Unfortunately due to low energy and lack of time, I could only attend the LA Art Show for a few hours to grab this interview and have a quick look around on one of the days that this was here.

INTERVIEW:
My radio interview with Kim Martingdale (click here for his bio) and others is now up:

click here to listen

REVIEW:
My first stop was the live “graffiti” art in the entranceway. Three artists were simultaneously working on three large murals brought to the LA Art Show by the LA Art Machine Gallery curated by Bryson Strauss. World reknown artists El Mac and Retna collaborated on a monochromatic portrait of a Latina done in aerosol with text. Mear One was working on a deconstructed cityscape with LA’s Watts Towers in the background and a figure of a boy in the foreground with butterflies flying from his chest. Coffee was painting a cubist monochromatic piece.

Next I visited what was probably my favorite exhibit at the LA Art Show, a show called “Signs” (click here to read press release). Sundaram Tagore Gallery curated a grouping of Islamic artists. The paintings were heavily text-based because depictions of the figure are prohibited in that culture. What you have then is text used as a textural element in most of the pieces, text abstracted to symbols. Text sources could be anything from poetry to holy books. The alphabet and its forms was also emphasized.

I then stopped off at the Uruguay exhibit. This year’s LA Art show debuted their guest country program featuring Uruguay. Uruguay is the second smallest country in South America, but it boasts a healthy democratic government, high economic development with a high GDP per capita and the 47th highest quality of life in the world. It sits nestled between Brazil and Argentina and its art scene is world class. They did not have anyone English speaking at the booth so I was not able to interview them, but the artwork shown consisted of contemporary painting and installation work, with a video exhibit as well.

Sister Cities had an collection of artists work from sister cities of Los Angeles. Pete Sterns of London had a very calming color field piece which he rendered as both a richly pigmented painting and as a computer animation. Nori, an artist from Japan, had two paintings representative of “every city.” His work is heavily influenced by jazz.

The Luce Foundation, a photography incubator, curated the Group LA exhibit. The main video element was a series of slideshows from different artist of their neighborhoods.

Finally, I found myself at the cluster of Korean art galleries. My favorite Korean artist is Yong Deok Lee who is known for his concave sculptures. The images are carved into a flat plane.

(YouTube turned up a few examples which gives an idea of the visual illusion created of 3-dimensionality when the viewer walks around his pieces:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SaG271TqqE)

I was happy to see a new piece, an aerial view of a swimmer underwater.

PHOTOS:
I didn’t have much time to appreciate the artwork this year, but this is a small sampling:

[View with PicLens]

 

David Wilson is the founding director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which opened in 1988. Wilson has also produced six independent films, most recently under the auspices of MJT in conjunction with Kabinet, an arts and science-based cultural institution located in St. Petersburg, Russia.

We were treated to a lecture and film about philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov and Constantine Tsiolkovski, the father of theoretical astronautics. David Wilson also spoke about the early days of the Russian space program and he showed a silent film influenced by the writings of Tsiolkovski. As an aside, currently on exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology are five commissioned dog portraits of the first dogs launched into space by the Soviets.

From Wikipedia:

Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov (Russian: Никола́й Фёдорович Фёдоров; surname also Anglicized as “Fedorov”) (June 9, 1827–December 28, 1903) was aRussian Orthodox Christian philosopher, who was part of the Russian cosmism movement and a precursor of transhumanism. Fyodorov advocated radical life extension, physical immortality and even resurrection of the dead, using scientific methods.

…

Fyodorov was a futurist, who theorized about the eventual perfection of the human race and society (i.e., utopia), including radical ideas like immortality, revival of the dead, space and ocean colonization. His writings heavily influenced mystic Peter Uspensky and early rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Mankind’s Common Cause

Fedorov argued that the evolutionary process was directed towards increased intelligence and its role in the development of life. Man is the pinnacle of evolution, as well as its creator and director. He must direct it where his reason and morality dictate. Fedorov noted that mortality is the most striking indicator of yet imperfect, contradictory nature of Man and the deep reason for most evil and nihilism in man and mankind. Fedorov argued that the struggle against death can become the deepest and the most natural cause uniting all people of Earth, regardless of their nationality, race, citizenship or wealth (he called this the Common Cause).

Fedorov thought that death and afterdeath existence should become the subject of comprehensive scientific inquiry. Achieving immortality and revival is the highest goal of science. And this knowledge must leave the laboratories and become the common property of all: “Everyone must be learning and everything be the subject of knowledge and action”.

Transformation of past physical forms

The revival of people who lived in the past is not a recreation of their past physical form — it was imperfect, parasitic, centered on mortal existence. The idea is to transform it into self-creating, mind-controlled form, capable of infinite renewal, which is immortal. Those who haven’t died will go through the same transformation. The man will have to become a creator and organizer of his organism (“our body will be our business”). In the past the development of civilization happened by increasing human power using external tools and machines — the human body remained imperfect.

Transhumanism

Fedorov points out that we need to breach the gap between the power of technology and weakness of the human physical form. The transition is overdue from purely technical development, a “prosthetic” civilization, to organic progress, when not just external tools, artificial implements, but the organisms themselves are improved, so that, for example, a man can fly, see far and deep, travel through space, live in any environment. Man must become capable of “organodevelopment” that so far only nature was capable of. Fedorov talks about supremacy of mind, “giving, developing organs for itself” and anticipates V. Vernadsky’s idea of autotrophic man. He argues that a man must become anautotrophic, self-feeding creature, acquire a new mode of energy exchange with the environment that will not end.

Fedorov repeatedly said that only broad scientific studies of aging, death, after death condition, only the science that strives to achieve a transformed immortal life, can really uncover the means to overcome death.

Wikipedia entry on Constantine Tsiolkovski:

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (Russian: Константи́н Эдуа́рдович Циолко́вский;Polish: Konstanty Ciołkowski) (September 17 [O.S. September 5] 1857–September 19, 1935) was an Imperial Russian and Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer of the astronautic theory. He is considered by many as a father of theoretical astronautics.[1] His works later inspired leading Soviet rocket engineers as Sergey Korolyov and Valentin Glushko and contributed for early successes of Soviet space program.

Tsiolkovsky spent most of his life in a log house on the outskirts of Kaluga, about 200 km (125 miles) southwest of Moscow. A misanthrope by nature, he appeared strange and bizarre to his fellow-townsmen.

…

He was born in Izhevskoye (now in Spassky District, Ryazan Oblast), in the Russian Empire, to a middle-class family. His father, Edward Tsiolkovsky (in Polish: Ciołkowski), was Polish; his mother, Maria Yumasheva, was an educated Russian woman. His father was a Polish patriot deported to Russia as a result of his revolutionary political activities. At the age of 9, Konstantin caught a serious illness and became hard of hearing^[1]. He was not accepted at elementary schools because of his hearing problem, so he was self-taught^[1].

Tsiolkovsky theorized many aspects of space travel and rocket propulsion. He is considered the father of human spaceflight and the first man to conceive the space elevator, becoming inspired in 1895 by the newly-constructed Eiffel Tower in Paris.

He was also an adherent of philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov, and believed that colonizing space would lead to the perfection of the human race, with immortality and a carefree existence.

Nearly deaf, he worked as a high school mathematics teacher until retiring in 1920. Only from the mid 1920s onwards was the importance of his work acknowledged by others, and Tsiolkovsky was honoured for it. He died on 19 September 1935 in Kaluga and was buried in state.

Someone forwarded this to me: Allen Salkin has a fascinating story in today’s NY Times (link) about high end pawnshops like Art Capital Group.  Annie Leibowitz has borrowed about  $15 milllion from them and for collateral, among other things, she has put up the rights to all of her photographs. ]]> http://christinepalma.com/blog/2009/02/pawning-the-rights-to-artwork/feed/ 0 http://christinepalma.com/blog/2009/02/my-favorite-pieces-from-14th-annual-la-art-show-at-the-la-convention-center-january-25/ http://christinepalma.com/blog/2009/02/my-favorite-pieces-from-14th-annual-la-art-show-at-the-la-convention-center-january-25/#comments Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:59:20 +0000 Christine Palma http://christinepalma.com/blog/?p=92 This photorealistic painting of a pile of The Wall Street Journal newspapers on a bookcase by Steve Mills and the concave intaglio-like sculpture by Yong Deok Lee were my overall favorites from the LA Art Show. Please scroll down for comments and other photos.

Steve Mills

(detail)

Steve Mills

Wall Street Journal 2

Oil on Aluminum Panel

42″ x 59″

The creamy paint treatment on aluminum panel intrigued me. Why use aluminum panel?

Ross Merrill, chief curator of conservation at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, writes in American Artist:

The most stable painting panel is an aluminum panel, such as Dibond (made by Alcon), that consists of a polyethylene and aluminum-skin core. Dibond does not respond to moisture or temperature changes, is exceptionally rigid, and is lighter than plywood.

From Wikipedia on Photorealism:

As a full-fledged art movement, Photorealism evolved from Pop Art^[1][2] and as a counter to Abstract Expressionism^[3][4] as well as Minimalist art movements^{[5][6][7] [8]} in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States.^[9] It is also sometimes labeled as Super-Realism, New Realism, Sharp Focus Realism, or Hyper-Realism.^[10] The Photorealist genre is predominately made up of painters. 

Photorealist painting cannot exist without the photograph. In Photorealism, change and movement must be frozen in time which must then be accurately represented by the artist.^[14] Photorealists gather their imagery and information with the camera and photograph. Once the photograph is developed (usually onto a photographic slide) the artist will systematically transfer the image from the photographic slide onto canvases. This is done by either projecting the slide or grid techniques.^[15] The resulting images are often direct copies of the original photograph but are usually larger than the original photograph or slide. This results in the photorealist style being tight and precise, often with an emphasis on imagery that requires a high level of technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate, such as reflections in specular surfaces and the geometric rigor of man-made environs.^[16]

20th century photorealism can be contrasted with the similarly literal style found in trompe l’oeil paintings of the 19th century. However, trompe l’oeil paintings tended to be carefully designed, very shallow-space still-lifes, employing illusionistic devices such as the use of shadows to cause small objects to appear to exist above the surface of the painting. (Trompe l’oeil literally means “fool the eye.”) The photorealism movement moved beyond this illusionism to tackle deeper spatial representations (e.g. urban landscapes) and took on much more varied and dynamic subject matter.

Yong Deok Lee

Yong Deok Lee
Untitled
Sculpture

This triptych was untitled. Yong Deok Lee is a Korean artist known for his concave sculptures. The images are carved into a flat plane.

YouTube turned up a few examples which gives an idea of the visual illusion created of 3-dimensionality when the viewer walks around his pieces:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SaG271TqqE

These remind me of ancient Roman intaglio jewelry:

http://www.ancienttouch.com/roman-intaglios-cameos.htm

Other interesting pieces:

Jordan Eagles

New Blood

I asked and they said it’s made from real cow blood.

Damien Hirst

Cathedral: Orvieto

Diamond Dust and Silk screen with Glazes

42 1/4″ x 42 1/4″

$38,000

Real butterflies?

William B. Hoyt

Hours with Walter Evans, 2005

Oil on Canvas

32″ x 48″

$45,000

William B. Hoyt

Island Kitchen, 2008

Oil on Canvas

30″ x 32″

$35,000

William B. Hoyt

Aranciata, 2008

Oil on Canvas

24″ x 29″

$25,000

Chris Shelby, CGU

Reflections, 2008

Pastel on Paper

50″ x 30″

This was from the student gallery.

These were my favorite prints from Photo LA held at the Barker Hanger at the Santa Monica Airport:

Soo Kim
Midnight Reyjavik, 2008?
Hand-cut C-print
25 x 25 ” (63.5 x 63.5 cm)

What is the story behind Soo Kim’s Midnight Reyjavik photo series? The title of the photograph above implies that it was taken at midnight on the longest brightest day when midnight is almost indistinguishable from noon. In fact, the shadows the structures cast are short. Soo Kim’s exacto knife cuts mainly in the highlight areas where you might expect white giving the image a blown out feel. She also turns architecture into lacey membranes inviting the audience to peer into the hive that is this city.

Some interesting facts from Wikipedia for Reykjavik, Iceland:

•Its location, only slightly south of the Arctic Circle, receives only four hours of daylight on the shortest day in the depth of winter; during the summer the nights are almost as bright as the days.

•Steam from hot springs in the region is supposed to have inspired Reykjavík’s name, as Reykjavík loosely translates to “Smokey Bay”.

•Most houses in Reykjavík use the geothermal heating system. It is the largest system of this kind in the world.

•The city has fostered some world famous talents in recent years, such as singers like Björk and Oddur Sigurjónsson and bands Múm and Sigur Rós.

The worse thing happened last week: My 15-year old dog Tommy died suddenly on January 2nd. He taught me to be sensitive to the animal spirit. We had been through so much together. I was still raw from this when I attended Photo LA. I was immediately drawn into Rob MacInnis’ work.

When you first encounter Rob MacInnis’ Farm Families series in the mural size, you are struck with a sense of the unhomely or uncanny. (Especially Fresh Faces I) Is it a trick, my friend asked, Are these animals alive or dead, How do they stand so still. In this particular “family portrait” (above) we have rare animals, including pygmy goats and miniature horses. I was also struck by the popularity of this print; I counted nine red dots next to the photo which means nine buyers.

If this print calls out to you, check out Rob MacInnis’ fascinating website – http://www.robmacinnis.com where you can see his body of animal portraiture work, as well as, watch a very good documentary on his work process. I would love to have this print.

The press release notes:

MacInnis’ work focuses on the idea of the creation of identity within the photographic image. By foregrounding our innate compassion of animals, MacInnis explores the correlation between the reifying process of animal consumption and the fashion world’s depiction of the body.

MacInnis’ uses animals as portrait subjects, drawing parallels between the idealization of the human form in contemporary fashion photography and the subjugation of animals by humans.

The artist gives the animals an arena for self-expression as well as humiliation. His photographs reverse the traditional roles of animals in western society, setting them to a level on par with humans. The artist’s objective is to portray an alternative world where animals are not our possessions, but individuals whom we subject to the same idealization as we would a contemporary fashion model.

Rob MacInnis’ portraits demand immediate emotional reaction, drawing on the raw connection between viewer and subject and exposing the instinctive, compassionate union of species.

Director David Lynch’s ‘Interesting Questions’ online art gallery (http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/030107_lynch_art.html).

His interesting website invites visitors to walk through a virtual gallery where they can stop in front of art work hanging on the “walls” for  a closer look.

Choose Floor ‘A’ in the elevator to find your way to the gallery. It may take a moment to load.

In the entry for December 18, WIkipedia notes:

• 218 BC – Second Punic War: Battle of the Trebia – Hannibal‘s Carthaginian forces defeat those of the Roman Republic.

In one of my five years of studying Latin, I had to translate parts of Livy’s (59 BC to AD 17) The War with Hannibal.

Synopsis
In The War with Hannibal, Livy (59 BC AD 17) chronicles the events of the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, until the Battle of Zama in 202 BC. He vividly recreates the immense armies of Hannibal, complete with elephants, crossing the Alps; the panic as they approached the gates of Rome; and the decimation of the Roman army at the Battle of Lake Trasimene. Yet it is also the clash of personalities that fascinates Livy, from great debates in the Senate to the historic meeting between Scipio and Hannibal before the decisive battle.

It was during the Second Punic War that Hannibal, a Carthaginian commander and military genius, defeated the Romans by winning several early key battles. Despite heavy losses Hannibal led an army of roughly 80,000 men (disputed), complete with a herd of 37 war elephants, from Iberia over the Pyrenees and the Alps (!) into Northern Italy. The feat was accomplished in under a month.

Excerpt:
Livy 21.32.6-37.6; translated by Iana Scott-Kilvert

Getting on the move at dawn, the army struggled slowly forward over snow-covered ground, the hopelessness of utter exhaustion in every face.

Seeing their despair, Hannibal rode ahead and at a point of vantage which afforded a prospect of a vast extent of country, he gave the order to halt, pointing to Italy far below, and the Po Valley beyond the foothills of the Alps. ‘My men,’ he said, ‘you are at this moment passing the protective barrier of Italy – nay more, you are walking over the very walls of Rome. Henceforward all will be easy going – no more hills to climb. After a fight or two you will have the capital of Italy, the citadel of Rome, in the hollow of your hands.’
…

The track was almost everywhere precipitous, narrow, and slippery; it was impossible for a man to keep his feet; the least stumble meant a fall, and a fall a slide, so that there was indescribable confusion, men and beasts stumbling and slipping on top of each other.
…

But even so he was no luckier; progress was impossible, for though there was good foothold in the quite shallow layer of soft fresh snow which had covered the old snow underneath, nevertheless as soon as it had been trampled and dispersed by the feet of all those men and animals, there was left to tread upon only the bare ice and liquid slush of melting snow underneath. The result was a horrible struggle, the ice affording no foothold in any case, and least of all on a steep slope; when a man tried by hands or knees to get on his feet again, even those useless supports slipped from under him and let him down; there were no stumps or roots anywhere to afford a purchase to either foot or hand; in short, there was nothing for it but to roll and slither on the smooth ice and melting snow.

In art history and currently on exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, we find:

J. M. W. Turner
Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps
Oil on Canvas, exhibited 1812

This picture exemplifies Turner’s achievement in the Sublime, combining personal experience with complex historical and literary associations. The picture originated in observations of a storm in Yorkshire, though it represents Hannibal’s invasion of Italy in 218BC.

Turner does not show the General himself, but focuses instead on the distress of Hannibal’s army. He thus aims at a universal, pessimistic vision of mankind, a theme Turner elaborated in poetry written to accompany this work. Nonetheless, the picture invites a contemporary parallel, between Hannibal and Napoleon, who had crossed the Alps to invade Italy in 1797.

(From the display caption August 2004)

Hopefully I’ll be able to see this exhibit before it closes and write a review.  Gordon Matta-Clark is one of my top five favorite artists. I’m a big fan of his films documenting his cut buildings, as well as, the cut building performances themselves. He first captured my heart fifteen years ago at Sci-Arc and during a city-wide retrospective with lectures and screenings at MOCA and UCLA.

The NY Times has background on Matta-Clark:

Few artists could match his ability to extract raw beauty from the dark, decrepit corners of a crumbling city. Fewer still haunt the architectural imagination with such force.

Enlarge This Image

Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artist’s Rights Society

An image from Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Splitting” (1974). H
ouses that the artist carved with a power saw commented on the American city’s decay.

A trained architect and the son of the Surrealist artist Roberto Matta, Matta-Clark occupied the uneasy territory between the two professions when architecture was searching for a way out of its late Modernist doldrums. His best-known works of the ’70s, including abandoned warehouses and empty suburban houses that he carved up with a power saw, offered potent commentary on both the decay of the American city and the growing sense that the American dream was evaporating. The fleeting and temporal nature of that work — many projects were demolished weeks after completion — only added to his cult status after an early death in 1978, from cancer, at 35.

The show brings home just how cleverly he challenged the high priests of architecture who, in Matta-Clark’s mind, inhabited a world of lofty abstractions divorced from the physical reality of everyday life. That critique is newly resonant, when even the most radical architectural ideas are quickly gobbled up by the cultural mainstream, and takes on the slickness of advertising slogans.

This is from the MOCA press release:

Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure is a full-scale retrospective of one of the key figures to emerge in the generation of artists that followed minimalism. During the brief but highly productive ten years that he worked as an artist, and even more so since his death at the age of 35, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–78) has exerted a powerful fascination on artists and architects who know his work. The son of surrealist painter Roberto Echaurren Matta, Matta-Clark produced a body of work that incorporated spatial, social, and psychological experiences. Best known for the variety of his often spectacular, planned architectural interventions, Matta-Clark’s works transformed everyday experiences into extraordinary visual encounters. Among the major works featured in the exhibition are sculptures made from his acclaimed architectural building cuts, as well as drawings, films, photographs, and notebooks. A wealth of documentary material related to his interactions with architecture and space, community events, and collective activity is also shown.

# # #

Installation views of Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” at MOCA Grand Avenue, 2007, photo by Brian Forrest:

Moon is The Oldest Television – 1965-67 (1996)
Nam-june Paik
TV Moniter,projector and video

I.
The Moon vis-à-vis the Beholder

In 1963 America put the first man on the moon, an event broadcast live on television sets around the world. That year, that day, that hour and even those minutes are punched into the timeclock of global consciousness. Two years later, Paik reflects on this event with “Moon is the Oldest TV.”   The installation is composed of a single row of Philco television sets on individual pedestals. On their screens play a progression of reprocessed black-and-white video footage from full moon to new moon.

The moon as television becomes a metaphor for a philisophical view of parallax. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (writes) in his work The Parallax View,

“…the observed distance is not simply subjective, due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stances, or points of view.

It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently mediated so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object itself.

Or -to put it in Lacanese- the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its “blind spot,” that which is “in the object more than object itself”, the point from which the object itself returns the gaze. Sure the picture is in my eye, but I am also in the picture.

Denial is also an extention of parallax and the moon landing as a staged event is a rock that revisionist historians (negationism) cling to. (Click here for  video from Moon Hoax Documentary – Fox News.)

As I contemplate Paik’s installation and the mythos of moon watching, I am immediately drawn to the Apollo Moon Landing hoax accusations which claim the Apollo Moon landings were faked by NASA.

From Wikipedia:

A year after the first moon landing, Knight Newspapers conducted a poll of 1721 U.S. citizens and found that more than 30 percent of all of the poll’s respondents were “suspicious of NASA’s trips to the Moon” with the number rising to over half in some demographic areas. The Newsweek article that published the poll results noted that among the respondents were “an elderly Philadelphia woman who thought the moon landing had been staged in an Arizona desert” and a “housewife” whose suspicions were based on her belief that her television could not “receive signals from the moon.” Another respondent said, “It’s all a deliberate effort to mask problems at home . . . the people are unhappy – and this takes their minds off their problems.” …

Fox television’s 2001 TV special “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Really Land on the Moon?” … said roughly 20 percent of the public had doubts about the authenticity of the Apollo program…

A Dittmar Associates poll in 2006 showed that among 18-26 year old college-educated students “27 percent expressed some doubt that NASA went to the Moon, with 10 percent indicating that it was ‘highly unlikely’ that a Moon landing had ever taken place.”

James Oberg, an American journalist who writes about space (and has worked for NASA’s space shuttle program), estimates that “perhaps 10 percent of the population, and up to twice as large in specific demographic groups” believe in the hoax or have some doubts about the Apollo program “It’s not just a few crackpots and their new books and Internet conspiracy sites,” Oberg said in 1999. “There are entire subcultures within the U.S., and substantial cultures around the world, that strongly believe the landing was faked. …

Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong in NASA’s training mockup of the Moon and lander module. Hoax proponents say the entire mission was filmed on sets like this training mockup.

Our American culture’s shifting regard for both the physical truth and the unifying vision of the Apollo Moon Landing just in the last 45-years, speaks to a jadedness deep in our belief system. We fear being conned. We keep one hand on our wallets. We are pessimistic about our past. We distrust the future.

This nation grown wary of shared feel-good moments is like the frog-in-the-well surrounded by a dark pit of complexity. The only way out, perhaps, is through art. In the literary and visual arts we are willing to suspend our disbelief in order to reach a simpler truth.

II.
The Moon vis-à-vis Abstract Time

“I think I understand time better than the video artists who came from painting-sculpture,” says Paik, because “music is the manipulation of time. . . . As painters understand abstract space, I understand abstract time“

Broadcast media, like music and other man-made timepieces are loose physical containers, observation points for our human concepts of time.

The New York Times traces Paik’s artistic roots to the revolution in avant-garde music:

A composer-performer who wrote a thesis on Arnold Schoenberg at the University of Tokyo, Mr. Paik began his romance with video in 1963.

After a stretch of Dada-like ”musical” performances in Europe that were born of his associations with John Cage, the electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and George Maciunas, founder of Fluxus, the 1960′s group of artists influenced by the chance and randomness preachments of Marcel Duchamp, he bought 13 second-hand television sets.

Cued by Mr. Cage’s ‘‘prepared” pianos, he began ”preparing” the television sets, embellishing them with odd exterior attachments while also, by electronic and other means, manipulating their scanning mechanisms into distorting the reception of broadcast images.

And thus was conceived a new medium, whereby, according to video lovers, the ready-made stream of images spewed by commercial broadcasting could be creatively transformed into the stuff of art, esthetically comparable to that created by more traditional practitioners in paint.

John Hanhardt (then of the Gugenheim Museum ) curated a retrospective of Paik’s work in 2000.

He writes:

Paik’s life in art grew out of the politics and anti-art movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. During this time of societal and cultural change, he pursued a determined quest to combine the expressive capacity and conceptual power of performance with the new technological possibilities associated with the moving image.

I will argue that Paik realized the ambition of the cinematic imaginary in avant-garde and independent film by treating film and video as flexible and dynamic multitextual art forms.

This critique is only for this particular art installation and not Maurizio Cattelan’s body of work which I like. I don’t normally write public negative reviews and I will reexamine what I have written at a later date to see if I was fair in my initial assessment or to see if my opinion has matured or mellowed. This is that re-examination.

On the surface level, this piece is humorous. It speaks of science versus religion. Science 1 : Religion 0. The meteor serves as a deus ex machina that asks Catholics to probe their relationship to the divine through the vehicle of irony. For the rest of us, non-Catholics, it can be read as a joke at their expense, or more generously, it is just a reminder of  how logic or physics flies against religion, literally in this case.

There is a quip that says, It’s only funny until someone gets hurt… then it’s hilarious! I was particularly offended by the fallout this art installation had on Anda Rottenberg, the Jewish gallery director who had to quit her job and probably go into temporary hiding as a consequence of all of the hate mail, angry phone calls, anti-semitism, the political turmoil and negative press that exhibiting this piece attracted. Modernity says that anything and everything is acceptable under the umbrella of free speech and artistic freedom, however, I question whether it is in good judgment to bash the icons of any of the world’s major religions, whether it be Muhammad or in this case the Pope. Strongly polarized feelings towards the Catholic church make it an easy target. It is with bated breath that the audience waits for the fallout. The art piece has come alive and anything can happen.

The use of the political effigy traditionally serves the purpose of a mob. And indeed, this piece successfully conjured up an ugly mob. Ugly mobs are only satisfied by a scapegoat; mobs want blood. In this case, it was Anda Rottenberg. The misery of one person pushed the joke a step further, to the point where it’s now hilarious. It was her bad luck for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who cares what happens to one person.

Art still has tremendous power to move people. If you bring a negative element into the world, sometimes it will find its expression through an angry or retributive reaction. Was it worth it? When a work is auctioned off for $3 Million, the market answers with a resounding Yes! This is one level on which La Nona Oralso hits its mark.

-April 20, 2011

My original post:

Maurizio Cattelan’s “La Nona Oralso” (1999, translated as “The Ninth-Hour”), was auctioned off at Christie’s in May of 2001 for $886,000.

In 2006, it sold for $3 Million.

Also known as “Pope Struck by a Meteorite,” Cattelan defends his installation at the 2000 Venice Biennale with a glib statement,

“In the end it is only a piece of wax.”

In the end, after the sound and the fury signifying nothing, after the media circus, perhaps this also means it is only an elaborate fraud.

The $3 Million price tag pains me to such an extent that I scrunch my face up in the same constipated expression worn by the life-size wax sculpture of Pope John Paul II.

Let me compare this amount with what $2.6 million can buy: a half-minute of air-time during the Super Bowl with a promised reach of nearly 91 million viewers.

It is obvious that “Pope Struck by a Meteorite” falls short of art and closer to advertising. It’s a visual one-trick pony, a one-liner along the lines of the Wendy’s classic “Where’s the Beef?”

In this case we can ask, “Where’s the meat?”  Is substantive discourse even possible when a work lacks “sincerity.”

On installation art, critic Mark Zimmerman writes¹,

Installation stirs up a contest, the challenge of balance between the artistic and the merely decorative, the potent with the merely incongruous.

Installation as a medium arouses discussion of dimension and participation, precluding most earlier patterns of theory and manifesto, the object innumerable, the gesture as environment.

From the elevated architectural paradigm to scatological extremities, installation absorbs us, involving all our senses and physical limitations, often casting them in irrelevant poses.

The artist’s expression may be so completely infinite as to encourage a squinted misinterpretation.

The translated language of artist to viewer is encoded and we come to the question of intent…

1. Zimmerman, Mark, Performance Review: Installing Sincerity
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art – PAJ 58 (Volume 20, Number 1), January 1998, pp. 76-80

And we come to the question of intent.

If Cattelan openly admits that his installation is just a catalyst for drama in the public sphere, in this case between Catholics, art institutions and the local government, and if the main concept of the piece is to instigate “spectacle,” then not much differenciates it from a PR stunt.

The controversy in the press puts Maurizio Cattelan’s name on people’s lips and in the company of:

•Robert Mapplethorpe and his 1989 retrospective, including, the piece called “Tie Rack”

•Andres Serrano and his photograph, “Piss Christ”

•Karen Finley and her performance, “Chocolate-coated woman”

•Robert Gober and his chapel installation, also known as, “Virgin impaled on a pipe”

•Chris Ofili and his painting “The Holy Virgin Mary”

•Renee Cox and her photograph, “Yo Mama’s Last Supper”

•Dennis Oppenheim and his public art sculpture, “Device to Root Out Evil”

•Jerry Boyle and her sculpture, “Holier Than Thou.”

Name recognition and manufactured provenance also boosts the asking price to a hefty $3 million and guarantees no shortage of collectors.

For Cattelan, the “art” here is in the buzz and the fallout.

In The New York Times we have:

A Fallen Pope Provokes a Sensation in Poland

… In Poland, John Paul II’s homeland, the response to the installation became the joke – at first grotesquely funny and then just grotesque.

On 21 December, a week after Warsaw’s museum of contemporary art, the Zacheta Gallery, opened a centenary celebration that featured “The Ninth Hour,” Halina Nowina-Konopka and Witold Tomczak entered the gallery and presented identification confirming their status as members of Parliament and granting them immunity to all but a few Polish laws.  They then removed the rock from the pontiff and tried, according to some news reports, to stand it on its wax feet.

They left a copy of the letter Mr Tomczak had sent to the prime minister, the minister of culture and national heritage and the minister of justice demanding the dismissal of the gallery’s director, Anda Rottenberg, on grounds that a “civil servant of Jewish origin” should not be spending the Roman Catholic majority’s money on disgusting works of art.  Ms Rottenberg should move to Israel, Mr Tomczak said, where she could commission wax sculptures of a chief rabbi knocked down by Yasir Arafat, for example.

A couple of weeks later, 90 members of Parliament joined Mr Tomczak in signing another, somewhat less offensive letter stating that “the restoration of a stately face to Polish national culture” required Ms Rottenberg’s immediate dismissal.

Before the exhibition opened, the president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, and two local priests acted to circumvent possible negative reaction by stating publicly that “The Ninth Hour” served as an allegory for the pope’s heavenly burden. …

But the official interpretation could keep neither the liberal and social democrats nor the conservative nationalists from casting Ms Rottenberg either as a victim of anti-Semitic nationalism or as a Catholic-basher.  Just in time for the Parliamentary election campaigns, the opposing camps got out their messages on television and radio, in newspapers and magazines. When Ms Rottenberg, a Soviet-born Polish citizen, finally resigned, in March, after receiving piles of anonymous hate mail (“You Yiddish whore, go back to Israel!” urged one note), Mr Cattelan’s “The Ninth Hour” had been largely forgotten. …

Mr Cattelan, who has been devising his spiky theatrical tableaus and actions since the late 80s, shares Marcel Duchamp’s belief that the artist begins the work but the viewer completes it, defining the artwork’s meaning and value and ultimately releasing it from its physical shell to become a story, a controversy, an image in the mind.  But unlike Duchamp, he is actively interested in his art partner – the spectator – and in the contrary social currents in which the spectator swims and drowns.  Mr Cattelan diverts the currents’ regular harmonious course and steers them toward collision. …

Lately, there have been two components to Mr Cattelan’s projects: the work itself and a carefully considered photograph of it.  The photograph of the toppled pope made its way into about 100 magazines, newspapers and Webzines.  “We live in a world of images, and I’m just an image selector,” Mr Cattelan said.

A few critics have described him, less charitably, as an ad man, a charge he embraces the way he does all charges, with infectious punk contrariness.  “I love ads,” he said.  “The more I work, the more I want to step toward pure, straightforward communication.  Who cares about art?  Art is such a little world.”

Source: The New York Times Sunday 13 May 2001; Apolllonaire Scherr contributes to “Goings on about Town” in the New Yorker.  Photo credits: Christie’s Images; Mr Cattelan’s photo by Chester Higgins Jr of The New York Times

In an interview with Alicia Bona published in the auction catalogue, Cattelan discussed this work at length:

“I like to think of La Nona Ora as a sculpture that doesn’t exist; a three-dimensional image that dissolves into pure communication – an object disappearing in the flux of information, news, comments, headlines, reproductions, newspapers and other seductive spectacles.On the other hand, La Nona Ora could simply be a bad joke taken too seriously, an exercise in absurdity….

Ideas never really come. They go: it’s all about distribution. I gather fragments, bits and pieces, crumbs of reality. Art works need to function very quickly, no matter how complex and varied they are: La Nona Ora is first of all a quick image – a mechanism for incorporating difference in a visual synthesis. When people are different, they tend to interact only through art or war. I prefer to use art as a field study for confrontation.

That’s where La Nona Ora came from or maybe that’s where La Nona Ora ended up….I don’t subscribe to the image of the artist as an isolated figure, hiding in his ivory tower. I’m trying to connect images and tensions,to bring together different impulses: I want religion and blasphemy to collide, as they do in our daily life. …

Our life is based on contradiction. In this sense, the Pope is just a pretext, a way to hold up a mirror to our daily mediocrity and existence, so we might as well start enjoying our symptoms. …

I might be idealistic or naive, but I think that any reaction is valuable and legitimate. Reactions transform art works, they change their shape and reception. Objects are nothing but projections of desire, images of a struggle. And I love when struggles happen right there in the daylight, so that everybody can see. What happened in Poland was a sort of upside down miracle; salvation wasn’t coming from the sky but from the earth, from the people….

Messages are for advertising, not for art; I always thought that art is not about explanations. It’s about opening up possibiities. Advertising, just like religion, tries to tell the truth. Art, instead, should try to tell lies.”