Still Here

Hello, I've been absent, focussing on my new dada which is early
computer programming.

Whatever happened to computer art anyway?


I've been pondering a lot about old
resurfacing art topics, about wrether
or not artists would be better off
quitting the stage of the gallery
space, stopping to wish to circumscribe
their art from everything else


I think the gallery space has been the 20th
century's laboratory for the exploration
of ideas long enough, and as art itself is
slowly turning back into commodity, I see
the future artists as expanding their
ideas into everyday sphere, at the risk
of defying categorization.

In 50 years, I see less galleries, less museums,
and more of reunions, festivals, schools,
where artists will test ephemeral ideas or
present prototypes of artistic infiltration,
assumed to be part of general life experience.

Sort of a meeting place where the terms design and art
don't mean a thing anymore.


In the meantime, so to grant you that you didn't
come here for nothing, I'm presenting this site
about GPS gaming and art which I consider to be my
Art Site Of The Month. This is the future!

I'll try select one site per month and than
categorize them with winners at the end of the
year. I'll be looking for the impossible:
sites that manage to break the foundations
of what is assumed to be art nowaday. I already
got my next month's link.


By the way, I still got 3 articles ready
since two weeks, but since I can only give
part time to this blog, I've yet to organize
all the necessary links for them (a process
that can take more time than actually writting
comments). These are comments on Norma Jeane,
Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn.

I will need to reduce this art gallery commenting,
which was the first reason I started this blog, to one
show per week (I'm already late), than add some
in row if I can find extra free time.


I am a pig at discovering things. I don't even
find the time to relate all what I've been into
in the past two weeks, but let's say that
I haven't seen a single art show since (for me,
that's rare).



The last show I've seen deserves an article
for all the wrong reasons. It was Language
Of Intercessions presented in 3 Montreal
galleries. A show that only prove that art
curating based on racial identity can be
sometimes problematic, categorically outdated
and a void of pertinence.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com


PS: actually, tomorrow I'll attempt to catch yet another show
suggested by Chris Zeke.

Your Fetish Is My Kitsch: Elena Dorfman "Still Lovers"at Edwynn Houk Gallery.

"Men and women, women and men. It will never work."

Erica Jong

"The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him."

Immanuel Kant

"There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul."

Arnold Bennett







Elena Dorfman is an artist I had never heard from before visiting her show "Still Lovers" at Edwynn Houk Gallery, a show that fitted perfectly with the elegance of this space situated in the marbled 745 fifth Avenue building.


Unsurprisingly, it was her first solo, but the work already sported the assurance of an artist already a long way in her career. Somehow, the artist's own claim that she had to adjust her work accordingly to her investigations, slipping away from common playfulness and entering darker psychological territories, translated into the work itself. The delicate treatment of her subjects let a sense that her art had been thoroughly "researched", both in terms of subject and
mise-en-scene.


What is this work exactly? Grosso modo, it's a series of photographs depicting people and their relationships with the expensive sex dolls that they acquired, a topic that on press would make anyone expect shock value.


Well, actually, the first image seen from the entrance of the gallery reserved a bit
of shock, because it looked like the hands of an older man seeking genital contact under the skirt of a school girl ("GingerBrook 1", 2001). (By the way, you must all know that the schoolgirl attrait is actually a traditional japanese fetisch.)


I have a lot of imagination, and I know somewhere in this world people must be designing dolls for pedophiles, so I was expecting the worst.


But turning past the lobby wall, I was instead confronted with a multitude of ackward images, for the most non-sexual, of people holding or simply passing time in company of their personal dolls. Actually, if you didn't know those were dolls, some of these images could pass rapidly in front of your eyes and convey all sorts of common, standard human emotions. It is upon realisation that these emotions are experienced under the presence of human dolls that renders these portraits quite complex, psychologically.


Even though the photographs were all dispersed in the space when I visited, I will try to connect each case of "doll owners" to better illustrate my point.



The striking example when I entered that first room was a photograph of a man sitting on a bed, seemingly weeping in the arms of the woman that he is holding ("Rebecca 1", 2001). The woman, a doll of course, but drastically different from the stereotype of the young sex school girl that was apprehended at the entrance, sported sort of a "mature" type look ("Rebecca 3", 2001), with short hairs, and a tragic figure, closer to a princess Diana.

Without getting any sort of insight about what was the story behind this picture, building up from the way it was constructed, I was imagining the case of a man buying a human doll to keep present in his home the memory of a deceased wife.


Now...it's probable that I have too much imagination, but, if I'm anywhere close to the truth, than this is the marvel of great art to be able to transcribe so much in a single picture.


In this sense, if Dorfman calls her art documentary, it's actually more tilting at an edge between documentary and narrative cinema, since her work is fabricated as such that it allows you to infer emotional content. Or rather, this art is not so much about information than about communicating the "right emotion" from which you can infer information (don't they call this a cognitive process?). She's taking the path of formulating "tableaux", and this results in a very aesthetic outlook that perhaps is hereby justified by her focus on plasticity, and how plastic is apparently able to trigger emotion. What are the value of emotions experienced through plastic? Oh so, you might start to think these people are all but remote lunatics, but.. Isn't art plastic? What is the value of an emotion when I am experiencing it forward a Dorfman photograph? How does it compares with fullfilling sentiments through the familiarity of a personal doll.


Does art functions the same as a sex doll?


Coming to my next case, I realize that the Dorfman show was a perfect response to a lot of recent art subjectifying porn stars and its industry. Her photographs are generally as slick as a pornographic shot, as you can see in this example ("Taffy 2", 2002) from the series, one of the rare photograph here that actually shows the doll's genital, and
how these objects weren't made for kidding in the first place.

Again, it seems here that Dorfman "designed" a shot that best reflected the relation of this doll ("Taffy 12", 2002) with its owner: no, not the cat, but here, the true king, the glorious, "reh'l
mân" who probably decided that sex was way more easy to get that way. While the nonchalent atmosphere of the previous shot looked like this couple had enough of banging the night before, this latter, adorned not so innocently with the motif of a cat, with the doll laying like she's ready for another ride, seems to manifest Dorfman's wish to underline the haunting feminist aspect of the show, an aspect that culminates in the clashing ultimatum of her most recent work, the fantastic collectiv
"slut shots" ("Girlfriend 1", 2004), that would make Vanessa Beecroft run for her money. Have you seen the mutilated faces ("Girlfriend 2", 2004) of these poor things?? Wow!.... I'm still apalled, gazing as I write. Is that supposed to be seducing?? They all look like drug addicts !! With ping pong balls in their mouths!! Mr. plastic-maker, can your image of an ideal woman ever be more dumbified, puh-lease ? Gee.... I'm near to suggest those doll owners start wearing that famous "I'm with stupid" T-shirt.







Is there was ever a work able to demonstrate the problematic within the traditionally paternalist genderification of woman as an "object of desire" (read cinema theory, of which this art is akin), than it was Dorfman's! Yes I know, old trick, and probably that work would have had more impact in the 60's, but you gotta admit how crude and ferocious these mosaics are compared with the more "gentile" photographs of the rest of the series, even compared to the previous close-up portraits ("GingerBrook 3", 2001) which on the opposite almost seek to reveal the hidden emotions
trapped within these dolls ("Sidore 5", 2001) (probably a study of how their makers dealt with the issue of facial expression, in response to their buyers' needs).


One of two great examples of this "gentility" I was just mentioning, is the cases of "Lily 1" (2004), proof that Dorfman hasn't entirely derived from her usual approach, and featuring the most relaxed of her artificial couples, enjoying a sunbath on a courtyard grass, letting you wonder how close to a sculpture by Duane Hanson we are getting here. The other strikingly idealized image is a magnificent picture of a married couple moving toward their bed ("Azra 1", 2002), a photograph that looks like a fairytale gone sordid
once you realize that this marriage is none but a faked sexual fetisch. Brrr...I'll admit I was thinking of Hitchcock a moment there. The use of distance and blur in the shot only enhanced that impression of bizarre, whatever Dorfman intended to express. At least now you are warned: the marrying doll is not an image that every woman will feel comfortable with. Or maybe somewhere afterall fetisch, since it involves so much of cognition, is never entirely deprived of romance? If Barthes argues that love is not much more than a secret wish to control the other, than maybe fetisch is simply an abstract materialization of romance, a projection of
idealized emotions unto an object? Or...Is romance just the soft, humanized version of fetishism?

I have poor knowledge in psychology, but this is the sort of topics that I'm sure will be discussed in a book that is coming out shortly in France, I think called "Les Amants Silencieux", and entirely dedicated to the study of human relationships with sex dolls, and which will be fully adorned with these photographs by Dorfman.




The last category of photographs, which I found to be the most successful (after the image of the man and his "dead" wife mentioned at the beginning of this commentary), were the pictures of dolls sharing the contexts of everyday domesticity ("Galatea 4", 2002). They are perticularly surreal! Apparently,
a woman bought many love dolls as a hobby, each one representing a trait of her personality, and in these photos it is obvious that she has established her as a member of her family, putting her at the table at times of breakfast ("Valentine 3", 2002), in presence of her "other kids", who seem to be
pretty used to the situation.. The shots are the most blunt of the lot, for once borrowing from in-yer-face "documentary" aesthetic.



Here the doll looses all sense of sexuality. It becomes the irreplacable daughter, now replaced ("Valentine 2", 2002) . I was imagining the story of a little girl who loved so much to play with dolls that she transformed into one. That story was probably influenced by the subconscious souvenir of an old science fiction film which traumatized me when I was a kid (link coming later, I am trying to remind myself the title of this film which depicted a family faced with the tragedy of living in a doll house).




Dorfman's work is really complex because part of it seems to dwell on
feminism, when on the other side she seems to endorse, or rather, comprehends the special psychological needs of people living with dolls.


Be it for reasons of memory, solitude, sex, or pure family fun, Dorfman really succeeds here at communicating the different layers of meanings implied in the behavior of acquiring human-shaped silicone. By wandering this deep, psychologically ("GingerBrook 4", 2002), I thought she was bypassing on her first intention to be politic.

I first wondered how important it was to her that she selected only cases involving woman dolls, when I would have love to see some of the rarer cases involving boy dolls.


It was after perusing her artist's statement on her website that all my doubts were made clear: she is seriously engaged with feminist theory. She even draws the humoristic illustration of Eve as being the probable first doll given by one man, God, to another, Adam. She goes on that in usual mythology, as soon woman...

"comes alive and exhibits her thirst for knowledge, she becomes a source of suffering and death. Men, afraid of the impulses women inspire, set out to rectify this by creating their own women: statues, mannequins, dolls and dolls that function for sexual pleasure."

And further:

"Synthetic women that are more satisfying, both sexually and psychologically, than their flesh and bone counterparts."

Ah well....I always think that it's the men that are the
sex machines. Have you ever met a man psychologically satisfying, Elena ? I think men represent themselves woman as objects because they, perhaps secretly, but very sincerely, enjoy being treated as objects themselves. That is how further I'll attempt a psychological interpretation on this topic.


Nevertheless, I prefer the general idea of projecting desire and emotions unto plasticity. And considering that I can equalize desire for a sex doll to the devotion for a manifactured replicate of a crucifix, I was wondering if this exhibit simply proved that the ultimate in any fetisch isn't always that it be confronted with its own kitsch.



At least this is how I ended up summarizing Dorfman's work: hanging there at a sweet tangent between kitsch and gravity.




Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com



PS: by the way, Great show!! Should I just write that !?

PS2: The title of the article is actually the title of an
old tune of mine.



Elena Dorfman: "Still Lovers"
January 13-February 26, 2005
Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
New York

Da Mario Code: Cory Arcangel & Paper Rad "Super Mario Movie" at Deitch Projects.

I would love to say there was some contemporary artist who's work really got me thinking, but lately I have just been trying to sort out 20 years of garbage TV culture that is filling my brain.

Cory Arcangel

Thou shalt not bother looking further than SMB1.

PJaine









Deitch Gallery in Soho is perhaps the trendiest gallery of New York, which grossly means that wrether the art that is profusionly presented there is meant to stay or be forgotten the next year, the shows themselves often turn out to be the New York art thrill of the month, and their vernissages got the prestige that can entertain the edgiest fashion and showbiz crowds that they attract.


This sounds like a critique but don't misinterprete me: I adore Deitch, and there is always at least one of their shows that I found memorable when I visit Manhattan. All I'm saying is that generally you can expect art at Deitch to be either humoristic, light, slick, fashionable, shocking, or all of the above, and this, regardless if the art deals with more serious issues in the background (which it often does).


In this sense, the gallery really corresponds to the
"playful" tendencies of art that emerged in the late 90's, an everyday art of
cuteness,
gags and tricks that probably evolved as the only vivable solution to the harsh utopian lessons of the more dramatically engaged, be it romantic or politic, art of the previous decade.



This presentation will sound like I'm putting a little too much on the shoulders of the artists I wish to relate about in this commentary.

For all it's worth, Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad are indeed presenting a very
"light" and "humoristic" installation at Deitch, one that is loud and danceable enough as to be fashionable. Yes you heard me, this intallation is "danceable", with its trippy,
addictive techno soundtrack based on 8-bits computer game sounds.


This is nearly the first solo exhibit by Cory Arcangel, an artist that was discovered
by many at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, when he presented his two
"video canvases" made from pirated old computer game cartridges (some sort of minimalist loops of which I already saw an example a year before in an excellent group show at the
New Museum of New York).

Video Games you hear? Sounds like one big trendy topic, but let's just say that Cory is probably among those who helped this trend to affect the art world.



Personally, I'm a fan. This is much more easy to claim than to explain. Have you read
the Press Release for this show? It's a very cute statement of the artist detailing his
process, which mostly consists of pirating an old video game cartridge, and
transforming it into video art (in this case, a Mario Brother cartridge but those who already know Arcangel also know that he constantly comes back to the icon of Mario Brothers(tm).


In fact, one of the two installations presented was exactly that: a "detailed explanatation of his process", which included a short "making of" video, demonstrating how his art is really not that easy to do, and a wallpaper (covering two walls) made of an inkjet printed copy of the
computer "code" that he had to write for this piece (took him 343 hours!!), including extra notes for the second installation and a full fresh copy of the original cartridge.


But what it didn't say is "why"?....WHY??... Why this obsession with
old game cartridges? And specifically, with the character and accompanying bit-mythology surrounding Super Mario Brother(tm)? (he's
not the only one, and I really mean it)



Here:

The main installation, "Super Mario Movie" (2005), is a 15 minutes piece of "cartridge art" (just to differientiate this from traditional dvd "video" art) that presents a non-interactive
representation of the Mario World, now turned into this hybrid between animation, old silent film (they are intermittent
text captions),
music video (there is loud danceable music all the way through) and
abstract art. All this, to give the collaborators Paper Rad some credit, presented within a
set environment consisting of
a few columns of decorated cubes, and about
6 cubes offered as seats, on which are projected extra videographic "ornements" to enhance the impression that you are fully being enveloped into Marios's world.


Sounds koooooolll, heh? Well that was my impression too, and actually one that I was trepidly expecting while walking toward Soho. I sort of knew what I was going to get and I was not disappointed. I think I watched the thing 3 darn times!


But why do we enjoy Arcangel's work, exactly? What does this enthousiasm tell about us? To contradict what the authors of the work say about it, part of it is simple nostalgia. Cory and his friend may argue that they never stopped playing 8-bits game, and that every computer media is automatically outdated by definition (hence how nostalgia would loose a necessary "referrent"), the major issue here is that there is one little cartoonish guy that most of us "westerners in our 30's" have cherished as a child and lost in contact with since more than a decade. It's so nostalgic I had an urge to dig a version of the game and play it!



Then, the character of Mario was probably art in the first place. Could you look more ridicule, please? Why did they designed that mustache, exactly? Apparently it was the only way to make the "square" nose makes sense...A construction worker, he looks like your average dad turned into some sort of surrealist hero.

I had to look up to learn a bit about the
history of this game, which came to be a landmark for Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in their early days (and ever since). Mario used to run across rolling barrels in the attempt to save a princess in the classic Donkey Kong (go figure), before he became a plumber, with the adjointement of his brother Luigi, when he had to cross a series of ackward sewers leading to an imaginary world filled with turtles, mushrooms, and other strange animals that he had to conquer in order to reach yet another princess guarded in a castle by a gigantic dragon-turtle.

....err....What ?!!


Forget the consumer world an instant, as with Cory's appropriation, pop art is defeated by the banging surrealism of the digital. This art is as autistic and outworldish as the material it originates from (and to which I might add, it is conveniently subordinated). With Cory there is no really secondary reading to what he exploits. Not much revolt either. The work is presented "as is", and you either accept to embark in this hallucigonetic trip or refuse it as a work of art. There's not much of options.


But let's not reduce this art to what it offers visually because that would be missing a very important point. One of its great merit is how it attempts to demystify computer technology, one that keeps tresspassing on common knowledge, as engineers are continually enhancing tools that we use daily without ever being able to fully grasp how they work (except for a few basic
principles).

By presenting us every detail of the process of his creation, Cory seems to insist on demonstrating how feasible the whole thing is, if you allow yourself some patience. I admire the trepidance of artists who
reveal their tricks.


I saw in the first room installation the outline
of a singular battle between man and technology, one that
resulted into man's victory. Somehow the juxtaposition of digital creation with the peripeties of an artist struggling to program some obsolete technology rendered a surprisingly humane aspect to the project. It was such a deliverance to witness someone explaining the secrets of early computer graphic language, since it gave us hints that a control over technology once lost was now regained. Can you imagine a world set against corporative computer societies, with every individual now able to construct their own computer applications?!



Also, and this will sound like a stretch, but, however silly and playful it seems on surface, you can consider Arcangel's work as taking part in a deconstructionnist tradition of formal painting. Nothwithstanding the conceptual approach of revealing the instructions for the work, what are 8-bits cartridge games but a series of
minimal colored squares aligned in movement next to the other? This connection with art history that I've perceived was really enhanced by the important amount of
abstract segments within the film. Can you imagine the influence of constructivism and subsequent minimalism on the craft of 8-bits cartridges? Don't we need to start thinking with "squares", mathematics, and probabilities before being able to
draw a Mario? In a sense Mario is a missing link between conceptual formalism and the figurative. Cory's work seems to dwell on a threshold between exploring the pure visual phenomenon of computer "data graphics" and what they are actually able to transcribe. This work in a way constitutes the compulsive demonstration that everything can indeed be calculated in representation. Don't seek for any other "Da Vinci" code: It's Mario!

It's been said here and there that Cory's "movie" is more akin to mathematics, sculpture, writting, than video art, because the work functions like a ready-made that is being altered, for one, and secondly because the way that images are normally
represented in video games, through a phenomenon of scrolling that would have give a hard time to Vitto Acconci, the concept of framing is also ackwardly altered. Games have their own frames which are virtual, and these don't actually correspond with what is shown on screen. They correspond to codes and their own algorithmical limits. What I'm saying is that what we "perceive" as diegetic in Cory's video is actually "quite there". Computer activity is functioning and thus the screen becomes only a threshold between two worlds functioning differently. By proposing to do a "movie" directly out of an old computer cartridge (and not a representation of this object, such as with the film
"The Matrix"), Cory is assessing the possibilities of a new media language, and how little of it we have explored yet, at least as a language for art. Are images really moving in Cory's art, or is it us that are moving in them?

If we need to agregate links with the history of moving images, we could argue that by being so process-inclined, the work is reminiscent of
early abstract animation by such luminaries as Norman McLaren or even, to look further in the past, the early formalist films of german artists such as Hans
Richter, again coming back to an extremely formalist reading of the work, which share of intrinsic logic is far from being deprived.



But thankfully, all these
analytical details are secondary to what is foremost a very sensual
experience (the room flashes constantly, and it's hard not to tap your feet to the funny kitsch electro rythms), one that is so empowering that you forget to read if the story proposed by the sparse captions actually made any sense.



Speaking of story, at this point I think I will need to wait and see if Cory provides an internet version of this thing (afterall here he is selling the installation, not the video rights) to add a comment. Believe it or not, after 3 times I couldn't really make sense of any plot, as I was mostly looking at the thing from an abstract point of view, with the incongruous Mario
running in every sense, or stopping to (apparently) weep on a cloud. From what I understood, the vignette was originally drawn as a comic strip by Paper Rad, so that Cory transcribed it as codes for the Nintendo cartridge. What story? Hmm....this is less interesting: Apparently Mario just runs everywhere in a chaotic world in order to get to a big rave party. A topic that was probably best rendered by Paper Rad themselves.


Did we really need a story? Maybe afterall that is the weekness of the piece to wish to trigger narrative when so many others (as seen previously) are already gagging on the Mario's theme with perhaps greater punch and effects. Anyway, this art "has a right to snobs", as it is not your average flash web animation. It is constrained to the possibilities that low-rom cartridges can offer. This said, a lot is happening on the screen as the piece is pretty much paced in the ups, so I'm not sure how relevant narrative would be to the work apart from the fact that it is titled as being a "movie", and that it aimed to reference the medium and compared with it. Actually it compared much more with a party!


Reminding myself of a recent article by Timothy Comeau, I was thinking that this work is probably symptomatic of the
Nike generation that Arcangel, at his young age, must be part of. The
"Just Do It" generation of those who know that their 15 minutes are going to be short
and that they must hit it with a bang.

Well "Super Mario Movie" functioned like such a bang.



Forget extraneous elements such as literature or art theory. From the minute you entered the room and the one you left, your eyes and ears were popping out like being in Clockwork Orange, and this is the greatest sucess of this exhibit to be able to captivate so much of attention in a cluster. It's a downright trippy
drug experience !

You come out of it, you have no idea what you saw, but it's like you were spinning in a rotor! I heard Jeffrey Deitch himself call it "the funhouse" when I was visiting. Well that pretty much summarizes it: fun art.


And... trying to find ways to formulate a reproach to all this fun,
I ended up thinking that if life itself is going to suck that much,
than maybe fun is something I want to focus on.



Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com




Cory Arcangel & Paper Rad: "Super Mario Movie"
January 15, 2005 — February 26, 2005
Deitch Gallery
76 Grand Street
Soho, New York
Tues - Sat, 12am - 6pm






Ok, as a BIG bonus, a tiny curatorial of links dedicated to the Mario Brothers world,
mostly those already cited in the article, with a few extras:





MARIO, THE GAME:



First, the original game itself(!). Or rather, a dead link of the work that apparently used to function.


Maybe then...try the very old old game when Mario first appeared?


I don't know how you can play this but it is defined as being the source code(!) itself for Super Mario Bros., so feel free and start hacking.


Some guy provided his version of Super Mario Brothers 2.


You can see the whole game Super Mario Bros. 3 being completed in 11 minutes.


If you get tired of innocent kiddy games, try this version.


The Super Mario Bros. original game can at least be played with a South Park character.





MARIO, THE ART:



A fantastic art project by Myfanwy Ashmore that hacks a Mario cartridge in order to reduce it to a worry-less promenade.


Art-induced portrait of Mario done with office sticky note sheets.


Paul Ter Voorde did this landmark flash animation replicating a famous scene from The Matrix in the Mario mode.


Alexander Leon did this incredible series of "epic" Mario cartoons forming a parody of contemporary fantastic cinema. A must!


I called this "average flash animation" in my article above exactly because it's not average. In fact, if you can cope with the scatologic sequence, it's a really bizarre short called "Mario Twins".


The people at I-Mockery have reviewed some of the most bizarre hackings of the Super Mario Bros. game, which you can all download and try for yourself. Here I've selected 4 of the most artistic. This first one is accompanied by a great essay on the clichés of game hacking which you will find to be thoroughly pertinent with the context of this article:


Another Mario Bros. hack that I've selected in context with this article. You got to try this to experience how flashy it is.


How about a bald version of Mario?


Cute version to play on a Christmas Day.


A dumb version where Mario seeks for weed.


A large collection of spoofs and animations based on the Mario character
(try the "relationships" section for very vulgar sex vignettes, or then my favorites not yet listed above which are "Behind The Mario Game", and the kid shorts "Super Duper Mario""" and "Mario's Jump").





MARIO, THE MOVIE:



The poster for the movie:.


The site about the movie.


You can download here, if you scroll a little, full homemade Z category films about Super Mario.





MARIO, THE TV SHOW:



A site devoted to the most absurd of these Mario TV shows:


An episode guide of every Mario TV shows you can imagine.





MARIO, THE LECTURE:



I adore this socio-philosophical analysis of Mario Bros.


An intriguing essay interpreting Mario as a communist.


A small article on what it means to admire Mario.


An essay about how to win the Mario game:






MARIO, THE MUSIC:



A lot of the Mario music can be recovered here.


Score sheets of the video game's music, slated for piano.


Guitar tablatures for every songs of the Mario games.


This pleasureble article covers the history of video game music, but does mentions the Super Mario games.


I did my own little improv demo, for a possible "ridiculous" Mario Bros crack of mine, up for a week because it's not even edited, processed or anything, really just fooling around yesterday, thinking about Mario.





MARIO, THE FAQ:



The ultimate Mario know-it-all site.


A concise description of the Mario Brothers game and its basic rules.


Another great and elaborate site on the the character and the games.


A very interesting historical chronology of the various shapes and styles of the Mario character.


All the ennemies of Mario catalogued here.


A full-fledged forum for those who wish to discuss about Mario.


The blunt list of all Mario games and thus, cartridges.


Another quick easy-to-print Faqall written in text-only:





MARIO, THE REST:



Apparently this Mario party thing is "The" thing, if you're able to make it function.


Why not try instead that little "breakdancing Mario" application, to which you need to first appose your own music.


Dress your own Mario.


Download and alter images of characters and designs from the Mario World:


A test to know which Mario Character you are the most alike.


The original boxe of the Super Mario Bros. game.


Apparently, if you can succeed downloading it, this video of Mario Bros with Ice Capades is amazing kitsch.





A FEW LINKS ABOUT CORY ARCANGEL:


An excellent interview from Petite Morte, you won't be disappointed!


A interview with a certain Eric Salvaggio letting Cory answers a couple of his own questions.


An interview with John Bruneau for Switch Magazine that provided many cool links for my own comment:


The "website for "Data Diaries", one of the most successful project of Cory Arcangel.

Art Fifa 2005 Coming Up.

Well I got a few reviews coming up (I'm compiling links for the next one), but in the meantime I'll throw a few words about the FIFA (festival of films on art) that is starting tomorrow.


Well, basically, I just browsed the categories rapidly on their website, and here
are films that attracted my attention:


ARCHITECTURE:

- An obligatory documentary on Tadao Ando working on a new project ("The Architect, The Kids, And The Acorns", 2002)

- A film on the bulbous houses of Antti Lovag ("Les Maisons D'Antti Lovag")

- "Countdown For The Parco Della Musica" is about the construction of apparently the largest musical hall yet in Europa by pompous and all-over-the-place Renzo Piano.

- "Living Space" is about Frank Gehry and a few others receiving an heritage to build cancer treatment centres.

- If you're interested in the early construction of american urbanity, try "Tall: The American Skyscraper And Louis Sullivan".

- The best of all is "Heavenly Mud", which is about African architecture.



DESIGN:

- I am not missing the film on Art Nouveau key artist "Alphonse Mucha".

- There's a strange film about Bic stylos ("Le Bic Cristal").

- What would have been Art Deco without the flamboyance of some "Lalique, L'Homme De Verre" glass ?




PAINTING:


- There are a couple films on Quebecois plastician Molinari, including "La Derniere Conversation", which documents his activities in the last years before his recent death (2004).

- There are a few portraits of the usual great surrealists: Dali ("The Dali Dimension", Max Ernst ("My Vagabond Life, My Disquiet"), Roberto Matta ("The Eye Of A Surrealist"), and perhaps a couple others.

- "New York, 1943" is a french film giving a fresh perspective on the explosion of the Ab-Ex scene in New York of the 1940's.

- An hour with Antoni Tapiès ("Tapiès Tea") sounds like a great time.

- Are you intrigued by Lucian Freud ? "Portraits" is interviewing his paint models (often friends) to find out about him.

- If you wish to ponder on canadiana versus modernism, go see "The Pines Of Emily Carr". Or compare it with a film on Caspar David Friedrich.

- Finally but not last, do not miss the documentary on the ever ackward children picturist Henry Darger ("In The Realms Of The Unreal")



Comic:

- 3 documentaries on 3 dark artists of the comic industry: Art Spiegelman and his terrible Maus ("Le Miroir De L'Histoire"), french dark surrealist Fred ("Derrière Le Miroir") and recent scenemaker Chris Ware ("Un Art De La Mémoire").




PHOTOGRAPHY:


- a documentary on American portraitist Richard Avedon sounds like the piece de résistance of this section( "Darkness And Light").

- I would definitely go see "Sam Taylor-Woods" documentary, though I expect it to
be kinda formal.

- The same usual biggies are always here: Helmut Newton, Henrier Cartier-Bressons, Robert Frank.

- "Contact" is still here to present short portrait of more contemporary artists: this time Rineke Dijkstra, Roni Horn and Wolfgang Stillmans. Here hoping you can catch these as opener for longer documentaries of interest.




CONTEMPORARY ART (SCULPTURE, ETC...):


- There is a small animation on Giacometti that sounds pretty well done ("Eternal Gaze").

- She died a bit too prematurely but left a mark that is increasing in recent years: Helen Chadwick got a documentary here blunty titled "The Art Of Helen Chardwick".

- Grahame Weinbren is considered a pioneer of intractive cinema (any retro any place?). The film is titled "Frames", stealing the name of a recent project.

- A "Spot" documentary on light and weather artist Olafur Eliasson is better than nothing (and worth a dozen other documentaries).

- "The Saatchi Phenomenon": name says it all. You decide. I'm definitely going.

- A film on Panaramenko's retro machines sounds promissing, despite the ridiculous title ("La Magie De L'Art" ).

- Land artist Frans Krajcberg is less known to my ears but sounds like a graet alternative to Andy Goldsworthy ("Portrait D"Une Révolte" ).

- If you love Video Art there is an unexpected documentary on the carreer of "The Wilson Sisters".

- The proof that being a contemporary artist can mean being stupid is demonstrated in "Casuistry: The Art Of Killing A Cat".

- There is a whole film on a single installation by Antony Gormley in Norway (Broken Column").

- They are more than a couple documentaries on the big artworld focus of recent which is the China contemporary art scene. They are a few portraits of other asian contemporary artists certainly worth a catch.

- Last but not least, a short 11 min portrait of a Richard Serra Ellipse set in Italy.



THEATRE:

- There's an opportunity to compare Kabuki and Nô Japanese theatre with two documentaries.

- A film about Luigi Nono's piece "Intollerenza" which was an audacious affair.




CINEMA:

- "Cinema Dali" is about the films of this celebrated artist.

- Absolute best apprehended film of the festival: Aleksandre Sokourov presenting a portrait of his mentor, Andrei Tarkovsky. Two very rare cineasts that are as much artists as they are film directors. The film is titled "Élégie De Moscou".

- An intriguing post-mortem "Autobiography" film on François Truffaut.

- What does poetic realism means in 2005? Try revisit Marcel Carné with "La Caméra Vivante".

- Another good film must be the one on Antonioni ("Pictures And Times"). "Cinema in the 60's definitely is hard to beat.

- A rare film: the portrait of Perotinus Magnus, the medieval key composer of early polyphony ("Thy Kiss Of Divine Nature" is the title).



MUSIC (AND DANCE):

- In "Notes Interdites" is covered the whole avant-garde of 20th Century Russian music and how it deal within harsh political context.

- 3 hours of film on Mozart's "Genius".

- A profile on Arvo Pärt, neo-ancestral composer of excellence ("24 Préludes Pour Une Fugue").

- Not exactly music, but: don't miss this presentation of Noémie Lafrance's "Noir" site-situ choreography which was endorsed by the 2004 Whitney Biennial.



ART THEORY AND HISTORY:


- Should The antique "Elgin Marbles" of the British Museum return to Greece, in their original settings?

- A film about the problematic of identity "copyright", an issue I find of importance (contrarely to intellectual property which I find to be materialistic).
Title is "La Rue Zone Interdite".

- Germaine Greer is a theorist claiming that the archetypal representation of beauty is a "Boy" and not the usual perception that it must be a "Girl". She arguments this humoristically through the visit of many old museums.

- The life of collector Hilla Von Rebay and how she built the Guggenheim Museum collection.

- Should contemporary artist care about who owns their work and who shows them?
The issue might seem a little exaggerated but the question still holds in "Collection F. C. Flick"..

- There's a film about Piri Thomas, new york poet, writer and performer, in the Literature section.



Done.

I don't think I'm seeing all this, but they are my pre-selection
for the festival. Hope that helped in any ways.


I'm not going to start a long critique but it's when you look at certain sections, like the music section or the literature, that you realize the programmators are being annoyingly conservative. Like if anyone who likes Chadwick or Olafur Eliasson means that they are listening to Mozart and Beethoven. I'm shocked that money to organize these events pass in the hands of people who are not able to prove how they are passionate about what they do. They are a lot of spheres left uncover. This festival is way too tranquille. It is in great need of some ferocious, interdisciplinary, punch-knock curating. Enough of Michelangelo, will you??
Westmounts grandmas are better starting wearing spikes on their heads.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@homail.com

Trash White: Rudolf Stingel "PC" at Paula Cooper Gallery.

"Culture (science) is the form of religion; Religion is the substance of culture (science)."
Paul Tillich







Following from yesterday's commentary on Gavin Turk, I thought of presenting
this new work by Rudolf Stingel, just seen at gallery Paula Cooper, and which to me constitute another of these "last nails" of conceptual art, like we've seen popping out in recent years: Art that questions its own value, and questions the market and art system in the meantime.

If you are reading such book as "The End Of Art" by Donald Kuspit, you may think this should have been all over since the 60's, but it seems they were a couple "last" proposals that needed to be made, and that hopefully in their dry appeal hide the potential of finally providing some light for change. I've said since a few years already, that the new major tendencies of art are trying desparately to get rid of the conceptual and embrace the decorative, what art yet succeeds to do only at a perfect meeting point between both design and concept.


You could argue that art never truly escaped from design and that is an impossible reality to wish this to happen, but I do believe the new "post"-concept art is more attracted by aesthetic presentation than it ever was when it only insisted on promoting ideas. Or rather, these new ideas attack the
staging of art itself, or what it represents to formulate an aesthetic form.


In this sense, without realizing it, minimalist art and conceptual art had a great influence on design put in the context of art, since the popular idea that art is only presented on its optimus ideal stage when it is presented in pristine white spaces: what has been referred to as the "White Cube", a concept of the exhibition space that thoroughly expanded since the second World War, and that is peculiar for being an affect of design that was influenced by new ways and considerations in the perspectivism of art.


If the minimalists were simply trying to convey ideas that already existed in the design activities of their era: functionalism, simplified architecture, new industrial materials, etc..all affects of a
technological
industrialization that led philosophers to start thinking like complex compartmental machines, resulting in the schools of structuralism and deconstructionism, than minimalism, which was already a meeting point between art and design, while influenced thoroughly by these new movement of thoughts, probably had a strong impact on this general conception that only a space devoid of the most forms, lines and meaning possible can really serve optimally the presentation of an artistic artefact.


Thus, the white gallery, or white cube, became the new "frame" for art.

The new spatial canvases on which anything could be thrown, and be considered art, as the elimination of any extraneous element from "reality" served the new conceptual aptitude very well.



The art, more and more dependant on this new frame, rapidly became no longer the art itself but rather its dialogue with any space that it found itself in. Not surprisingly, theory argues that as soon as it escapes the white cube, the art object starts to dialogue with its environment. But put it back in the "sterilized aesthetic cell", and the white cube functions like a
psychological seal. We automatically address it as a frame able to abstract any object from everyday reality, like if the gallery was a laboratory, a lense enticing the exploration and scrutinization of this same reality. The absolute spatio-temporal canvas, which Walter De Maria and Dia Foundation are so desparately trying to turn into intemporal somewhere in Soho since the late 70's.


Well, in these present tense of digital dialectics, the white cube days are probably over.

Finally we are able to switch it around and observe the gallery space as the work of art itself, questioning how a peculiar object it has become with age (it is still quite young), and what is with all the heavy charge that we have imposed unto it: all tricks of the mind, in the end.



Someone thought of directly attacking the topic.


Rudolf Stingel, here, presents at Paula Cooper a work that should not be mistaken
as being so original as they are a good number of artists that worked with
empty gallery spaces before him, changing them in spots to have a conversation, or replacing art by a paper statement, or a
subtle sound. What Stingel does that sounds strikingly new to my ears, is objectifying a whole precise context of a commercial gallery stuck in an art system, and using both minimalism and concept to actually dismantle the prescience of these schools of ideas within the arts.



Here is the situation:

When you enter Paula Cooper's space, it seems totally empty. You walk around and
find no art. After a couple contours, you finally face a gigantic realistic canvases that reads on the checklist as being the portrait of "Paula Cooper" (2004) (replicating with
definite skill a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, if there was ever one name whose corpus of portraits consisted really in a who's who of art of New York during the 80's).


If you're like me, you are looking around for the second "Untitled" piece, that is listed on the checklist. The curiosity becomes sensible enough that you need to ask for it. I did realize there was a new floor at the gallery, and had a reaction of thinking Paula Cooper simply wanted to flash (something I'd expect from being in Chelsea where every vernissage look more like fashion parade), but I was enlightened to learn that the second piece was the floor itself. Just a serie of pristine white rectangle boards (about 6 per 11 pieces in the main room) covering every surfaces of the gallery's ground.

Nothwithstanding the fact that the Paula Cooper shot actually looks like
coming from a fashion magazine, and you end up with an exaggerated artificial exhibit outlook that seems like the most superficial ever.



"Too good to be true", seems to be the artist's motto, as his intention
from the start was to show how people would normally dirt his flamboyant
floor... They are NO SUCH THING as a perfect white cube!! ah-ha ! What a kick in the ass ! I felt somewhat rejoiced, and "relieved", as I tried my best to imprint the
dirtiest traces possible in a left corner of the room that was still left too untouched for my taste.


Don't you like art that you're able to touch?


I was reminded of the famous walking painting by Yoko Ono, that she so wished Marcel Duchamps would have walked on.


I also thought about a piece by Jochen Gerz, called "Leben" (1974), and which consisted of the words "to live" (or here the french, "vivre" ) spelled many times on a gallery floor with chalk for people to erase them by walking over. Stingel is probably simply doing the opposite by creating his Pollock
out of ordinary living hazards. Afterall, who is this gallery's for? Why does it
exist? We never see any inhabitants when we are shown photographs of works of art,
be it on artnet or in catalogues. By letting life activity being recorded orimprinted in the gallery as the piece itself, somehow Stingel has proposed one of the most naturally (and automatic)
collaborative piece of art ever! I thought that was cute.

But the main image that we keep getting back to is Paula.

Cette chère Paula.



With the painting added, the exhibit is being pushed back to its junction between being unspecifically about reversing what I will term "traditional gallery design" on its head, and the specific context of pinpointing the reality of a commercial gallery confined in the world market of tastes that constitute Chelsea, New York. So indeed, Stingel is both flattering and teasing sarcasm at his gallerist by transforming her space into a temple devoted to her image. Indeed, if art has become
the new religion and the gallery the new church, Stingel is debilitating it all by presenting the powers at be, here the goddess that will decide what will be set in HER space from what won't (it doesn't help that Paula Cooper really looks on the picture like she's a star from
The Bold And The Beautiful, turning all this into pretty humoristic theatre rather than anything really upsetting).


Indeed Stingel exposes a myth to better undermine it (once you met God, I suppose there is not much less to desire).


But in the end I still wonder if it wasn't a bit too much, or rather, if by being this specific he hasn't also undermined the power of his piece a little.

Everybody understands the idea of whiteness, and how it's being in some sort of silly way associated with purity.

Everybody can grasp at the idea of taking a whole gallery and presenting
it as a sculpture, opposing its very constituent to the art market. But....
Who can care about Paula?


Who, apart from a few lucky art aficionados who take the time to travel to Chelsea once in a while, would be able to respond to the iconography of miss Cooper and the reference of her gallery? This is where, with all the best intentions in the world, and the cool trick of one full month of a show in Chelsea that choose to daringly caricature what's happening out there in those
garage slopes (this piece certainly serves as a great mirror to all galleries around), Stingel is facing his own limits.


All this because people are ignorant of one VERY IMPORTANT FACT that quite enhances Stingel's proposal: Paula Cooper is not "n'importe qui", but was one of the major galleries that supported and paralleled the carreers of the Minimalists. The gallery's statement even claims that Sol Lewitt exhibited his first Wall Drawing at her place. She probably also exhibited a few of the walking pieces by Carl Andre. Stingel is probably aware that he stands in the perfect spot to re-evaluate and crticizes a portion of art history, and thus his appropriation of the gallery space becomes charged with the specific, what he probably wanted to underline by adding that Paula Cooper portrait. Was it necessary? Or isn't it that without its presence those who already know about the gallery's background would still be able to connect the work to it? Or is the portrait of Paula not a little too distractive for most spectators who will have no clue about who she is? Bluntly: should the gallery intervention be read as an attempt to create a temple for Paula, or a temple for art? That is where I got a little confused.



As an artist who travels worlwide, I wonder if Stingel's next intention is to appropriate every galleries and their proprietaires as many "different objects", or if he'll be able to transpose his "attacks" on grounds much less specific (he's probably aware of the problematic, since he opted to separate his gallery show in two titled pieces).

Because if you didn't see any attack, I read two:
the long-run, now shorcutted, biting at the art market,
and a more interesting criticism of the affects of conceptualism
on the ways we conceive of the staging of art.


In a sense Stingel's floor is a piece of conceptual design, two words that a while ago would have sound as an
oxymoron, attached together.


Contrarely to a lot of conceptual art, which are proposed as dead ends in themselves, Stingel seems to really be pondering about what is going on next. Attempting to destroy the white cube can only be a sign of desiring to get rid of one big artifice and wishing to start on new grounds.


What will they be ?

Now that conceptual art is truly reaching its end, that ready-mades
and the framing of everything has been debased to quasi psychological ill,
now that we assume, thanks to Stingel's proof, that the white cube is a totally
unneccessary aesthetic fallacy, where exactly are we moving next?



Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com



Rudolf Stingel: "PC"
February 12 - March 12 2005
Paula Cooper Gallery
534 West 21st Street
Chelsea, New York
Tue - Sun, 10am - 6 pm




(Ps: within this month I'll try to review the show of a real hard-edged conceptualist: Lawrence Weiner at

Maria Goodman)

Your 15 Minutes Are Over: Gavin Turk "White Elephant" At Sean Kelly Gallery.

"Wasted space is any space that has art in it."
Andy Warhol







Gavin Turk, the english post-pop art monger, is in New York these days for a very late first solo at Sean Kelly Gallery, entitled "White Elephant".

Remember him ? You may remember his participation in the worldwide famous Sensation exhibit, when he presented his wax replicate of himself as Sid Vicious in a Warholian Elvis pause, called "Pop", a sculpture from 1993 that was already the summary of his career, which revolves around attacking some loose ends of modernism, notably the notion of originality as a criteria of value for art.


In other words, and this is why I admire this artist very much, a lot of his works
function more like "replies" to previous artists's works, or styles, rather than art standing as immediately recognizeable as his.

The major issue at hand is a re-valuation of the object, against its own concept, since that concept lost of its value for being "re-hashed" as it is, under Turk's hands. Or does it? This is the question left to answer: what is the precise value, be it artistic or monetary, of a work of art made by Gavin Turk ? The artist will soon trick you on your own wish to debase his art.


The Sean Kelly exhibit presents a few works from his recent series that already made the press in Europa last year.


The first, I don't know if it has a name ("golden thread"?), but you could call it an april's fool series, are his casts of thrash, where he transforms the most mundane and banal objects into highly desireable icons, mostly made of bronze, that is than painted to make sure that the final product ressembles the original object ("abject") as close as possible. Now that would mean, very close, because I swear some of these "clones" are practically seamless, unless you know that they are Turk sculptures.


Here are presented the already famous "Pile (2004)", which consists in the ultimate pop extremism of reconfiguring a bunch of garbage bags into a slick bronze sculpture, a work that with "Pop" probably constitute the opposite edges of his carreer: identity of a work of art and its intrinsic value.

"Pile" is probably the last nailed attempt at replying to Duchamp's readymade, and certainly an occasion to consider the opinion of those convinced that a great majority of contemporary art is thrash. What is you want ? Your big monument for a park ? Turk lends it to you. What could encompass better every ends of humanity than garbage bags offered in a deluxe format?

Following from "Pile" (an intriguing form for a bronze, for those who wish to read it from an abstract horizon), we get to the next "ready-made", which is "Box" (2002), which really looks like an average small box, and when you come really close to it, it actually seems more like made of ceramic rather than bronze, but whatever, still an item that evokes the usual wrapping of luxury objects, now turn into the luxury itself. Close to it are two blasted beer cans, also made of bronze, and finally, a pillow made in aluminium ("Somewhere Between Sleeping On The Streets And The Silver Clouds" (2005)), which unfortunately distracts from the corpus for sharing too much of a ressemblance with Koons (though the title re-affirms the artist's statement, and apparently nods at a work by Warhol that I'm abashingly ignorant about).

The best of these ready-mades, or rather, secondary to "Pile", was actually hidden from public view, and consisted of the most vain of tiny styrofoam glass ("Drunk And Bitten", 2005), also casted in bronze. I thought that owning it means you can actually drink out of a sculpture: that is pretty genuine !


Basically, the show could have presented a dozen more of those objects,
and it would have formulated a great case about the aura of art itself,
insisting on both the joint and dichotomy between the handmade and the readymade, the replicated and the found, the signed solennel stance of sculpture brought against art's contemporary behavior at recycling objects of poor material value.


But instead, the checklist cuts short into another series
of Turk, presenting two works from an earlier "signature" corpus,
when he focussed on presenting his signature as the work of art itself.
First, simply by writting his name in white paint over a canvas that once
enclosed a print by Andy Warhol , thus authentificating the canvas itself as his forever (though the Warhol print could be inserted anytime beneath its glazed surface), but the best work is the piece of paper directly nailed into the wall, which to me is much more of an update on Ben Vautier than the previous. Called "Metaphysical Nail" (2004), the whole power of the work lies in that urgent, even violent, gesture of the artist at claiming his space on the gallery wall. You may laugh at will that only a signature is offered as art, or you may turn upset, but the form obviously insists on being intimidating. You may rispost, but this artist ain't kidding.


Past a small work delimitating black and white contours ("Positive Negative A4" (2005)) that I didn't understand, and could really well be a replicate or a reply to some minimalist painter (or is it just some sort of ying and yang play on dividing the proportions of a standard page size?), we move to the end room where are presented the huge canvases of the artist's most recent series: "White Elephant"

"Big noizes for nothing" is a phrase that could capitulate what the expression
"white elephant" means, and by thoroughly re-appropriating pop art, the artist seems to aim at attacking it in some peculiar ways.

At first sight, you will wonder if all these canvases depicting Che Guevara ("Pink Che" (2005)), Elvis Presley ("Elvis Blue" (2005)), or Joseph Beuys ("Double Beuys" (2005)) (Beuys? Hmm... already an indication that something is not right..), are not simply from Warhol, or if the artist isn't perfectly appropriating the colored silkscreen style of this giant to explore his own pop idioms.

Well, you're halfway there, but there is a punch. And the more you look at them, the more you'll discover the trick (if like me, you never read the press release prior to watching the exhibit).

These canvases are fake, they are no pop art at all: they represent all the same person, disguised. It's all Gavin Turk! There's even a series (not shown in gallery) of Turk disguised as Warhol ("Fright Wig Purple", 2005)! (I think he left them out because it's the one where it's the most obvious that it's him).

Nothwithstanding the fact that some of these paintings (that "Yellow Diamond Elvis" (2005) ) sparkles almost like there is sandglass stuck in the painting, the room now really looks like the artist's own narcissistic temple, if you can't smoke self-indulgence, but as a relocation for pop art it couldn't be better established. "Who are all these people, anyway, that made up history at my place ?" seems to whine Turk. But by re-using Warhol's palette, the artist seem to want to extirpate contemporary art from all of its fallacies, or if indeed all of Turk's art is based on fallacy , it's one that is more apt at glancing towards an improbable truth than anything that happened in contemporary art since Ben Vautier.



Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com


(PS: Go ahead and peruse Sean Kelly Gallery's site for extra images of the work shown)


Gavin Turk: "White Elephant"
February 3 - March 5 2005
Sean Kelly Gallery
528 West 29th Street
Chelsea, New York
Tuesday - Sunday, 11am - 6 pm

Baby, I Want Your Art

Ok, there is one great article about the Lehmann VS The Project lawsuit right here (thanks to Chris Zeke for the link), that I find the be the Art World's "article du moment" because it deals with so much of the "right concerns" regarding how art is distributed through its market.



I'll comment on a few sentances, written by Christopher Mason, or quoted from the various people he interviewed:


And what dealers really don’t want to see is a work get flipped at auction.
(Christopher Mason)


I am hoping, and I think this is the case, that the big gallerists are giving privilege to museums and art institutions, and people who let pieces from their collections travel from exhibits to exhibits.

In that case I can understand that pieces are provided with "fair prices" to a special category of people, and that auctions must be feared, since than art can be accessed by big melancholists whose only good they'll ever do to art is to bury themselves with their private collections, already kept safe from world view in their sordid attics for an entire human life.



In the end I think this is what artists are seeking: dealers that will help them get their work travel constantly.

I would add that the only last detail that artists should observe, when a dealer shows interest in their work, is how gallerist attenders receive clientele, or how their work is presented at the gallery itself.

95 per cent of the time, it's very fine, but they are a few rare cases where a gallerist seem to think that putting someone in a bad mood at the front desk is the right idea. I think this job should be given to people naturally happy to discuss about the artists on show, or provide information. EVEN when an artist is so big that the work has already been sold since ages. Who cares? I think it's the events in themselves, the exhibits, that are prone to lead to interesting discussions. And that can't be bought, we are simply collecting some good times, here.





“If we started jumping our prices to match the auction market, we’d be faced with a limited group of collectors who’d be willing to buy,” says Boesky. “You never want to [then have to] lower your prices. So it’s better to have work that’s in consistent demand.” (Marianne Boesky)


And I'll add that the people who buy lots of art are probably limited in funds as art generally costs a lot. So if you want art to be in the "good hands", the prices must be reachable to them. Otherwise you end up with a company buying a big piece to flatter their offices, like Julie Mehretu's big Moma painting ending as decor for a bank.


Coming up the Lehmann case, here I'm opposing two sentances to argument
all what I just commented:


Lehmann testified that he was furious when he received a catalogue of paintings from a one-woman show by Mehretu at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “I was flabbergasted,” he said in court, “because I’d asked for a year and a half for a work by Julie Mehretu. And I saw that the Greenberg Rohatyns owned five, and people I’d never heard of owned them.” (Jean-Pierre Lehmann)


Than, later in the article:


Rohatyn and her husband, Nick, own a large, art-filled house on East 94th with a ground-floor gallery called Salon 94,
Rohatyn sees no reason to apologize for her Mehretus. “I showed Julie before she showed with Christian,” she says, referring to a group exhibition she helped organize in 2000. “I won’t sell pictures that I own personally. And I’m a happy lender to exhibitions. To me it makes perfect sense that I have them.” (Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn)


I think that pretty sums it up: if you have a gallery, or focus on lending art to major exhibits, you pass first. And I'm not yet commenting on the court issue itself, and what went wrong or not, but just wondering how in earth does Lehmann expect that he's gonna be first if he's just a private collector: did he send his own Mehretu to the Walker Art Exhibit? Maybe yes, maybe not, this is important info that the article should have provided, but from what I understand he doesn't own any gallery or salon, so I can only support that the Project would want works to be owned by those who will diffuse it.



“A client of mine was so desperate to buy a painting last week, he told me to tell the gallery he was starting a family foundation to build a private museum,”
says Amy Cappellazzo “I asked him if it was true and he said, ‘Of course not. Just tell them that so I can get the goddamned painting.’ (Amy Cappellazzo)


Oops...Well that can only come as a warning. Wait for facts, or ask for photos
of the foundation.


Ok, the case itself:



It seems that Lehmann, perhaps in all good rights (we haven't heard all details, but I'm suspicious of the fact 3 other people were sharing his privileges, and that he didn't jump on his computer and looked at photos of the Mehretu works when that first show happened at the Project....not the move of a real hard fan if you ask me..), won his case,

“unless the parties reach an agreement" (Judge Ira Gammerman)


My opinion:

Lehmann is not helping his case as a private buyer by suing a gallerist.

If I was him I would jump rightly to the agreement, and ask to be the next owner of a big Mehretu. Maybe Mehretu herself could help this case and just finish a couple canvases for once. It's kind of an urgency, Julie ? Your gallery is going bakrupt!



Another mistake from Lehmann, is that he probably should have met the artist since a great while if he was such a fan. Or just send a fan letter. Something dumb with a smiley.

It's good to sound dumb when you like an artist, they don't like it when they feel you are too brilliant for them. Caress and a "hoo, how you're so great" will do.
I'm surprised that Mehretu never asked for a list of her buyers herself,
since judging by the amount of paintings she offer, they are certainly less than 50
of them around the world.


Maybe after all The Project did something wrong? Maybe they asked for too many lenders and tried to please too many people at once, while at the same time trying to serve Mehretu's career the best possible ?

I think everyone is wrong in this affair and should make a case of serving as an example to every other dealers and buyers.

If Lehmann is too busy to attend gallery shows at first sight, than he can just contact me, and whenever I'll be in New York, for just a sleep on his couch, I'll tell him all what I saw during the day, and which button he needs to press.

I really don't think you can afford wasting time when you
have an artist in mind, because apart from some casual cases,
they don't really make art by the tons. Right? (Unless they are photographs.....but...ahem)

Also, keep in mind that they don't even need to, if they art is selling
by the big buck. One wonders what motivates Rosenquist to still paint.

Rich artists who do art only want one thing: GET THE ART SHOWN.

So simply open the tiniest spot in any garage, have it designed
by a reputated architect, publish a few accompanying books (curators
are not expensive), than maybe, you'll be first in line without ever having
to sign contracts about loaning money.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com