The Selling of France's May of 1968

Remembering May 1968 in France:

Even Fauchon, the expensive gourmet store whose color is hot pink, has lined up with the zeitgeist. The store is selling a metal box containing green tea from China called “le thé Mai 68” and adorned with slogans (including: “poetry is in the streets” and “imagination to power”). Described as “subtly perfumed with exotic fruits, grapefruit, bits of lemon peel and rose petals,” Fauchon calls it “the tea with the perfume of revolution.” Price: about $23.50.

Works Cited: Steven Erlander, "Barricades of May '68 Still Divide the French," The New York Times, April 30, 2008.

Jerry Saltz on 40 Years of Art in New York City

Jerry Saltz, adopting the chronological format of Foster, Buchloh, Bois, and Krauss in Art Since 1900, has published a list of the major events of the last forty years in New York art. (There's also an abridged version in New York.) There won't be many surprises for anyone who's been paying some degree of attention, but he does mention a few pieces that unfortunately don't get talked about much anymore: Walter De Maria's New York Earth Room, Daniel Joseph Martinez's I Can't Ever Imagine Wanting to Be White, and Alan Sonfist's Time Landscape.

While New York's editors isolate the inclusion of a 1986 Warhol self-portrait as a serious 'argument starter', the real controversy would seem to come from the 2004 entry (emphasis added):

Having opened a 292,000-square-foot space in upstate Beacon, N.Y., the year before, Dia, under director Michael Govan ... unforgivably closes down Dia’s West 22nd Street building. Thus, Govan oversaw the loss of the first space in Chelsea -- one of the most important exhibition sites in the world. This is the most lamentable misstep in New York exhibition history.

Even if you can't get endorse that type of hyperbole, there are still enough great moments to make it worth reading. A choice anecdote from Saltz's 1993:

At a dinner given for Anselm Kiefer, after his opening at Marianne Goodman Gallery, raw food is served to the crème-del-a-crème of the art world as they sit at long white tables atop a floor covered with white sand, as actors mimed dance. The decadent dinner marks the last gasp of 1980s hubris. As we entered the dining hall, artist David Salle looked at me and said, "They’re going to kill us all." And then he left.

Proust and the Vulgarity of Photographic Reproduction

'Young Marcel' on his grandmother:

She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of the most beautiful monuments or landscapes. But at the moment of buying them, and even though the thing represented had an aesthetic value, she would find that vulgarity and utility too quickly resumed their places in that mechanical mode of representation, the photograph. She would try to use cunning and, if not to eliminate commercial banality entirely, at least to reduce it, to substitute for the greater part of it more art, to introduce into it in a sense several "layers" of art: instead oh photographs of Chartres Cathedral, the Fountrains of Saint-Cloud, or Mount Vesuvius, she would make inquiries of Swann as to whether some great painter had no depicted them, and preferred to give me photographs of Chartres Cathedral by Corot, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud by Hubert Robert, of Mount Vesuvius by Turner, which made one further degree of art. But if the photographer had been removed from the presentation of the masterpiece or of nature and replaced by a great artist, he still reclaimed his rights to reproduce that very interpretation. Having deferred vulgarity as far as possible, my grandmother would try to move it back still further. She would ask Swann if the work had not been engraved, preferring, whenever possible, old engravings that also had an interest beyond themselves, such as those that represent a masterpiece in a state which we can no longer see it today (like the engraving by Morghen of Leonardo's Last Supper before its deterioration). It must be said that the results of this interpretation of the art of gift giving was not always brilliant. The idea I formed of Venice from a drawing by Titian that is supposed to have the lagoon in the background was certainly far less accurate than the one I would have derived from simple photographs.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, Trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 40-41.

Eduardo Sarabia's Bar Aleman at the Whitney Biennial

Photographs by Lauren K.

With Nicolas Bourriaud's notion of "relational aesthetics" now being embraced by curators at major museums thirteen years after its formulation, it was perhaps inevitable that visitors to the 2008 Whitney Biennial would be greeted with quite a few social events presented as art: among them, an interactive music performance (Lucky Dragons), an artist-curated dinner party (Rita Ackermann & Agathe Snow), a slumber party (DJ Olive), and a series of dance marathons (Agathe Snow, again).


Among these, though, none was probably more warmly received - and rightfully so - than Eduardo Sarabia's drinking establishment Bar Aleman. For a series of three nights Sarbaia served his homemade tequilas (available in three varieties) atop his ceramic and rosewood bar at the Park Avenue Armory. The night I was there (March 14, the final evening), my friends and I were served the delicious, smooth tequila by his friends, while he provided jams from a set of turntables. People were (pleasantly) packed into one of the main floor rooms, dancing as gigantic stuffed moose and oil portraits of long-passed general stared down on us.

There's not necessarily anything radically new here; contemporary artists have, of course, been playing the role of restauranteur and club promoter for some time now. Three examples: Gordon Matta-Clark running the pioneering SoHo establishment Food in the early 70's, Damien Hirst providing the decor and conceptual underpinnings for London's Pharmacy in the late 90's, Rirkrit Tiravanija opening a Thai food stand in New York's 303 Gallery in 1996. Matta-Clark and Hirst were establishing legitimate businesses (even if it's doubtful that Food ever pulled much of a profit), while Tiravanija was aiming for the opening of some sort of utopian framework for interaction within the gallery.


Sarabia's twist on the game is a lot more fun: three nights, some extra money via the Art Production Fund for full liquor licenses, and a massive sound system. It might be an allegory for the post-millennial art market (Though Sarabia claims his pure tequila leaves no hangover! No comment on that.) or a commentary on first-third world relations filtered through a meditation on agave production (as the Whitney's curators would somewhat bizarrely prefer you have it), but at its core it seems like an attempt to subvert the museum's standard operation, if only for a few moments. In place of the institution's bourgeois obsession with conservation, one experiences unrestrained expenditure, a give away (destruction) not unlike the potlatch ritual.

Art costs money, and Sarabia - to everyone's obvious delight - chooses to burn both in the service of a party. In one sense, it's an immense celebration of a change in status (a common occasion for the potlatch): he's made it into the Biennial. But Georges Bataille has noted that the potlatch is not purely celebratory: it also contains an inherent provocation, "... constituted by a considerable gift of riches, offered openly and with the goal of humiliating, defying, and obligating a rival." In other words, Bar Aleman, proffering endless glasses of tequila and blasting dance music, positions itself apart from Tiravanija's (and the Whitney's) purported desire for democratic discourse. In its place, it posits two things better-aligned with the moment: pure revelry and a bold challenge.

Debord Films Available

The sectors of a city are, at a certain level, legible. But the meaning they have had for us, personally, is incommunicable, like the clandestinity of private life, of which we possess nothing but pitiful documents. ... And only a few encounters were like signals emanating from a more intense life, a life that has not really been found.

- Guy Debord, Critique de la séparation (1961); translation from Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 433.

UBUWEB has a brilliant collection of Debord's films available.