Monday, June 01, 2015

Beyond Click Bait Monday



Albert Oehlen, Lämmle live, 2004 Oil on canvas

Good morning art reads:

1. The biggest article in the artworld from last week was Maura Reilly's thorough demonstration that sexism is a live and well in most artworld institutions. A number of female artists have responded directly to the article in their own words, telling horrible tales about the gross inequalities that they have felt personally or have seen demonstrated around them. It is important piece, and a piece that hit especially close to home. I did my own tally of the reviews I have written for magazines over the years and found that of the 51 reviews, only 17 were of women.  My 33% review rate of women, though better than the average gallery or museum rate for exhibiting women, is still not good enough. I promise to do better.

http://www.artnews.com/2015/05/26/taking-the-measure-of-sexism-facts-figures-and-fixes/

2. On June 10th, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York opens a major exhibition of Albert Oehlen. One of today's most enigmatic painters, Oehlen is usually contextualized through his association with Martin Kippenberger in Cologne, Germany in the 1980s. However, Oehlen was always more complicated than this narrative and has evolved consistently over the course of his entire career. Raphael Rubinstein's has written a nice piece for Art in America to this effect, and finds deeper touchstone for Oehlen in Willem de Kooning, and, as a result, finds a more expansive way to frame the artist.

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/the-accidental-abstractionist-/

3. Rock critic Greil Marcus has a monthly column on Barnes and Noble's website called Real Life Rock Top 10 that I recently stumbled across. It is a wonderful experiment, where Marcus sees his own specialization of music necessarily in dialogue with the wider avenues of contemporary culture, whether books, films, or, at times, everyday experiences. The best critics demonstrate how art is not a matter of insider baseball but something that is intrinsic to understanding how to live. Marcus' column is a good example of this criticism.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/stopping-time

Video of the Week:

4. Chloe Piene is currently exhibiting an absolutely chilling video in the last gallery of Susanne Vielmetter's Culver City Gallery. In the work, the artist works from the surprisingly large archive of video recorded by actual soldiers of Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond, footage taken with head-cams. Many of these videos can be found on youtube, an unvarnished view of the war as it is experienced first hand. Piene, however, does not merely show these videos but she uses them for art, careful to navigate a tricky terrain where horrible imagery can slip into desensitization. It is in what Piene withholds where she finds her power as an artist. Unfortunately, I can't show the Piene piece here, but I can direct you to the youtube archive of these videos and then recommend Piene's show:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=iraq+gopro

https://www.vielmetter.com/exhibitions/current/504/view.html

Poem for the Week:

5. I admit I know little about James Merrill, but when I came across his poem, The Broken Home, I realized that I had read the poem many times before, perhaps in all the anthologies that were trotted out before me in school which to someone must have felt like a proper introduction to poetry. Maybe they were right, for the poem did stick around to reemerge this week. When I think about the soldiers above, returning home after their experiences of war as articulated by those horrible go-pro cameras, Merrill's father in the poem gains poignancy. For all intensive purposes, Charles Merrill found success after World War One (He is the Merrill of Merrill, Lynch), yet that success was not enough for a happy life, not enough at all:

http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/smonte10/files/2010/08/Broken-Home1.pdf

One Click Deeper:

6. Stephen Yenser, UCLA professor, has for many years joined with the Hammer Museum's fantastic public programming department to bring Los Angeles outstanding poetry events that are always of high quality and always worth attending. James Merrill will be the subject of a public reading and discussion on Thursday at the Hammer, and, for people that want to go deeper into Merrill, I am sure it will be a profound experience:

http://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2015/06/poetry-james-merrill-life-and-art/