White Noise at James Cohan Gallery [Photographs]

Jack Pierson, Silence, 2002. Photographs: 16 Miles [more photographs]

James Cohan's front desk employees deserve a reward for all the cacophony they're sitting through this summer. "Too Many Creeps" by the Bush Tetras is blasting on outdoor speakers, wafting into the gallery as each visitor strolls through the door. Louise Lawler's 1972 audio piece Birdcalls, in which she chirps out the names of famous male artists, plays in the foyer. Inside the galleries, there is plenty of other noise. It's all part of White Noise, a group show that deftly and maniacally unites works - infamous, classic, new, and old - that explore the meeting points between visual and aural experience.

One of Nick Cave's gorgeous, hilarious performance suits stands in the main gallery, alongside a winding accordion of colorful record covers assembled by Jim Lambie. If I had the money and the entrée, these would be two obvious purchases.

Louise Lawler, Bird Call [text of audio recording], 1972.

The text of Lawler's piece is emblazoned on the front wall of the gallery's entrance room if you feel like following along as she squeaks out the artists' names. (You may recognize the piece from the napkins at Dia:Beacon's café.)

Raymond Pettibon, [Four posters], 1981-1982.

Classic posters from Pettibon, who designed Black Flag's four-bar logo.

Jim Lambie, Stakka Record Covers, 1999.


Robert Smithson, Radio Cyclops, 1964.

The great pleasure of White Noise is its quirky generosity. It's rare to find a show in Chelsea that actually seems to want you there. There's a listening station, where you can listen to Rodney Graham Band's collaboration with Japanther, Reena Spaulings White Light / White Heat project, and a new Lydia Lunch record, among other treats. There's a bizarre, relatively early Robert Smithson on display not far Brendan Fowler's memorial to his canceled tour (as BARR) with Deerhunter: something for everyone.

White Noise [view of listening station] at James Cohan Gallery.


Brendan Fowler, CANCELLED Fall 2008 Tour Poster (2 1/2 with Keyboard), 2009.


Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg, 1/2 Stack, 2003-2004.

I almost missed the nondescript wooden box on a pedestal in the main room of the gallery. Some kids were tip-toeing to put their ear next to it, so I wandered over and discovered Robert Morris' Box with the Sound of Its Own Making! (It consists of a tape loop of exactly what its title describes.) The sculpture has been canonized in textbooks as sort of the ur-postminimalist piece, but there it is, sitting right inside James Cohan. John Cage supposedly sat attentively throughout the entire three hour loop when he first encountered it. Even if you can't manage that (and I certainly can't), see it (hear it) before it gets shipping off to a private collection or museum. This is easily one of the best shows of the summer.

Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961.

White Noise
James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street
New York, New York
Through August 12, 2009
[more photographs]

Buying Sehgal's Kiss, Funding Mass MoCA, etc.[Collected]

Yayoi Kusama, Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009. Photo: 16 Miles

“Buying Kiss was a huge ordeal,” Biesenbach reports. The negotiations involved a dozen different people, including lawyers, curators, dealers, conservators, and an “interpreter” for Sehgal.

- Linda Yablonsky, on collecting the ephemeral, in ArtNews. More of this, please.

• Mass MoCA now has cash. For its first ten years, not so much.
• Holland Cotter highlights some a Pictures Generation cover-up noted by CAD.
• In other Met news, a Dutch Vermeer is coming to visit.
• Anaba was up in Hudson, New York. I want to see Pettibon and Okon in Venice Beach.
• Creative Time is bringing contemporary art to Governors Island.
• Jerry Saltz is not starting a blog, and this is why.
• Tracey Emin always looks like she's having fun. Lots of fun.

Video Art 5 - Raymond Pettibon and David Markey, Citizen Tania (1989) [Excerpt]

Before Gondry and Deitch, the original Be Kind Rewind. The full version is 87 minutes.

Quick Art 1

Raymond Pettibon
The Priest
1988
8 1/2 x 11 inches
Ink on paper

Setting aside his early political cartoons for the UCLA school newspaper (he majored in economics), Raymond Pettibon's first major break came from doing concert posters and album covers for his older brother Greg Ginn's band, Black Flag. The Priest comes right from the moment when Pettibon was beginning to make major roads into the high art world with a series of major gallery showings. Within two years his work would provide the cover for Sonic Youth's Goo album, solidifying his ascent.

For his artistic practice, the period was also deeply transformational. While early drawings tend to contain a punch line (however perverse), later drawings become filled with more text and, consequently, ambiguity. Pronouns become linguistic shifters (see Roman Jakobson) in these works, they are (to use Saussure) signifiers with multiple possible signifieds. Here Pettibon accomplishes the a similar feat with only two words: "the priest", and the viewer again becomes responsible for crafting their own interpretation. This is one version.

The scene is a memento mori of the type that flourished in still life in the seventeenth century and remained a common genre of painting into the twentieth century for Cezanne [pictured at left] and Picasso. However, unlike nearly every other example in the field, it sits alone; there are no remnants of worldly life and thus closely mirrors Warhol's skull paintings from the 1970s [pictured below]. This is almost certainly deliberate, as Pettibon repeatedly adopts the motifs of many of the great Pop stars in his own drawings.

The concept of a memento mori comes from the very beginning of Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities ... all is vanity." Every living person will die, he reminds the reader, and worldly pursuits will be rendered meaningless. It's tempting to suggest that the text sits as a label for the skull: this was a priest who also died. This is impossible to disprove. It is also possible that the words may refer to the preacher Ecclesiastes himself, bringing him into the drawing for commentary. His words only a few lines down in the Bible fittingly describe Pettibon's process: "there is no new thing under the sun."

There is nothing left to do but recycle old images, paint the same paintings, it first seems to suggest. That's not a particularly optimistic message. (Of course, Warhol's is perhaps even less so, capturing a skull divorced from any human trace: death is the only reality.) The trick, though, is that Pettibon has actually created something new. Grafting together text and a drawing, he disassembles the history of the memento mori painting, arguing that death may not be entirely final: Ecclesiastes was wrong. Art can cheat it.