinese artists and their guests, many of whom had been flown in from Beijing to celebrate the opening of a solo exhibition of new works by Zeng Hao, another rising star in China’s bubbly art scene.

“We’ve had opening dinners before,” said the Shanghai artist Zhou Tiehai, sipping Chilean red wine, “but nothing quite like this until very recently.”

The dinner, held on a recent Saturday night in a restaurant located on the top floor of a historic building that also houses an Armani store and the Shanghai Gallery of Art, was symbolic of the soaring fortunes of Chinese contemporary art.

In 2006 Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the world’s biggest auction houses, sold $190 million worth of Asian contemporary art, most of it Chinese, in a series of record-breaking auctions in New York, London and Hong Kong. In 2004 the two houses combined sold $22 million in Asian contemporary art.

The climax came at a Beijing auction in November when a painting by Liu Xiaodong, 43, sold to a Chinese entrepreneur for $2.7 million, the highest price ever paid for a piece by a Chinese artist who began working after 1979, when loosened economic restrictions spurred a resurgence in contemporary art.

That price put Mr. Liu in the company of the few living artists, including Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, whose work has sold for $2 million or more at auction.

“This has come out of nowhere,” said Henry Howard-Sneyd, global head of Asian arts at Sotheby’s, which, like Christie’s, has just started a division focusing on contemporary Chinese art.

With auction prices soaring, hundreds of new studios, galleries and private art museums are opening in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Chinese auction houses that once specialized in traditional ink paintings are now putting contemporary experimental artworks on the block.

Western galleries, especially in Europe, are rushing to sign up unknown painters; artists a year out of college are selling photographic works for as much as $10,000 each; well-known painters have yearlong waiting lists; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Pompidou Center in Paris are considering opening branches in China.

“What is happening in China is what happened in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century,” said Michael Goedhuis, a collector and art dealer specializing in Asian contemporary art who has galleries in London and New York. “New ground is being broken. There’s a revolution under way.”

But the auction frenzy has also sparked debate here about whether sales are artificially inflating prices and encouraging speculators, rather than real collectors, to enter the art market.

Auction houses “sell art like people sell cabbage,” said Weng Ling, the director of the Shanghai Gallery of Art. “They are not educating the public or helping artists develop. Many of them know nothing about art.”

But the boom in Chinese contemporary art — reinforced by record sales in New York last year — has also brought greater recognition to a group of experimental artists who grew up during China’s brutal Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

After the 1989 government crackdown in Tiananmen Square, avant-garde art was often banned from being shown here because it was deemed hostile or anti-authoritarian. Through the 1990s many artists struggled to earn a living, considering themselves lucky to sell a painting for $500.

That has all changed. These days China’s leading avant-garde artists have morphed into multi-millionaires who show up at exhibitions wearing Gucci and Ferragamo.

Wang Guangyi, best-known for his Great Criticism series of Cultural Revolution-style paintings emblazoned with the names of popular Western brands, like Coke, Swatch and Gucci, drives a Jaguar and owns a 10,000-square-foot luxury villa on the outskirts of Beijing.

Yue Minjun, who makes legions of colorful smiling figures, has a walled-off suburban Beijing compound with an 8,000-square-foot home and studio. Fang Lijun, a “Cynical Realist” painter whose work captures artists’ post-Tiananmen disillusionment, owns six restaurants in Beijing and operates a small hotel in western Yunnan province. Read the whole article.

Oaxaca calls upon its artists , LATimes

2006-12-29T10:14:00.000-08:00

Rows of poinsettias are rising along the zócalo, where police and protesters recently brawled. Fresh coats of paint are being slapped on buildings to cover up angry graffiti.

Even though the barricades have been removed and the blood has been mopped from the streets, this colonial-era city is struggling to recover from a violent spasm that scarred its buildings, traumatized its citizens and left as many as a dozen people dead over a seven-month span.
"It's a tense calm," said Francisco Toledo, the Zapotec Indian considered by many to be Mexico's greatest living graphic artist.

Oaxaca is now counting on perhaps its most precious resource to help lead the city's comeback: its world-renowned artists and artisans, with Toledo at the forefront, and its global reputation for exuberant creativity.

Just a few weeks ago, central Oaxaca was a combat zone. Thousands of public school teachers who'd been on strike since May, and their allies, were battling federal police and supporters of Oaxaca's autocratic state Gov. Ulises Ruiz. Concrete chunks and sheet metal blocked the streets. Spray-painted slogans covered large swaths of the city's baroque churches and government offices.

Though federal police finally retook control of the city of 260,000, the political dispute is far from settled. Possibly as many as 100 demonstrators remain under custody. Human rights groups charge that some detainees have been tortured and "disappeared." Demonstrators around the world have called for Ruiz to resign.

Toledo, a Oaxaca state native, characteristically has been near the center of efforts to resolve the crisis. Though the artist always has insisted that his mystical, folkloric-modernist images of rabbits, lizards and other creatures don't contain political subtexts, he is continually lending himself to social causes.

Born in southern Oaxaca state in 1940, Toledo has profoundly influenced local culture and politics both through his art and as one of the leaders of the non-governmental agency PROOAX (Council for the Defense and Conservation of the Cultural and Natural Patrimony of the State of Oaxaca). Four years ago, Toledo and PROOAX blocked McDonald's from plunking down a set of its golden arches in Oaxaca's venerable zócalo, or central public square.

During the height of the recent protests, the Institute of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca, which Toledo founded and leads, served as a temporary aid center for the injured. Doctors were on call to provide treatment to the wounded. "Never have we had so many visits," said Toledo, with a touch of irony.

A longtime advocate of indigenous people's rights, Toledo is now involved with a group that's raising money to provide legal counsel to incarcerated protesters. He also hopes to gain attention for "citizen proposals" to combat the poverty and other social problems that have bedeviled Oaxaca for centuries.

"If this government doesn't hear them, what happened is going to recur again and again," he said in an interview in the institute's stately, tree-lined courtyard. "It's very important … to create a consciousness among the citizens, the business managers, the church and the politicians that it's time to change."

As the political process stumbles forward, many Oaxacans have been busily restoring their battered city. In the zócalo, the profusion of poinsettias, many donated by ordinary Oaxacans, temporarily fills the gaps left by plants uprooted from public flowerbeds during the demonstrations and police crackdown.

Carlos E. Melgoza Castillo, director general of the Institute of Cultural Patrimony for Oaxaca state, said that building repairs have been complicated by the varied types of materials that were damaged. But he said none of the damages would be "permanent."

Funds for the city's recovery are flowing in from the foundation of wealthy Oaxaca businessman-philanthropist Alfredo Harp Helú, who helped PROOAX revitalize historic Santo Domingo church as a cultural center and keep it from being converted into a hotel in the mid-1990s. The federal National Institute of Anthropology and History has been overseeing much of the reconstruction.

"The greatest damage isn't in the monuments," Melgoza Castillo said. "It's the very bad example that children and young people received over six months, that the way to show your disagreement with someone is to paint on the walls. This is much harder than to restore monuments or walls, to restore the conscience of the new generation."

Though state police in full body armor remain posted near the center, many parts of the city have reverted to their usual rhythms, and a major charm offensive is underway to convince outsiders that things are back to normal, more or less.

Marimba bands are again performing around the zócalo. Last week, a trickle of foreigners and locals stopped by the Museum of Contemporary Art, located in an elegant colonial palace thought to have belonged to the conqueror Hernán Cortes, to examine Javier Martín's exhibition of colossal human-head sculptures.

Esperanza Arizmendi Bazan, one of 500 women who belong to the arts cooperative Women Artisans of the Regions of Oaxaca, said that the cooperative currently is doing only about 1% of its regular business. But she said the people would not allow "magic Oaxaca to die."

"The affection and the love of the Oaxacans that we always have had toward international tourism, I hope to God, that this will come back," said Arizmendi, who makes pre-Hispanic-style ceramics, some of which are used in the popular Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and Guelaguetza festivities.

Isolated for centuries by the surrounding Sierra Madre mountain range, Oaxaca has grown into one of Mexico's most popular tourist centers. Many are drawn to the arts scene, which received a major boost from the late modernist master painter Rufino Tamayo, whose intermittent presence in his native state drew numerous other artists, as later did that of Toledo and another painter, Rodolfo Morales, sometimes called the Mexican Marc Chagall.

Alicia Pesqueira de Esesarte, director of the Museum of Prehispanic Art of Mexico in Oaxaca, which houses Tamayo's personal collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, credits Toledo with attracting to Oaxaca a new generation of artists who share some of his beliefs in the importance of social justice and equality. "There are people [artists] that have a very important sense of society," she said. "I feel that their energy, their interest and their prestige are going to definitively make the restoration."

Yet Toledo and others hope that, in regaining its cultural equilibrium, Oaxaca won't simply regress to the political status quo. Oaxaca consistently ranks near the bottom of Mexican states in wealth, education and health care. Thousands have fled to the U.S. in search of work.

Toledo speculates that the recent problems here may help draw attention to these chronic deficiencies. But he also fears that the central city is fast becoming a boutique town like Venice or San Miguel de Allende, where rich foreign visitors are displacing poor locals. "The life of the city already is lost," he said.

Selma Holo, director of USC's Fisher Gallery and author of "Oaxaca at the Crossroads: Managing Memory, Negotiating Change," said in an e-mail that she believed the city would recover from what she called "a nasty, brutish interruption."

"Life is never easy in Oaxaca, but that does not seem to stop the Oaxacan artists and galleristas and restaurateurs, in the long run, from fighting the good fight," she said. Besides Toledo, she pointed to artists such as Demián Flores, Laurie Litowitz and José Luis García as "people with vision" who could be living and working in any of the world's major art centers, but have kept their roots here.

"There is something, as they used to say about Florence in the 15th century, that is 'in the water' in Oaxaca," Holo wrote, "and that something which is generative and healthy will not be permanently poisoned by this awful political mess that it has suffered."

Though Toledo earlier this year announced he was withdrawing from social activities to concentrate more on his art, those plans have been put on hold for now. "It's a necessary evil," he said, laughing, of his political activities.

China Celebrates the Year of the Art Market NYTimes

2006-12-26T16:34:00.000-08:00

COLLECTORS of contemporary art had a new set of names to learn this year: those of Chinese artists whose careers are soaring in a new and frenzied sector of the market. Much of the art is politically charged, with references to Mao Zedong, Tiananmen Square and, increasingly, globalization and consumer culture. Among the hottest names are Zhang Xiaogang, whose “Bloodline Series” consists of portraits set during the Cultural Revolution; the painter Yue Minjun, whose portraits of Chinese men look very much like himself; and Zhang Huan, a conceptual artist who produces works like “To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond.” (That piece was part of a performance in which Mr. Zhang photographed local workers standing in a pool of water to show how little effect they had on the water.)

These images can be found in galleries, art fairs and auction houses in every one of the world’s art-buying capitals, often fetching several million dollars apiece. Charles Saatchi, the London advertising magnate, collector and gallery owner, has begun snapping up works by Chinese artists, many of which he plans to exhibit in his new gallery, under construction on Kings Road in London.

“In a single year we sold over $60 million worth of Chinese contemporary art, whereas in 2005 we sold only about $15 million,” said Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby’s managing director in Asia and Australia. In April, the auction house devoted a special New York sale to this category that brought $13.2 million. The prices have been climbing steadily ever since.

A November auction at Christie’s, which holds its Chinese contemporary art sales in Hong Kong, brought in $68 million. Yet Christie’s experts in New York and London think it’s a mistake to market these artists in a narrow category. As a result the auction house also sprinkles such works into its general postwar and contemporary art sales. (Sotheby’s holds auctions devoted strictly to Chinese contemporary art in New York and Hong Kong.)

Whether the boom in prices for Chinese art will last is anyone’s guess. “It may feel like the first flush of fashion, but it’s actually a much deeper market,” said Brett Gorvy, one of the heads of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department worldwide. Mr. Howard-Sneyd said the soaring sales totals had more to do with years of underrecognition of these artists rather than inflated bidding.

So it may be an oversimplification to predict that this is a bubble about to burst. “While there has been a rapid internationalization of Chinese contemporary art,” Mr. Howard-Sneyd said, “there’s bound to be a correction, and then prices will simply level off.”

In Houston, Art Is Where the Home Is, NYTimes

2006-12-17T14:20:00.000-08:00

ON a strangely balmy late autumn afternoon, while the art world busied itself in Miami with beachfront reservations and limo drivers, Rick Lowe was, as he generally is, on Holman Street in southeast Houston’s predominantly black Third Ward, greeting another out-of-towner.

In the gloaming, decrepit houses and weedy lots dotted some surrounding blocks, on the edges of which were new double-garage brick homes — signs of encroaching gentrification, an unwanted side effect of Mr. Lowe’s work.

Although it’s hard to tell at a glance, this stretch of Holman may be the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country — a project that is miles away, geographically and philosophically, from Chelsea and Art Basel and the whole money-besotted paper-thin art scene.

Mr. Lowe, a lanky, amiable, remarkably youthful-looking 45-year-old artist from Alabama, moved to Houston 21 years ago and lives here in the Third Ward, where he founded Project Row Houses. In 1990, “a group of high school students came over to my studio,” he recalled. “I was doing big, billboard-size paintings and cutout sculptures dealing with social issues, and one of the students told me that, sure, the work reflected what was going on in his community, but it wasn’t what the community needed. If I was an artist, he said, why didn’t I come up with some kind of creative solution to issues instead of just telling people like him what they already knew. That was the defining moment that pushed me out of the studio.”

He tried to think afresh what it meant to be a truly political artist, beyond devising the familiar agitprop, gallery decoration and plop-art-style public sculpture. He considered what the German artist Joseph Beuys once described as “the enlarged conception of Art,” which includes, as Beuys put it, “every human action.” Life itself might be a work of art, Mr. Lowe realized: art can be the way people live.

And the Third Ward could be his canvas. He was inspired by John Biggers, the late African-American muralist who painted black neighborhoods of shotgun houses like the ones on Holman Street and showed them to be places of pride and community, not poverty and crime. “It hit me,” Mr. Lowe recalled, “that we should find an area like the one that Biggers painted that was historically significant and bring it to life.”

Behind him as he spoke, a phalanx of 22 gleaming shotgun houses stretched across two blocks. Built in 1930 as tenant shacks, derelict by the early ’90s, they were bought by Mr. Lowe and a coalition of artists and others. To Mr. Lowe they were like “found objects.”

Seed money came from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. The director of the Menil Collection gave his staff Mondays off to help renovate. Chevron redid the outside of a dozen buildings. Hundreds of volunteers pitched in to clear trash and sweep up used needles, hang wallboard and fortify porches. A local church adopted a house, and so did people and families from the neighborhood.

One of those people was Garnet Coleman, the neighborhood’s representative in the Texas House. His father’s family has lived in the Third Ward for 100 years. “Art is about the human condition,” he told me when I phoned him the other day. “You wipe out a people when you wipe out their history. What Rick is trying to do is to restore that history.”

The campus, as Mr. Lowe calls it, now includes eight houses for visiting artists, local and international. “We give them a key,” he said. “They come for anywhere from a week to five months. They can do whatever they want. There are a lot of other places for artists to prepare exhibitions for museums or alternative spaces. We encourage them to figure out how to be creative within this community.”

The artist Sam Durant has told me that what he did at Project Row Houses nearly a decade ago was still “the show I am most proud of” because “my work could have meaning beyond the parameters of the Euro-ethnic art institutions, the status quo contemporary art world.” Whitfield Lovell made wall drawings of African-Americans, based on early-20th-century studio portrait photographs, in the only row house where the wallboards had been left intact. That project, he said, remained a “pivotal piece” in his career. read the article.

More Than You Can See: Storm of Art Engulfs Miami, The NY Times

2006-12-10T14:56:00.000-08:00

It’s Baselmania week in Miami: the week the art world gets high on art fairs, its current drug of choice. This year there are said to be 13 additional fairs grouped around the mother ship, Art Basel Miami Beach, now in its fifth year. Once, an art fair was a concentrated event; more and more it is a catalyst for diffuse, ancillary, tag-along, glamour-by-association shop-a-thons. There are spin-off art fairs and design shows, museum openings, gallery exhibitions, private collection viewings, book signings, product introductions, fashion events and sundry art parades — all unfolding amid a good deal of social to-ing and fro-ing, seeing and being seen at parties, dinners, receptions and brunches.

Art Basel Miami Beach alone now offers more than any one person can see: in addition to nearly 180 exhibitors in the Miami Beach Convention Center, there are panels, lectures, a video lounge, a sound-art lounge, artist projects and Art Positions, the minifair held in containers on the beach. So in a way you’re back at square one, looking at the art. Seeing what I could — some of Basel Miami Beach and Positions, much of the New Art Dealers Alliance fair known as NADA, assorted museum exhibitions, some private collection shows — I had a fabulous time.

It is probably de rigueur to note, at this point, the insatiable appetite for art at fairs like this: the mindless buying frenzy, the herdlike pursuit of certain names, the trophy hunters with hedge fund money, the 100 museum-led groups that have descended on Miami this week, according to The Art Newspaper (which swings into a daily publication schedule for this fair). But the most valuable commodity at an art fair is information, and that is available to anyone.

The information has a particular intensity here. Unlike London, where the major museums are setting their exhibition clocks to Frieze Art Fair time, or New York, where the art machine is big enough to swallow almost any art fair whole, Miami offers what might be called a level playing field for different viewing circumstances: i.e., fairs, museums, the private collector/alternative spaces and a few other ventures. All contribute equally to the flow of information.

All sorts of new stuff fills the NADA fair, which occupies a sprawling white stucco building in the Wynwood section of Miami. At the London dealer Dicksmith’s booth, for example, the Japanese-born video artist Meiro Koizumi has a short video titled “Amazing Grace,” in which his face serves as whipping post, lead character and stage set all at once. For something more restrained, try Emily Wardill’s equally engaging, if more abstract, films at Jonathan Viner, another London dealer.

Kazok Hall, from Vienna, has a beautiful oversize rag rug, with fringe as long as hair extensions. It was made by Fabrics Interseason, a fashion collaborative that converts unsold clothes to rugs at the end of each season. Yet at Leo Koenig, a big, gaudy new painting by Peter Saul, now in his 70s, is in full cry.

At Art Basel Miami Beach the outer ring of the convention center, called Art Nova, is devoted to younger galleries and feels livelier than NADA. One of the dealers there, Catriona Jeffries from Vancouver, is introducing the artist Judy Radul with “Five Pieces of Relation,” an elaborate yet tight multimedia sculpture installation. The work sets the mind to thinking about the souls of animals, employing a teleprompter, a live camera, several small monitors and music.

All along the Art Nova pipeline, you run into pockets of resistance to the art world’s consumer culture. At the Maccarone booth you enter a small room and see (along with the artist himself) Anthony Burdin’s latest hallucinatory excursion into video, sound and the desert landscape. At Susanne Vielmetter, Rodney McMillian bucks the system with 15 identical photographs of a rather beat-up plaster bust honoring some forgotten businessman. As Ms. Vielmetter explained, quite happily, she expects to confirm Mr. McMillian’s theory that people won’t buy what is clearly plentiful.

Read here the complete article.

'I'm sure they were thinking it was time a woman won', The Guardian

2006-12-08T06:38:00.000-08:00

The night before, she had won the Turner Prize, but yesterday morning Tomma Abts' composure was such that you wondered how she'd look if she hadn't won. The 38-year-old German painter was pleased by the result, of course. But she didn't think it changed anything. "It's nice," she said, in a mild, pleasant voice as she lifted her shoulders in the international sign for "whatever".

Abts' win on Monday night has been widely interpreted as the Turner Prize correcting itself. As well as being the first woman and the first painter to win the prize in almost a decade, after years of artists with personas as feverishly worked upon as their art, here was someone about whom we knew practically nothing: 38 years old, from Kiel in Germany but resident in London for the past 12 years, and (rumour had it) the former girlfriend of Chris Ofili - that's pretty much it. Efforts to extract more would, as you will see, be a painful experience. We meet around the corner from Abts' studio in Clerkenwell, which she has occupied since she first came to London on a grant. She had been living in Berlin, doing a mixed media art course in which she had concentrated mainly on film - "structuralist films" - while doing her own painting on the side. The Berlin art scene at that time was a little "sleepy", she says, whereas London was just starting to swing with the YBA movement. Abts moved to the city not because she wanted to join in - she's not really a joining-in kind of gal - but rather to enjoy, at a tangent, the energy and interest in art that it generated. "It's quite nice to have that bit of distance, to have my own personal space to develop my work," she says.

For a couple of years she got by on the arts grant, and then was forced to find work. "I had strange jobs, like telephone marketing type jobs for German companies." It was only four years ago that she was able to live solely off her art, and it was a huge relief finally to give up the day jobs.

Abts has never had formal training in fine art and hasn't taken a painting lesson in her life. The town she grew up in was "not very exciting" - she summarises its main features as "sea" and "nice landscape" - but the idea that news of her win might appear in the local paper makes her smile broadly. Abts' parents still live in Kiel and told her proudly that she had made the national news in Germany on Monday night. They have always encouraged her, she says, and her upbringing was "very free." I ask if her parents do anything artistic.

"No."

What do they do?

"Do I have to say?"

Yes.

"My mum is a teacher in a primary school and my dad is a gynaecologist." She smiles sheepishly.

Is it true that you used to go out with Chris Ofili?

The smile falters. "I won't talk about that."

I tell her that I hope she did.

"Why?"

Because then you could be characterised as a former golden couple, the Posh and Becks of the art world. (Ofili won the Turner Prize in 1998.)

Abts looks horrified. "No comment! I don't think these private things should be part of art, in a way." Without naming names, she goes off on a riff about self-cannibalising artists who make their careers by rummaging about in their own detritus. "It [the Turner] used to be such a personality-based prize and I think that's not appropriate, necessarily, for art. I think it should be about the art and not the personality. These private things should not be mentioned."

OK. Are you married?

"No." She cracks up laughing.

Abts used to work on canvasses of all sizes, but somewhere along the line she started feeling most comfortable with a single size, a modest 19in by 15in, and has stuck with it ever since. She paints sitting down, and the canvas fits the arc of her arm. It's an agonisingly slow process, she says, and she will sometimes put a canvas away for a couple of years before returning to complete it. "They're such slow paintings to make that I think they might also be slow to look at ... that people might not really notice what's going on."

This isn't false modesty. Abts was surprised by the warm reaction of the critics to her work in the run-up to the Turner Prize. (In October, the Guardian's critic Adrian Searle wrote: "Abts' quiet and disturbing paintings seem utterly right and unexpected. They ought to win.") She has always painted for herself, on the side, and the fact that it has ended in glory is something she finds quite amazing. But her self-containment that might also be construed as arrogance. She won't name any influences, or works of art that first inspired her as a child, or her favourite past winner of the Turner Prize. She's not even sure she could name them.

I ask what she thinks of her co-nominee, Phil Collins, whose conceptual work based on the perils of reality TV was about as far from Abts' paintings as you could get. "It seemed to me," she says, "that for what he was doing, he was doing it very well." This sounds pointed, but perhaps that's just wishful thinking.

It is said that winning the Turner Prize doubles the value of an artist's work overnight. No, says Abts. "Maybe some galleries and artists would do that, but not the people I work with." She considers art a calling, not a career, and she didn't go into it to make money - well, who does? Actually, she says, she thinks young artists today have a rather warped attitude in this regard. "It seems that these young artists think of it as a career choice, to do art; they think that it will pay off and they'll make money." She looks doubtfully out the window. "Maybe they will."

Why does she think so few women have won the Turner Prize? "I don't know, because to me it feels that in the last few years a lot of female artists have been very dominant. In a way maybe [the prize] hasn't represented what's happened. I'm sure they were thinking that it was time a woman won it. I'm sure there are those kind of strategic decisions [going on]."

Abts' paintings are like palimpsests, multi-layered, and it gives one little jolts of pleasure to look at them, although it's impossible to say why. They require no external stimuli, no subject matter and no obvious end point. Starting a new painting is, says Abts, "the easiest part for me, because I have so many visual ideas. Colours, or starting to make shapes or thinking about where things go, that's easy. Then just trying to make it more concrete and trying to make some kind of meaning."

What is the meaning? Abts doesn't mind art that requires an explanation alongside it, but equally, she doesn't think one needs to explain - or even know - why something is good. There has been much discussion about how she can tell when one of her paintings is finished. Instinct, she says. "A question of balancing it all out or making it darker or ..." Anyway, she just knows. She very rarely abandons a painting, but when she does it's because she has painted over the canvas too many times and it has become bumpy.

"I can't really ever say what it will look like or how it will finish or what will make it work. It's a different idea or moment for each painting. It's not really... I try so much with the composition and colour, and get closer and closer, and then there's always a moment where there's a surprise, when I try something and ... everything is in place."

Isn't it scary, not being able to formalise what she is doing, has done, or is going to do - why any of it works or doesn't work? "It is scary!" she says. "Sometimes I think, God, I don't know if I will ever finish another painting because I don't know how to do it. But then it keeps happening ..."

She frowns and has another crack at it. "What is an interesting idea for me is something being ... an image and at the same time an object." We talk about Jasper Johns' Flag as an example of this: a painting, a flag, and also a representation of a flag. "When I finish [a piece of art] it becomes congruent with itself."

There is a confounded silence. "I don't know what that means," she says, and, with a lack of pretension we may not see again in a Turner Prize winner, laughs uproariousy.

Past winners on the Turner effect

Gillian Wearing, 1997 winner

The main thing I remember thinking after winning was: "How am I going to make work under this spotlight?"

That lasted quite a few months. I turned down a lot of media, particularly television. Apart from trying to keep a low profile, my experience was very good - though one curator told me they had been criticised for giving me a solo show so soon after, because it was too obvious. In fact, the show had been planned a year before I was nominated.

You can't control nominations. Some brilliant artists haven't been nominated, even when they have made significant work within the year being considered. Nominations reflect the judges' subjectivity.

Martin Creed, 2001 winner

I thought about whether to accept the nomination for a few days. But the thing is, it offers such a big audience. Winning had a good effect, I think. It's a stamp of approval, so it gives you confidence. Much as I thought I could do without it, I desperately wanted to win. I'd been brought up to think it was a bad thing to be competitive, in a moral sense, but I'm comfortable with it now. I've realised I'm just as human as everyone else. A lot of artists are very competitive.

Right now, I'm working on some paintings and drawings. I've been collecting hundreds of pens. Each pen is different and has a different colour, and I'm doing a different drawing for each pen.

Grayson Perry, 2003 winner

It didn't do me any harm. Overall, it doesn't make a huge difference. Artwork is not judged by popular success. It's not like the Booker Prize. Competitions are often considered a bit vulgar, but I've never had a problem with being vulgar. I enjoyed dealing with all the media attention. I wouldn't have refused a nomination - I'm not that cool.

Currently, I'm working on pieces for a gallery in Japan. It's in a variety of mediums - ceramics, metals.

· Interviews by Tancred Newbury

Season's greetings from Banksy and friends, The Guardian

2006-12-03T06:39:00.000-08:00

It used to be a Clarks shoeshop, though the stabbed teddy bear with a kitchen knife still dangling from its stomach in the window should give away its change of occupancy. Inside, the only shoes you will find are on the feet of bodies which look real but are models. One appears to have put his head through a wall.

This is Santa's Ghetto, a gallery and amusement arcade founded by the elusive graffiti artist Banksy, which opens for 23 days in London's West End to show art as well as selling affordable works.

"I felt the spirit of Christmas was being lost," said Banksy (real name possibly Robin Banks or Robert Banks, or possibly neither). "It was becoming increasingly uncommercialised and more and more to do with religion so we decided to open our own shop and sell pointless stuff you didn't need."

Inside is an entertaining mixed bag of work from about 20 underground artists which might make battling the Oxford Street throngs a touch more bearable, although following the instructions on one of Ben Turnbull's Break In The Case Of Emergency boxes may not be advisable. A handgun is inside.

Banksy's work is spottable. In one big painting depicting the wicked witch and Hansel and Gretel, the witch has been replaced by singer Michael Jackson trying to entice the children with a candy walking stick.

Rather ostentatiously, there are two Mona Lisas. One has Marge Simpson's towered blue hair and the other is showing her backside. Other works have a Hello Kitty influence, although if you look long enough you will notice the sweet girl holding the kitten is also holding a hand grenade.

Kelsey Brookes is described by the gallery as a west coast surfer and panda painter and in real life he does indeed have the blond, blue-eyed, tanned look of someone about to run into the warm Pacific. "I was involved last year and it's something you look forward to," said Brookes, over from San Diego for two weeks. "It seems like a gallery that's done by the artists, there's not a heavy galleryist's hand here."

The aim is to be affordable and it's possible to buy screen prints from £35 up to £500. Or you could spend a lot more. One work already sold is Emma Heron's vend-a-limb machine, which has a black child with his leg blown off looking longingly inside.

Why not have a go at throwing hoops at religious iconography? If you get all three, including one over a rotating Virgin Mary, you will win a Gorillaz cuddly toy.

The religious theme continues in a darkened TV room where you can sit on a dirty sofa and watch video art, such as two doodled men on a cross discussing the "son of whatshisname."

The Santa's Ghetto "squat art concept store" began five years ago and has been in various locations around London, though this is the first time it has alighted on Oxford Street, right next door to Tottenham Court Road tube station.

Banksy himself goes from strength to strength and you would have to be particularly well-heeled to call his work affordable these days. Earlier this year it was revealed that Christina Aguilera had paid £25,000 for three of his works, including a pornographic picture of Queen Victoria in a lesbian pose with a prostitute.

African Comics, Far Beyond the Funny Pages , NYTimes

2006-11-26T12:23:00.000-08:00

“It’s intense,” said the security guard as I was leaving “Africa Comics” at the Studio Museum in Harlem after an hour or more of up-close looking and reading. She was right. That’s exactly the word for the stealth-potency of this modest, first-time United States survey of original designs by 35 African artists who specialize in comic art.

Their work is intense the way urban Africa is intense: intensely zany, intensely warm, intensely harsh, intensely political. True, you could say the same of New York or New Delhi, or any major cosmopolis being shaped by globalism these days. Yet every place has very specific intensities. Africa does, and they are distilled in the art here.

I guess there are people who still can’t fit the idea of “art” and “comics” into the same frame. But why? If handmade, graphically inventive, conceptually imaginative images — which describes practically everything in this show — aren’t art, what is? The same images are topical, and are meant to be seen in reproduction; does that alter their status as art? Goya, Daumier and José Guadalupe Posada would of course say no.

In any event, Pop Art and all that followed it long ago wiped out the notion that comics are one-liner sight gags good only for the “funny pages.” “Masters of American Comics,” the ambitious historical survey split between the Jewish Museum in Manhattan and the Newark Museum, is truly a masterpiece show. “Africa Comics” edges into that territory, as does some of the work in a tiny show ending Dec. 17 called “Political Cartoons From Nigeria” at Southfirst, a contemporary gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Not that entertainment is missing from the Studio Museum selection. Just the opposite: some of the material is just plain fun. We are on familiar Marvel Comics ground with the adventures of the charismatic Princess Wella, a kind of superwoman with a ceremonial staff and braids, created by Laércio George Mabota, a young artist from Mozambique.

And even a non-African can see why the schlumpy but wily character named Goorgoolou — in a series by Alphonse Mendy, who goes by the name T. T. Fons — has become a national hero, or antihero, in Senegal. With Ralph Kramden-esque panache, he lampoons social pretensions and embodies the plight of an everyman in a baffling postmodern world. Such is the character’s fame that a television show and magazine have been built around him, and he was a star of the recent international Dakar biennial, Dak’Art, where comic art, for the first time, took center stage.

Yet far more often than not, humor is a sugar-coating for disquiet. For example, a piece by the South African artist Anton Kannemeyer, who goes by the name Joe Dog, uses a charming children’s book style — the source is “Tintin au Congo” from the classic Belgian series, its racial stereotypes deliberately left intact — to depict a black-on-white racial attack that turns out to be a paranoiac neocolonialist dream.

Mr. Kannemeyer is a founder, with the artist Conrad Botes, of the graphic magazine Bitterkomix, which has tackled some of the most pressing political issues in a still volatile South Africa. And in general African politics and popular culture are inseparable. Most of the comics in the Southfirst show are direct attacks on past and present governmental corruption in Nigeria, and nearly all of them are by Ghariokwu Lemi, an artist famous for having painted 26 album covers for the Afrobeat idol and political rebel Fela Kuti.

In some comic art, political content takes an upbeat, utopian tack. More than one piece at the Studio Museum evokes scenes of ethnic violence in order to propose an alternative vision of peace and solidarity, exhorting a new generation of Africans to learn from the mistakes of their parents.

More often the tone is skeptical, even sardonic, as in the case of a sly, graphically jazzy account by Didier Viode, an artist from Benin now living in France, of the bureaucratic roadblocks encountered by Africans applying for immigration papers. Or in a depiction by the Ivorian artist Maxime Aka Gnoan Kacou, known as Mendozza y Caramba, of a noctural mugging as an elegant shadow play in black and gold against a solid blue ground.

Visually neither style is intrinsically “serious.” You can’t know at a glance what you’re getting into. By contrast, right from its opening image — of a screaming woman carrying a bloodied child, done in full-blown social-realist style — there is no mistaking the didactic content of a story of female genital mutilation by the Senegalese artist Cisse Samba Ndar.

The showman , Guardian

2006-11-19T07:48:00.000-08:00

Drawing on advertising, the media and pornography, Jeff Koons's art is about 'aspects of entertainment'. His latest work is an assault on the shiny, happy surface of contemporary culture "So much of the world is advertising, and because of that, individuals feel that they have to present themselves as a package." It is one of the most-quoted things Jeff Koons has said.

Fresh off the plane from New York (and back on it again in under 12 hours), he had clearly given some thought to his self-presentation for an eight-hour stretch that was going to take in a picture session, interview, a private view of his latest work at the most bijoux of the American dealer Larry Gagosian's several spaces in London, a public grilling at the Serpentine Gallery, followed by a dinner at which he would be expected to, if not scintillate, at least give value to the assembled collectors and museum people in an impenetrable, Warholian, Sphinx-like manner. One of the great showman self-promoters of the past 20 years, the bridge between Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, Koons is aware that, in a world geared to the shock of the new, spooky ordinariness - wife, children, a gee-whizz love of life and the everyday vulgar and unexceptional - can command garrulous attention.

The persona Koons had chosen to come packaged in was, like the work that has made him one of America's most influential living artists, fugitive and particularly difficult to read. The neat business suit, the clubman's tie and the salt-and-pepper brush-cut hair suggested both the head buyer in the men's apparel department at Bloomingdale's and a retired astronaut still out of joint with life on Earth.

"I believe in advertisement and media completely," Koons has said. "My art and personal life are based on it." In an interview many years ago he described his idea of pleasure: dining with a group of friends, he recalled, he was moved to propose a toast. How lucky he was, he announced, to be in a beautiful place, surrounded by people he liked ... As he stood there, he remembered, in a state of bliss, it was like being in an advertisement.

Koons had already brought ad campaigns - for alcohol and Nike trainers - into his work, and with his factory-fresh vacuum cleaners in neon-lit perspex cases, and luxury objects switched straight from showroom to gallery, he seemed to equate artworks with commodities directly. Some critics interpreted his work as a crit-ique of consumer-capitalism: he had returned the Duchamp-inspired readymade to its status as a product. For others, such as Benjamin Buchloh, Koons was "only pretending to engage in a critical annihilation of mass-cultural fetishisation". In reality, he was acting out what Walter Benjamin had predicted for capitalist society: the cultural need to compensate for the lost aura of art and artist with "the phoney spell" of the commodity and the star. By 1992, after marrying the Hungarian-born Italian ex-porn star Ilona Staller (known as La Cicciolina), he had achieved the kind of crossover celebrity only previously experienced by the artist with whom he has most in common, Warhol.

Show Koons a camera and an audience, and he effortlessly snaps into "Jeff Koons" mode. He is disarming, shy, eloquent, charming, intriguingly wacko - preternaturally knowing, yet awkward and alarmingly innocent; the whole package. Produce a notebook, however, and ask him about his work in a conventional interview situation, and something within him freezes, a light clicks off.

The Gagosian Gallery in Mayfair is a tiny space, no deeper than a department-store window. From the street, Koons's newest piece, Cracked Egg (Blue), looked like the beginning of an up- market window display that would be completed with bewigged mannequin models later. The sculpture is made of high chromium stainless steel that has been engineered to standards no less precise, and to a finish even more reflectively immaculate, than on the cars in the Porsche showroom a few doors away. The new work is in two parts - a six-foot-tall, mirror-laminated egg and its jagged "lid" - and is a continuation of the Celebration series that Koons began in the mid-1990s. Previous works in the series include kitschy inflated Valentine hearts and fake satin ribbons and bows, as well as Koons's signature sculpture, the balloon dog - "like a balloon that a clown would maybe twist for you at a birthday party".

It has been claimed that the works in Celebration "conjure up a positive fundamental view not unlike the boundless trust with which a child looks at the world". As a boy in the provincial backwater of York, Pennsylvania, where his father was an interior decorator, Koons, who went on to be a Wall Street broker, earned pocket money by selling gift wrappings and chocolates door-to-door. "I'd present the product, and people would buy it, and it was nice," he once told David Sylvester. "I felt it was a way of meeting people's needs. So I was always good in sales."

Cracked Egg is the only work in the Celebration series in which fracture or assault of the shiny, happy surface has taken place. Koons is on record as saying that he never consciously sits down to try to create a work that is optimistic but has a dark side. He wants his work to be "a support system for people to feel good about themselves, to have their life be as enriching as possible, to make them feel secure - I don't tend to be pulled towards the idea of making a menacing work". But Cracked Egg, in its shatteredness and sharp edges, seems to cry out for a reading that invokes the spirit of post-9/11 America, specifically the sense of violation evident even now in New York, the city where Koons lives and works.

"It's interesting," he says. "They're all about holidays - the hanging heart Valentines, Thanksgiving, maybe even Christmas. The egg is about Easter, birth and rebirth, in art-historical terms the Botticelli Venus. But with the egg there's a sense of loss. There was an abduction. My son was abducted. By my wife. I'm supposed to be able to see him, but I'm not able to. It's complicated. We're supposed to be able to talk, but we can't. I started the Celebration works right before Ludwig was abducted. I continued with them because I wanted to let my son know I was thinking about him. He's 14 now. When he turns 18 I hope the first thing he'd want to do is get on a plane."

Ludwig was born in 1992, the year after Koons married Staller. In addition to a son, their collaboration produced Made in Heaven, a collection of sexually explicit photographs and kitschy sculptures of Koons and Staller that marries the pornographic ("Dirty - Jeff on Top", "Blow Job") to the teeth-rottingly banal ("Cherubs", "Three Puppies"). The photographs haven't lost their power to shock. There was a frisson even among the predominantly young, laidback Serpentine audience when the painting "Ilona's Asshole" flashed up on multiple video monitors. This was followed by disbelieving glances when Koons confided that "what I love about the picture are the pimples on Ilona's ass. That openness, generosity, the sense of self-acceptance." He later told me that the works in Made in Heaven were inspired by Masaccio's The Expulsion - "the guilt and shame on Adam and Eve's faces in the painting. I wanted to make work that showed what it was like to be tranquil and not feel shame about the body. Whatever anybody's history is, it's perfect. It can't be any different. I would tie this to nature."

Koons's interlocutors in Rem Koolhaas's semi-inflated pavilion in front of the Serpentine Gallery were Koolhaas himself and the gallery's co-curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist. The two European intellectuals took it in turns to try to penetrate beyond his very American resolve to be "really friendly, and really positive and optimistic". The American pop artists were not much interested in ideas. Pop art was about "liking things", as Warhol once said. Koons, who says his art is "about aspects of entertainment" and believes that "salespeople are on the front line of culture", is the true inheritor of that tradition. "You know, Hans Ulrich," he would begin, smiling sweetly, gently refusing a question on the Baudrillardian reading of the commodity-as-sign. Or: "Well, Rem, the answer to that is quite simple: the money didn't come." I was repeatedly reminded of something he once told Sylvester: "My painting is really, for me, about my background. I was trying to show that I come from a provincial background. Eventually, over a period of time, the provincial always wins."

Koons's father had a furniture showroom, which one day would be a living room, and a week later a kitchen. "The fact that Jeff grew up around commercialism and marketing, and the fact that a kitchen wasn't really a kitchen - wasn't really anything - resonates with the hollowness we have today," his friend Tom Ford, the former creative director of Gucci, has said.

Koons has remarried. He spends time with his wife and their three children on the farm that used to belong to his grandfather in the countryside close to where he grew up in Pennsylvania. John Updike's family farm, the setting for many of his novels, is also in Pennsylvania, at Shillington. Is Koons's farm anywhere nearby? This draws a blank. "I don't read books," Koons says. "I only see magazines and newspapers. Images. The flood of images. I enjoy narrative through the visual. The great thing about art is that it brings all the disciplines of the world together - literature, philosophy, psychology, science. But, you know, I only really like to be in the studio with the people I regard as my extended family, my assistants. You try very much to be in the moment, looking at everything in the world all the time, putting it into play."

Dennis Potter wrote for television, the great indiscriminate disseminator of the visual, so I try a Potter quote on him: "Capitalism now is about selling all of you to all of you. But they don't know what it is they're selling. The only object is to keep in the game. Which is to keep selling something. And one day we're going to find out what it is."

"I'm not interested in capitalism at all," says Koons. "I'm not interested in objects. I don't care about money. I'm interested in people - human desire and aspiration and having daily interconnection with the people I value. I believe in experience, and having transcendence in your life."

Step into his world LATimes

2006-11-11T14:33:00.000-08:00

MAGRITTE is back.

Not that the natty guy in the black bowler ever really left. He fell out of fashion long before his death, in 1967, but graphic designers and illustrators never stopped mining the Belgian Surrealist's work for visual shock and dreamy wit. Despite perpetually changing styles, new generations of painters, sculptors and filmmakers continue to assimilate his ideas in disjunctive images and enigmatic combinations of pictures and words. Nearly every floating phrase, levitating boulder and morphing body owes something to René Magritte, whose work has seeped into popular culture and still sparks irreverent inquiries into the nature of artistic representation.
"Magritte is part of the postmodern landscape," says artist Eleanor Antin.

Such familiarity tends to breed boredom, if not contempt. But the Los Angeles County Museum of Art isn't taking Magritte for granted. The big fall and winter show in the Anderson Building, opening next Sunday, is "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images."

It will offer 65 drawings and paintings by the Surrealist master, whose bourgeois persona masked a wild imaginaton, and an equal number of works by 31 artists who have paid tribute to him or infused his spirit into their art.

And that's not all. John Baldessari, a pioneering conceptualist represented in the show, has designed an installation intended to turn the galleries — and visitors' experience — upside down. The entrance will re-create "The Unexpected Answer," a Magritte painting of a door with a cutout silhouette of a ghostly figure.

Visitors will walk through the open silhouette into galleries carpeted with a woven version of a Magritte-style blue sky with fluffy white clouds. The ceiling, where the sky should be, will be papered with images of freeway intersections. A big square window will be covered with a transparency of the New York skyline. The guards will wear derby hats.

Not the usual Magritte exhibition, but it was inspired by institutional logic.

Not just another retrospective

"IT stems in great part from the fact that we have two remarkable Magritte canvases," says Stephanie Barron, LACMA's senior curator of modern art, who organized the show with Michel Draguet, director of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in cooperation with the Magritte Foundation.

"The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe)," one of the museum's most prized possessions, depicts a pipe with a line of French text, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or "This is not a pipe," reminding viewers that they are not looking at a pipe but a painting of a pipe. The other painting, "The Liberator," portrays a seated man with a straw hat but no head, holding a jeweled bauble in the shape of a woman's face.

"We felt that it was time to not do just another Magritte retrospective," Barron says. "We wanted to look freshly at his work. The inscrutable nature of Magritte's work has intrigued several subsequent generations of artists. If you look through the catalogue raisonné on Magritte, you see how many artists over time have owned his works. It's not insignificant: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, Saul Steinberg, Pierre Alechinsky. Many of them still own his works. In fact, artists were generous lenders to the exhibition. I was interested in what it was in Magritte that spoke to a number of artists."

Some pieces are direct quotations or dialogues with particular Magrittes that set up incongruous juxtapositions and startling shifts of scale or turn ordinary things into objects of contemplation and equivocal meaning. Vija Celmins' 6 1/2 -foot-tall enamel-on-wood comb was inspired by an oversized comb sitting on a bed in Magritte's painting "Personal Values." Koons' steel sculpture "J.B. Turner Engine" is based on a Jim Beam bourbon bottle, but it resembles the train steaming out of a fireplace in Magritte's "Time Transfixed."

Most of the contemporary works have more subtle or suggestive relationships with Magritte, who enjoyed great success in his own day.

Edward Ruscha's interest in wordplay is related to but not directly derived from the Belgian artist's use of puzzling labels and titles.

Robert Gober's obsessively crafted sculptures of body parts and ordinary objects don't look like Magritte's paintings, but the ambiguity and vaguely ominous tone have Magrittean echoes.

Martin Kippenberger's aggressively expressionistic paintings reflect the loose style and disturbing tenor of Magritte's relatively little-known paintings from the 1940s.

Pairing two artists in an exhibition is tricky, and pairing one with a multitude is particularly dicey, Barron says. She and LACMA Director Michael Govan came up with asking an artist to design the installation. The first name that popped into both of their heads was Baldessari, an éminence grise in the world of open minds and odd ideas.

He agreed and proposed several alternatives.

"The one we ended up going with was the most provocative," says Barron, who laid out the show in Baldessari's setting. "It's definitely an intervention, but it's also something that speaks on its own almost as a piece by John."

The exhibition will not travel to other museums, partly because of the difficulty of securing loans for multiple venues and partly because the installation was designed specifically for LACMA, Barron says. But museum officials decided to capitalize on theirs being the only place to see this particular take on Magritte.

"It's an astonishing installation, and it's up till March," Barron says. "Let people come here and see it."

Beirut Arts Lift Off with Political Gallery Show

2006-11-09T16:51:00.000-08:00

How about a jam session of Israeli bombs accompanied by the trumpet? Or maybe an Andy Warhol-like pink pop work of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah?

The devastating summer war between Israel and Hezbollah has inspired a multimedia exhibition opening Beirut's artistic season at one of the Lebanese capital's leading galleries, Espace SD.

"We wanted to create a platform for artists, poets, writers and film-makers to share their work produced during or in reaction" to the July/August war, said gallery director Sandra Dagher.

"Nafas (breath of) Beirut," which runs until Nov. 17, features work by more than 40 artists, many of them under 30.

The event also offers a series of events including video screenings, concerts, poetry readings and a lecture on the oil spill along Lebanon's coast since Israeli air raids destroyed seafront fuel tanks south of Beirut.

"The Beirut art scene had been witnessing a real revival before the war," Dagher said.

"After the events, we wanted to create a new dynamic. We launched this exhibition, but it is not about militant art: It allows artists to bear witness to the war in their own way."

The works are not of bloody or graphic scenes, but rather expressions of personal anger, sadness or despair at the horrors of the war and the hardship of forced exile.

Sintia Karam searched for her native Beirut in a series of artistic photographs of Berlin while in exile in Germany during the war. She also shot sandbags, military servicemen and news bulletins about Lebanon on plasma television screens in the subway.

On a television screen, Randa Mirza shows a "self portrait with remote control" showing her next to a dead child on a stretcher. She stares back at the viewer while pressing the remote control, as if freezing the moment.

Scattered on the floor of one side of the gallery lie photocopies of leaflets dropped by Israeli warplanes during the war to warn Lebanese citizens.

Artists Fadia Kisrwani Abboud and Maissa Alameddine invited visitors to take one of the leaflets stamped in red with "return to sender," write a message back to Israel and slide it into a box. They plan to send these messages to Israel's defense ministry.

Hala Dabaji's drawing on canvas shows eight identikit satirical drawings of "politicians responsible or accomplices of the war against Lebanon."

They group U.S. President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, his Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and army chief of staff Dan Halutz.

On one large wall, a glittery pop-art portrait in bright colors of Hezbollah's chief looks at visitors with a broad smile. It reads: "superstar."

"I chose him smiling because he is always portrayed with a stern look. I chose pink because I feel it is the color of my generation. It catches the attention quickly and it is not a solid color," she said.

A dark room at the gallery throws back visitors into the realm of war through music.

Mazen Kerbaj's piece—made up of real sounds of Israeli bombing and his own improvised trumpet tunes—was recorded live on the balcony of his flat in Beirut on the night of July 15-16.

News bulletins, slogans and songs recorded during the war are mixed, manipulated and scratched by audio-visual artist Raed Yassin into a composition which wounds like someone surfing radio waves during the war.

Rauschenberg's Mystery Goat Stars in Paris Show of `Combines' Bloomberg

2006-11-08T04:55:00.000-08:00

In 1964, after Robert Rauschenberg won the Venice Biennale Grand Prize, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano deplored the event as ``the total and general defeat of culture.''

Since then Rauschenberg, 81, has become one of the Grand Old Men of contemporary art, with auction prices to match. ``Combines,'' an exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, is on the third leg of an international tour that started in New York and Los Angeles and will end in Stockholm.

``Combine paintings'' is the name Rauschenberg gave to the three-dimensional works he produced between 1954 and 1961. At the time, they were viewed as a declaration of war against Abstract Expressionism, the movement that had dominated U.S. art since the 1940s.

Rauschenberg had started with monochromatic paintings. In 1954, he began to attach Coca-Cola bottles, light bulbs, shoes, stuffed animals and other ``found objects'' to his canvases.

The idea was not new. Dadaists and Surrealists had already experimented with ``assemblages,'' made of various materials, often junk. The funniest example was Kurt Schwitters's ``Merzbau'' (Merz Building) in Hanover aka ``the Cathedral of Erotic Misery.'' It was destroyed by the Royal Air Force in World War II.

Relating Materials

Rauschenberg's teacher at Black Mountain Collage in North Carolina was Josef Albers, an émigré from Germany. Although a Bauhaus man, not a Surrealist, Albers insisted on the exact knowledge of different materials and the relationship between them. ``Combination'' was an important term in his lexicon.

No wonder the young painter's strange excursions into the third dimension were first dismissed as ``Neo-Dada,'' the poor imitation of an old hat. In 1958, when Leo Castelli gave him a one-man show in his gallery on New York's Upper East Side, only one item was bought -- by Castelli himself.

The MoMA indignantly refused when Castelli tried to sell the museum ``Monogram,'' arguably Rauschenberg's most famous work and one of the Paris show's highlights. Today, it occupies a place of honor at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

``Monogram,'' a stuffed angora goat with a rubber tire around its body standing on a canvas with collages, has inspired extravagant interpretations. Some describe it as Rauschenberg's ``Rosebud,'' a memory of a pet goat killed by his father.

`Area of Feeling'

Although the combine paintings are replete with personal references and reminiscences, Rauschenberg has refused to admit that they are autobiographical statements. Instead, he has called them ``unbiased documentations of what I observed, letting the area of feeling take care of itself.''

Nor does he like to be pigeonholed as a pop artist. ``I have never belonged to them,'' he insists. He may have borrowed from pin-ups and cartoon strips, yet, he says, ``my intention was never to elevate commercials to an art form.''

In other words, the visitor has to solve the mystery of the 50 works the Pompidou Center has brought together or leave it unsolved, like the mystery of Mona Lisa's smile.

The show runs through Jan. 15, 2007. It will be on display at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm from Feb. 17 through May 6, 2007. Bloomberg

To Timbuktu, and beyond, The Guardian

2006-11-07T12:20:00.000-08:00

Critics have declared it clumsy, misguided and even racist. But, argues Jonathan Jones, Paris's new Musée du Quai Branly is quite simply thrilling.
Captain Cook was impressed by the art he saw in the Pacific. Power and Taboo, an exhibition at the British Museum of sacred objects from the Polynesian Islands, includes stupendous things brought back from his voyages - that is, by the first Europeans to make contact with the peoples of these islands. Among them is a wooden bowl supported by the arms of two figures with big round eyes. It's probably the artefact Cook describes with his brand of cool approval in his journal: "A large cava bowl ... neither ill designed nor executed."

Ever since Europeans started to visit - then with brutal rapidity conquer - places across the oceans in the 15th century, they have been struck by the carved, painted, cast, woven and embroidered objects travellers brought home. But here is a terrible irony. The very contact with Europeans that destroyed so many cultures, through violence, disease and, most lethally of all, the assault on traditional beliefs by Christian missionaries, also created the collections of premodern non-western art that today are the best resources for appreciating and trying to understand them.

This creates endless controversies, as the British Museum itself can attest. This year, though, it has been able to relax. The flak has been drawn across the channel. No recent event in the world of museums has been as bitterly contested as the creation of the Musée du Quai Branly, the new French museum of "the arts and civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas", which opened in Paris this summer. Such has been the criticism of this museum that a comment piece in the Guardian compared it to the Millennium Dome.

It was Jacques Chirac's personal plan to rehouse the French national collection of ethnographic art. In the eyes of radical critics, however, the project has been clumsy at best, racist at worst, reinforcing antiquated colonial prejudices. The museum's planners made a mistake when they described its contents as "arts premiers" - first arts, a phrase critics denounced as scarcely better than the defunct "primitive art". At exactly the moment when African curators like Simon Njami - founder of the magazine Revue Noir and curator of last year's exhibition Africa Remix in London and Paris - insist on the contemporaneity and urbanity of African art, here is a museum, basically, of masks and drums.

Now it has opened an exhibition that is a riposte, or sop, to its critics. D'un Regard l'Autre is about exactly what critics accuse the museum of crudely celebrating: the western gaze. I went to see it with some trepidation, wondering if I'd be the only person in the museum. At least I'd have plenty of space to be angry in.

I realised that news of this place has been distorted in traversing the immense cultural distance between Paris and London, as soon as I entered the jungly park over which the museum floats on bulbous legs. You queue underneath to get inside. That's right, queue. I had to compete with la toute Paris for a ticket. The excitement and eagerness can only be compared to Tate Modern - Jean Nouvel's spectacular organic building is Paris's answer to London's modern art museum - except it exhibits the antithesis of modern industrial life.

You go up a circular ramp around a transparent tower loaded with drums, to emerge into a flowing space that lets you wander from one world culture to another. The display is completely open and connected: a single stroll leads from Oceania to Africa to the Americas. Alcoves contain treasures: Ethiopian wall paintings are presented in a chapel of meditative quietness; another refuge has literary fragments from Timbuktu. It's not hard to criticise. Why imply that a small selection of works from village cultures in Asia reflects the whole of Asian art history? Why assume, in publications, a western visitor? Should we even call these objects art? Yet none of this carping seems relevant to the stunning fact of this exhilarating museum.

No other European government - least of all ours - has spent money on this scale to display what this museum rightly calls "masterpieces" of premodern global art. And what is so great about the British Museum's approach anyway? I find the Wellcome Trust Gallery, where artefacts from all over the world illustrate topics such as "respecting animals" and "coping with death", truly annoying: objects are not treated as works of art, but as part of social life. Which they are of course, but the elusive relationship of art to society is patronisingly simplified. Some of us go to the doctor, some to the shaman - it's all supposed to be perfectly logical. This rationalist social worker's anthropology is woefully inadequate in looking at works of art from any culture.

The Musée du Quai Branly takes the opposite approach. It doesn't explain much at all, but shows art - which it simply and rightly declares to be art - in dramatic, spectacular vistas, intimate close-ups, poetic juxtapositions. It's one of the most seductive museum displays I've ever seen. Its aim is to excite people about this art, to free it from dusty cases in neglected corners of museums, and make you want to see more. It is a triumph, all the braver for defying cliches of post colonial cultural studies.

The funniest thing is critics' belief that a French museum would be intellectually naive. This from the French, the inventors of structuralism? Quai Branly has American masks that come from the collection of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology; far from being unthinking, its flowing display surely reflects his writing on art. In a famous essay, Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America, Lévi-Strauss identifies formal similarities between art unconnected in time or space; it is one of the steps on the road to his theory of a universal structure of human thought. The way this museum invites comparison between cultures - why are masks universal? - resembles the big questions asked by Lévi-Strauss, yet its belief in the mystery of art goes back further.

In the exhibition D'un Regard l'Autre you can see how the Parisian avant-garde fell in love with "the primitive" 100 years ago. Here is a mask made by the Fang people in west-central Africa that was owned by the artist André Derain, who showed it to Matisse and Picasso; according to Derain it was the first time either of them "got" African art. The similarity between the great almond-shaped mask and the masked women in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is unmissable. Also here is a New Hebridean figure that Matisse gave to Picasso.

The exhibition takes us back further still. It shows how Europeans collected artefacts from Africa and the Americas, even in the Renaissance. Cabinets of curiosities - those Renaissance ancestors of museums - were full of exotic objects to wonder at; you could argue the Musée du Branly returns to this spirit of amazement.

Back in London, I am looking at A'a, a wooden image of the creator from the island Rurutu. There's a photograph nearby of Picasso next to his bronze cast of this work in the British Museum collection, yet here it's hard to recapture the excitement Europeans once felt for such art. There seems to be a choice, in displaying global art, between cautious introspection and full-throttle spectacle. The British Museum is too diplomatic and, as a result, Power and Taboo is scarcely one of the hot exhibitions in London. A reasonable number of people stroll about. In Paris, they're going mad for the art of elsewhere. And if they're not using the correct language, who cares?

Chelsea: The Art and Commerce of One Hot Block NYTimes

2006-11-05T07:44:00.000-08:00

Jack Fuchs remembers when the only profession being practiced along far West 25th Street was the world’s oldest.

“There were streetwalkers on 11th Avenue, and every three or four years something would go wrong, I suppose, and you’d find a body in a parking lot,” said Mr. Fuchs, a no-nonsense landlord who owns a large chunk of property between 10th and 11th Avenues. “Let’s just say it was not a place where you’d want to spend much time.”

On an unseasonably warm fall Thursday little more than a decade later, you could have found about 500 bodies, all very much alive, packed onto the same block by nightfall. Some emerged from Cadillac Escalades and Hummer limousines. Many were clothed in Prada and Marc Jacobs, accessorized by the spectral glow of their BlackBerrys. Besides English — “Sweetie! I just saw you at Gagosian!” — they spoke (and thumb-typed) French and Japanese and Russian.

They filled the street as if it had been closed down for a fair, but there was no funnel cake for sale. Instead, at Bortolami Dayan, a cavernous ground-floor gallery in a former taxi garage, you could have bought a hallucinogenic fractured-mirror sculpture by a British artist, Gary Webb, for $85,000. (You would have had to hurry; the show sold out.)

If you were looking to spend less, you could have paid $12,500 for a sleek oil painting of a red Corvette by Cheryl Kelley at the Lyons Wier Ortt gallery, a small second-floor space across the street. Or $4,500 at the Yossi Milo Gallery for a disturbing photograph by Tierney Gearon of her mentally ill mother, half-naked.

Or if you were really serious, you could have talked to the photo dealer Alan Klotz about buying a vintage print of Dorothea Lange’s “White Angel Bread Line.” At $800,000 — about the price of a nice one-bedroom co-op in the neighborhood — it has not sold yet, but Mr. Klotz is not worried.

Twelve years after the first major commercial gallery, Matthew Marks, ventured into what was then a ghostly neighborhood of truck fumes, oil stains and Soviet-size warehouses, Chelsea seems to show no signs of losing its momentum as a capital of art commerce the likes of which the city, and maybe the world, has never seen.

By one count, made by the Web site chelseaartgalleries.com, there are now 318 galleries in the neighborhood, many more than SoHo had at its peak. Along with the garment district and the diamond district in Midtown, Chelsea has emerged as one of the largest collections of like businesses in the city’s history.

For at least the last few years the attendant questions have come along almost as consistently as new gallery openings. Has Chelsea peaked? How much bigger can it get? When will it SoHo itself and become one big Comme des Garçons store? There are plentiful signs that company is coming. Recent zoning changes are spurring rampant residential development on the avenues, and the first stage of the High Line park, atop the old rail trestle that threads through the area, will be completed by next spring. But most indications are that Chelsea’s art businesses are continuing to grow apace, both in number and in square feet.

As a way of trying to describe such a huge and baggy beast, this reporter decided to lop off a part of it, to isolate one block and all but take up residence there for several months, watching its rites and rituals, talking to its pioneers and newcomers, its ground-floor gods and high-floor hopefuls.

The stretch of 25th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues presented a good subject for study because it is, in many ways, still a block in transition, unlike 24th, which has long been the neighborhood’s gilded heart, with names like Gagosian, Matthew Marks, Gladstone and Luhring Augustine.

At the 10th Avenue end of 25th Street, by contrast, a gritty car-repair garage remains, where mechanics stand outside in the afternoon smoking and sizing up the well-heeled collectors who pass by. Midblock a free soundtrack often issues from the windows of a recording studio that has somehow resisted the pressures to move. But at the other end of the block, on what was once one of Mr. Fuchs’s parking lots, a 20-story glass-and-concrete office building called the Chelsea Arts Tower is almost completed, 75,000 square feet of commercial cooperative space for galleries and arts-related businesses. Its most anticipated resident is the venerable Marlborough Gallery, which is said to have paid more than $8 million for the first two floors, significantly increasing its presence in Chelsea. Read the whole article NYTimes

Hats off to a new Pompidou centre Telegraph

2006-10-31T07:58:00.000-08:00

It is, by any standards, a hard act to follow. When the original Pompidou Centre, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, opened in the heart of Paris nearly 30 years ago, it was pioneering in more than one sense.
As well as propelling its architects into the international limelight, its epic presence and the shock of the new had a huge impact not just on Paris and the art world but on cities around the world. Arguably, it created the momentum for iconic, contemporary galleries and museums without which no major metropolis now feels complete.

But now the Pompidou itself – which draws in six million visitors a year – is branching out. Next Tuesday, construction work begins on the new Centre Pompidou-Metz, designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Situated around 200 miles east of Paris and close to the borders of Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, the city of Metz will be graced with the Pompidou's first outpost and another extraordinary architectural emblem.

The building that Ban has designed for Metz was partially inspired by a Chinese peasant's hat which the architect found in a Parisian market. To Ban, the woven bamboo of the hat suggested a kind of architectural canopy which set him on a train of thought that eventually led to a vast, luminescent, conical roof that will tie the various elements of the new Pompidou together. Ninety metres wide, this sinuous crown will be made up of a timber frame woven into a hexagonal lattice and then coated in a fibreglass membrane topped with a layer of Teflon.

"It was not so much the shape of the hat that interested me but the way that it was made," says Ban, talking at his temporary European office perched on the roof of the original Pompidou Centre. "It was not only the pattern but the structure itself, which is very light but can span big distances.

The design of this building may look quite complicated but it's really very simple. The different spaces of the museum itself – the galleries, the 'nave', offices – each have their own appropriate shape and are clearly defined and then the roof brings them all together."

For Ban, Metz is the culmination of decades of experiment with structure and materials. He is one of the most original thinkers in contemporary architecture, best known for buildings with both a lightness of touch and unconventional building blocks. He has famously used cardboard and paper tubes to build disaster relief shelters on the one hand and churches and museums on the other.

His Naked House in Japan lights up like a lantern, with walls made of translucent layers of polycarbonate sheeting with the sublime quality of rice paper – one of a series of ground-breaking homes. The temporary office on top of the Pompidou Paris is also made of paper tubes, coated in the same fibreglass membrane that will soon be seen at Metz.

Ban's capacity to think beyond both fashion and tradition, like a modern-day Buckminster Fuller, has brought him international commissions not just in the Far East but also in America – where he went to study in the late 1970s – and Europe. So the pressure of designing a new Pompidou, with the example of the original floating in the background, seems perfectly appropriate for a man who has founded his work upon individuality and experimentation.

"Of course, the Pompidou is a very influential building," says Ban, who is collaborating on Metz with his French partner Jean de Gastines.

"I came to Paris to see it in 1978, a year after it opened, and admired it very much. But with Pompidou-Metz, any reference to the original is really in the spirit of invention or innovation, not the shape of the building or the design itself. When I entered the competition to design the museum, I thought that it was a very appropriate project for me because of the history of innovation and architectural evolution established by Rogers and Piano."

With this new £27 million building, Ban has created a series of contrasts between the fixed and the flexible, the open and the closed. The cone-like canopy, reaching upwards to meet a 250ft central spire, envelopes three giant concrete tubes stacked on top of one another, each pointing in different directions.

These are the galleries themselves, with vast picture windows at each end framing views of the nearby station – which will soon host a new high-speed TGV link to Paris – and the cathedral, as well as the hills around Metz and the 20–hectare park surrounding the museum.

There will also be a vast, cathedral-like "nave" or massive central hall, capable of holding larger art works, as well as the entrance forum, auditorium, offices, restaurant and other service spaces. Many of these spaces – unlike the more regulated galleries – can be adapted for a variety of uses and, in places, opened up to the surrounding parkland.

'We were asked to position the museum in this huge green area, so I asked a landscape designer to design the park and put the roof on top of this garden, so that outside space could be brought right into the building," says Ban. "Usually, an architect first designs an object and then a landscape designer plants trees around it. We reversed this process so there will be a strong connection with the park and nature. I wanted a building that is totally exposed to the outside."

Helped by the lightness of the canopy roof, Pompidou-Metz will have some of the feeling of a pavilion or marquee sitting among the parkland when it opens in late 2008. It is a pavilion that is already a catalyst for major new development across the city and a place where the Pompidou Centre can show more of its remarkable collection.

And for Ban, it will be a major cultural project that will open up his work to a whole new audience.

The battle for Paris The Guardian

2006-10-27T09:49:00.000-07:00

The squatter art scene in the French capital is so big it's on the tourist trail. But now the riot police are moving in. By Angelique Chrisafis

The riot police arrived before dawn. Dozens of officers carrying riot shields, batons and tear gas parked their vans on an avenue on the fringes of Paris's Left Bank, ready for a confrontation. But the handful of film directors and actors inside the disused art deco cinema surrendered without a fight. They emerged blinking as police confiscated their projection equipment and theatre props, then bricked up the facade.

Le Barbizon, once one of Paris's turn-of-the-century "family cinemas", faced ruin in the 1980s, screening kung fu and porn films to stay alive, before shutting down and lying derelict and rat-infested for 20 years. Then, in 2003, a group of directors and actors broke in, secretly renovated it and turned it into an illegally squatted 100-seat showcase for plays and short films, as well as cinéma militant documentaries on the environment and the impact of France's nuclear power industry.

Like a dozen other illegal arts venues in Paris - empty factories, warehouses and parcel depots invaded and reclaimed by artists, designers and film-makers who can't afford the city's studio rents - Le Barbizon was a fixture on the local arts scene. It was supported by its neighbours, who were grateful for a cultural attraction, and an end to the rats, and its work was recommended by the local mayor. Thousands went to its screenings.

The raid on Le Barbizon and the threat of a string of other police evictions of squats artisques has panicked culture officials at Paris's city hall, who believe the capital's long tradition of squats and illegally occupied buildings are crucial to breathe life into its stultified arts scene. So integral are squats to Paris's cultural infrastructure that four years ago the city hall paid 7m euros to buy and renovate the most conspicuous one, 59 rue de Rivoli, a former bank not far from the Louvre, whose studio spaces showed street art, Duchamp-inspired sculpture, and trompe l'oeil paintings. With an estimated 40,000 visitors a year drawn by debris-sculptures hanging out of its windows, it was said by its illegal occupants to be the third most popular contemporary arts centre in Paris after the Pompidou Centre and the Jeu de Paume.

The city also rushed to buy up Les Frigos, empty cold-storage units near the Seine illegally occupied by artists and sculptors for 20 years. Now an established gallery and studio space, it sits near François Mitterrand's last "grand projet", the National Library. Even the Palais de Tokyo, a new official gallery space that the government hoped would kick-start France's ailing art scene, has hosted festivals of

squat art, inviting in installation and video artists from squats for heated debates. The notion of le squat artisque has become so mainstream in Paris that many are tourist attractions.

But the town hall's cultural leaders now fear the police and central government are putting the tradition in jeopardy in a clean-up of the city. Paris officials last week voted to protect Le Barbizon, as well as Paris's biggest arts squat, La Générale, an old shoe factory in Belleville occupied by 125 artists, film-makers and fashion designers.

Last Saturday, Le Barbizon's evicted directors projected a protest film on to their walled-up façade called: Smile, You've Been Bricked Up. Dozens of police again pulled up in vans, cordoned off the cinema and stood guard. Councillors pleaded with the police. Passers-by and shoppers joined the chorus: "Cops confiscate popular culture!"

"This is all about Nicolas Sarkozy," says Thierry Wurtz, the theatre director who ran Le Barbizon. He sees the crackdown on the squats as part of centre-right interior minister Sarkozy's campaign to be president. Sarkozy has already scored points, evicting hundreds of immigrants from France's biggest squat in the south of Paris. "He's just making a public show. I don't think he gives a shit about culture or artists."

Eric Offredo, a socialist councillor at the protest, says: "Paris is known for its big venues, its operas, cinemas, and the Louvre, but when culture becomes part of the establishment, we need to re-invent it. Art has to live and breath; these experimental spaces are crucial,"

Across the city, at La Générale, the biggest art-squat in Paris, artists were arriving for work. In one film-maker's office on the fourth floor, empty champagne bottles sat on a boardroom table surrounded by black leather chairs, with sweeping views over the rooftops of Paris. Around 125 artists work here on four floors of well-ordered studio space. They detest the term squat artistique and, like most other artists who have reclaimed derelict buildings, don't actually live there on mattresses , but rather turn them into tightly run work spaces and galleries.

La Générale has three exhibition spaces, a cinema and a photography lab, and has been used by more than 100 theatre companies and various fashion designers. Le Parisien newspaper calls it an "ideal city of art". But the building is owned by the ministry of education and there are plans to turn it into a psychiatric hospital.

"It would be a scandal for police to evict us when some people here are to show their work at Paris's international contemporary art fair this week," says Vladimir Najman, a Serbian-born economist who helps run the collective.

Arts leaders at Paris's city hall believe that work produced in squats could be a cure for the art establishment's malaise. The city of Picasso, Monet, Degas, Lautrec, Rodin, Van Gogh, and birthplace of just about every major art movement of the past 100 years, is now feared by critics to be in the artistic wilderness. Its scene has been in slow decline, stifled by bureaucracy and state control of spaces, and unable to compete with London, New York or Berlin.

Installation artist Eric Baudart, 34, sells in a gallery in the hip Marais area. Paris city hall has bought his work - pieces on transport, such as giant windscreens and road photos, as well as minimalist stone sculptures, some of which will show at the international contemporary art fair. But he still has to work in La Générale. "There is nowhere else like this in Paris," he says. "It's an autonomous space away from the officialdom of the arts world, where artists run their own studios for free. I've never produced as much work as I have since coming here."

Andrei Panibratchenko, the kilt-wearing charismatic founder of the squat, says: "Ever since Picasso and Chagall, modern artists in France have occupied spaces without paying rent; it's not going to stop now. Officialdom in Paris is creating heritage, not living art. No one is taking risks any more, so we feel we have to carry on.

"We want to prevent an eviction at La Générale, but whatever happens, the ethos of our project will continue elsewhere. At any given time I know where the empty buildings are in this city and what we could take over."

So important is La Générale, in fact, that the French culture minister promised this week that, although the eviction won't be stopped, the collective would be found a new space. But whether the squatters would want to work there remains to be seen.

Back at the gallery on Friday evening, a group of US visitors, giving whatever cash donation they chose, trooped into one of the tiny gallery spaces to look at installations such as a bucket of concrete thrown at a wall, and a large corrugated iron barrier filling a white room.

"I'm not opposed to the establishment. A lot of us work with institutions," says Sarah Fauguet, 28, who grew up nearby and has worked at La Générale since graduation from the prestigious Beaux Arts college. "But we're buying time here to create. I remember as a kid being taken by my parents to protest outside Les Frigos, which was under threat of eviction - now it's part of the Paris establishment."

The irony, however, is that it is that establishment, and the heavy bureaucracy that goes with it, that most squatters are trying to avoid.

Women on the Verge of a Very Finnish, Somewhat Cubist Breakdown NYTimes

2006-10-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL reputations and travels aside, artists typically rely on the solitude of a private studio to cultivate and execute their creative efforts. For the Finnish visual artist and filmmaker Eija-Liisa Ahtila, this is a fifth-floor loft studio in the old Kaapeli cable factory, overlooking an inlet of this watery city. Guarding the door behind a low wire barrier is her Catalonian shepherd, Harrison, recognizable as the same shaggy and endearing breed as Luca, an earlier pet whose death is featured in Ms. Ahtila’s 2005 installation film “The Hour of Prayer.”

That four-screen dramatic film is the only work among her “human dramas,” as she calls them, that is autobiographical. It was shown this year at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff, where in March Ms. Ahtila won the Artes Mundi international prize (about $74,000) for contemporary art with a human context. In April, her film “Ground Control,” about extraterrestrial contact, was viewed by 400,000 people a day on four billboard-size screens installed in busy sections of Tokyo.

This week Ms. Ahtila is coming to New York for Wednesday’s opening of her 14-minute film installation “The Wind” at the Museum of Modern Art. It will be accompanied by showings of her related feature-length film, “Love Is a Treasure.”

Sitting in her pristine studio here, which adjoins Crystal Eye, the film production company of her husband, Ilppo Pohjola, Ms. Ahtila described her medium as “moving images of stories that have already happened.”

She is primarily a fiction writer who draws on the world of human psychosis, mainly female, to transform individual case studies of mental illness into an imaginary dream world. By breaking the logical sequence of the narration, she introduces a Cubist interpretation of events that emphasizes perception over causality.

A no-nonsense woman of 47, dressed casually in jeans, a brown sweater and black running shoes, Ms. Ahtila is surrounded in her studio by warehouse shelving with neat upright file boxes and the kind of Finnish modern design elements — bright orange and red couches, a sleek water pitcher and glasses — that make visits to Helsinki so visually satisfying. Between films, she concentrates on serial photography; her current subject is women and Christian iconography. A Fra Angelico poster hanging on her studio wall states: “And every woman will be a walking synthesis of the universe.”

Ms. Ahtila views her film work more as theater than cinema, a new art that sets a stylized stage for fiction. Working in close collaboration with her cast, she often finds that an actor’s interpretation will improve her original concept of a character. During full production, script pages are pinned to the studio wall and she depends on a crew — cinematographer, set and prop designers, lighting and sound specialists, wardrobe and makeup people — for the technical and visual quality of her films.

But when she visited New York in January 2005, it was without a script or film crew, and the city was engulfed in a major snowstorm. She filmed the streets at night herself from her hotel window in Chelsea and around Madison Square Park, capturing the same enticing luminosity as that of a winter night in Helsinki. Thus began a chain of events — “a string of pearls,” she calls it — that became “The Hour of Prayer.” The film tells the story of Luca’s death from bone cancer, but is really about the stillness and emptiness of grief and the loss of what Ms. Ahtila calls “sensory surroundings.”

From those early scenes of New York, the film cuts to the winter landscape of her country cottage on a Finnish lake. It is evident when one views this landscape of icy waters against dense forests, shot as a still life and given greater depth by the zigzag configuration of rectangular screens, that her art belongs as much to the tradition of Finnish landscape painting from the early 20th century as to the world of film. (She began her art studies in Helsinki, rebelling against the prevailing abstract tradition, before studying film in London and Los Angeles.)

Alive and clicking The Guardian

2006-10-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

Heath Bunting, the first internet artist, showed me his piece A Visitors Guide to London at an underground arts event in the early 1990s. By clicking on a dustbin or a bit of waste ground, you could take a magical mystery tour of the metropolis. It was primitive, innocent, and infused with a radical optimism. Bunting was one of a generation of young activist-artists for whom the digital revolution was a superhighway to world anarchy.

They are still at it, only now it's the commercial structure of the internet they are trying to subvert - one project recently commissioned by the new media art site rhizome.com is called Google Will Eat Itself; the creators propose to buy bits of Google until they own the entire business. Such artists now seem a bit old-fashioned. The internet is no longer a utopian possibility but an ever-mutating reality; the hacker has been replaced by conventional artists who simply want to show their work online. And the man who has been first to tap into this desire and produce the art equivalent of YouTube is Charles Saatchi, whose reputation as a businessman and collector could scarcely be more different from Heath Bunting's lo-fi activism.

This summer, the Guardian teamed up with Saatchi's Your Gallery site in the hope of creating an actual, as opposed to virtual, exhibition, drawn from the the unwieldy mass of photographers, sculptors and painters on the site. It was hard to know where to start, but a judging panel - me, artists Cornelia Parker and Marc Quinn, gallerist Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst and broadcaster Tim Marlow - eventually drew up a shortlist of 30. Then we asked readers to nominate their top 10: the work of these finalists goes on show at the Guardian's Newsroom gallery next week. Your Gallery is typical of the new face of the internet: it does not claim any political or utopian dimension, yet delivers the interaction dreamed of by the first cyber-idealists.

The technology has caught up with the dreams. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century is a good analogy. Printing immediately transformed how art was seen. People throughout Europe could and did see Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling through prints. Yet this only enhanced the demand to see the original, as photography and film stimulate tourism today.

In his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin wrote that photographic reproduction would destroy the "aura" of the original work of art. In reality, masterpieces - even the "originals" of Duchamp's Readymades - have become ever more glamorous. The success of Your Gallery proves once again that people do not want to abandon the physical work of art, only find new ways to communicate it.

The Guardian has now helped Saatchi complete the circle and return the objects from his virtual gallery to a flesh and blood exhibition. Far from a betrayal of the non-physical nature of internet art, this is exactly what the artists who contribute work to Your Gallery want - to be seen. It is also a dramatic revelation of how, in the near future, this way of showing art may undermine the entire system of dealers, magazines and art fairs that calls itself the "art world".

There are no quality controls or limits on who posts art at Your Gallery, any more than there are controls on who posts a comment on a blog at the Guardian's Comment is Free website. The same democratic revolution that is transforming journalism promises to transform art. The 10 artists who have made it out of Your Gallery into the Newsroom are a hugely varied and debatable bunch, but what they have in common is that none of them have so far been picked up by the art world.

Art criticism is one of the things that has to change in a more democratic culture - as I quickly discovered when I joined the judging panel, a virtual, rather than face-to-face, process. Three of my picks made it into the final 10, and these are still my favourites - especially the nutty and grotesque art of Joshua Hagler, an anthropological window on to America's religious right - but what does getting them into the final 10 mean? Is this collective choice "the truth"? No, it's democracy. It does reflect a kind of consensus, but part of democracy is that you have the right to disagree totally.

The October Revolution

2006-10-13T04:53:00.000-07:00

Russian collectors have become a major force in the art market of late—but most have concentrated on 19th-century paintings, Fabergé, and the occasional blockbuster, of which the most famous is the $95.2m Picasso Dora Maar au Chat sold in May in New York, probably to a novice Russian buyer.

Buyers for contemporary Russian art were overwhelmingly non-Russian until around five years ago. But no longer. A new class of collectors has appeared, while contemporary galleries are springing up fast in Moscow. This year it is believed at least 30 Russian collectors have attended Frieze, and oligarch Boris Berezovsky was spotted

at the Frieze private view

on Wednesday.

A driving force behind the new interest in contemporary art is the Moscow-based Club of Contemporary Collectors, founded five years ago by financier Mikhail Tsarev and three friends. Today it has 46 members, including the French-native but Moscow-based Pierre Brochet, Natalya Ivanova (who is a partner in the new Yakult Gallery) and Vladimir Dobrovolsky, who has bought at earlier Frieze fairs.

“About 20 people in the club are really active and attend most of the main art fairs,” says Sergei Khripun, director of XL (E13), the only Russian gallery at the fair, adding that “the number of collectors is significantly up this year”. Among the works he has on show is a large “underwater” painting (Black, 2006) by the highly fashionable duo Dubossarsky and Vinogradov (sold to a Dutch museum for €55,000, $65,000).

The club’s vice-president, Claire Savoretti and fellow member Dilyara Allakhverdova, were at the fair yesterday visiting XL. Model, 2006, by Irina Korina (€10,000, $12,000), was among the pieces on view on its stand—a work that the club bought for its foundation, which aims to promote Russian contemporary art both locally and internationally and to support the artists through acquisitions.

Earlier this year the foundation organised an auction with Sotheby’s, which raised enough money to fund a school of contemporary art for a year, as well as sponsoring Russian students to study abroad.

Moscow still lacks a contemporary art museum although two collectors are opening private museums. Plastic-window mogul Igor Marklin will show his collection in Tverskaya Street in central Moscow, while a few blocks away the Ekaterina Foundation’s space will show construction tycoon Vladimir Seminikhin’s modern and contemporary art holdings.

Ms Savoretti collects for herself as well as for the foundation, but was unable to buy anything at Frieze. “Everything seemed to be sold,” she said, “but it is not too important, because coming here means I can discover the artists, get information and then hopefully buy things later,” she added.

“It took generations to recognise the importance of Malevich or Kandinsky—our aim is to ensure that today’s artists don’t have to wait so long,” says Mr Tsarev.

An offbeat homage to an unlikely pair International Herald Tribune

2006-10-08T04:01:00.000-07:00

Under the motto "The Year of Art," this Rhineland capital has launched a Quadriennale that more than lives up to its hype. A dozen major exhibitions in museums and other public spaces are complemented by more than 20 shows in leading private galleries and an uncountable number of fringe events. The consistently high quality of this fine arts smorgasbord establishes Düsseldorf as Germany's only serious cultural rival to Berlin.

No fewer than seven public institutions in the city are devoted to modern and contemporary art. The prestigious Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen, or "K-20," which is devoted to art of the 20th century, will soon acquire an extension nearly doubling its exhibition space. Art of this century is presented in "K-21," an elegantly renovated palazzo that once housed the state Parliament. Across the way from K-20, the grime- coated Kunsthalle, which has long borne unmistakable resemblance to a deserted bunker, is receiving a thorough makeover. Another neighbor, the historic Kunstakademie, continues to be a happy hunting ground for gallerists and collectors in search of fresh young talent.

Düsseldorf's progressive image is further enhanced by international architects like Frank Gehry and David Chipperfield, who have helped glamorize the city's once-defunct harbor area. Thus, the Quadriennale enjoys a fertile context that lends individual events additional authority. These range from "Mental Exercises," a Bruce Nauman anthology of video works and installations at the NRW Forum (through Jan. 14), to a chillingly reductionist ode to mortality by the Mexican installation artist Teresa Margolies at the Kunstverein (through Jan. 7). Meanwhile, K-21 is hosting a retrospective for the Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz (through Feb. 4), and the large-as-life figures of Manolo Valdés's "Las Meninas" saunter along a traffic island near the opera house.

Ironically, in a city that, with the aid of old masters Bernd and Hilla Becker and their gifted students, did so much to generate the international photography boom, the medium is largely absent from the official program. A number of gallery shows help to take up the slack. At Bugdahn und Kaimer, one encounters striking "Portraits from the Art World" by Dietmar Schneider. Under the rubric "Uniform," Gallery Voss features the ingeniously staged crowd scenes of Claudia Rogge.

A sense of dramatic staging also animates the large-format, black-and-white scenarios arranged by Jürgen Klauke, on view at the Hans Mayer Gallery. In many of these, the artist himself is the solo performer in an erotic-neurotic theater of the absurd. In comparison to earlier works, in which Klauke played with transsexual motifs, there is something almost classical in these dark-suited figures sprawled among tangled tresses of long black hair.

Klauke's self-dramatizations neatly complement the Quadriennale's central theme of the human body in the visual arts. Into this arena stride the true protagonists of the Düsseldorf event: Francis Bacon and Caravaggio. Surprisingly, the presentation at the Museum Kunst Palast (through Jan. 7) is the first German exhibition for Caravaggio's muscled uvre, represented here by 30 canvases.

For the Francis Bacon show, entitled "The Violence of the Real," the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen has assembled 64 works dating from 1945, when Bacon exhibited the first of his celebrated triptychs, to 1991, the year before his death at 82. Among the exponents on view are 10 triptychs and numerous preliminary works, photographs and memorabilia. Bacon's writhing, tormented bodies suggest striking parallels, as well as contrasts, to the sensuous, earthy, well-fleshed figures that would created the 17th-century vogue of "Caravaggisimo."

Unlike Caravaggio, Bacon has been the subject of several important exhibitions in Germany, so that viewers can expect few surprises here. Yet there are revealing moments and sudden insights to be gained: from the icon-like, small-format heads that underscore the painter's fascination with classical painting or the "Studies for a Self-Portrait" (1979), on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum, revealing the bulging, asymmetrical head that Louise Bourgeois once described as resembling nothing so much as "an overripe melon someone has sat on." Yet this small but stunning triptych turns these very irregularities into a painterly tour de force of sweeping curves, chiaroscuro effects and remarkable plasticity. This portrait of the artist as a vulnerable, far-from-young man has the stuff of fairy tale: of the repellent frog metamorphosing, before our eyes, into a handsome prince.

The models for Caravaggio's handsome princes and tormented martyrs were often youths recruited from the streets. Even his saints may reveal dirty feet, contributing with their very earthiness to the seemingly endless speculations about the painter's biography. Brawler, erotomane, murderer and a favorite of cardinals and noblemen, he died a mysterious, violent death.

Given the range of speculation about the painter's turbulent life, it would be comforting to say, "At least we have the pictures." But questions of attribution are almost as murky as the artist's biography. Following the baroque vogue of "Caravaggismo," the artist's star declined for two centuries, only regaining ascendancy at the beginning of the 20th century. As a result, scholarship now has to wend its way through an art- historical maze, tracking down originals, duplicates, copies and forgeries.

The Düsseldorf show takes this detective story as its point of departure, exhibiting originals and recently authenticated "discoveries" alongside duplicates from Caravaggio's own studio, copies later commissioned from other painters and outright forgeries. Only the fakes are clearly identified within the exhibition. For the rest, viewers are drawn into the drama of attribution, comparing for themselves different versions of the same motif and in the process discovering nuances frequently overlooked.

In the end, however, it is not the ongoing, sometimes acrimonious scholarly debate but the sheer power of figuration, the richness of color, the dramatic staging, the oblique framing that draw the viewer deeper and deeper into this odd but grandiose homage. A stately exhibition architecture heightens the effect. Long, comparatively narrow rooms have been augmented by niches suggestive of side-altars in a cathedral. With walls painted in rich, earthen tones, the total effect is hushed, sensuous, contemplative.

The curators at K-20 have had to contend with equally difficult spaces for the Francis Bacon show, but have failed to provide their Irish guest with suitable accommodation. A recycled exhibition architecture, originally conceived for last year's Matisse show, consists of a labyrinth-like setting with "cut-outs" that offer glimpses of works to come. This was a splendid concept for the Matisse show, which emphasized the borderline between interior and exterior spaces. The scheme makes no sense with Bacon. There is much that seems simply quirky here, but from which budding curators might learn a lesson or two. For example, if the decision has been made to situate labels to the left of works, stick to that principle unless the architecture forces you to do otherwise. And give folks a place to sit down.

Schlock and awe The Guardian

2006-10-06T07:35:00.000-07:00

After Iraq, Katrina and Abu Ghraib, what should we expect from US artists? More than Saatchi's show delivers, says Adrian Searle

One can forgive current American art a degree of querulousness, ambivalence and doubt about itself and its place in the world. One might expect it to be critical of the culture of which it is a part, and expect it to be cynical as well as satirical. How could it be otherwise? USA Today, the Royal Academy's exhibition of new art from America, all collected by Charles Saatchi, is certainly bold. Whether it adds up to a statement, or defines a zeitgeist, is another matter.

It has a sense of anxiety and self-loathing; amid this are angry protests, displays of mock insouciance, and tragicomic buffoonery. Ryan Tracartin's sculptures made me laugh out loud. At 25, he is as much a film-maker as a sculptor, and his sculptures look like props. Until Hurricane Katrina, he was based in New Orleans. World Wall is a kind of childish grotto, with bits of bodies poking out of the walls, a huge, cave-like open mouth where a living room once stood, mad bulging eyes, a house whose roof is painted over with waves. An unnaturally skinny naked mother stalks the floor, head aloof. The unattractive but game Vicky Veterinarian has a cat burrowing in her shirt. Mango Lady's skin is made from mango peel. The characters are all in search of a plot, but there isn't one.

The painted and sculpted human beings throughout USA Today seem variously dumb, stupid, aggressive, abject, forlorn, ridiculous, damaged, sick, in distress, screwed up. This can be no coincidence. Or perhaps Saatchi has a taste for this sort of thing, this dismal view of the world. Almost everything else here shouts, screams, lacerates itself in self-loathing, hectors, assaults, appals, insults.

In Fuck the Police, Dash Snow presents 45 framed press clippings: Cops Busted in Sex Abuse, Cops Who Killed For Mafia, Cop in Coke Ring. The catalogue tells us Snow "started taking photos when he was a yobbish teenager", and that the headlines are all "splattered with jism". Well, that changes everything.

Perhaps the most telling sculpture is an anonymous figure, either cowering or in prayer. The body is a black bin-liner. Brown clay hands reach forward, palms flat on the floor. Behind the figure is a trail of crumbled clay. Huma Bhabha's sculpture has an odd vulnerability, however curtailed an image of a human it presents.

After 9/11, after Hurricane Katrina, after Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, what should one expect from American culture, apart from rage and crawl-into- a-hole-in-the-ground-and-die abjection?

Perhaps that is what LA-based Jon Pylypchuk intends: his miserable little figures, touchingly dressed in remnants of fabric, stagger about on the floor, gather helplessly around the wounded, vomit in shock on the ground and upon each other. It is a horrible roundelay. All this goes on at ankle height. "Hopefully, I will live through this with a little bit of dignity," the title reads. Dignity is in short supply here. How about 222 plaster, wax and charcoal heads, each damaged in some way, each set inside a grubby little vitrine, in Beijing-born Terence Koh's Crackhead? Koh can't be accused of subtlety, any more than Banks Violette and her sculptural tableaux.

Violette's work is sculpture that wishes it was as edgy as a death-cult heavy metal band, but is about as dangerous as Spinal Tap. His casts of electric guitars, mock amplifiers and drifts of salt and sugar faking cocaine have schlock value, but little else.

In Barnaby Furnas's paintings, men in suits are being turned to mincemeat in a shoot-out on Hamburger Hill, and a flood of urethane red, like a bloody response to the poured and stained 1960s colour field paintings of Morris Louis, roars through a blue sky in another mammoth canvas. I can just see this sanguinous deluge displayed with pride in some American corporate lobby somewhere. That is one of the problems with art that attempts to make statements: it gets assimilated.

Paint becomes snot in a painted sneeze by Dana Schutz; she paints feelings as though they were regurgitated food. In one canvas, a head eats its own face, as well it might.

Schutz's paintings are at least funny and intelligently made. There are some silly paintings in this exhibition: a self-consciously badly painted decapitated horse with a huge penis, bluntly crass paintings of bits of bodies, Gerald Davis's deeply unpleasant paintings of adolescent sexuality.

Davis paints pubescent Monica giving head, and an x-ray view of teen Linsey's full colon, accompanied by a painted diary entry about her exquisite bathroom experience in the shopping mall. Where do we go with images like these? Am I meant to admire their more abstract qualities, or feel all smug at their sophisticated ironies?

USA Today is neither as good as I wanted it to be, nor as bad. When I say bad, I mean angry, lacerating, bitter, disillusioned, pained and powerful. In New York's Whitney Biennial, Richard Serra showed a rough little drawing of a now familiar image: a figure hooded in black, standing with outstretched arms on a box, waiting, so he thinks, to be electrocuted. "STOP BUSH," Serra scrawled on the drawing.

It may not be great art, but it doesn't need to be. That's the problem. I want an art more powerful - not just loud, not just blunt. Most of art's audience already know what they think about the state of America and the war on terror. The job of artists, novelists, film-makers, musicians and playwrights demands that they go further than stating the obvious. USA Today is an expression, more than anything, of impotence.

Hunting for lost apartheid-era black art China Dialy

2006-10-05T02:28:00.000-07:00

South Africa is scouring the globe to recover lost works by black artists that depict the turbulent apartheid era in a drive to educate young people about the struggle against white rule.

Vivid paintings of Zulu warriors and strife-torn black townships were shunned as too controversial, or simply too African, by mostly white South African art collectors under apartheid, and some were even banned.

But many paintings were quietly snapped up by foreign diplomats or visitors and spirited out of the country to adorn the walls of homes and boardrooms around the world.

The Ifa Lethu Foundation, supported by the ministry of culture, is trying to bring those works back to South Africa to display them in a touring exhibition of schools and community centres.

"This is about inspiring South Africans and forcing both black and white to confront their past and to celebrate what we have been able to achieve despite all the pain," Ifa Lethu Chairwoman Mamphela Ramphele said at the project launch in Soweto.

The travelling exhibition is also meant to educate young South Africans about the country's violent struggle against white rule and the sacrifices made by their parents' generation.

"It is making people aware of who they are and where they come from," said jazz maestro Hugh Masekela, who is backing the project. "If you don't know where you come from then you don't know where you are going."

The project first started when Australian diplomat Diane Johnstone donated a collection of 17 art works amassed during a posting to South Africa in the violent 1970s to the Pretoria Art Museum. That inspired a wider hunt for similar works.

Ifa Lethu has retrieved more than 60 works, including sketches of ghoulish figures depicting the 1976 Soweto street riots, a picture of women protesting apartheid laws, and vibrant paintings of traditional Zulu life.

Artist Sipho Ndebele sold his paintings of township life to Italian, German, and US diplomats and visitors after they were largely shunned by local buyers. Now one buyer from the United States has agreed to return some of it to join the exhibition.

"It is important for the young generation to know the history of our lives in art form," he said. "Despite the pain and grime of our lives, it is beautiful when we put it on paper."