tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52714711271909079732024-03-13T08:19:52.563-07:00Frenchy But Chic!From a Brussels-based displaced Frenchy formerly living in Los Angeles, public musings about art and anything else that happens to strike my fancy. Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.comBlogger580125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-51433935236565896892018-03-20T13:26:00.002-07:002018-03-21T04:52:04.008-07:00We're Baaaaaaaaaaack! With More MOCA Drama!<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYn6I22WEBAuljoxLJG5P7X9bgwbrtso2bjr_U3Q3DQycCyBB12fTgHBx3FyuftdOXQPQCT-l46BrnMA4sjv3ptldtmKPjj-lqMPsXgbGCF0rzO_v_z1PIC2fdCdBUCrKrMnlMs-eEK1M/s1600/IMG_8249.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYn6I22WEBAuljoxLJG5P7X9bgwbrtso2bjr_U3Q3DQycCyBB12fTgHBx3FyuftdOXQPQCT-l46BrnMA4sjv3ptldtmKPjj-lqMPsXgbGCF0rzO_v_z1PIC2fdCdBUCrKrMnlMs-eEK1M/s640/IMG_8249.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Pope L. at MOCA, March 2015</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Howdy, FBC! readers. Long time no see, right?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I had happily left this blog to peter out, busy as I was elsewhere (I invite you to buy back issues of <a href="http://www.frogmagazine.net/I_welcome_I.html" target="_blank">Frog Magazine </a>to read my prose, and wait for the next one coming out this year) and also I was tired of the format. Writing online is a pain, compared to good old MS Word.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Yet not only I cannot bring myself to study linguistics today (did you know that old pronouns are the new determiners? Me neither) but the new events unfolding at <a href="https://frenchybutchic.blogspot.fr/2012/07/incidents-of-time-travel-in-moca-drama.html" target="_blank">MOCA</a> have caught my attention, with friends left and right asking for my take on the news. That, and apparently there was a huge spike in readers of an <a href="https://frenchybutchic.blogspot.fr/2012/07/the-ongoing-soap-opera-at-moca.html" target="_blank">old blog post about past drama</a>, so I guess I should give my unsolicited opinion on that new turn of events. Anything but studying subordinate clauses, I'm telling you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">First of all, I need to preface whatever I'm going to write with a word or caution: as I obviously don't live in LA anymore, all that I know about the firing of Helen Molesworth by Philippe Vergne comes from online sources and of course juicy stuff people have told me. So whatever you, gentle readers, are going to read is just my interpretation of what I've read.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Secondly, <a href="https://frenchybutchic.blogspot.fr/2014/01/a-note-on-philippe-vergnes-appointment.html" target="_blank">as I said before I know Vergne vaguely,</a> but not beyond the "friendly acquaintance" stage. I've seen him a couple of times when I was in LA in 2015 for the remarkable Pope L. exhibition at the Geffen, where Vergne was his usual unfailingly urbane and polite self. As for Molesworth I've met her only once about a decade ago at a curatorial conference we were both attending that lasted about 3 days. She struck me as someone visibly enamored of her intellectual abilities and not shy about broadcasting them, but we didn't chat or socialize or anything and since I don't think I've ever seen any of the exhibitions she's curated, I can't comment on their brilliance or genius beyond what I've heard, which is generally positive.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Come to think of it, I didn't meet her for Pope L. when I was there, at least I don't remember meeting her but as I'm a small potato it didn't strike me as odd.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I must say I was surprised when she was hired at MOCA because I would have expected some super safe choice out of MoMA or the Whitney or even SFMOMA, in terms of seasoned professionals who know how to do fundraising, and not someone who was so vocal about positioning herself as political, if I remember correctly the few interviews I had read of her when she came to MOCA. Back then I assumed it was a strategic choice, to reassure the local art community that had been so bruised under Jeffrey Deitch's tenure, and that maybe the museum's finances were in good enough order to withstand some potentially controversial exhibitions or acquisitions. In any case, I had moved out of the country and didn't really think about MOCA whatsoever, I had other stuff to worry about anyway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Fast forward to last week, and the shockwaves sent from her firing. My first thoughts were, "Hhhm, Vergne is generally extremely tactful and diplomatic in whatever he does, so if he fired her the Board must have asked for her head," immediately followed by reminiscences of all the hearsay that ever got back to me about Molesworth's management style, which was generally <i>not</i> positive. Yet no curator is ever laid off for poor management style, because typically the Board never hears about it.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">I have also had the privilege during my distinguished career of working under women curators* with poor management style but great curatorial chops, and they lasted decades in their jobs (and still last as I write) because whichever way they dealt with folks under them, they delivered when it came to acquisitions, donations, and exhibitions that attracted both foot traffic and great critical reviews.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">So obviously there must have been some very serious stuff behind Molesworth's eviction, which I thought would come out as more information would unfold. I did recall that around the time Mark Grotjahn announced he was withdrawing from the MOCA gala, Vergne and Molesworth's respective statements seemed a bit at odds.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">There has been a spate of articles from the LA Times (obviously on Molesworth's side) to more nuanced takes in Frieze, Hyperallergic and finally the latest one in <a href="http://www.artnews.com/2018/03/19/makes-sad-artists-museum-professionals-vexed-imbroglio-moca-l/" target="_blank">Artnews</a>, probably the best informed of all from my point of view. This morning <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-moca-firing-20180320-story.html" target="_blank">Christopher Knight was demanding some statement from MOCA</a> regarding all of this, but as lawyer friends of mine explained to me, in all likelihood MOCA is legally barred from saying anything about the firing, so we can wait for a long time before a statement comes out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Initially most people reacted to the news of the firing in the light of the #MeToo movement, casting Molesworth as a victim of her gender kicked out by a white male, and lumping her eviction with two other recent firings of senior female art figures, the former director of the Queens Museum Laura Raicovich and Maria Ines Rodriguez from the capcMuseum in Bordeaux, France.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">As for Maria Ines Rodriguez, lost in translation in the international online outcry was the local political context, which would be incredibly long and complicated to explain here but basically what happened is the local, city government removed her because French provincial authorities tend to be complete Philistines when it comes to contemporary art and would like to show crap like Ai WeiWei or Banksy for one tenth of the price, rather than actually support decent programming.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">I am not sure Rodriguez's gender played that much of a role into that story, because there was a precedent in that exact same museum when founder and director Jean-Louis Froment was laid off maybe 15 years ago, after right-wing former Prime Minister Alain Juppé was elected mayor of Bordeaux, following the death of his predecessor Alain Chaban-Delmas (who, despite being an old school conservative himself was always a staunch defender of the museum and its director.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Juppé is still mayor of Bordeaux, where he had also slashed the budget of the local Opera house when he came into power, and whatever his other presumed qualities high cultural priorities don't find any echo in his agenda.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPfuvXPgYP3IW5Fvadb758_p5PlvVj9waH1DV-8HJefIRqpjttUPmGnEmG16MKhPC_OI5Uyd7FyTlMCXQR2YIgLVWZoKWx06093XLslW2KjiHjiQOnhj5FQzuGh_S5Bji-E9g8kQ1nQ4k/s1600/IMG_8304.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPfuvXPgYP3IW5Fvadb758_p5PlvVj9waH1DV-8HJefIRqpjttUPmGnEmG16MKhPC_OI5Uyd7FyTlMCXQR2YIgLVWZoKWx06093XLslW2KjiHjiQOnhj5FQzuGh_S5Bji-E9g8kQ1nQ4k/s640/IMG_8304.jpg" width="480" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sturtevant, at MOCA in 2015</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Now reading the various articles about Molesworth and Vergne, it appears that gender doesn't have that much to do with her firing, however tempting it would be to cast it under that frame of thought in the light of the Carl Andre retrospective –which was terribly mishandled if you ask me.**</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Rather, the picture painted in the Artnews article tells a tale of hubris from a senior curator who doesn't seem to understand the role of donors and trustees in a privately funded museum, and who appears to ignore the fundamentals of good manners when dealing with them.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Not showing up at an event is one thing, but not apologizing and simply explaining months later that one was elsewhere doing something else (a studio visit, which is easy to reschedule I guess?) is just plain rude. I get it, when you want to demonstrate you are on the artists's side, you make a point to say that this elsewhere you were at was a studio visit.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Nevertheless, if you fundamentally want to be on the artists's side, you need to understand it's in their best interest, for example, to rally trustees, donors and collectors to their cause and thus ensure a place of honor for their work within the museum you work at. If you don't get this, maybe you have no business being a museum curator. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">It is also just plain rude not to alert your coworkers and staff that you won't attend the event they spent weeks planning, so they cannot even explain away your absence to the host. It is bad politics, generally, to make your coworkers and boss –for Vergne, as the director, was Molesworth's boss– lose face in front of others, and if you're a mature person it is something you should have understood by your late twenties at most. Unless maybe you've never worked anywhere under a supervisor or boss, but aside from freelance people and scions of wealthy families, I'm unsure where you can grow into middle age without ever having the experience?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">There are other examples of her rude behavior toward donors in the various articles recently published. Is biting the hand that feeds you and foots the bill for your exhibitions the smartest thing to do when donors and trustees are the people who actually fund your salary? If you have an issue with the way museums are funded in the United States and with the need to diplomatically rub elbows with the deep-pocketed individuals who make them possible, it's better to rethink your career choices and either go work at some publicly-funded place, or campaign for public money to fund them.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">I know it is incredibly tempting to just yell "fuck you" at rich people in the current political context where some loudmouth, uncouth orange person has hijacked the presidency just because they were male and rich, and that some exasperation can only seep through the cracks if some of your donors are also GOP stalwarts, but if you really need to frame your rudeness in political terms, then you should take a hard look at yourself and wonder if the way you treat your (working-class) staff aligns with your stated politics. There are myriads people in the arts and elsewhere who are very vocal about their left-wing opinions yet treat waiters, janitors, hotel maids or retail workers like crap, who brandish their progressive politics like a badge of honor yet are incapable of an act of kindness toward anybody in real life, let alone treating everyone with respect. In passing, this is not about Molesworth specifically, as I haven't worked with her and only can report what I've read here and there, but about countless art people I've met over the years who're always happy to loudly express their political choices, preferably on social media, but tend to act poorly in real life. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">There is a point where I can understand Molesworth when it comes to curatorial choices, because I too would be totally unenthusiastic about curating a Mark Grotjahn's retrospective. I also know how discouraging it is to look at so-so contemporary art collections and feign enthusiasm about the umpteenth Kaws or whatever is in fashion right now and whose shelf life won't exceed eighteen months. As for donors and collectors, I often felt very uncomfortable meeting them when I was still in the game, because I haven't grown up around money and it took me a very long time to at least have an understanding of it. Very wealthy people can sometimes be rude themselves, or at least totally oblivious to the power they exert on people surrounding them, which can make them at their worst impatient, demanding or tactless. As Fitzgerald said, the rich are not like us, and it takes some effort to comprehend how and why.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Yet I have also met collectors and donors who were passionate, enthusiastic, generous and well-meaning, and wealthy people who were kind and understanding. I have also met rich people who were genuinely philanthropic and devoted to improving their local community, who enjoyed supporting not only the arts but also homeless charities and children hospitals, who donated money to support victims of natural disasters or to environmental protection organizations, who got involved in progressive politics because they understood their money would be well-employed there, who made a point to support Planned Parenthood and the ACLU and to give more than small change to the homeless people they encountered, who gave to such unsexy causes as mental illness charities.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Some of these people no doubt are of the same kind whose donations paid for Molesworth's salary, and footed the bill for her exhibitions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Whether she liked Grotjahn's or not, it would have been tactful and easy to just go to that meeting with him along with the junior curator and simply say, "so-and-so will curate your retrospective because I have too many obligations to be able to fully commit to it myself and your work deserves full attention and support, but of course I will be at hand if any help is needed" and keep it at that. If I, Ms. Foot-in-her-mouth-incarnate, can come up with a sentence like this, I'm sure a woman as smart as Molesworth could have done much better, not even mentioning the career boost it could be for the junior curator to actually curate this retrospective in their own name –as a senior person, Molesworth's job is also to mentor less seasoned colleagues.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Whatever her own feelings for Grotjahn's work, her job as a senior curator would have been to placate him before the gala drama came to light and ask him to stick with it, pairing him with another co-honoree more in keeping with his wish for diversity –after all, the Hammer routinely honors two people for its gala, it's not an unusual proposition in itself.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">This type of diplomatic stuff might be annoying, but it is not <i>difficult</i>. It doesn't demand enormous brain power or painful ethical contortions. One might not like Grotjahn's work, but if his chairing the gala can help raise enough money to support a more progressive, diverse programming, <i>so be it</i>. Any curator worth their salt know that blockbusters or mainstream exhibitions are necessary to get people through the door, as long as the programming isn't 100% crowdpleasers, and for this now Los Angeles has the Broad anyway.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtYQatFpzXe_nDDjGoJijgCQ7oHhGFLERybQ88fdSX_tI1OdrmPXa2SczNoNuRn0sV7fNHXFUJQNSy5D9jaJ8yN4b1on2U_-XvN1_OGv2c_hf9Q1yHpcrQ3tR7SH744OmeCm1yP4NfXjc/s1600/IMG_8325.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtYQatFpzXe_nDDjGoJijgCQ7oHhGFLERybQ88fdSX_tI1OdrmPXa2SczNoNuRn0sV7fNHXFUJQNSy5D9jaJ8yN4b1on2U_-XvN1_OGv2c_hf9Q1yHpcrQ3tR7SH744OmeCm1yP4NfXjc/s640/IMG_8325.jpg" width="480" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sturtevant, MOCA, 2015</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;">From what transpires in these various, recent online articles, the main reason why Molesworth was fired was that her whole attitude toward both the top brass and her underlings was too harsh and abrasive, and that it interfered with the fundamentals of museum curating, where all your energy is focused in two directions: the collection, and the programing. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Her attitude got in the way of her talent, and her talent couldn't save her from the realities of the job. Her refusal to do spectacular exhibitions is to her credit, intellectually speaking, but to survive a museum has to do blockbusters once in a while and for all the praise her Kerry James Marshall show has attracted and the slight spike in visitors, it can only pale in comparison to what the Broad does.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">The Broad is obviously the elephant in the room in this story, as it
sits across the street with its spectacular building and its blockbuster
exhibitions and public programs: it's amazing what you can accomplish
with a lot of money, right? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Doubtless that for MOCA's Board of Trustees,
they look at the beached whale on the other side of the road and
wonder, why do they have Kusama and why cannot we have Kusama? If Molesworth had brought at least one <i>Infinity Room </i>to MOCA, she
might have been forgiven all the quirks of her personality, her standing
up donors, and the rest. As I said, it is to her credit that she hasn't given in to
doing that kind of thing, yet people in LA remember that for all his faults, and God knows he was not an easy man to deal with, Schimmel did bring in spectacular harmless stuff that got people through
the door, too, like the stoner show that was nothing but a giant
carnival ride for adults. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">That failure to bring in blockbusters cannot rest squarely on Molesworth's shoulders in any case, because Vergne is also responsible for the programming of his museum. As a director, his job is also to talk to other institutions and see what "take" shows he can bring in, even if he doesn't have the staff himself to originate such shows.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">If you want to change your institution from within, the only way to do it is first of all to avoid alienating everyone who works there, because you need allies to effect change. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Secondly, you need to understand its history, and its relation to the local context. Reading between the lines, it is entirely possible that with all the internal hoopla that happened under Molesworth and Vergne's tenure, Molesworth might have done some of Vergne's dirty work in getting rid of some historical staff. I wouldn't know, I wasn't there, but it's a relatively common situation when a new director takes over, however generally misguided. It is foolish to get rid of the institutional memory of a museum, especially when it is the head preparator who has overseen everything from digging new foundations for Richard Serra's sculptures, built a cascade for Robert Gober, to installing the sprawling, magnificent mess of the <i>Whack! </i>exhibition.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">As for donors, the job of a curator is also to educate them and guide them toward what you want them to do for the institution. Granted it is not given to everyone to be eloquent and persuasive, but it is at least sensible to avoid rubbing the wrong way people who might just be persuaded to give enough money to make your cutting-edge, forward thinking new exhibition possible. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">After all, regardless of how their taste, politics and tax exemptions might diverge from yours, as my best friend says you are dealing with people who chose to devote a large part of their available income to supporting the arts, rather than some incredibly stupid thing like buying a gold-plated private yacht, or something horribly harmful like funding climate change deniers or neo-Nazis. Just for this we should be grateful, even if they buy Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst by the bucketful rather than commissioning a memorial to Kathy Acker. Some of them might even fund Peter Hujar retrospectives or Kara Walker exhibitions, if you know how to talk to them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">In the end, it is an incredible sad story of failure for the institution, for Vergne and for Molesworth herself; because there is no doubt she is a talented individual who simply failed to understand that with a modicum of diplomacy she could have accomplished great things there. Maybe she was not suited for what that specific job entailed, but then as a seasoned professional she should have known what she was in for when it comes to trustees and fundraising. It is also a spectacular failure for Vergne, who no doubt truly believed in Molesworth's talent when he hired her and who was apparently very close to her if that Artnews article can be trusted. As such the moment must be particularly painful for him, too.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">As for MOCA, it could certainly have done without the additional drama, and it will be complicated for the museum to attract the right kind of curator now, someone who can balance an accute understanding of funding and finances with the desire to organize great exhibitions and significantly augment museum holdings.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">There is no shortage of great curators out there, indeed they are a dime a dozen. Many of them are underemployed or even unemployed, or simply undiscovered. Some of them are homegrown (Naima Keith is a stellar example of someone from LA who does great things with undiminished enthusiasm) some others do good things on the other coast (Ian Alteveer comes to mind) or even in the hinterlands. There might be some fabulous person in Chicago, Detroit or New Orleans who would do a great job in LA, if only given the chance. Whether they'd want to come to MOCA now is another story, especially since the museum is singularly understaffed at present. Whoever comes there will need vision in addition to everything else. Many of the museum's woes are due to increased competition in terms of both fundraising and programming, now that Los Angeles counts LACMA, the Hammer, the Broad, the Marciano Foundation, in addition to all the other spaces such as The Underground Museum, the Mistake Room, 356 Mission or Hauser & Wirth's mega space, not even mentioning historical artist-run spaces such as LACE or POST and places like the MAK and the Armory.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Obviously MOCA has to find a way to distinguish itself from all these other LA art institutions. The artist Vincent Johnson recently told me it needed a new building, yet I think the museum could still be stellar within its current premises. Besides, as LACMA is decimating all local donations to create its foolish new building and disfigure the cityscape, I doubt MOCA could raise enough money for a new architectural venture right now. Its best strength is the Geffen, which should still be used for what it does best: ambitious solo exhibitions where artists are commissioned to create large-scale projects. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Maybe it could use the production money for these shows as acquisition money and keep the work made onsite as part of his permanent collection, who knows. There is no lack of women artists and POC who historically never had the opportunity to create large-scale work for lack of means and lack of recognition. The Pope L. show at the Geffen was a great step in that direction, evidently the museum should continue to mount this sort of spectacular yet meaningful exhibitions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">As for diversity, someone on Facebook recently published a list of all the women and Latinx artists the museum has ever exhibited, and it was very respectable. Of course it is always desirable to want to do better. Fortunately, Los Angeles is a town where there are so many great artists of all genders and colors that showcasing them shouldn't be that hard. Edgar Arceneaux for example is long due a comprehensive retrospective, and so is Monique Prieto. Jennifer Moon, Wong-Ju Lim, Juan Capistran, Ruben Ochoa, Analia Saban or Monique van Genderen all come to mind as far as local representation go, but there are countless others, not even mentioning all the younger local artists I do not know since I moved out of the country.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Another thing MOCA would be well-inspired to do would be to bring foreign artists or even people from the East Coast or elsewhere for its local audience. The Sigmar Polke retrospective for instance should have traveled to LA, ditto the Lygia Clark one. The current Zoe Leonard retrospective is scheduled to come to LA (I'm told Bennett Simpson curated it, but it opened on the East Coast first) and that's a good thing, but there are dozens and dozens of other artists who are rarely seen in LA that MOCA could showcase. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">It could also reignite the Postwar art spark that seems to have departed with both Ann Goldstein and Paul Schimmel and get scholarly exhibitions where under-represented artists are contrasted with better-known ones. It could also spotlight specific moments in art history that for some reason or other haven't been shown comprehensively in LA. Why not an Arte Povera show for example? There has been a resurgence of young painters interested in Supports-Surfaces, and that could be done, too. People like Bernard Frize or Walter Swennen are virtually unknown in the States, and I have been vocal enough about Lea Lublin whose German retrospective has been deemed marvelous by people who saw it. Has a survey show of Jackie Winsor ever been done? The Pompidou has a great Sheila Hicks exhibition on view right now, this would be awesome in LA. MOCA could also be the site for a West Coast satellite of the Performa Biennial, too, which would make a lot of sense given the historical importance of performance art in California. I'm sure many people could come up with other ideas, and even with potential blockbusters.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">There are so many different paths that MOCA could take to re-establish national prominence, but with the fragile situation it is in right now it obviously will need to not only attract talent, and a lot of it –it needs at least three curators in addition to a senior/chief curator one if it wants to function normally– but also to work internally to restore morale, because no workplace can ever be so great if its staff is demoralized and frightened. From here, the museum also needs to restore its image, not only in the light of this recent drama, but also because for a long time its exhibitions haven't been that attractive. It's time now to rethink the museum both on a local and international scale, and finally make it exciting again. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not MOCA: the Broad across the street, before it opened.</td></tr>
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*I have also worked under male curators with a terrible management style but who didn't deliver when it came to what mattered, and with male and female supervisors outside of the art world who were terrible in all respects. Needless to say I didn't really learn much from them, but the point I want to make is that with one exception who has now left the field, they maintained the illusion for a while by hopping from job to job before they were found out, but eventually they all ended up being fired, demoted, or pushed toward early retirement. In the end, it all comes down to how you manage your budgets and deal with funding rather than how shitty you are toward your staff, however being shitty to your underlings is generally a good indicator of how you deal with everything including financial matters.<br />
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**If I understand that it makes sense, historically, to organize a Carl Andre retrospective, it seems to me that to do so in a sensitive manner would have entailed to simultaneously organize an Ana Mendieta retrospective at MOCA, and to set up a series of events, debates and discussions about Andre's role in her death. In short, rather than try to ignore it and brush it aside, confronting it head-on and holding panels and debates about their respective places in art history might have been a better way of asserting the museum's understanding of how to tackle sensitive issues. I have no clue whether this solution has been contemplated by either Molesworth or Vergne, but from the outset it seems like a lost opportunity for the museum to fulfill its educational and art historical role.Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-48331401418282184452015-02-24T05:55:00.000-08:002015-02-24T05:55:37.205-08:00Effectively Announcing FBC!'s Demise As Of Today<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">A magnificent porn-y John Currin in between a landscape by John McAllister and an abstract painting by Christopher Wool.</span></div>
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Today I got notice that Google, a monopolistic entity that owns the Blogger platform, a shitload of other things, and doesn't pay its fair share of taxes, is going to ban "explicit nudity" on the blogs it's hosting. I'm pretty sure it's going to continue to allow videos and images of decapitations or soldiers in cage being burnt alive, and racist, antisemitic, homophobic and sexist images and texts on everything it hosts or operates, so as usual that ban on "explicit nudity" smacks of hypocrisy and double standards.<br />
This being said, I've used their product for almost 8 years now in exchange for paying absolutely nothing, so it's not as if I had a choice regarding their stupid users policy. But, even if I did, I've had it with their totally unwieldy format for a long while now, and as many people who blog, I've reach blogger fatigue.<br />
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FBC! was started as a personal space to fend off boredom when I was recovering from a car accident, and nothing else. It's been a bit incidental if it has reached a few people outside of my close friends, and for me it's been really helpful on my long road to recovery, in terms of learning how to write again, trying to organize my thoughts, and getting back into my love of music. Outside of this, the format was always complicated to use, and I never wanted to take it to the next [professional] level.<br />
So, today's announcement was a bit of the last nail in the coffin as far as FBC! is concerned. I occasionally post, er, "mature content" (that's the nature of the beast when writing about art) and I always trusted my 400 or so regular readers to be smart people. But at this stage I do not want to have to deal with "removing sexually explicit content" from the hundreds of posts on here, nor taking the blog "private" out of my own free will. So, effectively, as of March 23rd, Google will forcibly make that choice for me and so FBC! will stop to exist as such.<br />
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I will not take the blog offline yet however, because I won't have time to do it for a while, but I'll eventually will get down to it, after I've culled the few posts here and there I want to keep for myself and maybe publish in print sometimes in the distant future (any publisher interested?). Feel free to comment here or message me if there are some specific posts you really like you think would be worthy of a reprint somewhere. Just do it before March 23rd, because this is when FBC! will become "private", whatever the fuck that means in Google parlance.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">A close-up of part of an ass, a scrotum and a bit of a dick in action performing anal sex, from a Betty Tompkins painting.</span></div>
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I won't quit writing though, especially now that I've found a very happy home with <a href="http://www.frogmagazine.net/I_welcome_I.html" target="_blank">Frog Magazine</a>, the best art publication I've ever encountered and for which I am extraordinarily happy and honored to write for. So, if you like my writing, I can only recommend you buy Frog, and discover many other great writers. Frog has articles in both French and English and also publishes really beautiful photo spreads.<br />
I can already announce that I will publish a long feature article on Cady Noland in the next issue, Frog15, as well as a review of the Sigmar Polke retrospective in London. To keep up to date with Frog, you can also like their <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Frog-Magazine/62466585233" target="_blank">Facebook page</a> or follow them on <a href="https://twitter.com/FrogMagazine" target="_blank">Twitter</a>. The next issue should be out in June. If you can't find it at newsstands, ask your art bookstores to stock it, or you can order it directly online. It's a pricey publication but it only comes out twice a year and has very minimal advertisements, and really a lot of (great quality) writing in it.<br />
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I'm also going to publish a long essay in a print catalog about Eric Troncy's recent exhibitions sometimes in the next few months. It will be morbid and maritime, and talking about current things. I'll announce my future publications<a href="https://twitter.com/Frenchybutchic" target="_blank"> on my own Twitter </a>so feel free to follow me on there, just be aware I don't post on it very often and I don't necessarily follow back, not because I don't like you but because I don't like the medium that much. I won't write or publish a lot in the next few months because I unfortunately have to move out of my place as well, so it will take some time, but outside of Frog and this specific catalog, I may very well start something else online in the Fall, if I find a convenient format and platform I am comfortable with. If not, I'll remain print-only and that will be it.<br />
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Thanks so much for having been faithful to FBC! all those years, and for putting up with the lack of editing, insufficient research, terrible photographs, and the fact that I've been writing in my second language. Hope you enjoyed it nonetheless.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Blogger new "adult content policy". Fuck you, prudish male straight techs at Google and elsewhere, who are so frustrated you can't get any pussy <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-women-tech-20150222-story.html#page=1" target="_blank">because you're so lame and misogynistic </a>you take revenge on writers' free speech. That's not how you gonna get brownie points with women, you know?</span><br />
Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-78768200929515173332015-01-17T09:20:00.001-08:002015-01-19T02:24:38.451-08:00The Shell at Almine Rech Gallery - A Show Organized By Eric Troncy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-weight: 300;">Alex KATZ</span><span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-style: oblique; font-weight: 300;">, Three Cows, </span>1981
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>"Le Panorama</i> ( a literary and critical review appearing five times weekly), in volume 1, number 3 (its last number), February 25, 1840, under the title "Difficult Questions": "Will the universe end tomorrow? Or must it -enduring for all eternity- see the end of our planet? Or will this planet, which has the honor of bearing us, outlast all the other worlds?" [...]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[C8a,2]"</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Walter Benjamin, <i>The Arcades Project</i>, The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England, (1st paperback edition), 2002, p.98</span><br />
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It was a bit strange to find oneself in Paris last weekend in an atmosphere of trauma and world ending, many Parisians being shell-shocked enough to display a very unusual if pained niceness in their everyday dealings with each others. Yet everybody kept on going their normal business, in defiance of the trauma, and business there was to be had aplenty, albeit in places prominently displaying the ubiquitous <i>Je Suis Charlie</i> posters in their front windows as if to say the show must go on, the show can't go on, the show will go on, the show <i>must</i> go on.<br />
And so one found oneself attending the opening of <i>The Shell,</i> an exhibition organized at <a href="http://www.alminerech.com/en/current/250/The-Shell-Landscapes-Portraits--Shapes" target="_blank">Almine Rech Gallery</a> by über-talented French curator and art critic Eric Troncy, who, as you know if you follow FBC! even occasionally, is the (my) intrepid editor of<a href="http://www.frogmagazine.net/I_welcome_I.html" target="_blank"> Frog Magazine</a>, and someone I now find myself lucky to call a friend. If this doesn't constitute the fullest disclosure ever I don't know what else does, but in passing, he's the kind of friend of such caliber that I feel very free to critique what he does, because he's this very rare type of smart guy who can take in criticism (hi, Eric! Hope we're still friends at the end of this post!)<br />
For those of you who like to get their predigested primers in the form of a press release in advance of taking in a show, Eric Troncy must be the most infuriating of curators/writers ever because he refuses to be a condescending mansplainer uncovering all his choices and the reasons he made them, as he trusts the viewers to make their own opinion about what they see. Yet there was some unearthing of the ideas behind the exhibition in the press release, which for me seemed transparently clear but it may be because I've known a few things about it for a while. I know things. I really do.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Alas, all my pictures of the show suck. Sorry about that.</span></div>
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In a nutshell (ahem) the show is a reflection on the place painting is currently having in today's bloated art market, ostensibly showing current market darlings (Joe Bradley, Alex Israel, Brian Calvin, Christian Rosa, etc.) alongside artists who made it big, sometimes eons ago (Bernard Buffet or even David Hockney) or in the mid-distance, someone like Julian Schnabel who's represented in the exhibition with two (surprisingly) more than decent purplish abstractions <span style="font-size: small;">(<span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-style: oblique; font-weight: 300;">The Day I Missed, </span><span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-weight: 300;">1990
and</span></span><span style="font-family: 'UniversLTStd'; font-size: 9.000000pt; font-style: oblique; font-weight: 300;"> <span style="font-size: small;">Later That Day, </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-weight: 300;">1990</span><span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-weight: 300;">)</span></span> that would give shame to our current so-called zombie abstractionists. There's also one of his atrocious dinner plate paintings from the 1980s <span style="font-size: small;">(<span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-style: oblique; font-weight: 300;">Untitled, </span><span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-weight: 300;">1988) for contrast.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-weight: 300;"> There's a certain sadness in witnessing Schnabel has in fact been capable of producing paintings that were really good at some point in his career, but somehow ended up as that sort of harmless buffoon symbolizing the excesses of the art world of yesteryear, now being surpassed in fame by the likes of Koons, Hirst or Abramovic (not that we don't envy Schnabel's wealth, mind you). All because he got famous with this bloody dinner plate paintings, which unfortunately obscure the rest. It's the first feat in this show to make one reflects on an artist we usually dismiss as really commercially bloated and uninteresting to realize he had, in fact, all the makings of becoming a good artist, instead of settling for mediocre work that sold. </span></span>
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J<span style="font-size: x-small;">osh Smith, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, Betty Tompkins, Alain Séchas</span></div>
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I said, "ostensibly showing current market darlings " because some of the super smart choices like Betty Tompkins I don't believe have ever been art market darlings ever (I could be wrong, but I don't keep such a close watch on what happens or had happened on the art market over the last decades or so), ditto the French artist Alain Séchas who outside of France isn't particularly well-known. Tompkins is represented by in-your-face black and white (or rather, gray-hued) erotic/pornographic paintings seized for obscenity by French customs in the 1970s, in an innocent era that didn't know yet the ease of finding internet porn of a much more aggressive nature than Tompkins paintings, which now look almost subdued in comparison.<br />
In passing, the paintings are installed very close to each other in the exhibition (less than one foot I think) but when you see the show in person it doesn't look crowded whatsoever, on the contrary the closeness of the paintings to each other makes them come alive more and helps understand better the groupings and arrangements.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-weight: 300;">David HOCKNEY</span><span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-style: oblique; font-weight: 300;">, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven), 31 May, No. 1 2011, </span>2011 </span></div>
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What can be found online, art-wise, is also a theme of <i>The Shell,</i> and by extension so is the advent of the new technologies so ubiquitous nowadays. Troncy observes (in the press release but also elsewhere, such as <a href="http://www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/mp3/6_MIX_ERIC_TRONCY.mp3" target="_blank">in the audioguide</a> available online for the exhibition <i><a href="http://www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/1984-1999-la-decennie" target="_blank">La Décennie</a> </i>at the Pompidou Metz - in French) that the advent of the internet has totally changed the way exhibitions are conceived and also the way art is distributed and perceived: just perform <a href="https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1107&bih=601&q=art&oq=art&gs_l=img.3..0l10.2670.2925.0.3203.3.3.0.0.0.0.203.294.1j0j1.2.0.msedr...0...1ac.1.60.img..1.2.292.7jreVPNB7iw" target="_blank">any Google Image search</a> and jpgs jump at your face seemingly randomly, selected by an algorithm without any obvious reason why they're picked up in the first place over some others.<br />
The way we can now supposedly find <i>any </i>image online - supposedly, because in fact many photos of contemporary artworks made before, say, 2002 or 2003 are very difficult to find online if they haven't been exhibited recently - has radically changed the way art history is taught, for one thing, and therefore the way future art will be made (that is, if artists are still taught art history).<br />
Before the advent of digital photography and of Powerpoint, instructors were dependent on making/finding slides and often had to rely on re-shooting images out of art catalogs or magazines, themselves contingent on the availability of 4"x5". And so the art history we were told was reduced to a few "significant" choices of images representing which artworks were deemed masterpieces (by whom?), depending on whether they photographed well or not.<br />
In the age of mechanical reproduction, theoretically images could be multiplied indefinitely but in reality not so many artworks were deemed worthy of being photographed, which explains why sometimes we know only a few works from some historically significant exhibitions when the checklist is considerably bigger than the 30 or so plates reproduced in the catalog.<br />
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In the age of digital dissemination now just any image can be shot and uploaded in a matter of seconds, and made available for all to grab (I'm loosely paraphrasing Troncy here). I am not sure it has actually diminished the aura of the original artwork itself (if it had the art market would have crashed at the same time of the rest of the economy, maybe) the way mp3s and music streams have destroyed the magic of experiencing music, but it certainly has changed the way art history is taught, and is being constructed in today's hyperpresent. <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Part of a David Hockney, David Ostrowski, John Currin, Christian Rosa</span></div>
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For one thing there are exponentially many more art images to be found online, more often than not without attribution: if we know the name of the artist (frequently misspelled), then the title is missing, if the title is indicated then we're not told when the work was made, if there's a legend somewhere then the techniques and dimensions are missing, and so forth. If we come as total virgins to an artist's work it's not obvious from a Google Image search why some pieces are repeated more often than others, why some periods of the works are more represented than others, etc. (yes, yes, we know about SEO and all that shit, but how it works for art isn't particularly obvious).<br />
And so, if we are to believe the exhibition press release, the paintings in the show were meant to be shown the same way images appear on a Google Image Search, or are "reblogged" from Tumblr to Tumblr without reflection, critical thinking and, one might add, without comment or attribution.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">John McAllister, John Currin, Christopher Wool</span></div>
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Yet if there is no apparent hierarchy in a Google Image Search and the selection is made by an automated algorithm, in <i>The Shell </i>the selection is made by a human being and very seasoned curator who knows how to install a show like it's nobody's business. When visiting the exhibition it's rather obvious why some paintings are in the vicinity of the others, often (but not always) because of formal similarities. For example the Ostrowski, Currin and Rosa grouping shows a progression from left to right, with a squiggle within a beige rectangle that offers similarities with the ocher upright rectangle on the screen (where the bra is dangling from) in the Currin, while the abstract Rosa sees both the squiggle motif and the rectangles be present. <br />
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<span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-size: 9pt; font-weight: 300;">Karen Kilimnik,</span><span style="font-family: 'UniversLTStd'; font-size: 9.000000pt; font-style: oblique; font-weight: 300;"> The fancy pretty farm - the happy cows grazing by the fountain, </span><span style="font-family: 'UniversLTStd'; font-size: 9.000000pt; font-weight: 300;">2012 </span></div>
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Likewise, there are similarities between artworks by artists from different generations, which are not necessarily shown in the same room but offer easy points of comparison, such as the lovely if small Karen Kilimnik above and of course the magnificent and much larger Alex Katz at the beginning of this post. A lesser curator would have maybe tried to install one next to each other, and would have failed miserably in any case because of the scale. Speaking of Kilimnik and Katz I'm sure you guys can spot the blooming tree with pink flowers on the lower left corner of the image above, and then have a look at the the gorgeous and lovely <i>Cherry Blossoms</i> by Katz below and, well, you catch my drift. <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Richard Phillips, Daan van Golden, Alex Katz </span></div>
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Some of the groupings were very convincing, some less so, though it may have to do with individual taste - I'm still not convinced by Richard Phillips, whose painting here was preceded by a Brian Calvin on the adjacent wall - but in the arrangement above I thought the van Golden was a bit extinguished by the Pop-like colors of Phillips but mostly couldn't hold a candle to the really great Alex Katz right next to it. Which made me want to see a Katz retrospective, stats.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Charlene von Heyl, Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, Bernard Buffet.</span></div>
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This was one of my favorite grouping in the entire exhibition, in no small part because I totally fell in love with the two paintings by Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, who for me were the revelation of <i>The Shell.</i> As far as these three paintings being together it's rather obvious how they all function, so if people can't get it, well, what can I say? Maybe they should consider getting some sort of eye transplant. As for the Bernard Buffet shown on the right, some people at the opening were commenting about its relevance in regard to last week's events in Paris, but Troncy having worked on this show for months and months I'm pretty sure it's a coincidence.<br />
In passing, Troncy has been instrumental and very brave in trying to rehabilitate Buffet's standing as a painter, a courageous move I don't necessarily agree with (nor disagree with, just not my cup of tea but maybe Troncy will convince me otherwise next time we meet). Yet it's interesting to me in terms of how the fads and trends of the market and of art history work, generally speaking. The presence of the Buffet and the Schnabels make a strong point about how the aesthetic permanence of artworks can mark the collective consciousness at a given time, to give way to mockery and ridicule and aesthetic impermanence after the big sellout has occurred and we get tired of seeing the same things over and over.<br />
It may not be the mechanical reproduction of the artwork that destroyed its aura but rather its ubiquitous repetition (real Buffet paintings were shown in dentist waiting rooms the world over, not posters of them), the same way being subjected to the same songs over and over in supermarkets and shopping malls signals the entry into obsolescence of a proven hit.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Eric Lindman, Brian Calvin, Bertrand Lavier.</span></div>
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Here I thought there was an interesting juxtaposition, which works precisely because of the grouping. I am not sure the Lindman holds itself together as a standalone painting (it's rather bland in its, er, Matisse-esque paper cut/sort of Ellsworth Kelly-like desire to be a sharp abstraction and IMHO fails at it) whereas it works with the Lavier opposite (from the <i>Walt Disney Production</i> series, where Lavier appropriates background "abstract/modern" paintings and sculptures from Disney animated cartoons and blows them up as real artworks). The Lavier also shows some interesting layers that work as a "painterly" signifier over the inkjet print he used. Painterly layers as signifiers of "Painting" with a capital P are used as well in the Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille paintings, and in other works that punctuate the show at very precise moments.<br />
The layers/brushstroke as painterly signifiers work most interestingly so in <span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".13b.1:3:1:$comment10152885625439792_10152885729379792:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".13b.1:3:1:$comment10152885625439792_10152885729379792:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".13b.1:3:1:$comment10152885625439792_10152885729379792:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0"><span data-reactid=".13b.1:3:1:$comment10152885625439792_10152885729379792:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0.$end:0:$2:0">the Christopher Wool right next to the John Currin in the "erotic room". </span></span><span data-reactid=".13b.1:3:1:$comment10152885625439792_10152885729379792:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".13b.1:3:1:$comment10152885625439792_10152885729379792:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".13b.1:3:1:$comment10152885625439792_10152885729379792:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">The
Currin is rather porny, in a great porny way, yay! This specific
Christopher Wool painting, as far as his production goes, is rather the blandest and most boring one he
ever made. But, in between the Currin (which you should really go see in person) and the really great purplish
Schnabel next to it, it just seems to scream "smeared semen" and
suddenly loses its overall (and bland, boring and generic) abstract appearance</span></span></span></span></span>.<br />
I don't know about you, but me, when I saw this, the only thing I could think about was (beside "PAINTERLY SPERM!", I mean) was that it takes a really masterful curator to turn a painting into something that screams sexual arousal and subsequent release, a painting that in itself, alone, on a blank wall would only want to become some sort of elegant decorative tax-write off for a wealthy collector's foundation. <br />
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The exhibition was designed to function as a panorama, that 19th century invention displaying 360º paintings into rotunda-shaped buildings for the entertainment and sometimes education of the masses. At the time they were very popular in Paris, where one arcade abundantly studied by Walter Benjamin, the Passage des Panoramas, still keeps their memory in its name. They were a sort of pre-cinema, so to speak (Benjamin has written extensively about panoramas, if you're curious).<br />
As the center of the panorama presented by Troncy lays a spectator, here metaphorically represented by the Katharina Frisch sculpture you can see above, staring at my favorite painting in the entire exhibition (by Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille). Because I know things, and I really do, I know the sculpture is supposed to be the centerpiece that holds the exhibition together, logically so as the prehistoric man represents a sort of perplexed viewer being assaulted by this explosion of paintings surrounding him/her without any kind of apparent logic (yet as I said above there is one when you look closely). As far as it being successful I am not sure its presence was absolutely necessary, because I think the exhibition could hold itself together as well without it. Maybe it's a bit too demonstrative for me but yet again I knew why this sculpture is there whereas I'm not sure how obvious it is for other viewers. <br />
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In any case I'm glad that prehistoric man was placed in such a way he could stare constantly at the Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille painting, because these two are very talented painters and the crappy photo above doesn't give justice to their work. This painting alone is worth traveling to Paris to see <i>The Shell,</i> and if someone ever wants to commission me to write a 3,000-word essay on this painting and only this painting, you know where to find me. I'd gladly write it here but then this is going to be the longer than long epic post from Hell, so I'll just state that their paintings need to be seen up close as well as from a distance, because there's a very interesting superposition of layers and brushwork that can't be rendered in photographs. I really love the way the spots of color everywhere on the gray landscape seem to invade it, as some sort of disease spreading everywhere and ready to almost overflow outside of the canvas. If you really love me, my birthday is in April and I think this painting would fit very nicely in my bedroom. I hope. <br />
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Another revelation for me were David Hockney's iPad "paintings" as I've never seen them before. They're not "real" paintings obviously, just inkjet prints of digital images he makes using the painting app of his iPad, but the resulting glossy texture is very appealing and more interesting to me than his older, "regular" paintings (I tend to think Hockney is a much better draftsman than painter). The only regret I have about these inkjet prints is that to get one large size image, he assembles 4 smaller prints into one, the seams being very obvious when you look at the work up close. I mean, he's David Hockney, I'm sure he has the means to get them printed in one large sheet, if Jeff Wall can do it then so can David Hockney FFS.<br />
Since the exhibition is also a comment on the resilience and resurgence of painting (on the art market but obviously it goes beyond it) in the era of digital dissemination, and of the way new technologies change the way we experience art, Hockney's works could be a perfect piece of the puzzle if we think about them as the illustration of an idea. But then that would be too simplistic because this isn't the way the exhibition functions, thankfully. One of the Hockneys is situated opposite Katz's cows in the main room (the one with our friend the Neanderthal Man) where it responds formally to it with its green overall tones, but its purple hues also react to the John McAllister's painting that shares the same wall as the Katz. When you are in the exhibition, the most striking thing as a spectator is the way color is used masterfully throughout the exhibition, as in the examples I've just quoted but also with the Schnabels, etc.<br />
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This was the other Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille in the exhibition, where the yellow noodle-like finger painting (not sure it is finger-painting but from a distance it looks like it) oozes over the mountain to cover it, like some sort of dirty material answer to Hockney's own elegant use of iPad finger painting. In the show this was cornered by a black figure on a yellow background by Charlene von Heyl on the left, and the Bernard Buffet sporting a blackish balaclava-clad character holding a rifle on a yellow background, seemingly pointing from his own canvas over the yellow mountain of the Tursic & Mille in the direction of the von Heyl figure (see above). <br />
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This one was also of my favorite views in the show, in the same room as the über-porny Currin and the Christopher Wool "smeared semen" painting. The palm trees are a collaboration between Alex Israel and Josh Smith (and there's a Josh Smith painting of palm trees on a pinkish/orangey background in the other room immediately on the left of the door, if I remember correctly), with the curator taking advantage of the architectural decor over the door between the Smith/Israel painting and the John McAllister on the right. Now as far as standalone paintings go I do find the Smith/Israel paintings of no great interest whatsoever (especially when in the presence of the greats around them) but as an ensemble this is really a great view. Which is why <i>The Shell</i> really succeeds in its presentation "as a panorama without apparent hierarchy", the exhibition as an ensemble is gorgeous and smart even though some of the paintings in the exhibition are less than interesting to me (and, let's be blunt, not particularly good) and couldn't really function on their own.<br />
Which is exactly what happens when you do a Google Image search: some of the images are obvious, many less so, some are relevant, many more are not, and images get repeated while some others that would be obvious when you know what you're looking for don't appear. Images appear out of sequences, and you can get anomalous results based on whatever the algorithm is programmed to do.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Stripes against stripes: Charlene von Heyl next to Bridget Riley.</span></div>
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In this regard the exhibition as a whole can be somewhat cruel to a younger generation of successful artists, such as Brian Calvin whose large portraits (and only those as
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<span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-style: oblique; font-weight: 300;">The Low Road (God Out West), </span><span style="font-family: "UniversLTStd"; font-weight: 300;">2006, is rather good
)</span> </span>really pale in comparison to Katz, for example, and as I said I don't think the Smith/Israel collaborative paintings <span style="font-size: small;">work </span>all that well. The weakest works in my opinion were Jean-Baptiste Bernadet's whose specific brand of late post-Monet in psychedelic colors impresses me as much as the exact same type of New Age paintings made by the hippie wives of Hollywood executives living in retirement communities around San Diego or Santa Barbara. I don't see why they would be more interesting made by a youngish French guy than presented by some sort of elderly Self-Realization Fellowship devotee enthusiastically working for the local amateur society annual show in, er, say, Azusa.<br />
But then the Tursic & Mille paintings hold together fantastically if
you consider they're in the vicinity of Alex Katz and David Hockney,
and John McAllister does pretty well for himself, thank you very much, and
the Jonas Wood is rather cool, too.<br />
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The worst paintings in the show without contest, to me, are Richard Phillips's (I am very predictable) not for the same reasons everybody seems to hate Phillips (I, er, don't care that he's successful and rich) but because = Los Angeles commercial painting murals, anyone? Not sure I see such a difference if it's on canvas or on a warehouse wall in North Hollywood, and, er, there's such fantastically great work elsewhere in the show I'm not sure I see any use for these in it, except maybe as a counterpoint needed for a burst of color here and there within the entire ensemble.<br />
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Which functions fantastically in its entirety and manages to make everything shines within groupings and also if you think about it as a whole, with the placement of the paintings within the same room or how they respond to each other formally. Even though there are works I didn't like (and when is it you ever go see an exhibition and you like absolutely every single work in it?) I thought this was one of the most stimulating exhibitions I have seen in a while, and which would deserve a much deeper reflection if I wasn't so pressed for time. For one thing, this is one of the most fantastic exhibitions about painting I've seen in a long time, and an exhibition that asks questions about the validity of market success as an indicator of historic and aesthetic relevance in the long term, showing together heavyweights for whom fame, critical success and commercial success may not always have been concomitant (Katz was totally outside of fashion, and outside of art historical and critical discourse for a long time, for example) and how these indicators become even more blurred in the age of digital dissemination.<br />
Lastly, like all great exhibitions, it's one of these where seeing images online or elsewhere don't give a real feeling of the impression one gets as a spectator when physically confronted with the art, which is a perfect demonstration that the show drives the point home effortlessly. <br />
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Speaking of: you can have a pretty good idea of the show <i>as a panorama </i>on <a href="http://www.alminerech.com/en/current/250/tab/images/The-Shell-Landscapes-Portraits--Shapes" target="_blank">here</a> but you still need to go see it in person. You do. <br />
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<br />Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-69834440846065663142014-12-01T04:17:00.002-08:002014-12-01T09:30:08.977-08:00My Favorite Albums Of The Year And Then Some Personal Crap At The End Of This Post<br />
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It's this time of the year again, when every single music magazine or website publishes its top 50 or 100 of their favorite albums of the year.<br />
Nobody really gives a shit which ones were mine, beside I am so absolutely predictable anybody who's been following FBC! for the past few years will know *exactly* which ones are my top 3. But, this being December (meaning, not ALL albums of 2014 have been out yet) and because there won't be any new blog post on here until 2015 I thought I should keep FBC! on life support a little bit longer with crap and stuff. Speaking of, there will be other news at the end of this post so if you're not interested in music you can skip to the bottom right now.<br />
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Now, let's go back to music. There won't be a "top 100" albums because, as I buy everything on vinyl and I'm a permanently broke writer and translator, I don't buy that many records. My top 7 in decending order:<br />
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1. Scott Walker, Sunn O))), <i>Soused. </i><br />
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I know, I know. I haven't written a review for lack of time but in a nutshell, I think this is t<a href="http://frenchybutchic.blogspot.be/2014/07/the-audience-is-waiting-on-late-music.html" target="_blank">he most accessible Scott Walker record in 20 years</a>, because, let's not kid ourselves, this is Scott Walker & backing band much more than a real collaboration. Here's <i>Brando</i>, the belter on the album, if you don't find yourself singing OOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH THE WIDE MISSOURIIIIIIIIIIII after listening to it then you don't know what an earworm is.<br />
Only regret I have: this video is ridiculously stupid, Gisele Vienne should stick to choreography I think. Also, I wish there would have been more interviews of Scott Walker and the Sunn O))) people when the record came out, in terms of promotion because this record deserves to be heard and sold and bought and listened to obsessively over and over again.<br />
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2. Swans, <i>To be Kind</i>.<br />
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Told ya I was predictable. Musically I don't think the current Swans are super groundbreaking but <a href="http://frenchybutchic.blogspot.be/2014/09/ive-seen-gods-on-earth-and-they-are.html" target="_blank">the intensity of their music is so deep </a>it doesn't matter. A band you need to see and experience live. Gira did a short Q&A in Brussels recently before the concert and stressed that because people don't buy records anymore, in any form, it's becoming difficult to make a living but as a touring band. Which is great for us, the audience, but imagine how hard it is on musicians. Buy records, people, they last longer than your stupid smartphones and tablets and other shit.<br />
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3. Liars, <i>Mes. </i><br />
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I love Liars, a band I've never seen live but it's not for lack of want. It's probably the only electronic act I find interesting aside from Dan Deacon (who's going to release a new album soon, I'm told). It goes beyond the usual clichés of electronica yet manages to make you dance to dirty tunes. If there had been no Swans and Scott Walker this year they'd be my #1.<br />
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4. Einstürzende Neubauten, <i>Lament</i>.<br />
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Not strictly "an album" per se but the soundtrack to a live performance piece commissioned to them for the centenary of the First World War and premiered recently in Dixmude, Belgium. It's narrative and contains some tunes and lyrics not written by EN (the various hymn and <i>Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind,</i> made famous by Marlene Dietrich). As such it is uneven mostly because of the one song where they use autotune, proving to the world that even EN (and John Cale 2 years ago) can't manage to do anything decent with autotune. Below is a live performance of <i>Lament</i> in Prague.<br />
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5. Neneh Cherry, <i>Blank Project</i><br />
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That album came out about the same time as the new St. Vincent one (the indie Lady gaga), which was extraordinarily over-hyped in the same proportion it was overproduced and lacked soul. Meanwhile nobody really talked about <i>Blank Project</i> which I found much more adventurous musically than St. Vincent and had much more depth and soul. Thank you, Neneh Cherry.<br />
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6. The Woodentops, <i>Granular Tales</i>.<br />
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The Woodentops were one of my favorite bands when I was a teen, long, long ago sometimes in the last century. They made a new record that came out this year but unfortunately for them they're signed with Cherry Red, a label that doesn't bother with promotion and vinyls for things that should count. There are very few videos on YouTube alas, but trust me, this album is very good. Buy it, if only for <i>A Little More Time</i>, the best song on the record I think.<br />
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7. Hauschka, <i>Abandoned City</i><br />
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A really good album of prepared piano music. It certainly lacks John Cage's use of silence and to a certain extent also lacks subtlety (there are some slow numbers which aren't very far removed from shopping mall piano playing, especially on the extra tunes you get if you buy the vinyl. In passing, this is a very generous gesture) but it's an excellent gateway drug to more experimental or interesting music straddling the divide between indie (for lack of a better word) and contemporary "classical" music. A bit disappointing live but apparently his physical handsomeness makes up for that in the eye of his audience.<br />
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And that's pretty much it for my end of year list. Told ya I didn't get to buy that many albums. If you want to contribute to the "let's extend the Frenchy musical library" fund, all monetary donations are accepted.<br />
There were lots of other records my friends seemed to have loved, but that didn't do anything for me, such as The War On Drugs (boring) and Girls In Hawaii. I've seen a lot of people enamored of the new Perfume Genius, but alas I listened to it only after seeing the band live and, uh if you have pitch problems as a singer and your material so depends on adventurous and difficult singing, it's an issue. The few songs I heard from the record were very interesting but unfortunately that live experience totally ruined it for me. <br />
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And now that this year is nearly over, something deeply personal. <a href="http://frenchybutchic.blogspot.be/2014/01/an-essay-with-no-redeeming-qualities.html" target="_blank">I had started this year in the pits</a>, as some of you know, and didn't expect much improvement as it went on. Yet at about the same time last year, about seventy people reached out to me on Facebook and somehow made things more bearable to me. I would like to thank all of you collectively, for taking the time to be supportive and loving when I truly needed it. It was an astonishing and truly beautiful experience for me, especially as many of the people who messaged me were virtual friends I've had not much contact with before. From the bottom of my heart, thank you all, it's been much, much appreciated. And also very humbling.<br />
After this, everything that could make 2014 better happened: the new Lydia Davis book came out, and then there was the Swans record, the Liars one, and blowing everybody away, the new Scott Walker one. It can only be a good year when all these bands release an album, right?<br />
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Something else wonderful that happened this year is I started to collaborate to <a href="http://www.frogmagazine.net/I_welcome_I.html" target="_blank">Frog Magazine</a> (a print only art and architecture biannual publication) where I found a happy home writing and publishing, thanks to its marvelous editor, Eric Troncy whom I finally met in person this year, and it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship (hi, Eric!).<br />
All of you who read FBC! for the now super rare art writing, I'd like to encourage you to go and buy <i>Frog</i>, because there is some truly great writing in it, all the photos are taken by contributors (i.e. not the same press photos we see over and over again in other mags).<br />
In the next issue that will likely be out in the Spring of 2015 there will be a review of Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern written by yours truly as well as a feature on Cady Noland, and a review of Robert Gober at MoMA with really great photos by Grant Wahlquist, thanks to Chuck Kim's help in securing the photo op.<br />
And in the latest issue (#14), which you can buy online at the link above but also at select vendors worldwide, I've published a very weird article that starts as a review of an exhibit of the late French TV stage magician Garcimore at a roadside museum but somehow manages to cover Marina Abramovic's magic pee, the distinction between mainstream culture and the possibility of an indie one in contemporary art, and lots of other things.<br />
I'm not sure exactly what I've done with that one, to be honest, but I'm rather happy with it, a rarity with my own writing, so if you're curious take a gander at it. And if you read French I can only recommend you read ALL of Eric Troncy's articles. He's the best thing that ever happened to art writing, and, personally, to my own writing as well.<br />
<br />Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-16673302784167994602014-09-29T02:40:00.000-07:002014-09-29T02:40:19.622-07:00I've Seen Gods On Earth And They Are The Almighty Swans<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Swans At Brussels' Ancienne Belgique, September 25, 2014.</span></div>
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I've seen Gods on Earth and they are the almighty Swans.<br />
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Little did I know, when as a teen I bought their red-colored vinyl record of <i>Love Will Tear Us</i> Apart covers (Michael Gira doing singing duties on one side, Jarboe on the other) in my shitty little provincial hometown that one day I would get to see these strange radical New Yorkers -as they were then- play live one day.<br />
Which is why I'm so grateful to all these bands reforming these days and playing live, even if sometimes if makes me feel like my parent's generation deciding to attend a Rolling Stones concert at some giant arena in 1982.<br />
Not that Swans has anything do to with that sort of things of course, but I'm just happy they're having records of new music out* and that they're touring often.<br />
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The concert was preceded by a rare public interview with Michael Gira at Huis23, a cosy intimate space above the venue's bar where about 60 of us gathered to see the cowboy-hatted man answer a few questions.<br />
Asked if he did that often he said, "no, it's the very first time and the very last one, too!" It was very short, and the questions were not so interesting -pro tip: when you interview an artist, musician, writer, filmmaker… ask them about THEIR work and not every other band under the sun- nonetheless Gira gave some interesting answers and also proved himself tremendously funny.<br />
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Asked why the band didn't play old material he said that they did that after they reformed a few years ago but that he realized they were "wasting time, and it felt fake somehow" like some sort of old bands reforming to cash in I guess, so he decided to forge ahead with new material.<br />
He spoke a little bit about<a href="http://younggodrecords.com/" target="_blank"> running his own label </a>and how he decided ultimately to only use if for his own band, which has all to do with current music economics: you all young fuckers downloading the music for free and never buying records, despite a lot of people being interested in what he was putting out (check the link above and buy stuff there!). And that it involved a lot of energy and "I'm not 30 anymore, and I have children and stuff" and so he preferred to focus on his own activities and manage to survive doing that.<br />
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He told a funny anecdote about recording with Devendra Banhart and wanting him to focus on a vocal take, and playing some sort of private performance à la <a href="http://frenchybutchic.blogspot.be/2007/08/i-like-america-and-america-likes-me.html" target="_blank">Joseph Beuys'</a> <i>Coyote (I Like America And America Likes Me)</i> whereupon he stripped naked and threw a blanket over his head, running around in the studio like a mad man to elicit some sort of reaction from Banhart.<br />
He also answered a lot of questions about other bands (yes in the 1980s he felt more of a kinship with Einstürzende Neubauten than bands like Sonic Youth, no, there's nobody like Swans out there today, etc.)<br />
Also as the host kept on prodding him about "radical bands" and "radical music" and "radicality" [sic] in general in the end he said something like "I'm not sure being radical is really something desirable" (which I take it to mean "for the music's own sake"). There were some interesting bits about working in the studio and starting from mistakes, which every musician worth their salt always talks about. And after 20 minutes it was over, and time to get dinner for me and avoid (thank Lucifer) most of the opening act, Pharmakon. What I caught from her was some incessant wailing over electronic music which… give me back Lydia Lunch or Diamanda Galas, please. Talking about radicalness.<br />
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The venue was at capacity and the audience was a mix of middle-aged people who have known Swans for several decades like yours truly, and also much younger people who, despite what you would expect my generation to label them, weren't really hipsters. Thankfully there aren't that many hipsters in Brussels, but even if there were… I don't think they are the enemy.<br />
The gear on stage was stacked in such a way that there was very little room in front for the musicians to move, which must be some quirk from the band because the stage is actually very large. Thor Harris and the drummer (Phil Puelo, Wikipedia tells me) were a little bit behind the stacks.<br />
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The lights went out at 8.15 PM sharp (they're always on time at Belgian venues) and… the mighty Thor Harris came on stage and started to bang on his gong slowly… and slowly… and slowly… and I thought, uh oh is it going to be some sort of prog-like slow boring something? Then came Christopher Hahn on lap steel guitar (from where I was on the 1st balcony I actually thought it was a synth or some sort of keyboard) and it went on… slowly… and on... then came Gira and the rest of the band … and so the world exploded.<br />
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It's hard to describe a Swans concert and I'm going to fail like everybody else before me, because words are really lame in trying to recapture what is a collective trance-like atmosphere where everybody is enraptured by the music. It's true what everybody else says: it is ear-shatteringly loud. But not much more than a Dan Deacon concert or even a Sparks one. Having been warned by the lovely Barry Schwabsky who saw them recently in the US (hi, Barry!) I had made sure to bring my own earplugs (if you ever go to a concert in Belgium, most venues if not all usually give you free earplugs when you ask at the bar) but I took them off intermittently. The loudness is powerful enough to make the floor and walls vibrate, and all your body as well, which I'm sure must be the scientific reason why everybody is communing so well with the music as the band plays on.<br />
It doesn't however muddies the sound whatsoever, and so you get to really appreciate the use of percussive elements. There is of course a strong "American music" feel to Swans because it is primarily a guitar band (or so you would think), where guitars sculpt drone-like repetitive sound, which comes in great waves crashing out and washing out all over you.<br />
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But I think it's only on stage that Thor Harris' importance to the music becomes obvious and you understand what he brings to the band: he's not only a powerful percussionist but a delicate multi-intrumentist as well who plays I think clarinet (I was far…) and some sort of string instrument with a bow, and the trombone. But even when that moment of recognition comes, it is fleeting because witnessing a Swans concert is something that takes you away from "normal" gigs, even if there are some highlights -Thor Harris crashing his great cymbals in synch with Gira jumping on the stage with his guitar, Harris bare-chested playing trombone, Gira and Hahn kinda "jamming" together with Hahn looking like an evil character out of a Lynch movie, which is rather incredible for a seated musician.<br />
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It's fleeting because it's music you can't take apart and say, pore over the lyrics, dissociate some chord from another, analyze how it works, what it does, especially what it does as it is impossible to describe. You could say, "the band is tight", "it's a whole" but even this doesn't even begin to describe it. There's a certain perfection of craft, in any craft, when you have a group of people working in absolute synch together, and producing something that is more than the sum of its parts, and Swans<i> is</i> that <i>more</i>. And the audience comes to feel it and be part of this more, too, experiencing something that all religions the world over would be at pain to ever match, because it is a more that is<i> </i>real<i>.</i> Like all great music the sound that comes out of these musicians is almost tactile, but unlike merely good music it can't be reduced to "slow song", "uptempo number", "great hooks" and not only because the music is more drone-like than anything else, because it isn't only drone-like nor repetitive. You can hear it, you can feel it, you can almost touch it.<br />
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Swans is probably the best live band on the planet right now because it sculpt sounds with an intensity that is unmatched by anybody or anything else, and there is a sort of manic energy that runs through the various songs/tunes/pieces (most from <i>To be Kind </i>plus one I didn't recognize at all that I don't think was on <i>The Seer </i>but, hhhmmm, I think the lucid part of my brain was pretty much gone by then). I tried to record some video snippets at various moments, only snippets because I didn't want to hold my camera throughout when the only thing I wanted to do was be in the moment and enjoy the gig.<br />
Which is a trite way to describe the sort of feeling you have when you are at a Swans concert, aside from saying that as a spectator, you are indeed in the moment. There is nothing before and no mental recognition of what would be an after, you are, indeed, here, now. It's a bit beyond music, that power to make you just be. Now.<br />
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And it also makes you think, once the lights come on again, and the band has left the stage, and the rumble of hundreds of feet and bodies moving to reach the exits reaches you -nobody talked much after, really- it does make you think that there is nothing, absolutely nothing in the visual arts that can ever match this intensity. Nothing.<br />
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* <i>Filth</i> is being reissued on vinyl next month, if anybody reading this loves me and has some spare $, you know what I want for Christmas.<br />
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<br />Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-62686536718745770712014-07-27T00:51:00.000-07:002014-07-29T13:03:12.219-07:00The Audience Is Waiting. On the late music of Scott Walker.<div class="page" title="Page 1">
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<b>In December 2012 Scott Walker released <i>Bish Bosch,</i> the last record in a trilogy with which he has established a very personal style so far unmatched by any other musician. In 2013, after listening to each record in succession over a period of several months, I wrote the following text for an essay contest, albeit with a different (and, admittedly, really crappy) introduction. The text was prompted by the music, obviously, but also by the many reviews and reactions I had read then, none of which ever matching my experience of listening to the music. I must confess having come very late to the music of Scott Walker, maybe 4 or 5 years ago only, and via his later output, being totally ignorant of his 1960s music. The text was also written from the point of view of an art writer, a bit as if it was a piece of visual art. It was also intended for a general audience, initially, so I tried as much as possible to write it in non-artspeak. I had shelved it after a few unsuccessful attempts to pitch it to music magazine, and thought about maybe posting it later this year when his collaboration with Sunn 0))), Soused, was going to be released on Sept. 22nd, but as today marks FBC! 7th anniversary and that I'm in no real mood to write anything else, here it is for your enjoyment. Or not.</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">“The audience is waiting</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;"> Its audience is waiting </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Its audience is waiting </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Its audience is waiting”
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Scott Walker, “Hand Me Ups”, </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">The Drift, </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">2006</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">The Audience Is Waiting. </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"><b>On the late music of Scott Walker.</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Looking up at what established critics have written about Scott Walker's recent output, and being
confronted with qualifiers such as </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">“terrifying, harrowing, austere, arcane, inaccessible, difficult, taxing,
demanding, dense, austere, impenetrable, dark”, </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">one cannot help but feeling doomed to fail at describing the experience of listening to it. </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">But as the artist himself has said in the 2006 documentary </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">30th Century Man </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">“I fail lots of
times, but at least I’m trying.”</span><br />
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Let’s try.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">The Artist, The Audience.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Scott Walker, born Noel Scott Engel in 1943, is nearly as old as rock music and pop music, if
you will, having gotten his start as a teenage singer in the 1950s, in the wake of the
commotion caused by Elvis Presley’s success. In the United Kingdom, he is mostly known
or remembered as the lead singer of 1960s band The Walker Brothers and as an immense
Pop star back then, who went solo in 1967 and released in quick succession four albums of
delicate and timeless Pop music, backed-up by soaring orchestras that enhanced his famous
baritone voice. He’s also credited as introducing Belgian singer Jacques Brel to an English-
speaking audience by being the first one to cover his songs, later sung by the likes of David
Bowie and Marc Almond.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">The story goes that Scott Walker lost himself in the 1970s by recording mediocre albums of
middle-of-the-road standards, before resurfacing as an avant-garde musician in 1995 with his
record </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Tilt, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">following in the footsteps of earlier attempts, his 1984 solo record </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Climate of
Hunter </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">and the four songs he composed for the Walker Brother’s final album </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Nite Flights,
</span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">after they had briefly reformed for a failed come-back. This story is of course incomplete,
and as such has only served to grow a myth, about a reclusive and mad genius who releases a
new masterpiece once every decade, using strange sound-making techniques and devices in
the studio.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">The reality is probably more complex, his glacial rate of delivery having to do with record
companies’ corporate issues and with their need for commercial pragmatism, in addition to
Walker’s own self-avowed slow rate of production.<br />
The result of this complicated tale we’ve been fed however is that there seems to exist a split
within his audience, between the part that grew up accustomed to his magnificent but still
largely conventional music, and a newer one more interested in his recent adventurous </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">output. That some people might enjoy both is rarely acknowledged, not least by the artist
himself who’s convinced his old 1960s fans cannot abide his newer music. A quick look at
comments on video sharing websites or social networks appears to confirm this: “rubbish”,
“garbage”, “crap”, “trash”, or the ultimate crime, “pretentious” have been used to describe
his recent songs, while some people, seemingly unaware Walker likely doesn’t read their
comments, use the same pages to plead or demand he “goes back to his old style, to
accommodate his fans”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Walker’s most recent album, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bish Bosch, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">was released at the end of 2012, several years after
</span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Drift </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">(2006), completing the trilogy started with </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Tilt </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">(1995). With this latest record, we are
now afforded the possibility to comprehend better what he has been doing for the last two
decades or so, to situate it within a larger context. As if to further complicate matters, the
Scott Walker actuality has been quite busy recently when a box set of his first five solo
records </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Scott Walker The Collection </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">(Scott, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Scott 2, Scott 3, Scott 4 </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">and ‘Til </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Band Comes In) </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">was
commercialized earlier this year, accentuating the divide between fans of his older music and
lovers of his newer output. Though in truth the latter set tends to also enjoy early Scott
Walker music, so the musical divide might simply be a generation gap rather than a real,
sharp aesthetic division.<br />
The box set also helped to finally attempt a comprehensive examination of the artist’s work,
allowing to detect in early songs the roots of his current musicianship, as evidenced in a
recent article by John Doran on the specialized music website </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Quietus. </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Viewed
retrospectively, old songs such as </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Plastic Palace People </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">(1968) with its fragmented lyrics and
breaks of rhythm within the same tune help understand the evolution that lead to Walker’s
current work. Other songs like </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Old Man’s Back Again (Dedicated To The Neo-Stalinist Regime)
</span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">or </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Hero Of The War, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">both on </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Scott 4, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">are just the seeds which </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bolivia 95 </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">and </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Patriot (A Single)
</span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">on </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Tilt </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">will grow from several decades later, their lyrics as political and poetical at the end of
the 1960s than they will be at the turn of this century.<br />
Outside of the United Kingdom, Walker’s reputation and fame are rather murky. Except
maybe in Japan, he’s virtually unknown as a former pop star, which helps with a better
reception of the </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Tilt, The Drift </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">and </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bish Bosch </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">trilogy. For one thing it is the esteem in which
these records are held critically that has paved the way for people to rediscover his early
work, as in the United States.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">What It’s All About Is Not “About”.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">When confronted to the Scott Walker of the 21st century, it helps to think about other
mediums outside of music, such as literature or visual arts. Most music critics tend to
compare Walker to T.S Eliot, Samuel Beckett or James Joyce, understandably enough as his
lyrics draw from language tropes most famously pioneered by these modernists, however
these comparisons are unhelpful in the sense that they are used by the reviewers to try and
explain away what this music “is about”.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">That this music is wholly unexplainable and not necessarily “about” something might be a
more interesting avenue to explore. That this music is unexplainable and not necessarily
“about” something may be what makes it unbearable to anyone attached to simple answers
and used to a completely passive reception. That this music is unexplainable and not
necessarily “about” something is also why it is so new and fascinating.
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">If we lose the impulse to try to explain it away we can look at other elementary questions,
like the ones an art historian starts with when confronted with an unknown artwork outside
of an immediately recognizable context. What does the work do? What does it want? Where
does it exist?</span></div>
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Impulsively some quick answers come forth: what the work does is to simply exist, as such it
is new, it creates its own style, and as every single artwork that operates as “new”, it doesn’t
come from nothing, even when it does seem to appear out of thin air. So let’s look at it, now
that we have a body of works within which we can draw comparisons.<br />
In the visual arts field, most enduring artworks are effectively not “about” something,
because in the space where they exist they are multi-layered, dealing with complex
influences, functioning in a fuzzy cultural and social context, answering to historical and
mundane demands alike, interfering or dialoguing with vernacular and elitist tropes. They
appear: irritating, dense, scandalous, annoying, puzzling, funny, bleak, scary, strange,
encountering resistance and praise, sometimes failing their creators’ original intent but
succeeding in changing the then-current rules of the game, or more prosaically the artistic
conventions of the context within which they function.<br />
As such, they often meet the incomprehension and the mockery of a general audience, the
same general audience whose offspring will flock museums, concert halls and literary
commemorations later on: witness the annual </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bloomsday </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">celebrating James Joyce in modern-
day Dublin, the success of the many Picasso or Warhol retrospectives, and the reverence
accorded to modern recreations of Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Rite Of Spring. </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Yet all these
works have caused a scandal and met a large resistance when they first appeared.<br />
The late Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley was reviled as a jokester in the 1990s, yet his recent
retrospective (December 2012-April 2013) held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam
attracted nearly half a million people. Marcel Duchamp, the seminal 20th century artist
whose </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">readymades </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">influenced everything from Pop Art to 1980s Appropriation Art, used to
say that the audience accepts unconventional artworks only after a certain delay. It proved
certainly true for many influential movements and artists from the end of the 19th century to
the Postwar ones, so revered nowadays that it is sometimes difficult to understand the outcry
that greeted them when they first appeared. As they’ve been slowly assimilated and even co-
opted, at least superficially, by latter-day graphic designers and interior decorators, as attested
by the way the radicalism of Minimalism has been absorbed by contemporary corporate
office design, the uproar they met when they were first offered on view seems
incomprehensible.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">Out Of Thin Air
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Listening to Scott Walker in the 21st century can sometimes prove a challenge to an
audience unaware or unaccustomed to a wide array of musical genres that exist outside of
mainstream Pop music, yet there is an ever-growing circle of listeners who latch on his songs
without hesitation. For this audience, there is a musical context, which without being directly
traceable as an obvious influence on Walker makes it familiar to ease into his music. This
context is often ignored or goes unmentioned in reviews of his work, sadly, as they tend to
focus on the apparent dichotomy between his 1960s pop music and his recent dissonant
one. Dissonance in itself is important if you recall it is a leading principle of modern and
contemporary classical music, along with atonality. Modern and contemporary music is
roughly contemporary to Modernist art and literature: most milestones like Schoenberg’s </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">“Scandal Concert”, Stravinsky’s </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">Rite of Spring, </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Kandinsky’s invention of abstract painting, or
Duchamp’s </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">readymades </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">were all made or released around 1911-1913.</span></div>
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Abstraction, cerebral art and atonality have been with us for a good century and for the
culture at large we’re only getting accustomed to it now. Outside of high culture, in the
musical world most of us inhabit, the one that encompasses popular and vernacular music
released commercially, we’ve been used to underground, alternative and independent music
for many decades as well, music that strives to be experimental, unconventional and
innovative.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Some of it was ignored at the time of its making but grew extremely influential, with bands
like The Velvet Underground; other acts whose perception of eccentricity has more to do
with image like Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart, their music not really sounding
unconventional or difficult anymore today, still managed to attract a sizable public.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">A bit more foreign to a mainstream audience, some niche genres such as industrial music
have existed since at least the mid-1970s, with pioneer band Throbbing Gristle in the UK
(1975) or German band Einstürzende Neubauten (1980), later bigger acts such as Nine Inch
Nails, acknowledged as an influence by Walker, brought the genre to a larger international
audience in the mid-1990s. Outside of industrial music, Walker is known for being a lover of
classical music, as well as of modern and contemporary classical music. Composers Turnage,
Kurtag, Berio, Ligeti or Lachenmann are often mentioned in interviews or were played at the
Meltdown Festival he programmed at the Southbank Center in 2000. He has also often
talked about his love of progressive jazz back in the 1960s, and as for current mainstream
rock bands, he’s a Radiohead fan. An audience that is accustomed to these types of
unconventional music might be naturally drawn to what Walker does nowadays.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">The Audience Is Reading
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Listening carefully to the </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Tilt/The Drift/Bish Bosch </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">trilogy in successive order, we can
recognize an evolution, with </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Tilt </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">introducing the brand new style created by Walker, and in
retrospect probably the easiest of the three to get into, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Drift </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">being a consolidation and
refinement of the same style, while </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bish Bosch </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">clearly opens up new possibilities and
directions in his development, hinting at a more baroque and diverse future output while
signaling a sort of irregular closure of the cycle. Like most groundbreaking works in all
mediums, these records are by no means perfect. They offer however a certain methodical
construction that even an untrained ear can recognize, when listening attentively. Interviews
with the artist can also be illuminating in getting a deeper understanding about his creative
process.<br />
In all his interviews Scott Walker explains that he starts all his songs by writing the lyrics,
later on molding the sounds and the music to match them. Read separately from the music,
the lyrics are poetical with an often lush imagery yet they can appear nonsensical because of
the complex puns, metaphors and figurative expressions assembled together in a non-linear
way. Nevertheless there is a narrative continuity to them, as well as common themes:
violence, decay, anatomy, eroticism, fauna, astronomy, wars, dictators, and childhood. There
are even some love songs. Some of his songs are clearly explicit in denouncing the horrors of
war but associated with a poetic language that brings them beyond a simplistic political
message. Walker has also been insistent that there was humor throughout all his records,
though it is the most apparent in </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bish Bosch </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">you can catch glimpses of it on his other albums.
Walker himself rarely offers explanations about his lyrics save for some well-known</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">examples, so we get to know that </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Jesse </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">(on </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Drift) </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">is a song responding to 9/11 – here
paraphrasing Walker in the interview he gave in the documentary </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">30th Century Man </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">– a song
visually composed by juxtaposing the images of the vertical twin towers, reflecting
“American hubris” but having “no spiritual reflective qualities” in contrast with the
horizontal vision of the American prairie where Elvis Presley, in a nightmare, speaks to his
stillborn twin brother Jesse Garon whom he cannot see and who is therefore deprived of “a
reflective quality” himself.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Pretty much all of Walker’s song lyrics share this jumping from one idea to another via
associative pairing or aural puns, which at first listen give a very fragmentary idea of what is
going on. It’s only when listening to the music several times over that the structure of the
songs become apparent.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Because he uses many words coming from foreign languages, they sometimes come out as
nonsensical, though they make sense once you understand the underlying themes. For
example a song about the Balkan wars would refer to Bosnian place names, or on the
contrary the place name translated in English would open another entire new avenues by
using free words associations. Sometimes the listener understands them instinctively,
sometimes not at all; depending on their level of obscurity Walker occasionally offers
footnotes and references on the album sleeves or the lyrics booklet. These can be helpful
sometimes, but in truth they don’t always feel necessary.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">The Audience Is Listening.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Now as for the music, it also follows an inner logic that makes lots of sense once Walker
unveils the main rule that underlines his creative process: as the lyrics are what come first to
him, the music has to match them, sometimes quite literally. In an interview recently
published in the magazine </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Believer, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">he explains how the drums in the song </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">See You Don’t
Bump His Head </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">on </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bish Bosch </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">are there to match the image of the swan in the lyrics, where the
bird seems to be gliding majestically over the water while below the surface it is frantically
paddling, to keep on moving.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Once that principle of sounds corresponding to the lyrics or trying to give the best possible
approximation of them is understood, then the infamous percussive meat-punching for the
song </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Clara </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">on </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Drift </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">becomes evident as a signifier for the mob defiling the corpse of
Mussolini’s mistress after she’s been executed along the Italian dictator. Aside from the
Foley effects used on his records, the songs themselves tend to be built to include many
moments of silence, “silence” being defined by Walker as the origin for the lyrics and as an
essential part of the music itself.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">All the music is constructed according to an internal structure that isn’t made to be obvious
to a listener, so the traditional verse-chorus-bridge we’ve been used to with Pop music and
rock’n’roll is noticeably absent, though there are repetitions of musical patterns and lyrics in
most songs.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">When we switch on the radio, go shopping, hear movie soundtracks, go to restaurants and
bars, most of the current commercial music that we’re passively subjected to is constructed
around drum loops or build with the idea that the beat is the essential component holding
the song together as an entity.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Walker’s music is totally opposite: there are breaks and changes within the beat, and
sometimes there isn’t any beat at all for very long moments. These shifts in patterns are
startling to an audience that isn’t used to them, though they are relatively common in</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">contemporary classical music. The other changes that tend to shock and surprise the listener
are the shifts in registers when Walker sings, which are likely the source of the dismay or
even the disgust expressed by some of his [now former] audience, the one that screams
“bollocks” in capital letters in YouTube comments under videos from </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Drift </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">or </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bish Bosch.
</span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Journalists invariably mention Walker’s current singing style as “strangled”, “as if his testicles
were being squeezed” which immediately signal that they haven’t really listened to the
records in their entirety, because you can’t really hear that in songs such as </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Cossacks </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">even
though it is the opening tune on </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Drift, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">or that they somewhat missed the recent video
clip for </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Epizootics! </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">from </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bish Bosch, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">a song where you can clearly hear his baritone though not
throughout.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">In all the records in the </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Tilt/The Drift/Bish Bosch </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">trilogy, Walker doesn’t restrict himself to
one singing style but rather sings in at least three different registers, his regular baritone as
well as some lower and higher range, sometimes shifting from one to the other within the
same song. The singer’s magnificent baritone has been lauded everywhere as one of the
greatest male voice of the 20th century, consequently the high register he sometime uses in
his songs seems to be the one that rankles both his old fans and his current detractors, who
regret that he has “abandoned his own voice”. He hasn’t actually done that but rather has
added two different registers to his usual one and has been prominently using the tenor-like
over the others, something he explains in interviews once again by the need to voice his
lyrics according to their internal structure, but also in terms of pitch in relation to the way
the rest of the music is laid out.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">When listening carefully to Walker’s current singing style and his shifts between registers
within the same song, the most strikingly strange thing isn’t his use of the high register, but
first and foremost his diction. It is so impeccable it does indeed sound peculiar, the same
way opera singers can sometime sound incomprehensible when they sing in English as every
single word is so impeccably pronounced.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Walker articulates his singing so clearly and precisely that every single letter and sounds
comes out crystal clear: no final “s” is ever forgotten, every single “th” so exact you can
almost picture his tongue being placed between his teeth. His phrasing and articulation are
so perfect as to manage to convey humor even with onomatopoeia, which he uses
sometimes in appropriated lyrics, bringing echoes of Baroque singing with, say, a marked
elongation of consonants or an over-artificial way of repeating “la la la la”. But this use of
ultra-precise phrasing and diction isn’t new at all, as it can be heard as early as in the Walker
Brothers day, in their cover of </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Land Of Thousand Dances </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">for example.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">In his recent music, it is just used as yet another tool to emphasize the prominence of the
lyrics, as an additional instrument at the service of the music in its totality rather than a
personal mean of self-</span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond';">expression. If you start hearing it as such then it becomes clear that
the voice and the singing are the binding element of the music. It’s not the beat that holds a
Scott Walker song together, since it is not continuous indeed nor the melody since it also
shifts all the time; but the precise articulation of the lyrics by the voice, a voice that Walker
wants to see purged of its ego or personality so as to express a universal experience of
“another kind of self”. </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: small;">One can only hazard guesses at what this another kind of self is, a sort of collective persona
that could sum up the absurdity of human existence with all its travails but also all its
redemptive experiences (love, beauty, empathy, humor</span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">…</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: small;">). </span><span style="font-family: Garamond;">In this context, the famous Scott Walker’s baritone ceases to be the trademark of a former
Pop star but just another means at the musician’s disposal in the vast array of instruments
needed to complete the music. Therefore it can be modified, adulterated or bypassed in
favor of another register more apt to convey a particular piece of lyrics, without any concern
about whether the voice sounds “natural” or not.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Its volume also reinforces the artificiality of the voice and the diction: Walker can shift from
a whisper to a shout to spoken words to a snippet of melody within the same minute. By
doing so he has pretty much invented his own style of singing, a style that is so new very few
musicians have been able to cover his recent material successfully, a style that can appear
unnatural because we’re not yet used to it.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">The Voices And Their Audience
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">For someone coming new to his later work without any knowledge of his 1960s career, the
debate doesn’t really exists, but for clarity’s sake the question of natural versus unnatural
range and register deserves a quick detour.<br />
Now that we’re living in the 21st century and have been used to so many singers in both pop
and classical music singing outside of any “natural” or “conventional” range, from falsetto
(Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury, Russell Mael) to counter-tenor (Alfred Deller, Klaus Nomi)
you wonder why Walker’s use of a different one from his natural baritone in the music he’s
been making for almost twenty years now is so disturbing. Especially at a time when nobody
seems to think twice about how artificial and bizarre Autotune sounds when added to the
voice of Miley Cyrus or Lady Gaga yet their records and songs sell by the millions. Outside
of pop music, Schoenberg has come up with </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Sprechstimme </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">as early as 1912, and once again we
can quote opera or baroque singing as rather unnatural for untrained singers. More recently
we’ve been used to the recitative spoken lyrics expressed in hip-hop music, a genre that
pretty much radically did away with a lot of the melody and put the beat at the forefront of
the music.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Take seemingly niche musical genres such as Death Metal and Black Metal, where singers
routinely seem to be vomiting rocks when uttering fairly disturbing lyrics about mayhem and
murder, on top of complex distorted musical structures. All the same these types of singing
styles are no more conventional than Walker’s yet don’t encounter the same type of
indignant resistance. In most cases they’ve been already digested, sometimes via assimilation
by more mainstream acts, sometimes because of the powerful effect of dilution and
dissemination operated by movie soundtracks. We have yet to see how David Bowie’s
homage to Walker’s current singing style in his latest record could help spread it, but just the
fact it has been recognized as such in the mainstream media signals a flicker of recognition.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">The Audience Is Waiting.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">So, what is so new with Walker’s music that makes it difficult to immediately assimilate? Is
that the voice, then, considering the various singing styles enumerated above? The only real
difference is that with Walker, the breaks in the beat patterns added to the use of different
registers within the same song create surprising variations. Where Walker creates his own
style is for one thing the musical domain where he operates, because he is neither a
contemporary classical musician nor an alternative artist, as he uses instruments and </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">orchestrations that belong to both genres, bridging them in something that doesn’t exist
elsewhere yet. Contemporary classical music sometimes make uses of electric instruments
associated with rock and roll, while some rock musicians have occasionally used the power of
multiple instruments inspired by classical orchestras to create new works, like Glenn
Branca’s guitar pieces. What these lack usually is a singer. There are unconventional singers
in contemporary classical music, there are rock acts that play with large orchestras, but rarely
do these mix together to create a brand new genre.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">A striking thing comes up repeatedly when musicians who either worked with Walker or
enjoy his music comment on how what he does doesn’t belong to anything known musically:
it is not classical, it is not avant-garde, it is not Pop or rock music, it isn’t harmony, it isn’t
discord, but something that exists at the frontier between all of these. It escapes any known
definition as of now, and because it occupies such an uncertain space it produced discomfort
in the listener. That uncertain, undefined space is a space that moves away from known
musical conventions.<br />
It is not only the voice that is unconventionally used in Walker’s music, but the whole
structure of the music that constantly shifts unto itself, a process that Walker explains as a
way to avoid complacency in the listener. In very simple terms, the titles of the last three
records are fairly revelatory about what the music somehow does: it tilts, it drifts away from
accepted musical tropes, to somewhat unsatisfactorily wrap up with </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bish Bosch: </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">the job is
done, sort of, with an atrociously bad pun that also shifts from “bish bash bosh” to “a kind
of universal female artist”, according to interviews given by Walker. One doesn’t have to
swallow this explanation whole, but listening to the last album you can sense another
departure, another shift for Walker. This record is irregularly shaped, like a baroque pearl, it
sounds more dynamic, more diverse than the two previous ones, more humorous as well, a
bit as if Walker was announcing he was done exploring the sound he had created and was
now ready to experiment with new avenues with the next record. It’s also less tight and
compact than </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Tilt </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">and </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Drift, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">and if it contains great up-tempo songs (See </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">You Don’t Bump
His Head, Epizootics!) </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">it doesn’t present such magnificent and beautiful highlights like </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Farmer
In The City </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">or </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Rosary </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">(on </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Tilt) </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">or </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Jesse </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">and </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">A Lover Loves </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">(on </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Drift).<br />
</span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">There’s a certain abandonment of pure obvious beauty, though there are some beautiful
moments on </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bish Bosch </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">(Dimple comes to mind) for something more playful and
exploratory. And yet </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Bish Bosch </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">is still far ahead of most commercial music that has come up
since then and been hailed as new or innovative: David Bowie’s </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Next Day </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">still adheres to
conventional song structure even when he tries to imitate Walker on </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Heat, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">while The Knife’s
attempts at </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Shaking The Habitual </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">sound mostly contrived and laborious, as for Kanye West’s
</span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Yeezus, </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">the bloated egomania at work can’t mask the poverty of the lyrics while the music
itself is rather bland and unimaginative.<br />
To the simple question asked earlier, “What does the work want?” the simple answer is that
Scott Walker’s music demands undivided attention from the listener. This is not wallpaper
music that can be used as a backdrop for parties or domestic chores, but something else,
something closer to contemporary visual arts. It shares with artists like Mike Kelley the same
interest for irritating, grotesque or annoying motifs that are unforgettable and force the
audience to pay attention, to look, to listen, to try and think. Like most complex artworks it
asks questions and points to avenues of explorations, rather than provide the audience with
easy answers, with comfort, with delusions. Because its forms are so new it is easy to mock,
ridicule, vilify or crudely parody, like most groundbreaking works of art have been. Because
the work is so new despite its nearly two decades of existence, it has only found a limited
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">public... so far. Because it is so innovative yet existing in a context where all sorts of
unconventional genres of music are readily available on the Internet, it is in fact on its way to
finding an ever expanding audience, as evidenced in the many personal blog posts written
about it.</span></div>
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Meanwhile, the audience is waiting. It is waiting for the time when it will meet the trajectory
of Scott Walker’s music and finally surrender to it. It is still blind to the realization that the
unthinkable has already happened: the very first music that speaks of the 21st century is
here.
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Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-35286134319112204002014-07-20T04:01:00.001-07:002014-07-20T04:03:03.721-07:00FBC! Lite, Summer Edition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSNsQ7Vuv0nWk-qBcNdteOtybqf0hKpiGNUVWwVea2OVkwj8j6k2QOcsbbLlcT_XkVLmvESO35qjshWf2xPhhttmUnFCF6fI4ZRGkPYgUQQaZ31FpH6-B1uCPdTg8gFg1dFYW_GMnG378/s1600/IMG_6139.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSNsQ7Vuv0nWk-qBcNdteOtybqf0hKpiGNUVWwVea2OVkwj8j6k2QOcsbbLlcT_XkVLmvESO35qjshWf2xPhhttmUnFCF6fI4ZRGkPYgUQQaZ31FpH6-B1uCPdTg8gFg1dFYW_GMnG378/s1600/IMG_6139.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Coming soon, in a<i> Frog</i> magazine near you.</span></div>
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Posting on FBC! is becoming more and more infrequent, but I'm happy to inform you that part of it is due to spending some time writing for an upcoming print publication in<a href="http://www.frogmagazine.net/I_welcome_I.html" target="_blank"> Frog magazine</a> where yours truly has found a happy refuge at the invitation of its chief editor, curator and writer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Troncy" target="_blank">Eric Troncy</a>. <i>Frog </i>has already reprinted a couple of old blog posts for its December issue last year, but I've written an original (and long) essay for the September magazine. It's about magic. Sort of.<br />
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Posting on here is becoming rare also because I'm practicing my other type of writing, the one I'm not very good at (fiction) but I'm working on it. Not sure when/if it will ever see the light, but if it does I'll keep you posted. </div>
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Also, I'm technically on a break because I've misplaced my camera battery charger, so until I get a new one I can't take any pictures. Besides I haven't done much art viewing recently, or the one I've done was too uninspiring for me to want to spend a couple of hours in front of the computer to report on it. I might make it to the <a href="http://quadriennale-duesseldorf.de/?lg=en" target="_blank">Düsseldorf Quadriennale</a> in August so if I do there will be a post on here, but nothing is much certain, as I haven't booked a train ticket yet and it ends in about 3 weeks. </div>
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In other news, you regular FBC! readers know how nuts we are about Scott Walker's recent musical output here at our worldwide headquarters, so we're very pleased (and more than a little impatient) to have learned that the great man had teamed up with<a href="http://4ad.com/news/item/17/7/2014/scottwalkersunnoannouncesoused" target="_blank"> Sunn 0))) for an upcoming release on September 22nd, Soused</a>. </div>
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From the info on the 4AD website it seems that all 5 tracks have been composed by Scott Walker, and yours truly hopes he will also do most of the singing - what I really can't stand with Sunn 0))) is their totally stereotypical metal style of singing. Aside from their wearing monk robes and using smoke machines on stage, but then if that disguising apparatus means that Walker might actually end up touring with them, maybe there's an upside - apart from making me roaring with laughter at the vision of Walker with his trademark baseball cap donning a monk robe and getting back on stage. It probably will never happen, but it's fun thinking about it. </div>
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Surprisingly for Walker there's only a 2 years gap between Bish Bosch and that new record, which means he must have written at lightning speed, for someone known to labor for several years on a song. I, for one, won't complain. Just 2 months more and we'll discover the thing. <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/2014/07/18/fanatics-a-bodacious-assortment-of-tunes?utm_content=buffer94f86&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer" target="_blank">Henry Rollins</a> has apparently listened to the record already and I take his word when it says it's great.</div>
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This one is the only good news this week, when, you know, the world is on fire, shit happens all the time, and we're killing the planet a little bit more every day. About this I have very little to say except I am a bit puzzled by certain types of social network activists who seem to think they can change the world by posting such original thoughts as "world leaders, I conjure you to listen to ME and bring in global peace", and, er… I'm not sure it's the most efficient way to go at it. Not that I have anything better to propose, but I don't know that thinking you can address the powers that be from the sanctity of your social network account will bring global results, even if the NSA closely monitors your kitten photos and foodie Instagram pictures. </div>
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Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-53202206614676394102014-06-18T07:22:00.001-07:002014-06-18T07:27:18.516-07:00Support Nicolas Bourriaud In His Quest To Modernize An Antiquated French School<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtIUI6YampY7k5Pw2K8oKbVy29c1a8Pq8uY8bqiH-OOmJ44Ofsg5zFhR7MLqoeQCaxG-yzh3hdA43p86PNDicSF7o2OQ8GXl-BuSz-RC4JVP3r_OGFnTp2jDSOaj6FMLG6gb9RyiRQKVs/s1600/IMG_0902.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtIUI6YampY7k5Pw2K8oKbVy29c1a8Pq8uY8bqiH-OOmJ44Ofsg5zFhR7MLqoeQCaxG-yzh3hdA43p86PNDicSF7o2OQ8GXl-BuSz-RC4JVP3r_OGFnTp2jDSOaj6FMLG6gb9RyiRQKVs/s1600/IMG_0902.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="userContent"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">A totally irrelevant image posted here so text-adverse people would get their short attention span focusing on something.</span></span></div>
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<span class="userContent">I had posted this on Facebook, but for easy sharing I'm pasting it in a FBC! post.</span></div>
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<i>"Please give Nicolas Bourriaud some support in
his quest to make the National School of Fine Art (ENSBA) in Paris an
institution that would finally join the 21st century, instead of being
steeped in the same mediocrity it has been mired in s<span class="text_exposed_show">ince the 19th.<br />
This is a ridiculous situation of the kind that makes French art the
laughingstock of the international art community nowadays, and as such
is difficult to explain. Basically there is an internal conflict with
long-standing staff at the school, which has extended to students going
on strike. Because they’re upset their new director, Nicolas Bourriaud,
is trying to make up for a big shortfall in public spending in his
budget by renting out facilities to private companies, and by his
partnering with art galleries for one occasional event. Those of you
used to fundraising to keep art alive and available to the public will
appreciate the irony.<br /> <br /> It really boils down to an ugly internal
conflict of the kind that shouldn’t even be allowed to happen, if the
apparatchik civil servants running the French art world were smart
enough to lay aside their petty private interests for one moment in
favor of looking at the big picture instead. There won’t be good French
artists until there are good French art schools, and there won’t be any
good French art schools if administrators go on strike against any
needed reform coming from their hierarchy.<br /> If so inclined, please
sign the petition below and share it liberally. It’s in French, but on
change.org so there’s nothing complicated about it. Please support
Nicolas Bourriaud in modernizing this school, and maybe 10 years from
now the question won’t be “why are there no good French artists?”
anymore, but “how come France has such a bumper crop of new talents?”</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Link to the petition <a href="http://www.change.org/fr/p%C3%A9titions/madame-la-ministre-de-la-culture-et-de-la-communication-soutien-%C3%A0-nicolas-bourriaud-pour-son-maintien-%C3%A0-la-direction-des-beaux-arts-de-paris?share_id=unZiTDUuDI&utm_campaign=autopublish&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition" target="_blank">HERE</a></span><br />
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Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-6660103305775536862014-05-28T08:29:00.002-07:002014-05-28T08:29:33.082-07:00Please Let Us Interrupt This Current Absence Of Posting <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyp2Ec7Uf7XI80UonSuvRvIQ_uMDxdfA0QqHamfjvMYGJwFY6pXMR5G05AScNcjfEXBfg_CcLHBewD8MizqaytgvUd1kOKhlrta7XBtib6QUIboYayIHtiUzdcLHcFsmEMF6hbo6cj4cw/s1600/IMG_6148.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyp2Ec7Uf7XI80UonSuvRvIQ_uMDxdfA0QqHamfjvMYGJwFY6pXMR5G05AScNcjfEXBfg_CcLHBewD8MizqaytgvUd1kOKhlrta7XBtib6QUIboYayIHtiUzdcLHcFsmEMF6hbo6cj4cw/s1600/IMG_6148.jpg" height="320" width="125" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Garcimore's most famous stage costume</span></div>
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Hello, dear, beloved readers! It's been a while, isn't it? As usual we at the FBC! Headquarters have been a bit busy with non-blog-related things including a lot of non-art writing, some others related to the obligation to make a living (we're available for all <strike>stand-up comedy</strike> English-French-English live translation gigs for a hefty fee + expenses if you need us), and, you know, life.<br />
Some of this life has included and will continue to include extensive train travels (my favorite) and so I can announce now there will be an upcoming article in the September issue of <a href="http://www.frogmagazine.net/I_welcome_I.html" target="_blank">Frog Magazine,</a> about the late French TV magician Garcimore. And then some more!<br />
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Meanwhile, I know you can't live without a heavy dose of FBC! and are frustrated, what do I say, you are<i> dying</i> without it. Fear not, intrepid readership, for I have found a more than acceptable substitute for all your FBC!-deprivation woes. While waiting for yours truly to post stuff on here somedays, why don't you go and check my other favorite blogs, starting with <a href="http://houseguest.me/" target="_blank">Houseguest,</a> written by my bestie the fabulous Grant Wahlquist. Houseguest is a blog almost entirely devoted to studio visits with various artists, such as Joe Mama-Nitzberg or Jennifer Moon. It doesn't shy away from the tough questions ("do you have a day job, how does it impact your work?), always provides a nifty intro to the artist's work, and also shines a light on the working habits of artists.<br />
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My other favorite blog is the fruit of <a href="http://tamtambooks-tosh.blogspot.be/" target="_blank">Tosh Berman</a>'s labor, Tosh whom I've already talked about on here. Since the beginning of this year, Tosh has been writing daily posts centered around the famous births or deaths of artists, writers, actors, filmmakers, dancers or musicians but written in the first person. These posts are mostly fiction but with a heavy dose of real facts about the people Tosh writes about.<br />
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Lastly there are some shows I do intend to visit in the next few months, such as the Düsseldorf Quadriennale, so stay tuned for more FBC! posts in the not-so-distant future. In the meantime, check my friends' blogs!Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-58752693669086600002014-04-29T05:07:00.002-07:002014-04-29T05:07:31.479-07:00A Lackluster Art Brussels 2014<div class="Section1">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh75wfuGnlEV3JAiY9GANibOpLwIaggQLZtNQJ3J8wx-qOUYy005L8P3Il1wXZzA9NtTjbnGfWy1-11IzjT1vdAMgtKaellkPqX-Zmlmj3xBx6mAEass2Xt3IjexfcuAxh4ew3DqgsS6L4/s1600/IMG_6062.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh75wfuGnlEV3JAiY9GANibOpLwIaggQLZtNQJ3J8wx-qOUYy005L8P3Il1wXZzA9NtTjbnGfWy1-11IzjT1vdAMgtKaellkPqX-Zmlmj3xBx6mAEass2Xt3IjexfcuAxh4ew3DqgsS6L4/s1600/IMG_6062.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Some furry something by the Chapuisat brothers. I think my cat would have liked it.</span></div>
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Last week was the annual Art Brussels art fair, an event
that left me rather dubious, with the disclaimer that all art fairs give me the
willies, and also that I was rather wiped out after providing live translation
an hour away the day prior to my visit. </div>
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I had gone to the art fair last year as well and was rather
unimpressed, and would have skipped this year’s if not for friends being in
town and wanting me to come visit.
This year was even more underwhelming if that is possible, and I
wouldn’t have reported on it if several people in the business hadn’t asked for
my opinion, I suppose to test the waters and see if they’d want to apply for
future edition. </div>
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Most of the galleries represented were Belgian (maybe a 75%
ratio?) giving the fair a decidedly local feel; as for the rest it was a
hodgepodge of French, German, British, Latin American and a few galleries from the United States. My feeling about this specific art fair is that it is totally
over-hyped abroad, but that is true of the local art scene as well. </div>
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Not that the local art scene is bad, far from it, but the
emphasis is on “local”. Brussels certainly isn’t “the new Berlin” and even less
“the new Los Angeles”. It’s dynamic thanks to a myriad little non-profits that
are very active, and then they have some weird hybrid model here where they seem to have
public money going to support private commercial galleries as long as they show
local artists, I’m given to understand (a lot of exhibitions at private galleries get a notice "with the support of [either the Flemish or Walloon authorities]"). They even have art dealers doubling as
the main “art critics” writing and publishing about the artists they represent
and claiming it represents scholarly work instead of pure marketing, but then
the notion of “conflict of interest” doesn’t seem to rise to the consciousness
of a lot of actors in the Euro art world in general. In any case, the impression one gets from the Brussels art scene is that there are many little thing going on, but a lot of them seem stuck in a post-conceptual time warp, and the ambition always remains hyperlocal rather than international. And, why the hell not? But this is where the comparison with Berlin and Los Angeles stops. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHhfRuGBjJbihE2KhrC-kdad5lregmVyVsA0Jlai5Ry_YQmAhhsGWreCYoh64fx5dJQW-3bHnAaIblHgF_8CVx7j7VN-Pxp-eiG3V-R1GrQZQs8n5UMVv6tnoz22YktaeXshDSXZEhZSY/s1600/IMG_6039.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHhfRuGBjJbihE2KhrC-kdad5lregmVyVsA0Jlai5Ry_YQmAhhsGWreCYoh64fx5dJQW-3bHnAaIblHgF_8CVx7j7VN-Pxp-eiG3V-R1GrQZQs8n5UMVv6tnoz22YktaeXshDSXZEhZSY/s1600/IMG_6039.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">That one was really fun too, with a texture obtained by carving into styrofoam, but you can't help thinking it's going to age badly, yellowing and crumbling in a year or two.</span></div>
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The result here in Brussels is that you have many small art
events everywhere all the time, some of them interesting, many others totally
incomprehensible if you’re a foreigner. The main issue that stops the growth of the Brussels and Belgian
art scene, IMHO, is that there isn’t a national museum of modern/contemporary art anymore,
and if not for the Wiels (a Kunsthalle installed in a gorgeous former brewery)
that stages ambitious international exhibitions, there would be no real visibility
for foreign artists here and for Belgian artists abroad. </div>
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The SMAK in Ghent
(please, let someone tell them what smack means) and the MHKA in Antwerp
are good institutions, and you have really interesting museums in Ostend and Leuven, but generally speaking it feels like the country is
lacking a national collecting institution that could really support artists and
attracts visitors, and become the natural home for the famed Belgian private
collections. </div>
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To my knowledge Brussels is the only Western capital that doesn’t
have a flagship modern and contemporary art museum, when most big cities
actually have several, collecting or not (NYC: MoMA, PS1, The New Museum. LA: MOCA, LACMA, the Hammer. Paris: the Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo, the Jeu de Paume. Etc.) </div>
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This lack
of a great institution (when there used to be one before) feels extraordinarily
provincial, especially since there is a public here for cutting-edge culture if
you look at, say, contemporary ballet or avant-garde music. Provincialism
was also the vibe I got from the art fair* and it is strange to see visual arts trailing live performances in a country that used to be more trailblazing for contemporary arts 20 years ago.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiceB_RZqgIFevJAL5g1fzvjETxui54betgMjtyHqzHyJNSbWrwAXrWt7dFW1IsQhg9hkyXlL7ZsM0bJ1e7Ja4MRNb8l-twZ6r0ANi7-Sq39zH9KsQG0GZnIaHlBpGfBcwN96r8qMtg_A/s1600/IMG_6029.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiceB_RZqgIFevJAL5g1fzvjETxui54betgMjtyHqzHyJNSbWrwAXrWt7dFW1IsQhg9hkyXlL7ZsM0bJ1e7Ja4MRNb8l-twZ6r0ANi7-Sq39zH9KsQG0GZnIaHlBpGfBcwN96r8qMtg_A/s1600/IMG_6029.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">A work by Hans Op De Beek, one of my favorite Belgian artists.</span></div>
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As for the business end of the fair I do not know, except I’ve
been told of lukewarm sales from a few art dealers I know. As a spectator, I
felt a little bit like I was visiting Art Cologne circa 1993. A lot of the art
being shown had a D+, C- quality to my eye, with an overall grayscale aspect: a
lot of black and white photos, drawings, <span class="GramE">post</span>-conceptual
art… The disappointing thing was that, if you’re at an art fair that isn’t huge
on the international circuit (it’s not Basel or Frieze obviously) and where
most of the exhibitors are local, you could think that it allows for some
discoveries, maybe some new artists, some interesting booths, and some
surprises. For example, about 20 years ago I remember going to the FIAC in
Paris, a fair that at the time was particularly lame in terms of offerings, but
I got to discover Tetsumi Kudo, whom nobody gave a damn about then but looked
so different from everything else on view then it really stayed imprinted in my
mind. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6oiL1by9-rpur812_7SQJBawyFjdN9pvRX6trZsploBH9sow7Agoi36T6Q-sLrJ02LRFhsQBUp5a9LYw6li5rQTr7cuzLplRc6jrq6g58cOhsY6pYBwK2A5YCYx_yNhP0LVviQyEtja4/s1600/IMG_6007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6oiL1by9-rpur812_7SQJBawyFjdN9pvRX6trZsploBH9sow7Agoi36T6Q-sLrJ02LRFhsQBUp5a9LYw6li5rQTr7cuzLplRc6jrq6g58cOhsY6pYBwK2A5YCYx_yNhP0LVviQyEtja4/s1600/IMG_6007.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Do You Want To Know The Time Of Your Death</i>? a really fun, fun display from the Belgian National Lottery booth. It's a real national lottery, not an art collective operating under that name.</span></div>
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At Art Brussels if felt like most of the new artists were
totally derivative of something else, as, say, many of the painters seemed to
be doing pale imitations of Sigmar Polke or Martin Kippenberger. There were lots of very pretty gray
drawings and watercolors in the style of Hans Op De Beek, as well as many real
Hans Op De Beek works (thanks God for the real Hans Op De Beek). Someone somewhere made some really, really bad
giant knock-offs of Warhol, and then you had many artists trying to do some
1960s- style Op Art. It reached a stage where I was very happy to see works by
artists I don’t really care for usually, like Anthony Caro, because, woozah!
It’s well made! There’s an attention to detail and craft! Other things that I
liked were due to the fact that I’m a sucker for taxidermy, so the Kader Attia
work with a stuffed cheetah (I think the work might have referred to
post-colonialism maybe?) made me happy. There was a bandaged bear somewhere, too (not pictured here, a bit reminiscent of a tamer Paul McCarthy). I was pleased with the many Hans Op De
Beek everywhere, because his work is always visually appealing; with a
ghost-like quality that makes them very attractive.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidHV4r0va9FF_EuQvA3kD34wgFWkAr0wttFh7lSYXkl0qennRhvgFDSQ1naNMUdkkp5hipwIPO22UnMugyrOZ7_58WVSgdmlHCWlckgfIjTayWry-fQD26PzqK91hE3-9moFtpVoBcSBM/s1600/IMG_6027.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidHV4r0va9FF_EuQvA3kD34wgFWkAr0wttFh7lSYXkl0qennRhvgFDSQ1naNMUdkkp5hipwIPO22UnMugyrOZ7_58WVSgdmlHCWlckgfIjTayWry-fQD26PzqK91hE3-9moFtpVoBcSBM/s1600/IMG_6027.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The taxidermied cheetah in the Kader Attia work.</span></div>
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In the section with the most established galleries there
seems to have been a lot of Thomas Ruff photos, and as I’m a big fan I was
rather happy to see them. Another standout for me was a very rare Stanley
Brouwn, a pioneer conceptual artist whose work is too confidential everywhere.
I was surprised to see a large Allen Ruppersberg on display but that was before
I knew he was about to have a solo show at the Wiels next month**. But my favorite booth ever was
the one for the Belgian National Lottery, which, er, I don’t know why there
were there, maybe they fund something art-related, but we got to see old drawing
machines and that was fun. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvofUssqr27WkZeP4ajJPYGq3LybOskMpJ9odtwQmfAFtg6uN-FM1tRnx3bsbPE-wBgvcVtSZTNdYUel5wHpDKYB5kkrVoN3cQ3zmKXQqmGP_Y2MNaqtNd3o2HHql1m46QU39LdXdQsTc/s1600/IMG_6004.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvofUssqr27WkZeP4ajJPYGq3LybOskMpJ9odtwQmfAFtg6uN-FM1tRnx3bsbPE-wBgvcVtSZTNdYUel5wHpDKYB5kkrVoN3cQ3zmKXQqmGP_Y2MNaqtNd3o2HHql1m46QU39LdXdQsTc/s1600/IMG_6004.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Some lottery drawing machines</span></div>
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Overall, it was hard not to feel underwhelmed by the fair,
as everybody I talked to concurred.
It’s a bit difficult to know what to attribute this to, a lack of money,
a lack of ambition, or something else? There were a few good things to counter
the lackluster art offerings, namely the fact that the fair is human-sized, and
the general atmosphere was more relaxed and felt less like a display of bling
than at the usual fairs. The few
cafés scattered strategically around weren’t horribly expensive save for the
Ruinart champagne one but that would have been expected.<br />
In the end, it’s just a fair, i.e.
an anachronistic medieval trade exchange of physical goods, and not some
cutting-edge intellectual group exhibition. Its only purpose being commerce,
there isn’t much to be drawn in terms of having a panorama of contemporary art.
But as far as trade goes, it gives the image of mediocre offerings proposed to
a clientele perceived as undemanding and provincial. I can’t tell if it was a
successful commercial strategy, but as an amateur bystander it made me feel
like someone going to a bookstore wanting to see what the current serious literature was at
and being confronted with third-rate genre writing instead.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFJqgAXIBabGsD_kNnDkEj6xdp-mC6tapXzlBFAAHm7kFXJnxg_3XrDdLY4XopJd4hNlC5ad8EnA7Pn5KNDHyUiVIqL9yuRHhwgYjV9Kk7Z6sMtBy9iOKrz7Sn3E81nSpAxe5lGNER5sE/s1600/IMG_6024.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFJqgAXIBabGsD_kNnDkEj6xdp-mC6tapXzlBFAAHm7kFXJnxg_3XrDdLY4XopJd4hNlC5ad8EnA7Pn5KNDHyUiVIqL9yuRHhwgYjV9Kk7Z6sMtBy9iOKrz7Sn3E81nSpAxe5lGNER5sE/s1600/IMG_6024.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Stanley Brouwne</span></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span></span>* <span style="font-family: Symbol; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span></span><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Lest I be accused of comparing everything to Los
Angeles (where the art fairs always suck) everybody I met who went to Art
Brussels told me the same thing, whether they were curators, artists, critics or art
dealers themselves, so I didn’t invent this “provincial vibe”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span></span>** The Wiels is by far and large the standout
institution in Brussels and I really love their shows. But out of the last
4 solo shows and the next 2 upcoming ones, they showcased 5 male artists and one
woman. The next show is Allen Ruppersberg and Robert Heinecken, which I'm looking forward to. They announce it as something coming out of LA, but if you want to showcase a
great photographer based in LA who’s been on the scene for decades and deserves
a solo show, Judy Fiskin comes to mind. The lack of women representation in the
art world is a problem everywhere, not specifically Belgium, but it’s not a reason for Belgian
institutions to contribute to enforce the status quo. People here are smarter than this. </div>
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Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-20101054088842552022014-02-15T06:53:00.000-08:002014-02-15T06:53:51.604-08:00All The Cool Stuff That Fits One Bag With A Little Help From My Friends<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_ev9QghN-CzNDPZP0x3SRd5a4j0abj3EzYhSULlcLjXTV6Yog9dL68LAiFWOyUugC7gN4c4ys1w4QGdiLoCAUN7jkO1V6nAXk28_JXCOEvuCEJjKcDNjrJENmxC1f4HThUgbbzu5AnA4/s1600/604021_10152108982414792_841123836_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_ev9QghN-CzNDPZP0x3SRd5a4j0abj3EzYhSULlcLjXTV6Yog9dL68LAiFWOyUugC7gN4c4ys1w4QGdiLoCAUN7jkO1V6nAXk28_JXCOEvuCEJjKcDNjrJENmxC1f4HThUgbbzu5AnA4/s1600/604021_10152108982414792_841123836_n.jpg" height="270" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Last issue of<i> Frog Magazine</i> where yours truly has 2 articles</span></div>
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When <a href="http://frenchybutchic.blogspot.be/2014/01/an-essay-with-no-redeeming-qualities.html" target="_blank">I came out with suffering from depression </a>I had no idea so many people would reach out to me and be so supportive. It's a hard thing to live with, and in between migraines, having undergone brain trauma and this, let me tell you there's a painful crowd constantly living in my head. But seeing that so many people cared and took the time to help was immensely uplifting. In addition to many sweet messages I've received quite a few things in the mail over the last few months which I thought I should share with you, also as a way to publicly thank my friends. Above is a copy of the latest <a href="http://www.frogmagazine.net/I_bookshops_I.html" target="_blank">Frog Magazine </a>with 3 articles on Mike Kelley inside including two from yours truly, which are edited versions of posts previously published here. I linked to the page where you can buy copies online as well as where bookstores that carry the magazine internationally are listed. Eric Troncy who's the editor of the magazine sent me that copy while I'm waiting for the publisher to send me some additional ones.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj27797TwwvrVk4ySPq00Bhh2bMk2_Ba0tFtK8RXwswsjbxy_ys1BIdATzySY3nQ9XixKRiv1G9S4iMrxWsi2Tn0KoVENtEGvQRjiorMLpYvZCjZGhv5deSpXPkDFoQXXhlX6bF4REioA/s1600/IMG_5676.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj27797TwwvrVk4ySPq00Bhh2bMk2_Ba0tFtK8RXwswsjbxy_ys1BIdATzySY3nQ9XixKRiv1G9S4iMrxWsi2Tn0KoVENtEGvQRjiorMLpYvZCjZGhv5deSpXPkDFoQXXhlX6bF4REioA/s1600/IMG_5676.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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Here's a bird-eye view (and bad photo, sorry!) of everything I've received recently: a Freitag bag that can contain everything else you see in the picture above including Frog mag, two books, two LPs and a mystery jar. There's a list below so you have a better idea.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyqxx6-RG07rj0uLAKbHmQchRZuyCzklu1OGPMNtAsJ8v9d-ivlgLBE3YZ3mccYOsuqWUcmJcAOD8reHWRu9JbtuBAgB_LUjYZWYDHw2qHJrH0UjPjIb7pdCThPibzT8BsSBJYMICptdo/s1600/IMG_5678.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyqxx6-RG07rj0uLAKbHmQchRZuyCzklu1OGPMNtAsJ8v9d-ivlgLBE3YZ3mccYOsuqWUcmJcAOD8reHWRu9JbtuBAgB_LUjYZWYDHw2qHJrH0UjPjIb7pdCThPibzT8BsSBJYMICptdo/s1600/IMG_5678.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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This is the catalog for the traveling Mike Kelley retrospective, originated in Amsterdam by the great <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Goldstein" target="_blank">Ann Goldstein</a>, and that traveled to PS1 in NYC and is soon to open in LA at MOCA. Courtesy of my super buddy Grant Wahlquist who's responsible for this <a href="http://houseguest.me/" target="_blank">great new blog</a> you should all put in your bookmarks.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjS4iirBzArhSUvSmGbsweaL9NIsnU8-2iW7fJFgO2DIvcMrUAOr8EijqgD1Alncb5M8H50lUXZnt1QOdOjyDcyivuRfEvl0QYIGK5SZeAlyO9uYH5-wdFBSWTr_KrAjNHYcOAz1-SFLM/s1600/IMG_5679.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjS4iirBzArhSUvSmGbsweaL9NIsnU8-2iW7fJFgO2DIvcMrUAOr8EijqgD1Alncb5M8H50lUXZnt1QOdOjyDcyivuRfEvl0QYIGK5SZeAlyO9uYH5-wdFBSWTr_KrAjNHYcOAz1-SFLM/s1600/IMG_5679.jpg" height="320" width="228" /></a></div>
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Then my friend Stephanie Theodore <a href="http://theodoreart.com/" target="_blank">who owns this gallery</a> brought me this when she came to stay overnight in between London and Amsterdam. You can find almond butter here but not crunchy, unsalted and unsweetened almond butter. I love this stuff which I can never have enough of. better than Nutella if you ask me. Also I think if TJ's were to develop in Europe (as should Target and Crate & Barrel) they would make a killing. Similarly, Picard Surgelés should invade the US market.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTHHpxzeJCx2Dg7SbmRvmYVp8nUJtKlpAmOzhbv_RPG6acG89oIujo70wsPFBaVCiD5402VaX2fLSq4TzUsq-GGP1JdKTCw7_KgwonusGPJXTZkNCOq1W2CBgXSoLYYI1cwyngAcgjIfQ/s1600/IMG_5680.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTHHpxzeJCx2Dg7SbmRvmYVp8nUJtKlpAmOzhbv_RPG6acG89oIujo70wsPFBaVCiD5402VaX2fLSq4TzUsq-GGP1JdKTCw7_KgwonusGPJXTZkNCOq1W2CBgXSoLYYI1cwyngAcgjIfQ/s1600/IMG_5680.jpg" height="320" width="258" /></a></div>
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Years ago I met the Irish artist<a href="http://www.greenonredgallery.com/artist.php?intArtistID=30" target="_blank"> Niamh O'Malley</a> at a show <a href="http://www.casino-luxembourg.lu/en/Exhibitions/Open-House" target="_blank">I co-curated along with 11 other people</a> in Luxembourg. We maintained a long-distance friendship over the next few years. She's a good artist and a lovely lady and this is the second book she has sent me since I started FBC!.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifIKJ-CZg3jovw-6EFQ2bU1MJZodq6k8GcwgXgx_7ijdqDxAMHQMYf07IT5fReY3ZBs1vHDqGk0NZNLGTgGkhlkQUlwCZQ-Mj0gPknzGk7owpET5FUNi4nSGMubV3HOWhEfZzaYE9HdZ0/s1600/IMG_5681.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifIKJ-CZg3jovw-6EFQ2bU1MJZodq6k8GcwgXgx_7ijdqDxAMHQMYf07IT5fReY3ZBs1vHDqGk0NZNLGTgGkhlkQUlwCZQ-Mj0gPknzGk7owpET5FUNi4nSGMubV3HOWhEfZzaYE9HdZ0/s1600/IMG_5681.jpg" height="262" width="320" /></a></div>
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I still manage to listen to music sometimes and alongside my well-documented love for <a href="http://frenchybutchic.blogspot.be/search?q=john+cale" target="_blank">John Cale</a> and <a href="http://frenchybutchic.blogspot.be/search?q=scott+walker" target="_blank">Scott Walker</a> I like other things, such as psychedelic music and ethereal lady singers, and so for Christmas my brother and sister got me the latest <a href="http://www.woodenshjips.com/" target="_blank">Wooden Shjips</a> album as well as the one by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/rachelzeffira" target="_blank">Rachel Zeffira</a> (couldn't get a good picture of this one, sadly).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNfv3yauKI8d_egW3uov_bjm-_tWDEfQrc8bXialSmKKJRaY_jCbE0vIDRr5rZOlpj-m8R0Kbc8B99nto0FSDCAlrsEvJVYVqsCaIxz9Ibqcffbd9AcgMGAPx7ZhAZTx4A6Ub-YIpuj_o/s1600/IMG_5682.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNfv3yauKI8d_egW3uov_bjm-_tWDEfQrc8bXialSmKKJRaY_jCbE0vIDRr5rZOlpj-m8R0Kbc8B99nto0FSDCAlrsEvJVYVqsCaIxz9Ibqcffbd9AcgMGAPx7ZhAZTx4A6Ub-YIpuj_o/s1600/IMG_5682.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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One of my friends who's been extraordinarily supportive is <a href="http://stephanesaclier.com/" target="_blank">Stéphane Saclier</a> who kindly sent me a bunch of things including t<a href="http://www.freitag.ch/Fundamentals/Messengers-Classic/DRAGNET/pa/F12_01601" target="_blank">his really extraordinary messenger bag</a> made by Freitag, a Swiss company. I'm totally in love with it for many reasons, including the fact that everything you see above in the first photo fits into it, as evidenced by the photo below.<br />
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The main characteristics of the bag is that it's made entirely out of recycled materials, namely the kind of tarp used to cover trucks here in Europe, and the strap is made out of a recycled seat belt, while velcro bands are used to close the bag shut. As a result you get an extraordinarily sturdy bag, and this particular model I got is expandable, so you can use it to go grocery shopping, or carry your laptop and various electronics, or your flea market haul of books and vinyl records easily. The only caveat I think is that it smells of plastic but as mine is brand new I expect the smell to subside in a few weeks. One of the things I really like about it, aside from the fact that it's spacious, waterproof, sturdy and stylish is that because the strap is made out of a seatbelt it is also expandable and so you can wear it on any shoulder comfortably. Which is great when one of your shoulders has been damaged in a car accident, this way I can use the opposite one and there's no risk of the bag slipping off.<br />
It has one front pocket that is covered by the main flap, and because you need to undo the velcro to open both the flap and the front pocket there is no chance a pickpocket could try to help themselves without you being alerted by the noise. You will tell me you're not worried about pickpockets which is a rare event in the United States, but here in Europe it's a scourge.<br />
When I received the bag and realized how much I could expand it (double it's vertical length thanks to 2 inside flaps) I thought this would be a perfect carry-on purse for flights, because it would still fit under the front seat and I could carry many records, books and my laptop plus snacks and water, etc.<br />
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So thanks to everybody who's been so kind and generous to me. It helps keep me afloat when I'm in the pits, and reminds me what a lucky person I am to have you in my life.Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-87981755952812853182014-02-02T07:11:00.001-08:002014-02-02T07:11:53.165-08:00Introducing FBC! Lite<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">My cat made the cutest little arrangement with her toys. I always knew she was a genius</span></div>
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Like most everybody, we at the FBC! headquarters are possessed with opinions and assholes (I say most everybody in the eventuality some people might not have assholes, and I feel truly sorry for them). Which, like most everybody, makes us also be some assholes sometimes or even often, how would we know?<br />
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But whatever our opinions, there are times when we don't really want to expand on them for too long nor write for an effing amount of time because life's too short. So, we've decided to start a new series of posts that will all go under the headline "FBC! Lite" and that will mostly consist in putting down some links that you will have to click through if interested, and a few lines above or below to just state our opinions. Which are not open for debate in the sense that, if you wish to debate yourself in comments more power to you, but we won't engage with you at all (see above "life's too short"). Also the images chosen to illustrate the post will be totally random.<br />
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So, the links today are about "<a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-retail-returns-20140202,0,1314192.story" target="_blank">ethical shopping</a>" and "<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/02/do-charity-shops-threaten-small-businesses" target="_blank">charity shops killing the high street</a>". Yours truly is all for ethical shopping and also believes that artists, writers, musicians, designers, dancers, actors, etc. <a href="http://irespectmusic.org/" target="_blank">should be paid fairly for their work and its diffusion and distribution</a>.<br />
But I think at the bottom of this the real problem is that EVERYBODY who isn't the 1% has seen wages either stagnate or plunge down over the last 20+ years or so (I've certainly seen my own writer fees go steadily downhill over 20 years). Therefore, if all your income is swallowed by the high cost of housing, health care and transportation (as well as caring for other persons) then there is very little left for us to actually buy items that are affordable and of decent quality. We can all afford to be ethical shoppers when we get higher salaries, and real jobs that pay for the unemployed. Until then, newspaper that publish this kind of crap are just being assholes themselves. They'd better campaign for fairer wages across the board.<br />
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Then there is that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/02/dylan-farrow-child-sex-abuse-allegations-woody-allen" target="_blank">ongoing personal war being waged in the media</a> by people who I believe could afford to go to court to maybe once and for all settle their grudges? I want to be perfectly clear that I find child abuse and any kind of abuse abhorrent, and that Woody Allen is a grossly overrated filmmaker at best.<br />
But, uh, all these op-eds and interviews and Twitter wars give me the creeps.<br />
I don't know if there's a status of limitation or other legal reasons that prevent the injured parties to sue, but if there isn't, please, please, please do this. Thanks.<br />
If Mr. Allen is found guilty then he should certainly be punished to the full extent of the law. But all this media circus isn't really helping the cause of abused children, I believe. I understand that going through a trial is harrowing, but I don't know if the continuous media attention is that healthy either? I've seen a bunch of posts on Twitter about believing this person and that person on this issue. I don't know if "beliefs" can really help justice. Maybe the law is imperfect, but it serves a function, and maybe a lawsuit would be the best tool for the family to find closure?<br />
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On a much, much lighter note, I saw this article this morning about "<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/what-hugh-grant-gandhi-and-thomas-jefferson-have-common/355853/" target="_blank">performance anxiety</a>" but really it's about stage fright. Yours truly is afflicted when teaching and doing public lectures. So my heart goes to all the people who have to go onstage for a living, mostly musicians and actors but also teachers. If you've ever experienced anything like this, then you will understand. Which is why, whenever you attend a public performance of some sort, please don't boo the people onstage even if you think they suck. It won't make the play/concert/performance/lecture any better, far, far from it. Just be polite and silently exit the premises if what you're seeing is terrible.<br />
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<br />Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-88720433594656708502014-01-20T06:37:00.000-08:002014-01-20T06:37:43.439-08:00An Essay With No Redeeming Qualities, Written In The Spoken Style of Alain Delon<div class="page" title="Page 1">
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">An Essay With No Redeeming Qualities, Written In The Spoken Style of Alain Delon</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">This essay has no redeeming qualities. SPOILER ALERT! This essay has no redeeming
qualities. It won’t give you the warm fuzzies. You won’t come out of here grateful for the
gift of life, pledging to give yourself over to the higher power of mindfulness, meditation,
yoga and a gluten-free diet, thinking the author has given you a new perspective on human
existence. This essay isn’t going to garner rave reviews about its touching style and
compassionate ideas. Reading this essay won’t make you feel warm inside. Or outside, for
that matter. This essay isn’t going to make you feel better about yourself whatsoever but in
the guise of a heavy load of Schadenfreunde, and in this case, be my guest! There is plenty to
be had in here. This essay isn’t going to win any literary contest thanks to its irrefutable
mastery at disguising narcissistic prose as a universal lesson, powerfully describing the ills of
our current society, but offering no cure. This essay won’t morph into a triumphal Ted Talk
going viral on the Internet. This essay will tell you a story that is banal as fuck. This essay
won’t offer any conclusion. This essay was written in a pool of tears. No blood, no sweat,
just human-produced saltwater. This essay was written with a runny nose and blurry, puffy
eyes bleeding inane droplets of water splotching up a MacBook Pro keyboard, a computer
built with real blood, sweat and tears by slave labor somewhere in China.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">This essay was written by someone wearing a cheap H&M t-shirt made by slave labor
working in terrible yet indescribable conditions inside a Bangladeshi factory. This essay was
written by someone whose oldish Gap sweater has holes tearing up at the armpit. This essay
was written by someone staring at a beautiful green garden while profusely crying absurd
tears. This essay has neither visible outline nor any delicate, sophisticated construction
carefully hidden behind its elegant prose. This essay has no aim or goal or even definite
topic. This essay is written by someone who wakes up everyday crying and keeps on crying
non-stop for hours. Crying won’t make you spend that many calories. This essay had started
to be written about six hours after the writer woke up, but only twenty minutes after the
author had showered and dressed. This essay was written by someone who still has about
two days worth of food in the fridge and whose rent is paid until the end of the month,
about eleven days from now. This essay was written by someone who actually has many
friends, about seventy of those took the time to message the author when the writer went
public about suffering from clinical depression on a social network. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">This essay is written
from a place of social privilege by someone who still has the luxury to sit on their ass on a
mid-century modern chair of no known brand or origin but whose distinctive style wouldn’t
look out of place in the online world of mildly trendy home décor sites. This essay was
written by someone who is very conscious of being white and occasionally catches
themselves at internalized racism. This essay is written by someone who should be laughing
at the absurdity of it all but can’t repress the tears. While this essay without redeeming
qualities was written its author could have spent their time better by accomplishing normal
things such as looking for a job or trying to solve their seemingly inextricable administrative
issues. This essay written without apparent or hidden redeeming qualities bears no
resemblance whatsoever with anything Robert Musil would have written, no matter how
much its author would have liked it, but we’re talking about a fucking little narcissistic text
about being a failure here, not a masterpiece of 20th century literature (or was it 19th?) that
the author of this current text has read sometimes before this new millennium actually </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">started. Oh well. Musil. Maybe the author of this essay has no redeeming qualities
themselves. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">By writing a first-person essay at the third person the author is suddenly
conscious of writing in the spoken style of Alain Delon as evidenced in turn-of-this-century
interviews published in French gossip magazines. Alain Delon once said he was very proud
of his ass because it was round-shaped like a melon. This author’s ass isn’t anything to be
proud of yet it is as real as Alain Delon’s. As this essay is being written, now six-hundred-
seventy-two words in, its author is very conscious to not have started to even mention what
the problem was. The author is very conscious the problem is major depression which is
nothing to be laughed at but if the author manages to laugh about it maybe for one second
things will seem to be better. Or maybe not. While this essay was being written suddenly the
tears stopped. This is the very first try at stream-of-consciousness writing from the author’s.
The author never for one second felt like being Alain Delon, but this shit came into the
author’s head and refused to leave right there and then. Believe the author who started this
essay at the third person, the author would rather have anybody else in their head than Alain
Delon. Say, Claudio Abbado whose death was announced this morning. Claudio Abbado
was never called an asshole, not in New York. The author cannot stand listening to music
while in the pits which sucks because music is the best thing invented by humankind. The
author feels ridiculous referring to themselves as “the author” but there is some hope this
essay can be kept genderless throughout. Well, scrap that. Make it, “gender-neutral”.
Gender-neutral won’t give any further redeeming qualities to this essay but it will make the
author feels slightly better which is all the author is asking from life at present. The writer of
this essay always feels terrible to be referred to as “a writer” or “an author” because writing
is what they do and not what they are - a piece of shit, this is what the author of this essay
without redeeming qualities feels they are, on any given day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Major depression struck the writer of this quality-less essay when least expected. Nobody
knows what causes depression no matter what the other fucktards tell you. The other
fucktards are the ones getting rich writing self-help books. This particular bout of major
depression was triggered by unforeseen administrative issues, seemingly inextricable issues
that render the author as helpless as a discarded dirty rag doll on a trash heap. While this
essay without redeeming qualities is being written the clock keeps on ticking regarding these
administrative issues that the writer cannot seem able to solve. The administrative issues
might get the writer of this essay kicked out of their current country of residence. These
administrative issues scare the shit out of this writer to the point it’s impossible to answer
the phone, open a mailbox or just do anything remotely normal or constructive once in a
while. This inability to function normally vaguely reminds the author of a few lines in a
Franzen book this writer never managed to read a few years back. Yes this particular writer
feels no animosity of any kind toward Franzen even if he appears like a dick in his
interviews, because most everybody does appear like a dick in the medias anyway. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Sometimes this writer thinks a lot of this world’s ills could be solved by taxing the shit out of
maritime freight shipping. And legalizing drugs and taxing the shit out of these as well but
this should go without saying. For one full minute this writer thinks about some poor
Bangladeshi factory worker who made that discolored t-shirt the writer is currently wearing
and which was the only one the writer could afford buying. The writer’s mind has now
drifted for that era of their life ten years ago when they owned only one pair of shoes, with
holes in the sole. It took the death of several people for this writer to own more than one
pair of shoes without holes in their soles. That time we went on this road trip in Utah and
we stopped late at night at this Mom and Pop dinner in the middle of nowhere and there
were fifteen people in our group including six assorted vegans and vegetarians and the food </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">was inedible. The writer had ordered a glass of buttermilk that was the only thing remotely
edible there and the steak that was ordered rare came back so overcooked it felt like eating
the sole of a shoe. The black widow spiders inside of Nancy Holt’s </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">Sun Tunnels, </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">and all the
saltwater that was over </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">Spiral Jetty </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">so you could only see the beginning of an outline if you
climbed the hill overlooking the site. When we came back to Los Angeles we all made a
beeline to Koreatown and its 24-hour restaurants so we could finally have a decent meal. We
were gone for three days at most and yet we needed to get decent food ASAP. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Suddenly the
third person singular shifted to the first person plural but there isn’t any “we” in this
irremediably unredeeming essay. Word informs this writer that unredeeming isn’t a word.
Well now it is. The author is aware that most certainly so, we are all in it, but this isn’t an
essay about the state of the world today, or else it would be entered into some sort of
contest to prove a point about whatever but there isn’t anything else to prove anymore.
There are no redeeming qualities to this essay because it only speaks about its writer’s
experience, and only just so. This is the story of someone who found themselves suddenly
suffering from major depression. This is a story that happens to millions of people every day
and nobody gives a fuck so why should you? This story is written with no end in sight and
no other intent than keeping the world at bay for just a few minutes. This story is now about
fifteen-hundred or so words in the making, fifteen-hundred words or so that took exactly
thirty-three minutes to write so far. There is no conscious intent to get this essay or story get
out of hand and reach, say, more than three thousands words. We count in words, we the
writers. We can’t count in money units because nobody gives writers any money units
anymore. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">This story shifted again to the first person plural. The writer of this story has no
more control over it than a cancer sufferer over the proliferation of diseased cells inside their
bodies. It’s difficult at this stage to know whether this is an essay or a story but the writer is
still very firm in the belief that it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, at least for its
reader. It might be different for its writer in the sense that it did succeed for a few minutes
to keep the world at bay. Oh, who are we kidding? The world is still howling and wailing and
waiting at the door to swallow us whole. Scrap that, the world is ready to bite and chew and
tear apart and hurt like hell before it swallows whatever pieces are left of us.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">The world is outside and this writer can see it out of the window. It makes noises. Police
sirens that remind the writer they deport people from this country if they can’t extricate
themselves from seemingly impossible administrative demands, even if they are EU citizens.
To this writer’s knowledge this is the only EU country that actually deports EU citizens. The
writer has thought about Kafka a lot this year. When the writer manages to step outside of
their own brain for a few minutes – don’t try this at home, it’s a painful feat of absurdity –
the writer can see how ridiculously funny the situation is. The writer feels certain these
administrative hurdles are created by civil servants themselves so they have a seemingly
legitimate reason to keep their jobs. One civil servant at the foreigners office told the writer
that it wasn’t their job to explain how to get out of this quagmire. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">There is a letter from the
foreigners office in the mailbox that has been laying in there for a few days already and it
irradiates increasing waves of fear upward, toward the second story apartment where this
essay or story that has no redeeming qualities is currently being written. The writer could and
should take steps to immediately address this terrible situation but the writer is paralyzed by
terrible anxiety and panic attacks. This state has some biological consequences, most notably
the need to evacuate the author’s intestines up to eight times a day, which no doubt is one of
the reason the water bill for the whole household tripled over the last twelve months or so.
The writer often wishes anxiety would lead to a suppressed appetite but alas the reverse </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">happened, compulsive mindless eating which results in a much heavier weight and the
firmly-held belief that the writer’s physical appearance is a deterrent for prospective
employers and benevolent civil servants alike. Both species are imaginary, much like
imaginary boyfriends for young teenage girls longing at posters of One Direction plastered
on the walls of their small cluttered bedroom, instead of doing the homework that would get
them good grades at school and lead their path toward the radiant future of whatever kind
society will deem worthwhile for them. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Unlike this text. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">In an ideal world this essay would be
hysterically funny, as they say, maybe like a David Sedaris text that would be published in
the New Yorker and guaranty its writer the certainty of being able to pay next month’s rent
in full, and so if devoid of any redeeming qualities it would at least make the putative reader
feel like they didn’t totally waste the time it took to arrive at the two-thousand-one-hundred-
fifty-six word but hey it was said at the very beginning. This essay has still no redeeming
qualities. The word count you’re reading will be totally off after edits are done but the writer
doesn’t care. The writer doesn’t care much about anything anymore. The writer would like to
keep the anxiety at bay. The writer would like to write something worthwhile but doesn’t
know how to do it even if the writer keeps at it. Over the last seven years the writer estimates having written several hundred thousands words and likely more, the ongoing
count might be in the millions now. The writer would like to take a minute to tell you to
check the writings of Lydia Davis. The writer writes the way they write but if they could be
“a writer” the writer would like to be Lydia Davis.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Meanwhile the world is outside opening its monstrous toothy fearsome mouth, ready to
devour this helpless writer now in the throes of the most absurd depression ever. The world
outside makes noises that send this writers in fits of tears and panic. Each car that idles in
the street is a reminder they can come and get you. Each car that idles in the street is a
reminder they </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">will </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">come and get you. Every noise outside reminds you you’re not a
productive member of society. Each human voice wafting upwards is a menace reminding
you that they </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">will </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">come and get you. Now the narrative voice has shifted again. The tears that
had dried up are coming back. The cat is worried. The cat has been meowing little plaintive
sounds for fifteen minutes straight urging the writer to come on the bed with the cat and
huddle under a blanket with the cat. The cat is clearly anxious about the writer.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Sometimes the writer tries to soothe the anxiety by remembering that somewhere in this
world Noel Scott Engel, otherwise known as “Scott Walker”, is maybe sitting down at his
own desk writing the lyrics for his next album. This writer has no mental image of Scott
Walker writing at his desk and so thinks about his lyrics and wonders how he does it. Then
this writer tries to chase away this idea because there’s always the fear that lyrics will seep
down inside the text being written and then it will be plagiarism and one cannot plagiarize
the greatest artist alive. It is ridiculous. Then the writer thinks about one of the Kafka stories
written over the summer and wonders if some part of </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Amorous Humphrey Plugg </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">might
have seeped in one of the stories, the one where Gregor is a virgin maybe. Scott Walker
seems to be a very nice guy in the few interviews that are available online. Yet nobody ever
asks him the only question the writer is interested in, but then it’s a difficult question to
formulate in a logical manner. It is said Scott Walker is color-blind yet it is known the man
also paints as a hobby. So how does he do it? Sometimes the writer wants to believe Scott
Walker’s paintings might be as terrible as, say, like Bob Dylan’s – have you ever seen how
shitty Dylan’s paintings are? Yet he shows at Gagosian - because it would be a terrible
injustice if that man was also a good painter. Scott Walker, the writer meant, because we
already know Bob Dylan is a shit painter. Well no it wouldn’t be a terrible injustice but
during the three minutes it took to write these lines, the anxiety receded a little bit. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">No tears </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">were shed for a good hour now. This feels like a victory yet this essay still has no redeeming
qualities. Rather than writing an essay with redeeming or unredeeming qualities this writer
would like to have a good cry on someone’s shoulder. Or simply be able to get up and do
something. It’s been three whole days since the writer went outside. There is food in the
fridge and so there might have been a possibility to stay in tomorrow as well but tomorrow
will be the day when the writer sees their shrink who doesn’t seem to be that much helpful
to begin with. This morning the writer asked a friend to please help them find a lawyer to try
and solve this administrative quagmire. Just thinking about this and yet another knot is now
being firmly secured over the writer’s stomach. Being a writer or simply being someone who
writes should mean being able to convey things accurately, elegantly and meaningfully yet
this writer feels incredibly powerless and stupid and unable to explain why why why it is
impossible to pick up the phone to call people, answer emails or go downstairs open the
mailbox wherein lays that letter bearing the heading of the foreigners office that creates this
radiations of abject fears wafting upstairs nonstop toward the writers’ apartment, piercing
the windows and holding the writer under a powerful, invisible cloak of terror and paranoia.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Writers edit because frankly no writing is ever good without editing yet looking up five lines
upwards to check mistakes and this writer felt again like sobbing powerlessly for a few
seconds. Sometimes one word would trigger hiccups and tears and sobs. The heating is on
and the radiators are blasting full heat yet the writer is shivering in a cold sweat, wanting to
retreat beneath a blanket. Yet it is almost one pm now. Nothing has been accomplished
today but just writing these absurd words. The author feels like a stupid fuck. The author
had warned you beforehand this essay had no redeeming qualities. Yet you kept on reading.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;"> The writer often thinks about Walter Benjamin in addition to Scott Walker and John Cale
and Lydia Davis who are all personal heroes as well as Vanessa Place and then feels like shit
because all these people produce things that have redeeming qualities and help other people
keep alive. Yet maybe Vanessa Place would laugh at the idea. The writer has been working
for months and even years on a story about Walter Benjamin, a very sad claustrophobic
story where the writer recently introduced Bugs Bunny to “add in an element of violence”,
because the original narrator is boring as fuck. This is ridiculous. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Walter Benjamin had one
of the saddest life story this writer can think of and it occupies the writer’s brain daily. The
writer’s brain was subjected to violent trauma in two consecutive car accidents that fucked
up the writer’s life irremediably yet they triggered all that onslaught of logorrhea the reader is
now witnessing a part of. Most days the writer feels like there is one part of their brain that is
working and everything else is messed up. Before being subjected to the current episode of
clinical depression the writer thought the way their brain was malfunctioning was funny as
fuck as well as totally tragic – to this day this writer cannot handle handwriting anymore and
let’s not talk about opening plastic bags or eating with chopstick or read anything written by
Slavoj Zizek – but now the writer of this story without redeeming qualities suspects that the
bundle of jelly-like tissues being jerked around violently inside their cranium during the car
accidents has more than a little to do with their current state of being in the pits. At some
point it was thought writing a short text about the long and tedious process of recovery
might be helpful to other sufferers but the desire to help others died with the current onset
of depression. Instead the writer could only offer this essay with no redeeming quality
written in the spoken style of Alain Delon.
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">©Frenchybutchic, 2014. Not to be reproduced without permission, OK? The writer needs $ and things like that.</span></span><br />
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Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-65297925940553672732014-01-17T04:16:00.000-08:002014-01-17T04:16:10.120-08:00A Note On Philippe Vergne's Appointment As MOCA Director<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">I've pilfered this uncredited picture of Philippe Vergne <a href="http://www.aesop.com/usa/stories/philippe-vergne/" target="_blank">on here</a>.</span></div>
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I can't believe I'm even posting about this, but since the news had come out at least a dozen people have reached out to me to ask many questions, reasoning that out of 70 millions French people, two who are in the arts should know each other. Should we?<br />
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So, do I know Philippe Vergne? Only vaguely.<br />
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I went to school with his younger sister and even had dinner a couple of times at his parents' more than twenty years ago, but since he was older and not working/living in Paris I only saw him a few times then, and outside of randoms run-ins at gallery openings and occasional professional emails and phone calls I've never really been in touch with him. I think the very last time I've seen him must have been around 2000 or 2001, and last time I got in touch with him professionally must have been 6 or 7 years ago, at best.<br />
I'm not sure he would even remember who I am.<br />
I've never worked with him whatsoever, so I don't know what he's like to work with, but I've never had people telling me venomous gossip about him, I've never heard any dirt on him, which is much more than you can say about the vast majority of people working in the business.<br />
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All I know is that he comes from a family of lovely people, and based from the occasional contacts I had with him and things I've heard from other colleagues, whether in France or in the United States, he's known as a very hard-working, serious, professional person. My own professional relations with him (less than a half-dozens I would think) were always very courteous and pleasant, he always got back to me very quickly and provided the information needed as well as the occasional piece of advice about how to handle the matter at hand.<br />
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If I sum up recollections of the young man he was based on that semi-acquaintance we had back them, I would say he was a very curious, very active young curator, extremely hard-working, willing to unearth then-unfashionable artists and thinkers (I think I have somewhere a copy of a literary art magazine he had put up with friends that was centered on Clément Rosset). He was already interested in Los Angeles artists when nobody in Paris or Marseilles where he worked knew them. He was also someone who was doing a lot of the invisible work needed at museums, like being the "take" curator for exhibitions coming from elsewhere, writing all the wall labels, agreeing to be the courier on long truck rides, doing a lot of paperwork, etc. It's not the fashionable part of being a curator, but it's actually the biggest part of the job.<br />
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Aside from that I think I must have seen 3 exhibition he had curated, one in Marseille I only faintly recall which I think was about the body and performance (?) where I believe he had the misfortune of being in concurrence with the Pompidou for loans. The second I've seen was <i>Let's Entertain</i> at the Pompidou center, an exhibition I liked so much I went to see it 5 times. I even tried to get Susan Kandel interested so I'd write a review in the magazine she was editing but alas no dice. I'm sure the premises of the exhibition must have repelled a lot of our sour hardcore critics, but it <a href="http://frenchybutchic.blogspot.be/2014/01/architecture-takes-some-prisoners-moma.html" target="_blank">certainly foresaw the changes in both contemporary art and its attraction on a larger audience that we witness now</a>. Also, it was the best installation I've ever seen for a group show, showing a deep understanding of the physical space of the Pompidou and its connection to the city outside. I also remember it as an exhibition that had excellent wall labels describing briefly the artists career and intents and what the piece meant in the context of the exhibition. Without any empty theoretical jargon.<br />
The last exhibition I saw was his co-curated Whitney Biennial, which I don't remember that well but then I never remember well any Biennial, Documenta, etc. I might remember some of the pieces but if you ask me which Biennial, Documenta, etc. they were in, my brain can't find that.<br />
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After this I never really followed his career, as I said we were only distant acquaintances and we never lived in the same city. I don't think I was even aware he had moved on to Dia until maybe two years ago. I can't say Philippe Vergne enters my consciousness a lot, if only because he's not someone you see mentioned all the time in the gossipy pages of Scene and Herd (he might be actually, but I don't read that stuff). And then, ta da! yesterday came the news that to MOCA he was headed, and I was very happy for him and for MOCA because I think he's devoted to the arts as so to redress our beloved institution, and as far as I know he has demonstrated professional rigor and hard work, and has no commercial interest whatsoever to promote. And I'd have stopped thinking about it then and there if not for all the questions being sent my way, and then witnessing our professional blogging sourpusses ripping him a new one just because they're bored and the demolition of the Folk Art Museum in NYC was already old news. I'm going to sum up the criticisms below and address them:<br />
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- <i>His PR statement was bland and boring and all he could talk about was balancing the budget</i>. Yes, when you come to an institution that has been bled almost to death by about a decade of unheeded spending, to the point of nearing bankruptcy and closure, you certainly want to demonstrate that you're fiscally responsible. It's not a sexy quality, there's nothing flamboyant about it, but it's a necessary skill if you want your institution to survive and then thrive.<br />
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- <i>There was this scandalous deaccession issue at Dia</i>. Yes, it was only scandalous because two of the trustees whose real job would have been to get off their asses to raise money in order to keep the Lannan Foundation long-term loans in the collection decided to sue instead. I looked up the deaccession issues when they were pointed out to me last year, and from the outside track record they were done according to the rules. Yes, nobody likes when institutions deaccession artworks, least of them the people who actually work at the institution. I've worked on a set of deaccession myself, it's a long, tedious, difficult process everybody hates doing. It goes against all your curatorial/professional instincts and beliefs, and it's a hateful job to do. Believe me, when museums or foundations deaccession, it's usually because there isn't any other option. Nobody has limitless abilities to raise funds and sometimes, you have to make a choice about which works to keep in your collection and which ones to trade up for other things. Think about it as purging your library and record collection.<br />
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- <i>His track record is rather thin</i>. Possibly. I'm pretty sure that has far as curating goes he has done more than many other colleagues who are far more famous, but as I've never closely followed what he's done in terms of acquiring works at the Walker I would't know.<br />
As I said above, when he was young in France he was doing a lot of the unrewarding work that is invisible to an audience, yet necessary at museums. Being in a cubicle all day long doing paperwork and answering email is unglamorous as fuck yet every curator does it. It's not all moonlight and roses and studio visits and installing exhibition and hanging out at openings, you know?<br />
Jerry Saltz wrote something I saw yesterday to remind everybody that when Govan left Dia he also left a mess behind him, closing the NYC space to open Beacon.<br />
It seems Vergne's biggest failure in taking over was not re-opening a space in Manhattan. I don't really know why it was so, I'd surmise the lack of donors' commitment mingled with bureaucratic issues. To be honest when I heard that Vergne was at Dia I thought it was a mismatch, because he's someone who's interested in very contemporary art as far as I know, and Dia's focus and mission are incredibly narrow. They do a great job at preserving Land Art monuments, and I hear their lectures and performance program is very well regarded. But outside of that it's an institution that is difficult to develop in exciting ways, a bit as if there was a foundation devoted only to a certain type of art made between 1912 and 1937.<br />
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When Michael Govan was hired at LACMA, I seem to remember all the medias were talking about was how incredibly well-dressed he was, that he was flying his own plane and used to play long poker parties at night. When Jeffrey Deitch came to MOCA, aside from all the screaming because he was an art dealer, the medias focused all the parties he was throwing or attending and how he liked to have an entourage of young people around all the time. Please tell me how this is better than someone who comes in and say "yes, I can balance a budget"? If you want a tidbit of personal information about Philippe Vergne, I seem to remember he was a big fan of Sonic Youth in his twenties. So, score, Philippe Vergne.<br />
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And now that we've addressed all this stupid hoopla, I'd like to remind everybody reading here (hello, all 200 of you!) that the MOCA mess was almost a decade in the making, and it took many people to do it. It's now in a far healthier situation financially, but Vergne is going to have to rebuild the institution from the ground up and he will need the support of the community to do so. He won't be able to remake it a great institution in just one year or two, for starters he's going to have to hire a lot of people, and not only curators. In a way this could be a dream situation for a museum director, to be able to compose his own team, but in reality this will likely be a long and tedious process. There's only a skeleton staff at MOCA right now, so to get the museum going it's gonna take everything from preparators to registrars to educators and secretarial staff. It's likely the first two years of programming will consist of "take" shows and permutations of the collection. In addition, Vergne's work is to be the director of the museum, NOT its chief curator: he might get around a lot at openings etc, I don't know, but expecting that he will do a zillion studio visits with local artists is an unreasonable expectation. This will be the job of the curators he will hire, in addition to the ones already here (Alma Ruiz and Bennett Simpson).<br />
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So let's all wish the very best to Philippe Vergne and to MOCA and be kind and attentive while he starts remaking it a great museum, and let's have a look in about 5 years to see what he will have done. In the meantime, welcome Philippe! Enjoy Los Angeles as much as I did when I lived there.<br />
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<br />Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-44733890718376981762014-01-14T13:04:00.000-08:002014-01-14T13:04:19.084-08:00Architecture Takes Some Prisoners: MoMA And Its Audience<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">It was Blixa Bargeld's birthday earlier this week, which makes for an excellent opportunity to post one of my favorite Einstürzende Neubauten song,<i> Architektur Ist Geiselnahme</i>, which means roughly "architecture takes [some] hostages".</span></div>
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If you live in the United States and are somehow interested in modern and contemporary art, you've heard about the new scandal du jour: there's a new expansion design for NYC's venerable MoMA. As usual with these kinds of things, people have their knickers in a twist because we all hate change and we all love to have opinions. To sum it up shortly, for my very numerous European readers (ahem) people are upset because:<br />
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1) the plan calls for razing the now long-defunct Folk Art Museum whose very costly new building caused its collapse and financial ruin but hey it's been built by famous architects so it's a shame it should be demolished.<br />
2) The new design looks "corporate".<br />
3) People who used to visit MoMA in the 1980s had an intimate experience and fuck those tourists coming en masse to the museum, they spoil the real art lovers' aesthetic nirvana or what have you.<br />
4) Because whatever.<br />
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Of course viewed from Brussels WHERE WE DON'T EVEN HAVE A MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART AT ALL (sorry for shouting, this is the only Western capital that doesn't have one <i>anymore</i>) this looks like an amusing little local problem nobody really cares about, but you know, what with NYC sporting itself as the capital of the free world and so forth, we can see a few points worth raising that have very little to do with the quality of the architecture of the proposed expansion. But they are shared by many museums around the world, whether they house art or science collections, because everybody has the same problems. Namely, collections augment and so does the museums audience, and museums need to expand their space to fill their mission.<br />
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1) So, what upsets the US folks? The demolition of the Folk Art Museum, which I see as rather hypocritical because most people had never set foot inside (if they had, maybe the museum would still be with us) and as several of my friends who actually have visited it say, it was a shitty space to look at art. Now, re: the quality of the building itself, I cannot judge but I didn't find it that great myself that it should be preserved at all costs.<br />
I've seen some ludicrous arguments that "MoMA's mission being of preserving great art etc. it should also preserve architecture". Yes, I understand and I think I might have said the same type of idiotic thing myself in some old post or two on here, and on principle I like the idea but in reality, if museums had these types of resources we'd live in Utopialand where nobody goes hungry, inequality is eradicated and we've preserved the environment from our own follies. And believe me I'd love to live in that world. Also, I want a pony.<br />
More to the point, I've seen arguments that maybe the architects could have preserved and reused the building in their redesign, but if they didn't I guess it's likely that it was too costly and complicated and also tricky as far as using the maximum footprint possible for the new building.<br />
In addition, I'd like to point out to proponents of this argument that the result would likely be a jumble of mismatched buildings rending the interior layout extremely impractical both for the purpose of the museum (showing art legibly ) and of its audience (finding their way in the resulting layout). If you want an example of a museum wrestling with this very same issue, look no further than LACMA and its complicated campus.<br />
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2) The new design looks corporate, it looks like a giant shopping mall. Yes. So did the last redesign.<br />
Is it an improvement or something worse? I honestly cannot tell and I think 95% of us who are not architects cannot either. Now, quick question: name some museums that you think have a great-looking architecture, which one pops up first? Yes, we have a winner! The Guggenheim in Bilbao. Now, when was the last time you heard of a fabulous exhibition they had initiated? How about their collection, how world class is it?<br />
Yes, I thought so.<br />
People go to the Gugg Bilbao for the great architecture, no question about it, but not for what's inside. Which is a bit of a pity for an art museum (or any museum), if you ask me.<br />
The truth is, folks, that most museums, including the non-art ones, tend to be the victims of shit architecture. Either it's some trendy world-famous architect having a wet dream and pooping up a giant spectacular turd with leaky roofs, impossible to heat and cool down galleries that are improper to display art, or some totally bland, boring, unobtrusive building that may or may not be shit at preserving and showing art as well, but might not come in the way of looking at it. I don't know about you but when I'm looking at art I don't really care about having some cantilevered something or other obstructing the view or making the space impractical to put art in (the New Museum is very high on my shit list in that regard).<br />
Anyway, maybe the new redesign is bland and boring. Maybe it brings some unity to the overall museum, I don't know, and I feel I won't know until the thing is build and I visit it.<br />
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3) People who used to visit MoMA in the 1980s had an intimate experience and fuck those tourists coming en masse to the museum, they spoil the real art lovers' aesthetic nirvana or what have you.<br />
Are you fucking kidding me?<br />
I've seen this argument posted over and over by various people on Facebook. I'm not going to repeat the old saw that, you know, we fought this avant-garde battle to bring real art to the masses or something. Nah, all we wanted was to have the museum all to ourselves so we could commune in ecstatic transcendence with the art or something. Never mind we're being condescending to the museum's audience which, as we know, is always and forever composed of 99% great unwashed fuckwads and 1% true art lovers with credentials, good taste and intelligence, the elite. I know, I am a fucking elitist myself. I<strike> like fucking with an elite, I meant</strike>.<br />
Truly, I love to have an intimate experience and looking at art and having an artwork all to myself. Most everybody does. Ask all the foreign visitors lining up to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, they would love to have an unobstructed view of it. <br />
But I've also been a tourist (the horror!) visiting world-class museums and patiently waiting in line to pay my admission and come see masterpieces I had only seen in reproduction before. And the little-known artworks that are never reproduced, and the retrospective exhibitions of artists whose works I've only seen scattered here and there, and paying a visit to a bookstore where I can buy catalogs that are impossible or too expensive to find abroad. I'm sure most art lovers lamenting the old MoMA experience can understand that I, too, mourn the old Louvre of yore and I'm really pissed off to see NewYorkers gawking at Fragonard and Boucher paintings, asking stupid questions and obstructing my view for about two mega-long minutes.<br />
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So I understand the sense of loss, but you see, depending on the years, MoMA's total audience hovers between 2.5 and 3 million people a year. 60% of them being foreign visitors*. To continue to have "an intimate experience" would mean turning these tourists away at the gates, as well as the money they spend in NYC . And how do you propose doing this? Jacking up the entrance fee to $200 a pop? Yeah, I don't think so either. Conversely, if the audience were to decline significantly, it would also mean a decline in funding and revenue that could imperil the museum's budget. Do we really want that?<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">"… yet another Guggenheim"</span></div>
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I could go at length to explain that when you have such a significant mass of tourist and local bodies to safely move around inside a building, you need to sacrifice a bit of the intimacy and a lot of the magic in the name of the artworks security. Which actually comes first to people who work at museums, and the audience second, but we always have pesky fireman marshall regulations to contend with. Some of them determining the size of the rooms you put your artworks in so you can evacuate all your audience should a catastrophe happen.<br />
I could add that these ugly escalators everybody hate because they're so ugly are actually the fastest way to move all these visitors up and down the building, making sure the line outside doesn't stretch for too long (it does but what can you do when your building is located in the middle of a busy city block with other buildings around? You can't really have entrances on 4 sides of the building to accelerate the flow). So yes maybe the soul of the institution does gets diluted a lot in the need to get the 3 millions people flocking to see art at a world class museum in and out of the building safely.<br />
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Maybe the building looks corporate.<br />
Maybe it looks like a giant shopping mall.<br />
Maybe the building doesn't look spectacular.<br />
Maybe the building doesn't feel homey.<br />
Maybe the building isn't an artwork itself.<br />
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4) Because whatever. Yes, what's up with that? Oh, the usual. Actually, no. Not our old usual.<br />
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To which I can only say that in an era when the arts (all genres combined) are said to have brought in more audience in the United States last year than sports events, and more revenue in France than all the proceeds from the automotive industry last year as well**, we have to contend with a new model/paradigm Alfred Barr would have never imagined when he was at the helm of the museum.<br />
Over the last couple of years of so I've read a lot of things about how "the market" had "destroyed/changed" the "art world", but very little about the fact that art in general, but mostly modern and contemporary art have found a new mass audience, an audience none of us could have ever anticipated when we were entrenched in the Culture Wars, being told what we were doing had no mass appeal and wasn't worthy of interest and funding.<br />
The audience is here now, we need to deal with it whether we like it or not, and crying over how we had it better when everybody hated us won't change the fact that people are now flocking museums en masse, which strikes me as more desirable than, say, having them watching Fox News, reading stupid tabloids or gunning down each others in movie theaters and elsewhere.<br />
Maybe we should rejoice that people are finally being interested in art, even if it means we have to suffer bland architecture to accommodate their large presence inside museums.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Many thanks to my friend C. who provided me with the numbers.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** I've seen numbers around the Christmas holidays for both countries but I can't remember where, so this is a "top of my head" info that needs verification/sources.</span><br />
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<br />Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-79147445865069344402014-01-09T02:33:00.000-08:002014-01-09T02:33:04.282-08:00Happy Birthday, Noel Scott Engel a.k.a. Scott Walker!<br />
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Today Mr. Engel turns 71. Here's to wishing him many more healthy, happy creative years making the music he wants to make and keeping on breaking new ground. Scott Walker's birthday should be an international holiday celebrated worldwide, if you ask me. You didn't, but all the same, if you have time today, raise your glass to our hero and listen to his last three albums! Here's a selection from each in reverse chronological order. They're all available either new, in reissue or else at a local record store near you, where they can order them for you if needed.<br />
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Below is I think one of the most beautiful songs ever written.<br />
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<br />Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-9735796269078035822013-12-16T08:28:00.002-08:002013-12-16T11:25:39.744-08:00Walter Swennen Retrospective At The Wiels, Brussels<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Forget everything you might have read about Luc Tuymans or Michaël Borremans, the greatest living Belgian painter today is someone you've likely never heard of, Walter Swennen. I say.<br />
Unlike the two painters mentioned above, he's actually fun and looking at his career retrospectively, innovative as well <strike>rather than wallowing in the nostalgia of dated figurative painting,</strike> <strike>beholden to the market,</strike> <strike>making works only ignorant wealthy people would want hanging over the sofa,</strike> <strike>whatever they're boring</strike>. Because his work is so obviously humorous I guess it's the reason he might not be taken as seriously as his Belgian brethren, which is the fate awaiting any artist using humor in their work. If your work isn't depressing and purporting to deal with heavy subject matter, whether it's contemporary politics or the Holocaust, it's going to be passed over in favor of, oh, I don't know, gray figurative paintings of dead people or something. Or straightforward documentary videos of anything political, or propaganda posters or cardboard placards telling you how you should think, so it spares you the energy of having to do it for yourself. God, the art world is so boring and predictable sometimes.<br />
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Anyway, Swennen has two things going against him to be taken seriously as an artist in the pages of glossy international art magazines; one being that he's a painter and the other that his work is hilarious. Because we're contrarians here at FBC!, we've decided that he is in fact one of the two greatest living contemporary Belgian artists, the other being Ria Pacquée. There might be others, but I haven't been here long enough to list more. Oh yes, there is one! I like Hans Op De Beek's work very much.<br />
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Until a couple of months ago I had never heard about Swennen myself, and then friends mentioned there was an opening at <a href="http://www.wiels.org/fr/exhibitions/475/Walter-Swennen" target="_blank">the Wiels</a>, would I care to come with them? Sure, why the hell not.<br />
In case you don't know, the Wiels is the most interesting non-profit art center in Brussels, a Kunsthalle-style space housed in a former brewery (they still have huge copper vats on the ground floor) built in the best pre-war Brutalist Deco style ever - a Belgian specialty. They do proto-fascist Deco architecture here like you wouldn't believe! One day I'll post pictures of city halls and churches in Brussels and you will understand.<br />
Anyway, the Wiels is the most interesting art place here because as of now THERE ISN'T A NATIONAL MODERN & CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM IN BRUSSELS WHATSOEVER, which means local collectors, the famed Belgian collectors of lore, have no real place to donate or sell their collections to, so they either open small foundations/vanity-museums, or they sell their collections to MoMA and here goes the best Belgian and non-Belgian art abroad.<br />
It's a national tragedy if you ask me, but since Belgians pride themselves on bickering between French speakers and Dutch speakers (they also have German-speakers here but so far I haven't noticed any bickering from them) rather than develop a sense of national identity, all their best art shit goes abroad. I'm mentioning it here because I think Swennen's paintings should be snatched by US museums stats, as they're priced relatively low compared to whatever comes out of Brooklyn or LES art galleries these days.<br />
In any other Western countries nowadays, they open modern and contemporary art museums as if there is no tomorrow, and here, they closed the only one they had. Which sucks for artists and audience alike, because there is a big audience here for contemporary culture, if you look at the music festivals, bookstores and art movie theaters. The absence of a contemporary/modern art museum is mind-bloggling, and non-collecting spaces can't fill that gap.<br />
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So to the Wiels I went, happy to meet up with my friends and get drunk with Belgian people (another thing they're really great at here), but a bit uneasy at witnessing how overwhelmingly white the Belgian art world is. Belgium has a really big immigrant population, but it hasn't translated yet into the population you see in attendance at openings and during exhibitions. I'm not even talking about featured artists - generally speaking, Europe is still 99,99% white and 95% male as far as featured artists go. At any Belgian art institution you might frequent, the likelihood you will see non-white people is restricted to talking to the the museum/security guards. This is true of other European countries, not just Belgium, but after living in Los Angeles for ten years, re-acclimating to such a racial and social make-up is a bit shocking.<br />
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To go back to the Wiels, it's a tall, narrow building and you have to take up an elevator to go see the show at upstair levels. Not knowing anything about Swennen I had no preconception about whatever I was going to see, and I was enchanted when I went up and discovered such great paintings. My first thought was, "if Kippenberger had been doing only paintings and been Belgian, he would have been Walter Swennen!". Like Kippenberger, Swennen creates paintings that at first glance may look like they've been haphazardly made, but that a careful inspection reveals to be incredibly well thought out. If you look closely you can see underlying layers there to bring some effects to the surface, and a very balanced sense of composition. One note about the exhibition: it's non-chronological, a pet peeve of mine usually when it comes to retrospectives, but in this case it doesn't prevent anyone from enjoying the show. But you won't learn much about whether there are different series or projects within the body of work, and there's generally not much available about specific paintings, as well as a remarkable absence of art historical references that could make you understand how he doesn't come out of a vacuum.<br />
Additionally the educational components at the Wiels are rather low-key, so if you opt not to take a tour and can't afford the catalog, you're totally on your own to discover Swennen. There are labels at the entrance of each rooms detailing the painting titles from left to right but nothing under each painting itself, which is why none of the images I'm posting have any legend. I found that part a bit confusing.<br />
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I've mentioned Kippenberger because there is a distinctive element in Swennen's work that recalls a certain type of 1980s and 1990s painting, like this one above that could evoke Albert Oehlen, for example. And like these two painters, you could also trace back Swennen's use of humor and borrowing of comics and cartoons tropes to pioneer painter Sigmar Polke. And like Polke and Kippenberger, the use of what seems at first glance conspicuously goofily-made, carelessly painted images is just a device to get at the essence of painting as a medium. As such, the device also brings us back to Belgian master René Magritte, whose 1948<i> Période Vache</i> was doing just that, as a way to aggressively punch the stomachs of the calcified Surrealist French intelligentsia that was still the master of the quaint little art universe the next country over, in Paris. Where the doxa of the then art-world was calling for properly made paintings harking back to pre-war domination, Magritte sent some absurd paintings meant to challenge the state quo. They did it so well that up until the early 1990s and an exhibition in Marseille, the <i>Vache</i> paintings weren't very well-known, so challenging they were to the accepted wisdom about the Belgian master and the massive merchandising his paintings unfortunately originated (umbrellas, mugs, cookie tins…)<br />
Swennen takes over where Magritte stopped (he went back to his best-selling bowler hats and oversized apples and cloudy skies after that) but gets a step further by integrating whatever happens in painting in the next few decades (Guston is mentioned in the booklet, for example).<br />
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There were a couple of large vitrines and pinboards at the show featuring drawings, notes and xeroxes by the artist which I understand are there to show Swennen's thought process, with various puns in both Dutch and French (and sometimes English) but also series of words and quotations one senses the artist kept as material or source ideas for his paintings.<br />
The Belglish* booklet (there's a catalog but I was too broke to get it) makes a big deal of what are quintessential Belgian linguistic issues: Swennen was born in a Flemish family but educated in French, which was relatively common in Belgium until recently and generally makes all the tensions between language speakers very complicated (you can be of any ethnic descent and have grown up in the other languages, and for people having parents on both side of the linguistic divide it's never clear-cut). Therefore one is told that the subtext of the show is to look at painting as "translation", which, uh, OK, maybe, but if one comes to Swennen as a total ignoramus like I am, it doesn't really show. Or, er, "translate".<br />
I felt that component of the booklet was what I call a "Belgo-Belgian" preoccupation, something that I'm sure makes sense to people who have lived in Belgium all their lives, but isn't obvious to a newcomer. For example, I don't speak Dutch but thanks to French, English and German I've been able to understand some of the puns or jokes displayed in the artworks. And I understand the puns are starting points as the conspicuous subject matter of some of the pictures but they don't seem at all necessary for their reception by a passive audience. For example, if these paintings were to be exhibited in Spain or in the United States or in China, the puns, jokes and wordplay wouldn't be understood by most anybody there, yet the paintings (and drawings and couple of sculptures) would still be interesting (I hope) for someone outside of Belgian culture. Because as I said, if the puns or language are the conspicuous starting point, the real subject matter for each work is painting itself as a medium. Or so it seems to me (I'm sure Clement Greenberg would have a heart attack reading this, but he's already dead anyway).<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">One of the works on paper in the long vitrine pictures above</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">This was in the long vitrine pictured above</span></div>
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Rather I feel that the reference to "translation" was meant as some sort of device rather than an ontological necessity to explain the reluctance of the discourse around painting that tends to seep in most European critical writing. You see, if painting is just some sort of "translation" of a thought or a concept rather than just a plain old medium, it becomes legit for conceptual/political art critic mavens and not some sort of hedonistic commodity destined to hang inside <i>nouveau riche</i> mansions in Florida or Orange County. It's a translation so it's uneasy and awkward (and, uh, I guess it means something is lost along the way, too?). It's a bit sad, this very European unease about painting, but it's another debate entirely. Or else I'll end up writing a 30,000 words post and I'd rather not do that. I am tired. I have been waiting for the plumber since 8 AM for like, the 5th time in a row. Like Santa, I think he doesn't exist.<br />
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One of my regrets about the exhibition, and it's an a posteriori regret, is that the booklet mentions that Swennen had a past career as a <i>beat</i> poet and also someone who took part in "happenings" in his youth, and later on was a conceptual artist, to only take up painting in the 1980s. I wish there were works to be seen about his previous career, or just documentation. It's unclear if the absence is due to a curatorial choice (maybe from the artist himself) or if this previous work hasn't survived through the years.<br />
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Of course, when one thinks "Belgian person who used to be a poet and then became a visual artist late in life", Broodthaers comes to mind immediately but as this isn't mentioned anywhere in that specific conjunction in the booklet (he's mentioned for a very early work though but the parallel isn't made clear), maybe outside of the use of humor the similarities stop here. Here's a painting above that let us know what we should do with too much "this is only what I know of Belgian art so I'm going to use it over and over".<br />
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Because the educational aspect of the show and the installation are so bare-bones, one is left hanging with many questions. What did prompt Swennen to take up painting in the 1980s, did it have anything to do with the "Pictures" generation in NYC, or the resurgence of (truly atrocious) neo-expressionist painting in Germany? Because what he does is obviously totally removed from both, and closer to Kippenberger and Polke in intent if not in execution. Or has the decision to take up painting mostly to do with the local art scene at the time? Painting hasn't been so popular over the last decades in Europe outside of that early 1980s period, and so for Swennen to take it up in a country that was then mostly known for post-conceptual art is interesting.<br />
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When visiting the show one got a sense that Swennen really enjoys himself when working, sometimes giving tautological titles to paintings or rather, literally descriptive titles: you have a depiction of circles titled "circles", another rather abstract painting was called "red mass" I think, and so forth. There is also a joyous experimentation going on with unconventional supports or materials, with stretcher bars one guesses to be totally DIYed out of whatever was on hand, paintings running around curved pieces of metal, or xeroxes of drawings remade over. You cannot guess from the crappy image I took above, but this painting has a really lovely enamel-like finish.<br />
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I've been told people who don't like the work say they feel it isn't so great because "it's made so haphazardly like the guy doesn't give a fuck", but that is only an outward impression because as simple as that painting above is, its composition is perfect. It wouldn't be if there wasn't that small horizontal line on the frame and the other vertical one seemingly dripping out of the red rectangle, but these two details as well as the blue layers peeking from under the gray background reveal an attention to detail and perfect balance.<br />
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Elsewhere, Swennen makes fun of conventional ideas of paintings as objects, the ones that lie outside of the so-called art world, inside dentist waiting rooms, petty-bourgeois parlors, amateur societies' yearly exhibitions, second-hand stores, and far-right politicians' minds. A sinking ship mocks the convention of nautical paintings while coming with its mandatory brass lamp over it, with its cord displayed prominently below - the lamp is a signifier of old-fashioned bourgeois decorating values, where it is meant to signal the viewer that whatever is displayed beneath is important stuff indeed.<br />
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In many occasions Swennen reuses old pasty curlicued frames and repaints over them, or uses chalkboard-like paint to create the illusion of a blackboard where we'd expect some teaching device but instead are confronted with a seemingly childish drawing of a ghost figure, palette in hand, leaving a medieval castle. I guess it's the childish aspect of many of the works that puts people off whereas yours truly finds it enchanting, but then one ponders if a child would think about depicting a dog (or a wolf?) throwing out something that looks like a bomb while a scribbled inscription on top reads "Hosana" (yes, there's an "n" missing). If you have a child like this, please donate me one of their paintings. Thanks.<br />
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Elsewhere, you find colored dots in suspension on a white background, which could read as a parody of Hirst's famed and totally perfect, painted-by-assistants dot paintings, or just something Swennen was trying his hand at. When wandering in the exhibition you find that there isn't a question of whether Swennen paints abstract or figurative paintings because he does both, and there isn't such a sharp definition as far as both genres are concerned. Somewhere in the booklet it says something like "chance plays a major role in Swennen's practice" in the sense that he uses a lot of random ideas and visual data as starting points (explained as stuff that lays in piles in his studio, whether it's books, magazine images, old paintings found at thrift stores, etc.) or as "continuing devices" if I understand whatever is written in that &^%#* Belglish booklet, that is, when he's stuck in the middle of painting something some random image might give him inspiration to go in another direction to finish the work. My understanding of what they wrote and which I find hilarious is that, if he doesn't come across something that will spur his imagination, the work is abandoned/finish as "an abstract painting". If this isn't what they meant in that booklet, blame their English translator, or whoever wrote the initial text, but in any case I find my explanation super poetic, so there you go.<br />
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This was my favorite painting in the show. It's *this close* to being a truly bad thrift store painting yet Swennen pulls it off as something really interesting, which I attribute to the thin blue layer on top of the background, which contradicts the somewhat fatty inexpert brushstrokes of the fire.<br />
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And this was the bulletin-board and the vitrine in a corner of the exhibition, where some drawings are pinned with xeroxes mirroring other drawings and xeroxes. When you see these you understand that beneath the humor and the language jokes and the apparent uncaring concern for "what a proper serious art painting is supposed to look like" lays a very curious and experimental mind engaged in the business of making effing good work. It seems effortless and easy but its just very attractive. It's not telling you to sell the car, sell the house, sell the kids, but to engage with the painting on its own terms, which are not the ones we're told correspond to some conventions of "good" painting without falling into the trap of pretending to be "so bad it's good".<br />
With this, I'm going to wish you some happy holidays, dear readers. FBC! will be back in the new year.<br />
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* <span style="font-size: x-small;">The educational material at the Wiels is available in Dutch, French and English. The English booklet which I picked up with the intent of freely plagiarizing it if needed is in fact written in "Belglish", that is, Belgian English (not International Art English - it's better than that but still clumsy). It's understandable to English speakers if you apply yourself to it, but it's rather laborious and it looks like it's been written by a non-native English speaker. Or maybe the translator didn't manage to make it flow? In any case, it seems like different persons have written it, with some paragraphs truly informative and relatively well-written, and others totally mysterious. Some of the references mentioned in the booklet are totally unintelligible if you're not Belgian, unfortunately.</span>Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-25851237751421957172013-12-08T05:09:00.001-08:002013-12-08T05:09:20.571-08:00Music I've Liked This Year In No Particular Ranking Or Order<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If you're interested in music you will have noticed (ahem) that most music publications are very busy compiling and letting out their lists of the "10, 50, 100… best albums of the year". I always found the ranking of albums in music weird. Even worse many music reviews grade albums with 1 to 5 stars or from 1 to 10 (one US online publication is notorious for awarding grades like 3.73 out of 10 for albums. How ridiculous can it be?). Sometimes the written review doesn't square up with the final grading so you're left to wonder why a largely positive account of a record ends up grading it with 4.781 out of 10.<br />
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Nonetheless even my social network friends are now posting their own lists of the best 10 albums of the year. I've been asked a couple of times what mine would be. Er, I don't know?<br />
I'd be at a loss to do that because for one thing I don't listen to as much music as most of my friends do, and there are genres I really don't know much about (dance, electronica, metal…) or that I loathe (French hip-hop, contemporary commercial R'n'B, dubstep…).<br />
Secondly, due to very low finances I haven't bought many records this year. I did go to a few gigs including King Krule who was amazing on stage, very charismatic, but I'm still not convinced by the record, and Savages whose record reminded me of Siouxie & The Banshees circa 1978, and if I want to listen to that, I'd rather go to the original. Also, they're OK on stage, but not the phenomenon I was lead to expect.<br />
So, instead of writing down a best of whatever happened in music in 2013 according to my own uninformed opinion, I'm just going to list in no particular order the music I really enjoyed this year, and that includes some bands I know only via their bandcamp and I'm not even sure their music came out this year. So all mistakes and errors below are mine. I've linked all bands/records to a website that isn't Amazon where you can purchase their music/listen to it. There are a couple of iTunes on there, but as usual, go shop at an independent record store near you if there's one. They usually can order whatever you need and have it within 2 or 3 days. And you can browse their bins and buy more cool stuff.<br />
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A) John Luther Adams, <a href="http://bangonacan.org/store/music/inuksuit" target="_blank">Inuksuit</a><br />
B) Primal Scream, <a href="http://www.primalscream.net/" target="_blank">More Light</a><br />
C) Parquet Courts, <a href="http://www.normanrecords.com/records/138924-parquet-courts-light-up" target="_blank">Light Up Gold</a><br />
D) Willis Earl Beal, <a href="http://www.willisearlbeal.com/" target="_blank">Nobody Knows</a><br />
E) Wire, <a href="http://pinkflag.greedbag.com/" target="_blank">Change Becomes Us</a><br />
F) Hookworms, <a href="http://gringorecords.limitedrun.com/products/508257-hookworms-pearl-mystic" target="_blank">Pearl Mystic</a><br />
G) Houses, <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/a-quiet-darkness/id616433978" target="_blank">A Quiet Darkness</a><br />
H) Puppet Rebellion, <a href="http://www.puppetrebellion.com/" target="_blank">Chemical Friends </a>(it's an EP)<br />
I) Sauna Youth, <a href="http://saunayouth.bandcamp.com/" target="_blank">Dreamlands</a><br />
J) David Bowie, <a href="http://store.davidbowie.com/" target="_blank">The Next Day</a><br />
K) Wooden Shjips, <a href="http://thrilljockey.com/thrill/Wooden-Shjips/Back-to-Land#.UqRpa6VUifQ" target="_blank">Back To Land,</a><br />
L) Fidlar, <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/fidlar/id425454362" target="_blank">Fidlar</a><br />
M) Thee Oh Sees, <a href="http://www.castlefacerecords.com/products/thee-oh-sees-floating-coffin" target="_blank">Floating Coffin</a><br />
N) Males, <a href="http://malesmalesmales.bandcamp.com/" target="_blank">Run Run Run</a><br />
O) Killwave, <a href="http://killwave.bandcamp.com/" target="_blank">Killwave</a>.<br />
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Now there were plenty of commercial records that made a splash this year, and also non-commercial ones that left me cold. In no particular order, <i>Yeezus</i> which I think is so crappy (trying to be ambitious, ends up being pretentious without much to hold on to, and the lyrics are in most part beyond terrible. For someone whose creds are the "genius (ahem) hip-hop artist with intellectual leanings" it's not such a good testimony to his talent. And I generally like Kanye West), The Knife's <i>Shaking The Habitual</i> (ditto. They try way too hard, it ends up being contrived and unnecessary), the new Daft Punk who I think have become this century's equivalent of Lake, Emerson and Palmer (don't try this at home), the new Janelle Monae whom my Brits music contacts seem to be super proud of (very well made bouncy pop. Too manufactured for yours truly and the production is way too clean, but then you can say that of 99,99% of music being commercially released in this century). And despite all my best efforts because most of my friends love Bill Callahan, I can't seem to get into his new record.Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-4478269001186627432013-12-02T03:18:00.001-08:002013-12-02T03:18:55.434-08:00Liz Magor At Le Triangle France In Marseilles<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small; text-align: center;">Liz Magor, <i>Double Cabinet (blue), </i>2001, Polymerised gypsum, cans of beers
23,5 x 68,58 x 43,18 cm, Private collection, Vancouver, </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small; text-align: center;">Installation view </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small; text-align: center;"><i>No Fear, No Shame, No Confusion</i>, </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small; text-align: center;">by Triangle France </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small; text-align: center;">© <span style="background-color: white;">Photo : Aurélien Mole</span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; text-align: center;"> </span><br />
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<i>The following post is a verbatim reprint of the press release for Liz Magor's current exhibition in Marseilles. I haven't seen the exhibition at all but I can only applaud when an institution and a French one to boot shows a woman artist whose work isn't well-known in Europe. The show also features three other artists whom I'm skipping here in order to keep the post short, but <a href="http://www.trianglefrance.org/" target="_blank">if you go to the website you will have a more complete idea</a> (and a longer press release). </i><br />
<i>As a side note, I was somewhat mentally prepared for a very male, very white art world when I moved back to Europe, but between being prepared and experiencing it… the lack of diversity here is staggering. Kudos to Triangle France for having a program that strives to be more inclusive.</i><br />
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<i>So here's the press release, and if you find yourself near Marseilles, go visit the show.</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Triangle France is pleased to announce the first European
solo exhibition by Canadian artist Liz Magor. Gathering a
rigorous selection of her works from the past 20 years as
well as new works, <span style="font-style: italic;">No Fear, No Shame, No Confusion </span>is
an unprecedented presentation of Liz Magor’s work in
Europe since her participation in documenta 8 in Kassel
(1987). This solo exhibition opens towards a specific
reading of her work through a dialogue with artists sharing
a similar sensibility, interests, or processes. Three artists
were commissioned new works and invited to present their
practice in dialogue with hers: Jean-Marie Appriou, Laure
Prouvost and Andrea Büttner, whose woodcut from 2006:
No Fear, No Shame, No Confusion gives the exhibition its
title.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Since the mid-1970s, Liz Magor has contributed a vast
body of work across sculpture and photography exploring
with measure and subtlety the layers of information shaping
what is apparent in objects and people, how they reveal
themselves, claim to be, or pretend. From her early
‘machines’that automatically processed mundane materials
and produced sculptural forms, to her photographic series
documenting historical reenactment groups in the early
1990s, she has sought to reveal how meaning can be
concealed and generated, released and reproduced. Often
referencing domestic environments, as well as exploiting
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">the belief that nature is the ideal or authentic refuge, Liz
Magor questions the desire and sometimes compulsion for
emotional and physical comfort, and the fragility of the
human body and identity. The works gathered in this
exhibition, some of which have been created especially for
the occasion, are shown together for the first time and
constitute a precise selection of sculptures from the past
twenty years. Amongst them, her famous One Bedroom
Apartment (1996), her ambiguous cast objects from the
past decade, and her latest works on textile using found
blankets, which through alterations, she has bestowed with
attributes releasing parts of their history and temperament.
Re-using, duplicating and transforming objects coming
from a daily life that is already done consuming them, Liz
Magor addresses their status and inconsistency, and reveals
their anxiety.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Liz Magor, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Camping</i>, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">2013, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Wool, polymerized gypsum, silver specks, wood, metal
172,72 x 73,66 x 17,78 cm, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Artist's collection and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Installation view </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>No Fear, No Shame, No Confusion</i>, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Triangle France, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">© </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">Photo : Aurélien Mole </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Liz Magor</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Born in 1948 in Canada, lives and works in Vancouver,
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Liz Magor (b. 1948, Canada) lives and works in Vancouver,
Canada. Practicing for over 40 years, Magor has had numerous
solo exhibitions including The Mouth and other storage facilities,
Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Simon Fraser University Gallery,
Vancouver (2008); The Power Plant (2003); Deep Woods, Art
Gallery of York University, Toronto (2000); stores, Contemporary
Art Gallery, Vancouver (2000); Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon;
Winnipeg Art Gallery; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
(1987); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1986); Production/
Reproduction, Vancouver Art Gallery (1980); The Art Gallery of
Greater Victoria, BC (1977). A selection of group exhibitions
include Zoo, Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal (2012); Baja
to Vancouver, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Wattis Institute, San
Francisco; Vancouver Art Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art,
San Diego (2003); Elusive Paradise, National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa (2001); Notion of Conflict: A Selection of Contemporary
Canadian Art, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1995); More than
one Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1992);
Places with a Past: Site Specific Art in Charleston, Spoleto
Festival, Charleston, South Carolina (1991); Meeting Place:
Robert Gober, Liz Magor, Juan Muñoz, Nickle Arts Museum,
Calgary; Vancouver Art Gallery (1990); Camera Lucida, Walter
Phillips Gallery, Banff (1989). Magor exhibited at documenta 8 ,
Kassel, Germany (1987); and represented Canada at the Venice
Biennale (1984). Numerous monographs have been published on
her work from the late 1970s to the present.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">She recently had a solo exhibition <span style="font-style: italic;">“I is being This”, </span>at Catriona
Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver (2012) and her work was included in
the 2013 California-Pacific Triennial curated by Dan Cameron. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Liz Magor, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Tweed</i> (neck), </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">2008, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Polymerized gypsum, bottle, alcohol, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">35,56 x 40,64 x 10,79 cm, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Artist's collection and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Installation view </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>No Fear, No Shame, No Confusion</i>, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Triangle France </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">© </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">Photo : Aurélien Mole </span></span></div>
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Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-22984157302268050482013-11-24T04:24:00.001-08:002013-11-24T04:24:41.991-08:00Sparks-tastic: Twenty-One Nights With Sparks In London, A Book By Tosh Berman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In 2008, the Los Angeles band <a href="http://www.allsparks.com/" target="_blank">Sparks </a>did a marathon 21 nights in London, playing each one of their records in its integrality in chronological order, riffing on the trend of bands or musicians playing their often most famous records entirely (a trend I love because you get to rediscover albums and songs). Sparks is a band made out of two brothers, Ron and Russell Mael, and assorted studio and tour musicians.<br />
Like the Rolling Stones, it's been around almost forever (slightly less longer than the Stones) and has never split up. Unlike the Stones, they keep on issuing very good albums, such as the recent <a href="http://www.discogs.com/Sparks-Lil-Beethoven/release/1134268" target="_blank">Lil' Beethoven</a> or <a href="http://www.theseductionofingmarbergman.com/" target="_blank">The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman</a>.<br />
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If you've been following FBC! for a while, you know that we do indeed like this band very much, but what you don't know it that yours truly has been converted to the cult of Sparks by the fabulous Tosh Berman, former book buyer at Booksoup in Los Angeles, and current publisher of<a href="http://www.tamtambooks.com/" target="_blank"> TamTam Books</a>, specialized in international but also very francophile books by or on such luminaries as Boris Vian, Serge Gainsbourg, or crime boss Jacques Mesrine.<br />
I have met Tosh only once in my life, but we have a virtual friendship on some social networks, where he posts truly inspirational links that exhale coolness, dandyism, elegance, intelligence and great taste. After several years of being acquainted with his posts, I tend to see him as the resident genius of Facebook and Goodreads, in the same sense that the Ancient Romans had resident geniuses to protect their house. A benevolent, protective presence, here to guide you through the maze of great music and literature. Tosh is also the son of the late artist Wallace Berman, and is married to the artist <a href="http://www.lunnamenoh.com/" target="_blank">Lun*na Menoh</a>, and so his life revolves around books, music, and art… and many other things!<br />
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Through his enthusiasm for Sparks I started listening to them (I knew some of their songs, including their duet with Les Rita Mitsouko), then went to see them live* twice and had a blast each time. I don't remember if I was acquainted with Tosh when Sparks did their London marathon concerts, but I wasn't surprised when he announced he was writing a book about the experience, because Tosh is the ultimate Sparks fan. He kindly sent me <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sparks-Tastic-Twenty-One-Nights-Sparks-London/dp/0983925585" target="_blank">Sparks-Tastic: Twenty-One Nights With Sparks In London </a></i>after it came out and I fully intended to review it earlier, but some massive writing endeavor of another kind kept me from doing it. I'm finally getting around to it.<br />
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The book is curiously existential but in a sort of floating, detached way that is difficult to explain, because it is laden with personal anecdotes that would contradict the impression of detachment one gets from reading it. It starts with Tosh, in Los Angeles, being apprised of the news that Sparks are going to play all their albums live in London, and anguished about he financial impossibility to go there and attend. From then on, quite a few things happen but we're never really told of how they do happen. Like miracles. Did Tosh go into enormous debt to afford the trip and the stay? Was the experience of seeing Sparks 21 nights in a row playing their entire discography a transformative experience? Did he connect with other Sparks fans?<br />
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Unlike many books written by fans, <i>Sparks-Tastic</i> is neither the exact memoir of an obsession nor a meticulous retracing of the long career of the writer's idols. Thankfully. I've been fascinated by the whole fans phenomenon for a few years now and I'm usually disappointed by books written by fans** (including biographies) I've read, such as books on John Cale, The Fall or Scott Walker, because they usually lack deep insight into the reason for the writer's obsession, and as far as being informative they tend to lack intellectual rigor - I guess being trained as a historian pretty much ruined Pop writing for me.<br />
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This is not the case here, and in that regard the book is highly unusual. For starters, it isn't a book <i>about </i>Sparks. There are some autobiographical components to it but aside from the very poignant passages about how the death of the author's father they don't really delve deep into the psyche of the author. Except that the link between Wallace Berman's death and Tosh Berman's obsession for a band that offers him an alternative, imaginary life better than the real one is made abundantly clear and is obvious to the writer himself. Usually fans don't willingly show self-awareness for their love of this or that band, especially when it solely focuses on one band member or a solo act, but even when they obsess about the band as whole (let's remember that Sparks is relatively unusual as it is made of two brothers). Here Berman clearly connect the dots between his need for an alternative musical life reflecting his inner turmoil, and the premature loss of his father.<br />
In that regard the book isn't so much about Sparks themselves, as I said - there is surprisingly very little about the band and their music in it, given the fact that each concert has a chapter devoted to it - nor about Berman as a person, but it's a document about someone's dreamed life of idealized places (London, Paris), characters (some pages are devoted to Charlie Chaplin) and books. We learn almost nothing about Berman himself save for his love for his wife and family, his devotion to the alternate history of vernacular and pop culture, and the fact that he's crazy enough to go on this big adventure of going away to Europe for more than a month when he can ill-afford it, and comes back with a book.<br />
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We're apprised of the writer's daily routine during these days in London, a routine that exemplifies the loneliness of the stranger in a foreign country, able to get by but not to truly communicate with other people. It's a bit reminiscent of Teju Cole's <i>Open City</i> when the narrator finds himself in Brussels on an insane quest to locate his grandmother but spends his days cooped in, giving up on the pretext for the trip to stay locked inside his own alternate world. There are small points of friction with the others but no real exchange. Here Berman goes around in London, but aside from the brief time he spends staying with friends, he doesn't go out of his way to meet people or explore new places. He's on a mission to attend the concerts, and nothing will distract him from it.<br />
Each concert has a chapter devoted to it with a brief introduction to the record being played and Berman's opinion of the album in question, but it doesn't devolve in long discussions about the merits of this or that song or the personnel involved. Sometimes production is mentioned - there is nothing that define more an era of music than the style of production - in relation to the year/location it evokes for the author. There are mentions of the walks Berman takes on his way to the concert venue, <i>flâneur</i> or <i>dérive</i>-style, if you will, and personal anecdotes about his life in Los Angeles when that particular album was released.<br />
Occasionally he describes the other concertgoers, whose age decrease as the gigs go on and the band plays more recent albums, spotting some people who like him come regularly, but he never engages with them, and they never engage with him. It seems that Sparks' audience is entirely made up of loners, at least its London audience.<br />
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From this description you could think the book is boring when it isn't at all. It's fascinating for this floating quality of detached narration, when the narrator pretty much describe his own life in all its poignancy, a life that looks alternatively beautiful and terribly sad. It's the life of an aesthete who has built his entire existence around things of beauty, eccentricity and intelligence, confronted to the boredom of daily life; but whose imperative to construct his own alternate reality is triggered by an irreparable early loss that hovers on every page of the book. As such Sparks-Tastic is a curious literary object that like all interesting things is difficult to define. It's a testimony to a very personal way one can decide to counteract the harshness of contemporary society by living in an idealized world of one own's choosing, where interior feelings find a match in a specific type of music and in this particular case, a set of smart, ironic yet deep lyrics about loneliness, inadequacy, and the impossibility to fit in when confronted to oppressive normalized standards of living.<br />
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<i>The book is available at your corner independent bookstore where they can order it for you if they run out, so buy it there rather than on Amazon (where I linked above for convenience sake, but Jeff Bezos doesn't need your money).</i><br />
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*If you live in Los Angeles and they play in town, book your tickets early because they're always sold out.<br />
** Strangely, books written by fans seem to be by male writers. Whereas many truly crazy obsessive (stalker) fans tend to be female. The sexual politics of fandom however appear to be both obvious and complicated, regardless of gender and sexual orientation, and I've never really read anything great about music fans themselves. I'd be interested if someone has good reads to recommend on the subject.<br />
<br />Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-11826484173236114872013-11-17T07:51:00.002-08:002013-11-18T02:33:44.215-08:00A Most Hypocritical Position (Mine) On Free Admissions To Museums <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Marcel Broodthaers, Museum, Enfants Non Admis, 1968-1969, MoMA (<a href="http://www.moma.org/collection////browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A795%7CA%3AAR%3AE%3A1&page_number=26&template_id=1&sort_order=1" target="_blank">full credits here</a>)</span></i></div>
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It seems every single essay or article worthy of publication these days - that is, the publications that pay something - has to be a first person essay. I always found the genre unwieldy myself, if only because I don't know how opinions unsupported by facts can make a valid argument, and also because, uh, I don't give a damn that through your great-aunt Millie you discovered a lifelong love of knitting that lead you to become a rebellious yarn-bomber. I don't have any problems with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarn_bombing" target="_blank">yarn-bombing</a>, I just don't see the point.<br />
Now, you're going to tell me, what is FBC! but a succession of first-person essays? Touché, dear reader, but FBC! doesn't pay itself and given the few readers we have, I don't see that the first person essays here have any broad appeal. Or else I'd already have been hired as a hack at some fancy website. Just to say that, generally speaking, and there are some exceptions, I tend to be bored by first-person essays because I don't see how someone's else personal experience can automatically translate in something universal. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but I see the genre as fluff as opposed to serious journalism. For the record, I think maybe 95% of FBC! is fluff, so I'm not looking down on fluff, I'm just puzzled that more and more of the "content" we consume on the internet is made-up of personal essays.<br />
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Today's one comes from a series of recent discussions about free admissions to museums in the United States, with a couple of museums like the Hammer in LA announcing they'd offer year-round, free admission to their audience. Art critics and art cognoscenti applaud with all their hands and feet, stomping on the ground to demand that every institution in the US does this too, in the name of making art available to the masses. Not so fast, says <a href="http://trufflehunting.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/irresponsible-arts-journalism/" target="_blank">my friend Mario on his excellent blog</a>, don't compare apples and oranges and sardines, because it's complicated.<br />
As for me, I have a somewhat convoluted opinion on the subject, mostly based on autobiographical experiences and empirical facts.<br />
So, here I come with some first-person essay to try laying it around. Initially, I was going to title it "<i>The Day My Grandpa Wore His Best Hat To The Museum</i>", but I don't see why I should drag my late grandpa into this story, except to say that he was a working-class man who liked art and went to visit a museum with me exactly twice in his life. For the record, he loved Brancusi, and he quit school at 13, so fuck you anti-Modern art wankers who think it's only reserved to an elite. It's not.<br />
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Instead of my late grandpa, I'm going to drag in this story a bunch of unwilling people who never gave a fuck about art from birth onward, and likely will never give a fuck about it before they die, to demonstrate that free admission to a museum won't make people develop an interest in art if it's not there, though no fault of their own, because they've never been showed that art existed. There are some people to blame in this story, but not the putative audience or the well-meaning museum staff. Especially not them.<br />
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So, here I come with my autobiographical experience. I come from a family who's not especially interested in culture per se, but who values education as a tool for social mobility. My grandparents on one side were poor (construction workers), on the other they were modest civil servants (court typists), but my parents did climb the social ladder to become comfortably middle-class. The class issue is important, because to satisfy some bourgeois yearnings, my siblings and I were forcibly enrolled in cultural and sports activities we had zero interest in (I can only do passable air guitar with a tennis racket, and don't ask me to play the piano), but one of them changed my life forever.<br />
The one lucky thing that happened was that I was also sent to afternoon and evening classes for children at the local fine arts school, no doubt with the idea I might end up turning out inoffensive watercolors, but *that* changed everything. I never made it as an artist even after ten years of intensive classes, but truth be told it never occurred to me I could actually be one. Instead I set up to become a museum curator and an art historian later in life. These seemed like they were legit jobs people had, and as such they were comprehensible to me. That failed too, but it's another story altogether.<br />
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Through these art classes I discovered the world of museums, modern, contemporary and otherwise, and I also was told that as an under-18 I was guaranteed free entry in pretty much all of French public museums. Adults had free admission every Sunday of the year, and children every day.<br />
So I used that privilege freely and to museums I went, but not that much often because I was a child and obviously I couldn't travel wherever and whenever I pleased. There were only two museums in my hometown (a traditional fine arts museum with only a C+ collection and next to no contemporary art in it, and a folk art/historical museum) and my family didn't travel that much inside of France to places that had art museums. We did visit museums when we traveled elsewhere in Europe but as my mother had zero interest in modern art, we mainly stuck to the classics, which bore me to death back then.<br />
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I also quickly realized that outside of the fine arts school NOBODY shared my interest in museums and the stuff inside of them. My classmates at school weren't interested in anything I was into, unsurprisingly, but so were my school teachers. The people responsible for educating the children of the French Republic, I soon discovered, were barely educated themselves outside of the mandatory school curriculum. If it wasn't "in the program", it had no legitimate reason to exist. I'm sure you can see where this text is heading now, but if you don't stick with me for a few thousands words more.<br />
In French middle school you have or used to have a mandatory 1-hour art class per week, which isn't called "art class" but "drawing class", a designation that harks back to the 19th century when French children were taught technical drawing as an early preparation for engineering work.<br />
Our teacher was kind of cool but he never, ever took our class to visit the local fine arts museum.<br />
Ditto all the other teachers.<br />
I've never, ever gone on a school field trip to any fine arts museum or any museum for that matter from K-12, <i>despite museum entrance being free for all children and for the accompanying teachers</i>. Despite my hometown boasting two museums, both a very short walk away from the middle-school I attended.<br />
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There was simply no interest whatsoever from the people in charge of passing on education to us. School books never had any pages devoted to art, except for my 8th grade history textbook.<br />
It had a 2-page spread about art (and only two pages) that showed one Courbet painting and Duchamp's <i>Nude Descending A Staircase</i>, both images bearing the legend "this painting caused a scandal when it was first shown in public", but absolutely no mention of why there was a scandal or what the scandal was all about. They seemed pretty tame to me, these two pictures, so I was really puzzled, but when I asked my history teacher about these scandals I was met with a blank stare. He simply didn't know. He was a good history teacher, but we never actually tackled this 2-page spread during the school year. If you want to know, all the other images on these two pages were used as mere illustrations for historical facts, such as a Géricault painting pertaining to Napoléon, and a Gromaire one about WWI.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">This painting created a scandal when it was first exhibited. Marcel Duchamp, <i>Nude Descending A Staircase (Number 2)</i>, 1912, <a href="http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51449.html" target="_blank">Philadelphia Museum of Art</a>. Image lifted from Wikipedia.</span></div>
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In French classes we often had to write essays on weird broad general questions such as "May the poet be political?", "Is comedy always funny?", "Should realism prevail in literature?" and more often than not, a quote of some kind we had to elaborate on, but not too freely lest we show unacceptable ideas of our own. Students were supposed to, hhhm, "discuss ideas" but truly they had to show they had read whatever 19th century shit we were always mandatorily reading (according to the French Ministry of Education, it seems that French culture started and ended in the 19th Century) and demonstrate we could write a 3-part essay according to the same immutable outline (thesis - antithesis -synthesis) vaguely lifted out of dialectical principles.<br />
You were supposed to "discuss ideas" with the help of "precise examples" and as an eager, naive teen I always thought I could sneak in a couple of art examples, only to be met with question marks next to my mentions of Kandinsky or Mondrian at best - at worse, the teacher would have crossed out all mentions of art with vengeful red strokes. Fuck you, high school French teacher who almost disgusted me from reading, may Godzilla shove your beloved Flaubert down your ass and leave it there.<br />
As you see, there was absolutely no interest in visual arts whatsoever from the teaching corps during my formative school years in the French public education system.<br />
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As for the students, for most of them the question didn't even make sense. I went to school with some very poor children, for whom there was a certain mental barrier making it impossible to conceive the idea of a museum where they could go to.<br />
It's not even that they had an ingrained belief they didn't belong there (like my grandmother did, who always explained her shyness vis-à-vis cultural outings by saying "<i>oh but we're just poor working-class people</i>"), they just didn't know there was such a thing as art and that it was housed inside museums. Because no one ever told them it existed, and there was no mention of it on mainstream television programs, ever.<br />
The same children, at least many of them, had in effect never set foot downtown, which was a mere 5 minutes walk from our school and maybe 15 from our neighborhood, if you walked down straight on the main street where the city bus would take us to downtown, too, if we wanted.<br />
Downtown was where you had stores (duh!) but also where the fine arts museum which was free for all under-18 was located. You had a few cafés that let underage teens linger for hours around one single espresso (bye-bye, <i>Les Caves Thorel,</i> you were ghastly and you will be missed), some largely pedestrian areas where you could loiter like only teenagers like to loiter, and not much else.<br />
Our town was only 10 km away from the sea, and the beach was accessible by bus, and there was even a local path along the canal that was safe to bike on or even walk on if hiking was your thing.<br />
Yet many if most of the kids I was in middle-school with had never seen the sea, and I am not certain that they ever ventured there in adulthood afterwards.<br />
So if you wanted to go window-shopping you could walk 5 minutes away and it was free and accessible, and if you wanted to walk to the beach on a beautiful day it was a good hour walk away and it was free and accessible if you were young and healthy, and if you wanted to go to the museum it was no more than 7 minutes away and accessible and free everyday if you were under 18, or every Sunday if you were over 18.<br />
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Yet almost nobody in my school ever availed themselves of these possibilities. Of these <i>free and accessible</i> possibilities.<br />
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Possibly nobody wanted to walk an hour to get to the sea or go to the museum or go window-shopping downtown for lack of a parental authorization, yet the same kids I knew were left free to play and roam around outside until midnight on schooldays and until God knows when on weekends. They had almost no parental supervision, which translated into a lot of personal freedom to go as they pleased yet they had no access to culture or real education; beyond the one at school that shortly skimmed them off from the regular educational path that us, children of the well-to-do white people, were allowed to stay on, never mind if our grades weren't in actuality substantially better than theirs*.<br />
We'd move on from middle school to high school and they'd be carted off, aged 13 or 15, to vocational schools where they'd train on obsolete equipment for jobs that had disappeared already. They were the underprivileged youths for whom free museum admissions are designed and yet there was this invisible social and mental fence that made it impossible to avail themselves of free and accessible outings, cultural or not.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Now defunct local bar that was tolerant of teenagers lingering for hours over a single espresso and where the Frenchy misspent her youth. Uncredited picture lifted from <a href="http://www.caen.maville.com/actu/actudet_-six-ans-pour-expulser-un-hotelier-_4-923927_actu.Htm" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></div>
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Was there any particular outreach toward these kids and their parents from the local museum part? As far as I can tell, there wasn't that I can remember now, but in hindsight it is hard to fault the museum when the place where the kids spent the most time, school, had absolutely zero interest in trying to drag us there at least once in our lives even though, I repeat, it was FREE for everybody involved. Unlike the lone day trip we took once to the Mont St. Michel, which required renting a bus and therefore our families to pay some money for us to go on that trip, all but guaranteeing that the poor kids from the housing projects across form my house would be left out (and left out they were).<br />
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This is a very classist story, as you can see, which also doubles as a racist and xenophobic one because many of the kids in the projects were of arab or of gypsy descent; yet the majority of the poorest of the poor were white children whose parents used to be day laborers from the country who had migrated to the city looking for work. They shortly had found themselves massively unemployed when the local blast furnace, truck factory and small appliances factory had all closed their doors within the same decade. These were the French equivalent of US "white trash", if you will, people with no perspective of ever changing their lives in a positive way, being looked down in the same condescending way as "white trash" people are in the US.<br />
Maybe some of their children might have liked to look at art, but they were denied the knowledge that art even existed when they went to school. They simply were never told of the existence of the free museum no more than a 7 minutes walk away. During the "Drawing class" we merely participated in handicrafts, and were never showed any real art reproductions that I can remember of.**<br />
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As for myself I had that semi-underground art life, going to the local art school were we'd be taken to museums and would go on day trips to Paris see the Pompidou and the Louvre (cost, 10 francs, about $1.50 now), and discovering art anyway I could, freely borrowing from the the art school library which proudly boasted at the time a collection of about 2,000 books. When my parents took us on vacation I would try to go visit art museums where, more often than not, entrance was free for under-18.<br />
Of course a lot of my formative years were spent looking at a lot of crap, bad derivative AbEx French art from the 1950s, terrible academic works from the 19th century, conflating art with illustration with graphic design and comics, and generally going through a really haphazard way of gathering knowledge: I had no understanding of art history as something chronological and geographical, and there wasn't much in term of documentation to lay my hands on in these pre-internet day. You couldn't even regularly find a national newspaper in my hometown then, let alone an art magazine. This has fortunately changed, but it was rather bleak at the time. As I grew older I became interested in music as well and thanks to it I expanded my horizons when musicians mentioned their interest in, I don't know, Viennese decadent painters, Russian Constructivists or Fluxus and Dada.<br />
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I soon reached adulthood and went away to college to study art history. As I reached the dreaded age of 18 that should have barred me from year-round free access to museums, the French Ministry of Culture made the "free admission for everybody every Sunday" disappear and with a magical influx of canny PR reduced it to ONLY THE FIRST SUNDAY OF EVERY MONTH. But advertised for it, so the French people whose taxpayers money fully funds their national museums were made to believe it was an incredible progress, because most of them never knew in the fist place they used to have 52 free days a year instead of the now measly 12 ones.<br />
I should have been bitter, and I was on behalf of all art-inclined French citizens, but individually it didn't change anything for me because as an art history student at the Louvre, I was awarded the magic card that allowed me unlimited access to French museums. And boy, did I take advantage of it.<br />
Later on, as I worked in various art-related positions, I almost always got some sort of pass to get in for free at most museums, and when I didn't, I often knew someone working inside the place who would let me in. As a result, I have had the privilege of almost never paying at a museum pretty much my whole life until very recently.<br />
I can attest it changes the way you look at art a lot when you don't have to pay dearly just to get in. It requires far less advance planning, and whether you can spend only 30 minutes or an entire day inside a museum changes everything when you know you can get in pretty much whenever. Another advantage of getting free admission is that more often than not, you don't have to wait in line to get in, which is not negligible when visiting popular tourist museums such as MoMA, the Pompidou or the Louvre. But what it truly means is binge-looking at artworks, which makes you build a fantastic visual memory, and of course can only deepen your understanding of art.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">World-famous French museum that used to be free for everybody every Sunday of the month and free for children under 18 year-round when I was a child. Image lifted from <a href="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Louvre_2007_02_24_c.jpg" target="_blank">wikipedia</a>.</span></div>
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This lifelong experience should make me an apologist and a militant advocate for unlimited free admission to everybody at all museums.<br />
And in theory I would want it that way, yes.<br />
There's no reason people should be denied the same access I've had to art, especially if they have a craving for it and live in poverty.<br />
But after two decades of working at museums and talking with colleagues, I am not so sure anymore.<br />
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For one thing, as I've pointed out above, even when it's free, the population that should logically be the target of this policy almost never takes advantage of it, for lack of what I'd call intellectual access (Bourdieu had written eloquently about the issue pretty much all his life, so I'll refer you to his books). What you get are the same people who would come anyway, except they come more often. There is an increase of regular visitors as well, the ones who are not art cognoscenti and who tend to come mostly if there's access to a blockbuster exhibition and who bring their entire families, but it's hard to say if really deprived people come (because museums rarely have the means to do statistical surveys of their audience).<br />
Some museums try like crazy to have a generous outreach policy and invite deprived populations to visit, but museums can only be the equivalent of the band-aid on an amputated limb when schools<i> and </i>the mainstream medias don't have a systemic, generous and sophisticated approach to art.<br />
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It has become rather trendy in American art circles over the last couple of years to ask for free access to museums for all, at least to permanent collections the way they do it in the UK. The rationale goes that it would make art more accessible (never mind most American museums always have at least one day or portion of a day a week where admission is free) and also that entrance fees account for a very low portion of a museum budget. But US museums, unlike European museums, are not government-supported and can usually ill-afford to open for free.<br />
The Hammer Museum just announced that it would soon be offering year-round free admissions to everyone, which is fabulous but possible only because of the generosity of a big donor.<br />
Because even when the ticket fees only account for about 6% of your overall budget, if you get rid of them you have to find these 6% elsewhere, and typically donors or government authorities don't give a shit about your money woes if they don't meet their political or narcissist agenda, so your roof is going to be leaking for a while and letting humidity get into your storage space for a few years until you manage to convince someone to act. Meanwhile, you artworks will be irremediably damaged.<br />
Or, you won't be able to pay your security guards overtime, so your free admission everyday means that in effect, you are going to have to close the museum at 5 PM in addition to having to close it two full days a week, making sure that nobody but schoolchildren on a day trip (you know, the ones my schools never organized when I was a child), passing tourists or retirees are going to be able to visit your museum. And so your overall attendance numbers are going to drop, making it hard to convince whoever has their hands on the purse' strings to untie them for expanding the collection or organizing ambitious exhibitions and therefore expand your audience, etc, etc.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">A random picture I took a few years back of a Robert Gober sculpture, just to make a break in that big block of text.</span></div>
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Another dirty secret, and something I can only say is based on empirical evidence (my own experience as well as things colleagues from other museums told me) is that at every museum, when there is a free admission day, it is the day when we observe BIG spikes in vandalism.<br />
Vandalism can be inadvertent as well as voluntary, from someone backing out into an artwork while trying to avoid a rowdy group of people gesticulating wildly around another one, to somebody taking their ballpoint pen (these things should be banned forever from the surface of Earth) and deciding to deface your one and only Matisse in the collection, the one that would sell for a gazillion dollars should it be unloaded on the open market, and ruin it forever. Vandalism can be your kid eating some piece of chocolate candy and wiping their face and hands on a 17th century tapestry, or some moronic teenager trying to unscrew a vitrine from its base (which is why we glue the screws, ha). It often manifests itself in people trying to steal something small and being unsuccessful, irreparably damaging for all eternity a lovely little Renaissance portrait, for example.<br />
Even though every museum has "do not touch artifacts" signs everywhere, for some reason all Hell breaks loose on free admission day, and visitors who would normally never been caught dead shitting in public on their host's carpet when invited to dinner at new acquaintances' do just that once inside a museum.<br />
<a href="http://whenyouworkatamuseum.tumblr.com/post/66117829408/when-you-a-see-a-parent-change-their-baby-in-a-gallery" target="_blank">I mean, seriously, change a diaper inside a gallery and leave the dirty diaper on a sculpture?</a><br />
A friend of mine was seriously envisioning a museum policy where you'd fine people up to $200 if caught touching artworks AND they'd be banned for life from the premises. I have to say I love the idea, though I'm pretty sure it's unenforceable. Pretty much every museum person I relayed the idea to found it fabulous, so maybe it might come near you in a not so distant future.<br />
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The result of this type of assholish behavior ends up costing lots of money to a museum that never has enough to begin with (do you have an idea how much regular museum staff make?) but also wastes everybody's time, from the security guards to the conservators to the preparators to the curators. And if we're talking about a temporary exhibition with works on loans, it guarantees that if it is a loaned artwork that has been damaged the lender will never again accept to lend the institution anything in the future. So, if free admission days bring in more vandalism and more damages, I'm not sure it's worth making the policy year-round, but truth be told we'd need to see statistics from museums that have switched from 1 or 2 free days a week (or a month, like French museums) to year-round to see what the consequences are on the budgeting, the vandalism, and if it shows a marked spike in attendance or not.</div>
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All museums are different of course, so something that can work relatively smoothly at a big institution would be a catastrophic policy at a small one. I've recently read something about a small local European museum where the total yearly budget for the institution (including salaries, utility bills, building maintenance) is only one third of the current LACMA's director's annual salary.<br />
This museum used to have a free admission day only one day in the middle of the week, but had been recently forced to move it to Sunday per its government mandatory policy, resulting in a very problematic deficit for its overall budget. The situation resulted in a spat between the museum's director and their Minister of Culture; it is unclear as of now what will happens but it looks like the director is going to lose their job while no additional money will be provided by the government to patch up the budget. Hardly an ideal situation.<br />
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Now from a museum's point of view, the question of free admission days could be solved ideally if there was free money growing from trees that could make sure there are enough security guards in the galleries so the artworks are safe; and if there were some magical pheromones you could spray on visitors in the lobby so they'd be on their best behavior once inside the galleries.<br />
In the meantime, they have to make do with whatever their current local financial and administrative conditions are, which more often than not are downright shitty. Offering some sort of privileged membership that gets you in without waiting in lines and makes sure you can get, say, the equivalent of 6 yearly visits for the price of 4 is a sort of median resolution but it's not really effective to draw in the most underprivileged people, who usually can barely afford the public transportation fares to go to work, so for them a yearly membership is unattainable.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">An old picture of my cat looking awesome just because.</span></div>
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But aside from these really thorny situations, I am not sure that a year-round free admission to museums would make them more accessible to everybody. You see, what it does is privilege people like me (admittedly I'm broke, but not exactly deprived) and pretty much every art amateur who already has an attraction, an interest and a connection to art, in effect mostly middle-class people who would someway or other visit museums anyway, maybe just a little less often but that's all. Now if we have to pay to get inside museums, ideally it should be around the price of a movie ticket maybe, or even far less (something symbolic, around or under $5?) but far less than sports tickets or amusement parks entrance fees - which is a bit ironic because many people who pay for these without grumbling or even thinking would protest at the idea of spending around $10 to get inside a museum.<br />
But what I'm getting at is that the idea of a year-round free admission policy at all museums is rather hypocritical in the sense that the people it would benefit the most is us, the art world wankers who get all worked up on Jerry Saltz's FB page (that is, you, personally I'm not that much into his writings), we the art cognoscenti who want to have our cake and eat it.<br />
There's this commonly held belief in the so-called art world that we are the primary audience of museums, when in effect the larger mass of people are generally tourists coming into town, and sometimes local residents who come for a blockbuster exhibition. This is not to say that art people don't come, but proportionally they are a smaller audience, if dedicated, and they're not the audience that needs education and guidance, even though most curators have them in mind when they design an exhibition. So, wanting free admission to museums is a bit self-serving for the art world when pretending it is necessary to attract an underprivileged audience.<br />
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The underprivileged audience certainly should have an easy and comfortable access to the museum, but in order for them to even know they can come visit for free and be treated like valued guests, not as some sort of barely-tolerated charity case necessary for everybody to keep a good conscience; the educational work has to be done elsewhere first, and that is at school. AND in the mainstream media, and when I say the mainstream media I don't mean the lone professional critics at the NYT and the LAT who cater to us, but something a bit simpler.<br />
I don't know where people get their information these days (still the TV? only on the internet? The Sunday<i> Parade </i>supplement that comes with local papers?) but as long as the only mainstream discourse about art in the media is reduced to "these stolen artworks worth millions" and "this auction result record", and "multimillion-dollars artwork damaged by vandals", it's unlikely people whose only notion of visual art is linked to an unimaginable monetary value can ever feel any meaningful connection to it.<br />
I don't have any easy solution to this issue, at an age when most public school systems are eradicating their arts and music programs, when the teachers have to train their students to pass tests and exams rather than teach them the love of learning, and when many of the school children themselves come to school on an empty stomach.<br />
I am not even certain I have a point to make, except that most museums nowadays can ill-afford a year-round free admission policy, that such a policy, should it exist, would mostly benefit the middle-class and not the deprived population it aims to serve, and that maybe this deprived population has more urgent needs that should be addressed as well if we want to make them discover the wonders of art. They're the ones who've been having to bear the brunt of the recession we're still in, the ones whose very daily survival is constantly threatened by benefits cuts (not only in the US, but in the UK as well where there's currently a hateful class war being waged against the poor by their own government). It's difficult to appreciate even the greatest art on an empty stomach. It's impossible to access it when you don't know it exist.<br />
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*<span style="font-size: x-small;">One of my friends from another school was kicked out of the regular pathway to high school and sent to vocational school instead but for <i>one just-below-the-passing-grade-C </i>in physics and chemistry, despite good grades everywhere else, better than mine actually. His crime was to be the half-arab bastard child of an illiterate cleaning lady who didn't know she could appeal the school decision on his behalf. Wherever you are, Dominique G. I hope you thrive and are happy.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">**Post-car accident my memory can be rather murky, I do not recall any instance of seeing any slide or image of art during that class, just to be given some sort of exercises to complete, but maybe I'm totally off base. The teacher was cool and I liked that class, but I don't recall it being anything art historical or designed to develop some sort of art appreciation.</span>Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-47871348205706095892013-11-03T04:07:00.001-08:002013-11-03T04:07:40.113-08:00Mike Kelley Retrospective At MoMA PS1 - From Our Foreign Correspondent Grant Wahlquist<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><b>FBC! is overjoyed to host our foreign correspondent Grant Wahlquist today, reviewing the Mike Kelley retrospective currently held at MoMA PS1 in NYC. The exhibition originated at the <a href="http://frenchybutchic.blogspot.be/2013/04/mike-kelley-retrospective-at-stedelijk.html" target="_blank">Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam </a>last year and had a<a href="http://frenchybutchic.blogspot.be/2013/07/how-curating-got-bad-name-or-how-to.html" target="_blank"> greatly reduced iteration at the Pompidou Center </a>this summer, and will have a final stop at MOCA in Los Angeles in March 2014. All images and text ©Grant Wahlquist, 2013.</b></i></div>
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A long-time acolyte of FBC, I was intrigued by this blog's coverage
of the Mike Kelley retrospective in its two European incarnations. As a
former curatorial assistant and sometime critic, the idea of
chronicling how a show mutates as it encounters diverse cultural and
institutional contexts struck me as a productive exercise.
Unfortunately, the great FBC herself is unable to make it to New York
to see the next iteration that recently opened at PS1, so you'll have to
put up with me as I attempt to continue this delightful blog's
continuing coverage of the retrospective.</div>
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First,
the PS1 show is massive. Billed as "the largest exhibition of the
artist's work to-date," the exhibition includes well over 200 works from
the beginning of Kelley's career to the very end, and the entirety of
PS1 is given over to the show. I'm pretty familiar with Kelley's work
(although not nearly as much as FBC herself!), and was continually
surprised by work I hadn't seen before. </div>
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When you enter the first floor, you are greeted by a short introductory wall label and <i>Entry Way (Genealogical Chart), </i>1995,
a Kelley-ized version of the signs you often see when you enter a small
town notifying you of the existence of a Kiwanis Club, Rotary Club,
etc. In the next gallery to the immediate right, PS1 has installed <i>Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites</i>,
1991-99, MoMA's spiffy new Kelley acquisition. Though an impressive
work, it would have been better installed later in the exhibition, after
viewers were acclimated to the history of Kelley's use of stuffed
animals. This brings me to my first issue with the show: it's not
installed chronologically. Though portions of the show group works in
loose chronological conjunction, or by project, the show does not track
Kelley's career from beginning to end. Instead, a museum guide notes
that the exhibition "is organized to underscore the recursive nature of
Kelley's work. Kelley returned time and again to certain underlying
themes ..." This is true as far as it goes, but wouldn't that point
better be made if the work was viewed from beginning to end, so viewers
could see the progression and mutation of ideas and themes from one body
of work to the next? Instead, I worry that viewers less familiar with
Kelley's work will come away from the exhibition without understanding
how Kelley's practice grew and evolved. Often, Kelley initially
addressed a particular topic, theme, or medium in a compact but powerful
form, and later expanded or multiplied that format to draw out its full
potential, working a strategy over and over until he had exhausted its
possibilities. This is one of the aspects of Kelley's practice that, in
my mind, marks him as a genius (a word I don't throw around often).
However, instead of showing it to be the logical extension of a
particular trajectory in Kelley's practice, skipping to <i>Deodorized Central Mass</i> leads to reduced appreciation of its significance and meaning. This problem persists throughout the exhibition.</div>
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Another example of this problem is a series of galleries dedicated to Kelley's <i>Kandor</i>
works on the other side of the first floor. This series of galleries
could be a show in itself (hint, hint to some small but ambitious
university gallery), providing excellent examples of this body of work.
Unfortunately, I worry that the significance of this work is not fully
understood by either general audience members or the critical press, as
it is introduced without much context and instead appears as a series
whiz-bang-gee-whiz objects. Take, for example,<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/arts/design/mike-kelley-a-survey-at-moma-ps1-in-queens.html" target="_blank"> Holland Cotter's review in the New York Times</a>: "[<i>The Kandors</i>] date from after the time Kelley
signed on with the Gagosian Gallery in 1995. He was now a star with a
big budget, and the work suddenly looks expensive, machine-tooled,
overproduced. <i>The Kandors </i>have the luxury-line gloss of Jeff Koons junk
art. What saves them is that they have Kelley's history behind them."</div>
<div>
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<div>
First, I patently disagree that the <i>Kandor</i>s
are overproduced. Rather, I see this body of work as some of the most
formal and elegant of Kelley's career, simple but filled with pathos and
psychological complexity. But Cotter is right that, unmoored from the
history of Kelley's career, they do appear anomalous and I understand
why their power was lost on him given the lack of context. As Kelley
began the series in 1999 and returned to it repeatedly, again, a
chronological organization would have benefitted viewers immensely.
(Question: does any retrospective benefit from being installed other
than chronologically?)</div>
<div>
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<div>
The first floor also contains two small galleries devoted to video (collaborative works and <i>Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1</i>), and a small room adjacent to <i>Deodorized Central Mass</i> containing <i>Mechanical Toy Guts</i>, 1991/2012, one of Kelley's last works. Locating that work next to <i>Deodorized Central Mass </i>shows
Kelley's continued engagement with stuffed animals as medium, but the
juxtaposition (stuffed animals in one room, guts in the other) is too
cute curatorially for my taste. In another gallery, Kelley's "Felt
Banners" share a space with <i>A Continuous Screening of Bob Clark's
Film Porky's (1981), the Soundtrack of Which Has Been Replaced with
morton Subotnick's Electronic Composition The Wild Bull (1968), and
Presented in the Secret Sub-Basement of the Gymnasium Locker Room
(Office Cubicles)</i>, 2002. An amalgam of items and ideas left from <i>Educational Complex, </i>1995,
the piece is an excellent example of how Kelley revisited and
transformed bits of previous work into new and exciting works. However,
I wonder if the space could have been better used by <i>Sublevel</i>,
1998, especially since the exhibition catalogue contains an excellent
essay by George Baker about that work, and it's nowhere to be found in
the show. </div>
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Last but not least, one of the
first floor hallways is festooned with more banners, this time in fabric
and also used in a performance at one point (photographs of which are
hung adjacent). This brings me to one of the interesting but also
problematic aspects of the show: the presentation of Kelley's work,
which frequently treats issues of institutions, particularly educational
ones, in a former school. At first, I found the sight of Kelley's
banners and other educational themed works at PS1 exciting, but
eventually, I tired of it - when something is already so present in the
work, the additional "neat" factor felt a bit too much. That said, PS1
gave more space to the show than any other New York institution likely
would have, and they refrained from milking this connection for the rest
of the show.</div>
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There were some fantastic works installed in PS1's basement. First, some sound works (<i>The Peristaltic Airways</i>, 1986, and <i>Yummy Puffy Mommy Yoni</i>,
2008), were located in out of the way stairwells, an installation
strategy that used PS1's particular history and peculiarities to the
work's advantage. PS1 also installed <i>From my Institution to Yours</i>,
1987, a fantastic example of Kelley's continued engagement with and
commitment to labor and workers. The piece contains two parts: a large,
room sized installation featuring the emblem of a clenched fist and
slogans encouraging the viewer to storm the gates of the institution,
and a battering ram located in front of the museum's offices. The two
are connected by a ribbon. Putting aside the irony of a guard telling
me I could not even attempt to navigate around the battering ram (much
less pick it up and do some damage), I found the piece very compelling,
and it is one I'd never seen before. Last but not least, the basement
cinema space was hosting screenings of a number of video works,
including one I'd never seen before and really enjoyed (unfortunately I
did not grab the title, but it was ceramic objects acting out a play in
rhymed verse).</div>
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The museum's second floor is
largely devoted to Kelley's works from the 80s and 90s, as well as a
large gallery containing an excellent installation of a number of works
from <i>Day is Done. </i>The works on view include works from (this is not an exhaustive list): <i>Educational Complex</i>, 1995; <i>Half a Man</i>, 1987-93; <i>Empathy Displacement</i>, 1990; <i>Incorrect Sexual Models, Sack Drawings, </i>and <i>Lump Drawings</i>, 1987; <i>Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile</i>, 1985-86; <i>Reversals, Recyclings, Completions</i>, 2002; <i>Monkey Island</i>, 1982-83; <i>The Sublime</i>, 1984; <i>Half a Man</i>, 1995; <i>Blind Country</i>, 1989; <i>Endless Morphing Flow of Common Decorative Motifs (Jewelry Case)</i>, 2002; <i>Hermaphrodite Drawings</i>, 1987; Kelley's works from Documenta IX and associated schematic drawings; <i>Two and Three Dimensions</i>, 1994; <i>Lumpenprole and Agitprop</i>, 1991; and <i>Horizontal Tracking Shots of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms</i>, 2009<i>. </i>Each gallery generally lumped work together by project or performance (i.e. an entire room for <i>Plato's Cave</i>),
and wall labels helpfully noted not only when the work was first
exhibited/performed, but who the collaborators were and where it was
shown. However, the work was still not really chronologically
displayed, and there may have been too much of it. I adore Kelley's
work, but even I felt a bit exhausted by the end of this floor, and also
worried that I was not able to give all of the work the attention it
truly deserved because of that exhaustion. I commonly heard others at
the museum saying, "Wow, this guy was really prolific," "Wow, this is a
lot of work." I worry that a viewer less invested in or familiar with
the work would have felt a bit lost, and might have benefited from a
slightly more focused presentation. </div>
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The
museum's third floor is devoted to Kelley's earliest works as well as
some work from the 2000s. Works from the following are on view (again,
not an exhaustive list): <i>Black Out</i>, 2001; <i>The Banana Man</i>, 1983; <i>Garbage Drawings</i>, 1988; <i>Early Performance Objects</i>, 1977-79; <i>Birdhouses </i>and <i>Missing Time,</i>1978-79; <i>Personality Crisis</i>, 1982; <i>Pay for Your Pleasure, </i>1988; Memory Wares, 2000-10; <i>Abuse Report</i>, 1995/2007; <i>The Secret</i>, 2001; and <i>Rose Hobart II</i>,
2006. The drawings, objects, and videos of Kelley's performances form
the 1970s and 1980s are amplified by images of pages from his notebooks
that describe the evolution of each project. Again, I really wish these
works had been placed at the beginning of the exhibition, as they offer
an interesting window into Kelley's process. In general, I found the
photographic works form <i>Black Out</i> especially good.</div>
<div>
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<div>
If
you get the impression reading this post that, by the end of it, I am a
bit too exhausted to go into much detail, you are correct.
Unfortunately, that was also how I felt by the end of the show -
amazed, sated, happy, thrilled to see so much good work, but also a bit
worn out and guilty, as there was so much work to see. Again, I am
thrilled that PS1 mounted such a large, complete show (with a few
exceptions - why no <i>Craft Morphology Flow Chart</i>?), but there were
some minor works that could have been excised to tighten the
presentation - and mind you, I'd prefer a minor Kelley to a major work
by most other artists. I will definitely need to go back and spend more
time with the work, perhaps on <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_920339007" tabindex="0">January 5th</span>, when the museum is hosting a listening party for Kelley's music, or on <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_920339008" tabindex="0">December 15th</span>,
when Rachel Harrison, William Pope L, and Joe Scanlan will have a panel
discussion. And hey, maybe I'll complete FBC's coverage and see the
work again when it travels to Los Angeles!</div>
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Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-74379623185692020002013-09-18T07:38:00.002-07:002013-09-18T07:38:44.524-07:00Coming Back Very Soon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">David Miles, <i>Pact</i>, 2005, paper and wire. </span></div>
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<br />
Hello, Beloved And Patient Readership,<br />
<br />
<br />
FBC! should be back shortly, after a long Summer hiatus spent slaving away on a good hundred + pages of other writing and editing. I know you missed the blog, all 200 of you (on a good day). To whet your appetite, the next post should be the long-awaited review of Tosh Berman's book about Sparks. After this, it's a bit murky, likely some pictures of exhibitions here in Belgium and maybe some music reviews as well, I'm not sure yet.<br />
<br />
The image above was taken during a small art fair at a boutique hotel in Brussels about 3 weeks ago. I had gone reluctantly because, you know, boutique hotels = gah but I actually had a blast and not only because of the bottomless champagne. The David Miles artwork was part of a display by Manchester artist-run gallery Paper, and I liked their selection so much I went 3 times in their room to look at it.<br />
I also discovered there two adorable Belgian art dealers who run a gallery called <a href="http://transit.be/" target="_blank">Transit</a> in Mechelen, which is a bit of a commercial hub in Flanders but only about 15 minutes from Brussels, it's not exactly a suburb but certainly not where I'd expect to find a contemporary art gallery. I'm planning to go visit their space sometimes before the end of the year, so expect some pictures from the exciting Belgian town of Mechelen soon!<br />
<br />
In other blog-related news, two posts related to the Mike Kelley exhibitions in Amsterdam and Paris will normally be republished in print with minor edits in the upcoming issue of <a href="http://www.frogmagazine.net/I_welcome_I.html" target="_blank">Frog Magazine</a>. I'm told they're going to put a picture of yours truly wearing a cowboy hat in it. It's a disguise I wear so people don't recognize me in the mean streets of Brussels, a little bit like Scott Walker with his baseball cap and dark shades...<br />
<br />
In the meantimes, thanks for your renewed patience and faith in FBC!, the blog that is 100% devoid of any James Franco content (I hope, I haven't checked)!<br />
<br />Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-19104486842498502842013-08-07T02:16:00.000-07:002013-08-07T02:16:31.267-07:00How To Reasonably Respond To Bad Criticism <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Jem Finer performs the Philip Corner piece at the London Contemporary Music Festival, 2013</span></div>
<br />
There is bad faith, there is trying to get in a bit of fun at the detriment of solid argumentation, there is sloppy writing and there is bad criticism. We're guilty of all these sins at FBC! but I always figured out it was OK because we're a personal blog and not the official arts mouthpiece of a national or international media.<br />
<br />
Normally I don't try to get involved in too much back-and-forth concerning our little scandals in the art world, but this morning<a href="http://www.cookylamoo.com/boringlikeadrill/2013/08/objectionable.html" target="_blank"> I came across an excellent piece of writing</a> responding to a Guardian critic dismissive of one performance at a London festival (that piece is linked in the blog post itself).<br />
The <a href="http://lcmf.co.uk/" target="_blank">London Contemporary Music Festival</a> just ended its very first edition last weekend.<br />
It's in Peckham... and I have no idea where it is in London proper, but their program was mouthwatering even for someone like me who has a very amateurish interest in contemporary music. Glenn Branca, Tony Conrad, Helmut Lachenmann... You name it. I became aware of it thanks to both Tony Conrad and Rhys Chatham posting about it on their Facebook page, and I'm so grateful they did.<br />
<br />
My understanding is that the festival developed over three weekends, that all performances were free but you had to book tickets and that it was hosted in a concrete parking structure. If I hadn't been so broke I sure would have traveled to London to attend at least one weekend, and if next year I can afford it you bet I will try. In a nutshell, the idea is interesting, the program really serious and it's free, what's not to love?<br />
Well apparently some guy at the Guardian got his knickers in a twist, as they say across the pond, because a fifty-year old piece of performance was created during which a piano is dismembered. Apparently the guy from the Guardian isn't aware that such a small thing as Fluxus happened a long while ago, and what of these pesky rock musicians who used to light their guitars on fire or smash them on stage? He also seemed to be unaware that there is a vast stockpile of unwanted pianos all over the UK, even though the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19706812" target="_blank">BBC devoted a whole article </a>about the problem last year.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Jimi Hendrix lights his guitar on fire, Monterey Pop Festival, 1967</span></div>
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In a way it is fun and reassuring that a historical piece can still be shocking, but as "Ben H/Cooky LaMoo" underlined in his blog post, the Guardian critic didn't bother reviewing any other piece of music performed during the festival. It's a bit akin to, say, far-right extremists singling out a lone 1913 painting they deemed of dubious quality at a museum to demand it is deprived from its public funding, if you ask me. I'm not going to continue arguing about it because that piece I linked to is really excellent, so I should only recommend you read it. I only wish I could write as well as Ben H.<br />
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Speaking of writing... I am currently trying to meet two September deadlines and a page tally that should end up being around a hundred, so there won't be many more FBC! posts until mid-September, unless I'm finished sooner. If I post things it will likely be YouTube clips, and then when I am done the long-awaited post about Tosh Berman's book Sparks-Tastic will be on.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, read god books, listen to good music, go see some good art and enjoy the rest of the Summer!Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5271471127190907973.post-38396385089099949662013-07-28T09:19:00.001-07:002013-07-28T09:19:06.610-07:00Happy 6th Anniversary, FBC!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.muhka.be/images/original/image_4036.jpg" target="blank">Craigie Horsfield, Installing his work Above the Bay of Naples from Via Partenope, Naples, September 2008, 2010 photo M HKA </a> </span></div>
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<br />
And just like this, with this 556th post, FBC! just turned 6. Dang, it's high time we start elementary school now.<br />
I hadn't realized we had reached this milestone yesterday, and had no intention of posting anything whatsoever this weekend, but there we are. Normally the idea was to post a review of Tosh Berman's book <i>Sparks-tastic!</i> as the newest post when I'd finally gotten around to write it, well that will have to be next time.<br />
<br />
So what are we up today? Not cake, but just a very brief mention of a visit I paid with my friend Nancy to the M-HKA in Antwerp, a museum of contemporary art I used to visit as a kid.<br />
I remembered it then as rather leaning toward conceptual art, and heavy with Belgian artists, though I had no recollection of visiting permanent exhibits, mostly thematic group shows. It's a short hop from Antwerp's Central Station, one of the most magnificent train station this side of LA's Union Station. If you get on the #12 tram, it's a quick trip to the museum. Antwerp is a delightful city, in passing, maybe less pretty than Bruges, but more agreeable to visit.<br />
The museum itself is located in an unremarkable yet very pleasant building, not too big, and I insist on mentioning the two adorable ladies manning the front desk, who where professional and courteous but mostly very sweet. If someone from the museum sees this, it was on Wednesday afternoon and these ladies deserve all the praise we can lavish on them.<br />
<br />
The museum <a href="http://www.muhka.be/toont_beeldende_kunst_detail.php?la=en&id=3155&subbase=actueel&jaartal=" target="_blank">is currently showing its collection</a>, which is very 1990s-oriented, and of course has lots of Belgian artists represented. We saw a really great Cameron Jamie installation (complete with a separate entrance accessible to disabled people, super classy), a sprawling installation by David Blair about a Mandchurian film production company that may or may not have existed, a Mark Dion sculpture, about extinct birds, a <a href="http://www.muhka.be/image_detail.php?image_id=4844&la=en" target="_blank">James Turrell on the rooftop</a> that is your standard James Turrell sky cut-out but that was remarkable because somehow someone had stuck a bit of tape in one of the top corner...<br />
I don't know if it's an accident or an act of vandalism or a prank, but if you put a former museum professional like me in an exhibition space I will notice stuff like this (or wall labels that come unglued, walls that should be painted, dusty radiator covers... you name it). I found it really funny but of course that was the *only* thing I ended up obsessing about the Turrell...<br />
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Two artworks really stood out for me: a semi-circular and spectacular <a href="http://www.muhka.be/press.php?la=fr&date=&id=&subbase=archief&jaartal=2010&jaargang=&letter=&person_id=&work_id=&project_id=3035&zoekstring=" target="_blank">Craigie Horsfield</a> photograph of the bay of Naples with what looks like fireworks. I snatched the picture off the museum's website, so all credits are Craigie Horsfield and MHKA. The work is really striking in person, but it was also interesting to me because I hadn't seen Horsfield's work since the mid-1990s and I had somehow forgotten all about it. I mostly remembered somber photographs of working-class people in Poland, where Horsfield lived at the time, before the end of the Cold War, and these photograph for some reason always seemed like a modern analog of Van Gogh's<i> Potato Eaters</i> to me.<br />
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The other was a small work that looked <a href="http://www.muhka.be/verzamelt_depot_detail.php?work_id=848&person_id=310&letter=P&la=fr" target="_blank">like documentation from various performances </a>by the Belgian artist <a href="http://www.riapacquee.be/" target="_blank">Ria Pacquée</a> whose work I had never seen before nor heard about, and it's a shame because I fell in love with it then and there.<br />
I now feel like someone (say, me, but if it's not me, whoever does that will do a public service) should bring it to the US. It reminded me a bit of Michel Journiac and also Tracey Emin, if Emin had done her work 10 years before and it had actually been not so much about her ago but about a common, universal experience for a woman, whether she's an artist or not. Ria Pacquée lives in Antwerp and apparently has had <a href="http://www.argosarts.org/artist.jsp?artistid=2d3a0ad039bf4abe9a13c30907d750a9" target="_blank">some survey show</a> recently at a Brussels art space devoted to video and film called Argos. I'm looking forward to exploring her work further and hopefully bring it to the United States if I can.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdp6M8aVpRC1EcSnV6NcTnTo6MAVFWCEva7AvS88sqkd7i-VGc7CToy5g_OT4QK5JE90tGqcNtoF41MOl06t4NCJxtQK8Xijvtd2njd_Ky13s-n1aQ4FWpswA1uWC6eje2TATq38qpeVk/s1600/image_2429.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdp6M8aVpRC1EcSnV6NcTnTo6MAVFWCEva7AvS88sqkd7i-VGc7CToy5g_OT4QK5JE90tGqcNtoF41MOl06t4NCJxtQK8Xijvtd2njd_Ky13s-n1aQ4FWpswA1uWC6eje2TATq38qpeVk/s320/image_2429.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Ria Paquée, <i>documentation of performances 1982-1988</i>, 1989. Photograph Ria Pacquée and MHKA Antwerp.</span><br />
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With this, I'm going to celebrate FBC!'s 6 years with a drink tonight. Have a drink for us as well if you feel like it!<br />
<br />Frenchy but Chic!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02373786513886748195noreply@blogger.com0