and this, and this, and this, and this....: April 2010

26.4.10

Thomas Hardy. Hilarious?

First she fetched a great basin, and washed Tess's hair with such thoroughness that when dried and brushed it looked twice as much as at other times. She tied it with a broader pink ribbon than usual.

Then she put upon her the white frock that Tess had worn at the club-walking, the airy fulness of which, supplementing her enlarged COIFFURE, imparted to her developing figure an amplitude which belied her age, and might cause her to be estimated as a woman when she was not much more than a child."I declare there's a hole in my stocking-heel!" said Tess.
"Never mind holes in your stockings--they don't speak! When I was a maid, so long as I had a pretty bonnet the devil might ha' found me in heels."Her mother's pride in the girl's appearance led her to step back, like a painter from his easel, and survey her work as a whole.

21.4.10

My interview with Barbara Kruger

This was an odd assignment.
My buddy, one of BB's editors, a really smart guy, asked me if I'd like to interview Barbara Kruger. No brainer. I thought the occasion would be the release of her book, or her show at Mary Boone.

But as it turns out that was not my assignment. Instead of celebrating the accomplishments of a big-deal, living breathing feminist art crusader and her grand career, it was requested that I ask Kruger questions about a guy whose legend is already outsized and whom is six feet under. I was to ask her questions about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Why? Because in the pragmatic world of magazine publishing, April would be the 'Brooklyn' issue, and Basquiat was born in Brooklyn. Right.

I was impressed with this leap of logic, and when we started talking, Kruger was too. She made it perfectly clear to me right from the start, and the article reflects that. She hilariously kept on softball-pitching to me one-liners about Basquiat. Eventually, after the requisite Basquiat questions, we spoke of other things, which didn't make the article. Instead, this piece is of the 'article about the difficulty of this article' variety. So here's my version, which I filed somewhere between Memphis and New Orleans:

Barbara Kruger's art is at its core, a reflection of the artists' integral sense of doubt. Her job is to question everyone's motives and it was no surprise when she doubted my questions for this article. "Now you tell me why I find this funny," was her counter to my first question for her, which wasn't about her, her new book (published by Rizzoli) or the show she's putting on at Mary Boone (opening March 27). It was a question about Basquiat.

It's the Brooklyn issue, I explained. Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn. Though their careers and their artistic styles could not have been more different, like many artists who came to the art world's attention in the early 80's, both of them spent time at the Mudd club. On a phone call to her in LA, where she teaches now at the University of California, Los Angles, Black Book was hoping she might have something to say about the artist.

Not really. "One of the things that creeps me out, is the crazy nostalgia that paints times so different and rosier and utopian than they actually were. It was just everyday life, the way we have everyday life now…"

Twenty-two years since being laid to rest in Greenwood Cemetary, Brooklyn, the public's understanding of Basquiat's work has been de-clawed by a sort of celebrity-obsessed biopic-ization. "Basquiat" is short-hand for a grittier, more 'authentic' New York. The massive paintings he made in his big Soho loft in the 80s conveniently still look great in big Soho lofts today. “a Basquiat,” the noun, is a luxury commodity.

Answering questions about the late artists' life and legacy, Kruger took care not to perpetuate his deification: "All I can say is that I think he was a tremendously gifted artist….it's amazing how people do not know his work today, especially people involved in so-called street culture, that they don’t even know what his roots were and the importance of his work.”

Kruger emphasised the radicality of Basquiat's career: "The art world was a very different place then...there was a time when the art world in New York were 12 white guys. It's better now. The art world's more globalized, there are different people of different colors, different genders, persuasions, different classes who are able to call themselves artists, that makes for a richer cultural life.... I don't think about the good old days. To me, these are the good old days."

She recalled Warhol's strange adoption of the much younger artist (in 1982) and Basquiat's meteoric rise to fame: "I thought Warhol's appropriation of him was sort of weird, on a certain level, but it was based on power, and libido, and prominence, and about two very gifted male artists." Though Warhol would aid in the creation of Basquiat's myth, Basquiat himself was by no means naif to the benefits of a well-branded artistic persona. One painting of his, also from 1982, is nothing but two shades of brown acrylic and in the top half, the intended sale value of the work scrawled in white oil-stick. It is called “Five-Thousand Dollars”.

A work Kruger made that same year advocates her own ideas about the value of Art: over a photostat collage of the Sistine Chapel, she printed the following in her signature geneva font: "You Invest in the Divinity of the Masterpiece." (The MOMA invested, and the work is held in their permanent collection).

"To me the "art world" is an anthropology....It's all down to construction of power through a proper name. These people are no longer bodies to tell us that we're right or wrong.... so rather than talk about a particular artist, it's all about the construction of fame, or prominence, and in truth it's more about how proper names are created through a subculture.... You can attach a name to it, you can call it 'Basquiat', 'Warhol', you can call it 'Eva Hesse', if I dare mention a woman," Kruger said. "What we're seeing is this sortof really unexamined look at how things were back then. This article, these questions you're asking is a furtherance of this very thing. That is the way periodicals work."

Rodney Alcala's photos

My friend Jessica Wolfe points out
that each of his victims/subjects has "such specific beauty."

It goes without saying that a photographer is always present in his photo.

Intent seeps through form and looking at these makes you feel like a predator's accomplice ....or is that always how you feel reading the New York Post?

20.4.10

Joyce Kim

"It's sort of a parody of its own subject matter, a parody of seriousness. The aesthetic object has become a displaced subject. The cartoony aspect of it, the peeling, the Pollock-like style, the Barnet Newman-like vertical lines are present. It's a group of fragments of different experiences that I've witnessed. Placing myself as a visual witness in abstraction, and recategorizing the deck of cards, representing the process as a critique."