The Interviews and Speeches of Dave Hickey

Liz Glynn, Building Rome in a Day [installation view], 2009, at The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, at the New Museum. Photo: 16 Miles.

Writer, curator, and MacArthur Genius Award Winner Dave Hickey has a reissue of his collection of essays The Invisible Dragon out right now, which comes coupled with a new piece entitled "American Beauty," based on this essay.  It veers around from Robert Mapplethorpe to Caravaggio to Shakespeare: a pretty great time, especially when he's angry.  He's equally entertaining when speaking publicly.  Here are five choice examples:

The Future of Las Vegas' Art Scene

April 27, 2009, on KNPR, featuring Libby Lumpkin

"I really thought that Libby and I could contribute something to the culture here, and we have not managed to do that, so I apologize."  

Custodians of Culture: Schoolyard Art: Playing Fair Without the Referee

October 27, 2007, Frieze

"This is a really great moment for anyone who is twenty-five or under.  I would want to go to the beach and sit up all night with some guy playing the trombone, and some rich guy's wife...  My rule is Leo Castelli's rule.  You can't be right all the time, but you can never be wrong... Leo's idea of being wrong was to sell something for too much money."

Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland

September 24, 2007, on KNPR, via Las Vegas Art Museum

"All of this can fall down.  I've seen it fall down before... I think there will ultimately come a divergence between the public art world, which is mostly devoted to being fair, and the private air world, which is mostly devoted to things that are good."

Innovator Series, Speech to the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention

June 1, 2007, Las Vegas

"Good art is really expensive.  Good art we can look at for a long time.  Good art we can look at forever.  Good art we know we will never understand."

On Art and Democracy

June 15, 2006, on KNPR

"If you have something that people recognize as beautiful and new, you have an object that represents desires that have not yet been embodied...  I don't think this should be handed off to the administration of curators and professors.  My job is to help what I like survive and make what I don't like go away.  In other words, my job is to win."

Jacob Kassay at Eleven Rivington [Review]

Jacob Kassay at Eleven Rivington [installation view]. Photo courtesy of Eleven Rivington.

“The point was to make people think you were faking when it was actually real gold,” Chris Burden declares in the latest New Yorker, explaining his decision to hire a security guard to protect a sculpture composed of four gold bars. Nothing surprises like sincerity.

At Eleven Rivington, Jacob Kassay has a handful of seemingly identical paintings hung on the walls; a few more are stacked on the floor, ready for buyers. Ignore that feint toward assembly line aesthetics: these pieces are smarter – more committed – than that.

Kassay builds up the thin layers of silver paint with a fair degree of uniformity, scattering thicker patches and scrawls in a few places. Then he sends them off for a run through a mirror plating process, which creates vaguely reflective surfaces. The primed, unpainted pieces of canvas burn.

This is the sort of show that we’ve been told the recession is supposed to vanquish: big, relatively expensive paintings from recent art school graduates. Kassay is only twenty-four. But let's be clear: you’d have to be that young to tackle Ryman, Stingel, Klein, Warhol, this aggressively and successfully in a single set of monochromes.

The works look like elegantly abused luxury goods.  There's the precious metal color, the sophisticated post-production, and some smoky, sexy burns. If you’re going to risk a few thousand dollars on a piece of art, why not buy something impossibly desirable? Unfortunately, it’s too late to grab one. Another contemporary anomaly: the show was sold out before the opening.

Jacob Kassay
Eleven Rivington
11 Rivington, New York, NY
Through March 29, 2009

The High Modernism of Milton Babbitt and Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp, To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour [detail], 1918 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

"Why refuse to recognize the possibility that contemporary music has reached a stage long since attained by other forms of activity? The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics."   - Milton Babbitt, Who Cares if You Listen?, 1958

"When painting becomes so low that laymen talk about it, it doesn't interest me. Do we dare to talk about mathematics? No! Painting shouldn't become a fashionable thing. And money, money, money comes in and it becomes a Wall Street affair."    - Marcel Duchamp, The New Yorker, 1957

"I don't believe in the sacred mission of the painter. My attitude toward art is that of an atheist toward religion. I would rather be shot, kill myself, or kill somebody else, than paint again. Anyway, I quit long ago, and took up chess.   - Marcel Duchamp, The New Yorker, 1942

Leandro Erlich's Swimming Pool's Stay at P.S.1 Extended!

Leandro Erlich, Swimming Pool, 2004, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

Originally scheduled to close in April, Leandro Erlich's Swimming Pool will be staying at P.S.1 until September 14, 2009, the museum is reporting on its Twitter!  Judging by conversation in the space on a visit in December, it is the ideal place to procure your next Myspace or Facebook photograph.


Leandro Erlich, Swimming Pool, 2004, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

Stop Cheering the 'Art Recession'

Waldemar Januszczak became the latest writer to cheer the apparent setback in the art market, this time in the pages of the London Times.  After arguing that the art world has become "soft, blubbery, arrogant, self-congratulatory and decadent," he declares that economic turmoil is the answer: "British art needs a recession for the same sorts of reasons that those forests in South Africa need the occasional fire: to strengthen their wood, to return to an essence, to get rid of the weeds and to regenerate."  It amounts to a peculiar, lazy analogy that suggests a lack of understanding about the art market.

It's tempting to share his enthusiasm for the weeding that could potentially occur, the dissolution of "All these Johnny-come-latelys from Zurich or Berlin or New York who have ended up here because this is where the hedge-fund money was are as crucial to the national art scene as another branch of Starbucks," as he puts it.  To whom, though, is he actually referring?  At least here in New York, many of the "Johnny-come-latelys" are showing some of the best art right now and selling it at prices within the reach of a lot of working New York professionals, precisely the people that will be hit most by the wider economic downturn.  

I buy the argument that Koons and Hirst collectors are likely to continue to have the money to continue to fuel their acquisitions for a while.  Even if a few of their colleagues lose interest as the market drops, that monied upper-echelon can and will be able to avoid a collapse in the top-valued few dozen artists.  It's the scrappy, young galleries centered around the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn that are in the most danger.  I normally try to keep this a Clement Greenberg-free blog (and not use the term avant-garde), but I find myself almost echoing his point in "Avante-Garde and Kitsch":

"No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold."

That elite may choose not to funnel money to the newest galleries as they rein in their spending.  At the very least, potential collectors from slightly lower-income brackets may not materialize as they have in the past.  As long as the money is flowing, who cares where it comes from or what it supports at that moment?  It's feeding as much good as bad.  Some of both are likely to disappear this year. That shouldn't be a cause for celebration.

[Top 10 of 2008] The Complete List

Here's my Top 10 for 2008.  Each link goes to a post about it.  I'll be doing a round-up of other people's year-end reviews shortly.

10. The Panza Collection, Hirshhorn Museum, New York
9. The Whitney Biennial at the Park Avenue Armory, New York
8. Martin Boyce and Ugo Rondinone, We Burn, We Shiver, SculptureCenter, New York
7. Richard Serra, Thinking on Your Feet, K.W., Berlin
6. Jennifer Steinkamp, Daisy Bell and Left Clavicle, Lehmann Maupin, New York
5. Schweiz über alles at La Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City
4. Wolfgang Tillmans, Lighter,Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
3. Giorgio Morandi at Lucas Schoormans and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
2. Thank You for Coming, 2001-2008, Triple Candie, New York
1. Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns?, Tony Shafrazi, New York

[Top 10 of 2008] #1 - Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns? at Tony Shafrazi

Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns, installation view, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Photo courtesy of Lala.

[Top 10 of 2008] #2 - Triple Candie, Thank You for Coming, 2001-2008

Unauthored, Tourist Information Center, 2006, mural on Triple Candie wall. Photo courtesy of Geog.

The story goes that, pressured by his partners at STT Records to sign Sonic Youth in the mid-1980’s, Joe Carducci vehemently refused, declaring that record collectors shouldn’t be in bands. While California hardcore’s anti-intellectualism certainly played a role in the rejection, his suspicion of the band’s knowing New York pretension is understandable: the most knowledgeable people in the room rarely make the best art.

Transposed into the world of contemporary art, Carducci’s polemic might read: curators shouldn’t be artists. Over the past decade, no group came closer to breaching this maxim than Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett, founders and directors of Harlem alternative art space Triple Candie. Their programming began traditionally and tastefully enough in 2001, showing work by artists like Bruce Nauman, Kiki Smith, Matthew Brannon, and Taylor Davis, but then things began to get weird.

By 2006, Bancroft and Nesbett had largely abandoned standard shows of art for unusual curatorial experiments. Cady Noland Approximately featured recreations of the increasingly trendy artist’s work, David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective was composed of over a hundred photocopies of the artists work (after he purportedly refused to participate in a retrospective), and Lester Hayes: Selected Work 1962-1975 devoted the gallery space to the influential (and fictional) African-Italian post-minimalist.

A few of these ideas made a few people angry, but, for the most part, Triple Candie was simply ignored. The space’s final show, Thank You for Coming, Triple Candie 2001-2008, a compendium containing bits of each show presented in the space’s eight years (a pack of Budweiser from the Noland show, some photocopies of Jacob Lawrence paintings from the retrospective they mounted of his Migration of the Negro) proved definitively that their curious, meandering programming deserved more attention than it received.

Bancroft and Nesbett may have been the two people in New York’s art world most familiar with and interested in engaging its voluminous history, but they never lapsed into the pedantry or solipsism one might have expected from such record collectors. If they were curators that slipped into the role of artists, it was only because there were things that they thought people had to see. At the moment, I can’t think of a better definition of a good artist. Nor can I think of anyone else recently who has so bravely chased that goal.


Unauthored, Tourist Information Center, 2006, mural on Triple Candie wall. Photo courtesy of Geog.

Museo de Reproducciones Fotograficas, 2007 exhibition at Triple Candie. Photo courtesy of Sofia.

Advice for the New Year from Peter Fischli and David Weiss

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, How to Work Better, 1991, silkscreen on paper, 24 x 17 inches.  At Matthew Marks.

Dzama, Bergdoll, Neuberger on 2009 Resolutions

The Wall Street Journal asked a variety of people to share their New Year's resolutions.  Marcel Dzama's: "Read more and plant a garden in my backyard."  He also shares, "I have recently made sketches for a piece in Mexico that will be permanently installed in a botanical garden in Culiacán. It will be a snowman kept alive by solar panels."

MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll, dealer Mary Boone ("To laugh more.") and legendary collector Roy R. Neuberger (going strong 105 years old!) make up the rest of the art world contingent, alongside some other interesting picks.  This will probably be the only time that Chris Brown and Danny Meyer will ever appear in the same article.

Minimal and Conceptual Art in Europe: The Helga and Walther Lauffs Collection at David Zwirner

Gary Kuehn, Neon Object, 1970, cardboard, neon tubes, cable.

[Top 10 of 2008] #5 - Schweiz über alles at La Fundación/Colección Jumex

Entrance to the Colección Jumex.

Colección Jumex is located within the factory of the eponymous juice company, a bunker on the edge of Mexico City, accessible only by taxi. Before sliding open the metal walls blocking the entrance, security guards question you and check your identity.  It's open only via appointment and walled off from the congested streets of the DF.  To put it another way: it would be hard to imagine a white box purer than this.  (In our two-hour stay, we saw only two other visitors.)

Ugo Rondinone, Love Invents Us, 1999, neon, Perspex, transluscent film, aluminum, 310 x 721 x 10 cm.

Above the concrete block walls, a Rondinone sign.  Within the walls of corporate Mexico on top of La Fundación Jumex's storage facility, its admixture of sincerity and irony had never seemed so perfect.


Clever, adorable labels with little icons identify each work.

It was a smart presentation of pleasurable favorites with a needlessly incendiary title. Focusing solely on the Swiss artists in the collection, it presented a simple thesis well: the days of nationalist art are long over, washed away by an entrenched globalism, at least within the art markets of Chelsea, Berlin, and London.


Front: Urs Fischer, Addict, 2006, mixed media.
Back: Ugo Rondinone, Where Do We Go from Here?, 1996, ink on wall, playwood, yellow neon, 4 DVDs, 4 projections, 500 x 1200 x 1000 cm.


Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All, 1997, video installation, dimensions variable.

Any exhibition that features Pipilotti Rist's video of a Dorothy-figure wandering down the street, smashing car windows, and smiling to police officers will instantly earn my affection, but there were other charms as well: little icons identifying the art on display and an installation in the offices upstairs by a Mexican artist named Moris, which required you to climb a ladder and jump a wall, dodging barbed wire.  Containing tabloids filled with stories of gang violence and organized crime, it injected the reality outside the pristine walls into the center of the collection.


Moris, Hermoso paisaje No. 5 (el baldio), 2008, installation.


Free, delicious Jumex beverages are available for all visitors.

The real joy, admittedly, had to do with the exclusivity of the affair, viewing art that only a few are likely to see in an environment that - however ridiculous, elitist, and cloistered - would be hard to improve upon.  The young employees were tinkering happily with a recently-acquired video work; there were free drinks (Jumex-brand, clearly), a gargantuan research library (in which sat a full set of Artforums, their bindings seductively cascading along the shelves), and a seemingly limitless supply of art (attested to by the stacks of burgundy, catalogue binders filling the offices).  

[Top 10 of 2008] #6 - Jennifer Steinkamp: Daisy Bell and Left Clavicle

Jennifer Steinkamp, Daisy Bell, 2008, video projection, dimensions variable.

Jennifer Steinkamp, Daily Bell and Left Clavicle
Lehmann Maupin - 201 Chrystie Street
September 7 - November 2, 2008

The show’s press release offered some heavy theory and oblique references (to early computing and science fiction) to explain Steinkamp’s animated walls of sumptuous, scrolling flowers. Somehow, though, I don’t think anyone who visited Lehmann Maupin’s beautiful new warehouse space on the Lower East Side were so easily distracted from the rarity on display: beautiful video works about color, scale, and perspective, the original cornerstones of art. This was one of the only times that I’ve ever walked into a gallery and felt there was too much to take in, too much to see. It was certainly the first time a single piece had made me feel that way.


Jennifer Steinkamp, The Invisible Man, 2007, video projection, dimensions variable.

[Top 10 of 2008] #8 - Martin Boyce and Ugo Rondinone: We Burn, We Shiver at SculptureCenter

Installation view of We Burn, We Shiver, at SculptureCenter

We Burn, We Shiver, we're told the show is called. There's a replica of a nineteenth century fireplace, singed with smoke from a fire. A hand print is embedded in one wall. A mobile and a web of neon lights hang above, dark homages, perhaps, to Alexander and Flavin. It felt like we'd arrive just after the end of a performance, left only with beautiful, scattered detritus.


Pagan Void (2008) by Ugo Rondinone



twelve sunsets, twenty nine dawns, all in one (2008) by Ugo Rondinone



still.life. (folded cardboard) (2008) by Ugo Rondinone

[Top 10 of 2008] #9 - The Whitney Biennial at the Park Avenue Armory

If this was the year that relational aesthetics formally entered art’s leading institutions and their canon, it was the Biennial at the Park Avenue Armory that did it best. Lucky Dragons (Dan Fishback) won the show, bringing videos, a laptop, and electronic sensors to the floor of the massive chamber and allowing audience members to guide the music by holding hands or wielding rocks. Three other highlights: Visitors slept over (with DJ Olive), got drunk (with Eduardo Sarabia), and underwent psychoanalysis (with Bert Rodriguez).

[Top Ten of 2008] #10 - The Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum

While Eli Broad celebrated the contents of his storage crates at LACMA (85% of which came from Gagosian, by Christopher Knight’s count), Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s collection of clever, idiosyncratic conceptual, video and light works slipped into the Hirshhorn collection.  On Kawara Date Paintings, their boxes, and newspapers, sat down the hall from Doug Wheeler’s effervescent Eindhoven (1969), seminal Nauman videos and a handful of videos by the underrated Douglas Huebler.  The real game changer, though, was a perfect Irwin trinity: a glass column, a disc work, and a dot painting.

00-99=No1-2K-20K (1969-1970) by Hanne Darboven

[Detail of] Untitled (1970-1971) by Robert Irwin


October 24, 1971 (1971) by On Kawara


A Rubber Ball Thrown on the Sea, Cat. No. 146 (1970) by Lawrence Weiner

Between Paintings and Postcards: Ad Reinhardt at the Woodward Gallery

“If you want to know about Andy Warhol,” Andy Warhol once famously advised, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” While his approximate contemporary, Ad Reinhardt, never begged for such a blurring between the formal and the biographical, it’s always been difficult to avoid making such direct analogies. Indeed, the black monochromes he painted throughout the 1960’s (and the rhetoric that often accompanied them), have long-suggested a serious, scholastic figure obsessed with reduction, precision, and sterility.

In the Minds of Me, a show of Reinhardt’s drawings, papers, and letters to his mistress, Olga Sheirr, from 1946 to 1967 at Woodward Gallery thankfully undermines this image, revealing an enamored lover and playful collector underneath the studious geometry of his work. On display in Woodward’s pristine, year-old space on the Lower East Side until December 27, the show was assembled by Sheirr and John Woodward (her neighbor) from her collection of personal papers.

Reinhardt included an essay on pornography by Gore Vidal within one letter to Sheirr, postcards showing works by Matisse in another, we learn.  His words are alternately teasing, clever, and inscrutable. “Time stands still flags / wave / horns blow bands / toot and / play people parade / shout and / traffic stops Olga’s coming / home,” one postcard-koan reads in his inimitable, calligraphic script, the words arranged as if flying out of a flugelhorn embossed on the page.  Alongside these letters, his spare line drawings are curious, almost prehistoric human figures, symbols that could easily be scrawled across papers in the world of The Crying of Lot 49.  

There are postcards written in code, lists of stops on a tour of Europe. One of the most disarming is a two-sentence card: “Strike meeting. Call for instructions.” Sophie Calle and On Kawara would define their careers with material like this in later years. Here, it amounts to a handsome portrait of a man, a woman, and a love affair conducted between cities via post and in secret. If it’s an image no less constructed than that suggested by his paintings, that seems acceptable: it’s at least as alluring.

John Russell, 1919-2008

From the Times obituary:

"When art is made new, we are made new with it.  We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing life has to offer."  

- John Russell

Murakami and Anger

Takashi Murakami, excerpted from his book The Art Entrepreneurship Theory, in an old article on artnet: 

"Why am I constantly angry like a bulldog? ... Anger invariably spills out of me. I don't want to remain the way I am - that discontent drives me much more than my passion for success. ... I don't have a logical explanation for this, but I wonder if 'anger' is what you need to continue expressing yourself."

Hans Haacke, Cultural Production, and Tishman Speyer in Stuyvesant Town

The previous quarter's issue of October addressed the question "In what ways have artists, academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq?" to a series of thinkers.  The variety of answers is pretty remarkable.  Hans Haacke, in one of the more straightforward answers offered in response, discussed the Peace Tower of Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija at the 2006 Whitney Bienniel and some of the work at the Storr-curated 2007 Venice Biennale before concluding:

Cultural production should indeed be a "socially and politically communicative, transgressive, or critical activity." It requires professionalism of the highest level.

Haacke's most recent show was at Paula Cooper at the beginning of this year. It featured some recent work and one of his best older pieces, Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, which looks more terrifyingly prescient each day and lives up to the polemic he wrote for October. 

The New York Times is reporting today that Tishman Speyer has been using a private investigations service and three law firms to find residents in Stuyvesant Town, who are breaking the terms of their rent-stabilized leases, falsely accusing a large percentage of them in the process. In effect, they're reversing the direction of the research that Hans Haacke completed on Manhattan real estate in the 1970's - which famously led him into a showdown with the Guggenheim in 1971 (of which Sol Goldman... is a part).  Tishman Speyer's behavior in Stuyvesant Town is, of course, just one part of a much larger picture, and - I'm more pessimistic than Haacke (and Chomsky, apparently) - it's troubling to survey the lack of any sort of critical resistance within the American (or international) academy or art world on foreign and domestic issues in this election year.

Works cited: Hans Haacke, "[Untitled Response]," October 123 (Winter 2008), p.82
Photo: Paula Cooper Gallery