NYC report

It's hot and sticky here in Brooklyn, and because of heavy rains last night the NYC subway system is not exactly working. So I am not sure I will be able to go see the Whitney's psychedelic show and the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Met.
It is miserable outside, and I wonder why people do live here.
NYC is so horribly expensive you start bleeding money the minute you get out of the house, people are not really nice and polite and since everyone is working like dog to makes end meet, no one can really enjoy the city superior cultural offerings.
Playground for the super rich indeed.

American and chic!

Two more years to wait and I'll be able to apply for US citizenship. Initially I was a bit unsure whether I'd wanted to "become" American. I feel very French in my way of thinking and my manners, and I was viewing the switch in citizenship mostly as a convenience. I like America for many reasons - Americans are nice!- but, well, I was feeling a bit too French, plus I will never understand the attraction of baseball or even, the horror! American football.

Recently I was having this conversation with some French cultural officials, about Orlan's infamous gesture, defacing a museum label that correctly asserted Duchamp* as a French-born, American artist. We disagreed as their credo was Duchamp merely changed citizenship as a convenience, was born and died in France. Well, it is their job to make French every single particle of dust under the sun that passed some time in France, had French ancestry, etc. I begged to differ as Duchamp spent most of his career in the US, married and American woman, and got the recognition he deserved first in the US and not in his Motherland.
This got me thinking. I choose to live here, I pay my taxes here, I follow US politics as best as I can, I speak English everyday, and I have found some appreciation for what I am doing here. Lastly, I am writing a novel in English, so I guess the decision made itself insidiously, À l’insu de mon plein gré as they say back home. But still, 2 more years to wait may change my mind again.

Then this morning I checked the French newspaper Libération and found this article. I am so utterly disgusted. If Sarkozy as president hadn't achieved to convince me, this is the last push I needed to make up my mind about US citizenship.
This woman found out when she went to renew her national ID card that she had to provide a "religion certificate" because she had a "Jewish-sounding name" and was born in French Algeria. Algeria was part of the French colonies and therefore France until 1962.
Now French law is very clear: if you were born in France you do automatically get French citizenship no matter where your parents were coming from, moreover religion doesn't interfere with anyone's right to citizenship.

But since 1994 and some administrative act passed by then right-wing Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, the French has found it OK to ask people born "abroad" or of "foreign parents" to prove their citizenship. And in a blatantly revisionist and racist move, people born French of French parents in former French colonies suddenly were viewed as "foreigners": the idea I gather was to exclude all the Arab immigrant populace that came to France from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia to work in French factories after the end of the colonies. Many of them being French by law. Which, according to the Constitution, cannot be changed retroactively: a law enacted in 1994 cannot change what was legal before 1962, only what happened after 1994.

I had the disagreeable experience myself of having to prove my citizenship when I had to renew my passport at the French consulate: I was born on the French mainland from French parents and carried a French ID most of my life, but since my Dad had been born in French Algeria before 1962 suddenly I was viewed as having one "Foreign" parent.
I remember being particularly pissed off as my paternal grandfather was one of a handful of French people who fought with the Allies during WWII, working with the Deuxieme Bureau in intelligence. When many, many FRENCH people from the mainland were, ahem, not doing much in this department. Not speaking about the appalling action of the Vichy government against the Jews.

So I could imagine how this woman was feeling, being forced to prove her citizenship and her religion because of her name. I have a very Gallic name myself and for some reason no one asked me for a Catholic certificate, BTW.
Reading this article it turns out that in this administrative circonscription they routinely single out Jewish people and ask them for a religion certificate. Jews in French Algeria were all made citizens in 1870, so there shouldn't be any question about any Jew born there before 1962 not being a French citizen. And as far as I know, last time I checked Jews belonged to a religion, not a foreign country.
It seem that the overzealous administration clerks are taking upon themselves to act as vilely as their Vichy forebears, the article pointing out that some French citizens were brutally deprived from their French citizenship when trying to renew their IDs, after decades of being French, born on what was then French soil, being parents and children of French citizen.
The article precises that some people were stripped of their citizenship after "marrying a foreigner". Or adopted another citizenship, even though France does recognize dual citizenship. So many French people are now made alien on their own soil because of racist and antisemitic undercurrents.
Now I'd like to see the A.O.C Gauls to have to present a religion certificate each time they have to renew their administrative documents (BTW: we have 3 IDs in France: National ID, Passport, and Driver License plus another one if you live abroad and register at the local French consulate). Since a recent poll revealed 60% of my compatriots are atheists or agnostics, this may turn amusing.

The irony is that the current French president himself is from Hungarian descent, his father having been born in Hungary. Should he be stripped of his French citizenship because he is not 100% A.O.C? Moreover, it seems one of his grandfather was Jewish. Would he have to show a religion certificate to prove he is a French citizen? I'd say let him prove his Frenchiness up to the 6th or 7th generation, just so we renew with our 1940-1944 roots.
By this token, I am very sorry but Duchamp isn't French anymore. And I guess very soon, so will I, unless I become some fab' hyper glamourous writer and then we'll see some furious retro-pedaling to bring me back into the 100% A.O.C. Gallic fold.
You know what? I think I'll convert and join the tribe, just by esprit de contradiction.


* I wonder if Orlan would have changed back the label to "French" artist if it had been some cheesy academic painter and not Duchamp.

Mary Heilmann, To Be Someone

My neck comfortably resting on my très chic Isaac Mizrahi cashmere mini-pillow (sale of a sale of a Target sale), I’m eschewing the Jet Blue entertainment system to read the only thing currently accessible to my painkiller-numbed brain, the latest Vogue issue. It is the “Age” issue you see, the yearly “how to look great whatever your age as long as you are tall, thin, blessed with high-cheekbones and good hair and don’t have any money issues, really darling this is soooo effortless”.
I’m waiting for the “how to look cool when you are short and dumpy with bad skin” issue myself.
So I’m vaguely browsing it, and at the end, Ta Da! My favorite, favorite Cool Lady Artist, Mary Heilmann! This is it, everything is conspiring to derail my firm resolution of a contemporary art break this Summer! I am so happy with her inclusion I am keeping the issue for at least a week, rather than tossing it in the next recycling bin I find. Hail Mary, you are not one of those impossibly Waspy women who are the norm in the rest of the issue.

Anyway, I have been very excited over the last few months when running into Liz Armstrong as she was preparing the To Be Someone Mary Heilmann Retrospective at OCMA. Mary Heilmann is an artists’ artist as we say, meaning until now she never had the recognition she deserved but is highly respected among her peers AND the younger generation of painters/artists (the good ones, I mean). I have this half-baked theory about great paintings and artworks not lending themselves easily to photography: you don’t see the surface details, whatever amount of color corrections are never going to show the subtle differences between glossy surfaces, duller shines and minute variations in brushstroke sizes and patterns. Of course Heilmann’s work magnificently fits my crackpot theory, and even the gorgeous catalogue (there’s a Deluxe edition too) doesn’t give justice to her paintings.
My friends Ivan Morley and Donald Morgan and I were eagerly anticipating the show, and we were blessed in getting an invitation to the opening. Donald used to be her assistant when living in NYC, and I was very touched to see that she had remembered him and got him invited to the dinner. I like when artists don’t have an attitude – I don’t do well with Prima Donnas and egomaniacs, as a rule.

Now this is not the Artforum “scene and herd” diary so I won’t tell you who was there (note to Artforum: if you do cover West Coast events, don't mention your NYC cronies. We don't care. They are ugly Yalies anyway and they can't distinguish painting from critical theory).
I just want to mention the atmosphere was warm and fuzzy including the speeches. Everyone was relaxed and happy which changed nicely from the increasing stuffiness creeping over LA now that the institutions are so ostentatiously taking themselves sooooooo seriously, what with all these NYC /East Coast imports being hired everywhere.

Anyway, down to the exhibition. It started with very early works, part sculptural part painterly. They are reminiscent of Eva Hesse, minus the pathos and the tragedy, with a very playful and joyous edge. Interestingly they look very self-confident and don’t show the typical hesitation of these pioneering work that were neither/nor painting/sculpture but something else entirely and were going to give birth later to Judd’s specific objects (via Ann Truitt early experiments. Honneur aux dames).
Then we moved onto the first paintings themselves. I am not going to describe them by titles because I am typing from thousands of feet above the lovely USA, without access to any sources.
Generally speaking, the show can be described as a little bit crowded (the space is small and there is much to see), filled with gorgeous explosions of colors one after another. I think it had to look crowded out of necessity, out of the high quality of the paintings themselves. Each one and every single one of them could hold an entire wall. They are so strong whatever their format that even the small ones don’t seem so intimate as rather highly charged little painterly bombs packed with presence.

The sense of color is overwhelming in the way it is mastered: Heilmann can work from subdued monochromes and duo-chromes to multicolored bright hues, escaping the vagaries of boring minimalist chic as well as avoiding any sense of clash or gaudiness.
Another impressive feat is that first impression of sloppiness, immediately belied when the paintings are closely observed, at the leisurely pace they deserve. They do demand attention. Careful observation unearths under-layers of colors, say a dark green patch visible by transparency under a stratum of lighter blue that creates a dark blackish tone. Some white washes serve to tone down and reveal brighter colors.
I usually dislike sloppiness in art if it isn’t a deliberate part of the execution and even if it is (take that, Manfred Pernice!) it has to be extremely well done to pass muster.
It takes an extremely gifted, brilliant painter to pretend to be a bad one, as we can witness with Magritte’s Période Vache, Sigmar Polke’s early career and all of Kippenberger’s work. In short, appearing sloppy demands a great attention to balance, to composition, color arrangement and execution to create those masterpieces of seemingly effortless, carefree gestures. Mary Heilmann’s paintings are so deceivingly simple and easy, so attractive and playful in conveying this sense of spontaneity, as if they were made as an afterthought, in some spur of the moment casual encounter between the brush, the paint and the canvas.
They manage to let us forget how many hours of toil, technique and craft went into their happy radiance, their bright sense of togetherness. Appearances are deceiving, and it could well be that her work was overlooked for its awe-inspiring “simple” beauty , when too many of her male counterparts from the 1960s to the 1990s were stuffing their discourse and work with grandiloquent pomposity, uptight seriousness and macho self-aggrandizing postures. She was then too cool for her age, trop en avance, devoid of that would-be-rock-star attitude that plagues the art world.
Anyway, the show ends on August 26, so last chance for West Coaster to see it befor eit moves on. Future stops include Houston, Columbus and NYC.

My fabulously well-informed thoughts on Web 2.0

There seem to be some opinion wars going on in the bloggosphere about Web 2.0. I vaguely read an article (in the Guardian maybe? can't recall, it was after my car accident) explaining how user-generated content was basically, er, dumbing down everybody. And I also recall earlier in the Summer some debate around the lack of manners on the Internet.
The lack of manners I deplore, as anonymity tends to unleash the worse Nazi-influenced ugly feelings in anybody (got anyone to denounce from the safety of your own home lately?). Though we needn't have waited for Internet to see the phenomenon happening, but it's true it is developing in an exponential way.

As for user-generated content, well what am doing right now? I don't really have an opinion one way or another. I think it is a fabulous procrastination tool. It also reveal how deeply, fundamentally flawed the hyper-capitalist system is since we all try to eschew work/workplace boredom/stress/tyranny by either creating/posting/disseminating content or just viewing it on company time.

I'm posting all my vaguely formed thoughts without bothering to check and double-check my sources, something I would never dream to do in a scholarly or academic paper. But the scholar in me really wants to point it out so everyone knows how to take my writing with a grain of salt, I hope.

I'll post again later about the one and only most ridiculously ludicrous user-generated site later, as I'm getting into too much pain right now.

Everyone loves a good tragedy

The art world has been abuzz for a couple of weeks with the tragic news of Theresa Duncan's suicide followed a week later by Jeremy Blake's. The LA WEEKLY is running a story this week about the couple by one Kate Coe who apparently knew them, or at least she knew Duncan.

I didn't. So I don't feel particularly invested emotionally; but having been hit with double-whammy tragedies myself I can only imagine how their families feel. I sure hope they won't read the Weekly article and the rest of the press. No one likes to see their recently departed portrayed as glamourous loser and/or mentally unbalanced.

I've seen Blake's art in several galleries over the last few years and I did like it, but I am not sure he truly qualified as a "rising art star" as he is depicted in various articles (I'm quoting from memory, I think it's the NYT and the LAT). He had a solid career, his work was promising though IMHO never totally quite arrived.
Yes it was fashionable with that nice video-clip high quality that looks so clean and sleek. But I never encountered any hysteria when his name was mentioned, or people getting crazy with that giddy excitement when confronted with that hot flavor of the moment. In short, he was not the next Matthew Barney or Pierre Huygues or even Rirkrit Tiravanija, just a very solid artist whose work was accessible.

The Weekly article focuses mainly on Duncan, zeroing in on her alleged paranoid personality and depicting her as a full-fledged compulsive liar. Maybe she was. I wouldn't know. It doesn't make her demise more understandable or explainable anyway. Most suicides aren't, and there are so many issues we do not know and which are not even pondered about in the article: health, money, family, etc. Blake is barely mentioned and only to describe him as more successful than she was.

I guess what really irks me personally is that old "the artist depicted as a wacko" line, the assumption that personal character and eccentricities become fair game once the artist is dead, making him/her a "public figure". Next step it the myth taking over, no one looking at the work critically/scholarly anymore but projecting their personal fantasies, the zealots interpreting every prior action "in the light of the tragic events that could be foreseen in this and that aspect of their work, etc." Then the artist becomes a lost hero, a pioneer for future generations, etc. etc.
It makes for a good myth, maybe a good story, but certainly not for good art history, and the artworks get lost in the brouhaha.

The fact that the Weekly article was published under this particular light makes lots of sense in this town, where aspiring screenwriters are probably already busy pitching the "true story" of the "tragic golden couple" to movie execs with, "like, Brad and Angelina channeling the ghosts of the tortured artists in an Oscar-worthy performance."
Nothing we can do about it, but it sucks nonetheless. May they rest in peace and the world at large let their private life remain just so.

soon in exile

Hello my dear [now 3] faithful readers,

I am getting utterly exhausted and can function only in 20 minutes increments in between naps. So posting will be extremely light in the next 2 weeks as I have to travel back East for a joyous reunion.
Post to you later...

It's Classical Antiquity Central!

So things are moving on up fast in Classical Antiquity news! Please click on link to have the LAT full story.
[Apologies for my weak link skills BTW, but learning all the code tricks is difficult in the present state of my brain and neck and back and shoulders.]

I suggest now the Greek government sues the Italian one to get all these Greek finds returned to their original soil.
Including all these Greek colonies temples in Sicily. And the vases found in Etruscan tombs too, now that I think of it. It's not because they have been bought legitimately 2,500 years ago that they are any less Greek, after all.
The German and Russian can sue each other for all the art looting that occurred at the end of WWII, all the African nations that have been plundered during the 20th century should sue every single Western country with African Art collections, etc. The Irakis can sue each others as well as Donald Rumsfeld for all the Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian looting and destructions, and how is the state of the Al Mutawakil minaret in Samara? I've been wondering for the longest time.


UPDATE! Just looked up the Guardian and there we are