Left: Dealer Amanda Wilkinson with artist Joan Jonas. Right: Artists Mike Kelley and Trulee Hall. (All photos: Amber De Vos/Patrick McMullan)
AS THE GLITTERY, moneyed mass of guests surged toward the open freight elevator Friday night on the fourth floor of X Initiative, it was difficult to escape metaphors involving lemmings and cliffs. Performa’s opening celebration, a made-to-be eaten food installation by Jennifer Rubell (of, yes, those Rubells) called Creation, was all about quantity and consumption: a show of excess in a time of scarcity.
The elevator contained a tremendously stocked “DIY” bar. Guests needed only to pour, after grabbing one of 3600 drinking glasses—from goblets to jugs—and scooping out some ice from a giant heap slowly melting on its white platform and onto the concrete floor. Think Allan Kaprow’s Fluids. Sort of.
“Welcome to flu season,” choreographer Will Rawls quipped, digging into the ice with a big grin. “The only thing missing is a giant vat of Purell.”
True, though there were wet naps on the next floor, along with two thousand pounds of ribs. And shoulder-high rubber gloves on the floor below that, the better to fish cookies from vats of confectioners’ sugar. “For it to be really cool it should have been a big mound of cocaine,” the artist and event designer Avi Adler pointed out. (Where’s Rob Pruitt when you need him?) But chef Mario Batali was in heaven.
Left: Amanda Burden, Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg, MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach, and Michael Stipe. Right: Chef Mario Batali.
“I am profoundly happy,” Batali said, tucking into his ribs at the end of one of five long tables on the middle floor. He was beaming, resplendent in an orange shirt to match his Crocs and ponytail. “Half the people here look like they haven’t had a good meal in a month. That said, they’re getting one tonight.”
There were lots of tall, suspiciously skinny people in black (“high festive” attire, indeed). But designer Kai Kuhne was observed three-plating it on the ribs floor while, nearby, artist Mike Kelley was sneaking off with a mostly full bottle of vodka tucked under one arm and the flimsy excuse of not having a glass.
As designed by Rubell, each multifaceted level of the installation was meant to be participatory and communal; the movable feast, which Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg called “beyond her wildest dreams,” spent an hour on every floor, and also included three harvested apple trees, a ceiling unit dripping honey onto the ribs, and water coolers full of wine. The focused frenzy of the bar was really just a grander interpretation of what takes place at gallery openings all over this great city, but things got more interesting nearby in the one-ton pile of peanuts roasted in the shell when various people took it upon themselves to dive into the mound, from Alan Cumming to Performa board member Illya Szilak, who tried unsuccessfully to entice another woman into a bout of peanut-hurling.
“She didn’t understand the Futurist aesthetic, which was all about food fights,” sighed Szilak’s husband, Chris Vroom, referring to the biennial’s current theme. “This isn’t a food fight, it’s an art event.” (Cindy Sherman, accompanied by beau David Byrne, had another take: “People are a little too dressed up for fighting.”)
Left: Collector Mera Rubell with friend. Right: Actor Penn Badgley.
The food got raves, but as art Creation earned mixed ratings. Some attendees questioned the clarity of Rubell’s vision in a way that recalled how Goldberg’s program of commissioning visual artists to dip into live art—with decidedly mixed results—has drawn skeptical grumbles below the enthusiastic cheers.
Still, Performa always seems to give people something to talk about, and skepticism can be as productive as enthusiasm. But what to make of the most engrossing and disturbing performative encounter of the night, involving collector Mera Rubell and a Jacques Torres chocolate facsimile of Jeff Koons’s blow-up bunny sculpture—the only one of seven that hadn’t been smashed by provided hammers? Claiming her three-year-old granddaughter had asked that this bunny be licked, not beaten, the collector put her tongue to work, cozying up to every camera within view.
“Mera’s really having her moment,” one woman commented wryly.
Jennifer Rubell: “That’s my mother.”
“That’s it, I have to go,” a third observer said, her eyes widening.
Luckily, of course, there was an after party in the offering. Perhaps the rabbit went, too.
— Claudia La Rocco
Left: Jennifer Rubell. Right: The bar.
Left: Delusional Downtown Diva Isabel Halley, artist Kembra Pfahler, and Delusional Downtown Diva Lena Dunham. Right: Artist Rob Pruitt. (Photos: Roger Kisby)
“WHEN I HEARD ABOUT Rob Pruitt Presents: The First Annual Art Awards, I thought it was a joke” was a sentiment I heard several times amid the glamorous crowd sipping champagne last Thursday at the Guggenheim. It felt like a scene in a Woody Allen movie (as does most of my life). Sponsored by Calvin Klein and featuring a bona fide––though teensy––red carpet (where Yvonne Force and Doreen Remen of the Art Production Fund fussed delightedly in front of the cameras), one felt the frisson of history in the making that people of yore must have sensed at the advent of the Golden Globes (a model for the festivities, according to presenter Matthew Higgs). Or social commentary like The Gong Show. I must confess, thanks to Pruitt’s unprecedented breadth of vision, I broke my red-carpet cherry, holding his steady hand while I did my best impression of a deer in headlights (and rued privately that I hadn’t combed out my hair since I scrammed out of my apartment with a wet head. Damn!). But enough about moi. The whole event hit the perfect head-scratchingly “meta” note.
Indeed, it was the cool lunch table of the art world celebrating itself. The well-executed, Academy Awards–like event tried its best to twit its own insiderness—and muddy the waters between players and wannabes—with MCs the Delusional Downtown Divas. Videos featuring these “three art brats trying hard to be effortless” as they attempt to crash “the art scene” were the ceremony’s connective tissue. The trio of “kids who grew up stealing pretzels from Leo Castelli’s kitchen” (quaint!) now “bunk together in Peter Halley’s TriBeCa loft” as they work their family contacts and their “delusory” entitlement to art-world validation as their shtick—a self-reflexive loop significantly enhanced by this swanky gig, no doubt—to the dismay of equally ambitious though less well-connected wannabes everywhere.
Left: Critic Jerry Saltz with Art Production Fund's Yvonne Force Villareal. Right: Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector with artist Maurizio Cattelan. (Photo: Roger Kisby)
Anyway. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Pruitt who could put his name on a shindig like this and manage not to make it about his ego. With his twinkly, human-size penguin tableaux waddling up the ramp behind the podium to playfully echo the dressed-up crowd and his deft casting choices, Pruitt’s first go at founding a tradition felt strikingly inclusive. Even if no women were nominated as Writer of the Year, the ladies were well represented elsewhere: Joan Jonas (in a fierce white bob) received a Lifetime Achievement Award; Mary Heilmann relished her Artist of the Year moment and crowed “I own this place!” like a champ in a Pucci-esque sheath. In keeping with the star-fucker theme (an implicit tribute to Warhol’s superstars), the best intervention into the archive was the Rob Pruitt Award to Cynthia Plaster Caster—the gal who raised groupieness to Art through her oeuvre of plaster-cast famous-rocker penises. She even toted along her Jimi Hendrix “trophy” like a fashion accessory, waving the plaster member overhead as she received her award:
“I’m a show-off and a name-dropper. That’s what groupies are known for. This here is Jimi Hendrix”—waves him overhead to cheers from the classy crowd—“not at full capacity!”
Pruitt suggested this would be a good night to cast him: “My penis has never been bigger.” (More cheers.)
“I wanna thank you, doll, very much,” beamed Cynthia. “I am really excited about adding your large or small penis to my collection. I dedicate this to Frank Zappa—he called celebrity dicks an art form. Stay hard!”
Left: Artist Cynthia Plaster Caster. (Photo: Roger Kisby) Right: Kylie Minogue and James Franco. (Photo: Linda Yablonsky)
The smattering of “real” celebrities like Kylie Minogue, Julianne Moore, and the Twilight guy seemed oddly superfluous. “A key moment to me was Klaus [Biesenbach] getting down on his knee to Kylie,” I overheard. “How proud our little art world was to have a few fairly minor celebrities presenting. James Franco waiting in his car outside, not really wanting to mingle with art-world types before he comes in and almost flubs his three lines. Pretty obvious how absurd [pathetic?] any idea of parity with the big cultural heavyweights like film, TV, and music is . . .”
Upstaging the “pros,” my favorite presenter couple was Kembra Pfahler (of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black)—attired in her birthday suit, pasty blue body paint, a humongous matted black wig, and blacked-out teeth—and her “date,” Jeffrey Deitch, who, as always, looked dapper and pleased as punch. Pfahler was the perfect foil for the entire room. It was hilarious to watch the postapocalyptic apparition table-hopping like a weird nude Muppet.
I mistook New York Times style writer David Colman for Jack Pierson: “Everyone does that.” Colman himself has a disorder where he can’t remember anybody’s name, so he calls them “Steve” or “Wendy.” “The ‘Steves’ never mind,” he marveled in a natty burnt-sienna suit perfectly set off by a teal velvet bow tie. Artforum’s Knight Landesman, too, sported deep-persimmon-colored haberdashery. While I’m usually bored by men’s fashion, yet another inspired look was a chap from the Met with flowing white hair, fabulously turned out in plum velvet. When I wasn’t checking everyone out or reading along with the teleprompter that scripted every bit of patter, I would gaze up in wonder at the Modern Icon that spiraled overhead and seemed to entomb us in its belly like tables full of Jonahs, schmoozing away in this Frank Lloyd Wright–designed whale of Art World Prestige. “The museum belongs to everyone and no one,” noted Kaspar König (in the tribute video for his Lifetime Achievement Award).
Left: Curator Cay Sophie Rabinowitz and Museum Ludwig director Kasper König (left) with dealer Jessie Washburne-Harris. (Photo: Ruth Root) Right: Francisco Costa, artist Ryan Trecartin, and Julianne Moore. (Photo: Roger Kisby).
As Calvin Klein Collection New Artist of the Year, Ryan Trecartin bounded up to “thank my parents and Elizabeth Dee. It’s more than just a dealer,” he gushed. “I mean, I love it!” Eyes were rolling. The person next to me received a text: “Tell me Ryan Trecartin did not just win!” “The art world is so fragmented,” mused an artist at my table. “If they’re making this like the Oscars, it’s weird to make the art world seem centralized when it’s not. . . . And the awards are based on [just] this year . . .”
Someone else gave me the whole megillah about how controversial some people found the event. People “voting against their friends—with their consent—to spare them the embarrassment of receiving such an award . . .”
“What happened to the art world?” asked another observer. “If they can’t simultaneously mock and partake of a cultural phenomenon [like awards shows]—what’s the F–ing point? The question to ask is, What took so long?”
— Rhonda Lieberman
Left: Cindy Sherman and David Byrne. Right: John Waters. (All photos: Patrick McMullan)
THERE WAS A CARNIVAL FEEL to the New Museum’s Tuesday fete for the crowd-pleasing “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty.” Art-hungry hordes lined up for their dose of the uncanny, whether taking turns being shocked by Noisette, a lingual jack-in-the-box that sprung from a gallery wall, or queuing for entry to Service a la francaise, Fischer’s hall of mirrors silk-screened with images of consumer detritus rendered luminous by studio strobes.
Despite the dazzle, the three-floor show, which its curator, Massimiliano Gioni, was calling a “tour de force of perception,” also sustained deeper questions into the nature of representation. Fischer’s orthogonally reconstructed consumables played on techniques of projection and the cross section, his objects subjected to surgical incisions before being reproduced on his polished steel monoliths in five high-resolution views. A pillar of Froot Loops had been sheared across two planes, a pear cut across one side, even a cowboy boot was truncated––castrated, maybe, in a nod to the impotence of the late Bush administration. Perhaps due in part to restrictions on access (only forty guests at a time), the mirrored prisms were by far the favored work of the evening. Director Lisa Phillips staked out her place amid the stelae, beaming like a proud mother and chatting up the wide-eyed young artists (and Cindy Sherman and Chuck Close) wandering the works. “Does it make you jealous?” she teased, appraising the show.
Left: Dealer Jeffrey Deitch (left). Right: Artist Tom Sachs and New Museum director Lisa Phillips.
It seemed like half the guests had had a hand in the fabrication of the works on view (well, at least those not made in China). Fischer’s assistant, the artist Darren Bader, explained how the wallpaper that covered every surface on the third floor, including a drop ceiling with false beams constructed for the exhibition, was, in fact, a photographic copy of the space after the deinstallation of the prior show. (The almost imperceptible nail studs evidenced where David Goldblatt photographs had hung only a few weeks before.) The whole trompe l’oeil possessed a decidedly mauve cast, which, setting off what looked like a lavender soft sculpture of a piano (actually aluminum and painted by a mercenary from Jeff Koons’s studio), gave something of the effect of a chromatic afterimage.
Within the purple haze, a simultaneously quotidian and surreal sculpture of a (real) croissant, on which a mounted butterfly appears to alight, hung like a miniature moon. “Urs treats reality as if it could be Photoshopped,” Gioni asserted when I caught up with him outside the seventh-floor Sky Room. “Everything is in focus all at once.” Gioni and Fischer had put together the show in under a year, and several major decisions weren’t made until just before opening night. “Mass and Urs are like a divorced couple,” Rhizome and the New Museum’s Lauren Cornell joked in reference to the sometimes fiery relationship between the curator and the artist, both thirty-six.
Left: Artist Leo Villareal. Right: Dealer Gavin Brown and artist Hope Atherton.
According to what has by now become his custom, Fischer didn’t make an appearance at his opening, leaving the works (and the museum staff) to speak in his stead—and giving over the limelight to celebrity guests like John Waters and David Byrne. Sometime past midnight, long after I had departed the museum for the Interview-sponsored afterparty at Civetta in Nolita, I finally spotted Fischer at the bar upstairs; most everyone else, taking the lead of his dealer Gavin Brown and artist Hope Atherton, was dancing up a storm in the basement lounge. “My exhibition is still there, while everyone is asleep,” he marveled over a vodka tonic. Apparently with an eye on the show’s legacy he added, enigmatically, “In twenty or fifty years it will still be there like it is tonight.” Or perhaps he was simply stating a material fact: that he had created a show of relatively traditional sculptures that—unlike his houses of bread or gallery excavations––might indeed stick around for years to come. Except the croissant, that is.
— Michael Wang
Left: Mel Chin’s performers rehearsing for his presentation. Right: Artist Edgar Arceneaux. (All photos: Sam Horine/Creative Time)
THIS YEAR I’ve already sat through two art-related pecha kuchas—that’s the new ADD-friendly presentation format from Japan, in which people have a limited time (usually three to five minutes) to rattle through their life’s work. At the end of each speaker’s allocated slot, the next person’s PowerPoint begins, and the previous presenter has to quit the stage pronto. Pecha kucha is like a live version of channel zapping or Internet surfing—not long enough to get really bored, but also not long enough to get really interested. It’s the perfect format for the info-ravenous who crave high quantities of global-culture nuggets but don’t want to travel far from home or engage in personal dialogue.
An epic variant on the pecha kucha model took place last Saturday at the New York Public Library, in the form of Creative Time’s summit “Revolutions in Public Practice.” Each artist or collective had a relatively generous seven (!) minutes to strut their stuff; there would be no questions from the public; when the speaker’s time was up, his/her microphone would be turned down and a live musician would begin to play. This sweetly brutal device was lifted directly from the Academy Awards, but instead of a swirling orchestra, solo instrumentalists were deployed––a perky flute, a guitar, a double bass, a trumpet, and (most entertainingly) a banjo. Those speakers who finished ahead of time and avoided being drowned out by the chipper banjo kept their dignity intact; the rest were brought to a humiliating halt.
So much for the form, what about the content? Curator Nato Thompson confessed in the program’s introduction that he couldn’t really define the term “public practice,” as it encompasses everything from participatory performance to allotment squatting to socially conscious photography. Ten hours and forty presentations later and we had an amazingly comprehensive overview of the good and the bad of the genre. The ultimate artistic judgment, though, had been made the previous evening, when the Yes Men were awarded the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change. This presented something of an ontological conundrum: The Yes Men adamantly refuse to be called artists (they prefer “activists”). And yet most of their funding comes from art institutions, and their biggest fans seem to be in the art world. Rather than denigrating the Yes Men for lack of loyalty to their paymaster, it seems more productive to view their strategic disavowal of “art” as an indication of the paltry (or, better, ornamental) status of art in US culture. As any walk around Chelsea will affirm, art made in this country is more often a career choice than an existential decision.
Left: Artist Harrell Fletcher. Right: Curator Okwui Enwezor.
This, presumably, is why Thompson calls the alternative to this commercial game a “revolution” in public practice. To be honest, the revolution’s not so new: There was a striking similarity between many of the presentations and 1970s gestures of institutional escape, as well as to early-’90s “new genre” public art (the term coined by artist Suzanne Lacy, who also spoke at the summit). The big difference between then and now was the staggeringly dry and soulless language deployed by many of today’s artists who took to the podium. At countless points in the day, my eyes glazed over to the sound of earnest monologues announcing, “My practice is about creating platforms for a critical interface with overlooked spaces, networking with local communities to provide self-organized resources and coproducing social relations . . .” Aaagh!
This aside, there were some highlights. The women were particularly strong: a moving keynote by Sharon Hayes, an articulate overview of the collective Multiplicity by Francisca Insulza, a polemical presentation by WHW (What, How and for Whom), tough and concise statements by Tania Bruguera, and a rousing activist address by Laurie Jo Reynolds. The guys were hit or miss. The saintly rage of Alfredo Jaar (on Rwanda) was parried by the consummate opacity of Liam Gillick (on Volvo), while two of the most misguided art projects I have ever seen––the work of Vik Muniz and Harrell Fletcher, respectively––generated ripples of embarrassment through the audience for their reality-TV sentimentality. (Fletcher really took the biscuit: On finding out that he’d had a fifteen-hundred-dollar rug delivered twice to his home, he decided to sell the second one to an art gallery and get a grant to find the factory in India where the rug had been produced, at which point he gave this money back to the chap who said he’d made it. Tears of joy!)
As the day wore on, nuance was replaced by rally-style fervor. At the end of a particularly right-on presentation, the already-converted were keen to cheer and whoop. As such, the stick was definitely bent toward entertainment and affirmation rather than analysis and dissensus. Even the day’s most jarring juxtaposition, Gillick and the collective Temporary Services (amusingly grouped together under the evocative title “Ambiguity Is My Political Weapon”), was passed over without comment, seamlessly smoothed over with a bit of merry guitar picking. The only memorable moment of confrontation was in Lacy’s video clip of young black teenagers in a “facilitated debate” (i.e., full-on row) with white policemen in Los Angeles.
Left: A view of the "Conversation Room." Right: Writer David Levi-Strauss.
Perhaps some friction was happening upstairs in the “Conversation Room”––a large paneled chamber with free fruit and cookies––where speakers were expected to hang for an hour after speaking on stage. This innovative alternative to the Q&A format had the advantage of keeping the main hall fast-paced, but who in the student-heavy audience wanted to miss out on stars like Okwui Enwezor or Thomas Hirschhorn? Word had it that artist Gregory Sholette organized an impromptu panel discussion upstairs following his appearance onstage, but otherwise the predominant tone was of collective agreement and political consensus. In this respect, it was not unlike Thompson’s last major effort in this vein, “Democracy in America: The National Campaign,” the exhibition component of which was held last fall in a similarly majestic space, the Park Avenue Armory.
At its best, the “Revolutions” summit offered an immensely valuable overview of a wide range of engaged practices otherwise lacking visibility in New York, while the discursive format provided an appropriate alternative to the exhibition as a means of presenting this often visually evasive work. Socially, it was dynamic—and in this respect, it had much in common with the energy of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s marathons. On the other hand, the summit was only an overview and did nothing to problematize “public practice” as a direction in contemporary art. It assumed (along with many of the positions presented) that art as a discipline can and should be marshaled toward social justice. I would have liked to see more pondering of the specifically artistic competences that can be deployed toward these ends. The range of positions wheeled onstage clearly indicated that there are artistic innovators in this field who stand leagues ahead of those who laboriously rework worthy clichés. Sorting out the former from the merely well intended takes more than a pecha kucha, but at least this was a start.
— Claire Bishop
Left: Collectors Dakis and Lietta Joannou with artist DeAnna Maganias. Right: MAXXI director Anna Mattiroli and collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. (All photos: Cathryn Drake)
IT WAS RAINING CATS AND DOGS when I landed in Turin last Wednesday for “Investigations of a Dog,” an exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Inspired by Kafka’s eponymous short story, the show is the inaugural collaboration of FACE, a newly formed group of five European art nonprofits that also includes Athens’s DESTE Foundation; the Ellipse Foundation of Cascais, Portugal; Paris’s La Maison Rouge; and Magasin 3 of Stockholm.
Turin has a homey, sepia-toned feeling, especially when seen through the lens of a bottle of Barbera d’Alba, courtesy of an overworked hotel clerk (who was slammed with throngs of Israeli football fans). The exhibition’s premiere, held a mere fortnight before Artissima and coinciding with the opening night of FIAC in Paris, was missing all its artists save one, DeAnna Maganias, who flew in from Athens. But the nippy weather and unfortunate timing did not deter a rapt audience from filling up the house for an opening conference anchored by the host foundation’s artistic director, Francesco Bonami.
Left: Antoine de Galbert and Paula Aisemberg of Maison Rouge and curator Irene Calderoni. Right: Curators Alexandre Melo and Eleni Michailidi.
The exhibition turned out to be a wide-ranging essay on identification versus isolation, with a surprisingly spare selection of about forty works drawn from the various collections. Mark Dion’s grotesque mole, hanging limply at the entrance with a Kafka-scaled beetle peeking over its shoulder, set a tone of sympathetic/pathetic paranoia. A corresponding effigy, by (and of) Maurizio Cattelan, hung at the start of a long corridor near a similarly cartoonish Animal, by Fischli & Weiss. The most evocative works reflect the paradox of alienation within the familiar or the distortion of the prolonged stare: Maganias’s upside-down The View from Bed brings to mind the surreal bedchamber in “The Metamorphosis”; Gregor Schneider’s ink-black Das Grosse Wichsen invokes the fear of the dark that transforms personal spaces into chambers of horror. Nearby, a series of painterly photographs by Esko Mannikko portrays the meager lives of bachelors in northern Finland with a gorgeousness that only underlines their sense of isolation.
The dinner, at Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s home, was an intimate gathering of heads of some of the most interesting art institutions in Europe; it had the air of an affectionately teasing dysfunctional family. Bonami stood to deliver a toast: “Because we have so many people from uncivilized countries, I will speak English.” The rain pounding the roof of the garden tent nearly drowned him out. “I thought this whole idea was preposterous. Patrizia is a visionary, but she doesn’t know it yet because she is obsessed with table settings, and she always gets it wrong.”
Left: David Neuman of Magasin 3 and DeAnna Maganias. Right: Castello di Rivoli curator Marianna Veceillio and Gail Cochrane of the Spinola Banna Foundation.
Our hostess and roast subject looked smart with one of her vintage Trifari brooches—this time a large Lucite spider—pinned to her pert silver jacket. “When I first mentioned the idea to Dakis, he said it would be impossible,” she said. To that, the DESTE Foundation’s Eleni Michailidi responded, “Only a woman could have done it. Men are not interested in working together; they only care about their egos.” We sat at a corner table with the three fabulous female curators of the other partner foundations. “It was surprisingly easy to work as a team,” said Magasin 3 curator Tessa Praun, who reportedly came up with the exhibition’s title. “But next time,” said La Maison Rouge’s Antoine de Galbert, “we should have a more focused theme.”
Curator Jan Debbaut praised Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s curatorial residency program (for which he had served on the jury the day before), as well as the benefits of freelance curating. “It beats sitting through eight meetings a day at the Tate,” he said. Patrizia elaborated: “There are so many artist residencies in the world, and what good do they do? It seems more effective to bring young curators to meet the Italian artists rather than the other way around.”
After dinner, guests descended like locusts on a table arrayed with twenty-six different homemade desserts, “curated” by Patrizia’s mother. Bonami went at them with particular gusto. “He loves them,” Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s Helen Weaver explained. Under the watchful blank black gazes of Allan McCollum’s 480 Plaster Surrogates, Magasin 3’s David Neuman noted, “It’s not easy for a single collection to produce significant shows, but now we can draw on the resources of all our collections.” He paused, then added, “The museums are watching us with interest—and feeling a bit threatened.” Not to be paranoid or anything.
— Cathryn Drake
Left: A student with Maurizio Cattelan's piece. Right: Curator Francesco Bonami, dealer Giò Marconi, and curator Jan Debbaut.
Left: Centre Pompidou curator Bernard Blistène with Pompidou president Alain Saban. Right: Dealer Chantal Crousel. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky)
I HATE TO SOUND like an ugly American who can’t go abroad without wishing it were more like home, but the French really are a myopic lot. First of all, they want everyone to speak French. Then their art institutions produce exhibition brochures only in the native language. Of course, this makes it just like New York, but who wants everyone to be like us? Not me.
Yet it was the lingua franca of contemporary art that created an atmosphere of puzzlement at the Jeu de Paume last Monday night, when Parisians in furs and feathers drifted through the opening of three wildly disparate shows devoted to three wildly different mythologizers: Federico Fellini, Francesco Vezzoli, and Tris Vonna-Michell.
The Fellini show was the main event in this odd trio, filled out by the filmmaker’s caricatures of his friends with photos, movie posters, and films. Vonna-Michell, given a pocket space in the basement beneath a staircase—location, location, location—supplied a voice-over to an impossibly prolix video (in murmured English) about Henri Chopin, while Vezzoli contributed a cultural critique on the branding of art in the form of a fake commercial for an imaginary exhibition based on La dolce vita. “They don’t get it,” Vezzoli said of the befuddled French, who tend to take everything seriously, particularly parodies. They certainly were absorbed by the video Vezzoli made of the star-struck staged reading of a Pirandello play he directed at the Guggenheim two years ago, which at the time had been roundly greeted by yawns. The French were glued to their seats.
Left: Artist Francesco Vezzoli. Right: Dealers Philomene Magers and Sean Kelly.
Chantal Crousel has a theory. “Art fairs reflect their host cities,” said the Parisian dealer, when I stopped by her thoughtfully curated booth in the Grand Palais during Wednesday afternoon’s VIP promenade through the thirty-sixth Foire International d’Art Contemporain (FIAC). Crousel has been participating in the fair, on and off, since 1982. “FIAC offers more to chew on than Frieze,” she said, moments before Amanda Sharp, a director of the London fair, swept through on a two-hour stop in Paris.
Crousel was referring partly to “The Modern Project,” a new addition to FIAC that sent its organizers into promotional overdrive and spurred visiting collectors into dreams of grandeur (easy enough to come by anyway in a city of such operatic grandeur as Paris). Sharing a specially designed booth at the back of the center aisle were ten galleries showing museum-caliber paintings by Picasso, Léger, Mondrian, and the like, with price tags of up to forty million euros.
Not all the twenty-four works offered were for sale, but the experience of seeing Picasso’s Femme ecrivant (Marie-Therese) or Francis Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer Talking or Warhol’s Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice) in the context of a fair created involuntary frissons, even if they did come from unsurprising sources like Richard Gray, L&M Arts, and Gagosian, respectively. Malingue, the Paris gallery that had orchestrated the project, brought an especially attractive Surrealist painting from 1938 by Yves Tanguy, and PaceWildenstein had a knockout Roberto Matta, Splash, dated 1960–70.
Left: A view of FIAC. Right: Louvre director Henri Loyrette.
From there, it seemed the fair could only go downhill, but French dealer Almine Rech’s booth was jam-packed—with art by Don Brown, Mark Handforth, Anselm Reyle, and more, as well as plenty of collectors, most of whom appeared to be French. Equally busy was Emmanuel Perrotin, who had commissioned artist Daniel Arsham to design his booth. It suggested an igloo whose doors had been punched out with dynamite, but maybe my impression stemmed from the pronounced chill in the unheated Grand Palais, which may have sent shivers up everyone’s spine but did not slow the shopping.
The artist most prominently featured was George Condo, apparently a heartthrob in Paris. His paintings turned up in three different booths: Sprüth Magers, Simon Lee (showing only Condo works on paper), and Jérôme de Noirmont, Condo’s Paris dealer. “I’m not worried,” de Noirmont said with a shrug. “We’re used to that.” I heard the action was just as swift at the Cour Carrée, the part of the fair reserved for younger galleries at the Louvre, but because a snooty French guard sniffed at my press badge when I arrived for a preview and blocked my way, I couldn’t verify.
Instead I headed for the Pompidou, where its director of cultural development, the curator Bernard Blistène, was leading a tour of installations by Carsten Höller, Manfred Pernice, and others inaugurating the museum’s first annual New Festival. The opening of this five-week conflagration of art, performance, video, and theater attracted a crowd at least one and maybe two generations younger than that at FIAC, and were they ever an eager bunch. Some sat, completely rapt, in a space with a proscenium distinguished by a deformed theatrical mask that suggested a melting Casper the Friendly Ghost of monstrous proportions designed by Sophie Perez and Xavier Boussiron. Under it, New York musician David Moss was performing; at the same time, another performance was going on in a tentlike room designed by Jorge Pardo, but here, too, a guard prevented me from entering.
Left: Gagosian Gallery director Stefan Ratibor and artist Maina Karella. Right: Artist Joseph Kosuth.
Undaunted, I listened to artist Ben Kinmont, an expert on the history of cooking who works at the Bibliothèque Nationale, explain his rather fascinating recipe-as-art project, a collaboration with seven Parisian chefs whose restaurants artgoers can visit for samples. On the basement level, where dance videos were playing, I found a stretch of floor designed by Vincent Lamouroux that rises and falls in several smooth humps. “You’d be surprised how much good it does for the body,” said Lamouroux, who was on crutches. Here again, though I wanted to try it, guards stopped me, explaining that they had to keep the floor clean for a dance performance that was about to start.
But I had only one day in Paris to see everything, so I raced out to catch the opening of Joseph Kosuth’s ni apparence ni illusion (neither appearance nor illusion), a neon text installation in the medieval bowels of the Louvre. This was truly fabulous, a perfect marriage of concept and execution, with warm white neon lines stretching, at intervals, along a thousand curving feet of the museum’s original, twelfth-century sandstone walls. Kosuth’s words, translated into French of course, actually address their surroundings with more poetry than they do in English. (THE WALL IS THE SURFACE OF ITS OWN SUBMERGED HISTORY, one sign begins.)
His installation, curated by Marie-Laure Bernadac, is the second entry in an ongoing project that Louvre director Henri Loyrette has instituted to contemporize a museum that state law prevents from acquiring art dating later than the nineteenth century. (Anselm Kiefer was the first; Cy Twombly is next.) “I’m just reviving a tradition of involving living artists,” Loyrette told me at Kosuth’s dinner at the Louvre’s Café Marly, explaining that artists, including Géricault, had made work for the museum during their lifetimes. “It’s important to renew traditions,” he added, as I took a seat opposite Bernadac, who really should be heading up a French art museum herself. Alas, the boy’s-club tradition still thrives. At least no one stopped us from eating.
— Linda Yablonsky
Left: Dealers Stefania Bortolami and Jake Miller. Right: Dealer Thaddaeus Ropac.
