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!