Monkdogz Artblog

Artinfo reports:

LOS ANGELES—The Pacific Design Center, a design emporium featuring 130 showrooms, will launch its Design Loves Art initiative tomorrow, allowing art galleries to take over vacant commercial spaces in its sprawling building — sometimes referred to as the “Blue Whale” — for the next six months rent-free.
Some of the galleries participating in the project have permanent locations elsewhere in Los Angeles, while others are using the space as an opportunity to reopen their doors after being forced to close. The only cost to gallery owners is a 10 percent cut of any sale to the Pacific Design Center.
When I hear of stories like this, it restores my faith in people. There are people who have integrity, compassion and just some ordinary common sense.

I’d like to say a very big THANK-YOU! to the Pacific Design Center. You guys rock!

I’ve just finished watching the Lifetime movie of Georgia O’Keeffe, excellently portrayed by Joan Allen with Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz.

O’keeffe was born in 1887 near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago following which she attended the Art Students League in New York. She also joined a drawing class taught by Alon Bement at the University of Georgia.

Her work was first shown to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery by her friend Anita Pollitzer in 1916. Later the same year, he included 10 drawings by O’Keefe in a group show. He followed that by O’Keeffe’s first solo show in 1917.

In 1918 Stieglitz offered O’Keeffe a “residency” in New York, underwriting a year of expenses to allow her to paint. She accepted and turned down a teaching career in Texas. In the following years they would spend the summer and fall at Lake George where the Stieglitz family had a home.

In 1921, Stieglitz had a retrospective of his own photography at The Anderson Galleries in New York. Several nudes of O’Keeffe included in the show caused a media and public furor. Following this in 1923, Stieglitz opened an O’Keeffe show at The Anderson Galleries with 100 pictures. In the years to come Stieglitz mounted at least one solo show for O’Keeffe every year.
In 1924, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were married after his divorce to his first wife was finalized.

In 1927 O’Keeffe had her first museum exhibition which was at the Brooklyn Museum. It was however also the year that a woman named Dorothy Norman came into Stieglitz’s life. They became lovers and he her mentor. The film dwells significantly on the effect of this relationship on O’Keeffe’s emotional, mental and artistic states.

However Stieglitz continued to exhibit and promote O’Keefe making her one of the most important artists of the times. The result of which in 1928 six of her calla lily paintings sold for $25,000 US dollars, which was the largest sum ever paid for a group of paintings by a living American artist.

This relationship eventually led in part to O’Keeffe going to New Mexico in 1929 with her friend Rebecca Strand where they initially stayed with Mabel Dodge Luhan who offered O’Keeffe a studio. This started her life long love and connection with New Mexico. From then on until Stieglitz’s death in 1946, O’Keeffe split her time between New York and New Mexico. She continued to paint, while Stieglitz continued to represent her work, resulting in O’Keeffe’s work being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

After the death of her husband, O’Keeffe spent several years, personally organizing Stieglitz’s work and papers in order to remind and promote the importance of Stieglitz influence on the modern American art world including his role in securing the position of photographing as a medium of fine art.

In her latter years, O’Keeffe continued to paint and draw. In 1950, she agreed to be exclusively represented by Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery. This continued until 1963 when she turned to Doris Bry to act as her agent. That agreement came to an end in 1977. However during that time, her eyesight started to fail. She initially lost her central vision with only peripheral sight left. In 1973 she met sculptor-potter Juan Hamilton who taught her to work with clay. He also encouraged her to continue to paint which she did with assistance until several weeks before she died in 1986 aged 98.

Georgia O’Keeffe had become one of America’s most significant artist and probably the most well known female artist in the world.

I enjoyed the movie. There were several things that stood out for me.

Sex always sells. Stieglitz’s exhibition of O’Keeffe’s nude body was what brought her name to prominence in the first instance. Talent, creativity and integrity are not often enough to propel someone to world wide recognition and acclaim.

Art has to be managed. Press releases, exhibitions, pricing, marketing, sales are all part of the process. Artists need someone to represent them.

The most notable quote was “work only becomes art when it’s bought by a rich person”. I don’t condone the idea, but I fear that too many people believe it to be true.

Creating art is a very solitary profession. However much love there is, it most often has to be completed alone. Whoever manages to do it together is rare and very fortunate.

I would have liked to have met Georgia O’Keeffe.

As we wondered down 26th street in Chelsea, I looked into the window of the Stephen Haller Gallery. A piece of work on a far wall caught my eye; a riot of beautiful colors defined by many variations of circles. As I walked in, I wondered if it was shibori, a Japanese form of tie-dye that not only gives cloth distinctive patterns and colors but can also give three dimensional structure to the cloth.

It turns out that the work of Nobu Fukui whose work this is, is mixed media on canvas over panel. Magazines are layered to create a collage with overlays of circles and are painted, but what gives it the three dimensional texture that I mistook for shibori was hundreds of pearl-like beads that had been glued to the work and then daubed with paint.

The result is a very dynamic kinetic power that looks ready to be unleashed from the canvas. What is also quite intriguing, is that although from afar, it looks like non-objective work, but on closer inspection, the theme of each piece becomes apparent.

The exhibition continues until October 17th 2009. Fukui’s work is also currently on exhibition at the Haggerty Museum at the Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI in “Jump Cut Pop” until October 4th.

After the crowds of last week, Chelsea was very much more subdued tonight. The one exception was Gagosian on 24th Street which was a zoo. Anselm Reyle and Takahashi Murakami’s work just couldn’t be seen for the hoards of humanity milling around. I had to escape.

In sharp contrast, I found serenity and inspiration at Gallerie Lelong on West 26th Street, where Jaume Plensa is exhibiting his sculptures until October 24th. “In the Midst of Dreams” is a skillful and elegant exhibition.

As you walk into the gallery you are faced with a block of alabaster; one of three in the exhibition. As you walk around it to the front, a face cut into the stone starts to emerge. It is a beautifully serene face. The effect of the stone and lighting gives it a holographic effect; somewhat ethereal, that despite being a large solid object it feels as if it could just suddenly vanish into thin air.

The artist’s vision is for a universal and global humankind, where race and nationality are superseded by a common need for spirituality and dreams.

At the back of the gallery are three large polyester resin heads standing over 7 feet tall in the middle of a sea of marble stones. They are lit from within with white neon light which brings them to life. The heads are facing in towards each other so that it is not possible to see the whole face from any one angle, making it necessary to move around the perimeter of the sea of marbles in order to see all sides of the faces and the text which are overlaid on the foreheads and cheeks.

It left me with a feeling of gentle frustration, a feeling of not quite grasping a concept but knowing that understanding was not too far, just a stretch away. I initially sensed my mortality and limitations as a human being, but as I stood there I started to feel hope grow. The hope that wisdom and serenity were but a step or two away; that I only needed to be open to learning and new experiences.

When was the last time that a piece of art made you feel that way?

One of the fun things about openings is coming across your friends and acquaintances while wandering around the city. Catching up and swapping notes on which are the good shows that shouldn’t be missed.

Patrizia Iacino was just such a Monkdogz friend whom we met at Maya Lin’s exhibit at Pace Wildenstein on 22nd Street. Patricia is a jewelry designer originally from Italy but now based in New York. She creates hand crafted jewelry using what most of us would call trash such as milk bottle and beer caps or rubber bands and merges them pearls and precious metals and stones to create unique works of art.

She was modeling her work tonight, including her plastic bottle bottom star earrings, rubber band ring and plastic bottle bracelets. Her skill in creating beauty by recycling trash is a form of beauty in itself.

Who did you meet on the streets this week?

Do not try this at home or where they have security cameras.  

Let me preface this by saying, yes I know this is an art blog but in reality the visual arts world is part of a much larger family that has relatives called theatre, music, dance, and poetry to name a few. What we all share in common is commitment, imagination and communication.

Form, movement, color and sound are foundations to engage and interest.

There are quite a lot of people who have seen this amazing video of Susan Boyle from “Britain’s Got Talent”. When it was first suggested I look at this, I thought it was a goof. and almost made the mistake of not watching it all the way through. After watching the video the first time like many people who have seen her I found myself looking at my computer screen with the same amount of disbelief and awe that I would if alien beings had landed on my front lawn.

It’s a beautiful piece of work. But it’s more than that. It’s the realization that there’s hope and dreams do come true even today.

In a world where we have come to associate success and talent through marketing, beauty and carefully crafted hype. It’s refreshing to realize that talent is an internal thing that is so stand alone powerful in its raw validity that it supersedes the three card Monte game that we have all on some level come to believe is the reality of value and talent.

I think as artists if we can find a little piece of Susan Boyle in ourselves then the possibilities are truly endless.

Take a look….

I was reading about Michael J Fox’s new book “Always Looking Up; The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist”.  It’s about his life with Parkinson’s Disease.  Its been 19 years since his diagnosis and he says he is as vital as he was then.  “A lot of that has to do with attitude” he claims.  “Optimism doesn’t mean you get to skip the bad stuff,” he cautions.  “If you’re truly optimistic or have a capacity to hope, it should allow you to look at what’s bad and really get its measure, and say, What is the extent of this?  It’s the courage to look at something and say, However bad this is, it isn’t bad infinitely.”

It brings to mind one of my idols Chuck Close.  If there was ever a man who has met adversity and surpassed his prior abilities, this is him.  Born in 1940 in Washington, Close gained fame initially as a photorealist/hyperrealist, creating large images and paintings.  He was invited to the Whitney Biennial in 1969, had his first solo show in 1970 at Bykert and was being shown at MOMA by 1973.  He not only graduated from the University of Washington, but also from Yale and won a Fulbright scholarship with which he travelled to Europe.  

On one day in 1988 however in the space of a few hours he became paralyzed from the neck down due to a severe collapse of a spinal artery.  Yet today he is considered one of the most influential people in contemporary art.  Represented by PaceWildenstein in New York and hung in many of the most prominent art museums around the world, Close is defined by his work not by his physical limitations.   A recent quote shows where his ambitions and attitude lie:

“I am going for a level of perfection that is only mine… most of the pleasure is in getting the last little piece perfect.”

It would seem that the self-eluding righteous have decided to assassinate a Banksy mural “The Mild, Mild West“ in Bristol England; attacking it in a crude graffiti-way by spraying lines of red paint on the work, as reported by the BBC.

There is an irony and hypocrisy here. According to Appropriate Media the assault was executed in the name of gentrification.  The thing is, the community loved the mural and banded together to clean and restore it.

Graffiti work in New York is a way of life. Like all art work some of it is amazing and then there’s the work that would be best served left in the spray paint can.

There’s the issue of defacing property that belongs to someone else and with all due respect to business owners they are entitled to determine the look of their own businesses. I am sure that the graffiti artist wouldn’t want the business owner or M.T.A. showing up at their apartment and deciding to change the look of their interior.

Banksy is Banksy he is a very successful artist. Me I happen to like his work for the most part. Then again there’s the mystery and bullshit that accompanies his ghostly identity.  Is he good for the art world?  Possibly.  Is he good for Banksy?  Most definitely.  But the issue here is not the artist, his mysterious ways, or his bank account; it’s about another group of numnuts looking for their 15 minutes of fame.

P.S note to Oli Wells co-director of Coexist who can’t understand why they targeted a Bansky.  Well Oli,  let me clear up the mystery for you. If they defaced a Joe blow mural nobody would really give a shit and no one from the BBC would be chatting with you.  Now that we have cleared that one up, let’s take a look at establishing World Peace shall we Oli?

The lead story on The New York Times Online at the moment is about the results of a survey that was taken last week Americans are apparently more optimistic about the economy and the direction of the country in the 11 weeks since President Obama was inaugurated.  Taking a leaf out of FDR’s book, President Obama’s upbeat yet pragmatic approach may be helping turning the tide.

An example may be the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art which has decided to go ahead with plans to build an extension to double the gallery space and incorporate 60% of the offices which are currently off-site.

The museum is currently showing William Kentridge, a South African born in 1955 of European descent that has lived through apartheid and beyond.  His works are heavily influenced by the socio-political history of his country.  He is particularly known for a very unique form of animation, where he films changes to drawings on one piece of paper, rather than the multiple page filming that is usually used for animation.  He further restricts himself by working mainly in charcoal plus red and blue pastels.  The show which is on until  May 31^st includes sculpture, collage, etching as well as a performance of an opera, a legacy of his original wish to be an actor.