Left: Collector Cecilia Matteucci Lavarini and artist Stefano Cagol. Right: View of the panel Small Budgets, High Hopes. (All photos: Cathryn Drake)
ALTHOUGH THE BIG WINTER STORM had not hit Italy in time for the thirty-sixth Bologna Arte Fiera, it was clear that the European crisis had already put a freeze on the art economy. But the striking dearth of visitors at the preview on January 26 was more likely the result of the slew of national transport strikes. (Artist Michelle Rogers told me that even the fishermen were boycotting, so no one would be eating fish on Friday.) Indeed it seemed that only the most dedicated—a rarefied group of collectors, artists, and curators—had made it to Italy’s biggest fair, in the venerable old university town.
But small can be beautiful in terms of fairs these days, and with some fifty fewer exhibitors, the Bologna halls were easier to navigate and infused with sunlight and breathing space. No need to exhaust oneself just trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B. Aside from the pavilion dedicated to modern art, there were just two parallel pavilions (instead of the usual three) hosting contemporary galleries and the “Young Gallery” section, which had previously been relegated to a room at the far end of the mazelike halls. I arrived at Galleria ZAK’s booth just in time for the denouement of artist Paolo Angelosanto’s performance Vernissage, in which he stripped and plastered himself with show invitations collected over the years.
Farther down, painter Stella Rognoni, known for her political murals on Bologna streets, had made an “unofficial” exhibition: a life-size painting of curator Vittorio Sgarbi polishing the shoes of esteemed critic Philippe Daverio. “He was kicked out of his job by Letizia,” an Italian man next to me whispered, referring to the infamous Sgarbi’s firing by the mayor of Milan. (The following day the faces were obscured by plaster, and nobody was saying who did it.)
Left: Dealer Fabrizio Del Signore. Right: Dealers Giordano and Davide Raffaelli.
The beauty of the Bologna fair’s “haircut” was that it was easier to discover young Italian artists, a challenge even if you live in the country. “The fair is much better this year because it is more homogeneous and concentrated,” said Blindarte’s Memmo Grilli. “Those who have crap don’t sell and those with quality art do.” Only 10 percent of exhibitors were foreign. If you don’t count the nomadic gallery the Pool, run by three young Italians out of New York, the lone American dealer was Miami’s Diana Lowenstein, who said Bologna would be her only foreign fair for the year. Kalfayan Gallery jumped ship for the India Art Fair; Galleria Continua decided to cover both bases. “If there are few people here, they are the people who are buying,” said Mario Cristiani, who sported a spiffy white shirt with Damien Hirst spots. “It is not a golden moment, but when things are bad the art is often better.” The gallery did well with the work of Egyptian revolutionary Moataz Nasr, for example.
With so many behemoth fairs dominating the international market, why not offer Italian art at an Italian fair? The situation also seemed to be an improvement for less-established galleries. “We have done well,” dealer Giordano Raffaelli noted. “Having fewer galleries is better for us.” Milanese dealer Riccardo Crespi had an enviably expansive booth right near the entrance. Fabrizio Del Signore, of Rome’s Gallery Apart, noted: “Both blue-chip and young artists are selling; it’s the midrange that will suffer.” And that is basically what happened, with very little video on offer but lots of photography by big-name artists such as Thomas Ruff, Andres Serrano, and Vanessa Beecroft flying off the walls.
After a drive-by at a party for artist duo Blue and Joy, where we found all the young Italian fashionistas rubbing elbows and labels, I headed downtown to Spazio Carbonesi for the opening of the exhibition “Twin Mind,” curated by Daria Khan. Once inside the cavernous Palazzo Zambeccari, we found only the cream of the crop in attendance: designer Alberta Ferretti, Vogue’s Franca Sozzani, artist Luigi Ontani—whose sold-out performance reprising his oeuvre the next night would be the big event of the art week—and curator Ludovico Pratesi. In the ballroom, artist Emiliano Maggi performed against a gothic backdrop of Rorschach-style projections and dripping wax sculptures. Dressed in blond furs and a wig, he created eerie ambient noise from a keyboard and screeched before acting out a Native American creation myth, spitting out bloodlike liquid and turquoise beads into a tree stump. Russian artist Julia Zastava’s surreal video Cherries Talk, in which giant versions of the fruit with human mouths bark hypnotically, was projected on another wall. I asked collector Lorenzo Mancini, “Have you seen . . . ?” He cut me off—“A horror film?” he inserted indignantly. “Yes, I have!”
Left: Emiliano Maggi performance. Right: Artist Julia Zastava and curator Daria Khan.
If that was The Haunted Forest, the party at the aesthetically chaotic house of collectors Marino and Paola Golinelli was Eyes Wide Shut, with everyone wearing carnival masks and feeding from a fountain spurting pure chocolate. By the time we arrived around midnight a happy few were grooving to retro dance classics. I ran into fabulous fashion collector Cecilia Matteucci Lavarini and artist Stefano Cagol in a room encompassed by Bolognese artist Sissi’s giant woven nest: “They cannot possibly live here—it’s an art disco!” Cagol exclaimed. Afterward, the streets were creepily empty, and speeding through them with our Roman driver was like playing a car-chase video game with a medieval backdrop.
The next night was an exclusive dinner honoring artist Andrea Büttner on the occasion of her MaxMara Art Prize exhibition, “The Poverty of Riches,” at the Collezione Maramotti space, in the retrofitted former MaxMara factory in Reggio Emilia, one hour away from the fair. I chatted with the Armory Show’s Deborah Harris, who confirmed the trend of shrinking fairs: “We will have less exhibitors this year, and it will be more like a festival, with a curated section of young galleries and performances.” On the way out curator Chus Martínez made our host Luigi Maramotti, head of fashion house MaxMara, promise he would come to Documenta. “If you promise me there will be no fashion in the art!” he replied.
Left: Collector Luigi Maramotti and curator Chus Martínez . Right: Artist Andrea Büttner and curator Marina Dacci.
The city was buzzing on Saturday, when museums and galleries were free to the public and open late for the White Night. After an obligatory lunch at a homey Bolognese trattoria, we made a tour around the installations of Art First, the annual site-specific initiative curated by Julia Draganovic. This required entering some of the most obscure and distinguished edifices in the city—including the extraordinarily beautiful Palazzo Sanguinetti, housing the Museo della Musica. Part of the show was the well-heeled Bolognese strutting their stuff between shows and shops at the Galleria Cavour mall, and that day in particular it struck me that the problem with the aesthetically saturated country is that the rich architecture upstages any art.
We found a compromise to the conundrum at Palazzo Bevilacqua Ariosti that evening: the stunning Renaissance cloister was overlaid by green geometric projections, by artists Nicola Evangelisti with the ELASTIC Group duo Alexandro Ladaga and Silvia Manteiga. Up in the ballroom, which resembled a decadent nineteenth-century period film set, a party hosted by Ippolito and Carlo Bevilacqua was just getting started. By the time the Bonomo sisters, Valentina and Alessandra, and gossip columnist Roberto D’Agostino arrived, neon-colored hors d’oeurvres were being passed around and the place was heaving with air-kissing guests. As he sipped a glass of pink champagne, a Roman curator commented crisply, adding his take on the effect of a too-rich history, “The problem with Italy is arrogance.”
The bitter cold that came in the next day was a prelude to the biggest winter storm to hit Italy in over a quarter century, stopping trains to and from Bologna and basically shutting down the country—a reminder that there are bigger things at work in the universe than our economic foibles. At Bologna Centrale station I met collector and Ferrari head Luca Cordero di Montezemolo getting on my train to Rome, with bystanders greeting him like a friend. “Crises shake up and clarify things,” artist Arthur Duff noted.
— Cathryn Drake
Left: Artists Arthur Duff and Francesco Candeloro. Right: Artists Fabio La Fauci and Daniele Sigalot of Blue and Joy.
A virtual fair-goer in front of Kader Attia’s Po(l)etical / Demo(n)cracy / Unable, 2009–11, at Galerie Krinzinger's booth at the VIP Art Fair.
THERE IS A SPECIAL MIX of bewilderment, exhaustion, and despair that I feel only when visiting an art fair. The intensity of this feeling was the one metric in which the “exclusively online” VIP 2.0 Art Fair outdid its convention-center antecedents. Within the limits of its domain at vipartfair.com, the fair made a maze of 135 exhibitors showing over a thousand artists, all of whose work had a sameness imposed by the format—a monotony more emphatically pronounced when caused by file compressions rather than uniform booths. At least I got to stay home by myself while taking it in Friday and Saturday. If the “real-life” art fair combines the museum’s hauteur with the supermarket’s aisled blandness while eliminating, respectively, their edifying mission and practicality, then VIP 2.0 might be thought of as a similarly impoverished hybrid of ARTstor and FreshDirect.
Buying groceries online is safe because the products are packaged, preserved, standardized. Do you really need to rub your fingers on the glaze of a Damien Hirst spot print to know you want one? All the weirder, then, that the VIP 2.0 interface tries to model the physical encounter with art by letting visitors choose silhouette avatars—there are six options, two each under the monikers Mr., Mrs., and Ms. VIP—who float in front of the works, shifting in size to help you gauge dimensions. I picked Ms. VIP II, slim-waisted with generous hips. She nearly fell off the screen as she backed up to view a series of tiny Anri Sala prints at Marian Goodman, then shrank to a smudge below Kader Attia’s monumental neon installation at Galerie Krinzinger. “Galerie Krinzinger’s booth @vipartfair is a knockout that never could have worked in a physical stand. Pieces are too big and strong,” one visitor tweeted. I can just imagine the gallery’s archivist opening these images on her computer at work and giving a low whistle of awe.
Left: An e-mail announcing Terence Koh’s performance at the VIP Art Fair. Right: A detail view of Damien Hirst’s Lanatoside B, 2011, at Gagosian Gallery.
The fair is labeled “2.0” to reflect upgrades to the program as well as to the technology since its inaugural 2011 edition. There was a slate of special projects, the kind that fairs organize to make themselves into cultural events. On Friday, Thaddaeus Ropac presented a twenty-four-hour video “performance” by Terence Koh, who divided the day into one-hour chunks and farmed them out to collaborators who streamed whatever they liked. I let it run all afternoon as I went about my work. It was, like analogous projects anchored by art fairs, background noise. An array of “insider tours” invited visitors to explore the fair by lists of works selected by curators and collectors. “Hard, Fibrous Tissue Found in Trees,” by Jens Hoffmann of CCA’s Wattis Institute, highlighted sculptures made of wood. “In a living tree [wood] performs a support function,” Hoffmann elaborated in his curatorial statement, “enabling woody plants to grow large or to stand up for themselves.”
Once on a tour you can continue it by clicking a button in the screen’s upper right, or you can drop out to scroll to the left or right of a work and see what else is for sale at the same gallery. The blue-chip galleries pay up to $20,000 for the privilege of being listed under the “premier large” tab at the top left of the VIP 2.0 page and getting a big tile on the fair’s “map.” The lateral, hiccupping patterns of Web browsing drawn by the crisscross of lists and tours become galleries’ paths to reaching new audiences. Besides the publicity, what participating galleries are paying for is the opportunity to harvest the personal data that the fair’s visitors must supply to register a user account. A day after I clicked on the booth of Massimo Minini, the gallery sent me an e-mail. “Dear Brian Droitcour,” it said with the formality of an enterprising Nigerian. “Thank you for your interest in our booth at VIP art fair. I would be glad to send to your attention our private rooms, should you be interested in receiving them.”
VIP 2.0 borrows from the Internet’s toolbox for marketing, but not for sales. I read an article in the December issue of Wired about Art.sy, a startup that has built a “genome” of traits found in artworks in order to provide inexpert potential buyers with suggestions. If a user wants a blue artwork for under $10,000 and likes Roy Lichtenstein, the Wired reporter writes, “[a]fter accounting for color, price, and location constraints, the recommendation engine will display artworks that are available for sale for under $10,000” and that share a quantifiable je ne sais quoi with Lichtenstein’s oeuvre. I know what art I would buy if I had money. But I can appreciate the inventive effort to harness the Internet’s so-called “democratizing” capacity and truly change the way artists find their patrons. VIP 2.0, on the other hand, tries vainly to make you forget that it’s just another tab in your browser with a barrage of words like “exclusive,” “private,” “insider,” and, of course, “VIP.” As it constructs digital models of art-market institutions, it clings to the tried-and-true sales tactics of opacity and mystique. The shadow of Ms. VIP II stretches and shrinks beneath the sun of very important art.
— Brian Droitcour
Left: Performance of Kathryn Andrews's Fork Hunt. (Photo: Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer) Right: Artist David Lamelas, LAXART director Lauri Firstenberg, and Getty Research Institute curator Glenn Phillips. (Photo: Wire Images)
SEETHING WITH A SORDID HISTORY both on and off the silver screen to rival the wildest passages of Hollywood Babylon, Beverly Hills’s Greystone Mansion oozes noir from every moribund pore of its cold slate walls. With its turrets, peaked roofs, grand vistas, and fifty-plus rooms covering 46,000 square feet, it is the stuff of Hollywood-style fairy tales (albeit one of those particularly nightmarish ones tainted from its start with the spilt blood of the mansion’s owner, who was found murdered alongside his male secretary eighty-three years ago). Since then, the estate’s scandals have multiplied on the big screen in tons of movies that have been set at Greystone: Jack Nicholson played the devil here, Daniel Day-Lewis psychotically ranted about milkshakes, Batman scolded the Boy Wonder, and the Dude procured a new rug.
And yet for all of the storied sundowns that have ushered nightfall over Greystone, we’d wager that none has embodied the make-believe magic and haunted-house drama of the place as extravagantly and exuberantly as the Ball of Artists last Saturday night, produced by Richard Massey and organized by LAXART as the epic, high-budget culmination to the Performance and Public Art Festival component of the Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time.” Despite its hokey title, the ball was a night to remember. If Caligula’s ghost had materialized doing pirouettes on a brontosaurus, he would not have seemed out of place.
Left: Holy Shit band member and collector Jim Abrams. (Photo: Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer) Right: Artists Ming Wong and Piero Golia with REDCAT assistant curator Aram Moshayedi. (Photo: Wire Images)
We arrived by shuttle bus at 6 PM, just before the hoity-toity crowds but after the ultra-exclusive VIP previewers. A pair of dolled-up, Alice in Wonderland–type girls (appearing as silly and beautiful as a teenage dream) greeted wide-eyed guests who seemed confused and lost as soon as they stepped onto the driveway’s cobblestones. Greystone’s atmospheric, dimly lit halls quickly filled with countless black ties, gorgeous gowns, fancy pants, and, above all, deep pockets. It was a pleasure and relief to find the familiar friendly faces of so many hometown artists among the tuxes and plunging necklines: from Laura Owens and Edgar Bryan to Brendan Fowler, Piero Golia, Allen Ruppersberg, Stanya Kahn, Dawn Kasper, Ry Rocklen, Andrea Fraser, Liz Glynn, Ann Magnuson, and many more than were possible to keep track of. Was everyone here? Lets just say the entire event was totally disorienting—in the best possible way, like chugging cough syrup in a hot air balloon.
Everyone was there to experience the incredible surplus of art (some installed, some performed, and much of it responding specifically to Greystone’s history) crammed into every niche and boudoir throughout the mansion and its surrounding grounds. An intergenerational range of twenty-two LA artists participated, from revered old hands like Morgan Fisher, Charles Gaines, and David Lamelas to established talents like Kerry Tribe and Jedediah Caesar to more recent art-school grads like Eamonn Fox and Alex Israel. Foldout maps indicated the location of each artist’s contribution without revealing what to expect or, in some cases, even what to look for. Glenn Kaino’s The Nothing Happening, for example, eluded us and everyone else we talked to; its supersecret location made it totally inaccessible, but then again, the two seconds of hushed intrigue and speculative rumors it stoked were undoubtedly more interesting than the poker game that purportedly took place behind its closed doors.
Left: Los Master Plus performing cumbia as part of Eduardo Sarabia's installation. (Photo: Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer) Right: My Barbarian with artist Ann Magnuson. (Photo: Wire Images)
Eamon Ore-Giron’s Purple Haze set a theatrical ambience by tinting clouds of fog violet around the mansion’s entry. Kathryn Andrews had two misbehaving, begoggled clowns nonchalantly spinning, dropping, breaking, and sweeping stacks and stacks of white plates in a jazz freak-out kind of rhythm. My Barbarian “activated” their video installation by performing a pointed song about “upward mobility.” Shana Lutker’s rapidly spinning light sculpture in the Solarium was like a hypnotic lighthouse beacon. Down the hall, Mungo Thomson staged an exquisite orchestral rendition of cricket field recordings. Scott Benzel accompanied operatic singers fronting a savagely loud rock band playing covers of Iggy and the Stooges. Patrick Ballard serviced a long line waiting to experience his extra charming, private, one-on-one puppet show complete with smoke bombs and a glove with tiny feet for fingers.
The performances bled into one another as hundreds of guests swirled around, buzzing about what had just blown their mind, what to avoid, what to check out next—all the while looking over each other’s shoulders for the all-too-rare tray of hors d’oeuvres. Eduardo Sarabia’s installation in the mansion’s underground bowling alley was a highlight and crowd favorite: Guests sloshed on his potent trademark tequila could get their portraits taken in an old-timey photo studio or shake and grind to the irresistible cumbia pumped out by the amazing Los Master Plus, who had come from Guadalajara to light everyone’s fire.
Left: Dealer Honor Fraser with collector Stavros Niarchos. (Photo: Wire Image) Right: Artists Julian Hoeber and Mungo Thomson. (Photo: Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer)
Out on the majestically oversize balcony, the whole ball came into focus as Julian Hoeber’s enormous red klieg searchlight communicated in Morse code with a distant green pulse signaling back, Batman style, from the roof of Soho House a couple miles away. As we looked upon the glittering city below while partaking in the excessive quantities of every kind of top-shelf alcohol, the sight of a single green light blinking from afar recast the entire scene as a Great Gatsby affair, its collective energy swelling with an unusually joyful if noirish glow.
A bit after ten the festivities started winding down and happily soused revelers stumbled back to the bus. As the blaring cacophony of frenetic, overlapping music decrescendoed to eventual stillness, Wolfgang Puck was seen heading home and Justin Beal’s sculptures of cucumbers frozen in ice began melting away into the puddle of yesterday’s party. The night came to a fittingly absurd conclusion when a park ranger with a 1970s porn mustache and ill-fitting clothes walked past us announcing, in all seriousness, that the “party was over” and could “everyone please keep their clothes on.” Something about that announcement ringing through the marbled halls of Greystone Mansion made it seem, for just an instant, like everything in the universe might make sense after all.
— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Jeff Hassay
Left: Artist Alex Israel with Lauri Firstenberg. (Photo: Wire Image) Right: Artists Hans-Peter Thomas (aka Bara), Kathryn Andrews, and Mark A. Rodriguez. (Photo: Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer)
Left: The Radio City Music Hall marquee. (Photo: Matthew Carasella) Right: Antony and the Johnsons onstage. (Photo: Todd Eberle)
IT’S OFFICIAL! The Museum of Modern Art is now in the entertainment business. Mark Thursday, January 26, as the night MoMA departed its acoustically challenged home for the sacred ground of Radio City Music Hall. The reason: a one-night-only performance of Swanlights, a visually and vocally elevating concert by Antony and his Johnsons, a sextet that expanded into a sixty-piece orchestra for their appearance on one of the biggest and most storied stages on earth.
Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Liberace, Liza with a z, the Grammys, the Tonys, and, of course, the Rockettes have all trodden its boards (along with the camels and goats in its Christmas and Easter pageants). Personally, I regard David Bowie’s spectacular, drop-from-the-flies entrance as Ziggy Stardust there in 1973 as one of the great thrills of my life—an event also recalled on Thursday by Tilda Swinton, for whom it is less memory than legend.
The striking We Need to Talk About Kevin star, clad in a silky, red plaid, Haider Ackermann jacket and white blouse, was among a select group of fifty or so guests invited to a preshow reception in a breathtaking, triple-height, Deco lounge upstairs. In town to help promote a show of celebrity portrait paintings that her paramour Sandro Kopp had opened at Lehmann Maupin Gallery’s Chrystie Street outpost the night before, she spoke of her upcoming vampire movie with Jim Jarmusch and her delectable sense of style. “I’ve been wearing all white lately,” she told Terence Koh, who dressed for the occasion in a fluffy white angora coverlet of his own design. “Yeah, me too,” he said.
Left: MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach with artist Sandro Kopp, Antony, and Tilda Swinton. Right: Artist Terence Koh. (Except where noted, all photos: Linda Yablonsky)
“Have you seen the kitchen here?” asked Michael Stipe, sidling up to MoMA’s associate director Kathy Halbreich, who produced the show with MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach. “It’s fabulous.”
So was everything else about this high-wattage, Downtown Goes to Heaven evening, the social event of the year (so far). With it, Biesenbach may now claim to be the Sol Hurok of performance art. (Rumor has it that he snagged Kraftwerk for an appearance at MoMA later this year.) Rubbing shoulders with collectors Dasha Zhukova and Beth Swofford, choreographer Michael Clark, actor Alan Cumming, hotelier André Balazs, and MoMA director Glenn Lowry, the white-haired museo-showman worked the room as if born to schmooze.
According to Halbreich, Radio City had been Antony’s choice of venue for the show, advertised as “a meditation on light, nature, and femininity.” The decision followed two years of discontent centering on the singer’s wish to perform as a body floating among large crystals in a pool set in the museum’s atrium. “I think he is divine and heartbreaking,” Halbreich said. She also displayed an e-mail Hegarty had sent earlier in the day. “This could be my Hindenburg,” it said of the show.
Not a chance. At curtain time, ushers were still wrangling a capacity crowd of six thousand rain-soaked ticket holders into the amber glow of the theater, accompanied by William Basinski’s celestial electronica. Biesenbach and Halbreich slipped into the row in front of me, beside Wendi Murdoch and Zhukova. Matthew Barney and Björk were a few seats away, in front of Swinton and Kopp, Thomas Dozol and Stipe, with Jennifer McSweeney, Roberta Smith, and Jerry Saltz behind them and Biesenbach’s mentor Alanna Heiss a few rows forward.
Left: MoMA director Glenn Lowry, MoMA deputy director Kathy Halbreich, and Björk. Right: Adi from threeASFOUR.
The house lights went down and a heavily made-up Dr. Julia Yasuda, Ph.D., came onstage to read a missive from the star that dedicated the show to Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender figure active in the Stonewall days who inspired the name of Antony’s band. Johanna Constantine, a dancer, stepped before the immense gold curtain, flapping the white, wing-like appendages affixed to her arms with increasing velocity, as if she were a bird revving for takeoff. She raised her arms triumphantly, the curtain went up, and rotating skeins of green light expanded and contracted in the air above the stage like constellations of undulating green nets. “Reminds me of Pipilotti Rist,” someone sitting nearby whispered.
A giant mobile that suggested a loose aggregate of white and metallic box kites—crystalline forms from drawings by Antony, who has a show of them at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles now—descended from the flies behind the projections, as the unseen orchestra sounded the first notes of “The Rapture.” Antony’s ethereal voice wafted through the hall, but it was a few minutes before his statuesque figure, clad in a flowing white robe by Ohne Titel, and dwarfed by the mammoth mobile, emerged from a shadowy murk beneath it.
Though hardly self-conscious as a vocalist, Antony may be the shyest performer in show business, so determined is he to avoid the glare of a spotlight. There wasn’t one. (“No one wants to see the face of an old drag queen,” Antony, forty-one, has said to friends.) Standing alone onstage, he sang in shadow for most of the two-hour concert, frustrating those longing for a better look at the source of his emotive vocals, and pleasing others happy to find themselves in the realm of pure spirit.
Clearly, it was Antony’s intent to make his inimitable, sweet voice the star of the show, while the laser blasts (by Chris Levine) and the lighting design (by Paul Normandale) provided the visual dazzle. Running through torch songs, ballads, and laments at a leisurely pace, Antony sang of love, ghosts, darkness, and grace, reaching transcendent moments during favorites like “Cripple and the Starfish,” or “I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy,” when Antony became a stark silhouette against a backlit scrim.
Antony performs Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” at Radio City Music Hall in New York, January 26, 2012.
His surprise cover of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” delivered a dreamy meditation instead of a thumping rouser. It drew cheers from an audience so rapt and reverent, it might as well have been in church. For the final two numbers, the scrims that had so far shortened the stage lifted, as did the pendulous mobile, revealing the orchestra and bathing Antony in bright light at last. “It worked!” exclaimed Biesenbach. “The curtain went up! It actually worked!” (At rehearsal, he said, nothing had gone according to plan.) The show ended with “The Crying Light,” an aching love song that fades out on the lines “I was born to adore you / As a baby in the blind / I was born to represent you / To carry your head into the sun / To carve your face into the back of the sun.”
The audience rose from its trance and the hall erupted in bravos. “Thank you,” Antony said. “That’s the show—and I’m so fucking glad it’s done!” That got a very big laugh—relief all around. “It was so ambitious, this production,” he added. More cheers. The curtain fell but everyone remained on their feet, applauding and waiting for an encore. None came.
“It’s $8,000 a minute for overtime here,” Halbreich said, as the aisles filled with lingerers. Union stagehands started striking the set.
Left: Rufus Wainwright. Right: Artists Space director Stefan Kalmar with Clarissa Dalrymple.
In the downstairs lounge, Lady Bunny, Joey Arias, Agosto Machado, Taboo!, and several drag queens made the afterparty feel like a reunion of Antony’s Blacklips pals at the Pyramid Club of the early 1990s. Rufus Wainwright scooted through the room, recalling his own past show at Radio City. Filmmaker Charles Atlas, who recently completed a feature-length performance documentary with Antony, was all smiles. Steven Hegarty, Antony’s brother, introduced himself to Björk, who will soon bring her whiz-bang, iPad-driven show, Biophilia, to Roseland. “Wasn’t Antony great?” Hegarty asked. “I think this is a big step up for him,” the Icelandic diva replied.
Finally, Antony descended the stairs and was immediately showered with flowers and hugs. “Isn’t it amazing? My whole family is here!” said Antony, looking dazed. Asked if I could photograph them together, he retreated behind a column. “Oh, but that’s so private,” he said.
Yet this very public evening reminded me of New York in the old days, when such glam gatherings—the American premiere of Einstein on the Beach at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976, or the 1981 opening of Diego Cortez’s “New York/New Wave” show at PS1—marked seismic shifts in our culture. Swanlights didn’t quite do that. But it did make magic—no small feat in a world so badly in need of it.
— Linda Yablonsky
Left: Lady Bunny with artist Charles Atlas. Right: Artist Laurel Nakadate.
Left: Artist Francesco Vezzoli with Kate Moss. Right: Alexandre and Victor Carril. (All photos courtesy of Prada)
AT 8:30 PM LAST TUESDAY, I arrived at the invitation-only dinner for the 24 h Museum behind two good-looking fellows who also had forgotten their invites and thus had to wait outside for the keeper of the guest list. There was something nice—can we call this consolation?—in knowing that for at least a brief moment an art critic was on equal footing with twins Alexandre and Victor Carril, Paris’s latest enfants terribles. Their attendance was not surprising. During the recent men’s fashion week in Milan, the brothers had walked the catwalk for Prada alongside other actors in a show the fashion house had described as a “parody of male power.”
“Parody” was the theme of this evening, the opening of a fly-by-night museum, conceived by Francesco Vezzoli and Rem Koolhaas’s OMA/AMO with the support of Prada, inside Auguste Perret’s Palais d’Iena, just around the corner from the venerable Musée d’Art Moderne. “Conceptually speaking, this is a parody of a baroque feast.” That’s how Vezzoli described the project to Hans Ulrich Obrist in an interview from the slick press pamphlet. The OMA/AMO team made similar comments. The four spaces of gallery, staircase, cinema, and “Salon des refuses” were meant to destabilize the austere neoclassicism of the Palais (erected between 1936 and 1946), a building whose staid appearance befitted its use for government bureaucracy. You have to hand it to Prada, OMA, and Vezzoli for consistency across the brand.
Inside, the first casualty in a night practically defined by them was some poor woman whose ravishing heels did not agree with the fuchsia shag carpet laid on the concrete entrance stairs (no doubt as a parody of the red carpet). Her crash seemed like pay dirt for the scores of trigger-happy paparazzi.
Left: Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Condé Nast chairman Jonathan Newhouse, and Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani. Right: Marianne Faithfull and Kate Moss.
Whatever its guise, the concept of parody always implies a distance from the object of ridicule. Without this separation, the parodist risks becoming his or her own subject. Upon entering the pink, fluorescent cage that was the theatrical backdrop for the evening’s meal, I looked around for this elusive parody. Was it sitting next to Catherine Deneuve, cigarette in hand? Or maybe at the table with Miuccia Prada and Louis Garrel? Or perhaps it was hiding in Kate Moss’s stunning gray fur jacket or in Salma Hayek’s six-inch stilettos?
Eventually, though, it became clear that the whole spectacle was no different from any other opening dinner I’ve had the honor of attending, save for the fact I was seated with fashion editors (Anna Wintour, Alexandra Shulman), actors (Isabelle Huppert, Diane Kruger), and models rather than dealers, curators, and artists (apologies to Alfred Pacquement and Carsten Höller, who were among the token representatives of the art world). That and the food and tableware were better. This Milanese cenacolo via Paris and Rotterdam made no mockery of the baroque feast outside of the caricature already inherent in such art-fashion gatherings; it was its contemporary updating, gluttony and egomania included.
Around 11 PM, as the B-list invitees began to congregate outside the cage for the nightlong party and as the A-listers snuck away to their drivers, I saw some curious onlookers snapping pictures of those of us still lingering inside. It was only at this awkward conjunction of la foule with le demimonde that the tragedy of the 24 h Museum truly emerged. Beyond the fact that navel-gazing here had reached such epic proportions that you didn’t even need the semblance of a critical project—just the three D’s (dinner, drinks, and dancing)—to create a work of art, the descending hierarchy of events from VIP dinner to members-only party to press walkthrough to public tours replicated seamlessly and without comment the unjust inequity of society at large. Um . . . Parody?
Left: The crowd at the 24 h Museum. Right: Catherine Deneuve and Melvil Poupaud.
It remains an open question whether 24 h Museum is no more than highly stylized party decor organized around the theme of the museum or a cynical artwork that riffs on artists’ installations by the likes of Duchamp or Fontana or Broodthaers to prop up a dystopian “museum without walls” in which Fashion is both the beginning and the end.
However, I’ll give one thing to Signora Prada and Signori Koolhaas and Vezzoli. They throw a great party. At some point between midnight and 4 AM, when the music was driving and the alcohol flowing, a friend asked me if I wanted to check out Kate Moss at the turntables or instead get another (free) drink. I didn’t even have to think: Given the choice between celebrity and champagne, I’ll take du champ every time.
— Paul Galvez
Left: Judy Chicago's fireworks. Right: Artist Judy Chicago.
“LOS ANGELES IS POTENTIAL,” said dealer Thomas Duncan. It was the first weekend of his new gallery as well as his first fair, Art Los Angeles Contemporary. “New galleries open every week in New York, but starting in LA feels special.” This past weekend was marked by a whole host of beginnings, including the launch of the Getty and LAXART’s Pacific Standard Time Performance Festival and the opening of Matthew Marks’s pristine new West Coast space.
This array of special events is a new turn for Los Angeles, another coming of age in what’s becoming a series of coming of ages. Ours is, after all, a city perpetually in the throes of self-realization. The fair, now in its third edition, felt downright manageable this year—in a good way. And the dealers seemed to be selling: Thomas Solomon’s booth was hectic, to say the least, and Night Gallery, with its raspberry sherbet carpet and broken-mirrored bed (the latter by Samara Golden), attracted its own (buying) crowds, with both the Hammer Museum and Dean Valentine gunning for a Peter Harkawik light box. (Valentine got there first.)
I saw (almost!) every booth before heading to catch the much-anticipated opening of Matthew Marks’s LA gallery in West Hollywood. Inaugurated with a show by Ellsworth Kelly, the new space is all Space Odyssey—nearly totemic in its futuristic coolness, with its high ceilings cut with long narrow shafts for the skylights. I walked across the street with the building’s architect, Peter Zellner, to admire the Kelly-designed facade: The gallery’s long white front is graced with a forty-foot-wide, five-thousand-pound black bar floating along the top. Zellner parlayed a story about a little old Russian lady who pointed out the black bar as she walked by: “So, what’s it going to say?”
Left: The crowd at the opening of the new Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles. (Photo: Amy Duran/Juxtapoz Magazine) Right: Exterior view of Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles with sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly. (Photo: Joshua White/Matthew Marks Gallery)
Back in the car, I headed to the classy Tower Bar along the trashy Sunset Strip for the dinner in honor of the eighty-eight-year-old luminary. This was one of a whole series of prandial celebrations that also included a luncheon at LACMA for a retrospective of Kelly’s prints and a more intimate dinner in which Kelly painted actress Catherine Keener’s face. At the Tower Bar, I sat at a back table and tried to register who was who: artists Jeff Wall, Robert Gober, and Jennifer Bolande were present, as were collectors Tony Ganz, the Rales, and Rosette Delug; writers A. M. Homes and Rachel Kushner; and a quartet of museum directors: the Getty’s James Cuno, LACMA’s Michael Govan, the Hammer’s Annie Philbin, and the Guggenheim’s Richard Armstrong. I slipped out a little early alongside artist Mark Bradford around the time Kelly’s partner Jack Shear commenced a hearty Happy Birthday to collector Alan Hergott.
Saturday found me rushing to Pomona to catch three performances as part of the PST Performance Festival. This particular triad was set in conjunction with Glenn Phillips and Rebecca McGrew’s three-exhibition gem “It Happened in Pomona,” which chronicles Pomona College’s incredibly rich anni mirabiles, 1969–73. I sadly missed John White’s piece, featuring football players stripping and then playing up close inside the gym. And since I arrived too late to secure a seat in the public bleachers, I instead made my way to the other side of the field where the bleachers looked empty. (Apparently we weren’t actually supposed to be there, but if you look like you know where you’re going when you trot past security guards, it sort of works.) Curator McGrew was kind enough not to toss us out, and we ended up watching Judy Chicago’s pyrotechnic extravaganza with Chicago herself, who, in case you didn’t know, is a totally badass lady. She shot off stories and cracked jokes as we waited for the spectacle to start.
Left: Dealer Thomas Duncan. Right: Artists Jedediah Caesar and Stanya Kahn.
The stadium lights flicked off and seconds later the flares sparked in unison, revealing the shape of a butterfly writ large across the field. As the first fireworks exploded bright and white in the air, Chicago called out, “That’s the biggest orgasm in the world!” The butterfly flapped and fluttered with occasional (orgasmic) firework fusillades.
As the lights flicked back on in the stadium, I rushed to the next performance, a re-creation of a site-specific piece that James Turrell made at Pomona in the early 1970s. Huddled in a field, we watched as flares flickered on behind the neoclassical building’s columns. Hearing some fire truck sirens, I followed Turrell as he strode down to the road. He was met there by former Pomona professor Roland Reiss in a kind of jokey reenactment of the fire department showing up the last time Turrell did this piece (in 1971). After exchanging a few friendly words with the firemen, Turrell was beset by old friends and well-wishers. A question, surely a common one, arose from the crowd about Turrell’s long-delayed, forty-year, multimillion-dollar Roden Crater. “I swore I was going to open it in the year 2000,” Turrell said, “and I’ll be damned if I’m not sticking to it.”
Left: Roland Reiss and James Turrell. Right: Night Gallery's Mieke Marple and Davida Nemeroff.
I got back in the car and headed west again to Chinatown to catch Eli Hansen’s opening at the Company and then scurried to a dinner at the elegant townhouse of M+B gallery’s Benjamin Trigano, hosted by Trigano himself along with China Art Objects and American Contemporary. The walls of his Hancock Park place are festooned with vintage photographs and works of contemporary art (Walead Beshty, Raymond Pettibon, Rashid Johnson), with waist-high towers of books throughout; it’s the kind of place you (or at least I) want to live in when you grow up.
I ate quickly and then bolted over to Liz Glynn’s Black Box, a speakeasy and performance venue open late every night of the PST festival, arriving just in time to catch artist-musician Brendan Fowler perched over his keyboard before a packed house. I looked around and recognized nearly every face—some of my favorite artists, curators, writers, musicians, and scoundrels from around Los Angeles, all in one place. Getty curator Glenn Phillips was surrounded by artists: Glynn next to Ry Rocklen next to Stephen Prina next to Stanya Kahn next to Mateo Tannatt next to Eli Langer. Fowler began to play a doleful piano number, the kind of wistful melody that feels both like the beginning and the end to something. Half-drunk on a warm January night, Los Angeles felt ready, after so much posturing and growing, to finally and unapologetically celebrate itself. We all clapped loudly at the end.
— Andrew Berardini
Left: Artist Brendan Fowler. Right: Artist Liz Glynn and Getty curator Glenn Phillips.
