Monkdogz Artblog

Why a post on Louise Bourgeois whereas my participation in this high-quality blog has been rather transparent recently? Unloading poor Marina’s back off the heavy task of keeping Monkdogz’ blog consistent is not the only obvious reason.

Truth is I very recently watched a brilliant documentary called “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine”, a 1h30 film directed by Amei Wallach and Marion Cajori that was released at the Film Forum in NYC in June 2008.

Louise Bourgeois is one of those artists who are hard to categorize. French Born in 1911, she is raised in a family where her father despise her and her mother is emotionally absent. She feels at a very young age trapped inside emotions of anxiety, fear of abandonment, hatred that will later explain all her works on family, motherhood, sex, femininity among other topics.

What really caught me at first in her art is its extreme organic side. Weirdly enough it is my subconscious that provoked my very first encounter with Louise Bourgeois. We are back in the mid nineties, where twice a week I attend my long awaited session with my shrink in the city of Choisy Le Roi outside of Paris.

As a funny kind of coincidence, Louise was born and raised in Choisy le Roi. As a token of her gratitude for her tough childhood, she gave a few monumental spiral sculptures to the city to hang them on the trees of the beautiful City hall gardens. Since I’m always early I hang out in the park, sitting on a bench wondering what could be the hidden meaning of those weird hive-looking silver spirals swinging above me.

Years go by, my therapy which turned into a long analysis finally comes to an end and just like Louise did 68 years before me, I’m ready to leave Choisy le Roi to go to New York.

It was then only natural that sharing similar experiences, my second encounter with Louise happened in flesh and bones at her home two years ago. The opportunity rose when I heard that she had been entertaining an artists’ salon for almost 15 years. I went twice to the old woman’s lair hoping she would explain the spirals but she didn’t. Indeed, we were told that we were there to entertain her, not the opposite. Everything had been said about her work already and she no longer wanted to talk about it.

I left thinking that she would take her secret deep down into her grave. In the meantime I kept doing some research as I saw her important retrospective at the Pompidou center in 2008 and read some of her books… but the mystery remained unsolved.

This documentary definitely brought the extra enlightenment I needed. The woman who has an extremely acute idea of where she’s going is obsessed with exorcising her anxieties and uses her memories to bring her creations to life. A very opinionated woman, the technique and the skills of the process are of little importance compared to the relief felt when the piece is finally complete.

Life will tell how our paths may cross again in the future Louise, but you are really one kind of a woman!

Click to view the trailer of “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine”

I was recently moved to tears by a beautiful performance of “Brandenburgs” by the Paul Taylor Dance Company to JS Bach’s music. I wondered at that time whether a piece of visual art could move me to tears too. And then Mishy sent me a youtube link to a sand art performance by the very beautiful Kseniya Simonova, 24.  She was the winner of “Ukraine’s Got Talent” with this performance of her hands dancing in sand to create a wonderful visual narrative that brought many in the audience to tears.

The Story:

Simonova begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman’s face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman’s face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in the Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million. It’s hard not to be affected.

Watch Here

I’ve really tried to keep my nose out of the Tiger Woods story, but I have finally succumbed!

I understand from various sources on the internet that 20 consecutive front cover Tiger Woods headlines broke the previous record held by 9/11 headlines which only managed 19. Therefore one would assume that the NY Post would be the font of all things Tiger Woods.

Therefore I cite the NY Post as the source stating that Tiger Woods turned down Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings, from an art dealer who hoped to turn him into a collector, as too expensive although he “loved them”. He obviously didn’t know how expensive “love” could become at that time!

In 2008 he created a “painting” by hitting paint filled golf balls at a canvas for a TV advertisement for Buick and when interviewed he said “you can get away with anything in art can’t you!” He obviously didn’t realize that he was wrong about art and that it didn’t translate into his personal life either.

You cannot underestimate the art world and its impact!

I glanced across 24th street in the early darkness of a cold December Thursday night and saw what I thought were cat’s eyes staring at me from the back wall of the Mike Weiss Gallery. It looked very simple but the biting wind encouraged me to wander in. I’m glad I did.

Maya Gold creates canvas oil paintings of vast elegant minimalist backgrounds with one or two very clear but small focal subjects seen from far above. The result is very intriguing and beguiling. It is very easy to stand in front of her canvas and lose all sense of time and space. I felt as if I could easily float down to the world she had created like an autumn leaf gently gliding down.

Her background colors are dark or muted but show a tremendous degree of painstaking detail. Her focal figures have a hyper-realism edge that makes them pop in 3D. Yet close inspection of the canvas shows a very flat surface. Gold works with great dedication completing each element of a painting, such as the brickwork design, the shadows or a figure in one sitting to ensure evenness.

Gold’s subjects suggest that things may not be as they first appear. You wonder why the girl is trying to stand a beach umbrella in a brick walkway or who is under the umbrellas or why the two canoeists are back to back. There may not be any reason at all, but Gold manages to persuade you to look and think a little harder.

Maya Gold is an Israeli artist that lives and works in Tel Aviv. This is her first solo show in New York. “Wake” continues until January 9th 2010 at Mike Weiss Gallery, 520 West 24th Street, New York.

Jim Denevan’s medium is the earth’s surface. He draws in the sand. However it’s a little different from the doodles that you or I might scratch in the sand on the beach.

Earlier this year in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, Denevan created a drawing that is 9 miles in circumference with a total area of nearly 20million square yards. The previous record is held by Australia’s Ando who created the world largest portrait of the Mundi Man measuring 5million square yards in the Mundi Mundi Plains of New South Wales in Australia. Before that the largest artwork was created by Christo who wrapped 11 islands in Florida in a cloth.

Denevan and three colleagues spent 15 days creating over 1000 circles by dragging a chain link fence with a truck in the dirt as well as using an assortment of rakes and sticks. At some points of the work, the lines are 28 feet wide and 3 feet deep. The photo below gives you some hint as to the size of this work – the arrow points to  dot that is his pick-up truck.

The untitled work is rule based. Starting from a central point, he first created the 9 mile circumference circle, and then within it he drew two more nearly 3 mile circumference circles. After that Denevan says “after that there are no choices in size or placement. They just need to fit…”

The result is outstanding beauty in its simple and clean lines countered with dynamism through its sheer scale and yet ephemeral in its existence.

And in that moment as they finish and maybe even before, nature starts to erase all their hard work. The wind and rain start to fill in the lines and create new lines and shapes of their own as seen by the photo below taken just 5 to 6 weeks later.

And yet a trace of Denevan’s work remains. In 2008 he created another drawing starting at the same central point. The small circles from this work can be faintly seen in this photograph taken in May 2009.

In the mid 1990s, Denevan’s mother a Doctor of Mathematics developed Alzheimer’s. As her mind disintegrated, Denevan escaped to the beaches of California and started to draw in the sand. He started with a 12 foot fish, but moved onto geometric shapes such as circles, triangles, rectangles and spirals. Each completed piece of work would soon be erased by the incoming tides and weather often though after it had been enjoyed and appreciated by other beach goers.

Jim Denevan is a rare breed of person who manages to excel in several different fields. Apart from his life as an artist he is known for his surfing prowess as well as a being the founder and organizer of “Outstanding in the Field” a moveable feast which aims to to re-connect diners to the land and the origins of their food, and to honor the local farmers and food artisans who cultivate it.

Denevan’s immediate plans is to get back to California’s beaches. Apparently the next three months is drawing season when weather conditions are just perfect. He will also be scouting for suitable locations in Europe early in the New Year.

There’s one other project that Denevan is working on……he’d like to persuade NASA to let him use the Mars Rover to draw on the surface of Mars. Now that’s a project that’s out of this world! Go Jim!

 

My thanks to Jim Denevan for the photos.

Jerry Saltz reminded me of Jeff Koon’s “Puppy” the 40-foot West Highland white terrier constructed of stainless steel and 23 tons of soil and covered in more than 70,000 flowers that were kept alive by an internal irrigation system which was installed at the Rockefeller Plaza in New York in the summer of 2000. This certainly was a significant work representing the art, style, sentiment of this decade in America. How much of an impact did it have?

Saltz in his own inimitable style suggests that Koon’s work “has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy. Puppy adds to that: It is a virtual history of art, recalling the mottled surfaces of Delacroix (albeit on ’shrooms), the fantastical fairy-tale beings of Redon, a mutant Frankenstein canine from Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, and the eye-buzzing Ben-Day dots of Roy Lichtenstein. As it emits the swirling amorphousness of Tiepolo and the pathos of Watteau, it is also a magnified, misshapen abstraction of Duchamp’s urinal—a similarly deliberate gesture of antic outlandishness, and one that, of course, was signed “R. Mutt…….Not only was it an instant icon; it is the first piece of art exhibited in the 21st century that was clearly jockeying for pop-culture supremacy. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s ho-hum Gates or Olafur Eliasson’s East River waterfalls would follow, without generating Puppy’s sparks of weird delight……..Puppy was the first of this decade’s public-spectacle art extravaganzas, but it also marked the end of something, and the deepening chasm between sincerity and irony, joy and menace, life and decay. It is the last of a kind, a prelapsarian still point of perfection and innocence in a dissolving landscape of obliviousness.

For the complete article see the New York Magazine.

Popular culture suggests that 2009 is the end of the first decade of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium, although mathematically the end is really 2010 as there wasn’t a year zero at the start. However going with the flow and seeing all the lists of best and worst movies, people, events etc, I started to wonder about what impact people and events in the last 10 years will have had on the art world.

2000 started with the non-event of the Y2K computer scares, but also saw the early steps of the phenomenon of the internet where artist could more easily publish and promote their own work. Charles Schultz died but London saw the birth of the Tate Modern.

2001 saw 9/11 which affected many people around the world, not just in New York and many artists felt the need to express their fears, anger, helplessness as well as their compassion, concern and love in their work.

2002 The most expensive Old Master “The Massacre of the Innocents” by Rubens is sold at auction by Sotheby’s for $76.2 million

2003 Dia Beacon opens.

2004 Saw the birth of Facebook but the Scream and Madonna by Edvard Munch was stolen from the Munch Museum in Norway. Most expensive painting sold at auction Picasso’s Garçon à la pipe.

2005 Saw the birth of Youtube and the controversial publication of cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. Christo and Jeanne-Claude install “The Gates” in New York. Monkdogz Urban Art Inc is incorporated.

2006 The three most expensive paintings ever sold were sold in three separate private sales: No5 1948 by Jackson Pollock, Woman III by Willem de Kooning and Portrait of Adele Blch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt.

2007 The Salander-O’Reilly Gallery closes due to a financial scandal that looks like a precursor of what is about to come in the financial world. Sol Lewitt dies.

2008 The financial crisis hits banks and stock markets around the world. Robert Rauschenberg dies. Damien Hirst sells a complete show “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” at Sotheby’s by auction and breaking the record sales of a one-person auction.

2009 Effects of a world wide recession continue to reverberate.

What do you think will have been the most significant person, artwork or event to impact the art world in this first decade of the 3rd Millennium?

As the holidays become more and more commercially driven sales events, vehicles for political agendas or lobbyists, the original message seems to diminish. Integrity, compassion and beauty seem to become negligible values as opposed to “reality”, shock and scandal. So it was with great surprise that I saw the Tate Britain’s 2009 Christmas tree.

Since 1988 a contemporary artist has been invited each year to create a Christmas tree which is placed in the rotunda lobby of Tate Britain in London. In previous years, the tree has been hung upside down with its roots covered in gold leaf, a garbage dumpster (skip) has been filled with holiday detris including a dead fir tree, torn wrapping paper broken decorations, and trees have been wrapped in various materials. Last year Bob and Roberta Smith built a tree of recycled bits of wood, bicycles and lamps.

This year Tacita Dean a British born artist who now lives and works in Berlin displayed a simple fir tree decorated with real beeswax candles on the branches. In an interview with the Telegraph she said “I was struck when I arrived in Berlin by the simplicity of Christmas there. I felt the Germans had managed to hold on to something of its purity and magic….they have a great tradition of Christmas decorations and are still unafraid to have real candles on their trees.”

Impressively the authorities allowed naked candles to be used despite worries about health and safety after significant precautions were taken. The positive will to make things happen rather than just complaining, denying or blocking things from happening is a very refreshing change. So is the vision to allow simplicity and beauty to shine through.

At Lehmann Maupin gallery on 26th Street in NY, Teresita Fernández’s latest solo show is in it’s last week. Using graphite she has “drawn” sculptures and installations in the gallery.

Walking in, I was drawn to a waterfall of graphite “Drawn Waters” in the center of the main gallery that pours from the ceiling onto the floor with lightness and coolness that is palpable.

On the walls, what looks like swarms of movement are captured for an instant ready to be on the move any time now. The thousands of small gem-like pieces of graphite are attached to the wall and appear to be casting a shadow which is actually hand drawn in painstakingly under each piece.

Fernándezis an American born in Miami but now living and working in Brooklyn, New York. If you’re in the city over the next few days adding a stop to the gallery may be an idea. The exhibition continues until Saturday, December 19th.

��

At Christie’s International in London tonight a Rembrandt was sold for $33million, a record at auction for this artist and a Raphael study sold for $48million, the most at a public sale for any work on paper according to Bloomberg.

Compare this to the Warhol print of ‘200 One Dollar Bills’ which sold for $43.7 a month ago that I wrote about.

And to top this off, secondary market price fluctuations suggest that old master prices are holding or even doing well, while contemporary art has overall dropped in price by about 50% since the height of the boom in 2007.

Supply and demand is what usually drives prices and you assume that spending this sum of money usually requires some due deligence of the item.  How can a print be worth more than an old master painting?  What is the value of money? What is the value of art?