Via Artforum

James Franco’s actual artwork is beside the point, this is clear. Moving forward, what can James Franco’s presence in the art world tell us about the current cultural moment? Franco offers a literal cross over between art and popular culture, a moment Warhol predicted exactly and would probably be immensely enjoying. In our time, the James Deans are not solely the subject; they also get to make the art.

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Tony Feher, Untitled (detail), 2011; via The Pace Gallery.

On view at The Pace Gallery is a playful, if innocuous, show of five new works from New York-based artist Tony Feher. For Next on Line, Feher tethers vinyl tubes of colored water to the walls and ceiling. The tubes meet the ground in languid looping formations that evoke quasi-organic forms. The Pace Gallery self-consciously touts Feher’s works as Post-Minimalist drawings in space, not unlike the works of Eva Hesse or Richard Tuttle. Unfortunately, the effective marketing is poorly supported.

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Amie Siegel, still from Black Moon (2010), Via ICA

The James and Audrey Foster Prize at the ICA, which showcases the work of Boston area artists, always proves its necessity. I’ve seen it three times, three years in a row, and never recognize the names or the work of the artists in the show. And they’re supposedly Boston’s best, proving the city’s cultural vibrancy. One is alerted instead to the fact that the city doesn’t exhibit its own enough to generate familiarity or a sense of active community. Additionally, the show is always pedestrian. It’s easy to say that Boston is conservative, that it doesn’t support or foster productive artistic activity. This is completely true. More interesting though, is that Boston area contemporary art consistently has a very similar aesthetic, one which is generally limp wristed and caught in a vacuum several years behind the interests of the rest of the culturally informed world. This slow speed has its benefits and produces its own artistic parameters. The art time in Boston runs in an alternate plane to the rest of the recognized art world, at times parallel and simply recognizably behind. At other moments however, Boston time is hard to place in established cultural chronology and instead, has its own set of values. There are never completely disgusting, hugely over funded spectacles (which generally make or should make viewers feel guilty-for a multitude of reasons) like Jennifer Rubell’s meat party at the Brooklyn Museum, which the New York Times rightly classifies as a low of 2010. In Boston this would never happen. However it seems better to risk the audacious. Even when a big, famous artist shows (like Mark Bradford), the sense of largeness and drama is sucked out in this city.

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via Wired New York

Yesterday it was announced that the Museum of Modern Art has acquired, and will be displaying, Wojnarowicz’ controversial video Fire in my Belly. The video will be shown alongside works from the Museum’s permanent collection in an ongoing show: Contemporary Art from the Collection.  The news of the acquisition is neither thrilling nor shocking.  Though their recent programming (particularly in photography) has certainly taken a stab at readdressing the relationship between social factors and art-making, MoMA, seems less interested with queer politics than politics in quotes, in this case censorship. Hide/Seek curator Jonathan Katz has been incredibly vocal about the lack of representation of alternative sexualities in major New York museums.  During a discussion at the New York Public Library, the curator spoke of pitching Hide/Seek to every major institution in New York over the course of 10 years, choosing to move on to DC when not one of those museums showed interest.  Was MoMA on that list that declined the opportunity to display Hide/Seek at the beginning of the millennium?

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Architectural rendering of the Broad Art Foundation, via their website.

Yesterday, Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote a rather pessimistic article in The New York Times about Eli Broad’s plans for his new museum, The Broad Art Foundation. The building will be situated mere steps away from Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall which, like Broad’s new building, is not without its architectural flaws. The new Broad museum was designed with Gehry’s building in mind, meant to “absorb” light rather than to reflect it. One only hopes it will be built with art in mind as much as the Concert Hall was built with music in mind–everything from the wood of the auditorium stage to the arrangement of seats was meant to enhance the acoustics of the Disney space. Yet, when it comes to museums, viewer experience is seldom considered with as much rigor or seriousness.

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Strawberry (2002) Via The Wexner

Mark Bradford’s traveling solo show, currently on view at the ICA in Boston, is a large mid career retrospective, dominated by a long winded back story. The exhibition halls were full of older, painterly types in sport clogs with long grey hair peering intently at Bradford’s complex treatment of the canvas, its multitude of surfaces borderline overwhelming. Not to say that his practice is in anyway old-his foundation in abstract expressionist principles is apparent but it’s also clear that Bradford, in many ways, works in and with the contemporary world.  It is arguable that he uses the history of painting itself as a medium, just as much as the collage elements he is most famous for. Which sounds obvious enough, except that the critical interpretation of his work, which hovers over the exhibition like a stage mother, harps on Bradford’s use of urban collage elements in a constant, deafening roar. I am in support of the critical voice being allowed to occupy a substantial place in the experience of viewing art and am usually annoyed by calls for the dampening down of curatorial interpretation. I generally feel that that voice, the one that softly directs your attention throughout an exhibition, is necessary for everyone, regardless of art education.

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Via Rosenbaum’s blog

In her sloppy response to the curators of Hide/Seek, Lee Rosenbaum assumes a position high above either opponent in the fight over the censorship of Fire in my Belly. Using a long string of irrelevant conclusions about how the curators, David Ward and Jonathan Katz, have been handling the censorship of their show, Rosenbaum manages to become a condescending moderator. At best, she doesn’t seem to understand the situation. At worst, she speaks with self-assured authority on what role, exactly, GLBT visibility should play in the debate over our public institutions. She tells Hide/Seek not to ask or tell and just simply to revel in the ability to have the show at all.

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Thoughts on John Baldessari: Pure Beauty

The Overlap Series: Jogger (with Cosmic Event), 2000-1, via The Met.

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Protesters in Washington D.C., photo via The Washington Post.

The National Portrait Gallery’s hasty removal of David Wojnarowicz’s Fire in My Belly (1986-7) from the exhibit Hide/Seek was a dishearteningly soft-spined reaction to the onslaught of negative reactions. A short segment of the 4-minute video showed ants crawling over a bleeding crucifix, part of disjointed montages of violent, sometimes pornographic images which comprise the video as a whole. The segment was criticized as being “Anti-Christian”.

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A still from Fire in my Belly by David Wojnarowicz courtesy of The Washington Post

The dialogue surrounding the egregious censorship of the David Wojnarowicz video “Fire in My Belly” at the National Portrait Gallery appears to be centered around issues of responsibility and, subsequently, blame. Obviously the question of who is responsible for the ultimate removal of the piece is an indication of power; who bows to political and financial pressures and who has the privilege to exert this pressure?  The issues surrounding the removal of “Fire” have shown that, if it is in fact the religious right who determines the way in which our visual culture is archived, presented, and translated, what action is necessary to subvert this paradigm?

continued after the jump

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