Blood Sport

The rugby World Cup begins in France this week, and the new quai Branly "first arts" museum in Paris is exhibiting this huge photograph donated by the New Zealand team. The photo is supposedly made from "the blood and DNA" of all the team players, as some sort of gesture of brotherhood toward France. As it turns out, they mixed the blood into the fixer. That's all weird enough. What's more interesting, actually, is the text printed along the bottom of the photograph. It clarifies that the print has been thoroughly sterilized and thus "poses no risk". Except to the eyes, we guess.

Sub-urban excursions

This website is a gem. A French guy's carefully archived photographs of his walks around the dumpy suburbs of Paris.

The best part? He says that his site's current lay-out is only temporary. That's pretty much the situation with the Parisian suburbs, too, if the photos are any indication.

Tweeners diggin Warhol

Ever wondered how Andy Warhol and his limelight life come across in the eyes of a Midwestern junior high student?

Okay, probably not. But still, this kid's school project-- complete with photo of the school fair display-- surely would have won over Warhol.

And I admit, I did learn a thing or two from her report.

Jacob Holdt's American Pictures

Jacob Holdt. Remember the name. Tell it to your friends.

His photos of 1970s America are some of the best you'll find. And, happily, he has a website full of them.

The Landscape of Quilts

Remember when you were a kid and you made landscapes by bunching up the blankets on your bed?

I tripped across this blog entry surfing the net a couple days ago: an artist named Ian Hundley who makes quilts using maps as his patterns. I think it's brilliant.

Adieu, Ingmar

--Vem är du?
--Jag är Döden.

(--Who are you? --I am Death.)

from The Seventh Seal.

Pierre & Gilles in Frame

We've never been keen on Pierre & Gilles photographs. Crossing camp and propaganda, these loud, glittering images are all artifice and beefcake (with the occasional glimpse of cheesecake just to keep you on our toes) often revolving around mythology and religion. The style is easily recognizable and repetitive, which is why their work pops up in fashion magazines and advertising on a regular basis.

But Double Je, the current Pierre & Gilles retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, has enlightened us. If you haven't seen their work in person, YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THEIR WORK. The ads, posters, etc. are a poor substitute.

P&G don't produce photographs really, but old-fashioned, unique works of art. The photographic foundation (shot by Pierre) of these very large images is heavily retouched in paint (by Gilles), such that the object before your eyes is more painting than photo. It has texture and reflects light in different ways. The overpainting is a particularly interesting choice in the latest works, given the ease of creating digital effects today.

Each image is subsequently placed in a specially designed frame (from rough wood to shiny plastic) befitting the theme and mood of the image. Unfortunately, reproductions almost never include the frames, yet they are clearly integral parts of the work. See the image included here and you know what we mean.

They become enormous icons. A far cry from a magazine ad.

Cy Twombly's French Kiss

We never condone physical assaults on works of art. Okay, almost never.

This week, a woman kissed a Cy Twombly painting in his current show in Avignon, France. She's going to court next month for having smeared lipstick on the white canvas. Huh? A smear on a Cy Twombly painting? Didn't anyone notice that there are smears all over Twombly's work? Look at the example included here. That's Cy's thing, smears.

We certainly hope Twombly comes out in support of his French lover during the trial.

Authenticating Andy

It was bound to happen. Someone is suing the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. and the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board for their authentication practices.

Andy Warhol claimed he wanted to be a machine. His mechanical art practices back that up. As a result of that attitude and Warhol's penchant for knock-offs and marketing, I imagine authenticating his work is no small task. Warhol used authenticity as a foil for his work. His friends all played roles (he loved them more on film than in the flesh), the Factory was a silver-walled spectacle for fun-house reflections and of course he reveled in knocking out phony Brillo and Del Monte boxes. The very idea of the authentic must have made him frown.

There's a lot of money to be made on Warhol's art, so people are bound to seek some system of authentication. It'll be interesting to see how this $20 million suit plays out, but of course Andy (and his art) has the last laugh. Or frown.

Tate Modern's Urban Blight

The Tate Modern's Global Cities summer show is a confused shantytown clogging the back half of the museum's immense Turbine Hall. Ironically, the show targets the dangers of rapid urban growth in the face of inadequate planning and lagging infrastructure. It's a classic case of "do as I say, not as I do." They even shot a video of themselves creating the mess.

How's it go awry? The show's themed zones-- size, speed, form, density, diversity-- remind us of the Tate's maligned exhibition categories when it first opened: environment, history, body... The zones are teeming with redundancies, inconsistencies, contradictions and lacunae, both on a formal level and in the alphabet soup of statistics and statements plastered all over the cheap board walls.

Works from artists like Andreas Gursky and Paromita Vohra are scattered among the panels of text, models and charts. Architects like Rem Koolhaas and Hadid & Schumacher contributed as well, but it wasn't always clear what exactly, or where they were. The show screams the world-wide need for what it, itself, sorely lacks: coordination!

Beaux-Arts Open House - Back to the Future

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts, that Paris bastion of art academy, had an open house this weekend. Art school shows like these are far and away the best place to see how recent art's been digested. Strolling through the studios and looking over a lot of student work, there's a lot of regurgitation. One work nods to Gerhard Richter, a second smells of Marlene Dumas, a third stinks of Chuck Close, and so on through Neo Rauch and Peter Doig and Tatiana Trouvé and Damien Hirst.

Some of these similarities derive from a lack of creativity and some from a sheer youthful searching through the styles of established artists. All of us can learn as much from mediocre or bad art as we can from the best. The works of people who've been studying the field and taking it seriously for a couple of years offer a great opportunity for reckoning. So here it is: Sloppiness and abstraction are out. So is installation. Live art (like plants and ant farms) are in, especially when combined with man-made materials.

And beer is still in. Lots of it. We found empties all over the place. Some aspects of an art apprenticeship don't change.

Danger! Annette Messager's Body Parts

Annette Messager's art can be provocative, and it certainly was so 25-30 years ago, but it hardly counts as "dangerous". Until the current one-woman show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

In an off-shoot of her hybrid stuffed animals she's dangled huge stuffed body parts from winches bolted to the lobby ceiling. The winches release regularly, dropping an ear or a foot or a hand through the open stairwell into the basement, catching right before it hits the ground. Kids love it. Check it out on the Centre's web-cam (click on "webcam3").

The Centre's cordoned off the basement "strike zone" (and its piles of pillows), but this week widened the zone and posted prominent "DANGER" signs. Maybe the kids love it a little too much.

Monumenta-l Question - Why Anselm Kiefer?

Paris' newly inaugurated "Monumenta" exhibition is an annual one-man show specifically designed for the gigantic, recently renovated Grand Palais off the Champs Elysées. The tepid, if courteous, French press coverage seems to imply this question: Why spoil the place with Anselm Kiefer's work?

Kiefer's depressing, brooding large-scale paintings and sculpture certainly don't seem like the right opening note for a series of gala shows in this airy, glass-roofed Bell Epoque pavilion. So the newspapers and magazines are devoting much of their stories to explaining who Kiefer is-- an Austrian artist-- and why he matters-- because his overriding theme is history, especially the ruinous effects of 20th century European fascism and nationalism, and history, after all, is kind of important. Regular reference is made to Kiefer's move to the south of France 10 years ago, implying this played a role in the Monumenta choice. And just to let us all know things will only get better, Monumenta's next two shows-- Richard Serra in 2008 and Christian Boltanski in 2009-- are mentioned nearly as often. Beaux-Arts magazine even took the step of inviting two critics to write "for" and "against" reviews on facing pages. We doubt they'll do the same when it's Serra's turn at bat.

An Art Marketing Coup

Over the past four or five days, the news sites and art blogs have been chattering about the same artwork unveiled last week. I'm piling on, I guess, but as a test to readers I'll name neither the artist nor the work. If you've been reading any contemporary art sites, or even just mainstream news sites, you know what it is. If you haven't, it won't take long to sniff it out with a few keystrokes.

I can't think of a greater art marketing success from the recent past.

Okay, for those in a rush, try here, here, here or here. And even back here again...

Google's nod to Ed Ruscha

Google Map's new topographical search feature, "Street View", offers sequential photos of buildings taken along various streets in major U.S. cities. That's basically the principal behind Ed Ruscha's 1966 fold-out book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip. The book-- which unfolds to an impressive 27 feet!-- fell into the black hole of contemporary art. Google's effort, on the other hand, is getting all sorts of attention since it debuted this week. Some people scour the photos for curious details-- the passing lunatics and lovelies, or punctums, as Barthes might have quipped-- while others decry them as an invasion of privacy.

If Google continues its homage to Ruscha's deadpan photo projects, we can't wait to see their Gasoline Stations and Parking Lots series.

More Sleep at the Tate

Following up on my post about the Tate's Warhol Sleep marathon, the Guardian has a good first-person account of the event with a great lead: "The Tate Modern offered the cheapest accommodation in London on Sunday night, with check-out not till after 3pm on Monday afternoon." From the sound of the rest, the event came off as a Satie concert "accompanied" by the film and not the other way around.

Anish Kapoor, the Louvre and Iraq

C-Curve, a new sculpture by Anish Kapoor, is stopping people cold in the Louvre's Khorsabad court. A curving, eight-foot high wall of highly-polished steel with a concave face, it confronts visitors as soon as they walk in the gallery's principal entrance. From the door, its looks like an ordinary (though very large) mirror, but when you move towards it, the reflected space spins upside-down, stretches and blurs. Only when you get quite close to the surface does everything fall back into place again. It's the sort of simple but startling experience that keeps your attention and has you slowly moving around to come to your grips with it.

Part of the Louvre's "Contrepoint" exhibition placing contemporary works alongside the Louvre's collections, Kapoor has parked C-Curve amid the museum's monumental Assyrian bas-reliefs. These works come from Sargon II's eighth-century BC palace in the vicinity of modern-day Mosul in Iraq. A bewildering, troubling and potentially nauseating experience, it's hard not to link the piece to the disaster of present-day Iraq. Only the ancient walls illustrating Assyrian life from three millenia ago seem to keep the whole space from tumbling down.

Photo London goes 100% contemporary

This year's Photo London fair, opening on 31 May, has cut its ties with the past. For the first time in its four-year existence it'll be a contemporary-only event. Participating galleries and dealers will only exhibit photographs produced post-1970. That pretty much leaves out Weston, Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson, Steichen, Brassaï, Abbott...

The change reflects the shifting tide in the photo market. The recent explosion in the popularity of contemporary art photography has produced record-breaking auction prices like the $3.3 million for a Gursky image in February. But making Photo London 100% contemporary is also a clever strategy for the fair's new owners, who also own the more prestigious Paris Photo fair held every November. Limiting London to recent works limits overlap between the events, since Paris Photo runs the gamut from the 19th century to today. And if Photo London's new formula catches on, Paris Photo could always establish a similar restriction.

Asleep at the Tate Modern

As part of its "Long Weekend" festivities on 25-28 May, the Tate Modern is screening an 18-hour version of Andy Warhol's celluloid classic, Sleep, accompanied by Erik Satie’s 1893 repetitive piano piece, Vexations. Of course, when Andy screened it in 1964 it was less than a third that long and accompanied by a transistor radio tuned to a pop station. But the Tate has time to kill and tickets to sell and is projecting it in a loop from Sunday night to Monday afternoon. So is this new version still a Warhol?

Even if Warhol made his reputation on blurring the line between originals and copies, museums have a certain responsibility to historical accuracy. We're all for screenings of Warhol's classics-- sadly, they've always been more talked about than seen-- but the Tate Modern isn't doing the film any favors. The Tate claims that Vexations "inspired" the film. That's debatable. True, Warhol edited Sleep not long after he heard John Cage's production of Satie's piece, but he had shot it well beforehand. Yes, the film is full of repeated shots, but that repetition is also due to a lack of footage necessary to make the film as long as Warhol intended.

While Warhol was notorious for making films with varying lengths, random reels or loose ends, Sleep's history is relatively clear-cut. He made it 5 1/2 hours-- not 2 hours or 18 hours-- and it's a choice worth respecting. Then why wouldn't the Tate Modern respect those parameters and have 3 or 4 screenings throughout the night instead of a loop? Or add a screening in the auditorium, with the radio humming, for those who want to see it as it was first shown? Probably because such historical details endanger the mellow ambiance the Tate staff is aiming for, exposing the audience to the tedium and frustration that Warhol had in mind.

Keeping the lights on

Tonight was the third annual "Museum Night" across Europe. Participating museums (from Portugal to the Ukraine) were free and stayed open until the wee hours. It's basically an expansion of the annual "All-Nighter" art festivals usually held in October. However, Museum Night focusses on museums while the All-Nighters generally promote one-off art installations in public places. The event raises a fundamental question, though: why don't museums have more evening hours? We don't mean staying open until 1 AM (the case tonight), but offering day-job folks more opportunities to see an exhibition without fighting the weekend hordes. Not only does nightfall cast a new light (or shadow) on the place, but it also changes people's moods.

Being in Paris, we stepped over to the Rodin Museum. Long lines to get in (since it's a once-a-year affair and a Saturday night), but the place was stunning. The whole building was lit, throwing a glow on the gardens where the sculptor spent his last days. Bill Viola's The Messenger was projected at the back of the garden. The giant, slow-moving image of a man submerged in water, it reflected on the garden's pool and waterlilies. You can't get these experiences at noon!