This issue is about modern art - whoa! - before you go - and most readers have their hands already on the doorknob - YES you are indifferent to modern art, NO you really don't care about it and, WHY? - it's because modern art has no relation to you, no pull on anything that's important in your life or anyone elses life, AND , well let's just say it out right - NO RELATION TO ART EITHER!
With that in mind, this issue studies (with humor) these contradictions: why modern art hasn't been modern in 50 years, and why modern art - so praised and defended by so many is so .... baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad
So, besides articles, art news, a contest, illustrations, etc. - breaks from the HORROR that is 'conceptual art' - the bulk of these pages are a roundup of the latest in blurbs about current avant-garde (avaunt means go away!) great (?!#!^*?) modern art - the overtly, over-the -top, mouth opening wide and gasping for understanding , atrocious, emperor-has-no-clothes, patron-robbing, smell of burning tires, mind numbing, modern art.
And as I've said many times before:
I AM NOT MAKING THIS STUFF UP
* * *
* 'Burney was asked why he used tapioca as a medium. The artist, who also works with frozen petroleum jelly, glucose tablets, and fake pearls, explained, "I was shopping for starches..."' (ArtNews)
*'Terri Cummings' Long Distance ... is a mixed-media piece that examines the idea of memories triggered by sounds. Cummings runs a tin-can-and-string telephone from the gallery to different locations bearing emotional significance for her around Fort Worth.'
* 'James Behan presents The Weaver's Loom, an Irish song he has written, with Lament, a mixed media piece that visually represents the song. The tune is a lovely, traditional Irish guitar and flute piece ... the artwork ... the simplicity of the shapes he uses is undermined by their functions and the organic shapes of blood droplets, swimming sperm, stitches, shoelaces, and eyeholes all convey the meaning of the song and the struggle of the Irish people'. (Observer)
A BREAK FROM THE MADNESS: Quote: "The habitual art, pompously displayed in salons and galleries, has succeeded in passing for the only art to the exclusion of all others, in most people's eyes. This art seems to us quite poor in content, reduced to endless repetitions and imitations, and almost devoid of personal creativity. We take it to be a parasitic substitute which merely mimics artistic creation, having none at its source, it replaces this creation with arbitrary words and useless theoretical systems. We believe the time is near, if it has not already come, when the public will realize the enormous misunderstanding upon which the overpowering college of professional "artists' is built, with their pseudo "art critics' and their art dealers. Soon, the emptiness of these academic works, the inappropriateness of the commercial activity to which they give rise, the abusurdity of the commentaries surrounding them, and the overall lack of true creativity, will become apparent. True art, in our opinion, lies elsewhere." - Jean Dubuffet, 1988
* 'And from a few yards back, Fred Tomaselli's Thirteen Thousand may look like delicate, textured columns painted on a blue background - but step up and get hit with a harder truth. It's actually 13,000 aspirin pills stacked in neat rows between columns of stained blue wood, and the whole is sealed and varnished with a thick window of resin.'(Observer)
* "The 'Nottingham NOW ninety 8' art festival in England in October featured a seven hour long video, Filthy Words and Phrases, in which a woman merely writes 2,000 sexual and slang terms on a blackboard. The video project was made with a government grant of about $12,000 (News of the Weird)
A BREAK FROM THE MADNESS or I BLAME DUCHAMP. "Marcel Duchamp is now considered a pioneeer in, and in some cases the inventor of, Conceptual art, assemblage, Pop art, Op art, installation, process art, chance art, performance and body art, to name only a few genres." Sheldon Nodelman. Unfortunately what was gifted work (and much of it is still controversial) in Duchamp (from 1913 through the 40's) has been so diluted and copied and reduced to absurdity (an oxymoron with Duchamp) that it has become the Salon art of our day. Perhaps most dangerous is his idea of ready-mades, art that is found finished, the most notable is his Urinal that changed from a urinal to a piece of art when Duchamp labeled it as such. Then too his surreal, mysterious oeuvre (I can use the fancy art lingo too) leads to so many interpretations that it allows lesser artists to get away with virtually any nonsense - 'not profound merely foggy!'. For example:
* "Mr. Ruscha as is his habit, floats an enigmatic phrase, in this case Hostile Polyester, in a thin wash of blue acrylic paint on paper."
*Encyclopedia includes a small white-on-white painting printed with the message "NOT HERE". The painting ... sends just the right paradoxical message in whatever setting it finds itself. (DMN)
A BREAK FROM THE MADNESS or Dali deserves some blame too. In the 1939 World's Fair, was Salvador Dali's Dream of Venus pavilion, a fanciful building flanked by huge female legs in stocking and high heels. Inside, topless women played 'mermaids' and performed dream sequences in diving tanks as parts of tableaux featuring hedgehogs, melting watches, and exploding giraffes. (ArtNews) And though Dali was a gifted artist (and self promoter) that led to stuff like this:
*(Brooklyn artist Chris) Doyle videotaped each person leaping into the air, and for 4 days next month he will project 20-foot -high videos of these airborne urbanites on the facade of a building at 2 Columbus Circle. (ARTnews)
*Susan Laswell turns dough into stylish footwear with Bread Shoes.
*Patrick Kelly conquers the toy kingdom with Trophy Heads, a taxidermy parody that uses stuffed animals' heads as its prize.
*Metz delivers one of the funniest takes on puns with his Ham and Legs, a conceptual malapropism that joins male and female legs to thighs made of hams well past the point of being edible. (The Met)
CONCEPTUAL ART IS A JOKE IN SEARCH OF A PUNCHLINE
*Orian, the flamboyant French performance artist and self- styled star has gained international attention by undergoing a series of plastic surgery operations to transform herself into ... the forehead of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, the chin of Botticelli's Venus, the nose of a School of Fontainebleau Diana, the eyes of Gerome's Psyche, and the mouth of Europa as painted by Francois Boucher... The operations (are) broadcast live to 13 galleries (and are) conducted under local anesthetic so that Orian can ... speak with spectators and read aloud from texts in philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and science... Orian keeps the 'souvenirs' from the operations ... pieces of her flesh preserved in a liquid solution, slices of her skull, fats suctioned out of her body and pieces of gauze soaked with her blood. Each jar can be purchased for about $2,000 and she intends to continue "until there is no more flesh left to sell."... Art in America argues that Orian's work is art because Orian herself meets the 2 essential criteria that distinquish art from non-art: intention and modification. As (critic) Rose sees it, Orian's activity consists of aesthetic acts and not pathological behavior ... (World Press Review)
*From Foundation to Ornamentation: The Bra as Art, recently on view at Pennsylvania's Lancaster Museum of Art. With commissioned bra art by 50 artists. A motrocycle tank and tractor parts make up Biker Breastplate, a buxom structure by Leonard Streckfus. (ARTnews)
*A 64 ton wall of Alaskan ice recently appeared outside Jerusalem's Jaffa Gate. The creator? Seattle based glass artist Dale Chihuly ... The ice was cut from an Alaskan artesian well into 24 three to four ton chunks, transported form Alaska to New Jersey on trucks, and then ferried to Jerusalem ... (it's a) metaphor for melting political tensions in the Middle East ...(ARTnews)
A BREAK FROM THE MADNESS:
Art & Science: Australian psychologist Michael Nicholls, who recently concluded a study of portraits looking to the left, says that the facial expressions on the left are controlled by the right part of the brain, which is in charge of emotions therefore any emotional expression is more pronounced on the left side of the face than on the right. He suggests that's why many classic painters have pictured their subject's left side of their face. (ARTnews) ... In another art/science news, Dr. Semir Zeki, University College London, has suggested that the brain responds differently to abstract art versus representational art. Specifically that multi-colored abstract paintings like Mondrian's stiumlate the brain through 4 areas in the visual cortex of the brain, while representational art goes to and beyond the 4 areas suggesting that representational art may be more mind stimulating. (The Economist)
*Susan Laswell's cellophane tape objects and images on toilet paper.
*Greg Metz's trousers designed for nonexistent figures.
*Bennie Flores Ansell's photographs of shoes arranged like butterfly specimens ...(FW Weekly)
*In March '97, NYC artist Roxy Paine displayed Paint Dipper, a large device that repeatedly lowers a blank canvas into a steel vat of white paint. As the liquid dries, horizontal paint lines appear on the canvas and icicle like shapes form along the bottom ... 2 years later, and across the ocean, British artist, Natasha Kidd displayed Painting Machine which "dips a canvas repeatedly into a vat of white paint and horizontal lines appear across the bottom edge". When NYC's Paine called UK's Kidd about it, Kidd responded that she knew nothing about the earlier work (ARTnews))
A BREAK FROM THE MADNESS:
Part of the blame of this Emperor Art with no clothes is the crafty tailors - art critics. While The Dallas Morning News, Dallas Observer, The Met, and (to a lesser extant) FW Weekly, will trash bad film, TV, music, even restaurants; they seem hesitant to attack bad art. That leads to good and bad art all lumped together. Until Janet Kutner (DMN) and crew can say the obvious " this character has no clothes, modern art will likely continue its charade.
MODERN ART IS THE SALON ART OF OUR DAY - Art S Revolutionary.
* "If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art ... At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product." Bruce Nauman
*To Add One Meter to the Fish Pond (1997) Zhang (Huan) gathered a group of migrant laborers from the countryside to stand with him in a pond in Beijing.
*The all white canvas Pony (1998) was treated as a 3 dimensional object, the artist cut what resembled a postal slot through the canvas to the wall.
*In A Matter of Memory (1995) a plain glass of water doubles as a metaphoric wishing well. Projected from below onto the bottom of the ordinary sized glass are TV commercials from the 50's and photographs of the artists as young boys, all superimposed over the image of a dissolving sugar cube.
*Meanwhile, hanging from the elevator walls were a number of small stuffed creatures that one was also invited to touch. Cobbled together from cannibalized pull-string talking toys, these engaging personages could be set off into hilarious dialogue. Do you want to know a secret? ... Another produced a trill of Sinatra-style do-bee-do bee-doos, concluding with the admonition, lifted from a recent beer commercial, to "beware the penguins". (Art In America)
More Modern Art or